As wedding presents, Alvin T. Manson gave the couple a small house out on the pike beyond the edge of town, a membership in the country club, a maroon Essex sedan, and promoted Grant to assistant manager of the electric company with a substantial raise in salary. The generosity was well timed. Financially, Grant Austen was poorly prepared to undertake matrimony, a fact that he could not conceal from his father-in-law since his bank account was in the Suffolk National. Actually, he made no attempt at concealment. When, later, Mr. Manson asked him if he had ever gotten back the two hundred dollars he had loaned to Fred Gunsmann, he said that it was “settled,” simply not mentioning the fact that he had taken stock for the money as well as the wages that Fred owed him.
In the same way, Grant did not tell his bride that he almost invariably stopped at the old stone mill on his way home from work, that his Saturday and Sunday afternoons were more often spent with Fred than at the country club, and that the drawings he worked on at night were ideas for molded parts that Fred might sell to the manufacturers of electrical appliances. No evasion was necessary to keep Miriam from knowing what he was doing. She never asked. She had become pregnant in the third month of their marriage and was interested in little else than her own distress at what she made him feel was a catastrophe for which he was solely responsible. As the weeks went by, she spent more and more of her time at her parental home, often staying overnight. She was there for several weeks before Lory was born and for most of the month that followed.
Grant’s mother, with whom he once reluctantly discussed the situation, said that Miriam had been “spoiled by her rich parents” and that she would probably “settle down” after the baby was born. Afterwards, he could not deny that his mother had been right, but he could never completely erase from his mind the feeling that Lory was more his than Miriam’s because it was he who had wanted her when his wife had not.
Everything that happened from then on was dated from Lory’s birthdays. She was a month past her second when Conomissing Valley Electric Company was scooped up in the gigantic merger that formed the Mar-Penn utilities combine. Alvin T. Manson became one of its eighteen vice-presidents and Grant was offered an engineering job in the Philadelphia main office. Instead, he decided to throw in his lot with Fred Gunsmann at the Suffolk Moulding Company.
Looking back, he always thought of that decision as a courageous act but, admittedly, it was also the product of desperation. His father had died a few months before and his mother had received two thousand dollars from the insurance company. On the strength of a contract that Fred had gotten for the molding of radio dials, Grant had induced his mother to lend him the money to buy a new press. No sooner had the press been installed than Fred began to show symptoms of restlessness. He was an inventor at heart, bored with the repetitious routine of molding the same thing over and over again. Grant saw the danger that Fred might, at any moment, decide to pull up stakes and depart for a more adventurous enterprise. The only way he could protect his own and his mother’s investment was to get into the business himself.
Before Lory’s third birthday, Fred Gunsmann was gone. One Sunday morning—Grant was on the back porch painting a doll house that he had built for Lory—Fred came hurrying up the alley. He said that he wanted to go to Hollywood and work on an idea he had for three-dimensional motion pictures. He needed money. His half-ownership of the company was for sale.
Something happened then for which Grant was totally unprepared. Miriam had been in the kitchen and overheard the conversation on the back porch. Almost frantically, she had begged him to allow her to give him the money he needed, apparently imagining some resistance that did not exist. Her father, she said, had five thousand dollars that belonged to her and she left the house immediately to get it. She returned empty-handed, explaining that her father had put her money in some investment that couldn’t be quickly converted into cash. She was terribly upset—it was the first time Grant had ever seen her cry—and, although disappointed at not getting the money he needed, he was pleased at Miriam’s implied approval of his buying out Fred and taking over the company. He made himself believe that it was an evidence of love, and it became one of the too-small store of incidents that seemed to indicate a secret affection for him that Miriam was never quite able to express, either vocally or physically.
That next morning he went to Philadelphia to find some place to borrow money. With no knowledge of Philadelphia banks other than the memory of the name that appeared on the checks he was receiving in payment for radio parts, he walked into the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company. There he met Will Atherson and that had been the beginning of his since unbroken connection and an equally unmarred friendship. Will was young, scarcely older than he was, and they had spent a pleasant forenoon studying the account books that Grant had brought along. Will Atherson had said, after a noontime consultation with his father, that the bank judged the Suffolk Moulding Company to be worth at least twenty thousand dollars. They would be willing to loan six which would cover the five that Gunsmann wanted, plus an extra thousand for working capital. Grant Austen bought a doll carriage for Lory and went home.
Fred was satisfied with four thousand. He said that it gave him as much as he needed to work out his new invention and he was anxious to get going. It was all Grant could do to get him to wait long enough to sign the necessary papers.
