Gain

by Richard Powers

  Samuel and Resolve further commissioned Ben to find a cheap and feasible process for recovering waste glycerin. It irked the New Englanders to be discarding, as a corrupt by-product, quantities of a substance that fetched handy sums on the import market. Ennis declared the project a fool’s errand, like turning dross to gold. He thought it the perfect occupation for “school chemistry.” Benjamin agreed.

  The ends of Ben’s transmuting labors began to outrun the confines of chemistry. In his heated imagination, the fatty origins of this endeavor now converted themselves to the noblest ends. He dreamed a dream of conservation and utility, substances ingeniously made to answer to the varieties of human use. On the day the First Laborer set aside for rest, Ben mined, in place of the nostalgic Psalms, more delivering words, texts such as Dana’s Muck Manual and Goodrich’s Enterprise, Industry, and Art of Man. “I was dozing by my evening fire-side,” he read in the Preface of the latter,

  when one of those hasty visions passed before my mind, which sometimes seem to reveal the contents of volumes in the space of a few seconds. It appeared as if every article of furniture in the room became suddenly animated with life, and endowed with the gift of speech; and that each one came forward to solicit my attention and beseech me to write its life and adventures.

  The portly piano, advancing with a sort of elephantine step, informed me that its rosewood covering was violently torn from its birthplace in the forests of Brazil; its massive legs of pine grew in the wilds of Maine; the iron which formed its frame was dug from a mine in Sweden; its strings were fabricated at Rouen; the brazen rods of the pedals were made of copper from Cornwall mixed with silver from the mines of Potosi; the covering of the keys was formed of the tusks of elephants from Africa; the varnish was from India; the hinges from Birmingham, and the whole were wrought into their present form at the world-renowned establishment of Messrs. Chickering & Co., Washington street, Boston.

  If Chickering could turn the world’s rough rootstock into that celestial ditty-player, Ben Clare determined to turn the rootstock’s rootstock into the notes of a vaster symphony. In his kettle the globe’s scattered garden gathered and reconstituted itself, Cornwall and Brazil, Maine and Potosí bubbling up some new and unimaginable Boston of restless and advancing matter.

  Chemistry was not the means to soapmaking. Soapmaking was, rather, a means toward the consummate chemical end. To that goal, the elements moved from one incarnation to the other the way that the seasons, variously advantageous, moved through the eternally renewing year. If Nature were no more than eternal transformation, Man’s meet and right pursuit consisted of emulating her.

  Change paid regular visits to the factory at Roxbury. But it also came to take tea at Temple Place, sipping profusely. Ben’s sister-in-law Dorcas Fox, Samuel’s helpmeet, unwittingly brought about the family’s first major business rearrangement.

  For her whole married life, Dorcas ably discharged the conjugal duties expected of her. Her shadowy stasis made possible her husband’s eternal going. She brought the enterprise of domesticity onto a profitable footing.

  The joint partnership exacted a toll on Dorcas ever stiffer than its usual excise. She changed religions for Samuel’s sake, giving up more than he ever imagined. Fortune promoted her from petty retail to a dizzying Hill society that she never comfortably navigated. Sepsis harvested two infant sons. Anodynes prescribed to treat a nervous disorder after childbearing left her with a perpetual flinch and a constant roaring in her ears.

  To these vicissitudes of an industrialist’s wife she never objected. Her balance in sorrow and joy remained negotiable. But once or twice, over a quiet supper with their surviving children, she wondered out loud whether the family was not, in their style of life, in danger of serving two masters.

  Devout Samuel always reassured her. There was but one Master. Their factory gave work to two score of His most destitute. And their soaps made His cleanliness available to persons of limited means.

  But was it not wrong to profit from such work?

  If they had been committing some wrong, Samuel assured her, they could not have stayed in business so long. Prosperity only proved how fully they satisfied the wishes of both God and men.

  Did not Jesus say to take no thought for the morrow? asked the wife.

