“I know. I am too. It seems that the minute you get over one awful thing, another comes along.” She sat down on the sofa and smoothed his forehead. “Don’t wrinkle it like that.”
“Can’t help it. I’m thinking. Is it possible that I’m giving in too easily?”
“Funny, I had just been thinking for a moment that maybe you could be right.”
“Only for a moment?”
“Yes. And then I thought, No, it’s not over till it’s over.”
They were both silent. Then Lara asked, “Shall we wait and see? Do nothing as long as we can?”
“I’m willing. To tell you the truth, I don’t seem to have enough energy for much else.”
News spread through the town. Someone from P.T.C. Longwood had planted an item in the local paper, attracting startled attention. The item, during the months that followed, was repeated and expanded. Davey was interviewed and coped with the rumors by affirming some, denying others, and carefully avoiding any definite conclusions. Stockholders and employees wrote letters to the editor. Nine out of ten, indignant, righteous, reasonable, or pathetic were against any change in the Davis Company. An editorial deploring the talk of a leveraged buyout gave unsavory details about Bennett, Bennett’s life-style, his salary, and the “disgraceful” perquisites that such a man enjoyed at the public’s expense.
Rumors were picked up by the statewide press in a series of articles about the takeover mania. From these it was deduced that the Davis Company’s plant was to be shut down and five hundred people put out of work. The news, spreading over one weekend, resulted in a great protest rally, led by schoolchildren carrying banners in the high school stadium, and attracted a crowd as large as the one that had assembled there for the Thanksgiving Day football game.
Lara worried. “Three women stopped me on the street this morning. The latest talk is that the Japanese are going to buy the place and move it to North Carolina. Millie Corning was practically hysterical, telling me how her sister’s husband lost his job through a restructuring deal and then started to drink and hit the kids and how her sister attempted suicide. ‘Why doesn’t Davey tell us if something really is going on?’ she kept saying. It was awful.”
“Well, what answer did you give her?”
“I said of course you’d tell them if there was anything to tell, but that you had no intention of selling. People should know that by now.”
At an emotional meeting of his employees and their families, Davey spoke. With hands clenched and tears in his voice, he promised to fight Bennett and whip him. But driving home together afterward, he said to Lara, “We can’t win. I’ve canvassed, and I’ve had friends canvassing the stockholders for me. The stock’s already risen on rumors alone. So what do you think will happen when the offer’s on the table in black and white? They’ll take the lollipop instead of the good bread, and I’m certain of it. The damage has been done; they don’t trust me.”
“Davey, I don’t believe it for one minute. The business with Eddy is past and over. Everybody understands what really happened. People don’t hold anger forever.” She waited for comment, but since none came, she asked thoughtfully, “Don’t you think it’s mighty strange that we’ve heard nothing from Martin since he was here?”
“Not at all. Undoubtedly he expected to hear from us. Undoubtedly he’s angry. So they’re going full-steam ahead, and he doesn’t want to go through any more emotional useless meetings with us.” Davey put a hand on hers. “Everything all right between Connie and you? You haven’t said, and I’ve been afraid to ask.”
“We spoke three times last week, but not about this. You and I agreed not to talk about it, didn’t we? But anyway I have the definite impression that she has no idea what’s going on.”
“He probably wants it that way. It’s got to be a subject he’d like to avoid with her. Anyone would if he could.”
“They’re going to the London house for a few weeks over Christmas.” Lara hesitated. “Do you think we’ll know anything by then?”
“I imagine so. I imagine we’ll receive the final offer at the stockholders’ meeting next week.”
It will be a strange Christmas at the plant if we lose, Lara was thinking as they drove into the garage, a red-and-gold bonanza for a few and a bleak, gray loss for the rest.
The principals sent their representatives to the meeting. A fleet of rented cars came from the airport and disgorged a dozen or more prosperous young men with bulging burnished leather briefcases. These were the lawyers, bankers, accountants, and corporate executives of the upper-middle echelon. No Bennett, no Berg, or others from the pinnacles appeared. These did their work well, however; although their documents were loaded with statistics and complexities, their oral presentations were lucid and easy to understand, presenting in essence one simple fact: Do you want to take your golden dollars now, this minute, or are you satisfied with modest gains and future hopes?
In vain did Davey, when his turn came, point out that the golden dollars and the whole edifice of P.T.C. Longwood were founded on a gigantic pyramid of debt.
“Pull out one stone from the base, and the whole thing will tumble,” he warned. “One stone after the other will fall, all the way back to the banks who lent the money for the tenth-rate bonds that are financing P.T.C. Longwood. Whereas here”—and he gestured about him to the length and breadth of the room—“you have four tangible, debt-free walls where people work and make things that you can see and touch with your hands. No concealment here, no flim-flam—”
He was interrupted by a brief titter, suppressed but unmistakably mocking, nevertheless. Lara could have strangled them all, the cold, confident young men from the city, along with the gullible locals who were listening to them.
“You’ve been earning good interest on your money. We’re growing, providing products for which there is real need. And there are more plans on the drawing board, you all know that. Why else do you think this monstrous megacorporation is so eager to engulf us?”
