A Man of Affairs Read Online Free PDF Page A

lounges. They saw all the afternoon ball games on television. And they were getting a wise-guy boot out of using union strength to screw management. It was a cynicism and a “me first” approach to life which was in its way just as empty and destructive as Tommy and Warren’s complete idleness. The low productivity per employee was crippling us. A new union contract was coming up in November. I knew they were going to yelp for more money. I was going to go along with the demand for more money provided the union would play fair on work standards.
    “Deep black thoughts?” Louise asked over the sound of the airplane.
    “World on my shoulders,” I said, grinning at her.
    Warren Dodge had taken the chair on the other side of me just in time to hear the last remark. “You like to give the impression of being all burdened down with big deals, don’t you, Glidden?”
    I turned and looked at the puffy, sullen and arrogant face. Warren Dodge is a big man. I think he is two years older than I am, but I like to believe he looks ten years older. His blond hair is thin. Liquor has puffed the big body, ravaged the school-boy face. But there is still a curiously collegiate flavor about him, the forlorn echoes of a valiant goal-line stand in the mud of a November afternoon. His people had been enormously wealthy, and had been almost completely wiped out in 1934 when Warren was about nine years old. There was one little trust fund that the creditors couldn’t get at. It put Warren through Choate and Princeton, and then there was nothing left. For a few years between preparatory school and Princeton, I believe, he was an enlisted marine, and received a medical discharge. After Princeton he played amateur tennis that was so close to being top flight he was able to live off it.
    Louise met him when she was twenty-four at a house party when she went to visit, in Philadelphia, the girl who had been her roommate at Wellesley. Tom McGann, her father, was violently opposed to her marrying a tennis bum. He’d given up hope of Tommy ever coming into the firm, and he had hoped she would marry somebody whom he could take in. But she was twenty-four and she had an income, mostly from Harrison dividends, of about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. It had made a nice soft berth for Warren because his drinking had begun to soften his tennis game. And he was nearly thirty. She had married him the second week she knew him, and they had been in Italy three months on their honeymoon when Tom’s death called them back. And it had turned out not to be such a soft berth for Warren. She couldn’t support him in the way he expected to be supported.
    Warren Dodge was spoiling for a quarrel. Even though alcohol had softened him up, I wasn’t anxious to go around and around with him. He’d had some police trouble in Portston. He was known as a fast, vicious and merciless brawler.
    “A big deal every day, Warren,” I said.
    He took a gulp of his drink. “Tell Mike Dean about all your big deals. Don’t try to tell me. Maybe Mike will tell you what a big deal is.”
    “Don’t be tiresome, dear,” Louise said.
    “Tiresome! Ho, ho! Glidden is the tiresome one, honey. He’s been taking you in with all this crap about backing up the dear old family corporation. So you say: okay, no dividends. So they give each other unlimited expense accounts and pay raises and God knows what all. I’m sick of your being a sucker, honey.”
    “Knock it off, knock it off!” Tommy McGann said, standing and swaying with the slight movement of the plane, grinning down at Warren out of his broken face. “What the hell do you know about big finance? I wouldn’t let you make change of a dollar, you Princeton phony.”
    All the marks of anger went out of Warren’s face and he beamed up at Tommy. “Just a crazy flyboy,” he said. I have never been able to understand why the two brothers-in-law get along so well. It could be their mutual idleness, but that does