“That’s right.”
“And I assume you’re authorized to act for all the other stockholders?”
She anticipated her father’s glance in her direction and was ready to meet it, lip smiling as he said, “I guess there won’t be any trouble on that score, will there, Lory? You see, it’s all in the family, Mr. McCall. Lory has about five thousand shares and I hold the rest.”
“And there are no other stockholders?”
“No sir!” her father said proudly. “Not even a bank loan. Don’t know whether you saw our year-end statement or not—I gave it to Gil last week—but that tells the whole story.”
“There’s been no change since that statement was drawn—except, of course, the profit you’ve made since the first of the year.”
“Change? No, nothing important. Oh, there’s been a little shifting around—raw material inventory is up a few thousand—”
“All right, Mr. Austen,” Cash McCall interrupted, pivoting off the window seat, his hand extended.
Lory felt the blankness of her father’s face as if it were a mirrored image of her own.
“I’m accepting your offer,” McCall said, smiling and casual. “You offered me all the stock of the Suffolk Moulding Company for two million dollars. All you have to do to make it a deal is to shake hands.”
Lory held her breath through the eternity of waiting until her father’s hand, immobile at first, then moving in a fantasy of time-extended slow motion, finally met Cash McCall’s.
“It’s a deal,” she heard her father say.
Those words alone registered sharply. The words that came afterwards were only breaks in the verbal haze … adjustment to the statement … subject to verification … attorneys … tomorrow … settlement April first … no announcement …
She turned away, looking into the darkness of the foyer, still finding it difficult to accept the fantastic coincidence of Cash McCall turning out to be the man who had bought the Suffolk Moulding Company.
A door opened at the far end of the foyer and she saw the figure of a woman silhouetted against the lighted back hall, a silver bowl in her hand, listening, wifelike.
But before Lory could focus her eyes to discern features, the woman saw that she was being watched and the door was quickly closed. Lory looked back at Cash McCall, blinking. Something had happened to him. He was only a man now … flesh and blood … a man with a suite at the Hotel Ivanhoe … rich … buying a two-million dollar company as casually as if he were picking up some little trinket for the wife who was waiting at the back of the apartment.
She could breathe now, freely and easily. Her heart settled back to its normal beat. Testing her composure, she looked directly at Cash McCall. There was no quickening of her breath, no speeding of her heart. Her only sensation was the relieving realization that she would never again be haunted by those terrible hallucinations. She had fought for three years to free her mind of him and now, strangely, it was he himself who had released her.
Her father’s voice cut into her consciousness, “—you bet, Gil’s a good boy. I don’t know whether he’s quite up to that or not but—”
Gil? Of course! That was why Cash McCall had her drawing on his wall. Gil Clark had given it to him … Gil had always liked her things … Gil was with Corporation Associates and Cash McCall owned it. A present for the boss, that’s all it meant. How could she have ever imagined anything else? There was nothing unusual about someone having one of her drawings. Lots of people had them. Tony had three on the wall of his office at the publishing company.
Cash McCall and her father had risen and were walking toward her. She rose quickly, keeping ahead of them as they moved out into the foyer.
“Well, I’ll just say this, Mr. McCall,” Grant Austen said. “You’ve bought yourself a good company.”
“I’m satisfied,” McCall said, pressing the elevator button. “And I’m sure you are, too.”
“Sure, you bet, that’s what it takes to make a good deal. Has to work both ways.”
Cash McCall extended his hand and she took it. This was the final test. It was only a hand … a man’s hand … any man’s. He’d probably been married all the time … of course he had … that explained everything.
“Good to have seen you again, Lory,” Cash said. “I hope this won’t be the last time.”
Her father broke in. “Well, I guess we’ll be seeing you in Suffolk, won’t we, Mr. McCall? Want you to know that if there’s anything I can do—”
Lory stepped into the elevator cab, turning to face Cash McCall as the two men shook hands.
