by Sloan Wilson
“Friend told me,” Bugala said honestly. “Said you wanted that old barn made into a house.”
“I just want some estimates,” Tom said. “I won’t be in a position to do anything about it for some time”
“I looked at it this morning,” Bugala said. “You can’t do much with it–it’s just a shell. You could build a house from the ground up for what it would cost you to make anything out of that place.”
“Are you sure?” Betsy asked.
Bugala thought, You figure I go around discouraging business for the fun of it? Aloud he said, “There’s no basement–just a dirt floor. That stone is only a façade, and the wood under it is rotten.”
Well, there goes what we thought would be a sure initial profit, Tom thought. He said, “If we divided this land into one-acre lots, how much would it cost to run in a road that would give access to all of them?”
“You figuring on doing that?”
“I’m just looking into it.”
“You got permission from the Zoning Board?”
“I haven’t even asked. I don’t have title to the place yet.”
“Your land go to that row of pines over there?”
“That’s right. The stone fence marks the other boundaries.”
“Let me take a look at it,” Bugala said. He wanted time to think, for he had immediately perceived there might be more to do here than run in a road or convert a barn into a house. The light was fading, and the row of pines was dark against the sky. Bugala plunged into the grass, which was growing knee high, and walked rapidly toward the pines, darting quick glances in all directions. He took in everything–the astonishing view of the Sound, the gradual slope of the land which would provide a view from every lot, and the outcroppings of rock, which probably would mean expensive blasting, but no drainage problems. Putting in a road would be easy, he figured–the driveway to the old house could probably be continued right along the west boundary of the property. With a view like that, why sell acre lots? There was no place else in South Bay, almost nowhere else within commuting distance of New York, where a man could buy such a view of the Sound. Bugala’s imagination, which was always at a slow simmer, suddenly began to boil over. Why not put up a whole housing project on quarter-acre lots? All right, you’d have to jump over the Zoning Board somehow, but if it could be done–the prospect was fantastic!
Bugala’s mind did not plod, it soared, and he abruptly arrived at a picture of the way the land could be developed, complete with all financial details and photographs in national magazines showing what Antonio Bugala, Mr. Antonio Bugala, Esquire, had done. You’d start by running in a crooked road along the west boundary–a straight road would be cheaper, but everybody in Connecticut was crazy and liked crooked roads better. In all, Bugala judged with a practiced eye, there must be more than twenty acres of land. You wouldn’t put in straight rows of houses, you’d stagger them, about eighty houses on quarter-acre lots, each with a view of the Sound–you’d set them in just like seats in a theater, the back row the highest, and the front row the lowest, only you’d be careful to avoid straight lines. You’d put planting around each house and perhaps push up some earth between houses, so in time you couldn’t see one house from another, at least in the summer–maybe it would pay to transplant some fairly big bushes. The houses would be modern, very low to preserve the view, with big windows overlooking the Sound, and no cellars, to save having to blast through that ledge. It might pay to go arty and get a fancy architect to figure out enough variations on a few simple modern designs to prevent the place from looking like a low-cost housing development. The houses wouldn’t have to be much–what you’d be selling would be the view. With just an adequate house, you might get twenty-five thousand dollars for a quarter acre of that view. If you brought in your materials and heavy machinery to build all eighty houses at the same time, you might be able to put up something pretty good for a base cost of no more than fifteen thousand dollars per unit, for labor and materials.
Tony Bugala began to sweat. That meant there was a potential profit of ten thousand dollars on each quarter acre of land, he figured–a possible take of $800,000 before taxes, if it were handled right, and if you could raise the initial money for labor and materials. He wondered how much money Tom Rath had, and whether Tom had any clear idea of the potentials of the place. Quickly a lot of facts came together in his mind. Tom drove an old car; the land was obviously run down; people were saying old Mrs. Rath had died broke. Obviously Tom Rath didn’t have much. Bugala wondered whether Tom would sell him the land cheap–maybe the thing to do was to tell him a road couldn’t be put in, the whole venture was impractical, but he’d take the place off his hands for twenty or thirty thousand dollars. No, that wouldn’t work–in the long run it never paid to try that stuff, not if you planned on getting big. If you wanted to become really tops in the business, you had to forget that small-time cleverness and play it straight. Anyway, Rath had already asked other contractors for estimates on roads, and one of them would be sure to tell him he had a potential gold mine in the view.
