The Hurricane Years: A Novel Read online

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMERON HAWLEY

  “Hawley’s books are realistic page-turners about the romance and drama of business.” —Marsha Enright, The Atlas Society

  Executive Suite

  “An extremely well-informed novel of the financial world and its high-echelon inhabitants.” —The New York Times

  “This is the world of business snapshotted in one of its all-out battles with no holds barred.… The reader [is] entertained by some rapid-fire storytelling.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A fine job of writing; the suspense is terrific; and when you’ve finished the book we think you’ll know a lot more about what really makes businessmen tick than most people know.” —Daily News (New York)

  Cash McCall

  “Cameron Hawley, who proved in Executive Suite that the problems and personalities of corporation management make fascinating material for fiction, has done it again.… Cash McCall … is … just as entertaining.” —The New York Times

  “The picture of what goes on in the big banks, the law offices, the clubs, and hotel suites while millions of dollars are at stake will fascinate almost any American reader.” —Saturday Review

  “Fun to read … Its account of corporation maneuvers has an air of inside savvy.… A novel that will be read and talked about.” —New York Herald Tribune

  The Lincoln Lords

  “This third novel from Cameron Hawley sustains his reputation for an honest approach to business problems—in fictional dress.” —Kirkus Reviews

  The Hurricane Years

  “Engrossing … Will keep you reading.” —Chicago Tribune

  The Hurricane Years

  A Novel

  Cameron Hawley

  More than ever

  for Elaine

  I

  1

  For the rest of his life—a span that was, at this moment, far more indeterminate than he could possibly have realized—all that was about to happen would be instantly recallable.

  The time was a minute or two after 7:10 P.M., established by the glance that he had given the toll-booth clock as he came off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, fixed in his mind by having calculated that, with an hour and twenty minutes to drive the forty-two miles to New Ulster, he could easily enough keep his promise to Mr. Crouch that he would stop by his house with the proofs of the stockholders report before eight-thirty.

  He was noticeably tired, but no more so than he had often been after two days in New York, and he had no consciousness of being under unusual stress. True, he was behind schedule on the sales convention, only five weeks to go and most of the script yet to be written, but that did not seriously concern him—he always did his best work under the whip of time—and from here on out there would be no more lost evenings, no more bon voyage parties for Kay. All that had ended with the bash in her stateroom this morning, a champagne-and-caviar crush from which the sailing whistle had finally rescued him, freeing him to get back to the advertising agency for a showdown session on the assignment of a new art director to the Crouch Carpet account.

  The sun had been out when he left New York, but the sky had gone gray before he crossed the Delaware Bridge, a storm threat in the air, and now as he came down the tight cloverleaf turn, rain spattered the windshield. The wipers made an oily smear and he pressed the washer button. Water spurted, the blades picked it up and the glass cleared. There was an amber light at the highway and he made a whipping turn before it changed to red. The big envelope of printer’s proofs slid off the seat beside him, an oblique reminder of all that would have to be done if the stockholders report was to be mailed on Tuesday. The printer was holding the forms on the press waiting for a final okay … if Mr. Crouch cleared it tonight …

  There was no warning, no foretelling symptom, no premonition of disaster. The pain struck not as a blow but as a revealed presence, instantly full-blown, unwavering, unrelenting. Despite its stunning intensity, there was no veiling of consciousness, no diminution of any faculty. His senses were, in fact, noticeably sharpened. Ahead there was a flashing sign, alternately a red SAM’S and a yellow DINER, and his visual perception was so acute that he would later remember that there were two missing bulbs, one in the cross-stroke of the A, the other splitting the second s.

  He turned off the highway at the first possible moment, as soon as he reached the near edge of the diner’s paved lot, quickly stopping the car, leaning back as he reached out with his foot to set the parking brake, hoping for relief as he squared his shoulders and arched his back. But there was no change in the intensity of the pain. He took a deep breath. The pain was still there, fixed and unchanging. He tried to belch, attempting to relieve the pressure that seemed about to burst his lungs. He was unsuccessful. But now there was the greasy aftertaste of the cheeseburgers he had gulped down a few miles back at the turnpike lunch counter. Nausea suggested both an explanation and a promise, and he got out of the car, gagging himself, trying to vomit. He could not.

  Something urged him to walk—this he would later have occasion to recall—and drawn by the lighted windows of the diner, it now became his objective to buy some Alka-Seltzer tablets. This was logical enough since, as his medical history would reveal, he frequently suffered minor gastrointestinal disorders and was a habitual user of such proprietary products.

  There were three steps up to the entrance of the diner. The door was a sliding one, and when he reached out to pull it open, his hand slippery on the bar, he first realized that he was perspiring heavily.

  Three people came out, two men and a girl, forcing him back down the steps. Groggy, he staggered. One of the men looked at him, nudging the other. They laughed.

