Executive Suite

by Cameron Hawley

  The fog was clearing. He could think again. Yes, that’s what he had to do … think! It was the only way he could save himself … the way he had always saved himself before … with his mind. The thought of Shaw still ricocheted around in the dark labyrinths of his brain. Another fragment of memory was chipped loose. He had met a woman on Madison Avenue that evening after he’d had dinner with Shaw. Shaw had said she was the biggest stockholder in the company, the inheritor of the Tredway estate. What was her name? Tredway? No, she was married … lived in Millburgh … Julia? Yes, that was it … Julia … Julia … Julia? Suddenly the name flashed … Julia Tredway Prince!

  Bruce Pilcher started across the library again, retracing his path to the telephone booth. He would find some way to get that stock. His mind was working again. That was the important thing … he had always been able to think his way out of tight spots before. He could do it again.

  Everything was all right now. He had himself under control. He was walking the way a man walked when he was under perfect control, slow and steady and even-strided. Near the center of the lobby he passed Andrew coming toward the library with the Final editions flat on his outstretched arms. “Thank you, Andrew,” he said pleasantly. Yes, he was all right now.

  Inside the telephone booth he paused to make absolutely certain that the last trace of fog had left his mind. There was no doubt about it. It had been months since he had met Julia Tredway Prince, yet the moment he had asked his mind to supply her name, there it was. No, there was nothing wrong with his mind. It was functioning perfectly.

  He dialed the operator. “I want to place a long-distance call to Millburgh, Pennsylvania—person to person—Mrs. Julia Tredway Prince.”

  5.40 P.M. EDT

  “You’re quite certain that it’s been three months?” Dr. Marston asked.

  “Three months last Saturday night,” Anne Finnick said, dry-mouthed, not daring to take her eyes from his. “That was the only time.”

  “Then you’re not pregnant.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “By the end of the third month we can determine pregnancy quite easily. If it’s really been three months you have nothing to worry about.”

  A cry of ecstasy rose in her throat but all that escaped her lips was the low animal whimper of a frightened creature being released from the jaws of a trap.

  Blindly, fighting tears, she groped for her purse.

  “You can pay the young lady outside,” he said softly, turning away so she was not forced to show him the tears that could not be fought back.

  “That will be ten dollars,” the girl at the desk said.

  Anne Finnick opened her purse, shielding the opening with her hand, finding a bill from the center of the pack that was less water-stained than the others. She dropped it on the table, started for the door.

  “Your paper,” the girl called after her.

  She turned, hurriedly retrieving the tight-rolled newspaper from the maple settee. It was a Final edition that she had bought half an hour ago. It seemed like half a lifetime.

  4

  MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

  5.44 P.M. EDT

  As Don Walling entered the black marble lobby of the Tredway Tower he glanced up at the great bronze clock and saw that he had wasted a quarter of an hour by his hurried departure from the Pike Street factory. He might have waited ten minutes longer, long enough to have seen at least the start of the first test-run, but he had not dared to gamble that the traffic on South Front Street would be as light as it had proved to be. Once he had gambled and lost. He had not forgotten the expression with which Avery Bullard had greeted him as he had walked into executive committee meeting six minutes late. That had been almost two years ago, soon after he had been made a vice-president, when pleasing Avery Bullard had seemed to be the very essence of living, but the memory still persisted.

  Don Walling was certain that his presence at the meeting couldn’t possibly be as important as staying at the factory to supervise the first test-run of the new molding process. Yet he had not dared to stay. Avery Bullard’s command could not be denied. If there were a chance to talk to Avery Bullard before the meeting, he would be excused … but there would be no chance. The president would start the meeting the moment he entered the door of the directors’ room, talking as he strode to his chair. There would be no way to interrupt, no chance for a pardon. Afterwards, when Avery Bullard found out he would demand, “Damn it, why didn’t you tell me?”… and there would be no way to explain why he hadn’t. There were some things you couldn’t tell Avery Bullard … a great many things … more all the time. There had been a big change in Avery Bullard these last two years.

