End of the Tiger (18 page)

The executives of National Directions, and in particular the president, Brendan Mallory, see in Ben Weldon a pleasing prototype of the young National executive, a sort of ambassador at large. They are gratified that he had the good luck and the good sense to marry a girl who is and will continue to be of great help to him.

Brendan Mallory has a private timetable in his mind whereby Benjamin Weldon will assume the presidency at age 55. At that point Weldon will not only be receiving one of the more substantial salaries, but he will have additional income through the bonus and stock-option plan. But this, to Brendan Mallory, is of secondary importance. The man who heads the firm must, first of all, have respect for the obligations and responsibilities of the position, realizing that his decisions can have an effect on the national economy.

Brendan Mallory realizes that it is a most delicate problem to nurture the growth of the young executive. He must be taught to understand the blessings of and the reasons for conformity without deadening that creative individualism that the No. 1 man must have if the company is to remain competitively strong.

Virginia, wife of Benjamin, is lovelier at 30 than at 20, an outgoing blue-eyed blonde, who wears her multiple
emotions close to the surface, who has pride and the gift of laughter. She is loving, rewarding, and incurably absent-minded. She fills with a violent indignation at any injustice. Her energies inspire awe. Toward her children she is scrupulously, unpermissively fair, whacking them soundly when they need it. As a consequence there is order in their small world, and they feel secure, well loved, and feel no urge to express themselves through tantrum or bratty whining.

So here is paradise on Ridge Road. Strength, love, ambition, and a future. Nice people too. No sleazy little cocktail-party flirtations. No amorous discontent.

At the end of 1964, if you had asked them if paradise hadn’t become just a little conditional, they would have stared at you, and then defended themselves with great indignation. And that could have been the clue—the little excess of indignation.

If they had had the time to sit down quietly——

But there were the commuting to the city, and the job itself, and the increasing frequency of the field trips, and the two kinds of entertaining—business and friendship—and the Lawton Country Club (as a result of Mallory’s hint that he should belong), and the sitter problem and the Cub Scouts and the P.T.A. and the Community Chest and the Red Cross and the Civic Betterment Committee and the Ridge Road Association and, of course, five birthdays and holidays and church and anniversaries, and correspondence with friends and relatives, and television and shopping and essential do-it-yourself projects and office work brought home and that essential reading that must be done to keep up with the world’s swift pace.

So if there was a rare chance to sit down quietly, they took it. And spent the time making up little mental lists of the things undone. They no longer had time to talk to each other in any leisurely, thoughtful way, and so they were losing one of the best parts of a good marriage—and making it not quite as good as it should have been.

It should have been more of a clue to Ben and Ginny that, all that year, whenever they did have a chance to talk, they talked about money. Oh, it was reasonably amiable, with an infrequent edge of rancor showing only
briefly. They tried to make a kind of joke out of it. And why shouldn’t it be a joke? When you’re making $23,500 a year, money problems are a joke, aren’t they?

Ben paid the bills, so the true nature of their situation was trying to intrude itself on his awareness long before Ginny became aware of the growing tensions. Let it be said firmly and finally right here that these were not two silly, improvident people, whimsically tossing money left and right. Ben had paid a good share of his own way through school. Ginny had been on a tiny allowance. They had started marriage with debts, not riches, and had lived to a rigid budget, and paid their way. Ginny knew every rice dish in the book.

Perhaps the first intimation of what would eventually and incomprehensively turn into disaster was the Incident of the Cigarettes.

In January—right after New Year’s, in fact—when the checking account needed very dexterous juggling, Ben Weldon switched from cigarettes to a pipe. He told himself it would be good for him. Ginny had always wanted him to smoke a pipe. He told himself that it was purely secondary that cigarettes, at a pack and a half a day, were costing him $164.25 a year. He wondered why he had bothered to figure it up.

He struggled with the pipe problem until he had mastered the techniques. His birthday was in April. He got home from the city later than he wanted to, because he knew Ginny would keep the kids up so they could give him their presents, but it was one of those unavoidable things.

