‘Yes, Ted, and she’s a nice girl, too. A very nice girl.’ Clif started to draw away. ‘Good-bye, Chrissie! … See you around Ted!’
‘Sure thing, Mr. Burrell.’ Then he suddenly called after him, ‘Say ‒ Mr. Burrell!’
‘Yes?’
‘You goin’ t’need some new rose bushes put in this month. Them ones o’ yours didn’t hardly bloom at all last summer. Reckon they was put in before Mrs. Burrell died, and they’re most worn out.’
Clif gave a slight shrug, more for himself than for Ted. ‘I don’t … think so, Ted. When there aren’t any women about, a man feels kind of foolish playing round with a garden. Just tend to the lawn, and leave the old rose bushes be.’
As he drove on towards the town he knew that he had used Dorothy’s death simply as an excuse, a convenient way of saying no to Ted Talbot without further explanations. It was easier to let Ted think that he was a sentimental old man, still grieving for a woman who had died fourteen years ago, than to say outright that you grew indifferent with age, and cynical ‒ so that rose bushes and spring blooms mattered less each year.
From here the road ran without a bend straight into town. Clif thought of the notes on the Williams case lying on his desk, and thought of the discreet, inquiring look Milly Squires would give him when he entered. She would hope he had not been drinking ‒ at least, not enough to show. Milly typed and answered the phone for Clif, and had been doing it since she left school sixteen years ago; when her mother died she would go to New York ‒ that wasn’t too far off because Ginny Squires was reported to have cancer. In the meantime Milly got some satisfaction from the mistaken idea that she ran Clif’s life, and she thought it rather dreadful that a man she had been brought up to think of with respect, as a pillar of town society, a standard by which to measure honesty and civic responsibility, should undo himself with a drink. She behaved sometimes as if her personal god had been defiled. Clif felt uneasy as a destroyer of ideals; an outright reproof would have been better than her silent sadness and concern for him. He didn’t want to go back to Milly Squires this afternoon.
Then suddenly, just past the Downside road he stopped the car. He didn’t know whether he was driven to it by the thought of Milly Squires, or because Joe Carpenter had been on his mind all day, but he suddenly slapped into reverse, backed, turned, and set off in the opposite direction, taking the curve of the Downside road too sharply, and hearing his tyres whine in protest. Immediately off the main road were two massive stone pillars, but no gate hung between them, nor had there ever been one there. He didn’t trouble to read the notice ‒ he knew it by heart.
DOWNSIDE
Private Road
Keep Out
It had been sheer bluff on the part of the millionaire to place that notice, and the stone pillars. He had been unable to buy back the small properties and right-of-way from the three families who owned waterfront land along the lake before he had come to the district. But most people saw the notice and heeded it. The winding road through the close timber was almost always deserted.
The edge of the Downside lake flashed into view abruptly through the trees. Here the lake lay within the shadow of a high hill, the highest in the whole surrounding countryside. The lake touched the base of the northern side of the hill, and the sun only reached it briefly during the early morning; on the other side of the hill were the summer cottages of the week-enders, facing south across Lake Burnham to the town. The hill was the dividing point between the two lakes ‒ one open and sunny, with the town of Burnham Falls lying gently in its valley, the other cool and narrow, shadowed by the hills. The road to Downside had been cut from the side of the slope; beyond the white guard rail, the drop to the rocky shore of the lake was sharp.
Clif followed the road for a little better than two miles, flashing in and out of sunlight as the trees lightened or thickened. So far he had not caught a glimpse of Downside itself; it was at the farther end of the crescent-shaped lake. But as he topped a rise just on the bend of the lake, it came into view. The green copper turrets might have housed a story-book princess, a bridge of grey granite had been made where none had been needed, and an artificial lake created behind it, where in the summer the water lilies bloomed. The afternoon sun flushed pink on the grey stone. At this point it was nearly two miles distant. Clif braked sharply, as he always did, to look at it before he turned down the dirt road leading to the fishing cabin that had belonged to Joe Carpenter, and now belonged to Harriet.
