End of the Tiger and Other Stories

The Trap of Solid Gold

April 1960, Ladies Home Journal

If Ben and Ginny Weldon had only had the time to sit down quietly and think things through, they might have seen just how they were heading for a time of crisis. More than crisis, in fact. “Disaster” is not too mild a word, not when all the hope and promise is so great. By careful prediction they could have guessed that the early months of 1965 would be the time of ultimate trial, but of course they had no time to sit down and think. They would have admitted a growing uneasiness, small fore-warnings of doom that were briskly poked back down into the subconscious whenever they became aware of them.

Marriage is a small brave ship, and embarkation is valiant and hopeful. But the channel is narrow, the set of the tide tricky, and the buoys and markers forever shrouded in mist. They had set out in a tighter ship than most, which is a matter of luck, a factor for which you can be grateful without ever making the mistake of believing you have earned it. They were whole people, with the capacity to give and receive love in equal measure, with humor to give them that special balance of objectivity, with good looks, health, education, ability, and uncontrived charm. These factors are luck. You have to earn all the rest of it.

And so it was a special shock to realize that by 1965, after ten years of marriage, the copilots had lost the channel, the wind was rising, and the thunderous reefs were sickeningly close.

Marriage courts and counselors relate that the one most prevalent cause of marital difficulty is money. This seems a small, mean, shabby thing, with no dignity in its connotation of bickering. But money is a strange poison. It is an index of security, and when it becomes a problem, it has a nasty tendency to tinge those other less tangible aspects of security with despair.

In view of Ben Weldon’s position and his ability, if is both ludicrous and tragic that money should have been the hidden rock that cracked the hull of the stout little ship. By 1965 there were five in the boat.

Chris, at eight, was a small boy full of areas of a deadly earnestness, but with such a brimming joy in being alive that he was afflicted with frequent seizures of a wild and manic glee that would take him whooping to the top of a tall tree in a startlingly few moments.

Lucille, age six, was known only as Ladybug. She wore seven different personalities a day, from imprisoned princess to aging ballerina, combining an appetite for conspiracy with a thespian lust for costume.

Penny was a three-year-old chunk of round, warm appetite and placid insistence upon being hugged frequently, a goal consistently achieved despite a chronic condition of stickiness.

This is the Weldon family, whose combined ages total 79, who live at 88 Ridge Road in Lawton, New York, a one-hour-and-seventeen-minute commutation from the city.

The view of an outsider was perfectly expressed when they had, as a weekend house guest, a man they had not seen since college, a man doubly precious to them because it was he who had first introduced them. Just before he left, as they stood by the drive, Ben’s arm around Ginny’s slender waist, the friend said, with a fondness spiced with a dab of envy, “You kids have really got it made.”

One would have thought so.

Take a look at one target of this odd disaster, Benjamin Dale Weldon, age 32. By profession he is an executive, one of the rare good young ones, employed by National Directions, Inc., as Assistant to the Vice President in Charge of Unit Control. Weldon is a tall man with a dark semi-crew cut, glasses with thick black frames, and the kind of rugged-wry asymmetric face women have the tiresome habit of calling “interesting.” In his first years with National he gave a deceptive impression of low-pressure amiability, which obscured his special talents, but now they are thoroughly known and appreciated. Under pressure, he can plow through jungles of intricate work. He can properly delegate authority, backstop his superiors, make effective presentations, keep his temper, side-step company politics, resolve controversy, and make the people working for him feel as if they are a part of a special team.

All this is, of course, a description of a splendid No. 2 man. But Weldon has that additional gift of being able to come up with the important and unusual idea at the right time, and the willingness to fight for his idea to the extent of laying his career on the line. This makes him a potential No. 1 man, and the company is totally aware of his present and his future value.

For his abilities they pay him $23,500 a year. In return for this salary he is expected not only to function adequately in his job but to dress conservatively and well, comport himself with traditional National Directions dignity, live in a house and a neighborhood suitable to his position, entertain properly, take first-rate care of his family and their future, and take a hand in civic affairs.

The executives of National Directions, and in particular the president, Brendan Mallory, see in Ben Weldon a pleasing prototype of the young National executive, a sort of ambassador at large. They are gratified that he had the good luck and the good sense to marry a girl who is and will continue to be of great help to him.

Brendan Mallory has a private timetable in his mind whereby Benjamin Weldon will assume the presidency at age 55. At that point Weldon will not only be receiving one of the more substantial salaries, but he will have additional income through the bonus and stock-option plan. But this, to Brendan Mallory, is of secondary importance. The man who heads the firm must, first of all, have respect for the obligations and responsibilities of the position, realizing that his decisions can have an effect on the national economy.

Brendan Mallory realizes that it is a most delicate problem to nurture the growth of the young executive. He must be taught to understand the blessings of and the reasons for conformity without deadening that creative individualism that the No. 1 man must have if the company is to remain competitively strong.

Virginia, wife of Benjamin, is lovelier at 30 than at 20, an outgoing blue-eyed blonde, who wears her multiple emotions close to the surface, who has pride and the gift of laughter. She is loving, rewarding, and incurably absent-minded. She fills with a violent indignation at any injustice. Her energies inspire awe. Toward her children she is scrupulously, unpermissively fair, whacking them soundly when they need it. As a consequence there is order in their small world, and they feel secure, well loved, and feel no urge to express themselves through tantrum or bratty whining.

So here is paradise on Ridge Road. Strength, love, ambition, and a future. Nice people too. No sleazy little cocktail-party flirtations. No amorous discontent.

At the end of 1964, if you had asked them if paradise hadn’t become just a little conditional, they would have stared at you, and then defended themselves with great indignation. And that could have been the clue — the little excess of indignation.

If they had had the time to sit down quietly—

But there were the commuting to the city, and the job itself, and the increasing frequency of the field trips, and the two kinds of entertaining — business and friendship — and the Lawton Country Club (as a result of Mallory’s hint that he should belong), and the sitter problem and the Cub Scouts and the P.T.A. and the Community Chest and the Red Cross and the Civic Betterment Committee and the Ridge Road Association and, of course, five birthdays and holidays and church and anniversaries, and correspondence with friends and relatives, and television and shopping and essential do-it-yourself projects and office work brought home and that essential reading that must be done to keep up with the world’s swift pace.

So if there was a rare chance to sit down quietly, they took it. And spent the time making up little mental lists of the things undone. They no longer had time to talk to each other in any leisurely, thoughtful way, and so they were losing one of the best parts of a good marriage — and making it not quite as good as it should have been.

It should have been more of a clue to Ben and Ginny that, all that year, whenever they did have a chance to talk, they talked about money. Oh, it was reasonably amiable, with an infrequent edge of rancor showing only briefly. They tried to make a kind of joke out of it. And why shouldn’t it be a joke? When you’re making $23,500 a year, money problems are a joke, aren’t they?

Ben paid the bills, so the true nature of their situation was trying to intrude itself on his awareness long before Ginny became aware of the growing tensions. Let it be said firmly and finally right here that these were not two silly, improvident people, whimsically tossing money left and right. Ben had paid a good share of his own way through school. Ginny had been on a tiny allowance. They had started marriage with debts, not riches, and had lived to a rigid budget, and paid their way. Ginny knew every rice dish in the book.

Perhaps the first intimation of what would eventually and incomprehensively turn into disaster was the Incident of the Cigarettes.

In January — right after New Year’s, in fact — when the checking account needed very dexterous juggling, Ben Weldon switched from cigarettes to a pipe. He told himself it would be good for him. Ginny had always wanted him to smoke a pipe. He told himself that it was purely secondary that cigarettes, at a pack and a half a day, were costing him $164.25 a year. He wondered why he had bothered to figure it up.

He struggled with the pipe problem until he had mastered the techniques. His birthday was in April. He got home from the city later than he wanted to, because he knew Ginny would keep the kids up so they could give him their presents, but it was one of those unavoidable things.

He sat in the living room, and the cake was brought to him so the kids could see him blow out the candles, and the song was sung, and the kids gave him the presents, the littlest one first, as was the household custom. He lifted himself out of his weariness to make those exclamations that would satisfy them, and those jokes that would delight them.

The present from Ginny was the last one he opened. It was a pipe in a fitted case, with a beautiful grain in the wood. He remembered the brand name and the model name from the day when he had selected a pipe. And he certainly remembered the price. He had told the clerk that he didn’t feel like paying $25 plus tax for a pipe.

He looked at the beautiful thing, and he felt a resentment so sharp, so bitter that it shocked him. In one gesture she had cut the heart out of his campaign of frugality. He looked at her and saw her smile, which anticipated his pleasure in the gift, and in that instant he wanted to smash it to the floor in its fitted case.

Her smile faded and she said, “Don’t you like it? I thought it—”

He caught himself quickly and said, “It’s beautiful, honey. It really is. And the style is just perfect.”

So the kids had to see the ceremony of the first lighting of the new pipe, and then Ginny permitted them one small piece of birthday cake each, and shooed them off to bed.

After she came back to the living room she said, “Is anything wrong?”

“What could be wrong on my birthday, blondie? Bring me a kiss.”

The unexpected, irrational force of his anger over such a simple thing should have prepared him better for subsequent developments.

On an evening in early May, Ben got out the checkbook and paid the bills. This necessary ceremony was something that he had begun, not exactly to dread but to feel increasingly irritable about. He sorted them and paid all the little ones first — fuel oil, dentist, doctor, phone, light, gas, water, car repairs and so on. He totaled them and deducted the total from his balance. Next he looked over the big ones, and paid the ones that had to be paid. Every month it seemed as though an unexpected big one would come along. This time there were two discouragingly fat ones, the fire insurance on the house (paid annually and not included in the mortgage payments) for $208.20, and a life insurance premium of $442.50. They had to be paid. And a final check for $400 had to be drawn to Ginny’s order, for deposit in her checking account to take care of the household expenses. He tried not to think too much about the balance left: $41.14. He had his commutation ticket for the month and a little over $20 in cash. Light lunches in the city this month.

Ginny came in just then, and as she walked by she patted him on the shoulder and sat in the chair near the desk.

“Made out my check yet, financier?”

“Are you that hungry for it?”

“No. I think I’ve got to hit you for a raise, boss.”

“What?”

“Four fifty anyway, but five hundred would take some of the strain off.”

He glared at her and said, more loudly than he intended, “Just what do you do with all of it?”

She looked startled, then indignant. “What did you think I did with it? I buy groceries for five. I buy clothes for me and three children. Gas and oil for the car. A one-afternoon-a-week cleaning woman. Sitters. A yardman once in a while now that you don’t have as much time as you used to have. Dry cleaning. Toys. Movie money. Sometimes I even buy myself a dollar lunch. Prices are going up, darling. Up and up and up, and I’m asking for a cost-of-living adjustment. What’s the matter with you lately?”

He adjusted a weak smile. “I’m sorry, honey. Look here. Everything is paid. Here’s what’s left.”

She got up and stared at the figure and then sat down again rather heavily. “But you need more than that for the month!”

“I’ll get along. I can draw trip expenses in advance for the Toledo thing.”

“I’m not... foolish with money, Ben.”

“I know that.”

“But where on earth does it all go?”

“Good question.”

“You’re making good money. Don’t we owe the bank something on that open note?”

“Oh, I’ve whittled that down to just twelve hundred.”

“Will it be better when that’s paid off?”

“It might be. A little.”

