Big Money

Charley Anderson

First thing Charley heard when he climbed down from the controls was Farrell’s voice shouting, “Charley Anderson, the boy with the knowhow. Welcome to little old Detroit,” and then he saw Farrell’s round face coming across the green grass of the field and his big mouth wide open. “Kind of bumpy, wasn’t it?”

“It was cold as hell” said Charley. “Call this a field?”

“We’re getting the Chamber of Commerce het up about it. You can give ’em an earful about it maybe.”

“I sure did slew around in that mud. Gosh, I pulled out in such a hurry I didn’t even bring a toothbrush.”

Charley pulled off his gloves that were dripping with oil from a leak he’d had trouble with in the bumpy going over the hills. His back ached. It was a relief that Bill Cermak was there to get the boat into the hangar. “All right, let’s go,” he said. “Thataboy,” roared Farrell and put his hand on Charley’s shoulder. “We’ll stop by the house and see if I can fit you into a change of clothes.”

At that moment a taxi rolled out onto the field and out of it stepped Taki. He came running over with Charley’s suitcase. He reached the car breathless. “I hope you have a nice journey, sir.” “Check,” said Charley. “Did you get me a walkup?” “Very nice inexpensive elevator apartment opposed to the Museum of Municipal Art,” panted Taki in his squeaky voice.

“Well, that’s service,” Farrell said and put his foot on the starter of his puttycolored Lincoln towncar. The motor purred silkily.

Taki put the suitcase in back and Charley hopped in beside Farrell. “Taki thinks we lack culture,” said Charley, laughing. Farrell winked.

It was pleasant sitting slumped in the seat beside Farrell’s well-dressed figure behind the big softpurring motor, letting a little drowsiness come over him as they drove down broad straight boulevards with here and there a construction job that gave them a whiff of new bricks and raw firboards and fresh cement as they passed. A smell of early spring came off the fields and backlots on a raw wind that had little streaks of swampy warmth in it.

“Here’s our little shanty,” said Farrell and swerved into a curving graded driveway and jammed on the brakes at the end of a long greystone house with narrow pointed windows and gothic pinnacles like a cathedral. They got out and Charley followed him across a terrace down an avenue of boxtrees in pots and through a frenchwindow into a billiardroom with a heavilycarved ceiling. “This is my playroom,” said Farrell. “After all a man’s got to have someplace to play… Here’s a bathroom you can change in. I’ll be back for you in ten minutes.”

It was a big bathroom all in jadegreen with a couch, an easychair, a floorlamp, and a set of chestweights and indianclubs in the corner. Charley stripped and took a hot shower and changed his clothes. He was just putting on his bestlooking striped tie when Farrell called through the door. “Everything O.K.?” “Check,” said Charley as he came out. “I feel like a million dollars.” Farrell looked him in the eye in a funny way and laughed. “Why not?” he said.

The office was in an unfinished officebuilding in a ring of unfin ished officebuildings round Grand Circus Park. “You won’t mind if I run you through the publicity department first, Charley,” said Farrell. “Eddy Sawyer’s a great boy. Then we’ll all get together in my office and have some food.”

“Check,” said Charley.

“Say, Eddy, here’s your birdman,” shouted Farrell, pushing Charley into a big bright office with orange hangings. “Mr. Sawyer, meet Mr. Anderson… the Charley Anderson, our new consulting engineer… Give us a buzz when you’ve put him through a course of sprouts.”

Farrell hurried off leaving Charley alone with a small yellowfaced man with a large towhead who had the talk and manners of a high-school boy with the cigarette habit. Eddy Sawyer gave Charley’s hand a tremendous squeeze, asked him how he liked the new offices, explained that orange stood for optimism, asked him if he ever got airsick, explained that he did terribly, wasn’t it the damnedest luck seeing the business he was in, brought out from under his desk a bottle of whiskey. “I bet J. Y. didn’t give you a drink… That man lives on air, a regular salamander.”

Charley said he would take a small shot and Eddy Sawyer produced two glasses that already had the ice in them and a siphon. “Say when.” Charley took a gulp, then Eddy leaned back in his swivelchair having drained off his drink and said, “Now, Mr. Anderson, if you don’t mind let’s have the old lifehistory, or whatever part of it is fit to print… Mind you, we won’t use anything right away but we like to have the dope so that we can sort of feed it out as occasion demands.”

Charley blushed. “Well,” he said, “there’s not very much to tell.”

“That a boy,” said Eddy Sawyer, pouring out two more drinks and putting away the whiskeybottle. “That’s how all the best stories begin.” He pressed a buzzer and a curlyhaired stenographer with a pretty pink dollface came in and sat down with her notebook at the other side of the desk. While he was fumbling through his story, Charley kept repeating to himself in the back of his head, “Now, bo, don’t make an ass of yourself the first day.” Before they were through Farrell stuck his head in the door and said to come along, the crowd was waiting.

“Well, did you get all fixed up?… Charley, I want you to meet our salesmanager… Joe Stone, Charley Anderson. And Mr. Frank and Mr. O’Brien, our battery of legal talent, and Mr. Bledsoe, he’s in charge of output… that’s your department.”

Charley shook a number of hands; there was a slick black head with hair parted in the middle, a pair of bald heads and a steelgrey head with hair bristling up like a shoebrush, noseglasses, tortoiseshell glasses, one small mustache. “Sure mike,” Eddy Sawyer was stuttering away nervously. “I’ve got enough on him to retire on the blackmail any time now.”

“That’s a very good starter, young man,” said Cyrus Bledsoe, the greyhaired man, gruffly. “I hope you’ve got some more notions left in the back of your head.”

“Check,” said Charley.

They all, except Bledsoe who growled that he never ate lunch, went out with him to the Athletic Club where they had a private diningroom and cocktails set out. Going up in the elevator a voice behind him said, “How’s the boy, Charley?” and Charley turned round to find himself face to face with Andy Merritt. Andy Merritt’s darkgrey suit seemed to fit him even better than usual. His sour smile was unusually thin.

“Why, what are you doing here?” Charley blurted out.

“Detroit,” said Andy Merritt, “is a town that has always interested me extremely.”

“Say, how’s Joe making out?” Andy Merritt looked pained and Charley felt he ought to have kept his mouth shut. “Joe was in excellent health when I last saw him,” said Andy. It turned out that Andy was lunching with them too.

When they were working on the filetmignon, Farrell got up and made a speech about how this luncheon was a beginning of a new spirit in the business of manufacturing airplane parts and motors and that the time had come for the airplane to quit hanging on the apronstrings of the automotive business because airplanes were going to turn the automobile men into a lot of bicycle manufacturers before you could say Jack Robinson. A milliondollar business had to be handled in a milliondollar way. Then everybody yelled and clapped and Farrell held up his hand and described Charley Anderson’s career as a war ace and an inventor and said it was a very happy day, a day he’d been waiting for a long time, when he could welcome him into the Tern flock. Then Eddy Sawyer led a cheer for Anderson and Charley had to get up and say how he was glad to get out there and be back in the great open spaces and the real manufacturing center of this country, and when you said manufacturing center of this country what you meant was manufacturing center of the whole bloody world. Eddy Sawyer led another cheer and then they all settled down to eat their peachmelba.

When they were getting their hats from the checkroom downstairs Andy Merritt tapped Charley on the shoulder and said, “A very good speech… You know I’d felt for some time we ought to make a break… You can’t run a big time business with smalltown ideas. That’s the trouble with poor old Joe who’s a prince, by the way… smalltown ideas…”

Charley went around to see the apartment. Taki had everything fixed up in great shape, flowers in the vases and all that sort of thing. “Well, this is slick,” said Charley. “How do you like it in Detroit?” “Very interesting,” said Taki. “Mr. Ford permits to visit Highland Park.” “Gosh, you don’t lose any time… Nothing like that assemblyline in your country, is there?” Taki grinned and nodded. “Very interesting,” he said with more emphasis.

