Fast Start, Fast Finish Read online

  “I don’t want to get rid of Ryerson,” Tom said slowly. “And I don’t want to get rid of you, Charlie.”

  “But if you keep him there, I’ll be forced to hand in my resignation,” Charlie said.

  “Then it is an ultimatum,” Tom said. “Well, as I said, I have no intention of firing Ryerson.”

  “Then I resign, Tom. I’m sorry.”

  Tom Barry sighed. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “I tried. It didn’t work. I’ll ask you one more time to reconsider.”

  “There’s nothing to reconsider, Tom. If he stays, I resign.”

  “Well, Charlie, you’ve been in this business a long time. Surely you’re not naïve enough to think that anyone ever really resigns in this business.”

  “I’ve said I’m resigning! I resign.”

  “Each time you say that word, Charlie, you’re kissing your severance pay good-bye.”

  “Keep your severance pay, Tom. I’m not going to back down on this just so you can say you fired me.”

  “Aren’t you running out of places you can go to, Charlie? You’ve worked for almost every agency in town.”

  “I’ll worry about that, Tom. Listen, by this time tomorrow I’ll have forgotten that there ever was such a place as Barry and Kohler.” Because he had already, at that moment, made up his mind what he was going to do.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Charlie,” Tom Barry said. “And good luck to you.” And then, as Charlie left his office, he heard Tom Barry mutter, “Jesus! Orange juice!”

  But it wasn’t just orange juice. It was a matter of integrity and principle. And Charlie was proud of himself, that afternoon, for the way he had spoken up to Tom Barry, and proud too that he had rejected Tom’s offer of severance pay. He didn’t want severance pay on that condition—that he stand there and let Tom Barry fire him. Tom Barry was simply a man too stubborn or too afraid of change to make a decision. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too, which was always an impossibility. All the way home Charlie had felt exhilarated, elated really, and his head had been full of plans. Nancy had been proud of him too, proud of the way he had acted—eventually, after he had explained to her everything that had been going on. There had been, though, the one terrible moment when he first told her that he had left Barry & Kohler, and she had sat down on the sofa, burst into tears, and said, “Oh, darling! Not again!”

  Then there had been the unpleasant scene—maybe that was the one Carla was referring to, maybe she had overheard that—with Nancy’s father when he had heard that they were selling their house in Encino and planning to move east. Charlie had never gotten along particularly well with W. R. Aylesbury and for the most part merely tried to keep out of his way. “W.R.” as he made everybody around him call him, was a big, didactic, self-made man who had made a simpering slave of his wife and who had raised his only daughter to hate and fear him. W. R. Aylesbury had come storming in from Detroit on a chartered jet—or practically; W. R. Aylesbury always wore the air of a man who chartered jets to get him places—and demanded to know what they were doing. “I bought you this house!” he shouted. “How can you sell it without consulting me?” It was true, and if Charlie had known his father-in-law better he would never have accepted it. The house was the only gift of any size or importance they had ever taken from him. And Charlie remembered the pompous, heavy, and autocratic way, when they had first looked at the Encino house, W. R. Aylesbury had turned to Nancy and said, “Do you like it?” When she had nodded, he said, “Then you shall have it!” He had marched out to his rented chauffeur-driven car, picked up his briefcase, sat in the back seat of the limousine with the door open and the briefcase on his lap, and wrote out the check. He had marched back to the house, handed the check with a flourish to the astonished real-estate woman, turned and marched back to the car, and headed for the airport and his plane.

  “Doesn’t your father ever say good-bye?” Charlie had asked her.

  “Never,” Nancy said. “He never says hello either.”

  But that time, after her father had made the remark about not being consulted about selling the house, Charlie had said to him, “I guess I thought you were making us an honest gift. You are a rat.”

  Bellowing, slamming his fist so hard on a table that it seemed to shake the house, he had said, “I’m concerned with the kind of life you are treating my daughter to!”

  “I suggest you talk to her about that, W.R.,” Charlie said, and left the room.

