Executive Suite (18 page)

“Sometime in the middle of the afternoon.”

He closed his eyes and the lash of his remembered anger came back as a cutting backlash of terrifying self-criticism.

“He was a great man,” he said slowly, as if he were incanting a prayer for absolution. “He was the greatest man I've ever known.”

Mary was murmuring something but it could not be forgiveness … there could never be forgiveness. He was guilty of a sin that could never be righted or excused. Avery Bullard was dead. Avery Bullard had been dead when he had hurled his anger against him.

The telephone was ringing and Mary ran ahead of him into the house.

She was back before it seemed possible, holding the door open for him to enter. “It's the newspaper, Don. They've just had a flash from New York.”

“You talk to them, Mary. You know all that there is to know, more than I do.”

He turned, not waiting for her response, and walked slowly back toward the black oaks where the rock rose from the earth like the walls of the cathedral.

7.12 P.M. EDT

The Aldersons, the Willoughbys, and the George Smiths had eaten together once each month for all of the months there had been in the last fourteen years. There was no particular reason, other than habit, why the custom should have persisted over such a long span of time. Even in the beginning their only bonds had been that they all lived in the same block, all went to the same church, and all carried the common stigma of not being old Millburgh families which excluded them from the social activities that centered around the Federal Club and the Historical Society. The years had broken those bonds. Their homes were now separated, only the Aldersons still attended St. Martin's Episcopal, and both the Federal Club and the Historical Society had long since accepted their memberships. The Friday dinners now owed their existence to the reluctance of all three couples to be the first to break the tradition, a reluctance that was slowly being heightened by the inertia of advancing age and the way that death was beginning to constrict the circle of their other old acquaintances.

“Honestly, the price of things just makes you stop and think,” Mildred Willoughby said tonight, talking with the quick little bursts of breath to which she was always limited when she wore her all-in-one foundation. “Jim and I were talking about it the other night when we were going over the bills. Last month alone, our florist bill was almost fifty dollars.”

“This month will be worse,” Agnes Smith added. “All these June weddings.”

“The way it is with us, weddings aren't as bad as funerals.”

“No, I guess that's right.”

The subject was exhausted and the three women sat in a silence broken only by the blare of the radio from the sun porch where the three men had isolated themselves.

“Jim, honey,” Mildred Willoughby called. “Couldn't you turn the radio down just a teeny little bit?”

“Waiting for the ball scores, sweetie,” Jim Willoughby called back. “Be on in a minute now. Got a bet on with Fred here and I'm not going to miss taking the old skinflint's money away from him.”

He thrust his moon face around the corner so that all of the ladies could see him wink. “Fred's got some big money riding on the Yanks today—a whole dime!”

Everyone laughed. Fred Alderson's penuriousness was a thin-stretched joke, but no thinner than the others that someone else would dutifully remake before the evening was over.

Edith Alderson, watching her husband through the open door, was pleased to see that he smiled. Fred had seemed unusually worn and tired when he had come home tonight, almost as if he were having that old prostate trouble again.

“Oh, Edith?” Agnes called gently.

“Yes?”

“I've been meaning to ask you—”

Whatever she was about to ask was not asked. An imperative command for attention suddenly cut into the radio's music stream.

“We interrupt this program,” the voice said dramatically, “to bring you an important news bulletin. We have received a flash from the Associated Press that Avery Bullard died this afternoon in New York. I repeat—we have received a flash that Avery Bullard died this afternoon in New York. That's all we know at this moment. We will bring you additional news as soon as it's received. Keep tuned to this station for the latest developments.”

The music cut back in the middle of a phrase. Someone snapped the switch and there was stunned silence in the two rooms.

All eyes were on Frederick Alderson. He stood in the middle of the sun porch floor, his thin body wavering ever so slightly as if to hint that he might faint. Edith hurried to his side.

Mildred Willoughby whispered. “You remember what I was talking about just before it happened—funerals?”

