The Rebellion of Yale Marratt

by Robert H. Rimmer

  What Yale hadn't admitted to Sam was that somehow he was on the same merry-go-round. The desire to learn, the quest for meaning in life, was nowhere near so strong for him as it had been when he had had Cynthia to share his enthusiasm. Now, the freedom that he had obtained by reducing his courses to a formula, left him with lonesome unshared hours, skating on the Charles in the winter, or sitting on its banks in the spring, or probing in dusty bookstores in Harvard Square, or sitting in a lonely seat at Symphony concerts, or riding the subway to Boston and prowling through darkened streets as he looked for the companionship he couldn't discover. And there was no surcease from this almost overwhelming feeling of being a man alone . . . of not being a part of the warm, laughing stream of humanity that passed him on the Boston streets. And even worse, he was pursued by an insidious feeling that somehow he must shake loose. If he didn't he would sink into a rut in Midhaven, owned by Pat Marratt and the Marratt Corporation. He had to discover some other reason for his existence, some other meaning for his life.

  There had seemed to be no answer. And then one day in April, he had gone with Sam to the Boston branch office of Higgins, Incorporated on State Street. That was the day he met Agatha Latham. Yale remembered that Sam had tried to beg off when Jack Wills, the Boston manager, had asked him if he would drive Agatha Latham home to Belmont.

  "Have a heart, Jack, old man. I've been studying like a bastard. I don't want to get saddled with that old creep." Sam had looked nervously in the direction of the call-board room. He said to Yale, "She's another Hetty Green. More damned money than you ever dreamed of. She's related to the Lathams from your neck of the woods. Alfred Latham's older sister, I think. She's a wild old witch. Dad introduced me to her a couple of years ago."

  Wills explained that Agatha Latham's chauffeur, an elderly man whom she called Butch, had gone home to Vermont for two weeks. Agatha, who couldn't drive a car, was living alone and was very demanding to say the least. "She's down here every damned day, poring over corporation reports. Believe me that old dame knows the highs and lows of every company listed on both exchanges as well as their dividend payments for the past ten years. You fellows could learn more from her than you'll ever learn at Harvard."

  Yale had been curious. He had heard about the legendary Agatha Latham. He remembered Pat had mentioned her as being a thorn in the flesh of Alfred Latham. He remembered that Agatha had been accused of contributing huge sums, during the depression, to zany causes. Yet she had refused to aid her brother financially when the Latham Shipyards had been near to bankruptcy. Agatha hadn't lived in Midhaven since her father, Lincoln Latham, had died, but she occasionally came to visit Alfred. Yale remembered hearing Pat impart the information that Agatha was in town. She usually came once a year to the stockholders meetings of the Latham Shipyards. Yale understood that on these days Alfred moved into the Club. Leaving Agatha to his wife, he drank a few more than his customary one drink a day.

  Jack Wills reminded Sam that Agatha was the largest investing client that Higgins Incorporated had. Sam reluctantly decided to drive Agatha to Belmont. He knew that if he refused, Jack would pick up their New York phone and let Higgins Senior do the convincing. Jack Wills took them into the call-board room. He introduced them to a tiny five-foot-two-inch lady. Jack referred to her in very polite tones as Miss Agatha. Yale recognized in Agatha's grey-blue eyes and pert expression a resemblance to Marge Latham. He was amused that despite her petite appearance (he found out later that she weighed just ninety-eight pounds) she conveyed a tremendous sense of power and dignity.

  She had looked at them sternly. "Mr. Wills, when I visit with you you know I always wait until the New York Stock Exchange closes." She looked at her watch. "I will be ready to leave in twenty-three minutes. I'm sure that Sam Higgins' son will be pleased to wait for me." She wrinkled her brow when she looked at Yale. "Marratt? Yale Marratt? Of course! You belong to that big blustering man who is a friend of my brother's in Midhaven. A very rude man! I haven't seen him for ten years."

