by Sloan Wilson
It never occurred to Helen that her marriage would not continue almost exactly as it was until death concluded it. As she told her mother, she had forgiven Ken for his weaknesses, and that was that. She had no knowledge of the torments Ken went through with a young French Canadian woman who served as a technician in his laboratory, a girl whose fine, slender hands trembled when she worked beside him, and whose dark eyes showed that she understood him completely, though they had hardly exchanged a sentence which did not have to do with their work. Lillian Bouchard, her name was, and she was engaged to a young doctor serving his internship in a local hospital. In spite of himself, Ken found himself obsessed by a fantasy of asking her to stay late with him at the laboratory some night, of turning toward her and taking her into his arms, and then going, hand in hand, down through the dimly lit halls to his car, and a nearby motel. I cannot ruin a young girl’s life, he told himself sternly. I cannot disrupt her engagement unless I am willing to give her more than I can without divorcing Helen and giving up Molly. That was a thought he could not face, and he tried his best to put aside his fantasies concerning Lillian Bouchard, almost succeeding until one warm night in May, when Molly was nine years old, he left his laboratory and found Lillian Bouchard waiting in his car for him, and the whole fantasy abruptly became a reality.
But not a very good reality, a long, tawdry affair which had the curious effect of making him dream more intensely of Sylvia than he had in years. The half-nights he stole with Lillian Bouchard under the pretense of working late at the laboratory distressed him more than they delighted him. He could not accept her matter-of-fact assurance that their excursions would affect neither his marriage nor her engagement. There was something so deeply wrong in the whole arrangement that she began to appear ugly to him, and he was deeply relieved when she told him casually one night that they would have to break off, because she was soon to be married.
After that Ken gave himself with more abandonment than ever to his job. In 1951 he and an associate named Bernie Anderson began work on a plastic tissue in their laboratory which was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. It looked like paper, but it stretched, and when two pieces were pressed together they stuck. It took color easily, and a battery of tests showed it was durable, and resistant to both fire and water, although not actually proof against them. It also had the virtue of being cheap. Ken thought that all kinds of uses could be found for it, and when he passed the samples and formulas on to the head of his department, he expected a large bonus at least, and probably a substantial salary boost which would enable him to take Helen and Molly off somewhere for a long vacation.
But that didn’t happen. There was a delay of months, and finally the word trickled down through the layers of executives and administrators that the firm was not going to manufacture the product. It had been examined and judged a poor gamble.
Ordinarily, Ken would have accepted this decision stoically. He did not regard himself as an entrepreneur or a businessman of any sort. A research chemist’s job was to invent and to develop, and to leave the decision of what to manufacture, promote and market up to the big brass.
Bernie Anderson, however, did not feel that way. Bernie Anderson had worked hard on the plastic tissue, and he too had expected a bonus and a raise. He was furious when he heard about the executive decision, and he said one thing positively and angrily: “They’re wrong.”
“So what can we do about it?” Ken asked.
“We can start our own company and manufacture the stuff ourselves.”
To Ken, this was the fabric of fantasy. He had never imagined himself doing such a thing, but Bernie Anderson kept talking, and he kept bringing in other people, promoters and engineers and people who knew men who had risk capital to invest. “Do you have faith in the stuff?” Bernie kept saying. “Will it do the things your report says?”
“Yes,” Ken said, “but the big guys know what to market. They’re experts, for God’s sake!”
“They’re human, aren’t they?” Bernie retorted. “Can’t they make a mistake?”
So Bernie kept talking, and he talked fantasy into reality, but first he talked it into a sort of nightmare. Ken found himself quitting his job, giving up the pension plan and the stock bonuses and a salary of eighteen thousand dollars a year. Bernie Anderson talked all the security away. Both Helen and her mother were aghast. Ken found himself borrowing on his life insurance and taking a second mortgage on his house, selling his wife’s car and taking out a personal loan at the bank. Helen’s mother said openly that Ken was having “some sort of breakdown”—he had always seemed odd to her. But even that wasn’t the hardest part of it. He found himself doubting everything and everyone, including Bernie Anderson. Bernie was a Jew who had changed his name, and this seemed suddenly sinister to Ken, who had never been anti-Semitic before. A man named Jacobson who put fifty thousand dollars into the venture was also a Jew, and a phrase he had read somewhere, “I have fallen into the hands of Jews,” came back to Ken, and suddenly he was terrified, knowing this was absurd but still feeling it. Before the thing was over, he began to doubt his own sanity as much as his family did. What would make a man quit a good job and incur great debt voluntarily? Bernie Anderson talked constantly of “the enormous possibilities” of the project, and Ken found himself dreaming for the first time in his life of trips abroad, a huge house with a swimming pool, and more. Wasn’t that the classic symptom: delusions of grandeur?
During those months Ken lost forty pounds, and was thin for the first time in his life. Old friends stopped dropping in to see them, and friendly shop people became less friendly. Ken began to doubt his whole view of the world, and to become a cynic.
