I WALKED INTO THE FACTORY AND THE NOISE and the smell closed in on me like a cocoon.
I could feel the momentary stoppage of work as I walked by and I could hear the subdued murmur of voices following me.
"El hijo."
The son.
That was how they knew me.
They spoke of me with a fondness and a pride, as their ancestors had of the children of their patrones.
It gave them a sense of identity and belonging that helped make up for the meager way in which they had to live.
I walked past the mixing vats, the presses and the molds and reached the back stairway to my father's office.
I started up the steps and looked back at them.
A hundred faces smiled up at me.
I waved my hand and smiled back at them in the same way I had always done, ever since I first climbed those steps when I was a kid.
I went through the door at the top of the stairway and the noise was gone as soon as the door closed behind me.
I walked down the short corridor and into my father's outer office.
Denby was sitting at his desk, scribbling a note in his usual fluttery fashion.
A girl sat at a desk across from him, beating hell out of a typewriter.
Two other persons were seated on the visitor's couch. A man and a woman.
The woman was dressed in black and she was twisting a small white handkerchief in her hands.
She looked up at me as I stood in the doorway.
I didn't have to be told who she was.
The girl looked enough like her mother.
I met her eyes and she turned her head away.
Denby got up nervously.
"Your father's waiting."
I didn't answer.
He opened the door to my father's office and I walked through. He closed the door behind me. I looked around the office.
Nevada was leaning against the left wall bookcase, his eyes half closed in that deceptive manner of alertness peculiar to him. McAllister was seated in a chair across from my father.
He turned his head to look at me.
My father sat behind the immense old oak desk and glared.
Outside of that, the office was just as I remembered it.
The dark oak-paneled walls, the heavy leather chairs. The green velvet drapes on the windows and the picture of my father and President Wilson on the wall behind the desk.
At my father's side was the telephone table with the three telephones and right next to it was the table with the ever present carafe of water, bottle of bourbon whisky and two glasses.
The whisky bottle was about one-third filled.
That made it about three o'clock. I checked my watch. It was ten after three. My father was a bottle-a-day man.
I crossed the office and stopped in front of him.
I looked down and met his angry glare.
"Hello, Father."
His ruddy face grew even redder. The cords on his neck stood out as he shouted,
"Is that all you got to say after ruining a day's production and scaring the shit out of half the help with your crazy stunts?"
"Your message was to get down here in a hurry.
I got here as quickly as I could, sir."
But there was no stopping him now. He was raging.
My father had that kind of a temper. One moment he would be still and quiet, and the next, higher than a kite.
"Why the hell didn't you get out of that hotel room when McAllister told you?
What did you go to the hospital for?
Do you know what you've done?
Left yourself wide open for criminal charges as an accomplice abetting an abortion."
I was angry now. I had every bit as much of a temper as my father.
"What was I supposed to do?
The girl was bleeding to death and afraid.
Was I supposed to just walk out of there and leave her to die alone?"