The Tight White Collar Read Free Page A

things after I’m gone. You won’t get any help from Anthony, I can guarantee you that. Takes after his mother’s side, that boy. Frail and empty headed as they come. None of Benjamin in him at all. This house’ll be yours, Nathaniel, and the running of the mills. Benjamin’s house belongs to Anthony now, but this one is yours. For you and the wife you’ll bring here someday and for your sons.”
    Nathaniel looked around him. He looked at everything. He looked at the mills and he looked at the people. He looked at the house where he had been born and raised. And he tried to think, to find a way out.
    â€œDon’t ever get the idea, Nathaniel,” said his father, “that your grandpa and me and Benjamin ran the mills. Get that idea out of your head. The mills ran us. Just like they’ll run you. And don’t forget, too, when you look around, that everybody you see depends on you. Without you, there’ll be no Cooper’s Mills. Every worker in the factories has a family. Without you there’ll be no bread for them. Your grandpa built Cooper Station. He built it to live in, for when he wanted to get away from the mills for a little bit. Without you there’ll be no reason for Cooper Station to be here. Nate, son, when you get very tired, look at your hands. Look at them and remember that you hold the lives of thousands of people in them. It’s not easy, Nate. But, then, none of us ever said it was. It’s the way things are, if you’re a Cooper.”

    From the top of the hill where he sat, Nathaniel looked down at the mass of red brick for which he was supposed to do the thinking, and he shivered suddenly.
    So, it’s impossible for man to reason without God, is it? he thought angrily. His eyes turned heavenward and his fingers snapped the new green vine he held. Defiantly, he looked at heaven and shouted.
    â€œAll right, You’ve got all the aces. You call the turns, but I’ll never believe a damned word about justice and mercy. A big, magnanimous God! Well, tell me Your reason for Robin. What possible reason could You have for her? And what about Margery?”
    Nathaniel squeezed the sides of his head in an effort to shut out the memory of a night now almost ten years old. The night he had gone to Margery and she had turned on him, screaming.
    â€œGet away from me!” Margery had shouted, pushing at the hands that touched her with love. “Don’t touch me!”
    Impossible to reason without You? said Nathaniel to the silent sky. Far more impossible to reason with a God who’d bitch me up the way You have. I’m here. Where are You?
    Nathaniel Cooper turned and began the slow trek down the hill to his car. Never had he felt such loneliness, such complete emptiness and exhaustion.
    I hope Anthony won’t linger after dinner, he thought as he climbed into his car. I’ve got a Guardian meeting to go to.

Chapter III
    The Cooper Station high school stood in an open field at the end of Laurentian Street. This was the oldest street in Cooper Station, named by Old Nate in memory of the place where he and his wife had spent their honeymoon. The school was a beautiful new building, all brick and glass and completely fireproofed and almost everybody in Cooper Station regarded it as the town’s monument to free education and its tribute to the American Way. Sometimes, there was talk of building the same kind of school in Cooper’s Mills, but this kind of talk always trailed off into vagueness and finally halted altogether until someone brought up the subject again. The people who usually brought up the subject were Dr. Jess Cameron, Nathaniel Cooper and Thomas Averill, the owner of the
Twin Town Clarion
. For a while, everyone would be enthusiastic about the idea of a new high school for Cooper’s Mills, then the subject of higher taxes would come up at town meetings and the excuses, old and tired and very much used,