The Tight White Collar Read online

  Benjamin was everything that Old Nate and Ferguson had been in their younger days. After Old Nate died, Nathaniel kept more quiet than ever and tried to make himself blend into a background of obscurity. He was enrolled at Harvard, where, because his father insisted, he majored in business administration, but he carried a minor in botany and he was happy. Benjamin, on the other hand, had never even bothered with high school. He hated books, loved the mills and was encouraged in both emotions by Ferguson.

  To Isabel, making sure that Nathaniel heard, Ferguson said, “Nobody needs a college education to count money. You can either count to a million or you can’t, and there’s nothing a tight white collar will do for you but choke you and leave a red mark around your neck.”

  A year later Laura died and six months later Isabel followed. Benjamin closed his house and with Anthony moved across the street with Nathaniel and Ferguson.

  “Bad things come in three’s,” said Ferguson. “Grandpa and Laura and Isabel. Now it’ll stop for a while.”

  But less than a year later, while standing in front of a knitting machine at the mills, Benjamin fell forward.

  “Nathaniel!” he screamed, just before he died.

  Everyone in both towns said that Benjamin had died calling for his brother and that it was an omen telling that Nathaniel would come to stand in his brother’s place. But forever after, Nathaniel wondered if perhaps Benjamin had not called to his absent grandfather, screaming for the old man to get him out of another scrape.

  Ferguson did not mince words with his one remaining son.

  “It’s up to you, Nathaniel,” he said. “I’m not getting any younger and somebody has got to look after things. You’ll have to go into the mills as soon as you’re through school, and it’s going to fall to you to see to things after I’m gone. You won’t get any help from Anthony, I can guarantee you that. Takes after his mother’s side, that boy. Frail and empty headed as they come. None of Benjamin in him at all. This house’ll be yours, Nathaniel, and the running of the mills. Benjamin’s house belongs to Anthony now, but this one is yours. For you and the wife you’ll bring here someday and for your sons.”

  Nathaniel looked around him. He looked at everything. He looked at the mills and he looked at the people. He looked at the house where he had been born and raised. And he tried to think, to find a way out.

  “Don’t ever get the idea, Nathaniel,” said his father, “that your grandpa and me and Benjamin ran the mills. Get that idea out of your head. The mills ran us. Just like they’ll run you. And don’t forget, too, when you look around, that everybody you see depends on you. Without you, there’ll be no Cooper’s Mills. Every worker in the factories has a family. Without you there’ll be no bread for them. Your grandpa built Cooper Station. He built it to live in, for when he wanted to get away from the mills for a little bit. Without you there’ll be no reason for Cooper Station to be here. Nate, son, when you get very tired, look at your hands. Look at them and remember that you hold the lives of thousands of people in them. It’s not easy, Nate. But, then, none of us ever said it was. It’s the way things are, if you’re a Cooper.”

  From the top of the hill where he sat, Nathaniel looked down at the mass of red brick for which he was supposed to do the thinking, and he shivered suddenly.

  So, it’s impossible for man to reason without God, is it? he thought angrily. His eyes turned heavenward and his fingers snapped the new green vine he held. Defiantly, he looked at heaven and shouted.

  “All right, You’ve got all the aces. You call the turns, but I’ll never believe a damned word about justice and mercy. A big, magnanimous God! Well, tell me Your reason for Robin. What possible reason could You have for her? And what about Margery?”

  Nathaniel squeezed the sides of his head in an effort to shut out the memory of a night now almost ten years old. The night he had gone to Margery and she had turned on him, screaming.

  “Get away from me!” Margery had shouted, pushing at the hands that touched her with love. “Don’t touch me!”

  Impossible to reason without You? said Nathaniel to the silent sky. Far more impossible to reason with a God who’d bitch me up the way You have. I’m here. Where are You?

  Nathaniel Cooper turned and began the slow trek down the hill to his car. Never had he felt such loneliness, such complete emptiness and exhaustion.