  So when they had finally sold the house, the first thing Charlie did, though Nancy had begged him not to, was sit down and write his father-in-law a check for the exact amount. He mailed it to him in Detroit. The check came back a few days later, torn into little pieces in the bottom of an envelope.

  Lying in his bed in Westmount now he was remembering all these things. Nancy was still asleep beside him. Briefly he wanted her again, but he knew she usually disliked being waked up for that. He knew he couldn’t sleep any more this morning, and so he got up quietly and put on his robe. Fast start, fast finish. It was a little like what that Yale boy had said to him about his tennis game. “You’ve got a good delivery there, sir, but you’re weak on your follow-through.” He went downstairs in his bare feet. The kitchen was a mess. That meant Harold had been through it in his customary way—opening every cupboard door, pulling out every drawer—fixing himself some breakfast. The sticky dishes on the table confirmed the fact that Harold had eaten and gone out. Why Harold needed to open every cupboard to fix himself cornflakes and milk had always been a mystery. Charlie began closing the cupboard doors. In one cupboard he came upon an open box of chocolates. All the remaining candies, he noticed, had had their corners nibbled off by someone testing for soft centers. This cheered him considerably for some reason. He put the coffee water on. He would bring breakfast up to Nancy on a tray.

  While he waited for the water to heat he scanned the headlines in the morning paper and rifled through the morning mail. There was nothing of much importance—mostly ads and some bills. There was a letter, addressed to them both, from Westmount High School, and he opened it and read:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Lord:

  We are quite concerned about the progress of your daughter Margaret. Margaret’s transferral record from her previous school in California indicates that she is capable of doing work of excellent caliber. But thus far this term her work has been very poor, from the classroom standpoint, and her homework is almost always incomplete. In her classes, Margaret is inattentive and slow to respond. She seems off in her own private world. We wish to make you aware of this, should you wish to talk to Margaret about her schoolwork.

  We will of course also be happy to discuss Margaret’s poor progress with you personally at any time, should you so desire.

  Sincerely,

  J. J. Doyle

  Assistant to the Principal

  Charlie crumpled the letter and carried it into the living room. He touched a match to it and tossed it into the fireplace. He wouldn’t worry Nancy with it at the moment. Sometime over the weekend he would have a little talk with Maggie. A man who can be cheered by the sight of tiny human teethmarks in a scattering of chocolate candies can be cheered by anything. The first thing he would do today, he decided, watching the paper burn, would be to mount a fresh rectangle of canvas on a frame.

  6

  On Monday afternoon Myra Mirisch telephoned him. “You never called me again, Mr. Lord,” she said. “I began to worry. I wondered if you’d stayed drunk all this time. Or forgotten.”

  “I’m really ashamed of that call, Miss Mirisch,” he said. “I’m awfully sorry about that.”

  “Ashamed,” she said. “Poor man, don’t be. Drunk painters are forever calling me. I didn’t mean you to suffer agonies of guilt.”

  He said nothing.

  “I just wanted you to know that I meant what I said. I’ll be happy to talk to you at any time, Mr. Lord.”

  He hesitated. “The thing is—” he began, “the thing is that what
I was going to ask you the other day is something I’m a little ashamed to ask you now.”

  She laughed. “You have a great capacity for shame, don’t you?” she said. “Well, can you ask it? Over the phone?”

  “It was—just a favor,” he said. He closed his eyes briefly. “I was going to ask you if—you might consider hanging just a few of my pictures, just the ones you like, or just one—in your gallery. As part of a group show, perhaps.”

  “Mr. Lord, I’ve launched I don’t know how many careers. Why do you want me to launch yours the wrong way?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Yes’?”

  “I mean yes, I see what you mean. But—”

  “I think you have talent,” she said, “but it’s talent that needs work. The best I can do for you now is give you my best advice. Which is work.”

  “Doesn’t a painter need exposure? Just a few square feet of a gallery wall, for instance?”

