War was in the pure air once again, in the inky newspapers. It seemed to older people a continuation of the war they had grown up with, coming to a boil after just enough time to raise a new crop of sacrificial young men. A pattern was emerging — every twenty-five years or so another war would keep the human world stumbling along, a human boom and bust carried to deadly extremes. The Breitsprechers and Dukes had escaped military service for generations, but Conrad was called up. Both Raphael and Claude knew the right people. Conrad knew only Al McErlane and some forestry professors. Growing nursery seedlings was not a vital agricultural occupation.
• • •
He came back from the South Pacific in 1945, face and body damaged and changed, thoughts changed, ideas and beliefs changed. And when once more he shook Al McErlane’s hand and walked through the seedling greenhouses, he thought that the rows of spiky, fresh green sturdy little pines were the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
66. her place in the sun
Plywood and fiberboard kept Breitsprecher-Duke alive. During the Second World War they experimented with interior and exterior hardboard siding, but after two years of moisture problems with different recipes — one unhappy trial involved seaweed and corn husk pulp — they dropped the product and concentrated on their plywood — Brite-Ply, made of culls and forest fire salvage. In the years after the war they caught the tail end of the building boom, but bigger companies supplied by cheaper Canadian wood sent them into decline, although the illusion of a productive, busy wood products company headed by two dynamic men — James Bardawulf Breitsprecher and Andrew Harkiss — persisted. Both men photographed well standing in front of a mountain of logs or the glittering rotary peeler, but like plywood these images were only a surface layer covering inferior material.
The younger generation of Breitsprechers wanted nothing to do with the plywood company. But Sophia Hannah Breitsprecher Harkiss, the youngest of Dieter’s children, had her own idea of a place in the works. She found her brother and her husband annoyingly obtuse.
“Andrew! I do not understand why you and James Bardawulf don’t let me into the company. For God’s sake, it’s the sixties, not the Dark Ages. I have no position.” She had grown up listening to Dieter’s stories of how Lavinia Duke, his first wife, apparently a reincarnation of Elizabeth I, had controlled the lumber business since her youth, and it seemed to Sophia, only vaguely aware of the company’s decline, that she, too, should have a title. Her children were grown, why should she not have a career?
“You are a company director, you sit on the Board,” said Andrew. “Very few companies have women on their boards. You have influence in that way and your comments are taken into consideration. What more do you want?”
“I want a position. I want an office and the responsibility of that office.” She kept banging out this tune for more than a year until Harkiss said he would discuss it with James Bardawulf, who, as president of the company and paterfamilias, had the say. But she could not come up with a specific description of what her position might be.
• • •
“She wants to make a career move,” Harkiss said gloomily to his brother-in-law. “You’d think she’d calm down, now that she’s a grandmother. Instead she is like a rolling cannonball on the deck of a ship. She wants an office and her name on the door, a telephone and probably an expense account. Which she’ll spend on clothes.” He and James Bardawulf were having dinner at the Wild Goose in Sherman Oaks, James Bardawulf slashing at his veal cutlet Oskar, Andrew Harkiss picking gingerly at boned pheasant with a Kahlúa sauce.
“How’s the pheasant?” asked James Bardawulf.
Harkiss made a face. “Unusual. I think I prefer gravy to Kahlúa.” They were silent for a few minutes while the waiter hovered, filled their glasses with a sharp white wine. Harkiss drank greedily to rid his mouth of the Kahlúa.
“But what would Sophia do?” James Bardawulf wanted to resolve the issue.
“I don’t know. For God’s sake she doesn’t know. It’s the change of life — or something — and you know how they get.” “They” made up the vaporish, flighty, talkative, scrambling world of women. Yet her husband understood that she had been biding her time for years, and that she would not let this drop. “I told her the company isn’t the monolith she seems to think it is. I told her we had discussed selling out. She blew her top — how could we think of such a thing, ineffective management, lax ways, blah blah. I suppose I can put it to her that she has to draw up a formal request outlining the duties she would assume — tell her that vague wishes bear no fruit. I hope we can find something to quiet her down.”
James Bardawulf glanced at the dessert wagon against the wall. The waiter saw the glance and hurried to snatch up two dessert menus. “How about something to do with the arts? She’s always been interested in museums and concerts — she can do something cultural. Or civic. Community relations?”
“Sophia feels entitled to a place in the company.”
“She’s smart — I admit that. Too smart, maybe.” Andrew Harkiss thought of his wife’s years of correction of his appearance, how she sniped at his way of speaking, realigned the way he marshaled his facts. He sometimes felt he was married not to Sophia but to James Bardawulf; they spoke the same language. “She’s not young but I can tell you that pointing that fact out to her will produce Vesuvius in action. Let’s wait and see if she can come up with an idea on her own.” Harkiss saw that Kahlúa sauce figured in two of the sweets on the dessert menu. He asked for butterscotch pie but even that came with an arabesque of the moody liqueur drizzled down the triangle. He sent it back, saying, “The chef must have stock in the company.”
• • •
Andrew Harkiss told Sophia that James Bardawulf had asked that she write out a description of the job she wanted.
“Yes, yes,” she said and went upstairs to her closet to sort out old, boring clothes that she would replace on a shopping trip to New York, for Chicago did not have really good garment shops. The specific position she wanted, whatever it was, would come to her.
• • •
The flight to New York bumped over a cloudscape that looked like trays packed with cauliflower heads. The air evened out later in the afternoon. As they flew toward darkness, approaching the cities of the east, the slender tangles of light below became great webs, the radiant country glittering in the night.
Sophia stayed at the Waldorf, as the Breitsprechers always did. From her room she telephoned her cousin Althea Evans, who had married a Wall Street stockbroker. She and Althea could shop together and have an elegant lunch. A maid answered the phone.
“Mrs. Evans is away. They are in Boca.”
“Where?”
“Boca. Boca Raton. In Florida.”
“Oh. Well, tell her her cousin Sophia called. Sophia Breitsprecher. From Chicago.”