by Lamar Herrin
Howie Whalen had done all he’d had to to deserve a funeral like the one he got. For all his success, he remained bound to his town. He’d carried his boyhood friends with him—with their crudity and their loyalty and their blind spots as adults. He spoke in the town’s own unlordly drawl. Certain evenings he sat on a bench in the town’s square and chewed the town’s fat. He lingered outside the post office to chew the fat there too. In church he laid one arm along the back of a pew and in turn gave each of his sons a father’s conspiratorial wink, as his school buddies grown into fathers undoubtedly gave theirs. That man up there sure can preach, he’d whisper, but hang on, buddy, we’ll be out of here soon. You’ll be back playing, and I’ll be too. At home, on matters of etiquette and good taste he’d defer to his wife, and on the niceties of social intercourse, but the town as he knew it best was mostly out of doors, and out there he was the town’s townie.
So when Howie offered himself to his workers as a substitute for any union they might want to join, they came to him freely, and if it wasn’t a sensitive personal matter, he’d walk them out of his office into the open, where they could be joined by others, and where business, money matters, job grievances could become a social occasion and a way to talk things through. And Howie did this not because it had become a successful tactic in heading off trouble before it started, but because he took a genuine pleasure in his workers’ company, they were who he was, townspeople of his, and surrounded by them he felt himself grow, a pleasurable sensation, to grow and grow (unlike his father, whose growth was all flesh) until his well-being seemingly knew no bounds.
Yet he was still Howie, still Little Howie, however important an international figure he might become. I visited him on occasion, not often, but I kept in touch with his mother, my aunt, and his sister, grown into a teenage Ellie, and I watched his father drive around town as if he’d never ceased to be the ultimate authority, had never gone unconsulted for long. There goes that man again in his black Cadillac, and in deference other motorists might hug the curb. How Big Howie managed to fit his ever enlarging belly under the steering wheel was anyone’s guess. He put in token time in the office, the founder and now emeritus of the whole enterprise, and when Howie went on his business trips, his father went to the plant and in effect represented his son. When his son came back, Big Howie devoted his time to his daughter, this gift he’d received out of the blue to grace his retirement, whom he taught to shoot quail and pheasants on the wing, to cast and to hook a fish, salt or freshwater, and if it didn’t dwarf her, to clean it on the spot. And to drive a speedboat with the wind whipping her hair; soon thereafter, a Cadillac. Big Howie, no longer as mobile as he’d been, basically sat back and marveled at his daughter, and Ellie, no longer little, approaching womanhood but still within reach of her father’s shadow, must have kept telling herself, I’ll indulge him for a while longer, the rest of this season, say, but not the next. I’ll become my own woman then. He’ll see.
Little Howie always called his father Big Howie, regardless of the occasion, in his presence or in the third person. Ellie called him Daddy, with a sweetness and a sadness that let you know, regardless of how hard her father might try to play the clown for laughs, or to give an out-of-bounds shock, he could do no wrong. She was her daddy’s pet, and Big Howie was a fair facsimile of his old self. Rosalyn—
And that question you wanted to ask her? Walter broke in.
Ask Rosalyn?
No, Ellie. Remember? If she’d remembered stroking your beard?
The truth is, I forgot about it. Later …
Later?
Later I’d learn she hadn’t.
How much later?
Much later. It depends, Walter, if I can keep this up.
I drew a deep breath. We were back in our chairs, steep-slanted, so steep that once you got into them it took an effort to get out, with bourbon on the armrests and sweaters over our shoulders. The moon would be late to rise. There was dock light on the water and a fugitive flash when something broke the surface farther out. We’d yet to hear a loon. I did hear that boy again, whose discovery in the morning had attracted no corroborating witness, and whose whine now had a loon-like moan to it, perhaps, until somebody, a man, abruptly shut him up. I drew another deep breath.
Walter, I said, section 807 of the U.S. Tariff Code. Does that mean anything to you?
