Sincerely, Willis Wayde (30 page)

He saw that Mr. Beakney was watching him closely.

“Yes,” Mr. Beakney said, “but you didn't come here to speak about my oratory, did you?”

His mood was no longer mellow; he was the quick, incisive Mr. Beakney.

“No, sir,” Willis said, and he made his mood change too.

“Well, get it off your chest,” Mr. Beakney said. “I have to go to the club and dress for dinner.”

“All right, sir,” Willis said. “I want to know if you don't think I'm worth ten thousand dollars a year.”

Mr. Beakney gazed at the view for an appreciable length of time without giving any answer, and Willis knew the pause was deliberate and designed to disconcert him.

“I don't like this sort of thing,” he said, “at the end of a hard day. It's not the custom here for my people to ask for raises.”

Instead of being crushed, as he would have been a short time ago, Willis kept his wits about him. Watching Mr. Beakney was enough to tell Willis that he was in danger. Willis had only to say the wrong thing once, and Mr. Beakney's cool expression told him that it would be very easy to say it.

“Mr. McKitterick said you wouldn't like it,” Willis said.

Mr. Beakney looked again at the Hudson River.

“Just what in hell”—Mr. Beakney's voice had risen to a cool, hard note—“makes you think you're worth ten thousand a year?”

“I didn't say I thought I was,” Willis answered. “I only asked you if you thought so.”

“So that's it,” Mr. Beakney said. “Hawley's been getting after you, has he? I rather thought he would.”

It was a question of whether to answer or to remain silent, and there was only a second in which to make the choice.

“I wasn't especially attracted by Mr. Hawley,” Willis said.

You could always tell when you had said the right thing, and all at once the tension was broken.

“You wouldn't get on with him at all,” Mr. Beakney said. “Personally, I disliked every moment I spent with him. You're happy with us here, aren't you?”

“Yes, sir,” Willis said, “very happy.”

“I'm glad to have you say so,” Mr. Beakney said. “You've been making a real place for yourself here, but I guess we'd better change your plans a little.” Suddenly Mr. Beakney laughed, and slapped Willis affectionately on the knee. “I guess we'd better send Hal Towle with Joe to Cleveland. I wouldn't want to see you in Hawley Pneumatic Tool.”

“I woudn't want to be there,” Willis said.

“Now, Willis,” Mr. Beakney said, “if two thousand dollars more a year makes you happy, why, what's two thousand dollars? It won't mean anything to you in a while at the rate you're developing, but after this, you let me make the raises. It's annoying, being asked.”

“I'm sorry, sir,” Willis said.

“Don't say you're sorry,” Mr. Beakney said. “I was young myself once. I know what it's like when someone like Hawley puts on pressure. I wish I knew what he offered you, for purely academic reasons. I'll bet it was more than ten thousand, but I won't ask.”

“Thank you, sir,” Willis said.

“I get this in a better perspective now,” Mr. Beakney said. “It was loyal of you to come to me first. I won't say I would have matched him, but it was loyal. Ability is first here, but loyalty is a close second.”

Mr. Beakney slapped his knee again and stood up.

“Just the same,” he said, “I guess you'd better not go to Cleveland. I've got another problem that came to us yesterday. The Rahway Belt Company wants a survey done. It's a small outfit—not promising—but it's a chance for you to develop, and you worked at Harcourt. Have you forgotten about belting?”

“No, sir,” Willis said.

“Well,” Mr. Beakney said, “clear up what you're doing around here. Next week we'll send you down to Rahway. I wonder what you want that two thousand for. You're not thinking of getting married, are you, Willis?”

“No, sir,” Willis said, and he meant every word of it. “It's the last thing I've been thinking of.”

Until then Willis had been in the ranks of bright nice boys who attempted to achieve success by pleasing. He had spent years like a trained terrier in a vaudeville act, jumping through hoops and turning complicated somersaults in order to earn commendation. He had never snarled or bitten or dreamed of turning on his trainer. It would not be accurate to say that he had finally snarled at Mr. Beakney, but he had, for once, met a superior face to face. He had never realized, until it was over, that he could be capable of meeting successfuly anyone of Mr. Beakney's caliber. What still puzzled him was what had ever made him dare, at that particular time, when he had been doing very well indeed, to face up to Mr. Beakney? His salary would have taken care of itself automatically if he had continued jumping through the hoops. There was some other, deeper, cause for restiveness.

