Unrivaled (25 page)

After ringing off with Standard and telling myself the end justified the means, I placed a few more calls.

Sam sighed as he slouched against the wall. “Are you done yet?”

“Yes, Sam. I’m quite done.” I pulled on my gloves, took up my handbag, and looped it over my wrist.

“Good!” He stalked into the office and then pulled me out by the arm. “I don’t mind telling you that I don’t think it’s right, what you just did.”

The truth was, neither did I. But it couldn’t really be helped.

Saturday evening was a night off from being the Queen of Love and Beauty, but my presence was still required at the club. A benefit for the city library was being hosted there by the ladies’ auxiliary, and I had been enlisted to pour coffee.

As we entered the dining room, Mr. Arthur waved his hat at us.

Mother waved her program back at him. “Go ahead and sit by him. Your shift at the coffeepot doesn’t start for a little while. I’ll join you in a bit.”

I clutched at her hand. “Come with me.” Please! I never quite knew what to say to him.

“Don’t be foolish. I’m sure you must appreciate the chance to be alone with your fiancé for a few moments.” She practically shooed me in his direction.

He looked rather glum as I approached. Though he stood to greet me the way he normally did and nodded his head at me just the same as always, there was something not quite normal in the way he refused to meet my eye.

Perhaps . . . “Are you not feeling well, Mr. Arthur?” I gave him another glance as I sat down.

“No. I’m not.”

Poor man. He sounded so miserable as he said it. “Please, don’t feel you have to stay here for my benefit. Wouldn’t you rather go home?”

“No. Yes.” He closed his eyes for a moment as he pinched the bridge of his nose.

“If you’re ill . . . ?”

He opened them. “I’m not ill. Not exactly. It’s just that I want very much to do the right thing.”

“I’m sure no one would mind if you left. In fact, they probably
won’t even notice.” The dining room had been filled to bursting when we’d walked in and there had been others behind us waiting to enter.

“You don’t think so?” He sounded rather queer.

I hoped it wasn’t the influenza. “I wouldn’t give it a second thought if I were you. Truly.”

He leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “You’re a treasure, Lucy Kendall.” It was one of the most heartfelt statements he’d ever made to me. I smiled at him as he left.

Being Lucy Arthur might not be so bad after all.

“There’s something going on down in the factory.” Mr. Mundt whispered the words to me on Monday as he shot worried glances toward my father’s closed office door.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t know? He usually knew everything. “If you don’t know, then . . . how do you know?”

He held up a finger. “Listen.”

I turned my ear toward the office door. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly!”

He was such a strange man. I began to ask him to explain himself when I realized what he meant. There was nothing to be heard. There was no sound, no noise. Nothing at all. I started for the factory at a run.

When I reached the factory floor, the only machine working was the mixer. I approached some of the workers who stood in a cluster talking, as absolutely nothing took place around them. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

One of them shrugged. “Don’t know. There’s no sugar for the melting pots.”

No sugar? I ran to the men who stood staring at the giant kettles. “Why aren’t you working?”

“There’s no sugar to melt.”

I grabbed one of the bucket boys. “Why don’t you have any syrup?”

“Isn’t none.” He was standing there looking at the bottom of his bucket as if hoping some might appear. “Hey, mister.” Another of them tugged at my coattails. “We still going to get paid?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t their fault they didn’t have any work to do.

If the problem wasn’t with the mixer, and if they didn’t have any sugar to melt, something must have happened to the supplies. I talked to a receiving clerk and was told that no sugar had been delivered.

Mr. Gillespie was standing there arguing with one of the other clerks. “What do you mean there aren’t any shipments?”

The clerk shrugged. “There aren’t any shipments. Nothing’s come in today.”

I walked over to the bay and peered down the tracks that were normally packed with trains.

Mr. Gillespie threw his hands up. “Then—you’ll just have to use the reserves while I place some calls.”

“We have.”

“You’ve already called our suppliers?”

“We’ve already used up the reserves.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I should have been told!”

The man shoved his hands into his pockets. “We figured there was more coming along.”

We looked down the tracks in unison as if we were doing one of those tango dances, but there were no trains. It was clear that nothing was coming down those tracks today.

“I guess . . .” Mr. Gillespie turned to look at me.

What was there to say? “Finish up that last batch of Royal Taffy, then send everyone home.” There was nothing else to be done.

Back with Mr. Mundt up in the office, I took over the telephone. I called our suppliers, one by one. Their response to my inquiries was the same. They insisted that we had called and canceled all of the week’s deliveries. And they were all planning to charge us extra for their trouble.

“Can I just ask you when it was that we called to cancel our order?”

“It was . . . on Wednesday.”

“Can you tell me whom you spoke to?”

“It was someone from your . . . it was . . . it had to have been . . . your purchasing clerk?” There was a long pause. “Yes. I think so. It would have been the purchasing clerk.”

“Just a moment, please.” I waved Mr. Mundt over and covered the transmitter with my hand. “Who is the purchasing clerk?”

“Mr. Davis. Dennis Davis.”

I held the transmitter back up to my mouth. “Then it must have been to Mr. Davis that you spoke.”

“No, sir.”

“No?”

“No.”

Mr. Mundt had been so certain. “Then . . . who was it?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Only that it was a lady.”

“A lady? There’s no—” A
lady
! I highly doubted that. There was only one person it could possibly have been, and she was no lady at all. I knew as sure I was standing there that Lucy Kendall had called all of our suppliers and told them not to
ship the week’s orders. No candy was being made thanks to her. And now I had to go explain it all to my father.

“But why would she do such a thing?” My father asked as if he were fascinated by the possibilities. “I don’t understand.”

Didn’t understand? I would have thought it was clear as day. We were trying to get rid of her father’s company.