The door closed and the elevator started down. Her father’s hands clamped down on the points of her shoulders. “By golly, Lory, we’ve done it! Thought I might get a million seven—maybe a million eight—but never the whole two million. Wasn’t that something? I still can’t believe—” He exhaled an enormous sigh as if the pressure of excitement had suddenly become too great to contain.
“It’s wonderful,” she said boldly, looking straight into his eyes. She was free … her own money … two hundred thousand dollars … Italy …
“Yes sir, Lory, if I do say it myself, I handled that just about right. When he came out with that offer, I really stepped in there and nailed him down, didn’t I? Sure wasn’t giving him any chance to change his mind. Nice fellow, though, isn’t he? Golly, Lory, just think of it—I’m a millionaire!”
13
For the third time, Miriam Austen slipped on the lime-green taffeta, now with the long skirt pinned up, and examined her image in the mirror. Maybe if she cut it off to cocktail length … no, it just wouldn’t do. Or would it? It was so ridiculous to spend a lot of money on evening clothes when you wore them so infrequently … but Moon Beach was probably dressy … and the convention meant so much to Grant. Maybe the thing to do was to run down to Philadelphia and …
Again, inescapably, she thought of how silly she had been this morning, wanting to go to Philadelphia with Grant, on the point of saying it, the words on her lips, then foolishly afraid to speak, silenced by the fear that she would destroy the look of pleasure that had come to her husband’s face when Lory had offered to drive him.
She stood for a long time, staring at the mirror, the dress forgotten. Then, seemingly without the preliminary of conscious thought, she said aloud, “It’s your own fault, Miriam Austen. It’s no one’s fault but your own.”
The words were spoken as both accusation and acknowledgment and, heard and accepted, she began to take off the dress. It was a shame, such a lovely fabric, but it simply wouldn’t do for the convention at Moon Beach.
14
Gil Clark sat in his low-partitioned office at Corporation Associates, waiting for Grant Austen’s call, still reading the Lockwood report on the Cavalier Chemical Company. It was an amazing document. He had known for a long time that there were agencies that made a business of industrial investigations, and he had heard Lockwood Reports mentioned as one of the best, but he had never imagined it as being such a fabulously efficient detective organization. Out of such apparently unrelated bits and pieces as a guest list at a wedding, a real estate transfer reported in a South Carolina weekly, the questions asked of a prospective employee, an eavesdropped conversation in a Pullman club car, and a paragraph winnowed from a paper presented to a technical association, the Lockwood staff had accurately predicted, months before the announcement, that Cavalier Chemical was secretly angling its way into the sheeted-plastic business. More to the point, and with a cunning skill no less ingeniously devious, Lockwood had found out that Cavalier’s Plastics Division was having trouble keeping pace with its competitors, that the fault was recognized by company officials to lie in the unavailability of adequate pilot-plant facilities for the production testing of new molding materials, and that the Director of Research had already been secretly authorized by the Board of Directors to canvas the possibility of buying a moderate-sized molding plant to be operated as an adjunct to the Research Laboratories
.
Gil Clark had often read confidential reports of the kind put out by the credit-information agencies, but he had never seen anything that approached the intensity of surveillance and analysis evidenced by the document he was reading. The only possible parallel was a Navy Intelligence report that he had once been allowed to examine. Even that suffered by comparison.
Inevitably, he recalled how much Cash McCall had known about him before he had been called to the Hotel Ivanhoe, and he felt now a resentment that had been oddly unexperienced as long as he had been in McCall’s presence. He, too, had probably been the subject of a Lockwood investigation.