Charley took off his coat and shoes and lay down on the couch in the sittingroom to take a nap but it seemed he’d just closed his eyes when Taki was grinning and bowing from the door.

“Very sorry, sir, Mr. Benton, longdistance.” “Check,” said Charley.

Taki had his slippers there for him to stick his feet into and had discreetly laid his bathrobe on a chair beside the couch. At the phone Charley noticed that it was already dusk and that the streetlights were just coming on.

“Hello, Nat.” “Hay, Charley, how are you making out?” “Great,” said Charley. “Say, I just called up to let you know you and Andy Merritt were going to be elected vicepresidents at the next meeting of Tern stockholders.” “How do you know?” Nat laughed into the phone. “Some intelligence service,” said Charley. “Well, service is what we’re here for,” said Nat. “And, Charley, there’s a little pool down here… I’m taking a dip myself and I thought you might like to come in… I can’t tell you the details over the phone but I wrote you this afternoon.” “I haven’t got any cash.” “You could put up about ten grand of stock to cover. The stock won’t be tied up long.” “Check,” said Charley. “Shoot the moon… this is my lucky year.”

The plant was great. Charley drove out there in a new Buick sedan he bought himself right off the dealer’s floor the next morning. The dealer seemed to know all about him and wouldn’t even take a down payment. “It’ll be a pleasure to have your account, Mr. Anderson,” he said.

Old Bledsoe seemed to be on the lookout for him and showed him around. Everything was lit with skylights. There wasn’t a belt in the place. Every machine had its own motor. “Farrell thinks I’m an old stickinthemud because I don’t talk high finance all the time, but God damn it, if there’s a more uptodate plant than this anywhere, I’ll eat a goddamned dynamo.” “Gee, I thought we were in pretty good shape out at Long Island City… But this beats the Dutch.” “That’s exactly what it’s intended to do,” growled Bledsoe.

Last Bledsoe introduced Charley to the engineering force and then showed him into the office off the draftingroom that was to be his. They closed the groundglass door and sat down facing each other in the silvery light from the skylight. Bledsoe pulled out a stogie and offered one to Charley. “Ever smoke these?… They clear the head.”

Charley said he’d try anything once. They lit the stogies and Bledsoe began to talk between savage puffs of stinging blue smoke. “Now look here, Anderson, I hope you’ve come out here to work with us and not to juggle your damned stock… I know you’re a war hero and all that and are slated for windowdressing, but it looks to me like you might have somepun in your head too… I’m saying this once and I’ll never say it again… If you’re workin’ with us, you’re workin’ with us and if you’re not you’d better stick around your broker’s office where you belong.”

“But, Mr. Bledsoe, this is the chance I’ve been lookin’ for,” stammered Charley. “Hell, I’m a mechanic, that’s all. I know that.”

“Well, I hope so… If you are, and not a goddamned bondsalesman, you know that our motor’s lousy and the ships they put it in are lousy. We’re ten years behind the rest of the world in flyin’ and we’ve got to catch up. Once we get the designs we’ve got the production apparatus to flatten ’em all out. Now I want you to go home and get drunk or go wenchin’ or whatever you do when you’re worried and think about this damn business.” “I’m through with that stuff,” said Charley. “I had enough of that in New York.”

Bledsoe got to his feet with a jerk, letting the ash from his stogie fall on his alpaca vest. “Well, you better get married then.” “I been thinkin’ of that… But I can’t find the other name to put on the license,” said Charley, laughing. Bledsoe smiled. “You design me a de cent light dependable sixteen-cylinder aircooled motor and I’ll get my little girl to introduce you to all the bestlookin’ gals in Detroit. She knows ’em all… And if it’s money you’re lookin’ for, they sweat money.” The phone buzzed. Bledsoe answered it, muttered under his breath, and stamped out of the office.

At noon Farrell came by to take Charley out to lunch. “Did old Bledsoe give you an earful?” he asked. Charley nodded. “Well, don’t let him get under your skin. His bark is worse than his bite. He wouldn’t be in the outfit if he wasn’t the best plantmanager in the country.”

It was at the Country Club dance that Farrell and his wife, who was a thin oldish blonde haggard and peevish under a festoon of diamonds, took him out to, that Charley met old Bledsoe’s daughter Anne. She was a squareshouldered girl in pink with a large pleasantly-smiling mouth and a firm handshake. Charley cottoned to her first thing. They danced to Just a Girl That Men Forget and she talked about how crazy she was about flying and had five hours toward her pilot’s license. Charley said he’d take her up any time if she wasn’t too proud to fly a Curtiss-Robin. She said he’d better not make a promise if he didn’t intend to keep it because she always did what she said she’d do. Then she talked about golf and he didn’t let on that he’d never had a golfclub in his hand in his life.

At supper when he came back from getting a couple of plates of chickensalad he found her sitting at a round table under a Japanese lantern with a pale young guy, who turned out to be her brother Harry, and a girl with beautiful ashen-blond hair and a touch of Alabama in her talk whose name was Gladys Wheatley. She seemed to be engaged or something to Harry Bledsoe who had a silver flask and kept pouring gin into the fruitpunch and held her hand and called her Glad. They were all younger than Charley, but they made quite a fuss over him and kept saying what a godawful town Detroit was. When Charley got a little gin inside of him he started telling war yarns for the first time in his life.

He drove Anne home and old Bledsoe came out with a copy of the Engineering Journal in his hand and said, “So you’ve got acquainted, have you?” “Oh, yes, we’re old friends, Dad,” she said. “Charley’s going to teach me to fly.” “Humph,” said Bledsoe and closed the door in Charley’s face with a growling: “You go home and worry about that motor.”

All that summer everybody thought that Charley and Anne were engaged. He’d get away from the plant for an hour or two on quiet afternoons and take a ship up at the flyingfield to give her a chance to pile up flying hours and on Sundays they’d play golf. Charley would get up early Sunday mornings to take a lesson with the golf pro out at the Sunnyside Club where he didn’t know anybody. Saturday nights they’d often have dinner at the Bledsoes’ house and go out to the Country Club to dance. Gladys Wheatley and Harry were usually along and they were known as a foursome by all the younger crowd. Old Bledsoe seemed pleased that Charley had taken up with his youngsters and began to treat him as a member of the family. Charley was happy, he enjoyed his work; after the years in New York being in Detroit was like being home. He and Nat made some killings in the market. As vicepresident and consulting engineer of the Tern Company he was making $25,000 a year.

Old Bledsoe grumbled that it was too damn much money for a young engineer, but it pleased him that Charley spent most of it on a small experimental shop where he and Bill Cermak were building a new motor on their own. Bill Cermak had moved his family out from Long Island and was full of hunches for mechanical improvements. Charley was so busy he didn’t have time to think of women or take anything but an occasional drink in a social way. He thought Anne was a peach and enjoyed her company but he never thought of her as a girl he might someday go to bed with.

Over the Labor Day weekend the Farrells invited the young Bledsoes and Gladys Wheatley out for a cruise. When he was asked Charley felt that this was highlife at last and suggested he bring Taki along to mix drinks and act as steward. He drove the Bledsoes down to the yachtclub in his Buick. Anne couldn’t make out why he was feeling so good. “Nothing to do for three days but sit around on a stuffy old boat and let the mosquitoes bite you,” she was grumbling in a gruff tone like her father’s. “Dad’s right when he says he doesn’t mind working over his work but he’s darned if he’ll work over his play.”

