First Papers (61 page)

Expected, expected, expected, and yet the actual moment had come as a shock to him and to Otto. War orders, they knew, were already vast; some rumors had them streaming in from J. P. Morgan, whose offices were the largest single agent for the sale of American war products to England and France, and other rumors insisted that Mark Aldrich had made a deal with the Du Ponts, and was putting both plants under their command. Either way, the orders were there.

At Garry’s plant that same morning, a second announcement came from Sid Barclay, who had gone far since the days when he was “that fat salesman” boasting about sales. Just appointed vice-president in charge of foreign markets, he was now the operating executive of the older Aldrich plant. All work would stop at the end of that week in Number One, Barclay said, even where unfilled orders were still outstanding. Angry customers could lump it; there was priority on all orders from the Allies, and the plant was shutting down to rush conversion, so it could join Number Two in record time, as the European war crisis demanded.

“Nobody loses a day’s pay around here,” Barclay said, coming into the synthetics laboratory, beaming with the joys of generosity and mounting profits. “With double and triple shifts at Number Two, just move over there, and add ten per cent to your pay envelope. We’re putting it in across the board.”

Garry could still remember that moment. While Barclay was talking, he and Otto exchanged glances.

“I won’t be moving over,” he told Barclay. “I’ll call Mr. Aldrich, and go see him.”

“See him for what?” Barclay sounded suddenly chill.

“For good-bye,” Garry said, chill too.

“You needn’t bother,” Barclay said. “He told me that if you were going to speak up again, you might as well save your time and his.”

Garry picked up the telephone and asked for Aldrich, his face revealing his fury at Barclay’s insulting delivery of Aldrich’s insulting message. Barclay walked out as a hum of talk began among all the others—Otto alone remained silent. Garry asked Aldrich’s secretary for an appointment. “I won’t need but a minute.”

“He’s all tied up today, I’m afraid,” she said. “Let me see, why, that’s too bad, he’s all tied up tomorrow too, and Wednesday. How would Thursday be, Mr. Paige?”

“It would be posthumous,” Garry said, suddenly able to laugh, “Tell him I said ‘so long,’ will you? I’m quitting now.”

He called across to Otto, “I’ll call you,” waved to the others and left the lab. Otto was not going to leave today, it appeared, but Garry had to be off, at once, alone, as fast as possible. He had no plan except to leave the building.

When he reached the street, a blaze of late-summer heat struck him, but he did not slacken his speed. A plan had formed and grown to maturity in the minutes it had taken to get downstairs. He walked at top speed to the subway, and then half ran from the station near Wanamaker’s across to Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, where he had left the Ford, over a year old and no longer babied by being kept in a garage. It caught with one flip of the crank, and a moment later, he was driving up the Avenue. To be off in his car, with the canvas top down, bareheaded under a hot September sun, at ten o’clock of a Monday morning gave him a high sense of adventure. He did think of stopping to telephone, but decided against it and drove across the bridge to Long Island City. Nothing had changed there. The vacant block beside the Synthex plant was still vacant; there were a few more cars there, and an oversized new truck backed up to the loading platform on the ground floor.

Garry parked near it and went in search of a telephone.

“You probably won’t remember me,” he told Molloy, “I answered an ad of yours last spring before the war started. My name’s Paige.”

“I do remember. You’re with Aldrich Chemical.”

“Until half an hour ago,” Garry said briskly. “Could I see you again about a job with Synthex?”

“Sure,” Molloy said pleasantly. “When would you like to come out?”

“Well,” Garry said, “I’m calling you from downstairs, the phone booth in your lobby.”

“The hell you say.” Molloy’s laugh was sudden and loud. “Come on up. I’m on the third.”

It was over in five minutes, and Garry still warmed at the ease with which they had arranged it. Molloy told him he had taken the other applicant, the one he was to “see on Monday,” and had never been too pleased with the results. “Good enough fellow,” he told Garry, “and maybe I was right, to pinch some pennies then. But now with this war boom, we’re full blast, so what’s your pay been at Aldrich?”

