The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  The coffee was pretty bad, the Danish, as advertised, pretty good. Slade said through a mouthful of it, ‘And how is Amy?’ Amy was Morrison’s wife.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Morrison said heartily. ‘And how is Gertrude?’

  ‘Gretchen.’

  ‘That’s right. Gretchen. Stupid of me. But it’s been so long, Bill—’

  ‘It has. Almost three years. Anyhow, last I heard of her, Gretchen’s doing all right.’

  ‘Last you heard of her?’

  ‘We separated a few months ago. She just couldn’t hack it any more.’ Slade shrugged. ‘My fault mostly. Getting turned down for one worthwhile job after another didn’t sweeten the disposition. And jockeying a cab ten, twelve hours a day doesn’t add sugar to it. So she and the kid have their own little flat out in Queens, and she got herself some kind of cockamamie receptionist job with a doctor there. Helps eke out what I can give her. How’s your pair, by the way? Scott and Morgan, isn’t it? Big fellows now, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Thirteen and ten,’ Morrison said. ‘They’re fine. Fine.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. And the old neighborhood? Any changes?’

  ‘Not really. Well, we did lose a couple of the old-timers. Mike Costanzo and Gordie McKechnie. Remember them?’

  ‘Who could forget Mike, the world’s worst poker player? But McKechnie?’

  ‘That split-level, corner of Hillcrest and Maple. He’s the one got himself so smashed that time in the duck blind that he went overboard.’

  ‘Now I remember. And that fancy shotgun of his, six feet underwater in the mud. Man, that sobered him up fast. What happened to him and Costanzo?’

  ‘Well,’ Morrison said uncomfortably, ‘they were both in Regional Customer Services. Then somebody on the top floor got the idea that Regional and National should be tied together, and some people in both offices had to be let go. I think Mike’s in Frisco now, he’s got a lot of family there. Nobody’s heard from Gordie. I mean—’ Morrison cut it short in embarrassment.

  ‘I know what you mean. No reason to get red in the face about it, Larry.’ Slade eyed Morrison steadily over his coffee cup. ‘Wondering what happened to me?’

  ‘Well, to be frank—’

  ‘Nothing like being frank. I put in two years making the rounds, lining up employment agencies, sending out enough resumes to make a ten-foot pile of paper. No dice. Ran out of unemployment insurance, cash, and credit. There it is, short and sweet.’

  ‘But why? With the record you piled up at Majestico—’

  ‘Middle level. Not top echelon. Not decision-making stuff. Middle level, now and forever. Just like everybody else on Hillcrest Road. That’s why we’re on Hillcrest Road. Notice how the ones who make it to the top echelon always wind up on Greenbush Heights? And always after only three or four years? But after you’re middle level fifteen years the way I was—’

  Up to now Morrison had been content with his twelve years in Sales Analysis. Admittedly no ball of fire, he had put in some rough years after graduation from college – mostly as salesman on commission for some product or other – until he had landed the job at Majestico. Now he felt disoriented by what Slade was saying. And he wondered irritably why Slade had to wear that cap while he was eating. Trying to prove he was just another one of these cabbies here? He wasn’t. He was a college man, had owned one of the handsomest small properties on Hillcrest Road, had been a respected member of the Majestico executive team.

  Morrison said, ‘I still don’t understand. Are you telling me there’s no company around needs highly qualified people outside decision-making level? Ninety percent of what goes on anyplace is our kind of job, Bill. You know that.’

  ‘I do. But I’m forty-five years old, Larry. And you want to know what I found out? By corporation standards I died five years ago on my fortieth birthday. Died, and didn’t even know it. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to realize that at first. It got a lot easier after a couple of years’ useless job-hunting.’

