Big Money (26 page)

Nat Benton was eating rawroastbeef sandwiches and buttermilk. “I've got no more digestion than . . .” “Than John D. Rockefeller,” put in Charley. They laughed.

Benton started talking again. “But as I was saying, I don't know anything about manufacturing but it's always been my idea that the secret of moneymaking in that line of business was discovering proper people to work for you. They work for you or you work for them. That's about the size of it. After all you fellers turn out the product out there in Long Island City, but if you want to make the money you've got to come down here to make it. . . . Isn't that true?”

Charley looked up from the juicy sirloin he was just about to cut. He burst out laughing. “I guess,” he said. “A man'ud be a damn fool to keep his nose on his draftin'board all his life.” They talked about golf for a while, then when they were having their coffee, Nat Benton said, “Charley, I just wanted to pass the word along, on account of you being a friend of old Ollie's and the Humphries and all that sort of thing . . . don't you boys sell any of your stock. If I were you I'd scrape up all the cash you could get ahold of for a margin and buy up any that's around loose. You'll have the chance soon.”

“You think she'll keep on risin'?”

“Now you keep this under your hat . . . Merritt and that crowd are worried. They're selling, so you can expect a drop. That's what these Tern people in Detroit are waiting for to get in cheap, see, they like the looks of your little concern. . . . They think your engine is a whiz. . . . If it's agreeable to you I'd like to handle your brokerage account, just for old times' sake, you understand.”

Charley laughed. “Gosh, I hadn't pictured myself with a brokerage account . . . but by heck, you may be right.”

“I wouldn't like to see you wake up one morning and find yourself out on the cold cold pavement, see, Charley.”

After they'd eaten Nat Benton asked Charley if he'd ever seen the stockexchange operating. “It's interesting to see if a feller's never seen it,” he said and led Charley across Broadway where the lashing wind cut their faces and down a narrow street shaded by tall buildings into a crowded vestibule. “My, that cold nips your ears,” he said. “You ought to see it out where I come from,” said Charley. They went up in an elevator and came out in a little room where some elderly parties in uniform greeted Mr. Benton with considerable respect. Nat signed in a book and they were let out through a small door into the visitors' gallery and stood a minute looking down into a great greenish hall like a railroadstation onto the heads of a crowd of men, some in uniform, some with white badges, slowly churning around the tradingposts. Sometimes the crowd knotted and thickened at one booth and sometimes at another. The air was full of shuffle and low clicking machinesounds in which voices were lost. “Don't look like much,” said Nat, “but that's where it all changes hands.” Nat pointed out the booths where different classes of stocks were traded. “I guess they don't think much about aviation stocks,” said Charley. “No, it's all steel and oil and the automotive industries,” said Nat. “We'll give 'em a few years . . . what do you say, Nat?” said Charley boisterously.

Charley went uptown on the Second Avenue el and out across the Queensboro Bridge. At Queens Plaza he got off and walked over to the garage where he kept his car, a Stutz roadster he'd bought secondhand. The traffic was heavy and he was tired and peevish before he got out to the plant. The sky had become overcast and dry snow drove on the wind. He turned in and jammed on his brakes in the crunching ash of the yard in front of the office, then he pulled off his padded aviator's helmet and sat there a minute in the car after he'd switched
off the motor listening to the hum and whir and clatter of the plant. “The sonsabitches are slackenin' up,” he muttered under his breath.

He stuck his head in Joe's office for a moment but Joe was busy talking to a guy in a coonskin coat who looked like a bond salesman. So he ran down the hall to his own office, said, “Hello, Ella, get me Mr. Stauch,” and sat down at his desk which was covered with notes on blue and yellow sheets. “A hell of a note,” he was thinking, “for a guy to be glued to a desk all his life.”

Stauch's serious square pale face topped by a brush of colorless hair sprouting from a green eyeshade was leaning over him. “Sit down, Julius,” he said. “How's tricks? . . . Burnishin' room all right?” “Ach, yes, but we haf two stampingmachines broken in one day.” “The hell you say. Let's go look at them.”

When Charley got back to his office he had a streak of grease on his nose. He still had an oily micrometer in his hand. It was six o'clock. He called up Joe. “Hello, Joe, goin' home?” “Sure, I was waiting for you; what was the trouble?” “I was crawlin' around on my belly in the grease as usual.”

