As I walked, a comment of my father’s flitted through my mind: “Some men make it early in life, but you, my son, will make it a little late in life. But you’ll make it.” I said to myself, “Look, nothing has changed. Nothing at all. If you don’t expand, what of it? Are you beginning to think of the kind of success that feeds the infantile longings of so many adults? What’s wrong with what you’ve accomplished?”
I remembered going to my father to talk about college. “Go to college,” he told me. “It is very important to get a college education. I’m right behind you.”
“It takes money to go to college,” I said.
“Money?” he said. “What fool can’t go to college with money? The idea is to make it without money!”
And so I did.
I was feeling better when I reached the shop, but was still so deep in my soliloquy that I rested my head on the desk and did not even hear Ben Kartman’s steps when he came up the stairs.
“What’s the trouble, Stuart?” he said, standing in the doorway looking at me.
“I went to the bank,” I told him. “They turned me down. I’m a poor credit risk and they never heard of World War II, believe me. So there’ll be no expansion.”
“How much will the construction cost?”
“A thousand dollars.”