Gain

by Richard Powers

  Tim misses his curfew. He’s in deep mischief. Again. The kid is living on virtual time. It’s impossible to discipline him, when he lives at his mother’s. Between the two of them, he and Laura have failed these kids. They’ve failed to give them consistency, the one thing that every kid wants and needs.

  Ellen comes home first. She sees Don lying in wait, and tries to make a break upstairs.

  “Night, Dad. Had a great time. Catch you tomorrow.”

  “Ellen—”

  “Don’t want to talk about it, Dad.”

  “You can’t not want to talk about it. Because I don’t want to talk about it either.”

  She spins on the landing and pulls her hair. “Daddy. You’re absolutely stark-raving me.”

  “Are you done yet? You don’t even know what I want.”

  “I know what you want.”

  “What do I want?”

  “Okay. All right. I surrender. What do you want?”

  “Can you call your mother and say good night?”

  Relative prosperity encouraged Resolve to follow his brother’s example and marry. Samuel’s choice of Dorcas Fox brilliantly united the firm with its distributors. Resolve set his sights even higher, upon the ultimate business match. He courted and won a mate who would lend the firm an aura of social respectability.

  Julia Hazelwood played dawn to Dorcas Fox’s faithful dusk. The niece of Elbridge Gerry, former governor of Massachusetts and Madison’s Vice President, she’d suckled statesmanship with her mother’s milk. She owned by birth what her husband could only purchase.

  Where Dorcas ratified her husband’s life with an invisible hush, Julia ruled Resolve by rowdy voice vote. Her modest frame exuded stature, and her reedy voice intimidated with the sound of its native intelligence.

  Beyond all doubt, Resolve loved his wife. They fought fiercely, lived apart for months at a time, reviled and refuted and rebuffed each other. But theirs was a love match. Each scared the other into becoming more than either would have been alone. At times, they lost all common language, all mutual words. Fifteen years separated them in age, a span during which the world had overhauled itself into an unprecedented place.

  Yet they understood one another. For above all else, Julia Hazel-wood seconded the only truth Resolve ever swore to. She knew that the job of mankind lay in making much where there had been nothing, turning deserts into gardens, replenishing life’s spent paths.

  Julia was a freethinker, and she did not much converse with God. For God had said what He had to say to us very early on. Go forth, be fruitful and multiply, and have dominion over the earth. Beyond that, what was there to discuss?

  Clare’s Sons dutifully multiplied. They extended themselves through the flow of credit. They assumed their distributors’ risks and passed them back to their suppliers. In an era when a fifty-dollar bill issued in New York returned forty in Maine on a good day, Clare’s Sons broadened their contracts by the unprecedented practice of accepting distant bank notes at near–face value. Where needed, they resorted to cashless barter.

  The crates went out, each marked with the Clare “C.” Wholesalers sold the crates to stores of many stripes. And the stores, in turn, hacked from the slabs exactly the amount of soap that any one life’s week required. Shopkeepers sold the cakes of anti-fat like so many wedges of immaculate cheese.

  Protected for the moment from British undercutting, the Clares’ patient spider spun. Cholera to the south, uprising in Philadelphia, even the burning of New York served only to increase Boston’s need to ablute. By the mid-1830s, it seemed that if Clare’s Sons could survive Emperor Jackson and the nation survive Nullification, the factory venture might very well pay for itself two or three times over by decade’s end.

  The Clares could not have profited more handsomely from their damnation. They sank into manufacturing at the precise moment when the railroad broke loose. The new, self-propelling engines began to fling mankind outward, and the expansion sucked all business along in its wake.

  The first engines seemed to run mostly on hope. Rail cost outrageous sums to lay, a massive sink of both capital and labor. Trains were slower and less reliable than the creatures they competed with. Locomotives eternally exploded, setting fire to fields, boiling clientele alive by the hundreds per year. Extorted by canal companies, foreign interests, and politicians alike, the start-up railroad companies nevertheless plowed into the frontier, as inevitable as the grave to which all expansion leads.

