Executive Suite (19 page)

The story of Walt Dudley's money-raising prowess spread over the campus and he was appointed to the advertising sales staff of both the newspaper and the annual. In his junior year he was elected not only class president but also business manager of the annual, an unprecedented doubling of honors. His name had become magic on a ballot. Everybody liked Walt Dudley.

In terms of his afterlife, the most important thing that happened during his college years was his continued association with Bernie Sulzman. After his success with The Sanctum project, Bernie offered him a chance to sell furniture to students who were dissatisfied with the sparse furnishings of the fraternity houses and dormitories. Walt's commissions paid for most of his college education and, more to the point, he began to learn the furniture business.

It was Bernie who suggested, after his graduation, that Walt get a job as a wholesale furniture salesman and it was Bernie's recommendation, more than his own diploma or college record, that got him his chance as a junior salesman with A. B. Poindexter, sales agent in the Minneapolis area for the Tredway Furniture Company.

Six years later, Walter Dudley had made enough of a mark so that he was singled out by Avery Bullard, who was then sales manager of Tredway Furniture, and encouraged to establish a sales agency of his own in Kansas City. In 1936, after the Tredway Corporation was formed, he closed his own agency and joined the corporation as a district sales manager. After a number of moves, all of them upward, he had been named Western Sales Manager with headquarters in Chicago. In 1945 he had been brought back to Millburgh and made Vice-President for Sales.

At fifty-three, J. Walter Dudley was probably the best-known man in the entire furniture industry. His memory for names and faces was phenomenal. At one Chicago market, standing at the door of Tredway's display space in the Merchandise Mart, two bystanding salesmen had actually kept a count and heard him greet two hundred and eighteen furniture store owners and buyers by name before he was confronted by an individual whose name he did not know. There were hundreds of furniture merchants who would not have thought a market visit complete without having had the opportunity to shake hands with good old Walt Dudley.

In retrospect, J. Walter Dudley's life seemed to have followed such an unvarying line that fate appeared to have ruled the course with a straightedge. Actually, he had followed no conscious course. In all his years he had wasted a bare handful of hours worrying about his future. He was completely honest when he advised his young salesmen, “Work—that's the answer! Just keep working and don't worry. Don't watch the goal posts—keep your eye on the ball! If you're in there all the time, hitting that old line, you'll score a touchdown sooner or later.”

He practiced what he preached. His talent for making friends, coupled with his memory, were important assets but neither ability would have been effective without his never-failing store of energy. When he traveled with salesmen, which he frequently did, he demanded a schedule that started the day with an early-opening store and carried through at a pounding pace until they finally wound up at some neighborhood shop that was open in the evenings. Then there would be a hotel room session until midnight. As he moved across the country, J. Walter Dudley left behind him a trail of worn and astounded salesmen who, when they met afterwards to compare notes, would acknowledge that he was a phenomenon beyond understanding.

If J. Walter Dudley's driving energy was beyond the understanding of his salesmen, it was equally true that it was beyond his own. He himself did not know the source, nor did he waste time in searching for it. His motivation was not—though others often found it hard to believe—the fire of calculated ambition. He was a runner who ran without a goal. Running was his way of life. If you ran hard, and made enough friends, everything would work out all right.

There had been only two people in J. Walter Dudley's life who had ever worried him by seeming, at times, to withhold their total friendship. One was Avery Bullard—the other was his wife Katherine.

Marriage had been no departure from the straight line course of Walter Dudley's life. He met Katherine that first year after college. She was the daughter of a friend of Mr. Poindexter and lived in a near-mansion that fronted on Lake of the Isles. It was in that house that Walter entered the final phase of his education. There he drank his first cocktail, wore his first tuxedo, and learned the amenities of upper-level social life. He was a good student and adapted himself with an ease that confirmed Katherine's estimate that he was the most likely candidate left among the original prospects who had not yet discovered her two shortcomings—first, that her father was considerably less affluent than he appeared to be and second, that she was, if not totally lacking in sexual desire, at least considerably below the expectations of her experienced trial suitors. Walt, fortunately, was a man without experience. They were married the next June.