After leaving the office he went straight to his apartment on Tenth Street and sat for quite a long while thinking. He had succeeded with Mr. Beakney, he knew now, by giving himself a value which did not exist. Mr. Beakney had thought erroneously that Willis had received a tempting offer from another source, and Willis's conscience stirred uneasily, because he had allowed Mr. Beakney to think it, but then it had all been Mr. Beakney's own idea. Mr. Beakney was astute enough to look out for himself, and if he had fallen into a trap of his own contriving, there were fine dramatic precedents. If Willis had asked for an even larger raise, he realized that he could have got it. He had missed his opportunity, but he understood that there would be other opportunities. The point was that he was as good as someone in Mr. Beakney's class.

Then he was lonely and he wanted to share his thoughts with someone, which explained why he had pulled out his pocket address book and a moment later he was dialing Sylvia Hodges's number.

“Hello, Sylvia,” he said, “this is Willis Wayde. How would you feel about having a bite of supper? I'll pick up the car and we might run out to Long Island somewhere.”

What would have happened, he often wondered, if Sylvia had not been at home? As sure as fate he would have called up Lydia Hembird. He was in a mood where he had to call someone.

XIV

Occasionally it seemed to Willis Wayde that his was only the progress of any successful American who had started as a poor boy and had used the opportunities offered in what was called the American way. It was only when one began to search the mechanisms behind this pattern that there were complications, negligible in themselves and even laughable, like the problems in a soap opera, but these were different for every individual. Everyone seemed to deal in a slightly different way with conscience and obligation and everyone had his own concept of happiness and justice as well as his own fears. This may have been why everyone's life, beyond a few fixed points, was somewhat fluid.

For this reason, perhaps, there were plenty of people who set themselves up as authorities on instability, like priests and doctors and social anthropologists. These individuals wrote books about chronic dyspepsia, insomnia, posture, introversion, sex in marriage, and occupational therapy, and how to make friends and influence people. You could read these works, you could attend lectures, but in the end it always seemed to Willis that you were still alone. In the watches of the night at least, you were always you.

In an autobiography that he had once written for a subscription volume entitled
Industrial Leaders of America
, Willis believed that he had adequately covered the high points of his career. “In late May, 1936,” he had written, “I was sent by the management company Beakney-Graham to make an industrial study of the Rahway Belting Company.”

On the morning Willis first visited the Rahway Belting Company he drove there in his new car. He was dressed so conservatively and carefully that he looked like a picture of a consultant in an industrial advertisement. He had read, of course, all the available material on the Rahway Belting Company. He knew it was a small plant that had suffered badly in the depression—that its working capital was low, that its preferred stock had passed its dividends for three years, that the control of the company rested in the hands of Mr. Manley Jacoby, and that the other principal owners were Mr. John Hingham, a banker in Orange, and a garage owner by the name of Henry Peters, and a Mr. Jack Meister, a businessman who was also interested in a small machine-tool shop. He also knew that what had saved Rahway Belt in the depression and what was all that kept it running still was its product, the Planeroid high-speed belt made by a patented process. Willis had heard Planeroid spoken of when he was at the Harcourt Mill as a type of belting that offered high durability at low cost. Besides the Planeroid line, he knew that Rahway Belting manufactured rubber hose and also a variety of V-belts.

Willis had visited enough industrial plants since he had been with Beakney-Graham to know that exterior conditions were no criteria of efficiency. There were few factories along the tracks between New York and Philadelphia that were objects of aesthetic beauty. Although windows might be broken and paint peeling, a place could still give the impression of order and morale, but his acquired sense of appraisal told him Rahway Belting was a dying duck, with no future and not much of a past. Only a few shabby cars stood in its paper-littered parking lot, and the elderly gatekeeper showed no trace of interest when Willis Wayde approached, but sat slumped in his gatehouse carving a slice of tobacco from a plug.