She straightened her shoulders. “Well, I can certainly get along on the four hundred, Ben. If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have—”

“I didn’t mean to bark.”

“Golly, I don’t blame you. We’ll just have to live... simpler.”

“Where? How?”

“Those are good questions, too, aren’t they?”

And it was turned into a joke, but the strain was there, the tinge of poison. And all the affirmations of love could not make it go away entirely.

It was, Ben thought, as the lean month went by, just a case of holding on, cutting corners until income jumped again. It made him feel guilty, however. It was a shameful situation to be unable to live without strain on an income which, ten years ago, he would have considered wildly affluent. It was best not to think of what might happen should some emergency situation come up.

And so in June, of course, which had promised to be a better month, Chris nearly lost his right hand. He was in a school bus on the way to a picnic, sitting by the window on the right side of the bus, his right arm out the window. As they were making a turn at low speed on a gravel road the right front tire blew. The bus skidded, went through a shallow ditch and into a stand of small trees. Chris said later that he had tried to pull his arm in, but the motion of the bus had jammed everybody against him. At first it was believed that no one had been hurt. The sound Chris made was lost in the general turmoil. But then he fainted.

When Ben got to the hospital at four o’clock they had been working on the hand — pulped between tree and bus body — for over an hour. Ginny was very white and very still, and her eyes were huge.

They did the basic structural repairs in the first operation. The third day following there were evidences of infection. In spite of the sulfas and antibiotics, his fever went up to dangerous levels, there were consultations and tentative recommendations for amputation. It was a nightmare time, with the hospital the center of all thoughts and schedules. The child was so stolidly brave about it, so uncomplainingly courageous and gallant that it seemed to make the whole thing more pointlessly tragic.

Almost during the last hour of decision, the infection began to respond. There was a second operation in July, very delicate and intricate, close work with muscles, tendons, nerves, to achieve optimum functioning of the hand. He healed with such miraculous speed — a facility reserved to small healthy boys — that he was able to go back to the hospital for the final operation in late August, a relatively minor one to readjust repairs previously made in the index finger and thumb.

By the time he started school in the fall, the bandages were off. The hand was slightly but not obviously misshapen. The orthopedic surgeon was quietly proud of his work, of the restoration of an estimated 60 per cent of function. But Chris often wept with frustration at the hand that would not follow the commands of the mind and, when it did so, was so girlishly weak. He had a series of exercises that he tended to overdo. “By the time he is twelve, he will have eighty per cent function,” the doctor said. “Perhaps later it will become more. He will adjust, and never notice it.”

When your only son is injured, it is degrading to think of money. You get the money, somewhere, and you don’t think about it, at least very much. The hospitalization covered a small part of the expense. Ben had the optimistic feeling that he could recover the rest of it from the Department of Public Instruction. He had a local lawyer, Harold Crady, look into it.

Crady finally reported back. “I’ve been around and around on this thing, Ben. The insurance company takes the stand that their coverage does not extend past taking the kids to and from school, or on special instructional field trips. This was a picnic, not authorized by the company, and the bus was not being driven by a regular driver.”

“Who was driving it then?”

“The brother of Chris’ teacher. The Public Instruction people take the stand the bus was ‘borrowed’ without sufficient authorization. The driver has no personal liability coverage, and he hasn’t got dime one, Ben.”

“Then what do I do?”

Crady shrugged. “You could file suit against the Public Instruction Department and the insurance company and the driver.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

“Because I don’t think you’d get anywhere. You’d just be making a bad risk of more money, Ben. Take your loss. That’s the best thing you can do.”

Hospital, surgery, anesthesia, nurses, operating room, and outpatient care came to $3006.65. Hospitalization covered $401.20 of this total. It was particularly ironic that Harold Crady’s bill for legal services in the amount of $100 had to be considered a part of the expense of the accident. Ben Weldon raised the $2700. He cashed the last few Government bonds. He had been trying to forget that he owned them, so that he would leave them alone. He got a little over $900 for them. He borrowed against the cash value of his insurance, a final $1000, bringing his insurance borrowings to an even $4000, on which interest at 6 per cent was piling up, and leaving him a cash-value equity of a little over $100. He went down to the Lawton National Bank. His 180-day note had been whittled down to $1100. He paid the interest to date and had it rewritten for $2200, with the overage deposited in his checking account. Mr. Lathrop Hyde, the vice president, was cordial enough, but Ben Weldon thought he detected a certain reluctance, an almost imperceptible reserve and skepticism. There had been Hydes in Lawton Valley back when New York had been a full day’s trip away by carriage. He never could feel entirely at ease with what Ginny in her more irritable moments called the aborigines. They all seemed to have an emotional resentment toward the new people, which was at odds with their pleasure in making money out of the explosive growth of the area.

On leaving the bank Ben was uncomfortably aware that interest alone on his debts was costing him a little over a dollar a day, and all reserves were gone.

That night he and Ginny had to drive into the city to attend a theater party that was a professional obligation. Three couples from National Directions, with Ben the junior in rank, and the president of a client firm in Dallas and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Blessing.

Sometimes such evenings turned out to be fun, and Ginny had enjoyed many of them. But this night Mrs. Blessing relayed her apologies through her husband to the people she had never met. She was confined to her hotel bed. Something had upset her, possibly the New York City water. Mr. Blessing stated that Myrna was very sensitive about water. He was to go right ahead without her, and, clearly, he had been going ahead very effectively at the hotel bar.

Ben had been in conference with the man, and had admired the agility of Hank Blessing’s business brain. He was a big freckled man with a fringe of gray-red hair, small pale-gray eyes. In the present negotiations with National he was in the dealer’s chair and was capable of squeezing every last advantage out of it.

It astonished Ben that a man so coldly shrewd in conference could be such a total after-hours boor. Service at dinner before the theater was infuriatingly slow, providing a chance for Hank Blessing to proceed further with his self-inflicted paralysis of the cerebral cortex. He dominated the table with increasingly coarse tales of his homespun beginnings, while the three National executives and their wives sat with glazed smiles inadequately concealing acute distress. A man alcoholically convinced of his own irresistibility and charm will nearly always focus all of it on the nearest beautiful blonde. Ginny became Hank’s rebellious target.

They were late to the theater. Hank made a horrible racket in the aisle as they were finding their seats. He managed to plant himself beside Ginny and mumbled further exploits to her, ignoring the shushings, until he went soundly asleep. The play could have been excellent. The leading lady was sick. Her understudy ran through the part as though anxious to make a late date, drowning out her cue lines, yelling the tenderest passages.

Hank came up out of sleep at the final curtain, refreshed and ready to go. Ben was able to beg off, using the sitter as an excuse.

As they drove north on the parkway, Ben became aware of Ginny’s ominous silence. There had been other horrible evenings, to be sure, but they had always been able to make jokes on the way home.

“Charming guy, that Hank Blessing,” he said at last.

“Utterly.”

“We’ve been going around in a tight little circle with that guy. We ought to get it all locked up tomorrow.”

“And I went around in a tight little circle, too, darling,” she said hotly. “Two drinks he spilled on me. And I’m so tired of being pawed I could scream.”

“Come now, honey. You weren’t—”

She whirled in the seat to face him. “How could you keep track of what was going on? You were too busy thinking about how you’re going to... lock it all up tomorrow.”

“Honey, really now—”

“Don’t you really-now me, Ben Weldon. We used to go out together, a million years ago. Now when we go out, there’s an angle. I get dragged to town to prove that the young executive gets married just like ordinary people do. And I’m told that it’s my job. I’m helping you get ahead, or something. Well, I’ll keep right on doing it, because I suppose it’s part of the bargain, but you might as well know I consider it cynical and degrading, and I hate every minute of it!”

She flounced around and began to stare out her window at the night, as far from him as she could get.

“I wasn’t aware of the fact I was torturing you,” he said stiffly.

“What did that evening cost?” she asked in a small voice.

“What do you mean?”

“What did it cost? Total. Is that a hard question?”

“Tickets, dinner, drinks. Oh, I’d say about two twenty-five. But it’s a legitimate expense that can be deduc—”

“When do you have to go to Dallas?”

“It’s set up for next Tuesday.”

“First-class air out and back? The very best hotel? Room service? Bonded bourbon and steaks two inches thick and the biggest rental car on the lot—”

“It’s always that way. We can’t afford to give the impression of cutting corners. Actually it’s a public-relations and promotion expenditure, and I’m not exactly loafing, you know.”

“This dress,” she said in a dreary voice. “I’ve put the hem up and down so many times I feel like I’m wearing an elevator. And we decided it would be so jolly and unusual to just stay home for our vacation this summer. All I had to do was cook for five and keep house. No more cleaning woman one half day a week. I wonder how scraggly I dare let the lawn get before I hire Gus to cut it. You come home so bushed, I haven’t the heart to ask you. We can’t afford to entertain the people we really like very often, so we have to turn down invitations, which at least saves sitter money.” She sighed heavily. “It’s a double standard, that it is. You take trips and live like Aly Khan and then you come back to your well-mortgaged home and listen to your wife whine.”

“Ginny—”

“It must bore you stiff.”

“We have to hang on. That’s all. This is a bad time. We just have to get through it.”

She turned back toward him, this time with earnestness. “But don’t you see, darling, that there should be more to life than just ‘getting through it’? These are supposed to be the good years. We don’t have any fun. Neither of us sees enough of the kids in the right way. Oh, I know. You’re the fair-haired boy, and things will get fat in the future, but what if we’re so beat down by the time things do get good that it won’t mean much?”

“Should I quit?” he snapped.

“Typical,” she said in anger. “Typical! You get all defensive and won’t even talk about it.”

“I’ll talk about anything constructive you care to bring up.”

He knew he was driving a little too fast, and dared her mentally to make any comment about it. The grim silence threatened to continue all the way to the house, but a mile after they had made the turnoff toward Lawton, the motor began to make an odd sound, a combination of grinding and clanking. He slowed down quickly.

“Is that little red light supposed to be on?” she asked.

The very moment he noticed it was the oil-pressure light, the car acted as though he had stepped on the brake. He put it in neutral and used what was left of the momentum to coast onto the wide shoulder. The motor was dead. He tried the starter and the starter would not turn it over.

“What is it?” Ginny asked.

“No oil, I’d guess. I wasn’t watching the heat.”

He got out and opened the hood. The heat that came off the block felt much like that of an open fire.

“Do we have to get oil?” she asked.

“No, we do not get oil.”

“Don’t bite my head off. I just don’t understand these—”

“The moving parts were operating without oil. Friction created great heat. The moving parts expanded and that increased the heat. The main bearings were the last thing to go, and they didn’t go quick enough so I ran it too long and it heated up beyond the melting point of the moving parts, and now the motor is frozen.”

He looked at her face in the pale moonlight and the reflected glow of the headlights. She looked puzzled and blank.

“Frozen?” she asked. “But you can feel the heat coming off it!”

And that was the very end. He whooped and gasped and staggered, and the tears ran out of his eyes. After baffled moments she joined in. They clung to each other.

When he could catch his breath he said, “Ruined! Got to buy a new motor!”

“Luck of the Weldons,” she gasped, and they were off again.

While they were still fighting for control, a police car stopped and Ben arranged for them to send a tow truck back. The disabled car was given a $25 tow into Lawton, three miles away. They left it in the agency parking lot and took a taxi home, and sent the sitter home in the same taxi.

