In the earlier years of her married life, Mary Walling had tried to explain the unexplainable by telling herself that Don was the “artistic” type, a conclusion that was supported not only by his art training and obvious ability as a designer, but also by her memory of her psychology courses in which she had been taught that the truly creative mind seldom indulged in purely deductive thinking. Unfortunately, there still remained the unexplainable corollary, recited in the same textbook, that the artistic creative mind was at the opposite pole from the type of mind that could fulfill the requirements demanded of the modern business executive. Don was most certainly successful in business, not only as a designer and inventor—which was explainable in terms of his creative ability—but also in other ways for which there was no ready explanation. Her own judgment of her husband’s oddly disparate abilities was admittedly subject to prejudice, but it had been confirmed time after time, most recently and vividly by the suit over the patents on a method of extruding a plastic coating on the steel tubing used for metal furniture. Prior to the suit, she was quite certain that Don had little if any knowledge of patent law. He had dragged home an armful of books and, anxious to assist him, she had volunteered to search out and index pertinent references. He had side-stepped the offer and, much to her concern, had idly leafed through the pages, not making a single note. Yet at the cocktail party at the Federal Club where the court victory had been celebrated, the senior partner of the Wilmington law firm that had handled the case for Tredway had cornered her and said, “Mrs. Walling, that husband of yours missed his calling. He has one of the best legal minds that I’ve ever encountered in a layman—superior, I might even say, to those of many of my own colleagues at the bar.” She had known that it couldn’t be completely true—the predominant characteristic of the “legal mind” was its capacity for the exercise of pure logic—yet there was enough truth to deepen the eternal mystery of what actually went on inside her husband’s brain.
Tonight, she had expected Don to return home in an extension of the mood in which he had left, fog-minded by the shocking impact of Avery Bullard’s death. Awaiting his arrival, she had stocked her mind with the things that she might say to assuage his grief. None of those things had been said. They had talked for over an hour and Avery Bullard’s death had not been directly mentioned. She knew that Don’s grief was still there but it seemed so deep-buried now that it could not be raised. She was not surprised—there had been other cases before where the same thing had happened—but acceptance did not supply understanding. When something important dropped into the clear quiet pool of her own mind, the surface was rippled for days. When that same heavy stone dropped into Don’s mind there was only the quick first splash that a falling rock made in stormy water and then the waves erased the splash. But she knew that the stone still lay heavy on the bottom of the pool.
They had talked tonight about who would be the new president of the Tredway Corporation, not in the orderly and coherent way that she wanted to talk, but in the disconnected way that was demanded by the oddly assorted scraps of his conversation. Pieced together, she had made out that Alderson was out of the race and that Grimm was to be elected, not because of any special qualifications that he possessed, but because he was the one candidate who could defeat Shaw. The votes for Grimm would be votes against Shaw.
How different all of this was, she thought, from the world of big business that she had pictured when she had studied business administration back at the university. In her student days she had thought of the large corporation as a highly organized functioning of economic law, administered by a race of supermen endowed with a combination of the characteristics of the Dean of the School of Business Administration, the Professor of Economics, and the Associate Professor of Statistical Analysis. She could still vividly recall, during the early years of her marriage, the difficulty she had experienced in trying to make what Don told her about the Tredway Corporation fit the pattern that her textbooks had laid out. The bits of evidence that she gleaned from his offhand remarks made the company appear to be a disorganized, fumbling, and decidedly inefficient enterprise. The major executives seemed to be a quite ordinary group of men, disconcertingly human in their limited capacity for high-order thinking and far too given to the man-on-the-street practice of basing decisions on hunch and intuition rather than upon scientifically established fact.
The confusing end point of all that she learned was the seemingly contradictory fact that the Tredway Corporation was undeniably successful. Furthermore, the executives of other corporations, whom she met occasionally, seemed in no way superior to the Tredway officers. Nevertheless, she had felt a certain justification of her opinion when Don had told her one night that Avery Bullard had retained a firm of management consultants to make a study of the corporation’s organization structure and management methods. Her vindication had seemed even stronger some months later when Loren Shaw, who had supervised the study, was employed by the company and made a vice-president. The circumstances had given her a predilection for liking Mr. Shaw and, in addition, she found him an interesting man. He was widely informed, had a keen mind, and a marked ability to think in a clear and logical manner. Despite the fact that she had no particular liking for Shaw’s wife, Evelyn, she had begun to think of the Shaws as potentially close friends when, to her surprise, she had suddenly been faced with the fact that Don disliked Loren Shaw intensely. She had thought at first that it might be because he disagreed with some of the recommendations that Shaw had made in the management consultant’s report, but that had not proved to be the case. Don had been in substantial agreement with most of the suggested changes. His dislike of Shaw was something else, another of those inexplicable things that happened inside that strangely unfathomable mind.
