Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  The elevator sighed to a stop without the aid of an operator—I knew instinctively that I would miss that fixed barometer and the early warning it provided of the changes in corporate pressure that awaited the end of the ride—the doors glissed open, and we stepped out into a space the size of an airport waiting room, whose carpeted floor, cork-lined walls, and acoustical ceiling sponged up all sound. Crossing toward the central desk was like walking in a dream, an eerie sensation that had me listening for the noise of my own breathing, which lately I noticed had become labored, as if I’d climbed all twelve flights. The armed guards who rose from behind the desk at Ford’s entrance were an imposing trio, but they were subtly dwarfed by the full-length portraits that covered one wall, slightly larger than life, with the Deuce placed strategically between his father and grandfather. The presence of that Trinity did more than anything to cloak the reception area in the atmosphere of a cathedral. Without having seen the rest of the place I knew there would be no barging into offices without knocking or friendly settling of office differences around the water coolers. If there were water coolers; more and more executive offices were being equipped with their own bathrooms, eliminating both the need to go out into the hall and the opportunity for human contact outside the confines of a formal meeting. A good deal more than just half a century separated those antiseptic surroundings from the sun-flooded little office where Crazy Henry had bellowed instructions to his foremen over the din of production going on outside his open door.

  The tour began with Mr. Ford’s office, a room nearly as large as the reception area, with oak paneling already plastered over with framed community service certificates, the requisite photographs of Henry, Edsel, and Henry II, and a sepia-toned print in an old-fashioned frame of the 1908 Model T, its stout little body resting on spindly wheels with axles no bigger around than a woman’s wrist. The floor was cloaked in tweed and the entire back wall, behind a modern sweeping walnut desk with a bare top, was glass, dazzlingly spotless. Any time he wanted to, the Chief could rotate his high-backed, squishy leather chair and gaze out at the great sprawling factory complex and the scant few blocks that lay between him and the little one-story brick building where empire had sprouted like a healthy houseplant continually in need of re-potting. I wondered if he would ever bother. A button under the desktop conjured a bar from behind a hydraulically operated panel stocked with bottles and cut-glass decanters labeled Scotch, Bourbon, Gin, and Rye—a feature that would have prostrated the abstemious first Henry in an apoplectic seizure.

  From there we went to the place where Robert McNamara, Whiz Kid extraordinaire and Ford’s new president, would direct the company’s fortunes, a room slightly less big with brushed-aluminum panels on the walls but the same Cinerama view of Dearborn and beyond; former G-man Jack Bugas’ intelligence headquarters, home of the eye that never slept and the heart of the central nervous system whose slightest tremor at the farthest extent of its reach would instantly be noted by the brain behind that beveled face and jiblike nose; Israel Zed’s chamber, smaller yet but larger still than most apartments, a rabbinical cell complete with a prayer shawl folded atop a junior conference table, a mezuzah mounted over the door, and an inestimably ancient menorah, silver-encrusted and trembling on the rim of bad taste, its nine half-burned candles having dripped elaborately into its lips and whorls, standing on a credenza in front of the window. It was an odd thing to encounter this far past Hannukah, tantamount to finding a sprig of mistletoe still in place in May. The room already smelted pungently of incense, melted wax, and the rapid decay of books bound in tattered black fabric and bearing titles in Hebrew on their spines, crammed pitilessly into built-in shelves intended for style manuals and industry awards. Ford’s gray eminence wore his Judaism like no one since Moses.

  My office was last and smallest, but I had a window and a plant, items which I had been made to understand were conferred upon rising executives piecemeal, as designated symbols of rank. The desk was kidney-shaped, not my favorite configuration in youth, still less given the current status of my internal organs, but spacious, and I had a miniature bar that didn’t travel and a wall safe behind a framed print of the original architect’s conception of the Center, done in the same anemic pastels that illustrated girlie magazines. Compared to the others the office was a cloakroom, but I had shared one half that size with a political cartoonist in the Parker Block during the Banner’s salad days. The walk to the nearest bar hadn’t been much longer then, and it had involved three flights of stairs and downtown traffic. Life’s like that. If I had ever smoked, I would have quit the day before R. J. Reynolds decided to distribute cigarettes free of charge.

