A Man of Affairs Read Free Page A

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. He’s bright enough, and he’s gaining confidence. But this was happening too soon.
    I knew that Louise had enough of the McGann stubbornness in her so that I couldn’t get her to change her mind. 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 they’d moved back to Portston. It’s 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 you’re going, Louise. But let’s 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 you’re 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 they’re going to have to say yes, because they can’t afford the impression they’d 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 Gary 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 Gary 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 a 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 didn’t 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 don’t move until they’ve checked every angle. They’ll have a complete file on me. Now they’ll be planning how to handle me.”
    “You make them sound so conspiratorial, Sam.”
    “That’s what they are. I’ve 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. I’m 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 don’t 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,