A few moments later he called Gearling, the treasurer, and asked to borrow the balance in his retirement account.
“You... want to take it out, Ben?” Gearling asked.
“It’s permitted, isn’t it?”
“Of course! Of course! The — uh — whole amount?”
“Yes.”
“How soon do you want it?”
“As soon as you can get it, Edward.”
“It has to clear through the trust account that handles the retirement fund, Ben. Three days?”
“That’ll be fine. Thanks.”
“When will you — uh — put it back in, Ben?”
“Sometime before I retire, Edward. I guess I’d have to, or it would mess up my retirement, wouldn’t it?”
Gearling suspected that Ben was making a joke, so he laughed in a slightly hollow and uncomfortable way.
That evening Ben told Ginny what he had done. He wanted to see her happy. He wanted to see her eyes shine. He wanted to get at least that much out of it, the way they give the big loser a free taxi ride home. But she stared at him, her eyes round in shock, and then her face came apart like a small child readying itself for tears, and she fled to the bedroom.
Ten days later Bartlett phoned and asked Ben to come to his office. It had been a curious ten days. There had been a subtle yet obvious change in attitude toward him. He learned indirectly of a policy memo that had not been routed to his desk, and suspected there had been others. Men who had been stiff and rather formal with him in the past were now relaxed and quite friendly in his presence. Those who had sought him out now seemed to avoid him. Bartlett was taking an unusual interest in the details of matters he had previously left entirely up to Ben.
When he walked into Bartlett’s office he was not surprised to see Brendan Mallory there, or see his open friendly smile.
“Sit down, Ben. Sit down,” Mallory said. “Ed and I have been up one side of this and down the other, and I think we’ve come up with something that will solve your special problem.” There was an ironic emphasis on the word “special.”
“I’m glad to hear that sir.”
“You’re too good a man to lose, Ben. We’re quick to admit that, believe me. Gil Walker sent in a formal request for early retirement for reasons of health, and we’ve been sitting on it, wondering who to put in out there. That’s Southwest District, out of Denver, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“With all respect to Gil Walker, Ben, that district does need the kind of talent you can bring to the job. It’s a good place to live, I hear. And, traditionally, the district managers do better, salarywise, than a lot of us slaves in the home office.”
“I’ve heard about that, sir.”
“From the way it looks, Ben, you ought to make about thirty-two or thirty-three at the beginning and, if you can build it up, as I’m sure you can, it could peak at forty in a very short time. So it’s quite a handsome promotion, and it seems to Ed and me to be a good solution all around. And it certainly won’t hurt your future value to the corporation to have a few years of running a district on your record.”
It’s so neat, Ben thought admiringly. You bring the outstanding young men out of the districts into the home office, the way you brought me in, but you never, never bring a district manager to New York. There’s good reason. He’s acquired an incurably regional point of view. The pay is good because it has to be good, because it is just as high and far as the man can go with National. So you sit out there and you do one gutsy job of following the instructions from the home office, and it is, in a sense, a demanding job, but you never get your fingers into policy. It’s a handsome promotion if you think just about the money. But all of a sudden they’ve dropped the barricade across your highway, and you know just how long the road is. You can move to a bigger district — at their request — and that is all. You’ll be the youngest district manager in National. And ten years from now you’ll be of average age for district managers, and eventually you’ll retire to a little better than reasonable comfort. You can do the job. It’s no snap job. It’ll take diligence and concentration and good judgment. But there will be no opportunity to exercise that rare executive muscle that creates brand-new plans, programs, policies, and attitudes. It will use all the rest of you, but not that.
So look at us as we sit here, full of face-saving devices and fabrications. Theirs is a salvage operation. They have decided they were wrong in believing they had a machine that would push new roads through the wilderness. But the same machine can be very useful keeping old roads in repair. It is uneconomic to scrap it. So grease it well and put it to work.
The other choice is to resign here and now and get into another outfit where the road to the top level will not be so neatly blocked. But would not that run us into the same thing?
He realized they were looking at him and had been for a few moments too long, but they both wore expressions of polite attentiveness, and the pleased look of men who have found a way to do a seemingly generous thing. They had beribboned the gift with the fictitious hint that he could and would return here after running a district. It could not happen.
“I’m pleased you think I can handle the job, sir.” We all know very damn well I can handle it, don’t we?
“Done and done,” Mallory said with satisfaction, moving in quickly for the handshake. “I can speak for Ed, too, when I say we’re both very pleased at the way we’ve been able to work this thing out.”
“Now it’s decided, Ben,” Ed Bartlett said, “there’s no point in dragging our feet. Suppose you get cleaned up here by the end of the week and report out there Monday.”
“For a quick look,” Mallory said hastily, “then fly on back and take care of personal matters and then take your time driving your family out there. See something of the country. I’m sure that will be all right with Gil.”
The three men were standing. They smiled at one another. They were all members of the National family, and when these little family problems came up, you made a practice of handling them in a warm, human, cooperative way.
Ben Weldon spent a week in Denver. Gil Walker was delighted that Ben was taking over the district. Gil talked a great deal about the benefits of being a district manager, of being the top dog in the area. He was proud of his staff of sixty-two. The staff seemed competent, pleasant, and as wary of Ben as he expected them to be.
Gil steered Ben to a good real-estate agent who found a house that seemed nearly perfect, at less than he had expected to pay. He told Ginny all about it over the phone. She sounded ecstatic at the description, and told him to nail it down fast — the same advice given him by the agent.
He made the deposit. He was taking an evening flight back, leaving at ten o’clock, Friday night. He had checked out of the hotel. After dinner alone he had time to kill, and so he drove the rental car out to the house where they would live.
It was a very cold night, and the stars were vivid. He parked in the driveway and walked slowly around to the back of the house and sat on the low wall that enclosed the open patio. He smoked the cigarettes that he could afford, and he wore a new sports jacket, new flannel slacks, a new topcoat. He looked at the long slant of the land he would own, and he wondered if he had done it all as well as he could do it. He knew it was a question that could not be resolved, one that he would ask himself, probably, for the rest of his life.