Executive Suite

by Cameron Hawley

  “This month will be worse,” Agnes Smith added. “All these June weddings.”

  “The way it is with us, weddings aren’t as bad as funerals.”

  “No, I guess that’s right.”

  The subject was exhausted and the three women sat in a silence broken only by the blare of the radio from the sun porch where the three men had isolated themselves.

  “Jim, honey,” Mildred Willoughby called. “Couldn’t you turn the radio down just a teeny little bit?”

  “Waiting for the ball scores, sweetie,” Jim Willoughby called back. “Be on in a minute now. Got a bet on with Fred here and I’m not going to miss taking the old skinflint’s money away from him.”

  He thrust his moon face around the corner so that all of the ladies could see him wink. “Fred’s got some big money riding on the Yanks today—a whole dime!”

  Everyone laughed. Fred Alderson’s penuriousness was a thin-stretched joke, but no thinner than the others that someone else would dutifully remake before the evening was over.

  Edith Alderson, watching her husband through the open door, was pleased to see that he smiled. Fred had seemed unusually worn and tired when he had come home tonight, almost as if he were having that old prostate trouble again.

  “Oh, Edith?” Agnes called gently.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you—”

  Whatever she was about to ask was not asked. An imperative command for attention suddenly cut into the radio’s music stream.

  “We interrupt this program,” the voice said dramatically, “to bring you an important news bulletin. We have received a flash from the Associated Press that Avery Bullard died this afternoon in New York. I repeat—we have received a flash that Avery Bullard died this afternoon in New York. That’s all we know at this moment. We will bring you additional news as soon as it’s received. Keep tuned to this station for the latest developments.”

  The music cut back in the middle of a phrase. Someone snapped the switch and there was stunned silence in the two rooms.

  All eyes were on Frederick Alderson. He stood in the middle of the sun porch floor, his thin body wavering ever so slightly as if to hint that he might faint. Edith hurried to his side.

  Mildred Willoughby whispered. “You remember what I was talking about just before it happened—funerals?”

  Agnes nodded, awed. “You’d almost think it was presentiment.”

  “How old was he, Fred?” Jim Willoughby asked, asking the thing that was always asked.

  Frederick Alderson moved his lips but there was no sound at first. Then the slow words came. “He was five years younger than I am—only fifty-six.”

  “We’ll have to go,” Edith Alderson said in quick decision. “I’m sorry, Mildred, but I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  “Of course. I understand.”

  “Yes—yes, we’ll have to go,” Frederick Alderson said.

  Jim brought his hat and Edith went back to the living room for her purse.

  “If there’s anything I can do—” George Smith said and the others repeated the phrase, standing in a stiff little semicircle at the door.

  “I’ll let you know,” Edith Alderson said. Then, her hand on his arm, she guided her husband through the door.

  The telephone was ringing and Mildred Willoughby answered it. “Who?—oh, yes, Mrs. Walling—yes, they were here but they just left—yes, we heard it on the radio—yes, they know—not at all, Mrs. Walling. Thank you for calling.”

  “That was Mrs. Walling to tell Fred and Edith,” she explained.

  “Looked like it hit Fred pretty hard,” George Smith said solemnly.

  “Yeh, a thing like that hits you,” Willoughby said. “I know how it was when Mr. Payne went. Same thing. Heart trouble. Went just like that.”

  “He’d been mowing the lawn that morning,” Agnes broke in. “Mr. Payne always insisted on mowing his own lawn.”

  “That’s why I don’t let George mow ours,” Mildred puffed. “Or shovel our snow either. Well, if everyone’s ready I guess we might as well sit down. I’ll just have to leave Fred and Edith’s places. The table’s all set that way now.”

  George held his wife’s chair and then, still standing, looked across the table. “I’ve been thinking, Jim—you know what this means for Fred?”

  “For Fred?”

  “He’ll be the president of the company now, won’t he?”

  “Say, that’s right. Guess he will.”

  “Do you really think so, George?” Agnes asked. “I thought it would be that Mr. Dudley.”

  “Goodness, isn’t he the handsomest man!” Mildred said.

  George frowned. “If you want my opinion, I’d say it would be Fred.”

  “It would be nice for Edith,” Agnes said. “Goodness knows she deserves it and I never have cared much for that Dudley woman’s ways.”

  “You can say that again,” Mildred said, raising her spoon like a conductor’s baton. The spoon plunged into her fruit cup and the dinner was on.

  9000 FT. OVER ALTOONA, PENNSYLVANIA

  7.22 P.M. EDT

  If the advertising manager of Trans National Airlines had been aboard the flight, his professional alertness would have demanded a color photograph of the gentleman in Seat 9. There, beyond the slightest doubt, was the perfect illustration for an advertisement that would convince readers of the mass magazines that TNA was the choice of the nation’s most distinguished men. No model agency could possibly have supplied a man who radiated that same aura of true distinction, a man so unquestionably born to the purple, a man whom one and all would instantly accept as a visual representation of the thin top-cut of American aristocracy. No one, even the most discerning, would suspect that the gentleman in Seat 9 was anything but what his appearance credited him with being.

