Clarkton (7 page)

“I hate that kind of talk,” Lois said. “It's not flip, it's not clever. It's cheap talk.”

She kissed her father and sat down next to him, and Lowell, who was going to say something, swallowed his words.

“I got home at twelve-thirty,” Fern said. “I thought Elliott would still be here.”

“Why was that so important?” Lowell asked.

Fern, who was drinking her orange juice, put it down suddenly and looked at her father reflectively. “He's a beautiful man,” she said. She finished her juice, and began to pour her coffee. Lois asked:

“Is there any reason why we have to wait for this wretched business to be over, George? I hate a winter in Massachusetts. I always have hated it.”

3.
B
ut this was not really a winter's day, in the
old, time-accepted sense of the word; this was not the sort of a day that comes down out of the Berkshires, growling with suppressed anger, raising a godhead out of petulant Mount Greylock. This was a day when the morning mists cleared in the earliest dawn, and the sun flooded the hills around Clarkton, the cobbled red streets, and the long rows of red-brick tenements—that amazing New England combination of slum and countryside—that were strung the length of First and Fourth Avenues, nestling into the hills themselves. It was a windy, sunny day, full of delight for the senses—something that Mike Sawyer was highly conscious of as he walked down the main street with Danny Ryan, on their way to JÓe Santana's barber shop.

Sawyer was one of those men whose face hair ingrew unless he was regularly shaved and double-shaved by a barber, and when he brought this up with Ryan, the little man remarked that it was a good way to kill two birds with one stone, since he ought to meet Joe Santana in any case, and that they might as well walk over there and get him shaved, and then maybe chew the fat a little with Joe before they went up to the plant, which Mike Sawyer had not yet seen. Sawyer agreed to this; the prospect of a walk on this fine, cool morning was inviting, and he was immensely curious about New England, every aspect of it, all of it new to him, each part of it a part of a problem that would be his to solve, sooner or later. As they strolled along, he discovered that walking with Danny Ryan was a very good way to meet people. Also, Ryan showed no sign of the antagonism he had displayed the evening before. Ryan knew everyone, and he seemed to be consistently liked. It was just early enough for the workers to be drifting over to the plant, their pace that slow, puzzled walk of men on strike for the first time in many years, the big sheep-skin collars of their wind-jackets turned up, their red-flapped hunting caps sitting on the backs of their heads. Every so often, one of them buttonholed Ryan to pour out a long, quick-paced gripe, to each of which he listened, making a quick, seemingly snap decision.

Sawyer noticed how many of the men wore one part or another of army uniform, and when he remarked on this to his companion, Ryan said, “They been coming back since 'forty-two. This is a one-plant town, Mike. How many filling stations you going to open in a place like Clarkton?”

When they were almost at Santana's place, Ryan was stopped by a thin, redheaded, middle-aged man whom he introduced to Sawyer as Freddy Butler, one of the lasters. “What do you know, Danny?” Butler inquired, and Ryan answered that he didn't know much—it was quiet, too damned quiet. Butler said, “I hear it talked around that we got big-time company in town.” “You hear it talked around,” Ryan grinned. “The lips flap like they was in a hurricane. You going to listen, you going to hear an awful lot talked around.” “Well, what do I tell the guys?” “Take it easy,” Ryan said. “They want to know, you just tell them to take it easy.”

“A good guy?” Sawyer asked; as they walked away.

“A good guy, only he's awful nervous. He got pushed around too much, I guess. It makes him nervous.”

Joe Santana had just opened up when they got to his place. and he was sitting in his number-one chair, reading the New York
Times.
He was introduced to Sawyer, and shook his hand with real warmth. “You got a problem,” he admitted, referring to Sawyer's beard. “You get used to a certain kind of shave and you got to follow through. But you also got a situation where most barbers are butchers. I got a respect for my work—as a matter of fact, for work in general—but how many barbers have? Barbers are not a good type, unfortunately. I know; I worked for them all over the country. Mostly, I preferred other kinds of work, but sooner or later I'd have to fall back on tonsorial work to make a buck that was badly needed. This is different. This way I got a little independence—as much as a man can have in this system of ours—and I got people to talk to. Also, I got a basis for knowledge,” grinning and nodding at the New York
Times
, which he had folded carefully and laid on his pile of newspapers.

