Institute (10 page)

Hortense dropped a curtsey, crossing her hands on her heart and bowing low. “Colonel Lucas,” she said, “the honor is mine. I’ll cherish its memory always.”

She straightened up, and Mr. Garrett gave it a hand, which I wished he hadn’t done; it made her curtsey seem phoney. He said: “Hortense, I thought before things are made final tomorrow, you would like to look at the building I’ve bought, the one Dr. Palmer picked for your institute.”

“Tonight? Just like that?”

“Well, why not?”

“It’s an odd time to be taking a look, but—”

“It’s only nine o’clock.”

“Then let’s get it over with. Who are these gentlemen?”

He introduced them, and I could see her, out of force of habit, memorizing the names. Then we all went out into the hall, piled into an elevator, and went downstairs. We had to take three cabs to the building. When Hortense, Mr. Garrett, and I arrived, O’Connor was there ahead of us, waiting with the watchman and his flashlight to show us through. But Mr. Garrett had the cab stop across the street. When he pointed to the building, Hortense caught her breath. “It’s beautiful, just beautiful,” she said reverently. And it certainly was. By moonlight, it showed up gray and ghostly, its proportions even more striking than they had been by day.

We got out of the cab and crossed the street, and O’Connor took us through it. We used the one elevator that was in service. O’Connor took us upstairs and down again, finally showing us the “stockbrokers’ board room,” as he called it, across from the elevators downstairs. But Hortense corrected him.

“Mr. O’Connor,” she said, “it may have been designed for eminent stockholders, but now it has become the reception room of the Hortense Garrett Biographical Institute, and for that purpose, is perfection itself. Do you agree, Dr. Palmer?”

“I can’t imagine anything better.”

And I couldn’t. It was large, a bit higher than most rooms and wainscotted in some kind of wood. It was dignified in a quiet, high-toned way.

A half-hour later we were in the Black Tahiti Restaurant just down the street. We all ordered margaritas and some sort of Polynesian food which I don’t remember the name of, but Hortense was the only one who had anything to eat. When the drinks came, Garrett tasted the salt on his glass, raised it, and said: “To the Hortense Garrett Institute.” When we had all taken a sip, he added: “Once more Dr. Palmer reaches out and grabs the brass ring from nowhere.”

“Dr. Palmer,” I said, “did nothing of the sort. He just passed on a tip that paid off—as we think.”

“I imagine you saw, though, after meeting the colonel, Lloyd, why I had to be sure you weren’t being used?”

“Was he using
you
is the question,” Sam Dent said.

I should have been pleased with myself, but I wasn’t. We were in a booth. I don’t know whether the Garretts being on one side of the table, with Dent and me on the other, upset me or what; but for some reason I felt gloomy in spite of the building and the giant steps we were taking toward getting the Institute started. But Sam was truly depressed.

“The point,” he said, “is not the brass ring that was grabbed or who was using whom, but what we do with the worst turkey I ever heard of, now that we seem to have it. Mr. Garrett, I hate to be a killjoy, but if Bagastex broke Colonel Lucas, think what it will do to you.”

“Make me rich is all.”

“Rich
er
,” Hortense said. “He’s already filthy rich—except that the Hortense Garrett Institute will, to some extent, change that situation.”

“How can stuff you can’t sell make you rich?” Sam asked.

“By my changing the angle of promotion.”

“Lucas gave it all the promotion a product could ask for. That’s what landed him behind the eight ball.”

“I said I would change the angle.”

“Am I supposed to ask how?”

“By ninety degrees, exactly.”

“What is this, some kind of joke?”