Ginny phoned him at the office early the following afternoon. She had been to the agency. They had checked the car. The motor was shot. The estimate for putting in a new one was $770. It seemed that something had bounded up off the road, possibly flipped up by a front wheel, and had with devilish neatness sheared the drain plug off the bottom of the pan.

“They said our insurance couldn’t cover a thing like that,” she said solemnly.

“No. It wouldn’t cover that.”

“Billy suggested we trade it, but he said he couldn’t give very much, the condition it’s in.”

“How much?”

“Seven hundred dollars.”

“What! That was a thirty-eight-hundred-dollar car eighteen months ago!”

“Well, that’s what he told me.”

“I better talk to them.”

“What am I going to do for a car, Ben? You know I run a taxi service with these kids. I have to have a car. Should I rent one?”

“Can’t you borrow one?”

“I asked Billy, but they have a rule. Something about their insurance. I could try Alice, though. Stu is away for the whole month, and she can’t use two cars. But I sort of hate to ask her.”

“Give it a try, will you, honey?”

“O.K. How did it go with... last night’s companion?”

“About the way he wanted it to go. I’d hoped he’d be guilty and hung over, but he came out strong.”

“I got a call from Saks a little while ago. They were checking the address to mail a gift certificate. They said I’ve got a two-hundred-dollar credit all of a sudden, and they wouldn’t say from whom. So I guess he remembered slopping drinks on my dress. What should I do about it?”

“Honey, you might just as well use it. Get a dress.”

“No, sir! I’ll use it, all right. I’ve got uses for it. Bras, slips, nylons, blouses, skirts. Next time you get me next to a tycoon, I’ll joggle his elbow, believe me. ’By, darling.”

Ginny was able to borrow the neighbor’s extra car, and as soon as Ben had a chance he went to the agency. They would not go a penny over $750 unless, of course, he wanted to buy their biggest model, loaded with extras. Then they might go a couple hundred higher. He shopped around briefly, but he was handicapped by not having the car to show. He could only describe it. He had just finished the payments on the disabled car. Without cash, his only option was either to have the car repaired, and then refinance it to pay the bill, or to trade it and finance the new one. Billy pointed out the significant difference in the equity of the two vehicles one year from date. He said they would make a very special deal on a 1964 model.

Ben looked over the stock list and bought the cheapest ’64 station wagon in the warehouse. He dispensed with the usual extras — the only one he bought was the heater-defroster. It had been previously serviced and was ready to roll. They pushed the papers through quickly. Ben drove the gray wagon home, any pleasure in the new car well muted by the knowledge of being another $2200 in debt.

The third option, the one he had not let himself think about, was to purchase a good used car, something sturdy and reliable right off Billy’s used-car lot, for possibly $1200. It could be one year older than the disabled car. The $500 difference could be financed readily.

But at this station in life he occupied a certain recognized position. All public actions had to be consistent with this position. In so far as vehicles were concerned, he had already taken the risk of a slight inconsistency by owning only one. The house had a two-car garage. The typical Ridge Road family had one reasonably new Detroit product and a second car, usually an import, for the wife. It was not in good taste to have two spanking-new cars. The second car could be bought used, and it had character if it was slightly battered and noisy.

But Benjamin Weldon could not buy a used car as the family’s only car. It would indicate either an uninteresting sort of eccentricity, or serious money problems. Either conclusion was unpalatable. Everyone had problems. Everyone managed to get by, somehow, and keep up appearances. It was a test of both management and character, like dressing for dinner in the jungle.

Ben Weldon did not care about the opinions of Lawton. But of the two thousand men in the area who went down to the city every working day, at least fifty not only were in his age group and approximate earnings group, but were employed by organizations operating in the same areas as National Directions. Three men were, in fact, employed by National Directions, two junior to Ben and one senior to him. In any tensely competitive situation, trivia become excruciatingly important.

The fifty of the two thousand men who rode down to the towers of the city each day were blandly cordial to one another. And without being able to state precisely why, they watched one another with minute care. They learned to read the small signs. They could pick out the overconfident ones who, through talking too loosely and readily, were slamming doors they might have entered. They saw the first signs of decay in the man who would be felled by liquor. They detected evidences of the marital rift or the destructive affair long before the gossip became public property. And they could tell, with an uncanny, unerring accuracy, the ones who were on their way up and out of this narrow routine.

It was all casual, with the desperation carefully hidden away, but each year a few dropped off, and newcomers closed the ranks. They went down or up, and in either case their houses went on the market, and they rode those trains no longer. And at the lunches in the city, and in the idle moments before meetings were called to order, the smallest departures from standard behavior were discussed.

“What’s with Weldon, buying a used car? I thought he was crown prince over there. They cut his pay?”

“Maybe he’s just smarter than you and me.”

“Maybe. Seems funny, though.”

“Maybe he guessed the market wrong, or he’s playing the horses.”

Ben Weldon knew exactly how the system worked. Yet he guessed that if he had less at stake, he would have gone ahead and bought the used car. But when you’re playing the game for the house limit, it is stupid to go around handing the world any kind of club to beat you with. It would not be a crime to buy a used car. The crime would be in giving the men who control your destiny any personal questions to ask about you that do not have obvious and reasonable answers.

“If he can’t manage on what we’re paying him, how could he hope to run this outfit someday?”

Ben Weldon drove home in his brand-new car, and took his family for a short ride at dusk, wondering if he had been intelligent — or just scared.

October was a thin month. November was a little better, but it made Ben feel defeated to think of the onrush of the Christmas season. He made up budget after budget, and tore them up. No matter how he strained over the figures, he could see that, with luck, they could reduce the indebtedness each month, but by such a discouragingly tiny figure that it seemed to stretch endlessly into the bleak future.

When you have a chronic toothache, you eventually end up in the dentist chair. Ben had heard of a C.P.A. in Manhattan who had reputedly done wonders in straightening out the tangled personal finances of some of his friends.

He made one appointment and had to break it, and kept the second one, appearing with all his books and records and copies of his state and Federal tax returns, and his operating budget.

The wonder-worker was J.J. Semmins, with an office on West 43rd Street. He was a small fat man with a permanent scowl of impatience, an unlit cigar, a diamond ring, and audible asthmatic breathing. He had a huge bare desk in a very small office off the anteroom, where several people were working. He spread Ben’s papers all over the top of the desk and growled at Ben to have a seat and be patient. He went through the papers so fast that Ben could not believe he was absorbing what he was reading. From time to time he would scribble a note on a scratch pad. He reassembled the papers, plunked them on the corner of the desk and leaned back.

“Weldon, you keep good records. You should see some of the stuff comes in here. It looks like you’re even using your head here and there, but that isn’t helping you a bit, is it?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Twenty-three five, you make. And right off the top, for Uncle and the governor and other payroll deductions and that cooperative pension plan comes seventy-one, and none of that can you change, so we’re talking about sixteen four. Right? So twenty-six hundred goes into life insurance. It’s a little over ten per cent of total income, but with three small kids it isn’t out of line. Can you juggle the policies around and get the same coverage for less money?”

“I tried that. I’ve got a good agent. He couldn’t come up with a thing.”

“And you’re borrowed to the hilt on it. Now we’re talking about thirteen eight. Give me the story on this two hundred a month to your mother.”

“She’s quite old, seventy-four. She had her children late, and my father’s been dead thirty years. No Social Security to help out. She’s out in Columbus, Indiana, living in the house I was born in. We’ve tried to get her to come live with us, but all her friends are there. She seems to get along on two hundred. I’d send more if I could.”

“Any other children helping out?”

“I’m the only one living.”

“The house out there is in her name?”

“Yes, but—”

“Worth anything?”

“I don’t know what it would bring. It’s not big. A frame house in an old part of town, but she still likes it there. She has a woman come in and help her. The same woman for years and years.”

“If she signed it over, you could sell it and rent a nice little apartment for her. Put the money on these debts and cut your debt service.”

“I just couldn’t do that. It’s a matter of pride to her. I’ve heard her say a hundred times that the house is ‘free and clear.’ That means a lot to her.”

J. J. Semmins sighed. “So we’re talking about eleven four. If your house was free and clear, it would make the difference. Two ten a month on the mortgage and nearly six hundred a year town and county taxes. That’s a load, those taxes.”

“They’ve been going up ever since I bought the place four years ago. National brought me in from the Cleveland office then. Lawton is growing so fast they’ve had to spend a lot of money to take care of the services, schools and so on.”

J. J. Semmins scribbled for a moment and then leaned back. “Take the mortgage payments, taxes, and call it one fifty a month for heat, light, phone, electric and water and so on, call it five a year goes into that place. It’s a lot of house.”

“We hunted a long time before we located it, Mr. Semmins. And it scared us a little, even though I knew we bought it right. I can get seven more than I paid for it right now.” He paused and looked down at his fist for a moment, searching for the right words. “The firm I work for, Mr. Semmins, takes... a special interest in me. When I was brought into the home office, there was a certain amount of... gentle pressure brought to bear. They wanted me to live up to a certain standard, and the house and its location are part of that.”

“So now we’re talking about sixty-four hundred, which is what you got left after the house, and your wife takes forty-eight hundred of that. Right? So here’s sixteen hundred for car, clothing for you, entertainment, club dues, recreation, commutation expenses and, theoretically, interest and principal payments on your loans, plus medical, dental, personal, legal... and you come to me with this impossible situation and say that there’s nothing you can change, and I’m supposed to make up a miracle for you? You’re brighter than that!”

“I thought a fresh viewpoint might—”

“I’m sorry. What good is it yelling at you? You’re the man in the trap. Can you knock off at least the club?”

“We use it as little as possible, but they come up from New York and they expect—”

“O.K., O.K. How about this money you’ve been paying into the pension plan? Can you get your hands on it?”

“Theoretically I could borrow what I’ve donated at no interest. If I left the firm, it would be turned over to me, the exact amount I’ve put in.”

“How much is the total?”

“About nine thousand now.”

“Could you borrow it?”

Ben studied his fist again. “I have the right to. But if I exercised that right, it would have to be because of some... very obviously expensive and disastrous thing, such as a child in an iron lung or something. If I just borrowed it, it would be evidence that I can’t live on my salary.”

“But you can just barely get by on it right now, man, provided you have no more trouble!”

“I’m supposed to live on it,” Ben said miserably.

J. J. Semmins threw his yellow pencil against the far wall. It bounced back and rolled under his desk. “I get so sick of this same deal all the time,” he said. “Hundreds of you bright guys are in this trap. The big shots you work for made theirs so long ago that they think they’re paying you a king’s ransom. They want you to live big on it, advertise how good they are to work for. They’ll make certain the guys in the factories take home fat money, because the unions have put the fear of God into them, but the bright guys right under their noses, they’ll pay them twenty-five thousand and then put the pressure on so you spend all but a couple dimes paying your taxes and living as fat as they could have lived twenty years ago on the same money. Then, if you crack, it’s your fault. If you demand more money, you’re unreliable. If you start shopping around for more money, you’re labeled disloyal. Thirty-five would be about right for you, Weldon. You could reduce those debts down to zero and start a little savings program. Taxes would take a bigger bite, but you’d have about the right amount left. Go ask them for thirty-five. If they won’t give it to you, shop for it.”

“That’s a joke I can’t laugh at. Sorry.”

