Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  Lory curled into the big red leather chair beside his desk, kicking off her shoes, and he was reminded again that she was only a girl, only twenty-six … twenty-six was so much younger than you realized when you were twenty-six.

  “All right, tell me what’s wrong, Dad.” It was a soft command, smile-tempered. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  He hesitated, facing the barrier of beginning, the difficulty of finding the first words. Now that Lory was here he couldn’t quite recapture the mood of wavering uncertainty that had hung over him before she had come.

  “I’m up against a rough problem, Lory.” He shuffled the stacked papers on his desk as evidence.

  She had leaned back and her face had fallen into shadow as it moved out of the cone of light that fell from the desk lamp. “Oh, you’ve been up against rough problems before.”

  He was stopped by alarm. There had been the sound of a yawn in Lory’s voice. Something was wrong. She didn’t understand. Hadn’t she heard what he had said? Could it be … yes, she had glanced toward the window … Paul Bronson … she was still thinking about Bronson.

  “This is serious, Lory,” he said sharply, driven by the urgency of recapture. “It looks like I’ve come to the end of the line.”

  Shockingly, her voice was still lightly unconcerned. “You can’t make me believe that.”

  What was the matter with Lory tonight? Always before he had been able to count on her. Tonight she didn’t understand. He felt the spreading nettle prick of terror, shuffling the litter of papers in front of him, silent, finally realizing that he couldn’t expect Lory to understand what he hadn’t told her.

  “Andscott is forcing us into producing a new television cabinet that’s too big to turn out on any of our presses,” he said carefully. “If we don’t do it, they’ll take all of the rest of their business out of our plant. If we go ahead, it means plowing back a lot of money—at least a quarter of a million dollars, maybe more.”

  “Couldn’t Mr. Atherson help you?”

  She still didn’t understand!

  “But, Lory, can’t you see—” He stopped, waiting for the draining away of annoyance. “I’m going down to see him tomorrow. But I know what the answer will be. There’s only one way I can get a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “How?”

  “Let someone else into the company—sell someone a block of stock.”

  “Could you do that?”

  “Of course, but—Lory, can’t you see what that would mean? If I had to sell a part of the company—well, I might as well sell all of it!”

  He had raised the pitch of his expectancy to the breaking point, the now-or-never moment when Lory had to understand.

  Suddenly, miraculously, as the ultimate justification of faith is always a miracle, he heard her say, “Well, why don’t you? Why don’t you get out and let someone else take all the grief?”

  A tremor ran through his body at the release of tension and he felt a welling warmth of Tightness that erased any doubts of Lory’s understanding. “Well, maybe you’re right. I know this—we can make a lot more money by selling out now than by going on operating the company. Here, let me show you.”

  He shuffled hurriedly through the papers, finding the long tabular sheet where he had summarized his calculations. Lory had gotten up and was standing behind him, her hand on his shoulder, and words came more easily now. “Here are some figures that I’ve worked up tonight. This is a projection of what our total net profit might be for the next ten years. That’s the best I could hope for. I’ve even allowed for some cut in taxes. But look—here’s what I’d have to plow back into the factory just to replace worn-out equipment and do the things we’ll have to do to keep up with our competitors. You can see for yourself what it means. I’ll have to put back more than we can possibly earn. There’s just no point in going on, Lory, no point at all.”

  “Then why do it?” She pivoted quickly, half-sitting now on the edge of the desk, looking down at him.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “You’ve had so many years of it, worked so hard, taken so much out of yourself. Why go on?”

  “You want me to sell?”

  “Dad, it isn’t a question of what I want. The only thing that—”

  “No, Lory, it does matter what you want.” He stopped, lost, and then out of nowhere came a suddenly touched memory. “After all, I couldn’t sell the company without your agreement. You’re the second largest stockholder.”

  “I’m what?”

  “You own almost five thousand shares. Don’t you remember our deal when you left for Mount Oak? I sold you a block of stock. I’ve been paying for it out of your allowance ever since—plowing back your dividends—and then there’s your grandfather’s stock. He left that to you in his will. Whether you realize it or not, Lory, you’re quite a wealthy young woman. If I could sell the company for two million, your share would be something like—well, close to two hundred thousand.”

  She stared at him, wide-eyed with astonishment.

  “There’d be tax, of course,” he went on. “But it would be only capital gains—maximum of twenty six per cent.”

  “But could you get two million for the company?”

  “Well, I had a talk with Gil Clark this morning and he thought I might get that much. Depends, of course, on finding the right buyer. Might not be able to quite hit two million. I’ll get a better idea tomorrow. I’m going down to have lunch with Will Atherson.”

  She was looking at him intently, studying his face. “Dad, you’re really serious, aren’t you?”

  He tried to soften her face with a little joke that he hoped would make her smile. “Of course I’d have to have your agreement—second largest stockholder.”

  “You aren’t worrying about me?”

  “Not now.”

  No, not now … Lory understood … she knew that he wasn’t giving up, that he wasn’t running away, that the smart thing to do was to get out before the Andscott business blew up.

