Riverside Drive

Well, yes, they had.

“And you never wondered why?” she asked him.

“Well—”

“Sam,” she said, tapping a swizzle stick against her lower lip, “show me in the Wall Street Journal where it announces power changes in personnel.”

“What?”

“They’re putting you in the ghetto,” she said.

Now just what the hell was she—

“The government says, ‘Hire blacks.’ Okay, they say, we will. And where is the safest place to put them? Think, Sam. Where can they pay a good salary, call blacks executives, and never ever have to worry about them getting any power?”

Well, needless to say, had Harriet not been quite as attractive as she had been that night, had she not followed her criticism of Sam’s career by an utterly disarming seduction of him emotionally, he never would have seen her again.

Instead, six months later, he married her. Right after he took a pay cut to move into the marketing department at Electronika.

Sam worked like a demon—mostly because he loved his work and loved what he was learning (including that he was very good at it), and partly because he wanted to leave the sea of white faces around him back in the wash. He was under enormous pressure—real and self-induced—and a twelve-hour day was nothing unusual for him. When Harriet got pregnant in 1967, he worked even harder—pushing, pushing, pushing himself—and by the time Althea was born (the day after Martin Luther King was shot), Sam was supervising a department of ten in the new-product division.

Although Harriet did not drink at all, Sam customarily had two scotches before dinner and a beer with. In the few years following Althea’s birth Sam and Harriet joined a group of other black professional couples who met once a week for dinner. It was more of an encounter group on the state of black America than it was a social event, and they usually talked into the wee hours of the morning, sitting around on the living-room floor, with Sam and a few of the others drinking throughout. Something happened to the group after a while—around 1972—and the dynamics of it began to shift. The wives grew reluctant to come; Sam and two other men were drinking more and more and once even a fistfight broke out. The women stopped participating altogether and the talk of the men started to change, and suddenly it was no longer about “them,” the white establishment, but about “them,” the wives and children who chained them to jobs they hated and to a lifestyle that was smothering them.

The men moved to bars and Sam went with them. And then it was just Sam in the bars, with whoever was around. And then there were terrible fights between Sam and Harriet, always around the issue of his drinking. And then there were terrible fights over Sam’s drinking and Sam’s women.

Harriet went to work in the publicity department of Gardiner & Grayson at the end of 1972. In 1973 she started warning Sam that if he did not do something about his drinking she was going to leave him. And then, in November, Sam passed out in his chair and his lighted cigarette started a small fire. Harriet told him he was on his last chance. The very next night Sam did not come home at all, and Harriet took Althea and moved in with her aunt in Harlem.

Sam cried and pleaded and did everything he could to get Harriet back—except stop drinking. Then he said to hell with her and started hitting the bars straight after work, finding sympathetic women to tell his sad story to, to buy drinks for, and to sleep with that night. It was amazing how much he was still able to function at work in those days—particularly since he had taken to martinis at lunchtime—but word began to get around the office about the caution needed to make sure Wyatt was in the right “mood” when he made a decision.

By 1975 it was anyone’s guess whom Sam might wake up with in the morning. His blackouts were unpredictable, coming anywhere after two to ten drinks. At his company physical, he was told his liver was enlarged, his blood pressure was far too high and that he was running the risk of becoming diabetic. As for Harriet, she was so sick of Sam’s middle-of-the-night assaults on her aunt’s apartment (that he never remembered), she started calling the police and having Sam hauled away to the precinct.

And then Sam’s boss called him in one day, sat him down, and gently, quietly offered Sam a choice: take a leave of absence and sign himself in for treatment or be fired.

To this day Sam does not know why he agreed to go to a rehab. At the time he didn’t think he had a drinking problem. He thought he had a lousy wife and a lousy job problem. But somewhere, somewhere very deep inside of him, a little voice told him that maybe…maybe he would be better off it he stopped drinking for a while. And so, very quietly, very confidentially, Electronika flew him out to Minnesota for treatment.

Two months free of drinking, Sam went back to work. Four months free of drinking, Althea stopped hiding when he came to visit. Eight months free of drinking, Sam and Harriet went out on a date. Fifteen months free of drinking, Harriet and Althea came home to live with Sam. Thirty-nine months free of drinking, the Wyatts gave birth to a second daughter, Samantha, and Sam quit smoking. Sixty-two months free of drinking, Sam was made a vice-president of Electronika. Sixty-four months free of drinking, Harriet was made director of promotion, publicity and advertising at Gardiner & Grayson. Seventy months free of drinking, the Wyatts were profiled in the New York Times Magazine as examples of Manhattan’s black upper middle class. Seventy-eight months free of drinking, the Wyatts bought a four-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive.

Sam and his family were now one hundred and thirty-five months free of drinking. Of it.

Samuel J. Wyatt, Vice-President, New Product Development, sat in his office on the forty-seventh floor and wondered what the hell to do.