“There’s another choice. Sell the house. Grab that nine thousand in the retirement fund. Pay your debts, drop your insurance, and go to Florida or someplace and buy a gas station. You’ll live longer. You’d be surprised to learn how many guys in your shoes have done just that. They’ll tell you they got sick of commuting and conforming and so on. They won’t admit they got starved out. But they did, and it’s a shameful thing. Big business needs the guys they’re driving away because they’re too chinchy to pay them what they think they’re paying them. You’re the forgotten man, Weldon. Go anywhere in the country and beef about not being able to live on your salary, and you’d have them rolling in hysterics. Nobody will ever be sorry for you. You’ll get all the sympathy of a man with two black eyes. But from where you and I sit, it is a tragic, unnecessary thing, and we both know it. But it’s a story that won’t sell.”

Ben managed to force a smile. “Like the small-town bank clerk back in the ’twenties, trying to act like a substantial citizen on nineteen dollars a week.”

“And a lot of those guys took it as long as they could before they grabbed the money and ran.”

“I guess I can at least thank you for... confirming the situation, Mr. Semmins.”

“I won’t bill you, buddy. I don’t have the heart.”

“But—”

“Let’s have no arguments, please. What will you do?”

“Try to squeak by, I guess. Cut every corner we can. Try to hold on. You see, the stakes are big.”

“Sure,” Semmins said. “You sit in this great big poker game and you’ve got twelve dollars and you sit there, folding every hand, waiting for a royal flush, and while you’re waiting they ante you to death. Isn’t there some guy over there who is interested in you enough to sit down and go over these records with you?” He sighed. “I suppose not. All I can say is good luck.”

Ben Weldon reported this to Ginny, but he did not let her see the depth of his feeling of helplessness. He made it light, in so far as he was able, and, as Christmas hung over them, an ominous tinsel avalanche, they vowed all manner of economies as though it would be great fun. Economies can be fun for the recently wed: a romantic game, with the long walks to save bus fare, the happy magic of finding a quarter in the gutter, the painstaking budget to squeeze out the $4 a week to put in the savings account — against the future house, car, baby.

For those longer wed, economies can be a game if there is a special goal — the new house or the cruise or the swimming pool. But when it is part of a struggle to survive, and there seems to be no end to it, and you do not know when some small and expensive disaster may wipe out all your efforts — then there is a corrosive and destructive quality to it all. It can be a dreary battle, waged with the presentiment of defeat.

And there is not really too much you can do. You can put an end to the habit of bringing fond and silly gifts to your wife, little things you happened to see in store windows. You can avoid taxis as much as possible, give up the tenth-of-a-cent bridge game on the train, avoid all lunch dates that threaten to be expensive, try to get a little more wear out of the business suits between dry cleanings, give up the relaxing ceremony of the before-dinner drink. And you can begin a practice you have always avoided, the sly and delicate art of fudging the expense account. He found that he could show a small profit on each trip. Twelve dollars, seventeen dollars. It made him feel like a petty thief, but he told himself it was a practice hallowed by tradition.

Yet, with all these practices, he felt as if he were engaged in an exercise in futility. He was the captain at the wheel of the small boat, The sea was rushing into the hold. Every now and then he could rush down and bail for a few moments with a teacup before returning to his duty station.

There was a more serious aspect to it, one that he could not dare admit to himself. He had attempted to build an impenetrable wall between the increasing tensions of his personal life and the demands of his career.

There was an afternoon meeting ten days before Christmas, and as they were waiting for Brendan Mallory, who would conduct it, Ben Weldon heard Charlie McCain, saying, “—got them to promise to deliver it Christmas morning, a little M.G.A., robin’s-egg blue, and Kath’s eyes are going to bug like a stomped frog—”

Midway through the meeting Weldon was staring off into an equitable world where Ginny was driving her brand-new little M.G.A. down a sunny country road, the wind ruffling her blond hair, her eyes adance—

“Sir?” he said, falling abruptly back into here and now.

Mallory looked at him oddly and said, “You do have the break-even figures on Western Products, Ben?”

“Right here,” he said, flushing, and opened the folder to the summary his staff had prepared for him and began to make his report.

As the meeting adjourned, Brendan Mallory said, “Spare a few minutes, Ben?”

It was a command. He went with Mallory to the office of the president on the tenth floor. Mallory was a dapper little man with a narrow mustache and a deceptively ineffectual look. His voice was unerringly brisk and light and casual. But all the hidden force of the man was gathered somewhere and projected through steady bright blue eyes, as intent and merciless as the eyes of a falcon. No man who had endured the special focus of those eyes tended to underestimate Mr. Mallory.

“Sit down, Ben. We never seem to get a chance to chat lately.”

Ben sat in a deep leather chair. Mallory perched on the corner of the desk, arms folded, smiling down at him. “All arguments and no chat,” Ben said, returning the smile, feeling inside himself the special alertness of a blindfolded man on a tightrope.

“I’m very pleased with what you’ve been doing, Ben.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I discussed it with Ed and he agreed we should bring you into the bonus setup, starting this January.”

“I’m very grateful, Mr. Mallory.”

“I wonder if you aren’t pushing yourself a little too hard.”

This, Ben knew, was a direct result of the woolgathering in the special meeting. He carefully broadened his smile, and said, “I don’t feel oppressed, sir. As a matter of fact, I think I do better the heavier the work load is.”

“Everything outside the office is fine?”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said heartily.

“Give my regards to the lovely Virginia, please. Tell her you two are coming for dinner after the holidays. Alice adores you both.”

“We’ll both be looking forward to it, Mr. Mallory.”

“I thought you might be pushing yourself a little too eagerly, because you’ve seemed a little bit drawn and... remote lately, Ben. This has no bearing on your efficiency, but you don’t seem to have the — ah — lift you used to have. That light touch of yours that can take the tension out of sticky situations. And I do believe you’ve become a little less gregarious. I know that lunch with the people you work with all day can be monotonous, but sometimes things are resolved in little unexpected ways.”

Is there anything the little devil doesn’t see? Ben asked himself.

“Maybe I’ve been getting self-important,” Ben said with what he hoped was precisely the right amount of lightness.

“Not you, Ben! That’s a vice you’ll never have. I’m glad things are going well, and it’s been nice to have this little talk.”

“I do appreciate the bonus deal, sir,” he said, getting up.

Mallory shrugged as he led him to the door. “Be assured you earned it, Ben. And because it’s unexpected money, spend it foolishly. It will do you and Ginny good. Sometimes I wonder if you young people aren’t too reliable.”

He gave Ben a parting touch on the shoulder. Not a pat or a slap, but a barely perceptible touch, a curious gesture of reassurance.

Ben decided not to tell Ginny of the bonus. Had he been told the figure, he would have told her. He spent the entire train ride home trying to guess what it would be. He told himself that it would be a glorious $10,000 that would get him even with the board, with some to spare. But that was ridiculously optimistic. He knew the bonus scale of past years, and he knew corporate earnings, and he finally settled on $3500 as being a conservative and reasonable guess.

That evening he went over his financial accounts and saw that his most intelligent use of the money would be to reduce the bank loan by $1500, pay another $1500 on the insurance loan, and leave $500 in the checking account for emergencies.

Had they not previously made an agreement on the cost of the Christmas gifts they would give each other, Ben, in view of the bonus to come, might have refused to set such a small figure — no more than $5, and no cheating, please. After all, they told each other, Christmas is for the kids. And it isn’t the value of the gift anyway. It’s the act of giving.

Something that left a wound deeper than she had any right to expect happened to Ginny Weldon five days before Christmas. She had yet to find the proper $5 gift for Ben and she had begun to feel dismayed at her lack of success.

She was in a gift-shop area, bent on a specific errand, when she happened to notice in a window a beautiful English croquet set in a fitted hardwood box. She walked by the window, stopped abruptly, and turned back. Ben had admired Stan Sheridan’s layout the summer before. They had played a few times at Sheridan’s at afternoon parties on weekends, and Ben had been quite good at it. Afterward he had paced off their back yard and had told her that if they transplanted a few shrubs, there was plenty of room. He had mentioned getting a set quite a few times, saying it would be fun for them and for the kids. But he had never done anything about it.

Ginny knew that this was the perfect present, in spite of the fact that the season was wrong. It was the unusual sort of thing, the fun thing she always tried to find for him. It would be especially for him, but it would be a present for the whole family too. She was filled with a warm glow of excitement and anticipation, and a delight at having found the perfect thing so accidentally. The mallets, balls, and posts were varnished and striped with bright, pure colors in holiday mood.

Her happy sense of the rightness of the gift carried her into the shop and into the hands of a supercilious little clerk who called her “modom” and handed her a mallet from the set on display inside the store. As she held it, smiling with the thought of Ben’s surprise and pleasure, he told her the set was $124.95.

The blunt figures burst the dream. She handed the mallet back to the clerk, said something about thinking it over, and saw him shrug in a slightly patronizing way as he put the mallet back in the open hardwood case.

She walked out, and it took her a few moments to remember the small errand two blocks away. She squared her shoulders as she walked. This year five dollars is the limit. Stick to it, girl. You promised. Don’t cheat, because he won’t. And stop feeling so dreary about it. It isn’t that important.

He had stopped talking about croquet and there was, she knew, a whole list of things he had stopped talking about. As she walked she could see the cumulative weariness of her man, in his face and his posture. And it struck her, a sick blow at the heart, a twist of anguish so intense she was not prepared for it. He doesn’t have any fun, she thought. He is so good and I love him so much, and he doesn’t have any fun any more. Nobody does.

The sound, inadvertent, moved up through her throat, half sob and half cry of protest, and in the instant she realized other people were staring at her with startled curiosity, she felt the tickling run of tears on her face. She turned from them and stood facing a wall of decorative tile that was part of a store front — stood a few inches from it.

There was an insistent tugging at the sleeve of her coat and she looked down into the tear-blurred face, the soft, concerned, gentle face of a small round woman in a derelict fur coat.

“You all right, dearie? Anything I can do, dearie?”

“I’m... all right. Thanks.”

“Sometimes they die around Christmastime, dearie, and it’s God’s will. They wouldn’t do it if they could help it, poor things, but when the next Christmas comes around, it’s dreadful hard. Just get through it, dearie, best you can, and next year won’t be so terrible bad as this one. I know.”

And the woman was gone. Ginny got tissue out of her purse and wiped her eyes. In all the ways of pride she pulled herself together. And she went on with Christmas. She could tell herself over and over that it was too like a petulant child to whine about being unable to afford big glossy presents. But the wound had been inflicted, deep enough so that it could not ever heal perfectly.

In the last moments of shopping she found a walnut pipe rack and humidor thing for Ben for which she paid $4.98. In the shop she had been pleased by the way it looked, but when she unwrapped it to gift-wrap it herself, the finish had that shiny look of cheapness. After she had worked on it a long time, cutting the gloss by carefully rubbing it with steel wool, it was much more handsome.

Ben’s present to her was a small antique vase he found in a shop on Second Avenue. She could only guess the amount of stolen time used in finding something so lovely that was within the limit they had set.

The kids had prepared long and discouragingly expensive lists. Ben and Ginny had budgeted $100 for them, and due to the increased pressure of work because of the end of the year, Ben had been unable to help her but, as he told her later, she had performed a vast miracle of judgment and selection.

