He remembered Marge Latham and the crazy night of Barbara's wedding when he nosed the Chris-Craft into the boathouse. In the glare from the floodlights the wedding guests could clearly see Yale and Marge standing naked in the boat. He remembered the gasp followed by a titter of laughter from the crowd assembled on the dock. Marge had simply waved good-naturedly and climbed out of the boat, walking past an astonished Pat Marratt, who perhaps for the first time in his life didn't know how to handle a problem.
She had said to her father, "Close your mouth, Daddy, and don't bother to take off your tux jacket. It won't cover the bottom half of me."
Several of the photographers, who had retained their professional grasp, snapped pictures. The flash of bulbs alerted Al Latham. He roared his disapproval, and the forty or fifty guests who had come down to see Pat's Chris-Craft all started to talk at once. Liz wasn't there, but Doctor Amos Tangle and Mrs. Tangle were. Marie Middleton was there with a lot of men and women he had vaguely recognized. Yale remembered with delight their look of shocked disapproval. Thinking back on it, he had been only dimly aware of what was happening. It was Marge who carried it off. Walking naked the agonizing distance from the boathouse to the back kitchen door, followed by a sheepish Yale, and the overtones of utter amazement of the guests who were still prurient enough to follow them en masse back to the house, in a predicament that would have made many women hysterical or wildly tearful, Marge was forcefully prosaic.
"It was very simple. We were hot. We went for a swim. Our clothes fell off the deck and got caught in a current. They drifted downstream before we could rescue them. Now, Mummy, don't get in a tizzy. It's not spoiling the party. No harm done . . . was there, Yale?" She had giggled and pointed at him. "Men are so silly looking, aren't they?"
Marge had known her audience. Sensing that if she showed any concern over the incident, it could have easily caused an histrionic display from her mother and Liz Marratt . . . to the delight of the other female guests . . . Marge, by being delightfully gay and chuckling as she repeated details of what had happened, forced the guests to treat the incident as something they almost wished had happened to them.
Liz had found a summer cotton of Barbara's that fitted Marge perfectly. Yale had put on white flannels and a sport shirt. In a few minutes they were on their way back to the wedding tent, followed by Liz and Marge's mother who shook their heads in wonder at the "crazy younger generation."
"Just get that cat-that-just-swallowed-the-canary look off your face. Act unconcerned," Marge warned him. "My father is ready to blow his top. Your father looks none too pleased. There will be hell to pay tomorrow, but if we keep it funny we've got it licked."
"Was it funny, Marge?" Yale had asked, wondering if their brief passion had touched her.
He remembered Marge had looked at him intently for a minute before she said, "Yeah, it was funny. Considering I wouldn't have minded being the one you really wanted to be with, it was real funny." She grinned at his sad look. "Come on, you dog. That's no way to look. I can name a half dozen fellows who would have been delighted to change places with you."
The next night at dinner Pat had only been briefly angry. "I'm sick of having you make a damned fool of yourself. If Marge Latham hadn't been a lady, last night could have been a real mess. I suspect that there was more to the story than she told. I know about the champagne. I know you were pretty damned drunk. To act that way at your only sister's wedding was inexcusable. I hope you appreciate that if Al Latham and I hadn't acted pretty swiftly, pictures of you and Marge, stark naked, would be circulated in half the newspaper offices in the state." Pat lighted his after dinner cigar. "It's all right to have fun, boy. This time thank God you picked one of our kind. I like Marge Latham. Al Latham is one of the best. It's just damned poor judgment for people with money to get caught off base like that. If this story gets around Midhaven, as it probably will, it will put me in a difficult position with my employees. The same with Al Latham. The man in the street loves that kind of crap. It lowers you down to his level; even below it. When he starts sneering at your morals, he thinks he is your equal. You weaken your position of leadership. A few years from now when you're in a responsible position with the company, you'll understand what I mean."
It was useless to disagree with Pat, although several times during the summer Pat's easy assumption that Harvard Business School and the Marratt Corporation should be ultimate goals for his son brought Yale to a pitch of anger he could scarcely restrain.
