2

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

2.54 P.M. EDT

The telegram that Avery Bullard sent from the Chippendale Building in New York was received at the Western Union office in Millburgh, Pennsylvania at 2.54 P.M. As the words TREDWAY TOWER spattered down on the uncoiling yellow tape, Mary Herr immediately swiveled her chair to face the keyboard on which she would retransmit the message to one of the battery of teletype printers in the Tredway Tower. As she turned she flicked her eyes toward the window through which she could see the sky-thrusting shaft of the Tower, dazzlingly white against the heat-faded blue of the sky.

Mary Herr’s quick glance at the Tredway Tower had no direct relationship to the handling of the message. It was something that she, in common with almost everyone else in Millburgh, did a hundred times a day. There was no part of the city from which the Tower could not be seen, and there was no man or woman whose eyes could long escape its attraction. Most often they looked without seeing, as a sailor involuntarily glances at the sky, or an office worker at the clock, but there were other times when they stared in conscious awe. Early-rising men, on their way to work, frequently marveled at the way the warm sun would strike the top of the Tower while they still walked in the predawn chill. In the evening, after the sun had set for the rest of the city, they would sometimes see the upper reaches of the Tower still bathed in an unworldly glow of flame-colored light. On days when clouds came scudding in through the Alleghany passes and filled the whole river valley with gray mist, the top of the Tower would occasionally be lost in the sky. It was then that they looked upward most often, staring and uneasy, as if their minds were incapable of coping with their imaginations, as if some needed thing had been unfairly snatched away.

If the Tredway Tower had been built on the island of Manhattan, it would have been only a tree in a forest, possessing neither distinction nor magnificence. In Millburgh, it is the wonder of wonders. No other building is taller than six stories. The Tower rises an incredible twenty-four. Almost as impressive as its size is its whiteness, a white so startlingly clean that it almost seems as if some supernatural intervention protects it from the film of soot that smudges the low-lying clutter of old buildings that make up most of the downtown area.

There are only a very few people in Millburgh who do not regard the Tredway Tower as a thing of great beauty. W. Harrington Dodds is one of the few. Although two decades have passed since it was built, Mr. Dodds’ criticism of its design has grown no less bitter. He still calls it “an architectural monstrosity inspired by an Italian wedding cake and designed by a pseudo architect who should have been a pastry cook.” Such remarks by Mr. Dodds are usually accepted as the acid result of a bad case of sour grapes. At the time the Tower was built he had been the leading architect of Millburgh and a man of some standing in his profession, the former vice-president of the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Nevertheless, old Orrin Tredway had completely passed him by and had given the architectural commission to a New York firm. He had not even tossed W. Harrington Dodds the face-saving designation as “consulting architect.”

Despite the circumstantial evidence against the validity of Mr. Dodds’ criticism, there is more than a little justification for some of his caustic oberservations. The Tredway Tower does bear more than a little resemblance to an enormous wedding cake. The first twelve stories are a frosted white block, fitted as squarely to the four streets as if they were the edges of the pan in which it had been baked.

On the foundation of the twelve-story block, off center, rises the constantly narrowing tower of the building. The higher it rises the more elaborate its ornamentation becomes. Around the setbacks at the sixteenth and twentieth stories there are garlands of intricately worked white-glazed terra cotta which, as Mr. Dodds is fond of saying, would be “highly appropriate for a Gothic Christmas cookie.” They are reputed to be the finest work of a great sculptor, but their artistic merit can only be judged by an occasional high-flying pigeon, for they are completely invisible to the earth-bound observer.

The final thrust of the Tower, the lance of the shaft, is so highly embellished with a bristle of minarets that it appears from the street to be an area completely separate and distinct from the rest of the building. It is. Orrin Tredway had wanted it that way. He had planned it himself and the architects had not argued. On the twenty-third floor he had placed the offices of his vice-presidents. To the twenty-fourth he had transplanted three rooms that he had torn out by the roots from a sixteenth-century manor house that he had bought in England. The oak paneling had been dissembled by museum workers, marked piece by piece for re-erection, and the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower had been designed with no other consideration than to form a shell for the transplantation. What once had been a library for nine generations of the English peerage became the office of Orrin Tredway. The adjoining study, where at least three Prime Ministers had sat in conference, became the office for Orrin Tredway’s secretary. The old main hall had become the directors’ room and Orrin Tredway sat at the head of the same table, and in the same chair, that had been used by six lords of England. There were no other offices on the twenty-fourth floor. Orrin Tredway had wanted no other man to touch his feet to its hallowed parquetry without his personal invitation.

Eight months after he moved into his office, Orrin Tredway was dead. One night in January, Luigi, Cassoni, the operator of the private elevator that served the Executive Suite, heard what was unmistakably a shot. When he finally got up enough nerve to break the rule that Mr. Tredway was never to be disturbed by opening the door of his office, he found that Mr. Tredway was beyond being disturbed.

The coroner obligingly reported that Orrin Tredway had been killed by the accidental discharge of a pistol that he had been cleaning. No one was fooled. Everyone suspected suicide. A month later they knew for sure. By then the motive for self-murder was clearly evident. Orrin Tredway was bankrupt. He had squandered his entire personal fortune and all but ruined the Tredway Furniture Company in order to build the Tower. It had been a colossal financial blunder, the senile floundering of an old man who, in the last years of his life, was trying desperately to fulfill the promise of his ancestry. There had been great men in his lineage, men who had left their mark on Pennsylvania since the days of William Penn, but the strong blood was gone before it came to Orrin Tredway’s veins. He was the last of the line. There was no Tredway to succeed him as president of the company.

The people of Millburgh had bowed to the anticipated loss of the Tredway Furniture Company as another inevitable downward step in the slow disintegration of the city’s industry. It had been going on for a long time. The days of Millburgh’s greatest glory lay so far back in its history that there was no man still alive whose memory could span the years. There were those who could recite the facts, but their recitations came from legends preserved in the mice-smelling rooms behind the public library that served as the headquarters of the Millburgh Historical Society.

There were even people living in Millburgh—as horror-stricken members of the Historical Society were occasionally made to realize by papers at its first-Friday-after-the-first-Thursday meetings—who did not know that Millburgh had not been named for the mills that once lined the Susquehanna, but for John Mills of Liverpool, England, who had established the riverside settlement that eventually became Millburgh.

