John D. MacDonald - A Man of Affairs

John D. MacDonald

A Man of Affairs

First published in 1957

ONE

I GOT OUT OF MY CAR and stood beside it on the gravel driveway and looked at the big frame house. I had not seen it in over two years, not since the death of Louises father put an end to those futile and meaningless conferences he used to hold in his home. The house and grounds had not changed. The blinds were closed against the heat of a midmorning Monday in May. The plantings were as formal and rich and well-tended as ever.

I tried to calm myself with a cigarette. It would do no good to rush in full of anger and indignation and confront Louise. Louise had too much experience with being bullied. Just a half hour earlier I had dropped into the bank to see Walt Burgeson, and he had been very uncomfortable as he had told me the sorry and disappointing news about Louises unexpected decision--the decision that might well spill all the apples out of our basket.Though I had seen Louise here and there during the two years since her fathers death, Id had no close contact with her. Louise had been off with Warren Dodge on a honeymoon in Italy when her father, Thomas McGann, met his tragic, slapstick death, a death that, must have infuriated him during his final microsecond of awareness. The way it was reconstructed, he had dropped the soap and it had bounded out of the shower stall. When he stepped out he stepped directly onto it, and in falling struck his head squarely and irrevocably on the porcelained rim of the toilet. He had been a big and ponderous man, muscled like a steer.I had a clear memory of how Louise and Warren Dodge had looked at the time of the funeral, after their flying trip home from Italy--Warren big and beefy, solemn and sullen, heavily scented with bonded whisky--Louise remote and subdued and pallid, more spiritless than even the death of her father would have seemed to warrant.There are only seventy thousand people in Portston and so I had seen her around fairly often during the two years. And thought she looked unhappy. And heard the unsavory rumors about her marriage. I didnt need the rumors. I knew what sort of man she had married.I snapped the cigarette away, went to the door and pushed the bell. The door opened and a heavy Negro woman looked at me quite blankly. "Id like to see Mrs. Dodge, please.""She busy now.""Go tell her Sam Glidden wants to see her right now!"Some of my urgency and anger must have been apparent. Im big and Ive been told by intimates that I look a good deal rougher and tougher than I am. I saw a wider stripe of the whites of her eyes as she closed the door. She was back in a minute and a half to say, "She says you come back in the garden."I followed her through the house. There were glints of polish on the dark and heavy furniture, discreet gleams of brass and silver, a scent of cedar and wax and furniture oils. The house had a hushed feeling, a secret flavor.The small walled garden behind the house was sunny and bright with flowers. Louise got up from an aluminum chaise longue webbed with white plastic and took my hand and smiled her careful smile and said, "A long time, Sam. Too long.""Its good to see you, Louise."She indicated a chair for me and sat back on the chaise longue, still smiling. But I sensed she knew well why I had come. "Beer or anything, Sam?""Thanks, no." I had to put her off balance a little bit. She was braced for argumentation. I offered her a cigarette and said, "I was remembering about once upon a time, Louise. The time when I was so in love with you I couldnt even eat."Her greeny-gray eyes went round-wide with surprise. "Good Lord! When?""I was a senior in high, and you were a sophomore. You wore your hair a funny way. Braided and it went across here.""My coronet braid.""And you had a blue dress with white at the collar and white on the sleeves.""I havent remembered that dress for years. It was a favorite.""I suffered in silence. Sam Glidden had no business trying to get chummy with the McGann girl. We all knew your father sent you and your brother to public high school because he thought it was the democratic thing to do. Your brother had his own car, and you had your own crowd you ran around with, and as soon as the weather was warm enough youd all go right from school to the country club to swim and play tennis."She laughed aloud and it made me feel slightly hurt. "Whats so funny?""Not what you think, Sam. Right about that time I had a grim little crush on you. But you were unattainable. Big popular senior, football hero. Big Sam Glidden wasnt going to waste any of his time on a sappy little sophomore.""We should have found out about that," I said. She looked at me and after a few seconds her smile looked as though it had been pasted on, and then she looked away. I knew she was about to ask me why I had come to see her, so I beat her to the gun and said "Ill never forget how much I owe your father, Louise.""He was... glad he could help you, Sam."I had worked at the Harrison Corporation plant--Thomas