  Morrison was 46 and was liking this less and less. ‘But the spot you’re in is only temporary, Bill. There’s still—’

  ‘No, no. Don’t do that, Larry. None of that somewhere-over-the-rainbow line. I finally looked my situation square in the eye, I accepted it, I made the adjustment. With luck, what’s in the cards for me is maybe someday owning my own cab. I buy lottery tickets, too, because after all somebody’s got to win that million, right? And the odds there are just as good as my chances of ever getting behind a desk again at the kind of money Majestico was paying me.’ Again he was looking steadily at Morrison over his coffee cup. ‘That was the catch, Larry. That money they were paying me.’

  ‘They pay well, Bill. Say, is that what happened? You didn’t think you were getting your price and made a fuss about it? So when the department went under you were one of the—’

  ‘Hell, no,’ Slade cut in sharply. ‘You’ve got it backwards, man. They do pay well. But did it ever strike you that maybe they pay too well?’

  ‘Too well?’

  ‘For the kind of nine-to-five paperwork I was doing? The donkey work?’

  ‘You were an assistant head of department, Bill.’

  ‘One of the smarter donkeys, that’s all. Look, what I was delivering to the company had to be worth just so much to them. But when every year – every first week in January – there’s an automatic cost-of-living increase handed me I am slowly and steadily becoming a luxury item. Consider that after fourteen-fifteen years of those jumps every year, I am making more than some of those young hotshot executives in the International Division. I am a very expensive proposition for Majestico, Larry. And replaceable by somebody fifteen years younger who’ll start for a hell of a lot less.’

  ‘Now hold it. Just hold it. With the inflation the way it is, you can’t really object to those cost-of-living raises.’

  Slade smiled thinly. ‘Not while I was getting them, pal. It would have meant a real scramble without them. But suppose I wanted to turn them down just to protect my job? You know that can’t be done. Those raises are right there in the computer for every outfit like Majestico. But nobody in management has to like living with it. And what came to me after I was canned was that they were actually doing something about it.’

  ‘Ah, look,’ Morrison said heatedly. ‘You weren’t terminated because you weren’t earning your keep. There was a departmental reorganization. You were just a victim of it.’

  ‘I was. The way those Incas or Aztecs or whatever used to lay out the living sacrifice and stick the knife into him. Don’t keep shaking your head, Larry. I have thought this out long and hard. There’s always a reorganization going on in one of the divisions. Stick a couple of departments together, change their names, dump a few personnel who don’t fit into the new table of organization.

  ‘But the funny thing, Larry, is that the ones who usually seem to get dumped are the middle-aged, middle-level characters with a lot of seniority. The ones whose take-home pay put them right up there in the high-income brackets. Like me. My secretary lost out in that reorganization too, after eighteen years on the job. No complaints about her work. But she ran into what I did when I told them I’d be glad to take a transfer to any other department. No dice. After all, they could hire two fresh young secretaries for what they were now paying her.’

  ‘And you think this is company policy?’ Morrison demanded.

  ‘I think so. I mean, what the hell are they going to do? Come to me and say, “Well, Slade, after fifteen years on the job you’ve priced yourself right out of the market, so goodbye, baby?” But those reorganizations? Beautiful. “Too bad, Slade, but under the new structure we’re going to have to lose some good men.” That’s the way it was told to me, Larry. And that’s what I believed until I woke up to the facts of life.’

  The piece of Danish in Morrison’s mouth was suddenly dry and tasteless. He managed to get it down with an effort. ‘Bill, I don’t want to say it – I hate to say it – but that whole line sounds paranoid.’
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br />   ‘Does it? Then think it over, Larry. You still in Sales Analysis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I figured. Now just close your eyes and make a head count of your department. Then tell me how many guys forty-five or over are in it.’

  Morrison did some unpalatable calculation. ‘Well, there’s six of us. Including me.’

  ‘Out of how many?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Funny how the grass manages to stay so green, isn’t it?’

