Executive Suite (9 page)

He had less than four thousand dollars in the bank. It seemed incredible but it was true. His divorce settlement had taken fifty thousand cash. The house in Westchester was mortgaged for every cent he could borrow on it. If the stock went up even a few dollars a share he was bankrupt. He would not be able to meet his obligations and that meant the end of his reputation and his career.

There was only one way he could save himself … get his hands on two thousand shares of Tredway stock before the market opened Monday morning. Where … where … where? The pounding of the word loosened a fragment from the hard shell of his memory … Shaw … Loren P. Shaw. Yes, that was it! Shaw was the comptroller of the Tredway Corporation now. Shaw could find some way to get that stock. He had Shaw under his thumb. Shaw wouldn't dare refuse him, not when he reminded him that he still remembered what had happened on that government contract for Alliance back in … No, good God, no! Was he insane? Shaw had more on him than he had on Shaw. He didn't have Shaw under his thumb. It was the other way around!

The fog was clearing. He could think again. Yes, that's what he had to do … think! It was the only way he could save himself … the way he had always saved himself before … with his mind. The thought of Shaw still ricocheted around in the dark labyrinths of his brain. Another fragment of memory was chipped loose. He had met a woman on Madison Avenue that evening after he'd had dinner with Shaw. Shaw had said she was the biggest stockholder in the company, the inheritor of the Tredway estate. What was her name? Tredway? No, she was married … lived in Millburgh … Julia? Yes, that was it … Julia … Julia … Julia? Suddenly the name flashed … Julia Tredway Prince!

Bruce Pilcher started across the library again, retracing his path to the telephone booth. He would find some way to get that stock. His mind was working again. That was the important thing … he had always been able to think his way out of tight spots before. He could do it again.

Everything was all right now. He had himself under control. He was walking the way a man walked when he was under perfect control, slow and steady and even-strided. Near the center of the lobby he passed Andrew coming toward the library with the Final editions flat on his outstretched arms. “Thank you, Andrew,” he said pleasantly. Yes, he was all right now.

Inside the telephone booth he paused to make absolutely certain that the last trace of fog had left his mind. There was no doubt about it. It had been months since he had met Julia Tredway Prince, yet the moment he had asked his mind to supply her name, there it was. No, there was nothing wrong with his mind. It was functioning perfectly.

He dialed the operator. “I want to place a long-distance call to Millburgh, Pennsylvania—person to person—Mrs. Julia Tredway Prince.”

5.40 P.M. EDT

“You're quite certain that it's been three months?” Dr. Marston asked.

“Three months last Saturday night,” Anne Finnick said, dry-mouthed, not daring to take her eyes from his. “That was the only time.”

“Then you're not pregnant.”

“You're sure?”

“By the end of the third month we can determine pregnancy quite easily. If it's really been three months you have nothing to worry about.”

A cry of ecstasy rose in her throat but all that escaped her lips was the low animal whimper of a frightened creature being released from the jaws of a trap.

Blindly, fighting tears, she groped for her purse.

“You can pay the young lady outside,” he said softly, turning away so she was not forced to show him the tears that could not be fought back.

“That will be ten dollars,” the girl at the desk said.

Anne Finnick opened her purse, shielding the opening with her hand, finding a bill from the center of the pack that was less water-stained than the others. She dropped it on the table, started for the door.

“Your paper,” the girl called after her.

She turned, hurriedly retrieving the tight-rolled newspaper from the maple settee. It was a Final edition that she had bought half an hour ago. It seemed like half a lifetime.

4

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

5.44 P.M. EDT

As Don Walling entered the black marble lobby of the Tredway Tower he glanced up at the great bronze clock and saw that he had wasted a quarter of an hour by his hurried departure from the Pike Street factory. He might have waited ten minutes longer, long enough to have seen at least the start of the first test-run, but he had not dared to gamble that the traffic on South Front Street would be as light as it had proved to be. Once he had gambled and lost. He had not forgotten the expression with which Avery Bullard had greeted him as he had walked into executive committee meeting six minutes late. That had been almost two years ago, soon after he had been made a vice-president, when pleasing Avery Bullard had seemed to be the very essence of living, but the memory still persisted.

