America America (3 page)

My father was among those men. So had been his father, a miner, and his brothers, all five of them, who were construction laborers. With his oldest brother my father had run a sidewalk and foundation business, and one of my earliest memories is listening from upstairs to the slap of his knee-length rubber boots against the front corner of our stoop—
whap whomp, whap whomp
—as he knocked the mud and hardened bits of concrete onto our grass. When I heard that, I would run down to greet him. He would come inside for his bath, and my mother would hand me his glass of tea to bring up to him before dinner. For much of my childhood, a fine gray powder ran across our walk, climbed our porch steps, and collected in a pale ring on the woven mat inside our cramped front hall, which, like my father’s skin and my parents’ bedroom, always smelled of lime.

But my father studied every night in that tiny bedroom, and by the fall of my first year of elementary school he had earned himself a plumbing and pipe-fitting license. From the time I was old enough to care, that was what he was: a plumber. He joined a union, too, in the days when there was plenty of work for a union man. In our neighborhood, plumber was a high-ranking job—higher than what he’d been doing, certainly, and higher than his own father had ever reached. Most of his work—most of everybody’s work—was for the Metareys.

He was a reasonably good electrician, too—that’s how it used to work up here in the trades—and in later days he sometimes did both jobs on the projects that started going up quickly once Senator Bonwiller and the Metareys lured in IBM, in the sixties. The labor market was so good for a while that the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers looked the other way on those calls, and there are more than a few houses in this area where my father did all the piping and most of the wiring. There are even some where he did both those jobs and the foundation, too. If you look closely at the southeast corner of quite a number of forty-year-old basements around here, exactly at grade, you’ll see the letters GCS—Granger Corey Sifter—scratched tidily into the concrete, just above the date. Corey was his middle name. Just as Granger is mine.

This boom was a new kind of development—houses built right along with the roads they sat on and owned by the families that lived in them—and those years were the beginning of Saline’s second prosperity. In its newer form this prosperity lasts right to the present, with our electronics makers and box assemblers and now our chip suppliers coming into town—modern companies who bought the prime land where the Metarey mills and lumber forests once stood. These companies like the standard of living and the outdoor preserves and the plentiful high school graduates and the lakes so easily within everyone’s reach—all gifts of the Metareys, in one way or another.

And of Henry Bonwiller, too. It might seem quaint today that a whole town thought of these men the way we did then—as benefactors and guardians, and even, if needed, as saviors. But that was what the town of Saline was like when I was growing up. My eyes are clearer now, and like everyone else I have my opinion about Senator Bonwiller, but I still believe that Liam Metarey was a generous, civic-minded, and altruistic patron of the whole community, even after his businesses had outlived their era. And even, I suppose, after what he did. That’s a funny thing to say today.

I suppose it doesn’t matter what his motives were, either—not that I could ever know them. All I’m talking about is the actual evidence of what he accomplished for the town—of what he accomplished for all of us in the area, and of what he tried to do, really, for the whole country. I know several facts: that Saline kept its population even through the itinerant years after the Second World War because Liam Metarey lowered the rents his father had charged; that Liam Metarey always made his lands available to hunters and fishermen; that he employed hundreds of townspeople in his mills and quarries when they were open, and dozens on his estate and in various smaller ventures after they were closed; that he awarded college scholarships to the children of local tradesmen; that he offered his employees health insurance and pensions long before the unions required him to; and that he paid the family of any man who was injured in his plants, on top of what insurance gave out. When I was a boy, a worker was killed by the gang saw in a Metarey lumber mill, and to this day the Metarey family supports the widow. And anyone who knows the history of the American labor movement knows how pivotal Henry Bonwiller was—and thus Liam Metarey—in a good many of its triumphs. It’s easy to see what a force those men have been in our lives—it’s easy to see why we revered them.

It occurs to me that Senator Bonwiller might even have thought of himself in some way as the moral heir to Eoghan Metarey. That is to say, as the man who would rebuild what the social moment had sent into decline. Even after he was elected to the Senate and bought his well-known apartment on Fifth Avenue, near the Plaza, Henry Bonwiller kept his house in Islington; and on weekends, even during the height of his power, he walked in Saline with his cocker spaniel, Uncle Dan, pausing to shop at one or another of the local merchants, the same way Eoghan Metarey had once done with his Scottish deerhounds. There are old-timers who still call the three of them, in fact, “the trinity,” which implies, it seems to me, their faith that these men’s legacy will be unified and everlasting.

And perhaps it will; but there were differences among them, too. When Henry Bonwiller stopped in to eat at Morley’s Steak House, which was Saline’s version of a fine restaurant, or at Flann’s, across the street, which was the town’s main pub, the union men made their way in to greet him. For Liam Metarey they might have tipped their caps through the window; and it’s safe to say that for Eoghan Metarey they would have kept right on walking. Not out of enmity but out of deference. Liam Metarey worked much of his life, I think, to compensate for that deference; and Henry Bonwiller worked to harness it. By the time I was eleven, I’d already witnessed the Senator’s shows of solidarity more than once: the men, my father included, taking off their caps to shake his hand, and now and then the Senator inviting a few of them to sit down at his table. His shining, well-pleased face glowed in the light of the bar lamps. The Labor Relations Act of 1966, as everyone knows, was almost entirely his doing.

