Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  The whole incident took less than five minutes but it brought down upon Grant Austen’s shoulders the full weight of his weary resignation to what his life had now become. There had been a time when the refereeing of another episode in the running feud between Ed Berger and Jake Crown would have been a duty discharged with bland tolerance, almost with pleasure. In those days, the Hatfield-McCoy relationship between the foreman of the tool shop and the head of the engineering department had served a purpose. Their rivalry had been responsible for many of the improvements in molding technique that had helped to build the firm’s reputation. Now, after all these years, Grant Austen was unhappily aware that the quarreling wasn’t worth the strain that it imposed upon him. New developments weren’t so important any more. All that mattered now was keeping the Andscott production schedule. That’s what the molding business had become—mass production.

  Starting back toward the office building, he found himself trapped by George Thorson, the foreman of the pressroom, who had seen him enter the tool shop and waited where he couldn’t be avoided. His escape blocked, Grant Austen followed the foreman to his little office on the far side of the pressroom and sat down to listen to Thorson’s recital of his accumulated troubles. He was tempted, as usual, to comment that Thorson’s taste in wall calendars was hardly in keeping with the dignity of his position as General Foreman, but caught himself before any damage was done. Thorson was the man who kept the Andscott cabinets moving out on schedule. Calendars could be overlooked, the schedule couldn’t.

  During the next twenty minutes, he agreed to an increase in the backlog stock of the special phenolic resin that was used for Andscott television cabinets, approved the renewing of runners and sprues on two sets of dies, turned down a request for the purchase of six new inspection tables, and ordered the payment of a month’s dismissal wages to an unfortunate young girl in the packing department whom Thorson was being forced to discharge because her illegitimate pregnancy had progressed to the point where it was now causing lost time through a constant succession of sympathy meetings in the women’s rest room.

  Finally escaping, walking out through the pressroom, he felt the deadening weight of fatigue. He was more tired at ten o’clock in the morning than he should have been at the end of the day, but that was not an unusual situation and he accepted his debility in the same spirit with which the chronically ill bow to the inevitability of pain.

  He had gone through the Johns Hopkins clinic in October. The doctors had found nothing wrong. He had known they wouldn’t. No doctor could diagnose the atrophy of hope, nor understand what it meant to face what he faced—thirty years of building a company and now only this dead end of hopelessness.

  Outside the pressroom, standing on the edge of the shipping platform, he looked past the tool shop and saw the vacant lot beyond, the rough scraggle of dead weeds that ran all the way down to the creek bank. That was where he would have built his big factory if he could have carried out all the plans that had been bound between the black morocco covers of A POST-WAR PROGRAM FOR THE EXPANSION OF THE SUFFOLK MOULDING COMPANY. The government had wrecked all that—Truman and Korea and taxes and controls.

  The mist had become rain and the March wind swirled it through the yard, the chill penetrating to his body as he made his careful way down the wet steps of the shipping platform. Little pin jabs of protesting pain flickered across his shoulders and down the long muscles of his back. His body joints were stiff, gritty in their sockets.

  Picking his way around the shallow puddles that dotted the pavement, he made the conscious attempt to lift his spirits by contemplating the Administration Building that, only three years ago, had seemed his one best promise of a pleasanter life. There was no lift. There never had been. It hadn’t worked. Air-conditioning and fluorescent lighting were poor substitutes for lost hopes. His new private office, even though guarded by double doors and a forced passage through his secretary’s office, had done nothing to protect him. There were no fewer annoyances heaped on his desk, no fewer people pushing in to demand that he resolve, over and over again, the same problems that he had been solving for a quarter of a century.

  Suddenly, startlingly, Grant Austen was struck with the strange fantasy that it was not he who was moving toward the building but that it was the building that was moving toward him, a window-eyed monster crushing down upon him, threatening to swallow him up in the black mouth of the tongue-flapping doorway.

  He blinked away the mental aberration, restoring his sense of controlled movement even before his stride was broken, but he could not banish the hallucination of impending engulfment. Nor could he easily accept the strangeness of the tricks that his mind had been playing of late. This was not the first time that he had been victimized by one of these frightening moments of lost orientation.

  He was tired. But the convention was only ten days away. That would give him a break. Maybe he’d take a few extra days. But you always had to come back. The longer you were gone, the more things got fouled up. There was no one to carry on when he wasn’t there. That would have been the big difference if he could have gone through with the POST-WAR PROGRAM. By now there would have been sales volume enough to support a real executive staff … the five vice-presidents that the organization chart called for … big men, all of them … big enough to lift the whole management load from his shoulders … not little men who only added to his burden by their failure to take responsibility. That was the trouble with a business like Suffolk Moulding … everything on your own shoulders … too much for one man, not enough to justify the salaries you had to pay to hire top men with real background. The idea of getting young fellows out of college and training them yourself didn’t work. If they turned out to be any good, some big company outbid you and you lost them … Packer … Dinsmore … that boy from Perm. If they were flops, you were saddled with them … Brown and Wellett … and now Paul Bronson.

