The New York Stories

by John O'Hara

  “You mean where they give a man a classification number, and that determines whether he rates a Chevy or a Buick?”

  “Exactly. Who gets pictures on the wall, who gets a leather easy chair and so on. I see you’re familiar with that. Good. That makes it easier for me, and you won’t misunderstand.”

  “Let’s have it, if it’s something I’ve done.”

  Spencer took a deep breath, and put his fingertips together. “I only want to call your attention to the fact that since the reorganization, you have not yet been made a vice-president. I stress that not yet, thereby not ruling out the possibility that you’ll get your old title back. However, for the present, Ammond, you’re not actually a vice-president in the Wycherly organization.”

  “No one knows that better than I do, Spencer.”

  “I’m sure of it. And yet I have here in my pocket, let’s see, here it is. This is from the Princeton Alumni magazine. It seems to be a letter you wrote, fairly recently, and it gives your title as Vice-President in Charge of Advertising.”

  Ammond laughed. “I can explain that easily enough.”

  “Before you do, I also have a Xerox copy of a letter you wrote to a man in one of the big advertising agencies. It’s a personal letter, nothing about Wycherly Enterprises or Ammond & Stepworth. Nevertheless, it was written on old stationery that has your name and your old title.”

  “A small economy on my part. I never use that letterhead in business correspondence.”

  “I know you don’t. Before coming in here I took a sampling of your recent files.”

  “Boy, you are thorough.”

  “You bet I am. That’s my job.” For just a brief moment the perpetual smile all but vanished. “This may seem picayune to you, Ammond, but what’s actually happened here is not so damned lintpicking at all. By that I mean, the Wycherly organization is very, very big, as you well know. And getting bigger all the time. And unless we have well-defined policies concerning certain things, we’re going to have inefficiency and confusion. You don’t know it, but you have an opposite number in a smelting operation we own in Montana. Personnel might decide to have you and him switch jobs. We do that all the time, and it often works out very well. Not always, but by the time we’re ready to move, we’ve studied the various factors pretty carefully.”

  “I hope you’re not going to ask me to transfer to Montana, because I might have a little to say about that.”

  “The point is, if the Montana man came here and discovered that he was being swapped for a Wycherly vice-president, he might get off to a very bad start. Do you see why this isn’t lintpicking? The Montana man would want a promotion to vice-president before we were ready to give it to him.”

  “Uh-huh. And the vice-president wouldn’t want to be downgraded,” said Ammond.

  “Well, in actual practice we don’t do much of that. We buy up the rest of a man’s contract, if he has one, or we turn him loose. A downgraded man is a sorehead, and he’s no good to anybody, least of all himself. If a man is to be downgraded, that is, if a man reaches a stage where we have to lift him out of his job, we want to be as fair as we can. We’d much rather fire a man than demote him. He can put himself in the executive market and maybe even better himself. Some men, of course we may come across a special situation where a man ought to take a long leave of absence. We have a talk with him. Personnel. Psychiatrist. Medical man. Marriage counselor. We may talk to his wife. We’re not all that inhuman, you know. We have fifteen men right now, men in grades above the one you’re in, who are on temporary leave of absence, trying to straighten out one problem or another. And of course we’re always helping men to place themselves with other organizations. And always on the lookout for good men who want to leave other organizations. We steal, just like the rest of them. Well, I have to be in Chicago in two hours from now. Glad to’ve had the chance to talk to you.”

  “I’ll see that those letterheads are destroyed.”

  “I wish all my chores were as easy as this one. Tonight I’m having dinner with four United States senators.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “No, no. In Washington. I’ll only be with Mr. Brady a half an hour.”

  “I feel strangely honored to take up so much of your time. Four U.S. senators. I’d like to meet Mr. Brady sometime.”