“But look at the company we’ll have to suffer in, Annie.” Charley put his arm round her shoulders for a moment as she sat beside him on the front seat. Harry who was alone in the back let out a giggle. “Well, you needn’t act so smart, mister,” said Anne, without turning back. “You and Gladys certainly do enough public petting to make a cat sick.” “The stern birdman’s weakening,” said Harry. Char ley blushed. “Check,” he said. They were already at the yachtclub and two young fellows in sailorsuits were taking the bags out of the back of the car.

Farrell’s boat was a fast fiftyfoot cruiser with a diningroom on deck and wicker chairs and a lot of freshvarnished mahogany and polished brass. Farrell wore a yachtingcap and walked up and down the narrow deck with a worried look as the boat nosed out into the little muggy breeze. The river in the late afternoon had a smell of docks and weedy swamps. “It makes me feel good to get out on the water, don’t it you, Charley?… The one place they can’t get at you.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Farrell was apologizing to the ladies for the cramped accommodations. “I keep trying to get Yardly to get a boat with some room in it but it seems to me every one he gets is more cramped up than the last one.”

Charley had been listening to a light clinking sound from the pantry. When Taki appeared with a tray of manhattan cocktails everybody cheered up. As he watched Taki bobbing with the tray in front of Gladys, Charley thought how wonderful she looked all in white with her pale abundant hair tied up in a white silk handkerchief.

Smiling beside him was Anne with her brown hair blowing in her eyes from the wind of the boat’s speed. The engine made so much noise and the twinscrews churned up so much water that he could talk to her without the others’ hearing. “Annie,” he said suddenly, “I been thinking it’s about time I got married.”

“Why, Charley, a mere boy like you.”

Charley felt warm all over. All at once he wanted a woman terribly bad. It was hard to control his voice.

“Well, I suppose we’re both old enough to know better, but what would you think of the proposition? I’ve been pretty lucky this year as far as dough goes.”

Anne sipped her cocktail looking at him and laughing with her hair blowing across her face. “What do you want me to do, ask for a statement of your bankdeposit?”

“But I mean you.”

“Check,” she said.

Farrell was yelling at them, “How about a little game of penny ante before supper?… It’s gettin’ wind you there. We’d be better off inthe saloon.”

“Aye, aye, cap,” said Anne.

Before supper they played penny ante and drank manhattans and after supper the Farrells and the Bledsoes settled down to a game of auction. Gladys said she had a headache and Charley, after watching the game for a while, went out on deck to get the reek of the cigar he’d been smoking out of his lungs.

The boat was anchored in a little bay, near a lighted wharf that jutted out from shore. A halfmoon was setting behind a rocky point where one tall pine reached out of a dark snarl of branches above a crowd of shivering whitebirches. At the end of the wharf there was some sort of clubhouse that split ripples of light from its big windows; dancemusic throbbed and faded from it over the water. Charley sat in the bow. The boys who ran the boat for Farrell had turned in. He could hear their low voices and catch a smell of cigarettesmoke from the tiny hatch forward of the pilothouse. He leaned over to watch the small grey waves slapping against the bow. “Bo, this is the bigtime stuff,” he was telling himself.

When he turned around there was Gladys beside him. “I thought you’d gone to bed, young lady,” he said.

“Thought you’d gotten rid of me for one night?” She wasn’t smiling.

“Don’t you think it’s a pretty night, Glad?”

He took her hand; it was trembling and icecold. “You don’t want to catch cold, Glad,” he said. She dug her long nails into his hand. “Are you going to marry Anne?”

“Maybe… Why? You’re goin’ to marry Harry, aren’t you?”

“Nothing in this world would make me marry him.”

Charley put his arms round her. “You poor little girl, you’re cold. You ought to be in bed.” She put her head on his chest and began to sob. He could feel the tears warm through his shirt. He didn’t know what to say. He stood there hugging her with the smell of her hair giddy, like the smell of Doris’s hair used to be, in his nostrils.

“I wish we were off this damn boat,” he whispered. Her face was turned up to his, very round and white. When he kissed her lips she kissed him too. He pressed her to him hard. Now it was her little breasts he could feel against his chest. For just a second she let him put his tongue between her lips, then she pushed him away.

“Charley, we oughtn’t to be acting like this, but I suddenly felt so lonely.”

Charley’s voice was gruff in his throat. “I’ll never let you feel like that again… Never, honestly… never…” “Oh, you darling Charley.” She kissed him again very quickly and deliberately and ran away from him down the deck.

He walked up and down alone. He didn’t know what to do. He was crazy for Gladys now. He couldn’t go back and talk to the others. He couldn’t go to bed. He slipped down the forward hatch and through the galley, where Taki sat cool as a cucumber in his white coat reading some thick book, into the cabin where his berth was and changed into his bathingsuit and ran up and dove over the side. The water wasn’t as cold as he’d expected. He swam around for a while in the moonlight. Pulling himself up the ladder aft he felt cold and goosefleshy. Farrell with a cigar in his teeth leaned over, grabbed his hand and hauled him on deck.

“Ha, ha, the iron man,” he shouted. “The girls beat us two rubbers and went to bed with their winnings. Suppose you get into your bathrobe and have a drink and a half an hour of red dog or something silly before we turn in.” “Check,” said Charley, who was jumping up and down on the deck to shake off the water.

While Charley was rubbing himself down with a towel below, he could hear the girls chattering and giggling in their stateroom. He was so embarrassed when he sat down next to Harry who was a little drunk and silly so that he drank off a half a tumbler of rye and lost eighty dollars. He was glad to see that it was Harry who won. “Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” he kept saying to himself after he’d turned in.

A week later Gladys took Charley to see her parents after they’d had tea together at his flat chaperoned by Taki’s grin and his bobbing black head. Horton B. Wheatley was a power, so Farrell said, in the Security Trust Company, a redfaced man with grizzled hair and a small silvery mustache. Mrs. Wheatley was a droopy woman with a pretty Alabama voice and a face faded and pouchy and withered as a spent toyballoon. Mr. Wheatley started talking before Gladys had finished the introductions: “Well, sir, we’d been expectin’ somethin’ like that to happen. Of course it’s too soon for us all to make up our minds, but I don’t see how I kin help tellin’ you, ma boy, that I’d rather see ma daughter wedded to a boy like you that’s worked his way up in the world, even though we don’t know much about you yet, than to a boy like Harry who’s a nice enough kid in his way, but who’s never done a thing in his life but take the schoolin’ his father provided for him. Ma boy, we are mighty proud, my wife and me, to know you and to have you and our little girl… she’s all we’ve got in this world so she’s mighty precious to us…”

“Your parents are… have been called away, I believe, Mr. Anderson,” put in Mrs. Wheatley. Charley nodded. “Oh, I’m so sorry… They were from St. Paul, Gladys says…”

Mr. Wheatley was talking again. “Mr. Anderson, Mother, was one of our most prominent war aces, he won his spurs fightin’ for the flag, Mother, an’ his whole career seems to me to be an example… now I’m goin’ to make you blush, ma boy… of how American democracy works at its very best pushin’ forward to success the most intelligent and bestfitted and weedin’ out the weaklin’s… Mr. Anderson, there’s one thing I’m goin’ to ask you to do right now. I’m goin’ to ask you to come to church with us next Sunday an’ address ma Sundayschool class. I’m sure you won’t mind sayin’ a few words of inspiration and guidance to the youngsters there.”

Charley blushed and nodded. “Aw, Daddy,” sang Gladys, putting her arms around both their necks, “don’t make him do that. Sunday’s the only day the poor boy gets any golf… You know I always said I never would marry a Sundayschool teacher.”

Mr. Wheatley laughed and Mrs. Wheatley cast down her eyes and sighed. “Once won’t hurt him, will it, Charley?” “Of course not,” Charley found himself saying. “It would be an inspiration.”

