by Philip Roth
care unit, during his stewardship there had been a long-overdue modernization of
emergency room facilities. But who gives a shit about the emergency room of a
community hospital out in the sticks? Who gives a shit about a rural general
store whose owner has been running it since 1921? We’re talking about humanity!
When has there ever been progress for humanity without a few small mishaps and
mistakes? The people are angry and they have spoken! Violence will be met by
violence, regardless of consequences, until the people are liberated! Fascist
America down one post office, facility completely destroyed.
Except, as it happened, Hamlin’s was not an official U.S. post office nor were
the Hamlins U.S. postal employees—theirs was merely a postal station contracted,
for x number of dollars, to handle a little postal business on the side.
Hamlin’s was no more a government installation than the office where your
accountant makes out your tax forms. But that is a mere technicality to world
revolutionaries. Facility destroyed! Eleven hundred Old Rimrock residents
forced, for a full year and a half, to drive five miles to buy their stamps and
to get packages weighed and to send anything registered or special delivery.
That’ll show Lyndon Johnson who’s boss.
They were laughing at him. Life was laughing at him.
Mrs. Conlon had said, “You are as much the victims of this tragedy as we are.
The difference is that for us, though recovery will take time, we will survive
as a family. We will survive as a loving family. We will survive with our
memories intact and with our
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memories to sustain us. It will not be any easier for us than it will be for you
to make sense of something so senseless. But we are the same family we were when
Fred was here, and we will survive.”
The clarity and force with which she implied that the Swede and his family would
not survive made him wonder, in the weeks that followed, if her kindness and her
compassion were so all-encompassing as he had wanted at first to believe.
* * *
He never went to see her again.
He told his secretary that he was going over to New York, to the Czech mission,
where he’d already had preliminary discussions about a trip to Czechoslovakia
later in the fall. In New York he had examined specimen gloves as well as shoes,
belts, pocketbooks, and wallets manufactured in Czechoslovakia, and now the
Czechs were working up plans for him to visit factories in Brno and Bratislava
so he could see the glove setup firsthand and examine a more extensive sample of
their work while it was in production and when it came off the floor. There was
no longer any question that in Czechoslovakia leather apparel could be more
cheaply made than in Newark or Puerto Rico—and probably better made, too. The
workmanship that had begun falling off in the Newark plant since the riots had
continued to deteriorate, especially once Vicky retired as making room forelady.
Even granting that what he’d seen at the Czech mission might not be
representative of day-to-day production, it had been impressive enough. Back in
the thirties the Czechs had flooded the American market with fine gloves, over
the years excellent Czech cutters had been employed by Newark Maid, and the
machinist who for thirty years had been employed full-time tending Newark Maid’s
sewing machines, keeping those workhorses running—replacing worn-out shafts,
levers, throat plates, bobbins, endlessly adjusting each machine’s timing and
tension— was a Czech, a wonderful worker, expert with every glove machine on
earth, able to fix anything. Even though the Swede had assured his father he had
no intention of signing over any aspect of their operation to a Communist
government until he’d returned with a
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thorough report, he was confident that pulling out of Newark wasn’t far down the
line.
Dawn by this time had her new face and had begun the startling comeback, and as
for Merry… well, Merry dear, Merry darling, my precious one-and-only Merry-
child, how can I possibly remain on Central Avenue struggling to keep my
production up, taking the beating we’re taking there from black people who care
nothing any longer about the quality of my product—people who are careless,
people who’ve got me over a barrel because they know there’s nobody trainable
left in Newark to replace them—for fear that if I leave Central Avenue you will
call me a racist and never see me again? I have waited so long to see you again,
your mother has waited, Grandpa and Grandma have waited, we have all been
waiting twenty-four hours a day every day of every year for five years to see
you or to hear from you or somehow to get some word of you, and we can postpone
our lives no longer. It’s 1973. Mother is a new woman. If we are ever again
going to live, now is when we must begin.
Nonetheless, he was waiting not for the pleasant consul at the Czech mission to
welcome him with a glass of slivovitz (as his father or his wife would think if
they happened to phone the office) but across from the dog and cat hospital on
New Tersey Railroad Avenue, a ten-minute car ride from the Newark Maid factory.
