In his office Paul Simmons, on the phone, was saying, “I’ve booked a table and I’ve told Patty I had a business engagement, so I do think you owe me your company at lunch.”
“Do you indeed?” Her name was Zib Wilson, Zib Marlowe-that-was. “I was expecting a call from Nat.” Not quite true: she had been hoping for a call from Nat. “But,” she said, “I suppose he’s all tied up with the Tower opening.” She paused. “Come to think of it, why aren’t you?”
“I’m not wedded to my work the way some are. Your loving husband, for example.” Simmons paused. “Lunch, my sweet. Over the first drink I’ll tell you how much I love you. Over the second I’ll tell you in whispers what I’m going to do to you the next time I get you into bed.”
“It sounds fascinating.” There were piles of manuscripts on her desk, the August issue of the book was not yet locked up, nor could it be until she had at least one more piece of usable fiction. On the other hand, a BLT and a cup of bad coffee at her desk did not appeal. “You’ve convinced me,” Zib said. “Where? And when?” Funny, she no longer even thought about Nat and what his reaction would be if he knew she was straying from the fold. Bad fiction, she thought as she jotted down restaurant name and address. “Got it,” she said. “Ciao. And I’ll pay my share. As usual.”
Governor Bent Armitage, down from the capital for the Tower opening, met Grover Frazee for an early lunch at the Harvard Club on Forty-fourth Street. Over his martini the governor said, “The corporation reports you’ve been sending out haven’t really said much, Grover. How are rentals going at the Tower, or is it too early to tell?”
When he chose, Frazee thought, the governor could put on a diffident, baffled, bucolic act that would fool almost anyone. What was it they had called Wendell Willkie? The barefoot boy from Wall Street? Same thing. “The picture is still a trifle confused,” Frazee said.
The governor sipped his martini with appreciation. “It used to be,” he said, “that when you ordered a martini, that was it. Now you have to fill out a questionnaire: on the rocks or straight up? vodka or gin? olive, onion, or twist?” And then, with no change of expression, “I asked a question, Grover. Stop serving up ambiguities.”
It was a sore troublesome point. “Rentals,” Frazee said, “are going as well as can be expected under the circumstances.”
The governor could smile like a Disney wolf, white fangs showing. “Twelve words that say exactly nothing. You’d have made a splendid politician. Rentals are not going well. Tell me why.”
“A variety of factors—” Frazee began.
“Grover. You are not addressing a formal stockholders meeting. You are talking to one interested stockholder in the World Tower Corporation. There is a difference. Prospective tenants are staying away in droves? I want to know the reasons. Too much space available? Rentals too high? Money tight? Uncertainty in the business community?” The governor was silent, watching Frazee’s face.
Frazee hesitated. The governor was a self-made man, and there were times, as now, when he set aside his jovial friendly front and allowed you to see some of the force that had carried him, almost, to the presidency of the United States. “All of those reasons,” Frazee said. He hoped that his unconcerned shrug was convincing. “Things will change. They have to. The Trade Center is feeling the same pinch.”
“The Trade Center,” the governor said, “is Port Authority. Do I need to list the Port Authority’s other assets? For them a less than full building complex can be tolerated almost indefinitely. We are a private corporation, and I keep thinking back to the Empire State Building sitting half-empty during the Depression.”
Frazee said nothing.
“What it means,” the governor said, “is that we seem to have picked a piss-poor time to build our shining great goddam building, no?” He finished his drink. “I promised myself two martinis,” he said, and crooked his forefinger at the nearest waiter.
Frazee sat quiet, vaguely depressed. He was not a fearful man, nor did he consider himself less than responsible. When problems arose, he was accustomed to dealing with them and not, like some, sweeping them under the rug. On the other hand, he did not rush into trouble as the governor was prone to do, because if you do not deliberately seek it, sometimes trouble passes you by. The rental situation in the World Tower was not happy-making, but neither was it critical. Yet.
