Gain

by Richard Powers

  Okay, so it’s not Paris. But there’s a famous deli not far from downtown that people back in Lacewood always carry on about. They will go load up there, while she still feels like eating. The only time in her life she doesn’t have to worry about watching her weight.

  She orders the famous Reuben, so famous it has some kind of proper name. She orders a slice of chocolate cheesecake as well. It’s probably great. She makes Ken eat it. “I can’t afford the calories,” he says. Then sets a land speed record downing it.

  He drops her off in front of the house. He lingers a little in the car. Wants to say something. He pets her, feels her hair. Like he’s going to miss it. Like that’s what brings this whole thing home to him.

  All she can do is stroke his hair back, down behind the ear, where he has gone dead and bristly, as white as some expensive sheet of paper before anything’s been written on it.

  Ellen’s waiting. She’s seen her mother in the car.

  “Shameless public display of affection.”

  “Don’t start,” Laura warns her.

  “And with that man.” The girl stares at her mother, waiting for a full account. Refusing to ask for it. “Well?” she says at last. “What did the experts say?”

  “Well,” Laura begins. “The tumor is a Grade Three.”

  “Wait, wait. I thought the doctor here said it was Grade One.”

  It stuns Laura: her daughter. Her daughter has been paying attention. “No. Yes. That was Stage. This is Grade. And we don’t even know that I’m a Stage One, for certain.”

  The teenager slams a hand to her forehead. “Oy. Okay, okay. What’s Grade?”

  “How smooth the edges are. How well defined—”

  “No, Mom. Mom. Just tell me: is it a good thing or a bad thing?”

  Don calls, way too late. Well after ten, that cutoff hour he himself has declared as off-limits for them. He’s so excited he barely asks how it went out in Indy. “She was supposed to take your lymph nodes,” he blurts out.

  “The specialist said something about that. How did you—”

  “It says so. Plain and simple, in the National Institute guidelines.”

  “About needing the nodes for a complete diagnostic—”

  “That’s exactly it,” Don says. Proud of her for staying with the point. “She didn’t close the back door. You were lying there, open, on the cutting table, and she didn’t take them. Even though the guidelines say she’s supposed to.”

  “It’s done, Don. There’s no point in—”

  “I think we have solid grounds for a lawsuit here.”

  As good as winning the lottery. The Daily Double. A present from Don to her, to make her happy. Compensate.

  “Go to bed, Don.” And don’t forget to wake up, she refrains from adding.

  She sits in the kitchen, alone, after the rest of the world has called it a day. The stuff that the coffee machine has patiently kept warm all day has condensed into a chewable acid. She dumps this tannery sludge down the sink—the working woman’s Drno. Or maybe Drno is the working woman’s Drno. No matter. She starts a new pot.

  She starts a new list, too. Two cracked storm windows. The gutters on the north side. The upstairs toilet tank seal. Everything else can wait until after winter.

  The ceiling above the den gives a little pop in settling. First time this season. She should switch to decaf, but doesn’t. She cleans the counter, waiting for the Peruvian beans to brew. She wipes into oblivion the diet pop rings and the bits of Pop-Tarts rind. Toasted, as Tim says these days. My whole life, toasted.

  When the coffee is ready, she pours it into a Millennium mug that reads: “Own Your Dream.” Adds a slug of milk—2 percent, for the heart. Then some brown sugar. Life is short. Who’s counting?

  She sits at the butcher-block table that gave her so much pleasure when she bought it. That extra leaf that hides away in the middle. She takes the credit card calculator from her purse and sticks it under the fake Tiffany lamp, to activate the solar cell. She tears the top Post-It off the cube by the fridge and picks up the magnetized flower pen. The Post-It shows a little cartoon character holding a pencil twice the size of his marshmallow body. He’s saying, “Never put off ’til tomorrow what you can bury forever in a To Do list.”

