THE WORLD IS COMPOSED of two kinds of people: those who want things badly enough to sacrifice human dignity to obtain them, and those who do not.
I suppose that the incident between Denis Crater and myself brought out one of the basic questions of our time: was my throwing up my job in his company the simple preservation of a minimal integrity, or was it a hysterical act of self-exhibitionism? My children think the former; my wife, the latter. I believe that it was simply a happy chance—a chance that operated as the catharsis of an ancient apprehension.
For right up to the day of my supposedly quixotic decision, I was never what I seemed to be. Who is? I seemed prosperous, complacent, stuffy, a typical 1970 organization man. I was an executive vice-president of Arco Home Appliances, with headquarters at Armonk. I had a house with a three-car garage and a swimming pool at New Canaan. I was an Episcopalian and played golf. Can’t you see me? And, yes, I had a boy, Freddy, at Yale, who wanted to be a professional guitarist, and a daughter, Alice, at N.Y.U., who wanted to blow up the world. I had come to accept their affectionate contempt as all a father could ask. I had even decided that it might be the proper role of the husband-spouse of the suburbs to act as a foil, to make his son feel like Segovia, his daughter like Emma Goldman, and his wife . . . well, to make Matilda feel that she was alive.
But, of course, underneath I seethed with anxiety. Again, who doesn’t? I was constantly afraid that I would lose my job, my wife, my little pile of stocks and bonds. When I went to the doctor for my annual checkup I was convinced that he would find a symptom of cancer, and when I went up in a plane I was sure it would crash. But in addition to these perfectly normal reactions, I was haunted by the fear that I would show my fear. I was scared pink of looking pink. I always perfectly understood the man in my squadron in World War II who tried to jump out of a bomber in a raid over Berlin. He preferred death to the fear of death. And I suppose the reason that I could never understand why the people around me saw me as so different from my own image of myself—saw me, indeed, as a pompous, self-confident ass—was that a lifetime’s effort to cover my fear had succeeded.
The terrible thing about Denis Crater was that he seemed to have penetrated my disguise. I thought I could make this out in his leer down the table in board meetings, in his sly, friendly, mocking questions. I thought I could make it out in the falsely protecting arm that he placed about my shoulder if we walked down a corridor together. Denis was like a wet, blustering natural disaster given an ironic female name by hydrographic officers, a flood that drenched without enriching, that blew without cooling, that destroyed without cleansing. It had taken only one of his huffs and puffs to engulf my little Arco Home Appliances in the damp embrace of his amalgamated empire. Oh, these mergers! That a man could wake up in New Canaan, free, happy and seemingly secure, and drive over to Armonk to discover that he was as much a slave as a Goth in the court of Caligula!
I suppose that Denis Crater had come to think of himself as a kind of god. He made royal progresses to his various corporations, accompanied by a little permanent suite of yes men. He was a fine-looking man, I admit, for seventy, big and bony and bald, very Caesarish, and he had a habit of tossing his arms about as he talked of his abiding affection for the human material in his employ, dropping such phrases as “How blessed I am in my friends!” or “What have I done to deserve so much fun out of life?” Of course, it was all part of a public relations act in which he had come to believe and of which perhaps an essential part was the universally recognized obverse side of the coin: his total ruthlessness. At his immense birthday parties you could hear the wives of minor officers murmur with squeals of almost sexual pleasure: “Isn’t he marvelous? Of course, he doesn’t mean a word of it. He’d give you the sack if it would net him two bucks!”
But to the point. Crater had a little personal habit that fairly mesmerized the officers of his subsidiary corporations. It was a habit that seemed unconscious but that was almost certainly not so. And one that nobody ever mentioned. For even to have whispered it might have been to admit a personal inferiority to one’s boss that was hardly decent in a land once visited by the rays of the American dream. The little habit was this: At staff meetings, which were largely taken up by Crater’s harangues urging us to redouble our efforts and remold ourselves in the image of our great chairman, coffee was always served. Crater would drink half a cup, almost at a gulp, and then, when the waiter with the Silex approached with a refill, he would dispose of his slops by dumping them into the cup of his nearest neighbor.
