Chapter 5

The cage went down with him in it, and I stood there until the cable quit humming.

That night, over the candle shop, I had the phone in my hand and our old number half dialed. I put it down. I'd have had to say something.

The ad ran in October, in every women's magazine Ormsby could afford, and by then I was at O'Hare, trying to sell a man his own airline.

Malcolm Yates ran Lakeland Airlines out of a plywood office in a hangar, nine Convairs and one old DC-3 flying salesmen to Moline, Eau Claire and Peoria.

He'd flown B-24s out of Italy, and he talked like a man reading a fuel gauge.

New York had him in a campaign with a stewardess and a champagne glass. His stewardesses served coffee and a ham sandwich.

I asked him what he was ashamed of. Nobody had ever asked him, and he gave it some thought.

"We're slow, we're small and we've got propellers. Nobody ever flew us to be seen."

"What aren't you ashamed of?"

"We're on time. Nobody's stacked up over Moline. Eleven cancellations in nine years, not counting last January. I say six-ten, it's six-ten."

I drove back to Wells Street with that, and I didn't sleep.

I'm going to tell you exactly what I did, because I've told it to myself a lot of other ways.

I had Lois draw a front door at dusk, from behind a man with a suitcase in one hand and his key in the other, and through the glass in the door a hall clock at ten past six.

Under that, six words.

Home when you said you'd be.

Every salesman in four states would get it. Their wives would get it first.

Lois looked at it for a long time, then at me, then at the suitcase.

"That's a hell of a thing," she said.

She never said another word about it, that day or any other.

I told myself it wasn't using it. It was an airline ad.

It was the best thing I ever wrote, it was as close as I ever came to breaking my rule, and I knew that, and I ran it.

We showed it the last week of October in Malcolm's office, with a Convair running up its engines outside and the coffee cups walking across his desk.

Spencer came in from New York on somebody else's airline with a new campaign under his arm. He'd taken the champagne out. It was good. He was always adapting.

Malcolm turned my board around on the easel.

I'd seen Spencer read a four-hundred-word ad in the time it took him to cross a room.

This one was six words, and he stood in front of it for a long time.

He looked at the door, the suitcase and the key.

Then he looked at me, and I looked back.

Nobody else in that room knew there was anything to look at. Malcolm was asking somebody about a fuel bill.

"It's very good, kid."

He took out a Parliament and patted his right pocket, then his left. In five years I had never seen that man out of anything.

He looked around the table like someone who's forgotten where he parked.

"Anybody got a match?"

Malcolm slid him a matchbook. His hand was steady, I'll give him that. But he'd had to ask.

His presentation was only very good, which for him was a disaster, and by Friday we had the airline.

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving I heard someone coming up the stairs over the candle shop, slowly, the way you climb stairs that aren't yours.

A woman in a camel coat stopped in our doorway, thirty-two years old, with a fair, rosy, very calm face and ash-blond hair pinned up. The delivery boy behind her had forgotten what he was delivering.

"I own twelve percent of Ashworth Stoddard," she said. "How do you do. I'm Meredith Talbot."

Lois picked up her T-square and went to lunch at ten-thirty in the morning.

Mrs. Talbot took the client chair, which folded.

"It was a wedding present. My father lent them the money to buy out old Mr. Ashworth in 1958. The agency goes public this spring, if it goes at all." She opened her purse. "There's a poster of your ad at the Peoria airport. I read it for twenty minutes, waiting for your airplane."

"Was it on time?"

"To the minute. My husband came home from your hangar and didn't eat for two days. Spencer eats. He ate the night his mother died. Who did you write that to, Mr. Cavanaugh?"

"Salesmen."

"Mm."

She laid a Polaroid on my drafting table and turned it toward me with one finger.

It was a big frame house with a front porch, in summer, an old man in a chair and Mrs. Talbot on the steps in a white dress.

Beside her there was a hole.

Somebody had cut a man out of the picture, around the head and shoulders, very neatly, with small scissors. They'd left one thing. Lying on her shoulder, attached to nothing, was his hand.

"My father's porch, last summer. Nail scissors. I got as far as the wrist and thought, no, leave that. That's the part I know best."

I've got nothing funny to say about that. I didn't then, either.

"I have a drawer of these going back to 1961. My father reviews the soap account in March, fourteen of their thirty-eight million, and I vote my stock after that." She looked right at me. "Your ads have been carrying something around like a full glass since you got off the plane. What do you know, Mr. Cavanaugh? One sentence, and he gives you Peoria on Monday. Not the review. Monday."

Fifteen percent of fourteen million is two million one hundred thousand dollars a year. We had a hot plate.

The six words from that bar on Third Avenue were right where I'd left them.

I looked at the hand. It was a good hand, square and tanned. I'd seen it reach across a nightstand.

"Mrs. Talbot," I said, "your husband is the best ad man in New York. He taught me everything I know."

She kept her eyes on me about as long as he'd looked at the suitcase. Then she put the Polaroid in her purse and snapped it shut.

"You're a very good liar," she said. "You should be in advertising."

I'd like to call that honor. Mostly I couldn't have stood getting it that way, and I'm not sure that's the same thing.

I was still at the table at eleven that night, with the bayberry coming up through the floor, when the phone rang.

"I have a collect call from Mrs. Cavanaugh, New York. Will you accept the charges?"