Ten minutes away. And for years? In Newark, for years? Merry was living in the
one place in the world he would never have guessed had he been given a thousand
guesses. Was he deficient in intelligence, or was she so provocative, so
perverse, so insane he still could not imagine anything she might do? Was he
deficient also in imagination? What father wouldn’t be? It was preposterous. His
daughter was living in Newark, working across the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks,
and not at the end of the Ironbound where the Portuguese were reclaiming the
poor Down Neck streets but here at the Ironbound’s westernmost edge, in the
shadow of the railroad viaduct that closed off Railroad Avenue all along the
western side of the street. That grim fortification was the city’s Chinese wall,
* * *
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brownstone boulders piled twenty feet high, strung out for more than a mile and
intersected only by half a dozen foul underpasses. Along this forsaken street,
as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian
length of unguarded wall barren even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that
managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed
away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a
weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its
ugliness.
On the east side of the street, the dark old factories—Civil War factories,
foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys
pumping smoke for a hundred years—were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out
with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblock. These
were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet
crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the
cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out
g
oods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombs. It was Newark that was entombed
there, a city that was not going to stir again. The pyramids of Newark: as huge
and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every
historical right to be.
The rioters hadn’t crossed beneath the elevated railroad tracks— if they had,
these factories, the whole block of them, would be burned-out rubble like the
West Market Street factories back of Newark Maid.
His father used to tell him, “Brownstone and brick. There was the business.
Brownstone quarried right here. Know that? Out by Belleville, north along the
river. This city’s got everything. What a business that must have been. The guy
who sold Newark brownstone and brick—he was sittin’ pretty.”
On Saturday mornings, the Swede would drive Down Neck alongside his father to
pick up the week’s finished gloves from the Italian families paid to do
piecework in their homes. As the car bounced along the streets paved with
bricks, past one poor little
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Ik
frame house after another, the massive railroad viaduct remained brokenly within
view. It would not go away. This was the Swede’s first encounter with the
manmade sublime that divides and dwarfs, and in the beginning it was frightening
to him, a child susceptible to his environment even then, with a proclivity to
be embraced by it and to embrace it in return. Six or seven years old. Maybe
five, maybe Jerry hadn’t even been born yet. The dwarfing stones causing the
city to be even more gigantic for him than it already was. The manmade horizon,
the brutal cut in the body of the giant city—it felt as though they were
entering the shadow world of hell, when all the boy was seeing was the
railroad’s answer to the populist crusade to hoist the tracks above the grade
crossings so as to end the crashes and the pedestrian carnage. “Brownstone and
brick,” said his father admiringly. ” There was a guy whose worries were over.”
That had all taken place before they’d moved to Keer Avenue, when they were
living across from the synagogue in a three-family house at the poor end of
Wainwright Street. His father didn’t have even a loft then but got his skins
from a fellow who was also Down Neck and who trafficked out of his garage in
whatever the workers could carry from the tanneries hidden within their big
* * *
rubber boots or wrapped around them beneath their overalls. The hide man was
himself a tannery worker, a big, gruff Pole with tattoos up and down his massive
arms, and the Swede had vague memories of his father’s standing at the garage’s
one window holding the finished hides up to the light and searching them for
defects, then stretching them over his knee before making his selection. “Feel
this,” he’d say to the Swede once they were safely back in the car, and the
child would crease a delicate kidskin as he’d seen his father do, finger the
fineness appreciatively, the velvet texture of the skin’s close, tight grain. ”
That’s leather,” his father told him. “What makes kidskin so delicate, Seymour?”
“I don’t know.” “Well, what is a kid?” “A baby goat.” “Right. And what does he
eat?” “Milk?” “Right. And because all the animal has eaten is milk, that’s what
makes the grain smooth and beautiful. Look at the pores of this skin with a
magni-
220
fying glass and they’re so fine you can’t even see ‘em. But the kid starts
eating grass, that skin’s a different story. The goat eats grass and the skin is
like sandpaper. The finest glove leather for a formal glove is what, Seymour?”