In either 1747 or 1748, the exact date being as unverifiable as it is unimportant, John Mills sailed up the Susquehanna with a party of British traders who were intent upon buying iron from the furnaces that had recently been established in the river hills. Along most of the river, the hills came down sharply to the water edge and there was little flatland, but the Mills’ party discovered one place where prehistoric erosion had cut back the hills to leave a flat half-moon of lowland. It was almost three miles across the river face and, at the center point, there was over a mile between the water and the steep-cliffed palisade of the cutaway hills. It was here that the party stopped and began the building of a warehouse for the collection of iron until it could be loaded on the barges that were to float it down to Baltimore for shipment to England.

What scanty historical evidence still remains indicates that John Mills was more generously endowed with the spirit of private enterprise than with loyalty to his British employers. A year later he was in business for himself, contracting with furnace owners to supply the large quantities of charcoal that were used in the production of iron.

From the cutting of wood for charcoal to the cutting of wood for lumber was an easy step and by 1752 the sawmill that John Mills erected on Cutlass Creek was reputed to be one of the three largest in the colonies.

Much of the lumber was hauled overland to Philadelphia. Hauling required wagons and John Mills started to build them. It was a logical enterprise. The wood came from his own sawmills and the iron forges to make the necessary metal parts were close at hand. He had already acquired a controlling interest in one forge and was a partner in another.

The tide of emigration to the West had started to flow in earnest and the fame of the covered wagons that were built at Mills Landing spread through the taverns up and down the Eastern seaboard where men gathered to plan their treks to the lands beyond the Susquehanna. They came to Mills Landing to buy wagons and John Mills saw the chance to sell them other things as well. Great stone warehouses were built along the waterfront to house all manner of goods, but John Mills was a manufacturer at heart, not a trader, and soon there was a mill for the weaving of hempen canvas, a tannery and a harness factory, a pottery near the claybank on Cutlass Creek, and all manner of smaller shops. The wagon works suggested a natural expansion into agricultural implements and the Mills plow became as famous as the Mills wagon.

A letter written in 1761 by one W. Crayton to his waiting compatriots in Philadelphia, describes the Mills Landing of that year.

HONOURED SIRS:

This is to send you the intelligence that you should come with All Haste and it is in no ways necessary to burthen yourself for this part of the journey since all that is needed by us for our westward venture can be Purchased Here to good advantage from Mr. John Mills who is the Proprietor of such as I am sure will Amaze you. The shops are of a magnitude that is beyond belief and the sound of the smiths so great and constant that is as if a great Battle was being fought even into the night.

Our two waggons have been promised for the 9th instant but both taverns are crowded with those who wait before me and I do not view the date with Certainty. To hasten our departure I have ordered of Mr. Mills such articles as you will find on the list which I beg you to examine for your approval. The axes and scythes are of Superior Design and the chests are Iron Bound and most Nicely Made.

There is one matter in which I do not feel free to act without your counsel and it is about Horses. On his plantation, which is on the high level above the town, Mr. Mills raises a fine beast which is called the Conestoga Horse and there are teams of such which are yet for sale although I cannot perceive if all will not soon be boughten by others which is one cause why I implore you to Hasten here.

Do not Speak of this next matter to Mary but I have six jugs of Spirits made in Mr. Mills’ distillery. It is of Uncommon fineness and I mention it to add to your Haste in coming.

It was in the same year as Crayton’s letter was written, 1761, that the town was formally laid out and renamed Millburgh. Prior to that time everything at Mills Landing was owned personally by John Mills, including more than two hundred stone houses which he had built for his employees. The favored workers were the English wheelwrights and carpenters whose emigration from England had been arranged by John Mills, and he carefully managed the sales of houses and lots so that all of his countrymen lived in the northern half of the town. The south half, where the mills and shops fronted the river, thus became the home of the German and Swiss ironworkers and was soon called “Dutchtown.” The two main east and west streets were named George and Frederick, recognizing the reigning kings of Great Britain and Germany.

George Street and everything north became the “best” section of Millburgh. Social standing began to be measured by distance from the river. The mansion houses of those who grew rich from John Mills’ favor were built along North Front Street and they became known as “North Front families,” the top of Millburgh’s social scale.

South of Frederick Street, in Dutchtown, the houses that were built by the workers were of red brick instead of gray limestone, huddled closely together on small plots of land, many being built in the row fashion of Philadelphia and Baltimore with no division between them except a common wall.

John Mills held himself aloft from the rabble of the town. His plantation of over three thousand acres completely surrounded the cliff-edged bowl of Millburgh and, centrally on the rim, so that all of his domain could be seen from his veranda, he built the great mansion of Cliff House. It was started in the spring of 1760 but, according to a legend which the house still stands to verify, the elaborateness of the interior woodwork demanded nine years for its completion. John Mills was one of the richest men in the colonies and he lived on a scale to fit his purse. When he died in 1784, a contemporary account records that more than two hundred house servants and plantation workers followed the casket on foot.

James Mills, John’s eldest son, carried on in his father’s tradition and continued to expand the factories. Whether through wisdom or good fortune, his greatest expansion was in the lumber business and it was there that he laid the foundation for the high-water mark in Millburgh’s economic history.

After the War of 1812 the British flooded the American market with ironwork and agricultural implements priced so low that the Millburgh forges and factories could not compete. The lumber business took up the slack. The local timber had long since been cut, most of it to make charcoal for the iron furnaces, but now great rafts of white pine came floating down the river from the upper reaches of the Susquehanna. The Millburgh sawmills were waiting and the town became the center of lumber supply for Philadelphia and all of southeastern Pennsylvania. It was a lusty, rip-roaring, money-coining period. Millburgh had been a boom town since its birth but there had never been anything to match this. On South Front Street, raftmen stood six deep at the tavern bars. On North Front Street, the militia guarded the mansion dwellers from the drunken roistering rivermen who recognized no limits in their quest for port excitement. Every month there were more mansions to guard. New fortunes were being made so fast that the old designation of a “North Front family” had already begun to lose some of its meaning.

