Steve and Harriet signed the papers that gave the Burnham Falls Shellac Company in a daze of relief. It was six months since Joe had died.
Afterwards they learned that Amtec had no intention of converting the shellac factory to making compounds of Steve’s formula ‒ that would be done in two of their plants out West where they could be produced by processes and equipment already familiar to operating personnel. A man from Amtec’s Cleveland plant came to take over Steve’s job of factory manager. They began to manufacture shellac under the Amtec label, but with the resources of the Amtec distribution system, they could sell shellac profitably all over the eastern and southern states at prices far below those Joe had reached. Steve walked out of the shellac factory for the last time wondering why Amtec had bothered with that humble building and its humble operation. His contract with Amtec was two weeks old, and he was to report to the research division in New York.
It was when Steve asked about the future of the shellac factory that he learned the value of what he had sold.
On the strength of Steve’s formula, along with the results of research done in their own laboratories, Amtec had been given a grant from the government to build a new research centre. It was to be located in Burnham Falls, on the land that had gone with the sale of the factory. Close to it, also on the land that Steve had sold, they would build the housing for the families of their scientists. They had been looking for a location for their centre when Steve and Burnham Falls presented themselves.
If he felt he had made a bad bargain, Steve never spoke to Clif of it. In fact, Clif or Burnham Falls saw very little of Steve during the eighteen months following the sale of the factory. He spent a good part of his time out West, in Culver City and Tulsa. It was understood that he would not be back permanently to Burnham Falls until the Laboratories were finished.
There was plenty to keep Burnham Falls talking during those months ‒ and the townspeople as a whole seemed to have mixed feelings about Amtec. The factory was doing well, some new equipment had been brought in and more men taken on; the output was bigger and there was more activity on the railway siding. No one liked the new Amtec label that replaced the old one Joe Carpenter had used. The Laboratories and the two hundred houses seemed, to the startled eyes of the town, to go up overnight; the size of the project and the need for speed put it beyond the range of any local contractor, and not much local labour was employed. Burnham Falls enjoyed, however, the extra business that having construction teams camped on their doorstep for eighteen months brought.
During this time Clif watched Harriet’s loneliness deepen. When he had questioned her about joining Steve out West for a visit, she had shaken her head. On a kind of rebound from Joe’s loose spending, she seemed bent on a course of austerity that would quickly get them out of debt. Seeing the emptiness of those months, Clif wondered if it wasn’t too high a price to pay. He would have liked to urge her, against all prudence, to take herself to New York and buy some clothes; and from there fly out to Steve. And then sometimes, as he listened to Harriet talk of the need of economy until they had some money put aside, he wondered if she wasn’t talking to disguise her uneasiness because Steve hadn’t asked her to come ‒ was it in fact, the talk of a woman afraid to acknowledge that her husband had become used to her existing in the background.
But from to-day on, Clif thought, Burnham Falls would start to enter completely into the climate of thought and activity that having a big corporation in their midst must bring. They would soon have a new plant where components of defence weapons were made. They would have a working population that was not native to Burnham Falls or the surrounding countryside, who would occupy houses in yet another development which Clif knew meant only rows of similar boxes, however the Chairman of the Board of Amtec chose to call them.
In the long shadows of the afternoon, two boats were putting out on the lake from Downside, the figures of the men in them black and wooden against the water. Clif screwed the top back on the empty flask.
III
Neither Laura Peters nor Sally Redmond had driven directly to their various destinations when the lunch was over; each of them had been sitting beside her husband, each commenting from her different viewpoint on what she had seen in the last few hours, while they had passed through the centre of town; then the turn-off to Amtec Park had come into view and neither had been able to resist the sudden impulse to go and look again at the new house that waited for them.
On the way up the hill they passed construction trucks and teams still getting the black top on the roads, still landscaping the new gardens, cutting drainage channels. The blank curtainless windows of the new houses stared out at them; the place was raw and unfinished and waiting. Both of the women fell silent as the cars bumped over the ruts; the world of the corporation, and of Amtec fell away from them.
