Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  Several weeks later the committee had its initial meeting. It was the concensus of opinion, duly recorded in a unanimously adopted resolution, that there was no essential difference between post-war planning for Small Business and post-war planning for Big Business. The committee decided, therefore, that there was no need to hold more meetings. That was all right with Grant Austen. It was not his post-war plan to go on being Small Business. But the meeting was not a waste of time. He had learned that “contacts” were important and he made some good ones.

  The only flaw in the day was that the committee meeting reminded him of that week in New York and he couldn’t help wondering why Miriam was so different back in Suffolk. He resolved to try to find an open weekend when he could again take her to New York—some week when he didn’t have to go down to Washington—but that was hard to do. Washington took a lot of his time that spring. Mount Oak was only seventy miles away and Lory usually drove in and had dinner with him. Every time she came, there were more recognized faces to point out to her. In one evening they saw Jesse Jones, John L. Lewis, Harold Ickes, Henry Wallace and a lot of top men from big corporations. One of the vice-presidents of General Electric stopped by their table in the main dining room of the Carleton and Grant recounted how close he had come to being a G.E. man himself—how only a quirk of fate had intervened—and the G.E. vice-president had said that what had been Suffolk’s gain had been General Electric’s loss. Lory got a great kick out of that.

  She never said anything any more about not being pretty and he was grateful that she was beginning to show signs of maturity, the realization that there were more important things in the world than a pretty face. Lory was smart. She was getting straight A’s at Mount Oak. He was disturbed by her talk about going to some art school after she finished—he secretly hoped that she would go to Wharton Business at Penn—but when he found out that she was planning to study Industrial Design he stopped worrying. There was a big need for that in the plastics industry and Lory would be a real help to him when Suffolk moved into consumer goods after the war.

  That spring, before Lory came home to spend her vacation, he bought Orchard Hill, the town-touching estate of the Cathart family, the once wealthy owners of the now defunct paper mill. The big old house demanded considerable remodeling and refurbishing but, despite wartime restrictions, it was rapidly accomplished and in a manner discreet enough not to arouse any unnecessary talk around Suffolk. Even the swimming pool slipped into the back lawn with almost no one aware of what was happening.

  Miriam approved of the house—at least she said nothing against it—and it was obviously an advantage to her to have a nice place to hold all of her meetings. She had become more and more immersed in community activities—Chairman of Home Service for the Red Cross, Vice-President of the Community Chest, a director of the hospital, and active in the Planned Parenthood League. His contributions grew to substantial proportions but he wasn’t too much concerned. As was frequently pointed out at N.A.M. meetings, every industrialist had a social responsibility—and CONTRIBUTIONS TO CHARITY was, of course, a deductible item.

  When there were weekend guests at their home—and they became more and more frequent as he broadened the circle of his influential acquaintances—Miriam was a pleasant hostess, vaguely recalling that week they had spent together in New York, but it became increasingly apparent that she lacked a talent possessed by the wives of other corporation presidents to whose Detroit, Wilmington and Long Island homes he had been invited. Miriam never seemed to be able to spend money without worrying about it, and she had an unfortunate tendency to fuss over unimportant little details like meat-rationing coupons and whether she should order a three-rib or a four-rib roast. She couldn’t seem to accustom herself to the fact that, at the scale of living to which they had risen, an extra rib had no significance whatsoever.

  Lory worked at the office that summer, drawing charts for Ralph Andrews, the L. & E. Whitford man who was working on a projection of the company’s post-war expansion. L. & E. Whitford Company was one of the top firms of management engineers and Lyman Whitford himself was supervising the Suffolk account, which was a good indication of how the firm sized up the future of the Suffolk Moulding Company.