  If Don Walling had been a highly introspective man—which he was not—he might have understood that at least a part of what he thought of as a change in Avery Bullard was actually a change in his own viewpoint and understanding. These last two years of intimate association had made him see Avery Bullard as something other than the faultless idol that he had once thought him to be. Inwardly, Don Walling had fought against that realization. Even now he hesitated to step across the thin and wavering line that marked the limit of his unswerving loyalty to Avery Bullard. It had been a long journey to that line, a journey that had taken all of his life, a journey over an up-and-down road, alternately high and low with peaks of idolatry and deep valleys of disillusion.

  In the orphans’ home, from the time he was old enough for remembered thought until he was seven, he had dreamed of a father and mother who would some day come and take him from the home. Then one day they had come, both a father and a mother, and they had lifted him to the first peak of his life—but the descent to the valley of disillusion was cruelly swift. A mother, he found, was not the warm source of solace for which his heart had ached, but a strange woman who cried most of the time and insisted that his name was no longer his own name, but that he was now someone else whose name was “MacDonald Walling, the Second.” The man he was to call his father did not turn out to be the joyful companion about whom he dreamed, but a tired-eyed man who smelled of cigars and whiskey and spent the few evenings when he was home watching his wife over the top edge of a face-shielding newspaper.

  Four years later, when he was eleven, after the horror of a night about which he remembered little except the startling redness of blood against the whiteness of the bathtub, and the after-gained knowledge that his foster mother had attempted to commit suicide, he had been taken to Rubble Hill Academy, a boarding school for boys. He never saw his foster parents again. But the next morning he met Mr. Andrews.

  It was Mr. Andrews, the headmaster at Rubble Hill, who told him that he did not have to call himself MacDonald Walling, the Second. Mr. Andrews had proved it by telling him that his own name had been Bartholomew Meade Andrews but now it was simply Bart Andrews. The boy could be Mac Walling or Don Walling, whichever he preferred. He chose Don because Mac was what his foster mother had called his foster father.

  That had been only the first step of the long journey on which Mr. Andrews had piloted young Don Walling. Bart Andrews led him into the world of books and art, of thinking and knowledge, and the excitement of learning. He became the boy’s ideal, his unquestioned leader, the model against which he shaped his own development—until that day of disillusionment when Bart Andrews called him into his office and told him that his foster father had failed to pay his tuition for the next semester and, as an unfortunate but inescapable consequence, Don must leave Rubble Hill. Don Walling learned then that there was a price on friendship. He never saw Mr. Andrews again.

  At Rubble Hill, Don was given five dollars, a railroad ticket, and told to report to a Mr. McIlhenny at the Orphans’ Court in Pittsburgh. He never reported. Lost, wandering down Diamond Street, he saw a group of men loitering in front of an employment agency. He stopped to ask directions but, before his question could be answered, a man opened the door and shouted, “Twenty laborers on a construction job out in Schenley Hill. Anybody wants it, h
old up their hand.” Don held up his hand. He was only seventeen but he was big for his age and no questions were asked. The five dollars went for advance rent on a room. He had no money to buy meals until his first payday. Hungry, he picked a little restaurant near the job and asked for credit. That was how he met Mike Kovales. Mike needed a night dishwasher. Don took the job. For eight hours every day he shoved a wheelbarrow, for almost eight hours every night he washed dishes for Mike. That fall Mike promoted him to a counter man and talked him into going back to high school for his last year. The counter customers at night were mostly architectural students from Carnegie Tech and out of snatches of their overheard conversations, Don Walling built a new dream—he would go to college and become an architect.

  Tech was a disappointment. Don had keyed himself to a high pitch of anticipation in preparation for what he expected to be an intellectual challenge. He did not find it. It was all too easy. The pace was too slow, the demands too light. Weeks were spent on textbooks that he found he could read and understand in a single night. Study problems seemed elementary and unrelated to the actual practice of architecture. He felt that he wasn’t getting anywhere. He stayed on because he didn’t want to be a quitter and because Mike had taken to bragging that “his boy” was going to be a college-graduated architect.

  The second spring, when Don was a sophomore, Mike decided to remodel the restaurant. Because it was a chance to design something that was actually going to be built, Don drew the plan and made a perspective sketch. Mike was pleased and let him supervise the job. Twice a day Don went across the river to Trimmer’s cabinet shop in Allegheny, ostensibly to check on the construction of the booths and counters, but actually to drink in the pleasure of seeing his drawings transformed into polished mahogany. It was an enormously stimulating experience, surpassing in emotional intensity anything he had ever known. He decided that he would specialize in the architectural design of store interiors and, by a quirk of fate, his decision was made on the same week that he met Karl Eric Kassel. According to the double-page advertisement of the Pittsburgh department store whose interior he had just designed, Karl Eric Kassel was “the undisputed leader of the great modern revolution that is sweeping the field of interior design.”

  Karl Eric Kassel came to Pittsburgh to lend his redbearded presence to the store’s grand reopening. He was feted at Schenley Hall with a banquet that crammed the ballroom to its doors. Afterwards, the great man lectured to the Tech students and, to a second round of deafening applause, the chairman’s awed thanks included the announcement of an annual competition for furniture designs in the modern manner. The first prize for each year’s winner would be an opportunity to work as an apprentice in the New York studio of Karl Eric Kassel.

  In his senior year Don Walling won the Karl Eric Kassel competition. After a parting with Mike Kovales that touched him more than he had imagined possible, he left for New York. It was the spring of 1931 and, although he was conscious of what people were beginning to call the “depression,” he was not quite prepared for Karl Eric Kassel’s contention that general business was so bad he would be unable to pay him more than ten dollars a week, plus the privilege of sleeping in the storeroom behind the “studio.” Of course, as Mr. Kassel pointed out, there was the additional compensation of working with Karl Eric Kassel, a privilege that was something quite beyond mundane valuation, particularly since he was now pioneering a whole new field. Karl Eric Kassel was no longer a mere interior designer, he was now a “functional industrial stylist,” prepared to add the selling power of aesthetics to any article “from a mousetrap to a locomotive.” There was no reason, Karl Eric Kassel said, why Don Walling—given time, of course—could not find an “important niche” in this new field.

  For several months Don did not suspect how short that “given time” was to be, nor how important his niche really was. Karl Eric Kassel did not enlighten him. He kept Don’s drawing board heaped with “interesting little problems” and as fast as Don could reduce his problems to paper, Karl Eric Kassel took the drawings away with the uniform comment that they were “rather hopeful for a first attempt.” Several months later, fanning a merchandising trade magazine, Don saw a picture of a newly announced electric range. It was his “solution” of one of Karl Eric Kassel’s “interesting little problems,” line for line without the change of a single detail. The accompanying article quoted the manufacturer as saying, “The $5000 fee which we paid Karl Eric Kassel for the exhaustive design analysis that led to this superlative creation has proved to be a splendid investment.”

  Don, white with anger, was packing when Karl Eric Kassel intercepted his intended flight. What happened then was something for which Don Walling spent most of the next year attempting to excuse himself. Somehow, as the result of a blend of verbal artifice to which he had never been exposed before, he allowed Karl Eric Kassel to talk him into staying. Afterwards, thinking about it and trying to prove to himself that his submission was not the result of a personal weakness, Don told himself that it most assuredly was not because Kassel had given him a hundred-dollar bonus and raised his salary to twenty-five dollars a week. Money didn’t matter. What did influence him, according to the explanation in which he finally found some measure of self-justification, was Karl Eric Kassel’s honest confession that he was a complete charlatan who couldn’t draw a line himself, and that most of the work to which his name had been signed over the years had been done by the stream of talented young men who had been Don’s predecessors.