McGann, President--every summer while I was in high school. In my senior year I had a choice of football scholarships; but in the final high school game, I got hit and the cartilage of my right knee was badly torn. The word got around the conference I would be out of the game for two years at least. A football scholarship had been my only prayer of getting to college in spite of reasonably respectable marks. That was 1946 and I was nineteen. Id been too young for World War II, and the bum knee kept me out of Korea later.I applied for a job at Harrison, thinking I would save money for a year and then try college the following fall. I didnt know that Thomas McGann was aware of my existence. When I applied for a job in June I got it immediately on the basis of my past working record with them, and three days later I was called out of the shop and sent up to Mr. McGanns office. I soon found hed followed my football career as well as my record with the company on summer jobs. And he knew my home situation. I was the only child of my mothers first marriage. It had not been a good marriage. When I was eleven, after her fifth year of widowhood, she had married again, married a man she loved, a man who adored her. And there were, by that time, four half-brothers and half-sisters from that second marriage. It was a happy house without much money and without too much emotional room for me.Mr. McCann offered a deal. He would get me into a good college of business administration and back me for what I needed through four years if I would agree to come back and work for the Harrison Corporation. When I was on salary I could start paying.It took a long time for him to get it through my proud, thick head that it wasnt charity. I took him up on it. When I was twenty-three I came back to work as assistant to the purchasing agent. Five years ago, when I was twenty-five, I paid him back the last dime.In view of what he had done for me, I had to choose my words carefully in talking to Louise. "Im grateful to your father, Louise, but that doesnt alter my objective opinion of him. He was an overbearing, strong-minded, stupid man who refused all advice, good or bad, a man who came dangerously close to running a sound company into the ground."She stared at me for long seconds. She looked very lovely. She was wearing crisp white shorts with a red stripe down the sides, a red halter, red straw slippers. Her black and glossy hair was tied back with a white ribbon. She is not quite tall, and her bone structure is fragile and fine. Her flawless skin has a dusky, honeyed quality, and her legs are smooth and round and long. There is a look of brooding sensitivity about her face. I remembered how she was as a child, full of a dancing and endless vitality, a flame in shades of black and ivory. Now, in her, it is all muted. All fires are banked. But her new quietness does not give the impression of frigidity or sterility. At twenty-seven she has a way about her that is so much more provocative to me than any strip act that I could feel the annoying pulse-thud of awareness of her even while I was trying to make her understand what I had to tell her."Youd better explain that to me, Sam," she said quietly."He insisted on surrounding himself with yes-men, in making it a one-man operation.""Then why have you stayed?""Because I gave him my promise. I have to tell you something that sounds like Im giving myself medals, Louise. Im considered very very good in the field. Ive been scouted, and I have had some very handsome offers from some very sound businesses. Im apparently one of those so-called bright young men that industry cant find enough of. I cant put my finger on what the special talent is. Maybe its just a combination of being able to think clearly, handle people and work hard. I stayed because I gave my promise.""I havent got a good head for business, Sam. But it seems to me that ever since my father died, you and Mr. Dolson have been the ones who have been running the company into the ground. Warren thinks so, too. Look at it from my point of view. My brother Tommy and I each inherited fifty thousand shares of Harrison Common from Grandfather McGanns estate when we were twenty-one. While my father was running the company it was always listed at right around thirty dollars a share, and it always paid a dividend of around two dollars or a little less.""I know that.""Tommy and I agreed to vote our shares for the same board and everything, and what happened? There hasnt been a dividend since my father died, and now the stock is listed at twelve dollars.""Maybe you dont understand the situation because nobody has been blunt enough about your father. Harrison has gradually been losing its competitive position for the last fifteen years. Management has been unaggressive and unrealistic. Not enough money has gone into modernization of plant and equipment, so production costs have been going up in relation to the other firms in the industry. So profits have been going down. The distribution system is antiquated and inefficient. We