Each of the three cabins here fronted on the lake, but they were far enough away from each other, and the woods thick enough to completely screen them. Joe’s cabin had the best position, for he had been first here, and had bought the rocky land, useless for farming, very cheaply. The house stood on a point right at the bend of the lake, the nearest of the three to Downside, and the only one which had a view of it. It was built solidly of brown timbers and an old slate roof. It was impossible to see it from the road until the break came in the woods ‒ almost at its door.
Clif got out of the car stiffly, taking the flask from the glove compartment with him. He reached down under the stone where the key was always kept; the lock was stiff, and he tried several times before it yielded. While he struggled with the lock, he was aware of nothing so much as the deep silence that hung over the whole lake, and seemed to wrap the hills; a hush lay on the woods, and for a second or so he felt himself holding his breath, as if he expected something to happen.
But nothing happened. The door opened at last, and he stepped inside and was greeted by the smell of dust and disuse ‒ the smell of an unoccupied house. The door gave directly into the main room, a large room with windows running along two sides, and a fieldstone fireplace on the third wall. The fourth wall had a long counter that concealed the stove and sink, and had another door that led to a bathroom and two bedrooms. Joe had built it in 1928 when he had made a killing in the stock market; he had used it most week-ends through the season, and it was to this place, rather than to the house in Burnham Falls, that he had invited Clif and the two men who had remained close friends after college. His housekeeper, Nell Talbot, had never spent a night under this roof in all the years she had worked for him; here Joe did the cooking, and it was he who ordered the furnishings and kept them to a minimum. It was here he sat with his friends before the fire until late at night, with the whisky bottle on the table between them.
Clif had been part of those week-ends, and those nights before the fire, and he remembered how sometimes Joe would hush them to silence when the laughter got too loud, and he would tip-toe with exaggerated motions to the rooms where Harriet and Josh lay asleep. Whoever stayed with Joe in the cottage always slept on one of the sofas, or on a mattress on the floor. The rooms were for Josh and Harriet ‒ until Josh grew old enough to join the group. Harriet had always accepted the maleness of these week-ends with complete unconcern, and even in adolescence had never gone into a stage of coyness. Clif wondered if this was the reason he found it so easy to be with Harriet now.
He sank down on one of the couches facing the windows, and sat staring for some time at the double image of Downside, reflected now in the still water. The long shadows of afternoon edged out on to the lake.
He could remember how it had been when Joe had come out of college with a degree in science, and had got a job with a big chemical manufacturing company in Pennsylvania. He had swung into the job with brash confidence, and had tried to interest the company in a new formula for shellac which he had devised; they had examined it, and passed it up. In 1917 he had joined up and spent a year behind a laboratory bench for the Army; he had never seen France. Then he’d come home to Burnham Falls, borrowed some money from his father and space in a barn, and had set about manufacturing his formula. He had gone on selling trips through New England, sleeping in the back of the Ford to save hotel expenses, and counting the pennies on every meal. He had come through those first years by a hair’s breadth ‒ and because the formula was a good one, a
fter all.
When the business was a going concern, he had borrowed money from the bank and bought a hundred-acre farm about three-quarters of a mile on the other side of town, and here he had built his permanent plant. He was now selling his product through most of the New England region, and the business began to show a good profit.
These were the years when Clif and Joe had started to be friends. They had fished together, and hunted together, and Clif had sat with Joe when his wife, Claudia, had been dying.
Clif believed that if Claudia had lived, things might have been very different for Joe Carpenter and the shellac factory ‒ Claudia, intelligent, alert, the daughter of a Boston manufacturer, who had inherited his shrewdness, might have made that difference. She might have kept Joe’s eyes open to the world outside of Burnham Falls, might have seen the trend of what was happening in America, or might have got Harriet and Steve out of the factory before it engulfed them.