As he thought about it, holding Kathie in his arms, Yale realized that his real problem had been that he never had any clean cut plans for himself. For a time his love for Cynthia had helped focus his ideas and give him perspective. With Cynthia gone it simply hadn't mattered what he did. So, in a sense, Pat had won by default. If he could have said, "I want to teach," or "I want to write," if he had insisted with assurance that he really wanted to do these things, he might have escaped. But Cynthia, somehow, had constituted the mainspring of his existence. Over and over again during that summer he had gone over their college life together, trying to find the key that would give him the answer to Cynthia's crazy behavior. He had written letters to New Jersey. He had called her father. But his letters were returned unopened and Dave Carnell had sounded very constrained and distant. Finally, in a one-sided telephone conversation he admitted to Yale that he thought it really was for the best.
Yale knew that "for the best" meant the same thing Pat Marratt had implied when he called Marge Latham "one of our kind." The stupidity of it recalled to Yale the famous phrase about "the east and west." Man certainly had a wealth of jingoistic expressions to hide his ignorance behind.
During that summer he dated Marge Latham and worked in the advertising department of the Marratt Corporation under Bert Walsh. He knew that Pat and Liz were pleased as they never had been before with him. He remembered Liz telling Pat that she hoped "this was it." Pat had said, "When he finishes Harvard Business, I couldn't pick a better girl for him. A fine family."
Yale knew that if he had married Marge Latham, the wedding would have been a small scale merger of monarchies. The powers behind the scenes in Midhaven would have exchanged their blood, and the Marratts would at last be linked to a tradition that was several generations secure. But it hadn't worked out. The numerous times he took Marge out that summer they usually ended up at the bar at Midhaven Yacht Club or the bar of the Country Club, or in some "dive" that was popular, for the moment, with her friends. Marge seemed to have hundreds of friends in the "going steady" or "just married" category whose prime interest in life was sitting at bars, or spending the evenings in dimly lighted cocktail lounges where they drank and smoked and were admired by their male consorts. The conversation was carried on by innuendoes and gossip that presupposed a knowledge of the wealthier Midhaven younger group and their latest escapades; or it dwelt, usually unpleasantly, on the sexual behavior of some absent friend. Beyond the latest dirty joke, the newest hit song, the hot dance band, or the grimy newspaper scandal, these "friends" had little to bind them. Yale found the evenings so dull and sterile that he could keep himself interested only by getting progressively drunk.
Yale made no attempt to explain to Pat and Liz why, after a month of dates, he no longer saw Marge Latham. He knew they wondered . . . that they considered his lonely behavior odd, but since he spent most of his evenings in the house, reading, they had nothing they could really complain about. Liz asked him several times why he didn't go to the Club or why he didn't call up Bee Middleton or Marge Latham or invite some girl . . . any girl . . . to some special summer affair at the Club. He told her that he had lost all interest in girls, and smiled as she looked at him, bewildered. She said, "Well, I'm sure neither Pat nor I want you to end up a bachelor, dear."
She didn't answer when he replied sourly, "Just so long as I don't marry a Jew, a Chinaman or a Negro, you mean. With those alternatives to choose from you would probably prefer that I remain a bachelor."
Ya
le gently pulled his arm out from under Kathie. He looked at her sleeping. Naked . . . her body from ankle to head made a graceful arch. One arm under her pillow, her mouth open slightly, she breathed heavily, dreaming, no doubt, of a time and world lost to her forever. He knew he couldn't sleep tonight. The surprise of seeing Cindar again after nearly five years was still too close to the surface of his mind. Just five or six miles from this room she was sleeping in a trailer with Mat Chilling. If he went back tomorrow might he talk to her alone for a few minutes? Would be dare? Would the words, "I still love you, Cindar . . ." be so close to his lips as to make normal conversation impossible? Why couldn't he, in all this time, have found another woman?
