Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore (jenna bush book club .txt) 📗

what grief is. She's simply delighted at Joe's doing a Custer, but she's awfully bothered about his music."

"In what way?" I asked. "Do you mean getting it performed?"

"Getting it performed, nothing. Getting it suppressed. That a long line of generals and admirals should wind up in a composer is to her a disgrace which will need a great deal of living down. It preys on her mind. Poor old Stuart is home now reading her choice passages from the Winning of the West by Theodore Roosevelt to soothe her nerves."

I had been more than a little apprehensive of meeting Mama again, but Winifred's report seemed to reassure me that she would be confined, if not to bed, at least to her own apartments. I was sadly disillusioned to find her ensconced in a comfortable armchair beside a brightly burning fire, the general with a book held open by his thumb. He greeted me with his usual affection. "Albert, I'm sorry I wasnt able to get to the airport."[269]

I shook his hand and turned to his wife. "I regret to hear you are indisposed, Mrs Thario."

"Spare me your damned crocodile tears. Where is my son?"

"In his last letter he suggested he would remain in our country as long as it existed; however it is possible—even probable he escaped. Let us hope so, Mrs Thario."

"That's the sort of damned hogwash you feed to green troops, not to veterans. My son is dead. In action. My grandfather went the same way at Chancellorsville. Do you think me some whimpering broompusher to weep at the loss of a son on the battlefield?"

Stuart Thario put his hand on her arm. "Easy ... bloodpressure ... no excitement."

"Not in regimentals," said Mama, and relapsed into silence.

We had a very uneasy dinner, during which we were unable to discuss business owing to the presence of the ladies. Afterward the general and I withdrew with our coffee—he did not drink at home, so I missed the clarity which always accompanied his indulgence—and were deep in figures and calculations when Winifred summoned us hastily.

"General, Mr Weener, come quickly! Mama ..."

We hurried into the living room, I for one anticipating Mama if not in the throes of a stroke at least in a faint. But she was standing upright before the open fire, an unsheathed cavalry saber in her hand. It was clearly a family relic, for from its guard dangled the golden tassel of the United States Army and on its naked blade were little spots of rust, but it looked dangerous enough as she warned us off with a sweep of it. In her other hand I recognized the bulky manuscript of George Thario's First Symphony which she was burning, page by page.

"Some damned impostor," she said. "Some damned impostor."

"Harriet," protested the general, "Harriet, please ... the boy's work ... only copy ..."

She fed another leaf to the fire. "... impostor ..."

"Harriet—" he advanced toward her, but she waved him[270] away with the sharp blade—"can't burn George's work this way ... gave his life ..."

I had not thought highly of Joe's talents as a musician, believing them byandlarge to be but reflections of his unfortunate affectations. I think I can say I appreciate good music and Ive often taken a great deal of pleasure from hearing a hotelband play Rubinstein's Melody in F, or like classical numbers, during mealtimes. But even if Joe's symphony was but a series of harsh and disjointed sounds, I thought its destruction a dreadful thing for Mama to do and the more shocking, aside from any question of artistic taste, because of its reversal of all we associate with the attitude of true motherhood.

"Mrs Thario," I protested, "as your son's friend I beg you to consider—"

"Impudence," declared Mama, pointing the sword at me so that I involuntarily backed up although already at a respectful distance.

"Damned impudence," she repeated, feeding another page to the fire. "Came into my house, bold as brass and said, 'Cream if you please.' Ha! I'll cream him, I will!" And she made a violent gesture with the saber as though skewering me upon its length.

I whispered to Constance, who was standing closest, that her mother had undoubtedly lost her reason and should be forcibly restrained. Unhappily the old lady's keen ears caught my suggestion.

"Oho. 'Deranged,' am I? I spend my life making more money than I can spend, do I? I push my way against all decency into the company of my betters, boring them and myself for no earthly reason, do I? I live on crackers and milk because Ive spent my nervous energy piling up the means to buy an endless supply of steaks and chops my doctor forbids me to eat? I starve my employees half to death in order to give the money I steal from them to some charity which hands a small part of it back, ay? I hire lobbyists or bribe officials to pass laws and then employ others to break them? I foster nationalist[271] organizations with one hand and build up international cartels with the other, do I? I'm crazy, am I?"

Excited by her own rhetoric she put several pages at once into the flames. Constance pleaded, "Mama, this is all we have left of Joe. Please, Mama."

"Sundays the church banner is raised above the Flag. I never heard a post chaplain say immortality was contained on pieces of paper."

"Comfort, then, Mama," suggested Winifred.

"Creative work," muttered the general.

"Is it some trivial thing to endure the pangs of childbed that the creations of men are so exalted? I have offered my life on a battlefield no less and no more than my grandfather fought on at Chancellorsville. Little minds do not judge, but I judge. I bore a son; he was my extension as this weapon is my extension."

She thrust the sword forward to emphasize her utterance. "I will not hesitate to judge my son. If he did not die in proper uniform at least I shall not have him go down as a maker of piano notes instead of buglecalls." She threw the balance of the score into the fire and stirred it into a blaze with the steel's point.