Sally and Tom Redmond found their house by reading the numbers along the street where each house was almost a duplicate of the one beside it; they went inside exuberantly, like children, and Sally ran from room to room, dizzy with the space and light and shining freshness. They laughed and stood in each other’s arms, telling each other the good and wonderful things that could happen to them.
The house built for Laura and Ed Peters stood off by itself on the knoll of Amtec Park. It had been designed especially for them, and it was surrounded by newly-sodded turf and trees, just as it had looked in the rendering made by New York’s most fashionable architect. It was low, and set back to the hill, with glass walls facing south. But both Laura and Ed entered it with a certain caution. Each of them once before had entered a new home with the person to whom they were married; this time they were knowledgeable, and they did not feel invincible.
Harriet Dexter did not have a new house to return to but she had caught the mood of optimism, and she looked hopefully, and with fresh eyes at the Carpenter place when it came into view. Steve was beside her, and this was the end of his eighteen months of journeyings; the damaging years of doubt and worry were over. There might be peace now, and time for them to know each other again. There could be a chance that it might again be as it had once been in California.
And then, as if his thoughts had somehow crossed hers, he spoke.
He said, ‘Ed Peters told me to-day that there’s a possibility Mal Hamilton may come here to do some consultant work for Amtec.’
The words touched her coldly, and the hope of peace was gone.
Four
Afterwards, Harriet had often wondered why she had let herself be so completely Joe’s daughter. She had been all that he had wanted her to be, and that, it seemed, was not what she had wanted herself. But she could find no satisfactory substitute, no real purpose for rebellion, and so had gone along with Joe, being the kind of girl and woman he had meant her to be. She remembered very early that she had learned not to cry for what she wanted, or for hurt or distress, because tears upset Joe, and caused him to draw back a little from her. And since she had committed herself to Joe, she was committed all the way. She learned to endure the coldness of those mornings on the lake, and not to shudder when she baited a hook, she learned to be silent about Joe’s cooking at the lodge, and gratefully returned to Nell’s in town. She practised swimming, until her stroke was powerful and swift, and learned to shoot with fair accuracy, gritting her teeth and following the men through the woods, and hating it when they sighted game and the crash of the shots through the still air, and the bloodied skin of the animal.
She was rarely free to join the Saturday crowd at Carter’s ice-cream parlour, or watch the school football games from the sidelines. She was popular enough, or would have been, she thought, if Joe hadn’t wanted so much of her time, and she hadn’t given it. Joe was busy doing the job he believed that Claudia would have done in bringing up Harriet and Josh, and he interpreted that as meaning that he must spend all of his life away from the factory with them. If Harriet reluctantly acquiesced, it was because she sensed his desperate loneliness, the kind of
awful responsibility he felt for his children, his urgent need to keep everything on the surface calm, happy and unified ‒ and to believe that what he saw on the surface was real. And because, in the final reckoning, Harriet loved Joe ‒ and needed him more than the crowd at Carter’s ‒ she agreed to be the image of what Joe thought a well-brought-up girl should be.
He had entered her for Vassar, and while she was not a brilliant student, she tried harder than she might have done to bring her grades up to a good level because he wanted to be proud of her in everything. If Harriet got to Vassar, and Josh got to Harvard and both acquitted themselves well, there was little more Joe was going to ask from life.
Joe recognised some limits on what he knew was right for Harriet, and he listened to what Dorothy, Clif’s wife, had to say about clothes. Then he would take Harriet to New York, and he would buy expensive clothes for her, with nothing about them to suggest their cost, except the quality of the material, and their cut … skirts and sweaters of fine wool, a small string of pearls, a cashmere coat. Harriet knew that from age twelve, she was already in a Vassar uniform, simple and good, with no frills. Even her party clothes would never be looked at twice. She bought one party dress for herself in Burnham Flats, cheap, slightly flashy, and she wore it, in defiance of Joe, until she grew out of it; she had the idea that it was the only dress she owned that made her as much like the other girls at school as she wanted ‒ she liked the way it fitted tightly to the waist, and made her immature bosom look important. With it she wore very high-heeled shoes, and Joe told her that she’d break her neck with them.
