But the circle of wealth called out for more linkups, more loop-backs within loop-backs before the perpetuum mobile would run its course. All parts of the process had to be broken up and reconstituted, brought under the umbrella of making and management if manufacture were to pay for itself. To become true master of its own materials, to take charge of all the directions toward which the raw world might be sent, Clare, too, had to take its supplies, as much as possible, in-house. It would need to make its own synthetic alkali.
Julia and Peter pitched this case to Douglas. Together, they convened the board. The real purpose of business, Julia assured the assembled directors, lay not in getting but in spending. In the struggle for survival, the company had to pitch itself against a concern greater than its local competitors, greater than the soap castles of New York and Philadelphia, greater, even, than the mighty British. Clare Soap existed to level and bring low no lesser enemies than dependency and privation.
For the bemused businessmen, Julia traced out a kind of industrial allegory. She related a vision she had had on the factory floor, while watching the kettles split out products according to the levels each sank to in the agitated parfait. What if this whole tuned process, this entire ensemble generating its steady stock of Native Balm, were but one linked input feeding a far deeper churn?
Soap was but small potatoes. No more than the tiniest wart. No: a wart’s wart on the back of an amphibian just now rising from its quiet pond to take to the dry lands of this empty continent.
Think big, Julia implored them. Every manufacturing system that Clare had yet assembled resembled those smudges in an eye-fooling painting: the crowds on a middle promontory that, to the observer who takes two giant steps backward, suddenly reveal themselves to be but bristles in the nostril of a behemoth.
Throughout Julia’s delivery, Douglas shook his head. After she finished, he noted that no one had ever accused J. H. Clare of lacking ambition. His aunt’s vision would have appalled the young man had not something in its scale thrilled him. He perked up at the suggestion of interlocking processes, whole rings of marketable substances he might be able to vend.
Nevertheless, Douglas did not see the business sense in her vision. Clare made soap. Its soap sold. Nobody in his right mind abandoned the farm while the crops were still profitable. Granted, the years had gone tight. Yes, another depression pinned the country to the ground and picked at it like a turkey buzzard. But another boom would come along soon, to answer that bust. Another always did. Clare needed only to concentrate on what it did best. Mind the pennies, and let the dollars mind themselves.
It took Peter’s appeal to the memory of their Uncle Benjamin to bring Douglas around. The sickly cousin, who rarely came out in public, spoke of Ben’s untapped legacy, the coal tar work, the copious notebooks filled with the chemistry of anaesthesia. Peter invoked the orphan seminary-school students, their late uncle’s lab assistants. Without Ben Clare’s scientific ramblings, there would be no Utilis, no Native Balm Soap, no Clare. What would it cost Clare now, to continue that research?
Some negotiation passed before even Peter understood the shape of his proposal. At last, he hatched the unprecedented idea of an industrial lab. The cousins hammered out an agreement on what the lab would look like, how they would run it, where to enter it into the books. They settled on a shape somewhere between Peter’s idealist philanthropy and Douglas’s hunger for new products.
Although she really wanted new factories, Julia latched upon this compromise. Here was the first step toward a business worthy of the name. The board approved the new industrial lab, and Samuel attached his signature to it, without even bothering to read the charter.
In photos, the lab appeared as little more than a dingy, narrow stockroom fitted with beakers and basins. It occupied a back corner of the new Walpole plant, completed shortly before the first train ran from one American ocean to the other. Walpole produced twice the soap of all the Roxbury operations put together. It was a self-contained village, with candle factory; alkali, boiler, sal, soap, and still houses; cooperage and carpenter shops; stables, sheds, and warehouses for a dozen different commodities. A vast building four stories high housed the huge kettles designed expressly for it. Erected over its own private rail siding, the modern plant saved the firm an easy $50,000 a year in transport costs alone.
The Walpole plant molded and packed almost a hundred thousand bars of Native Balm every working day. And in its cramped research quarters, Walpole chemists developed products that in time proved more valuable than any then being made.