The lumber boom lasted well into the eighteen-thirties. By then the upriver sawmills at Williamsport, Lock Haven, and Renovo began to take the business away and Millburgh’s tide had turned. The iron and steel industry moved West and the farm implement business trailed the ironmasters. The old Mills Plow Company dwindled into insignificance. The tannery closed and the kilns at the brickyard crumbled into ruins.

The Civil War brought a respite in the city’s declining fortune but, with the Reconstruction years, the downward course continued. Only three local industries of any importance survived the panic of 1873—the Mills Carriage Works, with which no descendant of John Mills was any longer associated, the Mills Iron Foundry, now owned by the Krautz family, and the Everett-English Cotton Mill, which was the lineal inheritor of the weave shed where John Mills had woven the flaxen canvas for his covered wagons.

The Tredway Furniture Company could not then be listed as an important Millburgh industry but its advertised claim-phrase, “Established 1788,” can be historically justified. Josiah Tredway, a cabinetmaker by trade, came from England in 1766 to carve the decorations on the fireplace mantels of Cliff House and stayed on to make Millburgh his home. In 1788 he opened a shop on the alley behind Cromwell Street between George and Frederick, the present site of the Tredway Tower, for “the makeing of tables, chares, and cabinets in the style of England and of the best qualities.” The shop was carried on by his son, George, and during the early years of the nineteenth century was one of dozens of little one-man furniture shops in Millburgh, a natural outgrowth of the fact that many of the men John Mills had brought from England for his wagon works were cabinetmakers. From 1788 forward, various Tredways were continuously listed as “cabinetmakers” on Millburgh assessment rolls. The designation of “factory owner” does not appear until after Oliver Tredway’s name in 1874.

Aided by the depression of values brought on by the panic of 1873, Oliver Tredway managed to acquire one of the old stone warehouses that had been built more than a hundred years before by John Mills, equipped it with discarded machinery from one of the old sawmills, and gathered a complement of skilled woodworkers from the bread lines that formed daily on South Front Street. The company prospered and by 1910, when Orrin Tredway became its head, it was Millburgh’s largest industry, a distinction that it had acquired not only through its own expansion but also from the default of its rivals. The panic of 1907 closed the Mills Carriage Works. Shortly afterward the cotton mill owners uprooted their machinery and transplated it to North Carolina. Only the Krautz Steel Company—the former Mills Iron Foundry—remained and its days were numbered. In an attempt to compete with the Pittsburgh steelmakers, George Krautz had kept wages low and fought the unionization of his employees with the same unyielding independence that had kept him from selling out to one of the big steel combines. The eventual result was a strike that dragged on and on, frequently flaring into violence. One morning after a man had been killed in a picket-line brawl, old George Krautz climbed to the roof of the office building and shouted to the mob of men below that unless they went back to work that very day he would close the mills forever. The announcement was greeted with derisive catcalls. George Krautz was a man of his word. The mill never opened again. The machinery was moved away and the ghostly skeletons of the buildings, eaten away by the red cancer of rust, slowly dropped their sheet-iron skins into the weeds of the yard.

The Tredway Furniture Company that Orrin Tredway inherited from his father, Oliver, was a sound and substantial concern. In the 1910 edition of Whittaker’s Index it was ranked eighteenth in size among the furniture factories of the nation. If there had been a listing based upon profits, its rank would have been higher. Oliver Tredway had something of a genius for extracting gold from wood. Few men have made fortunes from furniture manufacturing. Oliver Tredway was one of the few. Much of his success was attributable to his mechanical ingenuity. During most of the first quarter-century of the company’s existence, furniture of the rococo Turkish and French styles was in vogue and Oliver Tredway invented machine after machine to reduce the cost of the elaborate carving, turning, and scrollwork. When the buying public finally revolted against overdecoration and turned to the severely plain Mission style, Oliver Tredway mechanized manufacture to an extent never before seen in the industry, reducing his labor costs so drastically that a number of other factories bought from him because, even after Oliver Tredway added a generous profit, his selling prices were still under their own production costs. In common with many of the industrialists of the period, Oliver Tredway’s prime interests were centered in the factory. His office was seldom used. He spent most of his working day wandering through the factory, frequently removing his frock coat and yellow doeskin gloves to lend a hand at tinkering some new piece of machinery into production. The gloves were a concession, as all of his intimates knew, to the propriety that a big factory owner should not have grease on his hands. When Oliver Tredway wore his gloves, no one could see the unremovable stains.

Orrin Tredway inherited little from his father except his wealth and the control of the company. Father and son were almost as temperamentally dissimilar as it is possible for two human males to be. Millburgh explained it by saying Orrin “took after his mother,” which was seldom spoken as a criticism, for Orrin’s mother had been an Elwood and the Elwoods were one of the oldest and most distinguished of the North Front families. She had wanted Orrin to follow his maternal forebears into the law as a steppingstone to high governmental service, but his years at Harvard revealed that what talent young Orrin Tredway had was better suited to the life of a dilettante in the arts than to an attorney. After college he spent most of his time abroad, and the back draft of occasional bits of rumor linking his name with famous artists and writers made him something of a local celebrity. Afterward he deserted the arts and took up international society. He was the only resident of Millburgh who had ever been the house guest of an English duke. His return to Millburgh after his father’s death was delayed, so it was said, because he had been asked by a member of the royal family to stay in England until after the coronation of George V.

There were some people who were surprised that Orrin Tredway returned to Millburgh at all, more who predicted that he would never take over the active management of the Tredway Furniture Company, and still more who prophesied catastrophe if he attempted it. The happenings of the first few years confounded the critics. Not only did Orrin Tredway step in as president of the company but he made an auspicious start at the job. While in England he had seen the decline of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement and realized that the pendulum of public taste was due for another swing. He guessed that it would be toward colonial reproductions and, against the advice of his father’s former associates, forced through a sample line that was strongly influenced by Sheraton and Hepplewhite. It was a great success. The next year he scored again with the introduction of new furniture woods, particularly with black walnut, which had hardly been used at all by American furniture makers since the end of Medieval and Gothic fashions in the eighteen-eighties.