The bonus came through on January tenth. It was for $1500. Ben managed, for Ginny’s sake, to conceal his disappointment. He knew it was a bit churlish of him to feel disappointment. There could easily have been no bonus at all. But he had so carefully worked out just how he would disburse the anticipated $3500, and had dwelt upon how much that amount would ease the endless tension—

Ginny, thinking it came as a surprise to him, too, was delighted. And it seemed to dilute some of her growing resentment toward National. He said nothing to decrease her pleasure. He did not tell her that, because it was considered 1965 income, a tiny additional tax nip would be taken out of each monthly check for the rest of the year.

He paid $600 on his $2200 note at the Lawton National Bank, reduced the insurance loan by $400, and left $500 in the checking account for emergencies.

And then began the time of waiting. The winter was exceptionally severe again, the fuel bills high. The reserve shrank to $300. The house thermostat stopped working and had to be replaced. Ladybug had flu for a week and, in spite of Ginny’s precautions, she gave it to Chris, and the prescribed antibiotics were $14 a patient. Ben, returning late from a stormy meeting of the Civic Betterment Committee (men who work for National take an active interest in the affairs of their home communities), took to the deep snowy ditch to avoid a skidding drunk, and the tow-truck fee was $15. The water company, with the approval of all agencies concerned, slapped a special $20 assessment on all users.

These were the small things. A very special guest, a member of the board of directors of National, drops a handsome Danish cocktail glass on the hearth. Once there were a dozen. Now there are seven. So for any special entertaining for more than seven in the future, a new set must be purchased. Little things. Like being pecked to death by sparrows.

So the little things make you irritable with each other. But it is not only the little things that corrode dispositions. It is the unspoken awareness, always just around a dark corner of the mind, that big things can happen, and do happen, and the process of life is in part the knowledge that they will happen and in being prepared for them. They lived with the knowledge of their defenselessness. In a primitive culture, they would have worn charms to ward off evil, and had they been able to believe in the efficiency of the charms, they would have felt secure.

But in suburbia there are no magic things you can wear suspended from a string hung around your neck. You pray for breathing space, for time to plant your feet.

Love was there, in abundance. But an endless worry about money is an astringent that sucks the juice from love, renders it wan and slow-moving. And penury is, perhaps, more endurable in matching surroundings. It becomes grotesque in a $40,000 house.

The stress of enduring an unfair situation makes people seek outlets for their irritability. Ben and Ginny were handy targets for each other. The apologies, in time, became more a matter of protocol than of guilt. And each of them built up a distorted picture of what the other one thought. Ben taught himself to believe Ginny thought him a spineless conformist who dared not complain for fear of upsetting plans so far in the golden future they were meaningless. Ginny grew to believe that Ben considered her spoiled and petulant, unwilling to endure all this for his sake, thinking only of pleasures she was missing. And, in the perversity of all mortals, they made more effort to fit the mistaken conception than to correct it. Some of the warmth went out of the house, and a lot of the closeness went out of the marriage during the cold months, and the children felt it and were troubled by it, and acted in ways unlike themselves without knowing why — knowing only that they more frequently deserved punishment, and taking a curious satisfaction in receiving it.

There was no snow in Columbus, Indiana, on the morning of the third day of March, and the temperature was in the low twenties, and dropping steadily. It had been above freezing during the night, and there had been a hard driving rain, which had frozen in a cellophane skim over everything the rain had touched.

Martha Weldon had got up early, as was her habit, and had the coffee on before Geraldine Davis came down, smiling, yawning, to the kitchen. Martha was a tall, heavy woman with an air of pious thoughtfulness, an authoritative, rather ponderous presence. Geraldine was also a widow, and she was four years younger than Martha. Geraldine had begun to “help out” at Martha’s house seven years ago. She was a small, lean, tireless woman of good spirits but with a talent for malice. Her life income from her husband’s insurance was too tiny to support her. She made ends meet by helping Martha and two other elderly women. She had the knack of keeping it on the basis of a friendship between equals, so that the necessary matter of slipping money to her had to be done with greatest delicacy.

Martha also had a small income. It had been larger quite a few years ago, and it was fortunate that, as it dwindled, her only living son, Ben, had been able to contribute to her support.

Three years ago one of the women Geraldine helped had died, and the other had gone to Oklahoma to live with a daughter. Geraldine told her problems to Martha. As a result, Martha suggested she give up her miniature apartment and move in with her. There was more than enough room. They would be good company for each other. It seemed an excellent arrangement.

After breakfast on that cool, bright morning Martha sat at the desk in the living room and wrote to Ben and Ginny. She knew that Geraldine knew what she was doing, and she also knew that it would give Geraldine her usual opportunity to make overly casual comments about how long it had been since Martha had seen her grandchildren, and how young people these days lacked consideration, and how you’d think a boy doing as well as Martha kept telling her he was doing, making all that money and all, could afford to send more. Maybe he just never thought of it. Young people were certainly thoughtless.

It was a few minutes after nine when Martha stepped out the front door to put the letter in the mailbox attached to the post at the head of the porch steps. The board floor of the porch was painted a dark green. She took two heavy steps on the dry wood, and a third step onto the slick, transparent, invisible ice. She struck the edge of the top step with a terrible force, felt her thigh snap, and tumbled in a white roaring spin of pain to the cement sidewalk, down the four shallow steps of the porch, and lay there moaning, rolling her head from side to side. She was half aware that Geraldine had come to her, that Geraldine was in great panic. And when Geraldine made a stupid futile effort to pull at her, as though to drag her into the house, Martha screamed once, with the strength of a young woman, and fainted.

Ginny phoned the office at 12:40 and caught Ben just as he was leaving for lunch. Geraldine had not been very coherent. Martha had had a bad fall, and was in the hospital, and Ben should come at once. He told Ginny he would leave right away. He kept a small travel case with the essentials at the office for emergency business trips. His secretary had not left yet. He had her check flights for him and make a reservation. He could use his air-travel card and reimburse the company. The other men were out to lunch. He left it to her to tell them the situation, and he dictated a hasty memo that made staff assignments of the work he was handling, and told her to reshuffle his appointments as best she could.

When he saw his mother in the hospital that evening, he was deeply shocked at the way she looked, and at the uncontrolled trembling of her hands. He stayed in the house. Mrs. Geraldine Davis made up a bed there for him with what he thought was an unwarranted surliness.

He had a long talk with the doctor the next day. Due to the nature of the fracture, they had had to set it immediately. Splintered bones had had to be pinned. Her heart had stood up well under the general anesthetic, but they had had to give her plasma for shock. The doctor would not commit himself on whether she would be able to walk again, but he was ready to admit that she would be bedridden for quite a long time. Ben signed a hospital form accepting financial responsibility. He stayed that day and the next, spending as much time with her as he could, but he was never alone with her. Geraldine Davis was there the entire time. The women were obviously close.

He flew back the morning of the third day, told Ginny the details he had not told her over the phone, and that evening they phoned Martha at the hospital. Ben had arranged for a phone to be put by her bed. Ginny and the three children talked to her. Ben dived back into a brute load of work, work so heavy and demanding that he had no time to think of the extra financial burden her fall had entailed.

Six days later, at midnight, the doctor in Columbus phoned and woke him from a sound sleep to tell him that his mother had contracted pneumonia and she was not responding to medication. She was in an oxygen tent, and it was perhaps best that he come as soon as possible. Ginny packed his things and drove him to the airport.

Air connections were bad. He did not arrive at the small hospital until quarter after ten the next morning. She had been dead for not quite an hour. He made arrangements for the funeral service and the burial with the same firm that had buried his father so long ago. He phoned Ginny, and she said she would make arrangements about the children and arrive the next day. He said he saw no reason for it. It was just an added expense, and it could not possibly do any good. She seemed hurt at his attitude.

But he was delighted to see her when she arrived. He had seldom felt as lonely, and the town where he had been brought up had never looked so strange to him.

And he was glad to hold his wife in his arms for a long reassuring moment because he was ashamed of himself. It had happened the night of the day she had died. He had awakened in the night and he had been unable to go back to sleep. Suddenly, in the darkness, there had come to him a sudden tingle of excitement and pleasure and relief as he realized he could now sell the house, and even in a hasty sale it would bring far more than the hospital and the burial expenses. It was a sound house, and the location was convenient to the downtown area. He would come out of it with a profit, and it would no longer be necessary for him to send the $2400 a year to her. It was a despicable and degraded rejoicing that made him feel soiled, but he could not help himself. He mourned her. But mourning was stained by his awareness of being freed by her death from the nagging trap he was in.

Ginny had met Geraldine Davis on previous visits, and it seemed to Ben that Geraldine seemed more friendly toward Ginny than toward him. But when Ben and Ginny were alone later, Ginny said, “I don’t think we’re the most popular people who ever stayed here, darling.”

“I was born in this house and I swear she makes me feel like an interloper.”

“The poor thing is probably worried sick about what she’ll do now. You can’t blame her, you know.”

“That must be it,” he said.

The service at the church was well attended. The Weldons were an old family. The great majority of the people at the church were elderly. There was the traditional ceremony at the grave, and then Ben and Ginny rode back into town in the limousine provided by the funeral director. There were no words with which Ben could tell Ginny how necessary it was to have her beside him.

They were back in town at two o’clock, and Ben had the driver let them out in front of the old office building that housed the offices of Gebbert and Malone. Old Willis Gebbert had been a friend of his father, and had handled what small legal business the family had had for sixty years. He had made the appointment earlier. Judge Gebbert had been at the church, and Ben had pointed him out to Ginny. “Must be ninety and still practicing,” he whispered.

The old-fashioned office was full of dark, heavy furniture and it smelled like dust and medicine.

Ben introduced Ginny to the judge, and he was courtly with her. His hair was wispy white, his blue eyes watery, his head in a constant visible tremor, brown spots on the backs of his large white hands. But his voice had not lost its deepness and resonance.

“A sad thing,” Judge Gebbert said. “She was a wonderful woman. She made Sam Weldon a wonderful wife, Benjamin.”

“I appreciate your saying that, sir. We’re going to have to leave today and get back to the children and the job. I was wondering if you’d take on a last chore for the Weldon clan. I’d like to give you a power of attorney to sell that house for me and pay off the medical and funeral expenses — I can have the bills sent directly here — and remit the balance to me.”

Judge Gebbert coughed in a slightly artificial way and stared out the window for a few moments, then sighed and said, “Nobody can say Martha wasn’t in her right mind, and nobody can say her mind wasn’t made up. She came in here almost two years ago, son, and I made up a will for her. Geraldine Davis gets the house and furniture and the money in her savings account, and you get the right to go over the house and take any personal stuff you might want to keep. Want to look at my copy of it, Benjamin? I can get it in no time at all.”

“No. Don’t bother. I’m sure it’s just as you describe it, judge.” His mouth felt dry and he felt far away, as though he were dreaming all this.

“She said to me you were doing so good you wouldn’t need it, and if anything happened to her, Geraldine’d have no place to lay her head, no kin and no money, and by making out the will that way, she could stop fretting about it. It was going to be a secret, but she told Geraldine about it all later on so Geraldine wouldn’t worry either — you know the way your mother was, son.”

“Judge, how about the... bills?”

Judge Gebbert looked at him with a slight frown. “I guess you can do that much, can’t you? I don’t know who else would be responsible.”

“Thank you for your time, judge,” he said, getting up.

“Geraldine talked to me on the phone just before you came here. Seemed to know you were coming. Asked me about occupancy. I told her she’s in her legal rights to stay right here, and it’ll go through Probate Court with no trouble at all.” He gave an astonishingly vital baritone laugh. “If after all these years I can’t draw a will, I better get out of the law business.”

