The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (37 page)

 

 

It was in the fall of his second year at Harvard Business that Aunt Agatha
revealed that she knew a good deal more about Yale than he had realized.

 

 

He remembered Agatha opened the discussion by saying, "I couldn't spend an
evening with your father, young man; I would find him extremely boring.
In fact, he and my brother make good companions since they are on the same
mental level. However, if you inquired in Midhaven this summer you no doubt
discovered that I'm the crazy maiden aunt who lives in Boston with her cats
and twice as many millions as I really have. I am considered crazy.
Alfred would have me committed if he could. In 1930, I refused to lend
the Latham Shipyards any money. He told me that the Yard would go bankrupt
and that I would lose my stock. I told Alfred that since our father had
seen fit to give him fifty thousand more shares than me, he rightly
expected that a man would be able to manage the Yard better than a
woman. I told Alfred that it would undoubtedly build up moral fiber
that he was definitely lacking to get out of the situation without my
help." Auntie Agatha had smiled, like a meek little old lady, at her
audience composed of the wispy Butch who cooked the meals and Yale
Marratt who had come to share the job of chauffeuring.

 

 

In a thin little voice, a gnome-like expression on his face, Butch had
explained to Yale: "Aunt Agatha likes the Clark Gable type. That's why
she refuses to marry me."

 

 

Aunt Agatha ignored him. "Now, I don't want you to think I don't admire
your father, young man. I think he is the salt that can keep this Roosevelt
system of capitalism from becoming rather pallid." Agatha banged the table
with her hand. "He's the type that refuses to conform to these wild-eyed
social planners. There are too many men who feel that the United States
is simply a jigsaw puzzle with so many pat pieces. Too many men who think
that they can make us all conform to their idea of what is best for us.
When they finish there will be big jagged pieces that you can label Pat
Marratt. You can thank the good Lord that the Pat Marratts still exist
in this country." She saw Yale shrug his shoulders. Then, she dropped
her little surprise. "I know you feel that your father is a narrow,
biased man. Doctor Tangle dropped in to see me this summer." She smiled
at Yale's shocked expression. "When you have a great deal of money,
you acquire some strange friends. Useful, though. Don't you forget that,
young man! From our mutual friend, Doctor Tangle, I learned about your
Jewish girl friend. I also learned that Pat Marratt is surprised that
you survived the first year at Harvard Business, and will be doubly
surprised if you make the second."

 

 

Agatha had paused. She looked at Yale very carefully before she spoke
again. "During the summer I thought this over very carefully. I wondered
how I could repay the generosity of a young man named Yale Marratt who
devotes so much time to an old lady."

 

 

"I'm planning to steal that oil painting in the front hall for repayment,"
Yale said, grinning at her.

 

 

"In case you don't think I know, that painting is a Copley." Agatha said
coolly. "You can have it together with the one over the fireplace. They'll
only bring you a few thousand dollars. They are his early period."

 

 

"Do you measure everything by money, Aunt Agatha?" Yale asked.

 

 

Agatha looked at him bitterly. "My father left me a hundred thousand
dollars and some shares in the Latham Yards. He had stuffed so much
education into me that I never could find a man who measured up to some
artificial idea I had of myself. When I got to be forty years old and had
no husband I knew that I had to prove myself some other way. I decided
that I would do it right, in the same area that had meant so much to my
father and my brother. Money. Only money doesn't own me, young man. I own
it! And that's the difference! My income last year from investments was
slightly over two million dollars. Butch and I lived here last year for
a total annual expenditure of about twenty thousand. A good portion of
the balance that is left to me after brokerage fees and in- come taxes
is donated to various Jewish refugee organizations."

 

 

Yale didn't try to apologize to her. He listened, in wonder, as
Aunt Agatha proposed to teach him everything she had learned about
investing. She had found out that Pat had given him ten thousand
dollars. She demanded to know how much was left. She was pleased to find
that he still had six thousand dollars.