Between herself and her brother Josh there was no strain, and no lack of communication. Over the years, they entered into a largely unspoken agreement to do as little as possible to disturb their father. For Josh this was not difficult, for he had all Joe’s love of doing things with his hands, all his skill with a rod and a gun and a horse; but he seemed better able than Harriet to get a few of his own wishes across to Joe, so that he tended to do things in his own fashion, and in his own time. It was even he who told Joe that Harriet had better stay off the horses, because she didn’t care for them, and Joe had accepted the idea without protest. Sometimes Harriet thought that Josh was the nicest person she would ever know in all her life. He was not quite two years older than she.
For Harriet the years seemed slow, for she was in a hurry to catch up with Josh ‒ and in the nature of things she never quite did catch up. Josh had won a freedom and independence for himself that she guessed would never be hers. He began the practice of going off on week-ends camping trips with his friends, leaving Harriet to go alone with Joe to the cabin. Joe cheered on these evidences of maturity in Josh, and at the same time clung closer to Harriet. He was not quite blind, however, to the longing looks she gave to Josh and his friends as they started off, and he interpreted them as meaning that Harriet herself wanted to see something outside of Burnham Falls. His solution was to take her to New York about once a month. They always stayed overnight at one of the fashionable hotels, went to a Broadway show, and a good restaurant afterwards, and ordered dishes that had never been heard of in Burnham Falls.
What he didn’t know was that Harriet, who had lived mainly with masculine companionship since she was a baby, who had learned to make her way around a big hotel, and tip bell-boys without embarrassment, who had learned not to obtrude a feminine personality too strongly into a party of men at the lodge, was still painfully shy with boys of her own age. There had not been enough sessions at Carter’s for her to learn the give and take of their talk, to hit back with the kind of remark that passed for wit among teenagers. Her voice was quiet and low, and among her giggling friends, she seemed out of place, just a fraction behind the meaning of those whispered comments, not quite quick enough to laugh, a little too ready to be talked down.
Josh was still her closest companion; perhaps because he guessed her loneliness he was willing to listen more attentively to all her ramblings of what was going to happen after she left Burnham Falls. The summer before he left for Harvard he spent whatever time he could with Harriet, sensing that the break that would come when he left would be a complete break for them ‒ that he could not return to their childhood brother and sister relationship. It must change, it could not be the same. He felt he had to give her what help he could in holding off his father, because for the first time Josh had learned the full weight of Joe’s possessiveness. It was the summer of 1940 and, after Dunkirk, Josh had played with the thought of going to England to join the Royal Air Force. Joe had simply, and without discussion, refused his consent. After that, Harriet and Josh were aware of a kind of irritability and impatience in Joe’s attitude towards the war in Europe.
So Harriet and Josh talked of it among themselves, and in September Josh went to Harvard.
Harriet was sixteen that year, and now the mistake Joe had made was beginning to show up clearly. Although she went to Burnham Falls High School, she did not belong there. For her there were none of the simple pleasures Joe remembered and idealised from his own boyhood; nor was she able to flaunt her possessions, and assume a role of leadership because of Joe’s position in Burnham Falls. When Joe began to talk of his plans to send her to Vassar he finished any hope she had of merging with the crowd at school.
It was Clif Burrell who finally saw what Joe had never seen. He told Joe that Harriet couldn’t go on trying to live half-way between the rather shabby humdrum of the Burnham Falls High School and the world that Joe was throwing about her ‒ the Rolls, the fishing lodge, the large house and the trips to New York. She would have to go where cashmere sweaters were commonplace rather than the exception. Joe listened to Clif, as he had done many times before, and Harriet became a weekly boarder at the Troughton School for Girls outside Poughkeepsie. Joe approved of it because it was near Vassar.