  “So would the senators, face to face across the table in the Caucus Room. My chore is to try to persuade them that that would serve no useful purpose, and I’m licked before I start, especially in a presidential year. They want Mr. Brady, and they’re going to get Mr. Brady, and he’ll be completely cooperative. But I have to make it a little hard for them. Not telling you any secrets. It’ll be in all the papers the day after tomorrow.”

  “Are you thinking of firing me, Mr. Spencer?” said Robert.

  “The only man not facing that possibility is Mr. Brady himself. How’s that for an equivocal answer? So long, Ammond.”

  One of the most difficult tasks Robert ever had was to give Miss Hathaway the order to destroy the remaining stock of old letterheads, and she was sympathetic. She was always on his side, always saw his side of every question, and she had become indispensable. If she had been just a little less plain, perhaps just a little less devoted to her mother, she could have been, might have been, more to him than merely his secretary. For things at home were going through one of those periods of strain that can develop in any marriage. Yolanda Ammond, with both children away at boarding-school, had more time on her hands, but she could not find the time to do things she wanted to do because she was not sure what she wanted to do. She had become, for example, a lingerer: she was the last to leave ladies’ luncheons because she had no place else to go. She engaged in long conversations with the people in the markets and in the shops, and she despised them because they were always having to excuse themselves to go wait on another customer. Yolanda was a retired pretty girl. Twenty years earlier she had been the prettiest girl in all The Oranges, or anyway a strong contender for the title. She had retained much of her girlhood prettiness, but no one retains it all, and in some cases, like Yolanda’s, the prettiness of girlhood is anomalous in a woman of forty. A hostile acquaintance described Yolanda as an overgrown midget, which some women in their circle of friends took as an oblique reference to Yolanda’s intellect. She was not a brain, and some of Robert’s admirers thought it unfair to make any comparison between her mind and his. The extremely fair among their friends, who were aware of the imperfect state of relations between Yolanda and Robert, said it was a pity that Yolanda had no resources to fall back on, but Robert had always been so far ahead of her mentally that he had never taken the trouble or had the patience to develop that side of her, such as it was. You had only to look at the two of them together—Yolanda with her empty, pretty face, and Robert deep in thought—to see that this marriage had been headed for trouble from the start. Yolanda was no good at bridge, just as bad at canasta, and a pigeon at gin rummy. It took her three months to read Peyton Place, and after all that work she confessed her disappointment in it. She said she did not know whether it was well written or not, but the stuff in it was no worse than some of the things she knew about friends of hers, if they wanted to be truthful about it.

  Sympathy was not entirely on Robert’s side. Not only was it felt that he could have tried a little harder to interest Yolanda in the things of the mind, but he had not always been fully appreciative of the job she did in running the household and bringing up the children. Robert took an awful lot for granted, and he did not seem to realize what a lot of work went into having a neat, attractive home and kids who were a credit to their parents. A man like Robert Ammond, prominent in the publishing business, thinking up new ideas and dealing with those scientists, could probably be darn hard to live with. And one thing you had to say for Yolanda: although she was still pretty and had a nice figure, she did not play around. Two cocktails was her limit, and if an
y of the boys got the least bit out of line, Yolanda knew how to put a stop to it, and did so. Robert, on the other hand, was not all intellectual. Edna Watlinger had accidentally opened the coat closet one night at a party at Peggy Stuart’s and found Peggy and Robert in a very compromising position, to say the least. And there were other little stories here and there that would not have amounted to much if they had been about anyone else, but they certainly proved that Robert Ammond was not perfect. Not that Robert had ever gotten involved in a big thing with any other girl, but he certainly was not perfect.

  Other marriages had weathered worse storms than this, and as far as their friends knew, the Ammonds’ difficulties had not reached any crisis. Nothing that could be called dramatic. It was what might be called a familiar American situation, in which the wife found herself with not enough to do, and the husband was so intent on business that he did not find the time to rectify matters before they got worse. This belief, this diagnosis, as it were, was so strongly held by the Ammonds’ friends that no one could believe the real news about Robert. But it was true. Robert Ammond, surely one of the brightest men around, had been fired.

  As it happened, Stan Musgrove was the only man among the Ammonds’ friends who was in a position to get close to the story. Stan was in Research at an advertising agency, and he had never had any direct business contact with Robert Ammond. But when a thing like this happened to a friend of yours, you wanted to know more about it. Robert would only say that he had been fired and ask to change the subject, but it was plain to see that that mind was turning the subject over and over, and his friends were sure he would come up with something pretty good. Meanwhile, however, his friends had to have some information, and Stan inquired around until a perfectly credible story had been pieced together. It was incredible, but Stan insisted that his best contacts would vouch for its authenticity.

  According to Stan’s version, Robert had had some unimportant tangle with Dennis Brady’s chief troubleshooter, a man named Spencer. It started over nothing, as those things will. The Wycherly crowd had asked Robert to do some kind of survey of some mining properties that Wycherly owned in Colorado. It was not to be a scientific, or engineering survey, but a study of executive personnel. Robert protested that it was not his kind of work, but Spencer tried to persuade him that that was the way they often did things in the Wycherly organization. The outsider with the fresh point of view. But when Spencer mentioned that Robert would probably have to spend two or three months in Colorado, Robert turned down the whole thing, flat. Spencer was quite disappointed, because he had to go back to Dennis Brady and report failure. Robert, being no fool, perceived that this could mean a loss of face for Spencer, and that Spencer, who was a sort of high-powered errand boy, would bide his time and at the right moment, no matter how long it might take, would give Dennis Brady a bad report on Robert. Any man with a responsible job is bound to make some mistakes. John J. McGraw never fined a ballplayer for a fielding error; McGraw’s theory was that the man was in there trying, and it was the same way in business. You did occasionally come up with a real blooper.

  Well, according to Stan Musgrove, Robert had the thing all figured out, as he would with that analytical mind of his, and so he quietly and carefully and methodically went about the business of interesting various individuals in an idea he had. The idea was simply to start a new publishing house, just as his grandfather had done. He lined up some pretty good men, men who were not too old to be set in their ways and not so young that later, when they went to the money men, they would be turned down for their youth and lack of experience. Bolger Brothers, who had about the same kind of setup as Wycherly Enterprises, were a natural for the financing of the new publishing firm, and one of the fellows Robert had lined up had a very good in at Bolgers’. Some family connection. But the fellow must have spoken too soon, and certainly without Robert’s authorization, because the leak could almost positively be traced to Bolger Brothers. And that cooked it.

  Apparently Spencer flew to New York one morning in time to be sitting in Robert’s private office when Robert arrived for work. Robert’s secretary tipped off Robert that Spencer was waiting for him. Her name was Hawthorne. Miss Hawthorne. Had been with Robert for fifteen years, and she was one of those really loyal secretaries that every executive dreams about. In any case, Robert went in and found Spencer sitting at his desk and actually reading his mail. The argument started right away, and it could be easily overheard. They made no effort to keep their voices down.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Robert said.

  “I’m reading the company mail,” said Spencer. “What’s it to you?”

  “It’s this to me, if you don’t get the hell out of here, I’ll resign.”

  “You have resigned,” said Spencer. “All you have to do is put your signature at the bottom of this letter.” And Spencer handed him a letter of resignation, all written out, with all the details about its being his understanding that the resignation was to take effect as of above date, that same day, and that he agreed to accept one year’s salary as final payment and in return for his discontinuing his efforts to organize a publishing company in direct competition with the firm of Ammond & Stepworth.

  “I won’t sign this,” said Robert. “That’s more like a confession than a resignation.”

  “Then you’ll take what you get, which is the absolute minimum,” said Spencer. “You’re fired, as of nine-thirty-five this date. The inkstand belongs to you, and those family photographs. The rest is ours, so beat it.”

