At noon Farrell came by to take Charley out to lunch. “Did old Bledsoe give you an earful?” he asked. Charley nodded. “Well, don’t let him get under your skin. His bark is worse than his bite. He wouldn’t be in the outfit if he wasn’t the best plantmanager in the country.”
It was at the Country Club dance that Farrell and his wife, who was a thin oldish blonde haggard and peevish under a festoon of diamonds, took him out to, that Charley met old Bledsoe’s daughter Anne. She was a squareshouldered girl in pink with a large pleasantly-smiling mouth and a firm handshake. Charley cottoned to her first thing. They danced to Just a Girl That Men Forget and she talked about how crazy she was about flying and had five hours toward her pilot’s license. Charley said he’d take her up any time if she wasn’t too proud to fly a Curtiss-Robin. She said he’d better not make a promise if he didn’t intend to keep it because she always did what she said she’d do. Then she talked about golf and he didn’t let on that he’d never had a golfclub in his hand in his life.
At supper when he came back from getting a couple of plates of chickensalad he found her sitting at a round table under a Japanese lantern with a pale young guy, who turned out to be her brother Harry, and a girl with beautiful ashen-blond hair and a touch of Alabama in her talk whose name was Gladys Wheatley. She seemed to be engaged or something to Harry Bledsoe who had a silver flask and kept pouring gin into the fruitpunch and held her hand and called her Glad. They were all younger than Charley, but they made quite a fuss over him and kept saying what a godawful town Detroit was. When Charley got a little gin inside of him he started telling war yarns for the first time in his life.
He drove Anne home and old Bledsoe came out with a copy of the Engineering Journal in his hand and said, “So you’ve got acquainted, have you?” “Oh, yes, we’re old friends, Dad,” she said. “Charley’s going to teach me to fly.” “Humph,” said Bledsoe and closed the door in Charley’s face with a growling: “You go home and worry about that motor.”
All that summer everybody thought that Charley and Anne were engaged. He’d get away from the plant for an hour or two on quiet afternoons and take a ship up at the flyingfield to give her a chance to pile up flying hours and on Sundays they’d play golf. Charley would get up early Sunday mornings to take a lesson with the golf pro out at the Sunnyside Club where he didn’t know anybody. Saturday nights they’d often have dinner at the Bledsoes’ house and go out to the Country Club to dance. Gladys Wheatley and Harry were usually along and they were known as a foursome by all the younger crowd. Old Bledsoe seemed pleased that Charley had taken up with his youngsters and began to treat him as a member of the family. Charley was happy, he enjoyed his work; after the years in New York being in Detroit was like being home. He and Nat made some killings in the market. As vicepresident and consulting engineer of the Tern Company he was making $25,000 a year.
Old Bledsoe grumbled that it was too damn much money for a young engineer, but it pleased him that Charley spent most of it on a small experimental shop where he and Bill Cermak were building a new motor on their own. Bill Cermak had moved his family out from Long Island and was full of hunches for mechanical improvements. Charley was so busy he didn’t have time to think of women or take anything but an occasional drink in a social way. He thought Anne was a peach and enjoyed her company but he never thought of her as a girl he might someday go to bed with.
Over the Labor Day weekend the Farrells invited the young Bledsoes and Gladys Wheatley out for a cruise. When he was asked Charley felt that this was highlife at last and suggested he bring Taki along to mix drinks and act as steward. He drove the Bledsoes down to the yachtclub in his Buick. Anne couldn’t make out why he was feeling so good. “Nothing to do for three days but sit around on a stuffy old boat and let the mosquitoes bite you,” she was grumbling in a gruff tone like her father’s. “Dad’s right when he says he doesn’t mind working over his work but he’s darned if he’ll work over his play.”
“But look at the company we’ll have to suffer in, Annie.” Charley put his arm round her shoulders for a moment as she sat beside him on the front seat. Harry who was alone in the back let out a giggle. “Well, you needn’t act so smart, mister,” said Anne, without turning back. “You and Gladys certainly do enough public petting to make a cat sick.” “The stern birdman’s weakening,” said Harry. Char ley blushed. “Check,” he said. They were already at the yachtclub and two young fellows in sailorsuits were taking the bags out of the back of the car.
Farrell’s boat was a fast fiftyfoot cruiser with a diningroom on deck and wicker chairs and a lot of freshvarnished mahogany and polished brass. Farrell wore a yachtingcap and walked up and down the narrow deck with a worried look as the boat nosed out into the little muggy breeze. The river in the late afternoon had a smell of docks and weedy swamps. “It makes me feel good to get out on the water, don’t it you, Charley?… The one place they can’t get at you.”
Meanwhile Mrs. Farrell was apologizing to the ladies for the cramped accommodations. “I keep trying to get Yardly to get a boat with some room in it but it seems to me every one he gets is more cramped up than the last one.”
Charley had been listening to a light clinking sound from the pantry. When Taki appeared with a tray of manhattan cocktails everybody cheered up. As he watched Taki bobbing with the tray in front of Gladys, Charley thought how wonderful she looked all in white with her pale abundant hair tied up in a white silk handkerchief.
Smiling beside him was Anne with her brown hair blowing in her eyes from the wind of the boat’s speed. The engine made so much noise and the twinscrews churned up so much water that he could talk to her without the others’ hearing. “Annie,” he said suddenly, “I been thinking it’s about time I got married.”
“Why, Charley, a mere boy like you.”
Charley felt warm all over. All at once he wanted a woman terribly bad. It was hard to control his voice.
“Well, I suppose we’re both old enough to know better, but what would you think of the proposition? I’ve been pretty lucky this year as far as dough goes.”
Anne sipped her cocktail looking at him and laughing with her hair blowing across her face. “What do you want me to do, ask for a statement of your bankdeposit?”
“But I mean you.”
“Check,” she said.
Farrell was yelling at them, “How about a little game of penny ante before supper?… It’s gettin’ wind you there. We’d be better off inthe saloon.”
“Aye, aye, cap,” said Anne.
Before supper they played penny ante and drank manhattans and after supper the Farrells and the Bledsoes settled down to a game of auction. Gladys said she had a headache and Charley, after watching the game for a while, went out on deck to get the reek of the cigar he’d been smoking out of his lungs.
The boat was anchored in a little bay, near a lighted wharf that jutted out from shore. A halfmoon was setting behind a rocky point where one tall pine reached out of a dark snarl of branches above a crowd of shivering whitebirches. At the end of the wharf there was some sort of clubhouse that split ripples of light from its big windows; dancemusic throbbed and faded from it over the water. Charley sat in the bow. The boys who ran the boat for Farrell had turned in. He could hear their low voices and catch a smell of cigarettesmoke from the tiny hatch forward of the pilothouse. He leaned over to watch the small grey waves slapping against the bow. “Bo, this is the bigtime stuff,” he was telling himself.