 

 

"Sell your car, young man. That will give you another thousand. I'm not
going to give you a red cent, but I'm going to help you prove that someday
you can beat Pat Marratt at his own game. And that's going to be the best
thing that ever happened to you, or I miss my guess. But it isn't going
to fall right into your lap, young man. You are going to study like you
never have before."

 

 

Agatha hadn't been fooling. Before the final year at Harvard was over,
with Agatha as a demon tutor, Yale worked his way through practically
every book available on the subject of finance. He found as he studied
the stock market and learned the intricacies of stocks and bonds and
warrants and puts and calls, and learned from Agatha the practicalities
of day-to-day buying and selling and investing, that the whole subject
was further confused by ever changing legal patterns and tax laws. Driven
by Agatha, he read widely in corporation law. He waded through endless
investment surveys that Agatha subscribed to. The more he studied, the
more he was amazed by the seemingly limitless breadth of Aunt Agatha's
knowledge. He told her that she astounded him. He remembered that it
was the only time that he had seen tears in the old lady's eyes.

 

 

"I know so much, young man," she said sadly, "that I was fifty-six before
I found a man. He was what Butch would call the Clark Gable type. A very
big, uneducated man. He would pick me tight off the ground and hug me.
He called me his little doll. That was in nineteen twenty-eight. One day
he asked me in his very endearing way how much money I had. It was about
six million dollars, then; all of it in the stock market. He told me that
he wanted to marry me but he pointed out that he couldn't live on his
wife's money. I knew that he had no money of his own. I assigned a million
dollars in blue chip stocks to him. A week later he disappeared." Agatha
sighed. "I was so broken up that I told Junior's father to sell me out
of the market. I had lost interest in everything. I took a trip around
the world. I was in Paris in October of nineteen twenty-nine. So you see,
young man, some of this investing business is luck. If Maguire, that was
his name, had married me, I probably would have lost over five million
dollars. Poor Maguire. He was so ignorant that I'm sure he probably left
his million in the market, thinking he would have two million."

 

 

 

 

Yale tiptoed back into the room. Kathie was still sleeping. He took his
clothes into the bathroom and slowly got dressed.

 

 

In a way, he thought, I was in love with Aunt Agatha. A wonderful,
sprightly old lady. He wondered if she was still holding out in her
Belmont house surrounded with shiny new retail stores. "They'll never get
this place," she had told him. "I've got a half-acre right in the middle
of everything. They offered me fifty thousand for the house. Imagine that,
young man! Fifty thousand dollars just to tear it down! Well, they'll
never get it. I changed my will yesterday. I'm going to leave enough money
some day to support this place as a free clinic for cats. The Latham Cat
Hospital. I must write and tell my brother, Alfred. He'll be delighted."

 

 

Dressed in his uniform, Yale deliberated whether to leave money
for Kathie. He decided against it. He scribbled on a piece of hotel
stationery. "It was nice, Kathie. Take care." Quietly he closed the
hotel room door. Walking toward the Floridian Hotel, he thought about the
money belt be had left there. Carelessly dropped into his barrack bag,
it contained twenty thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills. With
Agatha's help he had paid for the last year at Harvard and made twenty
thousand dollars to boot. What had he proved? That twenty thousand
dollars, and the ability to invest or speculate wisely had failed to
appease the awful sense of loneliness that pursued him. Now, two years
later, wearing the U.S. Army Finance department diamond insignia and the
shiny gold bars of a second lieutenant, he, like the rest of the people
in the world was racing nowhere with a deadly seriousness.

 

 

Walking through the hotel lobby he smiled vaguely at an attractive blonde
wearing a Red Cross uniform. But his thoughts were with a girl sleeping
in a trailer in Miami.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3

 

 

Anne Wilson walked up to the outgoing passenger desk at the Floridian
Hotel for the third time. This was typical army, she thought. They had
put her on call for overseas departure at ten in the morning. Now it
was nine-thirty in the evening and she was still waiting.

