Yale heard one of the reporters say it was "a suicide in a love nest." The reporter grabbed Yale's arm. "Downing shot himself . . . right in front of your sister, kid! Blew his goddamned brains out while she was eating breakfast and daring him to."
Agatha stood up and demanded that the reporters leave the room. "This meeting has not been adjourned," she snarled.
Pat, when he heard that Barbara had been with Paul Downing, paid no attention to Agatha. He told Alfred that he was leaving. Alfred, Jim, and Doctor Tangle followed him out of the office. Baker and Norwell, looking embarrassed, made their excuses, and left. Bessie Martin started to get up, and Agatha told her bluntly to sit down. "This meeting is still in progress. We don't need them anyway. We can issue a directive to them. Well, young Marratt . . . this company needs a President. . . ." She looked at Yale speculatively. "I know it's a shock to you, but don't let this Downing thing get you down. I knew him. I could have predicted that this would happen to him some day. . . ."
Yale looked at her for a moment, "Aunt Agatha, can you predict what will happen to me some day?"
Agatha leaned across the table. She grinned at Yale, and shook her head. "No, but I can tell you you've got a mess on your hands, and it is the kind of a mess that strikes at the fatal flaw in your personality. You've got a company without a president, and you haven't the time or inclination to be president. Unless you pull in an outsider and really clean house, the old-guard here will sabotage you. They will gladly pull the house down around their ears just so long as they can bury you in the mess. So you've got to get rid of them! That will hurt, because it could even mean that my brother or his son could try a Downing stunt . . . if they did, that, I think would demoralize you. You're not tough enough, yet! The other alternative is to liquidate the place. We could get out just dandy. I figure there is six to eight million dollars' worth of inventory even if we sell it below market. There's the two tankers which are nearly completed. There's at least ten million dollars' worth of choice real estate the company owns throughout the city, and there are those oil leases . . . which I have a hunch may be a real bonanza." Agatha stared at Yale. "You don't like it, do you? We could make more in the long run just wiping out the Latham Shipyards, but what happens to your Challenge ideas then? When Lathams is all gone and the couple of thousand people that are working here now are on relief . . . it's going to be kind of hypocritical to spout that Challenge stuff at them." Agatha sat back in her chair and looked at Yale triumphantly.
Sam scratched his head, and even Bessie Martin looked at Yale with interest. Yale walked over to the windows and stared out at the Yards. The noon whistle blew. The whistle you could hear even in the suburbs of Midhaven. He remembered the war years when the ways in the Yards were all occupied, and the lights burned through the night.
"Agatha," he said softly, "you are confusing me with yourself. I have only one reason to make money. It's all written down in that infamous book published by Challenge. What would it gain me to win the earth and lose myself?" Yale smiled. "Agatha . . . you are Chairman of the Board. If you expect to earn Alfred Latham's salary . . . get us a President . . . one who knows how to pull a company off its fat, complacent behind!"
11
When Ralph stopped the car in front of the house, Cynthia ran out, her hair flowing behind her. "Barbara is here," she told them. "Yale, she's on the verge of cracking up. Paul Downing shot himself right in front of her. Oh, my God, Yale, everyone says that you are responsible! What are you going to do?"
Barbara was in the library with Anne and Clara. She was crying. "I couldn't go home," she told Yale bitterly. "Liz will be completely shocked . . . me sleeping with him, and then having him do this. All the reporters know. They were swarming all over the place, interviewing his crew, wanting to know everything . . . O God, it was awful. . . ." Barbara looked haggard. In the lines around her eyes, and the tightness of her lips as she tried to restrain her tears, Yale was surprised to discover a resemblance to Liz.
Barbara opened her pocketbook, and handed Yale a check. She studied his face as he took it. Yale whistled his surprise, "Well, what do you know? Downing came through." He passed the check to Anne and Cynthia. It was made out to Challenge Inc. for three million dollars.
"You have no heart, have you?" Barbara said, tears running down her cheeks. "It doesn't bother you a bit that you drove Paul to do it. You killed him! But all that interests you is that money."