arent getting our fair share of the market. There was no reason to maintain that dividend rate. Your father was paying out in dividends money that should have been used for modernization. It was like... with a car, buying a quart of oil every ten miles instead of paying for a ring job. Louise, weve got to work like dogs to catch up. We _had_ to pass the dividends. Weve got to modernize and cut production costs, or were sunk.""How long will it take?" she asked me.I shrugged. "The way it looks it should be another two or three years before we can start paying legitimate dividends. Then theyll only amount to maybe two bits a share. But by then we should be getting healthy.""If things are as horrible as you say, then why is Mike Dean interested in the company?""Mike Dean is not interested in the company, Louise. Mike Dean is interested in making some money for Mike Dean. He doesnt care if he sinks us without a trace.""Are you trying to frighten me?"I despaired of trying to make her understand about Mike Dean. Mike Dean is a member of a small group of men who have come into curious prominence in the past few years. You see their pictures in _Business Week_ and _Fortune_ and _Time_. "This week, Mike Dean, suave and unscarred veteran of bitter proxy battles and corporate infighting, accused the management of the XYQ Company of a stale and unrealistic approach to the pressing; problems of the industry." Mike is always termed controversial, or a man of mystery. His thick thumb is in dozens of pies. He operates from a confusing web of interrelated corporate setups and has surrounded himself with a knife-sharp staff of C.P.A.s, tax attorneys, engineers and management specialists.The Mike Deans operate in the rich realm of capital gains. And they gain a spurious rectitude by cutting figures in the public eye in on the pies they bake.I tried to explain it to Louise as simply as I could. "Mike Dean has people who spend their time reading balance sheets, Louise. They look for one special circumstance. They look for a company like Harrison, where the book value of the stock is higher than the market value. When we passed the dividends, we left ourselves open to an operator like Dean. The stock was selling at eleven or twelve. Try to follow me, now. Please. That means that with four hundred and forty thousand shares of stock outstanding, the company was valued in the market place at four million, eight hundred and forty thousand dollars. Yet, if we closed up shop tomorrow, liquidated everything, equipment, buildings, reserves, inventory, accounts receivable, we could realize a total of nearly nine million. That means our book value is twenty dollars a share. The differential is what brought Mike down on us like a wolf on the fold. We know that he started over a year ago buying Harrison Common very, very cautiously so as not to attract attention or force the price up. Three months ago he came out in the open and started his campaign to get proxies. We can estimate that he and his group own or control close to one hundred and ninety thousand shares of Harrison voting stock. When we have the Board meeting on the first of June, he can force representation on the Board of Directors, but he cannot take control. Lets suppose he could take control. By a change in the dividend policy, and by liquidating some of the Harrison assets, he might be able to push the stock up to thirty-five or even forty. Then he could unload for a long-term capital gain, go over on the short side and ride the stock right back down into the ground. Say he personally holds one hundred thousand shares. I can see how he could make a profit of thirty dollars a share. And pay only a twenty-six per cent tax on his three million gain."She nibbled at her thumb knuckle. "How do you know he doesnt want to do what youre trying to do? I mean modernize and so on.""Thats what hes announced he wants to do, naturally. But will he do that? Or is this just a raid? We thought we were safe, Louise. We didnt know that you and Tommy might go back on your promise to Al Dolson. We thought the hundred thousand shares would be voted our way. Those shares are our margin of safety. But this morning Walt Burgeson at the bank phoned me at the office and asked me to come in as soon as I could. He told me what youre planning to do."She gave me a furious look. "You make it sound as if were being sneaky. All this talk about going back on promises.""Now wait a minute.""You wait a minute, Sam Glidden. A very nice man named Fletcher Bowman was in town last week. He took Tommy and me to lunch. He works for Mike Dean. He explained that in all fairness Mr. Dean should be given a chance to explain his position to us because we are the two largest single shareholders and so we have the largest stake in what hes trying to do. That seemed fair to us. We agreed. So, in Mikes name, he invited the four of us--Tommy and Puss, and Warren and me--down to Mr. Deans place in the Bahamas. A private plane is going to pick us up Wednesday morning. Because were going down