The thing to do, Bugala decided, was just to talk the whole idea over with Rath, maybe try to form some kind of partnership, even a stock company to raise the money to put up the houses all at once. After all, there was no reason to try to cut Rath out–there would be plenty of profit to go around, a long way around, and it was more important to get part of it than to fail in a try to get it all. Tony Bugala, a man of quick enthusiasms and fast decisions, immediately made up his mind to drive some sort of bargain with Tom. For five years he had been looking for something big, something into which he could throw all his energies, one great calculated risk that would take him out of the small stuff and put him into the big time, where no one had thought “Buggy” Bugala could go. This was it, he figured–there would have to be lots of talking and fussing around and figuring and paper signing, but if the Zoning Board didn’t block them, this was it.
Bugala had jumped so far ahead in his thoughts that when he reached the row of pines and looked up to find himself standing in a bare field, with the light almost gone, he was surprised. He turned and started walking rapidly back toward Tom. If I can’t get Rath’s co-operation, the whole deal’s off, he thought–that’s the first step. His mind, however, refused to wait for the first step–it kept bounding ahead. The financing wouldn’t be hard. Rath could probably raise fifty thousand dollars on the land alone, once it was re-zoned, Bugala figured. As each house went up, more could be borrowed on it. On his own heavy construction equipment, Bugala figured, he could raise twenty thousand, and maybe he could get more on a personal note–the banks were already beginning to keep a friendly eye on Antonio Bugala. It wouldn’t be difficult to find a partner to throw in another twenty thousand, maybe, and with a hundred thousand in the kitty, construction could begin. Put a down payment on the materials for all eighty houses, but concentrate on completing the first four. Sell those at twenty-five thousand apiece, and you’ve got your initial investment back!
While he was thinking all this, Tony Bugala was walking rapidly, almost running with enthusiasm, back to the house, where Tom and Betsy were standing with the three children. Tom watched Bugala’s hurried movements with astonishment. It was growing chilly, and an evening breeze was starting to ruffle the distant waters of the Sound, which lay gray and nebulous in the last glow of twilight. Bugala came striding up to Tom, perspiring with excitement.
“Mr. Rath,” he said bluntly, “I’ve got a proposition to make.”
They sat in the kitchen of the old house talking until midnight. “Buggy” Bugala slammed the table with his small thick hand and, talking a mile a minute, described the houses he wanted to build so minutely that Tom could almost look out the window and see them. Betsy leaned forward, her face flushed and her lips parted, drinking it all in. “Eight hundred thousand dollars!” she said.
“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “This is all fine, but before we go any farther, there are a few hard
facts we got to take into account. In the first place, the estate isn’t settled yet, and the will may be contested–it may be months before we have a clear title on this land. In the second place, the whole plan depends on our getting permission from the Zoning Board. I’ll know more about that Saturday when I see Judge Bernstein, but meanwhile I wouldn’t count on anything too much–it’s never easy to put quarter-acre lots among a lot of big estates. In the third place, even if everything else goes all right, we’re going to have to look for somebody to put up more cash. Even if I can raise fifty thousand on the land, and even if you can throw in twenty or thirty thousand, we’ve still got twenty or thirty thousand to go–and that’s assuming that a hundred thousand is enough to start a project like this. And in the fourth place, Mr. Bugala, I don’t mean to be discourteous, but I just met you for the first time tonight, and I don’t want to commit myself on going into a venture like this with you. Have you ever done anything like this before?”
