Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  “You’ll lose all your best guys. . . . Slavedrivin’ may be all right in the automobile business, but buildin’ an airplane motor’s skilled labor.”

  “Aw, Christ, I wish I was still tinkerin’ with that damn motor and didn’t have to worry about money all the time. . . . Bill, I’m broke. . . . Let’s have another whiskey.”

  “Better eat.”

  “Sure, order up a steak . . . anythin’ you like. Let’s go take a piss. That’s one thing they don’t charge for. . . . Say, Bill, does it seem to you that I’m gettin’ a potbelly? . . . Broke, a potbelly, an’ my wife won’t sleep with me. . . . Do you think I’m a rummy, Bill? I sometimes think I better lay off for keeps. I never used to pull a blank when I drank.”

  “Hell, no, you smart young feller, one of the smartest, a fool for a threepoint landing and a pokerplayer . . . my God.”

  “What’s the use if your wife won’t sleep with you?”

  Charley wouldn’t eat anything. Bill ate up both their steaks. Charley kept on drinking whiskey out of a bottle he had under the table and beer for chasers. “But tell me . . . your wife, does she let you have it any time you want it? . . . The guys in the shop, their wives won’t let ’em alone, eh?”

  Bill was a little drunk too. “My wife she do what I say.”

  It ended by Bill’s having to drive Charley’s new Packard back to the ferry. In Detroit Bill made Charley drink a lot of sodawater in a drugstore, but when he got back in the car he just slumped down at the wheel. He let Bill drive him home to Grosse Pointe. Charley could hear Bill arguing with the guards along the road, each one really had to see Mr. Anderson passed out in the back of the car before he’d let Bill through, but he didn’t give a hoot, struck him so funny he began to giggle. The big joke was when the houseman had to help Bill get him up to his bedroom. “The boss a little sick, see, overwork,” Bill said each time, then he’d tap his head solemnly. “Too much brain-work.” Charley came to up in his bedroom and was able to articulate muzzily: “Bill, you’re a prince. . . . George, call a taxi to take Mr. Cermak home . . . lucky bastard go home to his wife.” Then he stretched out on the bed with one shoe on and one shoe off and went quietly to sleep.

  When he came back from his next trip to New York and Washington, he called up Bill at the plant. “Hay, Bill, how’s the boy? Your wife still do what you say, ha, ha. Me, I’m terrible, very exhaustin’ business trip, understand . . . never drank so much in my life or with so many goddam crooks. Say, Bill, don’t worry if you get fired, you’re on my private payroll, understand. . . . We’re goin’ to fire the whole outfit. . . . Hell, if they don’t like it workin’ for us let ’em try to like it workin’ for somebody else. . . . This is a free country. I wouldn’t want to keep a man against his will. . . . Look, how long will it take you to tune up that little Moth type, you know, number 16. . . yours truly’s Mosquito? . . . Check. . . . Well, if we can get her in shape soon enough so they can use her as a model, see, for their specifications. . . . Jesus, Bill, if we can do that . . . we’re on easystreet. . . . You won’t have to worry about if the kids can go to college or not . . . goddam it, you an the missis can go to college yourselves. . . . Check.”

  Charley put the receiver back on the desk. His secretary Miss Finnegan was standing in the door. She had red hair and a beautiful complexion with a few freckles round her little sharp nose. She was a snappy dresser. She was looking at Charley with her lightbrown eyes all moist and wide as he was laying down the law over the phone. Charley felt his chest puff out a little. He pulled in his belly as hard as he could. “Gosh,” he was saying at the back of his head, “maybe I could lay Elsie Finnegan.” Somebody had put a pot of blue hyacinths on his desk; a smell of spring came from them that all at once made him remember Bar-le-Duc, and troutfishing up the Red River.

  It was a flowerysmelling spring morning again when Charley drove out to the plant from the office to give the Anderson Mosquito its trial spin. He had managed to give Elsie Finnegan a kiss for the first time and had left her crumpled and trembling at her desk. Bill Cermak had said over the phone that the tiny ship was tuned up and in fine shape. It was a relief to get out of the office where he’d been fidgeting for a couple of hours trying to get through a call to Nat Benton’s office about some stock he’d wired them to take a profit on. After he’d kissed her he’d told Elsie Finnegan to switch the call out to the trial field for him. It made him feel good to be driving out through the halfbuilt town, through the avenue jammed with trucks full of construction materials, jockeying his car among the trucks with a feeling of shine and strength at the perfect action of his clutch and the smooth response of the gears. The gatekeeper had the New York call for him. The connection was perfect. Nat had banked thirteen grand for him. As he hung up the receiver he thought poor little Elsie, he’d have to buy her something real nice. “It’s a great day, Joe, ain’t it?” he said to the gatekeeper.