He sighed, turning his chair away from the window and back around to his desk. He looked up at his wall, covered with plaques and certificates of recognition, and of pictures of him at various functions. Sam, it should be said, was a doer. He didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk. The Urban League, the United Negro College Fund, the Howard University Trustees Board, Junior Achievement…Sam sat on so many boards he had lost count, but he had never lost his energy or his willingness to do what he could for any organization he thought was effective.

But now…

Sam had recently pulled off a coup at Electronika. He had swung the deal for Electronika to take over a small British company called Trinity Electronics, which had developed a gem of a copying machine that no one had ever seen the likes of. The ZT 5000 could be used to reproduce originals; it could be hooked up to computer systems; it could be hooked up to wire services; and it could copy images of any size—from a postage stamp to the center fold of a city newspaper—and automatically cut the paper to size. In seconds. And at a cost that was leaving the competition agape.

Trial machines had been placed in key accounts across the country, and when the ZT started shipping five months from now, in October, it was already guaranteed some forty thousand placements and promised to move into every good library, telecommunications center and computer graphics room in the country before the end of the decade. On the strength of the machine’s early reviews, Electronika’s stock had climbed eleven points on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sam had been dancing in the aisles. With a hit like this, with Electronika miles ahead (in a product line they had always been sorely lagging in), it meant a huge promotion for him, vaulting him out of the divisional and into the corporate vice-presidential ranks.

But now there was a problem.

Oh, man, was there a problem.

And Sam was hoping against hope that today it would turn out that it had all been some terrible misunderstanding.

It has to be, he thought, pressing his temples.

Yesterday afternoon the new president of Electronika had summoned Sam to his office. There had not been any of the pleasantries that Sam had been accustomed to for the last six months from Walter Brennan. Brennan had scarcely greeted him, pointed to a chair and then had let him have it. “We’re in one hell of a mess with the ZT 5000.”

Immediately Sam’s stomach had lurched. I knew it was too good to be true, he had thought.

“And I’m not very happy about it,” Brennan had continued, pacing back and forth behind his desk. “Now, technically speaking, you’re not responsible for the production end of the machines—”

“No,” Sam had said, “Chet Canley handled that part of it.” Chet Canley was the senior executive vice-president who had come to Electronika with Walter Brennan.

“But you are responsible for Electronika acquiring Trinity Electronics in the first place.”

“Yes,” Sam had conceded, “that’s true.”

“So I thought you might be able to shed some light on the problem we’ve discovered,” Brennan said. Pause. He laughed suddenly, kicking his head back. “Christ!” he cried, looking at Sam. “The irony of it.”

“Of what?”

“Asking my black executive if he can shed some light on why we’re assembling machines in Pretoria, South Africa.”

“What?” Sam was up and out of his chair. “What?” he repeated, leaning over Brennan’s desk.

“Yeah,” Brennan said, nodding his head. “You got it. Chet has informed me that the ZT is being assembled in a plant in Pretoria.”

“That’s impossible,” Sam said, dropping back in his chair. “It’s just impossible. The components ship from Tokyo, San Francisco and London for assembly in Nairobi, Kenya.”

Brennan scratched his ear. “So you don’t know anything about the Pretoria plant?”

Sam snorted, jerking his head to the side. He looked back at Brennan. “I know I don’t do business with South Africa, I can tell you that. And I can tell you that nobody I dealt with at Trinity does either.”

“Well, somebody sure as hell does,” Brennan observed.

And so Sam had not slept very well last night. The whole thing had kept spinning around in his head and in his stomach. On the first level, he was furious. On the second level, he was furious because he didn’t know who to be furious at—Trinity Electronics or—or…himself. Could it be possible that he had prompted Electronika to take over a company producing in South Africa? South Africa? Sam Wyatt’s ZT 5000 was being assembled in South Africa? His big coup was with the inventors of apartheid?

Oh, God, his stomach hurt.

No, he had decided, he was not at fault. And Brennan knew that; he had only been looking for answers to a problem. But man, oh, man, if word got out on this—that Electronika was selling to institutional accounts machines that were being produced in South Africa—the ZT 5000 would be killed. It was just the year before that Sam had applauded the student demonstration at Columbia to protest the school’s stock-holdings in companies doing business in South Africa. And Columbia had divested itself of those stocks—and Columbia was a major institutional account for the ZT 5000! (Suddenly, visions of Althea conducting a sit-in in front of the Wyatts’ apartment building swam past Sam’s eyes. Suddenly, visions of protests across the country against Electronika swam past Sam’s eyes. Suddenly, visions of his own photograph accompanied by the headline BLACK EXEC BREAKS BOYCOTT IN SOUTH AFRICA swam past Sam’s eyes.)

Would he be fired? Sam had wondered. What was Electronika going to do? Sam had wondered. What was he going to do? he had wondered. Sit back, let them handle it, or try to find out more about what had happened, how it had happened?

He had decided not to panic, and he had decided to make some calls to Trinity in London to find out what or how this had happened. Sam looked at his watch. His secretary had been on the phone to London for over fifteen minutes. Was no one in? He looked at his watch again. It was only three-thirty in the afternoon there.