“Well, we’re in the book business,” said Russell.
“Yes, but not only the books. I mean the old furniture, the pictures. I almost expect you to serve tea.”
“We do serve tea,” said Russell. “We’re not terribly high-powered, I suppose.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I like it,” said Jarwin.
Russell refrained from commenting that that was nice of him. “What are you doing these days?” he asked.
“I have my own business now. Jarwin Manufacturing. We make certain parts for guns, and that brings me around to the Fund, the Duke’s Memorial Fund. I got your letter, the committee’s letter, and I was wondering if you had the right idea, establishing a scholarship in his memory.”
“Why, yes. I think it’s a very good idea. We all thrashed it out pretty thoroughly and a scholarship seemed like the best idea.”
“I don’t,” said Jarwin.
“No? That’s interesting. Why not?”
“I’ll tell you why not,” said Jarwin. “First of all, from a purely business point of view, if you start a fund now you aren’t going to know how to invest it to yield a uniform sum every year, therefore you don’t know how much the scholarship will be worth from one year to another, and that isn’t even taking into consideration inflation.”
“How about war bonds?”
“Oh, don’t think you have me there, Russell. I buy plenty of them for myself, but in this case I don’t think it’s a good idea. You certainly don’t want to cash your war bonds, you want to hold on to them, so that means you wouldn’t have what you might call a ‘live’ fund for some years to come, and in my opinion the memorial to the Duke ought to start right away. Have you thought of a marble shaft?”
“Naturally that came up.”
“That’s what I’m in favor of. Something permanent and something we can see in a few months’ time. That’s the kind of memorial the Duke ought to have. An inspiration, just as he was an inspiration to me.”
“I see. Well, I think the committee have already made up their minds, Jarwin.”
“Yes, probably have. That’s why I came to see you, to see if I could get you to change their minds.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Russell.
“I didn’t think you’d agree with me, but I have a counter-proposition. How much did you plan to put in the scholarship fund?”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“Uh-huh. You call that enough for the memory of Duke Brady, with all the money there is in our class?”
“You sound as if you had some pretty big ideas,” said Russell.
Jarwin smiled. “Not too big. You see, Russell, I was very fond of the Duke.”
“He was my best friend,” said Russell. “I, uh—”
“Go ahead, say it. You didn’t know he knew me. Well, he didn’t. He merely spoke to me, but he was an inspiration to me. I wanted to be like him, and if I couldn’t be like him in college at least I could keep punching when I got out of college. I consider him to a great extent responsible for whatever success I’ve had in business.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so, Russell, and that’s why I want to make this proposition: you fellows on the committee can have your scholarship, but will you let me match the three thousand with another three thousand of my own so that you can build something permanent as a memorial to the Duke?”
Russell hesitated before answering, and then he spoke deliberately: “Jarwin, I think you ought to be reminded that I am only a member of the committee and not the whole committee, but I’ll tell you now, quite frankly, that I’ll take your proposition to the committee, but with the recommendation that they turn it down. You see, my dear fellow, I don’t think you ought to be allowed to overwhelm us with your money. And I’ll tell you something else, if there were to be any really large gifts to the fund, I think they ought to come from people who were close friends of the Duke’s, not from someone that he didn’t even know existed for three years. If it hadn’t been for me, Duke Brady never would have known you existed.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“Oh? How did you know it?”
“In senior year he started speaking to me and one day I asked him why, and he said you told him I considered him a friend of mine.”
“He did?” said Russell.
“Oh, I guessed how it happened, Russell. That time in the White Mountains when I asked about him, you probably went back to college and you probably laughed about it and said you didn’t know he was such a great friend of Jarwin’s. That’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t that about the size of it? It’s all right, Russell, it was so long ago you wouldn’t be hurting my feelings.”
“To tell you the truth, it was,” said Russell, ashamed.
“Yes, I was a sort of joke in college, but Duke Brady was nice to me, so here’s a cheque, and you can do as you please with it.” He took out a chequebook and wrote quickly while the two of them sat in silence. Jarwin tossed the cheque to Russell, and rose.
“And you know, Russell,” said Jarwin. “If it had been you instead of Duke Brady, I think I’d have done the same thing. In a funny way you were good for me too. So long, Classmate.”
(1972)
THE NOTHING MACHINE
Her dress and the modified beehive coiffure deceived no one about her age, and were not meant to. It was a comparatively simple matter to fix the important dates of her career and of her life: her class in college, so many years as a copywriter and copy chief, so many years with one agency as account executive, so many years as vice-president of one firm and then another. She did not claim to be forty or forty-five, but her record spoke for itself and her chic proclaimed her determination to quit only when she was ready and not one minute before. The only thing was—more and more she liked to have Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday evenings to herself, to whip up her own dinner, to read a while, to work if she felt like it, to watch what the competitive accounts were doing on television, to take a warm bath in a tub of scented water and go to bed at a time of her own choosing. All she had she had worked for, fought for, fought dirty for when she’d had to. She had gone through those years when they said terrible things about her, and she had known they were saying them; but now that was past, and she was up there where they had to respect her—or be respectful to her—and they gave her plaques now, and wanted her name on committees. “Oh, Judy’s tough all right,” they said. “But she had to be, to get where she did in this rat-race. There aren’t many men around that started the same time she did.”
