striking. Mr. Hatherly was sensitive about the odd figure he cut, and disliked going anywhere alone. When Victor had worked with him for a few years, he was ordered to get to the old man’s apartment, on upper Fifth Avenue, at eight each morning and walk him to work. They never talked much along the way, but then Hatherly was not loquacious. At the close of the business day, Victor either put him into a taxi or walked him home. When the old man went off to Bar Harbor without his eyeglasses, it was Victor who got up in the middle of the night and put the glasses on the early-morning plane. When the old man wanted to send a wedding present, it was Victor who bought it. When the old man was ailing, it was Victor who got him to take his medicine. In the gossip of the trade Victor’s position was naturally the target for a lot of jocularity, criticism, and downright jealousy. Much of the criticism was unfair, for he was merely an ambitious young man who expressed his sense of business enterprise by feeding pills to Mr. Hatherly. Running through all his amenability was an altogether charming sense of his own identity. When he felt that he had grounds for complaint, he said so. After working for eight years under Mr. Hatherly’s thumb, he went to the old man and said that he thought his salary was inadequate. The old man rallied with a masterful blend of injury, astonishment, and tenderness. He took Victor to his tailor and let him order four suits. A few months later, Victor again complained?this time about the vagueness of his position in the firm. He was hasty, the old man said, in objecting to his lack of responsibility. He was scheduled to make a presentation, in a week or two, before the board of directors. This was more than Victor had expected, and he was content. Indeed, he was grateful. This was America! He worked hard over his presentation. He read it aloud to the old man, and Mr. Hatherly instructed him when to raise and when to lower his voice, whose eye to catch and whose to evade, when to strike the table and when to pour himself a glass of water. They discussed the clothing that he would wear. Five minutes before the directors’ meeting began, Mr. Hatherly seized the papers, slammed the door in Victor’s face, and made the presentation himself.
He called Victor into his office at the end of that trying day. It was past six, and the secretaries had locked up their teacups and gone home. “I’m sorry about the presentation,” the old man mumbled. His voice was heavy. Then Victor saw that he had been crying. The old man slipped off the high desk chair that he used to increase his height and walked around the large office. This was, in itself, a demonstration of intimacy and trust. “But that isn’t what I want to talk about,” he said.
“I want to talk about my family. Oh, there’s no misery worse than bad blood in a family! My wife”?he spoke with disgust?“is a stupid woman. The hours of pleasure I’ve had from my children I can count on the fingers of one hand. It may be my fault,” he said, with manifest insincerity. “What I want you to do now is to help me with my boy, junior. I’ve brought Junior up to respect money. I made him earn every nickel he got until he was sixteen, so it isn’t my fault that he’s a damn fool with money, but he is. I just don’t have the time to bother with his bad checks any more. I’m a busy man. You know that. What I want you to do is act as junior’s business adviser. I want you to pay his rent, pay his alimony, pay his maid, pay his household expenses, and give him a cash allowance once a week.”
For a moment, anyhow, Victor seemed to breathe the freshness of a considerable skepticism. He had been cheated, that afternoon, out of a vital responsibility and was being burdened now with a foolish one. The tears could be hypocritical. The fact that this request was made to him in a building that had been emptied and was unnaturally quiet and at a time of day when the fading light outside the windows might help to bend his decision were all tricks in the old man’s hand. But, even seen skeptically, the hold that Hatherly had on him was complete. “Mr. Hatherly told me to tell you,” Victor could always say. “I come from Mr. Hatherly.”
“Mr. Hatherly…” Without this coupling of names his own voice would sound powerless. The comfortable and becoming shirt whose cuffs he shot in indecision had been given to him by Mr. Hatherly. Mr. Hatherly had introduced him into the 7th Regiment. Mr. Hatherly was his only business identity, and to separate himself from this source of power might be mortal. He didn’t reply.
“I’m sorry about the presentation,” the old man repeated. “I’ll see that you make one next year. Promise.” He gave his shoulders a hitch to show that he was moving on from this subject to another. “Meet me at the Metropolitan Club tomorrow at two,” he said briskly. “I have to buy out Worden at lunch. That won’t take long. I hope he brings his lawyer with him. Call his lawyer in the morning and make sure that his papers are in order. Give him hell for me. You know how to do it. You’ll help me a great deal by taking care of Junior,” he said with great feeling. “And take care of yourself, Victor. You’re all I have.”
After lunch the next day, the old man’s lawyer met them at the Metropolitan Club and went with them to an apartment, where Junior was waiting. He was a thickset man a good ten years older than Victor, and he seemed resigned to having his income taken out of his hands. He called Mr. Hatherly Poppa and sadly handed over to his father a bundle of unpaid bills. With Victor and the lawyer, Mr. Hatherly computed Junior’s income and his indebtedness, took into consideration his alimony payments, and arrived at a reasonable estimate for his household expenses and the size of his allowance, which he was to get at Victor’s office each Monday morning. Junior’s goose was cooked in half an hour.
He came around for his allowance every Monday morning and submitted his household bills to Victor. He sometimes hung around the office and talked about his father?uneasily, as if he might be overheard. All the minutiae of Mr. Hatherly’s life?that he was sometimes shaved three times a day and that he owned fifty pairs of shoes?interested Victor. It was the old man who cut these interviews short. “Tell him to come in and get his money and go,” the old man said. “This is a business office. That’s something he’s never understood.”
Meanwhile, Victor had met Theresa and was thinking of getting married. Her full name was Theresa Mercereau; her parents were French but she had been born in the United States. Her parents had died when she was young, and her guardian had put her into fourth-string boarding schools. One knows what these places are like. The headmaster resigns over the Christmas holidays. He is replaced by the gymnastics instructor. The heating plant breaks down in February and the water pipes freeze. By this time, most of the parents who are concerned about their children have transferred them to other schools, and by spring there are only twelve or thirteen boarders left. They wander singly or in pairs around the campus, killing time before supper. It has been apparent to them for months that Old Palfrey Academy is dying, but in the first long, bleakly lighted days of spring this fact assumes new poignancy and force. The noise of a quarrel comes from the headmaster’s quarters, where the Latin instructor is threatening to sue for back wages. The smell from the kitchen windows indicates that there will be cabbage again. A few jonquils are in bloom, and the lingering light and the new ferns enjoin the stranded children to look ahead, ahead, but at the back of their minds there is a suspicion that the jonquils and the robins and the evening star imperfectly conceal the fact that this hour is horror, naked horror. Then a car roars up the driveway. “I am Mrs. Hubert Jones,” a woman exclaims, “and I have come to get my daughter…”
Theresa was always one of the last to be rescued, and these hours seemed to have left some impression on her. It was the quality of an especial sadness, a delicacy that was never forlorn, a charming air of having been wronged, that one remembered about her.