“Not at all, Sam. As you’ve observed a great many times, Bagastex, horizontal, was a flop, a turkey, a bust. It had to be made too thick. Kids tripped on it. It took a power tool to cut it. And it created a storage problem in places that handled it. But
vertical
—as house siding—it’s perfect. That’s where the ninety degrees come in. I had some of the stuff sent to the lab up in Wilmington and told them to work on it, see what it was good for, if anything. Don’t forget, Sam, I often know a thing from a thing, and with this crazy thing, the point of it is: it’s cheap. So they heated it, hoping it would soften and they could press a matrix into it and mold it to look like bricks or stone or something. But all it did was turn white. No matter what color it had been from the dye that had been put in it, when it was heated, it turned white. Pete Holton there in the lab kept thinking there had to be some way of making use of that characteristic. And all of a sudden, he had it—or thought he had. He loaded some oil bidons on a truck, drove down to Georgia, and propositioned the Bagastex foreman for a few gallons to take back home so he could fill up that hole in his cellar without calling a goddam plumber who would, in turn, have to apply for a permit which he wasn’t at all sure he could get because it involved his sewer connection. So, for a hundred bucks, the foreman filled the bidons with liquid Bagastex, the mush they rolled into sheets and tried to sell as linoleum. It just so happened that this batch of stuff was red, so when Pete got back, he poured a bidon of it into the tray he’d used for heating, and as it was starting to set, he pressed a matrix into it, one he’d made from a brick wall, a hammered mold of wet cardboard that he had let dry. The Bagastex took the impression and looked exactly like brick except that the joints were red, just like the rest. But a hot wire grid, when he pressed it down on them, burned them white; they looked like the plaster between bricks. Then he built a small house of the stuff on the hill there by the lab. He’s been swamped with inquiries about it. Curiously, it uncorked one advantage we hadn’t anticipated, that no metal siding has. It’s slightly porous, so ivy clings to it, which it won’t do to steel, aluminum, or copper.”

“I just love that little brick privy,” murmured Hortense with stars in her eyes—“its walls all covered with ivy—”

“You go wash your mouth out with soap,” Mr. Garrett snapped.

“I’m showing appreciation!”

He tried to reprove her some more but had to laugh in spite of himself. We all had to laugh.

Mr. Garrett went on: “The funny part of it was that I knew nothing about it until Lloyd Palmer called. Holton had sent me a memo, but I didn’t take time to read it until Miss Immelman brought me the file we had on Bagastex. There it was on top—and I got busy quick. So ... once more we have Lloyd Palmer to thank. Let’s drink to him.”

By then more margaritas had been ordered. They all picked theirs up, and I picked mine up before I remembered that I shouldn’t drink. By now I thought it was impossible to feel any crummier, in spite of the laughing I’d done. But with those three glasses raised in my honor, I managed it. Garrett looked at his watch and then asked Sam if he was all squared away for tomorrow.

“I am,” Dent said, “if Mrs. G. likes the building and you’ve come to a final decision that you want the deal to go through.”

“I love it,” Hortense said.

“Then it’s all yours, Sam. See that O’Connor is paid, and for God’s sake, check all the stock that Lucas turns in for those subsidiary companies. I don’t say he’d forge duplicates—”

“
I
do.”

“Let’s both say it, then.”

“Mr. Garrett, it’s all under control.”

“O.K., take it away.”

Mr. Garrett looked at his watch, motioned to the waitress for the check, then got up and followed her to the desk to pay it. When he came back, Sam asked him: “You’ll be here tomorrow?”

“I hadn’t expected to be. I have to be getting back. If something comes up, call me and—”

“You’re going back tonight?” Hortense asked, surprised.

“It’s not too late. I’ll have the road to myself.”

“Well, don’t wake me by calling me up.”

“Do I ever? How did you get here, by the way?”

“Taxi.”

“Lloyd, would you see her home?”

“Be only too glad, of course.”

Mr. Garrett had left his car in the ARMALCO garage. As soon as we were out on the street, he flagged a cab to take him there. He kissed Hortense, got in, and drove off. Same Dent flagged a cab, kissed her, and drove off. By then, I had told her where I was parked, but without saying a word, we knew we weren’t calling a cab. We swung hands and started walking down Seventeenth Street by the light of the moon, carefree, goofy, and happy just from knowing we would be together that night. We hardly said anything driving out or in the apartment, hanging her coat up, or having our first kiss of the evening.

She insisted on scrambling some eggs, “because you didn’t have much to eat, and I love cooking for you.” So we ate her little supper, went to bed, and for awhile were close. Then, stretched out on top of me, she whispered: “Did you hear what he said? ‘Lloyd, will you see her home?’
This
is my home.”

“Well, except for the wall decorations, it—”

“The stomach, not the apartment!”