The ringing of the telephonebell put a period to the scene. Constance, who spoke several languages, answered it. She carried on an incomprehensible conversation for a minute and then motioned to me with her head. "It's for you, Mr Weener. Rio. I'll wait till they get the connection through." She turned to the mouthpiece again and encouraged the operator with a soothing flow of words.

I was vastly relieved at the interruption. It was undoubtedly Preblesham calling me on some routine matter, but it served to distract attention from the still muttering old lady and give her a chance to subside.

Preblesham's voice came in a bodiless waver over the miles. "A W? Can you hear me? I can give you a tip. Just about three hours ahead of the radio and newspapers. Can you understand[272] me? Our big competitor has bought the adjoining property. Do you get me, A W?"

I nodded at the receiver as though he could see me, my thoughts racing furiously ahead. I had understood him all right: the Grass had somehow jumped the saltwater gap and was loose upon another continent.

73. I had about three hours in which to dispose of all my South American holdings before their value vanished. Telephone facilities in the Thario house, though adequate for the transaction of the general's daily business, were completely unequal to the emergency. Even if they had not been, Mama's occasional sallies from her fireplace fort, saber waving threateningly, frequently endangered half our communications and we suffered all the while from the idiosyncrasies of the continental operators who seem unable ever to make a clear connection, varying this annoyance by a habit of either dropping dead or visiting the nearest café at those crucial moments when they did not interrupt a tense interchange by polite inquiries as to whether msieu had been connected.

I must say that in this crisis Stuart Thario displayed all his soldierly qualities to the full. Sweeping aside his domestic concerns as he would at the order of mobilization, he became swift, decisive, vigorous. The first call he put through was to the Kristian IV Hotel, engaging every available empty room so that we might preempt as much of the switchboard as possible. Pressing Constance and Winifred into service as secretaries until his own officestaff could be summoned and leaving Pauline to deal with Mama, he had us established in the hotel less than threequarters of an hour from the time Preblesham phoned.

Even as the earliest calls were being put through a barely perceptible signal passed from the general to Winifred and presently large parts of the Kristian IV bar were being arranged on a long table at the general's elbow. I had little time[273] for observation since I had to exert all my powers of salesmanship on unseen financiers to persuade them by indirection that I was facing a financial crisis and they had a chance to snap up my South American holdings at fractions of their values; but out of the corner of my eye I admired the way Stuart Thario continuously sipped from his constantly refilled glass without hesitating in his duplicating endeavors.

I expected the news to break and end our efforts at any moment, but the quickness with which I had seized upon Preblesham's information confirmed the proverb about the early bird; the threehour reprieve stretched to five and by the time Havas flashed the news I had liquefied almost all of my now worthless assets—and to potential financial rivals. Needless to say I had not trusted solely to the honor of the men with whom I had conversed, but had the sale confirmed in each case by an agent on the spot who accepted a check, draft, or cash from the buyer. Only on paper did I suffer the slightest loss; in actuality my position became three times as strong as before.

74. The world took the extension of the Grass to South America with a philosophic calm which can only be described as amazing. Even the Latins themselves seemed more concerned with how the Grass had jumped the gap than with the impending fate of their continent. The generally accepted theory was that it had somehow mysteriously come by way of the West Indies, although as yet the Grass had not appeared on any of those islands, and even Cuba, within sight of the submerged Florida Keys, was apparently safe behind her protective supercyclone fans. But the fact the Grass had appeared first at Medellin in Colombia rather than in the tiny bit of Panama remaining seemed to show it had not come directly from the daggerpointed mass poised above the continent.

La Prensa of Buenos Aires said in a long editorial entitled "Does Humanity Betray Itself?": "When the Colossus of the[274] North was evilly enchanted, many Americans (except possibly our friends across the River Plate) breathed more easily. Now it would seem their rejoicing was premature and the doom of the Yankee is also to be the doom of our older civilization. How did this verdant disease spread from one continent to another? That is the question which tortures every human heart from the Antarctic to the Caribbean.

"It is believed the cordon around North America has not been generally respected. Scientists with the noblest motives, and adventurers urged on by the basest, are alike believed to have visited the forbidden continent. It may well be that on one of these trips the seeds of the gigantic Cynodon dactylon were brought back. It is well known that the agents of a certain Yankee capitalist have been accustomed to taking off on mysterious journeys near the very spot now afflicted by the emerald plague."

It was a dastardly hint and the sort of thing I had long come to look upon as inseparable from my position. Of all peoples the Latinamericans have long been known as the most notoriously ungrateful for the work we did in developing their countries. Why, in some backward parts, the natives had been content to live by hunting and fishing till we furnished them with employment and paid them enough so they could buy salt fish and canned meats. Fortunately La Prensa's innuendo, so obviously inspired by envy, was not taken up, and attention soon turned from the insoluble problem of the bridging of the gap to the southward progress of the weed itself.

From the very first, everyone took for granted the victory of the Grass. No concerted efforts were made either to confine or to destroy it. The World Congress to Combat the Grass, far from being inactive, worked heroically, but it got little cooperation from the peoples most closely affected. When at one time it seemed as though the congress had got hold of a possible weapon, the Venezuelans refused them the necessary sites and Brazil would not allow passage of foreign soldiers