Corporation Wife

by Catherine Gaskin

  And in the meantime her name became famous across America for the way she would walk across a model kitchen and flick the control of a stove or washing-machine. The Amtec dealers loved her, and Amtec began to plan a whole magazine advertising campaign featuring her.

  Goodman was studying the double-page spread in Life when she walked into the studio one day. He favoured her with his most concentrated stare. ‘I suppose this pays very well,’ he said, tapping her brightly-coloured photo.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered defensively, ‘but I don’t get it for nothing ‒ it’s a full-time job.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Is it, now?’ Then he put aside the magazine. ‘Well ‒ shall we get down to some work?’

  Laura met Ed Peters several times during her first year of working for Amtec, but she had heard him spoken of often enough to give her some idea of his strength in the corporation. Everyone knew Ed Peters, and some feared him. He was an executive vice-president in charge of the appliance division of Amtec. Amtec had no natural heirs to the positions of President of the Corporation, or Chairman of the Board, and there were already some who backed Ed Peters for one or both of those jobs when the time came. He was then forty-six years old.

  He had not seemed a man to fear on the occasions when she had met him ‒ usually at the dealers’ conventions. He was pleasant to look at without being strictly handsome, his crew-cut hair streaked with grey. He had charming, quiet manners which bore the stamp of Princeton. There was nothing about him that suggested the toughness of the men who had pioneered Amtec in the field of electronics in its early days. Rather there was a suggestion of subtlety, of an ability to manoeuvre and deal. Without being told Laura guessed that Ed Peters’ training was legal; there was the feel of a lawyer about him.

  She had her first real contact with him a little more than a year after she had joined Amtec. It came about because Al Roberts had an offer from Jerome Perkins for Laura to appear in a Broadway production ‒ not a starring role, but a meaty supporting part that could bring her a lot of attention.

  Amtec hardly bothered to discuss the situation. It merely reminded her of her signature on a three-year exclusive contract, and said it had no plans to release her, and that she could not be spared to meet the demands of eight shows a week on Broadway, as well as their own schedule for her. She had no choice but to turn down Jerome Perkins’ offer.

  It was then that Ed Peters called her and asked her to dine with him.

  She began the evening in a mood of sick disappointment, and a kind of impotent rebellion which included Ed Peters and his invitation ‒ but which she had not had the courage to refuse. He was an easy and skilful talker, and she wavered under the spell of his words. Mollified she heard him say how valuable she was to Amtec, how famous she had become as a result of their advertising, how many choice parts would be waiting for her at the end of the contract ‒ and the implication was that when this contract was finished they would draw another one which would permit her more freedom. In the meantime she had security, and the leisure to study with Goodman. He made Amtec seem something that was no less than paternal, encircling arms about her. She listened, and believed him.

  In the next six months he asked her occasionally to have dinner with him; sometimes they went to the theatre together. He was charming, but he held himself close, and gave nothing of himself. He asked nothing of Laura either, and he seemed for ever lost behind the upward-curling smoke of his cigarette. He seemed to take pleasure in her appearance, but he looked at her only as he might have looked at the portrait of a beautiful woman, not the reality. He told her very little about himself, but he seemed to take it for granted that she would question others about him.

  By letting her questions, apparently casual, drop at the right moment, she began to piece together a picture of Ed Peters’ career.

  She was told that he had started in his father’s law firm in Philadelphia ‒ a firm that handled only corporation law. The firm was conservative and prosperous, and it was in keeping that Ed should, at this stage, marry a Philadelphia girl who had money to go with her beauty. Her name was Joan Stratton. They had two daughters, Elizabeth and Clare.

  It was Ed Peters himself who told her that he had moved to the Justice Department in Washington after three years of fighting an anti-trust suit brought against M. M. & S. at the end of which the corporation had entered a consent decree, and had got off with a minimum payment. It was a triumph for a young lawyer, and when the Justice Department had made their offer, his father had been strongly in favour of him taking it for a few years for the experience it would give him in corporate practice, and the contacts he would develop within the various government departments. He had been caught in Washington when the war broke out, and the Justice Department refused to release him for active service.