“Cost overrun in construction?” the governor said.
There at least Frazee was on solid ground. “No,” he said. “We’ve held very tight to estimates.” It was a source of pride. “Careful design, careful planning.”
“All right. That’s a plus.” The governor smiled suddenly. “An unexpected plus. It gives a little room for maneuver, no?”
Frazee did not see how. He said as much with some asperity. His depression had turned to resentment at the apparent implication that he was overlooking the obvious.
“In some circles,” the governor said, “it is called wheeling and dealing. In others it is considered merely sensible accommodation to the facts of life. First, you survive, Grover. Remember that. It is true in politics and it is also true in building management. Since we have not run over in construction costs, we can afford to take a little smaller income on our rentals without hurting ourselves, no?”
“We have published our schedule of rates,” Frazee said stiffly. “We have signed leases on the basis of those rates.”
“Good-o,” the governor said. “Now where you think it expedient, let our agents sign some leases at a little less than our published rates and suggest to the tenants that they would do well to keep their mouths shut about it.”
Frazee opened his mouth and shut it again carefully.
The governor produced that wolf grin. “You’re shocked? It’s what comes of a Racquet Club background.” He beckoned the waiter again. “We’ll order,” he said, “while I still have a little martini left. It’s going to be a long dull afternoon.” He consulted the menu, wrote out his order, and leaned back in his chair. “There are a lot of marbles involved, Grover,” he said. “Maybe you don’t care about yours, but I do care a great deal about mine. Gentlemanly ethics are all very well in yachting and golf and other harmless pursuits, but we built that building to make money.” He paused. “Let’s get on with it.”
5
1:05P.M.
Paul Simmons was already in a small booth in the rear of the restaurant when Zib arrived. He rose as she came toward him smiling, skirt short on regal legs, long hair gleaming, unbrassiered breasts jouncing gently. She slid into the booth with the grace he always associated with her. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said, and brushed the long hair back with both hands. “I ought to be going through piles of slush to try to find a piece of fiction we can use without too much shame.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“So I am all the more flattered.” Paul beckoned the waiter and ordered drinks—gin martinis, straight up, very dry, very cold, with a twist. Then he leaned back and smiled at Zib. “When am I going to see you?”
“You are seeing me.”
“Not the way I want to. Shall I explain that?”
“You are a male chauvinist pig.”
“And you love it.”
Her smile was secret, inscrutable. It lifted the corners of her mouth and brought tiny lights into her eyes. “There is more to us than sex,” she said.
“Is there?”
Zib smiled again. The subject of sex was pleasurable, fun to spar about in a civilized way. It had been so as long as she could remember. “You’re running true to type,” she said.
“There are times when I wonder what my type is.”
His secretary had caught him on the way out with Bert McGraw’s message. He had listened and said easily, “Call him back, honey, and tell him I’m tied up—”
“I tried,” the girl said. “But all he said was, ‘Tell him to be here.’”
And what in the world did that kind of peremptory summons mean?
Now, “Once,” h
e said, “I thought I was a pretty average sort of fellow—school, college, then probably some corporation where I could serve my time without too much strain.”
Zib watched him steadily. “And?” Her voice was quiet.
The drinks arrived. Paul lifted his in salutation and sipped slowly. “You haven’t met my father-in-law, have you?”
“Nat speaks of him.”
Simmons set his glass down and studied it. He nodded slowly and looked up. “Nat would speak of him. They’re not unalike. Bert is a brawling two-fisted Irishman—”
“Nat isn’t. Nat is a lamb, sometimes too much of a lamb.” Zib frowned. “Don’t look at me like that. He is.”
“The last thing I want,” Simmons said slowly, “is to quarrel with you.”
“Then don’t say things like that.”
“We’re touchy today, aren’t we?”
“He’s my husband.”
