The Dream Merchants Read online

  “Good, Johnny. How are you?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “How about lunch?” he asked.

  “Thank God somebody thought of that,” I told him. “I was afraid I’d have to eat alone.”

  “Where will we meet?” he asked.

  I had an idea. “George,” I said, “you come over here. I want you to see the office.”

  “It’s nice, eh, Johnny?” he asked, laughing softly.

  “Nice isn’t the word for it,” I said. “It’s like the reception room in one of those high-class French whorehouses. Anyway, you come over and see it and let me know what you think.”

  “One o’clock, Johnny,” he said, “I’ll be there.”

  We said good-by and hung up.

  I called Jane in and told her to get all the department heads up into my office. It was about time they heard from me anyway. Besides, what was the good of being boss if nobody showed up for you to boss?

  The meeting lasted until almost one o’clock. It was the usual crap. They were full of congratulations and good will. I told them the company was in bad shape and that we’d have to quit screwing around and buckle down to some serious work or first thing we’d know we’d all be out of work. As I said it I felt funny. Saying something like that in an office that had cost about fifteen grand to refurnish seemed entirely out of place to me, but apparently none of them thought about it that way. They were impressed. Before I closed the meeting I told them I wanted on my desk before the week was out an economy chart from every department showing who and what we could dispense with. We had to eliminate waste and inefficiency if we were to survive this economic crisis. Then I told them to go to lunch, and as they filed out I knew from the looks on their faces behind their smiles that not a one of them would be able to eat.

  When the door closed behind the last of them I went over to the wall where the bar was and looked for the button. I couldn’t find it. I walked over to Janey’s door and opened it.

  “I can’t find those God-damn buttons,” I told her.

  She looked startled for a second, then she got up. “I’ll show them to you,” she said.

  I followed her over to the wall and watched her press the button for the bar. As it swung around, I told her to mix me a drink while I went down to the can. Automatically I started for the outer door, but she stopped me.

  “Private,” she said, “remember?” She touched another button and the bathroom door slid back.

  Not answering, I went in. When I came out, George was in the office, a drink in his hand, and looking around the place. I went over to him and we shook. “Well, George,” I asked, “what do you think of it?”

  He smiled slowly, finished his drink and put the empty glass back on the bar, and said: “A few pictures of some naked ladies on the wall and I think maybe, Johnny, you’re right.”

  I finished my drink and we went to lunch. We went down to the English Grill. I didn’t want to go to Shor’s because of the crowd and he didn’t want to go to the Rainbow Room because of the height, so we compromised on the English Grill. It was in the arcade of the RCA Building and looked out on the fountain. It was still cool enough for them to have their skating rink out and George and I got a window seat and for a few minutes watched the skaters.

  The waiter came. I ordered grilled lamb chops and George ordered a salad. Had to watch his diet, he explained. We looked out the window again for a while and watched the skaters.

  At last he sighed. “Makes you wish you were young again, Johnny.”

  “Yeanh,” I said.

  He looked at me closely. “Oh, I’m sorry, Johnny, I forgot.”

  I smiled. “That’s all right, George. I don’t think much about it any more, and even if I did, what you said was still right.”

  He didn’t answer, but I knew what he was thinking about. It was my leg. My right one. I had lost it in the war. I had the latest thing in prosthetics now and if people didn’t know about it they could never guess it wasn’t mine that I walked around on.

  I remembered how I had felt that day Peter had come to visit me in the hospital on Staten Island. I was bitter, sore at the world. I wasn’t thirty years old and had lost my leg. I was just going to lie in the hospital the rest of my life and Peter had said: “So you lost a leg, Johnny. You still got your head on your shoulders, ain’t you? A man doesn’t live by how he can run around, he lives by what he’s got between his ears. So don’t be a fool, Johnny, come back to work and you’ll forget all about it in no time.”

  So I went back to work and Peter was right. I forgot all about it until that night that Dulcie called me a cripple. But Dulcie was a bitch and in time I even forgot about that.