  During the next years he had helped prepare and write many of the contracts the Government had given to industry which sent the vast flow of material overseas. He learned the workings of the giant corporations that held defence contracts, he learned to know the men who controlled them, and those who were their brains and minds.

  His social activities in Washington were directed towards a better acquaintance with the heads of corporations who were in and out of the city constantly on defence business. Most of those who would talk to Laura about Ed Peters said it was during the war that he and his wife had grown apart; that she had become bored with the endless entertaining of people who would never be friends of hers, and were not meant to be.

  A year after the war ended Ed’s father died, and Ed had decided not to go back into the Philadelphian firm, but to accept an offer from Amtec to come to them as Assistant Corporate Counsel. During the war the Government had chosen to ignore the monopolies that had grown up, but now they were starting once again to prepare anti-trust suits. There was one pending against Amtec.

  He did not stay long in the legal division of the corporation. Amtec had branched out into manufacturing appliances, and he had persuaded E. J. Harrison, who was then President of Amtec, to let him switch to the appliances division, which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amtec. He had gone on writing the contracts with suppliers, procuring the raw materials, using his contacts in the Defence Department when he wanted to sell to the military, learning every aspect of sales and advertising with an eagerness and absorption that drove every other consideration from his life. At the right moment he had pointed up the weakness of the man who headed the company, and he had become president in his place. After the years of scarcity during the war, the public was on a buying spree, absorbing product more quickly than the manufacturers could make it. Ed’s division showed an upward spiral of profit that never slowed. He became something for E. J. Harrison to boast of as his discovery. At forty-three he had moved back into the parent company of Amtec as one of the executive vice-presidents, with the new President of the Appliance Division, and all the heads of departments reporting to him. He had moved up very quickly, and along the way he had made enemies.

  For these, then, there was some satisfaction when the news broke that his wife, Joan, had left him. After a Reno divorce, in which Ed won custody of his two daughters, Joan had immediately married a foreign correspondent of one of the New York papers. They had met in Washington during the war.

  This much information about Ed Peters Laura gathered over the months. She still knew very little about the man himself. As an actress she appreciated the degree of control he exercised, and was sometimes dismayed by it. She understood him well enough, however, to know that they had entered another phase in their relationship the first time that he asked her to come to his apartment to have dinner with his daughters.

  The younger one, Clare, was fair and docile, and she presented no problems to Ed Peters; he could manage her with ease, and she accepted this as an evidence of love. Elizabeth, at thirteen, was in open rebellion against her father, and expressed it in being everything he most disliked. In the process of her combat with him, she seeme
d to be slowly destroying herself. Laura felt a touch of pity as she was introduced to the overweight, pimply girl, whose lank hair and untidy clothes expressed a profound contempt for her father’s love of order. She had cold blue eyes that examined Laura carefully.

  ‘You’re beautiful, aren’t you,’ she stated as she dropped Laura’s hand. ‘My father doesn’t like ugly women.’

  And then, unexpectedly, she added, ‘If you like you can put your coat in my room.’

  Ed made no motion to stop them, and Laura followed Elizabeth to a room littered with clothes, records and school books. The girl sat on the rumpled bed while Laura ran a comb through her hair at the mirror.

  ‘This place is a mess, isn’t it? My father is always on to me about it ‒ but the servants don’t give a damn, and I don’t see why I should fuss over it just because he puts his head in here once a month.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d be more comfortable if it were tidy,’ Laura said gently. She was covertly studying the photo of a dark-haired woman which stood on the dressing-table. Elizabeth noticed her.

  ‘That’s my mother. She’s beautiful too.’ She got up from the bed slowly. ‘She has a wonderful time ‒ they live in Paris, and my mother goes with Doug all over Europe whenever he has to cover a story. She writes to me every week, and when I’m eighteen I’m going over to spend a summer with her.’ Suddenly she pointed. ‘And that,’ she said, indicating a framed picture turned to the wall, ‘is my great-grandmother. My father makes me hang it there. She lives on a farm in Pennsylvania. We have to go and spend every Christmas with her.’