Yale nodded slowly. He wondered for a moment if he were really responsible for Downing's death. The expression of doubt that he saw on Anne's and Cynthia's faces bothered him. What would they think if he told them he had very little sympathy for Downing? There were too many people in the world with cancer eating at their vital organs or heart trouble or lost limbs or eyes . . . people hanging desperately to life who would have gladly traded problems with Downing.
"I guess my Hindu leanings have pre-conditioned me. I fear the willful destruction of life. Downing killing himself is a form of inhumanity . . . masochism. . . ."
Barbara started to sob. Anne murmured, "Yale, that's cruel. You don't know what she has been through. Tell him, Bobby."
Barbara told them how Paul Downing had seen her Sunday evening at the Midhaven Yacht Club. He had been friendly and talked with her. Barbara admitted that she had been "feeling no pain."
"So when he asked me on his boat, I went with him." Barbara looked at Yale defiantly. "Go ahead, say that I'm a tramp. Maybe we've both got bad blood from some ancient ancestor. It's no worse than what you are doing. . . ."
"Except that I am doing it with responsibility," Yale said wryly.
Barbara shrugged. Downing had been very nice to her. Sunday night when she had been very tipsy, he had just undressed her and put her in a bunk. He didn't try any funny stuff. Monday they cruised in Long Island Sound. It was a beautiful boat. Except for a cook and a crew of three they had it to themselves. During the day, while Barbara sunbathed, Downing read Spoken in My Manner.
"He seemed to be very much interested in it," Barbara recalled. "I remember him discussing the Fifth Commandment: the one that says that Challenge believes that no man is pre-conditioned to act by any metaphysical fate or man-conceived determinism. Paul couldn't accept that. He felt that his entire life had been pre-planned for him. I remembered that we used to argue that 'free-will, or not free-will' crap in college, so I egged him on." Barbara looked at Yale ruefully. "It's too bad that you never met Downing. When you got to know him he was really nice."
Yale listened as Barbara told him about her one-day idyll with Downing. He wondered why, when people had discovered for a moment a little of the magic and wonder of living, they didn't work harder to hold onto it. Most people were so completely unaware when they were happy that they abandoned the moment they had already discovered in search of something better. That was what had happened to Downing and Bobby. After a day of delight with each other's thoughts and the warm peacefulness of the wind in their sails and the ocean gliding by underneath them, they docked at a yacht club that Downing was a member of on Long Island Sound. They both proceeded to get thoroughly drunk.
That was when Downing had telephoned Yale. "He didn't really think you would go easy on him, Yale. He believed that you had no choice in the matter. Anyway, he said that if he were in your shoes, he'd have done the same thing."
Yale looked at her curiously. "I know," Barbara said, "you think that leaves you off the hook. I don't believe it. . . ."
"After all," Yale said quietly, "he didn't tell me that he was in such a desperate spot that the only solution would be to kill himself. . . ."
"You wouldn't have believed him," Barbara said.
They returned to Paul's boat about one in the morning. When they were undressed and in bed together, Paul was too drunk to do anything. "He said that it was predetermined that he could never screw me . . . then he passed out. You see, even then he was thinking of killing himself," Barbara said sadly.
During the night, evidently
following Paul's orders, the crew had sailed the yacht back to Midhaven Harbor. This morning, when Barbara had awakened she discovered they were at anchor a few hundred yards off the Midhaven Yacht Club. After she had dressed, and staggered with her head pounding into the sunlight, she found Paul sitting in the fantail. It had been built so that part of it was permanently covered, and part of it covered with a retractable canvas. Paul was slouched in a rattan chair, his feet perched on a cocktail table. He called the steward and ordered breakfast for Barbara. Then she realized that Paul was still drinking. A bottle of Scotch and a half filled glass sat beside his chair within easy reach. Barbara commented on it. He told her that he wasn't hungry.
"He seemed very distant and remote. I tried to talk with him, but he didn't answer me."
After the steward had brought toast and coffee for Barbara, Downing pulled a small revolver out of his coat pocket. "It's predetermined that I do this, Barbara . . . this is the direction my life has been heading ever since I was born. . . ."
