Barbara Greer (25 page)

They sat on the brown sofa and Billy Woodcock crossed his legs carefully, hitching up his trouser knees to preserve their crease. ‘How does the old place seem?' he asked her.

‘Just the same as ever,' she said.

‘Well, good, good. That's good, Barbara. Yes indeedy,' he said and rubbed his hands together. ‘It's a grand old place, this farm.'

Barbara smiled. She had grown used, over the last few years, to Cousin Billy's jolly paternalism and his occasional pomposity. After all, he was president now of the paper company, and as a young man who had been given vast responsibilities in the family, he took these responsibilities with great seriousness.

‘Well, Barbara,' he said. ‘I suppose you're wondering why I wanted to have this little talk with you. Why I wanted to see you alone this afternoon.'

‘Well, frankly, I am,' Barbara said.

‘Don't blame you, by golly!' he said. ‘Don't blame you a bit. By the way,' he said, looking around, ‘where is Peggy?'

‘She's out,' Barbara said. ‘She went somewhere in the car. I don't think she said where she was going—'

‘Well,' he said, ‘that's just as well. Just as well. I want this little talk to be strictly
entre nous
, Barbara. After all, you're the older of you two girls and on business matters, I'm counting on you to assume responsibility.'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘You know,' he said, ‘I've always felt kind of sorry that you and I were—well, that we were never closer. And well, I guess I'm to blame for that. You know how it is with this company, Barbara. I eat, sleep and drink the paper business—not much time for socialising with the family. But it's too bad. We've never got to know each other the way we should because I've just been too busy with the company.'

‘Yes, I know,' she said, and remembering that Cousin Billy responded quickly to simple flattery, she said, ‘Everyone's so grateful, Billy, for all you've done.'

He smiled modestly. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I've done my best. That's all I can do—my best.'

‘You've certainly done that, Billy.'

His face grew serious again. ‘Well,' he said, ‘this little matter I want to talk to you about today concerns your sister, concerns Peggy. Now, you know that nobody has got a higher regard for your sister than I do. I'm very fond of Peggy, extremely fond. And I like her husband, too, Barney. Much to my surprise he's worked out pretty well down at the office, and I'm real pleased, all things considered. I think he's fitted in pretty fairly well, and that's a pleasure. Of course he's still got a lot to learn. This is a family company, always has been and always will be, and some of our—well, our methods—probably seem a little funny and strange to him. But what he's got to learn is that our methods, the way we do things, are based on experience and know-how, over a hundred years of experience and know-how. They've been time-tested you might say. However—' and he hesitated, holding up his hand, ‘that doesn't mean we're not receptive to new ideas when they come along, either. If the ideas are good ones, that is. Now, Barbara,' he said, ‘how much do you know about human nature?'

‘What do you mean?' she asked him.

‘Well, let me put it this way. I'm quite a student of human nature. In this business, I've had to be. And human nature is a funny thing, a very funny thing. And yet if you size it up correctly you can pretty much predict what it will do. Now take this Barney character. I've been studying him and I think I've got him sized up pretty fairly well. What he is, is a misfit. Now, Barbara, don't interrupt. You may like him and so do I, we all do. Liking is one thing, but human nature is something else again. He's a misfit, he's a dissenter and he's a very unhappy and mixed-up fellow. Why? It's easy enough to see why. He walked into this family—off the street as it were—and found something pretty big. We've been big in this town for over a hundred years and he didn't expect that kind of bigness, didn't understand it. It's outside his realm of understanding, what we are and the way we do things. Still, he's no dope. He's come out of that Harvard Business School with a lot of smart-aleck ideas. ‘Decentralisation' he said to me the other day, or some other fool thing. Because he's no dope he tries—rather than to fit in—to make his presence felt by trying to switch things around, overturn the apple cart. That's what I mean by a misfit. He's a trouble-maker and if he doesn't decide to shape up pretty soon, I'm—no kidding—going to have to take a few steps. But anyway, the interesting thing about these misfit types, if you understand human nature, is that they're misfits wherever they go. What I mean is that if he's a misfit in this company, chances are he'll be a misfit in the next one—and the next one after that. It's too bad, really, but that's what it amounts to. It's according to the laws of human nature. Now the only unique thing about this company is that it's a family company, our family. In other words, the family
is
the company and vice versa. So what I say about him not fitting into the company applies to the family, too, don't you see? Which is what makes it too bad. Now I'm telling you all this because I think you're mature enough to understand it. Peggy isn't. She doesn't understand it—not yet. So she's pushing him along in his smart-aleck schemes and what she's doing is riding for a great, big fall. Barbara, has Peggy asked you anything about the stock you own?'

