Marriage & Prosperity, Page 2

recipe that is the basis of the Clarke family fortune. And it was Westerfield, not us, who started the company. Neither your mother nor I knew anything about business back then. As we found out, Sarah didn't know much about business herself, but we'll come to that.

  "Your mother and I didn't take to each other. I was young, full of testosterone and interested only in girls who might be interested in sharing with me those activities which this hormone induces. Your mother wasn't such a girl. Her breasts were too small and her bottom too big, and I didn't particularly like her or anything about her. Her attitude toward me was the same. She told me I was too short, my ears were too big and protruding, and she thought I was a brutish, horny jerk. Because we didn't care for each other we frequently snapped at each other as we worked. This bothered Mock, because he was a happy-go-lucky fellow who always wanted everything to be light and friendly.

  "I got the job at Westerfield's by responding to a HELP WANTED sign posted in the window of its door. But your mother got her job through a relative, who was the only other employee of the company, its traveling salesman. His name was Albert, and he was only your mother's distant relative, sort of a second cousin twice removed. They had only met once before she came to Westerfield's, when she was working as a waitress at one of the cafes where Albert was trying to sell Sarah's sauce. They got to talking and discovered their distant relationship. That created enough of a bound between them for her to open up about the job she had. She didn't like it, nor did she like her boss. Albert knew Westerfield's needed another helper, so he recruited her.

  "Albert would come around about once a week, give us the orders for his sales, then load every square inch in his car but the driver's seat with cases of sauce which he would deliver to established customers or sell right out of his car to new ones. Like Mock, he also found the carping between your mother and me to be unpleasant, but he didn't say anything to us. However, we found out later, he wondered if it was personal or if it had something to do with our work, so he pulled Mock aside and asked him about it. As I said, Mock was a jokester, and apparently trying to be funny, he told Albert our unpleasant exchanges were all an act. In fact, he confided, your mother and I were really madly in love and secretly married, and were only playacting hostility, in order to keep our marriage a secret. Since Albert was seldom around he didn't know Mock was a jokester and the whole thing was a hoax. As a result, the story that was supposed to be satirical, Albert accepted as true.

  "But the mutual dislike of your mother and I was real, and more than once either one of us thought of quitting in order to get away from the other. Unfortunately, this was the middle of the depression and there were no jobs around. So even though our pay was always erratic and late, at least we were eating and had a place to stay. Sarah would buy food for us three workers when she bought stuff for the sauce, and we prepared our meals for ourselves on the shop's cooking equipment. We also stayed there, so we had a place to live. The shop had a minimal, industrial style bathroom. Nothing fancy, but it had a shower and a john. Mock and I had bunk beds in the storeroom, and your mother had a cot in the office. Sarah, however, had a room elsewhere. This was good, because whenever Albert was in town he stayed with her. So it would have been very awkward if Sarah had also bunked down in the shop.

  "Things went on like this for the better part of a year. Then one Monday morning we three workers got up, threw together something for breakfast, then started making steak sauce, our regular Monday job. But Sarah didn't come in, which was very unusual because she was dedicated to the business and especially to the quality of her product. There were certain steps in its preparation she insisted on doing herself. She relied on her taste and her taste only to judge when the ingredients were just right. So when we got to that point of the operation and she hadn't come in, we put things on hold while Mock ran over to her room to get her. It took some time for him to get back. When he did, he was white as a sheet. He had been unable to arouse Sarah by knocking on her room. So he got her landlady to open the door, and they found Sarah dead in bed. As the coroner later decided, she had died sometime Sunday night from a massive heart attack.

  "We didn't know what to do. Since we had the batch of sauce started we went ahead and finished it as best we could. While we worked we talked about what we should do. Mock said since Albert was the most senior person with the outfit we should find him and let him decide. That was better than any idea your mother or I had, so we did it. It took a bit of expense and a lot of trouble, but finally we got in touch with him. He told us to continue operations as well as we could, and he would return to town as fast as he could. A couple days later he got in, and he had nothing but surprises for us.

  "First off, he told us that even though they had different last names, he had been Sarah's husband, and as such he now was the legal owner of the business, its equipment and supplies, but not the shop itself. It was rented. His story was all true, and he got a local lawyer to put the title of the company in his name, all legally proper. Most important of all, he had ownership of the secret recipe. Next he told us that the company was broke, and he couldn't pay our unpaid back wages. He had enough to pay the rent, and he said he was working on a line of credit which he was sure would go through. He asked us three to stay with him for a few months for only board and room but no pay until he got the finances squared away.

  "That was too much for Mock. He told Albert to keep his unpaid wages, hopped a freight train and left town. A few years later we learned from a friend of his that he joined the Navy and was killed in the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. That's relevant because, other than Albert, your mother and I, he was the only other person in the world who had any idea what the secret ingredients were in Sarah's sauce, and the secret procedures for making it. When he went down with the USS Arizona, Albert already was dead, and that left your mother and I as the only ones with the recipe. But that's getting ahead of the story.

  "When Mock left it scared the hell out of Albert. Because if we left too, he was out of a livelihood. He had to be on the road selling sauce. But someone had to make it, and with Sarah dead and Mock gone, your mother and I were the only ones who could. So he pulled out all the stops to keep us. He told us something which we eventually learned was a bunch of baloney, but which at the time we thought was sincere. He said he and Sarah had always wanted to have a family, but she had never been able to get pregnant. He said family was everything to him, and he wanted to make us his family. He said Mock had told him we were secretly married, and he was delighted to have me too as a relative, even if only distant. If we would stay with the company till he could get it financially on its feet, as his family he would make us his legal heirs. Eventually we would inherit the company and, especially, the secret recipe for Sarah's steak sauce.

  "When he said the bit about knowing we were secretly married I was too surprised to say anything. Your mother started to correct him, but Albert interrupted. He apparently thought she was going to decline the deal, so he launched into a great song and dance about what family meant to him, and that we were his only family. He said he was happy we were in love and secretly married, and he wanted to help us lovebirds get securely settled in life.

  "We didn't know it was all a line. We were just dumb kids, and we thought he was sincere. Anyway, we didn't have any place to go, it being the depth of the depression. If he could continue to feed and board us, that was more than we expected to be able to get anywhere else. So we didn't correct his wrong idea about our matrimonial status, and we agreed to stay.

  "Right away we learned why Sarah wasn't a good business person. For example, one of her sauce's secret ingredients was truffles. These mushrooms are horribly expensive, and Albert had always tried to get Sarah to replace them. Now that she was gone, that's the first thing he did. He told us to experiment with other kinds of mushrooms till we found something that tasted similar to us. We objected that we didn't have Sarah's exquisite tas
te buds. Albert answered that neither did the overwhelming majority of persons who might buy and use the steak sauce. He said Sarah had been on a perfection kick. But only a few hundred people in the whole world could match her discriminating taste buds, and it was impossible to make a living selling to so few persons. If we found something that tasted reasonably similar to Sarah's truffle containing sauce, it was bound to be much cheaper, and that change of ingredients alone would put the company on the road to profitability. So we did, and it did.

  "Another thing Albert immediately taught us was the advantages of scale. Sarah had been purchasing ingredients and supplies in small lots, effectively paying retail for them. This meant that, even though her sauce sold well, there was little or no margin and she barely make enough to meet costs, let alone show a profit. Albert immediately advised us to up production as much as possible in the small shop. He pointed out how the per unit cost of just the bottles the sauce was sold in would drop to less than a third of what Sarah had been paying if we could triple production. So