But Joe had taken a good profit from the factory, and had spent it on himself and his children. He had seen the depression through not too uncomfortably, and had swung into glowing prosperity towards the end of the thirties, and after the outbreak of the war in Europe. When the States had entered the war, Joe picked up government contracts which had absorbed the whole output of the factory. But the factory did not expand, and with rising wages he was able to buy very little new equipment. When it was obvious that the war in the Pacific would soon be over, Joe had begun casting about among his old friends and acquaintances for new business, and had found it by becoming a supplier of shellac to two chains of stores which spread across the country; he manufactured for them under their own label, and the two contracts had taken care of his total output. He still had no other product.
It was fortunate, Clif thought, that Joe had secured those contracts before Josh was killed, because for more than a year afterwards he had hardly noticed what was happening in his own business; he had spent most of his time here at the lodge, fishing or simply sitting where Clif sat now, staring blankly at the lake and at Downside, empty and deserted, except for a caretaker. He had scarcely seemed to stir from his apathy ‒ not even when Harriet had returned home with Steve, who was convalescing after a wound received in the Pacific, and waiting for his final discharge. The only events that really roused Joe in the years that followed were the births of his two grandsons, Gene and Tim; they were to be all the things Josh had not lived to be.
It seemed obvious, almost as soon as Harriet and Steve came back, that the factory must either be sold, or Steve must help to run it. Clif had been close enough to their troubles to sense very strongly Steve’s reluctance, his backward look to California where he had wanted to stay ‒ and perhaps to start his own business. But Steve had had no capital, and Joe had been pathetically grateful for his son-in-law’s presence, and his experience as a chemist. They had listened to Joe’s pleas, taken a half-share in the business, and tried to forget about California.
It was then Steve started his fight for another product, for diversification, for an attempt to find new capital, for a way to use his ability other than supervising the manufacture of shellac. After a year in which he had spent more than half his time unsuccessfully trying to secure capital, Steve had finally returned to Burnham Falls and in desperation had set up his own laboratory. He spent every cent he could spare, and every hour that could be snatched away from the factory to work on formulas for vinyl products, seeking in them an answer to the narrowing market for shellac, which was being used less and less as the new finishes and veneers for furniture were developed, and as aluminium began to replace wood. With the formulas in his pocket, he went out to get capital to manufacture them, and found that the giants in the plastic and vinyl industry had cornered the market for investment in that direction, and that no one was interested in backing the efforts of a lone chemist working in a tiny laboratory. He lacked money for further research, for the equipment and help he needed; with the formulas incomplete and unproven he was unable even to sell them to the big vinyl manufacturers. They lay on his desk unused until he read in the scientific journals that one or other of the plastic or vinyl fabricators had finally found the answers to the problems he had researched. Then the formulas became worthless, simply a crude imitation of what was already known and in use.
And while Steve worked in the laboratory, Joe’s market for shellac was hit by a price squeeze. The young men who had joined the merchandising companies Joe supplied at the end of the war, were now rising towards top management. They were feeling their muscle, and seeking new ways to cut costs, to make the profits keep up with the rise in the price of labour. Joe, along with others, faced an ultimatum ‒ either to reduce costs to his customers, or to lose his contracts. When he appealed to his friends in the companies against the narrow margin of profit, he encountered the unexpressed but obvious fear among them of the younger men who were pushing hard and talking loud against outdated business methods and sentimental softness. Against the fear of the younger men who would take their jobs, Joe’s appeals had no weight.
At this point there came the offer to sell out and become a subsidiary of one of the companies he was supplying, retaining management, but not ownership of the factory. For a time he played with the idea, and Harriet waited for him to acknowledge that the day of the small factory was almost over, as he had known in his father’s time that the day of the small farmer was over.