Charley washed his hands and face in the lavatory and ran down the rubbertreaded steps. Joe was waiting for him in the entry. “My wife's got my car, Charley, let's take yours,” said Joe. “It'll be a bit drafty, Joe.” “We can stand it.” “Goodnight, Mr. Askew, goodnight, Mr. Anderson,” said the old watchman in his blue cap with earflaps, who was closing up behind them.

“Say, Charley,” Joe said when they'd turned into the stream of traffic at the end of the alley. “Why don't you let Stauch do more of the routine work? He seems pretty efficient.” “Knows a hell of a lot more than I do,” said Charley, squinting through the frosted windshield. The headlights coming the other way made big sparkling blooms of light in the driving snow. On the bridge the girders were already all marked out with neat streaks of white. All you could see of the river and the city was a shadowy swirl, now dark, now glowing. Charley had all he could do to keep the car from skidding on the icy places on the bridge. “Attaboy, Charley,” said Joe as they slewed down the ramp into the crosstown street full of golden light.

Across Fiftyninth they had to go at a snail's pace. They were stiff with cold and it was seven thirty before they drove up to the door of the apartmenthouse on Riverside Drive where Charley had been living all winter with the Askews. Mrs. Askew and two yellowhaired little girls met them at their door.

Grace Askew was a bleachedlooking woman with pale hair and faint crowsfeet back of her eyes and on the sides of her neck that gave her a sweet crumpled complaining look. “I was worried,” she said, “about your not having the car in this blizzard.”

Jean, the oldest girl, was jumping up and down singing, “Snowy snowy snowy, it's going to be snowy.”

“And, Charles,” said Grace in a teasing voice as they went into the parlor, that smelt warm of dinner cooking, to spread their hands before the gaslogs, “if she called up once she called up twenty times. She must think I'm trying to keep you away from her.”

“Who . . . Doris?”

Grace pursed up her lips and nodded. “But, Charles, you'd better stay home to dinner. I've got a wonderful leg of lamb and sweetpotatoes. You know you like our dinners better here than all those fancy fixin's over there . . .”

Charley was already at the phone. “Oh, Charley,” came Doris's sweet lisping voice, “I was afraid you'd been snowed in over on Long Island. I called there but nobody answered. . . . I've got an extra place . . . I've got some people to dinner you'd love to meet. . . . He was an engineer under the Czar. We're all waiting for you.” “But honestly, Doris, I'm all in.” “This'll be a change. Mother's gone south and we'll have the house to ourselves. We'll wait. . . .”

“It's those lousy Russians again,” muttered Charley as he ran to his room and hopped into his dinnerclothes. “Why, look at the loungelizard,” kidded Joe from the easychair where he was reading the evening paper with his legs stretched out towards the gaslogs. “Daddy, what's a loungelizard?” intoned Jean. “Grace, would you mind?” Charley went up to Mrs. Askew blushing, with the two ends of his black tie hanging from his collar.

“Well, it's certainly devotion,” Grace said, getting up out of her chair—to tie the bow she had to stick the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth—“on a night like this.” “I'd call it dementia if you asked me,” said Joe. “Daddy, what's dementia?” echoed Jean, but Charley was already putting on his overcoat as he waited for the elevator in the fakemarble hall full of sample whiffs of all the dinners in all the apartments on the floor.

He pulled on his woolly gloves as he got into the car. In the park the snow hissed under his wheels. Turning out of the driveway at Fiftyninth he went into a skid, out of it, into it again. His wheels gripped the pavement just beside a cop who stood at the corner beating his arms against his chest. The cop glared. Charley brought his hand up to his forehead in a snappy salute. The cop laughed. “Naughty naughty,” he said and went on thrashing his arms.

When the door of the Humphries' apartment opened Charley's feet sank right away into the deep nap of a Beluchistan rug. Doris came out to meet him. “Oh, you were a darling to come in this dreadful weather,” she cooed. He kissed her. He wished she didn't have so much greasy lipstick on. He hugged her to him so slender in the palegreen eveninggown. “You're the darling,” he whispered.

From the drawingroom he could hear voices, foreign accents, and the clink of ice in a shaker. “I wish we were goin' to be alone,” he said huskily. “Oh, I know, Charley, but they were some people I just had to have. Maybe they'll go home early.” She straightened his necktie and patted down his hair and pushed him before her into the drawingroom.

