Big Money (38 page)

“But, Mr. Bledsoe, this is the chance I've been lookin' for,” stammered Charley. “Hell, I'm a mechanic, that's all. I know that.”

“Well, I hope so. . . . If you are, and not a goddamned bondsalesman, you know that our motor's lousy and the ships they put it in are lousy. We're ten years behind the rest of the world in flyin' and we've got to catch up. Once we get the designs we've got the production apparatus to flatten 'em all out. Now I want you to go home and get drunk or go wenchin' or whatever you do when you're worried and think about this damn business.” “I'm through with that stuff,” said Charley. “I had enough of that in New York.”

Bledsoe got to his feet with a jerk, letting the ash from his stogie fall on his alpaca vest. “Well, you better get married then.” “I been thinkin' of that. . . . But I can't find the other name to put on the license,” said Charley, laughing. Bledsoe smiled. “You design me a de
cent light dependable sixteen-cylinder aircooled motor and I'll get my little girl to introduce you to all the bestlookin' gals in Detroit. She knows 'em all. . . . And if it's money you're lookin' for, they sweat money.” The phone buzzed. Bledsoe answered it, muttered under his breath, and stamped out of the office.

At noon Farrell came by to take Charley out to lunch. “Did old Bledsoe give you an earful?” he asked. Charley nodded. “Well, don't let him get under your skin. His bark is worse than his bite. He wouldn't be in the outfit if he wasn't the best plantmanager in the country.”

It was at the Country Club dance that Farrell and his wife, who was a thin oldish blonde haggard and peevish under a festoon of diamonds, took him out to, that Charley met old Bledsoe's daughter Anne. She was a squareshouldered girl in pink with a large pleasantly-smiling mouth and a firm handshake. Charley cottoned to her first thing. They danced to
Just a Girl That Men Forget
and she talked about how crazy she was about flying and had five hours toward her pilot's license. Charley said he'd take her up any time if she wasn't too proud to fly a Curtiss-Robin. She said he'd better not make a promise if he didn't intend to keep it because she always did what she said she'd do. Then she talked about golf and he didn't let on that he'd never had a golfclub in his hand in his life.

At supper when he came back from getting a couple of plates of chickensalad he found her sitting at a round table under a Japanese lantern with a pale young guy, who turned out to be her brother Harry, and a girl with beautiful ashen-blond hair and a touch of Alabama in her talk whose name was Gladys Wheatley. She seemed to be engaged or something to Harry Bledsoe who had a silver flask and kept pouring gin into the fruitpunch and held her hand and called her Glad. They were all younger than Charley, but they made quite a fuss over him and kept saying what a godawful town Detroit was. When Charley got a little gin inside of him he started telling war yarns for the first time in his life.

He drove Anne home and old Bledsoe came out with a copy of the
Engineering Journal
in his hand and said, “So you've got acquainted, have you?” “Oh, yes, we're old friends, Dad,” she said. “Charley's going to teach me to fly.” “Humph,” said Bledsoe and closed the door in Charley's face with a growling: “You go home and worry about that motor.”

All that summer everybody thought that Charley and Anne were engaged. He'd get away from the plant for an hour or two on quiet afternoons and take a ship up at the flyingfield to give her a chance to pile up flying hours and on Sundays they'd play golf. Charley would get up early Sunday mornings to take a lesson with the golf pro out at the Sunnyside Club where he didn't know anybody. Saturday nights they'd often have dinner at the Bledsoes' house and go out to the Country Club to dance. Gladys Wheatley and Harry were usually along and they were known as a foursome by all the younger crowd. Old Bledsoe seemed pleased that Charley had taken up with his youngsters and began to treat him as a member of the family. Charley was happy, he enjoyed his work; after the years in New York being in Detroit was like being home. He and Nat made some killings in the market. As vicepresident and consulting engineer of the Tern Company he was making $25,000 a year.

Old Bledsoe grumbled that it was too damn much money for a young engineer, but it pleased him that Charley spent most of it on a small experimental shop where he and Bill Cermak were building a new motor on their own. Bill Cermak had moved his family out from Long Island and was full of hunches for mechanical improvements. Charley was so busy he didn't have time to think of women or take anything but an occasional drink in a social way. He thought Anne was a peach and enjoyed her company but he never thought of her as a girl he might someday go to bed with.

