Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  He hesitated, not sure that her question was seriously asked.

  She added, “He isn’t having trouble, is he?”

  “Trouble? No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact—well, I’m only putting two and two together. Had a call from Danvers at Andscott and he told me that they were after Austen to expand—put in some new presses—so I’m imagining that’s what he wants to see me about.”

  “Of course you’ll make the loan?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” he said, searching out a cigarette case and beginning to fill it, scowling at the prospect of an evening without his pipe, then seeing that his expression had brought concern to her face.

  “You don’t like him as well as you used to, do you, Will?” she asked.

  He started to protest her misinterpretation but, instead, let his thought stream flow into the channel cut by her question. “It’s never been exactly a matter of my liking him,” he said, hesitating over the slightly emphasized word as if not satisfied with its accuracy. “At one time I had considerable respect for him. He really did accomplish a great deal.”

  “I haven’t seen him for several years,” she said. “Not since that party we gave when his daughter graduated from art school, but he struck me then as being on the verge of turning into a stuffed shirt.”

  “I’m afraid now that he’s beyond the verge,” he said with genuine regret. “He’s like so many self-made men—they always come to a point in their lives when they run out of material. Hadn’t we better be leaving?”

  “What’s happened to his daughter?” she asked, going to the closet for her wrap.

  “Still illustrating children’s books, so far as I know.”

  “Not married yet?”

  “No.”

  “Strange—such an attractive child, too,” she puzzled. “Why do you suppose she’s never married?”

  “Now, now,” he said, a smiled warning against another outbreak of her perpetual interest in matchmaking, recalling a rather silly conversation after the party they’d given for Lory five years ago.

  There must have been mental telepathy—he often suspected its existence—because Helen said, “I still think I’m right about her.”

  “If I were twenty years younger,” he began, repeating the words from memory, “I might be able to speak with more authority.”

  She paid him the same pleasantly erotic compliment that she had five years ago and he followed her out of the door, again feeling himself an astoundingly fortunate man.

  Six

  1

  As he opened the library door and stepped out on the terrace, Grant Austen heard the sound of wild geese from the midnight sky and, looking up, saw the half-moon racing through the wind-torn clouds. It was a March night, dramatic with the turmoil of the changing seasons. The wind had veered after the sun had gone down and now it came from the south, warm with the promise of an on-rushing spring but still riotously tempestuous. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs, his eyes slowly adjusting to the focus of infinity. For one fleeting moment he saw the breaks in the clouds as cracks in the shell of the universe and his mind was caught up by the enormity of the irresistible forces that were loose in the night.

  Suddenly, the moon seemed to cease its motion and then it was the earth that was moving, tilting under his feet, and he felt himself dizzy and losing his balance. Quickly, instinct demanding self-control, he looked down to orient himself with the familiar rectangle of the swimming pool in the center of the wide-spreading lawn. The pool became an island solidly anchored in the black sea of the night. The earth stood still again and the moon took up its race through the ragged clouds.

  There was no physical betrayal of inner turmoil. Grant Austen had long since taught himself the necessity of concealing his emotions and the veneer had become an inseparable part of his character. It did not fall away even when he was alone in the darkness of a March night. He stood very straight, almost artificially so, the exaggerated uprightness of carriage that is often affected by men of less than average height. But his posture was also the result of his subconscious belief that fear could be dissipated by containment.

  Looking down through the bare branches of the leafless trees he saw, in the valley below him, the grid of lights that marked the streets of the city of Suffolk. Habit-guided, his eyes found the fluttering red neon of the downtown section and then traced King Street to the bridge where it crossed Conomissing Creek.

  For an instant he felt the panic of strange alarm. There was only empty blackness where he should have seen the bead-strung lights of the Suffolk Moulding Company. Then he recalled that most of them were blocked from his vision by the new Lee-Bross warehouse. He identified the distant pinpoint of light that marked the watchman’s shack and then, moving west, found the triple window in the end of the power house. Memory easily filled in the black void.

  He saw the old mill building where the business had been started—once it had housed everything, now it was only a warehouse for carton storage—and with the quick strides of imagined walking he was in the tool shop, incongruously bright with sunshine through the sawtooth roof, pungent with the musk of hot oil, alive with the nerve-tingling sound of steel cutting steel. He walked on into the tool storage shed, seeing the molds stored behind the wire-fenced walls, the whole history of the business written in those chalked numbers on the oak-plank shelves, dates that went as far back as 1923, the male and female steel that had given birth to radio tube bases and bottle caps and switch assemblies and drill housings and rouge boxes and tool handles and watch cases and a thousand other things molded out of plastics, some remembered, more forgotten.

  He was in the big general pressroom now, brown-dusted and carbolic-odored, hearing the steam-hissing suck of the opening presses, feeling the jarring thump of the hydraulic rams, following the conveyor line through the firewall door into the sharply contrasting quiet and cleanliness of the warehouse and the shipping room, out into the yard, past the high-stacked powerhouse, up the back steps into the Administration Building.

