Executive Suite (40 page)

His mind was full of thoughts of Avery Bullard and his lips were parted to say how much, in so many ways, he had been that same kind of a man, but she interrupted before he could phrase what he wanted to say.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Walling,” she said, her voice suddenly lightened. “I hadn't intended to give you a lecture on family history. Do sit down. Since I have you here I intend to make the most of it.”

He was conscious of the fact that she pre-empted a chair with her back to the window so that her own face would be in shadow while his would be in full light, but he brushed aside the suspicion that it had been purposeful. She seemed too guileless for that.

“I'm sorry this is the first time you've been in my home, Mr. Walling. I'm sure you won't believe this because it's one of those pat things that people always say on occasions like this, but I've often thought of asking you and Mrs. Walling to come to dinner some evening. I know that you're interested in the arts and I thought you and Dwight might find something in common.”

Before he could force through a reply she went on, “Your wife is very beautiful, isn't she? I saw her at the flower show a few weeks ago. She was wearing a dress that was the color of the green verdigris on old bronze—a topaz brooch and some wonderful thing in her hair—and I thought she was quite the most handsome woman I'd ever seen.”

The accuracy of her description surprised him, erasing the first-thought possibility that he was being subjected to blatant flattery.

“Yes, Mary's beautiful,” he said. The words felt immodest to his tongue as if he were guilty of self-praise.

“She's Grecian, isn't she?”

Again he was surprised. “Yes, her mother and father were both born in Greece.”

“Dwight and I spent a winter in Athens. They're wonderfully strong—the Grecian women—but still without sacrifice of femininity. Perhaps that's why I admired Mrs. Walling so much—as we all admire the person we'd like to be but never can be. Or is that only a feminine characteristic? No, I'm sure it's not.”

Answering her own question had given him no hand-hold for a reply and he groped for something to say that would turn the conversation in the direction that he wanted it to take.

Suddenly, as if she were signaling the end of a pointless preliminary, her hands made an impatient darting gesture, “We're both being rather silly, aren't we—avoiding talking about him?”

The thought of Loren Shaw's having sat in this same room last evening had been close to the surface of his mind and his throat constricted.

“Avery Bullard is dead,” she said as if she were forcing the admission of a fact.

He nodded, annoyed with himself for his lack of perception, for having let a thought of Shaw intrude.

She had twisted her legs up under her and was sitting far back in the corner of the huge chair. “I want to talk about him, Mr. Walling. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

“I should say that I
need
to talk about him—and to someone who knew him very well. I'm sure you did.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Dwight knew him hardly at all, of course, so most of his impressions were erroneous—and there's no point in arguing about Avery Bullard. It's like believing in God—you either do or you don't.” She cut herself off as if startled by what she had said, and then added quickly. “That was a bad simile, wasn't it? You'll think me blasphemous.”

“I believe I know what you mean, Mrs. Prince,” he said, not certain that she thought the simile as badly chosen as she pretended. “It's true that you had to know Mr. Bullard to understand him—and a great many people never did, even people who imagined they were close to him. I thought of that a moment ago when you were talking about your grandfather. In some ways they must have been a good deal alike—Avery Bullard and Oliver Tredway.”

She gave him a startled glance and he thought at first that she, too, must have had the same secret thought, but what she said seemed to deny it. “I don't think you're right, Mr. Walling. You said that you could only understand Avery Bullard when you knew him well. I don't think you could ever understand him. He wouldn't let you. When you came close to understanding, he did something to throw you off the track—like a magician who was afraid that you might discover how he did his tricks.”

He had been listening with only half an ear, and a moment passed before he realized how aptly she had characterized Avery Bullard.

“Still a bad simile?” she had asked.

“No, a very good one. I was just thinking about it.”

That wasn't quite true. What he had actually been thinking about were the implications of that curious tone of faint rancor that had underlaid her voice. Could it be that there had once been something between her and Avery Bullard … a relationship that Bullard had broken when she had tried to draw him too close? Yet she had said that believing Avery Bullard was like believing in God … and the unadorned black dress was obviously mourning.

She picked a cigarette out of the heavy bronze jar at her elbow and he moved quickly to light it for her. She gestured him back. “Thank you but please don't bother, Mr. Walling. I chain smoke when I'm nervous.”

It was the first cigarette that he had seen her smoke but he saw the opening that her remark gave him and his impatience goaded him to take advantage of it. “Why should you be nervous, Mrs. Prince? I hope not about the future of the company?”

“The company? No, I wasn't thinking about the company—or perhaps I was, in a roundabout way,” she said, preoccupied. Then suddenly she flicked her eyes toward him, “Mr. Walling, do you mind if I ask you some questions about the company?”

“Not at all.”

For a fleeting moment there was a return of her earlier lightness. “It's my own fault, of course, that I'm forced to ask you these questions. If I hadn't been such a negligent director I'd know the answers.”

Matching her lightness, he said, “That's not so inexcusable, Mrs. Prince. Directors' meetings haven't meant too much usually.”

“That answers my first question,” she said with a faintly victorious smile. “I wanted to ask you if it were true that Avery Bullard was something of a dictator. That was pretty much the way the company was run, wasn't it, Mr. Walling?”

Both the phrasing of the question and the tone of its delivery brought back the memory of the hours he had spent on the witness stand in the patent suit on the extrusion process. He had learned then that an honest answer to an apparently innocent question could sometimes be grossly misconstrued, and that apparently innocent questions were often less innocent than they seemed. Julia Tredway Prince was not so guileless as he had first thought.

“I'm not certain that I know what you mean, Mrs. Prince. If you're suggesting that Mr. Bullard played a very strong part in the management of the company—yes, that's true.”