Barbara said, ‘Well, Billy, I can't lie to you. She has. She mentioned it this morning.'

He smiled, satisfied. ‘I thought she would. She's been hounding all the stockholders—except me, of course. She's smart enough not to try to hound me! What did you tell her?'

‘It came as quite a surprise to me,' Barbara said. ‘I didn't know what to say, really. I asked her to let me think about it.'

‘Did she ask to buy it?'

‘Either that or to let her have my proxy for a while.'

He nodded. ‘Well, Barbara, what you do with your stock is up to you. Entirely. It's yours, you own it, and far be it from me to try to tell you one way or the other what to do. But I can tell you this: Whatever Peggy wants to do, she's not being very smart about it. In fact, she's being pretty stupid. Want to know why?'

‘Yes,' Barbara said, ‘why?'

‘Well, let's start out by assuming she can get her hands on a majority of the stock. What could she do with it? Vote herself head of the company, or Barney? That's pretty ridiculous. We've got a couple hundred employees down there. Good, loyal and honest employees. Some of them like Sam Pike have been with us for over forty years. Do you know what the average length of service of our employees is? Well, the average length of service is a little over ten years, and that's a lot. It's one of the things we're proud of. Do you think any one of these men would sit back and let a woman tell them what to do? Not likely! Do you think they'd sit back and let a holy Roman Catholic tell them what to do, a guy who gets his orders straight from Rome? Never!'

‘But Barney isn't a Catholic,' Barbara said. ‘Not any more.'

‘Once a Catholic always a Catholic, that's what the Church itself says, isn't it? That's what my employees think, anyway. They don't care whether he still goes to church or not. I know these men, Barbara. I know them inside and out. But anyway, that's only reason A why she's being foolish. Want to hear reason B?'

‘Yes,' Barbara said. ‘What is reason B?'

‘Reason A is assuming she
could
get her hands on enough stock to have controlling interest. Reason B is that she can't do it, anyway.'

‘Why not?'

‘Where would she get it? She has stock of her own, true—about a hundred and thirty shares as I recall. Then you have stock—roughly the same amount. It was left to both you girls by your grandfather. Now your father also has some stock, but most of his is held in trust—he can't sell it, all he gets is the income from it. I'm one of the trustees and Mary-Adams is another. Your father owns a few shares outright—about twenty-five I think. If she could get your hundred and thirty, plus your father's twenty-five, along with her own hundred and thirty—that would still add up to only two hundred and eighty-five shares, or not enough. And I'd frankly be surprised if your father let her have those twenty-five shares of his. He wouldn't do it, not even in one of his most befuddled moments.'

‘What do you mean by that?' she asked quietly.

‘I mean—I'm sorry, that wasn't a very nice thing to say,' he said. ‘But you know as well as I, don't you, that your father these days sometimes gets a little—well, confused.'

‘You mean he drinks too much?'

‘I didn't say that! I didn't say that, Barbara. But, well, he has been warned about the drinking. A couple of doctors I know have warned him, and I've warned him. But, far be it from me to tell him how he should live his life. How he lives his life is his business and nobody else's.'

‘If he's killing himself, it's our business, isn't it?' she asked. ‘It certainly is my business. Is it that serious?'

‘Nobody says it's that serious,' Billy said. ‘Nobody says that. I'm sorry we got on this subject, on this chain of thought, because it has nothing to do with what we're talking about.' He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed his damp brow. ‘Well, anyway,' he said, ‘to get back to cases. Peggy can't get enough stock anyway, to do what she wants. Mary-Adams and I each have over five hundred shares and needless to say we're not going to turn anything over to Peggy, nossirree! But anyway, there's a third reason which we can call reason C.'

