The Lady of Situations (25 page)

"Edith tells me you're a smart one," he informed her. "I'm certainly glad to hear it. This family, at least my generation of it, could do with some of that quality."

"I don't know that my record shows so much smartness. What have I got to my credit? I can hardly point to my first matrimonial venture with great pride."

"You got out of it, didn't you? And without landing on the buttered side. I'd call that pretty smart."

The bluntness of this apparent reference to her improved financial state took her aback. But she thought it better to offer him an out. "You mean that I substituted a happy marriage for an unhappy one?"

"That's it, exactly. You certainly didn't think I meant the money?" His chuckle was almost insulting. He allowed his pale stare to flicker over the great porcelain centerpiece on the Angus Hills' dining table in which Orion was being rescued from shipwreck by dolphins. "Though speaking of money, if you're as smart as they say, how would you like to join your husband in my office? We could find a place for you."

"As a secretary, you mean?"

"Don't be silly. Why would you want to be a secretary? We could train you as a portfolio manager."

She wondered if he were mocking her. "But I don't know the first thing about stocks and bonds!"

"Who does? Brains and no preconceptions is all I ask. You could learn."

"You use women in jobs like that?"

"I use some. I don't look below the waist if the bean's okay. Hetty Green made as big a fortune on the market as Jay Gould."

"You tempt me. I'd love to get my teeth into something serious after I'm a bit more settled. But why should you need more than one member of our branch of the Hills in your office?"

"I'll be frank with you, Natica. The one I have right now is not much good to me. What I need is a kind of principal assistant to help me with the Hills. Someone who is also a member of the family. You see, they may think I'm a whiz, and I am, too, but they're always leery about my taking risks. Every time I go into a new venture, I need a bunch of family consents. Even from the trust beneficiaries. You could be a great help here, once you knew the business. Janine and Susan, for example, might listen to you, whereas I tend to scare them off."

"I don't think Stephen would much take to the idea of my marching downtown with him in the morning."

"Hell, you could work at home. I'd send up up everything you need, including a steno. Don't let Stephen talk you out of something that's fun just because
he
can't do it."

She marveled at how much contempt he could put into one flat sentence. "Give Stephen time. He may learn to like the business."

He didn't deign to comment on this. "I tell you what. Think it over. There's no hurry. I'll send you a batch of reports on different things I'm thinking of going into, and you can read them at your leisure. What can I lose? And what can
you?
You've got nothing else to do."

She bridled. "That's not quite true. Edith has suggested I go on the Carnegie Hill Settlement Board with her, and Mrs. Hill has—"

"Don't give me those stupid ladies' boards," he interrupted rudely. "If you're worth anything at all, you're too good for them. One board meeting every quarter where the paid director flatters the old girls and gets his padded budget okayed." Here he raised his voice to a mocking falsetto in crude parody of a lady chairman. " 'Will someone move to adopt the budget? Second? All in favor? Contrary-minded? Any new business to come before the meeting? Then do I hear a motion to adjourn? Good. And now, girls, I hear there's the most divine new place to lunch near Park at Fiftieth.'"

Natica had to laugh. "Well, you can certainly send me those reports. I promise to read them, anyway."

"Do that. And let me give you a tip. Don't let Edith waste too much of your time. She's the laziest white woman east of Central Park."

"Woman! I thought you didn't look below the waist."

"Where brains are concerned, that is. With Edith there's no other place to look."

***

Tyler did send her the reports, some dozen of them, by hand delivery directly to the apartment, and she spent several mornings reading them with care. She found that with the aid of a dictionary of commercial terms she could understand them readily enough, and she began to think that Stephen's cousin might not be wholly wrong in envisaging a role in his business for her. For the first time since she had worked for Rufus Lockwood she was using her brain, and she found an exhilaration in it that made an afternoon discussing "Should America remain neutral?" with her sisters'-in-law Current Events Club seem singularly fruitless. Perhaps she could develop a flair for the stock market. Had she not been almost a school administrator under Lockwood? But she thought it politic not to tell her husband of her new interest. It would be time enough if she decided to take the job.