He sat in the living room, and the cake was brought to him so the kids could see him blow out the candles, and the song was sung, and the kids gave him the presents, the littlest one first, as was the household custom. He lifted himself out of his weariness to make those exclamations that would satisfy them, and those jokes that would delight them.

The present from Ginny was the last one he opened. It was a pipe in a fitted case, with a beautiful grain in the wood. He remembered the brand name and the model name from the day when he had selected a pipe. And he
certainly remembered the price. He had told the clerk that he didn’t feel like paying $25 plus tax for a pipe.

He looked at the beautiful thing, and he felt a resentment so sharp, so bitter that it shocked him. In one gesture she had cut the heart out of his campaign of frugality. He looked at her and saw her smile, which anticipated his pleasure in the gift, and in that instant he wanted to smash it to the floor in its fitted case.

Her smile faded and she said, “Don’t you like it? I thought it——”

He caught himself quickly and said, “It’s beautiful, honey. It really is. And the style is just perfect.”

So the kids had to see the ceremony of the first lighting of the new pipe, and then Ginny permitted them one small piece of birthday cake each, and shooed them off to bed.

After she came back to the living room she said, “Is anything wrong?”

“What could be wrong on my birthday, blondie? Bring me a kiss.”

The unexpected, irrational force of his anger over such a simple thing should have prepared him better for subsequent developments.

On an evening in early May, Ben got out the checkbook and paid the bills. This necessary ceremony was something that he had begun, not exactly to dread but to feel increasingly irritable about. He sorted them and paid all the little ones first—fuel oil, dentist, doctor, phone, light, gas, water, car repairs and so on. He totaled them and deducted the total from his balance. Next he looked over the big ones, and paid the ones that had to be paid. Every month it seemed as though an unexpected big one would come along. This time there were two discouragingly fat ones, the fire insurance on the house (paid annually and not included in the mortgage payments) for $208.20, and a life insurance premium of $442.50. They had to be paid. And a final check for $400 had to be drawn to Ginny’s order, for deposit in her checking account to take care of the household expenses. He tried not to think too much about the balance left: $41.14. He had his commutation ticket for the month and a little over $20 in cash. Light lunches in the city this month.

Ginny came in just then, and as she walked by she patted him on the shoulder and sat in the chair near the desk.

“Made out my check yet, financier?”

“Are you that hungry for it?”

“No. I think I’ve got to hit you for a raise, boss.”

“What?”

“Four fifty anyway, but five hundred would take some of the strain off.”

He glared at her and said, more loudly than he intended, “Just what do you do with all of it?”

She looked startled, then indignant. “What did you think I did with it? I buy groceries for five. I buy clothes for me and three children. Gas and oil for the car. A one-afternoon-a-week cleaning woman. Sitters. A yardman once in a while now that you don’t have as much time as you used to have. Dry cleaning. Toys. Movie money. Sometimes I even buy myself a dollar lunch. Prices are going up, darling. Up and up and up, and I’m asking for a cost-of-living adjustment. What’s the
matter
with you lately?”

He adjusted a weak smile. “I’m sorry, honey. Look here. Everything is paid. Here’s what’s left.”

She got up and stared at the figure and then sat down again rather heavily. “But you need more than
that
for the month!”

“I’ll get along. I can draw trip expenses in advance for the Toledo thing.”

“I’m not … foolish with money, Ben.”

“I know that.”

“But where on earth does it all go?”

“Good question.”

“You’re making
good
money. Don’t we owe the bank something on that open note?”

“Oh, I’ve whittled that down to just twelve hundred.”

“Will it be better when that’s paid off?”

“It might be. A little.”

She straightened her shoulders. “Well, I can certainly get along on the four hundred, Ben. If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have——”

“I didn’t mean to bark.”

“Golly, I don’t blame you. We’ll just have to live … simpler.”

“Where? How?”

“Those are good questions, too, aren’t they?”

And it was turned into a joke, but the strain was there, the tinge of poison. And all the affirmations of love could not make it go away entirely.

It was, Ben thought, as the lean month went by, just a case of holding on, cutting corners until income jumped again. It made him feel guilty, however. It was a shameful situation to be unable to live without strain on an income which, ten years ago, he would have considered wildly affluent. It was best not to think of what might happen should some emergency situation come up.

