"We barely made it through the holidays, Sheila."
"I know,” she says. “But—"
"There are no ‘buts’ this time,” he interrupts. “I'm going to sell. If I can't sell I'm going to close. That's final."
Sell? Who would buy?
"And, for once, don't try to talk me out of it,” he adds. Round fingers tucked into his vest pocket, he paces behind his desk, moving in and out of darkness. So quickly, Sheila thought, so quickly he moves from charming businessman to bitter ogre. How many times had she watched him do business with a smile over lunch with clients only to have to listen to his red-faced ranting in the back of a cab on the way uptown?
"You will be putting eighty-five people out of work.” No, eighty-six, she amends. Kepler Glass has been the centerpiece of her adult life, the only place she's ever worked, starting as a secretary and, through hard, hard work, a sliver of savvy, and sixty-six hundred dollars of the money her father left, becoming Frolic's partner on his fifty-fifth birthday four years ago. Remember that, John? Happy birthday, said the repo man, you owe seven thousand on the used tank furnace. You can't repossess a furnace, John sneered. “Oh, no? Watch.” After much pleading and cajoling, she agreed to his offer of a partnership; John begrudgingly threw in four hundred, and the plant was saved.
"That isn't my problem,” he says and scratches the nape of his neck where his toupee meets his thinning hair. “I am not their keeper. I am the owner. The business fails, the business closes. Simple.” He dusts his hands together.
"John, listen to me. If we reopen tableware—"
"Sheila, don't start in with that again."
"Look at the numbers."
He pounds the stack of papers; the bellow startles her and he seizes the silence. “Don't tell me to look at numbers. The numbers don't tell what's in here.” He violently taps his chest with his fingers. A hollow thud sounds.
His heart. He always invokes his heart, she thinks. But, for the past few years, she had begun to doubt whether he still had one. When a shipment of soda ash out of Richmond, Virginia, was delayed because a bank wouldn't guarantee Kepler's credit, he fired dead on the spot the shipping foreman, Mike Mallory, an old ex-con who had been a reliable staffer for eight years. Only last week John's secretary, a nineteen-year-old cherub fresh out of vocational school, quit in tears after one too many of his spewing tirades, as had two others before her. Employee morale among the largely immigrant warehouse staff was in ruins; a moratorium on salary increases saw to that. Yet John continued to pull up to the loading dock in his new, obscenely luxurious Cadillac as the plant workers poured in from the dreadful Eighth Avenue subway station.
"We are finished,” he spits. “I'll call Goldstein after the first of the year."
"John, you cannot sell without my approval."
He laughs. “Don't give me that. I don't need your approval and you know it. You hold a minority position.” He drops into his high-backed chair. “This company belongs to Agnes and me."
At Goldstein's urging, Frolic, to shield himself from liability, put forty-five percent of his holdings in his wife's name when he signed over forty-five percent to his new partner. But Frolic claimed he held his wife's proxy and that plus his ten percent gave him majority interest in the firm.
"My father's money kept Kepler Glass alive,” she says.
He looks at the dusty portrait of Max Kepler on the wall above the sofa. “Fathers,” he says. “Everything I have I owe to fathers. To yours, to Agnes's.” He laughs; it is smug, satirical. “Baloney. This company would have died ten years ago if I ran it like old man Kepler, that feeble bastard."
Max Kepler, an inventor, was not a businessman, Sheila remembers. He wasn't much of an inventor, either; he played a small role in the development of aluminosilicate glass and contributed his thinking on glass ceramics to the aerospace industry but, other than that, almost nothing. However, he did build a successful company to support his efforts and won the respect of his peers and his employees, a rare feat. Frolic managed neither.
"And your money, Sheila, gets you more than you deserve."
"John,” she says, containing her anger. “I made more as chief accountant than I do now."
"Nobody begged you for your money, sweetheart."
No? “Look, I'm tired and I'm hungry. You want to call Goldstein, go ahead and call him.” He smiles; condescension spills across the desk. “But I will do everything I can to keep you from closing Kepler Glass."
"What can you do?” he laughs. “What, Miss Sheila? What are you going to do?"
