A Man of Affairs Read Free Page B

looking small and alone, but standing very straight in her little white shorts and her little red halter, standing with a kind of indelible pride.
    As I drove away I felt a bit hot-faced about trying to load her up with the corn-fed speech about the Gurrreat American Way. But, hell, I meant more than half of it. And I had thought there might be a chance she had inherited just a little of her old man’s feeling of responsibility not only to the company but to all of Portston.
    I had planned to go back to the plant, but decided it could do no harm to advise Tommy McGann of my self-invitation to join the party. That would give me a chance to sound him out about his reaction to Mike Dean. I phoned from a drugstore and their house man said that Mr. and Mrs. McGann were home, and when he came back on the phone he told me to come right out.
    Their rangy fieldstone house was in the hills west of town, the only private home in the area with a private airstrip. It was the result of the Texas approach of Tommy’s wife, Puss, and at present it accommodated their latest, a sleek and nimble Piper Apache with twin Continentals, retractable tricycle gear. Their house man told me they were out in back. I walked around the house. Tommy was in torn and faded khaki shorts and Puss was in a green swim suit and they were playing some kind of a game with great energy. There was a tall pole set in the lawn with a ball fastened to a long cord tethered to the top of it. They were armed with wooden paddles, and the object seemed to be to whale the ball past your opponent so that the cord wound itself around the pole.
    Tommy noticed me first and yelled, “Grab a chair, Sam. Be with you in a couple of minutes, soon as I whup this creature.”
    I swung one of the chairs by the pool around so that I could watch them. Tommy is thirty-five, eight years older than Louise. They are the same physical type, dark, fine-boned, almost delicate looking. Tommy has Louise’s long heavy black lashes, the fine lean hands. But there is nothing at all effeminate about him.
    When he was seventeen in 1939, he ran away to Canada and lied his way into the RCAF. He flew an incredible number of missions with the RCAF and the RAF. He bailed out twice, once with burns that kept him three months in the hospital. He transferred over to the American Air Corps in forty-three and flew fifty missions of fighter cover with the Eighth Air Force. Then, over his protests, he was sent back to the states as an instructor. At Randolph Field in Texas, during gunnery practice, a student shot him out of the air. One slug tore away half his jaw. The chute popped open so low that Tommy landed with an impact that gave him, by count, twenty-one fractures when he hit the baked hide of Texas.
    Two years later when he hobbled out of the hospital, he was a twenty-four-year-old retired Lieutenant Colonel with an eighty per cent disability pension, with extensive and not entirely successful cosmetic surgery, and with an eighteen-year-old Texas bride called Puss, youngest daughter of an oil and cattle family which gave them, as a wedding present, a few little ole producing wells. He had met her when she had come to the hospital to cheer up the injured. Tommy refused to spend the rest of his life hobbling about as predicted. Three years later he told the V.A. to cancel the pension. Thomas McGann had tried to get his only son to come into the firm, but Tommy amiably and firmly stated that he had no intention of doing anything constructive. He kept himself busy with his golf, his skin diving, his airplanes and his sports car racing. His only concession to his father was to make Portston his home.
    It was very difficult to dislike Tommy and Puss. Their goal seemed to be to be amused, and amusing. At twenty-nine Puss had a sleek and lovely greyhound figure. She had gingery red hair, a cute-ugly face, a nose that was always peeling or ready to peel, a freckled body, a vast capacity for brandy on the rocks,