Marriage is a small brave ship, and embarkation is valiant and hopeful. But the channel is narrow, the set of the tide tricky, and the buoys and markers forever shrouded in mist. They had set out in a tighter ship than most, which is a matter of luck, a factor for which you can be grateful without ever making the mistake of believing you have earned it. They were whole people, with the capacity to give and receive love in equal measure, with humor to give them that special balance of objectivity, with good looks, health, education, ability, and uncontrived charm. These factors are luck. You have to earn all the rest of it.
And so it was a special shock to realize that by 1965, after ten years of marriage, the copilots had lost the channel, the wind was rising, and the thunderous reefs were sickeningly close.
Marriage courts and counselors relate that the one most prevalent cause of marital difficulty is money. This seems a small, mean, shabby thing, with no dignity in its connotation of bickering. But money is a strange poison. It is an index of security, and when it becomes a problem, it has a nasty tendency to tinge those other less tangible aspects of security with despair.
In view of Ben Weldon’s position and his ability, if is both ludicrous and tragic that money should have been the hidden rock that cracked the hull of the stout little ship. By 1965 there were five in the boat.
Chris, at eight, was a small boy full of areas of a deadly earnestness, but with such a brimming joy in being alive that he was afflicted with frequent seizures of a wild and manic glee that would take him whooping to the top of a tall tree in a startlingly few moments.
Lucille, age six, was known only as Ladybug. She wore seven different personalities a day, from imprisoned princess to aging ballerina, combining an appetite for conspiracy with a thespian lust for costume.
Penny was a three-year-old chunk of round, warm appetite and placid insistence upon being hugged frequently, a goal consistently achieved despite a chronic condition of stickiness.
This is the Weldon family, whose combined ages total 79, who live at 88 Ridge Road in Lawton, New York, a one-hour-and-seventeen-minute commutation from the city.
The view of an outsider was perfectly expressed when they had, as a weekend house guest, a man they had not seen since college, a man doubly precious to them because it was he who had first introduced them. Just before he left, as they stood by the drive, Ben’s arm around Ginny’s slender waist, the friend said, with a fondness spiced with a dab of envy, “You kids have really got it made.”
One would have thought so.
Take a look at one target of this odd disaster, Benjamin Dale Weldon, age 32. By profession he is an executive, one of the rare good young ones, employed by National Directions, Inc., as Assistant to the Vice President in Charge of Unit Control. Weldon is a tall man with a dark semi-crew cut, glasses with thick black frames, and the kind of rugged-wry asymmetric face women have the tiresome habit of calling “interesting.” In his first years with National he gave a deceptive impression of low-pressure amiability, which obscured his special talents, but now they are thoroughly known and appreciated. Under pressure, he can plow through jungles of intricate work. He can properly delegate authority, backstop his superiors, make effective presentations, keep his temper, side-step company politics, resolve controversy, and make the people working for him feel as if they are a part of a special team.
All this is, of course, a description of a splendid No. 2 man. But Weldon has that additional gift of being able to come up with the important and unusual idea at the right time, and the willingness to fight for his idea to the extent of laying his career on the line. This makes him a potential No. 1 man, and the company is totally aware of his present and his future value.
For his abilities they pay him $23,500 a year. In return for this salary he is expected not only to function adequately in his job but to dress conservatively and well, comport himself with traditional National Directions dignity, live in a house and a neighborhood suitable to his position, entertain properly, take first-rate care of his family and their future, and take a hand in civic affairs.
The executives of National Directions, and in particular the president, Brendan Mallory, see in Ben Weldon a pleasing prototype of the young National executive, a sort of ambassador at large. They are gratified that he had the good luck and the good sense to marry a girl who is and will continue to be of great help to him.
Brendan Mallory has a private timetable in his mind whereby Benjamin Weldon will assume the presidency at age 55. At that point Weldon will not only be receiving one of the more substantial salaries, but he will have additional income through the bonus and stock-option plan. But this, to Brendan Mallory, is of secondary importance. The man who heads the firm must, first of all, have respect for the obligations and responsibilities of the position, realizing that his decisions can have an effect on the national economy.
Brendan Mallory realizes that it is a most delicate problem to nurture the growth of the young executive. He must be taught to understand the blessings of and the reasons for conformity without deadening that creative individualism that the No. 1 man must have if the company is to remain competitively strong.
Virginia, wife of Benjamin, is lovelier at 30 than at 20, an outgoing blue-eyed blonde, who wears her multiple emotions close to the surface, who has pride and the gift of laughter. She is loving, rewarding, and incurably absent-minded. She fills with a violent indignation at any injustice. Her energies inspire awe. Toward her children she is scrupulously, unpermissively fair, whacking them soundly when they need it. As a consequence there is order in their small world, and they feel secure, well loved, and feel no urge to express themselves through tantrum or bratty whining.
So here is paradise on Ridge Road. Strength, love, ambition, and a future. Nice people too. No sleazy little cocktail-party flirtations. No amorous discontent.
At the end of 1964, if you had asked them if paradise hadn’t become just a little conditional, they would have stared at you, and then defended themselves with great indignation. And that could have been the clue — the little excess of indignation.
If they had had the time to sit down quietly—
But there were the commuting to the city, and the job itself, and the increasing frequency of the field trips, and the two kinds of entertaining — business and friendship — and the Lawton Country Club (as a result of Mallory’s hint that he should belong), and the sitter problem and the Cub Scouts and the P.T.A. and the Community Chest and the Red Cross and the Civic Betterment Committee and the Ridge Road Association and, of course, five birthdays and holidays and church and anniversaries, and correspondence with friends and relatives, and television and shopping and essential do-it-yourself projects and office work brought home and that essential reading that must be done to keep up with the world’s swift pace.
So if there was a rare chance to sit down quietly, they took it. And spent the time making up little mental lists of the things undone. They no longer had time to talk to each other in any leisurely, thoughtful way, and so they were losing one of the best parts of a good marriage — and making it not quite as good as it should have been.