We'll see, she thinks. We'll see.
* * * *
Agnes Kepler Frolic looks in the mirror and sees a sad old sack of a woman, sixty-three going on ninety-three, withered from the top of her forehead to the heels of her pinching shoes. One hundred brush strokes through her silver hair in the morning, another hundred at night. With each she moans, “I hate you, John. I hate you, John."
This house is big, yes, and it is comfortable. But it is your house, John. My father's house, nestled away in the beautiful Ramapo Mountains, had a workbench and sawdust and scattered blueprints and silica flakes, the smell of soda-lime and a Bunsen burner. In your house, I see Naugahyde and cable TV, a wet bar, Gucci loafers, a VIP card from a casino in Atlantic City, ridiculous dice-shaped cufflinks.
Would it be too much to go for a walk in the woods, John? You took me to the forest, red, sienna, and crystal under the golden sky, when you first went to work for my father's company. Was it so horrible, John, that you could only marry me? That you couldn't love me? Eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one. I hate you, John. You made me grow old. You took my pride and my youth. You stole my laughter.
She looks at her pale reflection in the dressing room mirror. Where are you tonight, John? Ninety-two, ninety-three, ninety-four. Not that I care, John, even if you are in a cheap hotel with another of your paid lovers. I'd just like to know, John, where are you? I would consider it an act of kindness, almost an act of love, if just once you told me where you are, where you will be.
Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven. The white Princess phone on the vanity rings. It is so quiet, so still in this huge, soulless house, the little bell echoes.
"Hello?"
"Agnes? This is Sheila Anders."
"Yes, Sheila, how are you?"
"Oh, I'm not sure, Agnes,” she says in near despair, “I think I need your help."
A smile creases her wrinkled face. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. “Go on, dear."
* * * *
"Nobody's going to want to buy this place, John. You know that."
Goldstein is calm, studied. He sits on the leather sofa, not far from where Sheila sat last month when John told her Kepler Glass was dead.
"What about the equipment? There's got to be somebody out there who needs—"
"Come on, John, you think maybe Corning Glass is going to come into Manhattan begging to buy secondhand equipment?"
John looks at the ceiling. “Thirdhand."
"All right, thirdhand,” Goldstein says. “So you're faced with two possibilities: You can close down and get out of the business or you can file under Chapter 11, cut your losses, and probably continue."
"No. No bankruptcy.” He takes his feet from the desk and stares at the blotter. Wouldn't Agnes love that. He could hear her shrill voice, ringing from her bedroom across the hall to his. My father never had to declare bankruptcy, she'd yell. You're so smart and he was so dumb, but it's you who failed. Locking the door kept her out, but he'd yet to find how to silence her bone-chilling voice.
Goldstein fidgets on the sofa. “You're in a fix, buddy. Maybe you ought to follow Sheila's advice and start up the tableware operation again."
"That's great, Artie. Real solid business thinking.” He taps the side of his head with his gold Cross pen. “You ever hear of throwing good money after bad? That's what I'd be doing if I open tableware again."
"Why don't you let Sheila buy you out? I ca
n arrange suitable financial arrangements—"
"Hey, you representing her or me? I don't want to hear her name one more time. Sheila, Sheila. Sheila this, Sheila that. You love her so much, Artie, why don't you marry her?"
"She wouldn't have me and you know it."
John sips his drink; ice rattles around his thick glass. “You know what I ought to do?"
"What?"
Another sip. “Nothing. Forget it,” he replies. But in his mind he thinks, I ought to burn this place down.
Artie picks up his glass from John's desk. “Anyway, you let me know what you want to do. Mazel tov, kid."
"Yeah, yeah, Happy New Year to you, too,” he says and taps Artie's glass with his. I am standing in front of you, Goldstein, but I am one thousand miles away.
* * * *
"Sheila, I hope you don't think it odd of me to bring you all the way up here."
Sheila leans over to kiss Agnes on the cheek. “No, not at all,” she says politely. It's fifteen degrees and Agnes selects the Watchung Reservation up in the Ramapo Mountains, forty miles outside of Manhattan, as their five P.M. meeting place. Of course it's odd, Agnes; most of what you do is odd. She runs her tongue over her soft lips to remove the cheap rouge.
