“The coffee’s hot,” Mary called. “Or did you want a drink?”

“Drink,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

Three other pieces of mail: An overdue notice from the library. Facing the Lions, by Tom Wicker. Wicker had spoken to a Rotary luncheon a month ago, and he was the best speaker they’d had in years.

A personal note from Stephan Ordner, one of the managerial bigwigs in Amroco, the corporation that now owned the Blue Ribbon almost outright. Ordner wanted him to drop by and discuss the Waterford deal-would Friday be okay, or was he planning to be away for Thanksgiving? If so, give a call. If not, bring Mary.

Carla always enjoyed the chance to see Mary and blah-blah and bullshit-bullshit, etc., et al.

And another letter from the highway department.

He stood looking down at it for along time in the gray afternoon light that fell through the windows, and then put all the mail on the sideboard. He made himself a scotch-rocks and took it into the living room.

Merv was still chatting with Lorne. The color on the new Zenith was more than good; it was nearly occult. He thought, if our ICBM’s are as good as our color TV, there’s going to be a hell of a big bang someday. Lorne’s hair was silver, the most impossible shade of silver conceivable. Boy, I’ll snatch you bald-headed, he thought, and chuckled. It had been one of his mother’s favorite sayings. He could not say why the image of Lorne Green bald-headed was so amusing. A light attack of belated hysteria over the gun shop episode, maybe.

Mary looked up, a smile on her lips. “A funny?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just my thinks.”

He sat down beside her and pecked her cheek. She was a tall woman, thirty-eight now, and at that crisis of looks where early prettiness is deciding what to be in middle age. Her skin was very good, her breasts small and not apt to sag much. She ate a lot, but her conveyor-belt metabolism kept her slim. She would not be apt to tremble at the thought of wearing a bathing suit on a public beach ten years from now, no matter how the gods decided to dispose of the rest of her case. It made him conscious of his own slight bay window. Hell, Freddy, every executive has a bay window. It’s a success symbol, like a Delta 88. That’s right, George. Watch the old ticker and the cancer-sticks and you’ll see eighty yet.

“How did it go today?” she asked.

“Good.”

“Did you get out to the new plant in Waterford?”

“Not today.”

He hadn’t been out to Waterford since late October. Ordner knew it-a little bird must have told him-and hence the note. The site of the new plant was a vacated textile mill, and the smart mick realtor handling the deal kept calling him. We have to close this thing out, the smart mick realtor kept telling him. You people aren’t the only ones over in Westside with your fingers in the crack. I’m going as fast as I can, he told the smart mick realtor. You’ll have to be patient.

“What about the place in Crescent?” she asked him. “The brick house.”

“It’s out of our reach,” he said. “They’re asking forty-eight thousand.”

“For that place?” she asked indignantly. “Highway robbery!”

“It sure is.” He took a deep swallow of his drink. “What did old Bea from Baltimore have to say?”

“The usual. She’s into consciousness-raising group hydrotherapy now. Isn’t that a sketch? Bart-

“It sure is,” he said quickly.

“Bart, we’ve got to get moving on this. January twentieth is coming, and we’ll be out in the street.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” he said. “We just have to be patient.”

“That little Colonial on Union Street-”

“-is sold.” he finished, and drained his drink.

“Well that’s what I mean,” she said, exasperated. “That would have been perfectly fine for the two of us. With the money the city’s allowing us for this house and lot, we could have been ahead.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“You don’t seem to like very much these days,” she said with surprising bitterness. “He didn’t like it,” she told the TV. The negress songstress was on now, singing “Alfie.”

“Mary, I’m doing all I can.”

She turned and looked at him earnestly. “Bart, I know how you feel about this house-”

“No you don’t,” he said. “Not at all.”

A light skim of snow had fallen over the world during the night, and when the bus doors chuffed open and he stepped onto the sidewalk, he could see the tracks of the people who had been there before him. He walked down Fir Street from the corner, hearing the bus pull away behind him with its tiger purr. Then Johnny Walker passed him, headed out for his second pickup of the morning. Johnny waved from the cab of his blue and white laundry van, and he waved back. It was a little after eight o’clock.

The laundry began its day at seven when Ron Stone, the foreman, and Dave Radner, who ran the washroom, got there and ran up the pressure on the boiler. The shirt girls punched in at seven-thirty, and the girls who ran the speed ironer came in at eight. He hated the downstairs of the laundry where the brute work went on, where the exploitation went on, but for some perverse reason the men and women who worked there liked him. They called him by his first name. And with a few exceptions, he liked them.

He went in through the driver’s loading entrance and threaded through the baskets of sheets from last night that the ironer hadn’t run yet. Each basket was covered tightly with plastic to keep the dust off. Down front, Ron Stone was tightening the drive belt on the old Milnor single-pocket while Dave and his helper, a college dropout named Steve Pollack, were loading the industrial Washex machines with motel sheets.

“Bart!” Ron Stone greeted him. He bellowed everything; thirty years of talking to people over the combined noises of dryers, ironers, shirt presses, and washers on extract had built the bellow into his system. “This son of a bitch Milnor keeps seizing up. The program’s so far over to bleach now that Dave has to run it on manual. And the extract keeps cutting out.”

“We’ve got the Kilgallon order,” he soothed. “Two more months-”

“In the Waterford plant?”

“Sure,” he said, a little giddy.

“Two more months and I’ll be ready for the nuthatch,” Stone said darkly. “And switching over… it’s gonna be worse than a Polish army parade.”

“The orders will back up I guess.”

“Back up! We won’t get dug out for three months. Then it’ll be summer.”

He nodded, not wanting to go on with it. “What are you running first?”

“Holiday Inn.”

“Get a hundred pounds of towels in with every load. You know how they scream for towels.”

“Yeah, they scream for everything.”

“How much you got?”

“They marked in six hundred pounds. Mostly from the Shriners. Most of them stayed over Monday. Cummyest sheets I ever seen. Some of em’d stand on end.”

He nodded toward the new kid, Pollack. “How’s he working out?” The Blue Ribbon had a fast turnover in washroom helpers. Dave worked them hard and Ron’s bellowing made them nervous, then resentful.

“Okay so far,” Stone said. “Do you remember the last one?”

He remembered. The kid had lasted three hours.

“Yeah, I remember. What was his name?”

Ron Stone’s brow grew thundery. “I don’t remember. Baker? Barker? Something like that. I saw him at the Stop and Shop last Friday, handing out leaflets about a lettuce boycott or something. That’s something, isn’t it? A fellow can’t hold a job, so he goes out telling everyone how fucking lousy it is that America can’t be like Russia. That breaks my heart.”

“You’ll run Howard Johnson next?”

Stone looked wounded. “We always run it first thing.”

“By nine?”

“Bet your ass.”

Dave waved to him, and he waved back. He went upstairs, through dry-cleaning, through accounting, and into his office. He sat down behind his desk in his swivel chair and pulled everything out of the in box to read. On his desk was a plaque that said: