Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  “Benton know?”

  “I had to tell him some. I said you’d eaten some bad fish and had ptomaine poisoning.”

  “Not so bad for a young feller. God, I wonder if I’m gettin’ to be a rummy. . . . How are things downtown?”

  “Lousy. Mr. Benton almost went crazy trying to get in touch with you yesterday.”

  “Christ, I got a head. . . . Say, Cliff, you don’t think I’m gettin’ to be a rummy, do you?”

  “Here’s some dope the sawbones left.”

  “What day of the week is it?” “Saturday” “Jesus Christ, I thought it was Friday.”

  The phone rang. Cliff went over to answer it. “It’s the massageman.”

  “Tell him to come up. . . . Say, is Benton stayin’ in town?”

  “Sure he’s in town, Mr. Anderson, he’s trying to get hold of Merritt and see if he can stop the slaughter. . . . Merritt . . .”

  “Oh, hell, I’ll hear about it soon enough. Tell this masseur to come in.”

  After the massage, that was agony, especially the cheerful German-accent remarks about the weather and the hockey season made by the big curlyhaired Swede who looked like a doorman, Charley felt well enough to go to the toilet and throw up some green bile. Then he took a cold shower and went back to bed and shouted for Cliff, who was typing letters in the drawingroom, to ring for the bellhop to get cracked ice for a rubber icepad to put on his head.

  He lay back on the pillows and began to feel a little better.

  “Hey, Cliff, how about lettin’ in the light of day? What time is it?”

  “About noon.” “Christ. . . . Say, Cliff, did any women call up?” Cliff shook his head. “Thank god.”

  “A guy called up said he was a taxidriver, said you’d told him you’d get him a job in an airplane factory . . . I told him you’d left for Miami.”

  Charley was beginning to feel a little better. He lay back in the soft comfortable bed on the crisplylaundered pillows and looked around the big clean hotel bedroom. The room was high up. Silvery light poured in through the broad window. Through the A between the curtains in the window he could see a piece of sky bright and fleecy as milkweed silk. Charley began to feel a vague sense of accomplishment, like a man getting over the fatigue of a long journey or a dangerous mountainclimb.

  “Say, Cliff, how about a small gin and bitters with a lot of ice in it? . . . I think that ’ud probably be the makin’ of me.” “Mr. Anderson, the doc said to swear off and to take some of that dope whenever you felt like taking a drink.” “Every time I take it that stuff makes me puke. What does he think I am, a hophead?” “All right, Mr. Anderson, you’re the boss,” said Cliff, screwing up his thin mouth. “Thataboy, Cliff. . . . Then I’ll try some grapefruitjuice and if that stays down I’ll take a good breakfast and to hell wid ’em. . . . Why aren’t the papers here?”

  “Here they are, Mr. Anderson . . . I’ve got ’em all turned to the financial section.” Charley looked over the reports of trading. His eyes wouldn’t focus very well yet. He still did better by closing one eye. A paragraph in News and Comment made him sit up.

  “Hey, Cliff,” he yelled, “did you see this?”

  “Sure,” said Cliff. “I said things were bad.”

  “But if they’re goin’ ahead it means Merritt and Farrell have got their proxies sure.”

  Cliff nodded wisely with his head a little to one side.

  “Where the hell’s Benton?” “He just phoned, Mr. Anderson, he’s on his way uptown now.” “Hey, give me that drink before he comes and then put all the stuff away and order up a breakfast.”

  Benton came in the bedroom behind the breakfast tray. He wore a brown suit and a derby. His face looked like an old dishcloth in spite of his snappy clothes. Charley spoke first, “Say, Benton, am I out on my fanny?”

  Benton carefully and slowly took off his gloves and hat and overcoat and set them on the mahogany table by the window.

  “The sidewalk is fairly well padded,” he said.

  “All right, Cliff. . . . Will you finish up that correspondence?” Cliff closed the door behind him gently. “Merritt outsmarted us?”

  “He and Farrell are playing ball together. All you can do is take a licking and train up for another bout.”

  “But damn it, Benton . . .”

  Benton got to his feet and walked up and down the room at the foot of the bed. “No use cussing at me. . . . I’m going to do the cussing today. What do you think of a guy who goes on a bender at a critical moment like this? Yellow, that’s what I call it. . . . You deserved what you got . . . and I had a hell of a time saving my own hide, I can tell you. Well, I picked you for a winner, Anderson, and I still think that if you cut out the funny business you could be in the real money in ten years. Now let me tell you something, young man, you’ve gone exactly as far as you can go on your record overseas, and that was certainly a hell of a lot further than most. As for this invention racket . . . you know as well as I do there’s no money in it unless you have the genius for promotion needed to go with it. You had a big initial success and thought you were the boy wizard and could put over any damn thing you had a mind to.”

  “Hey, Nat, for Pete’s sake don’t you think I’ve got brains enough to know that? . . . This darn divorce and bein’ in hospital so long kinder got me, that’s all.”

  “Alibis.”

  “What do you think I ought to do?”

  “You ought to pull out of this town for a while. . . . How about your brother’s business out in Minnesota?” “Go back to the sticks and sell tin lizzies . . . that’s a swell future.” “Where do you think Henry Ford made his money?” “I know. But he keeps his dealers broke. . . . What I need’s to get in good physical shape. I always have a good time in Florida. I might go down there and lay around in the sun for a month.”

  “O.K. if you keep out of that landboom.”

  “Sure, Nat, I won’t even play poker . . . I’m goin’ down there for a rest. Get my leg in real good shape. Then when I come back we’ll see the fur fly. After all there’s still that Standard Airparts stock.”

  “No longer listed.”

  “Check.”

  “Well, optimist, my wife’s expecting me for lunch. . . . Have a good trip.”

  Benton went out. “Hey, Cliff,” Charley called through the door. “Tell ’em to come and get this damn breakfast tray. It didn’t turn out so well. And phone Parker to get the car in shape. Be sure the tires are all O.K. I’m pullin’ out for Florida Monday.”

  In a moment Cliff stuck his head in the door. His face was red. “Are you . . . will you be needing me down there, sir?” “No, I’ll be needin’ you here to keep an eye on the boys downtown. . . . I got to have somebody here I can trust. . . . I’ll tell you what I will have you do though . . . go down to Trenton and accompany Miss Dowlin’ down to Norfolk. I’ll pick her up there. She’s in Trenton visitin’ her folks. Her old man just died or somethin’. You’d just as soon do that, wouldn’t you? It’ll give you a little trip.”

  Charley was watching Cliff’s face. He screwed his mouth further to one side and bowed like a butler. “Very good, sir,” he said.

  Charley lay back on the pillows again. His head was throbbing, his stomach was still tied up in knots. When he closed his eyes dizzy red lights bloomed in front of them. He began to think about Jim and how Jim had never paid over his share of the old lady’s money he’d put into the business. Anyway he ain’t got a plane, two cars, a suite at the Biltmore and a secretary that’ll do any goddam thing in the world for you, and a girl like Margo. He tried to remember how her face looked, the funny amazed way she opened her eyes wide when she was going to make a funny crack. He couldn’t remember a damn thing, only the sick feeling he had all over and the red globes blooming before his eyes. In a little while he fell asleep.

  He was still feeling so shaky when he started south that he took Parker along to drive the car. He sat glumly in his new camelshair coat with his hands hanging between his knees s
taring ahead through the roaring blank of the Holland Tunnel, thinking of Margo and Bill Edwards the patent lawyer he had to see in Washington about a suit, and remembering the bills in Cliff’s desk drawer and wondering where the money was coming from to fight this patent suit against Askew-Merritt. He had a grand in bills in his pocket and that made him feel good anyway. Gosh, money’s a great thing, he said to himself.

  They came out of the tunnel into a rainygrey morning and the roar and slambanging of trucks through Jersey City. Then the traffic gradually thinned and they were going across the flat farmlands of New Jersey strawcolored and ruddy with winter. At Philadelphia Charley made Parker drive him to Broad Street. “I haven’t got the patience to drive, I’ll take the afternoon train. Come to the Waldman Park when you get in.”

  He hired a drawingroom in the parlorcar and went and lay down to try to sleep. The train clattered and roared so and the grey sky and the lavender fields and yellow pastures and the twigs of the trees beginning to glow red and green and paleyellow with a foretaste of spring made him feel so blue, so like howling like a dog, that he got fed up with being shut up in the damn drawingroom and went back to the clubcar to smoke a cigar.

  He was slumped in the leather chair fumbling for the cigarclipper in his vest pocket when the portly man in the next chair looked up from a bluecovered sheaf of lawpapers he was poring over. Charley looked into the black eyes and the smooth bluejowled face and at the bald head still neatly plastered with a patch of black hair shaped like a bird’s wing, without immediately recognizing it.

  “Why, Charley ma boy, I reckon you must be in love.” Charley straightened up and put out his hand. “Hello, senator,” he said, stammering a little like he used to in the old days. “Goin’ to the nation’s capital?” “Such is my unfortunate fate.” Senator Planet’s eyes went searching all over him. “Charley, I hear you had an accident.”

  “I’ve had a series of them,” said Charley, turning red, Senator Planet nodded his head understandingly and made a clucking noise with his tongue. “Too bad . . . too bad. . . . Well, sir, a good deal of water has run under the bridge since you and young Merritt had dinner with me that night in Washington. . . . Well, we’re none of us gettin’ any younger.” Charley got the feeling that the senator’s black eyes got considerable pleasure from exploring the flabby lines where his neck met his collar and the bulge of his belly against his vest. “Well, we’re none of us getting any younger,” the senator repeated. “You are, senator. I swear you look younger than you did the last time I saw you.”

  The senator smiled. “Well, I hope you’ll forgive me for makin’ the remark . . . but it’s been one of the most sensational careers I have had the luck to witness in many years of public life.”

  “Well, it’s a new industry. Things happen fast.”

  “Unparalleled,” said the senator. “We live in an age of unparalleled progress . . . everywhere except in Washington. . . . You should come down to our quiet little village more often. . . . You have many friends there. I see by the papers, as Mr. Dooley used to say, that there’s been considerable reorganization out with you folks in Detroit. Need a broader capital base, I suppose.”

  “A good many have been thrown out on their broad capital bases,” said Charley. He thought the senator would never quit laughing. The senator pulled out a large initialed silk handkerchief to wipe the tears from his eyes and brought his small pudgy hand down on Charley’s knee. “God almighty, we ought to have a drink on that.”

  The senator ordered whiterock from the porter and mysteriously wafted a couple of slugs of good rye whiskey into it from a bottle he had in his Gladstone bag. Charley began to feel better. The senator was saying that some very interesting developments were to be expected from the development of airroutes. The need for subsidies was pretty generally admitted if this great nation was to catch up on its lag in air transportation. The question would be of course which of a number of competing concerns enjoyed the confidence of the Administration. There was more in this airroute business than there ever had been in supplying ships and equipment. “A question of the confidence of the Administration, ma boy.” At the word confidence, Senator Planet’s black eyes shone. “That’s why, ma boy, I’m glad to see you up here. Stick close to our little village on the Potomac, ma boy.”

  “Check,” said Charley.

  “When you’re in Miami, look up my old friend Homer Cassidy. . . . He’s got an iceboat . . . he’ll take you out fishin’. . . I’ll write him, Charley. If I could get away I might spend a week down there myself next month. There’s a world of money bein’ made down there right now.”

  “I sure will, senator, that’s mighty nice of you, senator.”

  By the time they got into the Union station Charley and the senator were riding high. They were talking trunklines and connecting lines, airports and realestate. Charley couldn’t make out whether he was hiring Senator Planet for the lobbying or whether Senator Planet was hiring him. They parted almost affectionately at the taxistand.

  Next afternoon he drove down through Virginia. It was a pretty, sunny afternoon. The judastrees were beginning to come out red on the sheltered hillsides. He had two bottles of that good rye whiskey Senator Planet had sent up to the hotel for him. As he drove he began to get sore at Parker the chauffeur. All the bastard did was get rakeoffs on the spare parts and gas and oil. Here he’d charged up eight new tires in the last month, what did he do with tires anyway, eat them? By the time they were crossing the tollbridge into Norfolk Charley was sore as a crab. He had to hold himself in to keep from hauling off and giving the bastard a crack on the sallow jaw of his smooth flunkey’s face. In front of the hotel he blew up.

