Treasures (46 page)

“Where’s the company plane?”

“Preston has it in Vail. He’ll be flying back for the closing tomorrow.”

“Don’t you think we need a new one for ourselves, Martin? We have to get to Mykonos for the Byrds’ house party next month and if ours isn’t ready by then, it’ll be awkward because I’ve offered Bitsy Maxwell’s whole group, and the hairdresser, and—”

“All right, all right! I’ll order a plane, for God’s sake. I’ll charter one.” Martin stopped in front of the dressing-table mirror, before which Connie was sitting removing her makeup. “Look at me. I look like hell.”

Two deep lines had carved themselves into his cheeks, lines that she had really not been aware of until this minute, in the glare of the makeup light.

“Well, don’t I look like hell?” he demanded.

“You look tired, that’s all.”

“This business is wearing me down. I’m getting to be an old man before my time.”

“Well, I always tell you not to work so hard, but you won’t listen.”

“Get off that subject, will you? I have to work. You spend so much that no matter what I earn, it’s never too much. Huh! Barely enough, I should say. Ten million it cost me to do up the Fifth Avenue apartment, and now there’s this place. There’s never any end to it. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I do now. You’re the last one to talk to me about working so hard.”

She sprang up from the bench. Astounded and hurt by what she took to be an implication, she screamed at him. For the first time in their life together, she was really furious.

“Just because your first wife was a dowdy, dreary mess who didn’t spend, a joy killer who doesn’t even know how to bring up a daughter—”

“Leave her out of it!”

“Well, that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

“Nah, I don’t know what I meant. Yes, I do know. This whole damned evening was a bomb. Ben, with his holy conscience making me feel like a—like a thief or something. And you—you fall right in with him. I never would have believed it.”

“I didn’t ‘fall right in with him.’ But I have a right to agree with anybody I want when I choose. And he made a point. That business about one person planting and another one eating. He was right.”

“Oh, back to Lara and Davey again, of course. Lara
and Davey, all evening. Maybe that’s the reason I feel so wrung out.”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, I don’t. I’m tired of being nagged about them.”

“I never nag, and you know it. I’m too smart to nag,” she said coldly.

“Well, good. I’m glad to hear it. And now I’m tired. I want some sleep.”

In the morning there would be no time to talk. Then he would be gone, and the next day in New York, the deal would be closed. In Ohio, Lara would be waiting with Davey for the telephone to ring with the news. Probably, they would be waiting at home in the little den; Peg’s photograph was on the table near the telephone. There would be snow on the ground outside, and a white glare coming through the window.

“Martin, Martin, listen to me. I don’t want to fight with you. But listen. It’s only a piddling little company. There’s no reason why that man Bennett has to grab it, with all he’s worth.”

“It’s not so piddling. I’ve told you ten times that it fits into the whole combine; he wants it, and I’m not going to upset a multimillion-dollar deal and look like an ass besides, just because that stubborn, stupid fool happens to be my brother-in-law.”

“He is stubborn, I agree, and so is Lara. And personally, in their position, I might go along with the offer and be glad about it. But that isn’t the point.” She felt herself floundering. Surely he must understand what she
meant! And she pleaded. “You said yourself that Bennett’s a horror. Preston said so too.”

“One doesn’t have to admire everybody with whom one does business.”

A sense of futility overcame Connie then, as Martin, with his back turned, went searching through his tie rack. And she cried out, “I’m not going to let you hurt them, Martin! I’m not! How can you be so hard!”

He whirled upon her. “I? Hard? You can say that after all I’ve done for them, for the child?”

“Yes, it was wonderful, but that has nothing to do with this.”

“You’re right, it hasn’t. This is a question of money and nothing else.”

She stared at him. This man, who almost never turned down an appeal, and the daily mail was flooded with them.…

“Money,” she said. “I remember what you said about poor Eddy, how greed undid him. And now what arc you doing?”

“You’re comparing me with Eddy? After he swindled people? Filed false returns? God damn you, Connie, this I never could have expected to hear!”

