Revelation flashed, not fully seen but clear enough to be recognized as a memory that could never be completely examined … that awful night in Chicago, the night that had been the end of her marriage, opening the door and seeing her husband with that little bitch! Yes, that was when it had happened. Something had snapped inside her mind … the horror of it, the ugly nastiness, not even another woman, just a little high school girl that had come in to help with …
The pantry door squeaked and she wheeled to face the housekeeper who stood with the two silver bowls from The Wharf.
“These the ones you want?”
“Yes, thank you.” She hesitated and then made her decision. “There’s no reason why you can’t take over now, Mrs. Schilling.”
“Me? You mean I’m to finish up?”
“Yes,” she said, hurriedly explaining what remained to be done. “I’ve really given too much time to this already. I should have been downstairs a half hour ago.”
Outside, waiting for the elevator, she assured herself that it was not weakness that was forcing her to escape. She had been too impatient, tried to move too fast. You couldn’t force things. It took time. Tomorrow would be soon enough … tomorrow or the next day.
2
Leaving downtown Suffolk and swinging into Boulevard Drive, Paul Bronson tramped the accelerator and the convertible hurled itself against the demand of the sharply rising hill. At the hairpin turn around the end of the reservoir, he shot a glance back down the road, apprehensive that Grant Austen’s car might be following him. The old man had still been in his office at five-thirty but he might have left by now, he might even be home.
He pressed the accelerator to the floor, hopeful that he could get Lory out of the house without being forced to see her father. It was bad enough to be tricked into dating her again. Another dose of old man Austen would be more than he could take. He’d had enough for one day … enough for a hell of a lot of days!
Damn it, didn’t Austen have any sense of organization at all? Jake Crown had blown his top over the way that he’d let Berger mess up that mold design, and you couldn’t blame him. How could any department head do a decent job if the ground was being cut out from under him all the time?
And giving Thorson authority to build up raw-material stocks! A week ago it was Austen himself who was screaming his head off about the capital that was tied up in inventory. How crazy could a man get?
A stone retaining wall reared ahead of him and he twisted the wheel with only a split second to spare, gritting his teeth through the screaming protest of tires clawing the wet pavement. Angrily, as if suddenly discovering the false dusk of the gray-clouded evening, he flipped on the headlights and momentarily let the car coast out its momentum, feeling the ache of unclenched jaw muscles, then easing his foot down and down on the accelerator.
Austen hadn’t even had the common decency to call him in for that session with Gil Clark on revision of the depreciation schedule. Probably trying to pass it off as his own idea. Hell of a lot of good that would do … Gil knew where the idea had come from. Gil was no fool. He had the old man’s number. Everyone did. But what difference did it make? What could you do about it? Nothing! That was the hell of it in a little one-man company. One man was everything. No one else mattered. He did what he wanted to do and, crazy or not, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.
All the gang around Finch & Slade had told him how smart he was to get out of the New York rat race and into a sweet little outfit like Suffolk Moulding … all that crap about the opportunities in a small business … all right, he’d been a fool and fallen for it! So what? He was admitting it, wasn’t he? He’d been a green kid, fed up with New York, and Austen had come along and played him for a sucker with all that talk about expansion plans. Expansion! The only thing that would ever expand around Suffolk Moulding was the old man’s hat size. That happened every time somebody made him chairman of another damn fool committee. He wouldn’t spend a few hundred bucks for those inspection tables that would pay for themselves in six weeks, but he’d hand out a month’s pay to that little tramp in Shipping. Sure, he loved that … Grant Austen the great humanitarian! Wasn’t that a fine precedent to set? From now on, every dumb dame that got herself rolled in the bushes would be coming around with her hands out, wanting a month’s pay for a bonus.
A red light glowered and he brought the car to a lunging stop, his hands clenched into hard fists on the thin circle of the steering wheel. The old man would never have the guts to put in that new press they had to have to hold the Andscott business. This was the beginning of the end. The plug would come out when they started losing the Andscott volume. But what the hell was he worrying about? Let the old man wreck the company if he wanted to. He wouldn’t be there to see it happen. Tomorrow morning he’d be in Philadelphia following up that lead he’d gotten from Jack Hildreth at the employment agency. Lucky coincidence, that letter from Hildreth-Paris happening to turn up just when it had. If this Andscott thing worked out … of course it might not, but at least Andscott had been really interested when they knew who he was … Jack had set up a date with General Danvers himself, none of this Personnel Department business. Andscott Instrument might not be the hottest outfit in the world … last statement looked pretty bad … but that was when a comptroller had a chance to make a showing. Anyway, it was a real company, none of that sweet-little-outfit crap … big enough to have some organization. Imagine General Danvers pulling some of the stuff that old Austen pulled … that was a laugh!
