“I suppose that you have pictures.”
“Ben went out with me. He took a lot of them.”
“Where does this man get his skunks?”
“I told you. He raises them.”
“To start with, I mean.”
“Trappers. Farm boys. He pays good prices for the wild ones. He’s building up his business. He needs wild breeding stock. He’ll buy all that he can get.”
“Which reminds me,” I told her. “Payday today. You’re going to help me spend the check?”
She said, “Certainly I am. Don’t you remember that you asked me?”
“There’s a new joint opening out on Pinecrest Drive.”
“That sounds like fun,” she said.
“Seven?”
“Not a minute later. I get hungry early.” She went on to her desk and I went back to the clips. But even on a second look there was nothing in them. I shuffled them together and put them back into the envelopes.
I sat back in my chair and thought about skunks and hydrophobia and the crazy things that some people do.
The man who sat at the head of the table beside Bruce Montgomery was bald aggressively bald, as if he took a pride in baldness, so completely bald that I found myself wondering if he’d ever grown hair. There was a fly crawling on his head and he paid no attention to it. It made me cringe just to watch that fly, walking jauntily and unconcerned across the pinkness of the naked scalp. I could almost feel the slow and maddening prickliness as it pranced along its way.
But the man sat there, unconcerned, not looking at us but staring out above our heads, as if there were something on the rear wall of the conference room that fascinated him. So far as he seemed to be concerned, we weren’t even there. He was impersonal and had a touch of coldness, and he never moved. If you hadn’t noticed he was breathing, you would have been convinced that Bruce had hauled one of the window mannequins into the room and set it at the table.
The fly walked over the dome of baldness and disappeared from view, crawling out of sight down the rear exposure of that shining skull.
The television boys still were fiddling around with their equipment, getting it set up, and Bruce glanced at them with some impatience.
The room was fairly well filled up. There were the television and the radio people and the AP and UPI reporters and the man who was a stringer for the Wall Street Journal.
Bruce looked over at the TV setups once again.
“Everybody set?” he asked.
“Just a minute, Bruce,” said one of the TV crowd.
So we waited while the cameras were adjusted and the cords were strung and the technicians messed around. That’s the way it goes with these TV jerks. They insist on being in on everything and scream if you leave them out, but let them in and they bollix up the detail beyond all imagination. They have the place all cluttered up and you have to wait for them and they take a lot of time.
I sat there and, for some reason, got to thinking about all the fun Joy and I had had the last few months. We’d gone on picnics and we’d gone fishing and she was one of the finest gals I had ever known. She was a good newspaperwoman, but in becoming a newspaperwoman she had stayed a woman, and that’s not always true. Too many of them think they have to get rough and tough to uphold tradition, and that, of course, is a total canard. Newspapermen never were as rough and tough as the movies tried to make them. They are just a bunch of hardworking specialists who do the best they can.
The fly came crawling back over the horizon of the gleaming skull. It stood on the skyline for a moment, then tipped up on its head and brushed its wings with its rearward pair of feet. It stayed there for a while, looking the situation over, then wheeled around and went back out of sight.
Bruce tapped the table with his pencil.
“Gentlemen,” he said.
The room became so quiet that I could hear the breathing of the man who was sitting next to me.
And in that moment while we waited I sensed again the depth of that dignity and decorum which was implicit in this room, with its thick carpeting and its richly paneled walls, the heavy draperies and the pair of paintings on the wall behind the table.
Here, I thought, was the epitome of the Franklin family and the store that it had built, the position that it held and what it meant to this certain city. Here was the dignity and the foursquare virtue, here the civic spirit and the cultural standard.
“Gentlemen,” said Bruce, “there is no use employing a lot of preliminaries. Something has happened that, a month ago, I would have said never could have happened. I’ll tell you and then you can ask your questions . .
He stopped talking for a moment, as if he might be searching for the proper words. He halted in the middle of his sentence and he did not drop his voice. His face was bleak and white.
Then he said it slowly and concisely:
“Franklin’s has been sold.”
We sat silent for a moment, every man of us, not stunned, not stricken, but completely unbelieving. For of all the things that one might have conjured up in his imagining, this was the last thing that any of us would have hit upon. For Franklin’s, and the Franklin family, was a tradition in the town. It, and the family, had been there almost as long as the town had been. To sell Franklin’s was like selling the courthouse or a church.
Bruce’s face was hard and expressionless and I wondered how he could have said the words, for Bruce Montgomery was as much a part of Franklin’s as the Franklin family—probably in these later years more a part of it, for he’d managed it and coddled it and worried over it for more years than most of us could readily recall.
Then the silence broke and the questions came, all of them at once.
Bruce waved us all to silence.
“Not me,” he told us. “Mr. Bennett will answer all your questions.”
The bald man for the first time now took notice of us. He lowered his eyes from the spot on the back wall of the room. He nodded slightly at us.
“One at a time, if you please,” he said.
“Mr. Bennett,” asked someone from the back of the room, “are you the new owner?”
“No. I simply represent the owner.”
“Who is the owner, then?”
“That is something I can’t tell you,” Bennett said.
“You mean that you don’t know who the owner is, or—”
“It means that I can’t tell you.”
“Could you tell us the consideration?”
“You mean, of course, how much was paid for it.”
“Yes, that is—”
“That, too,” said Bennett, “is not for publication.”
“Bruce,” said a disgusted voice.
Montgomery shook his head. “Mr. Bennett, please,” he said. “He will answer all your questions.”
“Can you tell us,” I asked Bennett, “what the new owner’s policy may be? Will the store continue as it has before? Will the same policies as to quality and credit and civic—”
“The store,” said Bennett flatly, “will be closed.”
“You mean for reorganization . . .”
“Young man,” said Bennett, clipping off his words, “I don’t mean that at all. The store will be closed. It will not reopen. There will be no Franklin’s. Not any more, there won’t.”
I caught a glimpse of Bruce Montgomery’s face. If I live to be a million, I’ll never erase from memory the shock and surprise and anguish that was on his face.
I was finishing the last page of the story, with Gavin hovering over me, breathing down my neck, and the copydesk a-howl that it was way past deadline, when the publisher’s secretary phoned.
“Mr. Maynard would like to talk with you,” she told me, “as soon as you are free.”
“Almost immediately,” I said, hanging up the phone.
I finished the final paragraph and whipped out the sheet. Gavin grabbed it and rushed it to the copydesk.