there doesnt mean that we plan to betray anybody. Anyway, Im curious about him and Id like to meet him. And it will be a nice vacation.""Ive heard about that hideout of his," I said."Were going.""Understand, Louise, Im not trying to low rate your intelligence, or Tommys or anybody elses. This kind of a deal is outside your experience. Youre getting mixed up in a very smooth operation. Itll be a big snow job. Then suppose you and Tommy sign proxy forms down there and everything is just dandy." She got up quickly and walked away from me. She went over near the wall and sat on her heels and began picking dead leaves off a low bush."Suppose we do sign them? Suppose he does wreck the company?"I went over and stood behind her. "What does that mean?"She stood up and faced me, looking up at me. "Just suppose I dont give a damn any longer? Do you think Im happy here? Do you think I look back on a madly gay childhood? Do you think Im having a real dandy marriage? Theres enough income from the things my father left to keep this house up and live here. If the dividends were still coming in, we wouldnt be here. So I sound like a spoiled brat. Im still trying to make a marriage work. And it doesnt work well at all here in Portston. I can tell you that much. So suppose he does take over. The stock will go up, wont it? Hell make it go up. And then I can sell the damn stuff and get away from here for keeps." And she turned abruptly to hide tears and began picking off the dead leaves again."Let me be corny for a minute, Louise.""Go right ahead," she said in a muffled voice."In 1858 your great-great-grandfather, Aaron Harrison, started the company. His only daughter, Jessica, married the first Tom McGann. They were a rugged pair, Aaron and Tom. They built this house.""No. It was his son.""At any rate, they felt their obligations to the company and to the community. They bulled their way through panics and depressions. They had maybe too paternalistic an attitude toward labor, but they did the best they could in the tough times. When your father took over he had as much strength and power as the earlier ones, but he lacked their shrewdness. And he had just as much a feeling of responsibility as anyone in the past. Your brother is a great guy; but he couldnt run a hot dog stand, as you well know. Maybe Im simple, but to me a company like this is more than something you make money with. It supports directly or indirectly a couple of thousand families and a way of life that doesnt seem too bad to me. If Dean should wreck the firm, he also wrecks the town. But, naturally, you wont have to give a damn about that. Youll be living in Amalfi or Cuernavaca or Malaga."He turned to look up at me over her shoulder. "Very touching," she said, but her eyes were still shiny with tears."I dont think you ought to go.""Its all arranged."I could see all of our planning shot to hell. I could see Al Dolson throwing in the sponge. When Thomas McGann died, Al had been vice-president, and I had been his assistant. He was a mild man in his late fifties. Maybe once upon a time he had some push; but too many years of McGann had driven him back into a polite shell. When the Board, with Walt Burgeson as chairman, had made Al Dolson president, they had made me vice-president. Some of the other men felt that I had been jumped over their heads, that I was too young, and my ideas were too wild; but I had been able to kill off the resentment and get them all pulling together.I felt as if I were propping Al Dolson up. He was too hesitant about using the authority he held. When we, first learned that Mike Dean was snapping at our heels, Al was all set to give up. But I had managed to get him back on the rails. Right after McGann had died we had been in a tunnel where we couldnt see light ahead. But in the last year we had rounded a bend and you could begin to see a far-off glimmer. There was a new bounce and confidence to management. I managed to get Al feeling as I did: that even if Dean did place some people on the Board of Directors, wed still have enough backing to go ahead in our own way.But if he felt that the McGann kids were going to sell us out to Dean, thus giving him control of close to seventy per cent of the voting shares, Dolson would fold in on himself like a tissue paper tent. I felt that in a few years he would be all right. Hes bright enough, and hes gaining confidence. But this was happening too soon.I knew that Louise had enough of the McGann stubbornness in her so that I couldnt get her to change her mink. And perhaps she felt it would help her marriage to get away for a while with her husband. I had heard that Warren Dodge did more than his share of tomcatting since theyd moved back to Portston. Its too small a city for much of that.I could think of only one answer. I checked over what I had lined up to do in the next week. By working like hell the rest of today and all of tomorrow I could get it fairly well cleaned up."Okay, so youre going, Louise. But lets say you ought to have somebody around in case you have