Marriage & Prosperity

by Chris Hampton

we did that too, and it also worked.

  "But most of all, Albert showed us the importance of securing a line of credit, for you can't do anything in business if you can't get financial backing enough to pay for it. And Albert showed us how you get backing. He went from bank to bank and lied like a drunken fisherman until he finally was able to con one into setting up a line of credit. The claims he made to get it, about the huge stack of back orders we had waiting to buy the sauce as soon as we could make it, these were all flagrant frauds. If we had ever defaulted the bank would have had Albert thrown in jail, and your mother and I would have been out on our ears. But fortunately for us, it never came to that, and with the money Albert had conned out of the duped bank he did two things. First, he rented a larger facility, one large enough to deserve the title of plant. Then he increased production tenfold.

  "Your mother and I were scared to death. Albert had had his hands full selling just as much as we had been making when Sarah was alive. How did he expect to sell ten times more? He did it once again with pure and perfect salesmanship ... aided by abundant lies. He approached large grocery chains, told them Sarah's Sauce had theretofore been reserved only for the most exclusive, posh restaurants. Which was true if you called Joe's Hamburger Joint posh. Then he offered to sell them this theretofore (allegedly) exclusive steak sauce at a price their everyday customers could afford and the grocery chain could make a profit on. Finally he got one to buy. What Albert knew, but Sarah hadn't, was that the money is in mass marketing. Exquisite products make money only if they can be sold for exquisite prices, and Albert knew better than anybody that, good as Sarah's sauce is, no one would buy it for twenty dollars a ten ounce bottle. So the formula for success was to degrade the sauce a little, and increase its production a lot. Then clean up with mass marketing.

  "Even with the bigger plant there was no way your mother and I could increase production tenfold all by ourselves. So with the line of credit we hired additional workers. Since it was the depression we didn't have to pay them much, but we did pay them. However Albert said your mother and I were members of the family and heirs, so all we were getting from the company was our keep.

  "Albert didn't come back to town as much as before because he no longer was our only delivery man as well as salesman. Our big orders to the grocery chain all were shipped by regular freight. But Albert did return from the road from time to time to check out operations and to resupply the funds we needed for production. One time when he was with us at the plant your mother said something insulting to me, and I nailed her ears right back with a biting comment. That was the daily result of our mutual dislike. But Albert expressed great shock and concern about it. Was there a problem in his family? Surely, he said, he would be devastated if our marriage broke up, and he was unable to leave the company to us. His concern, we eventually figured out, didn't have a damn thing to do with our having a happy marriage. He was only worried that the two suckers who were running the plant for him for free, suckers he thought were married, might be heading for a divorce which would halt production. But at the time we were too young, naive and stupid to realize this, and we thought he really was concerned with our so-called marriage. And if he was, we worried he would disinherit us if he found out we weren't really married. And since inheriting the company was all the pay we could ever expect to get for the night and day work we were doing, the threat of being disinherited was frightening.

  "After Albert went back on the road we consulted together about this threat. We considered whether we really should get married. We didn't want to because we didn't like each other, but it seemed necessary in order to have a place to live and food to eat. However, we had no car nor other way to get out of town to do it, and if we got married in town then Albert would be sure to learn of it. If so, he might think we had been conning him, and he might disinherit us for that. As I said, we were too damn young and dumb to realize that it was he who had been conning us. We thought we had to do something to show we really were married. The only thing we could think of was the very obvious thing that usually results from marriage: Have a baby. In our confined circumstance there was absolutely nothing else we could think of to do to prove we were married.

  "As part of our marriage sham we had been sharing a room and bed at the plant. You might think it would have been hard keeping our hands off each other when we were in bed together, but it wasn't hard at all. That just shows you how much we didn't care for each other. And also, every second we were out of bed we were working so hard and much that when we got back into bed, sleep was the only thing we could do. But if in order to keep Alert from disinheriting us we had to have a baby as evidence of our marriage, we had to do more than sleep. So one night we did what we had to do.

  "Usually everybody finds this act relatively enjoyable no matter who they do it with. After all, that's the basis of the oldest profession. But not your mother or me. When we were done doing what you have to do to make babies each of us decided that if that kind of thing were necessary to keep Albert from disinheriting us, it wasn't worth it. Let him keep the company. Our first sexual encounter was mutually disgusting, and we resolved never to do it again. But for your sake, Alice, once is enough if the timing is right. And timing was the only part of our act that was right, so nine months later you were born.

  "As we should have expected if we had had a brain in our heads, baby Alice made no impression on Albert. He kept suggesting he might have to disinherit us. It was his way of keeping us working for free. Finally we had had enough, and we confronted him. Your mother and I didn't like each other, but on this point we saw eye-to-eye. Moreover, despite our mutual dislike, we always were able to work well together, probably because neither of us was ever concerned about hurting the other's feelings by saying exactly what we were thinking. We never had any hesitancy to cut through the polite crap and get right down to the heart of whatever we were doing. So we told Albert we would leave unless we either got some pay or we got a will naming us as the sole heirs for his company. All his lying, wheedling and conniving didn't budge us. Since he certainly wasn't about to pay us, he did the only other thing he could, he sat down and wrote out a will making your mother and I the sole heirs to the company. He had a couple of workers witness his signature, then he folded up the will, stuffed it in an envelope which he sealed, and gave it to us. After that he headed back out on another sales trip.

  "Like I said, we were so young and dumb we didn't realize he could have repudiated or changed his will five minutes after he left. He never did that. Probably because he wasn't expecting to die for a long time. What he did do, however, was something which put our backs against the wall and, if we hadn't been lucky, might have destroyed us. For Albert was using the company as collateral for loans, loans he was getting with his favorite tool, lies. Even though we now expected definitely to eventually inherit the company, all we really stood to inherit was a pile of debts.

  "But we didn't know this. We thought we had won a great victory, that our eventual ownership of the company and therefore our prosperity was assured. So I did a small bit of creative bookkeeping, and with a few dollars which appeared on the books as steak sauce ingredients, I bought a bottle of Champagne. We were going to celebrate our great victory. Your mother drank two glasses and got drunk. She never could hold her liquor. I could, and I finished the bottle myself. Then I was drunk too. It's easy for a couple of exhausted workers who don't like each other to sleep in the same bed without fooling around. But inebriation changes things, and you, Beatrice, owe your existence to that bottle of Champagne.

  "Your mother and I assumed that with the contract from the one big grocery chain the company had reached a stable sustainable size, and it would go on indefinitely at that size. And we were quite satisfied with that. But Albert had no such satisfaction or small ambitions. He looked on our grocery chain contract not as a goal achieved, but rather only as bait for catching his real goa
l. While your mother was carrying you, Beatrice, Albert was using our contract with one grocery chain as a hook with which to snag contracts with other grocery chains. What he did was to hire shills to go into a grocery which wasn't selling our steak sauce and ask for it, explaining that it was available at another grocer's. After a half dozen or so shills had planted the seed suggesting there was a huge demand for Sarah's Scrumptious Sauce, a demand being profitably satisfied by other grocers, Albert would approach management and make his pitch. By the time you were born, Beatrice, we had contracts with a dozen grocery chains.

  "As these contracts kept coming in we had to keep increasing production. We added workers until we had as many as the small plant could accommodate. Then we had to add shifts, one from four AM till noon, and the second from noon till eight. When you were born, Beatrice, it simply wasn't possible for your mother to continue her work at the plant and care for two infants. So that's when we hired Henrietta. She went on the company books as another plant worker, but from the start she was