Next day Charley and Mr. Wheatley had lunch alone at the University Club. “Well, son, I guess the die is cast,” said Mr. Wheatley when they met in the lobby. “The Wheatley women have made up their minds, there’s nothin’ for us to do but bow to the decision. I certainly wish you children every happiness, son…” As they ate Mr. Wheatley talked about the bank and the Tern interests and the merger with Askew-Merritt that would a little more than double the capitalization of the new Tern Aviation Company. “You’re surprised that I know all about this, Charley… that’s what I’d been thinkin’, that boy’s a mechanical genius but he don’t keep track of the financial end… he don’t realize what his holdin’s in that concern mean to him and the financial world.”

“Well, I know some pretty good guys who give me the lowdown,” said Charley.

“Fair enough, fair enough,” said Mr. Wheatley, “but now that it’s in the family maybe some of ma advice, the result of twenty years of bankin’ experience at home in Birmingham and here in this great new dazzlin’ city of Detroit…”

“Well, I sure will be glad to take it, Mr. Wheatley,” stammered Charley.

Mr. Wheatley went on to talk about a lot on the waterfront with riparian rights at Grosse Pointe he was planning to turn over to the children for a weddingpresent and how they ought to build on it right away if only as an investment in the most restricted residential area in the entire United States of America. “And, son, if you come around to ma office after lunch you’ll see the plans for the prettiest little old English house to set on that lot you ever did see. I’ve been havin’ ’em drawn up as a surprise for Mother and Gladys, by Ordway and Ordway… Halftimbered Tudor they call it. I thought I’d turn the whole thing over to you children, as it’ll be too big for Mother and me now that Gladys is gettin’ married. I’ll chip in the lot and you chip in the house and we’ll settle the whole thing on Gladys for any children.”

They finished their lunch. As they got up Mr. Wheatley took Charley’s hand and shook it. “And I sincerely hope and pray that there’ll be children, son.”

Just after Thanksgiving the society pages of all the Detroit papers were full of a dinnerdance given by Mr. and Mrs. Horton B. Wheatley to announce the approaching marriage of their daughter Gladys to Mr. Charles Anderson inventor war ace and head of the research department at the great Tern Airplane Plant.

Old Bledsoe never spoke to Charley after the day the engagement was announced but Anne came over to Charley and Gladys the night of the Halloween dance at the Country Club and said she thoroughly understood and wished them every happiness.

A few days before the wedding Taki gave notice. “But I thought you would stay on… I’m sure my wife would like it too. Maybe we can give you a raise.” Taki grinned and bowed. “It is regrettable,” he said, “that I experience only bachelor establishments… but I wish you hereafter every contentment.”

What hurt Charley most was that when he wrote Joe Askew asking him to be his bestman, he wired back only one word: “No.”

The wedding was at the Emmanuel Baptist Church. Charley wore a cutaway and new black shoes that pinched his toes. He kept trying to remember not to put his hand up to his tie. Nat Benton came on from New York to be bestman and was a great help. While they were waiting in the vestry Nat pulled a flask out of his pants pocket and tried to get Charley to take a drink. “You look kinda green around the gills, Charley.” Charley shook his head and made a gesture with his thumb in the direction from which the organ music was coming. “Are you sure you got the ring?” Nat grinned and took a drink himself. He cleared his throat. “Well, Charley, you ought to congratulate me for picking a winner… If I could spot the market like I can spot a likely youngster I’d be in the money right now.”

Charley was so nervous he stammered. “Did… don’t worry, Nat, I’ll take care of you.” They both laughed and felt better. An usher was already beckoning wildly at them from the vestry door.

Gladys in so many satinwhite frills and the lace veil and the orangeblossoms, with a little boy in white satin holding up her train, looked like somebody Charley had never seen before. They both said “I will” rather loud without looking at each other. At the reception afterwards there was no liquor in the punch on account of the Wheatleys. Charley felt half-choked with the smell of the flowers and of women’s furs and with trying to say something to all the overdressed old ladies he was introduced to, who all said the same thing about what a beautiful wedding. He’d just broken away to go upstairs to change his clothes when he saw Ollie Taylor, very tight, trip on a Persian rug in the hall and measure his length at the feet of Mrs. Wheatley who’d just come out of the receptionroom looking very pale and weepy in lavender and orchids. Charley kept right on upstairs.

In spite of the wedding’s being dry, Nat and Farrell had certainly had something, because their eyes were shining and there was a moist look round their mouths when they came into the room where Charley was changing into a brown suit for traveling. “Lucky bastards,” he said. “Where did you get it?… Gosh, you might have kept Ollie Taylor out.”

“He’s gone,” said Nat. They added in chorus, “We attend to everything.”

“Gosh,” said Charley, “I was just thinkin’ it’s a good thing I sent my brother in Minneapolis and his gang invitations too late for ’em to get here. I can just see my old Uncle Vogel runnin’ around pinchin’ the dowagers in the seat and cryin’ hochheit.”

“It’s too bad about Ollie,” said Nat. “He’s one of the besthearted fellers in the world.”

“Poor old Ollie,” echoed Charley. “He’s lost his grip.”

There was a knock on the door. It was Gladys, her little face pale and goldenhaired and wonderfullooking in the middle of an enormous chinchilla collar. “Charley, we’ve got to go. You naughty boy, I don’t believe you’ve looked at the presents yet.”

She led them into an upstairs sittingroom stacked with glassware and silver table articles and flowers and smokingsets and toiletsets and cocktailshakers until it looked like a departmentstore. “Aren’t they sweet?” she said. “Never saw anythin’ like it in my life,” said Charley. They saw some guests coming in at the other end and ran out into the back hall again. “How many detectives have they got?” asked Charley. “Four,” said Gladys.

“Well, now,” said Charley. “We vamoose.”

“Well, it’s time for us to retire,” chorused Farrell and Nat suddenly doubled up laughing. “Or may we kiss the bride?”

“Check,” said Charley. “Thank all the ushers for me.”

Gladys fluttered her hand. “You are dears… go away now.”

Charley tried to hug her to him but she pushed him away. “Daddy’s got all the bags out the kitchen door… Oh, let’s hurry… Oh, I’m almost crazy.”

They ran down the back stairs and got into a taxi with their baggage. His was pigskin; hers was shiny black. The bags had a new expensive smell. Charley saw Farrell and Nat come out from under the columns of the big colonial porch but before they could throw the confetti the taxidriver had stepped on the gas and they were off.

At the depot there was nobody but the Wheatleys, Mrs. Wheatley crying in her baggy mink coat, Mr. Wheatley orating about the American home whether anybody listened or not. By the time the train pulled out Gladys was crying too and Charley was sitting opposite her feeling miserable and not knowing how the hell to begin.

“I wish we’d flown.”

“You know it wouldn’t have been possible in this weather,” said Gladys and then burst out crying again.

To have something to do Charley ordered some dinner from the diningcar and sent the colored porter to get a pail of ice for the champagne.

“Oh, my nerves,” moaned Gladys, pressing her gloved hands over her eyes.

“After all, kid, it isn’t as if it was somebody else… It’s just you and me,” said Charley gently.

She began to titter. “Well, I guess I’m a little silly.”

When the porter grinning and respectfully sympathetic opened the champagne she just wet her lips with it. Charley drank off his glass and filled it up again. “Here’s how, Glad, this is the life.” When the porter had gone Charley asked her why she wouldn’t drink. “You used to be quite a rummy out at the countryclub, Glad.”

“I don’t want you to drink either.”

“Why?”

She turned very red. “Mother says that if the parents get drunk they have idiot children.”

“Oh, you poor baby,” said Charley, his eyes filling with tears. They sat for a long time looking at each other while the fizz went out of the champagne in the glasses and the champagne slopped out onto the table with the jolting of the train. When the broiled chicken came Gladys couldn’t eat a bite of it. Charley ate both portions and drank up the champagne and felt he was acting like a hog.