Afterwards, in the earlier years of their married life, he was occasionally troubled by his wife's failure to respond to him but, before it became of too serious concern, he found that his own desire was waning and, rather than risk embarrassment, his advances were held to a minimum. Every year the minimum had become less and less. There had been no children.

His business relationships with Avery Bullard had actually caused him more concern than his intimate relationships with his wife. There, too, he had suffered from the fault of infrequency. Before the move to Millburgh, he had seen Avery Bullard no oftener than two or three times each year and, since the subject of their meetings was frequently a promotion or a salary raise, he had naturally come to think of Mr. Bullard as a perpetually pleasant man and one of the warmest of his many friends.

After he had moved to Millburgh, almost daily contact with Avery Bullard had brought a frightening revelation. Always before, Walt Dudley had been able to solve all of his problems with the friend-making process that he thought of as “salesmanship.” Avery Bullard was shockingly unsusceptible. He was pleasant enough, as a rule, but his questioning was perpetual and he would not accept pleasant generalities as answers. To compound the difficulty, most of Mr. Bullard's demands were for facts about the future. In J. Walter Dudley's dreamless mind, the future was without dimension. He was like a soldier who, having spent his whole career facing only the close-up realities of hand-to-hand combat, is suddenly called upon to return to a headquarters desk and asked to plan the whole strategy of major battles to be fought at some indeterminate time, over an unknown terrain, with weapons not yet invented.

Although Avery Bullard's persistent questioning sometimes seemed to border on persecution, Dudley had not become bitter or resentful. Instead, his respect for the president mounted constantly and he did his best to model himself in the Bullard mold.

There were, inevitably, times of discouragement when he experienced the new sensation of personal inadequacy. It was during one of those times that Loren P. Shaw first came to his rescue. Avery Bullard had recently become imbued with a passion for “long-range planning” and he had demanded an estimate of annual sales, year by year and factory by factory, for the next five years. Dudley had fumbled the task for a week, making one false start after another, until Shaw dropped into his office one afternoon with an offer of assistance. It was only a few months after the comptroller had joined the company and Dudley had no appreciation of Shaw's talent for converting intangibles into neat columns of quotable figures. In a way that he had never been dependent on anyone else, J. Walter Dudley became dependent upon Loren Shaw. The comptroller's figures gave him the answers to Mr. Bullard's more urgent questions. There was nothing that he needed so much.

Over the past four years, dependency had ripened into friendship, both in and out of the office. Although Dudley thought of all of the vice-presidents as his friends, Shaw was unquestionably his best. Every day confirmed it. Today had been no exception. It was Shaw who had driven him out to the airport tonight and Shaw who had called him to his office this afternoon and prepared him to meet a danger that might lay ahead. “Walt, I suspect that you'll find some pressure on prices at the Chicago market. Dealers' stocks are up, they probably won't be too anxious to buy, and some of our competitors will be hungry for business. Prices may break. If you have to move, here's something that will help you.”

Then Shaw had given him the folder of charts that he was examining now. There was a chart for each major item and, by simply finding the intersection of two lines, the relative net profit at different price and volume levels could be quickly determined. Fanning through the charts, Walter Dudley felt the comfortable assurance of being able to act in a hurry with no danger that Mr. Bullard could ask embarrassing questions afterward. Loren Shaw was his very good friend.

If there were price trouble, Dudley knew that it would come quickly, as soon as he saw the mail order and chain store men in the morning. He was trying to prepare himself by studying the charts. But there was a night between today and tomorrow, and thoughts of the night persistently wormed themselves into the forefront of his mind.

Resolutely, he put the charts in his saddle-leather portfolio and told himself that the time had come to settle this business of Eva Harding, completely and finally, once and for all. If he weakened tonight, as he had weakened before, and allowed himself to call her again … no, there was no need to make that decision again. It was made! He had made it the last time he had left her. It was done … over … finished! He would never see Eva Harding again. This wasn't like the other times. This time he meant it!