Agnes nodded, awed. “You'd almost think it was presentiment.”

“How old was he, Fred?” Jim Willoughby asked, asking the thing that was always asked.

Frederick Alderson moved his lips but there was no sound at first. Then the slow words came. “He was five years younger than I am—only fifty-six.”

“We'll have to go,” Edith Alderson said in quick decision. “I'm sorry, Mildred, but I'm sure you'll understand.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“Yes—yes, we'll have to go,” Frederick Alderson said.

Jim brought his hat and Edith went back to the living room for her purse.

“If there's anything I can do—” George Smith said and the others repeated the phrase, standing in a stiff little semicircle at the door.

“I'll let you know,” Edith Alderson said. Then, her hand on his arm, she guided her husband through the door.

The telephone was ringing and Mildred Willoughby answered it. “Who?—oh, yes, Mrs. Walling—yes, they were here but they just left—yes, we heard it on the radio—yes, they know—not at all, Mrs. Walling. Thank you for calling.”

“That was Mrs. Walling to tell Fred and Edith,” she explained.

“Looked like it hit Fred pretty hard,” George Smith said solemnly.

“Yeh, a thing like that hits you,” Willoughby said. “I know how it was when Mr. Payne went. Same thing. Heart trouble. Went just like that.”

“He'd been mowing the lawn that morning,” Agnes broke in. “Mr. Payne always insisted on mowing his own lawn.”

“That's why I don't let George mow ours,” Mildred puffed. “Or shovel our snow either. Well, if everyone's ready I guess we might as well sit down. I'll just have to leave Fred and Edith's places. The table's all set that way now.”

George held his wife's chair and then, still standing, looked across the table. “I've been thinking, Jim—you know what this means for Fred?”

“For Fred?”

“He'll be the president of the company now, won't he?”

“Say, that's right. Guess he will.”

“Do you really think so, George?” Agnes asked. “I thought it would be that Mr. Dudley.”

“Goodness, isn't he the handsomest man!” Mildred said.

George frowned. “If you want my opinion, I'd say it would be Fred.”

“It would be nice for Edith,” Agnes said. “Goodness knows she deserves it and I never have cared much for that Dudley woman's ways.”

“You can say that again,” Mildred said, raising her spoon like a conductor's baton. The spoon plunged into her fruit cup and the dinner was on.

9000 FT. OVER ALTOONA, PENNSYLVANIA

7.22 P.M. EDT

If the advertising manager of Trans National Airlines had been aboard the flight, his professional alertness would have demanded a color photograph of the gentleman in Seat 9. There, beyond the slightest doubt, was the perfect illustration for an advertisement that would convince readers of the mass magazines that TNA was the choice of the nation's most distinguished men. No model agency could possibly have supplied a man who radiated that same aura of true distinction, a man so unquestionably born to the purple, a man whom one and all would instantly accept as a visual representation of the thin top-cut of American aristocracy. No one, even the most discerning, would suspect that the gentleman in Seat 9 was anything but what his appearance credited him with being.

The gentleman in Seat 9 was J. Walter Dudley. The unsuspected truth was that he had been born in a side-road village in Iowa, the son of a down-at-the-heels veterinarian who hated his life. “Doc” Dudley had dreamed of being a famous surgeon but, after failing in an attempt to work his way through medical school, he had made the veterinary profession a reluctant second choice. In a compounding of misfortune, his lack of satisfaction contributed to a bitterness that alienated the farmers and stockmen upon whom he was forced to depend for his livelihood.

Young Walter's mother had done her best to make her husband act in a manner that would make the farmers like him. Her efforts had little or no effect upon “Doc” Dudley, but they had created an atmosphere in which her son learned—as only the young can learn before they know they are being taught—that “getting along with people” was the most important thing in life.