Bugala flushed. “I built six houses last year,” he said. “I can do it. I built fifteen houses since the war. And you know what? During the war I put an air strip across Kiwan in eight days! Eight days! You ever seen Kiwan?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “I’ve seen it. Did you put that air strip in?”
“You’re damn right! In eight days! And with the Japs bombing us every night!”
“You didn’t have to pay your men for overtime on Kiwan,” Tom said practically. “This is a different deal.”
“All right,” Bugala said. “I’ll tell you something else I’ve done. You know that big place a guy named Hopkins just put up down where the old yacht club used to be? I built almost half of that. Now let me level with you–I wasn’t the contractor, but plenty of it was subcontracted to me. I did most of the outside construction work, and damn near all the landscaping. You want to see what I can do, go down and look at the place. I’ll give you a list of all the people I’ve done work for! Ask the bank about me. Ask anybody around here about me–I got a good name!”
“I don’t doubt it,” Tom said. “I just don’t want to have to commit myself tonight.”
“You wouldn’t take my ideas and go to a big outfit with them, would you?”
“I don’t plan to, but I don’t want to commit myself,” Tom said. “There are a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out of your ideas yet. Do you really think we can make a profit of ten thousand dollars on each house and quarter-acre lot?”
“Maybe–and what if we only make half that? Would that be so bad?”
“No, but how are you going to pay interest on a hundred thousand dollars while we’re building? And there’ll be taxes. It might be a year before we had anything to sell. We’d be operating on an awfully slim margin.”
“Hell, we can borrow a hundred and ten thousand and use ten of it to pay the interest and taxes–that would last us almost two years!”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “You make it sound awfully easy. What if you run into unexpected delays? What if you can’t get your materials on time, or a storm washes us out when everything’s half done, and what if a depression sets in, and we can’t sell our houses when we finish them? This might be an easy way to make a pile, but it’s also an easy way to go bankrupt!”
“Tom always looks at the dark side of everything!” Betsy said impatiently. “Tommy, sometimes I think you just look for reasons why nothing can ever get done.”
“You got to gamble,” Bugala said. “Hell, everything’s a gamble! It’s the guys who take the chances who make the dough! If I hadn’t been willing to gamble, I’d still be on a pick and shovel gang!”
“I’m willing to gamble,” Tom said. “I just want to make sure we’ve got the odds on our side.”
Bugala laughed and stood up. “We’ll make it work!” he said confidently. “Get in touch with me after you’ve talked to Judge Bernstein about the zoning.”
The next morning on the way to the train, Tom asked Betsy to circle around by the waterfront, where the old yacht club had been, so he could look at the house Hopkins had built. Involuntarily, Betsy stepped on the brakes when they saw it. Hopkins’ house was low, long and enormous. The old yacht club wharf had been removed, and in its place was a carefully buttressed sea wall and an elaborate artificial harbor, in which a tall white yawl was anchored. One wing of the house reached out over the edge of the harbor. At least twelve acres of green lawn separated the house from the road. Betsy whistled. “You mean you work for that guy?” she said.
22
THAT SAME MORNING Ralph Hopkins awoke in his Park Avenue apartment at precisely seven o’clock. He had been working on his speech about mental health until after midnight, and as soon as he opened his eyes, his thoughts were full of it again. The latest draft written by Ogden wasn’t right, and Hopkins was beginning to wonder whether he was ever going to be able to devise a speech on mental health he wanted to give. Maybe the whole idea of starting a mental-health committee was a mistake. Glancing at his wrist watch, he saw it was quarter after seven. No time to worry about the speech now, he thought–there was a busy day ahead. He jumped lightly out of bed, stepped briskly across his small, simply furnished bedroom, and slid open a door leading to a large tiled shower room. Stripping off his white silk pajamas, he stepped into a booth and pulled a curtain. He turned an elaborate chromium dial on the wall in front of him, and hot water shot against him at a high velocity from a dozen nozzles placed in the booth above and on all sides of him. Gradually Hopkins turned the dial until the water was lukewarm–the doctor had forbidden him to take cold showers. He stood there in the lukewarm water for thirty seconds before turning the shower off and stepped out of the booth. From a special slot in the wall he drew an enormous, warm turkish towel. Wrapping himself in this, he walked to the other side of the room and stepped on a set of scales which had been built into the floor. He weighed a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, including the towel. That was three pounds too much, he figured, and made a mental note to cut down on his eating. It was stupid to get fat, he thought–half his friends were eating themselves into their graves.