Judith Huffacker waved a pink-gloved hand at the chairman of the board. He raised his hat and shook it in farewell, and then was hurried along by the passengers behind him. That was that, and she turned to the man at her side. “Where can I take you?”
“Well, I was going to suggest I take you to dinner. It’s a little late, but some place like the Oak Room. How would that suit you?”
“No. No thanks. I’ve had a long day, but I’ll drop you anywhere you say.”
“Oh, come on. Have dinner with me. I don’t want to go back to Detroit and admit I couldn’t talk the famous Judith Huffacker into a dinner.”
“Admit it to whom?”
“Any of the guys you know and I know.”
“Like who, for instance?”
“Well—Jim Noble. Ed Furthman. Stanley Kitzmiller. You want me to name some more?”
“Production men. Don’t you know any advertising men?”
“Sure, but I thought you’d be more interested in your impression on production men. You’re aces with them.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“The ad men, of course, but that goes without saying.”
“Not always, you may be sure. All right, let’s go to the Oak Room.”
When they were under way he said, “This your car?
”
“Yes, are you impressed?”
“Naturally. I’m always impressed when people spend their own money when they don’t have to. You could have had the use of one of our cars, couldn’t you? Don’t you rate that executive-car deal? I’m sure you do.”
“Yes.”
“And it takes a certain amount of guts to drive around in a foreign car when you’re working with an American manufacturer.”
“You put it correctly. I’m working with them, not for them. I’ve worked with a lot of them, don’t forget, and if your company doesn’t like my taste in cars, if that’s going to make the difference, they can either get me fired or take their business elsewhere.”
“Nobody’d fire you at this stage.”
“They wouldn’t call it that, but that’s what it would be.”
“Do you mind if I call you Judith?”
“No, I don’t mind. What do I call you?”
“Van,” he said. “At the plant they call me B.B., but my outside friends call me Van.”
“What is B.B. for?”
“Benjamin Brewster Vandermeer is the full handle. Now I can ask you, who was Huffacker?”
“He was my second husband.”
“Oh, you were married twice? I didn’t realize that. Are you divorced?”
“Twice. But Huffacker’s dead. He died some time after we were divorced. I kept on using his name because I’d had three names in ten years and it was getting to be confusing.”
“Have you any children?”
“I have a daughter, married and living in Omaha, Nebraska. I have two grandchildren. And I own a Mercedes-Benz.”
“I don’t want to sound oversensitive, but do you resent my asking you these questions?”
“Well, resent isn’t the word exactly. Or maybe it is. I’ve spent so many years working with men, and with some success, working on equal terms. I don’t like it when a man asks me the kind of questions he wouldn’t ask another man. If you came to my house for a social visit it’d be different, but we’ve been together since nine o’clock this morning, talking some pretty technical stuff and all the give and take of a business conference. But as soon as we get alone together, you want to know about my sex life.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“Well, give up, because you’re not going to find out.”
“Oh, that isn’t what I meant. When I said you were absolutely right I meant you were right to be annoyed. But you’re kind of a legend, you know. You must be aware of that.”
“Fully. I’ve read enough about myself to know that. And I’ve heard enough, too. The kind of stuff that Fortune can hint at but wouldn’t dare come out and say it.”
“Well, I can take the hint. Let’s just be a couple of guys that haven’t had anything to eat all day, and are hungry and irritable. All right?”
“Fine.”
“I’ve been married twice and I have two grandchildren. Now we’re even, okay? I don’t own a Mercedes-Benz, but I think they make a hell of an automobile. Now we’ve traded information just about fact for fact.”
She wished she had not consented to have dinner with this man. All day he had been easy to work with because he had been brisk and efficient and bloodless. He had the right answers in his mind or readily available in his batch of papers, and it was not his job to relate his facts to the field of theory in which she functioned. At the airport he could have left her for a few minutes and in that brief time been lost in the crowd. She regretted that just that had not happened, so that she would now be on her way to her comfortable apartment and a warm, fragrant bath. She had had to change her mind about him too often: from a nothing-machine, with his quick mind and attaché case, to a lonesome out-of-towner, to one of the Detroit boys who gossiped about her, to a man who could express himself in sarcastic terms that compelled her respect. She very nearly told him she had decided to drop him at the Plaza, but the words she uttered were in a conciliatory tone: “You don’t get to New York very often?”
“About once a month,” he said. “Our department has a dinner at the University Club, usually on the second Monday. But I go back to Detroit the same night if I can.”
“Oh, yes. I knew about those dinners. We have them, too, but I don’t always have to go,” she said.
“I suppose they do some good. For my part, they have a dubious value. I don’t get home till around two o’clock in the morning and I like my sleep. But departmental dinners must be worth it or the company’d do away with them.”
“They can be a bore, all right,” she said.