The train clanked and roared in their ears through the snowy night. After the porter had taken away the supperdishes Charley took off his coat and sat beside her and tried to make love to her. She’d only let him kiss her and hug her like they’d done before they were married. When he tried to undo her dress she pushed him away. “Wait, wait.”

She went into the lavatory to get into her nightdress. He thought he’d go crazy she took so long. He sat in his pyjamas in the icy gritty flow of wind that came in through the crack of the window until his teeth were chattering. At last he started to bang on the door of the toilet. “Anything wrong, Glad? What’s the matter, darlin’?”

She came out in a fluffy lace negligee. She’d put on too much makeup. Her lips were trembling under the greasy lipstick. “Oh, Charley, don’t let’s tonight on the train, it’s so awful like this.”

Charley felt suddenly uncontrollably angry. “But you’re my wife. I’m your husband, God damn it.” He switched off the light. Her hands were icy in his. As he grabbed her to him he felt the muscles of his arms swelling strong behind her slender back. It felt good the way the lace and silk tore under his hands.

Afterwards she made him get out of bed and lie on the couch wrapped in a blanket. She bled a great deal. Neither of them slept. Next day she looked so pale and the bleeding hadn’t stopped and they were afraid they’d have to stop somewhere to get a doctor. By evening she felt better, but still she couldn’t eat anything. All afternoon she lay halfasleep on the couch while Charley sat beside her holding her hand with a pile of unread magazines on his knees.

It was like getting out of jail when they got off the train at Palm Beach and saw the green grass and the palmtrees and the hedges of hibiscus in flower. When she saw the big rooms of their corner suite at the Royal Poinciana, where she’d wanted to go because that was where her father and mother had gone on their weddingtrip, and the flowers friends had sent that filled up the parlor, Gladys threw her arms round his neck and kissed him even before the last bellboy had got out of the room. “Oh, Charley, forgive me for being so horrid.” Next morning they lay happy in bed side by side after they’d had their breakfast and looked out of the window at the sea beyond the palmtrees, and smelt the freshness of the surf and listened to it pounding along the beach. “Oh, Charley,” Gladys said, “let’s have everything always just like this.”

Their first child was born in December. It was a boy. They named him Wheatley. When Gladys came back from the hospital instead of coming back to the apartment she went into the new house out at Grosse Pointe that still smelt of paint and raw plaster. What with the hospital expenses and the furniture bills and Christmas, Charley had to borrow twenty thousand from the bank. He spent more time than ever talking over the phone to Nat Benton’s office in New York. Gladys bought a lot of new clothes and kept tiffanyglass bowls full of freesias and narcissus all over the house. Even on the dressingtable in her bathroom she always had flowers. Mrs. Wheatley said she got her love of flowers from her grandmother Randolph, because the Wheatleys had never been able to tell one flower from another. When the next child turned out to be a girl, Gladys said, as she lay in the hospital, her face looking drawn and yellow against the white pillows, beside the great bunch of glittering white orchids Charley had ordered from the florist at five dollars a bloom, she wished she could name her Orchid. They ended by naming her Marguerite after Gladys’s grandmother Randolph.

Gladys didn’t recover very well after the little girl’s birth and had to have several small operations that kept her in bed three months. When she got on her feet she had the big room next to the nursery and the children’s nurse’s room redecorated in white and gold for her own bedroom. Charley groused about it a good deal because it was in the other wing of the house from his room. When he’d come over in his bathrobe before turning in and try to get into bed with her, she would keep him off with a cool smile, and when he insisted, she would give him a few pecking kisses and tell him not to make a noise or he would wake the babies. Sometimes tears of irritation would start into his eyes. “Jesus, Glad, don’t you love me at all?” She would answer that if he really loved her he’d have come home the night she had the Smyth Perkinses to dinner instead of phoning at the last minute that he’d have to stay at the office.

“But, Jesus, Glad, if I didn’t make the money how would I pay the bills?”

“If you loved me you’d be more considerate, that’s all,” she would say and two curving lines would come on her face from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth like the lines on her mother’s face and Charley would kiss her gently and say poor little girl and go back to his room feeling like a louse. Times she did let him stay she lay so cold and still and talked about how he hurt her, so that he would go back to the tester bed in his big bedroom feeling so nervous and jumpy it would take several stiff whiskies to get him in shape to go to sleep.

One night when he’d taken Bill Cermak, who was now a foreman at the Flint plant, over to a roadhouse the other side of Windsor to talk to him about the trouble they were having with molders and diemakers, after they’d had a couple of whiskies, Charley found himself instead asking Bill about married life. “Say, Bill, do you ever have trouble with your wife?”

“Sure, boss,” said Bill, laughing. “I got plenty trouble. But the old lady’s all right, you know her, nice kids good cook, all time want me to go to church.”

“Say, Bill, when did you get the idea of callin’ me boss? Cut it out.”

“Too goddam rich,” said Bill.

“S — t, have another whiskey.” Charley drank his down. “And beer chasers like in the old days… Remember that Christmas party out in Long Island City and that blonde at the beerparlor… Jesus, I used to think I was a little devil with the women… But my wife she don’t seem to get the idea.”

“You have two nice kids already; what the hell, maybe you’re too ambitious.”

“You wouldn’t believe it… only once since little Peaches was born.”

“Most women gets hotter when they’re married a while… That’s why the boys are sore at your damned efficiency expert.”

“Stauch? Stauch’s a genius at production.”

“Maybe, but he don’t give the boys any chance for reproduction.” Bill laughed and wiped the beer off his mouth.

“Good old Bill,” said Charley. “By God, I’ll get you on the board of directors yet.”

Bill wasn’t laughing any more. “Honestly, no kiddin’. That damn squarehead make the boys work so hard they can’t get a hard on when they go to bed, an’ their wives raise hell with ’em. I’m strawboss and they all think sonofabitch too, but they’re right.”

Charley was laughing. “You’re a squarehead yourself, Bill, and I don’t know what I can do about it, I’m just an employee of the company myself… We got to have efficient production or they’ll wipe us out of business. Ford’s buildin’ planes now.”

“You’ll lose all your best guys… Slavedrivin’ may be all right in the automobile business, but buildin’ an airplane motor’s skilled labor.”

“Aw, Christ, I wish I was still tinkerin’ with that damn motor and didn’t have to worry about money all the time… Bill, I’m broke… Let’s have another whiskey.”

“Better eat.”

“Sure, order up a steak… anythin’ you like. Let’s go take a piss. That’s one thing they don’t charge for… Say, Bill, does it seem to you that I’m gettin’ a potbelly?… Broke, a potbelly, an’ my wife won’t sleep with me… Do you think I’m a rummy, Bill? I sometimes think I better lay off for keeps. I never used to pull a blank when I drank.”

“Hell, no, you smart young feller, one of the smartest, a fool for a threepoint landing and a pokerplayer… my God.”

“What’s the use if your wife won’t sleep with you?”

Charley wouldn’t eat anything. Bill ate up both their steaks. Charley kept on drinking whiskey out of a bottle he had under the table and beer for chasers. “But tell me… your wife, does she let you have it any time you want it?… The guys in the shop, their wives won’t let ’em alone, eh?”

Bill was a little drunk too. “My wife she do what I say.”