  “Parker, you’re fired. Here’s your month’s wages and your trip back to New York. If I see your face around this town tomorrow I’ll have you run in for theft. You know what I’m referrin’ to just as well as I do. You damn chauffeurs think you’re too damn smart. I know the whole racket, see. . . . I have to work for my dough just as hard as you do. Just to prove it I’m goin’ to drive myself from now on.” He hated the man’s smooth unmoving face.

  “Very well, sir,” Parker said coolly. “Shall I return you the uniform?”

  “You can take the uniform and shove it up your . . .” Charley paused. He was stamping up and down red in the face on the pave ment at the hotel entrance in a circle of giggling colored bellboys. “Here, boy, take those bags in and have my car taken around to the garage. . . . All right, Parker, you have your instructions.”

  He strode into the hotel and ordered the biggest double suite they had. He registered in his own name. “Mrs. Anderson will be here directly.” Then he called up the other hotels to find out where the hell Margo was. “Hello, kid,” he said when at last it was her voice at the end of the wire. “Come on over. You’re Mrs. Anderson and no questions asked. Aw, to hell with ’em; nobody’s goin’ to dictate to me what I’ll do or who I’ll see or what I’m goin’ to do with my money. I’m through with all that. Come right around. I’m crazy to see you. . . .”

  When she came in, followed by the bellhop with the bags, she certainly looked prettier than ever. “Well, Charley,” she said, when the bellhop had gone out, “this sure is the cream de la cream. . . . You must have hit oil.” After she’d run all around the rooms she came back and snuggled up to him. “I bet you been giving ’em hell on the market.” “They tried to put somethin’ over on me, but it can’t be done. Take it from me. . . . Have a drink, Margo. . . . Let’s geta little bit cockeyed you and me, Margo. . . . Christ, I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  She was doing her face in the mirror. “Me? Why I’m only a pushover,” she said in that gruff low tone that made him shiver all up his spine.

  “Say, where’s Cliff?”

  “Our hatchetfaced young friend who was kind enough to accompany me to the meeting with the lord and master? He pulled out on the six o’clock train.”

  “The hell he did. I had some instructions for him.”
<
br />   “He said you said be in the office Tuesday morning and he’d do it if he had to fly. Say, Charley, if he’s a sample of your employees they must worship the ground you walk on. He couldn’t stop talking about what a great guy you were.”

  “Well, they know I’m regular, been through the mill . . . understand their point of view. It wasn’t so long ago I was workin’ at a lathe myself.”

  Charley felt good. He poured them each another drink. Margo took his and poured half of the rye back into the bottle. “Don’t want to get too cockeyed, Mr. A,” she said in that new low caressing voice.

  Charley grabbed her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Christ, if you only knew how I’ve wanted to have a really swell woman all to myself. I’ve had some awful bitches . . . Gladys, God, what a bitch she was. She pretty near ruined me . . . tried to strip me of every cent I had in the world . . . ganged up on me with guys I thought were my friends. . . . But you just watch, little girl. I’m goin’ to show ’em. In five years they’ll come crawlin’ to me on their bellies. I don’t know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money . . . Nat Benton says I got it . . . I know I got it. I can travel on a hunch, see. Those bastards all had money to begin with.”

  After they’d ordered their supper and while they were having just one little drink waiting for it, Margo brought out some bills she had in her handbag. “Sure, I’ll handle ’em right away.” Charley shoved them into his pocket without looking at them. “You know, Mr. A, I wouldn’t have to worry you about things like that if I had an account in my own name.” “How about ten grand in the First National Bank when we get to Miami?”

  “Suit yourself, Charley . . . I never did understand more money than my week’s salary, you know that. That’s all any real trouper understands. I got cleaned out fixing the folks up in Trenton. It certainly costs money to die in this man’s country.”

  Charley’s eyes filled with tears. “Was it your dad, Margery?”

  She made a funny face. “Oh, no. The old man bumped off from too much Keeley cure when I was a little twirp with my hair down my back. . . . This was my stepmother’s second husband. I’m fond of my stepmother, believe it or not. . . . She’s been the only friend I had in this world. I’ll tell you about her someday. It’s quite a story.”