  He climbed the steps again and entered the diner. The cashier’s stand was at his right. There was no one behind it. He waited. The diner seemed very hot. He felt soaked through. Taking off his hat, he saw that the sweatband was already darkened by perspiration. He tried to catch the attention of the waitress. She was talking to three men at the counter, saw him, but made no move to come.

  He would later maintain that he did not, at this time, suspect the seriousness of his state, but that would be in conflict with the admission that he made an attempt to telephone someone. He would not, however, be able to remember whom he intended to call. Nevertheless, there was the positive memory of having walked the half-length of the diner to the telephone booth, of discovering that he did not have a dime, of returning to the cashier’s stand, of seeing the waitress still talking to the men at the counter. At this point he fell. There was, almost certainly, a momentary loss of consciousness, but his memory was of an unbroken awareness, a feeling not of collapse but of a slow-motion downward drifting, his bones softened by the heat, his body without structure, limp and formless, a damp rag draped over an unyielding rock. The rock was the pain in his chest.

  Although he was now aware of some fogging of the senses of sight and hearing, he nevertheless heard the muttered exclamations of individual voices, and he could see, to knee height, the legs of the men sitting at the counter. One of the pairs of feet came off the ledge and moved toward him. He expected the feet to stop, a voice to ask a question, and he prepared himself to answer. But there was only the rattle of coins on the glass counter top. The feet circled, edging around him. The door opened and closed.

  A second pair of feet moved toward him. But they, too, circled him, stepping around his head as if avoiding a puddle of filth. With great effort—he had not realized how difficult it would be to speak—he said, or thought he did, that he had to make a telephon
e call. The feet went out the door.

  With enormous effort he turned, trying to get off the rock. He succeeded. But now the rock was on top of him, crushing him down, making his second attempt to speak all the more difficult. But he must have managed it because now there was an answer, a snorting laugh, a man’s voice saying, “Yeah, call your buddies in A.A., huh?” And he heard the waitress say, “Geez, we sure had more’n our share of ’em lately.”

  The last pair of feet left the counter and he was looking up into a fat man’s face, impossibly distant, peering down at him over the bulge of a jutting belly. The belly jiggled and was gone.

  He saw white then, brown-splotched and red-spattered, the dirty uniform of the waitress, purple-nailed hands pressing the skirts to her legs, false modesty that struck him as ludicrous—he would remember the temptation to smile as proof that he felt no panic—and again he tried to speak.

  For an instant, he thought she would help him, a hope lost when he heard her say, “Geez, mister, you gotta get out of here. We can’t have nothing like this.”

  “Call—” he began and then, confused, he tried to remember who he had been planning to telephone.

  “I can’t make no call, mister,” the waitress said, the waggle of her chin the only movement in the foreshortened ugliness of her face. “It’s a pay phone. You got to have a dime.”

  He tried to sit up, heaving against the weight of the rock, thinking that his wallet was somewhere under it, then clearly recalling that he had been trying to get change, that there was a dollar bill in his hand. He found it, crumpled and sopping. But the girl was gone.

  The door was open. He could feel the draft icing the rivulets of perspiration on his neck. The waitress was calling to someone outside, her voice rising to a throat-cracking scream.

  Footsteps were coming in. “Okay, miss, take it easy.”

  He looked up at a questioning face, ominous, shadowed by a state trooper’s wide-brimmed hat. Now he was conscious of fear, not of what had happened to him but that he might not be believed. With all the strength he could muster he said, “I’m not drunk,” trying to hurl the words upward. But they were weightless puffballs, falling back in his throat, choking him.

  The hat became larger and larger, coming closer and closer, the face materializing out of shadow, the nose enormous, sniffing.

  The nose retreated. “Okay, mister, take it easy,” the trooper said, routinely repetitive, strangely comforting. “You ever had any heart trouble?”

  He shook his head, trying to say that he knew what it was, only indigestion, reasoning that it could not be his heart. Your heart was on the left side. That was not where the pain was. The pain was in the center of his chest.

  But the hat was gone before he could speak. The will to argument faded, pressed out of his mind by the crush of weight.

  The hat was back. “Okay, mister, we’re going to give you a little whiff of oxygen. Might help. Won’t do you any harm.”

  The mask came down, covering his mouth, stopping him from saying anything more.

  At this point there must have been a pronounced dulling of perception but not—or so he would later insist—a complete loss of consciousness. He would remember that the trooper asked for permission to take his wallet from his pocket, even recalling a concern that his driver’s license might not be there. He also remembered being told that an ambulance had been called, but there was no certain awareness of the passage of time until it arrived, nor was there any precise recollection of his being moved, only the memory that somewhere, sometime, he had felt the cold spatter of rain on his face.

  The return of coherent consciousness came after the ambulance was underway. It was, however, a borderline state in which he found it difficult to discriminate against the irrational. There was, for example, the illusion that he had already traveled a great distance—the total route was slightly less than three miles—and that he was being taken to some faraway place. The white-coated man who sat beside him spoke English as if it were a foreign language learned from a British tutor. There was something about his oddly accented pronunciation that was hauntingly familiar but he could not then dredge up the memory with which it was associated.