But Bernie Anderson kept talking, and gradually a new concept of the issues involved came to Ken Jorgenson. Success, or the attempt to get it, was not a matter of cleverness, as he always had thought. It was only in small part a matter of intelligence. It was mostly faith. He had to keep faith, he told himself in his despair. He had to keep faith with Bernie Anderson, who had changed his name, all right, but who was a tall man of enormous energy and integrity and hope. He had to keep faith with his research. He had to quit doubting that the tests meant what they said. And most of all, he had to keep faith with himself, to stop fearing that he was going insane. No, he was not a madman, he was a courageous person intent on seizing a great opportunity; yes, he was.
When Ken reached the conclusion that his faith was being tested and not his mind, he still was scared, but he worked harder. He began to help Bernie Anderson draw together the corporation they were forming. He began to try more as a salesman when he was called in by bankers to explain the product. Somewhat to his own astonishment, he found he could talk hard and long with enormous effect, his detailed knowledge and his air of diffidence combining to produce an atmosphere of earnestness, sincerity and confidence which gave others faith. Within a year the money was raised, over a half million dollars, a terrifying sum even to think about, and a large building was leased in which to start manufacturing.
For more than a year Ken worked day and night, often getting only three or four hours’ sleep. He helped to set up the machinery, and to sell—that was the important thing, not the manufacturing, but getting orders, the money, the cash on the barrelhead before the payments on their many loans had to be met. Ken wrote a long booklet on the uses of the new tissue which a promotion man named “Marfab,” a name which Ken once would have ridiculed, but which he now accepted eagerly on the premise that the promotion man knew what would sell. Selling was the only thing which counted that year.
Ken found that Marfab would make an excellent material for wrapping packages; no string or tape had to be used at all; department-store officials showed interest. There were moments of elation, such as the time when an automobile salesman accepted the idea of wrapping a whole car in it, and when a construction man agreed with Ken’s suggestion that the stuff could be used as insulation when building houses. “Marvelou
s Marfab,” the advertisements called it, marvelous, marvelous, marvelous, it could do anything. One night Ken Jorgenson, a research chemist, not a promoter, sat down to work up a list of things that could be done with it. Orange trees could be covered with it to protect them from the frost. The army could use it when transporting machinery across rivers. Marfab could do anything. While groping for ideas, Ken’s mind turned grotesque. Undertakers could use it as shrouds for the dead. It could take the place of condoms, there could be condoms of many colors. Marfab. In a frenzy he drove his imagination, and out of it all came a booklet of a hundred practical ideas, or ideas which at least sounded practical, a booklet which at any rate helped to attract a force of good salesmen.
There were moments of panic. The ownership of the formulas he had developed while working for a large corporation came under close legal scrutiny, even though that corporation had declared them impractical, and even though Ken varied them, changing them to make them a different legal property. There were threats of lawsuits, of attachments, the clear possibility of bankruptcy, debt, disgrace, a bad reputation, the man who tried to pull a fast one and failed. On one dark night even Bernie Anderson lost his nerve, and overcome by exhaustion, put his head on his arms and cried. “Faith,” Ken said to him, “we’ve got to have faith, faith in each other, faith in ourselves, faith, faith in God, I guess, and have a drink, Bernie. We’ll come through this yet.”
In the end, faith was what did it, faith and courage and hard work. The memory of a girl with a fake mink coat over her bathing suit who, Ken imagined, would laugh if she heard he had failed, and who would be astonished if he became a success—this had only a little to do with it.
The development of the Marfab Corporation was not a gradual thing. From beginning to end, it only took two years. For a month bankruptcy seemed certain. Ken went to bed with fear, brushed his teeth with it and ate it on his bread. He looked around his house, realizing that the walls were transient, seeing that soon they could all be taken away by the bank. When he passed tenements he said to himself, Someday I shall be living there. The gaiety of his daughter, Molly, seemed ironic to him. She doesn’t know, he thought, she doesn’t know, and he shouted at her when she asked to buy a hat for two dollars, “No, you’ve got to learn the value of money, damn it, no, you cannot buy a lot of foolish things.” His nerves were shot after eighteen months of pressure. He started to drink too much in order to get to sleep. He quarreled with Helen, he told her she was extravagant, that she put too much butter on the vegetables, that she was a bad manager, and she had to learn to be poor, damn it, poor, because that was what it was almost certain that they were going to be. He had nightmares in which he heard a girl’s derisive laughter.
But then the lawsuit was called off by the big company, and an offer was made, not a large one, but enough to enable them to repay their loans and make a small profit, an offer to buy them out, and to make them paid administrators with a salary three times what they had had before. “We’ve made it!” Ken said exuberantly.
“Not yet,” Bernie said grimly. “We’ve got to hold on!”
“Why? Let’s pick up our winnings!”
“No,” Bernie said. “They wouldn’t make such an offer if they didn’t know they were licked. If we hang on, we can make it big.”
So they hung on and the buffeting continued, warnings of each offer being the last one, threats of running them out of business, putting them on the street without a dime. Oh, the executives of the large corporations, the big men with the soft voices and money in the bank, they knew how to play hard ball with petty beginners like Ken Jorgenson and Bernie Anderson. Who the hell had ever heard of them?
