“I don't have any Wall Street friends anymore,” Adrian snapped. “As far as they're concerned, we're back to being a cottage industry. The war's over. We've saved the world for the goddamned automobile.”
For a moment Adrian's eyes met Cliff's. He seemed to be trying to ask him for something. Support? Sympathy?
“Mortgage the real estate then,” Frank said. “This plane has to be built. If I can't build it here, I'll go elsewhere.”
Adrian finished his wine. “We had some money in the bank until we ran into trouble with Excalibur.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop.
“The Talus will have a hundred seats in a cabin roomy enough to jitterbug in. At six hundred miles an hour,” Frank said.
“Six million an hour is more like it,” Buzz said. “Don't you have any idea how much fuel those jet engines use?”
“They'll solve that problem within a yearâtwo at the most.”
“That's not what I hear from Curtiss Wright. They don't see any future for jets except in pursuit planes,” Buzz said.
“Then I don't see any future for Curtiss Wright,” Frank said.
“All right,” Adrian said. “We'll build a Talus prototype. Providing Buzz gets the Air Force into the act to put up at least half the money.”
“Absolutely not,” Frank said. “I don't agree to that condition. I made a promise to myself never to build another bomber. We don't need one. We've got the atomic bomb and no one else does. The B-Twenty-nine can take care of anyone who threatens us for the next twenty years.”
“What if the Russians get the bomb?” Adrian said. “From what I hear in Washington, they grabbed more German scientists than we did when the Reich went kaput. They've built a pretty good imitation B-Twenty-nineâthat Tupolev Tu4âthe one they call the Bull.”
“What about the White Lightning? A jet derived from that design could put us back in the big time,” Buzz said.
“We don't need fighter planes any more than we need bombers,” Frank said.
“I predict we're gonna need bombers and fighter planesâa lot of themâto deal with Joe Stalin and his pals,” Buzz said.
“It's your sort of mentality that's created the cold war,” Frank said.
“Listen to the guy!” Buzz exploded. “He's a fucking Communist.”
“Let's be kind to our old friend,” Adrian said. “His problem is political naivete.”
“You can call me any name you please,” Frank said. “Are we going to build the Talus?”
Adrian's eyes roved the table. Cliff thought he saw some sort of message pass between him and Buzz. “Maybe we ought to humor the crazy bastard,” Buzz said.
“I want it designed for prop as well as jet engines,” Adrian said. “I agree with Jim about the public's attitude toward jets.”
“To the future,” Frank Buchanan said, raising his glass of Inverness. His designers rose with him, each at least as drunk.
“Aren't you going to join us?” Frank called to Cliff.
“You bet,” Cliff said, lurching to his feet. Only then did he discover neither Buzz nor Adrian nor Jim Redwood was with him. It was too late to sit down without looking like a fink. He found Adrian's eyes again. They were stony.
The hell with him, Cliff decided. The hell with Tama too. Who knew what could happen if Frank pulled this plane off? It was a gambler's business. He and Frank might start telling Adrian and Buzz what to do.
“I predict it will kill a lot of people,” Buzz said.
“Sacrifices must be expected,” Frank said.
“Remember, you'll be operating on borrowed money,” Adrian said.
Cliff Morris wondered if he ought to call Dick Stone and tell him he was crazy to come anywhere near the Buchanan Aircraft Company.
Six weeks after he walked out on Nancy Pesin, Dick Stone trudged off a Douglas DC-6 at Los Angeles airport with Irwin Shaw's
The Young Lions
under his arm. A smiling, crew-cutted Cliff Morris mashed his hand. They got into Cliff's white Buick convertible and in a few minutes were on a six-lane highway, roaring along at eighty-five miles an hour. “How do you like this?” Cliff said. “It's the Hollywood Freeway. They're going to build a whole network of these things.”
“How many people do they lose on it each week?”
“A half dozen or so. Everybody drives fastâit's the western approach to things. Fast cars, fast planes, fast women.”
“I'm ready for all three.”
“I can't believe it. Old Shylock is busting loose.”
“Yeah,” Dick said. He had never liked the Shylock joke.
“What happened between you and Nancy?”
“Diarrhea of the mouth.”
“Is there a dame who doesn't have that problem?”
“I'm hoping to find one.”
“It may take you the rest of your life.”
“I'll wait.”
“I've thought about splitting a couple of times. But we've got two kids now.”
“Hey, I'm not trying to start a fashion.”
Cliff's reaction gave Dick an instant attack of guilt. Maybe he should have tried harder with Nancyâasked her to come to California with him. Maybe distance would have eliminated the baby talk. But Sam Pesin had too much money to eliminate the source of it.
“How's business?”
“If you didn't have an MBA, I couldn't have gotten you near the place. We've made a couple of wrong moves. It's part of the sport, you know? You bet half the company on a plane. We did it on the Excalibur, a double-decker transcontinental job. Nobody wants to go near it.”