“Kid.” “That’s my boy. But it’s not only the kid, son, it’s the tanning. You’ve
got to know your tannery. It’s like a good cook and a bad cook. You get a good
piece of meat and a bad cook can spoil it for you. How come someone makes a
wonderful cake and the other doesn’t? One is moist and nice and the other is
dry. Same thing in leather. I worked in the tannery. It’s the chemicals, it’s
the time, it’s the temperature. That’s where the difference comes in. That, and
not buying second-rate skins to begin with. Cost as much to tan a bad skin as a
good skin. Cost more to tan a bad one—you work harder at it. Beautiful,
beautiful,” he said, “wonderful stuff,” once again lovingly kneading the kidskin
between his fingertips. “You know how you get it like this, Seymour?” “How,
Daddy?” “You work at it.”
There were eight, ten, twelve immigrant families scattered throughout Down Neck
to whom Lou Levov distributed the skins along with his own patterns, people from
Naples who had been glovers in the old country and the best of whom wound up
working at Newark Maid’s first home when he could come up with the rent for the
small loft on West Market Street on the top floor of the chair factory. The old
Italian grandfather or the father did the cutting on the kitchen table, with the
French rule, the shears, and the spud knife he’d brought from Italy. The
grandmother or the mother did the sewing, and the daughters did the laying off—
ironing the glove—in the old-fashioned way, with irons heated up in a box set
atop the kitchen’s potbellied stove. The women worked on antique Singers,
nineteenth-century machines that Lou Levov, who’d learned to reassemble them,
had bought for a song and then repaired himself; at least once a week, he’d have
to drive all the way Down Neck at night and spend an hour getting a machine
running right again. Otherwise, both day and night, he was all over Jersey
peddling the gloves the Italians had made for him, selling them at first out of
the trunk of the car, right on a main downtown street,
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and, in time, directly to apparel shops and department stores that were Newark
Maid’s first solid accounts. It was in a tiny kitchen not half a mile from where
the Swede was now standing that the boy had seen a pair of gloves cut by the
oldest of the old Neapolitan artisans. He believed that he could remember
sitting in his father’s lap while Lou Levov sampled a glass of the family’s
homemade wine and across from them a cutter said to be a hundred years old who
was supposed to have made gloves for the queen of Italy smoothed the ends of a
trank with half a dozen twists of his knife’s dull blade. “Watch him, Seymour.
See how small the skin is? The most difficult thing in the world to cut a
* * *
kidskin efficiently. Because it’s so small. But watch what he does. You’re
watching a genius and you’re watching an artist. The Italian cutter, son, is
always more artistic in his outlook. And this is the master of them all.”
Sometimes hot meatballs would be frying in a pan, and he remembered how one of
the Italian cutters, who always purred “Che bellezza…” and called him
Piccirell’, sweet little thing, when he stroked the Swede’s blond head, taught
him how to dip the crisp Italian bread in a pot of tomato sauce. No matter how
tiny the yard out back, there were tomato plants growing, and a grapevine and a
pear tree, and in every household there was always a grand
father. It was he who
had made the wine and to whom Lou Levov uttered, in a Neapolitan dialect and
with what he took to be the appropriate gesture, his repertoire’s one complete
Italian sentence, ” ‘Na mano lava ‘nad”—One hand washes the other—when he laid
out on the oilcloth the dollar bills for the week’s piecework. Then the boy and
his father got up from the table with the finished lot and left for home, where
Sylvia Levov would examine each glove, with a stretcher meticulously examine
each seam of each finger and each thumb of every glove. “A pair of gloves,” his
father told the Swede, “are supposed to match perfectly—the grain of the
leather, the color, the shading, everything. The first thing she looks to see is
if the gloves match.” While his mother worked she taught the boy about all the
mistakes that can occur in the making of a glove, mistakes she had been taught
to recognize as her husband’s wife. A
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skipped stitch can turn into an open seam, but you can’t see it, she told the
child, without putting the stretcher into the glove and tensioning the seam.
There are stitch holes that aren’t supposed to be there but are because the
sewer stitched wrong and then just tried to go on. There is something called
butcher cuts that occur if the animal was cut too deeply when it was flayed.
Even after the leather is shaved they’re there, and though they don’t
necessarily break when you stress the glove with the stretcher, they could break
if someone put the glove on. In every batch they brought up from Down Neck his
father found at least one glove where the thumb didn’t match the palm. This
drove him wild. “See that? See, the cutter is trying to make his quota out of a
