by Sloan Wilson
His father had been a second lieutenant during the First World War. He had been sent home from France several weeks before the Armistice for unexplained reasons and had for a while worked with a large investment firm in New York. As far as Tom could make out from the dim echoes of rumor which survived, Stephen Rath had either quit work or been fired about two years before he died, and during his remaining days had simply lived a life of leisure in the big house with his wife, mother, and son. Presumably he had not been happy; he had never played the mandolin any more. Tom suspected that there must have been quite a chain of events leading up to the night when Stephen had backed his Packard out of the carriage house and careened down the road to the waiting rocks at the turn. But of all this Tom could learn nothing from his grandmother’s conversation. According to the old lady, Stephen had been a great military hero, and over the years she had advanced him by her own automatic laws of seniority to the rank of major.
“I hear you’re getting ahead very well at the foundation,” the old lady was saying now.
“I think I may leave the foundation, Grandmother,” he said. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Leave? Why?”
How difficult it was to explain to an old lady who had never earned a penny in her life, and who had never even bothered to conserve what she had inherited, that he needed more money! He said, “I may have an opportunity offered me that’s too good to turn down.”
“I was telling Mrs. Gliden the other day how well you’re doing at the foundation,” the old lady said. “I told her it might not be long before you were chosen as director. I hear that man Haver may be leaving.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I don’t remember,” the old lady said. “There is a rumor. . . .”
That was the trouble–he never could be sure whether his grandmother was simply ensnaring him in her dreams of family glory, or whether the old connections with prominent people which she treasured so carefully actually resulted in useful information. But on the face of it, the thought that he might be chosen to head the Schanenhauser Foundation was ridiculous, regardless of whether Haver was leaving or not. There were at least twenty people who would be chosen first.
“Are you thinking of going into government?” the old lady asked unexpectedly.
“No–I’m thinking of going into business.”
“Your great-grandfather was very successful in business,” she said. “At one time he owned a fleet of twenty-eight vessels. Are you going into shipping?”
“No,” Tom said. “This will be a little different, Grandmother. There’s nothing definite about it yet, but I’ve mentioned it to Dick Haver, and I thought you ought to know.”
“I’m sorry you have to go into business,” she said soberly, “but I suppose it’s necessary. Business is such a bore–The Major never could stand it, and neither could The Senator. But I suppose it’s necessary. Come, let’s talk about something more cheerful. How do you think the place looks?”
“Fine,” he said.
“I can’t afford to keep the lawns up, but the house itself is in as good repair as ever.”
“It looks beautiful.”
“I hope that when I go, you and Betsy will be able to live here,” she said. “I’m trying to keep it up for you. I don’t want you to mention it to a soul, but I had to take a small mortgage on the place to have the roof fixed and to have an oil furnace put in. Edward is getting old, and he can’t shovel coal any more.”
A furnace, Tom thought–I’ll bet that the price of a furnace for this place would send all three of my kids through a year of college. He felt the old double, contradictory anger rising in him, the familiar fury at his grandmother for dissipating money which ordinarily would come to him eventually, and the accompanying disgust at himself for lusting after an old lady’s money. He tried to feel the gratitude which, after all, was due the person who had brought him up, and paid for his education, and treated him with kindness and love.
“She’s selfish, but I could forgive her that,” Tom remembered his mother saying about the old lady. “What I can’t forgive is the arrogance, and the deliberate pretenses she inflicted on her son, and everyone around her. Poor Steve was raised on lies. . . .”
His mother hadn’t been talking to him when she had said that; she had been talking to a minister who visited her quite often after her husband’s death, and the minister had noticed that Tom, who was only twelve years old then, had come into the room, and he had said, “Hush–the boy’s here. How are you, Tom? It won’t be long before you’ll be going to high school!”
Now Tom wondered whether he should try to work with the old lady’s lawyer to straighten out whatever might be left of her estate. When he had come home from the war, he had, after tortuous examination of his own motives, asked his grandmother whether he could help manage things for her, and she had turned him down abruptly. She had never mentioned money to him in all the years he had lived with her, except to say that it didn’t matter, that it was a frightful bore.
“If you want any help, let me know,” he said now. “I don’t think it’s wise for you to be taking out mortgages–there might be ways to avoid it.”
“The bank was very helpful,” she said. “I haven’t got many more years to go, and I think the lawyer has arranged for me to be taken care of quite nicely. The important thing is to keep this house in shape for you and Betsy.”
“I doubt whether we’ll be able to afford such a place,” he said. “Not many people can these days.”
“Nonsense!” she replied. “You’re going into business, aren’t you? Perhaps you’ll be able to improve it. The Senator always wanted to put another wing on the south side of the house. Come, and I’ll show you where.”
She walked with astonishing agility and pointed with her cane to show just where the billiard room should go, and a glass-walled conservatory for raising orchids.