Fresh snow covers the quiet cedar trees, and pine cones dot the white wilderness. Agnes turns up the heat in her car. Sheila blows on her cold hands. A chill that starts in her ankles vibrates to her shoulders as warm dry air brushes her legs.
"So he's going to sell,” Agnes says flatly, impassively. Sheila nods. “I didn't think he could without my approval."
"He says he holds your power of attorney."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means he doesn't need you to approve the sale. He'll use your forty-five percent along with his ten and have the majority interest. It's in the terms he drew up when I gave him my money. I should have—"
Agnes turns from her and looks ahead at the sun's last glowing arch beyond the white crest.
"He's already talked to Goldstein,” Sheila adds.
"Can't you talk him out of it?"
"I've tried."
Agnes, exasperated, says, “I wonder what my father would do?"
Nothing, Sheila thinks. He'd be as baffled as we are. Any time you took him from his workshop, his toys, he was baffled. Unless he was ready to demonstrate his latest invention. Then Max Kepler became an eleven-year-old boy, the bubbling joy on his face identical to what it was on a Christmas morning back in Mecklenburg. So many times he'd bounce into John's office with an armload of blueprints or a crazy-quilt stack of calculations. “John, wait until you see what I have here,” he'd say.
"Mr. Kepler,” John would reply, patronizing him, mocking him, “glassmaking hasn't changed in six thousand years, but you're going to tell me it will change today."
"Remember when your father tried to come up with that cleansing solution that wouldn't damage glass?"
Agnes laughs gently, quietly. Kepler knew industry preferred a hydrofluoric acid solution to clean brass and copper fixtures but was reluctant to use it on building ornaments near windows because it could weaken glass. Unaware that an extremely mild solution for such work already existed, Max set out to make one; it took him four months to exactly duplicate what was already sold in supply stores.
"He should have checked with the Patent Office,” Agnes says with another laugh. It was easy to make fun of that flop; using her father's formula, Kepler Glass never again spent a dime on hydrofluoric acid—based commercial cleaning solvents.
Both women, without a word, think of another of Max's offbeat ideas, but this time neither one laughs. Kepler proposed shatterproof glass as safety plate glass for shop windows. He knew that people who had accidents with glass were more likely to be injured by piercing jagged shards than the impact. A thirteen-year-old girl had lost her right eye in such a bloody incident at a jewelry shop not far from the Kepler plant. But shatterproof windows—a thin sheet of adhesive plastic sandwiched between two thin layers of glass—when damaged broke into tiny pieces so small they were virtually unable to cause serious injury.
John, by now Max's son-in-law and a full partner in Kepler Glass, cared little for safety but at first thought Max, finally, might have something. Not every shopkeeper could afford costly alarm systems, he reasoned. Kepler could offer shatterproof glass as a security device—the simple logic that two windows are harder to break than one would dazzle these greenhorns. And what did they know from shatterproof glass? He could tell them it cost fifty dollars more a standard frame than regular window glass and they'd believe him.
One hot July afternoon Max set up a five foot high sheet of his shatterproof glass, taut in a narrow steel frame, and, to mimic a jewelry store display, put his own erratic wristwatch behind it. John, Sheila, and twenty other staff members, many of whom had witnessed earlier failures, reluctantly gathered. Max, on short bowed legs, sweat-stain rings around the underarms of his royal blue shirt, practically trotted around the room to make sure everyone could see.
He then raised his calloused hand and, with an audible grunt, punched the glass sheet. To everyone's surprise, nothing happened; the glass didn't crack. He picked up a hardback book and flung it against the window. A slight wobble, yes, but no break. Max was delighted, as was the relieved staff. Led by Sheila, they broke into good-natured applause.
Placid, unimpressed, John stepped around the group and placed two black suction cups joined by a single steel handle against the sheet. From his suit jacket side pocket, he removed a dual-edged glass cutter and, with four short, precise lines, sliced through both layers of glass and the plastic adhesive. It took him two minutes to undo Max's dream.