One morning she determined to fulfill her honeymoon resolution of visiting the entrance hall of the Standard Oil Building, and she took the subway down to Bowling Green. She roamed pensively through the gray foyer, avoiding the people hustling to and from the elevators, and gazing up at the large carved names in the medallions, pausing as long as she comfortably could under the "Ezra Hill."

"And here I stand," she whispered to herself, "his granddaughter-in-law. I wonder what he would have thought of me."

She went from there to the Wall Street offices of Bennett & Son, which she had never seen, on the chance that she might find Stephen free to take her to lunch.

The Bennett space had consisted initially of a series of large paneled rooms in which the three sons and son-in-law of Ezra Hill could get away from their wives and daughters, cut their coupons and contemplate prudent charitable enterprises, but when son-in-law Bennett in more recent years, aided by his energetic son Tyler, had formed a corporation for investment purposes, he had kept leasing additional space until the original suite had been isolated like an ancient Romanesque chapel in a Gothic cathedral. Natica, conducted by a secretary to her husband's small office in the new part, noted as she passed, through open doors, two of his uncles secluded in dusky interiors reading newspapers at their desks. The Bennett area had more bustle; there was a large room with bare white walls cluttered with metal desks for telephoning men and a ticker tape machine in the middle. Her glancing eye recognized that Tyler wasted little of the family money in decoration. Other than a statue of a bull and bear fighting and a pompous portrait of Ezra Hill in the foyer there was hardly a picture in the place.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Hill, Stephen must have gone out," the young woman informed her. "Perhaps he went for a cup of coffee."

"Then he can't be far. I'll wait for him in his office if I may."

"Farther than you think, Natica," came a strangely familiar voice, and she turned to find Grant DeVoe standing in the doorway of the adjoining office. "He'll have to go down to Sloppy Joe's on Water Street. My brother-in-law permits no such levities as a coffee wagon in these august precincts. It might for as much as five minutes distract the mind from the chase of the dollar."

The secretary, seeing her charge taken care of, departed.

"I'm so glad to see you, Grant!" And indeed she was. The pleasure of finding herself on equal terms with the children of her family's old landlord had not yet worn off. Grant had hardly changed at all. His somehow tentative stance, his restrained smile, his cautious friendliness, seemed of a piece with an attitude of not committing himself until assured of a favorable reception. "I had no idea you were working here. I thought you were representing your father's bank somewhere on Long Island."

"I was. But Daddy decided I'd better learn the market with Tyler. He thinks the world of his brilliant son-in-law."

"Everyone seems to."

"Exactly. So here I am."

"It's the same with Stephen. I was hoping he'd take me to lunch."

Grant looked at his watch. "I doubt he comes back in time. Sometimes he doesn't come back at all."

"You mean he has an appointment outside the office?"

"Or an appointment with the Marx Brothers. He's become quite a movie fan."

She looked at him suspiciously. Had he decided that she was an old friend with whom candor was safe? Or was his sarcasm the evidence of his resentment of her too sudden rise to fame and fortune? Or did he simply want to tell her that her husband, like himself, was only the reluctant tool of Tyler Bennett?

"You imply that Stephen's heart is not in his work?"

"Well, I don't believe he was cut out to be a money man. Why should he be? If I had a fraction of what he has, you wouldn't find me in this joint."

"I thought the DeVoes were very well off!"

"My old man may be. But he doesn't believe in sharing the wealth."

"What would you do then if he died and left you your share?"

He studied her as if to determine how serious she was. "Would you really like to know? I think I'd like to keep kennels. I've always been very fond of dogs."

And she suddenly remembered that he had been. The day he had taken her sailing in Smithport there had been a chow with him, too big and restless to be taken on the small boat, which had been tied up at the dock while they were out and pathetically joyous in greeting Grant on their return. It now struck her that all of his snobbishness might have been a fear of people, a fear of committing himself beyond any of his immediate circle.