  “Dad, could you be happy without the company?”

  “Happy? Why not?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Don’t worry about me being happy, Lory, not me.”

  “Would you sell for what you said—two million?”

  “Would I!” Uncontrollably, there was the sound of exultation in his voice. “Just let someone offer me two million and he’ll own the Suffolk Moulding Company so fast it’ll make his head swim.”

  He reached out to take her hand, feeling the wonderful warmth of her agreement. The touching of their hands was a pact, a pledge, the promise of a happiness beyond anything there had ever been before. He’d been a fool to wait as long as he had, imagining that the final break would be hard to make. It had been so simple, so easy.

  4

  Miriam Austen lay in the darkness, her lips parted to quiet her breathing, courting the hope that absolute silence might permit her to pick words out of the distantly faint buzz of conversation that drifted up from the library on the floor below. Occasionally a word-sound did rise tantalizingly close to the threshold of recognition, only to lose itself in the whistling moan of the wind outside.

  What her ears did not hear, her imagination supplied. Her body, responding to her mind, was warm-damp with the vapor of burnt-out anger and the still-burning small fire of jealousy. Her nightgown felt sticky and clinging and she turned restlessly, trying to free its sodden grasp. Then, death-still again, her ears took up their word-hungry search.

  She told herself that after all these years she should be able to accept, without recourse to hope, the plain fact that she could never be as close to Grant as Lory was. She should … but she couldn’t, not completely.

  Her despair was not rooted in resentment. What had happened was not Lory’s fault … or Grant’s either. It was her own punishment for having made such an abysmal failure of her marriage. The most frightening prospect was that Lory might mak
e the same mistake that she had made. The circumstances were alarmingly similar. She, too, had worshiped her father. She had married Grant Austen without love … yes, that was a sin in itself, but a small one … and there might have been love if, in that first year of her marriage, she had been able to break her bondage to her father. Her life would have been different if she had only realized that Alvin T. Manson had not been the superlative creature that she thought him to be, that Grant Austen was so much more worthy of her love and respect.

  Actually, there had been love … at least moments of love. On that night when her mother had whispered the horrifying confidence that Alvin T. Manson was guilty of fraud, that he had appropriated funds that were not his and hidden his guilt in the closing of the bank, hadn’t her first impulse been to tell her husband? Didn’t that prove that she really loved him? But there was already that high wall between them that could not be broken down with words … afraid that Grant would not be able to understand that her love, declared then, was something more than a rebound rejection of her loyalty to her father.

  She had hated those after years when she had been forced to sneak money, Grant’s money, out of her household allowance and give it to her father. A thousand times she had wanted to tell her husband and seek the absolution of confession … just as she had wanted so desperately to warn Grant that her father shouldn’t be taken into the company and made its treasurer. Even after he had finally left the company, there had been that lingering terror because she had never known what had really happened. Grant had told her nothing, only that her father would be taken care of for the rest of his life.

  At least there was that difference … Lory could always be proud of her father … but all the rest was an alarming parallel. She, too, like Lory, had been an only child in a marriage that hadn’t worked. In her daughter’s case there was an excuse. In her own, there had been none. Grant was honest and fine and good. The fault was her own. It was she who, out of fear and delusion and weakness, had failed her husband and driven him to turn to Lory.

  It was only in these last few years that Miriam Austen had been able to face that terrible self-accusation. But, finally accepted, it brought the partially compensating recognition of what was really happening between Lory and Grant. Before she had come to that truth, Miriam Austen’s desperate loneliness had driven her far beyond the bounds of reason, goading her into the suspicion that there was something revoltingly abnormal in the relationship between her husband and their daughter. Now, long since, she had conquered that insane nightmare. It was all normal, perfectly explainable, and the endpoint was plain. Lory must fall in love, not merely to marry as she had married Grant, not because she had thought it was something her father wanted her to do, but to fall in love so wildly and passionately, so totally and completely, that affection for her father would fade to such a dim thing by comparison that it could never cast a shadow over her marriage.

  A faintly bitter-sweet smile crossed Miriam Austen’s face as she recalled what she had seen a half hour before. She had heard the car in the drive and had gone to the window to look down, safely unseen in the darkness. Lory had gotten out of the car almost as soon as it stopped. There had been no moment of lingering as there would certainly have been if there were the slightest danger that Lory might be considering a loveless marriage to Paul Bronson. That would be no solution. But Lory knew it. Lory knew what it meant to be in love … that man in Maine, whoever he had been. If you were really in love once you could never be fooled again.

  Miriam Austen’s lips moved in the darkness, almost voicing the words that she had said silently so many times before … why couldn’t it have been that man in Maine … why, why, why? No matter who he was, no matter what had happened between them, that would have been the answer to everything. But that was over … done … years ago. Lory had to fall in love again … she had to!

