End of the Tiger (23 page)

Ben glanced at Ginny and saw she was white with anger.

“Mr. Hyde,” he said, “you seem to be moralizing.”

“Perhaps I am. You people dismay me in a way. You’re all house-poor, car-poor, club-poor, party-poor. You seem to try to be proving to each other that you can live on one and a half times your income. At our expense. We have too many renewals. We’ve been loaning money on promises too slender. One little recession, Mr. Weldon, would shake most of you out of the fragile limbs of your tall trees, and the Lawton National Bank would be holding the bag. And all of you would be without assets or resources. We owe our own shareholders better judgment in these matters.” He smiled broadly for the first time. “It would be such a shame if the party suddenly ended for all of you.”

“I resent being classified as having … this lack of character you mention,” Ben said thickly.

Hyde tapped the balance sheet lightly. “Haven’t you done the classifying yourself, my dear boy? Right here. You make nearly twenty-five thousand a year and, except for this retirement-account money, which was taken apparently before you could see it, you haven’t a dime. What am I supposed to think?”

Ben controlled himself with an effort. “I respect your obligation to your stockholders in the bank. But please don’t moralize about situations you don’t understand.”

“Oh, but I have an intimate understanding of them, Mr. Weldon. Through supplicants such as yourself.”

“What can you do for me?”

“I can give you a ninety-day extension on this outstanding balance, and I must ask you to pay the interest up to date on the due date. I can assure you that there will
not
be another renewal. Why don’t you borrow from your retirement account, Mr. Weldon? Isn’t that permitted? It usually is in most companies.”

“That’s
my
problem,” Ben said, standing. “Mail me the renewal agreement. Come on, Ginny.”

“Your attitude isn’t going to make future relationships any easier, Mr. Weldon.”

“It is my deepest wish, Mr. Hyde, that there will be no future relationships of any kind.”

Hyde smiled once more. “It’s perhaps for the best. After all, you could have the sincerest desire in the world to pay us that … unobligated two hundred a month, but you people have so many unexpected social obligations.”

Ginny was standing. She leaned toward the desk. “They keep saying banks are friendly. They keep saying bankers are nice. You’re a monster, Mr. Hyde. It’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it.”

Hyde chuckled, almost fondly, as they left his desk. They could not reach him. Nothing could reach him, nothing they could do.

Ginny was crying by the time they reached the car. He drove to the station. As he got out she was snuffling, but trying to smile. “I guess we know what we are now,” she said.

“He made me bring you along so he could sink the knife a little deeper. That’s the thing I resent most.”

“But what are we going to
do
, Ben?”

“I’ll talk to you tonight.”

By the time he got home he had worked out a program for handling this new problem. It seemed to be the only answer, but it depressed him to think about it. It wasn’t brought up until Ginny had finished the dinner dishes and the kids were in bed.

Ginny came into the living room and sat in the corner of the couch and pulled her legs up. The floor lamp behind her made her fair hair luminous and left her face in partial shadow She faced Ben, who sat making a protective ceremony of stoking his pipe, lighting it evenly.

There was a quality of expectancy in the silence between them, the product of their separate awareness that this was, at long last, the time of showdown, the obligatory scene that was a product of far too many months of this big, abundant and wretched life.

“What are you going to do, Ben?” she asked.

He noticed it was “you,” not “we.” He said, “There aren’t any miracles, honey.”

“But we have to do something!”

“I know that. Two round trips to Indiana. That’s top priority. When the air-travel bill comes in, I have to
come up with the money fast. I’ll guess between five and six hundred. We haven’t got it. There’s nobody I dare borrow from. But I did some very discreet checking, and I’m pretty sure I can get six hundred from a loan company. They’ll take a chattel mortgage on the furniture, and they’ll do no checking on me that will be so obvious anybody will be able to guess. With their service charges, it will come to about thirteen per cent interest. I can get it right after the first of the month, so the twelve payments of fifty-something a month will start the first of May.”

