Eureka

by Jim Lehrer

  But if it hadn’t been for that ankle injury, he would not have been in the student infirmary the evening Sally came in to play the part of Cherie from Bus Stop.

  Instead of going into the service, he went directly from KU, with his bachelor’s in business administration, to work. He had five solid job offers, all but one from Kansas companies or firms—two banks, a finance company, and an insurance company—that wanted him to work for them in Kansas. The outsider proposal came from United America Seating in West Orange, New Jersey, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of car, truck, and bus seats. Their corporate recruiter came to Lawrence in search of young men who, he said, “saw opportunity in sitting down.”

  Otis saw no such opportunity, and he had absolutely no interest in moving to New Jersey. He went for an interview with the seating man because the dean of students insisted that every senior go through at least one interview with a foreign or distant company for the experience. Otis chose the New Jersey seating company over a mortgage company based in Minneapolis and an outfit that had been hired to establish a banking system in Nigeria.

  “Let me first tell you that from your office window, you will be able to see the Manhattan skyline,” said the seating recruiter, whose name was Charles Michel. “Don’t think New Jersey— think Broadway, the Great White Way, Central Park, the Empire State Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, ‘New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town.’”

  Otis tried, but all he could think of were muggings, bums, honking horns, dirty rivers, polluted air, crapping dogs, the Yankees, and rude people. He hadn’t been to New York or New Jersey, and his thoughts, impressions, and imaginings were based solely on what he had read and heard.

  “Seating is a forever industry—it’s of the past, present, and future,” said Michel, a well-dressed man of forty or so with a slight waistline problem that made Otis think he had spent too much time sitting down on United America seating. “No matter what happens, in times of war or peace, depression or prosperity, people have always had and always will have the need for something to sit on as they move from place to place. It’s like schools and teachers.”

  Otis said he didn’t follow the analogy. Michel explained, “There will always be sexual intercourse between men and women, which means there will always be children, which means there will always be schools, which will always require teachers.”

  Otis found himself listening to the man. He actually began to think about moving to a place called New Jersey and selling seating and looking out at the tall buildings of New York City. He began to seriously wonder if that might be the most exciting thing for a newly educated farm boy from Kansas. His widowed mother had taken her insurance money and moved to Wichita, where she had made a new and comfortable life as a salesclerk in the women’s clothing department at Buck’s, then the largest and best department store in Kansas. Otis had gotten himself through college with scholarships and part-time jobs at Lawrence cafeterias and doughnut shops, so she had no lingering obligations to him. She had a sister and many friends in Wichita, so she didn’t need her son close by.

  Why not take a risk and go to New Jersey and the Great White Way? But his father might have said, Congratulations, Otis, on running off and leaving your mother in Kansas.

  Congratulations, Otis, for taking a really big risk.

  Another angle on risk was at play. Kansas Central Fire and Casualty of Eureka had offered him a life’s work dealing with the calculations of risk that underlay the insurance industry. Otis also liked the KCF&C recruiter who came to campus. He was younger than the seating man by about ten years and was a native of Pennsylvania.

  “I had to leave home to find the Land of Oz and opportunity,” he said to Otis. “You’re already here. Come with me to be a man of KCF and C.”

  He said it in the same tone the fundamentalist preachers in Sedgwicktown used at the end of the Sunday-morning service when they invited people to come down and give their lives to Jesus and join the church.

  Otis had never forgotten what Pratt of KCF&C had done for his mother, and that played a major role in his decision to accept the invitation. The company that had paid off Lucas Allen Halstead’s death benefit when it didn’t have to was a company of compassion and quality.

  There was something else at work, Otis realized now in his hospital bed as he flipped through it all. What was it T Caldwell’s mother had told him? There are those who are meant to leave and those who are meant to stay. Otis was meant to stay.

  Last September he had celebrated having stayed in Kansas with the same company for thirty-eight years. He had stayed, all right.

  Then came the cast-iron fire engine and all the rest, and here he was, a prisoner of sorts at the Ashland Clinic.

  But what about Sally? What had happened to her desire to be an actress? He couldn’t remember their having a really serious conversation about it. Nothing more than a few minutes here and there. They fell in love, he proposed, and they talked from then on about his job offers and waiting awhile to marry but not about her acting.

  Why didn’t they talk more about her acting?

  What if they had gone to New Jersey thirty-eight years ago? Would he still be working at United America Seating? Would he be the CEO? What kind of life would Sally have had? Would she have crossed over the river to Manhattan to be an actress? What about Annabel? She was working on getting a master’s in social work at KU. What would she have been doing or studying—and where—if she had been born and raised in New Jersey instead of Kansas? Would she speak with a New Jersey accent instead of in that flat Kansas way? Would they have talked to each other? Would he and she have been a real father and daughter?

  Would he have wanted to run away from New Jersey? To the West? Wouldn’t it have been hell getting away from the New York—New Jersey area on a 1952 Cushman Pacemaker? He could imagine the traffic, the trucks, the smog, the turnpikes, the road rage, the idiots—the shitheads. Would he have bought a New York Giants or Mets helmet instead of a Chiefs helmet? What about the Daisy air rifle? They were anti-gun nuts up there in the East, so he probably couldn’t even have bought one without being arrested. Buck definitely would not have worked as a new name. There probably wasn’t one Buck in the states of New York and New Jersey put together.

