‘We will all be partners in this corporate venture ‒ we will be a team working together to make Burnham Falls, and the United States, a better place to live in.’
With great modesty E. J. Harrison left the speaker’s stand, and returned to his seat, apparently unhearing of the clapping, whistles and cheers that flowed about him. He merely smiled and nodded at the men about him who pressed their congratulations on him; he looked calm and unruffled ‒ a handsome, even distinguished man, Harriet thought, who for a moment had enjoyed playing God.
She leaned towards Steve, and said, under cover of the applause, ‘Well ‒ I guess Burnham Falls really knows it’s alive at last.’
Then it happened again. That strange look of wariness and chill came down on his face, a concern not for her, but for what was happening around them. He looked beyond her to Tom Harvey, and then at the solid bulk of Art Sommers in front.
‘Quietly! … They’ll hear you.’ He groped for his cigarettes, producing the familiar, untidy package that was characteristic of him. ‘Let’s not give them the wrong impression of Burnham Falls on this first day.’
Harriet froze in a second of disbelief; she seemed to exist in a little shell of troubled quiet in the midst of that noise. She couldn’t look any more at Steve, and didn’t even want to. She needed time, a little more time to try to get used to the thought that it was Steve who had just given her ‒ she, Joe Carpenter’s daughter ‒ the first lesson in how things were to be for the future in Burnham Falls.
As the crowd broke up, and began to flow towards the parked cars and the stands where the box lunches were being handed out, Harriet suddenly found herself staring into Jeannie Talbot’s face. The girl who was looking at her questioningly, and Harriet shook herself to attention, aware that she had been looking at her for some seconds without seeing her.
‘Hello, Jeannie!’ Harriet liked Jeannie Talbot very much. She was Nell’s grand-niece, and Harriet had watched her grow up. For a girl who was so pretty, and near the head of her class, there was something strangely unspoiled about Jeannie; she had a sweet, wild quality, like honey with an earthy tang. Jeannie’s lips parted in a friendly grin over strong, white teeth.
‘Hallo, Mrs. Dexter! Some turn out, isn’t it?’ Her eyelid came down in a broad, deliberate wink. ‘I’m going to get myself one of those lunches, and as much ice-cream as I can hold.’
Harriet felt herself linked in a swift kinship with this girl, and slightly envious of her air of nonchalance and freedom. ‘You do that, Jeannie!’ she said. ‘Might as well take everything that’s being offered ‒ while it is.’
Three
Clifden Burrell had slipped away from the square as soon as E. J. Harrison had stopped speaking, and consequently he was first in the bar at the River Bend Country Club. He had little use for speeches of the sort just delivered, and a great deal of use for the Canadian whisky that rested briefly now against his throat, and then touched his stomach, where he needed it. When you are sixty-eight years old, he thought, and you’ve been a widower for fourteen years, and growing a little more sour with each of them, then you may sometimes be forgiven for thinking that the first whisky of the day was a sweeter, more necessary thing than staring at the legs and faces of strange women. All those same legs and faces would presently be crowding the bar, and in the meantime he had his hand cradled round the second whisky, and he could begin to enjoy the prospect.
The bar was dim ‒ chintzy, with hunting scenes. Clifden disliked it intensely; it wasn’t a place where a man might get drunk comfortably. Almost as violently he disliked the whole club, and belonged to it only because his membership was almost obligatory as the town’s veteran attorney, and because he had to make some small effort to hold together the remnants of what had once been a very good law practice. He disliked the club because it was new, sanitary, and cultivated an air of pioneer America, while it discouraged him from wearing his old clothes there. He also resented it because its handsome greens and fairways had been cut from woods where he and Joe Carpenter had hunted on still, sharp winter mornings, mornings when the ice had crackled under his boots, but Joe’s well-trained dogs had remained exquisitely noiseless, their breath clouding in the cold air. Joe had known, of course, that the club would be here when he had sold the land. He had argued that it was better than selling it off in half-acres for week-end bungalows. But Joe, Clif reflected grimly, had not had to see the hunting prints in the bar.
