Paul closed it. "How's the Washington job?"
"I've quit."
"Really? Something bigger yet?"
"I think so, or I wouldn't have quit."
"Where?"
"No place. No job at all."
"Not enough pay, or worn out, or what?"
"Sick of it," he said slowly. "The pay was fantastically good, ridiculously good - paid like a television queen with a forty-inch bust. But when I got this year's invitation to the Meadows, Paul, something snapped. I realized I couldn't face another session up there. And then I looked around me and found out I couldn't face anything about the system any more. I walked out, and here I am."
Paul's invitation to the Meadows was carelessly displayed by Anita in the front-hall mirror, where no one could fail to notice it. The Meadows was a flat, grassy island in the St. Lawrence, in Chippewa Bay, where the most important men, and the most promising men ("Those whose development within the organization is not yet complete," said the Handbook) in the Eastern and Middle-Western Divisions spent a week each summer in an orgy of morale building - through team athletics, group sings, bonfires and skyrockets, bawdy entertainment, free whisky and cigars; and through plays, put on by professional actors, which pleasantly but unmistakably made clear the nature of good deportment within the system, and the shape of firm resolves for the challenging year ahead.
Finnerty took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered one bent at almost a right angle. Paul straightened it out, his fingers unsteady. "Got the shakes?" said Finnerty.
"I'm chief speaker tonight."
"Oh?" He seemed disappointed. "Then you don't ordinarily have the shakes these days? What's the occasion?"
"Thirteen years ago today, the Ilium Works was placed under the National Manufacturing Council."
"Like every other plant in the country."
"Ilium was a little earlier than most." The union of the country's manufacturing facilities under one council had taken place not long after Finnerty, Paul, and Shepherd came to work in Ilium. It had been done because of the war. Similar councils had been formed for the transportation, raw materials, food, and communications industries, and over them all had been Paul's father. The system had so cut waste and duplication that it was preserved after the war, and was, in fact, often cited as one of the few concrete benefits of the war.
"Does that make you happy, that this has been going on thirteen years?"
"It calls for comment, anyway. I'm going to keep it factual. It isn't going to be like Kroner's evangelism."
Finnerty fell silent, apparently uninterested in pursuing the subject. "Funny," he said at last, "I thought you'd be pretty close to the edge by now. That's why I came here."
Paul twisted his face as he struggled to get his collar button moored. "Well, you weren't completely wrong. There's talk of my chatting with a psychiatrist."
"So you are in rough shape. Wonderful! Let's get out of this damn party. We've got to talk."
The bedroom door opened, and Anita looked in from the hall. "Oh! Ed. Who's with Baer and Kroner?"
"Kroner's with Baer, Baer's with Kroner," said Finnerty. "Close the door, please, Anita."
"It's time to go to the club."
"It's time for you to go to the club," said Finnerty. "Paul and I'll be along later."
"We're going together, and now, Ed. We're ten minutes late as it is. And I won't be bullied by you. I refuse." She smiled unconvincingly.
"Let's go," said Paul.
"Anita," said Finnerty, "if you don't show more respect for men's privacy, I'll design a machine that's everything you are, and does show respect."
She colored. "I can't say I find you screamingly funny."
"Stainless steel," said Finnerty. "Stainless steel, covered with sponge rubber, and heated electrically to 98.6 degrees."
"Now, look -" said Paul.
"And blushes at will," said Finnerty.
"And I could make a man like you out of a burlap bag filled with mud," said Anita. "Anybody who tries to touch you comes away dirty!" She slammed the door, and Paul listened to her heels clicking down the staircase.
"Now, why in hell did you do that?" said Paul. "Do you mind telling me?"
Finnerty lay motionless on the bed, staring at the ceiling. "I don't know," he said slowly, "but I'm not sorry. Go on with her."
"What are your plans?"
"Go on!" He said it as though Paul had suddenly intruded just as he was giving form to an important, difficult thought.
"There's Irish whisky for you in a brown bag in the front hall," said Paul, and he left Finnerty lying there.
Chapter Five
PAUL overtook Anita in the garage, where she was starting the station wagon. Without looking directly at him, she waited for him to climb in beside her. They drove to the club in silence, with Paul feeling let down by the coarse, irrational reality of Finnerty. Over the years, he supposed bitterly, he must have created a wise and warm Finnerty in his imagination, an image that had little to do with the real man.
At the club door, Anita straightened Paul's tie, pulled her cape down to bare her shoulders, smiled, and pushed into the brightly lighted foyer.
The far end of the foyer opened into the bar, and there two dozen of the Ilium Works' bright young men, identical in their crew cuts and the tailoring of their tuxedos, surrounded two men in their middle fifties. One of the older men, Kroner, tall, heavy, and slow, listened to the youngsters with ponderous affectionateness. The other, Baer, slight and nervous, noisily and unconvincingly extroverted, laughed, nudged, and clapped shoulders, and maintained a continuous commentary on whatever was being said: "Fine, fine, right, sure, sure, wonderful, yes, yes, exactly, fine, good."
Ilium was a training ground, where fresh graduates were sent to get the feel of industry and then moved on to bigger things. The staff was young, then, and constantly renewing itself. The oldest men were Paul, and his second-in-command, Lawson Shepherd. Shepherd, a bachelor, stood by the bar, somewhat apart from the rest, looking wise, and faintly amused by the naïveté of some of the youngsters' remarks.
The wives had congregated in two adjacent booths, and there spoke quietly and uneasily, and turned to look whenever the volume of voices rose above a certain level, or whenever the bass voice of Kroner rumbled through the haze of small talk with three or four short, wise, wonderfully pregnant words.
The youngsters turned to greet Paul and Anita effusively, with playful obsequiousness, with the air of having proprietorship over all good times, which they generously encouraged their elders to share in.
Baer waved and called to them in his high-pitched voice. Kroner nodded almost imperceptibly, and stood perfectly still, not looking directly at them, waiting for them to come up so that greetings could be exchanged quietly and with dignity.
Kroner's enormous, hairy hand closed about Paul's, and Paul, in spite of himself, felt docile, and loving, and childlike. It was as though Paul stood in the enervating, emasculating presence of his father again. Kroner, his father's closest friend, had always made him feel that way, and seemingly wanted to make him feel that way. Paul had sworn a thousand times to keep his wits about him the next time he met Kroner. But it was a matter beyond his control, and at each meeting, as now, the power and resolve were all in the big hands of the older man.
Though Paul was especially aware of the paternal aura about Kroner, the big man tried to make the feeling general. He spoke of himself as father to all of the men under him, and more vaguely, to their wives; and it was no pose. His administration of the Eastern Division had an emotional flavor about it, and it seemed unlikely that he could have run the Division any other way. He was cognizant of every birth or major illness, and heaped blame on himself in the rare instances that any of his men went wrong. He could also be stern - again, paternally.