Scruff

  The President and the Ambassador remained silent, as if to let the importance of their revelation have an effect on Trevayne. The younger man looked bewildered, unsure of his reaction.

  “Then my ‘refusal’ wasn’t believed. That doesn’t surprise me. Those who know me probably doubted it—the way it was phrased, at any rate.”

  “Even when personally confirmed to selected visitors by the President?” asked William Hill.

  “Not simply me, Mr. Trevayne. The office of the President of the United States. Whoever that man is, he’s a tall fellow to call a liar. Especially in an area like this.”

  Trevayne looked over at both men. He was beginning to understand, but the picture was still out of focus. “Is it … was it necessary to create the confusion? Does it matter whether I take the job, or someone else?”

  “Apparently it does, Mr. Trevayne,” answered Hill. “We know the proposed subcommittee is being watched; that’s understandable. But we weren’t sure of the intensity. We surfaced your name and then proceeded to deny—vehemently deny—your acceptance. It should have been enough to send the curious out speculating on other nominees. It wasn’t. They were sufficiently concerned to dig further, dig until they learned the truth.”

  “What the Ambassador means—forgive me, Bill—is that the possibility of your heading up the subcommittee was so alarming to so many people that they went to extraordinary lengths to ascertain your status. They had to make sure you were out. They discovered otherwise, and rapidly spread the word. Obviously in preparation.”

  “Mr. President, I assume this subcommittee, if it functions properly, will touch a great many people. Of course, it’ll be watched. I expected that.”

  William Hill leaned forward over his desk. “Watched?… What we’ve described goes far beyond the meaning of the word ‘watched’ as I understand it. You may be assured that large sums of money have been exchanged, old debts called in, a number of dangerous embarrassments threatened. These things had to happen, or a different conclusion would have been arrived at.”

  “Our purpose,” said the President, “is to make you aware, to alert you. This is a frightened city, Mr. Trevayne. It’s frightened of you.”

  Andrew slowly put down his glass on the small table next to the chair. “Are you suggesting, Mr. President, that I reconsider the appointment?”

  “Not for a minute. And if Frank Baldwin knows what he’s talking about, you’re not the sort of man who’d be affected by this kind of thing. But you have to understand. This isn’t an interim government appointment made to a respected member of the business community for the sake of mollifying a few outraged voices. We are committed—I am committed—to see it produce results. It must follow that there will be a considerable degree of ugliness.”

  “I think I’m prepared for that.”

  “Are you?” asked Hill, leaning back once again in his chair. “That’s very important, Mr. Trevayne.”

  “I believe so. I’ve thought it over, talked it out at length with my wife … my very discreet wife. I have no illusions that it’s a popular assignment.”

  “Good. It’s necessary you understand that … as the President says.” Hill picked up a file folder from the large maroon blotter on his table-desk. It was inordinately thick, bulky, and held together by wide metal hasps. “May we dwell for a minute on something else?”

  “Of course.” Trevayne looked at Hill as he answered, but he could feel the President’s stare. He turned, and the President instantly shifted his eyes to the Ambassador. It was an uncomfortable moment.

  “This is your dossier, Mr. Trevayne,” said Hill, holding the file horizontally, as if weighing it. “Damned heavy, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Compared to the few I’ve seen. I can’t imagine its being very interesting.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked the President, smiling.

  “Oh, I don’t know.… My life hasn’t been filled with the sort of events that make for exciting fiction.”

  “Any man who reaches the level of wealth you did before he’s forty makes fascinating reading,” said Hill. “One reason for the size of this file is that I kept requesting additional information. It’s a remarkable document. May I touch on a few points I found salient, several not entirely clear?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You left Yale Law within six months of your degree. You never made any attempt to finish or pursue the bar. Yet your standing was high; the university officials tried to convince you to stay, but to no avail. That seems odd.”

  “Not really. My brother-in-law and I had started our first company. In Meriden, Connecticut. There was no time for anything else.”

  “Wasn’t it also a strain on your family? Law school?”

  “I’d been offered a full scholarship. I’m sure that’s listed.”

  “I mean, in the sense of contributing.”

  “Oh.… I see what you’re driving at. I think you’re giving it more significance than it deserves, Mr. Ambassador.… Yes. My father declared bankruptcy in nineteen fifty-two.”

  “The circumstances were untidy, I gather. Would it bother you to describe them?” asked the President of the United States.

  Trevayne looked alternately at both men. “No, not at all. My father spent thirty years building up a medium-sized woolens factory—a mill, actually—in Hancock, Massachusetts; it’s a town outside of Boston. He made a quality product, and a New York conglomerate wanted the label. They absorbed the mill with the understanding—my father’s understanding—that he’d be retained for life as the Hancock management. Instead, they took the label, closed the factory, and moved south to the cheaper labor markets. My father tried to reopen, illegally used his old label, and went under. Hancock became a New England mill-town statistic.”

  “An unfortunate story.” The President’s statement was made quietly. “Your father had no recourse in the courts? Force the company to make restitution on the basis of default?”