“What's wrong with your marketing people?”
“Marketing, schmarketing. In this business we operate on hunches. Rabbits' feet. Everything gets decided in Adrian Van Ness's head. Other companies aren't that different. Nothing happens at Douglas until Don Douglas makes up his mind. At North American Dutch Kindelberger came back from Washington the other day with a three-million-dollar contract on the back of an envelope. He couldn't read it until he sobered up.”
“Don't you have a chain of command?” Dick asked.
“Sure,” Cliff said. “Most of the time someone's trying to wrap it around some other guy's throat and pull it tight. This is a man's business, Dick. You've got to learn to talk back, fight dirty, play rough.”
“Are you still in sales?”
“There's nothing to sell. I'm a project manager on a new plane. It's the damndest thing you've ever seen. All wing and no fuselage. If it flies I'm a hero. If it crashes I'm a bum.”
They rocketed off the freeway down a ramp to a broad boulevard, where the traffic moved much slower. Eventually they reached Cliff's ranch house in a development that rambled up and down a half-dozen hills. It looked like a transplant from Long Island or Westchesterâexcept for the palm trees on the streets and the mountains looming in the distance.
“Here's your home away from home,” he said.
As Cliff helped carry his bags up the walk, a beaming Sarah Morris opened the door. “Dick,” she said in her low liquid voice that brought back the years in England. “How good to see you.”
Cliff dumped his share of the bags in the hall. “You two behave yourselves while I try to calm down a couple of designers who want to assassinate half the engineering department,” he said, heading back to his car.
Sarah had gained over forty pounds and looked much too matronly to keep a lothario like Cliff Morris happy. Dick dismissed that unpleasant thought as she led him into a living room full of inexpensive furniture. “I see you're reading
The Young Lions
. What do you think of it?” she asked.
“It's ten times better than
The Naked and the Dead
. I especially liked the German side of the story.”
“I agree on both counts. I hoped Mr. Mailer would teach me a bit about the American male, a mystery I need to penetrate. I'm afraid all I learned were naughty words.”
“Do you still read Gerard Manley Hopkins?”
“Hopkins?” For a moment she looked blank. “Oh, that poor old Jesuit. No. How did you know I ever read him?”
“Youâyou mentioned him to Cliffâthe night we met. The first night.”
She gave him a peculiar look. Did she remember where and how she had mentioned him to Cliff?
“âLike a daregale skylark scanted in a cage,'” he said.
Sarah's eyes came alive. “âMan's spirit in his bonehouse, meanhouse dwells.' Yes. Yes. I remember how much I used to love that passage. I don't remember mentioning it to Cliff.”
She made a wry face. “I can't imagine ever reciting poetry to Cliff. It's a sad commentary on how quickly romance vanishes, I suppose.”
She served him tea and scones covered with an inch of butter and another inch of raspberry jam. The tea was deliciously strong, brewed in the pot as only the English make it.
“I don't know why we revolted because you taxed this stuff. I would have paid gladly,” Dick said.
Sarah nodded, pleased. She stirred in some milk and sugar. “It must have been very painfulâgetting divorced.”
Dick shrugged. “The worst part is wondering how you got involved in the first place. How you could have made such a dumb mistake.”
There was a painful pause and Dick wondered if Sarah was applying the words to herself. He changed the subject to California. How did she like it? She struggled to be enthusiastic but ended up saying she had many acquaintances but few friends.
Her daughters awoke from their naps. Elizabeth, the three-year-old, was a little beauty. Dick felt a pang at the sight of her. If he had stayed with Nancy, would they have had a child like this?
Eventually Cliff came home and banged Dick on the back and told him Adrian Van Ness was looking forward to meeting a guy with an MBA. Buchanan was having a tough time right now like the rest of the industry but the coming decade was going to be stupendous. This hot air contradicted most of what Cliff had said in the car driving from the airport. Was he sorry he had told the truth the first time? Or was he talking for Sarah's benefit? If so, he was wasting his breath.
Gone was the adoration with which Sarah had gazed at Cliff at their wedding, just after he had volunteered for another twenty-five missions. Her tight mouth made it clear she was all too familiar with Cliff's tendency to talk big. It made Dick feel better about his decision to flee Nancy Pesin. Was seeing, knowing too much, an enemy of love?
Dinner was pleasant. Cliff talked sports, Sarah talked books. Dick was able to keep them both happy. He wondered what they would have said to each other if he were not at the table.
At midnight, in bed in the guest room, Dick listened to the rising wind. A Santa Ana, Cliff Morris had called it. A weird California phenomenon that swept down from the mountains and across the deserts with near hurricane force, hurling cars off highways, blowing roofs off houses. Tomorrow the weather would be hot and sticky.
