Marriage & Prosperity

by Chris Hampton

what you knew her as, nanny, cook and maid. And it wasn't possible to raise infants at the plant, so we finally got Albert to have the company rent a little house where we moved to with Henrietta so she could care for you two girls.

  "At this point we thought the company had grown to its maximum possible size. But Albert didn't. He thought our single product operation was inefficient. Groceries sell hundreds of products, but we were supplying only one. He thought it would be much better if we sold all kinds of condiments. So he added others to our line, things like catsup, mustard, relishes, etc. This required us to build a new, much larger plant, which Albert did. And he scouted out other small single product suppliers with the idea of buying them out and adding them to our company. We didn't learn till later where he got the money.

  "Then a terrible thing happened to him. He had just bought the eighth other company, an apple cider vinegar producer. He was exploring their facility when he fell into their huge storage vat. Nobody noticed him fall, and Albert couldn't swim, so he drowned. It was a hell of a way to go, and for his sake I always regretted that it wasn't hard cider. Drowning in booze, I'm sure, would have to have been better than going out in a vat of salad dressing fixings.

  "While we were recovering from the shock of his death we realized that we had become sole owners of the company, not the company we had originally expected to inherit, but a giant company with nine plants, the one we had just built here and the eight others Albert had bought, scattered all over the country. We took our sealed copy of Albert's will to his lawyer, and when he opened it we got another shock, the greatest shock of our lives. Instead of listing each of us separately, as we had naively and ignorantly thought, the will left the company to Mr. & Mrs. Clark McMurry Clarke! Well there was no Mr. & Mrs. Clark McMurry Clarke, not legally at any rate.

  "We didn't know what to do, except for one thing: Keep our mouths shut about not being married. We knew Albert had lots of other, much closer relatives, and if we let out the truth, one or all of them might challenge the will and take the company away from us. If that happened, since we had been working for no pay, we'd have been totally out in the cold with nothing at all. Since everyone in town knew, or thought he knew we were married, and since we had two little daughters, nobody ever questioned our right to inherit the company. All the legal business went through like clockwork, and in a few months Mr. & Mrs. Clark McMurry Clarke became the sole owners of the company.

  "We thought we had pulled off a slick trick. But when we got into Albert's papers we discovered that he was the one who had pulled the trick. In order to build the new plant and buy the eight other food processing companies, with his endless lies Albert had mortgaged our company up to the hilt, and a whole lot further. On the basis of his optimistic projections, otherwise known as bald-faced lies, he had borrowed many, many times more than the company was worth. To say we were over-leveraged is to make a mockery of the meaning of that term. Albert had left the company, and us, so overextended and smothered in debt it was virtually certain we'd go broke. Your mother and I were so discouraged we bought a half-pint of bourbon, the most we could afford, in order to drown our sorrows. Once again, two drinks got your mother plastered, and I finished the bottle, which finished me. And once again, though we normally found each other sexually repulsive, the drink did it to us. And for the third time in three years your mother got pregnant, this time with you, Clark Jr.

  "We were in a jam. A big jam. And for months we worried what to do. The most honest thing would be to declare bankruptcy, liquidate the company, and let the creditors fight over the scraps. We weren't responsible for Albert's lies, so they couldn't jail us. But if we took this way out it would bring our unmarried status out in the open and make bastards of our two beautiful little baby girls and of our on-the-way third kid, which we didn't learn till your birth, Clark Jr., would be our first son. And then how would we live? The only thing we knew how to do was to make steak sauce. The company was swimming in debt, but it was functioning, and it was providing a minimal living for us and our kids, so we decided to just plug on until the debts literally smothered us. What else could we do? I took Albert's job on the road as salesman and roving supervisor of the eight other plants he had bought. With me out on the road your mother needed someone to help her run operations at the home plant. So as your mother's assistant we hired the James who all of you have always known as our family's lifelong do-everything man. Henrietta, of course, continued to care for you two girls and then after your birth, for you Carl Jr., and to create a home for all of you and for your mother, who, with the help of James, was running the main plant here in town.

  "We struggled on, working our asses off and our fingers to the bone. We weren't getting ahead, but we were managing to eat and to keep the company from going under, just barely. Then almost a half year after you, Clark Jr., were born, everything changed. The Japanese surprise attack killed poor Mock, but it saved us. Within a month after the start of WWII the US government came to us and all but ordered us to sign a huge cost-plus contract to produce K-rations for the Army. Cost-plus, as you may know, was the government's way of obtaining all the things needed to fight WWII. These contracts paid a company for all of its costs, then the plus was added, a percentage of costs paid as a guaranteed profit. With one of those contracts it was virtually impossible for a company either to fail or to fail to make a profit. And as a result of our vital roles in a company that was a supplier to the Army, both James and I were deferred from the draft.

  "At that point, with a cost-plus contract, the company could not fail, not unless the whole country failed. In joyous relief at our salvation I bought another bottle of Champagne, and your mother and I celebrated by getting drunk again. Again it was two glasses for your mother and the rest of the bottle for me. And again, despite our mutual dislike, we did what we always did when we got drunk. You, Dan, are the result. Four times at bat, and four homeruns! How's that for a sexual batting average?! Fortunately for your mother's health (her doctor was alarmed about her too-closely spaced pregnancies) we never did that again. We didn't because we finally had fallen in love. Your mother had fallen in love with James, and I with Henrietta.

  "Normally in such a situation a couple would have divorced and gone their separate ways, each marrying the new woman or man who had come into his or her life. But we couldn't get legally divorced because we never had been legally married! And if it came out that we had never been married our inheritance of the company might have been legally challenged and overturned by some of Albert's relatives. So the four of us put our heads together and worked out the solution we all lived with for the rest of our lives.

  "We built the house we lived in ever since, the little house everyone always calls our love nest. Well, it was a love nest, but nothing like everyone thought. We built it with a separate apartment for a servant couple. Without any fanfare, but openly so everybody knew, Henrietta and James got married by a justice of the peace. They tried to make it look like a spur of the moment elopement, and that's what everyone took it as. But it was no elopement. Their marriage was as bogus as your mother's and mine. The two never lived together, and they most certainly never sexually consummated their marriage. However, as far as anyone but we four knew, James and Henrietta were our married servants who liven in our house's servants' quarters. In reality, Henrietta and I lived in those quarters. Your mother and James lived upstairs. It was a loony arrangement. But to the joy of each of the four of us, it worked.

  "While you four were infants it took some doing and a great deal of careful attention and lies to keep any of you from catching on to our peculiar living arrangement. That's why, as soon as each of you reached kindergarten age, you were shipped off to boarding school. Your mother, Henrietta, James and I all deeply regretted this, for all four of us loved each and every one of you and wanted you around us. But there was no way to do it. It was hard enough to keep you in the dark during vacation
s and summers at the lake. It would have been absolutely impossible if we had allowed you to grow up in our little love nest with its odd arrangement of lovers.

  "Henrietta and I always were madly devoted to each other, and we would have loved to have had some children of our own. But that would only have complicated matters and might have uncovered our whole unusual living arrangement and the phony marriage of your mother and I. That could have led to the loss of the company. So reluctantly, we never dared do it. Your mother, on the other hand, felt that with four babies in only a little less than five years, she had done her part for the next generation, so though she and James were as totally in love as Henrietta and I, they also declined having any children.

  "And that's how we two couples lived our lives. We four got on amiably, particularly James and Henrietta, who never had any hostility toward each other. Sometimes your mother and I would stir up our mutual dislike, but always James and Henrietta would smooth things over. We all were completely contented and happy in our unconventional love nest