  From time to time the white-coated man reminded him that he must not speak, make no movement, expend no effort. The continued cautioning was unnecessary. He was drained of will, totally acquiescent, accepting what now seemed foreordained and inevitable. He did not associate this feeling with the needle that had been jabbed into his arm.

  What seemed most strange—on this point he would remain adamantly convinced—he was experiencing no sensation of fear or panic. What he did feel, as nearly as he would later be able to describe it, was a sensation of being detached and uninvolved, as if his mind had been freed from his body, almost as if he were an observer rather than a participant. It was a feeling so strong, so clearly recognized, that he wondered, as an oddly dispassionate inquiry, if it was a phenomenon of death.

  He did not recoil from this thought. Instead, it gave him a sensing of important revelation, the discovery that death did not come as a terrifying struggle against the will to live, a mighty battle to hang on to the last breath of life. But neither was it at all like falling asleep.

  “The pain is less severe?” the strange voice asked. “Please, you must not speak—only nod.”

  He nodded, wondering how he could speak even if he wanted to, the oxygen mask covering his mouth.

  “I wish now to check the information I was given by the police officer,” the voice said. “It is for the admission record.”

  Turning his eyes, he saw a pair of dark-skinned hands, an aluminum clipboard, a poised ballpoint pen.

  “You are Mr. Wilder—Mr. Judd Wilder?”

  He felt an impulse to correct the pronunciation, but concern was fleeting and he disregarded it, nodding again, seeing now that his driver’s license was under the clip, that and the identification card that had been removed from the windowed pocket of his wallet.

  “Your home address—it is 1226 Vixen Lane, New Ulster, Pennsylvania?”

  He started to reach for the mask. The brown hand restrained him. “You will please not speak, Mr. Wilder. I will read to you. It is necessary to let me know only if something is not correct. You are—” He was reading from the card now, speaking as if in some language even stranger than English, the words individualized, disassociated, “—Director—Advertising—and—Promotion—Crouch—Carpet—Company.”

  The hand held the pen like an engraving instrument, precisely copying word for word, even letter for letter as he inscribed Crouch. Obviously, the name was unfamiliar, heightening the illusion of being in some distantly foreign place, so far away that Crouch Carpet was unknown.

  “Person to be notified—ah, yes, I see—your wife.”

  He lifted the mask. “You can’t call her. She just sailed—”

  Brown fingers shot out, clamping down, forcing the mask back, leaving a hospital odor in his nostrils. “Please, sir, in your own best interest—there is nothing about which you are needing to be concerned. Everything will be taken care of in the proper way.”

  He was hearing Kay’s voice as he had heard it in the crowded passageway outside her stateroom … “Now take care of yourself, Judd”… remembering the tone more vividly than the words, the thin brittleness of a worn cliché, lost then in the enveloping roar of the ship’s foghorn blast, lost now in a simple fading away, long distance over an impossibly distant span. For a panicked instant, he thought he was losing consciousness, a fear quickly dissipated when he heard, “Yes, everything is in order—except—it is only your age we do not have.”

  Lifting the mask, he said, “Forty-four,” expecting protest, but hearing a grateful “Ah, yes, very good.”

  The pen inscribed 44 in the one blank space on the form. The aluminum cover of the clipboard plopped down with the sound of a satisfied sigh.

  Silence made him suddenly aware, as he had not been before, that a siren had been wailin
g over his head.

  “Ah, here we are,” the voice said, expressing both relief and the triumph of accomplishment.

  He was about to ask “Where?” but remembered the legend printed across the top of the form, as readable now as if it were still before his eyes:

  COUNTY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  2

  Dr. Aaron Kharr typed the last words of the sentence, punched the period key with resigned finality, and picked up the telephone, his quiet “Dr. Kharr” a mildly critical rebuke for the tone in which the corridor squawk-box had blasted his hope that this might be an undisturbed evening. He needed it. If his book was to be finished by the end of September, he had to complete a chapter every nineteen days. It was a promise that he had made only to himself, but that made it no less binding.

  “Dr. Raggi wants you in Emergency,” the operator said, echoing the harshly reverberant demand that was only now dying away in the corridor.

  “Very well,” he said, curbing annoyance, knowing that she was falsifying the tone of young Raggi’s request. Whatever else might be said of the two young foreign interns that County Memorial had been forced to take on in order to provide some semblance of a resident staff, Raggi from India and Chang Lee from Malaya, neither could be fairly criticized for a lack of courtesy or professional deference.

  Standing, lifting his white coat from the back of the chair, he read again the last sentence that he had typed:

  Confronted with the businessman patient in his middle forties, the discerning physician recognizes that this is often a period of peak stress, a time when the forces of long-building tension swirl up into an emotional hurricane that is the common causation of a wide range of psychosomatic and psychogenic disorders.

  He hesitated, questioning his use of the “hurricane” metaphor, wondering if it might smack too much of the Reader’s Digest for professional taste. He would have to think about that. But later.