There were really four completely unrelated worlds in which he lived, Tom reflected as he drove the old Ford back to Westport. There was the crazy, ghost-ridden world of his grandmother and his dead parents. There was the isolated, best-not-remembered world in which he had been a paratrooper. There was the matter-of-fact, opaque-glass-brick-partitioned world of places like the United Broadcasting Company and the Schanenhauser Foundation. And there was the entirely separate world populated by Betsy and Janey and Barbara and Pete, the only one of the four worlds worth a damn. There must be some way in which the four worlds were related, he thought, but it was easier to think of them as entirely divorced from one another.
5
THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY Tom left the Schanenhauser Foundation at ten-thirty in the morning to keep his appointment with Walker. It was not necessary for him to give any excuse for leaving his desk, but he felt vaguely guilty as he told his secretary he probably wouldn’t be back until noon. He walked quickly up Fifth Avenue and across Rockefeller Plaza, so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he hardly noticed the people he passed. When he got inside the United Broadcasting building, a starter wearing a fancy, silver-braided cap directed him into one of the waiting gold-colored elevators.
“Floor please?” the elevator operator said. He spoke in a deep voice with a slight Italian accent. Tom glanced at him. The man was wearing a plum-colored uniform and had his back turned toward him. He was a stout, dark-complexioned man about thirty years old with thick black hair only partly covered by a plum-colored cap shaped like an army overseas cap. Across the back of his thick neck, just visible above his collar, was a long, thin white scar. There was something startlingly familiar about the slope of his narrow shoulders and the deep voice. Tom stepped to one side to get a better look at him, but the elevator was getting crowded, and he couldn’t see the front of the man’s face.
“Floor please?” the elevator man repeated as people filed into the car. “Floor please?”
“Thirty-six,” Tom said. The man turned toward him, and their eyes met. The elevator operato
r’s face was fat, almost round, and he had a thin, incongruously dapper mustache. His eyes were black and unblinking. He stared at Tom for several seconds. There might have been a quickly suppressed flicker of recognition, but Tom couldn’t be sure. The face seemed impassive. Tom looked away. The elevator doors rumbled shut, and the machine shot upward. There was an instant of silence before it stopped, and the doors rumbled open. Tom started to get out.
“This is twenty,” the operator said in his deep voice.
Tom edged back into the elevator. When he got out at his floor, he felt oddly flustered. Down the hall he saw a men’s room and went there to wash his face and comb his hair before going to see Walker. It was absurd to attach such importance to a chance encounter with an elevator man. Even if it were someone he had known, what possible difference could it make?
A few minutes later Tom found Walker reclining as usual in his adjustable chair. Sitting in front of Walker’s desk was a handsome, angular man whom Walker introduced as Bill Ogden. Ogden shook hands with Tom rather stiffly and said almost nothing during the remainder of the interview. Apparently he was there simply as an observer.
“We’ve gone over your qualifications and are now prepared to talk in more specific terms,” Walker said, smiling cheerily. “I think I should begin by saying that this isn’t just an ordinary job in the public-relations department we’re considering. What we’re looking for is a young man to work with Mr. Hopkins, the president of the company, on a special project. . . .”
He paused, apparently expecting Tom to say something. “That sounds very interesting,” Tom said.
Walker nodded. “As a matter of fact, this position wouldn’t really be with United Broadcasting at all, except in a purely technical sense,” he continued. “You would be working directly for Mr. Hopkins on an outside project completely unrelated to the company. One reason we think you might be suited for the job is that you would be working quite closely with the foundations. We hope that the project will eventually be sponsored by the foundations.”
“Just what kind of a project is it?”
“Mr. Hopkins has been asked to start a national committee on mental health,” Walker said.
There was a brief silence, during which Tom heard a fire engine, deprived of its siren because of the need to reserve the sirens for air raid warnings, go chortling down the street far below, uttering shrill but unsirenlike mechanical screams. “A committee on mental health?” he asked stupidly.
“Mr. Hopkins plans to get together forty or fifty national leaders from many different fields and devise a program to encourage people all over the United States to work for mental health,” Walker said.
“What kind of a program?” Tom asked incredulously.
“We don’t know yet. Perhaps it will be a drive for better mental hospitals, or community guidance clinics. Something which would do for mental disease what the March of Dimes has done for polio.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Tom said, realizing he was expected to register enthusiasm.
“What Mr. Hopkins wants now is a young man to begin helping him with research for the speeches he will have to make to kick the project off. Later he will want someone to help him draw up a prospectus for an organization and to start getting the people together. Are you interested?”
“I certainly am!” Tom said heartily. “I’ve always been interested in mental health!” That sounded a little foolish, but he could think of nothing to rectify it.
“This wouldn’t be a very high-paying job,” Walker continued. “We were thinking of a figure somewhere near seven thousand dollars.”
Tom knew then that Walker had talked to Dick Haver at the foundation and learned what he had been making. The union of bosses is the most powerful union in the world.
“I’d been hoping for more than that,” he said. “Ordinarily, salary wouldn’t be an important consideration for me, especially in connection with a job of this kind, but I have increasing personal responsibilities. I feel I should be making ten thousand dollars a year.”