  When the brass finished its duty call and retired, Zed stayed behind. Placing a finger to his lips like Major Hoople sneaking home past curfew, he closed and locked the door to the hall and spun the dial on the safe.

  “There’s a doohickey on the inside of the door where you can compose any combination you want,” he said. “I suggest you do so soon if you believe a safe should be safe. Right now all the ones on this floor are set at 9-21-45. An important date.”

  “V-E Day?” I had always been fuzzy on details of history I had lived through.

  “A footnote. I refer to the day the old man resigned and Hank took over the company. They say John Bugas and Harry Bennett actually pulled pistols on each other that day. Pistols!”

  He reached inside the safe with both hands and brought out a plain wooden case with a hinged lid, slightly longer than a cigar box and several inches deeper. This he carried over to the desk, where he set it down and lifted the lid with all the ostentatious care of a jeweler exhibiting his merchandise. I was sitting behind the desk and found myself leaning forward as he placed his hands inside and brought them out slowly, as if the thing between them were made of venerable parchment, in danger of disintegrating if exposed too quickly to oxygen.

  The finish was sapphire blue, flawless and shining, trimmed in glittering chrome with real glass in the windows. It smelled of fresh paint and new rubber, and when I held it in my hands it felt as heavy as a brick of gold. The door on the driver’s side opened at a touch of the handle. Inside, the seats were covered with real upholstery, the dashboard complete down to the clock. I nudged the steering wheel with a finger. The front wheels turned. The miniature license plates on front and back read EDSEL.

  “We’re going with that name, huh?”

  “Hank knew that from the beginning or he wouldn’t have let Jack Reith call it the E-car. What do you think? I tell you, any kid would trade all his best marbles for a toy like this. It’s entirely to scale. You could buy last year’s Cadillac for what it cost to build this model.”

  The horse-collar grille nudged the front license plate to the side. “I wish we could do something about the front. It looks lopsided.”

  “Forget the fucking grille.” It was the first time he had sworn in my presence. He had on a midnight blue three-piece with a steelpoint stripe, a gray silk tie, and the inevitable black skullcap. His tone too was impeccable. Zed was a man to judge solely by the words he chose. In this he was alone in all my experience. “A good design is one that belongs to a good car. Tell me what you think of it overall.”

  “I was going to say the grille was growing on me. The lines are nice. Which one’s this, the Corsair?”

  “Citation. Top of the line. We’re using the Mercury body and guts on that and the Corsair, straight Ford for the Pacer and Ranger. Eighteen models. That’s more than we’ve ever issued for any one car. That alone would have killed the old man. At the end he was sending out memos announcing his intention to return to a one-car company, and effectively bring back the Model T.” He shook his head. “The model doesn’t leave this room, of course. Let GM’s spies work for their pay. What’s your strategy?”

  I turned it over and rolled the wheels with my palm. The driveshaft turned. “Secrecy.”

  “That’s policy, not strategy. I’m talking about advertising.”

/>   “So am I. Why spend a fortune on TV and newspaper ads when the press is perfectly willing to promote us for free?”

  He hauled up a chair covered in burgundy Naugahyde and sat down, crossing his arms on the desk, the holy man preparing to hear the plea of a supplicant.

  “You know as well as I all this cloak-and-dagger crap is hype,” I said, holding up a hand when he opened his mouth to respond. “Oh, there’s plenty of need for secrecy in the design stages, when an idea can be swiped and rushed into production at GM or Chrysler or Studebaker, but all these car covers on the haulaways and soaped windows at the dealerships are just to make people curious. By the time a new model’s on the floor there’s no way anyone can push it through the line and out onto the lots in time to steal a march on anyone. All we’re doing is building anticipation.”