Sometimes the neighbor’s cup was already empty and could contain the fresh infusion without overflowing. Sometimes it was half-full, so that the boss’s unwanted residue would cause a cascade into the saucer. And sometimes the neighbor’s cup was still replete, and the little operation resulted in a messy spill onto the tablecloth. But whether Crater’s rejected coffee was contained in its new receptacle or caused a degree of flooding, the expression of the proprietor of the abused vessel invariably retained the same impassivity. It never betrayed by so much as a twitch of the muscles or a glance downward that anything untoward had been noted.
I was hypnotized by this little ritual. Was it a despot’s reminder of absolute power, the kicking of a faithful dog, or was it a demonstration of trust and affection, like Napoleon’s tweaking the nose or pulling the ear of a favored dragoon? I always avoided the seat next to Crater. I even dared to come late to meetings, rushing in with an armful of papers as if I had been detained by a customer and slipping into an empty chair against the wall. And I always shook my head at the waiter with the coffee Silex so that I would not have a cup available in case the great man, rising and circling the table as he talked, should happen to carry his cup with him and feel the sudden need of a hot refill as he passed my chair. Sometimes I thought he noticed my maneuvers. Sometimes it seemed to me that I caught the flash of humor in those large opaque eyes, a kind of threat that my turn was coming.
And of course it did.
“No, no, Tommy Trimbolt, you’re not slipping down to the end of the table today. I have reserved thee this empty chair beside me. Sit down, my friend, sit down. Sit down and elucidate us on why it was necessary to take eighteen thousand more square feet on Lydecker Street after I had canceled the Schwartz dryer sale. Of course, I realize that there must be an answer . . . no, no, my dear Tommy, you needn’t go to the Silex. We have your steaming coffee right here waiting for thee.”
Go to the Silex? I had made no such move. Explain the Lydecker lease? I had already explained it. I sat down beside Crater and began haltingly to repeat my explanation, but I could not look at him. I stared down at my papers and mumbled my words, and all the while, out of the corner of my eye, I watched the hot, brimming cup of coffee at my side.
“Okay, Tommy, okay. That seems to answer the question. Shall we proceed to Jerry O’Brien’s report? Oh, waiter! Some more coffee here.”
No condemned criminal can have watched the masked headsman approach him on the scaffold with more dread than I watched the waiter with the Silex move forward in response to Crater’s nod. Hypnotized, even though knowing the unspoken rule that one should avert one’s eyes from the deed, I now frankly stared at the long, gray, hairless hand of my boss as it moved to his cup. I saw the fingers with dirty nails raise it and approach a point above my own. The brown, creamy substance cascaded into my cup, flooding it, flooding the saucer, and causing a wide, shameful stain on the tablecloth. I looked up at Crater and smiled.
That was on a Monday morning. On Friday night, when I got home, I knew by Matilda’s meeting me in the front hall that something had happened. She was holding a copy of the picture magazine See.
“Have you read this?”
“Not yet. Does it have the profile of Crater?”
“It does.”
“I don’t suppose I’m mentioned.”
“Oh, but you are.”
Matilda’s angular features, her pale, white, dead skin, her sandy, bobbed hair, her long, pointed nose, seemed all to coalesce, for the first time, into something almost formidable, something that appeared to be calling for an account. She had always had a faintly Tudor look, but the spirit that might have been expected to lurk behind that cool mask had hitherto been curiously absent. Matilda was a woman of long silences, of strange inertias. It had been possible for us to be married for twenty-five years with almost no confrontations. She had a rather graceful way of accepting our lack of communion as if it were the common lot. Or had had.
“Let me see.”
