HOW FIRM A FOUNDATION

by

PATRICK DENNIS

Copyright © 1968 by Lancelot Leopard, Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo­copying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writ­ing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be ad­dressed to William Morrow and Company, Inc., 425 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016.

Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-8363

FOR  W.   McP.

Contents

Part One

Arrival    /    3

Tea    /    18

Gramps    /     28

Preparations    /     38

Mr. and Mrs. Justin Fennessey    /    46

Jenny    /    55

The Playboy of the Western World    /    62 Reunion    /    66

Office Hours    /    78

Servants' Quarters    /    95

Dine and Dance    /    103

Part Two

Togetherness    /    119

Projects   /   131

Pleas    /    137

Action    /    147

Conference    /    157

Story Time    /    169

Shooting    /    183

Sex    /    190

Troupers    /    196

Movies    /    211

Part Three

Sick Bay    /    219

Homecoming    /    246

Debut    /    250

Hangover    /    261

Fireworks    /    273

Fame    /    279

Meet the Press    /    285

Departure    /    299

PART ONE

Arrival

It was a horrible taxicab. Was it a Kaiser? A Frazer? A Tucker? Young Mr. Smith was not entirely certain, but he knew that it was one of the post-World War II Brave New Brands that had come hopefully and gone ignominiously dur­ing his early childhood. Nor had the driver's attempts at in­terior decoration-leopard plush seat covers, a pair of dirty white baby shoes dangling from the rear-view mirror, a hula doll writhing her pelvis at the back window, a spray of grimy paper roses where the ashtray should have been, and a plastic Jesus wobbling on the dashboard-done much to improve the car. It shuddered and heaved as it crept up the slight incline leading from the village's main street to the highway.

The highway, too, was a disappointment. Nowhere to be seen were the clover leaves, underpasses, and viaducts; the artistic clumps of trees and shrubbery; the discreet signs threatening drastic treatment and severe fines for drivers who sped, drank, or littered, signs which, back home in the Middle West, Mr. Smith had come to accept as the norm. This was a very bleak highway-gray, pitted, and splotched with gooey patches of tar.

The entire trip-a matter, now, of some three hours-had been depressing. The train out of Grand Central Station had smelled like a locker room, had been late, and had had its air conditioning stop dead at 125th Street. In a vast railroad yard at a place called Harmon, Mr. Smith had been forced to change trains and, quite unaided by any employee of the Penn Central System, to wallop everything he possessed from the large express train to a little sort of trolley car, painted red, white, and blue, that stood throbbing impa­tiently some distance away. Mr. Smith's worldly goods-two suitcases, a foot locker, a portable typewriter, an attaché case, and two heavy cartons of books-had taken up more than their fair share of space and he had been scolded for his lack of consideration even though the train contained no other passenger to be discommoded. From then on the little trolley had stopped at every station along the Hudson River-each drearier, dirtier, and more deserted than the last. When he had finally dismounted, in an avalanche of luggage, at the dreariest, dirtiest, and most deserted station of them all, he could hardly believe that he had traveled less than fifty miles.

In all of Mr. Smith's twenty-five years his contact with the rich had been limited to sharing a room at college with the son of a Michigan motor magnate until the boy had flunked freshman English and been drafted. He hadn't been sure of what to expect from the Fennessey family and their fabulous country estate, but surely something more along the lines of Xanadu than this pokey Hudson Valley village with its gritty railroad station. In vain had he looked for one of the Fen­nessey limousines to be purring at the curb. No. There had been nothing but this antique taxicab with its driver who had sat at the wheel philosophically picking his teeth while young Mr. Smith loaded his luggage into the cab.

The taxi came now to a crossroads-a liquor store, a dilap­idated grocery advertising itself as a supermarket, a scaley old shed that called itself the "Slipper Inn-Dine and I )dance," and a depressing compound of a dozen little lean-tos known as "Cozy Courts-Showers-TV-Vacancy." It was

I he sort of place which Mr. Smith, who had little firsthand knowledge of such matters, suspected would fill, vacate, and refill at two-hour intervals every Saturday night and at almost no other time.

The taxi stalled. "Motherin' heap!" the driver growled. With a phthisic wheezing and retching the car was coaxed back to life; a terrible scraping of gears and the taxi darted forward again. The driver turned at the Cozy Courts onto a gravel road. At that moment all ugliness was gone.

The hot, humid Hudson Valley temperature of June dropped ten degrees as the taxi plunged beneath a towering arch of elms. And then suddenly, set high on a hill, loomed

II vast, crenelated building with a glimpse of the Hudson glittering beyond it. "Why, it looks like a castle on the Rhine," Mr. Smith noted with surprise. (He had traveled very little.)

"What's that, Jack?" the driver said.