Walter was a criminal attorney, not a civil one, and couldn’t be expected to know his way around these tariff codes. Except that years ago section 807 had created quite a stir, since it was the provision that made outsourcing or offshoring profitable for American firms. In effect, section 807 stated that for imported goods made abroad of U.S. components, duty would be charged, upon reentry into the United States, only on the foreign value added. That “value added” corresponded to what it cost to assemble those components into something as recognizable and salable as a shirt or a pair of pants. Foreign “value added” also depended on the value of the currency in question against the value of the dollar, and since certain countries were willing to devalue their currencies to attract U.S. investment, “foreign value added” frequently meant next to nothing, what you’d toss into a beggar’s can. You calculated your import duties off that, and they were incalculably small. Your cost was essentially limited to the price of the material at home, the negligible wages you paid the foreign workers, and the shipping of the finished product to retailers, which was why outsourcing and offshoring had become code words for corporate disloyalty and greed. Towns in the United States whose jobs were lost to outsourcing were being blown off the map. When Big Howie, with his distrust of all things foreign, got wind of what the son was proposing to do, he was slow to come round, but once he understood that the only way to continue to compete was to ride 807 as hard as they could, he said, All right, no reason to go any further than those maquiladoras right across the border in Mexico. They’d be quick and close and the Mexican government had just devalued the peso.
Is it coming back to you now, Walter? I said.
Walter turned and faced me. He cocked his head at a disbelieving angle. This is not the picture you’ve been painting for me, he said. I would have guessed that before he outsourced, Howie Whalen would have gone down with the ship. Little Howie Whalen.
Howie Whalen was not fond of sinking ships or fishing boats or sinking vessels of any sort. His overriding intention all along was to save the town.
And to get rich.
Richer, I said.
Go on, Walter said.
He was a townie, I reminded Walter, maybe the ultimate townie, so it only stands to reason he’d go in search of a town.
Not the maquiladoras?
That was what Big Howie would have done, expedient to a fault. But from the very beginning Little Howie had in mind some Latino equivalent of the town he lived in. He had a vision, and it probably had Juan matching up with John, Carlos with Charlie, Anita with Annie, that sort of thing, so the first thing he did was to take a crash course in Spanish, and do a little reading on the side to see how badly the Spaniards and the norteamericanos had abused their privileges in these countries up to then. I know he made trips to Central America, Costa Rica I believe I heard, but a number of American firms had already crowded in there. He ended up in the Dominican Republic. Maybe he jetted into Punta Cana and began to go back in time from there. A town on the northeast coast. Bella something. Maybe he just strolled into it and with a fruitful, Johnny Appleseed sort of intuition dropped a seed to see if it would grow, and it did. He arranged a deal to everybody’s advantage. If Howie Whalen had a businessman’s credo, it was that money ungrudgingly made bred more of its kind. It was like fertilizing a garden well at the start. Thereafter, it bore the best of fruit. Howie paid his workers considerably more than any other outsourcer who had come through there, and he flew back frequently as the machinery was shipped in to be assembled and the bales of cloth, cut to the company’s specifications, were unloaded to be sewn into shirts and pants. He met Ju
an and Carlos and Anita. Of course, with his beginner’s Spanish coming out on that drawl and with his singular good looks, you can imagine. They lined up to work for him, and they worked well. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, Walter, Howie was an American, after all, and the dictator Trujillo—you’ll remember him, the one your FDR was referring to when he famously boasted he was a son of a bitch but our son of a bitch—
And it took one to know one, I’ve never disputed that.
Yeah, well, for a lot of people Trujillo and the yanquis went hand in hand, my hand in your pocket, yours just a little bit in mine. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. This town business, Walter. This townie’s banner my cousin proudly flew. I came back through his town to see my aunt and, in effect, to renew acquaintance with Ellie, now that she’d become engaged, but it was during that trip that I visited Howie and Laurie out in their new house—a mansion-sized place with a sort of French Provincial façade—built over that twelve-hundred-mile lake Phil Hodge and I had not fished. Howie and I did not talk fishing or much about family either, even though his children were in and out. I sat down to dinner with them. After having given birth four times, Laurie Whalen had gained a few pounds and a certain measuredness in her movements and a certain tolerance for turmoil, but she had also gained a glow in her face and a depth in the shifting planes of her eyes it was hard not to linger on. Her beauty had settled, become more accomplished; her children might mildly misbehave, especially Joey, the youngest, but she’d learned how to wait them out, and while she waited it was as if she was conducting her own private tally and allowing you to see how masterfully it had all worked out. When she looked at her husband, basically what she was saying was that there were no words.
