Contrary Pleasure (12 page)

Griffin opened his briefcase. He took out the folder containing the
financial reports. “This information was gathered from various sources. Some of
it may be way out of line, Mr. Delevan. You might glance at it and see how far
off we are.”

Benjamin Delevan studied the reports. He ran a pencil down the columns of
figures. He smiled a little bitterly as he handed it back. “You people are damn
thorough.”

“We have to be.”

“I suppose you have an offer all ready, too?”

“Just a general offer.
Varnen
has already
obtained permission from the SEC for a new stock issue. I won’t go into all the
details of the split on common stock outstanding. It would come out this way:
thirty thousand shares of
Varnen
Textiles for the thirty
thousand shares of Stockton Knitting. It is estimated that market value would
stabilize about twenty dollars a share. So it would be a share-for-share trade.
As your stock is not listed, it is worth precisely what you can get for it. A
share-for-share trade, in that case, would obviate a personal tax problem. Over
the past ten years
Varnen
has paid an average of six
point two percent on common stock. It is a healthy operation, Mr. Delevan.”

“Even with this trouble they seem to be in?”

“By becoming a client-firm they took a long step toward getting out of
trouble. This plan I have suggested to you is only one of the plans I have in
mind. It wouldn’t be wise to have only one alternative.”

“What would be my status?”

“You would be given a one-year contract with a bonus provision as
production manager of the Stockton lines.”

“And after that?”

“
Varnen
has their own executive-training
program. They would want you only during the changeover. I checked the recorded
copy of your father’s will. You have ten thousand shares. And the three
children of your father’s second marriage have the balance split equally among
them. I should think you would all be… reasonably comfortable. And you would
avoid the risk of a liquidation of this operation at a sacrifice.”

“How about the other employees here, Mr. Griffin?”

“
Varnen
would keep the labor force and add to
it, and retrain the lower-level supervisory personnel. All the rest would come
from
Varnen
, or be hired locally and trained in
Varnen
methods.”

Delevan shook a cigarette out of the package on his desk, offered one to
Griffin, who shook his head. Delevan leaned back in his chair and lighted his
cigarette. “Assume that I would go along with it. That’s no indication that the
rest of the family would.”

Griffin, for the first time, was disappointed in the man. “Come now, Mr.
Delevan. It’s quite apparent that you get their approval on anything you
recommend.”

“Would the
Varnen
stock be voting stock?”

Respect returned quickly. “No, it would not. But the dividend picture
would be identical with the voting stock.”

“It isn’t something that can be decided here and now, Mr. Griffin.”

Griffin latched his briefcase. “I realize that. But there is a need here
for more than the usual speed in making a decision. The
Varnen
situation deteriorates from week to week in the Tennessee plant. Today is
Thursday. I will have to know by next Wednesday.”

“What if we should agree, and then
Varnen
turns
down your recommendation, Mr. Griffin?”

For the first time Griffin smiled. It was a suggestion of a smile and it
faded immediately. “That’s a very remote possibility.”

“And if we make a counteroffer?”

“I learned long ago, Mr. Delevan, that I am inadequate in a bargaining
situation. It is a form of gambling. I do not gamble. In situations like this I
am impartial. I make the best possible offer for both parties concerned. You
can employ some disinterested party and have an audit of the situation made, if
you so desire. But I am afraid that would take too long.”

Delevan’s sudden grin looked oddly boyish. “This beats me. Things like
this are supposed to happen with about nineteen people around a table and a
bunch of corporation lawyers telling everybody what to say. It isn’t supposed
to be like this. One man and one briefcase.”

Griffin stood up, unsmiling. “The conference method is a grossly
overrated method of doing business, Mr. Delevan. Final authority usually rests
with one person. You have that authority. So do I, in this matter. I prefer to
work alone. Some people consider that a weakness of mine, an inability to
delegate authority and responsibility. But it suits me. I’ll leave my card with
your secretary. It has my office phone number on it. I will be in town until
nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You can reach me at the Brigadier if you have
questions you didn’t think of this morning. Please phone my office when you
reach a decision. They always know where to reach me.”

