Evan Hunter - Sons

He was taken to Bellevue Hospital the next day and committed on July 31 to Four Winds in Katonah.

I kissed Rosie.

I kissed her while inside the band played “Avalon” and Allen Garrett sat passed out at the table with his head cushioned on his folded arms, “I found my love in Avalon, beside the bay,” both of us huddled in the shadowed alleyway in the angle where the speakeasy’s kitchen and dining room joined, steam puffing from a vent onto the stifling August night, the aroma of roasting beef, “I left my love in Avalon, and sailed away,” her mouth opening, the taste of alcohol, and my hand sliding into and under the low corsage of her while dress, “You shouldn’t,” she said, and pressed herself to me.

I kissed her because when I’d been dancing with her earlier in the evening, she had pushed tight against me and I had felt myself growing hard and had wanted to hold her closer still, and was embarrassed even though everyone on the floor was dancing that way, I did not know what to do, I did not know what to think. I kissed her because I knew with certainty there was nothing beneath the white tulle but an underslip and knickers of the flimsiest stuff, kissed her because she had said to me the moment Allen passed out, “Let’s get some air, Bert.” I kissed her because she was dark and slender and wore rouge on her wide mouth and laughed very loud when anyone told a dirty joke and smoked cigarettes and drank far too much gin. I kissed Rosie because she was the complete and total opposite of Nancy my wife, whom I loved.

I kissed her, too, because grudges die hard, and I was still harboring a grudge against Allen Garrett.

I had found a job at last in June, but that had been entirely by accident, and every time I got to thinking about the close call I’d had, I started hating Allen all over again. I had asked Oscar for two additional loans of a hundred dollars each, which he had readily sent, together with the assurance that he would continue helping me for as long as I needed it. But the new loans put me three hundred dollars in the hole to my brother-in-law, and I didn’t like such a huge debt hanging over my head like a half-chopped tree. I had just about given up hope when I went out to the Circle Mill to apply for work as a loader. The job paid five dollars less a week than I’d been earning at Ramsey-Warner, but that turned out to be academic, anyway, because it had been filled by the time I got out to Joliet. I didn’t know what to do. I hated going home to face Nancy, I actually hated the thought of going home. I walked across the Circle yard breathing in all the familiar scents of a paper mill, hearing all the familiar sounds, and thinking maybe I should take Nancy and head back to Wisconsin, I could always get a job in the woods there, always make a decent enough living to support her that way. I guess I’d been walking with my head bent, hands in my pockets, and I only chanced to look up as I started out the main gate, and saw three fellows in suits like my own, standing on line outside a covered staircase that ran up the side of one of the buildings, its galvanized metal roof reflecting sunlight. I walked over to the line and asked the fellow on the end of it what was going on, and he told me they were hiring salesmen, and I said, Oh, and was ready to leave again, when I thought Well, why not a salesman, you’ve already considered cleaning out toilet bowls, haven’t you? and I got on the end of the line.

The man who interviewed me was named Gerald Hawkes, and he asked me six questions in rapid succession and then stared at me in silence.

Q: Have you ever sold paper products before?

A: No.

Q: Have you ever sold anything before?

A: No.

Q: Have you ever worked for a paper company before?

A: Yes.

Q: Which one?

A: Ramsey-Warner.

O: Why did you leave?

A: I wasn’t earning enough money.

Q: How much would you like to earn

A: Fifty dollars a week.

Gerald Hawkes blinked at me. He stroked his mustache. He fingered his stickpin. He got up and walked around his desk and came over to my chair and circled the chair and studied me, my suit, my shoes, my shirt, my tie, and then went back to his desk and sat again in the big leather swivel chair behind it, and fingered his stickpin and stroked his mustache.

“We’ll pay you ten dollars a week,” he said. “Plus commissions. You won’t be earning much in commissions at the start, but then neither will we be earning much in sales. When you’ve learned the territory, you should start making a lot more than the fifty you’re asking.”

“Will I have to travel?”

“Why, what’ve you got against traveling?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why’d you ask about it?”

“Because you didn’t mention anything about traveling expenses.”

“You won’t need traveling expenses, you’ll be selling to retail stores in the Chicago area. Can you drive?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, which was true. But I had been living in Chicago for more than a year now, and had not driven a car since I’d left Wisconsin, and was really a little apprehensive about driving in Chicago traffic. I did not tell him any of these things, though. I was learning fast that one way to get a job was to sprinkle a few lies here and there among the petunias.

“Can you start work tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, sir, I can.”

“Good. Report to Mr. Goss in Room 314 at eight o’clock.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Welcome,” Gerald Hawkes answered, and stroked his mustache.

I began working at the Circle Mill on a Wednesday morning. That Saturday night, Allen and Rosie came up to the South Lawndale flat bearing gifts — a turkey Rosie had roasted, and a bottle of gin her brother had made. (He had actually made two cases of the stuff, which qualified him as the biggest bootlegger I personally knew.) The visit was not unexpected. Nancy had prepared me for it, or, to be more precise, had bludgeoned me into accepting it. There was a lot of embarrassed foot-shuffling and eye-shifting when the Garretts arrived, but at last Allen and I shook hands like two schoolyard kids who had had a knockdown-dragout fistfight and were now reluctantly making up. We all toasted my new job (including Nancy, whom I had never before seen drinking hard liquor), and then we toasted Allen’s promotion, which I was still convinced he’d got by lying about me. Nancy and Rosie went out to the kitchen to warm the turkey and set the table. Allen and I sat opposite each other silently in the parlor.

He offered me a cigar, which I declined.

He cleared his throat.

He shifted his weight in the big easy chair.

Then he said, “Bert, no matter what you think, I never said anything to anybody about you being a radical.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“I believe you,” I said. But I didn’t.

The job was a good one. Circle ran a huge operation, with two mills on the West Coast, another in New York State, and of course the one in Joliet. Since the company manufactured a wide variety of paper products — newsprint, industrial papers, bond and writing and ledger and manifold papers, bags and boxes, book and offset papers, butcher’s wrap, you name it — my selling job took me to a great many different kinds of retail outlets, and I was certainly never bored. Circle’s main paper product that year, though (as was the case with ail of the Joliet mills), was wallpaper, and I guess I earned most of my commissions selling to the housewares sections of the big department stores, or to the smaller paint and wallpaper retailers scattered all over Chicago. By the end of my third week at Circle, I began to think that Allen had done me a big favor. My earlier ideas on how to become a corporation executive now seemed terribly naive. The way to get into the board room was not by spiking and rolling logs off the conveyer belt. This was the way. I found myself outlining a plan for my rise through the Circle Mill ranks, allowing three to live years for each phase of the escalation, from salesman to District Manager, in which position I would begin supervising salesmen, and fighting with plant managers for deliveries, and influencing mill schedules, and meeting regularly with management, and then moving up to Sales Manager where my salary would take a sudden jump and company stock would be offered to me, and then on to Vice President-Sales where I would undoubtedly come into conflict with the Vice President-Manufacturing because the next job upward on the ladder was Executive Vice President, third highest position at Circle, with only the Chairman of the Board and the President of the company above. This was 1920. If everything went as I expected it to go, I could become President of Circle by as early as 1932, but certainly no later than 1940. None of it seemed beyond my grasp. I was, perhaps, just an uneducated lumberjack from the Wisconsin woods, but (as I had once told Mr. Moreland) this was America, and I knew that here a man could become whatever he chose to become.