Orrin Tredway proved as much a dilettante in business as in the arts. In a few years his interest flagged. In 1915, through the influence of his maternal uncle who was an ambassador, he was appointed to a governmental commission and from that year until well after the end of World War I, he spent less and less time in Millburgh. The affairs of the company drifted, but profits were still high until the depression of 1921. It was rumored that the company lost almost a quarter of a million dollars that year. Orrin Tredway came back to his desk. Half of the factory was closed, more than half of the men were laid off. He rose to the emergency, using his political connections to get furniture contracts for government buildings. Even more important to the future of the company was the employment of a young salesman named Avery Bullard who, having quit his job with the old Bellinger Furniture Company, had walked in with the order for all the furniture for a chain of hotels.

The men came back to work in the factory and Orrin Tredway drifted away in search of a new interest. He found it through his appointment as General Chairman of a committee to arrange for the celebration of the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Millburgh. The hero of the occasion, of course, was to be John Mills, and Orrin Tredway conceived the idea of restoring Cliff House, the old Mills mansion. It was hidden away in bramble-laced thicket of second-growth brush, untenanted for over fifty years, and in a very bad state of repair. The committee saw no hope of financing the restoration, so Orrin Tredway took over, bought the property, spent almost two hundred thousand dollars on it, and moved into Cliff House as his own home. Not only did he adopt John Mills’ home, he also adopted his extravagant manner of life. Business boomed as the years of the twenties went by. The Tredway Furniture Company’s profits were large but not large enough to keep pace with Orrin Tredway’s spending. He was an old man now, fog-brained with delusions of aristocratic grandeur, and it was then that he decided to build the Tredway Tower. No argument could stop him, as no argument could have stayed the finger that touched the trigger of the gun that ended his life.

In the month after Orrin Tredway’s death, Avery Bullard quietly moved up from the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower. His election to the presidency of the Tredway Furniture Company was not generally regarded as an event of any great importance. The Millburgh Times gave it only a one-column headline and a stick of type. It was the general attitude of the community that the company had been ruined beyond salvage and the only reason for the election of anyone as a new president was to provide a signature on a petition for bankruptcy.

Having accepted the death of the furniture company as an accomplished fact, the citizenry of Millburgh were slow to awaken to the miracle of its resurrection. It burst upon them with spectacular suddenness in the fall of 1935 when the Millburgh Times published the story, this time under a banner headline, that Avery Bullard had announced the merger of seven other furniture factories and the formation of the Tredway Corporation, that the local manufacturing operation would be expanded and four hundred new workers would be employed. The next morning every policeman in Millburgh was taken off his regular beat and rushed to the Tredway plant to quell the riot of hungry job-seekers that crushed down upon the Tredway employment office.

There was more news in the months that followed. An addition was started to the Tredway factory on Water Street, the first new industrial building that had been erected in Millburgh in over a quarter-century. Tredway securities were admitted to trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The Millburgh Times front-paged a photo of the “For Rent” sign being taken down from the Tredway Tower and a syndicated picture service spread it all over the country. A furniture-trade magazine published a cartoon in which Avery Bullard, in the armor of St. George, was slaying a dragon labeled “Depression” with a sword branded “Courage.”

Somewhere along the way, at some unmarked moment, Avery Bullard became the first citizen of Millburgh. The Federal Club, established by John Mills in 1781, and still housed in the old Federal Tavern where Lafayette and four signers of the Declaration of Independence had been entertained, hastily amended its blue-blood tradition in order to escape the embarrassment of not having Avery Bullard as a member. He seldom entered the club’s portals but a corner table in the grill was always reserved for his use. When he did come for lunch, there was no man in Millburgh, even the president of the Susquehanna National Bank, who could escape the temptation of bragging to his wife that he had lunched that day at the table next to Avery Bullard’s. Arm-locked lovers, wandering along the dark streets, would look up in awe at the square pinpoints of light that burned into the darkness at the top of the Tower. “Sure, honey, that’s old Bullard himself up there right now. They say he never goes home. Some nights he works right through. You know what? The other day I saw him getting out of his car. I swear to God I was so close to him I coulda reached out and touched him!”

When Florence Bullard divorced her husband in 1938, she generated only criticism, receiving little of the sympathy that she felt a neglected wife deserved. With only a rare exception, even her closest women friends regarded Florence Bullard as a fool. They thought that when a woman was lucky enough to be married to a great man like Avery Bullard, she ought to have the sense to realize that she couldn’t live an entirely normal life, not the kind of a life that a woman would have if she were married to some ordinary man like the president of the Susquehanna National or the owner of Churchill’s Department Store, or the rector of St. Martin’s.

As the months went by, Avery Bullard gave little comfort to the few Millburgh citizens who guardedly whispered their secret prediction that his fall would be as rapid as his rise. The Tredway Corporation kept on growing. The big new Pike Plant was started in 1945, just as the nation began its postwar clamor for furniture. In 1949 the sales of the Tredway Corporation passed fifty million dollars and the following year went even higher. By contrast with huge corporations like General Motors or United States Steel, Tredway was small, but in the furniture field it was a giant company. It was the backbone of Millburgh’s economic life. One out of every three of Millburgh’s families lived on Tredway pay checks. Many of the factory workers were now fourth- and fifth-generation Tredway men. In some families, like Mary Herr’s, there were three generations working for the company now. Her grandfather, her father, and two of her brothers were all in the core-making shop. All four had been a little shocked when she had gone to work for Western Union. It seemed like something approaching disloyalty. The only explanation she could offer was that “someone had to be different.” It didn’t matter very much. Western Union was a good company, too, and practically all the messages she handled were for Tredway anyway. It was a good job. She was on the inside. She knew a lot of things that her father didn’t know, even if he was night foreman of the core-making department at Water Street.

BULLARD. She typed the signature of the message in a flurry of movement, her fingers speeded by the countless times that they had repeated the same combination of seven letters. When she first started for Western Union she used to tangle the keys typing Bullard … it was just one of those quirk words for her … but now it was easy. She must have typed Bullard a million times in these last five years … and she’d probably type it a million more in the next five if Kenneth didn’t ask her to marry him pretty soon.

TREDWAY TOWER

3.06 P.M. EDT

Luigi Cassoni stepped from his elevator cab and, as he did many times every day, carefully extracted his watch from the tight little pocket at the waistline of his trousers and compared its dial with that of the giant bronze clock suspended from the ceiling of the black marble lobby. Luigi had no special interest in the time but a great pride in his watch. It had been personally presented by Mr. Bullard himself on the occasion of Luigi’s twenty-fifth anniversary with Tredway.