  The gentleman in Seat 9 was J. Walter Dudley. The unsuspected truth was that he had been born in a side-road village in Iowa, the son of a down-at-the-heels veterinarian who hated his life. “Doc” Dudley had dreamed of being a famous surgeon but, after failing in an attempt to work his way through medical school, he had made the veterinary profession a reluctant second choice. In a compounding of misfortune, his lack of satisfaction contributed to a bitterness that alienated the farmers and stockmen upon whom he was forced to depend for his livelihood.

  Young Walter’s mother had done her best to make her husband act in a manner that would make the farmers like him. Her efforts had little or no effect upon “Doc” Dudley, but they had created an atmosphere in which her son learned—as only the young can learn before they know they are being taught—that “getting along with people” was the most important thing in life.

  Afterwards, when Walter was old enough to appreciate the extent of his father’s failure, he attributed it all to the old man’s inexcusable negligence in making people like him. It did not occur to Walter to soften his indictment on the grounds that the castration of pigs, from which his father earned most of what little income he had, was a frustratingly inadequate fulfillment of the dream of being a great surgeon. That did not occur to Walter because he was not, even as a boy, a dreamer.

  The nature of young Walter’s mind was well adapted to the process of learning and he always made good marks in school. It was easy for him to store away all that he read and heard and, since his carefully ordered memories were never disturbed by imaginative whirlwinds, all that he filed away in his mind was ready and waiting to be recalled when the need for the fact arose. His teachers, particularly those who taught by the transplantation of things to be remembered—and they were in the majority—thought of him as an “excellent student.” He graduated as the second-ranking student in a class of twenty-two high school seniors. What minor disappointment he felt in failing to become the valedictorian was more than outweighed by his election as class president and his designation as “Most Popular Senior” in the high school annual.

  Walter Dudley’s experience with football was in the pattern to
which his life had already been shaped. His nature did not incline him toward competitive sports, particularly those involving bodily contact, but in a small school where there were hardly enough boys to fill the required eleven uniforms, his participation was inevitable. He had been large for his age—six feet one and a hundred and ninety pounds—and not playing would have jeopardized his friendship with the entire student body.

  He derived little pleasure from the game itself. His body had an essential softness that no amount of training seemed to dissipate, and he was more than usually sensitive to bodily pain. Some of the other boys obviously reveled in the physical satisfaction of a crashing tackle, but to Walter Dudley it was something to be endured as a price that must be paid for the approval of his team mates, the privilege of joining in the rich-tongued banter of the dressing room, and the joy of being included in the circle around the pep-talking coach just before they ran on the field to the welcoming cheers of every person in town.

  No one ever knew that Walter was afraid. He did not flinch. He was driven—as the fear-filled sometimes are—to desperately serious effort. In his junior year he was elected captain of the team and, in his senior year, his name appeared in a Des Moines newspaper as an honorable-mention tackle on the all-state high school team. No one from the school had ever achieved an equivalent honor and a special assembly was called for the presentation of his gold football. What Walt remembered, long after the gold football had revealed itself as tarnished brass, was the entire student body rising to sing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  Walter Dudley went to college that fall on a scholarship supported by a group of alumni who had selected him as a promising recruit for the football squad. It was evident after the first few weeks of early training that Walter was not of varsity caliber, but he punished himself unmercifully in an attempt to make enough of a showing so that his sponsors would not think badly of him. It was more of a relief than he could admit, even to himself, when he finally cracked a collarbone on a tackling dummy and was barred from active practice. His association with the football team, however, was not broken. His board-and-room job was the care of The Sanctum, a room on the second floor of the field house that was reserved as a clubroom for the lettermen. To all others, none of whom was allowed to cross its threshold. The Sanctum was a place of intriguing glamor. Actually it was a bleak room, gray-brown and eternally musty, furnished only with battered tables and castoff chairs. Before the collarbone incident the lettermen had insisted that Walt acquire some new furniture, a demand that he had rightfully shrugged off as a mild form of hazing. Afterwards, in gratitude for the fact that the lettermen still allowed him to come in and clean up the incriminating evidence which the cigarette smokers left behind, he began to forage in earnest. That was how he met Bernie Sulzman.

  Bernie was a man of ideas. He ran a new and second-hand furniture store on College Avenue. When Walt approached him for a donation of furniture Bernie quickly made a counterproposal. Why not, he suggested, solicit the old lettermen among the alumni for donations to buy the furniture to which Bernie would attach, at no extra charge, a brass plate engraved with the name of the donor? Walt got the list, wrote the letters, and within a month The Sanctum was furnished with twenty-six new chairs, two leather davenports, four table desks, and an icebox. The lettermen awarded Walt Dudley a key to The Sanctum and he became, for the rest of his college career, the only non-letterman ever to have the full privileges of the clubroom.

  The story of Walt Dudley’s money-raising prowess spread over the campus and he was appointed to the advertising sales staff of both the newspaper and the annual. In his junior year he was elected not only class president but also business manager of the annual, an unprecedented doubling of honors. His name had become magic on a ballot. Everybody liked Walt Dudley.

