A Man of Affairs (2 page)

She gave me a furious look. “You make it sound as if we’re being sneaky. All this talk about going back on promises.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“You wait a minute, Sam Glidden. A very nice man named Fletcher Bowman was in town last week. He took Tommy and me to lunch. He works for Mike Dean. He explained that in all fairness Mr. Dean should be given a chance to explain his position to us because we are the two largest single shareholders and so we have the largest stake in what he’s trying to do. That seemed fair to us. We agreed. So, in Mike’s name, he invited the four of us—Tommy and Puss, and Warren and me—down to Mr. Dean’s place in the Bahamas. A private plane is going to pick us up Wednesday morning. Because we’re going down there doesn’t mean that we plan to betray anybody. Anyway, I’m curious about him and I’d like to meet him. And it will be a nice vacation.”

“I’ve heard about that hideout of his,” I said.

“We’re going.”

“Understand, Louise, I’m not trying to low rate your intelligence, or Tommy’s or anybody else’s. This kind of a deal is outside your experience. You’re getting mixed up in a very smooth operation. It’ll be a big snow job. Then suppose you and Tommy sign proxy forms down there and everything is just dandy.”

She got up quickly and walked away from me. She went over near the wall and sat on her heels and began picking dead leaves off a low bush.

“Suppose we do sign them? Suppose he does wreck the company?”

I went over and stood behind her. “What does that mean?”

She stood up and faced me, looking up at me. “Just suppose I don’t give a damn any longer? Do you think I’m happy here? Do you think I look back on a madly gay childhood? Do you think I’m having a real dandy marriage? There’s enough income from the things my father left to keep this house up and live here. If the dividends were still coming in, we wouldn’t be here. So I sound like a spoiled brat. I’m still trying to make a marriage work. And it doesn’t work well at all here in Portston. I can tell you that much. So suppose he does take over. The stock will go up, won’t it? He’ll make it go up. And then I can sell the damn stuff and get away from here for keeps.” And she turned abruptly to hide tears and began picking off the dead leaves again.

“Let me be corny for a minute, Louise.”

“Go right ahead,” she said in a muffled voice.

“In 1858 your great-great-grandfather, Aaron Harrison, started the company. His only daughter, Jessica, married the first Tom McGann. They were a rugged pair, Aaron and Tom. They built this house.”

“No. It was his son.”

“At any rate, they felt their obligations to the company and to the community. They bulled their way through panics and depressions. They had maybe too paternalistic an attitude toward labor, but they did the best they could in the tough times. When your father took over he had as much strength and power as the earlier ones, but he lacked their shrewdness. And he had just as much a feeling of responsibility as anyone in the past. Your brother is a great guy; but he couldn’t run a hot dog stand, as you well know. Maybe I’m simple, but to me a company like this is more than something you make money with. It supports directly or indirectly a couple of thousand families and a way of life that doesn’t seem too bad to me. If Dean
should
wreck the firm, he also wrecks the town. But, naturally, you won’t have to give a damn about that. You’ll be living in Amalfi or Cuernavaca or Malaga.”

She turned to look up at me over her shoulder. “Very touching,” she said, but her eyes were still shiny with tears.

“I don’t think you ought to go.”

“It’s all arranged.”

I could see all of our planning shot to hell. I could see Al Dolson throwing in the sponge. When Thomas McGann died, Al had been vice-president, and I had been his assistant. He was a mild man in his late fifties. Maybe once upon a time he had some push; but too many years of McGann had driven him back into a polite shell. When the Board, with Walt Burgeson as chairman, had made Al Dolson president, they had made me vice-president. Some of the other men felt that I had been jumped over their heads, that I was too young, and my ideas were too wild; but I had been able to kill off the resentment and get them all pulling together.

I felt as if I were propping Al Dolson up. He was too hesitant about using the authority he held. When we first learned that Mike Dean was snapping at our heels, Al was all set to give up. But I had managed to get him back on the rails. Right after McGann had died we had been in a tunnel where we couldn’t see light ahead. But in the last year we had rounded a bend and you could begin to see a far-off glimmer. There was a new bounce and confidence to management. I managed to get Al feeling as I did: that even if Dean did place some people on the Board of Directors, we’d still have enough backing to go ahead in our own way.