  For the next twenty minutes instead of watching the board Agatha talked continuously. She gave them a quick history of Midhaven from the time of the Civil War. She discussed the pros and cons of Pat Marratt selling his stock in the Marratt Corporation on the open market. She slid into a discussion of her brother Alfred whom she felt had lost his touch. He didn't have the ability to meet the current situation. He needed the drive of a man like Henry Kaiser, and his son Edgar, if he wanted to capitalize on the world situation. Not just a few cruisers but thousands of tankers. She told them if they had any Latham Shipyard stock to sell it. Or if they wanted to buy some she would sell hers to them. When Jack Wills tried to edge away and return to his office, she insisted that he listen to the problems she was having since Butch had gone home to Vermont. She explained to them that Butch was her chauffeur. She told them that Butch was seventy-three years old and that she was seventy-four. She told them she wouldn't consider marrying Butch because he was too much of a fuddy-duddy. In fact, she had named him Butch after a character she had seen in a gangster movie. She had decided to name him Butch to help his ego. Her firm opinion was that a rose by another name would not smell so sweet. If her father hadn't named her Agatha, she would have married. Girls with names like Agatha had a strike against them. She had noticed a definite improvement in Henry's character since she had named him Butch. Everyone needed some sense of ego. She gave them a rapId dissertation on the necessity for a strong sense of ego.

  She was still talking in a calm, modulated voice when she interjected the fact that the New York Stock Exchange was now closed; that rails and steel had held firm which was only to be expected because anyone with any sense could see that the United States would be in a war very soon.

  Sam and Yale led Agatha to the elevators, guiding her to the parking lot where Sam had left his car. Agatha kept talking. Sam drove out Storrow Drive, in sullen anger, while Agatha advised Yale that she liked to be called Aunt Agatha . . . that if he and Sam were learning anything at Harvard Business School it would surprise her . . . that President Eliot certainly hadn't taken her advice, or he never would have started a Business School . . . that business couldn't be taught to young men. Business was for old men and maiden ladies. When a man was young he should devote himself to young women. That businessmen were a boring lot anyway. Look at her brother Alfred. A very dull man with a dull wife, a dull son and a dull daughter and a dull hobby that no respecting man would engage in.

  Aunt Agatha was well into a discussion of the evils of golf when Yale realized that Sam had turned into Harvard Business School. He pulled into the parking lot behind the library.

  Agatha turned to Sam. "Now, Junior, I've been in George Baker's library many times. You just take me home to Belmont."

  Sam had looked at her feebly. "To tell you the truth, Auntie, I've got an afternoon class." He smiled thinly at Yale evidently wondering whether Yale would reveal his lie. "Yale has a brand new Ford convertible. He'd just love to drive you home."

  At Agatha's insistence, though it was early April, Yale had put the top down on his car. And strangely, as they drove toward Belmont, she stopped talking. Yale asked her if she felt all right. He caught the twinkle in her eye, as she replied, "Young man, I'm a woman. I like to hear myself talk. I lead a rather secluded life. Occasionally, I find a captive audience. It gives me a chance to test my lucidity." She chuckled. "Junior had more sense than I expected. He escaped, and left you trapped with me."

  But Yale hadn't felt trapped. Aunt Agatha's fast, probing mind entranced him. On the way to her home he stopped at a roadside restaurant, and ordered her tea which she accepted, with delight. "I like you, young man. You show considerable skill at making me feel like a woman instead of an old lady."

  "Let's say that I like ladies, young and old, with a dash of vinegar," Yale had said. It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted through the remainder of his Harvard Business School years.

  As he watched the ffickering neon signs on Co
llins Avenue, wondering whether to go back to bed with Kathie, or sneak out and return to the Floridian Hotel, Yale remembered that from the moment Aunt Agatha offered to hire him and give Butch a rest, a few afternoons a week, his memories of Harvard would always be mixed up with Agatha's Victorian house in Belmont. He would never forget the evenings when the three of them, Butch, Agatha, himself, sitting uncomfortably on horsehair couches, fending off innumerable cats, discussed business, the stock market, Agatha's charities, modern poetry, music, philosophy, the current news, and Agatha's one experience with love that had cost her nearly a million dollars, but had saved her five million.

