Executive Suite (10 page)

Don, white with anger, was packing when Karl Eric Kassel intercepted his intended flight. What happened then was something for which Don Walling spent most of the next year attempting to excuse himself. Somehow, as the result of a blend of verbal artifice to which he had never been exposed before, he allowed Karl Eric Kassel to talk him into staying. Afterwards, thinking about it and trying to prove to himself that his submission was not the result of a personal weakness, Don told himself that it most assuredly was not because Kassel had given him a hundred-dollar bonus and raised his salary to twenty-five dollars a week. Money didn't matter. What did influence him, according to the explanation in which he finally found some measure of self-justification, was Karl Eric Kassel's honest confession that he was a complete charlatan who couldn't draw a line himself, and that most of the work to which his name had been signed over the years had been done by the stream of talented young men who had been Don's predecessors.

The revelation was made all the more effective by Karl Eric Kassel's sudden dropping of the “Viennese” accent which Don had never suspected had been an actor's trick. He could not have been more surprised if Karl Eric Kassel had suddenly unhooked his red beard. “Listen, kid, it's time you learn something about the facts of life,” Karl Eric Kassel had said, dropping not only the accent but all of the well-polished mannerisms with which he had veneered his personality. “You're a clever boy. You got imagination. You got brains. You got drive. You got guts. You got ambition. Where's it get you? Lemme tell you—nowhere—not unless you know the facts of life. That's what I'm trying to teach you. You stick with me and I'll hand you the front-door key to a gold mine. You think all the gold mines are in the hard rock of the big mountains? No. The biggest gold mine in the world is right inside the hard skulls of all these big-shot businessmen. Ask yourself this—how did they get what they got? How do they make all their dough? Simple. They found something that the public was a sucker for. Right? They make a sucker out of the public—so I turn around and make a sucker out of them. What's wrong with that? Turnabout's fair play, isn't it? Do I give them their money's worth? Sure—exactly the way they give a woman her money's worth when they sell her twenty cents worth of perfumed lanolin in a fancy jar for two dollars. Does she kick? No. She's satisfied. She likes it. All suckers like it. Makes them feel good. That's the whole secret, boy. These big shots are no different. They like it too. There's only one thing. They're big men. They know it. Everything around them's got to be big. They got to operate in a big way. If they're going to be a sucker they don't want to be no small sucker—they got to be a big sucker.

“You know Mr. A. W. Wilberson, president of C & W Housewares? A very big man. Big in all ways. Let us take a hypothetical situation—very hypothetical. You are not the associate of Karl Eric Kassel—you are only you. You go to see Mr. Wilberson—which is what I mean by hypothetical because when you go there he will not see you. So you write him a letter. You ask him to give you a job at a very large salary like thirty-five dollars a week and in two weeks you will design him a new percolator. What happens? He tears up the letter. Why? He is insulted. That way the new design would only cost him seventy dollars. You have treated him in a small way. That is wrong. You have treated him like a man who is smart enough to want to make a good deal. That is wrong. Also you have treated him with respect. That is wrong. You have made all those mistakes. Now Karl Eric Kassel steps in. I do not make those mistakes. I do not treat him like a smart man. I do not let him know that I have respect for him. I treat him like a sucker. That is what he wants. I give him the red beard. I give him the phony accent. I give him the big name—which is also a phony. I give him the big price. I do not insult him. I give him the chance to be the big sucker. That is what he wants. He likes it. He is willing to pay for it.”

The appeal of Karl Eric Kassel's revelation was the appeal of an invitation to sophistication and Don Walling accepted it, somewhat as an adolescent toys with vice, but more as a student who steps over the barriers that separate him from a new field of learning without questioning either purpose or propriety.