The man who ran the Walpole lab had come to Clare as one of Ennis’s first “college kettle boys.” He stayed on to master every aspect of the practical chemistry of fats and oils. While still a young man, James Neeland had impressed Ennis by producing a larger laundry bar to supplement the original washing-up soap. Neeland had also been in on developing the hardmilled and vegetable soap formulas.
But Neeland owed his major advance to happy accident. A bitter worker tried to sabotage a run of Native Balm by spiking the pitching brine rinse with the slightly acidic coil wash. No one caught the batch until it came out of the crutchers. The foreman wanted to throw out the entire lot.
The foreman called Neeland in to inspect the botched job. Fearing the Queen Bee’s notorious thrift, he ordered the batch to be poured, set, and crated for shipping. Some weeks afterward, the distributors began asking for that wonderful hair soap, the one that left less oily residue and did not require a vinegar or lemon after-rinse. No one in the front office had any idea what was meant until Neeland stepped forward to describe his experiment. As a reward, the Clares gave Neeland charge of one of the country’s first industrial labs.
Neeland refined a glycerin recovery process that Clare did not need to license. The savings allowed him to turn his crude refuse into an emollient that undercut everyone on the market. When the factories began swimming in glycerin, Neeland tinkered with turning it to further ends. In time, Clare would make millions on the former waste, using it in everything from lipstick to explosives.
A more efficient recovery of Glauber’s salt from spent lye let Neeland close yet another internal production loop. Just as coal miners bought the very soap whose manufacture their digging helped fuel, so Neeland’s chemical recirculation fed upon itself, like a stove that ran off its own ashes.
The chemist, when he dreamed, dreamed of turning the refuse from every transmuting process back into the supply path of another. In his ultimate heaven—nothing so mundane as God’s—all growth lived off some other’s compost, like a gentleman farmer’s estate, or a balanced aquarium.
Neeland cast his eye across the ocean, to England, where chemists rolled a giant hoop around a regenerating hub, a wheel outputting its own inputs, its rim spinning off tangent substances, each the potential feed for whole new industries, each new industry a feed for the next. Neeland made a chart of the great wheel and hung it upon his laboratory wall, for all his assistants to study.
The synthesis of artificial alkali turned all manner of wasted byproducts back into the vat. Only sulfur could yoke such fiery bulls to the plow: Vulcan’s seed corn, the best measure of a country’s economic might.
The British had long seemed past challenge at this alkali game, a game of their own devising. But the British now suffered from the law of the retarding lead, where the innovator, having worked out the kinks, gets killed by the successor pack who improve upon the lead dog’s tricks without the expense of discovery.
The late starter had certain advantages, Neeland lectured his assistants. The great intersecting arcs of the British chemical industry were beautiful: the century’s crowning ballet. Leblanc’s artificial soda process showered its bounty upon all people in the form of paper, glass, soap, baked goods, bleaches, medicines, and dyes. It made luxuries commonplace and delivered new necessities at exactly the moment that history needed them.
But Neeland’s chart failed to include every substance that the process p
roduced. Decades of live experiment upon British alkali towns now showed the Leblanc process to be cruelly inefficient. For every unit of sulfur that created wealth, two units rained back down upon wealth’s beneficiaries as crippling soot and sulfurous drizzle.
Somewhere, Neeland’s chart had to harbor undiscovered branches, cleaner, more efficient arrows curling from sulfur to soda and back. Already the Belgian Solvay had invented a carbonating tower that made soda ash for half the price with a fraction of the poisonous discharge. Who knew where ingenuity might yet take the venturesome?
The self-sufficient machine would not come about in Neeland’s lifetime. His sons—even his sons’ sons—would pass away before the perfect hoop got rolling. But until that day, work in Neeland’s lab crept on, accreting cheaper soaps, cleaner methods, better products.
