Джон Макдональд - The Tempestuous Career of Molly Murdock

By the end of the year, Molly Murdock had earned a great deal of astonished respect. Somehow, Darmond, Birch, and Hollis had been pushed into award-winning efforts on behalf of Andro Cosmetics. Andro had secured some new and very favorable distribution arrangements, and production capacity had to be increased. All those people, both inside and outside the Andro organization, who had been of genuine help to Molly found their own circumstances improved. Those who had tried to mislead her and patronize her found themselves in trouble. She was not vindictive; she merely did all possible favors for the people she liked and totally ignored the ones she didn’t.

The anti-Molly faction eventually dubbed her “the poisonous pixie” and told one another she was dangerously ambitious, vicious, and cold of heart. They said she had used Max Andro not only to squash all competition within the company, but also to bulldoze Darmond, Birch, and Hollis into using shoddy techniques to bloat the sales of second-rate products.

On the day all this was reported to her, she went raging to Max Andro, ready to quit.

He heard her out and said mildly, “Suppose you’re a sweet, simple, harmless little girl, so everybody loves her, what good to me are you, anyhow? Anybody in this world does a job, Molly, you can believe me it is like putting your head through a canvas hole peoples should pay a dollar to throw pies. What you got is an orderly mind, energy for five peoples, fairness so everybody is glad working with you, and hutzpah like a bandit.”

“Max, what is this hutzpah you keep telling me I have?”

“Hutzpah is what has a boy who kills his parents and says to the court, ‘Be merciful, because I am an orphan.’ If I am a nice guy, Molly, I am still making up lotion in a cellar. Peoples hate me. It’s sort of the cost. Be glad, Molly, they should call you poison. Laugh at them.”

But then, after more than two years of pressure and achievement in her job, she learned she was pregnant. She knew the “career” was over, and she was not at all wistful about ending it. She spent her last working months training a man named Bill Pace. She had found him working for a pharmaceutical house, had earmarked him for the job, and had talked Max into hiring him. Also, during those last months, she and Tom had bought a house near the university. Tom had become an associate professor by that time, and by putting their savings into the house, the mortgage payments were reduced to an amount they could handle on Tom’s salary.

The new squalling miracle that was Joan Weston Murdock reduced the memories of Andro Cosmetics to the status of a hobby so long neglected she could not remember the rules.

And marriage seemed to acquire a new and richer texture which...

“Hey!” John Quinn said, and touched her arm. It startled her, and she turned and looked at him. “Sleeping with your eyes open?” he asked. “That’s our flight they’re announcing.”

“Dreaming, I guess,” she said. “Wondering exactly how I got to where I seem to be. Reserved seats, courtesy of Ross Hamilton Industries, Incorporated. Nothing done by halves.”

After they had fastened their seat belts, Quinn said, “I’ve seen pictures of the guy. What is he like, though?”

“No phony Texas trademarks, Johnny. No boots and big hats. Clothes by J. Press. Accent by Princeton. He isn’t easy. He’s watchful and subdued, but there is a — a quality of importance about him, and he has that trick of making everybody he talks to feel important.”

“Just how did that conversation go?”

Molly shrugged. “About an hour after I’d met him officially, he came to my office. He said he had heard marvelous things about me. I took that with a grain of salt. He said he was very sorry about my decision to quit again, and he said he understood I had come back the second time as a special favor to Max Andro when Max was dying, but he would consider it a great favor if I would stay for just a few weeks until he could take over the operation. I agreed. And then he asked me if there was any pet project I would be — sorry to abandon. So, Johnny, I told him about our unapproved project. I said there was a young man who had been working on the Andro account for over a year, named John Quinn. I told him that you and I felt it was time to take a gamble on upgrading the public image of Andro Cosmetics by socking big money into intensive promotion of a new luxury line, but that I had had no success selling that idea to Charlie Marks, any more than you’d had any luck talking to C. C. Hollis about it. He said maybe I could talk to some of his people about it before I left.”

“And here we are,” John Quinn said. “Thanks a lot, Molly.”

“Don’t be so nervous about it, Johnny. We’re taking him a very good report. And the idea makes sense.”

The airplane took off, with that ponderous, heart-stopping unreality of the jet, gliding upward at an improbable angle that dropped the world away in moments.

When they had leveled, Quinn unlatched his belt and said, “I have to be nervous, Molly. I’m just not big enough to be a lone wolf. To C.C., I’m not being fearless, just impertinent. You’ll have to take me off the hook with him.”

“I’ll try.”

He sat in frowning silence for a few moments and then said, “Max Andro brought you back twice? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yes. After Joanie was born, I settled into being the happy housewife. I thought I’d left everything in good shape at Andro. Bill Pace was a very good man. Jackie Thatcher was there to keep the routine things under control. And I had two other good people to backstop Bill. I knew Bill and Jackie would be sympatico. But they — got along too well.”

“I heard about that.”

“Who didn’t? Love walked in one day. And they were nice people, but not nice enough to handle that. It smashed Bill’s marriage, but his wife wouldn’t divorce him, and Jackie was too staunch to adjust to half a loaf without cracking up. So she did, thoroughly. I guess guilt got Bill onto the bottle, and after my whole operation there was nearly completely messed up, poor Max brought in somebody who finished the job. Then he came after me to put the house in order again. I didn’t want to go back, but Max was an incomparably stubborn man. He worked on me, and he worked on Tom, and he offered a ridiculous amount of money. So — I finally agreed to go back and get it running again.”

“How long was that supposed to take?”

“Six months. But I was there two years. Until our Lucinda came along and got me out of the rut. I left it in the enormously capable hands of Gil Jamison, that time.”

“I know. Gil was a wonderful man.”

“Max had to give him a stock deal to get him, you know.” She laughed in a rather bitter way. “The same deal he gave me to get me to come back once again after Gil drove into the back end of an unlighted truck.”

The stewardess served them the champagne breakfast. As they ate, they talked about the report, reassuring each other, telling each other Ross Hamilton would be impressed.

She glanced at Quinn and saw him looking at her in a speculative way. “What’s the matter, Johnny?”

“I was just wondering. Was it easier for Max to get you to come back to work the second time?”

“Yes. Max had his first stroke a week after Gil Jamison was killed. He sent for me and asked me to bring Tom along. He knew he was dying and was afraid he would be a long time dying. He was afraid the company would be gutted and there would be that much less to leave his children and grandchildren. He wanted me to take my job back and also serve as his ears and eyes. He was a dear man, and he had been more than decent to me, Johnny. I think I owed him that, so I went back with a lot less — discussion about it.”