  There was no excuse for Bronson. Didn’t he have a master’s degree from Harvard Business? Hadn’t he spent two years with General Electric and over a year with Finch & Slade in New York? With that kind of a background, shouldn’t Bronson be making a real contribution by now? But what had he done? Oh, he was clever enough with figures … give the boy his due, he had gotten the office paper work in fair shape. But you couldn’t run a company like Suffolk with figures and paper work. Could Bronson have handled Ed Berger this morning? No. The boy didn’t have what it took … no mechanical sense at all … been around for over two years now and he still didn’t know that you had to go to dielectric preheating when you were working with a preform that was more than an inch thick. That had come out yesterday when they had been discussing the bid on that Gridlux job.

  Deep in Grant Austen’s mind, bleeding the weak caustic of another lost hope, were the ashes of the very secret dream that he had sheltered during those first months after he had hired Paul Bronson. Paul had started dating Lory and for a while it had seemed that something might come of it. But nothing ever had. Now nothing ever would. Of course it was a good thing that it wouldn’t. Paul didn’t have the breadth. It would take a dozen Bronsons to manage the Suffolk Moulding Company. Lory knew that. She’d gotten the boy’s number in a hurry. Of course she’d never mentioned it … one of those things that she couldn’t talk to him about … but Lory knew. There was one smart youngster … a lot more in that little head of hers than anyone else realized. People underrated Lory … thought because she was an artist that she didn’t understand business. They were wrong. When he had a problem to thrash out and needed someone to talk to, Lory made more sense than anyone else.

  As always, the thought of his daughter warmed Grant Austen’s mind but it was not, at this moment, a warmth that could be sustained against the chill of a truth that was as inescapable as the cold wind that swept along the back side of the office building. The recognition that his daughter was so often the only person with whom he could talk forced the conscious acceptance of what, usually, he managed to keep dee
ply buried in his subconscious mind—that his whole life had become pointless.

  He was headed for a dead end. He knew it. There was no one to carry on. Everything would be different if he had a son … or even the right kind of son-in-law coming along. He didn’t. Yes, he should have recognized that before … even the POST-WAR PROGRAM couldn’t have given him a son. But there had always been that blind hope that somehow it would work out. It hadn’t. Now it never would. Lory would marry some day … she was only twenty-six … but it wouldn’t be the kind of man who could take over the Suffolk Moulding Company. There weren’t any men like that around any more. They were all like Paul Bronson, narrow and single-talented, trained to do one job and nothing else. Jay Bross had summed it up at lunch the other day. “What a lot of people don’t appreciate, Grant, is that men like you and me are running seven-ring circuses and we have to be in all seven rings at the same time. I’d like to see one of those big business hot-shots take over my desk for just one day! Brother, he’d find out something—what it’s like to have it all on your own shoulders, no legal department to check contracts, no market research department to tell you where to go to get some business, no research department figuring out new things to make. Yes sir, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—the smaller the business, the bigger the man on top has to be.”

  He was but a stride away from the back entrance of the office building, reaching for the door when it suddenly burst open, the handle snatched from his fingers. Only a reflexed backstep avoided a collision with one of the youngsters from the engineering department who came rushing out with an armload of blueprints.

  He brushed aside the boy’s embarrassed apology and stepped in through the door, hesitating on the landing at the bottom of the staircase. The violent interruption had given him the detachment of full realization and he was angrily self-critical for having done again what he had promised himself so many times he would not do. Why did he let himself start worrying? Why couldn’t he control his mind any more? He had to learn to relax. Nothing would change. This was what he was going to be up against for the rest of his life.

  He raised his head and squared his shoulders, rejecting the support of the rail as he started up the stairs. A man didn’t dare give in to weakness. When you did you lost control. You couldn’t fool anyone. They’d see it in your face.

  His secretary, Amelia Berk, greeted him with reassuring normality and he knew that he hadn’t betrayed himself. If he had, her expression would have reflected it. He greeted her pleasantly and went into his office, firm-carriaged, poised, grasping for the saving realization that he was the President of his own company. At least he wasn’t in a spot like Jay Bross, trying to please a dozen big stockholders.

  He hung his gray topcoat in his private washroom, carefully straightening the shoulders on the hanger, washed his hands to remove the oil smudge that he had picked up in the tool shop, combed and palm-flattened his graying hair, adjusted his blue polka-dotted necktie, and came out to his desk.

  He felt a little better now, not quite so tired, but the relief was only momentary. The basket of incoming mail was stacked high. It would take at least two hours to get through it. The President of a company ought to have a secretary who could handle most of his mail without his ever seeing it. Miss Berk couldn’t. She had tried and failed. Her self-written letters were always too short, too cold, only what had to be said and never a word more. But there was nothing he could do about it. Miss Berk had an invalid mother to support. In a big corporation you could hire and fire whenever you wanted to. It was different in a company like Suffolk Moulding. You couldn’t toss off a secretary any more than you could discard a cousin or disown an uncle.

  Settling into his chair, he fanned letters until Miss Berk, having satisfied her modesty by waiting until he was certainly out of the washroom, entered the room and emitted the sigh of recurrent despair that was the vocalization of her personality.