  Bill was waiting for him beside the new ship at the entrance to the hangar, wiping grease off his thick fingers with a bunch of waste. Charley slapped him on the back. “Good old Bill. . . . Isn’t this a great day for the race?” Bill fell for it. “What race, boss?” “The human race, you fathead. . . . Say, Bill,” he went on as he took off his gloves and his well tailored spring overcoat, “I don’t mind tellin’ you I feel wonderful today . . . made thirteen grand on the market yesterday . . . easy as rollin’ off a log.”

  While Charley pulled a suit of overalls on the mechanics pushed the new ship out onto the grass for Bill to make his general inspection. “Jesus, she’s pretty.” The tiny aluminum ship glistened in the sun out on the green grass like something in a jeweler’s window. There were dandelions and clover on the grass and a swirling flight of little white butterflies went up right from under his black clodhoppers when Bill came back to Charley and stood beside him. Charley winked at Bill Cermak standing beside him in his blue denims stolidly looking at his feet. “Smile, you sonofabitch,” he said. “Don’t this weather make you feel good?”

  Bill turned a square bohunk face towards Charley. “Now look here, Mr. Anderson, you always treat me good . . . from way back Long Island days. You know me, do work, go home, keep my face shut.” “What’s on your mind, Bill? . . . Want me to try to wangle another raise for you? Check.”

  Bill shook his heavy square face and rubbed his nose with a black forefinger. “Tern Company used to be good place to work good work good pay. You know me, Mr. Anderson, I’m no bolshayvik . . . but no stoolpigeon either.”

  “But damn it, Bill, why can’t you tell those guys to have a little patience . . . we’re workin’ out a profitsharin’ scheme. I’ve worked on a lathe myself. . . . I’ve worked as a mechanic all over this goddam country. . . . I know what the boys are up against, but I know what the management’s up against too. . . . Gosh, this thing’s in its infancy, we’re pouring more capital into the business all the time. . . . We’ve got a responsibility towards our investors. Where do you think that jack I made yesterday’s goin’ but the business of course. The oldtime shop was a great thing, everybody kidded and smoked and told smutty stories, but the pressure’s too great now. If every department don’t click like a machine we’re rooked. If the boys want a union we’ll give ’em a union. You get up a meeting and tell ’em how we feel about it but tell ’em we’ve got to have some patriotism. Tell ’em the industry’s the first line of national defense. We’ll send Eddy Sawyer down to talk to ’em . . . make ’em understand our problems.”

  Bill Cermak shook his head. “Plenty other guys do that.” Charley frowned. “Well, let’s see how she goes,” he snapped impatiently.

  “Gosh, she’s a honey.”

  The roar of the motor kept them from saying any more. The mechanic stepped from the controls and Charley climbed in. Bill Cermak got in behind. She started taxiing fast across the green field. Charley turned her into the wind and let her have the gas. At the first soaring bounce there was a jerk. As he pitched forward Charley switched off the ignition.


  They were carrying him across the field on a stretcher. Each step of the men carrying the stretcher made two jagged things grind together in his leg. He tried to tell ’em that he had a piece of something in his side, but his voice was very small and hoarse. In the shadow of the hangar he was trying to raise himself on his elbow. “What the devil happened? Is Bill all right?” The men shook their heads. Then he passed out again like the juice failing in a car.

  In the ambulance he tried to ask the man in the white jacket about Bill Cermak and to remember back exactly what had happened, but the leg kept him too busy trying not to yell. “Hay, doc,” he managed to croak, “can’t you get these aluminum splinters out of my side? The damn ship must have turned turtle on them. Wing couldn’t take it maybe, but it’s time they got the motor lifted off me. Hay, doc, why can’t they get a move on?”

