Cash McCall Quotes

“There are those along the Main Line who look upon Will Atherson as a violator of his inheritance, an opinion that is largely accounted for by the building that he had caused to be erected to house the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company of which, by right of primogeniture as well as ability, he was president. On a street where every door looks as if it might open at any moment to disgorge some bewigged and gaitered contemporary of Old Ben himself, the Freeholders Building is indeed incongruous to the scene. Designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, it was judged by one of the architectural magazines to be an outstanding example of “the best in unfettered contemporary design, free of any taint of traditionalism, radical in concept, daring in execution.” That, in 1940, it most certainly was. The later influx of countless chain shops and supermarkets, all designed in the apparent belief that glass is the only proper building material, has made the Freeholders Building seem less unfettered, daring and radical, but it still raises doubts in certain quarters about Will Atherson. The more generous Old Philadelphians excuse the building as one of the lapses of which even a gentleman may be guilty—there was a “folly” of one sort or another in most of their families—but the other school of thought holds that a gentleman’s folly must, like an affair with a woman, be carried on in privacy and with discretion. Will Atherson’s folly was unpleasantly public. Although none of his old customers went so far as to stop doing business with the bank, most of them still cringed at the necessity of transacting their financial affairs with no more privacy than a fish in a bowl. That sort of thing was accepted in New York, of course, but this was Philadelphia.”
― Cameron Hawley, Cash McCall

“Sometimes I think they’re the only really sensible people—the off-beat characters who don’t make sense at all. They create their own world and go on living in it, no matter what anyone else thinks of them. To Max, the edge of his cookstove is the rim of the universe and nothing ever concerns him but what’s happening right in his own saucepan.” “And he’s happy?” Cash chuckled affectionately. “You’d never know it to see him—he looks like an ogre and acts as if he were in a perpetual rage—but, yes, I’d say he’s happy. At least, I’m reasonably certain that he’s never lain awake at night asking himself whether he was doing the right thing with his life—and that’s about as good a test for happiness as there is.”
― Cameron Hawley, Cash McCall