Afterwards, when Walter was old enough to appreciate the extent of his father's failure, he attributed it all to the old man's inexcusable negligence in making people like him. It did not occur to Walter to soften his indictment on the grounds that the castration of pigs, from which his father earned most of what little income he had, was a frustratingly inadequate fulfillment of the dream of being a great surgeon. That did not occur to Walter because he was not, even as a boy, a dreamer.

The nature of young Walter's mind was well adapted to the process of learning and he always made good marks in school. It was easy for him to store away all that he read and heard and, since his carefully ordered memories were never disturbed by imaginative whirlwinds, all that he filed away in his mind was ready and waiting to be recalled when the need for the fact arose. His teachers, particularly those who taught by the transplantation of things to be remembered—and they were in the majority—thought of him as an “excellent student.” He graduated as the second-ranking student in a class of twenty-two high school seniors. What minor disappointment he felt in failing to become the valedictorian was more than outweighed by his election as class president and his designation as “Most Popular Senior” in the high school annual.

Walter Dudley's experience with football was in the pattern to which his life had already been shaped. His nature did not incline him toward competitive sports, particularly those involving bodily contact, but in a small school where there were hardly enough boys to fill the required eleven uniforms, his participation was inevitable. He had been large for his age—six feet one and a hundred and ninety pounds—and not playing would have jeopardized his friendship with the entire student body.

He derived little pleasure from the game itself. His body had an essential softness that no amount of training seemed to dissipate, and he was more than usually sensitive to bodily pain. Some of the other boys obviously reveled in the physical satisfaction of a crashing tackle, but to Walter Dudley it was something to be endured as a price that must be paid for the approval of his team mates, the privilege of joining in the rich-tongued banter of the dressing room, and the joy of being included in the circle around the pep-talking coach just before they ran on the field to the welcoming cheers of every person in town.

No one ever knew that Walter was afraid. He did not flinch. He was driven—as the fear-filled sometimes are—to desperately serious effort. In his junior year he was elected captain of the team and, in his senior year, his name appeared in a Des Moines newspaper as an honorable-mention tackle on the all-state high school team. No one from the school had ever achieved an equivalent honor and a special assembly was called for the presentation of his gold football. What Walt remembered, long after the gold football had revealed itself as tarnished brass, was the entire student body rising to sing, “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Walter Dudley went to college that fall on a scholarship supported by a group of alumni who had selected him as a promising recruit for the football squad. It was evident after the first few weeks of early training that Walter was not of varsity caliber, but he punished himself unmercifully in an attempt to make enough of a showing so that his sponsors would not think badly of him. It was more of a relief than he could admit, even to himself, when he finally cracked a collarbone on a tackling dummy and was barred from active practice. His association with the football team, however, was not broken. His board-and-room job was the care of The Sanctum, a room on the second floor of the field house that was reserved as a clubroom for the lettermen. To all others, none of whom was allowed to cross its threshold. The Sanctum was a place of intriguing glamor. Actually it was a bleak room, gray-brown and eternally musty, furnished only with battered tables and castoff chairs. Before the collarbone incident the lettermen had insisted that Walt acquire some new furniture, a demand that he had rightfully shrugged off as a mild form of hazing. Afterwards, in gratitude for the fact that the lettermen still allowed him to come in and clean up the incriminating evidence which the cigarette smokers left behind, he began to forage in earnest. That was how he met Bernie Sulzman.

Bernie was a man of ideas. He ran a new and second-hand furniture store on College Avenue. When Walt approached him for a donation of furniture Bernie quickly made a counterproposal. Why not, he suggested, solicit the old lettermen among the alumni for donations to buy the furniture to which Bernie would attach, at no extra charge, a brass plate engraved with the name of the donor? Walt got the list, wrote the letters, and within a month The Sanctum was furnished with twenty-six new chairs, two leather davenports, four table desks, and an icebox. The lettermen awarded Walt Dudley a key to The Sanctum and he became, for the rest of his college career, the only non-letterman ever to have the full privileges of the clubroom.