The night with Mary Jane in New York and the forlorn telephone call in the deserted lobby of the St. Moritz Hotel had steeled him against the pull of his own desire.
Of one thing he was certain—the next time he asked a girl to marry him, he was going to be damn sure she would say yes.
As he repassed the record counter, he made a mental note to try to get some older woman in the store tactfully to suggest to Miss Soames that perhaps she ought to wear a brassiere under her sweater.
He was going over the drawings for the March window with Bergson, the young man who prepared the displays, when the phone rang.
“Rudy,” it was Calderwood, “can you come down to my office for a minute?” The voice was flat, giving nothing away.
“I’ll be right there, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. He hung up. “I’m afraid these’ll have to wait a little while,” he said to Bergson. Bergson was a find. He had done the sets for the summer theater in Whitby. Rudolph liked them and had approached him about a job as window designer for Calderwood’s during the winter. Until Bergson had come on the scene the windows had been done haphazardly, with the different departments fighting for space and then doing their own displays without any reference to what was being shown in any window besides their own. Bergson had changed all that. He was a small, sad young man who couldn’t get into the scene designers’ union in New York. He was grateful for the winter’s work and put all his considerable talent into it. Used to working on the cheap for summer-theater productions, he made use of all sorts of unlikely inexpensive materials and did the art work himself.
The plans laid out on Rudolph’s desk were on the theme of spring in the country and Rudolph had already told Bergson that he thought they were going to be the best set of windows Calderwood’s had ever had. Glum as Bergson was, Rudolph enjoyed the hours he spent working with him, as compared with the hours he spent with the heads of departments and the head of Costs and Accounting. In an ideal scheme of things, he thought, he would never have to look at a balance sheet or go through a monthly inventory.
Calderwood’s door was open and Calderwood saw him immediately and said, “Come in, Rudy, and close the door behind you.” The papers that had been in the Manila envelope were spread over Calderwood’s desk.
Rudolph sat down across from the old man and waited.
“Rudy,” Calderwood said mildly, “you’re the most astonishing young man I’ve ever come across.”
Rudolph said nothing.
“Who else has seen all this?” Calderwood waved a hand over the papers on his desk.
“Nobody.”
“Who typed them up? Miss Giles?”
“I did. At home.”
“You think of everything, don’t you?” It was not a reproach, but it wasn’t a compliment, either.
Rudolph kept quiet.
“Who told you I owned thirty acres of land out near the lake?” Calderwood asked flatly.
The land was owned by a corporation with a New York address. It had taken all of Johnny Heath’s cleverness to find out that the real owner of the corporation was Duncan Calderwood. “I’m afraid I can’t say, sir,” Rudolph said.
“Can’t say, can’t say.” Calderwood accepted it, with a touch of impatience. “The feller can’t say. The Silent Generation, like they say in Time magazine. Rudy, I haven’t caught you in a lie since the first day I set eyes on you and I don’t expect you to lie to me now.”
“I won’t lie to you, sir,” Rudolph said.
Calderwood pushed at the papers on his desk. “Is this some sort of a trick to take me over?”
“No, sir,” Rudolph said. “It’s a suggestion as to how you can take advantage of your position and your various assets. To expand with the community and diversify your interests. To profit from the tax laws and at the same time protect your estate for your wife and children when you die.”
“How many pages are there in this?” Calderwood said. “Fifty, sixty?”
“Fifty-three.”
“Some suggestion.” Calderwood snorted. “Did you think this up all by yourself?”
“Yes.” Rudolph didn’t feel he had to tell Calderwood that for months he had been methodically picking Johnny Heath’s brain and that Johnny was responsible for the more involved sections of the overall plan.
“All right, all right,” Calderwood grumbled. “I’ll look into it.”
“If I may make the suggestion, sir,” Rudolph said, “I think you should talk this over with your lawyers in New York and your bankers.”
“What do you know about my lawyers in New York?” Calderwood asked suspiciously.
“Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said, “I’ve been working for you for a long time.”
“Okay. Supposing, after studying this some more, I say Yes and do the whole goddamn thing the way you outline it—go public, float a stock issue, borrow from the banks, build the goddamn shopping center near the lake, with a theater, too, like an idiot, supposing I do all that, what’s in it for you?”
“I would expect to be made chairman of the board, with you as president of the company, at an appropriate salary,” Rudolph said, “and an option to buy a certain amount of stock in the next five years.” Good old Johnny Heath. Don’t niggle. Think big. “I would bring in an assistant to help take over here when I’m otherwise occupied.” He had already written Brad Knight in Oklahoma about the job.
“You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you, Rudy?” Now Calderwood was frankly hostile.
“I’ve been working on this plan for more than a year,” Rudolph said mildly. “I’ve tried to face all the problems.”
“And if I just say no,” Calderwood said, if I just put all this pile of papers in a file and forget it, then what would you do?”
“I’m afraid I’d have to tell you I’m leaving at the end of the year, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. “I’m afraid I’d have to look for something with more of a future for me.”
“I got along without you for a long time,” Calderwood said. “I could get along without you now.”
“Of course you could,” Rudolph said.
Calderwood looked down morosely at his desk, flicked out a sheet of paper from a pile, glared at it with especial distaste.
“A theater,” he said angrily. “We already have a theater in town.”
“They’re tearing it down next year,” Rudolph said.
“You sure do your homework, don’t you?” Calderwood said. “They’re not going to announce it until July.”
“Somebody always talks,” Rudolph said.
“So it seems. And somebody always listens, don’t they, Rudy?”
“Yes, sir.” Rudolph smiled.
Finally, Calderwood smiled, too. “What makes Rudy run, eh?” he said.
“That’s not my style, at all,” Rudolph said evenly. “You know that.”
“Yes, I do,” Calderwood admitted. “I’m sorry I said it. All right. Get back to work. You’ll be hearing from me.”
He was staring down at the papers on his desk as Rudolph left his office. Rudolph walked slowly among the counters, looking youthful and smiling benevolently as usual.
The plan that he had submitted to Calderwood was a complicated one and he had argued every point closely. The community was growing in the direction of the lake. What was more, the neighboring town of Cedarton, about ten miles away, was linked with Whitby by a new highway and was also growing in the direction of the lake. Suburban shopping centers were springing up all over America and people were becoming accustomed to doing the greater part of their shopping, for all sorts of things, in them. Calderwood’s thirty acres were strategically placed for a market to siphon off trade from both towns and from the upper-middle-class homes that dotted the borders of the lake. If Calderwood didn’t make the move himself, somebody or some corporation would undoubtedly seize the opportunity in the next year or two and besides profiting from the new trade would cut drastically into Calderwood’s volume of business in the Whitby store. Rather than allow a competitor to undermine him, it was to Calderwood’s advantage to compete, even partially, with himself.