It ended by Bill’s having to drive Charley’s new Packard back to the ferry. In Detroit Bill made Charley drink a lot of sodawater in a drugstore, but when he got back in the car he just slumped down at the wheel. He let Bill drive him home to Grosse Pointe. Charley could hear Bill arguing with the guards along the road, each one really had to see Mr. Anderson passed out in the back of the car before he’d let Bill through, but he didn’t give a hoot, struck him so funny he began to giggle. The big joke was when the houseman had to help Bill get him up to his bedroom. “The boss a little sick, see, overwork,” Bill said each time, then he’d tap his head solemnly. “Too much brain-work.” Charley came to up in his bedroom and was able to articulate muzzily: “Bill, you’re a prince… George, call a taxi to take Mr. Cermak home… lucky bastard go home to his wife.” Then he stretched out on the bed with one shoe on and one shoe off and went quietly to sleep.

When he came back from his next trip to New York and Washington, he called up Bill at the plant. “Hay, Bill, how’s the boy? Your wife still do what you say, ha, ha. Me, I’m terrible, very exhaustin’ business trip, understand… never drank so much in my life or with so many goddam crooks. Say, Bill, don’t worry if you get fired, you’re on my private payroll, understand… We’re goin’ to fire the whole outfit… Hell, if they don’t like it workin’ for us let ’em try to like it workin’ for somebody else… This is a free country. I wouldn’t want to keep a man against his will… Look, how long will it take you to tune up that little Moth type, you know, number 16… yours truly’s Mosquito?… Check… Well, if we can get her in shape soon enough so they can use her as a model, see, for their specifications… Jesus, Bill, if we can do that… we’re on easystreet… You won’t have to worry about if the kids can go to college or not… goddam it, you an the missis can go to college yourselves… Check.”

Charley put the receiver back on the desk. His secretary Miss Finnegan was standing in the door. She had red hair and a beautiful complexion with a few freckles round her little sharp nose. She was a snappy dresser. She was looking at Charley with her lightbrown eyes all moist and wide as he was laying down the law over the phone. Charley felt his chest puff out a little. He pulled in his belly as hard as he could. “Gosh,” he was saying at the back of his head, “maybe I could lay Elsie Finnegan.” Somebody had put a pot of blue hyacinths on his desk; a smell of spring came from them that all at once made him remember Bar-le-Duc, and troutfishing up the Red River.

It was a flowerysmelling spring morning again when Charley drove out to the plant from the office to give the Anderson Mosquito its trial spin. He had managed to give Elsie Finnegan a kiss for the first time and had left her crumpled and trembling at her desk. Bill Cermak had said over the phone that the tiny ship was tuned up and in fine shape. It was a relief to get out of the office where he’d been fidgeting for a couple of hours trying to get through a call to Nat Benton’s office about some stock he’d wired them to take a profit on. After he’d kissed her he’d told Elsie Finnegan to switch the call out to the trial field for him. It made him feel good to be driving out through the halfbuilt town, through the avenue jammed with trucks full of construction materials, jockeying his car among the trucks with a feeling of shine and strength at the perfect action of his clutch and the smooth response of the gears. The gatekeeper had the New York call for him. The connection was perfect. Nat had banked thirteen grand for him. As he hung up the receiver he thought poor little Elsie, he’d have to buy her something real nice. “It’s a great day, Joe, ain’t it?” he said to the gatekeeper.

Bill was waiting for him beside the new ship at the entrance to the hangar, wiping grease off his thick fingers with a bunch of waste. Charley slapped him on the back. “Good old Bill… Isn’t this a great day for the race?” Bill fell for it. “What race, boss?” “The human race, you fathead… Say, Bill,” he went on as he took off his gloves and his well tailored spring overcoat, “I don’t mind tellin’ you I feel wonderful today… made thirteen grand on the market yesterday… easy as rollin’ off a log.”

While Charley pulled a suit of overalls on the mechanics pushed the new ship out onto the grass for Bill to make his general inspection. “Jesus, she’s pretty.” The tiny aluminum ship glistened in the sun out on the green grass like something in a jeweler’s window. There were dandelions and clover on the grass and a swirling flight of little white butterflies went up right from under his black clodhoppers when Bill came back to Charley and stood beside him. Charley winked at Bill Cermak standing beside him in his blue denims stolidly looking at his feet. “Smile, you sonofabitch,” he said. “Don’t this weather make you feel good?”

Bill turned a square bohunk face towards Charley. “Now look here, Mr. Anderson, you always treat me good… from way back Long Island days. You know me, do work, go home, keep my face shut.” “What’s on your mind, Bill?… Want me to try to wangle another raise for you? Check.”

Bill shook his heavy square face and rubbed his nose with a black forefinger. “Tern Company used to be good place to work good work good pay. You know me, Mr. Anderson, I’m no bolshayvik… but no stoolpigeon either.”

“But damn it, Bill, why can’t you tell those guys to have a little patience… we’re workin’ out a profitsharin’ scheme. I’ve worked on a lathe myself… I’ve worked as a mechanic all over this goddam country… I know what the boys are up against, but I know what the management’s up against too… Gosh, this thing’s in its infancy, we’re pouring more capital into the business all the time… We’ve got a responsibility towards our investors. Where do you think that jack I made yesterday’s goin’ but the business of course. The oldtime shop was a great thing, everybody kidded and smoked and told smutty stories, but the pressure’s too great now. If every department don’t click like a machine we’re rooked. If the boys want a union we’ll give ’em a union. You get up a meeting and tell ’em how we feel about it but tell ’em we’ve got to have some patriotism. Tell ’em the industry’s the first line of national defense. We’ll send Eddy Sawyer down to talk to ’em… make ’em understand our problems.”

Bill Cermak shook his head. “Plenty other guys do that.” Charley frowned. “Well, let’s see how she goes,” he snapped impatiently.

“Gosh, she’s a honey.”

The roar of the motor kept them from saying any more. The mechanic stepped from the controls and Charley climbed in. Bill Cermak got in behind. She started taxiing fast across the green field. Charley turned her into the wind and let her have the gas. At the first soaring bounce there was a jerk. As he pitched forward Charley switched off the ignition.

They were carrying him across the field on a stretcher. Each step of the men carrying the stretcher made two jagged things grind together in his leg. He tried to tell ’em that he had a piece of something in his side, but his voice was very small and hoarse. In the shadow of the hangar he was trying to raise himself on his elbow. “What the devil happened? Is Bill all right?” The men shook their heads. Then he passed out again like the juice failing in a car.

In the ambulance he tried to ask the man in the white jacket about Bill Cermak and to remember back exactly what had happened, but the leg kept him too busy trying not to yell. “Hay, doc,” he managed to croak, “can’t you get these aluminum splinters out of my side? The damn ship must have turned turtle on them. Wing couldn’t take it maybe, but it’s time they got the motor lifted off me. Hay, doc, why can’t they get a move on?”

When he got the first whiff of the hospital, there were a lot of men in white jackets moving and whispering round him. The hospital smelt strong of ether. The trouble was he couldn’t breathe. Somebody must have spilt that damned ether. No, not on my face. The motor roared. He must have been seeing things. The motor’s roar swung into an easy singsong. Sure, she was taking it fine, steady as one of those big old bombers. When he woke up a nurse was helping him puke into a bowl.

When he woke up again, for chrissake no more ether, no, it was flowers, and Gladys was standing beside the bed with a big bunch of sweetpeas in her hand. Her face had a pinched look. “Hello, Glad, how’s the girl?” “Oh, I’ve been so worried, Charley. How do you feel? Oh, Charley, for a man of your standing to risk his life in practice flights… Why don’t you let the people whose business it is do it, I declare.” There was something Charley wanted to ask. He was scared about something. “Say, are the kids all right?” “Wheatley skinned his knee and I’m afraid the baby has a little temperature. I’ve phoned Dr. Thompson. I don’t think it’s anything though.”

“Is Bill Cermak all right?”