He could hear the cars now, and he moved his position so that he was at the end of the bar, with his back against the wall. He felt grumpy and old, and had to acknowledge that he was both of those things, and he called for another whisky because the arthritic pains in his back and knees were giving him hell. He reckoned that if he stayed at the end of the bar and looked unconcerned, he wouldn’t be noticed by any of the Amtec people, and he could get on with his drinking without the necessity for any small talk. He scowled as the first of the crowd entered the bar, and buried his nose in the glass.
Five minutes later he had decided that they were a good-looking bunch of women, all right ‒ smart as paint, some of them, and some of them so young they looked as if they were just out of college, and they had young husbands to match. He figured that possibly all of those favoured two hundred engineers and physicists E. J. Harrison had talked about had been asked to the lunch with their wives. Papa Harrison was giving them and their bright new houses in Amtec Park the big welcome. Belonging to the River Bend Country Club was almost as much a part of their job as showing up each day at the Glass House, Clif figured ‒ but from this day on they would pick up their own tabs. He nodded to them over his whisky ‒ drink up, children, drink up. At the same time he realised that he was enjoying the freshness of their faces ‒ their young faces.
Harriet Dexter came in then, with Steve. Seeing her there in the midst of all the strangers, Clif did a quick reckoning of her age … thirty-two or thirty-three … he remembered Dorothy had died not long after Harriet had gone out to California to Steve, instead of going to college as Joe had wanted her to. She’d been one of those pretty kids who gave promise of being beautiful when she got past thirty. She’d lived up to that promise, though it wasn’t the kind of beauty that knocked you over at first sight. It was a quiet, composed face, with good lines ‒ hair a little darker than it used to be, and showing less of the red tints it had once had ‒ or was it, Clif wondered, just as the result of these damn’ dingy lights they’d put in here. Steve’s hand was on her elbow, steering her through the crowd, and Clif admitted that he was a good match for Harriet. Steve Dexter’s clothes always hung inconclusively on his tall frame, and his tie was apt to be askew; most people stopped noticing that when he talked to them ‒ particularly women.
He watched the two of them closely as the crowd and the smoke thickened in the room. This was the first time Clif had seen either Steve or Harriet at the Club; he guessed that they had joined, not willingly, but because it was expected of them. The membership of the River Bend Country Club would be drawn almost exclusively from two groups ‒ the new Amtec people, and the executive level of the T. J. Water Rubber Company that had set up their Eastern headquarters over at Swanston three years ago. Clif sensed that from now on Steve and Harriet would have to put in command appearances so that all the world could see how the old-timers and the newcomers could mix. From what E. J. Harrison had said in the town square, Amtec, in a polite sort of way, would be running Burnham Falls from here on, and Amtec was to-day officially putting its seal of approval on the River Bend Country Club as a place for its executives to spend their leisure hours. And its executives now included Steve Dexter.
Clif felt rather proud of them both, Steve and Harriet, as he watched their progress from group to group, and the introductions and the handshakes. He felt that they were representing what remained of the old Burnham Falls more than adequately ‒ they were doing it very well. If he and Dorothy had ever had children, he hoped they might have behaved as well as these two. In a se
nse Joe Carpenter had been the old Burnham Falls, which was to-day disappearing. However inevitable had been the take-over of the small company by the giant one, there still must remain for Steve and Harriet a touch of defeat. They were young, Clif thought, and they had inherited from Joe nothing but trouble and slow decline, and they had deserved better. He was proud of them because it did not show in their faces or manner; they were neither aloof nor over-eager. They did not seem either frightened or defeated, nor did they seem too anxious to please. Steve’s eyes were tired, and lacked their customary snap of humour, but none of the newcomers would know that. And there was Harriet, brown-eyed, olive-skinned Harriet, who was almost as beloved of Clif as she had been of Joe, with her gentle smile and the look of warmth that seemed for him to shine clear across the room. Harriet was almost as much the product of Clif’s upbringing as of Joe’s; that might explain why he loved her, and why he ached over what her feelings were at this moment.