to ask some questions. Would you object if I went along, too?"She stood up and she looked agitated. "No, but... but youre not invited.""You could fix that with a phone call, I think. Call the man. Bowden?""Bowman. Fletcher Bowman. I have his New York number, yes. But...""Louise, this is not a social occasion. I am not crashing a party. If you suggest I come along theyre going to have to say yes, because they cant afford the impression theyd make by saying no."Though I wanted to ask to listen on an extension, I waited in the garden. I picked up the book she had been reading and glanced at some of the pages in the middle. A Faulkner novel covering the further adventures of the Snopes family. I wished for more time to read, more time to be by myself, The last two and a half years had been full of furious activity that, at times, had seemed meaningless. The past week I had spent two days out on the coast with Gene Budler--our sales manager--and Cary Murchison of engineering. Gene and I had to explain the new distribution setup to the western wholesalers. We planned to use it as a test area. They were enthusiastic about it. And then Cary Murchison and I spent the rest of the time poking around in some warehouses full of machine tools recently declared surplus by Army Ordnance. We found a lot of stuff we could use, had public stenographer type our bids and left them with the military along with a certified check for two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars.Every week had been patch and pray, trying to remedy the neglect of two decades and at the same time build soundly for the future. The two most pressing problems coming up were to get some aggressive styling for the new lines, and do battle with the union about work standards.Louise came back out into the garden. "He acted as if he didnt quite know how to take it at first, and then he got very jolly and said, Of course, of course. Do bring Mr. Glidden along.""Those boys dont move until theyve checked every angle. Theyll have a complete file on me. Now theyll be planning how to handle me.""You make them sound so conspiratorial, Sam.""Thats what they are. Ive got a lot to do before Wednesday morning. What time?""Be at the airport at nine-thirty. Mr. Bowman said it will be hot in the Bahamas, and to bring swim clothes and sun clothes. Nothing very formal."We went through the gate in the garden wall and around to my car in the driveway. "Are you sorry I invited myself aboard?" I asked her.She looked up, at me gravely. She shook her head. "No, Sam. Im not sorry. I think I feel a little better about everything. I think I snapped at you because I was feeling a little bit guilty. I dont know... just what I want to do." She smiled in an apologetic way. "I guess I must be a little mixed up these days."I swung the car around in front of the garages and headed back down the drive to Walnut Street. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her standing in the morning sun in the middle of the wide graveled place, looking small and alone, but standing very straight in her little white shorts and her little red halter, standing with a kind of indelible pride.As I drove away I felt a bit hot-faced about trying to load her up with the corn-fed speech about the Gurrreat American Way. But, hell, I meant more than half of it. And I had thought there might be a chance she had inherited just a little of her old mans feeling of responsibility not only to the company but to all of Portston.I had planned to go back to the plant, but decided it could do no harm to advise Tommy McGann of my self-invitation to join the party. That would give me a chance to sound him out about his reaction to Mike Dean. I phoned from a drugstore and their house man said that Mr. and Mrs. McGann were home and when he came back on the phone he told me to come right out.Their rangy fieldstone house was in the hills west of town, the only private home in the area with a private airstrip. It was the result of the Texas approach of Tommys wife, Puss, and at present it accommodated their latest, a sleek and nimble Piper Apache with twin Continentals, retractable tricyclegear. Their house man told me they were out in back.I walked around the house. Tommy was in torn and faded khaki shorts and Puss was in a green swim suit and they were playing some kind of a game with great energy. There was a tall pole set in the lawn with a ball fastened to a long cord tethered to the top of it. They were armed with wooden paddles and the object seemed to be to whale the ball past your opponent so that the cord wound itself around the pole.Tommy noticed me first and yelled, "Grab a chair Sam. Be with you in a couple of minutes, soon as I whup this creature."I swung one of the chairs by the pool around so that I could watch them. Tommy is thirty-five, eight years older than Louise. They are the same physical type, dark, fine-boned, almost delicate looking. Tommy has Louises long heavy black lashes, the fine lean hands. But there is nothing at all effeminate aboutWhen he was