  When he got the first whiff of the hospital, there were a lot of men in white jackets moving and whispering round him. The hospital smelt strong of ether. The trouble was he couldn’t breathe. Somebody must have spilt that damned ether. No, not on my face. The motor roared. He must have been seeing things. The motor’s roar swung into an easy singsong. Sure, she was taking it fine, steady as one of those big old bombers. When he woke up a nurse was helping him puke into a bowl.

  When he woke up again, for chrissake no more ether, no, it was flowers, and Gladys was standing beside the bed with a big bunch of sweetpeas in her hand. Her face had a pinched look. “Hello, Glad, how’s the girl?” “Oh, I’ve been so worried, Charley. How do you feel? Oh, Charley, for a man of your standing to risk his life in practice flights . . . Why don’t you let the people whose business it is do it, I declare.” There was something Charley wanted to ask. He was scared about something. “Say, are the kids all right?” “Wheatley skinned his knee and I’m afraid the baby has a little temperature. I’ve phoned Dr. Thompson. I don’t think it’s anything though.”

  “Is Bill Cermak all right?”

  Gladys’s mouth trembled. “Oh, yes,” she said, cutting the words off sharply. “Well, I suppose this means our dinnerdance is off. . . . The Edsel Fords were coming.” “Hell, no, why not have it anyway? Yours truly can attend in a wheelchair. Say, they sure have got me in a straitjacket. . . . I guess I busted some ribs.” Gladys nodded; her mouth was getting very small and thin. Then she suddenly began to cry.

  The nurse came in and said reproachfully, “Oh, Mrs. Anderson.” Charley was just as glad when Gladys went out and left him alone with the nurse. “Say, nurse, get hold of the doctor, will you? Tell him I’m feeling fine and want to look over the extent of the damage.” “Mr. Anderson, you mustn’t have anything on your mind.” “I know, tell Mrs. Anderson I want her to get in touch with the office.” “But it’s Sunday, Mr. Anderson. A great many people have been downstairs but I don’t think the doctor is letting them up yet.” The nurse was a freshfaced girl with a slightly Scotch way of talking. “I bet you’re a Canadian,” said Charley. “Right that time,” said the nurse. “I knew a wonderful nurse who was a Canadian once. If I’d had any sense I’d have married her.”

  The housephysician was a roundfaced man with a jovial smooth manner almost like a headwaiter at a big hotel. “Say, doc, ought my leg to hurt so damn much?” “You see we haven’t set it yet. You tried to puncture a lung but didn’t quite get away with it. We had to remove a few little splinters of rib” “Not from the lung . . .” “Luckily not.” “But why the hell didn’t you set the leg at the same time?” “Well, we’re waiting for Dr. Roberts to come on from New York. . . . Mrs. Anderson insisted on him. Of course we are all very pleased, as he’s one of the most eminent men in his profession. . . . It’ll be another little operation.”

  It wasn’t until he’d come to from the second operation that they told him that Bill Cermak had died of a fractured skull.

  Charley was in the hospital three months with his leg in a Balkan frame. The fractured ribs healed up fast, but he kept on having trouble with his breathing. Gladys handled all the house bills and came every afternoon for a minute. She was always in a hurry and always terribly worried. He had to turn over a power of attorney to Moe Frank his lawyer who used to come to see him a couple of times a week to talk things over. Charley couldn’t say much, he couldn’t say much to anybody he was in so much pain.

  He liked it best when Gladys sent Wheatley to see him. Wheatley was three years old now and thought it was great in the hospital. He liked to see the nurse working all the little weights and pulleys of the frame the leg hung in. “Daddy’s living in a airplane,” was what he always said about it. He had tow hair and his nose was beginning to stick up and Charley thought he took after him.

  Marguerite was still too little to be much fun. The one time Gladys had the governess bring her, she bawled so at the look of the scary-looking frame she had to be taken home. Gladys wouldn’t let her come again. Gladys and Charley had a bitter row about letting Wheatley come as she said she didn’t want the child to remember his father in the hospital. “But, Glad, he’ll have plenty of time to get over it, get over it a damn sight sooner than I will.” Gladys pursed her lips together and said nothing. When she’d gone Charley lay there hating her and wondering how they could ever have had children together.

