Edsel (5 page)

“The cap’s on that tight?”

“It’s been this way since the war. All the former OSS men not working for Dulles are in private industry. General Motors and DeSoto each have fifteen percent more employees on the payroll than they report to Social Security. It’s reasonable to assume most of them are drawing a second salary from their competitors and reporting back from inside.”

I didn’t ask how he knew about that fifteen percent. “What if someone asks me what I do?”

“Lie.” He showed his teeth. “Chances are no one will. With half again more office space there will be plenty of new faces for the old guard to sort out. It will be three years before they get around to wondering about you. That happens to be the standard gestation period for a new model from drafting room to showroom.”

I ran my thumb down to the compensation clause and flicked it at what I thought was a gnat. It turned out to be another zero. “I don’t have a pen.”

He produced a two-tone plastic ballpoint with the Ford logo printed on the barrel in script. I scribbled on the crate to get the ink flowing. It matched the color of the company’s cheaper cars.

“I almost forgot your bonus.” He deposited a pair of keys on the crate. They were on a ring attached to a miniature license plate whose numbers nudged recent memory.

“The Skyliner?”

“It’s yours on a year’s lease. When that’s up you can choose its replacement. If you do the job as well as I expect, Mr. Ford himself will issue you title free and clear to a top-of-the-line model as soon as the new car enters production. Just remove your personal effects from your old vehicle and I’ll arrange for its disposal. The company can’t afford to let a staff member be seen driving around town in a wreck. I hope it hasn’t any sentimental value,” he added.

I removed the Studebaker’s keys from my lucky rabbit’s foot and laid them on his side of the crate. “It never fails. Every time I get rid of a car it’s just after I filled the tank.”

And so I signed my name in Ford pelican-puke green to a pact presented by a Devil in saddle shoes and a black skullcap. I figured one day they were all going to catch up with me.

I
GAVE NOTICE PERSONALLY TO
Winston Slauson the next morning. The old man, a former naval reserve officer retired with the rank of rear-admiral for losing a hand at Midway, rose from behind his big gray steel desk supporting a scale model of the destroyer he’d commanded in that battle and reached across to shake my right hand with his left, keeping his stump inside the side pocket of his blazer. He affected white muttonchops after Admiral Dewey and displayed his old dress uniform in a glass case in a corner of the office, obscuring the fact that he had spent most of his career in the recruiting department and never set foot on a bridge until after Pearl Harbor. He wished me the best and said the old tub wouldn’t be the same without me. I’d had to remind him who I was when I entered.

Ironically, during the two weeks I owed the firm I created the most brilliant campaign of my long stint in advertising. We’d landed the Enrico Fermi account, assuming public relations for the world’s first atomic energy plant near Monroe along with the burden of turning apocalyptic paranoia into popular acceptance of nuclear power as a common household item next to Scandinavian Modern and the Frigidaire. Someone in the art department—it might have been the beatnik, although I credited him with more subtle forms of subversion—had blocked out a sketch from a photograph showing a cluster of bulbous tanks swelling like Scrooge McDuck’s money bin over dozens of identical ranch houses fanning out from their base. Evidently it was intended to create a protective-umbrella effect, but even the cheery pastels zigzagging the tanks did nothing to decrease their resemblance to a hulking mass of alien life forms preparing to engulf and devour the community at their feet. That motif was just then entering drive-in theaters in the image of villainous carrot-men, shape-changing Martians, and creeping globular masses of intelligent bubblegum, and hardly seemed in keeping with the nuclear lobby’s quest for a wholesome identity to stand beside Betty Crocker.

“Got anything better to offer?” asked Fleenor when I brought it to his attention.

“I keep thinking of something Mr. Hearst said when I worked for him at the
Times
.”

“If it has anything to do with Marion Davies naked I don’t want to hear it.”

“It went something like ‘Show me a magazine with a picture of a child, a dog, or a pretty girl on the cover and I’ll show you a magazine that sells.’”

Fleenor plucked at his Hitler moustache. “Well, no photographer I ever worked with liked taking pictures of dogs or children.”