  And that was Stan Musgrove’s version, not necessarily accurate in every small detail, but all from pretty reliable sources. Miss Hawthorne, Robert’s secretary, stayed on at Ammond & Stepworth because she had this mother she supported, and anyway Robert would not need a secretary until he made up his mind about what he wants to do next. Yolanda has been taking a course in typing, and at least that gives her something to occupy her time. Their friends say they are not really so terribly badly off, except for Robert and his migraine headaches. He ought to take it easy for a while.

  (1964)

  BREAD ALONE

  It was the eighth inning, and the Yankees had what the sportswriters call a comfortable lead. It was comfortable for them, all right. Unless a miracle happened, they had the ball game locked up and put away. They would not be coming to bat again, and Mr. Hart didn’t like that any more than he was liking his thoughts, the thoughts he had been thinking ever since the fifth inning, when the Yanks had made their five runs. From the fifth inning on, Mr. Hart had been troubled with his conscience.

  Mr. Hart was a car-washer, and what colored help at the Elbee Garage got paid was not much. It had to house, feed, and clothe all the Harts, which meant Mr. Hart himself; his wife, Lolly Hart; his son, Booker Hart; and his three daughters, Carrie, Linda, and the infant, Brenda Hart. The day before, Mr. Ginsburg, the bookkeeper who ran the shop pool, had come to him and said, “Well, Willie, you win the sawbuck.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Ginsburg, I sure do. I was watchin’ them newspapers all week,” said Mr. Hart. He dried his hands with the chamois and extended the right.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, anduh tenner. Ten bucks, Willie,” said Mr. Ginsburg. “Well, what are you gonna do with all that dough? I’ll bet you don’t tell your wife about it.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Ginsburg. She don’t follow the scores, so she don’t know I win. I don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Hart. “But say, ain’t I suppose to give you your cut? I understand it right, I oughta buy you a drink or a cigar or something.”

  “That’s the custom, Willie, but thinking it over, you weren’t winners all year.”

  “No sir, that’s right,” said Mr. Hart.

  “So I tell you, if you win another pool, you buy me two drinks or two cigars. Are you going in this week’s pool?”

  “Sure am. It don’t seem fair, though
. Ain’t much of the season left and maybe I won’t win again. Sure you don’t want a drink or a cigar or something?”

  “That’s all right, Willie,” said Mr. Ginsburg.

  On the way home, Mr. Hart was a troubled man. That money belonged in the sugar bowl. A lot could come out of that money: a steak, stockings, a lot of stuff. But a man was entitled to a little pleasure in this life, the only life he ever had. Mr. Hart had not been to a ball game since about fifteen or twenty years ago, and the dime with which he bought his ticket in the pool every week was his own money, carfare money. He made it up by getting rides home, or pretty near home, when a truck-driver or private chauffeur friend was going Harlem-ward; and if he got a free ride, or two free rides, to somewhere near home every week, then he certainly was entitled to use the dime for the pool. And this was the first time he had won. Then there was the other matter of who won it for him: the Yankees. He had had the Yankees and the Browns in the pool, the first time all season he had picked the Yanks, and it was they who made the runs that had made him the winner of the ten dollars. If it wasn’t for those Yankees, he wouldn’t have won. He owed it to them to go and buy tickets and show his gratitude. By the time he got home his mind was made up. He had the next afternoon off, and, by God, he was going to see the Yankees play.

  There was, of course, only one person to take; that was Booker, the strange boy of thirteen who was Mr. Hart’s only son. Booker was a quiet boy, good in school, and took after his mother, who was quite a little lighter complected than Mr. Hart. And so that night after supper he simply announced, “Tomorrow me and Booker’s going over to see the New York Yankees play. A friend of mine happened to give me a choice pair of seats, so me and Booker’s taking in the game.” There had been a lot of talk, and naturally Booker was the most surprised of all—so surprised that Mr. Hart was not sure his son was even pleased. Booker was a very hard one to understand. Fortunately, Lolly believed right away that someone had really given Mr. Hart the tickets to the game; he had handed over his pay as usual, nothing missing, and that made her believe his story.