He laid his glass down on the bar, and looked about him for someone to talk to. But when he saw Laura Peters he forgot that he needed to talk. She was worthy of any man’s eyes, any man’s attention, and Clif gave her both in full measure, as he knew many other people in the room must be doing. She was not tall, but in the matter of figure and colouring she was so spectacular that one didn’t notice, at first, whether she was strictly beautiful. Some women understand beauty so well, reverence it so deeply, that they are able to create its attributes without actually having its substance. Clif thought Laura Peters may have been such a woman. Her hair was drab gold, subtly shaded, her clothes were expensive and soft ‒ beige and gold and light-brown colours merging imperceptibly, as only expensive things can do. There was an air of mysterious and complete femininity about Laura Peters, sexual in a deliberately understated fashion. She understood her art very well. There had been enough talk about her for Clif to be able to identify her as the wife of Ed Peters, the new President of the Amtec Laboratories.
Clif didn’t own a television set, so her face was not familiar to him, except as it resembled hundreds of faces of fashion models that stared out from the magazines. But he knew something about her, because Burnham Falls had been excited by the news of her coming. Seven years ago she had starred in a play that had run on Broadway for eighteen months, under the name of Laura Carrol. Since then she had been in three flops, and she had done a series of television commercials for Amtec. Clif tried to remember what she had sold ‒ dishwashers or gas stoves ‒ something like that, and he wondered how the public could believe that such a woman as Laura Peters could know anything about either, or might conceivably be pictured, hot and dishevelled, cooking a meal or washing dishes.
Thinking about this, and craning a little to get a better view of her through the crowd, Clif slid his hand back behind him on the bar and started groping for his glass. In raising it, he brushed against someone’s sleeve, and he felt the cool liquid spill against his fingers.
He turned to encounter a pair of light-blue eyes in an oddly attractive, but not a pretty face; they were amused, not annoyed.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘It was stupidly clumsy of me.’ He slipped off the stool, and pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket. As he dabbed at the sleeve of her dress he noticed that her hands were little and pretty, with rounded, unpainted nails.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘A few drops of liquor never hurt anyone. I thought it was the traditional way to christen an occasion.’ Her voice was soft and pleasant.
‘Well … you’re exceedingly gracious about it, ma’am.’ He gave her a half-bow, knowing that he was old enough to do it, and she still young enough to be pleased by it. ‘And I am truly sorry.’ She was really absurdly young ‒ or so she seemed to him. She had a fresh, clear face, with little curls of dark hair against white skin. For a hat she wore a straw bow, with a wisp of veil attached.
Then he noticed that her glass was empty. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said, gesturing towards it.
She smiled. ‘No ‒ I’ll stay with what I have. Drinks at lunch aren’t much in my line. I lost my husband ten minutes ago to several of his bosses, and I’d hate him to come back and find me stumbling. Besides, I don’t want to miss a second of all this …’ She motioned towards the crowded room. ‘This is my first look at the Amtec top brass. My husband Tom, has only been with the firm three years, and he’s still a very junior physicist.’ She smiled again, but this time with a touch of diffidence. ‘I’m awfully sorry ‒ and I expect I should know ‒ are you with the corporation?’
‘Don’t worry … I’m not your husband’s boss, and you haven’t put your foot in it. My name’s Clifden Burrell, and I’m one of what they choose to call “the old timers” in Burnham Falls. Lawyer by profession. Fisherman by choice.’
‘Well ‒ I’m Sally Redmond. Tom and I are moving here on Friday ‒ into one of those new houses in Amtec Park.’ She gave a faint giggle. ‘I don’t mind telling you … we’ve only been married since Christmas, and I’m scared stiff by so much house. Imagine it! … The one we’ve got has three bedrooms. In New York we live in one room and a kitchenette!’
‘Obviously Amtec believes in looking to the future. They expect you to settle happily in Burnham Falls, and fill those extra rooms with children. Will your husband be working at the research centre?’
‘Yes ‒ it’s a promotion for him, and we’re very excited about it.’
‘Do you think you’ll like it here?’
Her eyes opened wide. ‘Why, yes! Shouldn’t we like it?’
‘Well … I just wondered. I like Burnham Falls, but I know young people want some excitement … since you’ve lived in New York I wondered how you felt about settling in the country.’