But if he felt that the McGann kids were going to sell us out to Dean, thus giving him control of close to seventy per cent of the voting shares, Dolson would fold in on himself like a tissue paper tent. I felt that in a few years he would be all right. He’s bright enough, and he’s gaining confidence. But this was happening too soon.

I knew that Louise had enough of the McGann stubbornness in her so that I couldn’t get her to change her mind. And perhaps she felt it would help her marriage to get away for a while with her husband. I had heard that Warren Dodge did more than his share of tomcatting since they’d moved back to Portston. It’s too small a city for much of that.

I could think of only one answer. I checked over what I had lined up to do in the next week. By working like hell the rest of today and all of tomorrow I could get it fairly well cleaned up.

“Okay, so you’re going, Louise. But let’s say you ought to have somebody around in case you have to ask some questions. Would you object if I went along, too?”

She stood up and she looked agitated. “No, but… but you’re not invited.”

“You could fix that with a phone call, I think. Call the man. Bowden?”

“Bowman. Fletcher Bowman. I have his New York number, yes. But…”

“Louise, this is not a social occasion. I am not crashing a party. If you suggest I come along they’re going to have to say yes, because they can’t afford the impression they’d make by saying no.”

Though I wanted to ask to listen on an extension, I waited in the garden. I picked up the book she had been reading and glanced at some of the pages in the middle. A Faulkner novel covering the further adventures of the Snopes family. I wished for more time to read, more time to be by myself. The last two and a half years had been full of furious activity that, at times, had seemed meaningless. The past week I had spent two days out on the coast with Gene Budler—our sales manager—and Gary Murchison of engineering. Gene and I had to explain the new distribution setup to the western wholesalers. We planned to use it as a test area. They were enthusiastic about it. And then Gary Murchison and I spent the rest of the time poking around in some warehouses full of machine tools recently declared surplus by Army Ordnance. We found a lot of stuff we could use, had a public stenographer type our bids and left them with the military along with a certified check for two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars.

Every week had been patch and pray, trying to remedy the neglect of two decades and at the same time build soundly for the future. The two most pressing problems coming up were to get some aggressive styling for the new lines, and do battle with the union about work standards.

Louise came back out into the garden. “He acted as if he didn’t quite know how to take it at first, and then he got very jolly and said, ‘Of course, of course. Do bring Mr. Glidden along.’”

“Those boys don’t move until they’ve checked every angle. They’ll have a complete file on me. Now they’ll be planning how to handle me.”

“You make them sound so conspiratorial, Sam.”

“That’s what they are. I’ve got a lot to do before Wednesday morning. What time?”

“Be at the airport at nine-thirty. Mr. Bowman said it will be hot in the Bahamas, and to bring swim clothes and sun clothes. Nothing very formal.”

We went through the gate in the garden wall and around to my car in the driveway. “Are you sorry I invited myself aboard?” I asked her.

She looked up at me gravely. She shook her head. “No, Sam. I’m not sorry. I think I feel a little better about everything. I think I snapped at you because I was feeling a little bit guilty. I don’t know… just what I want to do.” She smiled in an apologetic way. “I guess I must be a little mixed up these days.”

I swung the car around in front of the garages and headed back down the drive to Walnut Street. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her standing in the morning sun in the middle of the wide graveled place, looking small and alone, but standing very straight in her little white shorts and her little red halter, standing with a kind of indelible pride.

As I drove away I felt a bit hot-faced about trying to load her up with the corn-fed speech about the Gurrreat American Way. But, hell, I meant more than half of it. And I had thought there might be a chance she had inherited just a little of her old man’s feeling of responsibility not only to the company but to all of Portston.

I had planned to go back to the plant, but decided it could do no harm to advise Tommy McGann of my self-invitation to join the party. That would give me a chance to sound him out about his reaction to Mike Dean. I phoned from a drugstore and their house man said that Mr. and Mrs. McGann were home, and when he came back on the phone he told me to come right out.