“And we’ll just owe more money,” she said in a dead voice.

“We’ll have the two hundred I won’t be sending mother starting April first. I’ll write the hospital and the doctor and the funeral home and send them each a small payment out of that two hundred as a gesture of good faith, and explain that I’ll have to pay them off that way, a certain amount each month. And I’ll make a payment on the bank loan out of that two hundred too. I don’t think those people in Columbus will raise a fuss. They must be used to this sort of thing.”

“So it’s your idea to do it all out of the two hundred each month. So we shall be living exactly the same as if we were sending it to your mother. How long will it take? Just tell me how long it will take if nothing happens.”

“Including the bank loan, and interest and all … call it two years. A little over.”

“Two delicious years
if
nothing happens. And something will, so it’ll be longer. Believe me, it will be longer. I wanted a miracle, Ben. I didn’t want more of the same. You know the miracle I wanted? I wanted you to march up to whoever you march up to down there and draw out that whole nine thousand dollars sitting there, and tell them you were taking it because you need it. But
that’s
too big a miracle to hope for.”

“You don’t under——”

“When will you get a raise, darling?”

“I’ve told you how——”

“Tell me again. I want to hear it again.”

“There’s practically no chance of a raise until Bartlett retires. Where I am, the money goes with the job.
I’m slated to take over Bartlett’s slot. There’ll probably be small upward adjustments, but nothing to get healthy on. He’s fifty-eight. He’s got seven years.”

“And what will you get when you take his job, darling?”

“I believe he gets about fifty-five, with a bonus between fifteen and twenty, and a small share in the stock-option plan. I expect I’d get fifty and a bonus of twelve to fifteen, assuming we’re running as far in the black as we are now.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said with a quiet bitterness. “Oh, whee, oh, joy. You’re going to be so terrifyingly important, and yet you can’t borrow nine thousand dollars of your own money. Why is it? Just
why?
Explain it to me.”

He rose and took slow steps toward the fireplace and turned and stared at her for a thoughtful moment, planning his words. “I’ll have to say this, Ginny, with no concession to modesty. I’m surprisingly good at what I’m doing. We deal with a lot of other corporations. I meet a lot of people. I’d say, and this is a pretentious thing for a man to say about himself, that there probably aren’t over a hundred guys in my age range with the same potential I have in the whole country.”

“Then why aren’t we——”

“Let me finish the explanation. It’s what you asked for. Some of those guys have landed, by bad luck, in the wrong slots. Some of them have changed jobs too many times, always pressing for the immediate salary bump. And I don’t think there are more than three or four in the whole batch who wouldn’t change with me in one minute, salary and all.”

She stared at him. “What!”

“I’m in the big big league, Ginny. And it’s exactly where I
should
be. I’m watched every minute, because there’s so much potential power at stake. It isn’t just the officers and directors of National, honey. At the top of the pyramid in big business there’s a group of men who know each other. It’s become pretty well known that I’m the heir apparent. It’ll be years before I’m in the kingbird’s seat, but they know of me, and they’re watching,
too, and if there was any kind of shake-up at National that threatened to sidetrack me, they’d come in with the right offer.”

“Why don’t they now?”

“Because the kind of fool who would take it they don’t want.”

“So you can’t take out the nine thousand that belongs to you and put it back later when you’re making all this big money?”

He suddenly felt inexpressibly weary. He went back to his chair and sat down and said, “Just why do you think I can’t ask for it?”

“Because you’re supposed to be infallible about everything or they’ll think you’re not good enough for the top of their pyramid.”

“I couldn’t have said it more accurately. Apparently you do understand.”

“I’ve listened. You listen.”

“Of course, honey.”

“I’m proud of you. Keep that in mind. I know you
can
do what they think you can. I can see how it can be pride with you too. But a woman has a different slant. I know you can do it. You know you can do it. So what are we proving and who are we proving it to by standing around in this … thin air?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to work harder all the time, and you get less kick out of it. You never come home any more just busting with triumph, Ben. The things we do together are all … obligations, carefully planned, never on impulse. I claw you for no reason. You snarl for no good reason. We live with these two kinds of pressure every waking minute—your job pressure, and this stupid, ludicrous thing of just barely being able to make ends meet on a salary most people in the country would consider real wealth.”