They walked the six blocks to the house. There was a faint rumor of spring in the air. Ginny held his arm.

“Darling,” she said gently, “we’re jinxed. If molten gold was coming down, we’d be out there with sieves, wouldn’t we?”

“Don’t make with the gallant little jokes. Not now, please.”

And at the tone of his voice she took her hand away and walked beside him, half looking away, tears standing bright on her lower lids.

They were on the porch of the house before Ben noticed the new sign in the window. Room for Rent. The door was locked. As he got out the spare key the door swung open and Geraldine stuck her hand out, palm up, and said, “I’ll take that key!”

He put it on the narrow wrinkled palm and stared at her. She stared back with a satisfied malevolence. “You don’t have to come in further than this front hall either. This place is mine, all legal, and you aren’t welcome here, you nor your blond wife either, Ben Weldon.”

“What’s the matter with you, Mrs. Davis?” Ginny demanded.

“Right here is your suitcases, all packed neat. And here’s this big wood crate with everything personal packed right in it, so you don’t have to go through my house poking around. I saved you the trouble, I did.”

“Why are you acting like this?” Ben demanded.

“Martha — God rest her soul — loved you, but I certainly got no call to. You’d go flying all over the country like a king, and you wouldn’t come near her. She wouldn’t see her grandchildren from one year to the next. Oh, I know how lonely she was. But you didn’t care, neither one of you. Send a little money, that’s all you had to do. So little you didn’t miss it at all, and you thought you were doing something big. I’ve been waiting years to tell you off, Ben Weldon. And right now you can get out of this hall and off my land. What do you want done with the box of stuff?”

“You don’t understand—” Ginny said.

But Ben said, “Never mind, honey. Send the box railway express.”

“Collect,” Geraldine said firmly.

“Collect,” Ben said and picked up the suitcases. They walked out onto the porch, and she slammed the door.

As they walked down the street Ginny looked back and saw her peering at them from the living-room window. She seemed to be grinning, but she was behind the curtains, and Ginny could not be certain.

When all the bills were in, Ben totaled them. They came to $3212.50. There was no hospitalization. The expenses of death are not deductible items for tax purposes. He would be able to claim her as a dependent for the year, and that was all.

This was the final rock that stove the hull of the small boat. He phoned the Lawton National Bank from his office and got Mr. Lathrop Hyde on the line. After he had identified himself, he said he could arrange to come in Monday morning at ten when the bank opened and discuss his note. Hyde had him hold the line while the folder was brought to him.

“Right now, Mr. Weldon, it’s sixteen hundred balance due on a hundred-and-eighty-day note, and the due date is — h’m-m-m-m — next Wednesday. Now I wouldn’t want to have to tell my loan committee I’d put through another extension on this note, Mr. Weldon.”

“I could pay it off with the proceeds of a new note, couldn’t I?”

“Well now, we’d have to see about that.”

“That’s what I want to discuss with you on Monday, Mr. Hyde.”

“Tell you what. You bring in an up-to-date personal balance sheet, Mr. Weldon. And bring your wife along.”

“It hasn’t been necessary in the past to—”

“Her signature goes on the notes too.”

“But I’ve always taken the notes, and she’s signed them at—”

“You just bring her along, and I’ll be looking for you at ten o’clock sharp, Mr. Weldon.”

When Ben and Ginny entered the bank on Monday morning, Ben had with him a personal balance sheet on which he had expended great care. It expressed his equity in the house based on current values, and his equity in the car based on purchase price. It included the $9000 in the retirement account. It assigned what he hoped was not too florid an evaluation of household furnishings and equipment. He had managed to squeeze out a net worth of $26,000 before current debts, and it gave him a certain amount of dubious assurance.

Mr. Lathrop Hyde’s desk was planted out in the open, against the back wall of the upholstered bullpen adjoining the customer floor of the building. Mr. Hyde greeted them and seated them courteously enough. He was perhaps sixty, long and solid in the torso, with gray hair worn long on one side so that it could be combed across the bald area and pasted in place. He had a long, square-cornered, fleshy face, with odd spots of high color on the cheekbones, pebbly brown eyes and a very wide mouth with thin colorless lips. His habit of dress was incongruously tweedy and informal. He took an active, leadership interest in community affairs. He and Ben had served on quite a few of the same committees.

As Ben handed the balance sheet over, he noticed a folder with his name on the tab centered in the middle of Lathrop Hyde’s blotter.

“Let’s see what we have here, folks,” Mr. Hyde said.

He studied each item on the brief statement with great care, checked the margin beside each one with a very small check made with a very hard pencil. He put it aside and let the silence grow until Ben had to say something and said, “Is that what you wanted from me?”

“I hoped it would look a little better, Mr. Weldon. You’d have a long wait getting that much for the house. Used furniture and equipment — especially in a house where there’s children — isn’t worth listing. And if you check the blue book, you’ll find you have no equity in that car at all. There isn’t enough equity in the house to allow a sound second mortgage. I guess I didn’t find what I was looking for.”

“What were you looking for, Mr. Hyde?” Ginny asked sweetly.

“Security, Mrs. Weldon. Security.”

“So are we,” she said.

“What? Oh, I mean ample legal security on which we can loan money, Mrs. Weldon. There’s no fat left in those insurance policies. You own no securities. And you certainly have a substantial amount of current bills to pay.”

“Nearly all of that is because of my mother’s recent death,” Ben said.

“I heard about that. May I extend my sympathies.”

“Thanks. If I can’t renew my note when it comes due day after tomorrow, Mr. Hyde, I’d like to borrow five thousand. I’d use sixteen hundred to retire the note, and pay off the balance of those bills.”

“A hundred-and-eighty-day note?” Hyde asked mildly.

“Yes.”

“And how would you expect to pay it back?”

“I’ve been sending my mother two hundred dollars a month, Mr. Hyde. That will no longer be necessary. I can pay the two hundred on the note instead.”

“Which in one hundred eighty days would be twelve hundred dollars. It is against the law, Mr Weldon, for us to loan money on an open note when we see little expectation of its being paid back within the stated time. A fully secured note is a different thing, of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Weldon.”

“Do you think I’m a bad risk?”

Mr. Hyde frowned slightly. “That’s an unfortunate expression, but since you used it, I’ll answer you frankly. Yes.”

“But—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Weldon. We are tightening our policy as far as you people are concerned. You bright young men who work in the city are very persuasive, you know. And we — uh — less sophisticated types are apt to be a little too awed by the salaries you are paid. And so, without realizing it until recently, we’ve let ourselves get into an unhealthy position on open notes to you brisk, successful young gentlemen. You make big incomes, but you live up to them and beyond them. Thrift seems to have become a dirty word nowadays. Personally, I am inclined to think of all this, on old-fashioned grounds, as a lack of character.”

Ben glanced at Ginny and saw she was white with anger.

“Mr. Hyde,” he said, “you seem to be moralizing.”

“Perhaps I am. You people dismay me in a way. You’re all house-poor, car-poor, club-poor, party-poor. You seem to try to be proving to each other that you can live on one and a half times your income. At our expense. We have too many renewals. We’ve been loaning money on promises too slender. One little recession, Mr. Weldon, would shake most of you out of the fragile limbs of your tall trees, and the Lawton National Bank would be holding the bag. And all of you would be without assets or resources. We owe our own shareholders better judgment in these matters.” He smiled broadly for the first time. “It would be such a shame if the party suddenly ended for all of you.”

“I resent being classified as having... this lack of character you mention,” Ben said thickly.

Hyde tapped the balance sheet lightly. “Haven’t you done the classifying yourself, my dear boy? Right here. You make nearly twenty-five thousand a year and, except for this retirement-account money, which was taken apparently before you could see it, you haven’t a dime. What am I supposed to think?”

Ben controlled himself with an effort. “I respect your obligation to your stockholders in the bank. But please don’t moralize about situations you don’t understand.”

“Oh, but I have an intimate understanding of them, Mr. Weldon. Through supplicants such as yourself.”

“What can you do for me?”

“I can give you a ninety-day extension on this outstanding balance, and I must ask you to pay the interest up to date on the due date. I can assure you that there will not be another renewal. Why don’t you borrow from your retirement account, Mr. Weldon? Isn’t that permitted? It usually is in most companies.”

“That’s my problem,” Ben said, standing. “Mail me the renewal agreement. Come on, Ginny.”

“Your attitude isn’t going to make future relationships any easier, Mr. Weldon.”

“It is my deepest wish, Mr. Hyde, that there will be no future relationships of any kind.”

Hyde smiled once more. “It’s perhaps for the best. After all, you could have the sincerest desire in the world to pay us that... unobligated two hundred a month, but you people have so many unexpected social obligations.”

Ginny was standing. She leaned toward the desk. “They keep saying banks are friendly. They keep saying bankers are nice. You’re a monster, Mr. Hyde. It’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it.”

Hyde chuckled, almost fondly, as they left his desk. They could not reach him. Nothing could reach him, nothing they could do.

Ginny was crying by the time they reached the car. He drove to the station. As he got out she was snuffling, but trying to smile. “I guess we know what we are now,” she said.

“He made me bring you along so he could sink the knife a little deeper. That’s the thing I resent most.”

“But what are we going to do, Ben?”

“I’ll talk to you tonight.”

By the time he got home he had worked out a program for handling this new problem. It seemed to be the only answer, but it depressed him to think about it. It wasn’t brought up until Ginny had finished the dinner dishes and the kids were in bed.

Ginny came into the living room and sat in the corner of the couch and pulled her legs up. The floor lamp behind her made her fair hair luminous and left her face in partial shadow She faced Ben, who sat making a protective ceremony of stoking his pipe, lighting it evenly.

There was a quality of expectancy in the silence between them, the product of their separate awareness that this was, at long last, the time of showdown, the obligatory scene that was a product of far too many months of this big, abundant and wretched life.

“What are you going to do, Ben?” she asked.

He noticed it was “you,” not “we.” He said, “There aren’t any miracles, honey.”

“But we have to do something!”

“I know that. Two round trips to Indiana. That’s top priority. When the air-travel bill comes in, I have to come up with the money fast. I’ll guess between five and six hundred. We haven’t got it. There’s nobody I dare borrow from. But I did some very discreet checking, and I’m pretty sure I can get six hundred from a loan company. They’ll take a chattel mortgage on the furniture, and they’ll do no checking on me that will be so obvious anybody will be able to guess. With their service charges, it will come to about thirteen per cent interest. I can get it right after the first of the month, so the twelve payments of fifty-something a month will start the first of May.”

“And we’ll just owe more money,” she said in a dead voice.

“We’ll have the two hundred I won’t be sending mother starting April first. I’ll write the hospital and the doctor and the funeral home and send them each a small payment out of that two hundred as a gesture of good faith, and explain that I’ll have to pay them off that way, a certain amount each month. And I’ll make a payment on the bank loan out of that two hundred too. I don’t think those people in Columbus will raise a fuss. They must be used to this sort of thing.”

“So it’s your idea to do it all out of the two hundred each month. So we shall be living exactly the same as if we were sending it to your mother. How long will it take? Just tell me how long it will take if nothing happens.”

“Including the bank loan, and interest and all... call it two years. A little over.”