She had looked at him astonished, and told him that it was no joke to kid about taking your life. When he told her he wasn't kidding, that within the next ten or fifteen minutes he was going to kill himself, Barbara told him that he would look good with a hole in his head.
She asked him why wait? Do it now. She told him that he was just being overdramatic, feeling sorry for himself because he had been impotent last night. She told him that people who talked about such things never did them.
"I'm sorry it has to be this way, Bobby," Paul told her mildly, not taking offense at her bitter kidding. "You might say that this business with Lathams is just the straw that broke that camel's back. Last night, too. And maybe that damned book of your brother's has affected me. Anyway, last night I saw myself as a sixty-year-old lecher trying to climb into bed with a woman half my years." He told Barbara that she was too nice a person to get herself mixed up with him. "I'm a bastard," he said. "I'd have screwed you for a while, and then got sick of you. . . . As for your brother . . . I don't know him, but anyone who has the nerve to do what he is doing deserves help. I could kill myself, and Yale would find my estate so fouled up he would never get his hold-up price on the Latham stock . . . or if he did it would take years. I've been in town while you were sleeping this morning. . . ." He gave Barbara the certified check.
Barbara was still kidding him, laughing at him, telling him that he was just trying to make her feel sorry for him, when he held the revolver up to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
Barbara shuddered. "God! What a horrible thing! There he was alive, talking to me, and then a second later he was sprawled on the deck, dead. Bleeding! I screamed and screamed and screamed." Barbara was silent, sobbing in body-wracking heaves. Cynthia suggested that they give her a sedative. She and Anne took Barbara upstairs, telling her that she could stay with them as long as she wished.
"Reminds me of a poem by a young poet I used to know, years ago," Agatha said, bemused. "When I lived in Cambridge . . . Eddy Robinson . . . people don't read him much today.
So on he worked, and waited for the light, and went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night went home and put a bullet through his head.
I used to ask Eddy what he meant by meat and the bread. Do you know, Yale Marratt?"
Alfred Latham wasted no time in bending the story of Downing's suicide to fit his purpose. Peoples McGroaty called Yale and told him that he felt as if he were an unarmed neutral caught between opposing armies. "They are playing the whole deal for all it is worth, Yale. I got a release this morning from Alfred that has been given out to all the news services."
He read parts of it to Yale:
"Yale Marratt, a young, wet-behind-the-ears speculator, and Agatha Latham, a woman approaching eighty-one years of age, today voted themselves as Director and Chairman of the Board respectively of the Latham Shipyards . . ."
Yale heard Peoples cluck unhappily on his end of the phone. "Listen to this," he read: "There is no coincidence in the suicide of Paul Downing this morning, and this despicable raiding of a strong, well-established business. Young Marratt, a ruthless, irresponsible, new breed of businessman, better known as a corporate pirate; a man who is a disgrace to the investment and business world, is directly responsible for the suicide of Paul Downing. The tax-dodge outfit that is controlled by Marratt and two women who parade under the Marratt name . . . called Challenge Incorporated . . . deliberately put Downing on the spot just as truly as modern gangsters put their victims on the spot."
"I don't like it, Yale," Peoples said, and his voice sounded doubtful. "Listen to this, and don't forget that this stuff is going to get a coast-to-coast play. It has the kind of drama that sells newspapers." Peoples continued to read to him. "How this young Marratt obtained his start in amassing a fortune estimated at three or four million dollars is a complete mystery. Alfred Latham declared today that he had it on responsible authority from young Marratt's father, who is well known in Midhaven and respected throughout the business world, that other than his pay as Lieutenant in the Finance Department of the U.S. Army and ten thousand dollars that Patrick Marratt had given him in 1939, young Marratt had no honest source of funds . . . that other than the time spent in the Army, Yale Marratt has never worked in his life."
Peoples sighed, "Don't you see what they are trying to do, Yale? They are intimating that you might have been robbing the Government."
"Don't worry," Yale chuckled. "If the General Accounting Office reviews my Army transactions, they'll find them clean as a whistle."