But the audience, Lara saw, was unmoved, even though Davey was speaking more eloquently than he had ever spoken before. She was stricken. These were the people who had been so eager to buy stock, so confident of his talent. Such intelligent people, too, or so one would think, a banker’s widow, a school superintendent, a doctor, an architect—
“Have you lost all confidence in me?” Davey pleaded. “It surely looks that way. Yet you have no reason to. We’re prospering, aren’t we, under my direction?”
And he looked from face to face as if to ask one of the ten to reply, but the faces were either blank or turned away. They were impatient. The evening was late; they were in a hurry to vote for their quick money and go home.
So, close to midnight, the vote was called. They hardly needed to take the trouble to count it, for the result had been predictable from the moment they sat down.
In the corridor afterward Ben Levy and Doc Donnelly were the only ones who even looked in Davey’s direction.
“Davey, I feel your pain,” Ben said. “I want you to know I’m sorry I had to do what I did.”
“It’s not that we in any way doubt your honesty,” the doctor explained. “I know I personally feel some guilt about deserting the ship, but frankly, the way most of us see it is that if you could be taken in by that Osborne fellow, why then—it’s a question of judgment, you see. So we want out, we’ll feel safer, and this is a perfect opportunity.”
Ben added, “You know we all lost a big bundle on account of him and this is a chance to recoup in a big, big way. It’s not a question of blame, Davey, but—”
“Osborne left a bad taste in my mouth,” Dr. Donnelly said, more sharply. “In all our mouths.”
Davey’s face, Lara saw, was stone-white. And she, too, spoke sharply to the men. “Enough’s been said, hasn’t it? Good night. Come into the office, Davey.”
Alone there with him, she asked, “What happens now?”
“Berg and his people will meet in New York with Bennett
and his people to finalize it. It shouldn’t take more than a month, if that. And then they’ll send me a check for our share of the stock. And then I guess I’ll start hunting for a job somewhere.”
Yes, she thought bitterly, it’s my family that’s done this to him. He’s only sparing my feelings, because surely he must be having the same thoughts. Eddy and Martin, but Eddy first, have brought him down.
She could not look at him. Later, when they were at home together, she would put her arms around him, but not here while the enemy was still under this roof in the process of making its noisy, triumphant departure.
“Wait here till they’re all gone. I don’t want to look any one of them in the face,” Davey said.
With their coats on they stood behind the office door until the last chair had scraped back, the last voice sounded, and the thrum of the last motor died away.
Theirs was the only car in the parking lot when finally they came out. The night was very cold, very still, and bright with stars. Light shone on the white building, the thriving, wintry trees, and the holly hedge, now thick with red berries, that Lara herself had planted when they had bought this derelict old warehouse.
When they reached the outer gate and were passing slowly through it, as if of one mind they both turned back for a look at the entrance. There, above the imposing double doors with their double Christmas wreaths the light fell clearly upon the carved inscription: THE DAVIS COMPANY.
“Dead in the water,” Davey said, and Lara had such a lump of tears in her throat that she could not answer. Anyway, there was nothing to say.
Then he gunned the engine and turned the car toward home.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Eddy lay on the bed alone in the room, skipping dinner. He had worked all afternoon in the kitchen and had no appetite for food; it seemed as if the smell of Patsy’s garlic sauce was still on his clothes. He had no taste, either, right now, for the nightly conversation about deals in the making, opportunities pending, opportunities lost, lawyers and their fees, pleas and appeals, the whole gamut of life in minimum security, a gamut that always seemed to end with family tales.
Family was the most miserable subject of all. It seemed that whenever he heard from his own people, they had painful things to tell. It was like seeing a house on fire across the street while you were tied to a tree and couldn’t even get to a telephone to warn or rescue the sleeping people inside. No, that was not fair! The fact was that neither Pam nor his sisters ever wanted to talk to him about troubles; it was he himself who insisted on knowing everything, by telling them that keeping things secret was a greater torment to him, and forced him to guess worse things. So it was that he now could have a graphic picture in his mind of Davey’s worried face bending over columns of figures and pages of complex legalese, none of which he was able to understand. He felt for Davey. To lose the business that was one’s brainchild! Even though the circumstances were so entirely different, the loss of Osborne and Company brought its own anguish; the visual impression of nail holes where the fine brass nameplates had been removed from the door was a sharp one, hurting as sharp things hurt when they pierce the skin.
The difference was, though, that he, Eddy Osborne, had no one to blame but himself for his debacle, whereas Davey had—face it, Davey had Eddy Osborne to blame.
I caused him to be vulnerable. With those lousy tax shelters that I made him sponsor, I lined up a phalanx of enemies for him. How could they trust him to head a company after that? Lara had been so sure it had all been forgotten. But Lara doesn’t know the world. I knew they wouldn’t forget. And a brother-in-law in prison makes a bad connection, anyway. Fair or not, disgrace rubs off on the rest of the family.