Eventually the children asked to be excused. Howie had something he wanted to tell me, not man-to-man talk, but something that had its roots in the family, perhaps, or reached back to our childhoods. Laurie accompanied us out to their deck, looking down on a finger of the lake and a boathouse so large it might have housed their family a second time over. She took my hand and reached up to kiss me on the cheek. Her hair, perhaps a bit muted but still lustrous, brushed against the side of my face. It was orange blossoms, not magnolia blossoms, I’d swear I smelled. Don’t let him talk your ear off, she whispered, which was a strange thing to say, since Howie was more of a listener than a talker, and then, having listened, a talker with just the right words.
Howie’d had a vision, it turned out, down in that town where he’d been setting up his plant, a vision of a routine occurrence, so routine, in fact, it happened every Sunday evening, and in all the towns down there. In an age when “courtship” might be considered an archaic word, he’d happened on a Sunday evening paseo. I was to picture the town’s main square, its plaza mayor. At its center a bandstand or a fountain, or a heroic statue of some sort, at its margins small trimmed trees, dense with shiny leaves, and large gaudy flowers that would be giving off a heady scent if the spicy meat and fruit smells coming from the food vendors in the surrounding streets were not so strong. There would be music, perhaps from the bandstand itself, or from speakers mounted on the trees, or music accumulating in the evening air from a thousand different sources, and the beat would be festive. Then I was to picture the young women of the town promenading around that bandstand or fountain or statue in one direction while the boys and young men would be strutting and careening around in the other. And there would be yet a third circle for the married couples and especially for the mothers of the young women so that they could observe their daughters and note which of the young men allowed their lustful eyes to linger longer than they should. And then there would be benches off to the side, or steps or low walls to sit on, where visitors such as Howie Whalen might admire the whole spectacle and come away with a sense that they had seen the town spiraling in to a point, the town in its entirety, generation after generation, wheels within wheels, with nothing left over.
One evening Howie Whalen had observed such a paseo in the town where he’d come to locate his plant, and he invited me to believe he’d gone into something of a trance. It was the brightness of it all, the color, the lively salsa step to the music, it was the sense that it had all been choreographed like this since time began, that some things never changed because they were eternally fresh, and then it was those circles of townspeople rotating in opposite directions, closing on that hypnotic point. Howie smelled sizzling flesh and a gaudy gush of flowers, fruit rinds, cheap perfume, and the day’s dust. He had never been much of a drinker—not with Big Howie’s example before him—and except for a few immersions in collegiate kegs of beer, intoxication had never been a part of his life, but he quickly became drunk on it all then. The girls circled with their arms linked. Some of the boys linked theirs or threw their arms around each other’s shoulders. The older couples or groups of women were linked too, just more sedately. There was nowhere for an outsider to break in.
A church, with a stucco colonial façade and a statue of the Virgin in her niche over the door, rose on the far side of the plaza. My cousin told me that he considered going in there to pray. For what? To whom? To the Virgen de la Esperanza, the Virgin of Hope, he said. There was something essential, fundamental, about that vision he’d experienced in the town where he’d come to do business, and he didn’t want to lose it. Then my cousin looked at me, lowered his head, and invited me to join him—at his own expense—in a laugh, which I did.
But if my cousin was a townie, I told Walter, he was a townie all the way through, and after having experienced such a sight, how could he be anything other than a jefe fabuloso, an offshore boss to die for. He could laugh at himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe it. And I could see that he’d been moved. Someone had to keep those wheels turning—whether in the Caribbean or in his own small southern town—if people were going to get along and work toward a common goal. Then he laughed again, but this time I heard the pleasure in the laugh, something of his mother’s windfall sense of abundance. In time it would all come streaming down.