  It was in the fall of his second year at Harvard Business that Aunt Agatha revealed that she knew a good deal more about Yale than he had realized.

  He remembered Agatha opened the discussion by saying, "I couldn't spend an evening with your father, young man; I would find him extremely boring. In fact, he and my brother make good companions since they are on the same mental level. However, if you inquired in Midhaven this summer you no doubt discovered that I'm the crazy maiden aunt who lives in Boston with her cats and twice as many millions as I really have. I am considered crazy. Alfred would have me committed if he could. In 1930, I refused to lend the Latham Shipyards any money. He told me that the Yard would go bankrupt and that I would lose my stock. I told Alfred that since our father had seen fit to give him fifty thousand more shares than me, he rightly expected that a man would be able to manage the Yard better than a woman. I told Alfred that it would undoubtedly build up moral fiber that he was definitely lacking to get out of the situation without my help." Auntie Agatha had smiled, like a meek little old lady, at her audience composed of the wispy Butch who cooked the meals and Yale Marratt who had come to share the job of chauffeuring.

  In a thin little voice, a gnome-like expression on his face, Butch had explained to Yale: "Aunt Agatha likes the Clark Gable type. That's why she refuses to marry me."

  Aunt Agatha ignored him. "Now, I don't want you to think I don't admire your father, young man. I think he is the salt that can keep this Roosevelt system of capitalism from becoming rather pallid." Agatha banged the table with her hand. "He's the type that refuses to conform to these wild-eyed social planners. There are too many men who feel that the United States is simply a jigsaw puzzle with so many pat pieces. Too many men who think that they can make us all conform to their idea of what is best for us. When they finish there will be big jagged pieces that you can label Pat Marratt. You can thank the good Lord that the Pat Marratts still exist in this country." She saw Yale shrug his shoulders. Then, she dropped her little surprise. "I know you feel that your father is a narrow, biased man. Doctor Tangle dropped in to see me this summer." She smiled at Yale's shocked expression. "When you have a great deal of money, you acquire some strange friends. Useful, though. Don't you forget that, young man! From our mutual friend, Doctor Tangle, I learned about your Jewish girl friend. I also learned that Pat Marratt is surprised that you survived the first year at Harvard Business, and will be doubly surprised if you make the second."

  Agatha had paused. She looked at Yale very carefully before she spoke again. "During the summer I thought this over very carefully. I wondered how I could repay the generosity of a young man named Yale Marratt who devotes so much time to an old lady."

  "I'm planning to steal that oil painting in the front hall for repayment," Yale said, grinning at her.

  "In case you don't think I know, that painting is a Copley." Agatha said coolly. "You can have it together with the one over the fireplace. They'll only bring you a few thousand dollars. They are his early period."

  "Do you measure everything by money, Aunt Agatha?" Yale asked.

  Agatha looked at him bitterly. "My father left me a hundred thousand dollars and some shares in the Latham Yards. He had stuffed so much education into me that I never could find a man who measured up to some artificial idea I had of myself. When I got to be forty years old and had no husband I knew that I had to prove myself some other way. I decided that I would do it right, in the same area that had meant so much to my father and my brother. Money. Only money doesn't own me, young man. I own it! And that's the difference! My income last year from investments was slightly over two million dollars. Butch and I lived here last year for a total annual expenditure of about twenty thousand. A good portion of the balance that is left to me after brokerage fees and in- come taxes is donated to various Jewish refugee organizations."

  Yale didn't try to apologize to her. He listened, in wonder, as Aunt Agatha proposed to teach him everything she had learned about investing. She had found out that Pat had given him ten thousand dollars. She demanded to know how much was left. She was pleased to find that he still had six thousand dollars.