‘What is reason C?' she asked him.

‘Reason C is—' he paused significantly, ‘reason C is that any arrangement such as Peggy and her husband want, or any
attempt
to make an arrangement like that, would be out of keeping with the terms of your grandfather's will. Don't forget that it was your own grandfather, not even mine, but my grandfather's brother, who set things up the way they are. He's the one who established the status quo. And it was his express desire, expressed in his will and even long before he died, that control of his mills should rest in
my
side of the family, not your father's. But you've heard all about that before. You know that story, and why things are set up the way they are. There's no need to go into all that story again.'

She did, indeed, know that story. She had not thought about it for some time, but it came back to her now with the realisation that it was the story, undoubtedly, that her father was planning to tell in the book he was writing. She had heard it—not all at once, but in fragments. Most of it she had heard from her mother, but some of it had come from Woody and some from her other cousins, Jeffrey and Talcott. She remembered it all. She remembered, too, her grandfather's old office at the mill, where most of it had happened.

For the president of a company whose net worth was then estimated to be in the neighbourhood of two and a half million dollars, Grandfather Woodcock's office had been austere. It was small, barely twelve feet square, and its furnishings were Spartan. In addition to his desk and tip-back chair, there were only two other pieces of furniture—a gaudily decorated Mosler safe of ancient vintage and a large, leather-cushioned chair with flat wooden arms, facing the desk, for visitors. Beside the chair stood a brass spittoon. The floor was uncarpeted and the single window was undraped. The amount of sunlight in the office could be regulated by raising or lowering the brown paper shade. No decorative touches had been supplied except, resting against the wall on top of the safe, Grandfather Woodcock's framed diploma from Yale on which the year 1887, in Roman numerals, was barely distinguishable, and on his desk, facing him, an autographed portrait of President Herbert Hoover. In one corner of the office, a high pile of shoeboxes contained samples of various Woodcock Paper products. One wall of the office was glass, permitting Grandfather Woodcock a clear view across the main floor of the mill; the other three walls were painted a muddy shade of brown. The office had no door so that his secretary, Mrs. McGraw, could hear every word spoken in the office from her desk, just outside. Though the office was gone now, replaced by more modern quarters, it was to this dusty and frowsty place that her father had gone that morning in the early 1930's, shortly after he had been given the title of executive vice-president, with his idea. She imagined her father, a young, handsome man, sitting opposite her grandfather in that cracked and sagging, leather chair.

A parkway was being planned, a modern superhighway that would extend from the Connecticut-New York border at Greenwich to the outskirts of New Haven, across Fairfield and New Haven Counties. There had been rumours from the State Legislature in Hartford, and the rumours were rapidly becoming fact. Preston had studied the map of the area. It was clear to him that the parkway would pass through Burketown.

As he saw it, there were two possibilities. One, that the parkway would pass through the west side of town, through the section known as West Hill. Two, that the parkway would pass to the east. Preston asked his father to consider the general terrain of these two areas. West Hill was a gentle, sloping, uncleared rise with no physical obstructions; to build a parkway across West Hill would require little more than cutting a clearing in the woods. On the east side, however, was the river and the hilly, rocky river bed. To direct a highway through this section would require, Preston was sure, building at least one and possibly two bridges across the winding little river; bridge-building, as everyone knew, added enormously to the cost of constructing a highway. Did it not—he asked his father—seem clearly logical that the parkway would thread its way across West Hill?

Grandfather Woodcock considered this for several minutes. Yes, he had finally agreed, perhaps it did, but what of it? He saw what Preston was driving at, but how could Preston predict the precise path of the parkway in the hundreds of acres on West Hill? Preston had a simple answer to this. It was not necessary to predict the exact route. If the parkway were to go through West Hill the entire surrounding area would quickly increase in value. A parkway meant roadside restaurants, gasoline stations, new sites for industry and housing developments. It was not, in other words, a ribbon of land that Barbara's father proposed to buy, but the entire area that the coming parkway would affect. It was roughly fourteen hundred acres and the average price of West Hill acreage was temptingly low.