  The waiter brought our order. We began to eat. We were halfway through with the meal when I began to talk. “George,” I said, “I’m glad you called and wanted to see me. If you hadn’t, I would have called you.”

  “About what?” he asked.

  “Business,” I said. “You know what the setup is. You know why I’ve been made president. Because Ronsen thinks I can bail him out.”

  “And you want to?” George asked.

  “Not particularly,” I answered candidly, “but you know how it is. You spend thirty years helping build something, you don’t like to let go just like that. Besides, it’s a job.”

  “And you need a job so bad?” he asked, smiling.

  I grinned at that. A job was one thing I didn’t need. I was worth a quarter of a million bucks. “Not in that sense, but I’m too young to lie around doing nothing.”

  He made no reply to that. After a mouthful of his salad he asked: “And what do you want I should do?”

  “I’d like you to play the terrible ten,” I said.

  Not a sign of what he was thinking flashed across his face. No surprise that I had just asked him to play what the trade had laughingly dubbed the ten worst pictures ever made. “You trying to close my theaters, Johnny?” he asked softly.

  “They’re not that bad, George,” I said. “And I’ll make a good deal for you. You can play ’em any way you like, short half or long half, fifty dollars a date; guarantee five hundred dates and you get them free after that.”

  George didn’t answer.

  I finished my chops, leaned back in my chair, and lit a cigarette. It was a good deal I had made. George had close to nine hundred theaters; that meant he would play them free in four hundred houses.

  “They’re not as bad as the papers say,” I threw in. “I saw them and I can say I saw a lot worse.”

  “Don’t try to sell me, Johnny,” he said softly, “I’ll buy.”

  “There’s just one more thing, George,” I said. “We need the dough right away.”

  He hesitated half a second before he answered: “Okay, Johnny, for you I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks, George,” I told him. “It’ll be a helluva help.”

  The waiter came up and cleared the table. I ordered coffee and apple pie, and George ordered black coffee.

  While we were on our coffee George asked me if I had spoken to Peter lately.

  I shook my head. My mouth was full of pie and I swallowed it before I answered. “I haven’t seen him in almost six months.”

  “Why don’t you give him a call, Johnny?” he said. “I should think he’d like to hear from you now.”

  “He can call me,” I answered shortly.

  “You still sore, eh, Johnny?”

  “Not sore,” I said. “Disgusted. He thinks I’m one of the people in the plot to steal the picture business. The anti-Semiten he calls them.”

  “You don’t think he believes that anymore, do you?”

  “How in hell would I know what he believes?” I asked. “He threw me out of his house that night I told him he would have to sell out or lose everything. He accused me of being a spy for Ronsen and part of the plot that was out to ruin him. He blamed everything that went wrong on me. The things he did that he said I should have stopped. Oh, no, George, I took it for
a long time, but that was the finish for me.”

  He took out a long cigar and placed it in his mouth and lit it slowly, all the while looking at me. When he had it lit to his satisfaction, he asked: “And what about Doris?”

  “She decided to string along with her old man. I haven’t heard from her either.” It hurt me even as I said it. I’d been a fool about many things, but just when I thought everything would turn out all right, it went wrong.

  “What did you expect her to do?” George asked. “I know the girl. Do you think she would run out on the old man when everything went wrong? She’s too fine for that.”

  At least he didn’t say a word about my futsing around all those years, I was grateful to him for that. “I didn’t want her to take a powder on the old guy. All I wanted to do was marry her.”

  “And how would that look to Peter?” he said.

  I didn’t answer. There wasn’t any answer. We knew how it would look to Peter, but it made me sore anyway. People had their own lives to live and both of us had given him more than enough of ours.

  George signaled for the check. The waiter brought it and he paid him. We walked out into the arcade and George turned to me. He held out his hand.

  I took it. His grip was firm and warm.