But he had decided not to sell the factory, still clinging to the belief that business would improve, and unable to bear the thought of working for anyone but himself. Labour costs were rising, and his profits dropped back to just slightly above the break-even point.
Clif had never understood why Steve, at this time, had not demanded his release from a mundane and dwindling business, a huge uneconomical house, and a father-in-law whose thoughts were back in the twenties. With firms all over the country clamouring for chemists and physicists, he could have taken his family and left behind the obligations and frustrations of Burnham Falls. Instead he chose to remain, and Clif had never been sure if it was a genuine desire to spare Joe’s feelings, or the complete and absolute belief that his work in the laboratory would produce something of value, and he must struggle to remain independent until that time came.
Steve went to the factory each day, and on selling trips when necessary, leaving Joe free to fill in his time as he wished. He returned to the house for meals, and spent his evenings and week-ends in the laboratory; any time away from the laboratory he used to read scientific journals and papers. Occasionally he put together enough money to attend a conference; these trips were the only vacations he permitted himself. Invariably he stayed in the cheapest hotels, and Harriet did not accompany him.
The expense of keeping the laboratory supplied and equipped was straining their resources, and Joe, perhaps from a sense of guilt, or perhaps cannily knowing that it was the only way to hold Steve in Burnham Falls, sold off his remaining securities to meet the demands of the laboratory. It was at this time that he sold the four hundred acres of land his father had worked to the country club syndicate.
Clif knew that most of the years since Harriet had come back to Burnham Falls had been a lonely and disillusioning time for her. From his frequent visits to the Carpenter house, he surmised that Harriet’s chief concern was in keeping the annoyance of unpaid bills away from Steve and seeing that there was hot food for him at whatever hour he returned from the factory or laboratory.
It was spring, two years ago, Clif remembered, when Steve had gone to a conference in Denver to deliver a paper on a solid-state fuel ‒ the result of the research he had been doing since his failure to find anyone to listen to his ideas on vinyls and plastics. The conclusions he reached were new, but soundly based. They caused a storm of argument and discussion, and for two triumphant days Steve tasted the reward of the lonely hours. He even felt exultant enough to call Harriet to tell her about it.
During the conference he had been approached by a repre
sentative from the research division of Amtec Industries, who had suggested that he stay in New York for a few days on the way home to have further talks with Harold McNaughton, who was the Amtec vice-president in charge of research and development. Behind the casual words he could sense an eagerness to own and control his formula, and he began to think that at last he might have found the backing he needed. He had been on the point of calling Harriet again to tell her he was going to New York, when she herself called him with the news that Joe had died during the night after a heart attack.
It was Clif who had drawn up Joe’s will, and had, of course, read it to Harriet and Steve. It was very simple ‒ apart from a small bequest to Nell Talbot, his estate was equally divided between Harriet and Steve, and he expressed a desire that his thanks be conveyed to ‘my beloved son-in-law, for his devotion and service.’
The estate consisted of the mortgaged house and land, and the run-down factory.
Steve turned at once to pursue Amtec’s interest in his solid fuel formula. Clif tried to help steer him through the maze of bargaining and arguments that went on in the months following, but found himself bogged down in a kind of hole of corporate vagueness. Amtec pointed out that Steve’s formula was untested, and they hesitated to commit themselves; Steve countered by offering to sell the Burnham Falls Shellac Company to them, demonstrating how easily it could be converted to producing the first components of his fuel. Amtec investigated the company, and pronounced it on the verge of bankruptcy, but at the same time it discovered other things about the situation that Steve had not mentioned ‒ the value of the large acreage which surrounded the factory, the spur of the railway that went to it, the abundance of water, and the cheap, non-union labour.
Almost immediately following came the decision of the Board to buy the Burnham Falls Shellac Company, to retain Steve on a salary to continue research for Amtec, to give him stock in Amtec Industries in payment for the factory, while they assumed its liabilities; the agreement also gave Steve options to buy stock at preferred prices.
Corporation Wife Page 5