Delevan stood up. “Could we have lunch together?”

“Thank you, no. But I would like your permission to walk through the
mill.”

“Sure. I can have one of the—”

“No thank you. I can find my way around. I’ve studied a floor plan.”

Delevan stared at him. “If you don’t mind my asking, just where in the
hell did you get a floor plan?”

“You had one drawn up for the
Loomarite
people
as a basis for their making an estimate two years ago.”

“What gives them the right to turn it over to you? I’m not annoyed. I’m
just curious.”

“I’m a director of
Loomarite
, Mr. Delevan.
Thank you for your time.”

“Just a minute. What’s the next step if we should agree to the
proposition?”

“I’ll make a recommendation to
Varnen
. Then
their attorneys will meet with yours to establish the routine. When the papers
are signed, they’ll send up a plant manager with staff.”

Griffin left Benjamin Delevan’s office. He felt that he had handled it
adequately. He had caught Delevan off balance, and had given an impression of
great organization, of monolithic power behind him. It would be very natural
for Delevan to feel subconsciously that the situation had been taken out of his
hands. And it was of comfort to find Delevan a man who looked tired and unwell.
Delevan carried a heavy load. The fact of its being a family firm added an
imponderable factor of sentimentality. Except for that one factor, he sensed
that he had won. But he did not trust factors which could not be measured.

It took him forty minutes to see all he wished to see. The employees gave
him sidelong curious glances. But visitors were common in every plant. They
came from federal, state, and local agencies. They walked about and looked and
made requests for reports. Each agency attempted to increase its own size and
importance. Thus many of the requests became quite strange. And the overhead
costs of industry went up—with whole sections of the offices engaged in making
reports which bore no relationship to the efficiency of operation. Thus the
cost of the goods manufactured went up. And taxes went up, in order to pay the
salaries of the field men who went about conceiving and demanding ever more
intricate reports and surveys. It was a destructive spiral that Griffin was
well aware of. An inevitable result of the police function of government
insofar as industry was concerned. And so he knew that his visit through the
mill was unlikely to start rumors.

From time to time he stopped, and, seeming not to see any special thing,
saw everything. Like the captain of many ships and many years who walks on a
strange vessel while she is at dockside and knows at once what her response
will be to heavy weather. And this was an old ship. She had come close to
foundering too many times. She had rolled and shuddered in heavy seas.

When he turned and left, he knew all he had to know.

When the door closed beyond Griffin, Ben Delevan sat down behind his
desk. So that was Thomas Marin Griffin. Creature of many fables. And not at all
what he had expected. You deal with many men and learn the many little ways in
which they can be moved and turned and twisted. It is a primary function of the
executive mind to be able to detect which way any man can best be controlled.
After many years it is a function which becomes automatic. And thus it was
shocking to Ben Delevan to meet a man who presented such an absolutely
featureless surface. There was nothing to be grasped or triggered. He was as
remote as a distant line of hills, and as immediate and personal as death. You
sensed at once that he was a tool without handles. The coldness seemed to
extend from his eyes down to the bottom of his soul. It was, Ben realized, the
personality you would expect in a professional assassin. The man could not be
bought or bullied or kidded or hurried or delayed. Yet with all that coldness,
the man was not as impersonal as a machine. Not when he radiated that strange
force. A force and hardness that was as immediately noticeable as any physical
deformity.

Ben could not imagine Griffin laughing aloud, kissing a woman, casting a
trout fly. He was as perfectly designed for his function as a scalpel or an
axe. He was a symbol of the facelessness of the great corporations, and a symbol
of this new era of management.

Ben realized that his own self-confidence had suffered an alarming
decline. Compared with Griffin, his own thinking and functioning were fuzzy,
erratic, emotional. Griffin would never operate by hunch. He would never have
to.