"Why don't you tell your father? He might just blow you to it."

"He? Never." He paused. "You don't think it's a silly thing to want to do?"

"Not at all. Why isn't a dog as good as a bull or a bear?"

He laughed. "So long as Stephen has pooped out, how about my taking you to lunch?"

"How nice. I'd love it."

But on the way out of the office Grant's plan was frustrated. They met Tyler in the corridor and stopped to greet him. Good manners required Grant to ask him to join them, as good manners should have required Tyler to decline. But that was not what happened.

"As a matter of fact, Grant, I'm expecting a call from your old man a little before one. It's about the Marston deal, which is really more your matter than mine. He wants someone to read him the tax covenant, which you'll find on top of the pile on my desk. Only a paragraph—Marcie will show it to you. And I'll take Natica to lunch. She won't mind, will she? It's all in the family."

Grant turned to Natica with a sour little smile. "As you see, I've been outranked. Another time, maybe."

When he had gone, Natica was left staring at her substituted host. "Well, I must say, that was pretty cool."

"Oh, come on, he won't die over it. I wanted to talk to you, anyway. We can go to my club. It's just across the street."

Amid green walls covered with Audubon prints Natica gazed from the window by their table over the panorama of the harbor. She had found it was idle to protest his treatment of Grant; Tyler simply wouldn't listen. He wanted to know if she had read his reports, and when he learned that she had, he delivered a short lecture on four textile mills in Massachusetts acquired by the Hills three decades before and now considered a poor investment which should be liquidated. He discoursed in his dry but lucid fashion on costs of production, declining sales and bitter labor agitation. She followed him with close attention.

"So what do you do?" she asked at last. "Dump the whole thing and swallow the loss? Grin and bear it? I suppose it's some comfort it's so small a part of the empire."

"But I hate to lose any part of it! My job is to make it grow."

"You're like a Roman Caesar. No matter how wide your domain you keep your ears tuned for the tiniest barbarian rumble on the remotest frontier."

"Well, look what happened when they stopped."

"It's true." She thought for a moment. "I suppose there is
an
alternative."

He leaned forward. "And what is that?"

"It was in those papers. You know it, of course."

"Tell me."

"It was in the report of the man who pointed out the advantages of moving that business south. Everything is cheaper there, particularly Negro labor, and there wouldn't be any union trouble, at least for a while. Most of the machinery could be transported and all the expert personnel. The expense could be made up in four years of a profitable operation."

Tyler nodded in approval. "And with a spreading war and the need for uniforms we could do it in two. But how would our gracious aunts and some of our bleeding-heart cousins take to the idea of an antilabor policy vigorously enforced? Which would be the only way to make it work."

She smiled. "You're testing me, aren't you? You want to find out how well I read all that stuff?"

"I don't deny it."

"Well, it's all there in the proposal. If you keep out labor organizers by paying your workers more than organized labor gets in a southern state, why should even liberal-minded shareholders object? And anyway, our 'gracious aunts' would never interfere in a labor question. They leave those things entirely to the men. And as for the bleeding-heart cousins, I can't think of any but Bill, Uncle Fred's son, who voted for Roosevelt because he's a fellow philatelist."

"What about Stephen?"

"Stephen isn't interested in politics."

"Look, Natica. Of course, I gave you those reports as a test. There were five proposals as to what to do with those mills, and you picked the only feasible one right off. Come on down and work with us here. I'll give you an office and a girl. You can have a salary if you like, but I don't take one myself. Who needs income, to give it to Uncle Sam? Capital gains are the thing, and those you will have, my friend. We're bound to get into this war, and the industrial boom that will follow is going to blow away the last traces of the depression the son-of-a-bitch New Dealers have been making such hay out of. How about it?"

"Stephen would hate it," she said pensively.

"Stephen is going to hate your doing anything better than he does, I'm afraid, Natica. I'm going to have to be brutally frank with you for your own good. Do you mind?"