  The Clares, like rail, sought subsidy in wishful thinking. And wish proved the very stepfather of growth. Necessity had forced trade to cultivate the infant nation’s industries. Soap made a virtue of that necessity. The Clares soon discovered that driving their own machines flat out was cheaper than letting them stand idle. Cost could be shared over greater volume. The more candles and soap Clare’s Sons sold, the more return per pound they saw. By the time their kettle reached full capacity, Samuel and Resolve managed to set aside enough cash to hire on a few men. More hands resulted in more boilings, which made for still greater and cheaper quantities.

  Ennis worked the changes. He stoked the blistering kettle, minded the coils, and tapped off the spent lye. He tinkered and tested, all the while humming to himself “The Lament of the Irish Emigrant.” He employed every avuncular Erse trick he had to boost yields and turn out a neat soap as pure as any other. When he could increase the kettle’s crop no further, he asked his employers to build another.

  They brought a second kettle on line, larger than the first. Soon this kettle, too, minded by the new men, was boiling flat out. And crates marked with the Clare “C” continued to speed healthily out the door.

  I need a new beast, Ennis declared. Something grand and unheard of. One that won’t be old-fashioned by the time we’ve finished building it. I need a profound, magnificent monster of a new process.

  Resolve eyed him with splendid superstition. What kind of process?

  Well now. Have you heard tell of the Harrowing of Hell?

  Resolve had not. And he reacted poorly upon learning the details.

  Ennis mapped out the uses of the experiment. The increased volume would give them hard soaps with new oils: olive, palm, and cocoa-nut from plantations in the Malay and Africa and Feejee. They might learn to make a cheap castile, a mottled, a yellow rosin. In time, they would possess the capacity and expertise to mill fancy toilets—a rose, a musk, a bitter almond, a cinnamon.

  The owners approached their baby brother Ben. They spelled out the flagrant plan: a kettle that could boil 30,000 pounds at one go. Will it work? Resolve asked the Harvard man.

  Benjamin demurred. Sirrah’s the chemist. I study plants.

  It works in miniature, Ennis defended himself. It’ll work bigged up to life-size.

  For some time the brothers mulled over the gamble. At last they accepted the inescapable conclusion. The only way to make money is to spend it.

  Samuel found a British-born mechanic to build the monster kettle. Anthony Jewitt had come to America as a young man with the idea of retiring by fifty and spending what remained of his life reading drawing room novels. By skill and effort, he managed to avoid starvation, and then some. But his foundry work left no time for reading of any matter. By the time Clare’s sons entered his life, Jewitt had all but abandoned fiction.

  In the empty lot adjacent to the Roxbury works, Jewitt built an open shed, three stories tall, to house the towering cauldron. Then he went about the task of casting the considerable stewpot. Neighbors came to marvel at the construction. Competing soap manufacturers from Boston and beyond came, too, first to spy and finally to laugh at Clare’s self-prepared funeral.

  Jewitt and his employers brought the monster into production in 1835, the afternoon the Liberty Bell cracked while tolling the death of Chief Justice Marshall. In fact, as Resolve later remarked, their kettle greatly resembled the said damaged goods, only inverted. And much, much larger.

  In a crude block print, a cadre of the dead, replete
with flowing gowns and tresses, rises up from holes in the ground. The recent corpses gaze astonished at their newly spotless limbs, the Last Judgment’s supreme windfall. Beneath the image, a caption beseeches:

  BE CLEAN IN THE EYES OF CREATION.

  FOR HE IS LIKE A REFINER’S FIRE,

  AND HIS GRACE LIKE FULLER’S SOAP

  J. CLARE’S SONS

  JUSTICE AND SPRING STREETS, ROXBURY

  2ND DOOR NORTHWEST

  Ennis’s hell-harrowing kettle left its mark upon the Columbian landscape. Its fires sparked an economic lift-off that changed the Clare operation as profoundly as splitting and decanting changed your garden-variety grease drippings into Savonnettes au Miel.

  For the first time, the name Clare circulated as part of the commodity it brokered. Clare’s Soap offered the old quantity of self-reliance by another, more manicured avenue. It emitted a whiff of purity that one could smell even above the crust of horse droppings that fouled ankles from Noddle’s Island to Southie.

