A Man of Affairs Read Free

very smooth operation. It’ll 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 don’t give a damn any longer? Do you think I’m happy here? Do you think I look back on a madly gay childhood? Do you think I’m having a real dandy marriage? There’s enough income from the things my father left to keep this house up and live here. If the dividends were still coming in, we wouldn’t be here. So I sound like a spoiled brat. I’m still trying to make a marriage work. And it doesn’t work well at all here in Portston. I can tell you that much. So suppose he does take over. The stock will go up, won’t it? He’ll 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 couldn’t run a hot dog stand, as you well know. Maybe I’m 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 doesn’t seem too bad to me. If Dean should wreck the firm, he also wrecks the town. But, naturally, you won’t have to give a damn about that. You’ll be living in Amalfi or Cuernavaca or Malaga.”
    She turned to look up at me over her shoulder. “Very touching,” she said, but her eyes were still shiny with tears.
    “I don’t think you ought to go.”
    “It’s 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 couldn’t 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, we’d 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