Their rangy fieldstone house was in the hills west of town, the only private home in the area with a private airstrip. It was the result of the Texas approach of Tommy’s wife, Puss, and at present it accommodated their latest, a sleek and nimble Piper Apache with twin Continentals, retractable tricycle gear. Their house man told me they were out in back. I walked around the house. Tommy was in torn and faded khaki shorts and Puss was in a green swim suit and they were playing some kind of a game with great energy. There was a tall pole set in the lawn with a ball fastened to a long cord tethered to the top of it. They were armed with wooden paddles, and the object seemed to be to whale the ball past your opponent so that the cord wound itself around the pole.

Tommy noticed me first and yelled, “Grab a chair, Sam. Be with you in a couple of minutes, soon as I whup this creature.”

I swung one of the chairs by the pool around so that I could watch them. Tommy is thirty-five, eight years older than Louise. They are the same physical type, dark, fine-boned, almost delicate looking. Tommy has Louise’s long heavy black lashes, the fine lean hands. But there is nothing at all effeminate about him.

When he was seventeen in 1939, he ran away to Canada and lied his way into the RCAF. He flew an incredible number of missions with the RCAF and the RAF. He bailed out twice, once with burns that kept him three months in the hospital. He transferred over to the American Air Corps in forty-three and flew fifty missions of fighter cover with the Eighth Air Force. Then, over his protests, he was sent back to the states as an instructor. At Randolph Field in Texas, during gunnery practice, a student shot him out of the air. One slug tore away half his jaw. The chute popped open so low that Tommy landed with an impact that gave him, by count, twenty-one fractures when he hit the baked hide of Texas.

Two years later when he hobbled out of the hospital, he was a twenty-four-year-old retired Lieutenant Colonel with an eighty per cent disability pension, with extensive and not entirely successful cosmetic surgery, and with an eighteen-year-old Texas bride called Puss, youngest daughter of an oil and cattle family which gave them, as a wedding present, a few little ole producing wells. He had met her when she had come to the hospital to cheer up the injured. Tommy refused to spend the rest of his life hobbling about as predicted. Three years later he told the V.A. to cancel the pension. Thomas McGann had tried to get his only son to come into the firm, but Tommy amiably and firmly stated that he had no intention of doing anything constructive. He kept himself busy with his golf, his skin diving, his airplanes and his sports car racing. His only concession to his father was to make Portston his home.

It was very difficult to dislike Tommy and Puss. Their goal seemed to be to be amused, and amusing. At twenty-nine Puss had a sleek and lovely greyhound figure. She had gingery red hair, a cute-ugly face, a nose that was always peeling or ready to peel, a freckled body, a vast capacity for brandy on the rocks, and an attention span as long as a six-year-old’s. She had that miraculous physical co-ordination that enabled her to swim, ride, dive, ski, play tennis, golf, badminton, and table tennis with the experts. She had a sprawling, lounging, boyish lack of body consciousness, and no sense of style. Her lipstick and clothes were always the wrong shade. She moved in a welter of broken straps, scuffed shoes, missing buttons, jammed zippers and smudges. She was everyman’s tomboy sister—and no woman resented her. You could sense the closeness between Tommy and Puss. It seemed a shame they had no children. They wanted them and would have been good with them.

I sat by the pool and watched them on the green lawn, yelping and panting and beating the bejaysus out of that silly tethered ball. Children at play, lithe and graceful and unselfconscious. In spite of Tommy’s frantic lunges, she belted the ball by him and it wound around the post.

He threw the paddle into the air, rumpled her red hair, and they walked toward me, hand in hand, breathing heavily. “Hi, Sam,” she said, and went with three running steps toward the pool and in with the oiled perfection of a leaping porpoise.

Tommy dropped into the chair beside mine and shook his head and said, “One day, dammit, I’ll find a game I can beat her at. What’s on your mind, Sam?”

“I’m going along on the little excursion to the Bahamas.”

“Hey, that’s wonderful. We’ll have a ball. Come on, I want to show you something.” I followed him to the garage and up the stairs. With tender loving care he opened a long box, took out a gleaming gizmo, handed it to me and said proudly, “How do you like that?”