Like thousands of other young Methodist men named John Wesley Smith, Mr. Smith had never been called Jack in his life.

"I said, is that the Fennessey place, Mack?"

"Naw. Yoosta belong to this big railroad president. Dead now. Kids sold it off to some garmentworkers' union. Nothin' but a pack of Commies there now, fyask me."

"I ... did . . . not . . . ask . . . you," John Wesley Smith said with remarkable control. Not for nothing was he I ho only child of the woman who had singlehandedly organized branches of the League of Women Voters, Planned Parenthood, the Anti-Defamation League, a Foreign Affairs dis­cussion group, a Hundred Great Books Reading Circle, and a powerful little-theater group in a pokey Midwestern town heretofore interested in nothing beyond bridge, gossip, the Epworth League, and recipes from the Woman's Home Com­panion.

The car raced on and so now did the driver. John Wesley applied his imaginary earplugs. Four years in a college dorm­itory, two in army barracks, a dozen summers as counselor in various boys' camps, and a year as paying guest of the musical and prolific Haskell family when he taught at Ponsonby had given him plenty of practice at not hearing what he did not wish to hear.

"An' we call that Nigger Heaven," the driver shouted, as they passed an endless stretch of white rail fencing with horses gamboling over an emerald pasture and, at the summit of a rise, a white Greek revival temple, its porticoes, pillars, and pediments gleaming. "Some smart-assed bastard got all these coons convinced he's God and lemme tell ya, Jack, they live high on the hog. Christ, the classa people we got livin' out here now." He leaned out the window and spat. But he did not lean out far enough. John Wesley was caught square in the eye.

The earplug trick broke down completely. John Wesley clenched his fists until his knuckles were white. "Listen, you stupid slob-" But the driver had already launched into a diatribe against a psychiatric group established in the neigh­boring pink Palladian villa. John Wesley tried to soothe him­self by counting the carbuncles on the back of the driver's neck.

Finally there loomed the biggest place of all, surrounded by an undulating wall of brick stretching for miles on either side of the road. Far away at the end of a blue gravel drive far wider and better kept than the public road, John Wesley could see a gloriously sprawling Georgian house.

"And this here's the worst one of the lot. A foundation they call it. Family the name of Fennessey-Irish as Paddy's pig an' richer'n God. Solid-gold faucets in the bathrooms. I know. My cousin Ernie's a plumber in Peekskill an' he told me." "Then this is the Fennessey Foundation?"

"That's what I'm tellin' yuh, Jack. Marble bathtubs. Even the hinges on the terlet seats is gold." The gears shrieked in protest and with a great shuddering and knocking the car lurched up the drive, eventually stopping with a sob, a gasp and a final paroxysm at the massive portico of the Fennessey Foundation.

  "I sure hope you ain't comin' for a loan-grant, they call it. There hasn't been a Fennessey livin' here since Chrissmus. They're all in Florida and Europe and their fancy finishing schools while you and me is workin' our asses off to pay for it. ... Want I should wait?"

"No, thanks. What do I owe you?" "Eight bucks."

"Eight dollars? That's more than the train fare here from New York."

"Just look at all the stuff you got for me to haul. This is a very valuable car."

"It's been ready for the junk heap for the last fifteen years. Now unload my things and be quick about it." "Hey, who the hell you think you are?" "I think that I am John Wesley Smith, Director of Projects at the Fennessey Foundation."

The magnificence, the munificence, the beneficence of the Fennesseys and their foundation had been made known to John Wesley and the public some time between his graduat­ing from college and being shipped overseas. In some dusty army training camp, he had come across on page two of The New York Times education section a discreet story revealing that a splendid new nonprofit foundation amounting to the not unimpressive sum of one billion dollars had sprung full blown from the brow of Justin Fennessey, nominal head of the Fennessey family. For The New York Times, as well as for the amount of money involved, the article had been sur­prisingly brief-somewhere between six and seven inches in length; too long to be classified as filler but much too short to rank with the banner headline whoopdedoo attendant upon, say, the forming of the Ford Foundation. In a style almost academic in its dreariness, the Times piece stated that Mr. Justin Fennessey, president and chairman of the board of etc., etc., etc., had announced at a small press conference the transfer of a fund of one billion dollars by the Fennessey family to the Fennessey Foundation for the Furtherance of the Arts and Sciences. A short history of the immense Fen­nessey fortune had followed as well as the information that details would be released at a later date.

If further details had been announced, John Wesley had not heard them. But he rather liked that. Mother had always told him that truly good deeds were done quietly, almost surreptitiously. Unlike, say, again, the Ford Foundation, the Fennessey Foundation had been most reticent-downright coy-about telling an indifferent world just how and when it went about furthering the arts and sciences. There...