  Eventually, the locked bottom-right drawer of Grant Austen’s desk was reserved for a top-secret notebook. Its scarlet label proclaimed it the POST-WAR PROGRAM FOR THE EXPANSION OF THE SUFFOLK MOULDING COMPANY. At first he had held back from having his hopes committed to paper but, afterwards, he had been glad that he had let Lyman Whitford talk him into it. The neatly typed words gave his dreams the pleasant substance of reality. The language was a little fancy for his taste—he didn’t want to sound like a New Deal economist—but still and all it was a good idea to know where you were going. And Lory thought it was wonderful. Her eyes sparkled with excitement when, coming into his office in the evening after everyone else had gone, he would read paragraphs out of the POST-WAR PROGRAM and explain what they meant. After the war they would move into proprietaries—nationally advertised consumer goods—dishes, appliances, housewares. There was no future in being only a custom molder of plastic parts for other manufacturers. As the POST-WAR PROGRAM said, “The future of the Suffolk Moulding Company lies in its manifest destiny as a major supplier of many articles of high utility to the American Buying Public.”

  Before Lory went back to Mount Oak in September he told her that he was increasing her allowance but she said she didn’t need it. She still had over four hundred dollars left from last year and all of her salary from the summer was untouched. So, very formally and both of them having the time of their lives, he sold her a block of stock in the Suffolk Moulding Company, the stock to be paid for out of her increased allowance.

  There was a legend on the flyleaf of the POST-WAR PROGRAM that read, “To be Activated on the Day of Victory,” a phrase that conjured the sound of whistles and bells signaling the beginning of a return to good old American Free Enterprise—freedom from controls, freedom from raw material restrictions, freedom from government interference—what Lyman Whitford so aptly called, “the freedom of self-determination.”

  It didn’t happen that way. V-J Day was an anticlimax, dulled by the anxious but certain anticipation that had begun with V-E Day in May. When the officially proclaimed Day of Victory finally came, the bells were dutifully rung and the whistles blown but everyone knew that it didn’t mean anything. There was more fear than exultation.

  The POST-WAR PROGRAM FOR THE SUFFOLK MOULDING COMPANY stayed in the unopened drawer of Grant Austen’s desk. Cancellations had cut back the plant to where most of the presses stood idle. Men who had been foremen dropped back to press operators and were happy to have even that much of a job. For the first time since the start of the war, Grant Austen made some customer calls himself—high level, of course, president to president—and found that his salesmen were right. Profit had to be cut almost to the vanishing point to get an order. There was excess capacity all over the plastics industry. This was no time to expand. All he could do was to wait until things settled down and got squared away.

  Lory had started at Prather Institute of Art the September before, but not until after he’d had a good straight talk with Harley Cunningham, the executive director, and assured himself that Mr. Cunningham was a fine man. After measuring Mr. Cunningham’s caliber, he accepted an invitation to serve on the Institute’s Advisory Council, an appointment that Mr. Cunningham assured him would take very little of his valuable time since the Council seldom if ever held a meeting.

  Some of the drawings that Lory brought home from Prather disturbed him. He knew that art schools had classes where the students drew from nude models, but he couldn’t see the point of exposing an innocent young girl like Lory to that sort of thing, particularly when it had nothing in the world to do with Industrial Design. There were several other times when he was tempted to drop a note to Harley Cunningham, but the only time he ever did was after his discovery that Lory had been made t
o spend several weeks working on illustrations for some book about one of those heathen religions they had over in India or somewhere. He had assumed, he wrote, that Prather was a good Christian institution and hoped that there’d be no repetition of anything like that. Harley Cunningham had replied that the whole thing had been a mistake and that the responsible instructor had been severely reprimanded.

  With Lory in Philadelphia, Grant Austen saw Will Atherson more frequently, often dropping in on Wednesday so that he could have lunch with Will at his club, The Wharf, whose clubrooms had recently been moved to the ninth floor of the Hotel Ivanhoe. The members of The Wharf were big men in Philadelphia—it was an honor even to be invited as a luncheon guest—and, looking around the room, Will told him that half of the men were in exactly the same spot he was, ready to go ahead and expand as soon as that mess in Washington started to clear up. Grant thought that the situation might improve after the election in November. If the Republicans got control of Congress things would be different.