Don Walling was certain that his presence at the meeting couldn't possibly be as important as staying at the factory to supervise the first test-run of the new molding process. Yet he had not dared to stay. Avery Bullard's command could not be denied. If there were a chance to talk to Avery Bullard before the meeting, he would be excused … but there would be no chance. The president would start the meeting the moment he entered the door of the directors' room, talking as he strode to his chair. There would be no way to interrupt, no chance for a pardon. Afterwards, when Avery Bullard found out he would demand, “Damn it, why didn't you tell me?”… and there would be no way to explain why he hadn't. There were some things you couldn't tell Avery Bullard … a great many things … more all the time. There had been a big change in Avery Bullard these last two years.

If Don Walling had been a highly introspective man—which he was not—he might have understood that at least a part of what he thought of as a change in Avery Bullard was actually a change in his own viewpoint and understanding. These last two years of intimate association had made him see Avery Bullard as something other than the faultless idol that he had once thought him to be. Inwardly, Don Walling had fought against that realization. Even now he hesitated to step across the thin and wavering line that marked the limit of his unswerving loyalty to Avery Bullard. It had been a long journey to that line, a journey that had taken all of his life, a journey over an up-and-down road, alternately high and low with peaks of idolatry and deep valleys of disillusion.

In the orphans' home, from the time he was old enough for remembered thought until he was seven, he had dreamed of a father and mother who would some day come and take him from the home. Then one day they had come, both a father and a mother, and they had lifted him to the first peak of his life—but the descent to the valley of disillusion was cruelly swift. A mother, he found, was not the warm source of solace for which his heart had ached, but a strange woman who cried most of the time and insisted that his name was no longer his own name, but that he was now someone else whose name was “MacDonald Walling, the Second.” The man he was to call his father did not turn out to be the joyful companion about whom he dreamed, but a tired-eyed man who smelled of cigars and whiskey and spent the few evenings when he was home watching his wife over the top edge of a face-shielding newspaper.

Four years later, when he was eleven, after the horror of a night about which he remembered little except the startling redness of blood against the whiteness of the bathtub, and the after-gained knowledge that his foster mother had attempted to commit suicide, he had been taken to Rubble Hill Academy, a boarding school for boys. He never saw his foster parents again. But the next morning he met Mr. Andrews.

It was Mr. Andrews, the headmaster at Rubble Hill, who told him that he did not have to call himself MacDonald Walling, the Second. Mr. Andrews had proved it by telling him that his own name had been Bartholomew Meade Andrews but now it was simply Bart Andrews. The boy could be Mac Walling or Don Walling, whichever he preferred. He chose Don because Mac was what his foster mother had called his foster father.

That had been only the first step of the long journey on which Mr. Andrews had piloted young Don Walling. Bart Andrews led him into the world of books and art, of thinking and knowledge, and the excitement of learning. He became the boy's ideal, his unquestioned leader, the model against which he shaped his own development—until that day of disillusionment when Bart Andrews called him into his office and told him that his foster father had failed to pay his tuition for the next semester and, as an unfortunate but inescapable consequence, Don must leave Rubble Hill. Don Walling learned then that there was a price on friendship. He never saw Mr. Andrews again.