  He did, conceded the husband. But there He spoke against unhealthy aggrandizement. As for our ordinary lives here, no good had ever entered into this sorry world but through the labor that God Himself, since the Garden, has bequeathed us for our own good.

  Such was the education of their three children: the honest table talk, man and wife grappling with the terms of their existence.

  In bad months, Dorcas’s demon was not prosperity but destitution. Then, too, her steadfast husband consoled her. One learned by adversity just what the world demanded. Hardship would teach them how to bring to market those qualities that best met the clamor of human need. The lean years called out for the vociferous Nay of faith, even as the fat years called out for a modest and pious enjoyment.

  To Samuel, even the history of the firm formed nothing short of a moral sampler. They had turned the Tariff of Abominations into a new beginning. They had weathered the Panic of 1837 and nursed the sapling business through absolute drought. They paced the developments of their fiercest competitors with bright notions of their own. Surely the Lord had clothed them with salvation, and they ought to rejoice in goodness.

  What other blessing but wealth allows us this liberty and leisure to entertain His many bounties? Samuel certained her. Come, my girl: we cannot banish ourselves from the hutch while still making off with His eggs!

  And the warm subtleties of Samuel’s arguments would once again bring Dorcas peace.

  Then one day in the autumn of 1844, when the earth’s newly reaped battlefields reeked of the mechanical war between McCormick and Hussey, Dorcas underwent what an outsider might have thought a surprising conversion. In the space of an evening, the wife of growth grew inconsolable.

  In the chill excitement of that fall’s harvest, almost by chance, the words of amateur preacher William Miller fell upon that woman’s ears like seed upon the readiest of soils. A slender broadside published by the Millerite corporate organ, Signs of the Times, came into Dorcas’s hands. She read how Miller, after years of extensive study of the Book of Daniel, discovered that the sanctuary was about to be cleansed. The bodily advent of Christ was at hand. The world would end at the stroke of midnight, October 22, 1844.

  This was not Miller’s first deadline for the end. But to Dorcas, hearing the proclamation for the first time, the words made and unmade creation. They clarified, in one swift syllogism, why all earthly things had been so full of pointless sacrifice. Dorcas lived with the words in silence for as long as she could. Then, before the first frosts rimed the squash and the leaves reddened, she called Samuel’s attention to their imminent destruction.

  Silent partner in so many cunning contracts, Dorcas now offered her husband a business option. Samuel could give up his share of the expanding engines, dispose of his hank of pretty wampum, and join her in this last, glorious venture for which mankind was made. Failing that, she would leave for the new heaven and earth without him.

  For the choice confronting them was non-negotiable, the deadline for divestiture, absolute. The hour had come, the one that no man could know. Man no longer owned tomorrow, let alone the day after. No time remained to fetch the prices that their lives sought. The smart trader would unload now, at market value.

  For three days, husband and wife pored over Miller’s material. Samuel picked at the tract, looking for fallacy but finding none. The two appraised the autumnal authentication visible all around them. All the auguries added up. No other explanation for events was as complete as Miller’s, as detailed, or as likely.

  Samuel woke to his wife’s urgings. Suddenly, he counted them lucky, and more than lucky, to receive such irrefutable warning just days before being caught with excess inventory. That sere,
crisp night when he fully accepted, Samuel came home from the factory and embraced his wife, the instrument of his preparation. He blessed her and his children for their service. With a speed and efficiency testifying to the ephemerality of all goods, he began to order his estate.

  It was time to dispose of worldly property and settle earthly accounts. Candles and soap had once been humankind’s best weapon against time. But now time had run out. Soon, in a few days, time would be no more. And humankind would no longer need manufacture.

  The turning of fat to soap, of labor to cash, of wilderness to rail-served settlements merely predicted in miniature Miller’s final transformation. All added value was God’s, and man’s most frenzied and sophisticated enhancements were but pale dress-ups of this original.

  Samuel now lived for heavenly reorganization. Without a blink, he signed over his share of the business to his brother. Dorcas wondered aloud whether they ought, in good conscience, to saddle Resolve with the damnation they now so narrowly avoided.