It was Pam alone who had the power during these hard months to cheer him. That was as it should be; if a man’s wife couldn’t sustain him, who should? She phoned, she wrote about the house and the horses, about new friends and the life they would have together. It was her letters especially that warmed him; her voice was gone the instant he left the telephone and walked away, but her letters endured and were reread uncountable times. There were more than a hundred of them by now, and when he read them over, it was almost like being in bed with her. He smoothed the pages on which her hands had rested, and held the paper to his nose as if he could recapture the delicate fragrance of her body.
The magic wasn’t working tonight, though. He didn’t know why, and perhaps it was absurd, but he’d had, the last few times she’d come to visit, a queer sense that there was something different about her. She’d seemed nervous, he thought. Or would “preoccupied” be more descriptive? And he tried to remember the nuances that had left him with that restless feeling. She had been as affectionate as always to the extent that one could be under the eyes of the damned guards. She wasn’t ill, she looked the same, but—what?
Oh, probably nothing. Maybe it was the weather that depressed him. It had rained in sheets for the past three days, and he was feeling a sense of permanent incarceration, as if he were in some gulag and would be here for the rest of his life. Nonsense, of course, but nevertheless, it was the way he felt.
It was so unlike him, so much against his principles to give way like this! Abruptly he sat up and reached for the newspaper that lay at the foot of the bed.
It was all the same stuff; couldn’t they ever find anything new to write about? Wrangling over the budget; drug wars in Brooklyn; a kid shot while he was playing in the hallway; more investigations on Wall Street; the same stuff—but wait! Wait! What—
“Man hurls himself from eighteenth floor.… Sometime between midnight and five o’clock when his body was discovered, Richard Tory jumped from his apartment onto the empty, silent street.… Police found a suicide note in the apartment.… Formerly in the advertising business, he had lately been unemployed.… Neighbors said he had suffered financial reverses.”
Eddy’s heart pounded, and he dropped the paper. Good God! Was this his doing, his, Eddy Osborne’s? “… had suffered financial reverses,” it said. Yes, yes Richard had. He had lost—how many thousands, hundreds of thousands? And gotten back what? Ten cents on the dollar. Perhaps not even that. It was all a blur in Eddy’s red-hot brain. Then he went cold, and trembled.
It occurred to him that Connie might not know. It seemed to him that she ought to be told. And he went to the telephone.
“I hoped you wouldn’t see it in the paper,” Connie said.
For some reason this offended him. “Don’t baby me!” he almost shouted at her. “Tell me what you know.”
“There’s nothing—” she began.
“The fellow he lived with, he’d know. What did it mean that he was unemployed? It doesn’t make sense. He had a great job.”
“Eddy, you’re all upset, and you don’t need anything to upset you more. I hoped you wouldn’t see it,” she repeated.
Then he repeated, louder this time, “I said, don’t baby me, Connie.”
He heard her considered pause. Then she said, “All right. I called his friend, and he told me the story. I don’t suppose you ever knew, because I never said much about Richard’s family, but—well, they didn’t know about his being homosexual, and they’re the sort of people—at least his father is—who would be horrified and unforgiving. It’s a long story. Anyway, what happened was that Richard had taken all his big inheritance from his grandmother and invested it, and—”
“Invested it with me.”
“Well. Yes.” There was another pause. “So when it was—lost—his father found out. I don’t know how, probably from the bank he had taken it out of. Yes, that was it, and he came up to New York in a fury and found that Richard was living with his friend. Found out about him, you see. He thought Richard had been living with a girl. But it was really the loss of the money that was the worst humiliation. All hell broke loose. Richard went into a severe depression. He felt worthless. And he quit his job. He went to pieces.” Another pause. “It just shook me. I couldn’t stop crying. But that’s all
I know.”
“It’s enough,” Eddy said.
“Eddy?”
“Yes?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“No?”
“His father was brutal.”
“Yes.”
“Families are supposed to stand together, to forgive.”
“Yes.”
“I know I shouldn’t have told you. Now I’ve made you miserable.”
“Yes, you should have told me. I’m all right. Just—it’s so sad. So goddamn awfully sad.” For a moment Eddy pulled himself together. “I’m all right, Connie. Really. It’s chow time. I have to go.”
When he replaced the receiver, he went back and lay facedown upon the bed.
How was it possible to look down from that height and find the courage to jump? It made you sick to your stomach even to think of it. How many seconds till you struck, and were you terrified, did you scream in horror, did you want to change your mind at that last instant when it was too late? Good God! Not wanting to live! Even on his worst day, standing there in court while the judge castigated him before strangers and all those hostile reporters, even on the day Rathbone had brought him to this place and the gates had closed behind him, even then he had wanted to live.
“I killed him,” he said aloud. “Poor, trusting innocent, I killed him.”
He was still lying there when he heard men coming into the room.
“Hey, Eddy, are you sick?”
“I’m all right,” he replied into the pillow.
“The sauce was great. You want a dish of pasta in here?”
That was Louie, Big Louie, the labor leader, in for extortion. Funny how a guy like that liked to mother people.
Now he tried to roll Eddy over, and in trying, caught the tears on Eddy’s cheek.
“Hey! Something happen?”
“Louie, for God’s sake, leave me alone a minute, will you?”
“He’s got the chills. Look at him shake.” That was Bosch’s nasal voice.