  Fluorescent lights flickered hesitantly at his touch, then leaped into triumphant brightness, sparkling on glass and chromium, softly reflected from the light green walls of the corridors, even more softly from the wax-rubbed paneling of his private office. He sat at his desk in the quiet that his gruff command demanded … no telephone calls, Miss Berk … something I have to think through … important decision to make …

  He was not one man now but two—the man on the terrace and the man at the desk—experiencing the strange duality of two minds, independent yet linked by a common consciousness; two pairs of eyes, one pair to watch with the clarity of distance what the other saw too close to be sharply focused; two voices, one emboldened by separation to say what the other had not yet dared to word … all this is yours, Grant Austen, the Suffolk Moulding Company. You built it … all of it … from nothing to this. If you sell the company, will you ever be able to fill the empty hole that it will leave in your life?

  The man on the terrace walked across the lawn toward the garden wall. His hand brushed a boxwood and he heard the unseen flight of small birds startled from their hiding place, the sound quickly snuffed out by the wind. He was alone now, the man at the desk suddenly gone, his disappearance a baffling trickery, and Grant Austen felt the pointlessness of having walked out into the empty night.

  Had he been a more discerning self-analyst, and more experienced in the vagaries of the various forms of affection, he might have recognized his impulse to draw physically closer to the factory as a last gesture at recapture before the final abandonment of a lost love. It was very like that last attempt at reconciliation that his conscience would have forced upon him if he had been contemplating the divorce of his wife. What he had once felt toward the Suffolk Moulding Company had truly been a form of love, and the fading of affection had not differed greatly from the way that the flame of man’s love for a woman is sometimes dimmed to a flicker so faint that it becomes only a memory to inspire
the restless hope for a new way of life. That was all that was left—except, as always for every lost love, the puzzling question of how what was now so obviously unworthy could ever have so completely claimed his affection.

  An airplane passed overhead and its sound, drawn out by the wind, was a high wail of loneliness. He turned to the road that came up the hill, watching for headlights. Of all the nights that Lory might have deserted him, why did it have to be tonight?

  He glanced upward at the second story of the big house. The windows of the master bedroom were dark. His wife had gone up to bed at eleven. He had wanted to talk to her … once tonight he had even called to her … but she hadn’t heard him … working on the pledge cards for the hospital drive. Probably just as well … always hard to talk to Miriam … and, anyway, she was asleep by now. He was alone … alone … alone …

  But Lory would be home in a few minutes. Then he could talk. That’s what he had to do … talk it out. He needed someone to understand … Lory … Lory would understand … she always did.

  The March wind still carried the sound of the plane.

  2

  Lory Austen saw the traffic light at the corner blink from green to red and, waiting as Paul Bronson slowed the convertible, told herself that she knew what he would say as he stopped the car.

  As always he proved predictable. His right hand fell away from the steering wheel and she knew that, in the pretense of accident, it would touch her thigh where her coat was parted, where there would be only thin silk between his hand and her flesh.

  There was the lost heartbeat of waiting and then she felt it—only the hard brush of his knuckles, instantaneous and then gone, no more than that. No tremor flashed inward from the touched nerve ends. There was no response from her brain, no lingering of sensation, now not even the persistence of memory.

  It was another confirmation of the fear that had come to haunt her—that some weird atrophy of desire had dulled her nerves and deadened the lobe of her brain that made her a woman. Would she never again respond to the touch of a man’s hand? Was that something that would happen only once in her life and, having happened once, could never happen again? No, that was impossible … crazy … neurotic! But how could she know that it wasn’t true?

  “It isn’t so late, Lory, only a few minutes after midnight. How about stopping by the apartment for a nightcap? I told Jim and Anne that we might.”

  “Not tonight, Paul.”

  Not tonight … not any night … he was only playing out the sham of their man-and-woman masquerade. Oh, he would be willing enough to marry her. But not for herself … because she was Grant Austen’s daughter … because a marriage certificate would be exchanged for a stock certificate that would someday give him control of the Suffolk Moulding Company.

  His body swayed toward her as the car started into the turn and she shrank away, purposefully evasive. She didn’t need him … no, not Paul Bronson nor any other man. It was archaic nonsense that a woman had to have a man in order to be happy. She could live alone and make her own life. And it would be a good life! Hundreds of women had proved that it could be done. Thousands! What was so wonderful about marriage? Dull routine … boredom … bickering … divorce. No, this was better … an artist’s life … and she was an artist. No one could deny that. Four books illustrated and a fifth …

  Through the thin screen of the bare-branched trees she had caught a glimpse of her home, identified by the multi-colored glow of light through the leaded glass windows of the library. Her father was still up … waiting for her … another of those horrible middle-of-the-night talks …

  “Sure you won’t change your mind, Lory?”

  She hesitated, tempted. If she went to Paul’s apartment it would be possible to lose an hour. By then her father might have given up and gone to bed, pardoning her from the torturous pretense of attempting to understand the things he always wanted to talk to her about … phenol-formaldehyde extrusion of the melamine ratio of standard costs to the excess profits of the pressure per square inch on the net profit of the year-end polystyrene …

  “I’m sorry, Paul. Not tonight.”

