Clemmie (30 page)

“There’s the job …”

“Skip the job. Maura first.” He pushed a button on the side of his desk. The door opened and a girl came in. “Dotty, I want you to get a Mrs. Craig Fitz on the phone. Person to person. Give her the address, Craig.”

“Talk to her!”

“Why not? She’s your wife.”

Craig gave the girl the address.

“Buzz when you’ve got her on,” Al told the girl. When the door was shut Al said, “That’ll look imposing on the phone bill. This Jardine is a wheel. Talks to people all over the world. An international practice, by God.”

“Will—you apologize to Irene for me?”

“No. That’s something you have to do for yourself. Just drop by. She isn’t hard to talk to.” He shook his head.
“The last guy in the world to get in a mess like this one.”

“All right. I’m ashamed of myself. Just stop patronizing me.”

“Touchy, too. Miss Clementina must be a very special item indeed. Craig, you know what this makes me think of? Damned if I know why. It’s like when the reverend runs off with the soprano in the choir. A terrific fall from grace. You’ve been around. You should have been able to take a chippy like that in your stride.”

“Maybe I haven’t been around enough.”

“In a way, it’s too bad you’ve got a conscience.”

“What do you mean?”

“Plenty of people would give a left arm for the chance. Marry into the Bennet clan and nestle right down into the feathers. No more exercise except a languid gesture when your glass is empty. Are you certain she wants you to marry her?”

“She’s made it pretty definite.”

“Twenty-three and cute. Pretty flattering to a morose old goat like you.”

“I know that Ober is going to …”

“One thing at a time, friend. One thing at …” There was a buzz. Al pointed at the phone. Craig picked it up gingerly. Al walked quickly out of the office and shut the door.

“Hello!” he said. “Hello! Maura?”

And he heard her voice, heard her say his name. It was a long way away, and came through a singing and humming of wires. She said something he couldn’t make out.

“I can’t hear you! Can you speak louder? Can you hear me?”

“Yes. What’s wrong, Craig?”

“Wrong?”

“… answer my letters … worrying … three weeks … wrong …”

“I’m sorry about the letters. I was sick. I’m better now.”

“… been awfully sick.”

“Have you been sick?”

“No. You. Too sick … somebody could write … tell Irene …”

“Listen, darling. Can you hear me? You’re going to get a letter soon.”

“… you?”

“Not from me. From a girl. You don’t know her. Pay no attention to the letter. I’ll explain everything later. Pay no attention to her letter. She’s … crazy.”

“What kind of a letter?” She came through clearly for a moment.

“A lot of lies. I’ll write too. Don’t worry.”

“… try not to.”

“How are the girls?”

“Fine … little homesick … not here now … very disappointed.”

“I love you.”

“What?”

“I said I love you. And give my love to the girls.”

“… raining here … not much longer …”

“Good-by, Maura!”

“… darling … soon.”

He hung up, took out his handkerchief, mopped his face. There was no way of telling if Maura had heard enough to understand. Al came back into the office.

“Work out all right?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t a good connection. I don’t know if she understood me or not.”

“You could have phoned her before. You could have phoned her when things started to go sour.”

“Maybe I … wanted things to go sour.”

“That’s a damn strange thing to say.”

“It isn’t clear in my mind, not yet. Maybe it won’t ever be. There’s a fascination in—I’ve got to use a pretentious word—in evil. Maybe not evil. Recklessness. Disregard, for once, of consequences. Everything has always been so planned. Like that story you told once, about the man jumping. Part way down I wanted to yell stop. Maybe there’s a law of gravity in emotion. I’m pretty damn incoherent.”

“Don’t look at me in that pleading way, Craig. I am not, for Christ’s sake, going to write you out a permit. I’m not going to tell you how many times to go count your beads. I see this all the time. You want to roll in your own guilt. A dog who’s found some lovely nastiness and gets tired of it and wants a bath. I see different degrees of this sort of thing all the time, and I can be objective, but not so damn objective with you because it usually doesn’t hit this close.
It’s like a disease, a special virus that infects the righteous. And your little deviation is not exactly world-shaking. It’s closer to pathetic. Sometime you should get a look at somebody who has gone all the way down to the bottom. I spent a nasty hour in a hotel suite one time. It took them that long to come and get the body, the body of a dead girl. She was seventeen. Alive, she had been close to the borderline of feeble-mindedness. Not bad enough to put away, but just barely bright enough to earn a living at something requiring no thought. Even dead and bloodless she was a provocative-looking kid.