“I guess you know the town pretty well,” Sawyer said.

“Yes and no. You got to talk of a degree. How well does a man know his own wife? Only within limitations. A town like this is a problem for a social scientist with a sincere interest in the species. I never been to Lowell's house—he owns the plant. I never been to Gafferty's house—he's the big-shot banker in town; I got connections with limitations, so I try to make insight do the work. A man like yourself, he probably learns more in a week than I do in a year. But insight has a place, a legitimate place. Take this business of the atom bomb. The New York
Times
thinks there is going to be a war with Russia; I dissent—not on political grounds, although there is no doubt you could give an argument there, a leading man like you, I mean—but on the basis of human nature. I put myself in the place of the average man, the average Joe. He don't want to die by an atom bomb. To you and me, it don't matter. But the average guy, he don't like this thing; it's unnatural. That's a factor.”

He had already finished lathering Sawyer's face, and now he was beginning to shave, with quick, competent strokes. He knew his work, and regardless of the part of it with which he was engaged, his smooth flow of talk was not interrupted.

4.
D
riving down Concord Way toward the
plant, Lowell found himself thinking of his daughter in terms of Elliott Abbott, something which—and this he was willi'ng to admit to himself—would have been inconceivable only a few days ago. His resentment, his feeling of frustration in terms of his wife, had to crystallize somèwhere, and the very fact that he was beginning to realize how much he had leaned upon Elliott Abbott during the past years helped to focus it upon the doctor. Yet mixed up in that and added to the crazy feeling he had that his daughter was in love with Abbott—a natural, understandable adolescent crush, he was also willing to admit—was a sense of envy. This morning, for the first time, he had been able to see his daughter from a point of vantage, and the sight disturbed him. He wondered whether he would remain close enough to Abbott to talk to him about it, and then he admitted that even if this were the case, it was something he could not possibly bring up.

He was close to the Fourth Avenue gate of the plant now, and he slowed down, so that he could present his pass to the picket captain in charge. Again, as on all previous times, since the beginning of the strike, it occurred to him what an element of the childish, of the absurd, there was in the antics of the little group of men and women who marched monotonously round and round in front of the gate, carrying their signs, which called so gracelessly for a wage raise, for the union of black and white, for unity, for solidarity—for all those other things which, it seemed to Lowell, were unwieldy slogans and no more. They themselves were either new at this thing or had forgotten the last time they were out on strike—so many years ago now—and betrayed the fact in a sort of self-consciousness, which they attempted to hide but were unable to.

Three more-than-middle-aged men on the line—they were probably inspectors, Lowell thought—carried furled umbrellas, the height of incongruity on that sun-drenched morning, and to complete the picture of respectability, the old gentlemen wore long black overcoats, silk scarves, and felt hats. Even though there was no one in particular watching them, they would every so often pick up a ragged chant, “… black and white, unite and fight …,” keep it going for a while, and then allow it to fade away. In this, the three old gentlemen were unable to join, and it was the clean voices of the young folks; the girls in their slacks and cheap fur coats, the boys in their motley of army uniform and outdoor clothes, that sounded through. Lowell noticed that, as always, there were half a dozen extras standing around, ribbing the pickets in a good-natured way occasionally, and making sure that the fires in the big oil cans, perforated with holes, and known from coast to coast as salamanders—perhaps because they turned red when heated long enough—were kept going.

To Lowell, it was a charade, and one that he found peculiarly unpleasant. It annoyed him that, even though they recognized him and his car easily enough, he was forced by the very block of their bodies to stop, present his pass, and have it countersigned by the picket captain before he could proceed to enter a piece of property he owned—and which, by virtue of his ownership, as he considered, gave them the wherewithal to exist. This morning, it was more annoying than ever, and when the company guards finally opened the gates, he fairly ripped the gears out of the big Buick, hurtling it through.