  “Call him,” he said. “You’ll both feel better.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “And good luck, Johnny,” he continued. “You’ll do all right. I’m glad you got the job instead of Farber. And I’ll bet that Peter is, too.”

  I thanked him and went back upstairs. All the way up in the elevator I kept thinking about calling Peter. When I got off on my floor I finally decided to hell with it. If he wanted to talk to me, he could call me.

  Jane’s office was empty as I went through it. I guessed she was still out to lunch. There was another stack of mail on my desk that had been placed there while I was out. It was piled pretty high and there was a little paperweight stuck on top of it to hold it down.

  The paperweight looked familiar. I picked it up. It was a little bust of Peter. I hefted it in my hand and, sitting down in my chair, looked at it. Some years ago Peter had thought that a bust of himself would prove to be an inspiration to every employee, so he had hired a sculptor, who had charged him a thousand bucks to make up this little statuette. Then we had found a small metalworks plant, had had a die cast, and soon the little bust was on every desk in the office.

  The statue was very flattering. It gave him more hair than I had ever remembered him having, a squarer chin than he ever had, a more aquiline nose than he had been born with, and an air of quiet determination that belonged no more to him than to the man in the moon. And underneath it, on the base of the bust, were the words: “Nothing is impossible to the man who is willing to work—Peter Kessler.”

  I got up again and, holding the bust in my hands, walked over to the bathroom and pressed the button. While the door rolled back I kept turning it over and over in my hand. When the door was open, I stepped through it. On the right-hand wall were a few little shelves for bottles and things. Carefully I placed Peter’s statue in the center of the top shelf and stepped back to look at it.

  The not true face that looked so real stared back at me. I turned and went back into my office and shut the door behind me. I picked up some of the mail and looked through it, but it didn’t do any good. I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking of Peter and the way he had looked at me when I had put him on the bathroom shelf. It wasn’t any use.

  Angry with myself, I got up and went back into the bathroom and took the bust out. I looked around my office for a place to put it where it wouldn’t disturb me. I settled for the top of the fireplace. It looked better there. It almost seemed to smile at me. I could almost hear his voice in the room saying: “That’s better, boy, that’s better.”

  “Is it, you old bastard?” I said aloud. Then I grinned and went back to my desk. Now I was able to concentrate on the mail.

  At three o’clock Ronsen came into my office. His round, well-fed face grinned at me. His eyes looked deep and self-satisfied behind their square-cut frameless glasses. “All settled, Johnny?” he asked in his surprisingly strong voice. When you first heard him speak you wondered how such a strong, commanding voice could come from such a round, comfortable body. Then you remembered this was Laurence G. Ronsen. In his class of society you were born with a deep commanding voice. I bet when he was a baby he didn’t cry for his mother’s tit, he commanded her to give it to him. Or maybe I was wrong, maybe mothers didn’t have tits in that class of society.

  “Yes, Larry,” I answered. That was another thing about him that I did not like. When I was around him I was subconsciously compelled to try to speak an almost perfect English, which was something I was constitutionally unable to do.

  “How did you make out with Pappas?” he asked.

  He must have his spies working overtime, I thought. Aloud I answered: “Pretty good. I sold him the terrible ten for a flat quarter of a million bucks.”

  His face lit up at the sound of that. I made my moment of triumph a little more complete. “In advance,” I added; “we’ll get the money tomorrow.”

  He rubbed his hands together and came over to the desk and slapped me on the shoulder. His hand was surprisingly heavy and I remembered he had also been an all-American fullback at college. “I knew you were the boy that could do it, Johnny. I knew it.”

  As quickly as his pleasure broke through his reserve it slipped back into its sheath. “We’re on the right track now, boy,” he said. “We can’t miss. Let’s play off that old product and tighten up our organization and pretty soon we’ll be in the black.”

  Then I told him about the meeting of the morning and what I had asked them to do. He listened attentively, nodding his head from time to time as I stressed the various things we had to do.