“She’d gotten into some kind of trouble. The Juvenile Court Judge, after questioning her, realized it had been inadvertent. He was a good and understanding man in his early fifties, respected, hard-working, even brilliant. A philosopher as well as a judge. He had her placed in a foster home and arranged for her employment in a laundry. He took an interest in her, and it seemed no greater than the interest he had taken in other kids.

“The cops stood around, very uncomfortable, and while we waited for them to come and get the body, I tried to talk to the judge because he was my friend. But there wasn’t anything left of him. There had been a very clumsy attempt at an abortion, and some futile attempts to staunch the hemorrhage, and when he realized it coudn’t be stopped he didn’t have the courage left to put in an emergency call. So he sat in that mean little suite while she bled to death, while everything that he had been and could have been went away from him, turning him into a trembling old man, a gray sniveling old man on his way to prison. So don’t expect me to punch
your
card, Fitz. The money gave your fling a better flavor. You could at least pretend it was romance. Let’s go get some lunch and we’ll talk about the job next, because that’s the next thing that has to be fixed, and it should be fixed because it will be necessary to Maura and the kids. Come on.”

They sat in a booth in a back corner of a restaurant near Al’s office, and Craig told him exactly what had happened to the job, and to his own performance on the job.

“It’s a good bet that Ober is going to bounce you out of there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes. He certainly knows I’ve been drunk on the job. And he knows I’ve been brushing Upson off instead of cooperating. And I haven’t been doing the work.”

“So we can’t salvage anything out of that.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“But, as of this moment, you are gainfully employed as assistant plant manager. That condition will exist until you go back in and Ober ties a can to your tail. How long can you stay out?”

“I’ll have to go back in Friday.”

Al pursed his lips, rattled his fingers on the table top. “If this was the first time I ever saw you in my life, I’d say here’s a guy whose nerve is shot. You’ve got a twitch in your cheek and your voice trembles when you talk and you can’t keep your hands still. This is Tuesday. Forty-eight hours might do it, if you do exactly as I say.”

“I’ll do anything you say.”

“I’ll bet you don’t have a suit that doesn’t hang on you like you borrowed it. And all your shirts are too big for your neck. You go right from here and get a suit and a shirt that’ll fit you. Don’t try to save money on it. Insist on delivery by tomorrow afternoon. Conservative and impressive. Then you come back to the office and by then I’ll have some pills for you. Some are going to be sedatives for tonight and tomorrow night, and I’ll have a tranquility pill for you to take Thursday morning. You are going to be relaxed and confident when you talk to Johnny Maleska. On Thursday morning you are going to go to a Turkish bath and get the works. Then you are going to a barber shop for the final polish. And then, in your new suit, with some color in your face, all calm and confident, you are going to do a snow job on Johnny, and you are going to be employed by Donner Plastics. Just one thing. Will you do a job for them?”

“Yes, Al.”

“Between now and then, don’t think about a damn thing. Don’t think about Maura or the Bennet woman or being unemployed. Eat and sleep like a vegetable. Get yourself pulled together.”

He was to meet Johnny Maleska for lunch at the City Athletic Club on Vine Street. It was an old, gray stone
building, with ten stone steps up to a wide door flanked by stone half columns. It was the third or fourth time Craig had been in the club. The lounge was to the left of the entrance, the desk to the right. The small bar was at the end of the entrance hall, and the dining room adjoined the lounge. It was a place of leather chairs, dark paneling, masculine talk. Political meetings were held there, with policy and strategy determined by the hearty red-faced men who wore cigars. The card rooms were upstairs. Downstairs was the pool, the gym, the handball courts.

He arrived at twelve-twenty and stopped at the desk and asked the attendant to tell Mr. Maleska when he arrived that Mr. Fitz was in the lounge. He went in and sat near the windows, with the latest issue of Fortune in a red leather binder in his lap. He felt rested, almost relaxed. At eleven he had taken the Dexamyl spansule Al had given him. It made him feel very clear-headed, keyed up, yet not shaky. It had given him a conviction of confidence and power. This was a poker game. After a long run of steady losses, there had been just enough left to stake one good hand. The cards had been dealt. He knew he would pick them up and sort them and find a pat hand, unbeatable.