  The Republicans did get control, both the House and the Senate, and when Lory came home for the holidays, Grant Austen showed her the preliminary sketches for the new plant addition to handle melamines and butyrates. The architect was going ahead with the detailed plans and contractors were working on tentative bids. Ground would be broken as soon as there was something definite from Washington on a tax cut.

  It was a year after that next April when the Senate finally passed the tax bill, but no ground was broken for a new Suffolk building. The final bids were almost fifty per cent higher than the preliminary estimate made two years before. Obviously, a period of inflated costs was no time to build. And it was becoming clearer every day that a depression was overdue.

  Fortunately, things weren’t too bad at the factory. It was beginning to look as if the Andscott business might turn into something really big. Of course, it was all custom molding, not the nationally advertised consumer goods that the POST-WAR PROGRAM called for, but now that taxes had been cut there was a little money to be made—not enough but every little bit helped—and piling up a good husky surplus wasn’t a bad idea. Lyman Whitford argued that he was taking too much Andscott business, getting too many eggs in one basket, but Whitford was always inclined to take the theoretical instead of the practical approach, and Grant Austen reasoned that if he had the cash it would be easy enough to move ahead when the time was ripe. Then, after the expansion, the Andscott business could be brought back into balance again.

  Lory graduated from Prather Institute in June and the Athersons gave her a big party at their Main Line country home near Devon. Although Grant Austen had always considered Will Atherson one of his closest friends he had never been invited to his home nor, until the evening of the party, had he ever met Helen Atherson. He had, however, not considered that strange since he had always accepted Main Line society as something remote from the orbit of his own life and generally unattainable. To his surprise he found himself treated with pleasant equality, his pleasure diluted only by the revelation that Lory, without telling him about it, had already been at the Athersons’ twice before with some of her classmates from Prather, one of whom was a niece of Mrs. Atherson’s. Lory had also made some other friends among old Main Line families, again without ever having told him, thus creating a little world for herself of which—unthinkingly, of course—she had not made him a part.

  There were other revelations that night. As he watched his daughter, Grant Austen became aware that Lory had changed. She was no longer the sum total of all of the superimposed images of her childhood that he had stored away in his mind. As a child she had seemed, despite her small stature, to be surprisingly mature, older than her years. Now, almost as if there had been some unnoticed period of arrested growth, the years seemed to have overleaped her development. There were flashed moments that night when she seemed astoundingly young, her laughter rippling and her eyes shining like a child’s. Of course some of her friends from the art school acted like kids, too—that was to be expected of them, but not of Lory. A number of people remarked about it. Even Will Atherson had said, “Grant, that little girl of yours is a mighty sweet youngster.” He had made no reply—there was nothing that could be said—but it disturbed him that Lory was making that sort of impression. She had always been so solid before, feet on the ground, and he wished that he hadn’t been so backward about advancing his suggestion that she go to Wharton Business. Allowing her to go to Prather had probably been a mistake.

  Miriam was no help at all that night. When Lory had come to them, all excited about a chance to spend the summer at some art colony in Maine, Miriam raised no objection. It was probably true, as Lory said, that some of that fine arts stuff would help her with her Industrial Design, but he couldn’t understand why she had to go off to Maine to do it. There was as pretty scenery right around Suffolk as you’d find anywhere.

  He had tried to talk to Miriam about it but she hadn’t seen what he had seen—the way Lory had changed. Miriam couldn’t seem to understand how important it was to get Lory home and in the right atmosphere as soon as possible. He went as far as he could. Lory would have blamed him if he had tried to keep her from going after her mother had offered no objection.