After he had brushed his teeth and shaved, Hopkins went into his dressing room, where his valet had laid out his clothes. The valet was not there–Hopkins liked to have his clothes laid out for him, but hated to have people fussing about him. He dressed himself.
At quarter to eight Hopkins walked downstairs to the living room of his apartment, just as his personal secretary, Miss MacDonald, the elderly gray-haired woman Tom had observed in Hopkins’ outer office, was arriving. She always began her working day at a quarter to eight in Hopkins’ apartment and went to the office with him.
“Good morning, Miss MacDonald,” he said cheerily. “What have you got on the docket for me today?”
“Mr. Albert Pierce is coming in to have breakfast with you,” she said. “Mr. Pierce owns three television stations in Texas and two in Oklahoma. He has some programming suggestions he wants to discuss with you–remember his letters?”
“Yes,” Hopkins said.
The breakfast business appointment was routine; it had been routine for ten years. So many people wanted to see Hopkins that it was necessary to fit them in wherever possible. First there were all the people who wanted to see him on company business–production people, research men, the top entertainers who had to be flattered, advertising executives with big contracts, the owners of affiliated stations, promotion men, publicity experts, sponsors, writers who were great artists and had never written for television, but now were going to. There were also bankers, real-estate men, investment experts, and lawyers who, under Hopkins’ guidance, administered the holdings of the United Broadcasting Corporation. And in addition to all these people who wanted to see Hopkins, there were executives of the many corporations of which he was a director, and the men and women connected with the good works of which he was a trustee. Hopkins was a trustee of two universities, five hospitals, three public libraries, one fund for orphaned children, two foundations for the ad
vancement of the arts and sciences, a home for the blind, a haven for crippled children, and a snug harbor for retired seamen. In addition to that, he was a member of committees and commissions studying, variously, conditions in South India, Public Health in the United States, Racial Segregation, Higher Standards for Advertising, the Parking Problem in New York City, Farm Subsidies, Safety on the Highways, Freedom of the Press, Atomic Energy, the House Rules of the City Club, and a Code of Decency for Comic Books.
“After Mr. Pierce, Dr. Andrews is coming up–it’s time for your quarterly check-up,” Miss MacDonald said.
Hopkins frowned slightly. It was only common sense to have a quarterly check-up, but he detested it. “All right, what next?” he asked.
“Because of Dr. Andrews, I haven’t scheduled you for anything at the office before ten o’clock this morning. At that time Mr. Hebbard wants a conference with you–he’s got some new cost estimates and time schedules. At eleven there’s a board meeting, lasting through lunch. . . .”
She was interrupted by the doorbell. Hopkins opened the door. Albert Pierce, a large potbellied man wearing a wide cream-colored sombrero, walked in.
“Hello!” Hopkins said, shaking his hand heartily. “So good of you to come so early. I had hoped to have lunch with you, but my board is meeting today, and you know how it is! I certainly appreciate this chance to see you!”
The big man beamed. “Right nice of you to put yourself out for me!” he said.
Miss MacDonald slipped out a side door, and Hopkins led Pierce to the dining room. A waitress served Pierce a bowl of fresh fruit, waffles, and sausage patties. Hopkins had only a bowl of dry cereal with skim milk and a cup of black coffee. “I wish I had your appetite!” he said to his guest. “It’s this city air that takes it away from a man!”