  The tax that forced them into manufacture gradually vanished. Years too late, Congress admitted that the tariff was a bipartisan swindle, one that backfired at disastrous cost to all parties. The fledgling native enterprise that had fared best under protectionism was Nativist riot. Belatedly, the over-steering skippers of the ship of state phased out the Abomination.

  The tariff had killed shipping. Now repeal threatened to kill shipping’s replacement. One by one, the economic props fell away, until nary a crutch remained. The high-water mark of protectionism receded, making way for a tidal surge of cheap imports. Yet to everyone’s surprise, the House of Clare, even with all its struts kicked out, did not go crashing to the ground.

  Habit had made a place for Clare in the lives of its customers. Habit, Service, and that most elusive quality, Quality. For in the two-way miracle of trade, their clients, too, had prospered. New goods entered their lives by virtue of exchange, goods in greater profusion, costing steadily less. Perfectly molded stearin candles; perfectly pressed olein soap. People—and more of them each year—grew to see these dependable goods as household familiars. Wholesalers liked the crates stamped with Clare’s “C.” And customers liked the moderately priced cakes hacked from those comforting slabs.

  But with prices falling, profit receded. Resolve suggested they follow the widespread trend of short-weighting. Samuel reacted in horror.

  We have not yet begun cheating our customers, Samuel declared.

  Resolve grinned at his brother’s righteousness. But he soon realized how fine a selling point the stamp of “Real Weight” had begun to make.

  With rising volume, their station rose. Yet a rise in status only agitated Resolve.

  We will never be anywhere near as famous as the Tappans, he worried aloud.

  Samuel reassured him. Our wives know us. Our children will answer to us. And we’ll never get mixed up in as many social caprices as those fellows.

  Ennis got along equally well with the two older Clare brothers, as different as the men were. But he saved his adoration for Benjamin. He loved to harass the fellow, just for sport. Young Clare supplied endless recreation. The boy spoke more languages than was healthy for a person. That university of his was a staggering waste. Its library boasted how many books? And not one had a working theory of poverty. All the combined thinking of Harvard’s finest had yet to discover how to keep the Irish in Ireland.

  Botany did not seem a real subject to Ennis. What use is all that school chemistry, he chided, if you waste it on plants? Come work with us. We’ll teach you some chemical chemistry.

  But the college graduate’s science remained the Irishman’s secret envy. Ennis commissioned Master Ben to bring him a world of journals, on the most urgent of topics: the chemistry of oils and alkalis, scent and solubility. Ben hunted down the appropriate tomes. The boy made good those years invested in meaningless study by reading Ennis the scientific German and French. Ennis, in turn, instructed Ben in the way agricultural chemicals really behaved, outside the laboratory, in the crucible of experience.

  Together, they isolated the source of soap’s action. Ennis supplied the facts and Ben the explanations. One side of the filmy substance mixed readily with water. Somehow soap’s microscopic shape—Dalton’s atoms?—fit hand in glove with the inner shape of that fluid. By contrast, the other side of this slippery go-between meshed just as nicely with the greases and oils upon which water ordinarily remained unpersuasive.

  So soap stood, a Janus-faced intermediary between seeming incompatibles, an interlocutor that managed to coax mutually hostile materials onto speaking terms. It removed grime by smoothing the way for the insoluble to be taken up into solution. Such the two men concluded, between themselves.

  Ennis was a genius in the truest sense. He held an iron grasp on simplicity. His mind let ideas fall like water to their lowest basin. Then he made good on those ideas. For each school-chemical insight he gleaned from Ben, he had Jewitt build him a machine. Or rather, he got Samuel to get Jewitt to build, as the English mechanic and the Irish chandler would not speak directly to each other.

  The Clare manufactory’s happy dream of growth shot awake in the Panic of ’37. Briggs Cotton Brokerage of New Orleans collapsed, pulling down the national pyramid of fiscal speculation. In the space of two months, the Clare brothers watched depression bankrupt forty thousand men and reduce more to starvation. The escalating crash drove ready cash from circulation and closed every New England mill except Stevens at North Andover, which survived by doubling working hours and increasing production.