Don Walling learned a great deal in the next ten months as Kassel allowed him to have more and more contact with prospects and clients. Some of what he learned followed the tenets of Karl Eric Kassel's teaching, some did not. He found some corporation executives of the type that Kassel had described, enough of them to keep a reasonably steady flow of commissions coming into the studio, but Don's reaction did not parallel Karl Eric Kassel's. Instead of generating cynicism, these men inspired pity. Most of them, despite their cultivated executive poise, lived with a terrible fear. They were trying desperately to find some way to counteract their own recognized shortcomings through buying talent and judgment to fill the void. What Karl Eric Kassel sold, even more than designs, was an escape from fear. Even if it was temporary, it was something. Even if it failed, it was a try. The “good try,” Don learned was a merit badge in the world of business.

He had little chance to get to know the industrial executives who most incited his admiration. They seldom survived the prospect stage. They were too smart to fall for the pretentious antics of Karl Eric Kassel. One of those men was Avery Bullard.

Karl Eric Kassel had secured a commission to design a house to be exhibited at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, and a second commission to create a new line of furniture to furnish the house. It turned out to be a one-man job for Don Walling. Kassel kept promising him assistants but, although there were unemployed draftsmen in every bread line, he somehow managed to avoid finding them. Don worked twenty hours a day for weeks on end. The final construction and furnishing, which he went to Chicago to supervise, was a nightmare seen through glazed and bloodshot eyes. On the night before the opening, completely exhausted, he had collapsed on a pile of furniture pads.

Sometime during the night the lights flashed on. Don awakened enough to be conscious that Karl Eric Kassel was giving some prospective client a preview showing as bait for his trap. Don heard the man's voice and there was something about its timbre that instantly completed his awakening. He listened and what he heard gave him a vindictive satisfaction. The man's words were slashing through the armor of Karl Eric Kassel's pretense. Finally there was a pause and then the heart thrust. “Kassel, who actually designed this furniture?”

Afterwards, over the years, when Don Walling was tempted to charge Karl Eric Kassel with all the bitterness and anger that he had felt during those two long years, there was always the book-balancing memory of the way the red-bearded charlatan had redeemed himself that night in the World's Fair house. Kassel had said, directly and simply, “This house and everything in it was designed by a very talented young man named Don Walling.”

“I want to see him,” the voice had demanded—and Don, more awakened than he had ever been in his life, unconscious of his grimy hands and his rumpled work clothes, unconscious of Karl Eric Kassel, unconscious of everything in the world except the necessity of obeying that command, walked out through the door to meet Avery Bullard.

Somehow, unnoticed, Karl Eric Kassel disappeared and left them alone. They wandered down to the lakefront, Bullard talking, questioning, gently probing. There was no sword edge in his voice now, but it had lost none of its exciting quality. It was the voice of strength and power, of integrity and purpose, of fearless imagination that leaped skyward with the same magic that the rising sun streaked the sky over Lake Michigan, setting even the water aflame.

Karl Eric Kassel was not surprised when Don told him that he was going to work for Avery Bullard. “I know,” he said simply. “Good luck. He's a great man.”

During those next two years, the years before the merger that created the Tredway Corporation, Don Walling worked closely with Avery Bullard. All his life he had been searching for a total challenge. Now he had found it. No matter how much energy and thought he poured into whatever they were working on, Avery Bullard could outwork him and outthink him. The range of the older man's ability was a constant goad. He would come rushing in, take one quick look at a design that Don had been working on for days and instantly put his finger on something which, the moment Don saw it, he recognized as a flaw that he should have caught and corrected himself. Even more exasperating was the way Avery Bullard could snatch up a pencil and redraw a line that Don, no matter how long he struggled, could seldom improve. Competence is a whip in the hands of a taskmaster, and the lash cuts all the deeper when the whip is held by a perfectionist. Avery Bullard was unrelenting. Once he made Don turn out twenty-six sketches for a little brass toe on a Duncan Phyfe table. When a sketch was finally selected and the first trial casting made, Avery Bullard took one look and literally threw it out of the window of his twenty-fourth floor office. Then they started all over again. Don agreed that the end result was worth all that it had cost in money and time. It was closer to perfection.