The model search took a few days. Most of the girls in the portfolios sent by the two agencies we used on a regular basis looked too much like Marilyn Monroe and the rest looked like you could cut yourself on their vaginas. Then a little mom-and-pop operation in East Lansing we’d turned to during a model strike in 1952, run by a former B-picture actor and his wife, who’d represented Michigan in the 1936 Miss America pageant, came up with Hope Crane.

Hope was a nineteen-year-old drama major at MSU who’d modeled underwear for S. S. Kresge sale bills and appeared in a brief outfit on WJBK-TV in Detroit long enough to throw a pie in Soupy Sales’s face and flounce off when Soupy had yet to decide whether he was a burlesque comic or the host of a children’s show. A natural honey blonde, with blue eyes the size of butter pats and red chubby cheeks like Santa Claus in the Coca-Cola ads in
National Geographic
, she managed to look as if she belonged milking a happy cow on a Mecosta County farm even when she was posing in nothing but a black garter belt and stockings. It was that serendipitous combination of female innocence and sex that made you want to chuck her under the chin even as you were de-pantsing her. The agency called her in for a preliminary shoot and hired her before the prints came back from the darkroom.

We put her in capri pants, two-inch heels, and a plain white blouse with the cuffs turned back, tied a frilly apron around her waist, and posed her at an electric grill, flipping hamburger patties with one of the big tanks in the background. When I saw the proofs I thought it was the corniest thing I’d ever seen. The Admiral took one look at that toothpaste grin, fake pearl necklace, and hint of cleavage where her blouse wasn’t quite buttoned up and okayed the campaign. The picture he selected went to the Associated Press the next morning with a news release written by me and that afternoon appeared in every newspaper of note between Boston and San Bernadino. By the end of the week the Atomic Burger had become a featured item on menus across the country and Hope Crane was signed to a three-picture deal with Paramount. If you’re still alert at three o’clock in the morning, you might catch her bit in Martin and Lewis’ last picture together during the late show. The movie bombed, her option wasn’t picked up, and until I came across a two-line filler about her double mastectomy in a back section of the Detroit
News
a couple of years ago the last I’d heard of her was she’d married a trumpet player with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra and settled down in Tarzana. Meanwhile that shot of her with spatula in hand and reactor at her back shows up in every 1950s collage, sandwiched between Elvis and the hula hoop. And nuke plants are as common as instant rice.

The first fever was still on when I cleaned out my desk, shook Fleenor’s carplike hand, and poked my head into the Snake Pit to wave at the beatnik whose name I never caught, lying unraveled on the swaybacked sofa sighting down his body at a half-finished painting on his easel of a ballpoint pen orbiting the earth. He lifted an index finger from his chest without looking at me and I went on to Research.

“So you’re really pulling out.” Agnes, seated at her desk with a platoon of potted plants lined up along the edge and a sheet of peel-and-stick file labels in front of her, glared at me over the tops of her rhinestone reading glasses.

“If you only knew how long I’ve waited to hear you say something like that.”

She stuck out her tongue. “You ought to hang around. I understand the A. Hitler Gas Oven Company is looking for a spokesmodel.”

“I thought all the ban-the-bomb nuts were out of work.”

“Hope Crane’s tits look a little like nuclear warheads, don’t you think?”

“So does Adlai Stevenson’s head. Are we going to argue politics or are you going to wish me well on my new job?”

“What is it, anyway? You never said.”

“I polish the dust out of the hole in the O in the Ford insignia on every car that comes off the line.”

“Go to hell, Connie.”

I twisted the doorknob. “Are we still on for a movie Saturday night?”

“Not if it’s another cowboy picture. I’m still scraping cowpie off my heels from the last one.”

“
The Robe
is playing at the Fox, if your bladder’s up to it.”

“Worry about yours. I don’t have a prostate. Enjoy the job.”

The new Skyliner and my old Studebaker had to have been made on different planets by cultures that never communicated. The big Ford held the curves like a cast-iron bathtub and the overhead V-8 thrummed like a bass fiddle whether idling or accelerating. The interior was more comfortable than my apartment. I liked the big green steering wheel, as wide as a manhole cover, with finger contours like bicycle grips and a chromium horn ring that when depressed cut loose a stereo blast that swept pedestrians and lesser machines out of its path like dead leaves. The seat, upholstered in ivory-and celery-colored vinyl, molded itself to my lower half like naked feminine thighs. When I turned on the radio, Teresa Brewer sang at me from all sides. Even the clock worked.

