Kernaghan was fifty-six years old when he joined Sweeting-Aldren as senior vice president. Those were golden hours for the patriarchy, when every executive in America wore pants with a zipper down the front, and every one of them had a secretary who wore a skirt with a zipper down the side and who, though often more intelligent, was always physically weaker than her boss (her delicate wrists arched over the IBM keyboard), and who sat on a little chair designed to reveal as much as possible of her figure from the greatest number of angles, and who wore a wife’s makeup and cheerful smile and obeyed her man’s orders and spoke in whispers, and the power of so many million heterosexual pairings harnessed by industry made the United States, in the space of a few years, the greatest economic force in the history of the world. Kernaghan’s secretary at Sweeting-Aldren was a veteran named Rita Damiano, a two-time divorcée twenty-odd years his junior. Neither tall nor young nor pretty, Rita hardly corresponded to the ideal woman of Kernaghan’s cheap and single-purpose imagination. Nonetheless she was his regular escort for better than three years, and eventually he even married her, so she must have had him figured out. Must have known that a Catholic manque such as he needed sex to be dirty. Must have known how to scale the affair, keep him off guard, make him commit himself, string out the liberties she allowed him, be coldly disgusted by anal sex on Easter, begging for more of it on Arbor Day, and tight-assed and ultra-efficient the next morning as she served coffee to Aldren Sr. and Sweeting, who with their eyes drew dubious lines between her and Kernaghan, as if to say, “Any interest there?” and Kernaghan coolly shaking his head no. She played a strange, transparent role, letting him know that she thought he was an old lecher and that she tolerated his intimacies only because she wanted money. Because with a man like him, it was wiser not to pretend. It was wiser to be a whore, to be enslaved solely by the promise of his money. She went to Bob and Melanie’s wedding and snubbed Kernaghan’s former in-laws before they could snub her. She drank with him. She sneered at marriage, sneered at pleasure, and by and by Kernaghan became fond of her, and began to cheat on her with the very bimbos whose hypocrisy they’d ridiculed together, and had her transferred to another executive, and that was the end of Rita, at least for the moment.
Meanwhile, thanks again to Kernaghan’s strategic intuitions, the company’s investments in new process technology were paying off. Initially derided by analysts as a high-risk gamble, Sweeting-Aldren’s M Line, a closed-system continuous process capable of producing one hundred tons of any of several chlorinated hydrocarbons per day, was operating at capacity, the U.S. armed forces having discovered hundreds of thousands of square miles of Southeast Asian jungle in urgent need of defoliation. It took the rest of the industry four years to catch up with demand, and in the interim Sweeting-Aldren never saw earnings growth of less than 35 percent annually. Its new G Line, producing spandex for a nation whose appetite for revealing swimsuits, lightweight bras and other clingy items had become insatiable, was going great guns as well. It was Kernaghan who’d persuaded Aldren Sr. to double the G Line’s capacity in 1956, when it was on the drawing board, Kernaghan whose elegant fingers tested the spandex virtues of countless articles of feminine apparel between 1958 and 1969, during which decade the extra G Line capacity earned the company $30 million, minimum, after taxes, all because of him. Add to this the brisk wartime sales of paint and high explosives, the budding market for Sweeting-Aldren’s new Warning Orange pigments, and steady returns on all its more mundane products, and it began to seem a wonder that Kernaghan came out of the sixties worth only six or seven million.
But the company was conservatively managed—looking to the future, holding the line on debt, funneling hefty sums into research and development. The young Anna Krasner, owner of an M.S. in physical chemistry from RPI, was one beneficiary of their scattershot hiring. Kernaghan later said he’d already picked her out in the parking-lot crowd on her first day of work. But neither of them liked to talk about those early days; they became silent and looked a little ill when the subject arose; and Bob found this curious, at least in Kernaghan’s case, because a victorious male so often enjoys reminding his lover how she couldn’t stand the sight of him at first. Maybe the sting of her rejection was still too fresh in his mind, or maybe he wasn’t so sure he was victorious, or maybe he was uneasy about the price he’d had to pay to change her mind.
In any case, Rita would have been watching. She would have known, firsthand or through the grapevine, that Kernaghan was smitten with the pretty new chemist in Research and that the chemist was flamboyantly crushing his initiatives, sticking the long-stemmed roses in Erlenmeyer flasks with reagent-grade sulfuric acid, feeding the Swiss chocolate truffles to albino rats. On an errand for her new boss, Rita drops into Kernaghan’s office and says, “Didn’t you know? You reach an age where you’re only hideous to a thing like her. Where she looks at you and all she can think is prostate problems.”
Let loose in her own lab with a fat budget, Anna takes the company at its word when it tells her no idea is too wacky to pursue. She reads some imaginative accounts of the origin of the solar system, cooks water and ammonia and free-state carbon in a high-pressure oven, and strikes oil. She happens to be the kind of person who’ll face hungry lions in a coliseum before she’ll admit she’s mistaken. She believes there’s a zillion gallons of oil and a godzillion cubic meters of natural gas inside the earth, beginning at a depth of about four miles, and no anvil-headed senior research chemist with a crew cut and stinky breath is going to tell her it isn’t so. She goes straight to the nearest vice president, young Mr. Tabscott, and says, “We drill for oil in Berkshires!”