The watch, like so many of the other wonderful things that life had heaped upon him, represented a blessing far more generous than Luigi knew he could possibly deserve. He regarded himself as a very fortunate man, a state of mind that was partially responsible for his almost perpetual happiness.

A second factor in Luigi’s happiness derived from his underestimation of his own mental capacity. He always thought of himself as being less intelligent than he actually was. Since he did not credit his mind with the ability to arrive at any worthwhile conclusions through conscious thought, he wasted little of his time in disturbing speculation and thereby achieved great serenity.

As the operator of the private elevator to the Executive Suite on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors of the Tower, Luigi occupied a position so completely gratifying that he regularly included his thanks in his prayers. That was no more than just. Divine Providence had unquestionably intervened in his behalf. Without supernatural beneficence it was totally incredible that he, little Luigi Cassoni who had been born with no right to expect anything from life but a peasant’s work in the olive groves, should now be one of Mr. Avery Bullard’s closest personal friends. That was true. No one could deny it. Mr. Bullard had said it himself on that never-to-be-forgotten night eleven years ago. “Luigi, sometimes I have a suspicion that you’re the only real friend I have in this whole damned company.”

Luigi knew that his intimate personal association with Mr. Bullard was recognized up and down the floors of the Tredway Tower. Even the vice-presidents on the twenty-third, riding up to twenty-four for a presidential audience, frequently said, “Luigi, what kind of a mood is the old man in today?”

His answers were always carefully guarded because he recognized the horrible danger that he might, by some inadvertent slip of the tongue, say something that would be disloyal to Mr. Bullard.

Despite the perpetual pleasure of his employment, Luigi was always conscious of a slight discount on his happiness when Mr. Bullard was out of town. When the president was not in the Executive Suite, the flash of the twenty-fourth floor signal light was different. Then it was only a pinpoint of red light, not the exciting crimson flare that sent him skyrocketing up the shaft.

Mr. Bullard had been out of town for two days now. He had been in New York since Wednesday. In this whole day, Luigi had made only seven runs to twenty-four … Miss Martin up this morning … Miss Martin down and up at noon … four trips with mail.

Now, unexpectedly, the yellow light blinked on the control board of his cab, signaling a special call from the mail room.

Luigi threw the control lever and the cab dropped to the sub-basement. As the door opened, the sliding panel revealed the spare and angular figure of Emily Gastings. She was waiting impatiently, her face frozen in her never-varying mask of icy criticism. For even longer than Luigi had been with Tredway, Emily had supervised the handling of all mail and telegrams. She was so clearly the frustrated spinster that she seemed an overdrawn caricature of the type. Through the years her mind had become something like a sour-soil plant that perpetuates its habitat by the self-generation of an acid atmosphere.

“Telegram for Miss Martin, and don’t take all day getting it up there. It’s from Mr. Bullard.”

The perpetually lurking smile behind Luigi’s eyes neither warmed nor cooled. He had long since learned that the easiest way to stay happy was to disregard unpleasantness.

He saw that Emily was perversely standing just far enough away to force him to step out of the cab to reach the envelope, but he took the step without resentment. “Mr. Bullard coming in tonight?”

She took a quick gasping breath as if his words had touched some inviolate spot. “None of your business. Telegrams are strictly confidential.”

Luigi held his smile until the closing door screened his face. Women were funny … if you asked them something and the answer was no, they’d say it right out … if the answer was yes, they’d shut up like a clam and not say a word. Mr. Bullard was coming home tonight.

He had thrown the control, express to twenty-four, and the cab was flying up the shaft, alive with silent flight, no sound except the soft swish of the air. Luigi nodded with satisfaction as he passed sixteen. That little clicking sound between fifteen and sixteen was gone. He had been right in forcing Building Maintenance to have it fixed immediately. George had tried to tell him that Mr. Bullard would never notice it, a sound that you could hardly hear even when you were listening for it. The trouble with George was that he didn’t really know Mr. Bullard, not the way Luigi knew him. There wasn’t a thing in the whole world that Mr. Bullard didn’t notice, not one thing.

The cab leveled at twenty-four and the door ghosted open. Luigi locked the controls and stepped out. There was a slide that would have carried the telegram to Miss Martin’s desk but he ignored it as he always did on days when Mr. Bullard was out of town. It was much more pleasant to walk around the corner and deliver the telegram to Miss Martin hand to hand.

He walked slowly, his eyes savoring the surroundings. Even after all of these years, and the thousands of times that he had experienced it, there was no diminution in the aesthetic pleasure that Luigi Cassoni derived from the twenty-fourth floor.

As a boy he had lived in a tiny Italian village at the foot of a hill that was crowned by a castle. Looking up at its impregnable walls, he had often engaged in boyish imaginings of the wonders that must be inside. There was an unbreakable link between those childhood dreams and the reality of the top floor of the Executive Suite, a linkage that persisted despite the incongruity of the castle having been in Italy and the fact that old Orrin Tredway had created the twenty-fourth floor by transplanting a sixteenth-century English manor house.

In the first months after the Tredway Tower had been built, Luigi had heard old Mr. Tredway recount the history of these rooms, stories filled with kings and queens and lords and ladies, but there had been too much to remember from the first telling and, before the stories could be retold, the teller was dead. It was Luigi who had found Orrin Tredway lying on the floor of his office, his red blood lost in the design of the Oriental rug, his outstretched hand white as chalk, the pistol glittering coldly under the blue desk-light. Strangely, for all its horror, that moment of gruesome discovery had not remained in Luigi’s mind as a vivid association with the twenty-fourth floor. It had been quickly submerged by the overriding memory of that morning shortly afterward when he helped Mr. Bullard move up from twenty-three. An essential rightness was created then that gave validity to Luigi’s mental association between the castle and the Executive Suite. There was a duke who had lived in the castle in Italy and there was much about Avery Bullard that reminded him of the duke.

