she was not greedy. What really worried her was that she suspected it was a sign of age.
Today was her fortieth birthday.
She had always been slender, and she looked good in expensive tailored clothes. She had hated the draped, low-slung fashions of the twenties and rejoiced when waists came back into fashion. She spent a lot of time and money shopping, and she enjoyed it. Sometimes she used the excuse that she had to look right because she was in the fashion business, but in truth she did it for pleasure.
Her father had started a shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts, outside Boston, in the year Nancy was born, 1899. He got high-class shoes sent over from London and made cheap copies; then he made a selling point out of his plagiarism. His advertisements showed a $29 London shoe next to a $10 Black’s copy and asked: “Can you tell the difference?” He worked hard and did well, and during the Great War he won the first of the military contracts that were still a staple of the business.
In the twenties he built up a chain of stores, mostly in New England, selling only his shoes. When the Depression hit, he reduced the number of styles from a thousand to fifty and introduced a standard price of $6.60 for every pair of shoes regardless of style. His audacity paid off, and while everyone else was going broke, Black’s profits increased.
He used to say that it cost as much to make bad shoes as good ones, and there was no reason why working people should be poorly shod. At a time when poor folk were buying shoes with cardboard soles that wore out in a few days, Black’s Boots were cheap and long-lasting. Pa was proud of this, and so was Nancy. For her, the good shoes the family made justified the grand Back Bay house they lived in, the big Packard with the chauffeur, their parties and their pretty clothes and their servants. She was not like some of the rich kids, who took inherited wealth for granted.
She wished she could say the same for her brother.
Peter was thirty-eight. When Pa died five years ago, he left Peter and Nancy equal shares in the company, forty percent each. Pa’s sister, Aunt Tilly, got ten percent, and the remaining ten went to Danny Riley, Pa’s disreputable old lawyer.
Nancy had always assumed she would take over when Pa died. Pa had favored her over Peter. A woman running a company was unusual, but not unknown, especially in the clothing industry.
Pa had a deputy, Nat Ridgeway, a very able lieutenant who made it quite clear that he thought he was the best man for the job of chairman of Black’s Boots.
But Peter wanted it too, and he was the son. Nancy had always felt guilty about being Pa’s favorite. Peter would be humiliated and bitterly disappointed if he did not inherit his father’s mantle. Nancy did not have the heart to deal him such a crushing blow. So she agreed that Peter should take over. Between them, she and her brother owned eighty percent of the stock, so when they were in agreement they got their way.
Nat Ridgeway had resigned and gone to work for General Textiles in New York. He was a loss to the business, but in another way he was a loss to Nancy. Just before Pa died, Nat and Nancy had started dating.
Nancy had not dated anyone since her husband, Sean, died. She had not wanted to. But Nat had picked his time perfectly, for after five years she was beginning to feel that her life was all work and no fun, and she was ready for a little romance. They had enjoyed a few quiet dinners and a theater visit or two, and she had kissed him good night, quite warmly; but that was as far as it had gone when the crisis hit, and when Nat left Black’s the romance ended too, leaving Nancy feeling cheated.
Since then, Nat had done spectacularly well at General Textiles, and he was now president of the company. He had also got married, to a pretty blond woman ten years younger than Nancy.
By contrast, Peter had done badly. The truth was he was not up to the job of chairman. In the five years during which he had been in charge, the business had gone steeply downhill. The stores were no longer making a profit, just breaking even. Peter had opened a swanky shoe store on Fifth Avenue in New York, selling expensive fashion shoes for ladies, and that took all his time and attention—but it lost money.
Only the factory, which Nancy managed, was making money. In the mid-thirties, as America was beginning to come out of the Depression, she had started making very cheap open-toed sandals for women, and they had been very popular. She was convinced that in women’s shoes the future lay in light, colorful products that were cheap enough to throw away.
She could sell double the number of shoes she was making, if she had the manufacturing capacity. But her profits were swallowed up by Peter’s losses and there was nothing left for expansion.
Nancy knew what had to be done to save the business.
The chain of stores would have to be sold, perhaps to their managers, to raise cash. The money from the sale would be used to modemize the factory and switch to the conveyor-belt style of production that was being introduced in all the more progressive shoe-manufacturing plants. Peter would have to hand over the reins to her, and confine himself to running his New York store, working within strict cost controls.
She was willing for him to retain the title of chairman and the prestige that went with it, and she would continue to subsidize his store from the factory’s profits, within limits; but he would have to give up all real power.
She had put these proposals in a written report, for Peter’s eyes only. He had promised to think about it. Nancy had told him, as gently as she could, that the decline of the company could not be allowed to continue, and that if he did not agree to her plan, she would have to go over his head to the board—which meant that he would be sacked and she would become chairman. She hoped fervently that he would see sense. If he were to provoke a crisis, it was sure to end with a humiliating defeat for him and a family split that might never be repaired.
So far he had not taken offense. He seemed calm and thoughtful, and remained friendly. They decided to go to Paris together. Peter bought fashion shoes for his store, and Nancy shopped for herself at the couturiers’ and kept an eye on Peter’s expenditures. Nancy had loved Europe, Paris especially, and she had been looking forward to London; then war was declared.
They decided to return to the States immediately; but so did everyone else, of course, and they had terrible trouble getting passage. In the end Nancy got tickets on a ship leaving from Liverpool. After a long journey from Paris by train and ferry, they had arrived here yesterday, and they were due to embark today.
She was unnerved by England’s war preparations. Yesterday afternoon a bellhop had come to her room and installed an elaborate light-proof screen over the window. All windows had to be completely blacked out every evening so that the city would not be visible from the air at night. The windowpanes were crisscrossed with adhesive tape so splinters of glass would not fly when the city was bombed. There were stacks of sandbags at the front of the hotel and an underground air-raid shelter at the back.
Her terrible fear was that the United States would get into the war and her sons, Liam and Hugh, would be conscripted. She remembered Pa saying, when Hitler first came to power, that the Nazis would stop Germany going Communist; and that was the last time she had thought about Hitler. She had too much to do to worry about Europe. She was not interested in international politics, the balance of power, or the rise of Fascism: such abstractions seemed foolish when set against the lives of her sons. The Poles, the Austrians, the Jews and the Slavs would have to take care of themselves. Her job was to take care of Liam and Hugh.
Not that they needed much taking care of. Nancy had married young and had her children right away, so the boys were grown up. Liam was married and living in Houston, and Hugh was in his final year at Yale. Hugh was not studying as hard as he should, and she had been disturbed to learn that he had bought a fast sports car, but he was well past the age of listening to his mother’s advice. So, as she could not keep them out of the army, there was not much to draw her home.
She knew that war would be good for business. There would be an economic boom in America, and people would have more money to buy shoes. Whether the U.S. got into the war or not, the military was bound to be expanded, and that meant increased orders on her government contracts. All in all, she guessed her sales would double and perhaps treble over the next two or three years—another reason for modernizing her factory.
However, all that paled into insignificance beside the glaring, awful possibility that her own sons would be conscripted, to fight and be wounded and perhaps to die in agony on a battlefield.
A porter came for her bags and interrupted her morbid thoughts. She asked the man whether Peter had yet dispatched his luggage. In a thick local accent she could hardly understand, he told her that Peter had sent his bags to the ship last night.
She went along to Peter’s room to see whether he was ready to leave. When she knocked, the door was opened by a maid, who told her in the same guttural accent that he had left yesterday.