  “There was no default. His understanding was predicated on an ambiguous clause. And talk. Legally, he had no grounds.”

  “I see,” said the President. “It must have been a terrible blow to your family.”

  “And to the town,” added Hill. “The statistic.”

  “It was an angry time. It passed.” Andrew recalled only too well the anger, the frustration. The furious, bewildered father who roared at the silent men who merely smiled and pointed to paragraphs and signatures.

  “Did that anger cause you to leave law school?” asked William Hill. “The events coincided; you had only six months to go for your degree; you were offered financial aid.”

  Andy looked at the old Ambassador with grudging respect. The line of questioning was becoming clearer. “I imagine it was part of it. There were other considerations. I was very young and felt there were more important priorities.”

  “Wasn’t there really just one priority, Mr. Trevayne? One objective?” Hill spoke gently.

  “Why don’t you say what you want to say, Mr. Ambassador? Aren’t we both wasting the President’s time?”

  The President offered no comment; he continued to watch Trevayne, as a doctor might study a patient.

  “All right, I will.” Hill closed the file and tapped it lightly with his ancient fingers. “I’ve had this dossier for nearly a month. I’ve read it and reread it perhaps twenty times over. And as I’ve told you, I repeatedly asked for additional data. At first it was merely to learn more about a successful young man named Trevayne, because Frank Baldwin was—and is—convinced that you’re the only man to chair that subcommittee. Then it became something else. We had to find out why, whenever your name was mentioned as a possible nominee, the reactions were so hostile. Silently hostile, I might add.”

  “ ‘Dumbstruck’ might be more appropriate, Bill,” interjected the President.

  “Agreed,” said Hill. “The answer had to be here, but I couldn’t find it. Then, as the material was processed—and I placed it in chronological orde
r—I found it. But I had to go back to March of nineteen fifty-two to understand. Your first compulsive, seemingly irrational action. I’d like to capsule …”

  As Ambassador William Hill droned on, summarizing his conclusions point by point, Andrew wondered if the old man really did understand. It was all so long ago; yet yesterday. There had been only one priority, one objective. To make a great deal of money; massive amounts that once and for all would eliminate the remotest possibility of ever having to experience what he witnessed his father living through in that Boston courtroom. It wasn’t so much a sense of outrage—although the outrage was there—as it was a feeling of waste; the sheer waste of resources—financial, physical, mental: that was the fundamental crime, the essential evil.

  He saw his father’s productivity thwarted, warped, and finally stopped by the inconvenience of sudden poverty. Fantasy became the reality; vindication an obsession. At last the imagination lost all control, and a once proud man—moderately proud, moderately successful—was turned into a shell. Hollow, self-pitying, living through each day propelled by hatreds.

  A familiar, loving human being had been transformed into a grotesque stranger because he hadn’t the price of survival. In March of 1952 the final gavel was sounded in a Boston courtroom and Andrew Trevayne’s father was informed that he was no longer permitted to function in the community of his peers.

  The courts of the land had upheld the manipulators. The best-efforts, endeavors, whereases, and therebys buried forever the work of an adult lifetime.

  The father was rendered impotent, a bewildered eunuch appealing in strained, falsely masculine roars to the unappealable.

  And the son was no longer interested in the practice of law.

  As with most histories of material success, the factor of coincidence, of timing, played the predominant role. But whenever Andrew Trevayne gave that simple explanation, few believed it. They preferred to look for deeper, more manipulative reasons.

  Or in his case an emotional motive, based on revulsion, that lucked in.

  Nonsense.

  The timing was supplied by the brother of the girl who became his wife. Phyllis Pace’s older brother.

  Douglas Pace was a brilliant, introverted electronics engineer who worked for Pratt and Whitney in Hartford; a painfully shy man happiest in the isolation of his laboratory, but also a man who knew when he was right and others were wrong. The others in his case were the Pratt and Whitney executives who firmly refused to allocate funds for the development of close-tolerance spheroid discs. Douglas Pace was convinced that the spheroid disc was the single most vital component of the new high-altitude propulsion techniques. He was ahead of his time—but only by about thirty-one months.

  Their first “factory” consisted of a small section of an unused warehouse in Meriden; their first machine a third-hand Bullard purchased from a tool-and-die company liquidating its assets; their first jobs odd-lot assignments of simple jet-engine discs for the Pentagon’s general contractors, including Pratt and Whitney.

  Because their overhead was minuscule and their work sophisticated, they took on a growing number of military subcontracts, until second and third Bullards were installed and the entire warehouse rented. Two years later the airlines made an industry decision: the way of the jet aircraft was the way of the commercial future. Schedules were projected calling for operational passenger carriers by the late fifties, and suddenly all the knowledge acquired in the development of the military jet had to be adapted to civilian needs.

  And Douglas Pace’s advanced work in spheroid discs was compatible with this new approach; compatible and far ahead of the large corporate manufacturers.

  Their expansion was rapid and paid for up front, their backlog of orders so extensive they could have kept ten plants working three shifts for five years.