Max took the tool and examined it. It had never occurred to him that such a device, with a long, beveled blade to work against the inner sheet as the diamond-hard blade slit the outside, could exist. Bewildered, he dropped the weapon.
"They sell ‘em in hardware stores,” John taunted as the staff drifted away in embarrassment. “Well, it's back to the drawing board, ain't it?” The sting of his son-in-law's remarks cut Max as deftly as the blade would have. He had badly misjudged him, this once-sweet boy he had nurtured. Surely he now knew John had played him perfectly and had stolen both his prizes, his daughter and his company.
"But it is safe maybe,” Max said to no one. To finish the humiliation, John flicked the sheet with the back of his hand above the box he'd cut and the glass broke into five hundred tiny pieces. “Not much for safety, neither,” John cracked, as several small slivers hung from his bleeding knuckles.
"Your father was a fine man, Agnes."
"Why did he let John do it?” she replies. “Why did he let him take over the company?"
Their breath had steamed the windshield, and the falling evening made it hard to find the twinkling stars. “I think he did it for you, Agnes. I think he did it because he loved you.” The comment was improbable; everyone knew John and Artie had tricked Max into signing over Kepler Glass. But Sheila said it gently and could see her subtle prompting was working.
* * * *
Mike Mallory stands in the shadows near the Kepler loading dock and throws lit matchsticks into the street. Less than a mile from Times Square, West 28th Street, lined with teeming gray warehouses, is a ghost town. Funny, Mike thinks, for eight years I couldn't walk down this street without bumping into some chump. Now I am all alone in this cold, starless night. Wild, ain't it?
He looks at his cheap watch, then holds it against his ear. She said ten o'clock. It was ten fifteen and still no sign of her. Where the hell is she?
Puffs of steam come from his nose and mouth as he leans against the brick wall and waits. A Checker blows down the block, bumping hard on a manhole cover, sending the passenger in back against the roof. The cabbie laughs; Mike thinks maybe he hits that spot for the hell of it. Every night he zips down the block and sends a passenger sprawling across the back of his hack.
Soon the cab is a faded memor
y and the last of the matches goes flying onto the frozen concrete. Mike digs his hands deep into the pockets of his short brown corduroy coat. Imagine getting canned after eight years, then a year later getting a call like that. Why would he want to see me after all this time? Maybe he wants to apologize. In the joint, you'd hassle a guy and a few weeks later, when he finally found out how much damage you could do to him, he'd send his chicken over to make peace. That's when you knew you had him. That's when you turned up the gas and really burned him. In a crazy way, he admired Frolic for cutting him so hard and so cold. Now he wants to apologize. Too bad.
The rusty traffic light at the corner changes to green with a click but no cars, not even screaming taxis, come toward him. I wonder who his new secretary is? Nice, smooth voice. Real nice. Probably looks real nice, too.
For no reason, Mike begins to whistle, of all dumb things, “Melancholy Baby."
* * * *
I don't think I've been on these stairs since old man Kepler died, Sheila thinks, and I know I've never been on them at ten thirty at night. Though a naked bulb lights each landing, the steps are black, and the wind from below blows through with a moaning whistle. Moving slowly, she stumbles but recovers before her knee hits the ground.
Noise isn't a problem—the reinforced concrete forms a virtual tomb—silence is. Sheila scrapes her flats against the sandy stairs and taps her rings against the steel handrail, deliberately making enough sound to frighten curious rats, like the one she saw gnawing on an empty Styrofoam coffee cup in the alley. Thus far the only rat she'd run into, on the fifth floor, was long dead.
* * * *
Short of breath, hot and damp under winter clothes, she finally reaches the eighth floor. Scores of cigarette butts, from production and shipping employees sneaking out for unscheduled breaks from the danger and stench of flammable liquids and noxious acids, litter the landing. Kicking through the debris, she finds the dented knob and carefully pulls back the heavy steel-reinforced door. Its grunting squeal rattles down and around the empty stairwell.
AHMM, October 2006 Page 16