Mr. Tabscott, more susceptible to good looks than the anvilheaded senior research chemist, says, “We’ll take this under serious advisement, Anna, but maybe in the meantime you should reinvest your energies in some totally new direction, give yourself a well-deserved rest from this very interesting and speculative research you’ve done.”
He’s still chuckling and shaking his head when the single-minded Anna begins to write the paper that eventually appears in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, and Jack Kernaghan gets wind of her difficulties. He steals into her lab, looks over her shoulder at the orthographic atrocities she’s committing in her notebook, and says, “You’re pretty stupid if you think we’re going to drill a four-mile hole through granite for you.”
She doesn’t look up. “They’ll do it.”
“Not a chance, girlie.”
“No?” She raises her eyes from the notebook to the periodic chart in front of her. She flares her nostrils. “Then it’s because you stopped them. And if they do drill, it’s because they like me better than you.”
He considers the flasks holding his blackened roses and their exploded stems. “Tabscott was just humoring you,” he says. “He’s going to let this thing die. When he does, you go and see him and ask him if I had anything to do with it. And then before you do anything rash, you come and see me.”
Anna tosses her lovely hair from one shoulder to the other and goes on writing. But it happens just as Kernaghan said it would. Various sober scientists are consulted and agree that her theory is 99.9-percent-probably hogwash, Tabscott tells her the company won’t spend $5 million on a one-in-a-thousand chance, and Anna says, “I quit! This is good theory.”
“We’d like to have you stay on, Anna. But if, ah, you insist. . .”
Kernaghan finds her in her lab, angrily emptying her desk. “Scholarly journals accept my paper,” she says. “And you won’t drill!”
“Five-million-dollar checks don’t grow on trees.”
“La, la, who cares? My pearls aren’t worthy of you.”
“Be reasonable,” he says. “You’ve got vanishingly minimal academic credentials, and you’re never going to work for anybody as flush as we are. Anywhere else you go they’re going to make you study vulcanized rubber. Stay with us, play your cards right, you might just get your hole drilled.”
She sno
rts. “You are a swine.”
He laughs agreeably, leaves her office, goes and confers with Aldren Sr. and Tabscott.
“Oh, sure, Jack,” they say, “we’re going to spend five mill to help you get in Krasner’s skirt.”
“Gentlemen,” grinning, “I resent the imputation. The fact is, it’s an interesting theory. And the fact is also, if she’s right about the gas and oil in the Berkshires, there’s probably gas and oil right under our feet here in Peabody. More important, though, I sense a wind shift, and I ask you, have I been right about wind shifts in the past? Possibly even so right that five million dollars seems a paltry sum? I see a problem with our waste stream, say in the next three or four years. A new problem, a regulatory problem. I’m thinking of the M Line, the dioxins, in particular. It won’t surprise me if M Line disposal costs triple in the next five years.”
“Matter of opinion, Jack.”
“We’re going to drill this hole. I don’t rule out coming up with commercial quantities of gas and oil, maybe even at ordinary depths. But if we don’t, and if we’ve drilled it here, you know what we get as a consolation prize? An injection well. One that goes so far below the water table that we can direct the waste stream down it from now till kingdom come and still be good neighbors.”
“Legality?”
“I know of no statute,” he says smoothly, “that would interfere.”
So a feasibility study is performed. The more management thinks about Kernaghan’s plan, the more it likes it. Certain workers on the M Line are developing chloracne, a disfiguring and irreversible rotting of the skin caused by exposure to dioxins, and there are disquieting reports coming out of Vietnam about soldiers using Sweeting-Aldren herbicides and turning up with tender livers and intestinal sarcomas and other, more nameless dreads. Half the guinea pigs in a delivery truck unwisely parked for an hour by the M Line’s evaporation pond go into convulsions; the other half are dead. Since the only way to reduce dioxins in the waste stream is to double the reaction temperature, the cost of electricity to pump the waste underground begins to seem reasonable. And when management looks at the effluents from all its other process lines, and feels the winds of regulation and public opinion shifting, the decision is clinched.
Kernaghan pays another visit to Anna, who has been cooking up ever more nasty-smelling synthetic crude in her oven; she looks like a Swiss chambermaid in her white chemist’s apron. He shows her the rental contract for equipment to drill a five-mile-deep hole—the work orders, the authorizations for energy use. She shrugs. “What took you so long?”
“You’re in charge of the drilling. We’re adding ten K to your salary.”
“La, la, la.”
“You have exclusive publication rights. Exclusive rights to the core samples from the deepest hole in eastern North America.”
“Of course. I thank you, Mr. Jack Kernaghan. Really. Was there something else?”