“It’s at cross-purposes with the plan, and the longer we wait, the worse my position gets, but . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t see that there’s anything more to do right now. Until those supplies get here, we’ll have to shut our doors.”

That’s about what I’d figured. “I’ll let all the workers go home. Although . . . I did tell them that they’d be paid.”

He raised a brow. “You told them wrong, then.”

“It wasn’t their fault we didn’t have the supplies.”

“Of course it wasn’t. But I can’t pay them if I don’t make any money.”

I thought of the Boys’ Brigade and how thin some of them were. “If they don’t get paid, then some of them might not eat this week.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“Some of the men will probably lose their homes.”

“Again: Not my problem. My problem is keeping my customers happy. The customer is the person who matters.”

“Do you even know who that customer is?”

“Of course! It’s the variety stores and Stix and Vandervoort’s and places like that.”

“The real customers are people just like those workers down there. They’re the newsies who earn a few cents a day and spend some of it on a Royal Taffy. Do you—do you even
realize
what you’re selling? It’s not candy. It’s a—a dream. It’s not sugar and
oil and flavoring. It’s a blessed five minutes when they don’t have to think about anything else but how
perfect
a Royal Taffy tastes. You’re selling a vision of all that’s right in the world.
That’s
your product. And that’s your customer. And you won’t have any of them if we can’t keep the workers.”

He dismissed all of my outrage with a wave of his cigar. “I’ve never had a problem keeping workers. The minute one walks out of the factory, there are ten more willing to take his place. Why should you care what happens to them?”

“Because I used to be one of them! I scraped together every penny I could so that we could pay the grocer’s bill. And I never had any left over for candy.”

At least he had the grace to looked shamed. “I . . . didn’t know.”

“Because you didn’t care to.” I couldn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth. “What did you think happened to us once you left?”

“Your mother’s the one who sued for divorce.”

“You left us. She only made official what you’d already done. You left us in a house that was falling apart with no food in the cupboards and no wood for the fire. Do you even know what happened to Tillie? Do you want to?”

For a moment he looked just as weary as my mother always had. “Of course I know. How could you think I would forget about all of you? Just because I wasn’t there didn’t mean I didn’t care, that I didn’t know.”

“You knew? About the consumption?”

“Your mother wrote to me.”

“You never . . . said . . .” He’d never said anything about it. Never showed his face at all in the fifteen years since he’d left.

“I’d made such a mess of things, I figured the best I could do for all of you was just to stay away.”

“The best you could do. So . . . you knew and you didn’t do anything about it.”

“I did do something. I sent your mother money so she could take Tillie to a special doctor. In fact, I started sending your mother money the moment I got established here. And I kept sending money. But she wouldn’t take any of it. She always sent it back . . . until Tillie.”

I remembered that. I remembered taking my mother and my sister to a doctor. Remembered thinking that at last all my work had been good for something. That I’d finally earned enough money to do my family some good. Only I hadn’t. It was my father’s money that had paid for it. And Tillie had grown too ill by then. “But you never came. Not when she was sick. And not to the funeral.”

“Son. I’d given up that right.”

“Did you know about Ruthie? How she got married at sixteen to a lout who isn’t worth ten dimes?”

“Your mother didn’t—”

“Because he had a car. She married him because he had a
car
. They don’t have a house and they hardly have anything to eat, but he has a car.” I felt like hitting something.

“You can’t blame me for her poor judgment.”

“I could blame you for her lack of any model to judge
by
, but as I look at you I realize that’s not fair.”

He fumbled with his lighter.

“Even if you’d been there, you couldn’t have given her an example good enough to measure anyone by.”

He set the lighter down. “That is not fair, Charles. I run a business, not a charity.”

“You’ve made that more than clear to everyone who works here!”

“I didn’t get where I am by worrying about my workers. Or their pay.”

“No. You got where you are by stealing someone’s recipe and then taking care of yourself.”

“That’s not what happened. I was given that recipe, fair and square.”

“You can’t just—just steal someone else’s life because you don’t like yours. You don’t get to throw people away and start over!”

“I never threw you away.”

“You might as well have.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“I don’t even know why I’m standing here listening to you. I don’t even know why I came.”

He put his cigar down and came around his desk to put a hand to my shoulder. “Because I want to make it up to you. I want to help you. I want to give you the success that I spent years working for.”

He wanted to give me something. Well. It was about time. It was past time. He was offering me everything I’d always wanted as a boy. The chance to work with him. The chance to be with him. The chance to know him. He finally wanted me to be his son. But I no longer knew what I wanted. And I didn’t know who I was.

I had Nelson drive me back to the house. I pulled my mother’s old satchel out from under the bed and put one of the worsted suits into it, followed by three of my new shirts. The rest of the clothes weren’t worth the space. I’d come to St. Louis wearing a suit that Mr. Dreffs had thrown away and an old derby hat. If the only thing I took with me was a change of clothes, then I would leave a better man.

There was no one in the city to say good-bye to, except for
Winnie, maybe. But she’d probably only ask me questions about church and accuse me of not listening to anything. And there was Lucy. But I didn’t want to see her gloat. She’d figure out soon enough that I’d gone. And it wouldn’t take her much longer to realize that my leaving changed nothing. My father was bent on the Kendall family’s destruction. If I could say nothing else about him, he always seemed to get what he wanted.

I went down the service stairs and out to the garage.

Nelson was bent over Louise, a rag in his hand. He straightened as he saw me. “Going somewhere, Mr. Clarke?”

“I was hoping you’d take me over to Chestnut Valley.”

“Gonna do some dancing tonight?”

Or play some cards. I’d sent most of last week’s pay check to my mother in Chicago, just like the week before. At least she hadn’t sent any of it back. But if I wanted to leave the city with a train ticket in my pocket, then I needed some way to buy it.