“Oh, please don’t bother, Miss Bahm. I happened to be going by the door and stopped in, that’s all.”
Desperately quick, Rose Bahm opened a sliding door on a rack of dresses. “It would be a twelve, wouldn’t it? Of course it would—that lovely figure of yours.”
“I’m sorry,” Maude Kennard said, clearly begging forgiveness for having been guilty of an error of impression. “Your things are much too fine for my purse, Miss Bahm. After all, I’m a working girl, too. Fortunately, I do have a good many connections—friends in the business, you know. That does help.”
She saw the quick side glance of Rose Bahm’s black eyes as she lifted a glass-green taffeta frock from the rack, the moment of hesitation before she turned. This wasn’t going to be difficult at all. Rose Bahm was smart. They usually were, girls like that. They’d been around long enough to know that business was business.
Rose Bahm gave her full attention to the dress, spreading the skirt, letting the light ripple and glint on the glassy surface. “Of course, anything you’d want for yourself, Mrs. Kennard, I’d be glad to give you a special discount—twenty per cent.”
Maude Kennard resisted the temptation to thank her. That was always a mistake, letting anyone think that they had done you a favor, and could some day ask for a favor in return.
She walked to the rack, fanning the fabrics with her fingertips, professionally flipping a cuff to examine the needlework. “Yes, your things are nice, Miss Bahm, very nice indeed. Thank you so much for showing me around.” She tucked her purse under her arm in a gesture of departure.
The green taffeta was still in Rose Bahm’s hands.
“Just a minute, Mrs. Kennard, please.” There was a quality of special pleading in Rose Bahm’s voice, a note beyond fear, the cherishing of a vitally important hope. She tossed the green dress and disappeared through the curtain into the back room, returning almost instantly with another dress in her hands. The openness of pleading was gone from her black eyes. They were bright now with something beyond an asking for trade, or favor, or even approval. They were the eyes of the zealot connoisseur, of the near-artist, and what there was in her eyes seemed to flow through her whole body, out of her fingertips and into the dress as she held it against herself, making it come alive with a beauty that was something beyond style.
Involuntarily, Maude Kennard’s hand reached out, knowing that she was betraying more interest than was wise, yet unable to restrain herself.
“It’s an original Velucci from Milan,” Rose Bahm said in a low tone. “I couldn’t keep from buying it, even if I don’t ever sell it.”
“How much?” Maude Kennard asked, keeping her voice flat and matter-of-fact.
Rose Bahm hesitated. “A hundred and sixty is the price I should get—that’s low for what it is—but I know you’re in a place you can help me, Mrs. Kennard.”
Maude Kennard stood purposefully silent. There was only the sound of the traffic outside, the dull rumble of a passing truck and the insistent bleating of even more distant car horns.
“All right, Mrs. Kennard—a hundred dollars to you.”
“I’ll try it on.”
She hardly needed a mirror. It was right. She had sensed that the minute her hands had touched the fabric, known it for certain as it slipped over her shoulders.
“It’s wonderful for you, Mrs. Kennard, just wonderful.”
“Yes, I might be able to use it. Let’s see—a hundred dollars with my twenty per cent discount would make it eighty, wouldn’t it?”
Rose Bahm looked startled. “But I meant—”
Maude Kennard was already unfolding the bills that she had taken from her purse. Cash was always the clincher. By the end of the third month they always needed cash. “And you’ll have it sent over to the hotel right away, won’t you? I may wear it tonight.”
There was a long moment of silence as she counted the bills into Rose Bahm’s hand.
5
Max Nicollet, chef de cuisine of the Hotel Ivanhoe, was not what a psychiatrist would call a normal and well-adjusted person. Indeed, had anyone in Max’s presence ever argued the point in his favor, he would have screamed them down with denial. The normal and well adjusted he knew only too well. They were the sons and daughters of imbecile pigs whose pocketbooks bought them the privilege of ruining his masterpieces—salting his perfectly seasoned Caneton Rouennais, slopping catsup over his Châteaubriand, insisting on making his Tartelettes à l’Aurore an idiot’s delight by ordering it “à la mode.”