When the last of Doris's dinnerguests had gone the two of them stood in the hall facing each other. Charley drew a deep breath. He had drunk a lot of cocktails and champagne. He was crazy for her. “Jesus, Doris, they were pretty hard to take.” “It was sweet of you to come, Charley.” Charley felt bitter smoldering anger swelling inside him. “Look here, Doris, let's have a talk . . .” “Oh, now we're going to be serious.” She made a face as she let herself drop on the settee. “Now look here, Doris . . . I'm crazy about you, you know that. . . .”

“Oh, but, Charley, we've had such fun together . . . we don't want to spoil it yet. . . . You know marriage isn't always so funny. . . . Most of my friends who've gotten married have had a horrid time.”

“If it's a question of jack, don't worry. The concern's goin' to go big. . . . I wouldn't lie to you. Ask Nat Benton. Just this after' he was explainin' to me how I could start gettin' in the money right away.”

Doris got up and went over to him and kissed him. “Yes, he was a poor old silly. . . . You must think I'm a horrid mercenary little bitch. I don't see why you'd want to marry me if you thought I was like that. Honestly, Charley, what I'd love more than anything in the world would be to get out and make my own living. I hate this plushhorse existence.” He grabbed her to him. She pushed him away. “It's my
dress, darling, yes, that costs money, not me. . . . Now you go home and go to bed like a good boy. You look all tired out.”

When he got down to the street, he found the snow had drifted in over the seat of the car. The motor would barely turn over. No way of getting her to start. He called his garage to send somebody to start the car. Since he was in the phonebooth he might as well call up Mrs. Darling. “What a dreadful night, dearie. Well, since it's Mr. Charley, maybe we can fix something up but it's dreadfully short notice and the end of the week too. Well . . . in about an hour.”

Charley walked up and down in the snow in front of the apartmenthouse waiting for them to come round from the garage. The black angry bile was still rising in him. When they finally came and got her started he let the mechanic take her back to the garage. Then he walked around to a speak he knew.

The streets were empty. Dry snow swished in his face as he went down the steps to the basement door. The bar was full of men and girls halftight and bellowing and tittering. Charley felt like wringing their goddam necks. He drank off four whiskies one after another and went around to Mrs. Darling's. Going up in the elevator he began to feel tight. He gave the elevatorboy a dollar and caught out of the corner of his eye the black boy's happy surprised grin when he shoved the bill into his pocket. Once inside he let out a whoop. “Now, Mr. Charley,” said the colored girl in starched cap and apron who had opened the door, “you know the missis don't like no noise . . . and you're such a civilspoken young gentleman.”

“Hello, dearie.” He hardly looked at the girl. “Put out the light,” he said. “Remember your name's Doris. Go in the bathroom and take your clothes off and don't forget to put on lipstick, plenty lipstick.” He switched off the light and tore off his clothes. In the dark it was hard to get the studs out of his boiled shirt. He grabbed the boiled shirt with both hands and ripped out the buttonholes. “Now come in here, goddam you. I love you, you bitch Doris.” The girl was trembling. When he grabbed her to him she burst out crying.

He had to get some liquor for the girl to cheer her up and that started him off again. Next day he woke up late feeling too lousy to go out to the plant, he didn't want to go out, all he wanted to do was drink so he hung around all day drinking gin and bitters in Mrs. Darling's draperychoked parlor. In the afternoon Mrs. Darling came in and played Russian bank with him and told him about how an opera
singer had ruined her life, and wanted to get him to taper off on beer. That evening he got her to call up the same girl again. When she came he tried to explain to her that he wasn't crazy. He woke up alone in the bed feeling sober and disgusted.

The Askews were at breakfast when he got home Sunday morning. The little girls were lying on the floor reading the funny papers. There were Sunday papers on all the chairs. Joe was sitting in his bathrobe smoking a cigar over his last cup of coffee. “Just in time for a nice cup of fresh coffee,” he said. “That must have been quite a dinnerparty,” said Grace, giggling. “I got in on a little pokergame,” growled Charley. When he sat down his overcoat opened and they saw his torn shirtfront. “I'd say it was quite a pokergame,” said Joe. “Everything was lousy,” said Charley. “I'll go and wash my face.”