Luigi recalled how all the children had stood in silent respect as the Duke rode past in his carriage, not because silence was demanded but because there was some aura about the Duke that made him unmistakably the man above all other men, the man who owned all that there was to own—the shining carriage and the black horses, the streets and the shops and houses, the fields beyond and even the smallest loose stones that lay upon the earth. One of Luigi’s earliest memories was of his father’s distress when a branch had been accidentally broken from an olive tree that stood near the hut that was their home. His mother had attempted to console him by saying that perhaps the Duke would not notice. Luigi’s father knew better. There was nothing in the world that the Duke did not notice.

If it had not been for certain moral considerations which weighed heavily in his mind, Luigi could have fitted Miss Martin into the child-formed pattern of his thinking with no more effort and concern than he employed in transforming Mr. Bullard into the Duke who lived in the castle. Miss Martin even looked a little like his memories of the Duchess. There was that same up-carriage of her head, that same alert perception, that same ever-watchful anticipation of the Duke’s desire. “Wine,” the Duchess had ordered on the fiesta day when the Duke had made a speech in the hot sun of the piazza, and when the wine had been brought and the Duke had drunk thirstily, Luigi had stood staring at them and trying to understand how it was that the Duchess had known. His eyes had not left the Duke’s lips in all of the time that they had been there and he knew that the Duke had not spoken to the Duchess. Yet she had known. There must be, he had reasoned, some mysterious manner of silent speech between them. Now he knew that there was that same gift of wordless communication between Mr. Bullard and Miss Martin. She, too, had some way of knowing what he wanted before he asked for it. He had seen it happen many times.

Luigi had never dared to pursue the parallel because he also knew that the Duchess was the Duke’s wife and Miss Martin was only Mr. Bullard’s secretary. If, in the case of the Duke and the Duchess there had been some connection between the love that made them man and wife, and their ability to talk without speaking, there had to be some other explanation for the case of Miss Martin and Mr. Bullard. Luigi never tried to find that explanation because he was certain that it would require a high order of thinking of which his mind was sure to be incapable. In any event it didn’t matter. Miss Martin was, above any woman that he had ever known, beautiful and intelligent and kind, and a part of the pleasure he found in coming to the twenty-fourth floor were these moments when he stood in the doorway and spoke her name and she would look up pleasantly startled, speaking his.

“Hello, Luigi.”

“Telegram, Miss Martin.”

He waited while she opened the envelope, noting the quick-flashing instant of reaction as she read the message, following her eyes as she glanced at a time-table that seemed to have been waiting for this moment, then back at the time stamp on the telegram again.

“Mr. Bullard’s coming in this afternoon. Probably on the five-four.”

“You want me tell Eddie be there with the car?”

“Will you?”

“Sure, Miss Martin, I tell him.”

“And, Luigi, please ask Eddie not to have the car sitting out in the sun. It gets so terribly hot and Mr. Bullard will be worn out after two hard days in New York.”

Luigi nodded. “Mr. Bullard come back here from the train?”

“Yes. He’s called an executive committee meeting for six o’clock.”

“Then I tell Maria not to wait dinner.”

“There’s no reason why you have to wait, Luigi. There’ll be a night man on who can take us down after the meeting.”

“No, I wait!” he said quickly. “Waiting don’t matter, not for him.”

Unexpectedly, her eyes flashed up, searching his face as if she suspected some hidden meaning, giving him the uncomfortable feeling of having said some improper thing. Suddenly, his self-conscious concern seemed to be matched by hers and an instant later she was laughing.

“It’s a hard life, isn’t it, Luigi?” But the words had no meaning for they floated out on a wave of denying laughter. Then, as quickly as the laughter had come, she turned and was reaching for the telephone.

Walking back to the elevator cab, Luigi toyed with the temptation of trying to make himself understand what had happened—why Miss Martin had looked at him in that strange way and then so suddenly broken into laughter—but there was no explanation that came before he saw the first-floor signal glowing like a beckoning jewel from the control panel.

Going down the shaft, all that remained in his mind was the pleasantly echoing sound of Miss Martin’s laughter. It was too bad that his wife did not laugh like that. But a man could not expect everything. He was very fortunate. There were men … even men who were very intelligent and had been to college … who did not have a wife.

3.11 P.M. EDT

Erica Martin hesitated, her fingertips playing nervously over the black arch of the telephone instrument. Here again was that annoying puzzle of organizational precedence. Which of the five vice-presidents should be called first about the executive committee meeting at six o’clock? It was one of those little things that should not matter but she knew that it would. If Mr. Alderson were to discover that she had called Mr. Grimm before she called him, he would be sure to give it some frightening supersignificance. It would be no better to start with Mr. Dudley or Mr. Shaw, or even with Mr. Walling. They were all vice-presidents, all equal in rank, all poised on the same knife edge of uncertainty. It wasn’t their fault. You couldn’t blame them. Avery Bullard should have settled the matter weeks ago by choosing one of them to be executive vice-president.

The nervous play of Erica Martin’s fingers was a completely involuntary gesture of annoyance. If she had been conscious of it she would have stopped it at once, for she had long since schooled herself against any outward display of emotion, particularly where Avery Bullard was concerned and there was very little emotion in her life with which Avery Bullard was not concerned. She had been his private secretary for almost sixteen years.

At eighteen, Erica Martin had not been a pretty girl. At thirty-eight she was a handsome woman. As a girl she had been tall, heavy-boned and rather too strong-featured to match the current standards for sweet femininity. Now, at maturity, she had the compensation—inadequate and belated though it was—of inciting constant admiration. Men paid her the supreme business male’s compliment by saying that she had a mind like a man’s. Women, particularly those of her own age group, saw her as the strong, independent, and capable person that they might have been if they had not sacrificed themselves to the enervating demands of housekeeping, childbearing, and the constant catering to a husband’s petty quirks and foibles.

The truth, which almost no one bothered to suspect, was that Erica Martin’s life was not so very different from that of her long married compatriots. Her relationship with Avery Bullard, although completely platonic and totally devoid of any compensating display of even minor affection, did not differ greatly from the relationship between any intelligent and helpful wife and any dominant, driving, and brilliant husband. She was treated with slightly more respect than is usually typical in such a marriage, but that advantage was offset by the fact that there were no moments when a pleasant disrespect might be the prelude to an act of love.