Dick found himself remembering his father's distress when he appeared at his parents' house in Rego Park the night of the cosmic no. On the stairs going up to his old bedroom, his father had seized his arm. “Why such bitterness?” he cried. “It is something I've done?”
Dick almost tried to explain one last time. A new metaphor flared in his mind. The last mission over Berlin. Leaping from the doomed bomber. It was a kind of birthâlike a butterfly from a burning chrysalis. But it would have been futile. He could not talk frankly to the rabbi. He had become a professional advice giver, a spokesman for Jewishness.
He looked past his father at his mother and was shaken by what he saw there. Her face was sad but her eyes said:
go
. In a flash he saw deep into his parents' marriage. She did not want him to be a secular replica of this pompous man she no longer loved. How did she know that Saul Stone, the articulate boy she had fallen in love with one teenage summer in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, would become a verbose Reform rabbi?
In another flash, Dick saw the evolution. His grandfather had abandoned his Orthodox faith for the glory, the power of modern culture, in particular the German culture into which he had been born. His son, reacting against the father as sons have a way of doing, had doubled back to Reform Judaism, trying to hold the old and the new together. His son had repudiated himâfor what? Was it for another faith, Americanism? Maybe freedom was a better name.
Dick drifted down into sleep in the middle of these thoughts and dreamt he was flying through the darkness on a gigantic arrow, to which he clung with total desperation. A hand was seizing his shoulder, trying to tear him off. He fought with amazing fury to resist it. “Whaâ?”
Cliff Morris was shaking him awake. “Hey, Navigator. You got a telephone call.”
“Your mother gave me the number,” Nancy Pesin Stone said. “I just want to tell you one last time what a rotten no good son of a bitch you are.”
A fugitive from Jewish wrath and pain, Dick Stone was almost afraid to meet Adrian Van Ness the next morning. What if he turned out to be an anti-Semite? He could hear Sam Pesin chortling, his father mocking him with his compassionate smile.
To Dick's immense relief, Adrian Van Ness was exactly what he imagined a Protestant aristocrat would be like. Urbane, unhurried, he slouched in the big leather chair behind his desk, wrinkles of quizzical surprise on his forehead because Dick had recognized the paintings by Klee and Matisse on his wall. “I
picked them up in Paris in the twenties. You're the first person who's even known they were serious paintings,” he said.
Cliff Morris squirmed and said nothing. Dick smiled, pleased at being recognized as a fellow member of the shadowy brotherhood of the elite, those with superior taste, judgment, wisdom. He was only a novice in this undefined unrepresentative band. But he was eager to grow in wisdom and age and grace.
“We could use someone with an MBA to bring a little order out of our chaotic accounting methods,” Adrian Van Ness said. “Basically we spend money on developing new planes and take in money for planes we've sold and add things up at the end of the quarter to see how we're doing. That frequently leads to rude shocks. For your first assignment, I want you to take a look at one of our biggest, riskiest projects, the X-Forty-nine, also known as the Talus.”
“What is it?”
“Some people call it a flying wing. I call it a headlong catastrophe,” Adrian said, his hooded eyes flickering toward Cliff.
“Why don't you stop it?”
“You'll find out the answer to that question by going to see the man who's designing the thing.”
A surly Cliff called Frank Buchanan's secretary, who reported he was in the wind tunnel studying some aerodynamic problems in the Talus. “Let's go meet the rest of the big shots,” Cliff said.
They found Buzz McCall on the factory floor conferring with a foreman. They had to talk above the rattle of rivet guns, the shriek of metal cutters. “You're the navigator?” Buzz yelled.
“That's right,” Stone shouted.
“Now you're going to play cost cutter?” Buzz bellowed. “Come see me tomorrow in my office. We'll discuss the next layoff. Then you can go explain it to the union.”
“We've got some pretty tough unions in the garment industry,” Dick shouted.
Buzz looked at him if he had just confessed he was an embezzler and went back to talking to the foreman. “Don't let it bother you,” Cliff said as they retreated to the office side of the building. “He treats everybody that way.”
The treasurer, a big easygoing man named Thompson, welcomed Dick as an ally. “It isn't easy to track costs in this crazy business,” he said. “You've got to prorate guys selling planes at the Twenty-One Club in New York and birdbrains on the assembly line connecting hydraulic controls backwards. Then there's Tama's stable. That's one we've got to cover under miscellaneous. And the Honeycomb Club. That's ten feet under miscellaneous, in never-never land.”
Thompson grinned at Cliff as he said this, apparently presuming he had already explained all this to Dick. Outside the treasurer's office, Dick asked for the explanation. Cliff wryly told him how Tama's stable of willing women employees helped sell planes.
Welcome to the United States of America, Dick thought, recalling his repugnance when he escorted Pesin Baby Wear buyers to whorehouses in Harlem.
“And the Honeycomb Club?”
“We'll let you see that for yourself one of these nights when Frank's in the mood.”