The yard was as dirty as the parking place, and the wooden steps leading to the office were shaky. The waiting space for callers had not been swept, and the girl at an antiquated switchboard behind the rail knew nothing about his visit. Mr. Jacoby was in, she said, and nodded toward a plain board door. The room where Mr. Jacoby sat reminded Willis of the waiting room in a country railroad station. Although it was late in May, a fire was burning in a hot-air stove, and Mr. Jacoby in his shirt sleeves, seated at a golden-oak roll-top desk, looked exactly like a rural stationmaster. He was fussing with a pile of invoices and he pushed his steel-rimmed reading glasses up over his narrow high forehead.

“Good morning,” Willis said. “Am I speaking to Mr. Jacoby?”

Mr. Jacoby pulled a soiled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the corners of his eyes.

“Yes, young fellow, that's my name,” he said, “and it wasn't my idea to get you here.”

It wasn't his idea, Mr. Jacoby said, but the bank's idea, and that was the trouble with getting mixed up with banks. Once you started dealing with them you were like a fly on sticky paper. As Willis sat in an uncomfortable chair listening to Mr. Jacoby, he felt like a doctor hearing the complaints of a chronic patient. It was clear that Mr. Jacoby, and Rahway Belting with him, had been on flypaper for a long time. Even while Mr. Jacoby's querulous voice rang in his ears, Willis was beginning to see the picture of Rahway Belt, and he knew right from the beginning that Mr. Jacoby was the key to the puzzle.

Willis could see him still, a tired old man in his middle sixties who was constantly trying to fit the past impossibly into the present. He was only a shadow of what he had been once, and he was running down like Rahway Belt, but Willis could see behind the shadow, because it never paid to underestimate anyone, and traces of shrewdness and vestiges of skill enlarged themselves in various ways as Mr. Jacoby talked.

“Say,” Mr. Jacoby said, “you know something about belting, don't you?”

They wouldn't have sent him down if he didn't, Willis told him, and then he mentioned the Harcourt Mill.

“By God,” Mr. Jacoby said, “that used to be a nice concern.”

Willis often thought that the saying no love is like your first love applied to business as well as sentiment. When the Harcourt Mill was mentioned, old loyalties came over him and old habits of thought that unexpectedly fused into creative desire. He had thought in the first minutes of his interview that there was only one honest recommendation he could make—to put the factory up for sale and to dispose separately of its Planeroid patents. But now he revised that estimate because an old and inefficient man was talking of the Harcourt Mill. It used to be a great place once, Mr. Jacoby was saying, a finely managed property, and he had made a tour of it some years ago. Before he got arthritis—and that was why he had to keep the room dry and hot, on account of his arthritis—he had made a practice of traveling around and getting new ideas. That was why he had invested in the Planeroid patents and had bought into the Rahway Belt—because he liked new ideas. Planeroid was a low-cost process, and there was still a Planeroid market, if anyone had the guts to build it, but since the depression, everything was different, but if he had twenty years off him he could show them. But to get back to the Harcourt Mill—their Oak-Heart line was a fine seller, and Mr. Henry Harcourt was a grand gentleman. Mr. Jacoby wondered, now that Mr. Harcourt was dead and gone and things weren't going so well up there, what had happened to the Harcourt place.

“I guess it's still right there,” Willis told him, “but I haven't seen it for quite a while.”

Willis had deliberately put the Harcourt place out of his mind for a long while, but now he found himself thinking how it would look with the pear and tulip trees about to start their bloom. He could almost smell the New England spring again, and he could almost feel that Mr. Henry Harcourt was beside him as he talked to Mr. Jacoby. He could even think later that the ghost of Mr. Harcourt must have given him advice and warned him not to miss an opportunity. At any rate Willis grasped the vital fact that the Planeroid process was a very good one. Even before he inspected the plant and the books, he had a good picture of the Rahway problem. The whole answer lay in cutting costs and concentrating first on a single line.

“I'd like to have a look at the Planeroid division if I might,” Willis said, and he had been right. It was the only part of the plant that mattered.