She looked at him firmly. ‘Mr. Burrell, I’ve had all the excitement I need for the rest of my life when I was working my way through at Columbia. You can’t own New York ‒ when you can’t afford to go to theatres and concerts and expensive restaurants you kind of look forward to having enough space about you to raise some petunias. Children too ‒ Tom and I want a family, but not in one room and a kitchenette.’
He nodded, encouraging her to go on talking. A minute ago she had seemed a child, her eyes bright with excitement. But when she had spoken of New York a little edge of disillusionment had appeared briefly, and a little of her lovely, shining youth had gone. When she wasn’t smiling she had a rather serious, questioning face; in repose it was almost plain. He decided that he liked her very much, and he was sorry that both she and her husband would consider him of an age that it would be impossible for them ever to be anything but acquaintances. He knew that Tom Redmond would, inevitably, call him ‘sir’.
‘Then you like your new house?’
‘Yes ‒ yes, very much. It isn’t a wonderful house ‒ I mean it doesn’t look like anything out of Architectural Forum. But it seems pretty wonderful to me. We couldn’t afford one of the better ones. Ours is the least expensive model they have, but I expect we’ll move up when Tom’s been with Amtec longer, and earns more money. You know, Mr. Burrell, the only difference between it and the next-but-one house is the colour of the roof and the front door. I know Tom doesn’t care for that part of it too much ‒ but it’s got big windows and plenty of closets, and space for a dishwasher. And they haven’t cut down the trees ‒ we have seven trees on our lawn, Mr. Burrell, and that’s a different view from staring into our neighbour’s living room across a light well.’
‘I suppose after living in the city these things matter very much,’ he said gently. ‘I suppose they matter more to a woman than to a man.’
‘I think they do too ‒ and I don’t think it’s because we read more house and garden magazines. I think, as a woman, I want to have neighbours. I’m tired of riding up and down in an elevator with the person who lives in the next apartment, and pretending they’re invisible. When the mood hits me, I like to talk …’ She grinned suddenly. ‘… Just as I’m doing now. I think I’ll enjoy having coffee wit
h my neighbours, and keeping a dog, and playing with my babies on the lawn.’
‘You don’t mind living in a place that’s called Amtec Park … you don’t get a Big Brother feeling?’
She shrugged. ‘Let’s not be too sensitive about it … Tom works for Amtec, and without Amtec we wouldn’t own our house, or our plot of earth, Mr. Burrell. Amtec is doing an awful lot of things for us that we couldn’t do for ourselves. I don’t mind our house matching the one next door because it also means there’s a medical centre two blocks away ‒ which Amtec also built. When I have my children they’ll have a playground to use ‒ you know, wading-pools, sand-pits … a workshop and hobby rooms for them when they get older. I don’t have to worry about them running out on a highway, because there aren’t any highways going through Amtec Park.’
She gestured, with her small hands. ‘This sounds pretty good to me. There’s going to be a lot more in Amtec Park than just houses, Mr. Burrell. If the price I have to pay for it is conformity ‒ why then, I’ll conform. After all …’ she laughed a little ‘… Amtec isn’t trying to own my soul. I intend to do much more with my life than just grow petunias and conform.’
‘Oh …?’ Slowly Clif took up his whisky again. ‘And what is there for a young woman of intelligence and ambition to do in Burnham Falls?’
She said quickly, ‘I’m going to write. I’m going to write a novel I’ve been planning all through college. I think Burnham Falls is going to give me the peace and quiet I need to really get into it. I’ve got all the notes made …’
Then a flush began to mount in her white skin. ‘I talk too much,’ she said. ‘I told you I wasn’t used to drinks at lunchtime. I’ve never told anyone except Tom ‒ I don’t believe in talking about things until they’re accomplished. And this is only beginning …’
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘telling your secrets to an old lawyer is like telling them to the grave. They’re buried.’ He raised his glass to her. ‘It would give me very great pleasure if your plans work out. I hope this town gives you what you’re looking for. Good luck to you!’ He smiled at her, laid down his glass, and took her arm. ‘Now, I see they’re starting to go into lunch. Let me help you find your table.’
Corporation Wife Page 3