  Ed began to call Laura more frequently, and often they dined with Elizabeth and Clare before they went to the theatre. Elizabeth, garrulous in Laura’s presence, was almost always silent with her father. She began to invent excuses to get Laura into her room, and her talk was alternatively friendly and hostile. Gradually her craving for companionship drew her closer, and haltingly she asked Laura about getting her hair permed, and about the colours she should wear. Before Laura’s visits she made an effort to tidy her room. She admired Laura’s carefully tended hands, and after a while she stopped biting her nails.

  Clare was pretty and smiling, and she showed a dutiful deference to Laura. For her part, Laura thought her a dull child ‒ except for the expensive clothes, Clare might have been herself at nine years old.

  ‘You have a knack with Elizabeth,’ Ed said, one evening as they left the apartment. ‘She tries to improve her appearance when you’re around, and she’s stopped gorging herself on candy.’

  She knew, once he had said that, that he intended to ask her to marry him. But characteristically he took his own time about it.

  She also knew that if she did not want to marry Ed she had to withdraw now, because he would not forgive a refusal. She hesitated, and put off thinking about it, but it remained there, at the back of her mind, a wavering question mark.

  She found herself agreeing, though she knew what it implied, when Ed asked her to be his hostess at a dinner-party he was giving for some of the officers of Amtec. E. J. Harrison, and his wife would be there. When Laura heard this she knew that the matter between herself and Ed was settled. She was irresistibly drawn towards the promise of security.

  E. J.’s long conversation with her that evening, and his string of compliments, was tacit acknowledgment of her acceptance into the corporation world. She and Ed were married quietly a month after the dinner-party, and Ed took her immediately down to Pennsylvania to meet his grandmother.

  The farm was a colonial house that was one of the show places of the county, and on the piano in the drawing-room stood signed photographs of senators, ambassadors, and one of Calvin Coolidge who had visited there during his term of office. The house had been much used for entertaining during Ed’s father’s time. Among the beautiful furniture that bore the patina of age, Laura felt raw and new, and she understood even less why Ed had wanted to marry her. It was his grandmother, an imposing woman past eighty, who gave her a reason.

  ‘Joan was sloppy and emotional,’ she said, ‘‒ bad for Ed, and bad for his children. No discipline.’ She tapped the arm of her chair thoughtfully. ‘We have always prized discipline and thoroughness in this family.’

  They did not stay long in Pennsylvania because Ed was wanted back in New York. At the apartment Clare greeted them with a dutiful kiss for both, and Elizabeth with a rather gauche enthusiasm. Laura hung her clothes in the closets of Ed’s bedroom ‒ which Ed had told her she could decorate to suit herself ‒ and wondered what was going to happen next. Her contract with Amtec had four months to run.

  She finished out her contract, and went on to fund-raising committees of two charities in which Amtec was interested. She called Al Roberts to ask him if there was anything coming up on Broadway for her. She could picture him, leaning back in his chair, feet on the desk, while he laughed into the telephone.

  ‘What do you want to keep in this rat race for?’ he said. ‘You’re in clover.’

  ‘Yes, I know ‒ but keep looking for me, will you?’

  Six months after they were married, Ed was told confidentially by E. J. that the board had selected him for the job of president of the new laboratories which they had started to build at Burnham Falls, New York.