“Two delicious years if nothing happens. And something will, so it’ll be longer. Believe me, it will be longer. I wanted a miracle, Ben. I didn’t want more of the same. You know the miracle I wanted? I wanted you to march up to whoever you march up to down there and draw out that whole nine thousand dollars sitting there, and tell them you were taking it because you need it. But that’s too big a miracle to hope for.”

“You don’t under—”

“When will you get a raise, darling?”

“I’ve told you how—”

“Tell me again. I want to hear it again.”

“There’s practically no chance of a raise until Bartlett retires. Where I am, the money goes with the job. I’m slated to take over Bartlett’s slot. There’ll probably be small upward adjustments, but nothing to get healthy on. He’s fifty-eight. He’s got seven years.”

“And what will you get when you take his job, darling?”

“I believe he gets about fifty-five, with a bonus between fifteen and twenty, and a small share in the stock-option plan. I expect I’d get fifty and a bonus of twelve to fifteen, assuming we’re running as far in the black as we are now.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said with a quiet bitterness. “Oh, whee, oh, joy. You’re going to be so terrifyingly important, and yet you can’t borrow nine thousand dollars of your own money. Why is it? Just why? Explain it to me.”

He rose and took slow steps toward the fireplace and turned and stared at her for a thoughtful moment, planning his words. “I’ll have to say this, Ginny, with no concession to modesty. I’m surprisingly good at what I’m doing. We deal with a lot of other corporations. I meet a lot of people. I’d say, and this is a pretentious thing for a man to say about himself, that there probably aren’t over a hundred guys in my age range with the same potential I have in the whole country.”

“Then why aren’t we—”

“Let me finish the explanation. It’s what you asked for. Some of those guys have landed, by bad luck, in the wrong slots. Some of them have changed jobs too many times, always pressing for the immediate salary bump. And I don’t think there are more than three or four in the whole batch who wouldn’t change with me in one minute, salary and all.”

She stared at him. “What!”

“I’m in the big big league, Ginny. And it’s exactly where I should be. I’m watched every minute, because there’s so much potential power at stake. It isn’t just the officers and directors of National, honey. At the top of the pyramid in big business there’s a group of men who know each other. It’s become pretty well known that I’m the heir apparent. It’ll be years before I’m in the kingbird’s seat, but they know of me, and they’re watching, too, and if there was any kind of shake-up at National that threatened to sidetrack me, they’d come in with the right offer.”

“Why don’t they now?”

“Because the kind of fool who would take it they don’t want.”

“So you can’t take out the nine thousand that belongs to you and put it back later when you’re making all this big money?”

He suddenly felt inexpressibly weary. He went back to his chair and sat down and said, “Just why do you think I can’t ask for it?”

“Because you’re supposed to be infallible about everything or they’ll think you’re not good enough for the top of their pyramid.”

“I couldn’t have said it more accurately. Apparently you do understand.”

“I’ve listened. You listen.”

“Of course, honey.”

“I’m proud of you. Keep that in mind. I know you can do what they think you can. I can see how it can be pride with you too. But a woman has a different slant. I know you can do it. You know you can do it. So what are we proving and who are we proving it to by standing around in this... thin air?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to work harder all the time, and you get less kick out of it. You never come home any more just busting with triumph, Ben. The things we do together are all... obligations, carefully planned, never on impulse. I claw you for no reason. You snarl for no good reason. We live with these two kinds of pressure every waking minute — your job pressure, and this stupid, ludicrous thing of just barely being able to make ends meet on a salary most people in the country would consider real wealth.”

“I don’t think I’m trying to prove—” He broke off.

“Please don’t go all haughty and stuffy. An electrician was here last week.”

“What has that got to do with—”

“He came to fix the refrigerator. He bought a beat old cabin cruiser two years ago. He’s been working on it himself for two years. As soon as school is out, he and his wife and two kids are going down the inland waterway to Florida. He found time to study navigation and small-boat handling in night school. It’s almost three months away, but he’s so excited about it he glows like a lantern when he talks about it.”

“I should go to night school and learn how to fix refrigerators.”

“Stop that, Ben. Please. All this is hurting our marriage. You’re honest enough to see that. It’s hurting the kids, this atmosphere of continual tension. I’m in favor of vast success and golden years, I guess. But not at this price. I mean that. Not at this price.”

He looked at her for one long moment. “Just what are you saying, Ginny? It has the sound of an ultimatum.”

“What good is the golden future if you ruin the good things while waiting for it?”

“Other people are able to—”

“This isn’t other people. This is me. I can’t afford the big leagues, Ben. Emotionally, I can’t afford them. I’m sorry.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t want to hang around and watch what we have left go the same way the rest of it went. I better ask you the same thing. What do you plan to do?”

“Live up to... my maximum potential.”

“When every morsel of joy has gone out of it, and all you have left is pride? Is that enough?”

“It looks like it will have to be, honey.”

“And you won’t take the slightest risk of upsetting their... big fat opinion of the crown prince?”

“Not the slightest.”

There was destruction in the long silence, and they looked away from each other. When love is twisted, a marriage can end, even though love is still there. It needs only the words of ultimatum to be said, and then the dreadful effects of pride.

The words were there, waiting to be said. Each of them believed the other one to be blindly selfish, and wondered that it had not been more evident up until now.

“We’re both tired right now,” Ben said gently, and so the words were not said. But the narrowness of it had frightened them both.

Ben Weldon could not sleep that night. He left the bedroom at two in the morning, so quietly that Ginny did not awaken. He made coffee, and he sat at the kitchen table. He went to the drawer where Ginny kept the cigarettes for their entertaining and opened a fresh pack. At dawn his mouth had a bitter taste, and half the pack was gone. He located the budget summary he had prepared for the interview with Semmins, and a copy of the balance sheet he had prepared for his meeting with Hyde.

He thought of many things, and he made a decision, but it gave him no feeling of relief. He sneaked back into bed a half hour before the alarm went off. When he came out to breakfast, Ginny stared curiously at him and said, “You were up in the night?”

“For a little while.”

“What did you do, smoke five cigarettes at a time?”

“Like a candelabra.”

When she drove him down to the station, they sat in the car waiting for the train to come into view up the tracks.

“It will rain later on,” she said.

“I’ve got that other raincoat in the office.”

“Ben... about last night.”

“Yes, honey.”

“You should know this. Even if you were willing to do it my way, it wouldn’t be easy — I mean I’d always be wondering if you were thinking I’d... held you back.” She gave a dry little laugh, and he saw where the morning light touched the little network of weather wrinkles at the corner of her blue blue eyes. “Nothing is easy any more, I guess,” she said.

“Don’t fret about it,” he said. “Here comes Old Unreliable.” He kissed her and got on the train and rode down toward the cold arena.

Brendan Mallory had flown back from London the previous day, and so his schedule was full. But his secretary was able to give Ben an appointment at 4:40. It was a dreamlike day for Ben Weldon. All day he had the feeling he was standing a half step behind himself and off to one side, watching himself go through the routines as one would watch a stranger.

All day he kept thinking of alternative possibilities, some of them logical, some of them absurd.

In his favorite alternative, Brendan Mallory would look up from his study of the figures, his eyes vivid with shock and concern, and say, “Why, I had no idea we’d been forcing you into such a ghastly position, Ben! Why hasn’t somebody brought this to my attention before? This is absurdly unfair! It shall be corrected immediately. A man carrying the load you’re carrying these days shouldn’t be forced to endure this kind of personal anxiety!”

In another scene, he had filled a gas tank and wiped the windshield and he was taking the money from the customer when the man looked at him intently and said, “Say, aren’t you the Ben Weldon that used to be with National?”

There was, of course, a background of hot sun and sandy beach, and his brown children playing on the beach, with Ginny near them, barefoot and splendid, and a boat anchored at a dock.

“You’re right, friend,” he would say, “but we got out of that ulcer trap. We didn’t know what real living was until we came down here, friend.”

There was another that kept slipping into his mind, making his stomach feel hollow. The word would be passed around in some mysterious way, and he would spend the sour, defeated weeks and months sitting in waiting rooms, filling out forms that would be filed away and forgotten, and the men he talked to would treat him with a brusque courtesy that did not quite conceal their contempt for the sort of man who would quit the team just before the Series.

“Sit down, Ben. Sit down,” Brendan Mallory said in his light and casual voice. “Something that has to come directly to the top, eh?”

Ben knew that when Mallory learned of the request for the appointment, he would have checked with Bartlett, who would be just as much in the dark as Mallory. So he was outside normal channels, and in National, when you bypassed your immediate superior, you had to be sure of your ground. He sensed a wariness in Mallory. This was it, and it made all the day’s conjectures seem silly. It was an effort to grope for and remember his planned opening.

“This is a personal thing, Mr. Mallory. I guess it’s a request for advice.”

“You know I’m ready to help in any way I can, Ben.”

“Before I ask for advice, I’d like to make one general point, sir. In many ways I’ve been led to believe that I’m considered a valuable man. It may be bad taste to bring it up this way, but can we assume it’s true?”

“It’s definitely true. Bringing you into the bonus picture was a pretty good clue as to what we all think of you, Ben.”

“So if I am valuable, can I make the further assumption that an extra effort would be made to keep me happy, Mr. Mallory?”

Mallory reached for the small gold model of a military jet on his desk and gave it a quarter turn before answering. “That’s such a hypothetical question, I can only give a hypothetical answer, Ben. We will do our best to treat you fairly. Isn’t it time we came to specifics?”

“Of course. I’ve come directly to you because I know this is a policy question. It may sound petty, but I’m asking you to look at the broad implications of why I have to bring it up. I can’t live and support my family on what you’re paying me. We have no other source of income. I have here our budget figures, and a personal balance sheet. We’re in debt, with more probability of going further in debt than paying it off. I’d like you to look these over and—”

Mallory, with a slightly pained expression, raised his hand and said, “Please, Ben. I don’t want to pry into the personal details of your life. Statistically you’re in the top five per cent income wise.”

“That’s no comfort if it doesn’t work out, sir.”

“I don’t want to bore you with reminiscences, Ben, but Alice and I didn’t have an easy time of it, believe me.” He chuckled and shook his head. “The macaroni years, that’s what Alice calls them. We had to watch every last penny, and sometimes it was a wearisome thing, but I can’t say that it did us any harm. I think it did us a lot of good, as a matter of fact. It doesn’t hurt anyone’s character to be careful, Ben.” He smiled and his voice became more confidential. “We both know it’s harder on our wives than on us, those lean years. And sometimes a woman can force a man to make... a small error in judgment. You can tell Virginia that you made the old school try, and the man said not yet. And we’ll both forget this little chat.”

“I can’t let it drop, Mr. Mallory. That’s the point I’m trying to make. If you’d look at the figures I—”

“This isn’t like you, Ben. It can’t possibly be so serious. You have a beautiful home, handsome, healthy children, a lovely wife. I can get a little angry when I think of the way you live now compared with the way Alice and I lived during the lean years. It’s a sign of our times, I guess.”

“What do you mean by that, Mr. Mallory?”

“Nobody is willing to wait any more. They have to have it now. You people all seem to want to live the abundant life before you earn the right to it.”

“It’s the kind of abundant life I’m living that I don’t want. And I’m not yearning for a cabin cruiser or a mink coat for Ginny or an airplane of my own, Mr. Mallory. I want to get out of debt because I feel degraded by being in debt when I make so much. But too much of what I make goes to keeping up the front you people demand of me. Let me unload that house and stop being a clubman and stop doing semibusiness entertaining I can’t write off, and I can get out of the swamp.”