  With textiles dead, the whole region threatened to fold. Men who just last year had busied themselves with drilling Jerusalem’s new seed now plowed themselves under, resigned to the long, all-winnowing winter.

  Resolve and Samuel refused to wait passively for disaster. Instead they sallied out to circumvent it. For if any healing charm against disintegration existed, it was light and scent. Candles and soap, if not depression-proof, remained resilient enough to weather the storm. Volume might vanish and cash sales fall off as sharply as the great auk. But people still needed the things Clare’s Sons had to give.

  From their debtors, the Clares extracted food transfers, trade credits, and whatever various instruments of forgiveness they could secure. With this makeshift scrip, they settled up with their suppliers, for their suppliers had no choice but to take what they could. When pinch came to punch, Samuel and Resolve paid their workers in soap. All the soap their laborers’ ragged dependents could ever hope to use.

  What cash they could secretly stockpile went toward acquiring defaulting competitors for as little as ten cents on the dollar. The fewer the rivals lasting until recovery, the easier recovery would come. The Clare sons moved through the massacre, picking opportunities for philanthropy like the Lord’s Passover angel spotting unmarked houses. All the while, Samuel bargained with and rebuffed their own creditors, stalling these financiers until one by one they, too, went under, with no one to take up demands for payment.

  This nationwide misery trickled steadily downward, in that direction most favored by gravity. Depression gathered its scapegoats, some of whom Benjamin described in a letter to Boston from a field excursion to the South:

  I cannot ascertain precisely how many are affected, but the resettlement of the Civilized Tribes touches even those who own houses, who work the land as we do, who trade in our currency and worship as we have taught them. We send them many hundred miles, on foot, in the dead of winter, the sick, the aged, the women with small mouths gnawing hungrily at their spent bodies. They number not fewer than forty thousands in my estimate, and if the half of them survive to reach the deserts we have set aside for them out West, it will only be by virtue of the Government’s count . . .

  On route from Atlanta, I found it my misfortune to witness a band of these forsaken. I cannot tell you what an ill-making education it is, to travel by rail at maniacal speeds, to stop for the night at another wayside inn, with its requisite
print of General Jackson embarking on yet another heroic dash to save New Orleans, shimmying onto his charger, smoke emanating from nostrils (those of the horse, not of our General), and then to turn from this comfortable scene to see, through the window of the public room, a column of creatures struggling to build a makeshift church and altar, from which a Cherokee preacher might exhort his hopeless fold to remember the delivery of the Children of Israel from bondage!

  Whose art thou? and whither goest thou? and whose are these before thee? I asked myself at that moment, searching to revive in my soul some vestige of the religion these lost men yet practice with such surety . . .

  Back in Boston, the recipients of this letter each resorted to his private reading. Ennis worried for the boy’s safety among savages. Samuel feared for his younger brother’s doubting soul. Resolve vowed to make the wayward philosopher join the firm and earn his practical living, immediately upon return.

  But that return took the youngest Clare son some time. Ben did not come straight home, but made a four-year detour, shipping out from Hampton Roads with the United States Exploring Expedition to the southern polar regions. Quietly and quickly, before any other Clare could thwart his intentions, Benjamin accepted a position on the nation’s first scientific voyage.

  Nor could any Clare, in his wildest mercantile fantasy, have imagined that from such remote wastes would come the firm’s salvation.

  The full moon shines above her empty house. Tonight’s blaze is so bright it almost tricks her nasturtiums into syncopating their circadian rhythms. Moonlight the width of a halogen spot pierces her bedroom window. Such a moon, were she home in bed, would keep Laura awake all night.

  At home, she would lie stretched out in moonlight’s cool puddle. Lie on her abdomen—no sign of pain; not even tender—gazing out at the tops of her trees. Her skin would explore these sheets of wrinkle-treated Wamsutta, sheets that, to her mother’s soul’s horror, she hasn’t had to iron in years.