  She tries to turn this into an interest rate problem. Mortgages, amortization, points: things she can follow. But it will not go. Three-quarters times 80 percent, plus one-quarter times 20? Or maybe you take the good chance minus the bad chance. Or maybe you have to find a number, say, three times closer to four fifths than it is to one.

  As the pamphlets say: the numbers stand for groups, not for individuals. What does it mean, an 80 percent chance of surviving? Eighty lives out of the hundred hypothetical lives that she might lead will make it past their mid-forties? Or maybe it means, repeat the next five years forever, and on average, a fifth of her will die.

  The numbers mean nothing. Still she insists on reaching a number, any number, by bedtime. Some definitive digit, right or wrong.

  She thinks of that box up in the attic, two flights above this kitchen, a floor above her waiting bed. Her life’s cardboard safe, containing the whole paper trail leading from her girlhood to this table. Last she checked, she still had every report card anyone ever served her with. She could find it now, if she wants, that one from age eight, where her third-grade math teacher sums her up in a looping hand: “Laura is slow, but not always accurate.”

  Typed for life, from out of the starting gate. Nothing ever changes. Slow. Not always accurate. But per sis tent as the day is long. Per sis -tent as her own cells.

  Clare’s Sons have always sold their candles a full sixteen ounces to the pound. We invite you to ascertain the truth of our stamp of “Real Weight” by submitting our product to your own scales.

  J. CLARE’S SONS

  Justice and Spring Streets, Roxb.

  After the world stubbornly refused to end, Resolve welcomed Samuel back into the business. Never again on equal footing, of course. Samuel expected no such absolution, even from his most charitable Maker, let alone that Maker’s flawed reflection, his brother.

  Samuel and Dorcas returned to commerce’s fold chastened but unrepentant Adventists. Granted, the world had missed the latest deadline for its demise. But who would be so foolish as to conclude, from one respite, a world without end? Visitation was merely delayed. All mankind became stakeholders in Creation’s impending completion. Had not the Lord Himself said, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled”?

  But for Resolve, the practical question remained: Just which generation had Christ referred to by “this”? At the end of the day, all business would indeed be futile. But until such a time, time was of the essence. So long as Now and its consequences belonged to two different tallow lots, why not let the cooker boil for a few more business cycles? The trick was to keep working, so long as there remained time to liquidate before final evaporation.

  Upon Samuel’s return, the brothers settled into a simple routine. The two senior partners so trusted each other that they no longer crossed paths. Samuel stayed in the plant in Roxbury, overseeing the quality of the goods issuing from it. He seldom set foot in the Boston office. Nor did Resolve often feel it necessary to travel to the factory to inspect the processes. In fact, Resolve rarely saw the crates and wagons his brothers assembled. But he kept them routed, and found them new destinations.

  Resolve took charge of the business. The business now summed to much more than its five major parties. Thirty men and women labored under them. But still no candles cracked from their molds, no soap from its frame except through the combination of Jewitt’s monster cauldrons, Ben’s chemistry, Ennis’s seasoned recipes, Samuel’s benevolent direction of the workforce, and Resolve’s raptor-like eye on the wholesalers’ correspondence.

  The firm was like some frugal bank client, reinvesting its dividends in itself. The brothers had long honored a de facto pact not to draw out from the compo
unding stockpile more than three thousand a year—fifteen hundred for Ennis and Jewitt. Slowly they were getting rich again, richer than the glory years of merchanting. But wealth depended on the provision that they not touch their kingdom.

  A dollar sunk into new heated dryers returned a dollar ten cents in increased productivity. A new squad of men to work the acid baths, brought on at $100 a head per year, added $150 a head of new soap and candles by the same period’s end. The freed Negro, battered on all sides, would generally work for next to nothing. And there were always jobs, amid the reeking fat, where a Negro’s presence would not disturb even the most sensitive of whites.