“Wouldn’t that be quite a jump from your present position?” Walker asked bluntly. Ogden, who had been sitting almost motionless, put his hand in his pocket and took out a package of cigarettes.
“It would,” Tom said, “but there would have to be considerable incentive for me to leave the foundation.”
Walker, lolling comfortably in his chair, glanced at Ogden, who had just finished lighting a cigarette.
“We don’t have to make any decisions now,” Ogden said, in a casual, almost bored voice.
Walker nodded. “Perhaps the next step would be to have him meet Mr. Hopkins,” he said to Ogden, as though Tom were not in the room.
“All right,” Ogden said.
“Could you have lunch with Mr. Hopkins at twelve-thirty, day after tomorrow?” Walker asked.
“Certainly,” Tom said.
“Meet me here, and I’ll take you up and introduce you,” Walker concluded.
Tom thanked him and hurried out of his office. When he got in the elevator, he glanced at the operator, but it was a thin man he had never seen before. In a telephone booth in the enormous lobby downstairs he called Bill Hawthorne, who had told him about the job in the first place. “Come on down and give me some briefing,” he said. “I’m supposed to have lunch with Hopkins day after tomorrow!”
“With Hopkins!” Bill said in an awed voice. “Say, for a guy who hasn’t even been hired yet, you’re doing all right!”
They went to a bar two doors down the street and ordered Martinis. “Now tell me all about your boy Hopkins,” Tom said. “Walker tells me he’s starting a project on mental health. What’s it all about?”
Bill sipped his drink thoughtfully. “What do you already know about Hopkins?” he asked.
“Not much,” Tom said. “I’ve hardly heard of him. Somebody told me he started with nothing and he’s making two hundred thousand a year now. That’s about all I know–I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a picture of him.”
“Precisely,” Bill said professionally. “Precisely.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“I mean it looks like the public-relations boys have cooked up a big deal to put Hopkins on the map, and you’ve stumbled into it.”
“I don’t get it,” Tom said.
“Figure it out for yourself. Here’s Hopkins, about fifty years old, and the president of the United Broadcasting Corporation. As you say, he makes about two hundred thousand dollars a year, and that doesn’t count stock deals and all the rest of it. Inside the company he’s the biggest shot in the world. The top comedians and all the famous actors are scared to death of him. But outside the company he’s nothing. Taxi drivers don’t call him “Sir.” Waiters in restaurants more than five blocks from Radio Center don’t give him a special table. Little boys don’t gape at him. Don’t you see how tough it must be?”
“I’m weeping,” Tom said.
“All right. Here’s a guy who works fifteen or twenty hours a day–inside the company he’s famous for it. He’s a regular machine for work. And he’s competent. Give him almost any business, and he’d double the profit in a year. And people like him–he knows how to drive people and still make them like him. But whats he get out of life?”
“Money.”
“Of course! But if he made only a quarter as much money, he’d still be able to buy everything he wants. Hopkins is a guy of simple tastes. He has only one or two places in the country, and a small yacht, and three automobiles. He was able to afford all that long ago and could go on affording it if he quit work tomorrow. So what’s he keep working fifteen or twenty hours a day for?”
“Must be nuts,” Tom said.
“Nuts nothing! The poor son of a bitch wants fame! And he’s in a position to buy it. So he calls in Ogden and Walker and says, ‘Boys, make me famous. One year from today I want to be famous, or you’re fired!
“Oh come on,” Tom said, laughing. “You know damn well
that’s nonsense.”
“Perhaps it wouldn’t work that way exactly,” Bill said, obviously enjoying himself. “He’d say, ‘Gentlemen, I believe that for the sake of the company, the major executives must direct more attention to their personal public relations, and I hope that in the immediate future we can work something out.
“I doubt like hell that a man in his position would say that either.”
“Okay–be a stickler for detail. What would really happen is that somebody would suggest that Hopkins head a committee on mental health–these guys are asked to do that sort of thing all the time. Usually they refuse. But this time Hopkins figures he’s got a chance for the national spotlight. You’re right about one thing–he’d never say anything about it. He wouldn’t have to. He’d call in Walker and Ogden, and they’re paid enough to know what he’s thinking without being told. The only thing they’d all say is that it’s every citizen’s duty to do something about mental-health problems. They’d be nauseatingly noble about it. But all the time they’d know damn well they were doing it to give Hopkins a shot of publicity, and that’s the reason why you, my boy, will be on the United Broadcasting Corporation’s payroll, and why every cent that Hopkins spends on this project will come off his company expense account!”
“Why mental health?” Tom asked. “Why a subject like that?”
“Figure it out for yourself. What would you do to make Hopkins famous? You can’t play up the success he’s had in business, because nobody much cares, and because newspapers and magazines don’t like to publicize radio and television companies any more than they have to–they’re all in competition for advertising. You’ve got to play up something about his personal life, not his business. And you can’t have him marrying chorus girls, or winning a prize for water skiing–you’ve got to keep it dignified. What would you do?”