  I hope Anthony won’t linger after dinner, he thought as he climbed into his car. I’ve got a Guardian meeting to go to.

  Chapter III

  The Cooper Station high school stood in an open field at the end of Laurentian Street. This was the oldest street in Cooper Station, named by Old Nate in memory of the place where he and his wife had spent their honeymoon. The school was a beautiful new building, all brick and glass and completely fireproofed and almost everybody in Cooper Station regarded it as the town’s monument to free education and its tribute to the American Way. Sometimes, there was talk of building the same kind of school in Cooper’s Mills, but this kind of talk always trailed off into vagueness and finally halted altogether until someone brought up the subject again. The people who usually brought up the subject were Dr. Jess Cameron, Nathaniel Cooper and Thomas Averill, the owner of the Twin Town Clarion. For a while, everyone would be enthusiastic about the idea of a new high school for Cooper’s Mills, then the subject of higher taxes would come up at town meetings and the excuses, old and tired and very much used, would begin.

  “After all, the Catholics over there have their own school, so it hardly seems worthwhile to go to the expense of building a new public high school.”

  “Most of the kids at the Mills don’t really want to go to high school anyway.”

  “And most of them who do go never finish. I mean, they quit as soon as they’re sixteen years old and go right into the factories. I mean, the kind of education we give our children here would be sort of wasted there.”

  Besides being the newest, finest school building in the state, the Cooper Station high school had been provided with an auditorium and several smaller meeting rooms which provided facilities for all important town activities since the town hall was old, drafty and inadequately heated.

  As Nathaniel Cooper walked toward the lighted school building where the Cooper Station Town Board of Guardians was having its regular monthly meeting, he thought of the rather uncomfortable dinner he had just finished. It was always awkward to have dinner with a relative one hadn’t seen for ten years, he supposed. And Anthony certainly hadn’t been the best company.

  He drinks too much, thought Nathaniel, remembering the way Anthony had gulped four Martinis before dinner.

  “Just put in the gin, Nate,” Anthony had said. “And then whisper vermouth. That’s all. Whoops! Here, let me do it. You said vermouth too loud.”

  Margery had been nervous.

  “I watched for you, Anthony,” she had said. “When you wrote that you were coming and didn’t say anything about having anyone meet the train, I figured that you’d be driving. Is everything all right over at your house?”

  “Wonderful,” Anthony had said. “The place is so spotless that it looks as if Mother’s ghost had been busy cleaning for a month. And Cooper Station hasn’t changed a bit. Nobody can fart but that it doesn’t make the front page of the Clarion. I hadn’t been in the house three minutes when you called up and I’ll bet everyone in town knows I’m here.”

  “Well, I don’t know what we’ll do from now on,” Margery had said worriedly. “I’ve had Marie over there, but she cleans for Jess regularly and I just borrowed her from him.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Margery. I’ll be fine. I don’t want anyone underfoot all the time anyway.”

  “Anthony?”

  “Yes?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Good Lord, Margery, stop fussing. I’m fine. I just came home to rest and get some work done.”

&nb
sp; “Nate wrote to your agent, Anthony.”

  “Margery,” Anthony had said savagely, “nervous breakdowns are very fashionable among writers. Didn’t you know?”

  The last of the Coopers, thought Nathaniel sourly. Oh, well, it’s probably a good thing. Maybe the line’s been around too long as it is.