  Just about the time he began to see clearly that they all expected him to be a cripple the rest of his life he began to mend, but it was winter before he was able to go home on crutches. He still suffered sometimes from a sort of nervous difficulty in breathing. The house seemed strange as he dragged himself around in it. Gladys had had every room redecorated while he was away and all the servants were different. Charley didn’t feel it was his house at all. What he enjoyed best was the massage he had three times a week. He spent his days playing with the kids and talking to Miss Jarvis, their stiff and elderly English governess. After they’d gone to bed he’d sit in his sittingroom drinking scotch and soda and feeling puffy and nervous. God damn it, he was getting too fat. Gladys was always cool as a cucumber these days; even when he went into fits of temper and cursed at her, she’d stand there looking at him with a cold look of disgust on her carefully madeup face. She entertained a great deal but made the servants understand that Mr. Anderson wasn’t well enough to come down. He began to feel like a poor relation in his own house. Once when the Farrells were coming he put on his tuxedo and hobbled down to dinner on his crutches. There was no place set for him and everybody looked at him like he was a ghost.

  “Thataboy,” shouted Farrell in his yapping voice. “I was expecting to come up and chin with you after dinner.” It turned out that what Farrell wanted to talk about was the suit for five hundred thousand some damn shyster had induced Cermak’s widow to bring against the company. Farrell had an idea that if Charley went and saw her he could induce her to be reasonable and settle for a small annuity. Charley said he’d be damned if he’d go. At dinner Charley got tight and upset the afterdinner coffeecups with his crutch and went off to bed in a rage.

  What he enjoyed outside of playing with the kids was buying and selling stocks and talking to Nat over the longdistance. Nat kept telling him he was getting the feel of the market. Nat warned him and Charley knew damn well that he was slipping at Tern and that if he didn’t do something he’d be frozen out, but he felt too rotten to go to directors’ meetings; what he did do was to sell out about half his stocks in small parcels. Nat kept telling him if he’d only get a move on he could get control of the whole business before Andy Merritt pulled off his new reorganization, but he felt too damn nervous and miserable to make the effort. All he could seem to do was to grumble and call Julius Stauch and raise hell about details. Stauch had taken over his work on the new monoplane and turned out a little ship that had gone through all tests with flying colors. When he’d put down the receiver, Charley would pour himself a little scotch and settle back on the couch in his window and mutter to himself, “Well, you’re dished this time.”

  One evening Farrell came around and had a long talk an
d said what Charley needed was a fishing trip, he’d never get well if he kept on this way. He said he’d been talking to Doc Thompson and that he recommended three months off and plenty of exercise if he ever expected to throw away his crutches.

  Gladys couldn’t go because old Mrs. Wheatley was sick, so Charley got into the back of his Lincoln towncar alone with the chauffeur to drive him, and a lot of blankets to keep him warm, and a flask of whiskey and a thermosbottle of hot coffee, to go down all alone to Miami.

  At Cincinnati he felt so bum he spent a whole day in bed in the hotel there. He got the chauffeur to get him booklets about Florida from a travel agency, and finally sent a wire to Nat Benton asking him to spend a week with him down at the Key Largo fishingcamp. Next morning he started off again early. He’d had a good night’s sleep and he felt better and began to enjoy the trip. But he felt a damn fool sitting there being driven like an old woman all bundled up in rugs. He was lonely too because the chauffeur wasn’t the kind of bird you could talk to. He was a sourlooking Canuck Gladys had hired because she thought it was classy to give her orders in French through the speakingtube; Charley was sure the bastard gypped him on the price of gas and oil and repairs along the road; that damn Lincoln was turning out a bottomless pit for gas and oil.

  In Jacksonville the sun was shining. Charley gave himself the satisfaction of firing the chauffeur as soon as they’d driven up to the door of the hotel. Then he went to bed with a pint of bum corn the bellboy sold him and slept like a log.

  In the morning he woke up late feeling thirsty but cheerful. After breakfast he checked out of the hotel and drove around the town a little. It made him feel good to pack his own bag and get into the front seat and drive his own car.

  The town had a cheerful rattletrap look in the sunlight under the big white clouds and the blue sky. At the lunchroom next to the busstation he stopped to have a drink. He felt so good that he got out of the car without his crutches and hobbled across the warm pavement. The wind was fluttering the leaves of the magazines and the pink and palegreen sheets of the papers outside the lunchroom window. Charley was out of breath from the effort when he slid onto a stool at the counter. “Give me a limeade and no sweetnin’ in it, please,” he said to the ratfaced boy at the fountain.