— Yes well I don’t know about all that Coen… he sat tapping the empty cup for a moment, and then stood pushing the chair back and the jacket off to the floor. — You see you got to remember he was pretty upset by all this, I just met him that once out there that night and I’ve tried to call him since but I never can get him at home, his one aunt there even told me one time he was off on a business trip but… he paused, pouring, and turned, — there’s just something about him you like, something you kind of like and trust about him that you want to help out. Now right now he’s maybe a little mixed up but I think I could talk some sense to him and maybe…
— That may all be quite true Mister Angel but I don’t quite see the precise relevance to…
— Well put it this way then. I don’t exactly want to go into details here but put it this way. If instead of Stella holding twenty-five shares against my twenty-three it turned out that her and Edward split that twenty-five I’d, well I guess you see what I mean… and he raised the cup again before he came down behind the desk.
— Oh. I see.
— Yes you see it’s not hardly the question of the money here it’s, it might even sound to you like I’m just trying to step in and grab all I can but…
— No you make your position quite clear Mister Angel but, excuse me, there is a point regarding this nephew you may have overlooked. Now even assuming that half the residue of the estate should fall to him and that he is as ah, as appealing a young man as you find him, it is still not established whether or not he is a minor and should that prove the case of course, his aunts or his father, or rather his Uncle James it would be if his claim on the decedent’s estate proved valid, one of them at any rate would in all likelihood be named his guardian in this matter with the right to exercise the rights of his twelve and a half shares added to their aggregate of twenty-seven. Now…
— Well but I wouldn’t mean to…
— No but please let me finish because I shouldn’t want you to misunderstand me. While his aunts did express a rather impatient interest in seeing some return on their investment in the form of dividends I don’t for a moment wish to accuse them of being particularly venal, in fact it seems quite a normal attitude for anyone apparently living in somewhat straitened circumstances. But even on my brief visit with them I did feel that their grasp on reality seemed somewhat ah, tenuous at times, they do appear to have occupied that Long Island residence for some time yet what they refer to as the local paper is a weekly they have mailed to them from the Indiana town the whole family apparently left a good generation ago. The attorney they referred me to there has never answered any of my correspondence and I almost feel his very existence may be open to question, and very frankly the figure of James Bast himself seems so ephemeral that when they tell me he is abroad somewhere accepting an award there is the sense that they may be referring to the Paris Exposition of nineteen eleven. The only point I wish to make is that if these ah, if they exercised anything approaching control in an enterprise I was trying to conduct in a rational, businesslike manner, I believe I would be rather uneasy.
— Well that makes enough sense but…
— Now and so, excuse me, from your point of view even though you may have reason to regard the prospect of your, of the decedent’s daughter holding this larger number of shares as a threat to your position, it still might be somewhat safer than the alternative I just outlined if you can explore the possibility of these five remaining shares, added to yours of course they would give you the bare majority you…
— Yes well I can add Coen, he said looking up from the long narrow ellipse constricting Gibbs 5 that had taken shape under the blunt pencil, — the problem is so can she, so can Stella.
— But I oh, oh I see, I wasn’t aware this Gibbs person might be someone you both had access to, in that case of course the sooner you can…
— Well I don’t know who in hell she has access to as you put it, Jack Gibbs, I lost track of him a few years ago but, this may sound funny but I thought I saw him not too long ago right out here a few blocks away, that first minute I saw him it couldn’t have been anybody else but him and then ljust wasn’t sure, playing ball with a little girl there and he had a bad limp that Gibbs never had and what the hell he’d be doing out here next to nowhere in the first place. And then he was gone and when I asked the little girl after she said that was her father, I’d heard someplace he’d got married that didn’t last but just a few months, right after him and Stella stopped seeing each other and he got to drinking there for a while…
— Yes, well of course the sooner you…
— See he worked here for a while just before I came, just real brilliant but, I don’t know but just to give you an idea, one time when we’d all three had lunch and he’d taken a few drinks a bum came up to us on the street with his hand out and the wind blowing his torn coat, a whole wreck of a man that couldn’t hardly see us anyway but Jack all of a sudden reached out and gave him a dollar and that really, well you know a long time after that I said something about it once to Stella and all she said was, she said he did it because what he saw coming toward him was himself. And I just always remember the way she said that… he broke off, returned to the figure before him to fringe its edge with heavy strokes and stand abruptly, reaching his cup as he passed toward the cabinet. — See Stella, he said from over there bent to tug at the door again, — sometimes she’s just got no real understanding of just how the way things are, that this idea you can fail will just build up inside a man… he tugged it, — or you know maybe she does, he tugged sharply, — better than anybody can guess…
— No be careful!
— There…! He stood with half the door off in his hand, — now look at this thing, look at it! That’s a wood cabinet I had put in here, did that split like wood with no grain to split along? There isn’t any. They press sawdust and glue together and paint on a grain…
— Yes I, I see it is Mister Angel but I wouldn’t let it upset me this much, after all it’s only a…
— Coen God damn it can’t you see what I mean? Can’t you see this is what’s going to happen right here, after all it took to put all this together? Can’t you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don’t give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch of vice presidents some place you never heard of like the ones that turned this out, this wood product they call it, they spot you and launch an offer and all of a sudden you’re working for them trimming and cutting and finally bringing in people to turn something out they don’t care what the hell it is, there’s no pride in their work because what you’ve got them turning out nobody could be proud of in the first place… He broke the piece over his knee and stood up with the bottle, — if they’d just understand I’m not just trying to grab this whole show for myself but to keep it doing something that’s, that’s worth doing…
— Yes and of course the sooner you can…
— You know it’s funny, I look back sometimes and I think if it hadn’t of been for Stella in there, sometimes I think we could have done something here, me and Gibbs, really done something.
— Yes of course the sooner you can reach him… the unemptied cup was placed carefully aside for a sharp squaring of papers on the corner of the desk, — the sooner the status of these five shares can be clarified and…