Green Grow the Dollars

by Emma Lathen

  Despite these shortcomings the celebration, fueled by New York State champagne in Styrofoam cups, was going strong. Even Ned Ackerman was letting himself feel euphoric.

  “What did Vandam say then?” he demanded, enjoying the answer before he heard it.

  “I didn’t wait to see,” said Scott Wenzel with a grin of such pawky mischief that Ackerman laughed aloud. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Ned, he’s beginning to realize what he’s in for. He looked sick, didn’t he, Barb?”

  The partners of Wisconsin Seedsmen were united in many things, but not all. Wenzel, assisted by the crew of high school kids now congregated in the corner, took care of the technical side.

  Ackerman shouldered the burden of keeping them all afloat. For years he had raised money they could not afford to lose, borrowed when necessary, and stretched payments to the limit in order to finance Wenzel’s research. Now, with a payoff in sight, even warm champagne did not blur his levelheaded realism.

  “It was the injunction against the catalog that got through their thick hides, Scotty,” he observed.

  Scott Wenzel had unbounded confidence in his own powers. But since linking up with Ackerman he had begun to appreciate other, less exotic, talents. Sketching a toast to the older man, he said, “That, I’ll hand you, Ned. You called it absolutely right.”

  At any other time, this handsome concession would have tickled Ackerman, representing as it did a new plateau in the maturation of Scott Wenzel. Working with a young genius had not been the least of Ackerman’s difficulties.

  “Me,” Ackerman said wryly, “and Paul Jackson.”

  Expensive Wall Street lawyers made a dent in Wisconsin Seedsmen’s budget. Although Ackerman was convinced that the risk was worth taking, the outlay made him wince. “But we’ve got Vandam’s just where we want them, and Standard Foods, too. Listen, Scotty, you didn’t give Vandam any hint—?”

  “Hint?” Barbara Gunn broke in indignantly. “Scotty went after him like a wild man. You know him, Ned. When would Scotty hint?”

  Her intervention forestalled any more serious conversation between the two men.

  “I nearly died of mortification in that elevator,” she said, trying to make a joke of it.

  Her performance was good enough for Wenzel. “Oh, come on, Barb,” he said indulgently. “You have to admit he had it coming. After all, I may have lousy manners—”

  “May?” she said ironically.

  Ignoring her, he swept on. “—but Richard Vandam and all his relatives are a bunch of goddamn thieves.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Ackerman told her more gently.

  Ned was always unsure of the two others. When Wenzel turned up five years earlier with his business proposition, Wisconsin Seedsmen had taken an unexpected and, to Ackerman, exciting leap into the big time. Mrs. Gunn had arrived two months later, an appealing little thing with soft brown hair and a trusting mouth. She had, Ackerman was told, worked at IPR for Scotty and, without consulting anybody, Wenzel had hired her again. At the time, Ackerman thought he understood why a widow with a small baby had made the long trip from Puerto Rico. But the woman who had moved into Scotty’s apartment was named Hilary, not Barbara.

  A sudden uproar from the corner claimed his attention.

  “Who gave you kids champagne?” he demanded with jovial ferocity. “You’re all underage. Besides, we’re not paying you to hang around here boozing. Beat it!”

  Dutifully the part-time help began filing back to the greenhouse, halting only for an earnest declaration from their leader.

  “We want to say congratulations, Dr. Wenzel,” he said, quavering from bass to tenor. “All the way!”

  Then, overcome by embarrassment, he fled.

  “Next stop—the Nobel Prize,” said Wenzel flippantly. “I suppose I’d better get back to work, too. Barb, will you type up those notes I gave you? Ned, Jackson gave me a list as long as your arm for the stuff he wants.”

  Wisconsin Seedsmen’s long-distance charges were ballooning, too. “I talked to Jackson this morning,” Ackerman said. “Don’t worry, I’ve got everything pretty much under control.”

  “Fine,” said Wenzel, trudging off to the greenhouse. Shaking her head, Barbara looked after him.