As for a husband’s quirks and foibles, no wife could have been subjected to more—and Erica Martin also had her moments when tolerance was difficult to summon. There were times when Avery could be a very annoying person. The silly thing about it was that it was almost always over some minor matter. Day after day, Avery would make decisions on big problems almost as fast as she could place them on his desk. She couldn’t ask for better co-operation. Then, all of a sudden, some little thing would come along and, for no reason at all, he would decide to be stubborn about it, almost as if he were purposely trying to annoy her. Every week since Mr. Fitzgerald had died she had struggled to find adroit ways of nudging Avery into clearing the “executive vice-president” note from her personal reminder pad. Once she had even asked a direct question. Even then he had done nothing. That was as far as she could go. If Avery wanted to be stubborn he’d just have to be stubborn. “Elect executive vice-president” wasn’t something that she could write at the top of his engagement calendar every Monday morning the way she wrote “Haircut.” The disconcerting thing, of course, was that Avery never stopped to realize the unpleasant position in which she was placed as a result of his negligence. She was the one who had to call the vice-presidents. But, of course, he never thought of that.

She glanced down and the telegram in her hand was an urgent reminder that the minutes were slipping away. It was Friday afternoon. None of the vice-presidents knew that Mr. Bullard was coming back from New York. Any one of them might be planning to slip away for an early start on the weekend. She must catch them at once … all of them. Avery would throw a tantrum if anyone missed executive committee meeting and those tantrums weren’t good for him … his blood pressure had been up two points last time.

Hurriedly she slipped through the door of her office and started down the winding, medieval oak staircase that joined the two floors of the Executive Suite. The foot of the staircase solved the problem of precedence. Directly opposite was the door lettered: Frederick W. Alderson, Vice-President and Treasurer. No one could possibly place any special significance on the fact that she opened that door first.

Frederick Alderson was sitting behind his desk, his body squarely in his chair, his head held plumb-bob straight, not a white hair out of place on the high dome above his wax-pink face. He sat as if his own presence were a part of the meticulously precise arrangement of everything in his office. His smile of welcome was in the same careful pattern.

“Come in, Miss Martin.”

“I’ve just had word from Mr. Bullard that he’s on his way home from New York. He’s called a meeting for six o’clock.”

There was an almost imperceptible fading of his smile, so slight and so quickly recovered that she all but missed it.

“I hope it isn’t too inconvenient, Mr. Alderson.”

“No.” He made the one syllable say that there was nothing in his personal life that could ever overshadow the importance of a summons from Avery Bullard.

“I’m sure it must be something important,” she said, “or he wouldn’t have asked everyone to stay.”

“Everyone?” Mr. Alderson asked in cautious inquiry.

“The executive committee.”

“Oh, of course. Thank you, Miss Martin.”

His voice stopped her at the door. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how long a meeting it might be?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Well, it really doesn’t matter. Mrs. Alderson and I are going out to dinner at seven, but I’m sure our hosts will understand if we’re a few minutes late.”

As she was closing the door she saw him pick up a newly sharpened pencil and reach for his desk pad. Nothing ever happened in Mr. Alderson’s life that did not seem to require a note to himself, written in a tight bookkeeper’s script that looked like copperplate engraving.

Down the hall, Erica Martin wondered if Avery Bullard ever really stopped to appreciate the sacrificial loyalty of Frederick Alderson … a nice gesture if Avery were to make Mr. Alderson his executive vice-president … no reason why he shouldn’t … every reason why he should. Mr. Alderson was the oldest of the vice-presidents. There would be no organizational complications and, since he was sixty-one, he would retire in four years anyway.

She passed the blank door waiting to be lettered with the name of the new executive vice-president and went on to open the door labeled: Jesse Grimm, Vice-President for Manufacturing.

Jesse Grimm was not in his office but the odor of his pipe hung heavily in the air. Erica Martin walked through to the door of his secretary’s little cubicle. “Hello, Ruth. Mr. Grimm around?”

Ruth Elkins swallowed hard, sending another chocolate-topped cookie the way of all the thousands upon thousands of tidbits that had contributed to her puffball figure. “Gosh, Miss Martin, he left just a few minutes ago.”

“You’ll have to reach him, Ruth. Mr. Bullard’s called an executive committee for six o’clock.”

“Six o’clock? Gosh, Miss Martin, I don’t know if I can or not. He’s going down to his place in Maryland.”

“How long ago did he leave here?”

“Maybe about ten minutes.”

“Was he going home first?”

“I guess so.”

“Then you still have a chance to reach him if you call immediately.”

“Sure, only—gosh, it’s a shame, Miss Martin. Mr. Grimm’s been at the factory almost every night and this was the weekend—”

“If you don’t reach him, let me know at once,” Erica Martin said sharply, clipping off the subject. Ruth would blabber on endlessly if you gave her half a chance. How Mr. Grimm had managed to put up with Ruth Elkins all of these years was something almost beyond understanding. The only possible explanation was pure pity. That was like Mr. Grimm … his one weakness … demanding perfection from his machines but too quick to excuse the lack of it in his people. It was a fault … Avery recognized it, too … but, as he had once said, if a man had to have a fault there were worse ones to have. Avery liked Jesse Grimm. That was plain. There was a special affection in his voice when he said, “Get old Jesse up here.” The other vice-presidents were almost always referred to by their surnames … “Ask Mr. Alderson to come up for a minute.”

The juxtaposition of the two names in her mind sparked a question. Was that why Avery was delaying? Perhaps he wanted to make Mr. Grimm executive vice-president but was waiting until he could find some way to do it without offending Mr. Alderson … no, she was wrong … Avery never shrank from facing anything that needed to be faced. Personal considerations had never stopped him before … he had the strength to override them … he couldn’t hide behind that excuse. There was no excuse … he was just being stubborn!

J. Walter Dudley, Vice-President for Sales, and Don Walling, Vice-President for Design and Development, occupied offices that were joined by a connecting door. Dudley’s office was empty but she heard his voice through the closed door and opened it. The two men were seated in front of a long side table over which a collection of furniture-design sketches was scattered.