The colossal wrath that such desecrations generated within the ample vessel of Max’s enormous body would, in a more normal man, have been a sure precursor of apoplexy. Max was a man of a different sort. He cherished no myth that peace of mind was an idyllic state. He relished rage. Life was only worth living when he could feel his veins bursting with a fresh supercharge of adrenalin.
There were those among his circle of perpetually frightened assistants—anyone incapable of instantaneously registering fright soon left the circle—who attempted to excuse his more violent outbursts as the result of his “French” temperament. This, unfortunately, Max dared not deny. His professional rating would have dropped like a cold soufflé if he had ever admitted that his father had been a Greek, his mother a Turk, and that he had blithely snitched his present name from the avenue in Minneapolis on which he had acquired most of what he called his “Continental” experience. After all, who could say that North America was not a continent?
That Max Nicollet had become one of the great chefs—and he was—could only be explained by the efficacy of rage as a stimulant to superlative effort. After one of his more volcanic outbursts of distilled venom, anything less than a triumph would have been unthinkable since it would have destroyed his license for a repeat performance. His Sauce Nicollet, now famous on more than the North American continent, had been created as the back thrust of his colossal anger at being told that his Sauce Marguery was “almost as good” as some money-bagged pig claimed he had eaten at Coq D’Or in Paris.
This particular day in Max’s turbulent life had started in astoundingly good fashion. Until now, Mrs. Kennard had been of little value to him. She had never before inspired anything beyond the antipathy that he felt toward all employers, slightly enhanced by the fact that she was a woman. But today she had surpassed herself and inspired a first-class rage. Even now, recalling it, his eyes still blazed like a fat-spattered fire. Outstretched in his enormous left hand he held the plump carcass of a faintly blue-tinged guinea hen which he had originally intended as two servings of Faisan à la Normande. The carving knife in his right hand cut a whistling arc. A fry cook scrambled for his life. That woman had dared to tell the great Max Nicollet that there was a guest to whom he could not speak! He would show his defiance in a magnificent way. He would create a new dish! He would call it …
His anger burned into a blue brandy-flame of pure inspiration. There was only one possible name—Faisan à la McCall!
With a howl of demoniacal glee he tossed the dead fowl high in the air, bounced it off the low ceiling, caught it, clutched it to his breast like a fierce beast defending its new-born young, glaring back at the frightened faces of his cowering associates.
Mr. McCall was his friend, his very good friend, but even if he had never been his friend before, he would be his friend now.
Max Nicollet threw back his head and howled with the rage of great happiness.
6
Frank, the bell captain, saw her as she came into the lobby and Maude Kennard acknowledged his signal, waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs to the mezzanine.
“You want me, Mrs. Kennard?” he asked anxiously. “I hear you was looking for me, huh? I guess that must have been when I was up unpacking them boxes for Mr. McCall.”
“Boxes? What sort of boxes?”
“Books, ma’am. I figured I’d better lend a hand.”
She held her smile until the end so there was a moment when he was tricked into thinking that she disapproved. �
��All right, Frank.”
He grinned his relief. “Sorry I wasn’t around.”
She remembered now what she had wanted. “There’s a change to be made on the bulletin board.”
“You mean shifting that luncheon to the Velvet Room? I got that. Louis gave it to me.”
“Oh, good. Is Louis still here?”
“Louis? Yah, sure. Saw him in the Fontainebleau Room not more’n a couple minutes ago. Want me to get him for you?”
“No, give him a message. Tell him not to worry about Mr. McCall’s dinner tonight. I’ll handle it myself.”
Frank repeated, “He’s not to worry about Mr. McCall’s dinner, you’ll handle it yourself.”
“That’s right.”
Everett Pierce was waiting for her, stepping out of his office as she reached the top of the staircase.
“How did it go?” he asked anxiously.
“How did what go?”
“The report on—” He substituted an upward-pointing gesture for Cash McCall’s name.
“All right.”
“You got it started?”
“Yes.”
“How—how long will it be before we get something?”
“Quite a while,” she said, deciding that the report, when it came, would serve her own purpose best if Everett Pierce didn’t see it too soon … maybe not at all.