  “And he’ll be there until midnight,” she said, going over to her own desk. “I understood why he was working day and night until he finished VR-117. But what’s he doing now?”

  Wenzel wasn’t the only one who wore blinkers, Ackerman reflected. Barbara Gunn typed the lab notes and listened in on most of their conferences. But all the time she was thinking her own private thoughts, and they did not revolve around plant genetics. Whether they centered on Scott was an open question.

  “I expect he’s studying catalogs of equipment,” said Ackerman. “Once we start marketing VR-117, you won’t recognize this place. Scotty’s tired of making do with chicken wire and high school kids. And I don’t blame the guy. He deserves better facilities to work with.”

  “Just my luck,” she said. “You’ll get a decent bathroom in this dump the day after I leave.”

  To his relief, she did not sound sentimental. Because, if Scott Wenzel had big plans, Barbara Gunn had small ones. Next fall, when her daughter, Tracy, was old enough to go to school, Barbara was going back to college herself.

  Ackerman sometimes wondered if the fact that Scott’s Hilary was a lawyer had influenced this decision.

  “I don’t know how we’ll get along without you,” he said with more kindness than accuracy. Part of the upgrading at Wisconsin Seedsmen was going to involve office staff.

  “Maybe I’ll get a Ph.D . . . . and come back.”

  She busied herself with her typewriter for a moment. Then, in a burst of confidentiality, she said, “You know, you really should have come to New York, too.”

  “Two fares was enough,” he grunted.

  “It really was an eye-opener,” she said. “Until we were sitting in Mr. Jackson’s office—well, I guess I never really took VR-117 seriously enough.”

  “Yup,” he said, “hard as it is to believe, VR-117 is going to be every bit as important as Scotty said all along.” Usually she was easily diverted by this sort of avuncular badinage. But not today.

  “Ned, what’s going to happen now?” she asked. Perhaps because of the champagne, he slipped back into the private thoughts that he too had.

  “Now we start throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Vandam’s. They’re going to be so busy ducking, they won’t have time to think about anything else. And by the time they do manage to lift their heads, we’ll have whipped Vandam’s, and we’ll have whipped them good.”

  Barbara was dismayed. “But Scott didn’t say anything about all this. He acted as if getting that injunction was what mattered.”

  Still in a half-reverie, Ackerman spoke in little more than a whisper. “Scott doesn’t know all the details yet.”

  “Well, don’t you think it’s time he found out?”

  With a jerk he returned to the world around him. “He doesn’t have to,” he said cheerfully.

  “That’s the beauty of it. Scott does his part of the job and I do mine.”

  For a moment Barbara stared at her keyboard in dissatisfaction.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into both of you,” she complained. “It’s bad enough when Scotty starts ranting and raving, but at least it usually doesn’t last very long. Now you’ve caught the bug, and, if you ask me, you’re deliberately keeping him stirred up with all your talk about hitting them where they hurt and getting them where you want them. Why don’t you leave Scotty alone so that he’ll calm down and go back to work? That’s what he’d do if he had half a chance.”

  At Wisconsin Seedsmen the three very different personalities sharing the office tended to mesh neatly rather than to rasp against each other. Ned Ackerman wanted to keep it that way.

  “Look, Barbie,” he said kindly, “this isn’t your ordinary disagreement. Somebody’s trying to steal our results
.” “What makes you so sure they’re stealing?” she persisted. “Every time there’s a new discovery, it turns out that people on different sides of the globe were working on the same project. It happens all the time.”

  Ned sighed. So long as Barbara did her work conscientiously, it was her business if she drifted around the office without knowing what was going on. But that certainly gave her no right to question his judgment calls.

  “Yes, it can happen that way,” he said, making a final effort. “But not with exactly the same tests on exactly the same timetable.”

  Barbara liked to think the best of everyone. Her frown told Ackerman how distasteful she found his black-and- white analysis. For once, however, she was trying to understand the issues involved.

  “But if everything is identical, then nobody can tell who really invented the VR-117 and you’ll have to compromise somehow, won’t you?” she asked at last.