  It was funny, come to think of it. No, funny wasn’t the word. Morrison said weakly, ‘Well, a couple of the guys wanted to move out to the Coast, and you know there’s departmental transfers in and out—’

  ‘Sure there are. But the real weeding comes when there’s one of those little reorganizations. You’ve seen it yourself in your own department more than once. Juggle around some of those room dividers. Move some desks here and there. Change a few descriptions in the company directory. The smokescreen. But behind that smoke there’s some high-priced old faithfuls getting called upstairs to be told that, well, somebody’s got to go, Jack, now that things are all different, and guess whose turn it is.’

  Slade’s voice had got loud enough to be an embarrassment. Morrison pleaded: ‘Can’t we keep it down, Bill? Anyhow, to make villains out of everybody on the top floor—’

  Slade lowered his voice, but the intensity was still there. ‘Who said they were villains? Hell, in their place I’d be doing the same thing. For that matter, if I was head of personnel for any big outfit, I wouldn’t take anybody my age on the payroll either. Not if I wanted to keep my cushy job in personnel, I wouldn’t.’ The wind suddenly seemed to go out of him. ‘Sorry, Larry. I thought I had everything under control, but when I saw you – when I saw it was one of the old Hillcrest bunch – it was too much to keep corked up. But one thing—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t want anybody else back there in on this. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘Don’t just toss off the oh, sure like that. This is the biggest favor you could do me – not to let anybody else in the old crowd hear about me, not even Amy. No post-mortems up and down Hillcrest for good old Bill Slade. One reason I let myself cut loose right now was because you always were a guy who liked to keep his mouth tight shut. I’m counting on you to do that for me, Larry. I want your solemn word on it.’

  ‘You’ve got it, Bill. You know that.’

  ‘I do. And what the hell’ – Slade reached across the table and punched Morrison on the upper arm – ‘any time they call you in to tell you there’s a reorganization of Sales Analysis coming up, it could turn out you’re the guy elected to be department head of the new layout. Right?’

  Morrison tried to smile. ‘No chance of that, Bill.’

  ‘Well, always look on the bright side, Larry. As long as there is one.’

  Outside the Coliseum there was another of those little wrestling matches about paying the tab – Slade refusing to take anything at all for the ride, Morrison wondering, as he eyed the meter, whether sensitivity here called for a standard tip, a huge tip, or none at all – and again Slade won.

  Morrison was relieved to get away from him, but, as he soon found, the relief was only temporary. It was a fine Indian summer day, but somehow the weather now seemed bleak and threatening. And doing the Majestico show, looking over the displays, passing the time of day with recognizable co-workers turned out to be a strain. It struck him that it hadn’t been that atrocious cap on Slade’s head that had thrown him, it had been the gray hair showing under the cap. And there was very little gray hair to be seen on those recognizable ones here at the Majestico show.

  Morrison took a long time at the full-length mirror in the men’s room, trying to get an objective view of himself against the background of the others thronging the place. The view he got was depressing. As far as he could see, in this company he looked every minute of his 46 years.

  Back home he stuck to his word and told Amy nothing about his encounter with Slade. Any temptation to was readily suppressed by his feeling that once he told her that much he’d also find himself exposing his morbid reaction to Slade’s line of thinking. And that would only lead to her being terribly understanding and sympathetic while, at the same time, she’d be moved to some heavy humor about his being such a born worrier. He was a born worrier, he was the first to acknowledge it, but he always chafed under that combination of sympathy and teasing she offered when he confided his worries to her. They really made quite a list, renewable each morning on rising. The family’s health, the condition of the house, the car, the lawn, the bank balance – the list started there and seemed to extend to infinity.

  Yet, as he was also the first to acknowledge, this was largely a quirk of personality – he was, as his father had been, somewhat sobersided and humorless – and, quirks aside, life was a generally all-right proposition. As it should be when a man can lay claim to a pretty and affectionate wife, and a couple of healthy young sons, and a sound home in a well-tended neighborhood. And a good steady job to provide the wherewithal.

  At least, up to now.