  Laura was aghast. ‘You mean we’ve got to leave New York?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘What else?’ He turned to her with some irritation. ‘Don’t you understand what this means? I’m no scientist, and I don’t want to be pulled away from the centre of things here. At the same time the Board knows what a son-of-a-bitch job they’ve handed me. If you let a bunch of scientists loose by themselves up there, they’ll play with their test tubes all day, and maybe in fifty years come up with one or two scientific curiosities. We have defence contracts to meet certain specifications, and it’s my job to see that they’re met, and on time. I’m to be the pressure man, and the contact man with Washington. I’m also expected to keep a finger in the new plant when they get it ready. I’m supposed to keep the lab men happy, and the military happy and Congress happy, and at the same time keep prodding to get a commercial product out of whatever the lab boys dream up for the missiles. It’s a job they’ve handed to a lawyer, because they can’t trust it to a scientist. It’s a son-of-a-bitch job, and if I can make it work, I’m right in line for being President of Amtec.’

  Laura said hesitantly, ‘I asked Al Roberts to find me something on Broadway. What happens if he does?’

  ‘Then you’ll have to turn it down,’ he said. ‘You haven’t time for two jobs.’

  Six

  ‘You’ll have to have it without ice,’ Tom said as he handed the Scotch to Sally, ‘the way you were brought up to drink it by that good Irishman, Mike Brennan.’

  Sally smiled, and took the glass. ‘You should have heard the storm when Uncle Oliver came over and found Dad had Scotch in the house, instead of Irish whiskey ‒ he ranted for ten minutes about giving profits to those bloody Imperialist English.’

  She rotated the liquid in the glass a little, and surveyed it with mock thoughtfulness. Then she leaned back in her chair with a small, contented sigh. ‘I feel wonderfully immoral being in a motel with you, Tom. It’s the best thing in the world for a married woman not to feel respectable with her husband for a while. It keeps a marriage from being dull.’

  Tom pulled the two pillows up against the headboard of one of the beds, and settled himself against them. ‘Dear, sweet bride,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘if you’re worried about having a dull marriage after only a few months, then we’re both in trouble. And as for not feeling like a respectable married woman, let me tell you that every room in this place has been solidly occupied by Amtec ever since the Laboratories got going ‒ there’s not been a woman here who wasn’t respectably married to the man whose room she was in. There’s one thing to be said for Amtec ‒ it’ll keep you on the straight and narrow through sheer lack of opportunity.’

  ‘There are other motels up the road …’
Sally said sweetly.

  ‘And Big Brother is watching you,’ Tom answered.

  ‘You’re the second person to-day who’s said that to me. I met a local lawyer at the lunch ‒ an old man who’s lived here all his life, and who took a pretty dim view of Amtec and Amtec Park. I suppose,’ she added slowly, ‘it can be a bit hard to take something like this suddenly planked down in your front yard.’

  ‘The town needed it,’ Tom said. ‘They all admit that much, even if they all don’t like it.’

  ‘Yes … I suppose so.’ She twirled her glass again, slowly. ‘Do you think Amtec is going to like it? … I mean in the end? Is it going to be a success?’

  ‘With the millions of dollars they’ve poured into this place, it has to be a success. That glass factory up on the hill is going to produce results, or they’ll just keep on buying more and bigger scientists until it does. And the dead wood will go quicker than you can look. That’s why they’ve got a man like Peters riding herd on us all. From a scientist’s point of view, he’s strictly a know-nothing … but he does know what Amtec wants out of this place.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound exactly … comfortable.’

  He shrugged. ‘Corporations aren’t meant to be comfortable ‒ but if you’re a scientist you go with them, because they’re the only ones with enough money to do research. That’s the idea in getting all their research people together here ‒ better communications, and quicker results.’

  ‘It must be hard for the people who came from Tulsa and Culver City to settle in … at least the ones from New York can run back and see the old haunts.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Homesickness is about the least of their problems. The three factions seem to be staying in cliques ‒ with the two Western ones united in their deep suspicion of the smart-aleck Easterners. Everyone’ll shake down after a while, I guess. We’ll have to.’

  Then he put his glass down on the bedside table, and punched the pillows into a more comfortable shape; there was a touch of irritability in his movement. ‘Hell, Sal, we’ve had Amtec all day. Let’s kid ourselves that we left it outside the door, shall we? What have you been doing all week? … God, I’ve missed you, Sal!’