The Celebrity by Laura Z. Hobson Read Free Book Online Page A

direction, too, there were new horizons. Temporary but new. And it was possible that easygoing Gregory might put off so troublesome a decision for several weeks, maybe even months.
    Exhilaration raced through. Thorn’s blood. Never had he thought to be so richly repaid for that off hand suggestion, made during one of Gregory’s brief furloughs from the Pentagon Building, the year before the war ended.
    “I’ll give things a once-over for you,” he had said when Gregory had told him; about quarreling with Marilyn Laird. “Get all your stuff from her office and let me dig around for a while.”
    “Would you, Thorn?”
    “Sure. There’s no big rush about it, is there?”
    “It might be a lot of trouble. That’s what you pay ten per cent to agents for. ” He suddenly sounded dispirited. “But I suppose ten per cent of not much wasn’t enough of an inducement to make Miss Laird accurate.”
    “If I could get the hang of it, couldn’t you keep your ten per cent? Do you have: to have an agent?”
    “I suppose not. Plenty of writers never do.”
    “Well, we’ll think about a new agent deal when the time comes.”
    It had never come. There was very little mystery to an author’s contract when you got right down to it. Only once had he needed guidance from experts, and he had gone to the same firm that handled Roy Tribble’s: legal business. Jim Hathaway had looked astonished when he said he would pay the fee himself rather than deduct, it from his brother’s small royalties, but it was for himself, really, he had sought counsel, so that he might go on with, his new interest as long as possible, free from worry about possible errors. He hadn’t bothered to tell Gregory he had gone.
    And now he was delighted that no serious move toward a new agent had ever been made. Now there would be real problems to cope with, and circumstance had found him ready for them. What would the most professional of professional agents have done just now but learnedly mention contracts and stall for time until morning?
    Illogically, he thought of Diana. The change which would come over her face tomorrow when he told her! He wouldn’t boast about Gregory, of course, but he would have to sketch her in on what had happened and tell her he would go right on handling the business end, infinitely more complicated though it would be. He would wait until she came in with the letter to Roy Tribble; instead of reaching for his pen to sign it, he would look up from the spread of book contracts and tell her to file the Tribble letter until sometime next week.
    “Next week, Mr. Johns?” she would ask, her voice concerned over anything so unusual.
    “Yes, more important things are afoot,” he would answer, and then, very casually, he would tell her. And he would be watching her face as he did so; there’d be no cool remoteness in her eyes tomorrow. Five would get anybody fifty on that.
    Anticipation bubbled up and once again he looked at Gregory. The kid brother! The unambitious one, the failure! Now he was a big-money author, somebody whose work all sorts of people, hundreds of thousands of people, not just a few high-brows but real people, would read and respect and argue about.
    Even here in the bosom of the family Gregory was already “different” in everybody’s eyes. He was an important author; soon he would be A Name. Ever since the first hubbub had died away, they had all been pumping him about The Good World, asking its plot, begging to be allowed to read it at once, even in manuscript form, since Digby and Brown had sent him only one set of galleys, which he had had to correct and return. The whole family was still in the process of getting used to having such a novelist in their midst. Already Gregory had displaced him as the most successful member of the family, but he was only too happy to relinquish his title. This was a success story surpassing anybody’s rosiest and wildest dreams; it would be ignoble to begrudge him any