And at the tone of his voice she took her hand away and walked beside him, half looking away, tears standing bright on her lower lids.
They were on the porch of the house before Ben noticed the new sign in the window. Room for Rent. The door was locked. As he got out the spare key the door swung open and Geraldine stuck her hand out, palm up, and said, “I’ll take that key!”
He put it on the narrow wrinkled palm and stared at her. She stared back with a satisfied malevolence. “You don’t have to come in further than this front hall either. This place is mine, all legal, and you aren’t welcome here, you nor your blond wife either, Ben Weldon.”
“What’s the matter with you, Mrs. Davis?” Ginny demanded.
“Right here is your suitcases, all packed neat. And here’s this big wood crate with everything personal packed right in it, so you don’t have to go through my house poking around. I saved you the trouble, I did.”
“Why are you acting like this?” Ben demanded.
“Martha — God rest her soul — loved you, but I certainly got no call to. You’d go flying all over the country like a king, and you wouldn’t come near her. She wouldn’t see her grandchildren from one year to the next. Oh, I know how lonely she was. But you didn’t care, neither one of you. Send a little money, that’s all you had to do. So little you didn’t miss it at all, and you thought you were doing something big. I’ve been waiting years to tell you off, Ben Weldon. And right now you can get out of this hall and off my land. What do you want done with the box of stuff?”
“You don’t understand—” Ginny said.
But Ben said, “Never mind, honey. Send the box railway express.”
“Collect,” Geraldine said firmly.
“Collect,” Ben said and picked up the suitcases. They walked out onto the porch, and she slammed the door.
As they walked down the street Ginny looked back and saw her peering at them from the living-room window. She seemed to be grinning, but she was behind the curtains, and Ginny could not be certain.
When all the bills were in, Ben totaled them. They came to $3212.50. There was no hospitalization. The expenses of death are not deductible items for tax purposes. He would be able to claim her as a dependent for the year, and that was all.
This was the final rock that stove the hull of the small boat. He phoned the Lawton National Bank from his office and got Mr. Lathrop Hyde on the line. After he had identified himself, he said he could arrange to come in Monday morning at ten when the bank opened and discuss his note. Hyde had him hold the line while the folder was brought to him.
“Right now, Mr. Weldon, it’s sixteen hundred balance due on a hundred-and-eighty-day note, and the due date is — h’m-m-m-m — next Wednesday. Now I wouldn’t want to have to tell my loan committee I’d put through another extension on this note, Mr. Weldon.”
“I could pay it off with the proceeds of a new note, couldn’t I?”
“Well now, we’d have to see about that.”
“That’s what I want to discuss with you on Monday, Mr. Hyde.”
“Tell you what. You bring in an up-to-date personal balance sheet, Mr. Weldon. And bring your wife along.”
“It hasn’t been necessary in the past to—”
“Her signature goes on the notes too.”
“But I’ve always taken the notes, and she’s signed them at—”
“You just bring her along, and I’ll be looking for you at ten o’clock sharp, Mr. Weldon.”
When Ben and Ginny entered the bank on Monday morning, Ben had with him a personal balance sheet on which he had expended great care. It expressed his equity in the house based on current values, and his equity in the car based on purchase price. It included the $9000 in the retirement account. It assigned what he hoped was not too florid an evaluation of household furnishings and equipment. He had managed to squeeze out a net worth of $26,000 before current debts, and it gave him a certain amount of dubious assurance.
Mr. Lathrop Hyde’s desk was planted out in the open, against the back wall of the upholstered bullpen adjoining the customer floor of the building. Mr. Hyde greeted them and seated them courteously enough. He was perhaps sixty, long and solid in the torso, with gray hair worn long on one side so that it could be combed across the bald area and pasted in place. He had a long, square-cornered, fleshy face, with odd spots of high color on the cheekbones, pebbly brown eyes and a very wide mouth with thin colorless lips. His habit of dress was incongruously tweedy and informal. He took an active, leadership interest in community affairs. He and Ben had served on quite a few of the same committees.
As Ben handed the balance sheet over, he noticed a folder with his name on the tab centered in the middle of Lathrop Hyde’s blotter.
“Let’s see what we have here, folks,” Mr. Hyde said.
He studied each item on the brief statement with great care, checked the margin beside each one with a very small check made with a very hard pencil. He put it aside and let the silence grow until Ben had to say something and said, “Is that what you wanted from me?”
“I hoped it would look a little better, Mr. Weldon. You’d have a long wait getting that much for the house. Used furniture and equipment — especially in a house where there’s children — isn’t worth listing. And if you check the blue book, you’ll find you have no equity in that car at all. There isn’t enough equity in the house to allow a sound second mortgage. I guess I didn’t find what I was looking for.”
“What were you looking for, Mr. Hyde?” Ginny asked sweetly.
“Security, Mrs. Weldon. Security.”
“So are we,” she said.
“What? Oh, I mean ample legal security on which we can loan money, Mrs. Weldon. There’s no fat left in those insurance policies. You own no securities. And you certainly have a substantial amount of current bills to pay.”
“Nearly all of that is because of my mother’s recent death,” Ben said.
“I heard about that. May I extend my sympathies.”
“Thanks. If I can’t renew my note when it comes due day after tomorrow, Mr. Hyde, I’d like to borrow five thousand. I’d use sixteen hundred to retire the note, and pay off the balance of those bills.”
“A hundred-and-eighty-day note?” Hyde asked mildly.
“Yes.”
“And how would you expect to pay it back?”
“I’ve been sending my mother two hundred dollars a month, Mr. Hyde. That will no longer be necessary. I can pay the two hundred on the note instead.”
“Which in one hundred eighty days would be twelve hundred dollars. It is against the law, Mr Weldon, for us to loan money on an open note when we see little expectation of its being paid back within the stated time. A fully secured note is a different thing, of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Weldon.”
“Do you think I’m a bad risk?”
Mr. Hyde frowned slightly. “That’s an unfortunate expression, but since you used it, I’ll answer you frankly. Yes.”
“But—”
“Just a moment, Mr. Weldon. We are tightening our policy as far as you people are concerned. You bright young men who work in the city are very persuasive, you know. And we — uh — less sophisticated types are apt to be a little too awed by the salaries you are paid. And so, without realizing it until recently, we’ve let ourselves get into an unhealthy position on open notes to you brisk, successful young gentlemen. You make big incomes, but you live up to them and beyond them. Thrift seems to have become a dirty word nowadays. Personally, I am inclined to think of all this, on old-fashioned grounds, as a lack of character.”
Ben glanced at Ginny and saw she was white with anger.
“Mr. Hyde,” he said, “you seem to be moralizing.”
“Perhaps I am. You people dismay me in a way. You’re all house-poor, car-poor, club-poor, party-poor. You seem to try to be proving to each other that you can live on one and a half times your income. At our expense. We have too many renewals. We’ve been loaning money on promises too slender. One little recession, Mr. Weldon, would shake most of you out of the fragile limbs of your tall trees, and the Lawton National Bank would be holding the bag. And all of you would be without assets or resources. We owe our own shareholders better judgment in these matters.” He smiled broadly for the first time. “It would be such a shame if the party suddenly ended for all of you.”