“I didn’t accuse you of anything like that, did I? But if you make people wretched, if you destroy them in their hearts, I don’t see that it matters much whether what you did is legal or not.”

Her words had enraged him. She hadn’t meant them to, had meant rather to touch him, but the effort had misfired and failed.

“You and your hard-luck family! Your brother and your sister … nothing but trouble.”

“That’s not true. And at least we care about one another. We talk to each other, not like you and your brother Ben—”

“Now leave me alone. I’ve heard enough,” Martin said. “I need some rest. I’m sleeping across the hall.”

The door closed sharply behind him.

She wanted, she needed, to fling herself onto the bed and cry out her frustration. And for a moment she stood undecided. But then she would look frightful in the morning, with her eyelids puffed red above dark rings. Frightful. And she had promised to take Thérèse to see Santa Claus; after that there was a luncheon at the Savoy with some delightful English ladies whom she had just met. No, no, Connie. Cream your face as you always do. Drink some hot milk, climb into bed, and swallow the tears. Be sensible.

The plane roared up out of Heathrow and climbed northward toward Scotland and the Atlantic. Martin had been lucky to get the last seat in economy class. The Concorde had been filled, as apparently was every seat in every class on every westbound plane, and he had spent hours waiting for this lucky cancellation.

It had been years, he could truly not remember how long it had been, since he had ridden in tourist class. He was terribly tired. He had scarcely slept all night in that strange bed, he was that upset about having argued with Connie, and he was tense, too, about the closing. Indeed, when it was all over, when the final signatures had
been affixed, there would be triumph and exhilaration, but there was always so much to be gotten through until that moment, so much wrangling over last-minute demands and bothersome minutiae, so many withdrawals into corridors and men’s rooms for whispered conferences among lawyers and accountants, an army of them on either side. He had been through it all so often.

He laid his head back, but he was too cramped to fall asleep, and anyway, his mind was too perturbed. So he ordered a drink to soothe himself, but was still miserable.

He hadn’t said good-bye to Connie that morning. She had been asleep when he had gone into their room to get his clothes. Then he had just had time before running to the airline office to see Thérèse; he’d kissed her on the run and gotten a spot of grape jam on his tie where she’d grabbed it, wanting him to stay. He felt bad about having left them both like that. And, too, he’d said some nasty things to Connie last night, to his good-natured, good-hearted Connie. Well, she had said some pretty nasty things too. Still, they hadn’t been as nasty as what he’d said, about her spending so much, for instance. God, Connie could spend whatever she wanted as far as he was concerned! When you loved a woman, you wanted to give her things, didn’t you? Anyway, admit it, he liked to spend as much as she liked to. They were both caught up in spending. “Expenses rise to meet income.” He’d always said that, and it was the truth.

As to her family, the fact was that he admired their warmth; to their credit they stood fast to each other in a
tough, chilly world. But to hear Connie you’d think he had attacked them! It had been queer to see her in agreement with Ben, or Ben in agreement with her.

And it’s funny, too, about Ben, he thought. He can be so hard sometimes, so sure he’s right, and yet he can also be so soft, quoting Papa, remembering the words exactly. He can remember a hundred things that I’ve forgotten or buried someplace, being too busy to keep them in my head: what we ate on those Friday nights when Papa read to us; all those fine singing words, mostly about charity and loving-kindness. Well, nobody can possibly say that Martin Berg doesn’t give! But it’s not just the giving, Ben always says, it’s the accumulation, the first taking that enables the giving. And if the accumulation is all wrong—

Abruptly, Martin became aware that his nervous fingers were drumming on the armrest. He removed his hand and held it on his lap.

It’s a game with you, Ben says. It’s a war. You’re tensed up all the time, waiting to go to war.

And then something made Martin remember that fellow McClintock. Something? Why, those had been McClintock’s words, almost exactly.
You guys are playing a game with money, a war game, and most of the money isn’t even yours.
And Martin wondered what had become of the man after they kicked him out. Just about a year ago, it was.
This kind of high, wide, and handsome financing can’t hold up, and when the day of reckoning comes—
He had taken a chance with that kind of talk, McClintock had, and Martin had been as furious as everybody else in the room. Maybe he’d been even more furious
because common sense told him—and if you read the signs throughout the country, you had to see—that McClintock was right. One knew it, and one didn’t want to know it.