Walt Dudley was on his feet instantly, a broad smile blooming. He was an impressive man—big, broad-shouldered, with prematurely white hair above a strong deep-tanned face—and he was a practiced master of the art of winning quick friendships. “Erica, my dear, you’re just what we need—a neutral referee—but with a good eye for a fast-selling number. Don and I can’t figure out which of these specials I should take along to the Chicago market tonight.”

Erica Martin smiled in spite of herself. She knew that everything Walt Dudley said was a part of his own highly personal act—like the “Erica, my dear” that no other vice-president could possibly have said—yet he was able now, as he always was, to demand her smile.

“What you’d really like me to tell you,” she said, letting the smile lighten her tone, “is which designs Mr. Bullard will like.”

Dudley tossed his handsome head with an appreciative chuckle directed at Walling. “Don, haven’t I always said she was a mind reader?”

Don Walling nodded in the demanded agreement but it was obviously tinged with an undertone of slight embarrassment. “I’m afraid that’s putting Miss Martin on a spot—asking her to outguess Mr. Bullard.”

“If I could outguess Mr. Bullard,” she said lightly, “I’d be a vice-president myself.”

Dudley’s laughter was instantaneous. “That’s not a qualification. If it were, there wouldn’t be any vice-presidents.”

She saw the conversation was fast reaching the forbidden ground of personal comment about Mr. Bullard and she cut it off with a quick announcement of the meeting.

For once Walt Dudley was caught off guard. His smile vanished. “But I’m taking the seven o’clock plane to Chicago. The furniture market opens Monday and we’re to have a preview showing for the chain and mail order boys tomorrow.” His last words weakened as if the hearing of what he had said destroyed its validity. “Well, I can probably get a later plane.” The smile was back. “Dust off my chair, Erica, I’ll be there.”

Walling was facing her, frowning. “I don’t see how I can possibly make it, Miss Martin. Everything’s set to start our test run on the molding process as soon as the five o’clock shift comes off.”

“Better hold it up,” Dudley advised, the older man to the younger.

“We can’t hold it up,” Walling protested. “They’ve already started reacting the finish resin. It has to come off on schedule or not at all. We’ve spent a whole month getting things organized for this one weekend. If we miss now it will be a month before we can get things set again for another factory test.”

“Couldn’t they go ahead without you?” Erica Martin asked, framing the question so that it was a way of telling him that nothing must stop him from attending the meeting. Don Walling was a new vice-president … it had been less than two years since he had moved up to the Executive Suite … there were still things that he had to be taught.

“I don’t see how. There’ll be decisions to make as they go along,” Walling said, “but under the circumstances, I don’t suppose there’s anything else that can be done except to hold up.”

He was learning, Erica decided, but there was more to learn … he hadn’t taught himself to hide his feelings.

“Cheer up, boy,” Dudley broke in with a forced laugh, the good actor covering a fellow player’s bad cue. “The meeting might turn out to be a quickie and then you could still get over to the factory in time.”

Erica Martin was tempted. She knew how important the test run was. She had seen the preliminary estimates that had been attached to the appropriation request. If the new molding process worked out it might well become the most important development in years. A month’s delay would be serious. If Avery were there he would almost certainly tell Walling to go ahead with the test run and not worry about the meeting. Yet she dared not yield to the temptation to speak for him. That was the frustrating prohibition that hemmed in her whole life. She knew, better than any living person, what Avery Bullard’s reaction would be to any given situation, yet she never dared anticipate it. She could only repeat his words, relay his orders, echo his commands. That was all. Anything else was beyond the border line.

Outside the door, Erica Martin groped, as she had groped so many times before, to find some bench mark of reason that would make it easier to orient her thinking and find some justification for the unpleasant situation in which she constantly found herself. She was always in the bufferland between Avery Bullard and his vice-presidents. She had nothing to do with the orders that she relayed, yet she was forced to be the object of the resentment and anger that they aroused. The demand for a six o’clock executive committee meeting was an arbitrary act of dictatorship, issued without consideration of anyone else’s plans or desires. She agreed. But it wasn’t her fault. Why should they hate her … and they did hate her, all of them! Walling was the only one who had dared to show it, but that was only because he was new, because he hadn’t learned yet that a mask was essential equipment for the vice-president’s trade. They all had their masks, Dudley’s was laughter, Alderson’s was his impassivity, Grimm’s was the thin blue veil of smoke that drifted up from his black pipe. Shaw’s was …

The name was a prod and she hurried around the corner to the door that was lettered: Loren P. Shaw, Vice-President and Comptroller. There was a meeting in progress and she withdrew quickly, intending to leave the message with Shaw’s secretary, but she was only a step away from his door when he popped out.

“Something, Miss Martin?”

“I’m sorry I disturbed you, Mr. Shaw.”

“Not at all, Miss Martin. Nothing important, just a little gathering of our section heads. Getting our plans laid for the midyear closing, you know.”

“Mr. Bullard is on his way home from New York. He’s called an executive committee meeting for six o’clock.”

Of all the masks, Loren Shaw’s was the best. Her eyes were directly on his, yet she saw not the faintest flicker of reaction, nor was there the slightest hint of an unusual tone in his voice as he said, “Apparently there must have been some developments in New York today.”

“Apparently,” she said quickly. Did he know what Avery had been working on in New York … or was he making a guileful attempt to get her to tell him what the meeting was about? In either event there was nothing more to be said. “Thank you, Mr. Shaw.”

“Not at all, Miss Martin. I’ll be there.”

She felt his eyes following her down the hall and it was not until she had turned the corner and was starting up the staircase that she heard his door close.

At the top of the staircase she suddenly realized why Shaw had been watching her. He was confirming the fact that he had been the last one that she had told. An unaccountable tremor of fear ran through her. She brushed it aside. Why should she be afraid of anything that Loren Shaw might think? He was only a vice-president. In less than three hours Avery would be here.

She walked through her own office and into Avery Bullard’s. She had drawn the shades against the sun and now she closed the door, shutting out all of the light except the soft cathedral glow that came through the stained-glass ports between the heavy oak beams. She walked behind his desk, stopping when she could reach out to touch the back of his chair. Then, slowly, her hands dropped until her fingertips had passed over the hard roughness of the oak and found the soft yielding flesh-touch of the red leather. Her eyes did not follow her hands. She was looking straight ahead. There was no break in the mask of her face.