It was like getting out of jail when they got off the train at Palm Beach and saw the green grass and the palmtrees and the hedges of hibiscus in flower. When she saw the big rooms of their corner suite at the Royal Poinciana, where she’d wanted to go because that was where her father and mother had gone on their weddingtrip, and the flowers friends had sent that filled up the parlor, Gladys threw her arms round his neck and kissed him even before the last bellboy had got out of the room. “Oh, Charley, forgive me for being so horrid.” Next morning they lay happy in bed side by side after they’d had their breakfast and looked out of the window at the sea beyond the palmtrees, and smelt the freshness of the surf and listened to it pounding along the beach. “Oh, Charley,” Gladys said, “let’s have everything always just like this.”
Their first child was born in December. It was a boy. They named him Wheatley. When Gladys came back from the hospital instead of coming back to the apartment she went into the new house out at Grosse Pointe that still smelt of paint and raw plaster. What with the hospital expenses and the furniture bills and Christmas, Charley had to borrow twenty thousand from the bank. He spent more time than ever talking over the phone to Nat Benton’s office in New York. Gladys bought a lot of new clothes and kept tiffanyglass bowls full of freesias and narcissus all over the house. Even on the dressingtable in her bathroom she always had flowers. Mrs. Wheatley said she got her love of flowers from her grandmother Randolph, because the Wheatleys had never been able to tell one flower from another. When the next child turned out to be a girl, Gladys said, as she lay in the hospital, her face looking drawn and yellow against the white pillows, beside the great bunch of glittering white orchids Charley had ordered from the florist at five dollars a bloom, she wished she could name her Orchid. They ended by naming her Marguerite after Gladys’s grandmother Randolph.
Gladys didn’t recover very well after the little girl’s birth and had to have several small operations that kept her in bed three months. When she got on her feet she had the big room next to the nursery and the children’s nurse’s room redecorated in white and gold for her own bedroom. Charley groused about it a good deal because it was in the other wing of the house from his room. When he’d come over in his bathrobe before turning in and try to get into bed with her, she would keep him off with a cool smile, and when he insisted, she would give him a few pecking kisses and tell him not to make a noise or he would wake the babies. Sometimes tears of irritation would start into his eyes. “Jesus, Glad, don’t you love me at all?” She would answer that if he really loved her he’d have come home the night she had the Smyth Perkinses to dinner instead of phoning at the last minute that he’d have to stay at the office.
“But, Jesus, Glad, if I didn’t make the money how would I pay the bills?”
“If you loved me you’d be more considerate, that’s all,” she would say and two curving lines would come on her face from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth like the lines on her mother’s face and Charley would kiss her gently and say poor little girl and go back to his room feeling like a louse. Times she did let him stay she lay so cold and still and talked about how he hurt her, so that he would go back to the tester bed in his big bedroom feeling so nervous and jumpy it would take several stiff whiskies to get him in shape to go to sleep.
One night when he’d taken Bill Cermak, who was now a foreman at the Flint plant, over to a roadhouse the other side of Windsor to talk to him about the trouble they were having with molders and diemakers, after they’d had a couple of whiskies, Charley found himself instead asking Bill about married life. “Say, Bill, do you ever have trouble with your wife?”
“Sure, boss,” said Bill, laughing. “I got plenty trouble. But the old lady’s all right, you know her, nice kids good cook, all time want me to go to church.”
“Say, Bill, when did you get the idea of callin’ me boss? Cut it out.”
“Too goddam rich,” said Bill.
“S — t, have another whiskey.” Charley drank his down. “And beer chasers like in the old days… Remember that Christmas party out in Long Island City and that blonde at the beerparlor… Jesus, I used to think I was a little devil with the women… But my wife she don’t seem to get the idea.”
“You have two nice kids already; what the hell, maybe you’re too ambitious.”
“You wouldn’t believe it… only once since little Peaches was born.”
“Most women gets hotter when they’re married a while… That’s why the boys are sore at your damned efficiency expert.”
“Stauch? Stauch’s a genius at production.”
“Maybe, but he don’t give the boys any chance for reproduction.” Bill laughed and wiped the beer off his mouth.
“Good old Bill,” said Charley. “By God, I’ll get you on the board of directors yet.”
Bill wasn’t laughing any more. “Honestly, no kiddin’. That damn squarehead make the boys work so hard they can’t get a hard on when they go to bed, an’ their wives raise hell with ’em. I’m strawboss and they all think sonofabitch too, but they’re right.”
Charley was laughing. “You’re a squarehead yourself, Bill, and I don’t know what I can do about it, I’m just an employee of the company myself… We got to have efficient production or they’ll wipe us out of business. Ford’s buildin’ planes now.”
“You’ll lose all your best guys… Slavedrivin’ may be all right in the automobile business, but buildin’ an airplane motor’s skilled labor.”
“Aw, Christ, I wish I was still tinkerin’ with that damn motor and didn’t have to worry about money all the time… Bill, I’m broke… Let’s have another whiskey.”
“Better eat.”
“Sure, order up a steak… anythin’ you like. Let’s go take a piss. That’s one thing they don’t charge for… Say, Bill, does it seem to you that I’m gettin’ a potbelly?… Broke, a potbelly, an’ my wife won’t sleep with me… Do you think I’m a rummy, Bill? I sometimes think I better lay off for keeps. I never used to pull a blank when I drank.”
“Hell, no, you smart young feller, one of the smartest, a fool for a threepoint landing and a pokerplayer… my God.”
“What’s the use if your wife won’t sleep with you?”
Charley wouldn’t eat anything. Bill ate up both their steaks. Charley kept on drinking whiskey out of a bottle he had under the table and beer for chasers. “But tell me… your wife, does she let you have it any time you want it?… The guys in the shop, their wives won’t let ’em alone, eh?”
Bill was a little drunk too. “My wife she do what I say.”
It ended by Bill’s having to drive Charley’s new Packard back to the ferry. In Detroit Bill made Charley drink a lot of sodawater in a drugstore, but when he got back in the car he just slumped down at the wheel. He let Bill drive him home to Grosse Pointe. Charley could hear Bill arguing with the guards along the road, each one really had to see Mr. Anderson passed out in the back of the car before he’d let Bill through, but he didn’t give a hoot, struck him so funny he began to giggle. The big joke was when the houseman had to help Bill get him up to his bedroom. “The boss a little sick, see, overwork,” Bill said each time, then he’d tap his head solemnly. “Too much brain-work.” Charley came to up in his bedroom and was able to articulate muzzily: “Bill, you’re a prince… George, call a taxi to take Mr. Cermak home… lucky bastard go home to his wife.” Then he stretched out on the bed with one shoe on and one shoe off and went quietly to sleep.