BUtterfield 8 (8 page)

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“Yes, it is. It’s exactly the same thing. If I got out of the taxi now would that be humiliating you publicly?”

“Oh, don’t. It’s so unnecessary.”

“Please answer my question.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. Does that answer it?”

“Yes. Driver! Pull over, please, over to the curb, you dope. Here.” He gave the driver a dollar and took off his hat. “Good-by, Isabel,” he said.

“You’re being silly. You know you’re being silly, don’t you?”

“Not at all. I just remembered I was supposed to be covering a sermon this morning and I haven’t put in at the office all day.”

“Good heavens, Jimmy! Will you call me?”

“In an hour.”

“I’ll wait.”

 • • • 

Liggett took a late afternoon train back to town. He almost enjoyed the ride. It had been a strain, being with the girls. Not so much with Emily; for the time being she was out of this, and she would only be in it if something slipped. So she was not a strain. Not that he expected anything to slip; but there was always the possibility that that fool girl might still be asleep in the apartment, or that she had left something behind, and he wanted to have plenty of time for a thorough search before Emily and the kids got back. Whatever got over him, he asked himself, that he should take that girl to his apartment? He’d never done that before, not even when Emily and the girls were away for the summer, or in Europe. Well . . .

Europe. This had been a tough winter. The things that were supposed to happen this last winter, hadn’t happened. He was beginning to think that the things that were promised to happen were not going to happen, either. Privately, secretly, he did not delude himself as to his own importance in his own economic scheme; he was the New York branch manager for the heavy-tool manufacturing plant his grandfather had founded as a tap and reamer plant. Liggett could read a blueprint; he could, with a certain amount of concentration, pass upon estimates with sufficient intelligence to see the difference between cost and eventual purchase price, which was a not inconsiderable part of his job, since one of his best customers was the City of New York. He also had to deal with large utility corporations and he had to have at least a working knowledge of the accounting and valuation systems of these corporations, which make a practice of carrying, say, a $5, 000 pneumatic drill outfit as a $5,000 capital investment ten years after the purchase, allowing nothing for depreciation. He had to know the right man to see among all his prospective customers—which did not by any means always turn out to be the purchasing agent. He did not know how to use a slide rule, but he knew enough to call it a slip-stick. He could not use a transit, but among engineers he could talk about “running the gun.” Instead of handwriting he always used the Reinhard style of lettering, the slanting style of printing which is the first thing engineers learn. He would disclaim any real knowledge of engineering, frankly and sometimes a little sadly, but this had a disarming effect upon real engineers: they would think here is a guy who is just like a kid the way he wants to be an engineer and he might have made a good one. The superficial touches which he affected—the lettering, the slang, the knowing the local engineering gossip like who was the $75-a-week man who did the real work on a certain immense job—all these things made him a good fellow among engineers, who certainly are no less sentimental than any other group of men. They liked him, and they did little things for him which they would not have done for another engineer; he was a non-competing brother.

A crew man, he always had something to talk about to M. I. T. men. He would talk about the spirit of the M. I. T. navy, taking its beatings year after year. His own father had gone to Lehigh, so he always had a word of Lehigh engineers. He would recognize Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi keys a mile away. He was even known to remark, in the presence of non-Yale men, that he wished he had at least gone to Sheff and learned something. He never made the mistake of saying of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi men, as he once said to a man he did not like: “I never saw a Phi Beta Kappa wear a wrist watch.”

The “personal-use clause” which required Yale men to sign statements that they hoped their mothers dropped dead this minute if these football tickets that they were applying for were to be used by someone else—that was a gift from the gods to Liggett. He would apply for his tickets, sign the pledge that went with the tickets—and then when some properly placed Tammany man came to him for a pair for the Harvard game, Liggett would explain about the pledge but he would turn over the tickets. Liggett did not think it entirely necessary to justify this violation of his word of honor, but he had two justifications ready: the first was that he did not approve of the pledge; the second, that he had got boils on his ass year after year for Yale, four years of rowing without missing a race, and he felt that made him a better judge of what to do with one of the few benefits he derived from being an old “Y” man than some clerk in the Athletic Association office. On at least one occasion those tickets made the difference between getting an equipment contract and not getting it. And so, looking at it one way, he was a valuable man to the firm. The plant no longer belonged to the Liggett family, but he was a director, as a teaser for any lingering good will that his father and grandfather might have left. He voted his own and his sister’s stock, but he voted the way he was told by the attorney for his father’s estate, who was also a director.