The light changed and he drove on, tire-screeching the road bends. He should have been quicker on the trigger when Grace Elberth had invited him. He ought to have known that she’d rope him in to picking up Lory. But he’d already accepted and there’d been nothing he could do. He couldn’t say, “Listen, Grace, I’ve sworn off little Miss Lory Austen,” the way you’d say that you’d sworn off cigarettes. He’d go through with it … take it easy … not let Lory know what she did to him. It was that cold act that always got him … knowing that it was an act. But if you could ever crack that shell … find the combination … touch the right button … no, to hell with it!
The black bulk of the crenellated castle that was the Austen home loomed ahead and he slowed for the turn, glancing right as he coasted up the drive, his eyes caught by the side-seen flit of a figure across the lighted window.
The terrace door burst open as he stepped out of the car and Lory, tiptoed and waving, signaled that she was coming. He stood immobile, staring at her retained after-image against the blankness of the closed door, tricked into an unsummoned resurgence of the feeling she had incited the first time he had ever seen her and, repeatedly, had re-incited during those months until he had been smart enough to figure out the score.
No girl that he had ever known, even that kid from Bryn Mawr that he’d taken to New York that weekend, had ever so bedeviled his mind with the erotic challenge of innocence unknowingly pleading for conquest. For a while Lory had driven him almost off his rocker … like trying to work out a puzzle where you couldn’t figure the first move … but that was lucky. It might easily have gone too fast. The way it had been, he’d had time to think it through. If he’d let himself fall in love with her … and there’d been times when, alone at night after he had left her, he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t … he would have wound up marrying her. She was the kind you married. The first was the last. But he wouldn’t have been marrying Lory … no, that was the hell of it … he would have been marrying Grant Austen’s daughter. The price was too high for the pay-off.
Coldly—and now he could admit the coldness of his calculation—even the promised inheritance of the Suffolk Moulding Company wasn’t enough to compensate for what he’d have to go through while he waited for the old man to get out of the way. Anyway, at the rate Grant Austen was going, there’d be nothing left that was worth waiting for. The handwriting was on the wall. That was one rule of business management that you could always tie to … yo
u went either forward or backward. You couldn’t stand still … and with Grant Austen’s kind of gutless fumbling you went backward in a hurry. Be different if there were any hope of the old man giving up and retiring … his kind never did. In big corporations they had a way of cleaning out the dry rot … forced retirement at sixty or sixty-five … but Grant Austen owned the place and made his own rules. He would be messing things up until he was ninety. Those wiry little guys lived forever.
The terrace door opened again, the path of light scissoring out across the flagstone, and he steeled himself against quickening excitement. Lory was talking to her mother, standing with her back to him, but even in black silhouette there was the insweep of her tiny waist, the outcurve of her hips, and in the flashed instant of her turn, the momentarily seen upthrust of her breasts.
She came to him running, lightfooted and flying, borne by the rush of March wind.
“Hi,” he said, the iron-banded constriction of his throat choking off anything else that might have been said.
“Nice of you to pick me up,” she said—and that was all she said.
Damn it, there wasn’t anything else to be said … only that it had been a long time since he had seen her … and there was no point in saying that.
She was curled against the door, sitting as far away from him as she could.
Damn her, damn her, damn her! But it was only for tonight. He could stand it that long.
3
The same oddly perverse disruption of normality that made Max Nicollet find inspiration in rage caused him to approach his climactic creative moments with gay abandon. Executing a light-footed dance step that made him seem Gargantua imitating a bouncing balloon, humming a snatch of song in a piccolo falsetto, he poised a knife above the first guinea hen, freshly lifted from its perch above the steaming herb broth by the trembling hand of Carlos, his saucier.
Twice the knife flashed and the breast of guinea hen, severed with a surgeon’s skill, fell into the nest of parchment in Max’s left hand. His right hand traded the knife for the spoon that Carlos offered and he dipped it into the sauce with which he tenderly anointed the savory morsel. Carlos retrieved the spoon and Max, squealing a high note in the melody of his unbroken song, twisted the parchment into a tight packet which he delivered to the roasting oven with the flourish of a dueling thrust.
Twelve times the wordless pantomime was re-enacted, varied only by improvisations on the theme of the accompanying song. Only then, with the last serving consigned to the oven, did the chef de cuisine sufficiently relax the rigidity of his concentration to become aware that Maude Kennard was watching him.
The needle points of his mustache quivered.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
Max’s body seemed to swell as if, like an enormous pufftoad, he possessed some inner organ of inflation. “And why would it not be all right?”
“I’m sure it is,” she said.
Since rage was an emotion that Max Nicollet reserved for a special purpose, he saw no point in wasting it on Maude Kennard’s uncalled-for intrusion. She was obviously an unworthy adversary, too easily defeated, already walking back toward the door of the Fontainebleau Room. His breath whistled out through his pursed lips but it did not disturb his smile, the smile of an enormous cupid upon whose apple-cheeked face some mischievous child had crayoned a black mustache.