  “Of course he does—if he has the right kind of painting to expose. With the right kind of paintings, I’ll give you every inch of my gallery walls. Are you working now?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at the empty canvas in front of him in the room Nancy had fixed up for his studio. “Or trying, at least. It always takes a little time, at the beginning—”

  “Isn’t it a pity that everything takes time.”

  Just then there was a hammer of footsteps outside his room, a rattle, and his door banged open, and there was Harold, looking sweaty and out of breath in his Levis and windbreaker, his schoolbooks under one arm. “Excuse me, Dad,” Harold began, “but—”

  “I’m on the phone, Harold,” he said.

  “Oh, sorry, Dad,” Harold said. He sat down hard in one of the canvas sling chairs and let his books fall to the floor with a thud. He sat there while Charlie talked, tapping his foot on the floor, cracking his knuckles, and making impatient, whistling sounds under his breath.

  “Household interruptions, Mr. Lord?” Myra Mirisch said.

  “Well, a few,” he said.

  “Why don’t you get a little studio in a loft somewhere, or even a barn?” she said. “That is, if you can afford it—and you said money was not your problem.”

  “I’ve thought of that, yes.”

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “I think we understand each other. Keep working. And keep in touch. And any time you would like to talk—”

  “Yes.”

  “But of course I have a personal theory,” she said. “A painter shouldn’t talk. He should paint. And I think you’re a painter.”

  “Yes,” he repeated. “Yes.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Harold hardly gave Charlie a chance to hang up the phone before he began to speak. “Dad,” he said, “that car is still not fixed right! Ever since Mom smacked it up there’s been a terrible rattle in the front end! Buck was just driving it and he said—”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Charlie said. “I don’t want Buck Holzer driving my car. Who gave Buck Holzer permission to drive my car?”

  “Why can’t he?” Harold looked amazed. “He’s got his license and all!”

  “You may drive our car—when you have our permission. But I don’t want anyone else driving it, Harold.”

  “Well, anyway, there’s this rattle—it sounds like the whole front end coming off!”

  “I haven’t noticed anything as bad as that. It got a clean bill of health after it came out of the garage.”

  “Now, look, Dad, Buck knows cars—even better than I. He thinks the whole chassis’s been twisted, that’s what he says. And he says there’s just no way to fix a thing like that—after someone’s smacked up a car like that. We can never get rid of that rattle, Buck says.”

  “I also wish you wouldn’t keep talking about your mother ‘smacking up’ the car. That accident was nobody’s fault.”

  “Nobody’s fault!”

  “And stop doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Cracking your knuckles.”

  Harold spread the fingers of both hands and looked at them. “Well, it was certainly Mom’s fault, Dad,” he said. “Leaving it parked on a hill in neutral with no emergency on was hardly using the old gray cells, was it, Dad? After she’d left the headlights on all day, for gosh sake. Well, anyway, what are you going to do?”

  “Do about what?”

  “About the car!”

  “I’m not going to do anything about the car. It’s running fine.”

  “Aw, Dad! You try taking it over a bumpy road—”

  “What bumpy roads are you and Buck Holzer taking my car over? When you drive my car, please keep it on the pavement, young man.”

  “Try taking it fast down this Lane—”

  “Don’t—take—it—fast—down—this—Lane!” Charlie said. “Especially down this Lane.”

  “Well, anyway, Dad, you’ve got to do something. It’s got that rattle, and it can’t be fixed, and it’s a four-year-old car—”

  “Three years old, Harold.”

  “Four model years, Dad, and it’s got forty thousand miles on it. I think we ought to turn it in on a new one, Dad, I really do. It’s the oldest car on this Lane.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Charlie said. “I really am. That fills me with a whole new sense of respect for our car.”

  “Aw, Dad! Do you always have to make jokes?”

  “I’m not joking, Harold. I’ve never been more serious.”

