«An unfortunate story.» The President’s statement was made quietly. «Your father had no recourse in the courts? Force the company to make restitution on the basis of default?»
«There was no default. His understanding was predicated on an ambiguous clause. And talk. Legally, he had no grounds.»
«I see,» said the President. «It must have been a terrible blow to your family.»
«And to the town,» added Hill. «The statistic.»
«It was an angry time. It passed.» Andrew recalled only too well the anger, the frustration. The furious, bewildered father who roared at the silent men who merely smiled and pointed to paragraphs and signatures.
«Did that anger cause you to leave law school?» asked William Hill. «The events coincided; you had only six months to go for your degree; you were offered financial aid.»
Andy looked at the old Ambassador with grudging respect. The line of questioning was becoming clearer. «I imagine it was part of it. There were other considerations. I was very young and felt there were more important priorities.»
«Wasn’t there really just one priority, Mr. Trevayne? One objective?» Hill spoke gently.
«Why don’t you say what you want to say, Mr. Ambassador? Aren’t we both wasting the President’s time?»
The President offered no comment; he continued to watch Trevayne, as a doctor might study a patient.
«All right, I will.» Hill closed the file and tapped it lightly with his ancient fingers. «I’ve had this dossier for nearly a month. I’ve read it and reread it perhaps twenty times over. And as I’ve told you, I repeatedly asked for additional data. At first it was merely to learn more about a successful young man named Trevayne, because Frank Baldwin was—and is—convinced that you’re the only man to chair that subcommittee. Then it became something else. We had to find out why, whenever your name was mentioned as a possible nominee, the reactions were so hostile. Silently hostile, I might add.»
«‘Dumbstruck’ might be more appropriate, Bill,» interjected the President.
«Agreed,» said Hill. «The answer had to be here, but I couldn’t find it. Then, as the material was processed—and I placed it in chronological order—I found it. But I had to go back to March of nineteen fifty-two to understand. Your first compulsive, seemingly irrational action. I’d like to capsule …»
As Ambassador William Hill droned on, summarizing his conclusions point by point, Andrew wondered if the old man really did understand. It was all so long ago; yet yesterday. There had been only one priority, one objective. To make a great deal of money; massive amounts that once and for all would eliminate the remotest possibility of ever having to experience what he witnessed his father living through in that Boston courtroom. It wasn’t so much a sense of outrage—although the outrage was there—as it was a feeling of waste; the sheer waste of resources—financial, physical, mentaclass="underline" that was the fundamental crime, the essential evil.
He saw his father’s productivity thwarted, warped, and finally stopped by the inconvenience of sudden poverty. Fantasy became the reality; vindication an obsession. At last the imagination lost all control, and a once proud man—moderately proud, moderately successful—was turned into a shell. Hollow, self-pitying, living through each day propelled by hatreds.
A familiar, loving human being had been transformed into a grotesque stranger because he hadn’t the price of survival. In March of 1952 the final gavel was sounded in a Boston courtroom and Andrew Trevayne’s father was informed that he was no longer permitted to function in the community of his peers.
The courts of the land had upheld the manipulators. The best-efforts, endeavors, whereases, and therebys buried forever the work of an adult lifetime.
The father was rendered impotent, a bewildered eunuch appealing in strained, falsely masculine roars to the unappealable.
And the son was no longer interested in the practice of law.
As with most histories of material success, the factor of coincidence, of timing, played the predominant role. But whenever Andrew Trevayne gave that simple explanation, few believed it. They preferred to look for deeper, more manipulative reasons.
Or in his case an emotional motive, based on revulsion, that lucked in.
Nonsense.
The timing was supplied by the brother of the girl who became his wife. Phyllis Pace’s older brother.
Douglas Pace was a brilliant, introverted electronics engineer who worked for Pratt and Whitney in Hartford; a painfully shy man happiest in the isolation of his laboratory, but also a man who knew when he was right and others were wrong. The others in his case were the Pratt and Whitney executives who firmly refused to allocate funds for the development of close-tolerance spheroid discs. Douglas Pace was convinced that the spheroid disc was the single most vital component of the new high-altitude propulsion techniques. He was ahead of his time—but only by about thirty-one months.
Their first «factory» consisted of a small section of an unused warehouse in Meriden; their first machine a third-hand Bullard purchased from a tool-and-die company liquidating its assets; their first jobs odd-lot assignments of simple jet-engine discs for the Pentagon’s general contractors, including Pratt and Whitney.
Because their overhead was minuscule and their work sophisticated, they took on a growing number of military subcontracts, until second and third Bullards were installed and the entire warehouse rented. Two years later the airlines made an industry decision: the way of the jet aircraft was the way of the commercial future. Schedules were projected calling for operational passenger carriers by the late fifties, and suddenly all the knowledge acquired in the development of the military jet had to be adapted to civilian needs.
And Douglas Pace’s advanced work in spheroid discs was compatible with this new approach; compatible and far ahead of the large corporate manufacturers.
Their expansion was rapid and paid for up front, their backlog of orders so extensive they could have kept ten plants working three shifts for five years.
And Andrew discovered several things about himself. He had been told he was a major salesman, but it didn’t take a high degree of salesmanship to corner markets in which the product was so sought after. Instead, other gifts came into play. The first, perhaps, was the soft-science of administration. He wasn’t just good; he was superb, and he knew it. He could spot talent and place it under contract—at some other company’s loss—in a matter of hours. Gifted men believed him, wanted to believe him, and he was quick to establish the weaknesses of their current situations; to hammer at them and offer viable alternatives. Creative and executive personnel found climates in which they could function, incentives which brought out their best work under his aegis. He could talk to union leadership, too. Talk in ways it readily understood. And no labor contract was ever signed without the precedent he’d fought for in the company’s first expansion in New Haven—the productivity clause that locked in wages with the end result of assembly-line statistics. The wage scales were generous, outstripping competition, but never isolated from the end results. He was called «progressive,» but he realized that the term was simplistic, misleading. He negotiated on the theory of enlightened self-interest; and he was totally convincing. As the months and years went by, he had a track record to point to; it was irrefutable.