Before he left, Garry found the opportunity to ask whether Synthex “might be converting to making war supplies too,” and the primary sympathies of Molloy boomed a “Never” at him.

“I sure want to see those Heinies beaten, Mr. Paige, but if I raised one finger to help the Allies, sure as hell those damn English would grab off most of it.” Molloy then talked hotly of the Rebellion, as if Irish Home Rule outranked all other struggles in the world.

Garry left with a flashing pleasure. It was done. The move he had so long ago begun to think of, to speak of, to discuss with Otto, to try to persuade Letty into endorsing—at last it was done. He had enjoyed his five years at Aldrich, had learned much, had earned his pay and promotions, and it had been a good beginning of whatever career in chemistry research he was to have. Now those years were behind him, for cause. That was the only good way to leave a job. For your own reasons.

He paused at the telephone booth in the Synthex hallway, and gave Letty’s number to the operator. But as she repeated it, he said, “Hold it. I think I better make another call first,” and gave the Aldrich number instead. In a moment he was talking to Otto.

“You’ll never believe it,” he said. “I’ve got another job!”

“Where?”

“Synthex. I drove straight out here and saw Molloy.”

“Verdammt
—” Otto’s delight matched his own. They talked technicalities, about the equipment at Synthex, and Garry’s probable first project for Molloy.

“When do you start there?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Luck,” Otto said. “I wish you the best good luck. You will despise me?”

“Probably,” Garry answered. “What for?”

“I’m going to stay here.” Otto was suddenly agitated. “I face myself and I know I live for nothing except to kill it off forever, there in Germany.”

H. G. Wells, Garry thought, but for a different reason. The telephone booth became insufferably hot.

“Are you still there?” Otto asked.

“I was thinking,” Garry said. “We’ll make a date later this week. I’ll talk you back to our side.”

“Yes, well,” Otto said, and then in a sudden spurt, unlike his familiar deliberate speech, he added, “Armament-makers don’t make wars, Garry! They only make profits from them.”

The rationalizations, Garry thought as he hung up. For the moment he felt bereft, stripped of something he had valued and counted on. And when he and Otto had their evening two nights later, he ended by feeling bereft again.

With Letty—

Their quarrel over Otto and Louise had become a pattern for others, especially after the war started; each left an acid residue for both of them; always they got over the specific quarrel, as man and wife always did. But each time the residue hardened, calcified into a stony memory that became another milestone on the road they were traveling.

He decided against calling Letty, and went to her shop in the afternoon instead. Customers were there, and he had to wait with his big news until she was free. They went to a Huyler’s, ordering sodas and pastry, like children. Then he told her.

“Oh, Garry.” She looked desolate and he understood, but as her silence continued, resentment climbed in him.

“What did Mark Aldrich say?” she asked at last.

“He wouldn’t see me. He was ‘tied up’ until Thursday.”

“Did he know you were leaving?”

“I told his secretary to say ‘so long’ for me.”

“But you always said you would give them plenty of notice,” she said. “Is it right to walk out before they can get somebody else?”

“I gave them my notice in March. This is September.”

“You needn’t shout.”

“I’m not shouting.”

He put his fork through the éclair on his plate and half of it shot away from him and skittered across the table and to the floor.

Looking back across the distance of two and a half years, he could still see that skittering éclair, feel again the lurch of his anger. He no longer hoped to find a magic that would make Letty share his beliefs. As he had done when she had first gone without him to spend a week with her parents, he felt familiar with aloneness.

But one February afternoon in 1917, on his way home from Synthex, he felt its grip with a fresh insistence. A newsboy at the foot of the subway stairs yelled his gibberish and a glance at his papers made it clear. In the train going to the city, voices were raised to a new level; whatever the words, the mood was the same: “Thank God, at last.”

U.S. BREAKS WITH GERMANY

WILSON ADDRESSES BOTH HOUSES

—SEVERS DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS

BERNSTORFF HANDED PASSPORTS;

GERARD ASKS FOR HIS IN BERLIN

It is all but, Garry thought. All but war, and that will come soon enough. He stared down at the great black lines marching across the page like armies. Within him an excitement beat, too, different in kind, but a rhythmic beat just the same. My damn clock, he thought. The sense of time closing in was frequent now, and each headline of American crisis sharpened it and hurried it, for when the time came to act, his own crisis would arrive. Would he also exult and say, “Thank God, at last” or would he too find out how quickly the marble of resolve could melt into the pulp of acquiescence?

