The Last Manly Man by Sparkle Hayter Page A

Morton had bushy gray hair and a handlebar mustache. Judging by the expression on his face, he hadn’t been having a good day when he’d sat for this portrait back in, according to the brass plaque beneath it, 1929.
    His son, Gray Morton, on the other hand, looked blankly sober, Gray’s son, Herbert, looked frail and sad, and Herbert’s son, William, stern and sturdy. William’s son, Gill Morton, robust and ruddy-cheeked, had chosen to be painted in outdoorsman gear, his retriever at his side. None of the men resembled one another in the least.
    Below the portraits were display cases with the original Morton products: the Morton Mop, the Morton Scrub Brush, Morton Soap, and an antique bottle of Morton Mopwash.
    At the other end of the hall was a statue of an angel holding a fallen doughboy under one arm.
    Within five minutes, Gill Morton, a stocky, florid man with a blond brush cut, strode into the lobby. He seemed taller in his portrait, but maybe that was because the portrait was about twenty feet high. Behind him came his assistant, a young man named Ken Duffin, who handed me a packet of old press ads and some videos I had requested. Behind Duffin was Morton’s security detail, five beefy guys in black suits.
    I introduced the crew and Jim mentioned that he had met Morton before, when Jim was seven and his dad had won a big sales award which he had kept with his most private things until the day he died. Morton was most gracious. He seemed touched and gave Jim a two-handed handshake, and in keeping with my careful study of men, especially men in power, I noticed that Morton didn’t feel the urge in the face of praise to immediately self-deprecate. Jim was tickled and I was glad for that too, because I was trying to be extra nice to Jim, on account of his wife having a second baby and … what was that other thing … oh yeah, because he was a lousy cameraman. Our several talks about improvements had yielded nothing, and I was going to have to demote him back to sound tech soon, a task I was putting off.
    Morton had a weird voice, stiff, moderately deep, earnest, and totally fake-sounding. He sounded like the dubbed voice of Hercules or Sinbad in a cheesy foreign film from the fifties or sixties. You half expected to see his lips move out of sync with his words. It was hard to keep a straight face when talking to him.
    After a few ham-handed pleasantries, Morton said, “Now, on to Phase Two.”
    With a half wave, half salute to the crowd, he strode off with his men, me, and the crew scrambling to follow him through steel doors and a long hallway to the Phase Two Annex, a building next to the Morton Building that Gill Morton had purchased in order to convert it into the workplace of the future.
    Duffin put his hand against a laser reader of some kind and another big steel door opened automatically.
    â€œAfter you,” Morton said to everyone.
    We went into a large office area, empty except for us. It was bright but not too bright—it had a soft, diffuse light—and clean, in pale cheery colors, with no sharp corners on any of the “ergonomically designed” office furniture. There were no windows.
    As soon as Gill Morton stepped through the door, the room said, in a female voice, “Good morning, Mr. Morton. Don’t you look handsome!”
    Morton laughed. “Couldn’t resist having the programmers do that,” he said, and led us through the unpeopled office, divided by semicircular partitions that allowed a small measure of privacy without making employees “feel boxed in.”
    â€œThis will be the ultimate in smart buildings when it is done. Just the technology in this part of the building alone involves over four hundred new patents,” Morton said. “It’s completely hypoallergenic. Sensors read each employee’s bar code. This tells the room what the employee’s temperature, allergies, and Muzak preferences are, and the