Less than a month later, the Suffolk Moulding Company was threatened with a suit for the violation of patents on a molded radio-tube base that had become an important part of the plant’s volume. Grant never knew whether or not Fred had been aware of the pending suit—he was inclined to think him innocent—but his suspicions taught him a lesson in the dangers of partnership and, although the threatened suit was amicably settled by a license agreement, he lived through some terrifying weeks, culminating in the October break of the stock market and the almost simultaneous collapse of the Mar-Penn utilities combine. Alvin T. Manson, who had taken Mar-Penn stock for all of his holdings in the old Conomissing Valley Electric Company, crashed into bankruptcy and he carried the Suffolk National Bank with him. Most of Suffolk Moulding Company’s working capital was in the closed bank. Grant would have been bankrupt, too, if Will Atherson had not come to his rescue with another loan.
For most businesses, the depression was a hurricane of calamity but for the Suffolk Moulding Company it was a strong fair wind and Grant Austen was in a perfect position to ride with it. Circumstance and temperament were fortuitously timed. He was still in the first flush of the excitement of being in business for himself, thrilling to the adventure that he had never suspected there was in business management. His confidence in himself was at a high point, buoyed by the fact that he had proved he could run the business without Fred. The money he owed was a goad to superhuman effort and both his body and mind had the sustained capacity to respond. He had never thought of himself as anything but an engineer, and it came as something of a surprise to find that he was a good salesman, but as no more of a surprise than the discovery that he could do almost anything else that was required of him. He unraveled in short order—as the owner of a small business must always do in order to be successful—the mysteries of dozens of specialized tasks that the big corporation president can delegate to his vice-presidents. Grant Austen became a whole executive staff rolled into one man. He hired young engineers to help him develop his ideas but delegated little responsibility. The important decisions were all his own. New orders came in as fast as he could expand the plant. More machinery was constantly being installed, much of it bought at bankruptcy prices and set up in a new building that was erected at depression cost levels.
On Lory’s tenth birthday he gave her what she said she wanted more than anything else in the world—“a studio like Miss Tassman’s.” Eloise Tassman was a commercial artist who lived at Chester Springs. Grant had employed her to model some designs for watch boxes and, on one of his trips to inspect the work in progress, he had taken his daughter along for the ride. After t
hat, Lory always insisted on accompanying him, entranced by the little studio that Miss Tassman had created by remodeling an old smokehouse on the farm where she lived.
Miriam had said that building a “studio” for Lory seemed rather silly—a ten-year-old child couldn’t even know what the word meant—but he had gone ahead and built her a little playhouse in the back yard. If Lory wanted to call it a “studio” what harm was done? Anyway, he could afford it. Suffolk Moulding was beginning to make enough money so he didn’t have to worry about small extravagances.
He took gambles during those early years but more paid off than failed. His percentage was good and that was all that success required. His only serious mistake was taking in Alvin T. Manson as Secretary and Treasurer. He did it because he thought Miriam would appreciate it as a gesture of kindness to her father who, since his bankruptcy, had been living on the few dollars that he could weasel away from the referee—plus, Grant Austen suspected, a portion of the too-generous allowance that he gave Miriam to cover her personal and household expenses.
The announcement that he had given her father a job had brought no response from Miriam except an expression of cold shock. He had hoped that what he had done would somehow draw him closer to his wife but it appeared to have produced the opposite effect and, since she offered no explanation, the only conclusion he could draw was that he had committed what was, to her, the unpardonable sin of forcing her adored father into a position of demeaning subservience.
Two years later, after another in a series of his father-in-law’s pompous fumbles had cost the company an important customer, Grant Austen finally accepted Will Atherson’s suggestion that the old man be “retired.” To ease the blow, he gave him a block of stock in the Suffolk Moulding Company, the dividends from which would keep him comfortably for the rest of his life. The gift of the stock was not a part of Will Atherson’s suggestion but Grant Austen made it with the hope that Miriam would be pleased. If she was, she never gave him the satisfaction of telling him so.
It was then, for the first time—and he remembered it as if it were an event, even recalling where he had been when the thought first came into his mind—that Grant Austen asked himself whether he had ever really loved his wife. He could not be sure. If it were true that his marriage was not happy, it was equally true that it was not actively unhappy. He had none of the petty complaints against his wife that he heard voiced by other husbands. With the same stubborn tenacity with which he pursued the never-defined ideas upon which his business was being built, he clung to the hope that eventually something would happen to bring about the fulfillment of his vague dream of what a happy marriage would be. He tried to do things to please Miriam but was handicapped because she so seldom expressed a desire for anything.
When, to his surprise, she suggested a European trip with Lory in the summer of 1939 he agreed at once, even though it meant having his daughter away from him for six weeks. It was impossible to take the trip himself—that was the summer they were getting started with extrusion molding—but Lory’s letters were the next best thing to actually having her with him. She wrote a letter every day. Miriam sent an occasional postcard.