Its only drawback was its main selling point. That clear Plexiglas insert in the front half of the roof, while affording a spectacular view of sky and cityscape normally obscured by steel and headliner, also exposed the car’s interior and occupants to the sun, in fact magnifying its rays at certain angles the way a convex lens in the hands of a cruel little boy focuses daylight into a lethal pinpoint that fries ants in their tracks. To avoid sunburn I had taken to wearing a hat for the first time in fifteen years, and the problem of finding parking in congested areas was complicated further by the need to locate a spot in the shade to keep the upholstery from fading; or worse, fusing itself to some of my favorite parts when I sat down on it without thinking. I wanted to speak to Israel Zed about it but thought I’d wait until the job was more secure.

For the first couple of weeks it felt anything but. The Ford Administration Center wouldn’t be finished for two more years, and pending the availability of my plush office just down the hall from Henry’s I was holding down a desk behind a flimsy partition in the Accounting Department at the aging Administration Building on Schaeffer Road. It was a horseshoe-shaped brick building, three stories high, built in swampland, and was regularly mistaken for the local high school by new deliverymen. The cubicle’s only solid wall was dominated by a huge portrait of the late Henry Imperitus, whose pinched Yankee features glared down at me from above his stiff collar as if contemplating the possible presence of a smoker or imbiber of alcohol in the Holy of Holies. Although I didn’t use tobacco and hadn’t drunk more than a jiggerful of bourbon in a beer garden on the way home from work since the Lindbergh kidnapping, I made it a point to keep a pint of Hiram’s and a carton of Chesterfields in my desk at all times. It’s the quiet revolutions that keep you sane.

Beyond keeping track of Hank the Deuce’s
wunderkind
, now slated for production in fall 1957, there wasn’t much to do
except
revolt quietly. The first day I hung my framed copy of the last front page of the Detroit
Banner
on the partition opposite the desk, sharpened and separated my pencils according to color, used the telephone to bet the Indians against the Giants in the first game of the Series, and made a necklace out of paperclips. The second day I took down the newspaper in favor of a print my father had left me of George Washington crossing the Delaware, sharpened the pencils again and mixed up the colors, bet my bookie double or nothing on Cleveland in Game Two, and took the necklace apart. By the end of the week I had replaced Washington with poker-playing dogs, all my pencils were two and a half inches long, the paperclips were bent beyond use, and I was considering asking Israel Zed for an advance on my first two weeks’ salary to keep my kneecaps out of jeopardy when the telephone rang and it was Zed.

“How are you settling in?” he asked.

“So far it’s the best job I ever had. Getting paid for doing nothing has to be the universal dream.”

“Didn’t you get the new sketches?”

I said I had. They’d arrived at my apartment by special messenger over the weekend, in a briefcase chained to the wrist of a bodyguard type in a black wool suit with extra room tailored into it for the holster under his arm. The wheelbase had lengthened and interior studies included a front seat like a divan and a circle of buttons marked PRNDL in the center of the steering wheel, eliminating the need for a lever to change gears. The instrument-studded dash reminded me of an automat. “I’m still not used to that grille. Whose idea was it?”

“We won’t discuss details over the telephone. Did you burn the sketches as instructed?”

“Of course.” I made a note to do that as soon as I got home. I was pretty sure I’d tucked them under a stack of newspapers in the bathroom.

“Good. I’m meeting Mr. Ford at Berman’s Chop House in twenty minutes. Care to come along? It’s high time you met the man you’re working for.”

“I might be late. I’ll have to swing by my place and pick up a jacket and tie. They’re pretty strict.”

“Don’t worry. You could show up naked and be seated at the best table if you’re with Hank. One thing. Don’t mention his grandfather in his presence. He hates the old boy for what he did to his father.”

I thanked him for the advice. Hanging up, I tried once again to remember the name of the Ford who had come between the two Henrys and came up empty once again.