At Rubble Hill, Don was given five dollars, a railroad ticket, and told to report to a Mr. McIlhenny at the Orphans' Court in Pittsburgh. He never reported. Lost, wandering down Diamond Street, he saw a group of men loitering in front of an employment agency. He stopped to ask directions but, before his question could be answered, a man opened the door and shouted, “Twenty laborers on a construction job out in Schenley Hill. Anybody wants it, hold up their hand.” Don held up his hand. He was only seventeen but he was big for his age and no questions were asked. The five dollars went for advance rent on a room. He had no money to buy meals until his first payday. Hungry, he picked a little restaurant near the job and asked for credit. That was how he met Mike Kovales. Mike needed a night dishwasher. Don took the job. For eight hours every day he shoved a wheelbarrow, for almost eight hours every night he washed dishes for Mike. That fall Mike promoted him to a counter man and talked him into going back to high school for his last year. The counter customers at night were mostly architectural students from Carnegie Tech and out of snatches of their overheard conversations, Don Walling built a new dream—he would go to college and become an architect.

Tech was a disappointment. Don had keyed himself to a high pitch of anticipation in preparation for what he expected to be an intellectual challenge. He did not find it. It was all too easy. The pace was too slow, the demands too light. Weeks were spent on textbooks that he found he could read and understand in a single night. Study problems seemed elementary and unrelated to the actual practice of architecture. He felt that he wasn't getting anywhere. He stayed on because he didn't want to be a quitter and because Mike had taken to bragging that “his boy” was going to be a college-graduated architect.

The second spring, when Don was a sophomore, Mike decided to remodel the restaurant. Because it was a chance to design something that was actually going to be built, Don drew the plan and made a perspective sketch. Mike was pleased and let him supervise the job. Twice a day Don went across the river to Trimmer's cabinet shop in Allegheny, ostensibly to check on the construction of the booths and counters, but actually to drink in the pleasure of seeing his drawings transformed into polished mahogany. It was an enormously stimulating experience, surpassing in emotional intensity anything he had ever known. He decided that he would specialize in the architectural design of store interiors and, by a quirk of fate, his decision was made on the same week that he met Karl Eric Kassel. According to the double-page advertisement of the Pittsburgh department store whose interior he had just designed, Karl Eric Kassel was “the undisputed leader of the great modern revolution that is sweeping the field of interior design.”

Karl Eric Kassel came to Pittsburgh to lend his redbearded presence to the store's grand reopening. He was feted at Schenley Hall with a banquet that crammed the ballroom to its doors. Afterwards, the great man lectured to the Tech students and, to a second round of deafening applause, the chairman's awed thanks included the announcement of an annual competition for furniture designs in the modern manner. The first prize for each year's winner would be an opportunity to work as an apprentice in the New York studio of Karl Eric Kassel.

In his senior year Don Walling won the Karl Eric Kassel competition. After a parting with Mike Kovales that touched him more than he had imagined possible, he left for New York. It was the spring of 1931 and, although he was conscious of what people were beginning to call the “depression,” he was not quite prepared for Karl Eric Kassel's contention that general business was so bad he would be unable to pay him more than ten dollars a week, plus the privilege of sleeping in the storeroom behind the “studio.” Of course, as Mr. Kassel pointed out, there was the additional compensation of working with Karl Eric Kassel, a privilege that was something quite beyond mundane valuation, particularly since he was now pioneering a whole new field. Karl Eric Kassel was no longer a mere interior designer, he was now a “functional industrial stylist,” prepared to add the selling power of aesthetics to any article “from a mousetrap to a locomotive.” There was no reason, Karl Eric Kassel said, why Don Walling—given time, of course—could not find an “important niche” in this new field.

For several months Don did not suspect how short that “given time” was to be, nor how important his niche really was. Karl Eric Kassel did not enlighten him. He kept Don's drawing board heaped with “interesting little problems” and as fast as Don could reduce his problems to paper, Karl Eric Kassel took the drawings away with the uniform comment that they were “rather hopeful for a first attempt.” Several months later, fanning a merchandising trade magazine, Don saw a picture of a newly announced electric range. It was his “solution” of one of Karl Eric Kassel's “interesting little problems,” line for line without the change of a single detail. The accompanying article quoted the manufacturer as saying, “The $5000 fee which we paid Karl Eric Kassel for the exhaustive design analysis that led to this superlative creation has proved to be a splendid investment.”