  When cash found no immediate outlet in capital improvement, Resolve once or twice bought up a local competitor, put it out of business, and stripped its inventory of usable equipment. For a time, the works enjoyed the growth of a strapping toddler. Wider distribution and greater efficiency kept them redoubling every four or five years. And a 16 percent growth rate per annum only served further to feed new economies of scale. Each time they increased their daily tonnage by half, it cost them half again what it cost on the last occasion.

  The age of the cottage industry was over. The number of Boston chandlers and soapmakers had declined steadily, although the area’s population had boomed since the firm’s inception. Those few dozen outfits that remained boosted output and pared costs to the marrow. Jewitt’s bold kettle—forever nicknamed Clare’s Funeral—spared the Clare works this shakeout and brought them into industry’s next stage. And by and large, the Clares got there just one step before the next outfit down the road.

  For his part, Jewitt typified the new industrial tinkerer, the inventive hero, the man of the future. He out-Yankeed any of the native-born. His silent treatments now extended well beyond his antagonist, the Irishman. He stopped talking to all of his colleagues, except to show them his schematics and explain his plans.

  Jewitt’s Roxbury plant annex was a forest of belts and bearings. He packed the manufactory with self-stringing wicks, self-pouring vats, and self-releasing molds. He perfected his steam-driven soap crutcher, finally sending to its grave the old hand-churning hickory rods. Jewitt squeezed so much use from each square foot of manufactory that the growing number of employees found it difficult to maneuver inside the buildings.

  Ennis cursed the fastidious Englishman’s each act of mechanical progress, even though he benefited from the inventions as much as anyone. For years, Ennis had to rise at four in the morning to light the kettle fires. When Jewitt’s steam boiler coils changed all that, the Irishman’s gratitude consisted of railing against the wizardry.

  For all his ingenuity, Jewitt’s most profitable invention scraped the bottom of technology’s barrel. He rigged up massive block tables with hinged overlays strung with piano wire. Slabs of soap were made to roll onto these tables. Then the stoutest laboring men yanked on the wire-rigged hinges, cutting several blocks at one go. A second set of wires strung at 90 degrees produced scores of discrete, one-pound chunks. The chunks then slipped off the cutting tables to be crated and sold in any quantity, over any distance.

  The new cutting process changed the way that product passed through the plant. Flexible, rational, better-regulated: the “bar” proved the biggest boon to margins of all Jewitt’s innovations. Had the Clares paid him by percentage of return, he could have retired with enough years left to read every gloomy parlor novel ever written.

  Mid-century prompted the Clares to take stock and examine the overall health of their holdings. Together, the men mounted a comprehensive inventory, forecasting the fate of their group labors. They calculated and projected, sampled and surveyed. Owners and agents went over their library of ledgers. How solid were the sales of their various soaps and ten kinds of candle? Did each carry a price the market would bear? Were the machines and hands being used to maximum advantage, at the lowest possible costs? How ready was the company to undergo a new round of strong change?

  The numbers revealed a concern healthy enough to trundle along for many seasons to come. But mere persistence wasn’t good enough for Resolve. His genius lay in seeing that progress demanded the destruction of much that had once been considered wealth. Manufacturing, like the very project of civilization that it advanced, was a snaking, torrential Shenandoah beyond anyone’s ability to dam. The waters had constantly to leave behind the landscape they drained, if ever they meant to reach open sea. So, too, any forward-looking enterprise had to be ready to cast off what had once been its mainstay. Hanging on to spent ways was a pro forma suicide.

  Resolve persuaded his brothers to quit making cheap tallow candles. They broke up once-gainful equipment, their former pride, for scrap. They stopped production of the Fair Grade and the Extra Fair Grade, the last scouring soaps still made by the old potash method. They committed to superior soda ash, however much that indentured them to English alkali. They concentrated on their German mottled, whose red veins proved how little water the soap contained; their yellow rosin laundry soaps, good for the hardest waters; their palm oils, with their pretty violet scent; and of course, their star toilet brand.