  Besides Nathaniel, the Cooper Station Town Board of Guardians was made up of James Sheppard, a relative newcomer to the town who had been elected by what almost everyone regarded as a fluke, and Doris Delaney Palmer, the wife of Adam Palmer who was the president of the Palmer Soap Company of Boston. The Guardians, as they were called, acted in a supervisory capacity over all social and educational matters that concerned the town. The board acted as trustees for the town hospital, a fact which had driven Jess Cameron to outrage more than once, for except for Nathaniel who believed in leaving the job of hospital administration to those who knew what they were doing, the board, more often than not, fancied itself wise beyond wisdom and insisted on arguing about the price of x-ray machines when, as Jess put it, they should have busied themselves with rolling bandages. The Cooper Station library was also a victim of the Town Board of Guardians with the result that the small library contained a surfeit of books about Tibet while the works of Sigmund Freud were volumes that were regarded as consumption for foreigners who planned eventually to work in insane asylums and therefore not fit for the eyes of God-fearing northern New Englanders. Nathaniel Cooper had given up in his efforts to buck the ladies who served with him on the board long ago and until the election of Jim Sheppard, Nathaniel’s attitude had been one of To Hell With It.

  “Not that I expect to see the works of Henry Miller on the shelves of the public library,” he told Margery, “but perhaps now we can put in something besides the limp mutterings of Frances Parkinson Keyes.”

  The library, which had been given to the town by his grandfather, was Nathaniel’s pet project while Doris Delaney Palmer’s was the Administration of Funds for the Poor. Doris loved the poking and prying that was involved with such administration and it was a point of pride with her that she handled every town dollar as if it were her own. The end result of Doris’s way with money was that more than one family had lived on oatmeal and beans rather than ask the town for a dime and every year, at town meeting, Doris always delivered the accounting of funds with what some people considered pardonable pride.

  “You have to hand it to Mrs. Palmer,” they said. “Knows where every cent is every minute of the time.”

  But although the Funds for the Poor might be where Doris did her best work, it was at the selection of schoolteachers that she really shone. She relentlessly questioned and probed into the life of every man or woman who applied to Arthur Everett, the school superintendent, for a position in the Cooper Station schools.

  “After all,” Doris was fond of saying, “we are paying their salaries and when a person is going to be in charge of our young people, we just can’t be too careful, now can we?”

  Doris preferred teachers who had graduated from the state university, were married to people who had also attended the university and had the good taste to restrain themselves to one child.

  “They make the most suitable teachers,” she said. “They are settled but not harried and they seem to fit right into things.”

  “It beats me how the hell you find anybody dumb enough to apply for a job here in the first place,” said Adam Palmer. “Not with the money you pay.”

  “Adam, to a dedicated schoolteacher there is no such thing as money,” said Doris.

  “Well, then, I guess I can see why you’d never make a teacher,” said Adam.

  “Adam,” said Doris severely, “it’s coarse to discuss money with such obvious interest.”

  “You’re right,” said Adam grandly. “I shall leave the obvious interest to you, on the first of the month, when you examine the bank statements.”

  Adam Palmer was the only man in Cooper Station who was wealthier than Nathaniel Cooper, a fact which gave Doris unlimited hours of pleasure. She could not understand what she called “Adam’s kowtowing” to Nathaniel.

  “You could buy and sell the Coopers a dozen times over,” she told her husband often and angrily. “What makes them so special anyway? Why, that Anthony is totally worthless, off in New York doing heaven knows what. And as for Margery and Nate, well, if I couldn’t do better than produce an idiot—”

  “Why don’t you shut up, Doris?” said her husband. “Just try to remember that there were Coopers around here when my grandfather was still stirring up hog fat and lye in his barn and long before any of the Delaneys had got off the boat.”

  “And you should see the way he high-hats me at Town Guardians’ meetings,” continued Doris as if Adam had not spoken. “I’ve known Nathaniel Cooper for fifteen years and he still calls me Mrs. Palmer. Well, he needn’t think that I’m going to Mr. Cooper, sir, him like one of his millhands.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Cooper,” said Doris Delaney Palmer when Nathaniel walked into the room where the Town Board of Guardians meeting was to be held.

  “Evening, Mrs. Palmer,” said Nate. “Mary. Jim. Arthur.”

  Mrs. Palmer’s smile never wavered. That bastard, she thought savagely, I’ll fix him. And that Jim Sheppard, too. Jim never had any business getting on the board in the first place. Callie Webster should be sitting in his chair right this minute.

