“I resent being classified as having... this lack of character you mention,” Ben said thickly.
Hyde tapped the balance sheet lightly. “Haven’t you done the classifying yourself, my dear boy? Right here. You make nearly twenty-five thousand a year and, except for this retirement-account money, which was taken apparently before you could see it, you haven’t a dime. What am I supposed to think?”
Ben controlled himself with an effort. “I respect your obligation to your stockholders in the bank. But please don’t moralize about situations you don’t understand.”
“Oh, but I have an intimate understanding of them, Mr. Weldon. Through supplicants such as yourself.”
“What can you do for me?”
“I can give you a ninety-day extension on this outstanding balance, and I must ask you to pay the interest up to date on the due date. I can assure you that there will not be another renewal. Why don’t you borrow from your retirement account, Mr. Weldon? Isn’t that permitted? It usually is in most companies.”
“That’s my problem,” Ben said, standing. “Mail me the renewal agreement. Come on, Ginny.”
“Your attitude isn’t going to make future relationships any easier, Mr. Weldon.”
“It is my deepest wish, Mr. Hyde, that there will be no future relationships of any kind.”
Hyde smiled once more. “It’s perhaps for the best. After all, you could have the sincerest desire in the world to pay us that... unobligated two hundred a month, but you people have so many unexpected social obligations.”
Ginny was standing. She leaned toward the desk. “They keep saying banks are friendly. They keep saying bankers are nice. You’re a monster, Mr. Hyde. It’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it.”
Hyde chuckled, almost fondly, as they left his desk. They could not reach him. Nothing could reach him, nothing they could do.
Ginny was crying by the time they reached the car. He drove to the station. As he got out she was snuffling, but trying to smile. “I guess we know what we are now,” she said.
“He made me bring you along so he could sink the knife a little deeper. That’s the thing I resent most.”
“But what are we going to do, Ben?”
“I’ll talk to you tonight.”
By the time he got home he had worked out a program for handling this new problem. It seemed to be the only answer, but it depressed him to think about it. It wasn’t brought up until Ginny had finished the dinner dishes and the kids were in bed.
Ginny came into the living room and sat in the corner of the couch and pulled her legs up. The floor lamp behind her made her fair hair luminous and left her face in partial shadow She faced Ben, who sat making a protective ceremony of stoking his pipe, lighting it evenly.
There was a quality of expectancy in the silence between them, the product of their separate awareness that this was, at long last, the time of showdown, the obligatory scene that was a product of far too many months of this big, abundant and wretched life.
“What are you going to do, Ben?” she asked.
He noticed it was “you,” not “we.” He said, “There aren’t any miracles, honey.”
“But we have to do something!”
“I know that. Two round trips to Indiana. That’s top priority. When the air-travel bill comes in, I have to come up with the money fast. I’ll guess between five and six hundred. We haven’t got it. There’s nobody I dare borrow from. But I did some very discreet checking, and I’m pretty sure I can get six hundred from a loan company. They’ll take a chattel mortgage on the furniture, and they’ll do no checking on me that will be so obvious anybody will be able to guess. With their service charges, it will come to about thirteen per cent interest. I can get it right after the first of the month, so the twelve payments of fifty-something a month will start the first of May.”
“And we’ll just owe more money,” she said in a dead voice.
“We’ll have the two hundred I won’t be sending mother starting April first. I’ll write the hospital and the doctor and the funeral home and send them each a small payment out of that two hundred as a gesture of good faith, and explain that I’ll have to pay them off that way, a certain amount each month. And I’ll make a payment on the bank loan out of that two hundred too. I don’t think those people in Columbus will raise a fuss. They must be used to this sort of thing.”
“So it’s your idea to do it all out of the two hundred each month. So we shall be living exactly the same as if we were sending it to your mother. How long will it take? Just tell me how long it will take if nothing happens.”
“Including the bank loan, and interest and all... call it two years. A little over.”
“Two delicious years if nothing happens. And something will, so it’ll be longer. Believe me, it will be longer. I wanted a miracle, Ben. I didn’t want more of the same. You know the miracle I wanted? I wanted you to march up to whoever you march up to down there and draw out that whole nine thousand dollars sitting there, and tell them you were taking it because you need it. But that’s too big a miracle to hope for.”
“You don’t under—”
“When will you get a raise, darling?”
“I’ve told you how—”
“Tell me again. I want to hear it again.”
“There’s practically no chance of a raise until Bartlett retires. Where I am, the money goes with the job. I’m slated to take over Bartlett’s slot. There’ll probably be small upward adjustments, but nothing to get healthy on. He’s fifty-eight. He’s got seven years.”
“And what will you get when you take his job, darling?”
“I believe he gets about fifty-five, with a bonus between fifteen and twenty, and a small share in the stock-option plan. I expect I’d get fifty and a bonus of twelve to fifteen, assuming we’re running as far in the black as we are now.”
“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said with a quiet bitterness. “Oh, whee, oh, joy. You’re going to be so terrifyingly important, and yet you can’t borrow nine thousand dollars of your own money. Why is it? Just why? Explain it to me.”
He rose and took slow steps toward the fireplace and turned and stared at her for a thoughtful moment, planning his words. “I’ll have to say this, Ginny, with no concession to modesty. I’m surprisingly good at what I’m doing. We deal with a lot of other corporations. I meet a lot of people. I’d say, and this is a pretentious thing for a man to say about himself, that there probably aren’t over a hundred guys in my age range with the same potential I have in the whole country.”
“Then why aren’t we—”
“Let me finish the explanation. It’s what you asked for. Some of those guys have landed, by bad luck, in the wrong slots. Some of them have changed jobs too many times, always pressing for the immediate salary bump. And I don’t think there are more than three or four in the whole batch who wouldn’t change with me in one minute, salary and all.”
She stared at him. “What!”
“I’m in the big big league, Ginny. And it’s exactly where I should be. I’m watched every minute, because there’s so much potential power at stake. It isn’t just the officers and directors of National, honey. At the top of the pyramid in big business there’s a group of men who know each other. It’s become pretty well known that I’m the heir apparent. It’ll be years before I’m in the kingbird’s seat, but they know of me, and they’re watching, too, and if there was any kind of shake-up at National that threatened to sidetrack me, they’d come in with the right offer.”