Edsel (16 page)

“Just barely. Your peers in the retail stores hang their wreaths on Thanksgiving now. It’s risky, Connie. Suppose you get them all pumped up and then they don’t like the car?”

“That part’s up to the boys in design. My job is the pumping.”

“What you think. When Hank crawls this far out on a limb he likes company. It’s six plants, by the way. We’re bringing in Ypsilanti and Rawsonville.” He rose. “I’ll take it to him.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I like what you’ve told me. If Mr. Ford doesn’t, you didn’t hear it here.”

“No room for you on that limb, huh.”

“Tom Dewey tried to talk me into running for office. Not with him, naturally; there isn’t a hook for a yarmulke in the vice president’s quarters. He even offered to stump for me. I guess he thought it would help him in New York, where they had enough of him after he got rid of Lucky Luciano. I turned him down. I only gamble with the other guy’s money.”

“Wise,” I said. “Considering the results.”

He tugged down the points of his vest. “It’s a sound campaign. Simple enough to be brilliant. I never expected less. You ought to stick to advertising and tell Walter Reuther to look somewhere else for his spies. That’s what I do.” He left me alone with my sharp new pencils.

J
ANET
S
HERMAN AND
I drove to the Tigers’ home opener in her Lincoln. I’d had enough of the Skyliner, turned it in, and been told I was third in line for a Mercury Montclair. I’d requested a white-over-red hardtop whose picture in the brochure had reminded me of strawberries and whipped cream. What I could no longer eat I was determined to drive. Janet wore a Tigers cap with her hair in a ponytail, a gray sweatshirt, and red torreadors with high-heeled sandals. Her toenails were painted to match the pants, a gesture toward fashion that made me feel a little less uncomfortable about my navy blazer and white ducks. My generation dressed up for ball games; hers would meet the Queen in pedal pushers. Climbing the stairs behind her to our seats in right field I could see the play of muscles in her thighs.

I craned to see past the green-painted girder in front of me. “The friend who got you these tickets must be in tight with Bucky Harris. Is that Ray Boone on deck or a Dixie cup?”

“I didn’t say they were good seats. Anyway, all you’re paying for is the hot dogs. If you’re planning on being a pain I’ll eat a dozen.”

“I’m not. Any place you sit at Briggs is a good seat.”

It was, too. Everybody seemed to be batting southpaw that day. Harvey Kuenn and the kid, Kaline, both pounded fouls, one of which I lunged for and might have had a chance at if someone invisible hadn’t stuck an icepick behind my left shoulder that took the starch out of my joints.

“Are you all right?” Janet watched me mopping my face and neck with my handkerchief.

“Hell no, I’m not all right. I’m fifty-five.”

“Fifty-six.” She shrugged when I looked at her. “You left the card lying on your desk when I brought you those network rate sheets. That Agnes person has quite a sense of humor, hasn’t she?”

It had been one of those jokey over-the-hill birthday cards that pleased me about as well as the stuff that came up from my throat when I rose in the morning. “She’s a riot. She laughs so hard at air raids she gives herself a bellyache.”

“I guess you care a lot for her.”

“We worked together at Slauson and Nichols. Sometimes we see a movie. She doesn’t care a lot for Clifton Webb.”

“I love Clifton Webb. Did you see
Woman’s World
?”

I looked again. I didn’t know her well enough to know if she was serious. “You liked it?”

“Well, the executive-intrigue stuff was kind of clumsy. It’s more subtle than that and a whole lot more cutthroat. But if I wanted to see real life I’d never leave the office. I went to see Clifton Webb. He was great in
The Dark Corner.
He pushed William Bendix out a window without even knocking off his homburg.”

“I thought girls your age liked Marlon Brando.”

“Too much mumbling and scratching. I’ll choose a nice head of gray hair over a motorcycle jacket any time.”

“Provided it wears a homburg.” I’d stopped wearing hats because they squashed my face down.

“Lauren Bacall was nicely naughty in
Woman’s World.
Is Agnes like that?”

“In some ways. She can be sweet. Anyway we’re just friends.”

“The Dixie cup’s coming to bat.”

We stayed to the end and trickled out with the small percentage of spectators who hadn’t left before the lopsided home victory. The pain in my shoulder had subsided to an excruciating throb.

