The Cavanaugh Quest Read Online Free PDF Page A

my father did, and your husband, as well as Hub. I never knew her. I never knew Blankenship, for that matter.”
    “Well, you were away much of the time, weren’t you?” She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “And Larry’s world was quite different from yours—business, accounting, the sort of thing you never got involved in. Larry wasn’t sophisticated, no big college, none of the advantages,” and she went on in the Horatio Alger vein while I wondered why she was being so defensive about him. She sounded as if she had a stake in him, as if he were something like a son and I was the enemy who had cast some near aspersion on his background.
    “But he was a good boy and when he came down to Minneapolis—let’s see, it must have been 1952 or 1953, I’d think—he showed up at the plant asking Pa for a job, wanted to go on the road and learn the business by selling paint.” She cocked her head like an aging parrot, watching a memory scurry along the edge of time like a mouse behind the sideboard. “I remember Pa coming home that day and telling me about this young man with white socks and a blue suit—that always appealed to Pa, that the boy dressed the same unfashionable way he did himself. He’d come in and looked around the offices and it was lunchtime and the secretaries all happened to be out and Larry saw Tim’s name on the office door, Timothy Dierker of Dierker and Company, and he figured this must be the fellow to see, the big mucky-muck, he called him …” Her eyes were developing shiny tears and I supposed she really was remembering. “He walked right in on Pa and Pa was so surprised and impressed that he gave him a job. Oh, if Dan Peterson hadn’t finally come into the office off the road, there wouldn’t have been a job but Pa always said he’d have found him a job, he liked him that much.” She sighed spitefully. “Oh, he’d never met her at that point … but, you know, Paul, it must have been foreordained even then because it was just about that time that Ole Kronstrom began giving Helga problems—Helga was his wife, one of my best friends, and Ole was Pa’s partner in Dierker and Company.” She was turning it over in her mind, like a marginal worm. “Yes, it was just about the time that Larry Blankenship came to work for Pa that Helga told me that she thought Ole was going through the change—she thought he was running around with girls; she saw him winking at the waitresses out at Norway Creek … it was hard for me to believe at first because Pa had never been one to engage in that sort of smutty thing. But wives know their husbands best, Paul”—she touched my arm to underline her contention—“and it turned out that she was right, Ole was beginning to chase …” She sniffed righteously. “Working his way up, or down, if you see what I mean, to that Kim Roderick, who was just nothing, nothing but a waitress herself at Norway Creek, a waitress out to catch a rich man.” It was difficult to tell which upset her more, Ole’s infidelity or the fact that it had been committed with a waitress. The Dierkers had never really gotten used to having a lot of money, even though they were the second generation in paint, but while Tim never took it very seriously Harriet was self-consciously moneyed—unsure of her grammar and schooling and antecedents but sure of her power over underlings, all those who didn’t have as much money and were defined in their own minds by the lack of it. Largesses, noblesse oblige—she loved to take those poses but only if you were well behaved and knew your place. Larry Blankenship had but Kim Roderick apparently hadn’t.
    The story Harriet Dierker told me about Kim Roderick was a honey, filtered through a mesh of venom, hatred. I couldn’t quite imagine why she was so virulent about it but then I remembered that Blankenship had done himself in only the day before and her grief, real or imagined, was at least new and