  “That’s just good business.”

  “It’s a start, but we haven’t been doing enough with it. Why not let Joe Nine-to-Five in on our wall safes and guards and blood oaths to silence? Why not take a picture of a carrier loaded with mysterious lumps under canvas pulling out at first light, bound for an authorized Ford dealership near you? Crank them up tight enough wondering what we’ve got that nobody else has and when we finally unlock those doors they’ll spill in like clowns piling out of a midget car at the circus.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Of course not. I’m a pitchman. You can’t credit anything I say.”

  He laughed boomingly, showing perfect molars without a filling in sight. “You’ve just shown you can obey the first rule of PR: Never fall for your own publicity. Seriously, what can you put on the table? Mr. Ford’s beginning to ask questions.” His eyes were like pewter despite the laugh lines still in evidence.

  “It’s plenty rough.” I handed him a typewritten sheet I’d folded and put in my inside jacket pocket just that morning. Another thing I’d learned from the ad game was when to have something ready to spring. I’d worked it over enough to memorize the lines and played them back in my head as he read them:

  Early this week, a group of automotive carriers cleared the yards of___ giant U.S. plants and rolled out into the night.

  “Night?” He looked up.

  “Love affairs don’t start at high noon.”

  “I could disprove that statement, but I promised FDR I’d never engage in Washington gossip.” He returned his attention to the sheet.

  … into the night.

  Balling the jack. Because their steel racks held something they had never held before.

  Maybe you’ll see some of these carriers loaded with covered cars on your roads in the next few days.

  If you do, you might call to mind what one of their drivers said before he started out. The driver lifted the cover on one of the Edsels in his load and looked it over very carefully. And what he said, plainly and forcibly, was:

  “Man, would I like to have one of these.”

  He let the page refold itself and placed it on the desk. “I won’t ask which driver said that, since the only working model is parked there on your blotter. Kind of getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you? They won’t come out until September of next year.”

  “Margaret Mitchell wrote the last chapter of Gone With the Wind first. I just wanted to show you the direction I’d like to go. I’m thinking of running blank pages in all the magazines worth reading, to start. You know, Watch This Space.”

  “Been done.”

  “Show me something in advertising that hasn’t. I’m betting when they get around to translating those ten-thousand-year-old pictographs in that cave in New Mexico it comes out ‘Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp.’ Anyway, we’re not out to shock America. Leave that to this punk Elvis. We just want to give it something to look forward to before Christmas sneaks up on it like the Red Menace.”

  “Just barely. Your peers in the retail stores hang their wreaths on Thanksgiving now. It’s risky, Connie. Suppose you get them all pumped up and then they don’t like the car?”

  “That part’s up to the boys in design. My job is the pumping.”

  “What you think. When Hank crawls this far out on a limb he likes company. It’s six plants, by the way. We’re bringing in Ypsilanti and Rawsonville.” He rose. “I’ll take it to him.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I like what you’ve told me. If Mr. Ford doesn’t, you didn’t hear it here.”

  “No room for you on that limb, huh.”

  “Tom Dewey tried to talk me into running for office. Not with him, naturally; there isn’t a hook for a yarmulke in the vice president’s quarters. He even offered to stump for me. I guess he thought it would help him in New York, where they had enough of him after he got rid of Lucky Luciano. I turned him down. I only gamble with the other guy’s money.”

  “Wise,” I said. “Considering the results.”

  He tugged down the points of his vest. “It’s a sound campaign. Simple enough to be brilliant. I never expected less. You ought to stick to advertising and tell Walter Reuther to look somewhere else for his spies. That’s what I do.” He left me alone with my sharp new pencils.

