Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley Page A

him. He doesn’t count. I had to keep him for appearance’ sake. He’ll be out in a year. Work closely with the superintendent, a man named Jesse Grimm. I don’t know him too well yet but he looks good. I think he’s our kind. But don’t rely on Grimm. Don’t rely on anyone. Get out in that factory yourself. Learn how to work metal. Know what you can do with those machines and what you can’t do—and when you want to do something that a machine won’t do, design a machine that will do it. Get out in the trade. Talk to people. Go to the markets. Find out what they want—even when they don’t know yet that they want it—and then give it to them. One last thing, Walling. Don’t wear out the seat of your pants on the drawing board stool. Hire a draftsman to get your ideas on paper. If you get enough ideas, hire two draftsmen—or three or four or five. Draftsmen are cheap. Ideas are what count.”
    Don Walling went to Pittsburgh fired not only with the incentive of a flaring opportunity but also with the chance to escape from the constant domination of Avery Bullard. Before the end of the first week the second motivation had lost its validity. He needed Avery Bullard and the recognition of that need revealed a weakness in himself that he set out to remedy. In the attempt, he began unconsciously to model himself in the Avery Bullard pattern. Trouble developed. The morale in the factory, stemming from a natural resentment of the forced merger, was none too good at best. Don Walling’s aping of Bullard’s tactics made it worse. Finally, in a midnight session on the back porch of Jesse Grimm’s house, the superintendent said, “Somebody has to tell you off, Don, and I guess I’m elected. I don’t know too much about Avery Bullard because I’ve only had two short talks with him, but I know something about the men in our plant. They won’t swallow the idea that Avery Bullard sent you out here to be a twenty-six-year-old carbon copy—and I might as well tell you that it doesn’t go down with me either.”
    Don’s first reaction was one of angry resentment but, under the soft attrition of Grimm’s reasonableness, it gradually dissolved into the reluctant acceptance of just punishment. He felt like a spanked child and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. He promised himself that no one would ever again call him a carbon copy of Avery Bullard. In time he became as good a friend of Jesse Grimm’s as the older man’s carefully impersonal attitude would permit.
    Meetings with Avery Bullard were few and far between, much less frequent than Don would have liked. He said so once on one of his trips to Millburgh. Avery Bullard had grinned. “Hell’s bells, boy, don’t you know that leaving you alone is the best compliment I can pay you? When I don’t like what’s happening you’ll hear from me soon enough—more than you’ll want to hear! By the way, we’re boosting your salary to ten thousand.”
    It was then that he said, “I guess that ought to be enough to support a wife, Mr. Bullard.”
    â€œWho is she?”
    He had hesitated, asking himself again the very secret question that he had asked himself so many times during the last two weeks. Then, more defiant than he had ever dared be with Avery Bullard before, he had said, “Her name is Mary Kovales. Her father used to run a little restaurant where I worked when I went to school. He’s dead. She isn’t in the social register and the first time she’ll ever taste champagne will be at our wedding.”
    â€œHow smart is she?” Avery Bullard had asked, and it was no idle question.
    â€œWell—” Don hesitated, searching for some way to tell him. “She’s a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and she has a job now as an assistant to an economist. She—”
    â€œGood,” Bullard