  “Now don’t you worry about that,” Ackerman said hearteningly. “Scott isn’t sitting still for highway robbery, and neither am I. We’ll get our rights.”

  Barbara Gunn had little taste for slug fests and none at all for uneven odds. “Vandam’s is awfully big, isn’t it? I’ve known about them all my life.”

  “In some ways that makes them more vulnerable. They couldn’t keep the catalog injunction from becoming big news. And as soon as they get over that shock, we’ll hit them with something else. That’s why we’ll be taking your deposition next week.”

  “My deposition! What does it have to do with me?” Barbara squawked, horrified.

  Ackerman leaned down to pat her shoulder. “Whoa, there, Barbie! There’s nothing to get excited about. All the field hands will be doing it, too.”

  She was far from reassured. “But I don’t know anything,” she protested. “And I can’t stand the idea of a lot of people watching while someone barks at me and tries to trip me up.”

  “You’ve been watching too much television,” Ned said tolerantly. “This is no big deal. You’ll be sitting in an office telling a lawyer about your filing system, that’s all. Now you can do that, can’t you?”

  “You’re sure that’s all there is to it?”

  “Absolutely!” he trumpeted, inwardly cursing himself for alarming her. He had intended to be as offhand as possible, but Barbara was such a frightened mouse that it had been a mistake to link her deposition to the general escalation in hostilities.

  As she continued to wilt before his eyes, Ackerman cast around for supporting arguments.

  “Nobody knows better than you how hard Scott has worked for this moment,” he said, shamelessly appealing to her emotions. “The credit for this discovery will make him the recognized authority in his field. Now it’s only fair that he gets what he’s worked for, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” she said reluctantly.

  Ackerman’s tone hardened. “I’ll spell out some other things, too. This tomato has taken most of our assets and time for five years. It was a long shot and, now that it’s paid off, we certainly aren’t going to let it slip away. We’ve pinched pennies around here long enough.”

  Chapter 6

  Needs Protection

  PINCHING pennies has always been relative. It was true that Ned Ackerman had performed miracles of credit manipulation to make the last five years possible. On the other hand, he was going home that Friday night to a substantial suburban house to enjoy a meal cooked by his wife and to share with her a letter from their married son in Oregon.

  None of these material or emotional comforts awaited Barbara Gunn at the end of the work week. Her whole life consisted of a frantic juggling act in which the claims of breadwinning, maternity, housecleaning, laundry, and shopping had to be constantly maintained in fragile equipoise. At five o’clock she did not sign off duty; she merely raced from one set of chores to another. Her first stop was always the neighbor who took care of several local children.

  Like almost everyone else, Marge Kemper unconsciously softened her style when she was dealing with Barbara.

  “It’s only quarter to six,” she said soothingly as she opened the door and caught sight of Barbara’s anxious face. “You’re nowhere near late.”

  “Oh, I know. It’s only I was hoping to catch Phyllis but I guess she’s already been.”

  “Thank God!” Marge breathed enthusiastically.

  There was never any doubt as to whether Phyllis’ twin boys were rampaging around the premises.

  “I guess they are a handful,” Barbara said in duty bound, but the response was sheer reflex. She was surprised herself at her crushing disappointment. Phyllis, whose husband was a sports addict, frequently asked other mothers to bring their children over during the weekend. These sessions were almost as meaningless to Barbara as they were to Phyllis . . . usually. But this Friday some worm of discontent had impelled Barbara to rush through traffic in order to dispel the specter of two completely empty days.

  “Is there anything wrong, Barbara?” asked Marge. Barbara pulled herself together. “Nothing, nothing at all,” she stammered. “It’s this damned winter. I get so sick of all this snow.”

  Marge, trying to strike a positive note, remembered that one of the rare breaks in Barbara’s treadmill existence was on the horizon.

  “Well, you’ll be going to Chicago soon. It will make a nice change and give you some time with your family. Do you know whether you’ll be taking Tracy yet?”