  “Well, anyway, Dad,” Harold said, continuing earnestly, “Buck knows this guy who has a friend who works for a dealer, and we took the car over to this friend of Buck’s friend this afternoon, and he looked at it—we didn’t tell him the car had been smacked up, of course, or about the chassis—and he said you could probably get a thousand dollars for that car against the new model!”

  “Now, wait a minute, Harold,” Charlie said. “This is rather startling—to hear that you and your friend have spent your afternoon trying to sell my car.”

  “Not sell it, Dad! Just turn it in. Just see how much—”

  “It’s not up to you to turn in my car. Did you think of that?”

  “Aw, Dad! I was just trying to get the information for you! Anyway, Buck knows another guy who knows how to tinker with speedometers, and he can set it back to, oh, maybe, twenty thousand, and you might be able to trade it in for even more!”

  “Now, wait a minute—”

  “Everybody does it, Buck says.”

  “Everybody does not do it. Crooks do it. But not everybody is a crook—not yet. I am not a crook. But your friend Buck sounds like a crook, and so do some of his friends. Harold, you and I have got to have a little talk about a few things.”

  “But Dad—”

  “Harold, when we moved here from California, I thought you understood there’d be some adjustments to make. Adjustments like—” Like what, he suddenly wondered? “Like getting along with our car for a few more years, making a few sacrifices—”

  “You mean you’re not going to turn it in?”

  “Absolutely not. And that’s final. I don’t want to hear another word on the subject.”

  “Aw, cool it, Dad!” Suddenly Harold jumped up and strode across the room to where Charlie sat behind his easel. “Painting a new picture, Dad?” he said. He craned his head over the easel and looked down at the blank canvas. “Hey!” he whistled. “White on white! Neat, Dad!”

  “That will be quite enough, Harold!”

  “Aw, I was only kidding,” Harold said, turning away. “You can dish it out, but you can’t take it, can you, Dad?”

  “Listen, Harold—”

  “Aw, what’s the use?” he said. “Nobody can talk to you anymore.”

  “I’m always glad to talk to you, Harold; Talk, that is. Not argue about new cars.”

  “No,” he said in a different voice. “Nobody can talk to you anymore, Dad—since you started this painting thing.” Hands in his Levis’ pockets, he
walked out the door, leaving it open, leaving his books still on the floor.

  She always hated to interrupt him while he was working. But a little later, when she tiptoed to his door and looked in, she saw that he had stopped and was standing at the window, looking out into the quiet Lane, his hands on the windowsill.

  She tapped on the door frame. “Excuse me, darling,” she said. “But the children are here.”

  He turned. “Hm?” he said.

  “The children are here. Is this a good time? Or shall I tell them to come back later?”

  “What children?”

  “Carla’s friends from The Chatterbox, dear,” she said. “They said they’d like to see where you work if you didn’t mind. Is it all-right if they come up here?”

  “Oh,” he said, “sure. Send them up.”

  Charlie picked up Harold’s books and placed them on a cabinet. He moved his easel and turned it to face the wall and smoothed his hair with his hands.

  Outside he could hear footsteps on the stairs and whispered conversation, and it sounded like a sizable delegation from The Chatterbox—the whole staff, perhaps—and he wondered where he would find chairs for all of them. But when they appeared at the door, he saw that there were only two, a girl in a ponytail and heavy horn-rimmed glasses and a gangly boy whose trousers rode low on his hips and whose open-collared shirt seemed a bit too small. Charlie tried to muster his best smile. “Hi, I’m Charles Lord,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “How do you do, Mr. Lord,” the girl said. “I’m Rita Melnick, editor in chief of The Chatterbox. And this is Stanley Bronson, special-affairs editor.”

  “Miss Melnick … Mr. Bronson …” He shook hands with them. “Always glad to take part in special affairs,” he said, trying to put them at their ease. They were certainly a very solemn-looking pair.

  They spent a few minutes now, moving around his room, inspecting it, looking out the windows. “This is a very nice studio, Mr. Lord,” Rita Melnick said. “You command a very nice view from here.”