around, and grabbed the telephone.
I am, he had realized, in one of my “Boy, do I feel sorry for Poor Ol’Flem Pickering” moods, and I don’t want Pick picking up on that.
“Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “What’s up?”
“Mom still in New York?” Pick asked.
“I think today’s Saint Louis,” Pickering replied. “You know your mother.”
A picture of his wife of thirty years—a tall, shapely, silver-haired woman with startlingly blue eyes—flashed through his mind. He missed her terribly, and not only because she made him feel as if he were still twenty-one.
When Fleming Pickering had heard the sound of trumpets and rushed off to the sound of musketry in World War II, Mrs. Patricia Foster Pickering had “temporarily” taken over for her husband as chairman of the P&FE board. Surprising everybody but her husband, she had not only immediately gathered the reins of authority in her delicate fingers, but pulled on them with consummate skill and artistry.
When he’d come home, there had been some talk of the both of them working at P&FE, but Patricia had known from the start that, if their marriage was to endure, she would have to find something to do other than share the control of P&FE with her husband.
The temporary chairman of the board of P&FE had become the chairman of the board of Foster Hotels, Inc., in part because she was the only daughter of Andrew Foster, majority stockholder of the forty-two-hotel chain, and partly because her father—who had wanted to retire—had made the cold business decision that she was the best-qualified person he could find to run the company.
While Patricia Foster Pickering shared her husband’s— and her father’s—belief that the best way to run an organization was to select the best possible subordinates and then get out of their way, she also shared her father’s belief that the best way to make sure your subordinates were doing what you wanted them to do was to “drop in unannounced and make sure there are no dust balls under the beds and that the liquid in the liquor bottles isn’t colored water.”
Which meant that she was on the road a good deal, most often from Tuesday morning until Friday evening. Which meant that her husband was most often free to rattle around—alone—in either their penthouse apartment in the Foster San Franciscan or their home on the Pacific Ocean near Carmel from Tuesday morning until Friday evening.
While he frequently reminded himself that he really had nothing to complain about—that in addition to his considerable material possessions, he had a wife who loved him, a son who loved him and of whom he was immensely proud, and his health—the truth was that every once in a while, say once a month, he slipped into one of his “Boy, do I feel sorry for Poor Ol’ Flem Pickering” moods and, logic aside, he really felt sorry for Poor Ol’ Flem Pickering.
“Let’s go to Tokyo,” Pick said.
“Why should I go to Tokyo?”
“Because your alternative is watching the waves go up and down in San Francisco Bay until Mom gets home,” Pick went on. “Come on, Pop. Let her wait for you for once.”
It probably makes me a terrible husband, Fleming Pickering thought, but there would be a certain justice in having Patti rattle around the apartment waiting for me for once.
He had another thought:
“I thought it was decided you weren’t going to Tokyo,” he said.
He hadn’t ordered Pick not to go to the conference, but he had happened to mention what Pick’s grandfather had had to say about picking competent subordinates and then getting out of their way.
“Bartram Stevens of Pacific Cathay is going to be there. Charley Ansley called me from Hong Kong last night and told me. Charley doesn’t want him pulling rank and taking over the conference; he asked me to go.”
Bartram Stevens was president of Pacific Cathay Airways, which was to Trans-Pacific Shipping what Trans-Global was to P&FE. J. Charles Ansley, who had been with P&FE longer than Pick was old, was general manager of Trans-Global.
Charley didn’t call me. There’s no reason he should have, I suppose; he was asking/telling Pick to go, and that would be Pick’s decision, not mine.
But if I needed one more proof that I am now as useless as teats on a boar hog around here, voilà!
“And if I showed up over there, wouldn’t that be raising the stakes?” Fleming Pickering thought aloud.
“With all possible respect, General, sir, what I had in mind—and Charley agrees—is to stash you quietly in the