Now, lying in the darkness, she tried again to probe the mystery of Don’s feeling toward Loren Shaw. She was driven by no urgency of discovery because she knew that nothing she might conclude would have any effect on Don’s attitude. What made her pursue the subject again, after not having thought about it for a long time, was the still lurking fear—largely subconscious—that her husband’s dislike of Loren Shaw was a reflection upon herself because she found him an interesting man. She saw him rarely now, except at the larger parties, because they had long since allowed their social relationship with the Shaws to lapse, but, a few weeks before, at one of the Dudley’s big dinner parties, she had been seated next to Loren Shaw and had enjoyed the experience. At the very least, Loren Shaw’s wide-roving interest and the sharpness of his mind were clearly preferable to Jesse Grimm’s clamlike taciturnity, Fred Alderson’s piously unbroken preoccupation with the affairs of the company, or Walt Dudley’s perpetual desire to be the life of the party.
“Asleep?”
Don’s wide-awake whisper seemed as loud as a shout and she felt a moment of unreasonable embarrassment as if her privacy had been rudely invaded.
“No. Can’t you sleep, dear?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
The breaking of the stillness let the night sounds drift in through the open windows. She heard someone walking up the road whistling, adding incongruous trills and off-key variations to the scarcely recognizable melody of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Out of the stillness her ears picked up a sound that it had rejected before, the throbbing of the engine in the pumping station way up on Ridge Road, a distant bark in slow four-four time with a deeper rain-barrel cough on the downbeat.
“I didn’t know you were awake,” she whispered.
“Lot to think about tonight.”
“I know.” Reaching out, she found his hand and the hard grip of his fingers was a thrilling reassurance of the intimacy they shared.
“Can’t get Fred off my mind,” he said impatiently, as if the attempt had built a background of annoyance. “Don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about him.”
“Did you really want him to take the presidency, Don?”
“No, not that,” he said with sharp di
smissal. “It’s just that—you know, it’s a pitiful thing to see a man like Fred want something as much as he wanted the presidency, and then sit there and watch him take that horrible beating—punch-drunk—groggy—like an old fighter that just doesn’t have it any more.”
“Did he ever have it, Don?”
“Sure. If it hadn’t been for Fred—” His voice cut off as if he had suddenly discovered that what he had planned to say was either unthinkable or unsayable. “Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It’s hard to separate him from Avery Bullard. They were so close you can’t figure out for sure what was Fred’s and what was Mr. Bullard’s. I guess that’s what I was thinking about really. You know, it’s an awful thing to let anyone come into your life and mean so much to you that when you lose them you lose yourself.”
Her flinch came so quickly that she could not prevent the shiver from running down her arm and into her hand.
“What’s the matter?” he asked in quick concern.
“Nothing, dear. I—”
“Something bothered you. What?”
“It doesn’t matter. I know you didn’t mean it that way. I’m just being silly.”
“Mean what?”
She made a laugh run ahead of her voice. “That you mustn’t let anyone else come into your life and mean so much to you that—”
His lips smothered the words. “Mary, you know I didn’t mean—”
Their lips parted just long enough for her to say, “Of course I know, but if I ever lost you—”
“Don’t worry, you won’t.” His voice was roughly male, more caressing than softness could have been.
She pulled back, feeling the warm glow that was spreading through her body. “No—no, Don, no.”
“No what?”
“Darling, please—I wasn’t tricking you into making love to me.”
“Why not?” His hand ran over her and she was trembling and vibrant. She pushed his hand away. “Go to sleep.”
“Why?” The word was a throaty bass note.
“No!”
The bass note was in his low laugh. “You’re being a very enticing little bitch.”
She reacted instantly. “What a horrible thing to—” and then she was struggling against his word-smothering kiss again until the struggle became its own defeat.
He lifted his lips to let her say, “Am I really as bad as that?”
“As what?”
“What you said.”
“What did I say?”
“You know.”
“Tell me,” he teased.
“I couldn’t”—but there was something that forced her lips to his ear and made her whisper the word.
“Yes, you are!” he said fiercely, twisting her body and crushing her to him. “Damn it, Mary, I wish there were some way to make you understand, once and for all, that I’ll never stop loving you.”
“I don’t want it to be once and for all,” she whispered. “I want you to keep telling me—over and over and over.”
She could feel his lips moving silently to the words “I love you” as he kissed her.
“Darling, if there’s any time when you don’t will you promise to tell me?”
“There never will be.”
“Promise me—there are so many times when I’m afraid. Darling, you’re such a mystery to me—I want to help you—I want to think the way you think—but when I’m close to you I can’t think—all I want is to be a part of you—”
And then she was a part of him through a timeless oblivion and when she could hear the night sounds again the sound that she heard first was his deep-sleep breathing.