Eva Harding had led J. Walter Dudley into the one side journey from the straight course of his life. There was no argument now about his having been led. Eva had eventually admitted it as freely as she then chided him for his reluctance. Under the intimate circumstances of the confession, he had found the admission as beguiling as the chiding, despite the fact that it made Eva seem, by contrast with Katherine, a rather abnormal woman. His experience had not prepared him for the fact that sexual desire was not an unfeminine characteristic, nor that sexual satisfaction was something other than a favor which was reluctantly granted by a considerate woman to a demanding male.

The face and name of Eva Harding had first been impressed on Walter Dudley's mind at one of the summer markets. She had been introduced to him on the display floor by Mort Finney, a salesman in the Chicago office, and catalogued in his memory along with Mort's whispered footnote that she was “a clever gal who's just opened a decorating shop on North Michigan and is plenty worth keeping an eye on.”

At the winter market, J. Walter Dudley's memory performed with its usual efficiency and he was able, without prompting, to call Miss Harding's name and inquire about her shop on North Michigan Boulevard. He repeated the performance the following June and again in January when, recalling her name on a list of customers who had done unusually well with Millway Federal, Tredway's most expensive line of colonial reproductions, he had congratulated her on her success and suggested the possibility that a photograph of her shop might be used in one of Tredway's trade-magazine advertisements. That had led to her invitation to stop by and see her shop, an invitation to which J. Walter Dudley attached no special importance since it was a gesture as commonly made by store owners as their invariable inquiry about the state of business. Afterwards, however, Mort Finney had come to him and said, “Chief, I think it would be swell if you could manage somehow to stop in her place for a minute or two while you're in Chicago. She's really beginning to pick up some volume now on top-end stuff. I've got a hunch that a little personal visit from you would help keep me on the inside track. She's quite a gal—got a lot of tricks up her sleeve. Unless I miss my guess, you'll get a kick out of talking to her.”

Mort Finney was never to know how accurately prophetic that last remark had been.

The next Friday, coming down North Michigan Boulevard after a late afternoon meeting at the Drake Hotel, J. Walter Dudley happened to see Eva Harding's name on the front of her shop and decided that the few remaining minutes of the afternoon could be better spent in calling on her than by returning to the Merchandise Mart.

There was light snow falling and a sharp wind whipping in from the lake. Walking back the long block by which the driver had overshot the mark before he could be stopped, J. Walter Dudley had felt unusually tired. The meeting, which had been held at Avery Bullard's suggestion, had been a complete failure and he faced the prospect of an unpleasant report when he got back to Millburgh. The task immediately ahead of him, calling on Eva Harding, aroused no anticipation of pleasure. He was only fulfilling a promise that he wished he hadn't made.

As a generality—to which, of course, Walter Dudley never gave open expression—he did not like businesswomen, particularly those of the type to which his mind had assigned Eva Harding. He had known many of them and they were all too boldly clever, too hard and brittle, too obviously an incongruous blend of feminine wile and masculine imitation.

There had been nothing in the first few minutes of his visit to Eva Harding's shop that had changed his original estimate of her, although he did find her somewhat easier to talk to than he had expected. She did not feel called upon, as so many of her type did, to display a “personality.” Then, too, as she took him on a quick tour of the shop, she showed unusual discrimination in her selection of the merchandising ideas that she picked to call to his attention, by-passing the familiar and reserving her comments for those that were genuinely original.

When they reached the second floor, where the furniture stock was displayed, Walter Dudley's interest sharpened. There was hardly a piece of Tredway furniture to which she had not made some improving modification. A change of brasses on the No. 1604 buffet gave it a distinction that it had not had before. There was a gold Chinese tea paper under the glass of the No. 370B table. Four little brass stars on the doors made a startling change in No. 9181.