“We pay you as much as we do, Weldon, because we expect you to live in that style.”

“Then it isn’t enough. Somebody should make a study of the suburban budget, Mr. Mallory. Too many of us are trapped.”

“Trapped? By a need for economy? What kind of a trap is that?”

“We’re not communicating, Mr. Mallory. I wouldn’t have taken up your time if it wasn’t important. I hoped this talk would go better than it’s going. I’ve got to have thirty-five.”

“You’ve got to have thirty-five thousand dollars a year!”

“If I’m to go on in the same job, and live on the same scale. I got that figure from an expert who did study my figures, Mr. Mallory. The tax bite will be much larger, of course. But the difference will be enough for me to get out of hock and begin to save a little, build up an emergency fund, lay money away for the education of my kids.”

“Ben, how many people are on your approximate level of pay in this building, in this home office?”

“As a quick guess, fifteen.”

“Closer to twenty, I’m afraid. Though salaries are not supposed to be public knowledge, quite a few people work on payroll and on overhead-expense data. An eleven-thousand-five-hundred-dollar raise would not pass unnoticed. And it would be a source of discontent.”

“Why should it be? If I am slated for bigger things, as you have hinted, why wouldn’t it be considered merely a confirmation of those plans?”

“Traditionally the salary is matched to the job, not the man, until you become one of the top officers of the corporation. But is that all we’re here for, Ben? Is that all National is — a money cow to be milked as often and strenuously as possible?”

“On the other hand, Mr. Mallory, should National have an irresponsible attitude toward the personal problems of its junior executives?”

“That’s a rather large word, Ben.”

“It wasn’t said hastily. To maintain the façade of my existence I’ll have to get that thirty-five, sir. Somewhere.”

It was that final deadly word, with its implications of disloyalty, that immediately changed the atmosphere in Mallory’s office. Ben had vowed not to bring that factor into the discussion. It would be there, but only by implication. But he had been pushed into the position of saying it, and things would not be the same again.

Mallory studied him for a moment. Ben had the feeling that Mallory had put a small strong hand against Ben’s chest and walked him backward and, with a final push, had then slammed and bolted a big door, and now looked at him through an armored peephole.

Or, in a more fitting analogy, two ships had hove to, side by side, exchanging cautious messages, until suddenly one had run up its battle flags, opened the gun ports and cleared the decks for action.

“We certainly don’t want to lose you, Ben,” Mallory said heartily. “You belong in the National family.” He had watched Mallory in action too many times not to see that this was the Mallory attitude toward all outsiders. Cordial almost to the point of being effusive, the eyes clear and friendly, the smile correct to the final millimeter of spread.

“Thank you, sir.”

Mallory came around the desk as Ben stood up. He put his hand out and Ben took it. “I recognize your problem, Ben, and I’m glad you brought it to me, and you can be assured I’ll do my very best to find a solution. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as we can come up with something.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mallory.”

There was no escort to the office door, no light touch on the shoulder. Ben went back down to his floor, his office, his desk. He sat down and looked out the glass wall at the beginning of the rain. Everything is so gentle and delicate here, he thought. They don’t ride you down in the elevator and give you a swing, and bounce your pants off Lexington Avenue. But somehow it feels exactly the same.

A few moments later he called Gearling, the treasurer, and asked to borrow the balance in his retirement account.

“You... want to take it out, Ben?” Gearling asked.

“It’s permitted, isn’t it?”

“Of course! Of course! The — uh — whole amount?”

“Yes.”

“How soon do you want it?”

“As soon as you can get it, Edward.”

“It has to clear through the trust account that handles the retirement fund, Ben. Three days?”

“That’ll be fine. Thanks.”

“When will you — uh — put it back in, Ben?”

“Sometime before I retire, Edward. I guess I’d have to, or it would mess up my retirement, wouldn’t it?”

Gearling suspected that Ben was making a joke, so he laughed in a slightly hollow and uncomfortable way.

That evening Ben told Ginny what he had done. He wanted to see her happy. He wanted to see her eyes shine. He wanted to get at least that much out of it, the way they give the big loser a free taxi ride home. But she stared at him, her eyes round in shock, and then her face came apart like a small child readying itself for tears, and she fled to the bedroom.

Ten days later Bartlett phoned and asked Ben to come to his office. It had been a curious ten days. There had been a subtle yet obvious change in attitude toward him. He learned indirectly of a policy memo that had not been routed to his desk, and suspected there had been others. Men who had been stiff and rather formal with him in the past were now relaxed and quite friendly in his presence. Those who had sought him out now seemed to avoid him. Bartlett was taking an unusual interest in the details of matters he had previously left entirely up to Ben.

When he walked into Bartlett’s office he was not surprised to see Brendan Mallory there, or see his open friendly smile.

“Sit down, Ben. Sit down,” Mallory said. “Ed and I have been up one side of this and down the other, and I think we’ve come up with something that will solve your special problem.” There was an ironic emphasis on the word “special.”

“I’m glad to hear that sir.”

“You’re too good a man to lose, Ben. We’re quick to admit that, believe me. Gil Walker sent in a formal request for early retirement for reasons of health, and we’ve been sitting on it, wondering who to put in out there. That’s Southwest District, out of Denver, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“With all respect to Gil Walker, Ben, that district does need the kind of talent you can bring to the job. It’s a good place to live, I hear. And, traditionally, the district managers do better, salarywise, than a lot of us slaves in the home office.”

“I’ve heard about that, sir.”

“From the way it looks, Ben, you ought to make about thirty-two or thirty-three at the beginning and, if you can build it up, as I’m sure you can, it could peak at forty in a very short time. So it’s quite a handsome promotion, and it seems to Ed and me to be a good solution all around. And it certainly won’t hurt your future value to the corporation to have a few years of running a district on your record.”

It’s so neat, Ben thought admiringly. You bring the outstanding young men out of the districts into the home office, the way you brought me in, but you never, never bring a district manager to New York. There’s good reason. He’s acquired an incurably regional point of view. The pay is good because it has to be good, because it is just as high and far as the man can go with National. So you sit out there and you do one gutsy job of following the instructions from the home office, and it is, in a sense, a demanding job, but you never get your fingers into policy. It’s a handsome promotion if you think just about the money. But all of a sudden they’ve dropped the barricade across your highway, and you know just how long the road is. You can move to a bigger district — at their request — and that is all. You’ll be the youngest district manager in National. And ten years from now you’ll be of average age for district managers, and eventually you’ll retire to a little better than reasonable comfort. You can do the job. It’s no snap job. It’ll take diligence and concentration and good judgment. But there will be no opportunity to exercise that rare executive muscle that creates brand-new plans, programs, policies, and attitudes. It will use all the rest of you, but not that.

So look at us as we sit here, full of face-saving devices and fabrications. Theirs is a salvage operation. They have decided they were wrong in believing they had a machine that would push new roads through the wilderness. But the same machine can be very useful keeping old roads in repair. It is uneconomic to scrap it. So grease it well and put it to work.

The other choice is to resign here and now and get into another outfit where the road to the top level will not be so neatly blocked. But would not that run us into the same thing?

He realized they were looking at him and had been for a few moments too long, but they both wore expressions of polite attentiveness, and the pleased look of men who have found a way to do a seemingly generous thing. They had beribboned the gift with the fictitious hint that he could and would return here after running a district. It could not happen.

“I’m pleased you think I can handle the job, sir.” We all know very damn well I can handle it, don’t we?

“Done and done,” Mallory said with satisfaction, moving in quickly for the handshake. “I can speak for Ed, too, when I say we’re both very pleased at the way we’ve been able to work this thing out.”

“Now it’s decided, Ben,” Ed Bartlett said, “there’s no point in dragging our feet. Suppose you get cleaned up here by the end of the week and report out there Monday.”

“For a quick look,” Mallory said hastily, “then fly on back and take care of personal matters and then take your time driving your family out there. See something of the country. I’m sure that will be all right with Gil.”

The three men were standing. They smiled at one another. They were all members of the National family, and when these little family problems came up, you made a practice of handling them in a warm, human, cooperative way.

Ben Weldon spent a week in Denver. Gil Walker was delighted that Ben was taking over the district. Gil talked a great deal about the benefits of being a district manager, of being the top dog in the area. He was proud of his staff of sixty-two. The staff seemed competent, pleasant, and as wary of Ben as he expected them to be.

Gil steered Ben to a good real-estate agent who found a house that seemed nearly perfect, at less than he had expected to pay. He told Ginny all about it over the phone. She sounded ecstatic at the description, and told him to nail it down fast — the same advice given him by the agent.

He made the deposit. He was taking an evening flight back, leaving at ten o’clock, Friday night. He had checked out of the hotel. After dinner alone he had time to kill, and so he drove the rental car out to the house where they would live.

It was a very cold night, and the stars were vivid. He parked in the driveway and walked slowly around to the back of the house and sat on the low wall that enclosed the open patio. He smoked the cigarettes that he could afford, and he wore a new sports jacket, new flannel slacks, a new topcoat. He looked at the long slant of the land he would own, and he wondered if he had done it all as well as he could do it. He knew it was a question that could not be resolved, one that he would ask himself, probably, for the rest of his life.

On the evening of the day he had accepted the new job, he had gone home with two bottles of champagne. He beamed at his Ginny and presented her with the champagne. She stared at him in blank confusion. He took the champagne out of her hands and kissed her with splendid emphasis and resounding duration.

When he released her, gasping, she said, “What is this all about?”

“It is because you are a woman of rare perception and intelligence. And if I have your solemn promise never to gloat, I’ll tell you it is because you were entirely right, and I was dead wrong, darling.”

“About the job?”

“What else, pray? I just got bumped ten thousand, baby.”

“Ben! I don’t know what to say! How incredibly wonderful!”

“And we’re going to live one mile in the air, woman. You are standing in the presence of the brand-new district manager, Southwest District, headquarters in Denver.” Even as he beamed at her proudly, he was watching her closely. It was the critical moment.

He saw the doubts go out of her eyes. “Then champagne is exactly the right thing, isn’t it?” she said.

“Please chill it immediately. And jump when I give an order. I expect more respect around here from now on.”

“Lord and master,” she said, smiling, and came into his arms again.

He held the flame of his lighter to read his watch. Another ten minutes and it would be time to start to the airport. You did what you felt you had to do, and when it was done, you lived with it.

They could be content here, secure and happy. Things might become as good as they had once been, before insecurity began to corrode their contentment.

But he knew, and he would always know, that he had once climbed to a high and lonely place, that with the climbing irons and the ropes he had reached the last sheer drop before the summit. He had swung there in the frosty gale until finally, too numbed to make the final effort, he had climbed back down the way he had come, back down to a niche where he could be warm and safe and out of the wind.

He knew he would read and hear about the ones who made it all the way to the high peaks. The lower slopes of the mountains were warm and easy, and the trails were marked. The high places were dangerous. He knew how close he had come, and he could read about the others who had made it. Their powers and their decisions would affect him. And all his life he would wonder just how it felt to be up there.

He stood up and snapped his cigarette into the night and walked back to the car. As he got behind the wheel he found himself wondering if it was a happy ending. He smiled with derision at himself as that ancient phrase came into his mind. Happy endings were reserved for stories for children. An adult concerned himself with feasible endings. And this one was feasible, as an ending or as a beginning. You had to put your own puzzle together, and nobody would ever come along to tell you how well or how poorly you had done.