Ken got mad, finally. He and Bernie made a good team, for when one was down, the other was up, and they talked fast together and they held on while the offers mounted. A big firm in New York got interested, and one in Chicago, and three in Buffalo, and then the bidding really got hot.
“Let’s hold out and run it ourselves,” Ken said. “The hell with ‘em.”
But the lawyers started talking. There were sober explanations of complex deals involving capital gains, deferred payments, all kinds of ways to reduce taxes. The lawyers kept talking with the well-groomed men carrying briefcases who arrived in rented Cadillacs from the airport, and finally the deal was made. It was concluded so quickly that it made Ken’s head swim; he picked up a pen and signed his name and found himself in possession of more than a million dollars. Ken Jorgenson was in Wonderland, and the well-remembered sound of a girl’s laughter in his ears almost stopped.
That afternoon Ken drove his old Chevrolet home slowly, and pulled up in front of his small suburban house which had seemed so expensive when he bought it for fifteen thousand dollars only a few years ago, and again he had the sensation of everything being ephemeral. Inevitably, the house would be sold now; it was not a rich man’s home. Old Paul Crandon who used to call “Come on over for a dipper,” meaning a drink, on hot summer evenings when they were working in their gardens; and Mary Harper, next door, the prettiest girl on the block, who volunteered to take Molly any time Ken and Helen wanted to go out—these people would disappear, they would fade into Ken’s past as surely as though they had died. Getting out of his car, Ken knew a moment of dizziness, of disorientation which blurred his triumph. He walked into the house, and Helen came out of the kitchen wearing a soiled apron, a thin woman whom he saw objectively for the first time in years, her sad eyes, the poor weak chin, the nice black hair. Suddenly he remembered stories about people who get suddenly rich; they get divorced. They go out and buy themselves new wives, and even Helen seemed transient, a leaf that could be easily blown away in this strange new wind. He swept her into his arms then and hugged her so tightly that she gave a little cry of pain, and he kissed her more passionately than he had in years. “Did everything go all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Signed, sealed and delivered!”
“Do we actually have the money?”
“The checks are being sent to the bank.”
She shook her head, a gesture of sudden confusion, and she said, as though naming a duty, “I guess we ought to celebrate.”
“Yes,” he said, and an idea came to him then. As a tangible act of celebration they would buy a new car.
When Molly, a slender, serious child worrying about her arithmetic, came home from her junior high school, Ken said to her, “How would you like to go out with us and buy a convertible?”
“Now?” Molly asked, sounding surprised.
“Yes, now!”
“I promised I’d go over and see Kay Harper.”
“This is a big day,” Helen said. “Call Kay and tell her you’ll see her later.”
“All right,” Molly replied, and made the telephone call, her clear voice explaining, saying, “Yes, Kay, yes; I’ll see you tomorrow or the day after…”
So they went and they bought the car, a new blue-and-white Oldsmobile. Helen wanted to buy a Cadillac, but Ken said nuts, he wasn’t going to play a part. They drove it home and the neighbors all came out and admired it; they were most polite, even effusive, only old Paul Crandon didn’t say, “Come on over and have a dipper,” and there was a tired look in his eyes. Margaret and her husband, old Bruce, acted as though they had suffered a personal defeat when they saw the car.
The next afternoon the Buffalo Evening News carried a big story on “The Marvelous Sale of Marfab,” and the telephone started ringing, and the doorbell. Old friends showed up whom Ken hadn’t seen in years; bright young men came to sell life insurance, stocks, automobiles, real estate—all the goods of the world.
I shall not let success go to my head, Ken thought, I shall move slowly and cautiously. When Helen wanted to go out and look at new houses, he said, “No! For at least a month, we stay here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t even know what city I want to live in,” he said. “We don’t have to stay in Buffalo any more. After all,
it isn’t Athens, it isn’t Paris in the spring!”
“No…” she said, sounding puzzled—Helen, a Buffalo girl, who had never thought of living anywhere else. “Where do you want to live?”
“It depends partly on what I want to do,” Ken said. “I might want to start another business, or just loaf, or do research. Anything.”
“What do you really want?”
“I don’t know!” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “I don’t know yet!”
“All right,” she said soberly, her face worried. “Let me know when you make up your mind.”
“I’m not making the decision just for myself,” he said, replying to her implied accusation. “I’ve got to figure out what is best for all of us. What do you want to do?”
“First of all, I’d like to take a vacation,” Helen said. “At least a year…”
“Where?”
“This is kind of silly,” Helen said, her cheeks growing pink. “My cousin Faye always used to talk about cruising the Maine coast in a yacht. Her roommate’s grandfather had one once, and it always seemed to me the most glamorous thing in the world, and I used to dream that some day…”
“Do you want to buy a yacht?” Ken asked in astonishment.
“No, but couldn’t we rent one?”
“I guess so,” Ken said. And then the memory came to him, the old, sore memory of those three summers on Pine Island, the laughter, and with the memory an idea.