When they came home he had a surprise for them. He had already broken ground for a new press building. Lory laid the cornerstone on August 24, 1939. He had a photographer come up from Philadelphia. On the night of the day that the prints were delivered, he heard the sound of weeping and discovered Lory in tears, a torn print of her picture crumpled at her feet. After long minutes of gentle prodding he finally wormed out her adolescent consciousness that she was not a pretty girl. He tried his best to make her think differently but was aware that he accomplished little. He didn’t know the right words to use and, even more seriously, there was the handicap of possible truth. He knew that he couldn’t judge—to him she was a beautiful child—but his fact-loving mind recalled how many people had remarked on her resemblance to him and so he accepted the blame for her unhappiness. If, as Miriam afterwards implied, he was from then on even more extravagant in the things he did for his daughter, there was a secret reason. Again, he could afford it.
In February of 1940 he bought out two small competitors, dismantled their plants and moved the machinery to Suffolk. The expansion was well timed. War clouds were gathering and orders soon began to rain down. Earnings leaped to a level where he could have paid himself an annual salary of $100,000—the hallmark of a Big Business president—but Grant Austen knew from his increased contact with the world of Washington, New York and Detroit that the Suffolk Moulding Company was a painfully small example of what was referred to as Small Business. His standing in the world of industry was the sociological equivalent of an underprivileged sharecropper. At industry banquets, which he had not before had the inclination to attend, he found himself a lost soul at the pre-dinner cocktail parties, and was invariably seated at a table behind one of the balcony posts. His name was never read off when committee appointments were made. When he went to Washington he could no longer get a reservation at one of the best hotels. From overheard lobby conversations he deduced that he was an “outsider” without “connections.” He didn’t know a single Congressman, bureau-topping official or White House satellite well enough to be called by his first name. He didn’t even have a “Washington representative.” None of his shortcomings in any way stopped the flow of business that kept his factory flooded with orders, but Grant Austen was nevertheless disconcerted.
In June of 1942 something serious happened. The Chadwick School rejected Lory’s application to enter in September. They wrote a trying-hard-to-be-nice-about-it letter, saying that they were sorry that prior applications precluded the possibility of accommodating his daughter. Grant Austen knew better. There were other men whose daughters had applied afterward and been accepted. There was only one possible conclusion—he wasn’t a big enough man to count. The Chadwick School was like so many of the men he met in Pullman club cars—they had never heard of the Suffolk Moulding Company. Being president of a small company didn’t mean a thing. There were thousands of little one-man outfits like Suffolk Moulding and every one of them had a president. He saw himself then in a new perspective and it was a sharp-roweled spur to his ambition.
Lory insisted that Chadwick didn’t matter, that she would prefer to stay on at Suffolk High, but he didn’t believe her. Again, as when she had seen her pictures, he blamed himself. She seemed a perpetually lonely child and it was easy to imagine that quality of character as something inherited from him. Since his mind was so constituted that it could not contentedly accept the unexplainable, he evolved an explanation for Lory’s tendency to spend too much time alone and her failure to make friends. It was, he reasoned, because she was so small for her age. That made sense. In his own high school days he hadn’t been able to make the football team because of his lack of weight. But he had stuck it out and in his senior year had won his letter. Lory didn’t seem to understand that loneliness was something that had to be licked. She was always running away, hiding herself in that little studio, spending her time making drawings instead of out making friends. That was why he had been so anxious to get her into Chadwick. Something had to be done to break the child out of her shell. He shrank from the prospect of separation but was willing to trade his own loneliness for the curing of hers.
Although Chadwick was unattainable, he finally managed to enroll her in Mount Oak, thanks to Bruce Martinson whom he had been lucky enough to talk into accepting the Suffolk Moulding Company as one of the firms he served as Washington representative—most of Bruce Martinson’s other clients were much larger companies—and after the way Bruce handled the Mount Oak affair with a single telephone call there was no doubt that he had the right connections. Mount Oak was every bit as good as Chadwick, in some ways even better. There were the daughters of a lot of big men at Mount Oak.
Except for the black-market Buick—Miriam had said Lory was too young for her own car—his wife had seemed to approve of sending their d
aughter to Mount Oak. At least, during the weeks after Lory left and the two of them were alone in the house for the first time in sixteen years, their life together changed for the better. He took her along when he went to New York in December for the N.A.M. convention and it was the best week of their married life. They had a theater party every evening—except the night of the big banquet—and Miriam did a surprisingly good job of handling herself as the wife of a corporation president. Their guests were other presidential couples, all of whom outranked them in corporate net worth, but Miriam held her own. She was pleasant and friendly without sacrificing either dignity or poise. During the days while he was attending convention sessions, she managed to get acquainted with two women whose husbands were both officers of companies that had their securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
On one of those days, Grant Austen made a secret shopping expedition during the noon recess and bought a diamond clip. It had taken a certain amount of courage to enter Tiffany’s—he was not sure that they would ever have heard of the Suffolk Moulding Company—but he was treated with respect and his check was accepted without question.
He had intended to keep the clip for Miriam’s Christmas present but they were so happy together that he decided, on their last day in New York, to give it to her so that she could wear it at the banquet. They were sitting that night at the table of the Regional Vice-president who, just before noon, had asked Grant to serve on a committee charged with drafting a program for Post-War Planning for a Greater Small-Business America.
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