Over the Labor Day weekend the Farrells invited the young Bledsoes and Gladys Wheatley out for a cruise. When he was asked Charley felt that this was highlife at last and suggested he bring Taki along to mix drinks and act as steward. He drove the Bledsoes down to the yachtclub in his Buick. Anne couldn't make out why he was feeling so good. “Nothing to do for three days but sit around on a stuffy old boat and let the mosquitoes bite you,” she was grumbling in a gruff tone like her father's. “Dad's right when he says he doesn't mind working over his work but he's darned if he'll work over his play.”

“But look at the company we'll have to suffer in, Annie.” Charley put his arm round her shoulders for a moment as she sat beside him on the front seat. Harry who was alone in the back let out a giggle. “Well, you needn't act so smart, mister,” said Anne, without turning back. “You and Gladys certainly do enough public petting to make a cat sick.” “The stern birdman's weakening,” said Harry. Char
ley blushed. “Check,” he said. They were already at the yachtclub and two young fellows in sailorsuits were taking the bags out of the back of the car.

Farrell's boat was a fast fiftyfoot cruiser with a diningroom on deck and wicker chairs and a lot of freshvarnished mahogany and polished brass. Farrell wore a yachtingcap and walked up and down the narrow deck with a worried look as the boat nosed out into the little muggy breeze. The river in the late afternoon had a smell of docks and weedy swamps. “It makes me feel good to get out on the water, don't it you, Charley? . . . The one place they can't get at you.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Farrell was apologizing to the ladies for the cramped accommodations. “I keep trying to get Yardly to get a boat with some room in it but it seems to me every one he gets is more cramped up than the last one.”

Charley had been listening to a light clinking sound from the pantry. When Taki appeared with a tray of manhattan cocktails everybody cheered up. As he watched Taki bobbing with the tray in front of Gladys, Charley thought how wonderful she looked all in white with her pale abundant hair tied up in a white silk handkerchief.

Smiling beside him was Anne with her brown hair blowing in her eyes from the wind of the boat's speed. The engine made so much noise and the twinscrews churned up so much water that he could talk to her without the others' hearing. “Annie,” he said suddenly, “I been thinking it's about time I got married.”

“Why, Charley, a mere boy like you.”

Charley felt warm all over. All at once he wanted a woman terribly bad. It was hard to control his voice.

“Well, I suppose we're both old enough to know better, but what would you think of the proposition? I've been pretty lucky this year as far as dough goes.”

Anne sipped her cocktail looking at him and laughing with her hair blowing across her face. “What do you want me to do, ask for a statement of your bankdeposit?”

“But I mean you.”

“Check,” she said.

Farrell was yelling at them, “How about a little game of penny ante before supper? . . . It's gettin' wind you there. We'd be better off inthe saloon.”

“Aye, aye, cap,” said Anne.

Before supper they played penny ante and drank manhattans and after supper the Farrells and the Bledsoes settled down to a game of auction. Gladys said she had a headache and Charley, after watching the game for a while, went out on deck to get the reek of the cigar he'd been smoking out of his lungs.

The boat was anchored in a little bay, near a lighted wharf that jutted out from shore. A halfmoon was setting behind a rocky point where one tall pine reached out of a dark snarl of branches above a crowd of shivering whitebirches. At the end of the wharf there was some sort of clubhouse that split ripples of light from its big windows; dancemusic throbbed and faded from it over the water. Charley sat in the bow. The boys who ran the boat for Farrell had turned in. He could hear their low voices and catch a smell of cigarettesmoke from the tiny hatch forward of the pilothouse. He leaned over to watch the small grey waves slapping against the bow. “Bo, this is the bigtime stuff,” he was telling himself.

When he turned around there was Gladys beside him. “I thought you'd gone to bed, young lady,” he said.

“Thought you'd gotten rid of me for one night?” She wasn't smiling.

“Don't you think it's a pretty night, Glad?”

He took her hand; it was trembling and icecold. “You don't want to catch cold, Glad,” he said. She dug her long nails into his hand. “Are you going to marry Anne?”