“And you know him well.” Simmons nodded. But the fact is, he thought, she doesn’t know her husband well. In Simmons’s opinion she didn’t know him at all, which was, perhaps, all for the best. “So,” he said, “we’ll stick to Bert McGraw, my revered father-in-law.”
Zib had one of her rare flashes of insight. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you?”
He sipped his martini while he considered the question and at last said, “Yes.” He had no wish to appear heroic; there was more to be gained by appearing otherwise, in effect throwing himself on Zib’s mercy. It was an approach he had used before with success. “You and I,” he said, “are anachronisms. We were raised to believe that all men were gentlemen and all women ladies. No cheating, no gouging, no butting in the clinches, life played strictly by Marquis of Queensberry rules.” He was silent, watching for effect.
Zib was not sure that she understood exactly what he meant, but she was flattered that he would speak seriously to her about serious matters. Few men did. And she and Paul did come from similar backgrounds, so with that at least she could agree. She nodded. “Go on.”
“I think kids today see it more clearly than we ever did,” Paul said. “They listen to the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments and they say they’re crap because nobody believes them any more. Well, that isn’t exactly true, but the people they point to, the ones we look up to, the ones who have been what we call successful, it is true that they haven’t always played by those rules if they’ve ever played by them.”
Zib thought she followed him now. “Your father-in-law?” she said.
“Exactly. Bert is a street fighter in a gutter neighborhood; he’s that much in tune with his environment. He’s in a tough trade, and because he’s tougher than most, he gets along fine.”
Zib looked across the table with fresh interest. “And you don’t?”
He shrugged, modest now. “I stagger along.” His smile was appealingly wry. “With Patty pushing me every step of the way.”
In a sense, he thought, he had been accurate when he said that he wondered what his type was. He was and always had been a chameleon, with a chameleon’s ability to blend into his surroundings. He had brains, technical competence—it would have been surprising if he had lacked technical competence after the education that had been provided for him—and he was long on charm, but there the list of assets seemed to end. Sometimes it seemed to him that an essential ingredient had been left out of his particular formula, a hardening agent perhaps, and the result was that he had never coalesced into a firm recognizable entity.
“I like Patty,” Zib said.
“You’re welcome to her.” Again he smiled. “That isn’t as far out a suggestion as it sounds. I wouldn’t be surprised if Patty decided to play both sides of the street. She’s unsold on men. Or me.” He paused. “Shocked?”
“Hardly.”
“The emancipated woman?”
“We face things as they are.”
The worst part about any aspect of Women’s Lib, Paul thought, is that it is taken so seriously that its disciples can speak only in cliches.
Zib studied her martini. She looked up. “I don’t really know you at all, do I?” She paused. “Sometimes I wonder if I really know anyone. Do you ever get that feeling? You know, that you’re—locked out?”
“Frequently.” Paul gestured to the waiter for another round of drinks. If he was going to face Bert McGraw, he thought, he wanted inner support.
“What you said about Nat,” Zib said.
“I said he was not unlike Bert McGraw.”
“And what did you mean by that?”
Paul smiled. “He’s a character out of the Wild West. He covers it well, but every now and again a little of it shows. ‘When you say that, smile, podner!’ That kind of thing.”
Zib shook her head. “You’re wrong. I told you. He’s a lamb and I wish he weren’t.” Because if he weren’t, she thought, I wouldn’t be carrying on with you, or anybody else. So, in a sense, it was Nat’s fault. Comforting thought.
“Sweetie,” Paul said, “let me tell you something. Don’t ever push him too far. Now, let’s order. I’ve been summoned to the presence.”
Patty was at a table for two at Martin’s when Bert McGraw walked in. Martin himself, menus in hand, scurried up in greeting and led the way across the restaurant. McGraw bent to kiss his daughter, not on the cheek, but squarely on the mouth; for the McGraws a kiss was a kiss and not a vague gesture.
Then he sat down. His whiskey was waiting, as promised, a generous hooker of bourbon on ice. He tasted it, sighed, and smiled at the girl. “Hi, honey.”
