Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley

had collapsed on a pile of furniture pads.
    Sometime during the night the lights flashed on. Don awakened enough to be conscious that Karl Eric Kassel was giving some prospective client a preview showing as bait for his trap. Don heard the man’s voice and there was something about its timbre that instantly completed his awakening. He listened and what he heard gave him a vindictive satisfaction. The man’s words were slashing through the armor of Karl Eric Kassel’s pretense. Finally there was a pause and then the heart thrust. “Kassel, who actually designed this furniture?”
    Afterwards, over the years, when Don Walling was tempted to charge Karl Eric Kassel with all the bitterness and anger that he had felt during those two long years, there was always the book-balancing memory of the way the red-bearded charlatan had redeemed himself that night in the World’s Fair house. Kassel had said, directly and simply, “This house and everything in it was designed by a very talented young man named Don Walling.”
    â€œI want to see him,” the voice had demanded—and Don, more awakened than he had ever been in his life, unconscious of his grimy hands and his rumpled work clothes, unconscious of Karl Eric Kassel, unconscious of everything in the world except the necessity of obeying that command, walked out through the door to meet Avery Bullard.
    Somehow, unnoticed, Karl Eric Kassel disappeared and left them alone. They wandered down to the lakefront, Bullard talking, questioning, gently probing. There was no sword edge in his voice now, but it had lost none of its exciting quality. It was the voice of strength and power, of integrity and purpose, of fearless imagination that leaped skyward with the same magic that the rising sun streaked the sky over Lake Michigan, setting even the water aflame.
    Karl Eric Kassel was not surprised when Don told him that he was going to work for Avery Bullard. “I know,” he said simply. “Good luck. He’s a great man.”
    During those next two years, the years before the merger that created the Tredway Corporation, Don Walling worked closely with Avery Bullard. All his life he had been searching for a total challenge. Now he had found it. No matter how much energy and thought he poured into whatever they were working on, Avery Bullard could outwork him and outthink him. The range of the older man’s ability was a constant goad. He would come rushing in, take one quick look at a design that Don had been working on for days and instantly put his finger on something which, the moment Don saw it, he recognized as a flaw that he should have caught and corrected himself. Even more exasperating was the way Avery Bullard could snatch up a pencil and redraw a line that Don, no matter how long he struggled, could seldom improve. Competence is a whip in the hands of a taskmaster, and the lash cuts all the deeper when the whip is held by a perfectionist. Avery Bullard was unrelenting. Once he made Don turn out twenty-six sketches for a little brass toe on a Duncan Phyfe table. When a sketch was finally selected and the first trial casting made, Avery Bullard took one look and literally threw it out of the window of his twenty-fourth floor office. Then they started all over again. Don agreed that the end result was worth all that it had cost in money and time. It was closer to perfection.
    After the merger, which was the first major fulfillment of the dream picture that Avery Bullard had drawn in that predawn hour on the shores of Lake Michigan, he had sent Don Walling to Pittsburgh to work with the Coglan Metal Furniture Company. “There are things we can do with metal that the furniture industry hasn’t even thought about yet. Go out there and do them. Don’t let anything stand in your way. Old man Coglan will tell you it can’t be done, that they tried that before. Don’t bother to tell him to go to hell, just disregard