Maybe that’s what had been bothering him lately, nagging like an ulcer, not so much in the stomach—although here too—as in the head, if that were possible. Just one more big deal, real fireworks, and then quit. Quit in the fullness of power. Celebrity status. I bet half the people on this plane right now would recognize my name if it were called out, he thought.

Now, above the general babble and noise, he caught a snatch of conversation between two grown boys across the aisle.

“My dad hasn’t lost his job after all. So that was great news.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I can’t wait to get home.”

That last time in Ohio, Davey had been more worried about his men losing their jobs than about almost anything else. The original innocent, that was Davey. The innocents of the world. “Nice guys finish last.” What if that kid’s father—and out of the corner of his left eye Martin could see the kid’s nice, eager face and his cheap imitation leather windbreaker—what if that kid’s father had lost his job? When you thought about it like that, really looked at a flesh-and-blood person, not a statistic, it did something to you.

How could he have forgotten? He, a child of the tenements … How could he? Why, it was easy, because
he had wanted to, that’s all. Hadn’t things always been like this, as far back as the Roman Empire or farther?

A vague sadness, an unfamiliar pity, filled Martin’s chest. He could not even try to analyze it. Fragments of thought, like dispersing cloud shreds, floated through his head. Thérèse, his little darling. And his Melissa, his heart. The son who hated him because of the divorce. Connie, his joyous Connie. He wished he could turn the plane around, go back to London, and tell her how much he loved her.

“Even with,” he’d say, “even with that troublesome family of yours.” But he’d laugh when he said it.

He had been so angry at Lara, really disgusted, baffled by her stubborn resistance. And yet—he had to admit it—a part of him had been filled with admiration all the time. One had to admire the human being who went down fighting because he believed he was right.

It was funny to think of little Lara Davis, a small-town woman who’d never gone any farther from home than New York, defying the firm of Fraser, DeWitt, Berg. Or, more than that, defying the great Franklin Bennett and his multibillions. Amazing, when you considered the contrasts.

God, what a loathsome thing was Bennett! He was probably flying back from Acapulco right now, licking his chops over the deal, while ordering his cohorts to wait on him. Cohorts like Martin Berg who’d gladly wait on him provided that the fee was big enough. Well, that, too, had probably been no different back under the Roman Empire.

Wouldn’t it be something, though, to turn on him
one day and out of a bright, clear sky, tell him to go to hell? Think of those astonished, popping eyes, the jowls gone slack in disbelief, the spluttering fat lips!

And think of being able to say to Connie, “You know what? You’re right. I’m not going to destroy Davey’s work or quench his dreams. I’m not. For what? For Bennett and his kind? No, or for Fraser, DeWitt, Berg either.”

Now Martin let his imagination go free. Suppose he were to walk into that meeting tomorrow and announce that after much thought, he had concluded that he couldn’t approve this buyout? They wouldn’t believe him! And he could see them all sitting around the table with their faces turned to him, staring, thinking that they couldn’t have heard aright, so that he would have to repeat his words. Preston would be speechless. At first they would all think he must be having some sort of nervous breakdown, and then when they finally understood that he was perfectly sane, they would be wild with fury. There would be a battle such as the venerable firm of Fraser, DeWitt, Berg had never seen before. They would search their minds for motives, they would suspect him of some kind of double-cross. They would drive themselves crazy trying to figure him out.

It would be a new kind of battle, one that he might even, in a way, enjoy. He would be fighting this time not for profits, but for people. For Peggy, who had returned to life. And in a curious way, for his own Thérèse; he hoped she would grow into the kind of person who would understand. It would not occur to them that a man could simply and suddenly undergo a sea change.

So, here at last he stood with his decision. And an inward chuckle began to bubble to his throat, where a few moments before a lump of sadness had lain. He knew exactly what he was going to do the moment he landed.