He looked down at his scratch pad and saw that he had doodled some chubby
dollar signs. He tore the sheet off and made a quick computation of his own
personal net worth. Equity in insurance policies. Fair valuation on house and
land. Savings and investments. Conservatively, seventy-five thousand. Add two
hundred thousand worth of
Varnen
stock. And a
one-year contract. Then what? House of glass and tile and cypress on a Florida
bayou?… My name is Ben Delevan. Yes, I was in textiles. Ran a mill up North.
Family outfit. Sold out to a big firm. Moved down here. You can’t beat this
sunshine. No, sir. We had our roots sunk deep up there. Family firm for
generations. So we cut those roots right off. Right off. Man can get too
infatuated with his own traditions. Job would have killed me by sixty. Down
here I’ll live forever. Man has to think of himself sometime. Doesn’t he?
Wouldn’t you say he had to? No, sir, you couldn’t get me back in that rat race.
Not for a million bucks.

The job could kill you. It was a monstrous task, fighting the creeping
neglect of two generations. Little by little he was gaining. Bit by bit he had
been pulling manufacturing costs down through a modernization program that
crept as slowly as a glacier. Griffin was right, though. A recession would set
the whole thing back. They were still not competitive in the market. For the
last two years he had had a very good man in New York. He was paying him well.
They were getting a better share of the high-style fabrics, and the
shopmen
were performing miracles with the antiquated
equipment to turn out the desired weaves, to deliver on time. High style meant
risk and a consequently bigger margin. The bigger margin meant that more could
be plowed back into new looms, into new attachments for old looms, into shoring
up rotting floors, pointing up flaking brick walls, improving factory lighting.
A Stockton fabric had always meant something. Maybe it could mean even more…

And yet he was so damn tired. Most of the time the old mill seemed like a
big debacle tottering along on its inevitable way to complete chaos. So damn
tired. He went out of the office, nodding blankly at the new girl, forgetting
to tell her where he was going. He went down the old corridor to the
old-fashioned board room. The shades were drawn and the air was dusty. He
closed the door behind him and walked to the head of the table and sat in the
ornate oak chair. Benjamin Delevan, President and Chairman of the Board of
Directors—Grandson of the Founder—Past President of the Stockton Rotary
Club—Member of the Board of Governors of the Stockton Club—Chairman of the
Board of Admissions of the Oak Dell Country Club—Deacon of the First
Presbyterian Church of Clayton—Husband—Father—He who with Childish Faith always
stays in the pot with a Pair of Sixes—He who can never remember a bawdy story
or tell it properly…

So very damn tired.

Every reason in the world to accept the offer. But he felt a dulled urge
to block it. And wished he knew why he felt that urge. Maybe it was a stubborn
pride that came from making something run when there were so many reasons why
it shouldn’t, kicking it along, prodding it, outguessing the fat-cat
competition, carrying the whole scheme and plan of everything that concerned
the family, carrying it all on plump tired stubborn shoulders. A horse in a
worn harness, so used to traveling this known road that it distrusted all
others. There had to be more reason than blind habit for this reluctance. He
would have until Wednesday to see if he could find the reason. And if that was
all the reason there was—then accept.

He got up and the big chair tilted and came back down hard on its front
legs. He pulled the shade away from the window frame and looked out at the
mill. As always, the metal ventilators on the roof looked to him like the woman
on the Dutch Cleanser cans. He heard the sound of the mill. It was not like the
sound of the heavy industries, where metal was shaped and ground and peeled and
polished. Those places sang deep in their chests, with counterpoint of the
tortured molecular scream. His mill, at a distance, had a hissing,
clittering
, rushing roar, thin-voiced, feminine.

He was a small boy. He sat beside his father and they rode down to the
mill in the big car. He heard the sound of the mill. And wondered if it was like
the sound ships made when they moved before the wind under full sail. The men
who worked for his father always laughed down at him from their tallness and
made jokes with him. He sat at a table in his father’s office while his father
worked, and he drew pictures of ships on the big yellow pads of paper, the kind
of paper you only saw when you went down there with your father. And they had
come into this room and he had sat in the ornate oak chair at the head of the
table and pretended it was the captain’s chair and this was the dining room of
a great ship.