At Harvard Business School there had been no lack of dates. Girls from Radcliffe, girls from Wellesley. Saturday evenings with his roommate, Sam Higgins, at the Latin Quarter or the Cocoanut Grove or out in South Boston at Blinstrubs, and always, each week -- like a man gone mad, searching for something impossible to discover -- he would date a different girl, calling this girl or that girl blindly on recommendations from Sam or some other student. And when the evening was over he knew that it was no fault of the particular girl; it was simply that he was looking for Cynthia again. He was looking for the easy companionship and love that they had enjoyed. A companionship which had become such a thorough blending of personalities that it would take years of effort to achieve it with someone else.
Yale stood on the tiny balcony window of the hotel room. He waved good-naturedly to a woman leaning out a hotel window on the other side of Collins Avenue. The street below was busy with traffic. A continual flow of tourists, soldiers and people in automobiles in search of excitement. The balustrade was high enough to conceal his nudity. The warm night air felt cool and strangely exciting. He wondered at his virility; restored so quickly. He thought of waking Kathie and then decided against it. With the two continent years at Harvard Business School followed by two years as an enlisted man and officer with no sexual experience, it was little wonder that he was so ready. But not again. Even during the few moments he had been with Kathie, brief and uninteresting as they were, he felt that he was somehow separating himself still further from Cynthia.
What a sterile four years they had been, he thought grimly. He remembered the week before he had left Midhaven for Harvard. Pat had called him into his office, and motioned to a chair beside his desk.
"I want you to know that this summer, all in all, I have been pleased with you. You've done a good job working with Bett Walsh. I think you might have got out and played a little golf instead of hanging around the house all the time -- but that will come." Pat offered him a cigar which Yale refused. "I've been thinking about the question of finances. Up to now, you've earned some money in the summer, not a hell of a lot; for the rest -- your clothes, your school, I've doled it out when you needed it. That's all over now. You are twenty-two. I had started this business when I was twenty-one." Pat picked up a check and slid it across his mahogany desk. "There you are. That's it. I'm through coddling you. The next money you get from me will be from my estate. Since I feel damned healthy I wouldn't sit around waiting, if I were you."
Yale remembered looking at the check, astonished. It was made out to him for ten thousand dollars.
"I've talked with one of the Deans. You can pay all your expenses and live comfortably at the Business School for twenty-five hundred a year. Many get through with considerably less. You must have saved at least five hundred this summer. You can work next summer. When you graduate you'll have at least five thousand left. Not a fortune, but five thousand more than I had, when I was your age, and no father to offer me a damned good job."
It was so typical of Pat that Yale could only smile. "I thank you for deciding that you can't own me, forever," he had said. "What bothers me, though, is now that I have money, what makes you think I'll stay at Harvard? I could just take off. Have some fun before the war catches up with the United States. Or I could join the R.A.F. I know a couple of fellows who have."
Pat had chuckled. "You know why I think you'll go through Harvard? Because you know I think that you haven't got the guts. I've got three H.B.S. graduates right here in the plant. They tell me it's a pretty tough course. Seventy hours a week. You may be a Phi Beta Kappa. You may be smart as hell in English and Philosophy but when it comes to business, you don't know which side is up. You're like those damned 'brain trusters' in Washington. Never earned an honest dime in their lives, yet they think they can run the country. Someday Roosevelt and his gang will take the incentive right out of the whole system, and it'll collapse on their thick heads." Pat smoked his cigar. "You think I'm a tough bastard, don't you? Well, I've learned that some men you drive by making them love you; some by making them hate you. Go ahead, it wouldn't surprise me at all if you flew the coop. But you won't fly very far on ten thousand. Keep it in mind." The discussion was over. Yale knew that he was being dismissed as casually as any other Marratt employee.
"I just want to ask you one thing," Yale remembered saying. "If I were engaged to Cynthia, would you have given me this check?"
Pat looked at him coolly and said, "I would never give you carte blanche to marry a Jew. It's obvious the girl had more sense than you have."
Yale remembered the day he arrived at Soldiers Field, and met his roommate Sam Higgins. Sam, the only son of a wealthy New York stockbroker, had listened in dismay to the introductory lecture given by Dean Donham in the Baker Library.