It took the whole year 1930 to teach him that he just did not know his way around that stock market. Business was a simple thing, he told himself: it was buying and selling, supply and demand. His grandfather had come over here, a little English mechanic from Birmingham, and supplied a demand. His father had continued the supply and demand part, but had also gone in more extensively for the buying and selling. In 1930 Liggett reasoned with himself: the buying and selling is not up to me the way it was up to my father, and neither is the supplying of the demand up to me the way it was up to Grandfather. I am in the position of participating in the activities of both my grandfather and my father, and yet since I am not right there at the plant, I have something they didn’t have. I have a detached point of view. Liggett & Company are supplying—and selling. Now wherever I go I see buildings going up, I see excavations being made. A few common stocks—all right,
all
common stocks—have taken a thumping, but that’s because some of them were undoubtedly priced at more than they were worth. All right. Something happens and the whole market goes smacko. Why? Well, who can explain a thing like that; why. But it happened and in the long run it’s going to be a good thing, because when those stocks go up there again, this time they’re going to be worth it.

On that basis he brought his income down from the $75,000 he earned in 1929 to about $27,000 for 1930. His salary was $25,000 and this was not cut, for his Tammany connections were as good in 1930 as they were in 1929, and he sold. In 1929 his income from Liggett & Company, aside from salary, was $40,000, including commissions. In addition he had an income of about $10,000 from his mother’s estate, which was tied up in non-Liggett investments in Pittsburgh. In 1930 his profits from Liggett & Company amounted to $15,000, which went to his brokers, as did the $5,000 he got from his mother’s estate. But he and another man did make $2,000 apiece from an unexpected source, and they thought seriously of doing it every year.

Liggett convinced himself he had to go abroad in the Spring of 1930, and a man he had known in college but less well in the after years came to him with a scheme which took Liggett’s breath away. They talked it over in the smoke room, and as part of the scheme they bought out the low field in the ship’s pool. The next day shortly after high noon the ship stopped, and was stopped for a good hour. As a result of the delay Liggett and his friend, holding the low field, won the biggest pool of the voyage, and Liggett’s end was around $2,000. It was not clear profit, however; $500 of it went to the steward whom they had bribed to fall overboard at noon that day. In Liggett’s favor it must be said that he refused at first to go into the scheme, and would not have done so had he not been assured that a financier whom he always had looked up to as a model of righteousness and decorum had once given the bridge an out-and-out bribe, with subtle threats to back it up, to win a pool that didn’t even pay his passage. Also, Liggett had to be assured that his fellow-conspirator would choose a steward who could swim. . . .

He hurried from the train to a phone booth and called his home number. No answer. That didn’t mean anything, though. It only meant that this Gloria was not answering his telephone. He took the subway to Times Square, but instead of taking the shuttle to Grand Central he went up to the street out of that horrible subway air (it was much better when there were a lot of people in it; you could look at the horrible people and that took your mind off the air) and rode the rest of the way home in a taxi.

He looked for signs of something in the face of the elevator operator, but nothing there, only that six-months-from-Christmas “Good afternoon, sir.” He hurriedly inspected the apartment, even opening the kitchen door that opened upon the service hall.

“Well, she’s not here,” he said aloud, and went back to take a better look at the bathroom. She certainly had made a nice little mess of that. Then he noticed that his toothbrush, which always, always stood in a tumbler, was lying on the lavatory. A tube of toothpaste had been squeezed in the middle and the cap had not been replaced. He held the toothbrush to his nose. Yes, by God, the bitch had brushed her teeth with his brush. He broke it in half and threw it in a trash basket.