He stared at the subway flooring, and stamped his right foot, to get warmth back into it. He was seated too near the sliding door, and a stream of frozen air slipped under its lower edge; idiotically, his left foot remained warm. He picked up his newspaper, still unread on his knees, and folded it lengthwise. The armies of type instantly were chopped in two—a sudden killing, as in a trench in France.

He began, at last, to read the story under the headlines. It was, of course, inevitable, and had been all week, since the Germans tore up their year-old pledge to leave American ships untouched on the high seas, announcing unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany had invited this break; they knew it must follow; why did they want it, and to what military end?

He wished he could buy all the late editions and stay in and read them, but they were going out to dinner at Hank and Cindy’s and there wouldn’t be time. Connie and her Wilsonian husband, Proff Yates, had never forgiven him for his departure from Aldrich; they took it as a slur on the family ethics. But Hank, the lesser thinker of the two brothers-in-law, had thumpingly told Cindy that she wasn’t responsible for one damn thing her father did, nor for one damn thing his chemists or ex-chemists thought about what he did, so why break off old friendships?

When he got home, Blanche told him Madame would be delayed, and set out a silver bowl of slivered ice near the carafe of whiskey. He made himself a Scotch and soda, mildly surprised to find himself eager for it, aware that the glow of the first swallow loosened the tightness of his nerves the way a hot sun on the beach eased aching muscles.

Letty was often delayed these days, often telephoning Blanche to delay dinner for half an hour or more. The war had made a big change for her, doubling her business, nearly trebling it. “You’ll be a wealthy woman any minute,” he had exclaimed when she showed him her final figures for 1916. Somewhere along the unbroken line of her success, he had put a halt to their earlier sharing of all earnings. “You make too much by now,” he had said once. “I’d feel like a kept chemist.” Thereafter, her profits were her own; she paid for Blanche and her own clothes, and he paid for everything else.

He was still proud of her “as a new woman,” though he couldn’t forget his newer feelings about the shop. Still, his work was his own substitute for other kinds of happiness, and he could not begrudge her hers. At New Year’s she had moved to a larger place, farther uptown, with twice the space of the old one. Her Mrs. Everrett now had a younger colleague. “Very Four-Hundredy,” Letty said about Miss McNaught. “She
knows
why a piece is good, without having to memorize what I tell her about it.”

Garry sipped at his drink and thought idly that she had said the same thing once about Peter Stiles. Impossible—she couldn’t have. Yet the notion stuck; she had said something to the same effect about Peter, a long while back. Funny, that he should remember it after all this time. “He has a hobby of collecting antiques,” she had said. “If only he weren’t a stockbroker.”

Garry suddenly remembered the long-ago Sunday they had spent contentedly unpacking her first shipment on consignment. They had had problems before then, even quarrels, but they had not yet really mounted the tightly held animal of pain they had been riding so steadily through the years of the war.

He made himself a second drink and leaned his head against the high back of the great wing armchair that now stood by the fireplace, a comparative newcomer to their apartment; “Eighteenth-century and important,” Letty had called it. It was still the same apartment, but in many ways it too had changed in the five years they had lived there. Every month or two, Letty altered it in some particular: a lamp she had not been completely pleased by would disappear and be replaced by another of crystal, with a dazzling circle of pear-shaped pendants just below its shade. Their familiar dinner plates would vanish and the table would blossom in a banded and encrusted china which Letty told him was Royal Worcester. A vase, a small table, the andirons in the fireplace, would suddenly not be there, and something finer and costlier would appear in their stead, always a something from one of the great names, and dated “circa” one of the great years.

How far a distance was this perfection of a room from their early talk of Letty’s “five heirlooms” and of barrels and boxes she would paint red and gold. How young they had been then, and how unwarned.