  But Resolve seemed ready for the saddle. No other family branch agreed to join the ascension, and Samuel could not bring himself to sell out his equity to some consortium of strangers. Damnation seemed the greater of two brotherly loves.

  On the predicted, gusty October night, all manner of men donned ascension gowns and waited. Legend says they sought out the highest points they could reach. Some mounted hillsides, like loving flocks. Some advance scouts of the Saved even climbed to their own roofs, to speed by a few seconds their joining the fundamental merger.

  Some hundred thousand more merely waited quietly, hands held, linked in a circle of family and friends, alive to imminence and completed in this their vigil. And a million other unbelievers no doubt hedged their bets with a watchful head-bow, in the event of some secular miscalculation.

  Samuel and Dorcas, with their surviving daughters and infant son, waited in the vanguard. The sweep of the minute hand moved them forward, toward the very borders of expectation. Robed for arrival, they pushed up against the world’s last midnight. Faith bumped up against its furthest meridian.

  The moment they blundered toward was not fear. And the moment they awaited was not hope. Patient, convinced, prepared, they accepted the hour. No longing, no regret, no belonging. They felt no joy at deliverance, nor anguish at the errands left undone.

  Everything up to the click of midnight was becoming. Beyond midnight, there would be no more becoming. Everything would only be.

  Histories agree that in the instant for which Samuel and Dorcas and thousands of other Millerites waited, nothing happened. But histories look for revelation in occurrence, rather than in its more likely dwelling. For something did, in fact, happen on that stroke of midnight: an exchange as subtle and strong as any within human purchase.

  In the early hours of October 23, Samuel and Dorcas Clare, Elizabeth, Mary, and baby Douglas descended from the upper room of their house, still stubbornly theirs. They walked back through the obstinately undissolved foyer, emptied at last of the waking nightmare of deliverance. And they looked out, like returned Crusoes, upon the manufactured world.

  They send Laura home. Except it isn’t home anymore. As soon as the van drops her off, panic closes on her like the automatic garage door.

  The place is rotten with cut flowers and pretty, printed Get Wells. The kitchen spills over with trays of roasts and casseroles. Her kids will not touch any of the food that anxious neighbors have prepared for her return. Her kids do not eat irregularly shaped meals. Her kids would not recognize a roast if one bit them.

  She, of course, is not yet past broth and bouillon. Tomorrow, a little clear soup; the day after, maybe some pureed potato. All those days in the hospital, desperately trying to fart. To pass just a wee little bit of gas to prove that her GI tract was working again. All she wanted was to be off the IV, take a little something in her mouth. Go home, where well-meaning people have piled up mounds of brisket.

  The place is much bigger than it was. She gets lost, creeping on the way from the bed to the toilet. She lies sedated, unable to remember how the kitchen and breakfast nook connect, or if they even do.

  The house has suffered much water damage in her absence. The rooms have all warped like delinquent cardboard, as soggy as an unsupervised soufflé. The wallpaper gives her vertigo.

  All her square footage goes massively irrelevant. Utility room, laundry room, rec room, study, den. How many things must one person do? How many rooms does anyone need to do them in?

  All this space: it’s never been anything more than an obligation to fill it. And the filler, all her carefully coordinated furniture: so cozy a nest once. Now lifeless twigs, the rotted rigging of a ship in a vacuum bottle.

  She must have been mad. Had some crazed idea that the house would be her safe haven. Would always take care of her. She’s spent years taking care of it, keeping up her end of the deal. But now, at the first called debt, the house gets ready to renege.

  She lists in her head all the people she has to tell. Searches for ways to avoid telling them. She can’t even manage the backlog of the last few days, the thank-yous for all the gorgeous hothouse mums. Going back to the office seems worse than jury duty. The requests for details, that vaguely excited show of distress. Hands consoling her, hugging her shoulders. Colleagues shouldn’t let colleagues hug other colleagues.