  What kind of person would I be now if I had gone away to New Jersey instead of staying in Kansas?

  Would Pete Wetmore still be alive? Would Pete have killed himself, somewhere else working for somebody else?

  What about Deputy Canton? Would Canton have had a heart attack anyhow? He was a smoker and overweight and, according to all health and insurance industry paradigms, his chances of dying from a myocardial infarction were in the highest percentile.

  Otis saw something up on the hospital room ceiling that was shining, sparkling. It appeared to be a decoration of some kind. A red and green and silver star? Was it a Christmas thing?

  It couldn’t be. This was still May. Only a few days before his birthday.

  Christmas.

  Last year, at the small annual Christmas luncheon Otis gave for the KCF&C’s top eight executives in a private dining room at the Hotel Eureka—there was also a huge company party for everybody—somebody suggested they go around the table and each recount his or her most memorable Christmas.

  The stories were mostly happy ones. The time somebody’s father came back from World War II and they had Christmas for him two months late—the best Christmas in the family’s history. The Christmas it snowed twenty-two inches and everyone was snowed in for almost a week of eating, singing, and rejoicing. The time somebody forgot to turn on the oven to cook the turkey and everybody had hamburgers from a Kings-X diner instead. And so on. Otis’s story was about not getting the Daisy air rifle he wanted so badly for Christmas. But he told it with a light touch, so it didn’t violate the joy-to-the-world spirit of the lunch.

  Only Pete Wetmore, the last of the eight to speak, told a real downer.

  “On Christmas Eve when I was seven, my
parents went down the street for a quick open house some neighbors were having. While they were gone, my little brother and I decided to scour the house for Santa Claus presents. We already knew there wasn’t a Santa Claus, but we had not let on to our folks. We were playing along with them. We found our presents in a closet in the basement, right where we thought they might be. There were a lot of great things in the closet, including the Sandy Koufax baseball glove I wanted with all my heart, and the twenty-seven-soldier war set my brother had written to Santa for. When Mom and Dad came back, they sensed something from our looks or attitudes or giggles. They asked if we had been looking around the house for anything. We both lied. Dad, who’d had a little eggnog at the open house, went down to the basement and saw signs of our having been in the closet. He came back upstairs, knocked both of us down with his fists, and then went over to the Christmas tree, pulled it down, and said as far as he was concerned, there would be no Christmas in the house this year. He went into our guest bedroom and stayed there the rest of Christmas Eve and all day Christmas. My poor mother cried and cried, pleaded and pleaded with him to come to his senses. My brother and I shouted our apologies and vows of perfect future behavior through the bedroom door, but to no avail. My mother, brother, and I had a form of Christmas late in the morning, opening the few presents that were under the tree. We stood the tree back up, but most of the decorations had been broken or bent. We never were given the things that were in the closet, including my Koufax glove. That was my most memorable Christmas.”

  There was absolute silence in the room when Pete finished.

  It was Otis who finally broke that silence by saying, “Think of it as a learning experience, Pete.”

  Think of it as a learning experience, Pete?

  Recalling his words now as he looked up at what appeared to be some kind of Christmas decoration, Otis would have given anything, including possibly his own life, not to have said such an insensitive-shit thing to Pete Wetmore.

  But that was only one of many, many shit things he had said and done to Pete. Intentionally keeping him out of meetings or business dinners he knew Pete wanted to attend. Not inviting Pete and his family to various high-visibility social events, and never having them to the Halstead home. Cutting off Pete during meetings with cracks like “Boring us to a decision, Pete?” Keeping Pete out of membership in the most exclusive men’s club in Eureka. Even blackballing him from being on the board of their church.

  Was it the bald thing? What if Otis had not lost his hair? What if he had not ruined his ankle and been a navy or marine officer? Would he have been different?

  Would he still have treated Pete like shit?

  Would he still need to be Buck?

  VERYONE SEEMED TO know about Otis and Pete Wetmore.

  Mad Severy, the rehabilitation provocauteur, used it as a shock therapy tool. He said to Otis, “I’ve been told you pretty much caused a man named Pete Wetmore to kill himself. Some might say that was a form of murder. Isn’t that right, Otis?”

  Otis shook his head to the left and then to the right.

  It was a reflex response. A real one. If Otis had realized he could move his head, he might have decided to nod up and down, saying yes.

  Whatever, it was considered another erectionlike breakthrough event in the coming back to life of Otis Halstead.

  Otis, again, was alarmed a bit at the happiness over his response to something concerning the death of another man. On the other hand, he understood what was going on. Response was everything. Whatever shocks it took to get him to respond were part of the cure, part of bringing him back to life.

  “Now you wish you’d said yes, don’t you, Otis?” asked Mad, who was clearly one astute man. “Say it. Say yes and nod.”

  Otis nodded. He figured, why not? Give them another thrill.