In much the same way that the fading of intoxication causes a man to reach back for the orienting memory of what had happened before his brain had become fogged, Gil Clark recalled the feelings with which he had approached the Hotel Ivanhoe. He had anticipated that Cash McCall would turn out to be another Harry Guizinger and now, try as he would, he could not satisfactorily explain why he had changed his opinion. Cash McCall, of course, was infinitely smoother, cultured and polished, a decidedly more likable man, but was there any other essential difference? Why had he been so willing to excuse McCall for what had been inexcusable in Guizinger? Was there any less justification for the bribery and cutbacks with which Guizinger had set up the Tronic Wire & Coil deal than there was for the network of spies that Cash McCall had set up with his secret ownership of Lockwood Reports, Hildreth-Paris and Corporation Associates?
Resolutely, Gil checked the instinctive urge for self-justification, accepting no excuse for himself until it had been carefully examined. But was there really anything wrong with Cash McCall owning Lockwood Reports? What difference could there be between retaining them and owning them? All companies bought information, even if only from credit agencies. After all, there was nothing in the Lockwood report on Cavalier Chemical that anyone who was clever enough could not have ferreted out and interpreted? Was there anything morally wrong about using information that some man had been fool enough to blab out in an open Pullman club car?
But it was more difficult to justify Cash McCall’s ownership of Corporation Associates. There was a confidential relationship between a firm of management consultants and its clients that permitted no invasion of a third party. But was there any evidence that McCall had ever taken advantage of his ownership? Wasn’t he buying Suffolk Moulding in the open market? Wasn’t it true that the only way he could get it was to pay Grant Austen more money than anyone else would …
Suddenly, he had become aware of the effort that he was expending on justification. Why was he trying so hard? Because he had been bought off with that big salary? No! That had nothing to do with it. He’d made up his mind long before Cash had even mentioned twenty-five thousand a year … “in case your wife asks you …”
Again, as he had done a dozen times in this last hour, Gil Clark debated an attempt to call Barbara. But how could he? All he knew was what she had written in that last letter ten days ago … Dad and Mother have invited me to go down to Florida so I’m leaving with them in the morning—and maybe that will give me a chance to think things over … just that, nothing else, not even the name of the hotel where they’d be staying.
But even if it were possible to call her, what could he say … that everything between them would be different now because he was making twenty-five thousand dollars a year?
No, that couldn’t be said … made it sound as if love were something that could be bought. But it would make a difference … buy herself some clothes … and if she had something decent to wear maybe she’d quit slopping around in that damned old housecoat! And if she could afford to get a permanent in a beauty parlor there’d be no more of that stinking stench in the bathroom … smelling it in every towel for a month afterward … and maybe she’d take some interest in cooking, too, if it weren’t for that penny-sweating budget … dishes stacked in the sink … drain plugged again … that damned jerry-built house! That was what had been wrong, that more than anything else … no wonder she had gotten fed up … take the heart out of anyone, trying to keep that dump looking like anything … water in the basement every time it rained … the porch cockeyed because there was no foundation under the flagstone.
They could afford a better house now … twenty-five thousand a year … and Barbara would know that he’d been right to stick it out with Corporation Associates and not take that job that Harry Guizinger had offered him. That would have meant more money, too, but …
Damn it, there was a difference! But it wasn’t something you could explain over the telephone … yes, Cash McCall bought and sold companies, too … and made a lot of money. But what was wrong with that? It didn’t matter how much money a man made as long as he did it honestly … and in a way that …
The telephone rang and his hand shot out, but he waited a moment before he picked up the receiver, resurrecting the rehearsed sentences that he had prepared for Grant Austen’s call.
The voice on the other end of the wire was not Austen’s. “Gil, this is Cash. I’ve just bought Suffolk Moulding. No need to go into the details. You can get that later. We take over on April first. That gives you a week. I’d suggest you get over to Suffolk the first thing in the morning. I’m having a short meeting to set up the legal details at seven tomorrow morning with Winston Conway and his lawyers, but they ought to be in Suffolk by ten. Vincent Thompson will be there, too, with a gang of men to make a fast audit. Nothing for you to worry about except to get your feet on the ground. I’ve told Austen that you’ll be in charge after we take over. By the way, before I closed the deal I told him about my relationship to Corporation Associates. Thought you might be worrying about your own position, so I made that perfectly clear. Now look, Gil—you may not be able to get in touch with me for a few days. I’m leaving in the morning. Just hold the fort until I call you. Right?”