“I don’t need the inspirational presence of my fellow man,” he said. “I can perform just as well over the telephone and the teletype, and those big martinis they serve at the University Club, they certainly do promote frank discussions. Here we are.”
At the table he said, “They all seem to know you here, customers and waiters.”
“I’ve been coming here a long time,” she said.
“I’ll tell you one thing. Whether you like it or not, you didn’t get that reception because you were vice-president of an ad agency. That was for a good-looking woman. Shall we order?”
It was unexpectedly smart of him to have noticed the quality of the reception, but he was not making it easier for her to like him. He put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands and looked about the room. “All these people that I’ve never seen before and probably never will again. I don’t suppose I’ll see you again, either. At least not for a year.”
“I guess not. You’re originally from the Middle West, aren’t you?”
“Hell, that’s written all over me. Yes, I’ve lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. I was born Wisconsin. My father was a preacher, that’s why we moved around so much. I graduated from Purdue and got a job near Indianapolis . . . Oh, here’s somebody I don’t want to see.” He raised his water glass in front of his face, but he had been seen and recognized.
“Hyuh, there, Van. Do you remember me? Charley Canning?” The newcomer was in his middle fifties, dressed with expensive care by no tailor on this side of the Atlantic. He seemed sure of his welcome and had his hand out.
“Oh, hello there.”
“Hello there? Have I changed that much, or have you got a lousy memory? Charley Canning, from Humphreysville. Or maybe I’m wrong. You are Benjamin Vandermeer?”
“Yes, and I lived in Humphreysville, but I can’t seem to place you.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t crack your brains trying. You know damn well who I am, but maybe you have your reasons for wishing I didn’t remember you. Good day, sir.” Canning stared angrily at Vandermeer and at Judith Huffacker, then went on his way.
“Why did you do that? He seemed all right, and he knew you were doing it deliberately.”
He nodded. “I did it deliberately.”
“But why? He doesn’t know why you did it.”
“No, and he wouldn’t understand if I told him,” he said. “I haven’t seen that fellow in thirty years. If I told you why I snubbed him you probably wouldn’t understand either . . . I didn’t order any wine. Are you used to having wine with your dinner?”
“Forget about the wine, and stop being evasive. I want to know why you disliked that man so. If it’s not too personal.”
“It isn’t personal, in the sense of his doing something to me. Consciously, deliberately doing something to me.” He looked at her quickly. “All right, I’ll tell you.
“I went to live in Humphreysville, my first job after I graduated from Purdue. It’s a little town about fifteen miles from Indianapolis, population about twelve-fourteen hundred, and I was assistant county engineer. A kind of a maid-of-all-work and utility outfielder. Highways. Water supply. Anything that was on a blueprint or you looked at through a transit. I liked it. I got twelve hundred a year, and that was t
welve hundred more than a lot of my classmates were making. And I liked the town, the people. It was like going back home, to any of the other Middle Western towns I’d lived in. And like most Middle Western towns, especially Indiana, they were crazy about basketball, so when the high school coach had to quit, I took over the team. I’d played at Purdue and they knew that.
“Well, we had a pretty good season. Won sixteen and lost eight and came in second in the county league. And at the end of the season they had the usual banquet. My boys, and letter men from other years and a few leading citizens. Small. If we’d won the county league it would have been bigger, but they always had a team banquet regardless of how they came out. The basement of the Presbyterian church, which was used for a lot of community get-togethers because they had a kitchen and plenty of chairs et cetera. We had the high school principal give out the little miniature basketballs, silver. I still have mine at home. And it was a very nice sociable gathering. A lot of kidding among ourselves, replaying some of the games we lost, and recalling funny incidents that happened on our trips. And the whole thing broke up around nine-thirty, quarter of ten, because the boys had dates and the place where they hung out closed at eleven.
“But instead of that, eight of my boys and their dates all got into cars—not their cars. They didn’t have cars, with one or two exceptions. There were cars waiting outside for them. And they all drove off to a roadhouse down near Indianapolis, where this fellow you just saw gave them another kind of a party. Got them all liquored up, and some of them had never taken a drink before, and when they got home that night some of them were sick, and the girls were crying, and the parents raised holy hell, and the whole town was in an uproar the next day. And that’s why I don’t like Canning.”
“Was anybody hurt?”
“You mean drunken driving? No, nothing like that.”
“What did you do?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, about Canning?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing. Oh, I could have gone and had it out with him and most likely he would have ended up on the floor. That was what I felt like doing, I’ll admit that. But if I didn’t know my own boys better than that, that I’d been seeing every day and three-four nights a week for four months. And if they wanted to sneak off and go to a roadhouse with a fellow like Canning, maybe I didn’t know them so well, either. No, I didn’t do anything. But as soon as the first job came along, I left Humphreysville and I’ve never gone back since. A fellow like Canning, he probably got a big laugh out of seeing a bunch of kids get drunk. Canning was a rich guy. His father owned the hardware store and was agent for Deering and Delaval and companies like that. This fellow was a Dartmouth graduate, Phi Psi, I think he was. I wouldn’t have accomplished anything by mopping up the floor with him, although I admit I was strongly tempted.”