“I can’t understand people who pay good money for tickets and then won’t see a game through,” she said.

“You may when we’re trying to get out of the parking lot.”

“There’s no hurry. The Shamrock’s close. Do you know it?”

“I’m surprised you do. I used to watch Big Jim Dolan swap mayors for governors from his corner booth—well, a long time ago,” I finished shamblingly.

“Before I was born, you were going to say. Does your age bother you?”

“Only every time I get out of a chair or go to the bathroom or think.”

“You aren’t as old as you seem to want to act. My father’s two years older than you and he plays tennis every Saturday.”

“I can’t breathe fast enough for tennis.”

As we came out of the shade of the stands into the bronze late-afternoon light, she curled her good arm inside mine. It didn’t mean a damn thing. Women had been doing that since Eve, and Adam was the last man who could be sure she wasn’t going home with someone else. Yet I felt a faint stirring in my white ducks that made me forget about my shoulder. That was where the Stegosaurus had it all over the modern American human male; he had a brain below his waist as well as above. Young women who are out to seduce fossils don’t begin by telling them they’re two years younger than their fathers.

The Shamrock, eternally twilit by the reflected glow off red oak and hand-rubbed brass, was murky with smoke and smelled bitterly of beer and boiled cabbage and phantoms in derbies with gold toothpicks on their watch chains. It was already filled with gamegoers, but Janet spotted a table being vacated, squealed, and disengaged herself from my arm to claim it, caroming off hips and elbows and spilling an ounce of somebody’s highball on the way. I trailed her, muttering apologies.

“You take chances.” I sat down.

She was already sitting. “I can afford to. I’m told I’m cute.”

“I’m told I’m not. I have a punchable face.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot.” A concerned look claimed her features. When I was released from Henry Ford Hospital I’d found a comic get-well card awaiting me at home with Janet’s signature. “That must have been horrible. Did you decide to press charges?”

“I might have, when I was younger and time was cheap. I don’t care to take a day off work to let some defense attorney take a crack at me on the witness stand. Anyway, they’re juveniles. Even if they got the maximum, which never happens, they’d come out with the same pimples they took in.”

“What makes them do it? Rock ’n’ roll?”

“Don’t mock me, child. My old man said we wouldn’t have gangsters if we didn’t have the Charleston. A punk’s a punk in black leather or a silk suit.”

“That sounds like you read it somewhere.”

“Wrote it” I tapped my forehead. “In here. It’s too long for a dummy sheet.”

“I’ve known a few advertising men, none of them outside the office. I never heard any of them talk about the job the way you do. They were all so…” She moved her shoulders, smiling at her inadequacy.

I grinned back. “‘Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes’?”

“Did anyone ever actually say that?”

“Someone must have. No business can go a hundred years without one original thought. Go on.”

“That’s pretty much it. I always had the impression they’d rather sell cigarettes than be President.”

“There’s a difference?”

She flicked it aside. “How can you be any good at something you have so much contempt for?”

“I don’t know if I’m any good at it.”

“Mr. Zed says you’re a genius.”

“Mr. Zed voted for Tom Dewey. I don’t know if I’m any good. Fortunately, neither does anyone else.” I looked around. “Are you hungry or thirsty or both? It doesn’t look like we’re going to be waited on before 1960.”

She said a vodka tonic would be welcome. I shouldered up to the bar and returned with her preference and a glass of mineral water and bitters for me, with a lemon twist to make it last. I hate lemons.

“Do you really want to hear this rubbish?” I asked. “I’d rather discuss the Tigers’ pennant chances.”

“The season’s young. I’m trying to learn.”

“Don’t bother taking notes. By the time the numbers come in on an ad campaign, so many others have come and gone nobody remembers who came up with it except the guy who did, and he’s only going to mention it if the numbers are good. If the button-counters ever got around to assigning averages the way they do in baseball, half the fifty-grand-a-year account executives in this country would be on relief.”

“Not much incentive.”

“Less than none. The vocabulary we draw from contains just forty words. Twenty of them have only four letters and ten of those are ‘free.’ All the possible combinations were used before the invention of the portable can opener—which by the way is the last absolutely essential item our civilization has produced. Now, there’s a campaign I’d have been proud to have participated in. All we’ve done since is chew our cud.”