  When I had finished he said: “I can see you’re going to have plenty to do around here.”

  “Christ, yes,” I answered. “I’ll probably stay in New York the next three months to keep on top of things.”

  “Well, it’s important enough,” he agreed. “If you don’t control things here, we might as well close up shop.”

  Just then my phone rang. Jane’s voice came through: “Doris Kessler calling from California.”

  I hesitated a second. “Put her on.”

  I heard the click-click, then Doris’s voice: “Hello, Johnny.”

  “Hello, Doris,” I said. I wondered why she had called; her voice sounded strange.

  “Papa had a stroke, Johnny. He’s calling for you.”

  Automatically I looked over at the statue on the fireplace. Ronsen followed my glance and saw it there. “When did it happen, Doris?”

  “About two hours ago. It’s awful. First we got a telegram that Junior was killed in a battle in Spain. Papa took it awful hard. He fainted. We hurried him to bed and called the doctor. He said it was a stroke and he didn’t know how long Papa would last. Maybe one day, maybe two. Then Papa opened his eyes and said: ‘Get me Johnny, I got to talk to him. Get me Johnny!’” She began to cry.

  It only took a moment, then I heard myself saying: “Don’t cry, Doris. I’ll be out there tonight. Wait for me.”

  “I’ll be waiting, Johnny,” she said, and I hung up the phone.

  I clicked my receiver up and down a few seconds until Jane came back on. “Get me a ticket to California on the next plane out. Call me as soon as it’s confirmed, I’ll leave from here.” I hung up the phone without waiting for her answer.

  Ronsen stood up. “What’s wrong, Johnny?”

  I lit a cigarette; my hands were shaking a little. “Peter just had a stroke,” I said. “I’m going out there.”

  “What about the plans here?” he asked.

  “They’ll have to keep for a few days,” I answered.

  “Now, Johnny”—he held up a quieting hand—“I know just how you feel, but the board won’t like it. Besides, what can you do out there?”

&
nbsp; I looked at him and stood up behind my desk. I didn’t pay any attention to his question, didn’t bother to answer it. “Frig the board,” I said.

  He was the board and he knew that I knew it. His mouth tightened. He turned and angrily left the office.

  I watched him go. For the first time since I had decided to take the job that night Ronsen had offered it to me, my mind was at peace.

  “Frig you too,” I said to the closed door. What did that son of a bitch know about the last thirty years?

  THIRTY YEARS

  1908

  1

  Johnny held the shirt in his hand as he listened to the church bell toll. Eleven o’clock. “Only forty minutes more to make the train,” he thought as he savagely resumed packing. Angrily he threw his remaining clothing into the valise and snapped it shut. Placing one knee on its corner, he put his weight on it and cinched the strap around it. Finished, he straightened up and picked the valise from the bed and carried it out of the room through the store and placed it on the floor near the door.

  He stood there a moment looking around him. In the dark the machines seemed to be mocking at him, jeering at his failure. His lips tightened as he walked back past them and into the little room. There was one thing more he had to do. The most unpleasant part of this whole nasty business. Leave a note for Peter telling him why he was running off in the middle of the night.

  It would have been easier if Peter hadn’t been so good to him. For that matter, if the whole family hadn’t been so damned nice. Esther having him up for dinner almost every night, the kids calling him “Uncle Johnny.” He could feel his throat tighten up a little as he sat down at the table. Somehow this was the kind of family he had always dreamed about in those long, lonesome years he had worked on the carnival.

  He took out a sheet of paper and a pencil and wrote the words: “Dear Peter,” across the top of it and then stared at the paper. How do you say good-by and thanks to people who have been so kind to you? Do you just casually write the words: “So long, it’s been nice knowing you, thanks for everything,” and forget them?

  He put the end of the pencil in his mouth and chewed on it reflectively. He put the pencil down on the table and lit a cigarette. After a few minutes he picked up the pencil again and began to write.