He parked in his usual place by the loading depot, and was hardly mollified by the warm good morning old Mack Seelly, one of the watchmen and a man who had started in the plant not too long after Lowell's father built it, gave him. He stalked into the office wing, relaxing to the extent of lighting a cigarette only when he was in the self-service elevator and on his way up. He thought that it was something of a shame that he had not brought Elliott Abbott with him this morning, so that the doctor's sentimentalism in terms of workers might come to rest on something concrete. In Lowell, who was not an easy man to like, there was a deep need for the liking of others; and even such small matters as the smiles of the girls in the office reassured him.

The office wing of the Lowell Company had been added early in the nineteen-twenties, but the offices themselves, while spacious, were done in the dark oak and somber red of at least two decades before. There was nothing frivolous about them, nor was there any attempt at sophistication; and perhaps in unconscious opposition to his wife's course at home, as well as for other reasons, Lowell left them completely alone. At the same time, he could not stomach the thought of sitting in the enormous room that had been his father's; he handed it over to Tom Wilson, the plant manager, retaining Wilson's office as his own.

Now he was at his desk only a few minutes, staring idly and without a great deal of interest at the pile of mail, when Wilson entered, his face bisected with a broad grin, his out-thrust hand demanding Lowell's, gripping it, “Good to see you back on the firing line, George.” Wilson was a given-name man, a fact that he implemented five years ago, when Lowell first met him. It was, “Welcome to the firing line, George” then, and it was some variant of the same ever since. In any case, Wilson did it well. He was a big man, not too tall, but big and fleshy, broad-shouldered, in his late forties, with a considerable paunch already developed. Three chins led down to his collar, and he had a booming, somewhat hoarse voice, a tremendous affinity for the Lowell Enterprises, and a security in himself, his way of life, his mission in life, and his position in life that Lowell at one and the same time despised and envied. Lowell did not like him; Wilson knew this, and considered it a challenge, respecting the dislike as coming from the type of man Lowell was, a type he admired highly—in a sense being proud of the dislike—and unswervingly determined to eliminate it.

He sat down, alongside Lowell's desk, and gave him a detailed report of what had occurred in the past two days, a series of facts in which Lowell was only formally interested. Pausing only to bite off the end of a cigar and light it, he went on to relate these facts to the situation in the country as a whole, the great wave of strikes, the possibilities of war with Russia, and the excess profits tax, which provided that if, during the current year, the profits of the corporation fell below the profits of 1939, the difference would be supplied by the government.

“Which puts us in a sound position economically,” Wilson said. “Just on that simple basis of dollars and cents, it would almost pay us to keep the plant shut down. But that's short-sighted thinking. I don't like shortsighted thinking and planning. You agree with me there?”

“I agree with you,” Lowell said. “I don't intend to keep the plant shut down.” Actually, he had come to the decision that once it opened, once the strike was over, he would drop the operation of it into Wilson's lap—and go away; for the rest of the winter, certainly, and perhaps for a longer time than that.

“For one thing,” Wilson went on, “it's going to breed trouble for the future. There's nothing the commies like better than a strike; it's meat and drink to them.”

“I think that's something less than the main problem,” Lowell said impatiently. He did not like red-baiting; he felt, instinctively, that there was something unclean in this inordinate urge to build a Communist menace. Aside from Joe Santana, the barber, who was a Communist and made no secret of it, he could not recall that he had ever seen a Communist, known one, or been faced with the problem of one—unless Elliott Abbott was one of them, a notion that he put aside at once, thinking that his anger against Elliott could at least be kept rational.

“Yes and no—don't underestimate those babies,” Wilson nodded, his voice taking on that slightly patronizing air it always assumed sooner or later when he spoke to Lowell. “Ham Gelb could say a word or two about that. But what I'm thinking about is the whole character of our operation here in Clarkton. Until 1932, your father never had any trouble with these folks. As a matter of fact, he made them feel they were all one big family, not in a soft way, you understand; there was an iron fist in the velvet glove; but he interested them in profit-sharing and all that kind of thing, and there just never was any trouble to speak about. Well, there was plenty of trouble in the 'thirties, when the union came in, until the war brought it back to normalcy. These are high-paid, skilled workers we got here, and I like to run a plant without any trouble. But if this strike stretches out too far, they're going to become mean. You'd be surprised at how mean nice people can become, George. That's one part of it; the other is the market. I want to settle this and get into the market.”