To this day, the Senator’s name will bring a nod of affection among the handful of old-time Local 68ers still drinking the free instant coffee at the back of Gervin’s General Store. These men voted for Henry Bonwiller all their working lives. And like my father, they always understood that the Metareys were intimately tied with everything the Senator did. We all understood this. The Metareys were the ones who got him elected to the Senate, and they were prominent among the ones who ran him for president. But that’s not even all of it. The closest of the Metarey businesses is now a hundred miles away, but the family still keeps dozens of townspeople employed—the kind who don’t want to work for Ikea or IBM Assembly, or the kind who can’t. Our own family, in fact—that is, the whole Sifter clan—has always been the particular beneficiary of their generosity, and there are plenty around Saline who’d say that I’m the one who’s benefited most of all. Which is another reason for this story.

I
WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL
in the same building my father did, although in my father’s time it was called Carrol County Senior High and not Franklin Roosevelt. And in my father’s time, at least at Carrol County Senior, the sons of rock miners didn’t take classes in algebra or American history or English. They took shop. This was 1942. Japan was winning the war.

My father and the other shop students maintained the grounds—it seemed to be their job. Not just at Carrol County but at the four elementary schools and the two junior highs and at all the other government buildings in the area—the post office and the town library and the public pool. As far as my father was concerned, it was a perfect education.

As soon as he turned seventeen, he was going to enlist. That’s what he must have been thinking on the day in May of his junior year in high school when he was told to go up on the roof to repair the air conditioner. The Japanese had just taken Burma and Corregidor, and two days earlier they’d sunk the
Lexington
. But the U.S. Navy had stopped them short of Australia. That had been the headline on
The March of Time
newsreel that week at the Empire Theatre, another of Eoghan Metarey’s gifts to the town. And that’s when my father decided the navy was the branch for him.

He crawled out a classroom window onto the fire escape, climbed the ladder to the roof, and went over the parapet onto the top of the building. It was a hot afternoon and the tar grabbed his boots. In those days, air-conditioning was done with ice banks, and at Carrol County Senior the ice banks were mounted above the auditorium. When he crossed the roof, entered the mechanical shed, and pulled the manifold up onto the floor next to him, he discovered he was looking through a hole in the ceiling right down onto the stage. He saw the top of a girl’s head.

She was dressed in a costume. Some kind of yellow dress. Suddenly she whirled and a wider yellow skirt flared around her. She was acting, he realized. Acting in a play. He’d never seen one. On the floorboards next to her was an X of dark tape, and she pulled a chair to cover it, then sat down, a little off to the right: now he could see a bit of the side of her face and part of her ankle. He dragged the manifold across the floor as quietly as he could, and when he’d set it against the wall he heard her deliver a line: “Thanks, Momma, I’m quite comfortable where I am.” She rose from the chair and twirled again, the yellow skirt fanning out farther this time until he saw a hem of green. He set aside his wrenches and lay down to watch.

It would be a long time before he saw another play—more than sixty years, in fact. But that week he ended up seeing the one she was rehearsing—it was by Oscar Wilde. And a month later he joined the navy. Then he spent two years in the Pacific, maintaining the hydraulics of the cruiser
Louisville
. In the South China Sea near the end of his tour, a pair of kamikazes hit the ship, and what he found himself remembering as smoke filled the engine room was the view he’d once had through a rectangular hole in the ceiling, that girl’s auburn hair against the green ribbon.

When the rehearsal was over he’d climbed down and come in the rear door of the stage. There was an electrical panel there. He stood in front of it, screwing and unscrewing a fuse, until finally she walked out of the dressing room. She was in her regular school clothes.

“Would you see me sometime?” he said.

She glanced at him. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“Because I’m going over, then.”

She pointed at his boots. “You’re getting tar on the stage.”

“Excuse me,” he said. He bent down to clean it up. “Would you?”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“Would you tell it to me?”

“All right. Anna.”

“Anna What?”

“Anna Bainbridge.”

“Would you, then, Anna Bainbridge?”

“I have no interest.”

“What if I came to the play?”

She looked at his boots again. “I don’t think you’d like it.”

“I might surprise you.”

“Then come, if you want. It’s a free country.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” She pointed. “You didn’t get all the tar.”

He bent down again.

“I’m Grange Sifter,” he said when he stood.

And a little more than a decade later, when my father had returned to Saline, Anna Bainbridge Sifter—after a stillbirth and a late miscarriage of twins—had me.

I
T WAS AT THE
G
ROTON NAVY YARD,
where he was posted after his tour on the USS
Louisville
, that my father first gained the attention of one of Liam Metarey’s foremen, and from the day he returned to Saline, his work was on Metarey rentals. The rentals were solid, handsome houses in a way that seems to have vanished today in all but the most genteel neighborhoods, with deep front porches shaded by red oaks, corniced eaves that formed rain shadows around the foundations, and signature brick steps in a diamond pattern bordered in herringbone. When I was a kid, those corniced eaves were still being built by one set of my uncles, and those brick steps were still being laid by another. The Metareys were able to go to great lengths to keep up their neighborhoods, in part because they owned the lumber mills and the brick furnace and the ironworks, but also in part because they employed men like my father and his brothers, who were more or less permanently at their call.