“Oh. Then, it has a beautiful tenant.”

“Tenant?”

“Well—mate.”

“Wife, I think you mean.”

“I wish I did, but I don’t. You have a husband already.”

“You’re the only husband I have or ever expect to have.”

“I tell it like it is.”

She rolled off me, and I said: “However, I love you.”

“Then act like it.”

I acted like it, and after some time, she was topside again, kissing my neck.

I
N WILMINGTON, WASHINGTON, AND
various places, things now began to accelerate. Next in our order of business was the application we had made to I. R. S. for a tax-exempt status. To sit in with us on that, Sam brought in a tax lawyer, a character named Kaufman, who was a bit of a stuffed shirt, but was a shark on tax law, which was what we hired him for. Around Sam’s age, he was grossly overweight. Kaufman insisted that we work in his office on Sixteenth and C because his reference books were there, so I would walk there every day from the Garrett Building on Massachusetts. The reason I had to sit in was that I knew what the Institute would be doing. So day after day, for the supplemental booklet we would submit, I dictated to Kaufman’s secretary a detailed account of our projected activities, so every possible thing would be covered and we wouldn’t hit any snags later just by failing to include some material in our application—“to acquire, repair, and shelve books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and source material of all kinds”; “to employ researchers, technicians, scholars, consultants, and librarians for the assistance of scholars writing biography or writing anything which, in the judgment of the director, contributes to biographical study”; “to employ persons qualified to prepare indices for the assistance of scholars writing biography”; “to acquire, operate, and maintain recorders and employ technicians to maintain them, such recorders to use film, tape, wax, wire, or other means of reproduction, oral or visual or both, for the preservation of biographical material”—and so on for eighty-five pages in blue cover, until my tongue had kinks in it from dictating such gobbledygook. But Kaufman seemed satisfied, and it was Garrett who called at nine-thirty one morning while Hortense was still in bed to tell me: “Lloyd, I’ve just opened my mail and wanted you to be the first one to know. We have our ruling.”

“We have our—”

“Ruling. From I.R.S. We’re in.”

“Well, hey, that’s wonderful news. I’d heard they were fairly prompt but didn’t expect action so soon. It’s hardly been a week.”

“Our application’s in order and on the up and up, that’s why. Kaufman gives you full credit—while, of course, saving some for himself.”

“He did fine. Well, I’m pleased.”

That put him up tight and me up tight—him because by now rumors were going around, with stuff coming out in the papers, and he had to make some kind of announcement, and me because I was named in the rumors and the university kept calling me, especially the president’s office, to know what was going on and whether I would be there next year, as so far I hadn’t resigned, not being quite sure how things would finally turn out. So I had to make up my mind, and did. In a short, hand-written note, I resigned. Mr. Garrett had also made up his mind. He asked me to come up to discuss his press statement. So next morning I was in his Wilmington office, listening to his idea on how to make the announcement. It was weird, to say the least but at the same time, interesting, because it showed how little a big wheel understands public relations or what he owes the public in the way of information. He thought it was enough to send out a brochure, one I would write, “of two thousand words or so,” describing the Institute, along with an engraved announcement, “and that’s all. I’ve checked off the newspapers here that I think the brochure should go to.”

He had his thumb marking a place in a book, which he passed to me. It was Ayer’s newspaper directory. He had put markers in for Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Norfolk, Richmond, and a few more places, with check marks beside the big papers in each city, which you couldn’t overlook, of course, as the circulation figures told you. I glanced at it here and there, and while I did this, he went on: “I may say that, since this is in my wife’s honor, for once in her life, I don’t want her besmirched—by printer’s ink, I mean—as she has been in Wilmington. After all, it’s a private matter, and when we’ve come up with all legitimate information. I think we should cut it off. I think we’re
entitled
to cut it off.”

“Private? Cut what off? I don’t understand.”

“Well, isn’t it? It’s my money.”

“It’s your money, but you’re claiming exemption from taxes. That makes it public.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“As far as Mrs. Garrett goes, I don’t believe for one second that she minded very much, that she really minded at all, the things that came out in the papers, especially the pictures. In plain English, she loved it. This idea you seem to have, of cheating her out of her big moment, strikes me as somewhat silly.”