Executive Suite (5 page)

Orrin Tredway proved as much a dilettante in business as in the arts. In a few years his interest flagged. In 1915, through the influence of his maternal uncle who was an ambassador, he was appointed to a governmental commission and from that year until well after the end of World War I, he spent less and less time in Millburgh. The affairs of the company drifted, but profits were still high until the depression of 1921. It was rumored that the company lost almost a quarter of a million dollars that year. Orrin Tredway came back to his desk. Half of the factory was closed, more than half of the men were laid off. He rose to the emergency, using his political connections to get furniture contracts for government buildings. Even more important to the future of the company was the employment of a young salesman named Avery Bullard who, having quit his job with the old Bellinger Furniture Company, had walked in with the order for all the furniture for a chain of hotels.

The men came back to work in the factory and Orrin Tredway drifted away in search of a new interest. He found it through his appointment as General Chairman of a committee to arrange for the celebration of the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Millburgh. The hero of the occasion, of course, was to be John Mills, and Orrin Tredway conceived the idea of restoring Cliff House, the old Mills mansion. It was hidden away in bramble-laced thicket of second-growth brush, untenanted for over fifty years, and in a very bad state of repair. The committee saw no hope of financing the restoration, so Orrin Tredway took over, bought the property, spent almost two hundred thousand dollars on it, and moved into Cliff House as his own home. Not only did he adopt John Mills' home, he also adopted his extravagant manner of life. Business boomed as the years of the twenties went by. The Tredway Furniture Company's profits were large but not large enough to keep pace with Orrin Tredway's spending. He was an old man now, fog-brained with delusions of aristocratic grandeur, and it was then that he decided to build the Tredway Tower. No argument could stop him, as no argument could have stayed the finger that touched the trigger of the gun that ended his life.

In the month after Orrin Tredway's death, Avery Bullard quietly moved up from the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower. His election to the presidency of the Tredway Furniture Company was not generally regarded as an event of any great importance. The Millburgh
Times
gave it only a one-column headline and a stick of type. It was the general attitude of the community that the company had been ruined beyond salvage and the only reason for the election of anyone as a new president was to provide a signature on a petition for bankruptcy.

Having accepted the death of the furniture company as an accomplished fact, the citizenry of Millburgh were slow to awaken to the miracle of its resurrection. It burst upon them with spectacular suddenness in the fall of 1935 when the Millburgh
Times
published the story, this time under a banner headline, that Avery Bullard had announced the merger of seven other furniture factories and the formation of the Tredway Corporation, that the local manufacturing operation would be expanded and four hundred new workers would be employed. The next morning every policeman in Millburgh was taken off his regular beat and rushed to the Tredway plant to quell the riot of hungry job-seekers that crushed down upon the Tredway employment office.

There was more news in the months that followed. An addition was started to the Tredway factory on Water Street, the first new industrial building that had been erected in Millburgh in over a quarter-century. Tredway securities were admitted to trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The Millburgh
Times
front-paged a photo of the “For Rent” sign being taken down from the Tredway Tower and a syndicated picture service spread it all over the country. A furniture-trade magazine published a cartoon in which Avery Bullard, in the armor of St. George, was slaying a dragon labeled “Depression” with a sword branded “Courage.”

Somewhere along the way, at some unmarked moment, Avery Bullard became the first citizen of Millburgh. The Federal Club, established by John Mills in 1781, and still housed in the old Federal Tavern where Lafayette and four signers of the Declaration of Independence had been entertained, hastily amended its blue-blood tradition in order to escape the embarrassment of not having Avery Bullard as a member. He seldom entered the club's portals but a corner table in the grill was always reserved for his use. When he did come for lunch, there was no man in Millburgh, even the president of the Susquehanna National Bank, who could escape the temptation of bragging to his wife that he had lunched that day at the table next to Avery Bullard's. Arm-locked lovers, wandering along the dark streets, would look up in awe at the square pinpoints of light that burned into the darkness at the top of the Tower. “Sure, honey, that's old Bullard himself up there right now. They say he never goes home. Some nights he works right through. You know what? The other day I saw him getting out of his car. I swear to God I was so close to him I coulda reached out and touched him!”