  It was a bad summer, hot and muggy, and the day after Lory left for Maine, Dewey was nominated instead of Taft. From then on everything went wrong. U.S. Steel caved in for the third round wage increase and there wasn’t anything he could do but ride along—a straight nine per cent right through the plant. The C.I.O. Rubber & Plastic Workers already had an organizer in town. The television business was boomed by the’ conventions and Andscott boosted its orders, but they had no sooner stepped up the schedule than Congress passed a fool law that gave the Federal Reserve Board the power to clamp down on installment sales. The only bright spot was in the future—the communist investigation was licking Truman. After that “red herring” business, Dewey was as good as in the White House. But even that prospect wasn’t enough to dispel the strangely ominous feeling of impending disaster that haunted Grant Austen. There were many days, more and more as the summer wore on, when there was no letter from Lory.

  It was the last week in August when his premonition of disaster crashed down upon him with the terrifying confirmation that his fears had not been unfounded. He had been in Washington that day with Park Cady, Andscott’s Vice-president for Merchandising, trying to get to the right people in F.R.B. about the installment selling regulation. It had been almost midnight when he had gotten home. Miriam had met him at the door, blocking the way, her voice a voice he had never heard before. “Lory is home, Grant, and I don’t want you to talk to her.”

  He pushed past his wife as she attempted to block the staircase, frightened when Lory didn’t answer the knock on her bedroom door, then crushed by the blow of realized tragedy when Miriam had finally told him, “She’s had a love affair, Grant. If you hound her about it—if you ever even mention it to her—I’ll leave you!”

  It was an empty threat, not because Miriam didn’t mean it—her eyes vowed that she did—but because there was no spirit within him that was left to be killed. He had failed Lory. When she had needed him most he hadn’t been there. That in itself was a kind of dying.

  But as the days went by, in the warmth of Lory’s unspoken forgiveness, there was a new relationship with his daughter. She had changed, mature now in a way that she had never been mature before. It took a long time before he could block his mind to the gagging realization of why she had changed, but by then they were closer together than ever, drawn by the bonds of a mutually survived tragedy.

  When she finally asked to have the second floor of the old stable remodeled into a studio he knew that everything was all right again. He hired the best architect in Philadelphia and he really made a job of it. Lory was as pleased as Punch. A publishing house in Philadelphia commissioned her to do some illustrations—it didn’t really amount to anything, just some kids’ book, only a couple hundred dollars—but Lory w
as as happy about it as if it had really been something big. Lory’s happiness was all that mattered. Money wasn’t important. The older you got, the more you realized that. He had recently obtained a new Andscott contract that would gross close to a million—and it didn’t mean a thing, particularly with the way that Truman, unbearably cocky after his victory over Dewey, was demanding six billion dollars in new taxes. It was a time for caution. All anyone had to do to know that was to read Dillingham’s Washington Letter every Monday morning.

  L. & E. Whitford Company wasn’t showing up too well—Lyman Whitford was getting a little too big for his breeches, seldom coming to Suffolk himself any more, not even mentioning Suffolk Moulding in a speech he made at the Congress of Commerce. Fortunately, about that time Harrison Glenn happened to drop in. Glenn was one of the really big men in management counseling, the kind of man who didn’t say much but what he did say carried a lot of weight. A month later, Suffolk Moulding signed up with Corporation Associates and Harrison Glenn, as he had promised, put one of his best men on the account, young Gil Clark. It was a good move. Harrison Glenn had a lot of contacts. Suffolk Moulding hadn’t been a Corporation Associates client for more than a month when Grant Austen was named as Chairman of the Inter-Industry Committee of the Congress of Commerce.

  He dusted off the plans for the new factory, telling Gil that he wanted to be ready to move when the price break was deep enough. The smart time to build was in a depression. Wasn’t that when he had built Suffolk Moulding? He had hired bricklayers for eighty cents an hour—and bricklayers who really laid bricks, not these slow-motion holdup artists that got two-eighty an hour and had a union that would let them lay only so many bricks a day. This was no time to build factories.