"It won't be the General Accounting Office. . . ." Peoples warned him, "it will be the Internal Revenue."
Yale told him that he had a splendid tax lawyer and accountant. Challenge was in excellent shape.
"You don't understand," Peoples said. "I admire what you are trying to do with Challenge. But your father and Alfred Latham will try to cast doubts as to your honesty . . . maybe even your sanity. When a respected, influential citizen calls you a thief, the general public begins to think you are one. I'm afraid that when they get through, your name will be mud in this city. You won't be able to change the impression later even if you manage to prove your honesty. Listen to this: 'Although the stockholders' meeting was interrupted by the announcement of the death of Paul Downing, Alfred Latham stated today that it was reliably reported to him that young Marratt and Agatha Latham were considering the possible liquidation of the Latham Shipyards. This would be necessary, Alfred Latham stated, in any event, since the new controlling interest had been unable to elect a President from the present employees or directors. Since it is impossible to run the Latham Shipyards without intimate knowledge of local conditions, it is apparent that the people of Midhaven, and the businesses in this city that depend on Latham for their livelihood, will face the future without a Latham Shipyards.'" Peoples was silent, and then he asked Yale if it were true that he and Agatha would liquidate the Yards.
"Look, Peoples, I sense throughout this one-sided conversation that you, too, are a victim of Alfred Latham's nonsense. That disturbs me more than anything. Let me tell you that Agatha and I have absolutely no intention of liquidating the Latham Shipyards. I'm demanding that you print that."
Before the evening was over Yale wearily told the telephone operator that he couldn't take any more telephone calls, but before he managed to call a halt to them, he had patiently explained his position to the owners of several of the larger stores in Midhaven, as well as a number of small businessmen who assured him that the collapse of the Latham Shipyards would mean the end of their enterprises. One anonymous caller shouted at him angrily and accused him of not only planning to ruin the city of Midhaven, but the entire Christian world with his vile book. To dare to call his cheap and orgiastic ideas Commandments was a crime against God. He would be punished everlastingly. The last call that he accepted was a menacing voice that abruptly warned him that if the Latham Shipyards were closed down, his life wouldn't be "wor
th a cent" in the city of Midhaven. The voice was calling him a dirty son-of-a-bitch when he hung up.
Cynthia and Anne listened silently to some of the calls on the extension telephone. When Yale finally refused to take any further telephone calls, he noticed that Cynthia had walked away from the phone, and was sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands. He lifted her face and looked at her tear-stained cheeks.
"Our little private world is crumbling, isn't it, Yale? Starting tomorrow we stop living for the three of us, and devote our lives to the great public who will hate us for being happy, and spit on us for trying to tell them how to be happy. Doesn't it frighten you, Yale?" Cynthia brushed the tears from her eyes. She looked at Anne who was listening to her. "Neither of you seems to realize it. Maybe because you don't know what it is to be one of the 'minority.' We will be hated for the same reason that Jews are hated . . . because we have set ourselves apart." Cynthia smiled sadly. "Whether you realize it or not, Yale, the First Commandment of Challenge that states that Man is God, denies the need for Christ, and puts us in a position equivalent to the Jews. We are going to be in trouble, Yale . . . I just know it. We are providing people with just the kind of whipping boy they need. People like conflict. It's an antidote to boredom. I've been through it with Mat. Being horrified with us and what we are doing will help them keep their minds off their own boring lives. People don't want to be challenged. Socrates proved that. It's too demanding for them."
"What about the people who are buying the book? I don't expect to reach everyone." Yale rubbed his eyes in weariness. "A few hundred thousand seems like a pretty good start to me."
"Maybe it's just a fad . . maybe they are not buying the book because they agree with us but because it is something to talk about." Anne looked at Yale in thought. "Maybe we shouldn't push it so hard, Yale. I don't think that either Cynthia or I realized that you were going to stir up such a commotion with this Latham business. I think one thing at a time is all that we can handle." Anne wanted to say "handle emotionally," but Yale looked so dejected that she rumpled his hair. "We're with you, honey. It just may be good judgment to go a little slower."
The Rebellion of Yale Marratt Page 59