  “Yes, I heard from my parents. She’ll stay with them.” The annual convention of plant geneticists usually required Marge to act as surrogate mother.

  “Wonderful! And I just gave Tracy some milk and crackers because I know you have late supper on Fridays.”

  During Barbara’s endless parade up and down the supermarket aisles, she had plenty of time to come to grips with her dissatisfaction. New York, she decided, had unsettled her. It was the sight of those bustling throngs everywhere, all taking part in a splendid exciting world from which she was forever debarred. There must be more to life, she thought mutinously, than a daily round confined to a young man who never noticed anybody else’s existence (except Hilary’s, except Hilary’s, said an inner voice that should have been stilled years ago), an old man ready for retirement, and a six-year-old child.

  Her depression continued through the trip home and was not lightened by the discovery that, after paying Marge, the supermarket and the landlord, she had barely enough left for Tracy’s new snowsuit.

  What’s wrong with you? she asked herself. Life isn’t one country club dance after another. Lots of people have to work hard. Look at Scotty, he’ll be at the lab all weekend without a break and you don’t see him complaining. Why can’t you be the same?

  But certain emotions are like runaway horses. Once they get the bit between their teeth, there is no stopping them until exhaustion takes its toll. Tonight, everything Barbara touched turned sour. The chicken was overdone, Tracy balked at bedtime, the fluorescent fixture in the kitchen began to blink ominously.

  It’s only for one more winter, she told herself grimly. By this time next year you’ll be back in college making a new life for yourself. And God knows you’ve earned a change, you’ve paid for it in sweat and blood. So look on the bright side! If you’ve held out this long, you’ve got it made.

  Like most exhortations to look on the bright side, this one was accompanied by steadily falling spirits, as the iron ritual of Friday night unfolded. Barbara shampooed her hair, Tracy emerged for her last glass of water, the light in the kitchen expired. By the time that Barbara, in a decrepit old robe, was curled up on the sofa with the TV blaring the late news, she was feeling suicidal. A long look at herself in the bathroom mirror had been the final straw. Her face had looked plucked and naked with the fine colorless hair hanging in long wet strings.

  “Oh, God,” she thought longingly, “what I want is a body permanent, a new peignoir, and a tan.”

  * * *

  Barbara, devoured by her own troubles, had oversimplifie
d her notions of other people. Ned Ackerman was not an old man sinking into a comfortable rut. He was planning changes in his life style almost as thoroughgoing as Barbara’s. Most of the weekend he spent planning a golden new future with his wife.

  “It’s damn near in the bag,” he promised her. “And we’re not plowing everything back into the company either. What do you say to a house in the Caribbean for the winters?”

  On the subject of Scott Wenzel, Barbara was even further afield. Her conception of the dedicated scientist came straight from late-night movies, and her own stillborn romantic hopes did not help. It was true that Wenzel put in long hours, but his existence was by no means as monotonic as Barbara believed. On Friday night, for instance, his labors were interrupted about eight o’clock when a car pulled into the lot and Hilary Davis emerged, carrying a bucket of chicken and two bottles of beer. She, too, had been working late, at her law office.

  For 45 minutes the two of them picnicked together while Scott brought her up to date on the New York trip. She laughed outright at his description of the elevator encounter.

  Nonetheless she shook her head at his analysis. “You may have given him a hard time for a couple of minutes, but that won’t be what’s worrying him,” she declared.

  “If he isn’t worried by now, he’s more of a fool than I think,” Scott retorted.

  “Of course, of course,” she said impatiently. “But what’s got him going is that Paul Jackson is representing you. Even if Vandam doesn’t know what that means, his attorneys will have clued him in. He knows he’s got big trouble.”

  Hilary had only a passing interest in the Numero Uno lawsuit, which lay miles away from her own specialty, but it was she who had steered Wisconsin Seedsmen into the arms of the right trial lawyer.

  And Hilary was never unduly modest about her achievements.

  Scott shrugged. “So we’ve got a wonderful lawyer,” he said negligently. “We’ve also got the most irrefutable laboratory results you’ve ever seen.”