seventeen in 1939, he ran away to Canada and lied his way into the RCAF. He flew an incredible number of missions with the RCAF and the RAF. He bailed out twice, once with burns that kept him three months in the hospital. He transferred over to the American Air Corps in forty-three and flew fifty missions of fighter cover with the Eighth Air Force. Then, over his protests, he was sent back to the states as an instructor. At Randolph Field in Texas, during gunnery practice, a student shot him out of the air. One slug tore away half his jaw. The chute popped open so low that Tommy landed with an impact that gave him, by count, twenty-one fractures when he hit the baked hide of Texas.Two years later when he hobbled out of the hospital, he was a twenty-four-year-old retired Lieutenant Colonel with an eighty per cent disability pension, with extensive and not entirely successful cosmetic surgery, and with an eighteen-year-old Texas bride called Puss, youngest daughter of an oil and cattle family which gave them, as a wedding present, a few little ole producing wells. He had met her when she had come to the hospital to cheer up the injured.Tommy refused to spend the rest of his life hobbling about as predicted. Three years later he told the V.A. to cancel the pension. Thomas McGann had tried to get his only son to come into the firm, but Tommy amiably and firmly stated that he had no intention of doing anything constructive. He kept himself busy with his golf, his skin diving, his airplanes and his sports car racing. His only concession to his father was to make Portston his home.It was very difficult to dislike Tommy and Puss. Their goal seemed to be to be amused, and amusing. At twenty-nine Puss had a sleek and lovely greyhound figure. She had gingery red hair, a cute-ugly face, a nose that was always peeling or ready to peel, a freckled body, a vast capacity for brandy on the rocks, and an attention span as long as a six-year-olds. She had that miraculous physical co-ordination that enabled her to swim, ride, dive, ski, play tennis, golf, badminton, and table tennis with the experts. She had a sprawling, lounging, boyish lack of body consciousness, and no sense of style. Her lipstick and clothes were always the wrong shade. She moved in a welter of broken straps, scuffed shoes, missing buttons, jammed zippers and smudges. She was everymans tomboy sister--and no woman resented her. You could sense the closeness between Tommy and Puss. It seemed a shame they had no children. They wanted them and would have been good with them.I sat by the pool and watched them on the green lawn, yelping and panting and beating the bejaysus out of that silly tethered ball. Children at play, lithe and graceful and unselfconscious. In spite of Tommys frantic lunges, she belted the ball by him and it wound around the post.He threw the paddle into the air, rumpled her red hair, and they walked toward me, hand in hand, breathing heavily. "Hi, Sam," she said, and went with three running steps toward the pool and in with the oiled perfection of a leaping porpoise.Tommy dropped into the chair beside mine and shook his head and said, "One day, dammit, Ill find a game I can beat her at. Whats on your mind, Sam?""Im going along on the little excursion to the Bahamas.""Hey, thats wonderful. Well have a ball. Come on, I want to show you something." I followed him to the garage and up the stairs. With tender loving care he opened a long box, took out a gleaming gizmo, handed it to me and said proudly, "How do you like that?"I held it and looked at it and said, "I like it fine, but what is it?""New spear gun. Just came yesterday. And the Bahamas is one of the worlds best places for skin diving. Hows that for timing?""Thats just fine, too. Tommy, I just came from Louises house. We had a talk about this Mike Dean and what this might mean to the company."He took the spear gun from me. "This thing is really built. Its a pilot model, made in West Germany.*"Mike Dean will try to swing you and Louise around to his way of thinking, and everything weve been working for will go to hell.""There isnt anything on it to corrode. And the balance is perfect. Works on compressed air.""Im going along to make sure Mike Deans team doesnt do a complete snow job on you and Louise." "Look at the way theyve designed this reel attachment, Sam.""Tommy! Damn it!"He gave me a quizzical look. "Whats the trouble?""I think its a mistake for you and Louise to accept his invitation."Something seemed to move behind his eyes, something that, for a moment, belied the usual impression of general uselessness. "Whats the harm in it, Sam? I dont know why Louise is going. I dont know why youre going. But Im going for the skin diving. Okay?"And I couldnt get one inch farther. Back by the pool I refused the offer of a drink and the offer of a swim. I looked back as I left They were swimming the length of the pool, side by side, in perfect rhythm, and the two fat boxer pups, named Meanie and Moe, were on the pool apron barking their fool heads off.Next page