Everything had gone just the way Al wanted it to. There had been no attempt by Clemmie to contact him. And he had not let himself worry about that. He had not conjectured about what she might be doing. He was as ready to meet Maleska, he felt, as he would ever be.

He turned the pages of the big magazine, half seeing the industrial photographs.

The desk attendant came in and said, “Mr. Fitz, Mr. Maleska just phoned and asked me to tell you he’ll be late. He suggested you go in the bar and have a drink and he’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

“Thank you.”

“The bar is at the end of the lobby on your left, sir.”

The small bar was crowded, the air smoky, the single bartender very busy. He nodded at two half-familiar faces. A group left the bar to go to the dining room and he was able to find space. He ordered a vodka on the rocks, and as he sipped it he listened to the fragments of conversation,
full of key words, option and wait-listed and writeoff and dealer stocks and zoning board and sales picture and bogie on the stinking twelfth hole.

He felt a part of it, and yet apart from it. It was as though this was a language he had once known and spoken fluently, but now, hearing it again, he knew he had forgotten the syntax and the grammar.

When Maleska came up behind him and spoke his name, it startled him so that he spilled some of his drink on the back of his hand when he turned around.

Maleska was a stocky man in his thirties. His hairline and the pyramidal shape of his face reminded him of Richard Nixon, but his hair was white-blond, his eyes pale green, nose and forehead sunburned and peeling. He wore a cotton cord suit, pale blue shirt, dark knit tie. His handshake was firm. He apologized for being late and ordered dry vermouth on the rocks, steered Craig over to a small table.

The bar was beginning to empty out. They sat at a table with a top of pale waxed wood. Maleska said, “The old man is really something. I swear he works a twenty-hour day. God knows when I get my vacation this year, if I get any. Last year we drove up to Maine and two days after we got there, the old man sent the plane after me. Betty and the kids spent the vacation alone, and then I flew back up and had one day before we had to drive back. Al says there’s a chance you might want to come to work for us. Want to fill me in on the background? Education, experience and so on.”

Craig told him.

“So U. S. Automotive is the only outfit you’ve worked for.”

“That’s right.”

“They’re sharp people. Why do you want to get out now?”

He had prepared himself carefully for that inevitable question. “I could explain how I worked myself into a dead-end job at Quality Metals, Johnny. That’s part of it, but it isn’t the whole truth. Quality Metals is the headache division of U. S. Automotive. Plant layout is uneconomic and inefficient. They’ve brought a new broom in.”

“Ober, eh?”

“That’s right. A shakeup is on the way. I believe they’ll transfer key personnel. You know, a change for the sake of making a change, just to see what happens.”

Johnny Maleska nodded. “I see what you mean. There’d be no criticism of you, or of the others shifted, but you would always be the boys Ober moved out. Sort of a stigma on your record.”

“Exactly. And there’s something else. If they’d moved me around the way they do others, I wouldn’t kick about a move. But they’ve left me here ever since the war. We’ve put our roots down deeper than we should have, I guess. We’d like to stay here in Stoddard.”

“I appreciate your frankness, Craig. What would you have to get?”

“By leaving them, I’m cutting myself out of accumulated retirement benefits. In order to get back to even, I’d have to make seventeen five. Frankly, that’s more than I’m making now.”

“It’s not out of line. There’s a couple of flaws, though. The old man doesn’t believe in raiding local industry.”

“You didn’t come to me. I’ve come to you. I want a change.”

“I think he’ll take that into consideration. The other thing is that our problems aren’t the same as the ones you’re used to.”

“I’m assuming I’ll be given a chance to learn. Basic policy should be pretty much the same whether you’re making locomotives or clothes-pins.”

“That’s true, Craig. And another thing, plastics and chemicals are moving so fast, we can’t get executive personnel out of our own field.” New drinks were placed on the table. Craig hadn’t seen the signal when Maleska ordered them. He felt wary of the third drink. There seemed to be a curious inter-reaction between the pill he had taken and the two drinks he had consumed.