She felt as if she were eternally awake, as if she could never sleep again, nor even want to sleep again. She knew now, as she had never known before, that there was nothing more important to him than she was. He had never wanted her as much as he had wanted her tonight … tonight of all nights.
11.56 P.M. EDT
Dwight Prince faced the necessity of making a decision, a prospect that he never found pleasant. He stood in the hallway facing the closed door of the bedroom that he usually shared with his wife. He was confronted with two alternative courses of action—he could either open the door or not open the door. If he chose the latter alternative, he would have to sleep alone in the front guest room. If he chose the former, he might find himself an unwelcome intruder. Julia had obviously wanted to be alone when she had gone flying up the stairs the moment that fellow Shaw was out of the house. But that had been an hour ago.
As usual, Dwight Prince let himself be guided by his instinct, which he had found to be more trustworthy than intelligence in all matters where Julia was concerned. He opened the door.
She had been lying on the bed, but the recoil of her body was so swift that she was in a sitting position before the door was half open.
It was his first thought that his decision had been the wrong one, for there was an embarrassed desperation in the way that she tried to stop the flow of her tears.
“I’m sorry, Dwight,” she gasped, catching up the fullness of her dressing gown and burying her face in its folds as if she dared not let him see her eyes.
Instinct told him to go to her and he did, sitting beside her, his arm tight around the curve of her thin waist, feeling the sobs that she was now choking into silence. The grief that she had stored since they had heard of Avery Bullard’s death, withheld from him and later from Loren Shaw, was still unspent.
“If you’d rather be alone—” he started to whisper.
Her hands dropped and her head flashed back. “Do you hate me, Dwight?”
“No. Why would you think that I did?”
“For feeling this way about Avery Bullard.” Her eyes were still avoiding his.
He waited, trying to think and then giving up the attempt. “It’s never been a secret that you were once in love with him—you told me that before we were married—so there’s no reason now why you should be afraid to let me see your tears.”
She turned to him and the tears that she had not been able to stop before had suddenly stopped. She kissed him then, desperately, forcing her strength to overpower his so that it was an act of her own doing.
The hall clock struck twelve but there was no answering sound from the carillon in the Tredway Tower.
Saturday
June 23
“… long live the king”
9
MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
4.47 A.M. EDT
Since midnight Van Ormand had been living at the heady peak of his career. Nothing as exciting as this had happened to him since he had been appointed Director of Advertising and Publicity for the Tredway Corporation. After the releases on Avery Bullard’s death had been cleared, he had stopped by the Millburgh Times to see how they were coming with the story for the morning edition. To his exhilarated delight, Bill Freisch, the city editor, had grabbed his arm and pushed him into a chair at the rewrite desk. There he had experienced the thrill of coming as close as he would ever get to being a real honest-to-God newspaper editor. He had checked a thousand facts, answered a hundred shouted questions, been the focal point of all of the wonderful hubbub of handling the biggest story that had broken in Millburgh in ten years. Yes sir, that’s just what Bill had said—the biggest local story in ten years!
Bill was a swell guy and you could say that again! Bill had even let him write most of the feature story on the company’s history, and now here it was in type, word for word, just the way he had written it. The pictures were swell, too.
Bill had forgotten all about the pictures the Times had used four years ago when Millburgh had staged its Bicentennial Celebration, but he’d said it was a hell of a good idea … that’s just what Bill had said … and it sure as hell was a good idea! Mr. Shaw would really get a kick out of it! Made a terrific splash … the line-up of presidents’ pictures across the top of page two … old Josiah Tredway dignified as hell … good prestige stuff … and George Tredway with the big beaver and Oliver wi
th the mutton chops … and old Orrin looking like he must have been a nice guy … and then a two-column cut of that Underwood & Underwood shot of Mr. Bullard that he always said was the one to use … “Doesn’t make me look like such a stuffed shirt.” Bullard was all right, by God! You could say what you pleased but the old guy had one hell of a lot on the ball!
Out of the corner of his eye, Van Ormand saw Bill Freisch stabbing at the page proof with his pencil and, guiltily, he tried again to concentrate on his own search for errors.
Bill was coming toward him now, flapping a proof in each hand as if they were limp wings. “Catch anything more, Van?”
“Just a few typos, Bill,” he said, professionally flippant.
Freisch leaned over his shoulder, checking. “Yah, I got all of those.” He spread his own proof before them and his pudgy finger found a query. “What’s Walling’s first name?”
“Don. You got it right, Bill.”
“No abbreviations,” Freisch said curtly. “We always use full names. What is it—Donald?”
Van Ormand fumbled. “Well, I think Don is his full name, just Don. That’s the way he always signs—” A vague memory floated into his mind and then suddenly crystallized. “Hey, wait. I got it—MacDonald. I remember seeing it one time on his personnel record when I was checking my story about his being made a V.P.—MacDonald Walling.”
“M—c?” Bill spelled.
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