“Apparently you don't think that was a bad thing for the company—or do you?”

“The record pretty much speaks for itself.”

“Then you think there's nothing wrong with a dictator management?”

“I wouldn't go quite that far, Mrs. Prince. There's something wrong with everything. I suppose—and I'm still not certain that I know what you mean by dictator management.”

“Have you resented it, Mr. Walling? Men of your type usually do resent buckling under to a dictator, don't they? That's why dictatorships usually fail, isn't it—when the good men underneath can no longer stand the subjection?”

He felt the first vapor of resentment rising within him but he fanned it away. “Let's get one thing clear, Mrs. Prince, I have nothing but admiration for Avery Bullard. He was a great man and I'll never be out of his debt. Everything I have came from Avery Bullard.”

“I know how you feel, Mr. Walling,” she said—and for an instant he thought he had scored—but then she went on. “But that isn't precisely true, is it? What you have came from the
Tredway Corporation
—not personally from the man who happened to be its president.”

“He
was
the company! If it hadn't been for Avery Bullard there wouldn't be a Tredway Corporation.”

“Isn't that a little like saying that if it hadn't been for Franklin D. Roosevelt there wouldn't be a United States of America? Admittedly, the country was in rather bad shape when he became president—but there had been a George Washington before him—and a Jefferson and a Lincoln and—”

“Yes, of course,” he said hurriedly, trying to escape the consequences of his quick tongue … he'd been an idiot to say what he had, knowing how she felt about her grandfather!

“That wasn't an original thought of mine,” she said, smiling almost as if it were an apology. “It was something that Dwight said to me once after I'd made much the same remark about Avery Bullard that you just did. He reminded me that a company is much larger than one man—any man—and that many people contributed to its building. Even my father, whom I'd come to regard as a failure, actually made a great many important contributions to the company. Even building the Tower doesn't seem so foolish now, does it?”

He felt a twinge of annoyance at the way she persisted in taking advantage of his too quickly made remark. “You're quite right, of course, Mrs. Prince—a company is much more than one president.”

“Much more than any president,” she persisted, “—and particularly so today with the company as large as it is. I had a very interesting discussion of that subject last evening.”

Shaw! Now it began to make sense … all of the things she had said were tying together … yes, now she was even sounding like Shaw … the same pat phrases.

Her words faded back into his consciousness. “—that a pronounced change should be made in the whole management concept of the Tredway Corporation. He made the point that the dictator was an outmoded form of industrial government, just as it's an outmoded form of political government.”

He choked back the impulse to argue. There was nothing to be gained. He had to get to the point … get it out in the open. “I presume the man you talked to was Mr. Shaw.”

Surprise lifted her face. “Yes, it was Mr. Shaw.”

“I thought so.”

“Why?”

“I recognized his point of view.”

“It isn't yours?”

“Hardly.”

“Just what is your point of view, Mr. Walling?”

He hesitated, momentarily silent. It was plain that those old rumors about her sanity were only malicious gossip. She was a clever woman … damned clever! He had to watch his every word.

She took advantage of his hesitance and said, “Perhaps you'd prefer not to answer that question.”

“No, no,” be countered, side-stepping what was clearly a trap. “That's a big assignment, Mrs. Prince, asking me to give you my point of view. I was trying to think how to state it briefly.”

“Then let me simplify it. A few minutes ago you said that you felt Avery Bullard was very much like my grandfather. Did you mean that Mr. Bullard has been running the corporation in the same way—in the 1890 concept that the boss was a god-on-a-hill—supreme—unquestioned—the absolute dictator?”

Anger had risen to become a barrier to his voice, not anger at Julia Tredway Prince but at Loren Shaw. It was Shaw who was to blame … she was repeating Shaw's words … it was Shaw who had planted the “dictatorship” notion in her head. He had to fight back! But how? There were only two courses and there was a deadfall ahead on both paths. If he defended Avery Bullard he would be defending “dictatorship” and all that Shaw had made it mean … everything that was wrong with the company. Yes, there
were
things wrong … plenty of things … and he'd do something about them as soon as he could! But any admission now would mean walking into the trap that Shaw had set for him.

“It's hardly possible to compare your grandfather's management of the old Tredway Furniture Company with Avery Bullard's management of the Tredway Corporation. In your grandfather's day—”

The flip of her hand signaled an interruption. “That's the point, Mr. Walling—the phrase you just used—
Avery Bullard's
management of the Tredway Corporation.”

“That was only a figure of speech, Mrs. Prince.”

“Was it really? Isn't it true that Avery Bullard has been managing the corporation almost singlehandedly, making all of the decisions himself?”

“No, that isn't true—it couldn't be true. The corporation is much too large for that to be possible. There are literally thousands of decisions made every day. With factories all over the—”

“I meant the important decisions, the top-level ones, the decisions that really count.”

“If it's a decision that involves a major policy then, of course, it becomes a matter for the board of directors to decide.”

“But, Mr. Walling, I thought you said a minute or two ago that the directors' meetings never meant very much.”

He flinched inwardly, feeling himself unfairly trapped, forcing a smile to help him keep from losing his temper. “We seem to be going around in a circle.”

“Yes, don't we.”

“May I turn the tables and ask you a question, Mrs. Prince?”

“Of course.”

“You seem concerned about Mr. Bullard's management of the company. Why? Don't you feel that it's been successful?”

She answered so quickly that she must have anticipated the question. “I'm much more concerned with the future than I am with the past, Mr. Walling—but don't you agree that it's reasonable to ask whether or not there should be perpetuation of Mr. Bullard's kind of a management attitude?”

“I'm not certain that I know what you mean.”

“I hesitate to use the word again because I know that you dislike it.”