In the bedroom he saw her evening gown and evening coat. He picked up the gown and looked at it. He turned it inside out and looked at it at approximately the point where her legs would begin on her body, expecting to find he knew not what, and finding nothing. It was a good job of tearing he had done and he was embarrassed about that. From the way she had behaved when once he got her into bed there was no reason to suspect her of being a teaser, but why had she been so teaser-like when he brought her home? They were both drunk, and he had to admit that she was a little less drunk than he, could drink more was what he was trying not to admit. She had come home with a man she had met only that night, come to his apartment after necking with him in a taxi and allowing him to feel her breasts. She had gone to his bathroom and when she came out and saw him standing there waiting for her with a drink in his hand she accepted the drink but was all for going back to the livingroom. “No, it’s much more comfortable here,” he remembered saying, and remembered thinking that if he hadn’t said anything it would have been better, for as soon as he spoke she said she thought it was more comfortable in the livingroom, and he said all right, it was more comfortable in the livingroom but that they were going to stay here. “Oh, but you’re wrong,” she said, and looked at him in the face and then slowly down his body, the frankest look anyone ever had given him, the only time he ever was completely sure that he was looking at someone’s thoughts. He got up and put his drink on a table and took her in his arms as roughly as possible. He squeezed her body against his until she felt really small to him. She kept her drink in her hand and held it high while she leaned her head back as far as she could, her face away from his face. She stopped speaking, but she did not look angry. Tolerant. She looked tolerant, as though she were dealing with a prep school kid, as though she were suffering but knew this would be over in a little while and she would be there, with her drink in her hand and her dignity unaffected. That finally was what made him release her, but not for the reason she supposed. She thought he was going to give up, but that dignity was too much for him. He had to break that some way, so he let her go, took his arms from around her, and then snatched the top of the front of her dress and ripped it right down the front. It tore right down the middle.

Instantly there were changes. He had frightened her and she was pitiful and sweet. He didn’t even notice that her dignity was at least genuine enough to cause her to hold on to the drink and walk two steps with it to a table. For a minute, two minutes, he was ready to love her with all the tenderness and kindness that seemed to be all of a sudden at his command, somewhere inside him. He followed her to the table and waited for her to put down the drink. He was aware now, the day after, but hadn’t been last night, that she looked a little posed, in a trite pose, with her chin almost on her shoulder, her eyes looking away from him, her right arm making a protective V over her chest, her left hand cupped under her right elbow. He put his hands on her biceps and pressed a little. “Kiss me,” he said.

“As a reward,” she said.

She turned her face toward him, sufficient indication that she would kiss him. He put his hands in back of her again and kissed her tenderly on the mouth, and then she slowly lowered her arms from in front of her and put them around him, and she walked up to him without moving her feet.

Thinking of it now he knew that it went beyond love. It was so completely what it was, so new in its thoroughness and proficiency that for the first time in his life he understood how these guys, these bright young subalterns, betray King and Country for a woman. He even understood how they could do it while knowing that the woman was a spy, that she was not faithful to them; for he did not care how many men Gloria had stayed with since she left this apartment; he wanted her now. He hadn’t remembered this all afternoon, so long as he was with Emily and the girls, but right now if he could have Gloria here he would not care if Emily and the kids came in and watched. “God damn it!” he shouted. She couldn’t possibly know the things he knew. He was forty-two, and she wasn’t less than twenty years younger than he, and—aah, what difference did it make. Wherever she was he’d find her, and he would get her an apartment tonight. This, then, was what happened to men that made people speak of the dangerous age and all that. Well, dangerous age, make a fool of yourself, whatever else was coming to him he would take if he could have that girl. But he would have to have her over and over again, a year of having her. And to make sure of that he would get her an apartment. Tonight. Tomorrow she could have the charge accounts.