Troughton helped Harriet, but not quite in the way Joe and Clif had imagined it would. Fewer daughters of solid, well-to-do families were enrolled at Troughton than Joe would have liked; instead there was more than a sprinkling of the children of theatrical parents ‒ because Troughton was not too far from New York, and because it was more convenient than having them live at home. There were some exaggerations in dress and speech and manners that Harriet could recognise as pure Broadway; there were also the two daughters of John McGuire, whose novels appeared regularly on the best-seller lists, and whose faintly scandalous love affairs were openly discussed by his children. Harriet lived vicariously the lives of the famous and well-known parents, and forgot to wonder what kind of impression she was making. The result was that she became popular among the girls because of her willingness to listen sympathetically. With this came confidence, and a poise, of a kind. She learned to speak up for what she wanted, and expect to have as good a chance as anyone else of getting it.
She looked eagerly to see if Josh approved the change when he came back to Burnham Falls for the summer vacation in 1941, but Josh had become a man very quickly, and she was still only seventeen years old; he was still Josh, gentle, even-tempered, but strangely preoccupied. He spent a month of the summer on a canoeing trip in Canada, and Harriet was left alone with Joe again. While Josh was away she went to spend ten days with Norah and Mary McGuire, who were living with a housekeeper in their New York apartment while their father was in Spain pursuing a story and his latest mistress. At dinner one night Norah suddenly produced vintage champagne from her father’s store, and it was the first time Harriet had ever drunk more than a few sedate sips. They each drank more than they knew, and the next morning Harriet woke to a painful headache and nausea, and was rather surprised to find that, contrary to Joe’s warnings, it was not the end of the world.
When she returned to Burnham Falls, Josh had come back and Mal Hamilton was working at the fishing cabin.
Mal Hamilton was the local success story ‒ or he would be when he had time to prove what was already more than potential. He was more of a success story because people remembered that the odds cou
ldn’t have been stronger against him. Charlie Hamilton, his father, had been the town drunk, a bullying, loud-talking Scotsman who had landed in Burnham Falls for no reason that anyone could ever discover. All that was known of him was that he had crossed over from Canada as a young man, and had started to walk to New York. At Burnham Falls he had stopped to earn some money by doing odd jobs, and he had stayed there ‒ firstly because he had no pressing reason for moving on, and secondly because he had got Rose Tyler pregnant, and rather indifferently decided to marry her. Rose’s father, Nat, hadn’t worked since the depression, but he owned the run-down old farmhouse where he lived, and twelve rocky acres that were choked with timber. Charlie moved in with Rose and Nat, and two children were born, Malcolm, and a girl, Mary, who died of typhoid when she was five years old. The family subsisted on relief, and the few dollars Charlie earned when he was sober.
Mal Hamilton had fought everything there was to fight ‒ poverty, ignorance, indifference, and the prejudice of Burnham Falls, which believed that nothing good could come of the Tyler stock. There was even a certain unwillingness on the part of Mal’s teachers to put him at the head of his class for he was an ugly, tattered boy, with his father’s red hair, often dirty, and without any manners to speak of. But no one could keep Mal Hamilton down, and his brilliance was too obvious to be subdued or extinguished. There was nothing of the reticent scholar about Mal ‒ he was loud and pushing, and he paraded his achievements with a brash cockiness before Burnham Falls’ startled eyes. He worked before school and after school at whatever jobs he could get, and people paid the extra cents he asked per hour because his work was better and more thoroughly done than any other boy’s. The money he earned went to buy books, and he kept it out of his father’s reach by opening an account at the Burnham Falls First National Bank. He waited in the bank all of one hot summer’s day, his dusty, bare feet marking the polished floor, until the manager, George Keston, finally consented to see him. Mal told George Keston that his father would try to take the money away from him, and he also told him how he intended to use it. George was so impressed that he sought out Charlie Hamilton and threatened him with action by every public authority he could name if he touched Mal’s money, and Charlie was frightened enough to do nothing more than mutter sullenly. From that day George Keston was Mal’s unofficial champion, excusing the boy’s brusqueness and aggressiveness on the score of his upbringing, and the temperament of a genius he believed he had discovered. He even went through all the forgotten text books, biographies, and encyclopaedias on his shelves to see what might be of use to Mal, and urged his friends to do the same. Very few people in Burnham Falls bought books, so Mal’s haul wasn’t great. Privately he considered them out-of-date, but he said nothing because he recognised George Keston as a powerful ally.
Corporation Wife Page 6