“I don’t think I’m trying to prove——” He broke off.

“Please don’t go all haughty and stuffy. An electrician was here last week.”

“What has that got to do with——”

“He came to fix the refrigerator. He bought a beat old cabin cruiser two years ago. He’s been working on it
himself for two years. As soon as school is out, he and his wife and two kids are going down the inland waterway to Florida. He found time to study navigation and small-boat handling in night school. It’s almost three months away, but he’s so excited about it he glows like a lantern when he talks about it.”

“I should go to night school and learn how to fix refrigerators.”

“Stop that, Ben. Please. All this
is
hurting our marriage. You’re honest enough to see that. It’s hurting the kids, this atmosphere of continual tension. I’m in favor of vast success and golden years, I guess. But not at this price. I mean that. Not at this price.”

He looked at her for one long moment. “Just what are you saying, Ginny? It has the sound of an ultimatum.”

“What good is the golden future if you ruin the good things while waiting for it?”

“Other people are able to——”

“This isn’t other people. This is me. I can’t afford the big leagues, Ben. Emotionally, I can’t afford them. I’m sorry.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t want to hang around and watch what we have left go the same way the rest of it went. I better ask you the same thing. What do you plan to do?”

“Live up to … my maximum potential.”

“When every morsel of joy has gone out of it, and all you have left is pride? Is that enough?”

“It looks like it will have to be, honey.”

“And you won’t take the slightest risk of upsetting their … big fat opinion of the crown prince?”

“Not the slightest.”

There was destruction in the long silence, and they looked away from each other. When love is twisted, a marriage can end, even though love is still there. It needs only the words of ultimatum to be said, and then the dreadful effects of pride.

The words were there, waiting to be said. Each of them believed the other one to be blindly selfish, and wondered that it had not been more evident up until now.

“We’re both tired right now,” Ben said gently, and so
the words were not said. But the narrowness of it had frightened them both.

Ben Weldon could not sleep that night. He left the bedroom at two in the morning, so quietly that Ginny did not awaken. He made coffee, and he sat at the kitchen table. He went to the drawer where Ginny kept the cigarettes for their entertaining and opened a fresh pack. At dawn his mouth had a bitter taste, and half the pack was gone. He located the budget summary he had prepared for the interview with Semmins, and a copy of the balance sheet he had prepared for his meeting with Hyde.

He thought of many things, and he made a decision, but it gave him no feeling of relief. He sneaked back into bed a half hour before the alarm went off. When he came out to breakfast, Ginny stared curiously at him and said, “You were up in the night?”

“For a little while.”

“What did you do, smoke five cigarettes at a time?”

“Like a candelabra.”

When she drove him down to the station, they sat in the car waiting for the train to come into view up the tracks.

“It will rain later on,” she said.

“I’ve got that other raincoat in the office.”

“Ben … about last night.”

“Yes, honey.”

“You should know this. Even if you were willing to do it my way, it wouldn’t be easy—I mean I’d always be wondering if you were thinking I’d … held you back.” She gave a dry little laugh, and he saw where the morning light touched the little network of weather wrinkles at the corner of her blue blue eyes. “Nothing is easy any more, I guess,” she said.

“Don’t fret about it,” he said. “Here comes Old Unreliable.” He kissed her and got on the train and rode down toward the cold arena.

Brendan Mallory had flown back from London the previous day, and so his schedule was full. But his secretary was able to give Ben an appointment at 4:40. It
was a dreamlike day for Ben Weldon. All day he had the feeling he was standing a half step behind himself and off to one side, watching himself go through the routines as one would watch a stranger.

All day he kept thinking of alternative possibilities, some of them logical, some of them absurd.