She started for her office, stopping as she glanced over the mezzanine rail, and saw a small woman in a black coat step through the front door and into the lobby. There was a box in her hands. It was Rose Bahm. She was delivering the dress herself.
7
Impatiently, Gil Clark waited in front of the occupied telephone booth in the lobby of the Hotel Conomissing. There was no alternative to waiting. He had to catch Harrison Glenn before he went out to lunch, yet he dared not talk from an open phone. This was the only closed booth that he could remember having seen in Suffolk. Of course this whole business might not mean a thing. It was four years since the president of Corporation Associates had ordered that he was to be immediately informed, without the slightest delay, if Grant Austen ever gave any indication that he might be willing to sell Suffolk Moulding. Four years was a long time. Harrison Glenn’s special interest in Suffolk Moulding, whatever it had been then, had probably faded long since. But that assumption involved a risk that was too great to take. It was never safe to assume that you knew what was happening behind the granite mask of that great stone face.
The man who had been in the booth backed out and Gil shoved in past him, put in the call, wincing as the bell clang of the dropping coins deadened his ears, finally hearing the familiar chant of the Corporation Associates’ operator, then the cautiously suspicious voice of Harrison Glenn’s secretary.
“Is he in?” he asked. “This is Gil Clark and it’s important.”
The president’s voice was wordless, sounding like the rumble of a rock slide.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Gil said, fighting the unexplainable breathing trouble that he always had when he was talking to Harrison Glenn. “I remember you saying once, sir, that you wanted to know immediately if Suffolk Moulding ever came up for sale.” He paused but there was no response. “I don’t know whether it means anything now—whether you’re still interested or not—” There was still no sound in the receiver clamped to his ear. “Well, anyway it is. I dug it out this morning. Austen is all set to sell—I think to Andscott Instrument. He’s coming down there tomorrow to talk it over with Will Atherson of the Freeholders Bank.”
Harrison Glenn finally broke his silence. “Where are you?”
“I’m still in Suffolk, sir. I just left Grant Austen and I—”
“Get down here as soon as you can,” Glenn ordered, the receiver choked with the power of his voice, suddenly cut off as the connection was broken.
Gil Clark hung up, feeling out of breath, leaning for a moment against the booth wall. Released now from the urgent first-things-first task of getting word to Harrison Glenn, he began to think through all the implications of the situation. His initial reaction to the possibility that Suffolk Moulding might be sold had been one of great relief, but he had been thinking then only of the hope that a new management might relieve the frustration that he had endured because of Grant Austen’s pompous fumbling and do-nothing attitude. Now, embarrassingly, he was conscious that he had missed a key point. A new ownership of Suffolk Moulding might well mean that Corporation Associates would lose the account. It would be almost a certainty if Austen let himself be squeezed into selling to Andscott Instrument. It was entirely possible that Harrison Glenn’s silence, and then the barked order to come into the office, had been occasioned by that realization. The president might even blame him for having let Grant Austen get too many eggs in one basket. But how could he have done anything with Grant Austen? Hadn’t he tried? Time after time! The file was full of plans and recommendations that Austen had approved and then done nothing about. The guy was solid dry rot from the neck up. And it was a damn shame … Suffolk Moulding was a sweet little company … all it needed was the right management.
Four
1
“Is this what you want, Mr. Austen?” Miss Berk asked. She held a large blank book, its cracked leather binding proclaiming its antiquity.
“Yes, thank you.”
She placed the book in front of him, sniffing at the sight of her smudged fingers, holding her hands away from her body as if the dust of the record room were some lethal poison to which she had been dangerously exposed. “If you won’t need anything else, I’ll go to lunch now.”
“All right,” he said, anxious to be alone.
After the door had closed, he took a dust cloth from the bottom drawer of his desk and wiped the binding of the book, careful not to dislodge the label. It was already loose, edge-curled where the old adhesive had lost its bond. The words were lettered in Fred Gunsmann’s heavy Teutonic hand, the once-black ink faded to a watery brown. This was the old ledger in which first Fred, and later he himself, had recorded the early stock sales and transfers. From it, Grant Austen hoped to find the answers to some of the questions Gil had asked about what the tax situation would be, particularly on the stock given to Alvin T. Manson and later transferred to Lory.