  "Sell your car, young man. That will give you another thousand. I'm not going to give you a red cent, but I'm going to help you prove that someday you can beat Pat Marratt at his own game. And that's going to be the best thing that ever happened to you, or I miss my guess. But it isn't going to fall right into your lap, young man. You are going to study like you never have before."

  Agatha hadn't been fooling. Before the final year at Harvard was over, with Agatha as a demon tutor, Yale worked his way through practically every book available on the subject of finance. He found as he studied the stock market and learned the intricacies of stocks and bonds and warrants and puts and calls, and learned from Agatha the practicalities of day-to-day buying and selling and investing, that the whole subject was further confused by ever changing legal patterns and tax laws. Driven by Agatha, he read widely in corporation law. He waded through endless investment surveys that Agatha subscribed to. The more he studied, the more he was amazed by the seemingly limitless breadth of Aunt Agatha's knowledge. He told her that she astounded him. He remembered that it was the only time that he had seen tears in the old lady's eyes.

  "I know so much, young man," she said sadly, "that I was fifty-six before I found a man. He was what Butch would call the Clark Gable type. A very big, uneducated man. He would pick me tight off the ground and hug me. He called me his little doll. That was in nineteen twenty-eight. One day he asked me in his very endearing way how much money I had. It was about six million dollars, then; all of it in the stock market. He told me that he wanted to marry me but he pointed out that he couldn't live on his wife's money. I knew that he had no money of his own. I assigned a million dollars in blue chip stocks to him. A week later he disappeared." Agatha sighed. "I was so broken up that I told Junior's father to sell me out of the market. I had lost interest in everything. I took a trip around the world. I was in Paris in October of nineteen twenty-nine. So you see, young man, some of this investing business is luck. If Maguire, that was his name, had married me, I probably would have lost over five million dollars. Poor Maguire. He was so ignorant that I'm sure he probably left his million in the market, thinking he would have two million."

  Yale tiptoed back into the room. Kathie was still sleeping. He took his clothes into the bathroom and slowly got dressed.

  In a way, he thought, I was in love with Aunt Agatha. A wonderful, sprightly old lady. He wondered if she was still holding out in her Belmont house surrounded with shiny new retail stores. "They'll never get this place," she had told him. "I've got a half-acre right in the middle of everything. They offered me fifty thousand for the house. Imagine that, young man! Fifty thousand dollars just to tear it down! Well, they'll never get it. I changed my will yesterday. I'm going to leave enough money some day to support this place as a free clinic for cats. The Latham Cat Hospital. I must write and tell my brother, Alfred. He'll be delighted."

  Dressed in his uniform, Yale deliberated whether to leave money for Kathie. He decided against it. He scribbled on a piece of hotel stationery. "It was nice, Kathie. Take care." Quietly he closed the hotel room door. Walking toward the Floridian Hotel, he thought about the money belt be had left there. Carelessly dropped into his barrack bag, it contained twenty thous
and dollars in one hundred dollar bills. With Agatha's help he had paid for the last year at Harvard and made twenty thousand dollars to boot. What had he proved? That twenty thousand dollars, and the ability to invest or speculate wisely had failed to appease the awful sense of loneliness that pursued him. Now, two years later, wearing the U.S. Army Finance department diamond insignia and the shiny gold bars of a second lieutenant, he, like the rest of the people in the world was racing nowhere with a deadly seriousness.

  Walking through the hotel lobby he smiled vaguely at an attractive blonde wearing a Red Cross uniform. But his thoughts were with a girl sleeping in a trailer in Miami.

  3

  Anne Wilson walked up to the outgoing passenger desk at the Floridian Hotel for the third time. This was typical army, she thought. They had put her on call for overseas departure at ten in the morning. Now it was nine-thirty in the evening and she was still waiting.

  "Do you think that the plane will go out tonight?" she asked wearily. The sergeant at the desk gave her a sad look. "You and about twenty others are wondering the same thing. In case you don't know it, you are flying Pan American to Casablanca. From there the Air Transport Command picks you up. Maybe the wings have fallen off the plane. At any rate from the looks of things it won't go out for another couple of hours."