Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [94]
He himself went the proverbial extra mile almost every day, and his working hours were already legendary. He was in early, he left late, and he didn’t go home until he had cleaned off his desk, according to Schulte, who was no slouch himself.
I was absent for a good deal of this time—Casey’s difficult pregnancy, during which she was confined to bed for several months—ended successfully with the birth of a son, and I soon found myself plunged unprepared into the world of first-time parenting, made even more traumatic by the fact that Casey appeared to have no relatives to rely on except for her mother, whom she regarded as naive and unrealistic, and her grandmother, a difficult old woman. Since my family was in London and Casey would rather have died than ask hers for advice or assistance, we were without the safety net that most young parents have.
Once we had returned to some kind of routine, however different it might be from our previous way of life, my attention returned to S&S—it was a lot more rewarding to think about books and authors than about diapers, formula, and middle-of-the-night feedings. To my surprise, I was asked to attend the annual convention of librarians in Atlantic City, a request that was puzzling, since I could think of no very good reason why librarians would want to meet me, nor I them. Clearly this assignment was not a plum—Bob Gottlieb, I learned, had already turned it down—but I was in no position to be fussy. In those days, of course, Atlantic City was not Las Vegas East, as it has now become. It was a 1920s seaside town slipping ungracefully into terminal decay, its once elegant seafront hotels declining into single-occupancy rooming houses for the poor and the old or worse, its famous boardwalk now a haunt for drug addicts and muggers. It was a place that no sensible person would have chosen to visit, not even the librarians, who, I thought, could surely have picked better.
A COUPLE of days after I had written this into my calendar and more or less forgotten about it, I received a call from Snyder, saying that he, too, was going to the librarians’ convention, to represent sales and marketing. He suggested that we join forces. I said that sounded like a good idea and a chance to get to know each other. He offered to rent a car, so we could drive there together.
It did not occur to me at the time that being sent to Atlantic City was S&S’s way of putting us in our places—Snyder for making too many waves, me for expressing my opinion too often and too loudly. Nor did it occur to me that Snyder might have included me deliberately. The one area of the company about which he had little knowledge was the editorial department of S&S. I might have seemed like his best bet to get a foothold there, however small—after all, we were almost exactly the same age and both struggling to get ahead of numerous layers of entrenched and more senior people. I was more or less content with my position, but Snyder was not. He positively glowed with ambition in a company—indeed, in an industry—in which it was crass to admit to personal ambition.
In those days, the renting of a car was by no means the easy and everyday transaction it is now, nor was S&S particularly liberal when it came to that kind of thing. The best we were able to do was a yellow Rambler of uncertain vintage, which Snyder had picked up from some discount rental place known only to the S&S business department. He was, however, happy to leave the driving to me.*
Dick—we were on a first-name basis at once—lived only two blocks away from me, in an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, where he and his wife, Ruth, were soon to have their first child. Far from being the fearsome personality that most people at S&S believed him to be, he could not, in fact, have been more simpatico. He was better at asking questions than at answering them, with the result that by the time we were in New Jersey, he already