He opened the record book and the turning cover wiped across his mind like a scene shift in a motion picture. On the marbled endpaper, Fred Gunsmann’s hand had repeated the title on the backbone label, the protected ink blacker here, the memories that it incited as clearly seen as if they had happened yesterday; in truth, even more sharply focused because what had actually happened yesterday, or on any of the days of these last few years, was already dimly vague by contrast with his detailed recollection of those first days, now thirty years past.
He found the first entry bearing his own name; 10/14/22—100 shrs.—value recvd—G. Austen. That was the stock Fred had given him for working that summer of 1922, putting the electric wiring into the old mill building. Everyone around Suffolk had told him he wouldn’t be paid. Fred, they said, was a no-good. There was Pennsylvania Dutch blood in most Suffolk veins and no standard of judgment was more rigidly applied than a man’s credit. Fred’s wasn’t worth a dime. Even worse, he was said to be “slippery.” He hadn’t paid Henry Diffle for the SUFFOLK MOULDING COMPANY sign, maintaining that Henry should not have put a “U” in MOULDING, but everyone could see that Fred had gone ahead and hung the sign on the old gristmill building down on Conomissing Creek, trying to fool people who didn’t know him into believing that he amounted to something. No one was fooled. Everyone knew that SUFFOLK MOULDING COMPANY was just crazy old Fred Gunsmann.
Admittedly, Grant had been disappointed when Fred had paid him off with stock instead of cash, but it hadn’t mattered too much. He had graduated from Penn State that spring and was just hanging around, anyway, hoping that General Electric would be taking on some more student engineers in September. Wiring the mill was good practical experience.
September came
and went, and there was still no offer from G.E., so he stayed on with Fred, helping to rebuild and install the hydraulic press that Fred had somehow managed to hornswoggle out of a Philadelphia junkyard. He hadn’t been much concerned with what Fred was trying to do—at that point it was only the “engineering” that really interested him—until one October afternoon when they made the first trial pressing. The mold was placed in the press, a carbolic-smelling powder spooned into the cavity, and the hot platens brought together. When the press opened, a miracle had taken place. The powder had miraculously become the socket for an electric light bulb.
In the enthusiasm of accomplishment, Fred took some sample sockets to Philadelphia and came back with an order for ten thousand. He forgot until he returned home that he had no money to build the production mold upon which he had based his selling price. Every cent that he could beg or borrow had already been spent. It was then that Grant Austen made the decision that set the whole course of his life. He agreed to talk to Alvin T. Manson and attempt to get a loan. That was the beginning of everything.
Alvin T. Manson was the president of the Suffolk National Bank but, by a life-shaping coincidence, he was also president of the Conomissing Valley Electric Company. The power company was interested in employing a bright young electrical engineer with a burning zeal to talk Suffolk residences into using more light bulbs and electrical appliances. Mr. Manson had been adamant in his refusal to lend money to a proved bad risk like Fred Gunsmann but he was willing, after Grant Austen had agreed to take the job with the power company, to make him a personal loan of two hundred dollars. It was to be repaid, with interest at seven per cent, by the deduction of twenty-five dollars a month from his salary.
But that was not all that had happened on that day. A girl came into Mr. Manson’s office. He introduced her as his daughter Miriam. Less than three years later, on the fourth day of June, Miriam Manson became Mrs. Grant Austen. Everyone in Suffolk agreed that the wedding was as nice as anything you’d ever see in Philadelphia and that Miriam had looked surprisingly pretty in her wedding gown. It was whispered about that she was twenty-seven, two years older than her husband, but in the general buzz of excitement, that fact was relatively unimportant to anyone but the town’s worst gossips. It was the first time in the history of Suffolk that anyone had staged a lawn party for a wedding reception. For the special guests who followed Alvin T. Manson’s whispered instructions to inspect the second-floor sun porch, there was French champagne that was said to be right off the boat and a waiter in a white coat to serve it.
Cash McCall Page 9