  They severed ties with now-unprofitable outlets, those glories of the canal age that rail had siphoned off. They pitched their lot with the chaotic spew of new lines, cuts connecting the Hub with Albany and Vermont, routes like the Champlain and St. Lawrence, promising endless frontier. Rail freed them to serve all sorts of previously isolated customers. They hired commission brokers in Baltimore and fought to break into New York’s murderous market.

  They also joined the fray for the Western customer. The crushing of Mexico—Julia’s pet cause—resulted in their shipping an additional ten thousand pounds of candles and soap around the Cape every two months.

  Lard moved off the premises by the tierce, the keg, and the pail. The years had been good to lard oil as well. Pig and cow fat, pressed prior to splitting, yielded rivers of precious grease. When burned in special lamps, the oil produced a light acceptable enough for the Clares’ own factory floor. When Ennis discovered how to convert the stuff into the perfect machine lubricant, demand for the happy by-product swelled.

  But light from another source threatened to do in candles altogether. Each year, gaslight further eroded the income that candles brought in. Resolve, in every other respect a man of progress, refused to let the enemy into his own home. But the end of candle profit, however distant, was inevitable. The books predicted this unhappy end. Unless some gain could be extracted from the same costs, the blessings of the Clare works would begin to contract.

  We need to increase production, Resolve told Samuel. We must implement a new round of stretch-outs.

  Samuel shook his head. A stretch-out would not go down with labor. Neither would a fresh round of speedups. Work had sped up and stretched out to its outermost limits. The workers had taken to singing ironic choruses at the dinner ring-out. The most popular tune aired often enough times to lodge in Samuel’s conscience:

  For Liberty our Fathers fought,

  Which with their blood, they dearly bought,

  The Fact’ry system sets at naught.

  A slave at morn, a slave at eve . . .

  At which point, the youngest candle girls trilled their way up into an undeniably thrilling descant.

  Worst, the denizens of the boiling floor, encouraged by the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision in Commonwealth v. Hunt, were organizing. They had begun to make collective noise about a ten-hour day. To Resolve’s astonishment, the law no longer let their very employers shut such movements down. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw’s majority opinion announced that labor societies were no longer to be considered criminal conspiracies. The court declared trade unions, closed shops, and even strikes to be as salubrious as any market auction—in fact, free competition by another name.

  Samuel spelled it out for his brother. Any further attempt to force labor into greater profitability would ruin them. The Clares needed a breakthrough: the holy grail that Ben had been la
boring on for so long.

  Only the recovery of glycerin held out the hope of countering candles’ sagging returns. After saponification with soda ash, soap simply waltzed away, abandoning glycerin in crude water solution at the bottom of the vat. The Clare brothers, like their Boston competitors, simply ran the dregs into the gutter, flushing them away as cheaply as they could. Meanwhile, imported English glycerin, a golden heal-all, fetched prices as high as two dollars the pound.

  Salvation depended upon converting that slag into the much-sought-after salve hiding inside it. From kettle piss to medical emollient: thus the task confronting modern chemistry, the age’s enchanter. Ben devoted himself to the problem, sneaking away only to tend to his beloved namesake, the contraband South Sea plant now kept alive only through virtue of Cambridge hothouses.

  Ben’s alchemy, when it came, took a Jewitt autoclave to bring it to life. Hermit botanist and misanthrope tinkerer worked out the details in a series of lengthy notes to each other. Remarkably, specification and prototype drifted close enough to each other for Ennis to make the thing work. Not well, at first. But gradual refinements in the process at last turned their factory’s sewer effluent into cash.

  Soon the Clares were making glycerin at half the cost of British imports. As the price of the elixir fell, its uses multiplied. At the right price, all manner of other manufacturers lined up to place orders: inkers, decanters of boot black, papermakers, printers. Word spread of the Clare grubstake, and entrepreneurs from far and wide descended on the claim.

  The Panic of ’57 blasted their prosperity as a coolie blasts rock. The distant Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed, and began pulling the entire fabric of overbuilt, overextended American commerce down with it. The nation’s business ran to the brink of disintegration. Employment vanished again, and money along with it.