Walter broke in to say, That wheel, those wheels, could have been mill wheels, you know. You’d better have a lot of water sluicing through to keep them turning.
Or everyone working in unison. No one not pulling his weight.
And back home?
They cut the pieces to company specs for the workers down there to sew.
And you’re telling me no one got laid off?
On the contrary, I’m telling you that business got so profitable that the workers in Howie’s town never had it so good. That Howie Whalen’s town became a sort of hub. That for a few years there, tourists might come through to exclaim, Ah, here’s the charming little town where it all started. That Whalen Apparels workers began to build houses on the lake, much smaller than the Whalens themselves were used to, granted …
I saw that it had become sport for Walter, but who could blame him after having sat through a family saga like this? He said, So, in effect, the original workers became little offshore bosses themselves. John meet Juan. Charlie meet Carlos. That sort of thing. Or they became stockholders. Little Howie Incorporated …
Walter?
Yes, Jim.
When you fish the jumps, there comes a moment when the fish are crazy to be caught. If you don’t catch them, they’ll catch you. Until you run out of minnows.
If I understand you correctly, Walter responded, as deliberately as if he were appearing before a judge and connecting the necessary dots, you’re saying there comes a moment when, if you’re smart, you’ll look for a way to stay sane.
Exactly. Which, if we’re talking fishing, I said, means finding a lake like this one. The Whalen fortune came from readymades, which means a lake big enough for any boat you want to run out on it, but if you wanted to restrict it to canoes and a few little pickerel, you’re talking customized clothing, one shirt, topcoat, sport coat, and suit of clothes at a time.
And that’s what your cousin did? He opened a cust
omized clothing plant?
In addition to his plant overseas, the first, then a second, that is exactly what he did, and Big Howie just shook his head.
Don’t tell me Little Howie grew a beard, too! Don’t tell me that!
I gave Walter his laugh.
The next to the last time I saw my cousin Howie Whalen, I said, was at that plant he’d built for his line of customized clothes. It was a small plant, a sort of freestanding adjunct to the main one, with an overhead rail system and rows of specialized machines. I walked in on him, I thought, unawares. The building was air-conditioned. The smell was of one vast unspooling bolt of cloth, sweetened by oil. Out of a multi-pitched hum of numerous machines came bursts of stitching, and I found my cousin standing beside one of his workers seated at her machine with a sheet of paper in his hand. He looked around at me and grinned. Of course he knew I was in town. The grin said as much. He introduced the worker as Doris, then passed me the paper he held, where I could read all the peculiar little specs a man named Roger Gold desired in his suit of clothes and, in this particular row of machines, specifically in his pants. The number and placement of belt loops, the desired depth of the coin pocket, the unusually large cut to the calves. Howie told his worker Doris to take a break, then sat down at her machine himself and showed me how to cut the hip pockets of Roger Gold’s pants and stitch them before sending them via the overhead rail system on to the next station, where a buttonhole would be cut and, depending on the spec, either a flap or a tab attached. The material was a pale gray wool, and Roger Gold, I was informed, as though he might be a neighbor of mine, came from no less a place than New York City. Howie was allowing me to believe that if he wanted to show off he could singlehandedly, machine by machine, sew Roger Gold’s entire suit. But Howie was not a showoff, and he would never supplant his workers like that. It was the pleasure he took that he wanted me to see, plus the performance of his latest machine and, step by step, the impeccable results. I remember saying that it was a little spooky, the way he could get inside another man’s skin like that, and I remember exactly what Howie replied. It does give you a kind of rush. When Roger Gold reaches in his pocket to get a quarter, he’ll find it in a coin pocket—and Howie glanced again at the spec paper I still held—exactly four inches deep. Not everyone knows that about the man. Then my cousin laughed, a sweet and sly insider’s chuckle that was the very sound of kinship itself. He said, Give me your measurements, Jim, and tell me how far down you want to reach, and I’ll make a suit for you.