When Florence Bullard divorced her husband in 1938, she generated only criticism, receiving little of the sympathy that she felt a neglected wife deserved. With only a rare exception, even her closest women friends regarded Florence Bullard as a fool. They thought that when a woman was lucky enough to be married to a great man like Avery Bullard, she ought to have the sense to realize that she couldn't live an entirely normal life, not the kind of a life that a woman would have if she were married to some ordinary man like the president of the Susquehanna National or the owner of Churchill's Department Store, or the rector of St. Martin's.

As the months went by, Avery Bullard gave little comfort to the few Millburgh citizens who guardedly whispered their secret prediction that his fall would be as rapid as his rise. The Tredway Corporation kept on growing. The big new Pike Plant was started in 1945, just as the nation began its postwar clamor for furniture. In 1949 the sales of the Tredway Corporation passed fifty million dollars and the following year went even higher. By contrast with huge corporations like General Motors or United States Steel, Tredway was small, but in the furniture field it was a giant company. It was the backbone of Millburgh's economic life. One out of every three of Millburgh's families lived on Tredway pay checks. Many of the factory workers were now fourth- and fifth-generation Tredway men. In some families, like Mary Herr's, there were three generations working for the company now. Her grandfather, her father, and two of her brothers were all in the core-making shop. All four had been a little shocked when she had gone to work for Western Union. It seemed like something approaching disloyalty. The only explanation she could offer was that “someone had to be different.” It didn't matter very much. Western Union was a good company, too, and practically all the messages she handled were for Tredway anyway. It was a good job. She was on the inside. She knew a lot of things that her father didn't know, even if he was night foreman of the core-making department at Water Street.

BULLARD
. She typed the signature of the message in a flurry of movement, her fingers speeded by the countless times that they had repeated the same combination of seven letters. When she first started for Western Union she used to tangle the keys typing Bullard … it was just one of those quirk words for her … but now it was easy. She must have typed Bullard a million times in these last five years … and she'd probably type it a million more in the next five if Kenneth didn't ask her to marry him pretty soon.

TREDWAY TOWER

3.06 P.M. EDT

Luigi Cassoni stepped from his elevator cab and, as he did many times every day, carefully extracted his watch from the tight little pocket at the waistline of his trousers and compared its dial with that of the giant bronze clock suspended from the ceiling of the black marble lobby. Luigi had no special interest in the time but a great pride in his watch. It had been personally presented by Mr. Bullard himself on the occasion of Luigi's twenty-fifth anniversary with Tredway.

The watch, like so many of the other wonderful things that life had heaped upon him, represented a blessing far more generous than Luigi knew he could possibly deserve. He regarded himself as a very fortunate man, a state of mind that was partially responsible for his almost perpetual happiness.

A second factor in Luigi's happiness derived from his underestimation of his own mental capacity. He always thought of himself as being less intelligent than he actually was. Since he did not credit his mind with the ability to arrive at any worthwhile conclusions through conscious thought, he wasted little of his time in disturbing speculation and thereby achieved great serenity.

As the operator of the private elevator to the Executive Suite on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors of the Tower, Luigi occupied a position so completely gratifying that he regularly included his thanks in his prayers. That was no more than just. Divine Providence had unquestionably intervened in his behalf. Without supernatural beneficence it was totally incredible that he, little Luigi Cassoni who had been born with no right to expect anything from life but a peasant's work in the olive groves, should now be one of Mr. Avery Bullard's closest personal friends. That was true. No one could deny it. Mr. Bullard had said it himself on that never-to-be-forgotten night eleven years ago. “Luigi, sometimes I have a suspicion that you're the only real friend I have in this whole damned company.”