“You look peaked, McGraw.”
“Maybe I am, but seeing you makes it better.” Simple truth. Patty was a long generation removed from his Mary, but there was a similarity between the women that never ceased to amaze him, a quiet warm steadiness that certainly had not sprung from his rough genes. In her presence he could relax. “Between you and the whiskey I’m feeling fine.”
Patty was smiling too. “Liar. You’re tired. They put too much on you on the big jobs, and there’s never been a bigger than the World Tower.”
“Your mother’s been at you.”
“She didn’t need to.” Smiling still. “I have eyes in my head. You need a rest. Take Mother away. Take that trip to Ireland you’ve always talked about.” Patty paused. “Why haven’t you ever done it, Daddy?”
Why indeed? “There’s never been the time.”
“That isn’t the reason.”
McGraw smiled. “If you’re such a smart whippersnapper, tell me what the reason is.” He shook his head then. “No, that isn’t fair, is it? I’ll tell you the reason, honey. It’s because Ireland isn’t a place to me, it’s a dream, and I’m afraid the dream would be damaged if I actually went to look at it.” Confession. He finished his whiskey.
Patty was smiling fondly. “I believe it all but one part,” she said, “and that I won’t swallow. You afraid? Of anything? Ever?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
There were times when his feeling of closeness to her equaled, in different ways even surpassed, his feeling of closeness to Mary. Wife and daughter were not the same thing: each had her domain where she ruled supreme. “Afraid of many things, honey,” McGraw said. “Afraid from the moment I saw you through the hospital window that one day you would go away, as you have—”
“I haven’t gone away, Daddy.”
“In a way you have. I don’t know how mothers feel about their sons who marry, but I know how a father feels about his daughter.” He forced himself to smile. It was uphill work. “The finest man in the world isn’t good enough for her.”
“Do you think Paul is the finest man in the world?”
Right up to you, McGraw. How do you answer that? Smiling, “I’ve known worse.” Have you? After your talk with Giddings, do you still think so?
Patty’s smile was gone. “I wonder if you mean that.”
“I said it, didn’t I, honey?”
Patty said, “You’re a woolly bear, Daddy, and, I’ve been to
ld, a very fine poker player.” She shook her bright head. “I don’t see how, because sometimes you’re so transparent. I always thought you liked Paul.”
“And what changed your mind?”
“The look in your eye. Daddy, what’s happened?”
McGraw took his time. He looked up as a waiter approached. “Another drink, sir?” the waiter said.
“Yes.” It was Patty who answered. “For my father, but not for me.” And when the waiter was gone, “It’s bad?” she said.
“Bullied by my own daughter,” McGraw said. He tried to keep it light, but he wasn’t sure it sounded that way. “I don’t know, honey. There may be—things to do with the World Tower.
“What kind of things?” And then, contractor’s daughter, subcontractor’s wife, she answered her own question: “Shenanigans? Paul? But how could—” She stopped. She said quietly, “He could, couldn’t he? I’ve heard your tales—kick-backs, false invoices, bills of lading—” The words came easily to her tongue. “Is that it?”
“I don’t know anything for sure, honey. And I’m not going to badmouth a man until I do know.”
The fresh drink arrived. McGraw looked at it, picked it up, and made himself sip it slowly. What he needed, he thought, was not a drink in a glass, but a bottle. And cronies, as in the old simple days. Frank and Jimmy and O’Reilly and McTurk—the names ran through his mind like a litany. Drinking and brawling and laughing together—a long time ago.
“Yes, Daddy.”
Good God, was he talking aloud? He noticed that his hand was unsteady as he set the glass down.
“I’ve heard you talk of them all,” Patty said. “I wish I’d known you then.”
He had himself under control again. “I was pushing forty, honey, when you were born.”
“I know.”
“Mary, bless her, only a year younger.”
The Tower Page 5