  Mary Welch, the town librarian, had come to make her usual futile plea for money and Arthur Everett waited impatiently until she had gone.

  “Well, let’s get to it,” he said briskly. “I’ve got to go to a meeting up the Mills when I finish here.” Arthur Everett always spoke briskly when he was unsure of himself. “We’ve got to get the new teacher question out of the way. As you all know, there is a vacancy in the history department caused by the resignation of John Colbath. I’m recommending a young man named Christopher Pappas to fill that vacancy.” Arthur took a deep breath, the way a man might if he just stepped under a cold shower at seven o’clock in the morning. “Here are Pappas’s records,” he continued, not looking at Doris, and tossed a sheaf of papers down onto the table in front of Nathaniel.

  “Arthur,” said Nate, whose head felt a little heavy from the Martinis before dinner, “I’ve been looking at papers of one sort or another all day. Can’t you just tell us about this fellow? Then we can vote and get it over with.”

  “You’re recommending whom?” demanded Doris Palmer.

  “Christopher Pappas,” said Arthur Everett and sighed inwardly. I knew it, he thought. I knew she’d never stand for it.

  “Do you know who Christopher Pappas is?” cried Doris, turning to look at Nate.

  “Well, from what Arthur’s said,” replied Nate, “I gather that Christopher Pappas is a male teacher.”

  “I’ll tell you about him,” said Doris. “He’s that Greek fellow from the Mills. Born and raised there. And he got a job teaching down at West Farrington, the Lord only knows how. He was there for less than a month when he just upped and quit his job. No reason, just like that, he upped and quit. He’d signed a contract and everything. He was committed to teach for the whole school year and he just quit.” Doris fixed her eyes on Arthur Everett. “Everyone knows about Christopher Pappas,” she said. “And I, for one, would like to know whose bright idea it was to suggest a man like that for a position here in Cooper Station.”

  James Sheppard balanced a yellow pencil on two fingers and looked up at Doris Palmer.

  “Mine,” he said calmly.

  “Mr. Sheppard,” said Doris, “must I remind you that the welfare of our children depends on us and that is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. After all, we are being asked to approve a teacher not a garbage collector and—”

  “Mr. Pappas is a teacher,” said Jim Sheppard.

  Doris Palmer quivered with outrage. “Some teacher!” she cried. “
Do you know what he’s doing now? He’s living in a shack up at the Mills with that wretched wife of his and their two brats and he’s teaching physical education at the School for the Feeble-Minded over at Marmington.”

  Jim Sheppard put down the pencil he had been holding.

  “The Pappas family is not living in a shack,” he said quietly. “They live in a house which they rent from Eben Seton for thirty-five dollars a month. The Pappas children are not brats, but attractive, well behaved, intelligent children. And Mrs. Pappas is far from wretched.”

  “She’s not even decent!” shouted Doris Palmer. “She was pregnant before she ever got married. Everybody knows it.”

  “You don’t know that for a fact, Mrs. Palmer,” said Jim Sheppard. “And even if it were true, I don’t imagine that Lisa Pappas is the first woman around here to have found herself in the same circumstances.”

  “For God’s sake, Arthur,” said Nate wearily. “Will you please tell me about this man so that we can vote and get it over with?”

  Arthur Everett looked at Doris. She might not be a Cooper, but Arthur knew that she was not without a certain power with many people in town. People who admired Palmer soap and Palmer money and who were not without influence when it came to a question of Arthur’s job.

  “Well, Nate,” said Arthur, “Pappas is a good man. Honor student at the state university, two years’ experience with excellent references. It was Jim, here, who suggested that we consider him, but it was Ed Bailey, the head of the education department down at the university, who really talked me into recommending Pappas for this job.”

  “It would seem to me, Mr. Everett,” said Doris Palmer angrily, “that Cooper Station has a superintendent with remarkably little backbone when someone we don’t even know can talk him into suggesting an undependable foreigner to teach in our town.”