I sat on the hall bench and read the article. It was written by a radical journalist who had carried little but his bad manners from the Greenwich Village rag in which he had made his name to the big illustrated weekly in which he hoped to make his fortune. He had a lot of obvious fun with the arrogance of Denis Crater, yet his piece was still infused with an admiration that struck me as being as basic as that of any of the latter’s vice-presidents. He must have been present at the Monday board meeting, for the little episode of the coffee slops was related in full: “Executive Vice-President Thomas Trimbolt surveyed sadly the creamy, cold bilge into which his steaming black brew had been converted. Like Job, he had no complaints. God had spoken. That was all.”
I laughed. “How true.”
Matilda nodded, and I noted that not for a moment had she questioned the accuracy of the story. Oh, she knew her man! But perhaps not quite as well as she imagined.
“The children are here,” she said grimly. “Freddy drove over from New Haven, and Alice came up from N.Y.U. They’re both very upset. They can’t believe you’d put up with such insulting conduct.”
“I thought it was precisely what they could believe.”
“You’re their father, after all.” Never had I seen Matilda so intense, so organized. Mother love had evidently galvanized her into unexampled activity. “And I’ve figured it out. Here’s what you must tell them. Say that before Mr. Crater did what he did, he asked you, in a voice that the reporter couldn’t catch, if you were going to drink your coffee.”
“And I told him I was!” I exclaimed with a shout of laughter.
“Tommy, this is serious. Your children have become laughingstocks in their colleges.”
“Let us talk to them,” I said, rising. Decidedly, I was enjoying myself.
They were playing records in the living room, but as a token of the gravity of the occasion Freddy turned the machine off. He was big, blond, hulking, hirsute, helpless, with the mildest blue eyes I had ever known. It struck me at once that these eyes were looking at me for the first time. Not so Alice’s. She had seen me before. She was a militant protester of all the usual things, broad-browed, thin-lipped, straight-haired, with female vanity manifest in the perfect fit of her blue jeans and in her balletlike movements.
“Your father has a perfectly good explanation,” Matilda blurted out. “He never touches coffee, and Mr. Crater knows it.”
“But I always ask for a fresh cup so he can use it for his slops.”
“Tommy, I warn you!” Matilda cried harshly.
“It’s a kind of ritual,” I explained. “I present the backside, and he presents the kick. Like the priest and the fatted calf. Does either really have a choice?”
“Dad, listen.” Freddy strode up and down the carpet, his big hands pushed into his small hip pockets. “This is really rough. At lunch today five guys filed by my table and dumped coffee in my cup. I took a poke at one of them, and the place was in an uproar.”
“He may not get into a fraternity!” Matilda exclaimed.
“Oh, Ma!” Alice cried in disgust. “Freddy doesn’t care about that. Freddy and I simply object to having a name that has become overnight a symbol of obeisance to the establishment. A trademark of the fawning attitude of organization men to economic barbarians! We want to know what Dad is going to do about it.”
“What can I do about it, Alice?”
“You can announce to the press that you will no longer work for such a boor. You can resign.”
“And who will support you?”
“That’s a detail. We’ll get along.”
This, I had to concede, was true. At least so far as Alice was concerned. The young are not worldly.
“But your mother and I might not,” I pointed out. “There are too many things we want. The world is divided into two kinds of people, Alice. Those who want things and those who don’t. If you want something badly enough, you will forget dignity. If you don’t, you won’t.”
“Oh, Dad, do you really think the world is made up entirely of little company back-stabbers in gray suits? There are bigger people. I know some!”
“Only if they don’t want anything,” I insisted. “And I’m not confining myself to little company back-stabbers. No, indeed, I’m talking about big people. As big as you want. Your great statesman has to pander to the mob to win an election. Your great soldier has to smirk and flatter to get a command. Even in love it’s so. Won’t the true lover submit to humiliation? You’ll find out all about it someday, Alice. You’ll meet some bearded, leather-jacketed bully who’ll strike you as possessing the political keys of the future, and you’ll do anything for him.”
“Tommy!” my wife warned me again.