After the merger, which was the first major fulfillment of the dream picture that Avery Bullard had drawn in that predawn hour on the shores of Lake Michigan, he had sent Don Walling to Pittsburgh to work with the Coglan Metal Furniture Company. “There are things we can do with metal that the furniture industry hasn't even thought about yet. Go out there and do them. Don't let anything stand in your way. Old man Coglan will tell you it can't be done, that they tried that before. Don't bother to tell him to go to hell, just disregard him. He doesn't count. I had to keep him for appearance' sake. He'll be out in a year. Work closely with the superintendent, a man named Jesse Grimm. I don't know him too well yet but he looks good. I think he's our kind. But don't rely on Grimm. Don't rely on anyone. Get out in that factory yourself. Learn how to work metal. Know what you can do with those machines and what you can't do—and when you want to do something that a machine won't do, design a machine that will do it. Get out in the trade. Talk to people. Go to the markets. Find out what they want—even when they don't know yet that they want it—and then give it to them. One last thing, Walling. Don't wear out the seat of your pants on the drawing board stool. Hire a draftsman to get your ideas on paper. If you get enough ideas, hire two draftsmen—or three or four or five. Draftsmen are cheap. Ideas are what count.”

Don Walling went to Pittsburgh fired not only with the incentive of a flaring opportunity but also with the chance to escape from the constant domination of Avery Bullard. Before the end of the first week the second motivation had lost its validity. He needed Avery Bullard and the recognition of that need revealed a weakness in himself that he set out to remedy. In the attempt, he began unconsciously to model himself in the Avery Bullard pattern. Trouble developed. The morale in the factory, stemming from a natural resentment of the forced merger, was none too good at best. Don Walling's aping of Bullard's tactics made it worse. Finally, in a midnight session on the back porch of Jesse Grimm's house, the superintendent said, “Somebody has to tell you off, Don, and I guess I'm elected. I don't know too much about Avery Bullard because I've only had two short talks with him, but I know something about the men in our plant. They won't swallow the idea that Avery Bullard sent you out here to be a twenty-six-year-old carbon copy—and I might as well tell you that it doesn't go down with me either.”

Don's first reaction was one of angry resentment but, under the soft attrition of Grimm's reasonableness, it gradually dissolved into the reluctant acceptance of just punishment. He felt like a spanked child and it wasn't a pleasant feeling. He promised himself that no one would ever again call him a carbon copy of Avery Bullard. In time he became as good a friend of Jesse Grimm's as the older man's carefully impersonal attitude would permit.

Meetings with Avery Bullard were few and far between, much less frequent than Don would have liked. He said so once on one of his trips to Millburgh. Avery Bullard had grinned. “Hell's bells, boy, don't you know that leaving you alone is the best compliment I can pay you? When I don't like what's happening you'll hear from me soon enough—more than you'll want to hear! By the way, we're boosting your salary to ten thousand.”

It was then that he said, “I guess that ought to be enough to support a wife, Mr. Bullard.”

“Who is she?”

He had hesitated, asking himself again the very secret question that he had asked himself so many times during the last two weeks. Then, more defiant than he had ever dared be with Avery Bullard before, he had said, “Her name is Mary Kovales. Her father used to run a little restaurant where I worked when I went to school. He's dead. She isn't in the social register and the first time she'll ever taste champagne will be at our wedding.”

“How smart is she?” Avery Bullard had asked, and it was no idle question.

“Well—” Don hesitated, searching for some way to tell him. “She's a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and she has a job now as an assistant to an economist. She—”

“Good,” Bullard broke in. “You'll need a smart wife. It's a hell of a handicap when you don't have one. Champagne? Well, that runs up the cost, doesn't it? In that case we'd better raise you to twelve instead of ten. Now get out of here and get back to Pittsburgh before Alderson finds out that I've wasted another two thousand of his precious dollars.”

That next year Jesse went back to Millburgh as Vice-President for Production and Don was made General Manager of the Coglan plant. Then the rearmament program started and the Pittsburgh plant was converted to the manufacture of parts for aircraft and naval ships. There were four years when Mary said that she might as well have stayed single for all she saw of her husband. Don didn't agree and Avery Bullard didn't either. “I don't know whether you know it or not, Walling, but that girl's doing you a lot of good. You're beginning to get ripe.”