He smiles, unsurprised. “I don’t think you understand that I spent twenty-five years’ worth of leverage to get you this piece of paper. Twenty-five years’ worth of service to the company.”
“This is boring.”
“Boring?” He holds up the rental contract and begins to tear it down the middle.
She can’t stop herself from grabbing his hand. She says, “You think you can buy me.”
“Say I’m proving my love.”
“You tear up rental contract to prove your love?”
“If there’s no hope for my love?”
She takes the contract and reads it carefully. “My Berkshires. What happened to my Berkshires?”
“I did my best.”
She has a beaker of synthetic crude on her desk. She dips a Pyrex stirring rod in it, dribbling the black, viscous stuff from the tip. She lets herself fall backward and her chair catches her, rolling into a wall with the impact. “You want to drill my hole? Good! You want to touch me? Good! You can touch me. But you’ll never touch me.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She stands up and walks in a circle around him, her mouth open as wide as she can stretch it, saying, “La, la, la, la, la.” She laughs. He seizes her, works one knee between her legs, turns on the urgency that has served him so well in the past.
“So, OK,” pulling away from him, “walking filth has smart knees.”
He stands, panting, maddened. “Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you.”
“La, la, la,” tongue wagging. “You’ll never touch me!”
Which was how things stood in the fall of ’69. Bob Holland of course couldn’t understand why Anna had only two modes with Kernaghan—the contemptuous and the vampish—and why Kernaghan would put up with even a minute of being ignored by her as she plied Bob with throaty questions about his work. The “lovers” exchanged brief, cutting phrases and then held long competitions for Bob’s regard which Anna invariably won, Kernaghan receding into his chair to stare at her, his eyes a pair of hate beams, minute after minute, while Bob talked about the country’s history and Anna talked about her personal history, in Paris as a baby, in upstate New York as a girl and adolescent. She turned her face away from the cigarette she held vertically at mouth level, narrowing her eyes and twisting her lips as she blew the smoke straight up. She told Bob that she was like him in loving knowledge for its own sake, that the corporate mind was grotesque and soulless, that she would quit her job in a flash if she weren’t allowed to pursue knowledge with total freedom. She said young people had life and energy and ideals. Old men were drained of their juices and loved money more than beauty, more than anything. And Kernaghan was a sly enough dissembler that when he abruptly left the dinner table, as though hating Anna for flirting—as though powerless to stop her—Bob believed that he was being a bad guest and hastened after his father-in-law, unwilling to be the instrument with which she tormented him. When he turned around, Anna had her silver fox on and her car keys in her hand.
An hour later, when he was in his room typing up notes, he heard her cries, loud enough to have awakened him if he’d been sleeping. He hadn’t heard her car return.
In the morning he found them smoking breakfast ciggies in the east room, thick as thieves, holding hands. They looked at him as if he were the devil they’d been speaking of.
It being a Sunday, all the archives closed, they took him for a drive. Armed guards waved the car through the gates of Sweeting-Aldren’s main installation, and Kernaghan drove the avenues winding among the various process lines at screeching speeds.
“You’re giving me a headache,” Anna said.
“I’m showing Bob what it’s all about.”
The three of them put on hard hats and toured the process structure on the brand-new AB Line, into the maws of which went ethylene and chlorine and out of the anus of which came white prills of polyvinyl chloride. The structure was an orgy of metal forms, twenty cottage-sized modules straddling and abutting and embracing one another tightly, each with its own voice of thermodynamic ecstasy and all with their fat appendages rammed deep into steel-collared orifices; but a rigid orgy, full of power and purpose, never ending. In these plants, chemists transformed the verbs of their imaginations into the nouns of their achievement by adding -er or -or or -r. There were 5,000-gallon double-arm mixers, paddle blenders with carbon-steel shredder blades, a triple-wall main reactor built like Charles Atlas, an 80-ton two-stage chiller, a jacketed continuous turbulizer, a shuddering particulate-transfer screw feeder, nozzle concentrators, triple-effect evaporators, intensifier bars, a 400-cubic-foot cone dryer, a cylindrical concrete priller, a heat exchanger with stainless tubes and a carbon-steel shell, a 6,250-square-foot vertical condenser, a twin-cone classifier, and a dozen centrifugal compressors. The scary thing was smelling so many smells that reminded you of nothing in the world. They were like alien ideas impinging directly on your consciousness, unmediated by a flavor. This was how it would feel when space invaders came and took control of your brain, some insidious something neither spirit nor flesh filli
ng your sinuses and clouding your eyes . . .
Bob realized he was alone. A mantle of rain was descending on Peabody, closing up the vistas between the surrounding process structures, quarantining the place. Kernaghan and Anna were leaning against a front fender of his car. They exchanged glances. Finally Anna said, “Jack and I were wondering if you had any pot.”
“Pot.”
“Marijuana.”
Bob laughed. It happened that he did, back on Argilla Road. In those days, an ounce would last him months.
Strong Motion: A Novel Page 44