“She will, Matilda! And when you want something badly enough, fawning becomes noble. It becomes sacrifice.”
“No!” both children cried.
“You can’t face the world,” I told them, shaking my head. “You can’t face the world as it is.” Then I paused as a sudden thought struck me. “Perhaps nobody can. Perhaps, really, nobody can.”
“Surely Mr. Crater can,” Alice said sneeringly.
“Oh, he least of all.”
Freddy turned on me now with unconcealed disgust. “But even if what you say is true, how can you care enough about getting ahead in household appliances to put up with a gorilla like Crater?”
And then a funny thing happened to me. I realized that I didn’t care enough. I realized that I didn’t give a damn. I had only cared that what had happened should not have happened.
“Maybe you’re right, Freddy!” I exclaimed. “Maybe I’ve always had myself wrong. Maybe, after all, I belong to those who don’t want things.” I looked bemusedly about at these three strangers who constituted my family. “Whereas you three are all wanters. Yes! I see it. Matilda, you want your children’s love. Of course you do. There’s nothing in the world you wouldn’t do to keep it. And Freddy wants to be respected by his pals at Yale. He’d give anything to have yesterday’s anonymity back. And Alice wants to be able to worship some Weatherman and make bombs. Ah, you poor dear creatures! You all suffer from the pathos of loneliness in an overpopulated world. I pity you. I, who want nothing.”
Well, this provoked an uproar. Never before had I taken the offensive with them. We talked till late at night, and by the time we all went to bed I was actually “communicating” with my son and daughter. That is, they had ceased to treat me as a total idiot. Matilda was another matter. She was obviously apprehensive of the contents of the Pandora’s box that the children had opened, but what could she do? She had started it, after all.
The next morning, at the office, I was summoned by Mr. Crater.
“My dear fellow,” he began, in a peculiarly beneficent tone, as soft and mauve as the curtains that rimmed his cage of glass on the top of our building, “I have news for thee. How would thee like a little sojourn, say for three years, in Topeka? I see you in soap pads. Yes, dear friend, I definitely see you in soap pads. I looked at a memo only this morning that I had jotted down just a year ago. It read, quite simply, ‘Trimbolt. Soap pads.’”
“Did it read, Trimbolt. Soap pads. Executive vice-president’?”
“No, I do not recall that it did.”
“So this, then, is a demotion?”
The opaque eyes were half-concealed by heavy lids. “You might call it that.”
“Might thou?”
“I might.”
“And might thou tellest me why?”
“I have a little test, Tommy. A little test of executive capacity. It’s a very simple trick, but it never fails.”
“But we all know it, of course! The coffee slops. The man who sits by while that is done to him cannot be an executive type.”
Crater’s smile seemed not merely to congratulate me. It was a beaming sun that could afford to illuminate the rulers and the ruled.
“So, my dear fellow, you see!”
“Certainly. But I also see that you haven’t an executive in any of your companies. For who has passed your test?”
Crater’s smile faded slowly as he found himself in the novel position of having to answer. Then it beamed again as he saw his way. “Well, there you are, dear fellow! None of them has. It’s why I can never retire!”
I rose. “That’s a good answer, and the one I expected of you. But of course it’s all a farce. You adopted the test theory when you read that article in See. For you cannot face the facts. You cannot bear to live in a world where a man will deliberately cringe, yea, fawn and prostrate himself, before such a thing as Denis Crater. I hardly blame you. It’s a funny world. But I see it.”
Crater’s voice was even silkier. “My dear fellow, I begin to wonder if I even see thee in soap pads.”
“Oh, of course I’m quitting. I only came around this morning to see if I could call you a son of a bitch without experiencing the least titillation, the least pleasure. Simply as a matter of course. I find that I can.”
Crater ran around the desk to grip my shoulders. “Tommy boy, I love you. Stay with me! Succeed me!”
But I did not even smile as I shook myself loose and strode from the room. He bored me. That was all.