 

 

"Do you think that the plane will go out tonight?" she asked wearily.
The sergeant at the desk gave her a sad look. "You and about twenty others
are wondering the same thing. In case you don't know it, you are flying
Pan American to Casablanca. From there the Air Transport Command picks
you up. Maybe the wings have fallen off the plane. At any rate from the
looks of things it won't go out for another couple of hours."

 

 

Anne walked slowly through the lobby, watching the crowds of army officers,
wondering which of them would be on the plane with her. They were so
young and yet looked so important. Several of them stared at her as she
passed. Out near the hotel's deserted swimming pool she sat in a beach
chair and hoped that no one would follow her. She didn't feel able to
fend off the glib approach that some of these young lieutenants had
acquired. In a few minutes of conversation they had you sized up as
a possible bed companion. Some had the idea that the Red Cross girls
were provided, courtesy of Uncle Sam, for just one thing. Enlisted men
were easier to handle. Most of them seemed just glad to have a girl to
talk with.

 

 

She remembered her conversation with Mr. Gisler, the field director to
whom she reported. "I want to go overseas," she had said. "I didn't join
the Red Cross just to run an enlisted man's club in the States."

 

 

"What's your hurry, Anne? You've got a good spot here in Miami. A lot of
the girls would give their right arm to get stationed here." Mr. Gisler
was good-hearted. He tried to figure out why each girl was in the
Red Cross. Then he adopted the attitude of father-confessor. He knew
about her husband. Dead on Guadalcanal after less than sixteen months
a soldier. He had been killed six months after Anne had joined the Red
Cross. Her promise to follow him wherever he went in the army could never
be kept. Once she knew of Ricky's death, she had no longer tried to get
assigned in the Pacific theater. It didn't matter where she went -- just
so long as she kept moving. She had been certain of one thing. She hated
Miami with its melting pot of soldiers, sailors and civilians living
as if there were no war. Living as if their own pursuit of immediate
pleasure was all that mattered. She kept working on Mr. Gisler for
reassignment. Last week he had called her into his office.

 

 

"Well, you asked for it! You are assigned to the Assam Valley. To one of
the dirty little bases set up by the Army to ferry pipe into the China
end of the Burma Road." He looked at her grimly. "A lot of these fellows
have been over there for three years."

 

 

What you mean is they haven't seen any white girls."

 

 

Mr. Gisler had been embarrassed He started to give her the routine advice.
How she should conduct herself. How to maintain the Red Cross distance,
and yet give the soldiers all the feeling of companionship that they
might get from any girl in the States. To stay away as much as possible
from the officers. The officers had nurses. Red Cross clubs were for
the enlisted men. In a few seconds Mr. Gisler managed to cover every
admonition she had received since joining the Red Cross.

 

 

"A smile means so much," Mr. Gisler had said, smiling himself and showing
a decayed tooth. "You are a very lovely woman, Mrs. Wilson. You'll have to
. . . well, you know what I mean."

 

 

Anne knew what he meant. When she walked up to a group of them and said,
"Hi, boys," their mouths would open and they would grin foolishly. Someone
would remark, "Gosh, the Red Cross is coming up in the world! Where did
they get you?"

 

 

She had heard them say, "Have you seen that blonde dish with the deep blue
eyes? Brother what a shape." Or, "Boy, would I like to get into that." Or,
"What a pair of tits, yum, yum." And she had smiled. Not from conceit, but
amusement. The difficulty was keeping out of their grasp. For every one
that looked and admired, there were two that wanted to grab or touch. They
acted like disappointed children when she gently repulsed them.

 

 

She accepted it as a fact that men were attracted to her. It meant nothing.
The one man who had counted was dead. Maybe there would be another man,
but she would never lose the memory of her first and only love.

 

 

You grow up with a boy, she thought. A rough and tumble, tously haired
kid who was always going on expeditions in the woods to examine trees,
to collect leaves and plants. You wander along with him, carrying his
precious collections, helping him catch all kinds of strange bugs and
insects, and pretty soon you care for him so much that you begin to lose
your own identity and you're in love though you're only ten years old
and don't know what love is.