And so in June, of course, which had promised to be a better month, Chris nearly lost his right hand. He was in a school bus on the way to a picnic, sitting by the window on the right side of the bus, his right arm out the window. As they were making a turn at low speed on a gravel road the right front tire blew. The bus skidded, went through a shallow ditch and into a stand of small trees. Chris said later that he had tried to pull his arm in, but the motion of the bus had jammed everybody against him. At first it was believed that no one had been hurt. The sound Chris made was lost in the general turmoil. But then he fainted.

When Ben got to the hospital at four o’clock they had been working on the hand—pulped between tree and bus body—for over an hour. Ginny was very white and very still, and her eyes were huge.

They did the basic structural repairs in the first operation. The third day following there were evidences of infection. In spite of the sulfas and antibiotics, his fever went up to dangerous levels, there were consultations and tentative recommendations for amputation. It was a nightmare time, with the hospital the center of all thoughts and schedules. The child was so stolidly brave about it, so uncomplainingly courageous and gallant that it seemed to make the whole thing more pointlessly tragic.

Almost during the last hour of decision, the infection began to respond. There was a second operation in July,
very delicate and intricate, close work with muscles, tendons, nerves, to achieve optimum functioning of the hand. He healed with such miraculous speed—a facility reserved to small healthy boys—that he was able to go back to the hospital for the final operation in late August, a relatively minor one to readjust repairs previously made in the index finger and thumb.

By the time he started school in the fall, the bandages were off. The hand was slightly but not obviously misshapen. The orthopedic surgeon was quietly proud of his work, of the restoration of an estimated 60 per cent of function. But Chris often wept with frustration at the hand that would not follow the commands of the mind and, when it did so, was so girlishly weak. He had a series of exercises that he tended to overdo. “By the time he is twelve, he will have eighty per cent function,” the doctor said. “Perhaps later it will become more. He will adjust, and never notice it.”

When your only son is injured, it is degrading to think of money. You get the money, somewhere, and you don’t think about it, at least very much. The hospitalization covered a small part of the expense. Ben had the optimistic feeling that he could recover the rest of it from the Department of Public Instruction. He had a local lawyer, Harold Crady, look into it.

Crady finally reported back. “I’ve been around and around on this thing, Ben. The insurance company takes the stand that their coverage does not extend past taking the kids to and from school, or on special instructional field trips. This was a picnic, not authorized by the company, and the bus was not being driven by a regular driver.”

“Who
was
driving it then?”

“The brother of Chris’ teacher. The Public Instruction people take the stand the bus was ‘borrowed’ without sufficient authorization. The driver has no personal liability coverage, and he hasn’t got dime one, Ben.”

“Then what do I do?”

Crady shrugged. “You could file suit against the Public Instruction Department and the insurance company and the driver.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

“Because I don’t think you’d get anywhere. You’d just be making a bad risk of more money, Ben. Take your loss. That’s the best thing you can do.”

Hospital, surgery, anesthesia, nurses, operating room, and outpatient care came to $3006.65. Hospitalization covered $401.20 of this total. It was particularly ironic that Harold Crady’s bill for legal services in the amount of $100 had to be considered a part of the expense of the accident. Ben Weldon raised the $2700. He cashed the last few Government bonds. He had been trying to forget that he owned them, so that he would leave them alone. He got a little over $900 for them. He borrowed against the cash value of his insurance, a final $1000, bringing his insurance borrowings to an even $4000, on which interest at 6 per cent was piling up, and leaving him a cash-value equity of a little over $100. He went down to the Lawton National Bank. His 180-day note had been whittled down to $1100. He paid the interest to date and had it rewritten for $2200, with the overage deposited in his checking account. Mr. Lathrop Hyde, the vice president, was cordial enough, but Ben Weldon thought he detected a certain reluctance, an almost imperceptible reserve and skepticism. There had been Hydes in Lawton Valley back when New York had been a full day’s trip away by carriage. He never could feel entirely at ease with what Ginny in her more irritable moments called the aborigines. They all seemed to have an emotional resentment toward the new people, which was at odds with their pleasure in making money out of the explosive growth of the area.