  Miriam Austen’s mind, saving itself, spun the pink floss of a dream. Lory would meet a man this summer … fall in love … run away … marry … live in London … Paris … San Francisco … any place that was far away. Then she and Grant would be together again, alone, the way they had been alone together that week in New York … the diamond clip and his boy-bashful voice saying, “You’ve been wonderful this week, Miriam, just wonderful and I want you to have this.” He had kissed her then as he had never kissed her before or since … but he would again … when Lory was gone … when they were alone …

  Footsteps were coming up the stairs … Grant … Lory …

  “Goodnight, Lory.”

  “Goodnight, Dad.”

  In the instant before the door opened, an unconquerable impulse made Miriam Austen close her eyes. For a moment, the hall light glowed dull red through her lowered eyelids. It snapped off. Grant tiptoed across the room. She tried desperately to force a word through her lips that would tell him she was awake, but her voice froze in her throat as it had so many times before. Defeated, she lay in the too-still stillness of feigned sleep.

  There was the latch click of the bathroom door closing and she opened her eyes. Moonlight marbled the wall with the writhing veins of racing cloud shadows and she was struck with the hallucination that she was staring into the organic depths of her own brain.

  5

  Lory threw open the south window of her bedroom and the curtains whipsnapped in the March wind. Her hands caught them back and she stood in the darkness with her arms spread, feeling the wind against her body.

  The clouds were unbroken now, the moonlight gone. A sparse spangle of lights marked the town in the valley below and she imagined the deep sleep of all the people who were lying in their beds under those black roofs. It was a purposeful thought, consciously provoked as an attempt to incite sleep, but she knew there would be no result. She was hopelessly awake. This would be another of those sleepless nights.

  Would her father really sell the company, or was it only another of his midnight ideas that would be gone and forgotten by morning? Probably. She’d been a fool for a minute or two, letting herself be tricked, accepting hope as fact … her old trouble, the same mistake she had made too many times before.

  There was a distant moving light, an automobile circling the reservoir, its headlights drawing a self-erasing chalk line on the blackboard of the night. Paul? No, he’d be in bed by now, asleep, dreaming his cost accountant dreams … “You see, Lory, what your father doesn’t seem to comprehend is that bringing in new capital would favorably affect our whole tax base. Our carrying charges would be offset by a tax saving so that …”

  Her forced smile twisted into a scowl of inquiry. Had Paul been trying to tell her that her father was incompetent, slipping, losing his hold …?

  She felt the angry counterthrust of filial loyalty. It wasn’t his fault! It was this crazy world and what it was doing to good men … battering down their courage … weakening them … destroying their initiative. The world wanted weaklings now, cringing little men whose bible was the income tax manual, hunting for salvation in the fine print that promised absolution from the hellfire and damnation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, little men like Paul Bronson who priced himself so cheaply that he could be bought for a marriage certificate … if there was enough common stock attached.

  Paul had said it himself … “There isn’t much chance to build a business out of earnings these days.” No, you didn’t build it, you married it! That was his shoddy little plan, the petty conniving of his dollar-sharp mind, the insult of imagining that she could be tricked into responding to him as a woman was supposed to respond to a man she loved.

  I hate him and everyone like him!

  She shouted the silent words and then waited for the confirmation of anger. It did not come. It was as if one part of her brain was set against the other, a guardian segment that weighed and measured every thought, passing only the true and rejecting all that was false.

  She accepted the rejection, realizing now that anger was a false emotion, untenable, another attempt to make herse
lf believe what she wanted to believe, that her inability to respond to Paul Bronson’s invitation of affection was chargeable to him and not to this terrifying inadequacy within herself. It wasn’t only Paul Bronson, it was any man, all men … even her father …

  Her father?

  No, that was different. The affection of a daughter for a father was not the same thing at all as the love of a woman for a man. Or was it? Even with her father she had never been able to respond as she should have responded. Was there something wrong there, too?

  The oscillating pendulum of her wildly fluctuating mood swung wide, touching sensitive contact points that had never before been joined. Was it possible that there was a connection between the way she felt about her father and this atrophy of desire that had grown within her woman’s body, this deadening that had destroyed the thing that made her a woman?

  It was a terrifying thought, pushing her toward the depths of what seemed an unexplored cavern. Yet, as she approached the blackness, there was the vague suggestion of familiarity, as if in a dream, or in another life, or in her early childhood, before reality had become something separable from instinct, she had walked into this same unlighted cave.

  Lory Austen had known, seemingly always, that she had not been what her father had wanted her to be. She had been a disappointment. He had wanted a son. She could see now that he had, relentlessly, in a thousand little ways, with a patience more terrifying than force, tried to remold her into the image of what his son might have been.

  She was closer now than she had ever been before to an understanding of the instinctive resistance she had always had to conquer before she could do the things he wanted her to do. She could remember the horror of his taking her through the molding plant when she was a little girl, so small then that he had carried her from the car to the door on his shoulder, but forcing her to walk when they entered the man’s world of the factory. When she had cried with fright, he had said, “Look at the men, they aren’t afraid.” That was how he had first let her know that he wanted her to be as a man would be, as his son would have been if he had had a son, and that was the same day when, to her speechless embarrassment, he had taken her to the men’s toilet.