  16

  JANET SHERMAN AND I drove to the Tigers’ home opener in her Lincoln. I’d had enough of the Skyliner, turned it in, and been told I was third in line for a Mercury Montclair. I’d requested a white-over-red hardtop whose picture in the brochure had reminded me of strawberries and whipped cream. What I could no longer eat I was determined to drive. Janet wore a Tigers cap with her hair in a ponytail, a gray sweatshirt, and red torreadors with high-heeled sandals. Her toenails were painted to match the pants, a gesture toward fashion that made me feel a little less uncomfortable about my navy blazer and white ducks. My generation dressed up for ball games; hers would meet the Queen in pedal pushers. Climbing the stairs behind her to our seats in right field I could see the play of muscles in her thighs.

  I craned to see past the green-painted girder in front of me. “The friend who got you these tickets must be in tight with Bucky Harris. Is that Ray Boone on deck or a Dixie cup?”

  “I didn’t say they were good seats. Anyway, all you’re paying for is the hot dogs. If you’re planning on being a pain I’ll eat a dozen.”

  “I’m not. Any place you sit at Briggs is a good seat.”

  It was, too. Everybody seemed to be batting southpaw that day. Harvey Kuenn and the kid, Kaline, both pounded fouls, one of which I lunged for and might have had a chance at if someone invisible hadn’t stuck an icepick behind my left shoulder that took the starch out of my joints.

  “Are you all right?” Janet watched me mopping my face and neck with my handkerchief.

  “Hell no, I’m not all right. I’m fifty-five.”

  “Fifty-six.” She shrugged when I looked at her. “You left the card lying on your desk when I brought you those network rate sheets. That Agnes person has quite a sense of humor, hasn’t she?”

  It had been one of those jokey over-the-hill birthday cards that pleased me about as well as the stuff that came up from my throat when I rose in the morning. “She’s a riot. She laughs so hard at air raids she gives herself a bellyache.”

  “I guess you care a lot for her.”

  “We worked together at Slauson and Nichols. Sometimes we see a movie. She doesn’t care a lot for Clifton Webb.”

  “I love Clifton Webb. Did you see Woman’s World?”

  I looked again. I didn’t know her well enough to know if she was serious. “You liked it?”

  “Well, the executive-intrigue stuff was kind of clumsy. It’s more subtle than that and a whole lot more cutthroat. But if I wanted to see real life I’d never leave the office. I went to see Clifton Webb. He was great in The Dark Corner. He pushed William Bendix out a window without even knocking off his homburg.”

  “I thought girls your age liked Marlon Brando.”

  “Too much mumbling and scratching. I’ll choose a nice head of gray hair over a motorcycle jacket any time.”

 
“Provided it wears a homburg.” I’d stopped wearing hats because they squashed my face down.

  “Lauren Bacall was nicely naughty in Woman’s World. Is Agnes like that?”

  “In some ways. She can be sweet. Anyway we’re just friends.”

  “The Dixie cup’s coming to bat.”

  We stayed to the end and trickled out with the small percentage of spectators who hadn’t left before the lopsided home victory. The pain in my shoulder had subsided to an excruciating throb.

  “I can’t understand people who pay good money for tickets and then won’t see a game through,” she said.

  “You may when we’re trying to get out of the parking lot.”

  “There’s no hurry. The Shamrock’s close. Do you know it?”

  “I’m surprised you do. I used to watch Big Jim Dolan swap mayors for governors from his corner booth—well, a long time ago,” I finished shamblingly.

  “Before I was born, you were going to say. Does your age bother you?”

  “Only every time I get out of a chair or go to the bathroom or think.”

  “You aren’t as old as you seem to want to act. My father’s two years older than you and he plays tennis every Saturday.”

  “I can’t breathe fast enough for tennis.”

  As we came out of the shade of the stands into the bronze late-afternoon light, she curled her good arm inside mine. It didn’t mean a damn thing. Women had been doing that since Eve, and Adam was the last man who could be sure she wasn’t going home with someone else. Yet I felt a faint stirring in my white ducks that made me forget about my shoulder. That was where the Stegosaurus had it all over the modern American human male; he had a brain below his waist as well as above. Young women who are out to seduce fossils don’t begin by telling them they’re two years younger than their fathers.