  In terms of his afterlife, the most important thing that happened during his college years was his continued association with Bernie Sulzman. After his success with The Sanctum project, Bernie offered him a chance to sell furniture to students who were dissatisfied with the sparse furnishings of the fraternity houses and dormitories. Walt’s commissions paid for most of his college education and, more to the point, he began to learn the furniture business.

  It was Bernie who suggested, after his graduation, that Walt get a job as a wholesale furniture salesman and it was Bernie’s recommendation, more than his own diploma or college record, that got him his chance as a junior salesman with A. B. Poindexter, sales agent in the Minneapolis area for the Tredway Furniture Company.

  Six years later, Walter Dudley had made enough of a mark so that he was singled out by Avery Bullard, who was then sales manager of Tredway Furniture, and encouraged to establish a sales agency of his own in Kansas City. In 1936, after the Tredway Corporation was formed, he closed his own agency and joined the corporation as a district sales manager. After a number of moves, all of them upward, he had been named Western Sales Manager with headquarters in Chicago. In 1945 he had been brought back to Millburgh and made Vice-President for Sales.

  At fifty-three, J. Walter Dudley was probably the best-known man in the entire furniture industry. His memory for names and faces was phenomenal. At one Chicago market, standing at the door of Tredway’s display space in the Merchandise Mart, two bystanding salesmen had actually kept a count and heard him greet two hundred and eighteen furniture store owners and buyers by name before he was confronted by an individual whose name he did not know. There were hundreds of furniture merchants who would not have thought a market visit complete without having had the opportunity to shake hands with good old Walt Dudley.

  In retrospect, J. Walter Dudley’s life seemed to have followed such an unvarying line that fate appeared to have ruled the course with a straightedge. Actually, he had followed no conscious course. In all his years he had wasted a bare handful of hours worrying about his future. He was completely honest when he advised his young salesmen, “Work—that’s the answer! Just keep working and don’t worry. Don’t watch the goal posts—keep your eye on the ball! If you’re in there all the time, hitting that old line, you’ll score a touchdown sooner or later.”

  He practiced what he preached. His talent for making friends, coupled with his memory, were important assets but neither ability would have been effective without his never-failing store of energy. When he traveled with salesmen, which he frequently did, he demanded a schedule that started the day with an early-opening store and carried through at a pounding pace until they finally wound up at some neighborhood shop that was open in the evenings. Then there would be a hotel room session until midnight. As he moved across the country, J. Walter Dudley left behind him a trail of worn and astounded salesmen who, when they met afterwards to compare notes, would acknowledge that he was a phenomenon beyond understanding.

  If J. Walter Dudley’s driving energy was beyond the understanding of his salesmen, it was equally true that it was beyond his own. He himself did not know the source, nor did he waste time in searching for it. His motivation was not—though others often found it hard to believe—the fire of calculated ambition. He was a runner who ran without a goal. Running was his way of life. If you ran hard, and made enough friends, everything would work out all right.

  There had been only two people in J. Walter Dudley’s life who had ever worried him by seeming, at times, to withhold their total friendship. One was Avery Bullard—the other was his wife Katherine.

  Marriage had been no departure from the straight line course of Walter Dudley’s life. He met Katherine that first year after college. She was the daughter of a friend of Mr. Poindexter and lived in a near-mansion that fronted on Lake of the Isles. It was in that house that Walter entered the final phase of his education. There he drank his first cocktail, wore his first tuxedo, and learned the amenities of upper-level social life. He was a good student and adapted himself with an ease that confirmed Katherine’s estimate that he was the most likely candidate left among the original prospects who had not yet di
scovered her two shortcomings—first, that her father was considerably less affluent than he appeared to be and second, that she was, if not totally lacking in sexual desire, at least considerably below the expectations of her experienced trial suitors. Walt, fortunately, was a man without experience. They were married the next June.

  Afterwards, in the earlier years of their married life, he was occasionally troubled by his wife’s failure to respond to him but, before it became of too serious concern, he found that his own desire was waning and, rather than risk embarrassment, his advances were held to a minimum. Every year the minimum had become less and less. There had been no children.

  His business relationships with Avery Bullard had actually caused him more concern than his intimate relationships with his wife. There, too, he had suffered from the fault of infrequency. Before the move to Millburgh, he had seen Avery Bullard no oftener than two or three times each year and, since the subject of their meetings was frequently a promotion or a salary raise, he had naturally come to think of Mr. Bullard as a perpetually pleasant man and one of the warmest of his many friends.

  After he had moved to Millburgh, almost daily contact with Avery Bullard had brought a frightening revelation. Always before, Walt Dudley had been able to solve all of his problems with the friend-making process that he thought of as “salesmanship.” Avery Bullard was shockingly unsusceptible. He was pleasant enough, as a rule, but his questioning was perpetual and he would not accept pleasant generalities as answers. To compound the difficulty, most of Mr. Bullard’s demands were for facts about the future. In J. Walter Dudley’s dreamless mind, the future was without dimension. He was like a soldier who, having spent his whole career facing only the close-up realities of hand-to-hand combat, is suddenly called upon to return to a headquarters desk and asked to plan the whole strategy of major battles to be fought at some indeterminate time, over an unknown terrain, with weapons not yet invented.