Luigi knew that his intimate personal association with Mr. Bullard was recognized up and down the floors of the Tredway Tower. Even the vice-presidents on the twenty-third, riding up to twenty-four for a presidential audience, frequently said, “Luigi, what kind of a mood is the old man in today?”

His answers were always carefully guarded because he recognized the horrible danger that he might, by some inadvertent slip of the tongue, say something that would be disloyal to Mr. Bullard.

Despite the perpetual pleasure of his employment, Luigi was always conscious of a slight discount on his happiness when Mr. Bullard was out of town. When the president was not in the Executive Suite, the flash of the twenty-fourth floor signal light was different. Then it was only a pinpoint of red light, not the exciting crimson flare that sent him skyrocketing up the shaft.

Mr. Bullard had been out of town for two days now. He had been in New York since Wednesday. In this whole day, Luigi had made only seven runs to twenty-four … Miss Martin up this morning … Miss Martin down and up at noon … four trips with mail.

Now, unexpectedly, the yellow light blinked on the control board of his cab, signaling a special call from the mail room.

Luigi threw the control lever and the cab dropped to the sub-basement. As the door opened, the sliding panel revealed the spare and angular figure of Emily Gastings. She was waiting impatiently, her face frozen in her never-varying mask of icy criticism. For even longer than Luigi had been with Tredway, Emily had supervised the handling of all mail and telegrams. She was so clearly the frustrated spinster that she seemed an overdrawn caricature of the type. Through the years her mind had become something like a sour-soil plant that perpetuates its habitat by the self-generation of an acid atmosphere.

“Telegram for Miss Martin, and don't take all day getting it up there. It's from Mr. Bullard.”

The perpetually lurking smile behind Luigi's eyes neither warmed nor cooled. He had long since learned that the easiest way to stay happy was to disregard unpleasantness.

He saw that Emily was perversely standing just far enough away to force him to step out of the cab to reach the envelope, but he took the step without resentment. “Mr. Bullard coming in tonight?”

She took a quick gasping breath as if his words had touched some inviolate spot. “None of your business. Telegrams are strictly confidential.”

Luigi held his smile until the closing door screened his face. Women were funny … if you asked them something and the answer was no, they'd say it right out … if the answer was yes, they'd shut up like a clam and not say a word. Mr. Bullard was coming home tonight.

He had thrown the control, express to twenty-four, and the cab was flying up the shaft, alive with silent flight, no sound except the soft swish of the air. Luigi nodded with satisfaction as he passed sixteen. That little clicking sound between fifteen and sixteen was gone. He had been right in forcing Building Maintenance to have it fixed immediately. George had tried to tell him that Mr. Bullard would never notice it, a sound that you could hardly hear even when you were listening for it. The trouble with George was that he didn't really know Mr. Bullard, not the way Luigi knew him. There wasn't a thing in the whole world that Mr. Bullard didn't notice, not one thing.

The cab leveled at twenty-four and the door ghosted open. Luigi locked the controls and stepped out. There was a slide that would have carried the telegram to Miss Martin's desk but he ignored it as he always did on days when Mr. Bullard was out of town. It was much more pleasant to walk around the corner and deliver the telegram to Miss Martin hand to hand.

He walked slowly, his eyes savoring the surroundings. Even after all of these years, and the thousands of times that he had experienced it, there was no diminution in the aesthetic pleasure that Luigi Cassoni derived from the twenty-fourth floor.

As a boy he had lived in a tiny Italian village at the foot of a hill that was crowned by a castle. Looking up at its impregnable walls, he had often engaged in boyish imaginings of the wonders that must be inside. There was an unbreakable link between those childhood dreams and the reality of the top floor of the Executive Suite, a linkage that persisted despite the incongruity of the castle having been in Italy and the fact that old Orrin Tredway had created the twenty-fourth floor by transplanting a sixteenth-century English manor house.