  Morrison took a long time falling asleep that night, and at three in the morning came bolt awake with a sense of foreboding. The more he lay there trying to get back to sleep, the more oppressive grew the foreboding. At four o’clock he padded into his den and sat down at his desk to work out a precise statement of the family’s balance sheet.

  No surprises there, just confirmation of the foreboding. For a long time now, he and Amy had been living about one month ahead of income which, he suspected, was true of most families along Hillcrest Drive. The few it wasn’t true of were most likely at least a year ahead of income and sweating out the kind of indebtedness he had always carefully avoided.

  But considering that his assets consisted of a home with ten years of mortgage payments yet due on it and a car with two years of payments still due, everything depended on income. The family savings account was, of course, a joke. And the other two savings accounts – one in trust for each boy to cover the necessary college educations – had become a joke as college tuition skyrocketed. And, unfortunately, neither boy showed any signs of being scholarship material.

  In a nutshell, everything depended on income. This month’s income. Going by Slade’s experience in the job market – and Slade had been the kind of competent, hardworking nine-to-five man any company should have been glad to take on – this meant that everything depended on the job with Majestico. Everything. Morrison had always felt that landing the job in the first place was the best break of his life. Whatever vague ambitions he had in his youth were dissolved very soon after he finished college and learned that out here in the real world he rated just about average in all departments, and that his self-effacing, dogged application to his daily work was not going to have him climbing any ladders to glory.

  Sitting there with those pages of arithmetic scattered around the desk, Morrison, his stomach churning, struggled with the idea that the job with Majestico was suddenly no longer a comfortable, predictable way of life but for someone his age, and with his makeup and qualifications, a dire necessity. At five o’clock, exhausted but more wide-awake than ever, he went down to the kitchen for a bottle of beer. Pills were not for him. He had always refused to take even an aspirin tablet except under extreme duress, but beer did make him sleepy, and a bottle of it on an empty stomach, he estimated, was the prescription called for in this case. It turned out that he was right about it.

  In the days and weeks that followed, this became a ritual: the abrupt waking in the darkest hours of the morning, the time at his desk auditing his accounts and coming up with the same dismal results, and the bottle of beer which, more often than not, allowed for another couple of hours of troubled sleep before the alarm clock went off.

  Amy, the soundest of sleepers, took no notice of this, so that was all right. And by exercising a rigid self-control he managed to keep her
unaware of those ragged nerves through the daylight hours as well, although it was sometimes unbearably hard not to confide in her. Out of a strange sense of pity, he found himself more sensitive and affectionate to her than ever. High-spirited, a little scatterbrained, leading a full life of her own what with the boys, the Parent-Teachers Club, and half a dozen community activities, she took this as no less than her due.

  Along the way, as an added problem, Morrison developed some physical tics which would show up when least expected. A sudden tremor of the hands, a fluttering of one eyelid which he had to learn to quickly cover up. The most grotesque tic of all, however – it really unnerved him the few times he experienced it – was a violent, uncontrollable chattering of the teeth when he had sunk to a certain point of absolute depression. This only struck him when he was at his desk during the sleepless times considering the future. At such times he had a feeling that those teeth were diabolically possessed by a will of their own, chattering away furiously as if he had just been plunged into icy water.

  In the office he took refuge in the lowest of low profiles. Here the temptation was to check on what had become of various colleagues who had over the years departed from the company, but this, Morrison knew, might raise the question of why he had, out of a clear blue sky, brought up the subject. The subject was not a usual part of the day’s conversational currency in the department. The trouble was that Greenbush was, of course, a company town, although in the most modern and pleasant way. Majestico had moved there from New York 20 years before; the town had grown around the company complex. And isolated as it was in the green heartland of New Jersey, it had only Majestico to offer. Anyone leaving the company would therefore have to sell his home, like it or not, and relocate far away. Too far, at least, to maintain old ties. It might have been a comfort, Morrison thought, to drop in on someone in his category who had been terminated by Majestico and who could give him a line on what had followed. Someone other than Slade. But there was no one like this in his book.