“Maybe. . . . Why? You're goin' to marry Harry, aren't you?”

“Nothing in this world would make me marry him.”

Charley put his arms round her. “You poor little girl, you're cold. You ought to be in bed.” She put her head on his chest and began to sob. He could feel the tears warm through his shirt. He didn't know what to say. He stood there hugging her with the smell of her hair giddy, like the smell of Doris's hair used to be, in his nostrils.

“I wish we were off this damn boat,” he whispered. Her face was turned up to his, very round and white. When he kissed her lips she kissed him too. He pressed her to him hard. Now it was her little breasts he could feel against his chest. For just a second she let him put his tongue between her lips, then she pushed him away.

“Charley, we oughtn't to be acting like this, but I suddenly felt so lonely.”

Charley's voice was gruff in his throat. “I'll never let you feel like
that again. . . . Never, honestly . . . never. . . .” “Oh, you darling Charley.” She kissed him again very quickly and deliberately and ran away from him down the deck.

He walked up and down alone. He didn't know what to do. He was crazy for Gladys now. He couldn't go back and talk to the others. He couldn't go to bed. He slipped down the forward hatch and through the galley, where Taki sat cool as a cucumber in his white coat reading some thick book, into the cabin where his berth was and changed into his bathingsuit and ran up and dove over the side. The water wasn't as cold as he'd expected. He swam around for a while in the moonlight. Pulling himself up the ladder aft he felt cold and goosefleshy. Farrell with a cigar in his teeth leaned over, grabbed his hand and hauled him on deck.

“Ha, ha, the iron man,” he shouted. “The girls beat us two rubbers and went to bed with their winnings. Suppose you get into your bathrobe and have a drink and a half an hour of red dog or something silly before we turn in.” “Check,” said Charley, who was jumping up and down on the deck to shake off the water.

While Charley was rubbing himself down with a towel below, he could hear the girls chattering and giggling in their stateroom. He was so embarrassed when he sat down next to Harry who was a little drunk and silly so that he drank off a half a tumbler of rye and lost eighty dollars. He was glad to see that it was Harry who won. “Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” he kept saying to himself after he'd turned in.

A week later Gladys took Charley to see her parents after they'd had tea together at his flat chaperoned by Taki's grin and his bobbing black head. Horton B. Wheatley was a power, so Farrell said, in the Security Trust Company, a redfaced man with grizzled hair and a small silvery mustache. Mrs. Wheatley was a droopy woman with a pretty Alabama voice and a face faded and pouchy and withered as a spent toyballoon. Mr. Wheatley started talking before Gladys had finished the introductions: “Well, sir, we'd been expectin' somethin' like that to happen. Of course it's too soon for us all to make up our minds, but I don't see how I kin help tellin' you, ma boy, that I'd rather see ma daughter wedded to a boy like you that's worked his way up in the world, even though we don't know much about you yet, than to a boy like Harry who's a nice enough kid in his way, but who's never done a thing in his life but take the schoolin' his father provided
for him. Ma boy, we are mighty proud, my wife and me, to know you and to have you and our little girl . . . she's all we've got in this world so she's mighty precious to us . . .”

“Your parents are . . . have been called away, I believe, Mr. Anderson,” put in Mrs. Wheatley. Charley nodded. “Oh, I'm so sorry. . . . They were from St. Paul, Gladys says. . . .”

Mr. Wheatley was talking again. “Mr. Anderson, Mother, was one of our most prominent war aces, he won his spurs fightin' for the flag, Mother, an' his whole career seems to me to be an example . . . now I'm goin' to make you blush, ma boy . . . of how American democracy works at its very best pushin' forward to success the most intelligent and bestfitted and weedin' out the weaklin's. . . . Mr. Anderson, there's one thing I'm goin' to ask you to do right now. I'm goin' to ask you to come to church with us next Sunday an' address ma Sundayschool class. I'm sure you won't mind sayin' a few words of inspiration and guidance to the youngsters there.”

Charley blushed and nodded. “Aw, Daddy,” sang Gladys, putting her arms around both their necks, “don't make him do that. Sunday's the only day the poor boy gets any golf. . . . You know I always said I never would marry a Sundayschool teacher.”