“Right,” Gil echoed.
Before he could say anything more the connection was broken. He dropped the telephone receiver to its cradle, easing its fall as if the muffling of sound were a way to keep anyone from knowing what a fool he had been to imagine that Cash McCall even remotely resembled Harry Guizinger.
Eight
1
On the first day of April, Miriam Austen awakened to the consciousness of effervescent joy, a sensation immediately challenged by the threat that she was being tricked by a dream, then miraculously confirmed when she glanced at the night table between their beds. The coffee cups were there. It had actually happened!
Grant was asleep, hard breathing in the deep slumber of exhaustion, suggesting the composite memory of other moments, long ago, when she had lain awake beside him after the draining away of passion, finding it strange that what had been the ultimate of his aliveness could so quickly fade to inanimate torpor. But now those old memories were mismatched and inapplicable. What had happened last night was something beyond experience, something more meaningful than anything remembered from those long ago first years of marriage.
Her mind obeyed the lover’s ever-practiced habit of tracing the strange antecedents of exultation, the events of this past week, the treacherous alternation of fear and hope that had finally come to this wondrous end.
She had been hurt as never before on that night last week when Grant and Lory had returned from Philadelphia and told her that the company had been sold. To have been so completely excluded, not even knowing that her husband was considering such a move, had seemed a wounding blow from which she could never recover. Yet, only a few minutes later, everything had been excused by the prospect she saw opening out ahead of her … Lory was going to Italy!
That next day, Thursday, had built her anticipation of a new life with Grant, the years ahead a never-ending extension of that week in New York when he had taken her to the N.A.M. convention and bought her the Tiffany pin, the prospect verified by the change that had so obviously come over him since his decision to sell the company. He had suggested going to the Suffolk Country Clu
b for dinner—and they had actually gone—not Lory, just the two of them, Lory insisting that she had to stay home and work on her book, and only once during the whole evening had Grant mentioned Lory. And then he had said that a month in Italy would probably do her a lot of good!
Friday had brought the crash of hope. Something had gone wrong—she didn’t know what—but Grant had come home in the middle of the day and wouldn’t talk to her, her anxious questions answered with only grumbled monosyllables that made her sure the trouble must be something that might prevent final consummation of the sale.
Hope had flared up again on Saturday. Grant had called her at noon—yes, called her, not Lory—and the weekend had been a reassuring return to hope. But by dinnertime on Monday, the situation had changed again. Grant had chomped through his meal, grimly silent, not even talking to Lory before he went back to the office again.
Yesterday, fear heightened by loneliness, she had gone out to Lory’s studio again, humbling herself into asking for an explanation. But Lory had known nothing that she hadn’t known, a revelation that brought incongruous satisfaction but no relief. “Maybe he’ll talk to me tonight,” Lory had said, and Miriam Austen had lived through the dull terror that her daughter might be right, that Grant would come home that evening and, as he had done so many times before, deny her the sharing of his confidence, talking to Lory instead of to her.
It was desperation that had driven her to do what she had finally done last night, enduring the awful incongruity of a wife being forced to beg to be left alone with her husband … “Lory, dear, why don’t you go to bed and let me wait for your father tonight.” And Lory had been oh, so wonderful! … saving her the embarrassment of explanation, kissing her on the cheek and then going quickly upstairs, leaving her alone to wait for Grant.
Now, remembering, Miriam Austen felt the tear-burn of her gratitude, a sensation that dissolved, mist into mist, as she recalled the boldness of what she had forced herself to do … being in the library when he came in through the terrace door … then the shameless mimicry of suggesting that she make coffee for him as, on other nights when she had listened from the silence of her bedroom, she had heard her daughter do.
Cash McCall Page 24