  And Andrew discovered several things about himself. He had been told he was a major salesman, but it didn’t take a high degree of salesmanship to corner markets in which the product was so sought after. Instead, other gifts came into play. The first, perhaps, was the soft-science of administration. He wasn’t just good; he was superb, and he knew it. He could spot talent and place it under contract—at some other company’s loss—in a matter of hours. Gifted men believed him, wanted to believe him, and he was quick to establish the weaknesses of their current situations; to hammer at them and offer viable alternatives. Creative and executive personnel found climates in which they could function, incentives which brought out their best work under his aegis. He could talk to union leadership, too. Talk in ways it readily understood. And no labor contract was ever signed without the precedent he’d fought for in the company’s first expansion in New Haven—the productivity clause that locked in wages with the end result of assembly-line statistics. The wage scales were generous, outstripping competition, but never isolated from the end results. He was called “progressive,” but he realized that the term was simplistic, misleading. He negotiated on the theory of enlightened self-interest; and he was totally convincing. As the months and years went by, he had a track record to point to; it was irrefutable.

  The most surprising asset Andrew found within himself was completely unexpected, even inexplicable. He had the ability to retain the most complex dealings without reference to contracts or notes. He had wondered briefly if he possessed a form of total recall, but Phyllis shot down that conceit by pointing out that he rarely remembered a birthday. Her explanation was, he felt, nearer the truth. She said he never entered any negotiation without absolute commitment, exhaustive analysis. She gently implied that this pattern might be traced to his observation of his father’s experience.

  It all would have been enough—the airlines, the expansion, the production network that began to extend throughout the Atlantic seaboard. On balance, it should have appeared that they had gone as far as they could hope for; but, suddenly again, the end was nowhere in sight.

  For on the night of October 4, 1957, an announcement was made that startled mankind.

  Moscow had launched Sputnik I.

  The excitement started all over again. National and industrial priorities were about to be altered drastically. The United States of America was relegated to second status, and the pride of the earth’s most inventive constituency was wounded, its people perplexed. Restoration to primacy was demanded, the cost inconsequential.

  On the evening of the Sputnik news, Douglas Pace had driven out to Andy’s home in East Haven, and Phyllis kept the coffee going until four o’clock in the morning. A decision was reached that ensured the Pace-Trevayne Company’s emergence as the Space Administration’s largest independent contractor of spheroid discs capable of sustaining rocket thrusts of ultimately six hundred thousand pounds. The decision was to concentrate on space. They would maintain a bread-and-butter margin with the airlines, but retool with space objectives, anticipating the problems to merge with the larger aircraft surely to be demanded in the late sixties.

  The gamble was enormous, but the combined talents of Pace and Trevayne were ready.

  “We reach a remarkable period in this … most remarkable document, Mr. Trevayne. It leads directly into the area of our concerns—the President’s and mine. It is, of course, related to March of nineteen-fifty-two.”

  Oh, Christ, Phyllis. They’ve found it! The “game,” you called it. The game that you despised because you said it made me “dirty.” It began with that filthy little bastard who dressed like a faggot tailor. It began with Allen.…

  “Your company made an audacious move,” continued Big Billy Hill. “Without guarantees, you restructured seventy percent of your factories—nearly all of your laboratories—to accommodate an uncertain market. Uncertain in the sense of its realistic demand.”

  “We never doubted the market; we only underestimated the demand.”

  “Obviously. And you proved correct. While everyone else was still on the drawing board, you were ready for production.”

  “With respect, Mr. Ambassador,
it wasn’t that simple. There was a two-year period when the national commitment was more rhetorical than financial. Another six months, and our resources would have been exhausted. We sweated.”

  “You needed the NASA contracts,” said the President. “Without them, you were on dangerous ground; you were in too far to reconvert.”

  “That’s true. We counted on our preparation schedules, our timing. No one could compete with us; we banked on that.”

  “But the extent of your conversions was known within the industry, wasn’t it?” asked Hill.

  “Unavoidable.”

  “And the risks?” Hill again.

  “To a degree. We were a privately owned company; we didn’t broadcast our financial statement.”

  “But it could be assumed.” Hill was centering in.

  “It could.”

  Hill removed a single sheet of paper from the top of the file, turning its face toward Andrew. “Do you recall this letter? It was written to the Secretary of Defense, with copies to the Senate Appropriations and House Armed Services committees. Dated April 14, 1959.”

  “Yes. I was angry.”

  “In it you stated categorically that Pace-Trevayne was wholly owned and in no way associated with any other company or companies.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When questioned privately, you said you’d been approached by outside interests who implied that their assistance might be necessary to obtain the NASA contracts.”

  “Yes. I was upset. We were qualified on our own.”

  Ambassador Hill leaned back and smiled. “This letter, then, was really a highly strategic device, wasn’t it? You scared hell out of a lot of people. In essence, it assured you of the work.”

  “That possibility occurred to me.”

  “Yet in spite of your proclaimed independence, during the next several years, when Pace-Trevayne became the acknowledged leader in its field, you actively sought outside associations.…”

  Do you remember, Phyl? You and Doug were furious. You didn’t understand.