  The revelation was made all the more effective by Karl Eric Kassel’s sudden dropping of the “Viennese” accent which Don had never suspected had been an actor’s trick. He could not have been more surprised if Karl Eric Kassel had suddenly unhooked his red beard. “Listen, kid, it’s time you learn something about the facts of life,” Karl Eric Kassel had said, dropping not only the accent but all of the well-polished mannerisms with which he had veneered his personality. “You’re a clever boy. You got imagination. You got brains. You got drive. You got guts. You got ambition. Where’s it get you? Lemme tell you—nowhere—not unless you know the facts of life. That’s what I’m trying to teach you. You stick with me and I’ll hand you the front-door key to a gold mine. You think all the gold mines are in the hard rock of the big mountains? No. The biggest gold mine in the world is right inside the hard skulls of all these big-shot businessmen. Ask yourself this—how did they get what they got? How do they make all their dough? Simple. They found something that the public was a sucker for. Right? They make a sucker out of the public—so I turn around and make a sucker out of them. What’s wrong with that? Turnabout’s fair play, isn’t it? Do I give them their money’s worth? Sure—exactly the way they give a woman her money’s worth when they sell her twenty cents worth of perfumed lanolin in a fancy jar for two dollars. Does she kick? No. She’s satisfied. She likes it. All suckers like it. Makes them feel good. That’s the whole secret, boy. These big shots are no different. They like it too. There’s only one thing. They’re big men. They know it. Everything around them’s got to be big. They got to operate in a big way. If they’re going to be a sucker they don’t want to be no small sucker—they got to be a big sucker.

  “You know Mr. A. W. Wilberson, president of C & W Housewares? A very big man. Big in all ways. Let us take a hypothetical situation—very hypothetical. You are not the associate of Karl Eric Kassel—you are only you. You go to see Mr. Wilberson—which is what I mean by hypothetical because when you go there he will not see you. So you write him a letter. You ask him to give you a job at a very large salary like thirty-five dollars a week and in two weeks you will design him a new percolator. What happens? He tears up the letter. Why? He is insulted. That way the new design would only cost him seventy dollars. You have treated him in a small way. That is wrong. You have treated him like a man who is smart enough to want to make a good deal. That is wrong. Also you have treated him with respect. That is wrong. You have made all those mistakes. Now Karl Eric Kassel ste
ps in. I do not make those mistakes. I do not treat him like a smart man. I do not let him know that I have respect for him. I treat him like a sucker. That is what he wants. I give him the red beard. I give him the phony accent. I give him the big name—which is also a phony. I give him the big price. I do not insult him. I give him the chance to be the big sucker. That is what he wants. He likes it. He is willing to pay for it.”

  The appeal of Karl Eric Kassel’s revelation was the appeal of an invitation to sophistication and Don Walling accepted it, somewhat as an adolescent toys with vice, but more as a student who steps over the barriers that separate him from a new field of learning without questioning either purpose or propriety.

  Don Walling learned a great deal in the next ten months as Kassel allowed him to have more and more contact with prospects and clients. Some of what he learned followed the tenets of Karl Eric Kassel’s teaching, some did not. He found some corporation executives of the type that Kassel had described, enough of them to keep a reasonably steady flow of commissions coming into the studio, but Don’s reaction did not parallel Karl Eric Kassel’s. Instead of generating cynicism, these men inspired pity. Most of them, despite their cultivated executive poise, lived with a terrible fear. They were trying desperately to find some way to counteract their own recognized shortcomings through buying talent and judgment to fill the void. What Karl Eric Kassel sold, even more than designs, was an escape from fear. Even if it was temporary, it was something. Even if it failed, it was a try. The “good try,” Don learned was a merit badge in the world of business.