  “Awful lot of people want to see you this morning,” she said.

  He nodded, accepting the inevitable. “We’ll get at this mail first. Bring in your book.”

  She sniffed, sitting, showing him that she already had her notebook. But she didn’t open it. First there were the messages that had been left for him, so hastily shorthanded on odd bits of paper that he was, as always, forced to sit through the painful process of her sorting and deciphering. His annoyance impaired his hearing and he heard only part sentences and broken phrases.

  “—check for the Republican County Committee before tomorrow so he can report it at the meeting—Jake Crown is ready to show you some drawings that you wanted to see—with Mr. Bronson and said he’d be ready whenever you had time to—”

  “Who was that?” he asked, something missed.

  “Mr. Clark from Corporation Associates. He said that he had—let’s see, it’s something about a report on—”

  “I know,” he said, again letting her voice drone past his ears, the mention of Gil Clark suggesting the question of whether or not he ought to retain Corporation Associates for another year. The contract for management counseling service had an automatic renewal clause. If he wanted to cancel he would have to give notice by the first of the month … five thousand a year was a lot of money … most of the things Gil Clark came up with only confirmed what he already knew … but it helped sometimes to have someone to talk to, someone besides Lory … and Gil Clark was a good boy. It was too bad that Lory couldn’t have found some boy who …

  He was interrupted by the consciousness of silence. Miss Berk had finished the recital of her messages and sat waiting. He began to dictate, driving through the burdensome triviality of his correspondence. But what could he do? When people wrote to the Suffolk Moulding Company they wrote to him. He was the company. In a big corporation it was different … the president was protected … vice-presidents to take care of the details …

  “I beg your pardon,” Miss Berk sniffed, her accent critical.

  “Read me that last paragraph,” he said.

  She read what he had dictated and his words came back, remembered not as he had said them a moment before, automatically, but as the memory of all the other times he had submitted to the minor blackmail of a page of advertising in the high school annual. He began to dictate again, time-worn words, phrases so often spoken that now they spoke themselves without effort or volition, and the sound of the words became a part of the jangling sound-flow of the day, of his telephone ringing, of the door opening and closing, of the paper rustle of orders and schedules to be initialed, of the parchment crackle of blueprints to be approved or changed, of the cacophony of voices and voices and voices, begging, wheedling, cajoling, demanding. Miss Berk in and out of his office, in and out, in and out … damn it, how did she expect a man to work if she was constantly interrupting him!

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Austen,” she was saying, “but Mr. Bronson has to see you right away. He’s just had a call from Andscott.”

  “All right,” he said wearily.

  Bronson entered almost immediately, his forced smile more ominous than a scowl. “Hate to break in on you like this, Mr. Austen, but—”

  “Andscott?” Grant Austen asked, hoping to short-circuit one of Bronson’s typically long-winded preambles. That was the trouble with these youngsters, they couldn’t get to the point.

  Bronson nodded. “Joe Keening called me a few minutes ago about this new television cabinet. I know you said last night that we weren’t interested unless they were willing to—”

  “We still aren’t interested,” Grant Austen snapped back. “Nobody would be crazy enough to go ahead on their kind of deal—a quarter of a million investment and no guarantee of volume.”

  “I’m afraid, sir, that someone is interested.”

  Grant Austen felt the choke of shock. “Who?”

  “Heckledorf in Newark.”

  There was the tightening constriction of apprehension in Grant Austen’s throat. “All right, let him have it. We’ve got enou
gh Andscott business as it is, enough eggs in one basket.”

  “Afraid it isn’t quite that simple, sir,” Bronson said. “Heckledorf’s made them a rough proposition. He’ll go ahead and do what they want—put in that 2500-ton press and give them their new cabinet—but for a pay-off he wants all of the rest of their business.”

  “All of their—that’s crazy. They can’t.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s the way it is. I double-checked Joe to be certain.”

  A plunging knife seemed to have cut through the control nerves of Grant Austen’s body. He sat in mute paralysis, conscious that his face was betraying his weakness, yet momentarily unable even to tighten the slackness of his lips. More than half of the plant’s capacity was now taken up by Andscott production. To lose all of that volume in one fell swoop would rip the very backbone out of the business. There was no place to turn for substitute orders that would come anywhere near making up the loss.

  “Puts us in a difficult position, no doubt about that,” Bronson said glumly.

  “They’re bluffing!” Grant Austen slashed in.

  Bronson shook his head. “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “But they can’t pull those jobs,” he fought back. “They’re our molds.”

  “Andscott owns the molds, Mr. Austen. They can do anything they want to do.”

  “But they’re built for our presses. They’ll have trouble. You know that as well as I do. Damn it, Bronson, why didn’t you point that out to them?”

  “They know they’ll have trouble,” Bronson said with quiet patience. “Joe remembers the headaches we had when we tried to use those tools they took over from Randall.”

  “Well then?”

  “There’s nothing Joe can do about it, sir. He’s got his orders from the top. General Danvers has made up his mind they’re going to get that new cabinet molded and that’s all there is to it. If we won’t do it, then they’ll sign with Heckledorf.”