“Wow.”

I held up a finger. “That’s one of the words.” I sipped from my glass, made a face at the lemon.

She noticed. “Do you miss drinking?”

“Never developed a taste for alcohol. When I was with newspapers it was a diplomatic tool. All the work got done in blind pigs. The most successful reporter I ever knew never left his table at the Anchor Bar.”

“Somehow I don’t think you could be that kind of reporter.”

“I couldn’t find the rush in a glass. That was my undoing. My kind of newshawk went out with running boards.” I stirred my swizzle. “Bold talk for an old coward.”

“Why do you say that?”

Because the only time I ever saw a man murdered I wet my pants.
“No reason. It’s the mineral water talking. Do you miss Toledo?”

“I miss my parents. I see them every Christmas, though. In a way that’s harder than not seeing them at all. I notice how much they’ve aged from one year to the next. Oh.” She put her glass to her lips instead of a hand.

I grinned again to show her I knew how old I was. Give or take a year.

She rotated her glass, making hula hoops with the rings. “What you said about nobody knowing who dreamed up a campaign when the sales figures come in,” she said. “It isn’t going to be that way this time, is it? I mean, everything’s sort of vested in you.”

“Your boss is no fool. Our boss. He took the heat when Truman beat his boy, but he’s not going to make that mistake in the private sector. He’s found a goat.”

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Everything scares me, Janet. Sitting in a wheelchair with my wrists tied to the arms in a state nursing home scares the living hell out of me. Boys one-quarter my age in sideburns and girls with their shirttails out make me cross the street when they come my way. I’m scared of dogs. Not the big ones with deep barks, the little yappy ones that rip at your ankles when you turn your back on them. Failing doesn’t scare me the way those things do. I’ve done it before. I’m good at it.”

When she laughed I could see the shallow dents in her incisors where the braces had been removed. “That’s quite a pep talk. Do you believe any of it?”

“Enough of it.” I emptied my lungs. “Well, it’s a great car. The economy’s booming. It should sell itself with no help from me. I’d be an idiot not to claim credit.”

“You’re no coward. Courage isn’t being unafraid, it’s being afraid and going ahead and doing it anyway. Like when I left home.
That
took guts.”

“How’s it working out?”

“I don’t plan to be a secretary my whole life, if that answers your question.” She took in a healthy dose of vodka and set the glass down with a bang that turned heads from the packed tables nearby. “You’re looking at the future first female division chief in the history of the American automobile industry. Think I stand a chance in hell?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. I’m the one who said no woman would last two weeks in an aircraft plant. I thought they’d get their bracelets caught in the punch presses.”

“What do you think now?”

We were no longer the object of others’ attention. The bartender, a porky butch-cut towhead in a green velvet vest and leatherette bow tie, stood on tiptoe behind the bar, smashing the flat of his hand against the brown Bakelite cabinet of a Tele King TV set on its high shelf. Wyatt Earp refused to stop doing backflips on the big seventeen-inch screen; the pounding only made him speed up.

“Unless the United States of America declares war on Chrysler,” I told Janet, “you’ve got as much chance at an office with a window and a plant as Duffy there has of getting that picture to look as good as it did in the store.”

Her face went smooth.

“Well,” she said, “you’re honest.”

I nodded. “It’s a fault.”

She covered the hand I had resting on the table with the one on the end of her short arm. It was as soft and pink as a baby’s and seemed to have as much strength. The pressure she applied almost wasn’t there.

“You’re no coward,” she repeated.

I had moved from my apartment in the city to a rented house on Puritan Street in Highland Park, a woodsy community hemmed in by Detroit on all four sides like a snag in the current. In younger days, given the brighter turn in my personal finances, I might have popped for something in brick with a trellis in St. Clair Shores, but one thing I had learned about any kind of upswing was that gravity is older and more patient, and real estate is tougher to get rid of than warts when you need cash. It was a comfortable thousand square feet stacked into two stories under a high-peaked roof like the houses Henry the First used to throw up for his employees in Dearborn, and about that old. I had a strip of grass and a flowerbed next to the front stoop with some kind of tough streetwise blossoms poking through the tangled greenery. I shared the driveway with the house next door and the sky was my garage.