  “You can move your head,” said Mad Severy. “Add that to the list with erecting—if that’s the word—when properly stimulated by Jeannie, and we’ve got progress on our hands, Otis.”

  “Sharon,” Otis blurted out. This time the shock had worked. “Sharon” was spoken in a full-throated voice like that of a normal human being.

  He had talked out loud for the first time since falling into the Chanute.

  “Hey, Otis! You did it!” said Mad Severy, a most happy man. “Go on. Tell me more. Sharon who? Sharon what, Otis?”

  Sharon the nurse, you idiot. Sorry, you moron.

  But those words were not spoken.

  There had been enough dramatic progress, public and private, for one day—for a few moments of one day.

  And when they were over, what lingered with Otis were thoughts about Pete Wetmore, not Sharon.

  OTIS HAD MET Pete the first time over dinner at the Oak Room, a famous and expensive restaurant at the Presidential Shore Hotel in Chicago. A headhunter firm had spit out five finalists for a new KCF&C executive vice president, one who had CEO potential and probabilities. Otis decided to go to each of the five by himself before involving board members and others in the company.

  Otis was never quite at ease in elegant restaurants like the Oak Room. He always felt slightly like a Kansas farm boy, slightly out of place, slightly afraid he might do or ask for the wrong thing. But he loved the feeling of well-being, of success, of arrival that being in such places gave him.

  In contrast, the initial thing Otis noticed about Pete Wetmore was how at home he appeared. Pete took a menu from the waiter as if it were a natural act, something he did as regularly and as casually as opening a door or shaking a right hand.

  Pete ordered asparagus tips with a light Belgian hollandaise sauce to start and, for the entree, beef Wellington—medium well—in a calvados sauce with skinless new potatoes seared in avocado butter.

  “I’ll have the same,” Otis said as nonchalantly as he could manage. It annoyed him that he felt awkward in this situation. After all, he was a college graduate, and he had been in business for over thirty-five years, he had traveled, and he was the corporate CEO at this dinner table. But the feeling of country hick would not go away—not at this particular moment in the company of this particular young man.

  The wine steward was at the table a few minutes later to make it worse. He was a man in his forties who could have passed for a corporate CEO in both appearance and speech. Otis said he was no wine expert and insisted that Pete choose a wine that fit their meal choices.

  Yes, a red would be perfect, they agreed. Something light and five years old from Bordeaux.

  As the staff of the Oak Room went off to prepare the wine and the asparagus, Otis immediately turned to the business at hand, to his turf, to his world, where he felt very much at ease and where he was in charge.

  “Why are you interested in coming into the insurance business?” he asked Pete firmly.

  “I need a new challenge,” said Pete. “Mortgage banking has its high moments, but I believe I have now experienced and learned most of what there was to learn from them.”

  Otis already knew about Pete’s background from the search people. Pete was the product of an upper-middle-class life, having grown up in a nice Denver suburb, the son of a Chrysler dealer and a garden-and-country-club-golfing activist. Mother and father had attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, where they had met, but they had higher and lawyer aspirations for their two sons, both of whom went to Ivy League schools. Pete’s was Harvard, where he graduated in the upper third of his class and went on immediately to Harvard Law School, where he did almost as well. He had practiced law for a couple of years and then gone into mortgage banking.

  Otis asked about hobbies and outside interests.

  “None, really,” said Pete.

  “Do you follow sports?”

  “Not much, except the Cubs sometimes.”

  “In Eureka, you’d have to cheer for the Royals in baseball and the Chiefs in football, or you’d get run out of town.”

  Pete smiled but said nothing. Otis couldn’t get a reading on what the smile meant.
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br />   “Family,” said Otis. “Tell me about your immediate family— wife and kids.”

  Pete said his wife, June, whom he had met at Harvard, as his parents had done at Colorado, was not happy in Chicago. They had the kids and she had gotten caught up in the mommy-wife-homemaker trap. Her bright mind, talents, and energies were being consumed by preschool, school, after-school, playgroups, soccer, baseball, carpool, sleepovers, Cub Scouts, Sunday school, Junior League, grocery shopping, meals, homework, cleaning ladies, yardmen, babysitters, fistfights, pouts, sore throats, skinned knees, hundred-degree temperatures.

  Otis considered telling Pete that Eureka, Kansas, had all of those things for bright wives and mothers, but he decided against it. That was about something very personal between this young man and his wife, and it had nothing to do with geography or place. Otis knew all about that kind of thing from his own life with Sally, who had lived a similar life. But she didn’t consider it a trap.

  Or at least Otis didn’t think she did. They had never really talked about it. They had never really talked about much of anything important. Their life had become one of mutual assumptions rather than of discussions. And it worked. Or at least it worked for Otis. And he assumed it did for Sally.

  Pete passed on dessert. So did Otis. Both had a double decaf espresso.

  “A brandy or another after-dinner drink?” asked the waiter.

  “No,” said Otis first. Pete ordered a VSOP cognac just for “the sniff.” When it came, all he did was run it back and forth under his nose several times. Otis had never seen anybody doing such a thing—ordering a sixteen-dollar glass of cognac and not even taking a sip of it.