Gladys’s mouth trembled. “Oh, yes,” she said, cutting the words off sharply. “Well, I suppose this means our dinnerdance is off… The Edsel Fords were coming.” “Hell, no, why not have it anyway? Yours truly can attend in a wheelchair. Say, they sure have got me in a straitjacket… I guess I busted some ribs.” Gladys nodded; her mouth was getting very small and thin. Then she suddenly began to cry.

The nurse came in and said reproachfully, “Oh, Mrs. Anderson.” Charley was just as glad when Gladys went out and left him alone with the nurse. “Say, nurse, get hold of the doctor, will you? Tell him I’m feeling fine and want to look over the extent of the damage.” “Mr. Anderson, you mustn’t have anything on your mind.” “I know, tell Mrs. Anderson I want her to get in touch with the office.” “But it’s Sunday, Mr. Anderson. A great many people have been downstairs but I don’t think the doctor is letting them up yet.” The nurse was a freshfaced girl with a slightly Scotch way of talking. “I bet you’re a Canadian,” said Charley. “Right that time,” said the nurse. “I knew a wonderful nurse who was a Canadian once. If I’d had any sense I’d have married her.”

The housephysician was a roundfaced man with a jovial smooth manner almost like a headwaiter at a big hotel. “Say, doc, ought my leg to hurt so damn much?” “You see we haven’t set it yet. You tried to puncture a lung but didn’t quite get away with it. We had to remove a few little splinters of rib” “Not from the lung…” “Luckily not.” “But why the hell didn’t you set the leg at the same time?” “Well, we’re waiting for Dr. Roberts to come on from New York… Mrs. Anderson insisted on him. Of course we are all very pleased, as he’s one of the most eminent men in his profession… It’ll be another little operation.”

It wasn’t until he’d come to from the second operation that they told him that Bill Cermak had died of a fractured skull.

Charley was in the hospital three months with his leg in a Balkan frame. The fractured ribs healed up fast, but he kept on having trouble with his breathing. Gladys handled all the house bills and came every afternoon for a minute. She was always in a hurry and always terribly worried. He had to turn over a power of attorney to Moe Frank his lawyer who used to come to see him a couple of times a week to talk things over. Charley couldn’t say much, he couldn’t say much to anybody he was in so much pain.

He liked it best when Gladys sent Wheatley to see him. Wheatley was three years old now and thought it was great in the hospital. He liked to see the nurse working all the little weights and pulleys of the frame the leg hung in. “Daddy’s living in a airplane,” was what he always said about it. He had tow hair and his nose was beginning to stick up and Charley thought he took after him.

Marguerite was still too little to be much fun. The one time Gladys had the governess bring her, she bawled so at the look of the scary-looking frame she had to be taken home. Gladys wouldn’t let her come again. Gladys and Charley had a bitter row about letting Wheatley come as she said she didn’t want the child to remember his father in the hospital. “But, Glad, he’ll have plenty of time to get over it, get over it a damn sight sooner than I will.” Gladys pursed her lips together and said nothing. When she’d gone Charley lay there hating her and wondering how they could ever have had children together.

Just about the time he began to see clearly that they all expected him to be a cripple the rest of his life he began to mend, but it was winter before he was able to go home on crutches. He still suffered sometimes from a sort of nervous difficulty in breathing. The house seemed strange as he dragged himself around in it. Gladys had had every room redecorated while he was away and all the servants were different. Charley didn’t feel it was his house at all. What he enjoyed best was the massage he had three times a week. He spent his days playing with the kids and talking to Miss Jarvis, their stiff and elderly English governess. After they’d gone to bed he’d sit in his sittingroom drinking scotch and soda and feeling puffy and nervous. God damn it, he was getting too fat. Gladys was always cool as a cucumber these days; even when he went into fits of temper and cursed at her, she’d stand there looking at him with a cold look of disgust on her carefully madeup face. She entertained a great deal but made the servants understand that Mr. Anderson wasn’t well enough to come down. He began to feel like a poor relation in his own house. Once when the Farrells were coming he put on his tuxedo and hobbled down to dinner on his crutches. There was no place set for him and everybody looked at him like he was a ghost.

“Thataboy,” shouted Farrell in his yapping voice. “I was expecting to come up and chin with you after dinner.” It turned out that what Farrell wanted to talk about was the suit for five hundred thousand some damn shyster had induced Cermak’s widow to bring against the company. Farrell had an idea that if Charley went and saw her he could induce her to be reasonable and settle for a small annuity. Charley said he’d be damned if he’d go. At dinner Charley got tight and upset the afterdinner coffeecups with his crutch and went off to bed in a rage.

What he enjoyed outside of playing with the kids was buying and selling stocks and talking to Nat over the longdistance. Nat kept telling him he was getting the feel of the market. Nat warned him and Charley knew damn well that he was slipping at Tern and that if he didn’t do something he’d be frozen out, but he felt too rotten to go to directors’ meetings; what he did do was to sell out about half his stocks in small parcels. Nat kept telling him if he’d only get a move on he could get control of the whole business before Andy Merritt pulled off his new reorganization, but he felt too damn nervous and miserable to make the effort. All he could seem to do was to grumble and call Julius Stauch and raise hell about details. Stauch had taken over his work on the new monoplane and turned out a little ship that had gone through all tests with flying colors. When he’d put down the receiver, Charley would pour himself a little scotch and settle back on the couch in his window and mutter to himself, “Well, you’re dished this time.”

One evening Farrell came around and had a long talk and said what Charley needed was a fishing trip, he’d never get well if he kept on this way. He said he’d been talking to Doc Thompson and that he recommended three months off and plenty of exercise if he ever expected to throw away his crutches.

Gladys couldn’t go because old Mrs. Wheatley was sick, so Charley got into the back of his Lincoln towncar alone with the chauffeur to drive him, and a lot of blankets to keep him warm, and a flask of whiskey and a thermosbottle of hot coffee, to go down all alone to Miami.

At Cincinnati he felt so bum he spent a whole day in bed in the hotel there. He got the chauffeur to get him booklets about Florida from a travel agency, and finally sent a wire to Nat Benton asking him to spend a week with him down at the Key Largo fishingcamp. Next morning he started off again early. He’d had a good night’s sleep and he felt better and began to enjoy the trip. But he felt a damn fool sitting there being driven like an old woman all bundled up in rugs. He was lonely too because the chauffeur wasn’t the kind of bird you could talk to. He was a sourlooking Canuck Gladys had hired because she thought it was classy to give her orders in French through the speakingtube; Charley was sure the bastard gypped him on the price of gas and oil and repairs along the road; that damn Lincoln was turning out a bottomless pit for gas and oil.

In Jacksonville the sun was shining. Charley gave himself the satisfaction of firing the chauffeur as soon as they’d driven up to the door of the hotel. Then he went to bed with a pint of bum corn the bellboy sold him and slept like a log.

In the morning he woke up late feeling thirsty but cheerful. After breakfast he checked out of the hotel and drove around the town a little. It made him feel good to pack his own bag and get into the front seat and drive his own car.

The town had a cheerful rattletrap look in the sunlight under the big white clouds and the blue sky. At the lunchroom next to the busstation he stopped to have a drink. He felt so good that he got out of the car without his crutches and hobbled across the warm pavement. The wind was fluttering the leaves of the magazines and the pink and palegreen sheets of the papers outside the lunchroom window. Charley was out of breath from the effort when he slid onto a stool at the counter. “Give me a limeade and no sweetnin’ in it, please,” he said to the ratfaced boy at the fountain.

The sodajerker didn’t pay any attention, he was looking down the other way. Charley felt his face get red. His first idea was, I’ll get him fired. Then he looked where the boy was looking. There was a blonde eating a sandwich at the other end of the counter. She certainly was pretty. She wore a little black hat and a neat bluegrey suit and a little white lace around her neck and at her wrists. She had an amazed look on her face like she’d just heard something extraordinarily funny. Forgetting to favor his game leg Charley slipped up several seats towards her. “Say, bo, how about that limeade?” he shouted cheerfully at the sodajerker.

