“And how!” said Mary Klein.
It was one of those mornings when he could tell himself that he was up to his ears in work or that he had nothing to do, and either with equal honesty. His hangover did not bother him inordinately; he knew he could work in spite of whatever effect the night before still maintained. He wanted to work; the difficulty was in getting started. He wanted to work to put things out of his mind, and he tried to the extent of getting out some scratch paper and pencils with the idea of working out some sort of summary or recapitulation of the year’s business of the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company. This was a good time to do that; when no salesmen would disturb him, and when there was nothing much else he could do. But the words, summary, recapitulation—they made him think of Lute and how he had recapitulated and summarized his performance of the night before, including the consequences. The Quilty business—well, he thought he knew what to expect there: O’Dowd probably hadn’t said a word to old Quilty, but when O’Dowd did hear about Julian’s throwing the highball at Harry Reilly, he would hot-foot out to Quilty and make the sale. O’Dowd was a good salesman, and he knew how to handle a situation like this. Julian hated to lose that sale, too, because no matter how people joke about it, when you place a car with an undertaker, you have a pretty good advertisement. Undertakers keep their cars in the best of shape, black and gleaming and polished and clean. Julian knew this from his own reaction; he often had thought that if you had to die, it wouldn’t be so bad to ride to the cemetery in Quilty’s luxurious hearse, followed by Quilty’s well-kept Studebaker sedans. Whenever he heard the tune Saint James’ Infirmary, he always thought of old Quilty. And the sale would be for cash. That wouldn’t be hard to take. It certainly made it hard to lose. He wondered if Harry Reilly had gone to work already. Harry was a very rich man and handling his investments and holdings was a full-time job, but he also managed to know what was going on in other people’s businesses, and it would be just like him to know that old Quilty was thinking of buying a Cadillac. It was just the kind of thing he would know. After all, why shouldn’t he know it? He had lent Julian twenty thousand dollars last summer, and that was a nice piece of change no matter how much Harry might be worth. It was enough to excuse any extraordinary interest Harry might be taking in Julian’s business.
Twenty thousand dollars! Why in God’s name had he ever asked for that much? He knew perfectly well why he had asked for that much: at the time he needed ten thousand, but he figured he might as well get a good hunk while he was at it. Ten thousand had gone in no time: it cost, even with the cheap labor and construction costs of last summer, about eight thousand to build the inclined driveway inside the building, which he had calculated would mean eventually a great saving in electric power bills through decreased use of the elevator. So far it hadn’t made much difference, if any. In fact, Julian would not have argued very long if someone suggested that the driveway was an ill-advised project. Then what else was there? Well, there were those two three-wheel motorcycles. The idea of them was a mechanic would ride the motorcycle to, say, the Davis’ garage, hook some kind of gadget on the Davis’ Cadillac, and drive the car, with the motorcycle trailing along behind, back to the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company for servicing or repairs. That was another idea that was going to make a saving, but the saving, Julian was sure, had failed to make a showing on the books. And why two motorcycles? One was enough. More than enough. Then there were the trees, those beautiful, slender trees. Julian had conditioned himself against ever seeing them when he passed them, but now he made himself think of them. There they were out there in the little strip of grass along the curb. Seven-hundred and sixty-six dollars and forty-five cents’ worth of them, including freight and planting. Julian knew to the penny what they cost, but he still was not sure of the name of them. They had been purchased while he was in a fine, naturalistic mood as an aftermath of a City Beautiful luncheon. There had been trees a long time ago where the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company now stood, and there had been trees along the curb, but they had been chopped down. Then one day Julian went to a City Beautiful luncheon and everybody got up and said a few words about trees and what they did for a residential section—Julian’s garage was in a residential section—and by the oddest coincidence there chanced to be a man from a nursery at the luncheon, and Julian signed. And that about took care of the extra ten thousand dollars.
The other ten thousand had gone for expenses, real ones, like payments on notes, payroll, and so on.
Lute was right on another score: Ed Charney was a good customer. “I’m a good customer of Ed’s,” Julian reminded himself, “but he’s a better one of mine.” Something ought to be done about Ed, but he supposed the best thing to do for the present was to lay off trying to fix it up. Yes, he certainly had loused things up last night: Ed Charney sore at him, Caroline—well, he wouldn’t think of that now; he was at work, and he would try to think of things only in so far as they affected his business. If Ed Charney got really sore—but he wouldn’t do that; he wouldn’t throw a pineapple at the garage. This was Gibbsville, not Chicago. And after all, the English name meant something around here. “No thanks to me, however,” Julian said under his breath.
“Darn his buttons anyhow,” said Mary Klein.
“What is it, Mary?” said Julian.
“Luther Fliegler,” she said. “He makes out these slips when he gets gas, but you never can tell whether he means ten gallons or seventy gallons, the way he makes figures.”
“Well, I don’t think he’d be making out a slip for seventy gallons. A car doesn’t hold that much gas,” said Julian. “Besides, that’s not your headache. Let Bruce worry about it.”
Mary turned to look at him. “Sure, but you forget. You told Bruce he could go to Lebanon over the weekend.” She spoke as a woman who was carrying on in spite of all injustice. Bruce Reichelderfer was the bookkeeper, and Julian had given him the week-end.
“That’s right, I did. Well, let me see it.”
She handed him the slip. She was right as usual; you could not tell from the figures whether Lute had meant 10 or 70. “We ought to use the French seven,” he said. “Then we’d always know. However, I guess we can take a chance that he meant ten gallons. He wouldn’t be signing for seventy gallons all at once.”
“Well, I just wanted to be right on it. Sixty gallons of gas, that costs money, and we can’t just—”
“I know, Mary. You’re right.” Somehow her tone filled him with terror, the kind that he felt when he knew he was doing something bad. It was an old experience; he still thought of it in the terms of boyhood: “—when I’m doing something bad.” And it wasn’t her tone alone; it was her manner, and it was not a new manner. For weeks, and probably months, she had behaved like someone, a school teacher, who was meaning to speak to him about his lessons or conduct. She was Right, and he was Wrong. She could make him feel like a thief, a lecher (although God knows he never had made a pass at her), a drunkard, a no-good bum. She represented precisely what she came from: solid, respectable, Pennsylvania Dutch, Lutheran middle class; and when he thought about her, when she made her existence felt, when she actively represented what she stood for, he could feel the little office suddenly becoming overcrowded with a delegation of all the honest clerks and mechanics and housewives and Sunday School teachers and widows and orphans—all the Christiana Street kind of people who he knew secretly hated him and all Lantenengo Street people. They could have their illegitimate babies, their incest, their paresis, their marital bestiality, their cruelty to animals, their horrible treatment of their children and all the other things which you could find in individual families; but collectively they presented a solid front of sound Pennsylvania Dutch and all that that implied, or was supposed to imply. They went to church on Sunday, they saved their money, they were kind to their old people, they were physically clean, they loved music, they were peace-loving, they were good workers. And there they sat, with their back curved in at the small part, their oilcloth cuffs covering their sleeves, their fresh blouse as neat after five hours’ wear as Julian’s shirt after two. And they were thinking what a pity it was that this wonderful business wasn’t in the hands of one of their own men, instead of being driven into the ground by a Lantenengo Street—wastrel. And yet, Julian made himself admit, Lute Fliegler is a Pennsylvania Dutchman and one of the swellest guys that ever lived. Thinking that over Julian returned to his old theory: it was possible, wasn’t it? that Lute’s mother had had a quick one with an Irishman or a Scotsman. A hell of a thing to think about that old Mrs. Fliegler, who still baked the best pie crust Julian had ever tasted.