4
In much the same way that some men are inspired to reverence by the crossing of a church’s threshold, Will Atherson rarely approached Starwood, his Main Line estate, without conscious awareness of love for his wife. His feeling was usually expressed in a needless reminder to himself that he was an unusually lucky man. After more than a quarter century of married life, he still came home from the bank every workday evening with a warmth of anticipation little dimmed by the passage of time. Actually, in many ways, he loved his wife more now than he had in the first years of their marriage. The only aspect of their relationship in which there had been a deterioration was no longer of great importance and, even there, the loss was considerably less than he had been led to expect by the satiric humor of his friends at The Wharf.
A part of Will Atherson’s affection for his wife came from a sustained consciousness of its existence, love growing out of the awareness of love. Another part—and it was a considerable one—resulted from the fact that Helen had, in all particulars, vastly exceeded every expectation that had been in his mind when he had asked her to marry him. In truth, love had been far more a product of marriage than of courtship.
He had proposed to her because he had given up waiting to be struck by a grand passion, because Starwood needed a mistress—his mother had died two years before—and because he could think of no soundly logical reason why Helen wouldn’t make a competent manager of his household, a pleasant and reasonably intelligent companion, and a good mother of his children. She had enough social standing to make her acceptable to his friends, yet not enough to force him into riding the dinner-jacketed treadmill. She had been raised in a family of reasonable substance, yet there was no danger that Starwood and all the other material things that he could offer her would not be received with gratitude and appreciation.
On the debit side of the balance sheet—and he had not been blinded by love—she was a large girl with a quite obvious tendency to take on weight, a face that suggested the adjective wholesome rather than pretty. When he had taken her on a tour of Starwood—a calculated preliminary to proposal—she had proved to be more interested in the kitchen than any other room of the mansion, according the master bedroom no more attention than a nod of apparently unconcerned acceptance.
It had been a startling surprise to discover on their honeymoon that his careful planning of the groom’s reticently tender approach to the frightened bride was totally unnecessary. He was, in fact, overwhelmed before he even had a chance to give the plan a fair trial. He discovered then that there was, at the core of her being, an essential earthiness that came through freely and boldly, far more appealing in its uninhibited honesty than would have been any practiced feminine wiles.
As the years had gone by, Will Atherson had observed that the wives of his friends developed in one of two directions, coming eventually to a state where they either coarsened themselves by too frank remarks about matters of sex, or went to the opposite extreme of middle-aged prudery. Helen was wonderful. Outwardly, she was as conventional as his mother had been, the proper mistress of Starwood, yet she could—and always, it seemed, at exactly the right private moment—break through with a good bawdy remark that brought a sensation like the recapture of youth. She was his perpetual antidote against the proprieties forced upon him by the double handicap of his position as the head of the Atherson family and the president of the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company. She never allowed him to become aware that he was getting to be an old man. That, perhaps, was the most important reason of all for the way he felt about her.
She met him in the front hall tonight, wearing a dinner dress, her arm encircling his waist, walking a few steps with him before she hesitated for the kiss that she always found some way to take out of the pattern of expectancy. Reaching behind his back, she produced a just-mixed scotch and soda from its hiding place behind an arrangement of red carnations on the hall table.
He drank his highball a bit too hurriedly, recited his cliché insistance that she had not told him they were going out to dinner, accepted another scotch and soda as an affectionate peace offering, and went upstairs to change his clothes.
Helen came in as he was finishing dressing, sitting on the edge of their double bed to watch him as he tied a careful bow and shrugged into his dinner jacket. He suspected that she had something on her mind and asked an opening question.
“I’m coming in to town tomorrow forenoon,” she said, “and thought that I might be clever enough to trick you into taking me to lunch.”
“Darling, I’m terribly sorry but—”
“Tied up?” she asked,
disappointed. “I was afraid that you might be.”
“I’ll cancel it.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
“But it isn’t important.”
“Neither is this.”
“Darling, it’s only Grant Austen.”
She laughed. “Tomorrow must be Wednesday.”
“I’ll call him and—”
“Of course you won’t. You know how he dotes on The Wharf. What you should do, Will dear, is to get the poor man a membership of his own.”
“Well, he does have an excuse this time,” Will Atherson admitted in Austen’s defense. “He needs some financing. But there’s no reason why I can’t cancel out on lunch. He can see me after—”
“You’d break his heart.”
“But I’d much rather—”
“Will, honestly it was only a silly notion. We’ll have lunch together next week.”
“Sure you don’t have something else on your mind?”
“Nothing, dear.”
“Positive?”
“I just like having lunch with you.”
“Damn it,” he said tenderly, kissing her cheek, then making the pretense of pushing her back on the bed.
She escaped the pinning arch of his arms, laughing. “You’re much too easily seduced, no resistance at all. A girl doesn’t even dare tell you that she likes having lunch with you.”
“Depends on the girl.”
“Time to change the subject,” she said over a trickle of gay laughter. “Why does Grant Austen need a loan?”
Cash McCall Page 14