The girl was looking at Charley. Her eyes really were a perfectly pure blue. She was speaking to him. “Maybe you know how long the bus takes to Miami, mister. This boy thinks he’s a wit so I can’t get any data.”

“Suppose we try it out and see,” said Charley.

“They surely come funny in Florida… Another humorist.”

“No, I mean it. If you let me drive you down you’ll be doing a sick man a great favor.”

“Sure it won’t mean a fate worse than death?”

“You’ll be perfectly safe with me, young lady. I’m almost a cripple. I’ll show you my crutches in the car.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Cracked up in a plane.”

“You a pilot?”

Charley nodded. “Not quite skinny enough for Lindbergh,” she said, looking him up and down. Charley turned red. “I am a little overweight. It’s being cooped up with this lousy leg.”

“Well, I guess I’ll try it. If I step into your car and wake up in Buenos Aires it’ll be my bad luck.”

Charley tried to pay for her coffee and sandwich but she wouldn’t let him. Something about her manner kept him laughing all the time. When he got up and she saw how he limped she pursed her mouth up. “Gee, that’s too bad.” When she saw the car she stopped in her tracks. “Zowie,” she said, “we’re bloomin’ millionaires.”

They were laughing as they got into the car. There was something about the way she said things that made him laugh. She wouldn’t say what her name was. “Call me Mme. X,” she said. “Then you’ll have to call me Mr. A,” said Charley.

They laughed and giggled all the way to Daytona Beach where they stopped off and went into the surf for a dip. Charley felt ashamed of his pot and his pale skin and his limp as he walked across the beach with her looking brown and trim in her blue bathingsuit. She had a pretty figure although her hips were a little big. “Anyway it’s not as if I’d come out of it with one leg shorter than the other. The doc says I’ll be absolutely O.K. if I exercise it right.”

“Sure, you’ll be great in no time. And me thinkin’ you was an elderly sugardaddy in the drugstore there.”

“I think you’re a humdinger, Mme X.”

“Be sure you don’t put anything in writing, Mr. A.”

Charley’s leg ached like blazes when he came out of the water, but it didn’t keep him from having a whale of a good appetite for the first time in months. After a big fishdinner they started off again. She went to sleep in the car with her neat little head on his shoulder. He felt very happy driving down the straight smooth concrete highway although he felt tired already. When they got into Miami that night she made him take her to a small hotel back near the railroad tracks and wouldn’t let him come in with her. “But gosh, couldn’t we see each other again?”

“Sure, you can see me any night at the Palms. I’m an entertainer there.”

“Honest… I knew you were an entertainer but I didn’t know you were a professional.”

“You sure did me a good turn, Mr. A. Now it can be told… I was flat broke with exactly the price of that ham sandwich and if you hadn’t brought me down I’d a lost the chance of working here… I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“Tell me your name. I’d like to call you up.”

“You tell me yours.”

“Charles Anderson. I’ll be staying bored to death at the MiamiBiltmore.”

“So you really are Mr. A… Well, goodby, Mr. A, and thanks a million times.” She ran into the hotel. Charley was crazy about her already. He was so tired he just barely made his hotel. He went up to his room and tumbled into bed and for the first time in months went to sleep without getting drunk first.

A week later when Nat Benton turned up he was surprised to find Charley in such good shape. “Nothin’ like a change,” said Charley, laughing. They drove on down towards the Keys together. Charley had Margo Dowling’s photograph in his pocket, a professional photograph of her dressed in Spanish costume for her act. He’d been to the Palms every night, but he hadn’t managed to get her to go out with him yet. When he’d suggest anything she’d shake her head and make a face and say, “I’ll tell you about it sometime.” But the last night she had given him a number where he could call her up.

Nat kept trying to talk about the market and the big reorganization of Tern and Askew-Merritt that Merritt was engineering but Charley would shut him up with, “Aw, hell, let’s talk about somethin’ else.” The camp was all right but the mosquitoes were fierce. They spent a good day on the reef fishing for barracuda and grouper. They took a jug of bacardi out in the motorboat and fished and drank and ate sandwiches. Charley told Nat all about the crackup. “Honestly, I don’t think it was my fault. It was one of those damn things you can’t help… Now I feel as if I’d lost the last friend I had on earth. Honest, I’d a given anythin’ I had in the world if that hadn’t happened to Bill.” “After all,” said Nat, “he was only a mechanic.”

One day when they got in from fishing, drunk and with their hands and pants fishy, and their faces burned by the sun and glare, and dizzy from the sound and smell of the motor and the choppy motion of the boat, they found waiting for them a wire from Benton’s office.

UNKNOWN UNLOADING TERN STOP DROPS FOUR AND A HALF POINTS STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS

“Instructions hell,” said Benton, jamming his stuff into his suitcase. “We’ll go up and see. Suppose we charter a plane at Miami.” “You take the plane,” said Charley coolly. “I’m going to ride on the train.”

In New York he sat all day in the back room of Nat Benton’s office smoking too many cigars, watching the ticker, fretting and fuming, riding up and down town in taxicabs, getting the lowdown from various sallowfaced friends of Nat’s and Moe Frank’s. By the end of the week he’d lost four hundred thousand dollars and had let go every airplane stock he had in the world.

All the time he was sitting there putting on a big show of business he was counting the minutes, the way he had when he was a kid in school, for the market to close so that he could go uptown to a speakeasy on Fiftysecond Street to meet a hennahaired girl named Sally Hogan he’d met when he was out with Nat at the Club Dover. She was the first girl he’d picked up when he got to New York. He didn’t give a damn about her but he had to have some kind of a girl. They were registered at the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

One morning when they were having breakfast in bed there was a light knock on the door. “Come in,” yelled Charley, thinking it was the waiter. Two shabbylooking men rushed into the room, followed by O’Higgins, a shyster lawyer he’d met a couple of times back in Detroit. Sally let out a shriek and covered her head with the pillow.

“Howdy, Charley,” said O’Higgins. “I’m sorry to do this but it’s all in the line of duty. You don’t deny that you are Charles Anderson, do you? Well, I thought you’d rather hear it from me than just read the legal terms. Mrs. Anderson is suing you for divorce in Michigan… That’s all right, boys.”

The shabby men bowed meekly and backed out the door.

“Of all the lousy stinkin’ tricks…”

“Mrs. Anderson’s had the detectives on your trail ever since you fired her chauffeur in Jacksonville.”

Charley had such a splitting headache and felt so weak from a hangover that he couldn’t lift his head. He wanted to get up and sock that sonofabitch O’Higgins but all he could do was lie there and take it. “But she never said anything about it in her letters. She’s been writin’ me right along. There’s never been any trouble between us.”

O’Higgins shook his curly red head. “Too bad,” he said. “Maybe if you can see her you can arrange it between you. You know my advice about these things is always keep ’em out of court. Well, I’m heartily sorry, old boy, to have caused you and your charming friend any embarrassment… no hard feelings I hope, Charley old man… I thought it would be pleasanter more open and aboveboard if I came along if you saw a friendly face, as you might say. I’m sure this can all be amicably settled.” He stood there a while rubbing his hands and nodding and then tiptoed to the door. Standing there with one hand on the doorknob he waved the other big flipper towards the bed. “Well, solong, Sally… Guess I’ll be seein’ you down at the office.” Then he closed the door softly after him. Sally had jumped out of bed and was running towards the door with a terrified look on her face. Charley began to laugh in spite of his splitting headache. “Aw, never mind, girlie,” he said. “Serves me right for bein’ a sucker… I know we all got our livin’s to make… Come on back to bed.”