  She lies in bed at 3 a.m., the sawtooth trough across her ruby abdomen throbbing like a digital alarm. The yanked nose tube has left behind a permanent phantom scratch, and her PICC line lies coiled and taped to her collarbone. Junior, floating tumors may be loose in her system, ready to anchor and flare back into production. She must do something. But they leave her with nothing to do. She lies still, trying to kill the stray cells by the power of her concentration.

  She’s under orders to keep her dressings clean. Come in on Wednesday to get the staples yanked. Thursday for more blood work. Go to Indy in another week to get the chemo regimen settled on. As soon as possible, she must start the first drip. Other than that, they tell her to go slow, try not to burst her evacuated gut.

  “Life as usual,” Dr. Jenkins prescribes. “The best thing for you.”

  “Life as . . . ?”

  “Live, Laura. But easy. Do what you always do.”

  And what was that, again? Houses. Go sell a few houses. She wants to start with her own. Get the best lump sum offered and move into a hotel. The kids would love it. Daily breakfast buffet. Swimming pool. Maid service. Slumber parties with unlimited jumping on the beds.

  Sell everything. Sell the sport utility vehicle and give Ellen a year’s worth of limousine fare. Sell the desktop machine and get a notebook, so Tim could hack his way through basilisks without having to get out of bed. That Mrs. Jensen over on East Prairie died of ovarian cancer.

  She gets a driver’s license renewal form in the mail. She sticks it to the refrigerator with the Raid magnet. She’ll run up to the DMV as soon as she can twist a steering wheel and press a pedal again at the same time.

  She walks by herself, but slowly. Damn baby steps everywhere, as if she’s Method-acting a geriatric. Cleaning the bathroom is out of the question. Even making microwave popcorn is an ordeal.

  She puts it off as long as possible; then, one morning, she slips back into the office. Next Millennium. The Dream Finders. She sells a few houses, or tries to. The best thing for her. Colleagues’ hands linger on her shoulders only for half an afternoon. People fuss a little, kindly. It’s as if she’s fallen off the Nautilus machine and twisted an ankle. The only C-word anyone uses is “condo.”

  Only gardening gives her some relief. Pruning the cosmos, she almost forgets herself, except for the throbbing gash in her gut. She plucks the first cukes and peppers, the ones she can reach without leaning. She would sink some narcissus bulbs for next spring, but it’s way too soon, and she cannot bend over. Can’t get all the way to the ground. Besides, perennials seem too obvious a plea bargain.

  In the evenings, she tr
ies to watch her old favorites. Her head still snaps back at the funny lines, the quirks of character. But no sound comes out of her mouth. She surrenders her responses wholesale, to the statistical averages of the studio audience.

  Private confusion she might bear. But everything stays so plain, so ordinary. Standard order of business. That’s the strangest thing about illness. Her body’s betrayal changes nothing. The standing, routine pileup of diversions. How disorienting: here, now, all these weird familiars. Nobody sees, so regular is life. Nobody knows what’s blossoming inside him.

  She’d play dumb, if that could protect everyone. But people catch on, despite her best efforts. Cashiers eye her warily: sure you want all this stuff? The bag boys no longer bother asking her paper or plastic. They choose for her, the bag that will give her the most for the moment. She selects entrees by prep time. She stops buying thick magazines.

  Ken calls furtively, early in the morning, when the kids are going to school and he knows she can’t talk. “We’ll talk soon. About everything.”

  Don’t you see? she wants to shout at the receiver. There’s nothing to talk about. Everything’s handled. Taken care of. Just fine.

  The children feel the hypocrisy of routine worst of all. Ellen will not forgive her. She bikes to cheerleading practice, furious that Laura won’t forbid her to go. Furious at the stupidity of the disease that crashes her year, just when she was about to win probationary membership in the Populars.

  Tim sits at a corner of the cluttered table, cursing the year’s last homework. Laura can’t tell him what’s going on. She does not know, herself. All she can do is fall back on pretense. Life as usual.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart? What’cha working on?”

  He slams the book shut and tosses it, knocking over a stack of back mail she hasn’t answered. He starts to cry, his face a twisted mask, denying its fat tears.