  They drove on until stopped by another red light.

  This time his hand did not fall from the steering wheel. That, too, was expected. She had somehow known that it wouldn’t happen again.

  The car was moving and, between two houses, she caught another glimpse of the library windows. A black silhouette moved across one of them. Her father was out on the terrace, waiting for her.

  “Go up the back drive, Paul.”

  He would stop the car at the library terrace and, seeing her father, would not attempt to kiss her.

  3

  There was the fanning sweep of the headlights as the car turned up the drive and Grant Austen stepped back into the moon-cast shadow of the giant columnar yew at the corner of the terrace.

  Waiting, he heard the wind-muffled sound of Lory’s voice, a car door opening and closing, and then he saw her running up the path toward him, her coat whipped back, her dress molded against her body by the March wind. In that moment of first seeing she was a moon-sculptured nymph suddenly sprung to life out of the mysterious wonder of the night.

  Her voice was a startling return to the earthy reality of flesh and blood. “Fine thing,” she said, terrier-shaking his hand in mock admonishment. “You’ll never get rid of your old-maid daughter if you do a thing like that.”

  “Now what have I done?”

  “Frightening away the only man in the world just as he might have been about to propose.”

  Her voice was an invitation to laughter and he tried to accept it. “Time a child of your age was in bed.”

  Instantly, he felt the fear that he had hurt her, that being called a child might be an unpleasant reminder of what he knew troubled her most—that she was twenty-six and unmarried.

  But there was no break in the soft ruffle of her laughter. “What about a child of your age? What are you doing up so late?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  She looped her arm through his. “No, you weren’t.”

  He made a show of looking at his watch, subconsciously restrained from admission. “I’ll have to speak to that young whipper-snapper. No good at the office if he’s up all night running around with the boss’s daughter.”

  “But it’s very nice for the boss’s daughter.”

  Her words were gaily tossed and he felt a cold shiver of fear. Was it possible that she had meant what she had said about Paul Bronson proposing? He set his lips on guard before he spoke, carefully filtering his concern from his voice. “Have a good time?”

  Her throat made a wordless sound, liquidly pleasant.

  “Nice dinner?” he asked.

  “Very.”

  They stood silent and again there was the wild-geese sound from the sky.

  “Spring’s coming,” he said. “Wind’s changed. It’s warmer now than it was this afternoon.”

  She threw back her head and her face was blue ivory in the moonlight. “It’s March. There couldn’t be a night like this in any other month but March.”

  The car was turning at the end of the drive and they were caught for a moment in a blazing glare of its headlights. He waited until the black night came back. “I didn’t really break up anything, did I, Lory?”

  “Of course you did. Two minutes more and I would have been one of the world’s two greatest experts on the amortization of tool costs.”

  He chuckled, consciously showing his appreciation. She was a wonderful girl. There was no one like Lory, no one in all the world!

  “And,” Lory added, “you needn’t worry about my distracting Mr. Bronson from his job. He’s undistractable.”

  “Even by the boss’s daughter?”

  “Particularly by the boss’s daughter.”

  There was a sense of guilt in his feeling of relief and he tried to ease his conscience. “Paul’s a good boy, Lory. He’s all right.”

  “Are you really
so anxious to get rid of me?”

  He flipped his open-fingered hand. “You know better than that.”

  They went through the door together, Lory wrinkling her nose at the foul still-smoke-filled air of the library, glancing accusingly at the heaped ashtray and the paper litter on the top of his desk. She swung sharply to face him, her hands on his shoulders. “What’s wrong, Dad?”

  Instinct counseled evasion but his caution was overwashed by gratitude for the quickness of her perception. His wife had not known but his daughter did. It was always like that, always Lory who knew when something was wrong. Miriam had been in the house all evening and the only thing that she had said was, “I think I’ll go up to bed now, dear. Don’t work too late or you’ll have one of your headaches in the morning.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Lory said, reiterating her awareness.

  “Afraid I am up against a tough one,” he admitted.

  “Shall I make some coffee?”

  That was her idiomatic way of asking if he would talk to her about it. She often made coffee for their middle-of-the-night talks. Strangely, Lory’s coffee never kept him awake as other coffee usually did.

  “I’d rather have a highball tonight, Lory.”

  He savored her surprise. It was the first night he had ever asked for whiskey instead of coffee. Her hesitation was clear evidence of her concern for him.

  “Scotch?” she asked.

  He nodded, watching her as she crossed the room and went into the pine-paneled bar, finding an odd pleasure in the way that her hurried anxiety made her fumble at the unaccustomed task.

  There were two glasses in her hand when she came back into the library and he smiled inwardly as he noticed that the water in her glass was almost crystal clear.

  He sipped, tasting. “There’s more than a jigger in this, young lady.”

  “You looked as if you needed it.”

  He felt the warm flush of his gratitude … Miriam would probably have said, “Do you really want a drink this late at night, dear?”