"I don't know," Sam told Yale, as they walked to their room in Gallatin Hall, "I'm not hot on this idea of slaving seventy hours a week. Only damned reason I came here was to please my old man. The way he figures it, I'm only twenty-two. There's absolutely no reason according to him why I should get into the brokerage racket so young. Learn business. Get that M.B.A. degree. That's prestige, he says. I told him, bull! Most of the men who have made a fortune on the street, including him, never went to college, let alone have a master's degree. In the market it's horse sense that counts. They can't teach you that." Sam flopped on the window seat in their room. He stared across the quadrangle at the Charles River. "Don't expect to find me cooling my ass around here every night. I'm going to enjoy a little of this Boston 'poontang.'"
There were as many kinds of reactions to the Dean's welcome as there were men in the first-year class. The lecture had been obviously designed to jar the men out of their easy "college-day" mentality . . . to awake them to the stern reality of graduate school. Yale remembered that as the months went by the pressure both real and imaginary increased until even Sam was studying into the small hours of the morning. Most of the first-year men had responded with the courage of those who refused to be defeated.
Slowly, as Yale spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours poring over business cases, trying to solve problems in accounting, finance, advertising, administration, industrial management, business policy, he began to realize, that while he was capable of doing the work and responding in a manner that would result in high marks, he was not reacting with the same intensity as most of his classmates. Before mid-years he discovered that by sheer concentration, he could memorize the needed facts for any course. By approaching most of the business problem cases with knowledge of human psychology and a general knowledge of the business environment Yale learned that he could "solve" them as effectively as most of his classmates who spent hours toiling in their rooms. In March he gave up taking notes. He rented an Ediphone, dictated his reports on wax cylinders, and had them transcribed by a public stenographer. Teaching the efficient old lady how to type a correct business report was surprisingly easy. She even learned what was expected in the area of terse business English, automatically paring his reports down when he became too verbose.
Sam Higgins watched what was happening with disgust and envy. Yale remembered that he had managed to cut the seventy hours a week required of a career businessman down to about twenty-five hours; a few hours in class, and a couple of hours a day preparation for the coming clas
ses.
"I don't see how in hell you do it," Sam had complained. "Half the evenings you are either reading some damned book on philosophy that you picked up in Harvard Square, or you are going to Symphony Hall. You're no businessman! You are one of those long hairs from the other side of the Charles River. All the rest of us have to grind like bastards, while you are farting around . . . or reading crap. Not even any woman. What in hell makes you tick, Marratt?"
Yale remembered the night he tried to explain himself to Sam. "You see, it isn't that I don't give a damn. I suppose there is a certain interest in running a business, and making it successful, but it's a question of ends and means. If I frighten you, believe me most of the characters around here positively scare me to death. I sit in the back of the classes and watch them literally pour themselves into these business problems. I wonder what motivates them; and then as I think about it, I'm afraid. I know. These are the men of tomorrow! Most of them came here from an engineering college or another business college. Business isn't just a way of life to them. It is life. In a way they are developing themselves into some kind of fantastic super-machines. Believe me, I used to think my father was tough, but he's just one of the old-fashioned kind. In another twenty years, when these boys are running businesses, Pat Marratt will be as useless as a Model T Ford. These bright young wonders will run everything and plan everyone's life with slide rules and I.B.M. machines. Sure, I've learned to use a slide rule, but only in self defense. For these fellows business is real, business is earnest. They thank God for their unconquerable soul. By the nineteen-sixties they'll own the thousand or so companies who do seventy-five percent of all the business in this country. If Yale Marratt came looking for a job from them . . . God forbid . . . they'd quickly analyze him, and with their aptitude tests they'd discover that he might be a genius . . . but, alas, he would have a fatal weakness . . . he wouldn't really believe that all this tempest in a teapot was worth the effort. You see, Sam, I have discovered that it isn't that I don't like business . . . it's just that businessmen with their one-sided, give-it-everything-you've-got approach, bore hell out of me. Which gets me back to ends and means. The end of living for me is to know everything; knowing that I never will, is part of the fun. It adds to the delight to know the search is endless. Most of the people I have met in business, have a very simple goal: they want either power or money. It makes them pretty dull people."
The Rebellion of Yale Marratt Page 25