Neeland closed in on the long-term goal by successive refinement. Profit gained along one of the arrowed paths supplied him with the means to survey the next. And the more links Neeland’s crew added, the cheaper each addition would be.
The Walpole lab experimented with small runs of bleaches and dyes. The nearby, failing Wamesit Rapids cloth mills snapped up Clare’s stock of ready chemicals. For a time, Clare made Wamesit competitive again. Neeland’s men cracked engineering challenges as well as chemical ones. They built enormous, watertight lead chambers for the soap baths. They toyed with the cold process and with saponification under pressure.
Each increase in laboratory know-how led Clare Soap closer to that businessman’s grail of relative advantage: selling more for less. Five years after starting this first industrial research program, Clare made ten cakes of Native Balm for what it had once cost to make seven. The savings paid for new equipment, and new machines bought new economies of scale.
At the end of the day, or at least by the end of that adventurous morning, Clare produced a soap cheap enough to sell back to England, the mother country of all soap products. Colonial revenge—mercantilism getting its own back—had been Samuel’s chief incentive to hold out into old age. The last pleasure that business offered the old man was to sell back to his ancient supplier all those obligations that had so long held him hostage.
The first shipment put in at Liverpool; a British customs agent instantly intercepted it. Certain that the shipper was undervaluing the stock in order to evade paying the lawful duty, the agent exercised the Crown’s prerogative and bought the entire lot, at the suspicious declared price, even before the soap could be offloaded from the ship.
Gleeful, Clare’s new order-handlers packed off another cargo at the same price. This time, the British customs officials smelled a dumping racket. No doubt the upstart Americans meant to sell this Native Balm below cost, in order to force an entry into British markets. Once again, Inspection bought up the entire shipment right there on the docks, to punish the company with pointless mounting losses.
Clare redoubled its shipment, delighted to shoot the fish so long as someone else kept stocking the barrel. At this point, the bewildered British concluded that if they had not yet wiped out this manufacturer, then the parvenu’s price must in fact be yielding an honest profit. This time, customs let the soap through to market, where it sold well, although never again quite so briskly.
The chemistry that issued from Neeland’s lab altered every aspect of Clare’s soapmaking but one. The magic additive—the truculent vegetable, remarkable Utilis—remained beyond synthesis. Although only trace amounts of crushed root sufficed to bestow Native Balm’s fabled properties upon a large run of neat soap, supply no longer kept pace with the volume that the factories could now deliver. Clare remained bottlenecked by the tiny stores of tropical plant it could cultivate.
Douglas commissioned Neeland to develop a workable substitute. The labs tried wheat grass, agave, and other promising chemical matter. But any alteration in the recipe produced unacceptable changes in the finished product. The same agrarian nostalgia that pushed the brand to national prominence now prevented its wholesale adoption of rational production methods.
And yet that same recalcitrant vegetable nature now made Native Balm the perfect cure for the country’s growing ablutomania, a cleanliness craze Clare had helped to cause. Native Balm embodied all the natural wisdom lost to the onslaught of modern industrial chemistry, while each package remained immaculate, milled, dependable.
On the strength of the discoveries that trickled out of Walpole’s scientific back room, Clare parlayed Native Balm into a dozen new products. Clare now shipped as much soap into the once-wastes between Ohio and Missouri as it had shipped in New England prior to the war. It began to toy with the idea of national advertising. The notion no longer seemed absurd. In fact, the Chicago meat-packer needed Native Balm perhaps even more than did the Boston Brahmin.
The company’s earliest printed proclamations read like revival meeting transcripts. Sermons in a circus of typefaces framed earnest copperplate engravings depicting some languorous Allegory enjoining the benefits of proper sanitation. A person needed a good five minutes to read the full text. And when finished, he still could not be sure just what was for sale: whether Native Balm, Healing Root Extract, the abstract idea of soap, or simply “Trade, that plant that grows wherever peace and labor water it.”
As Thomas J. Barrat of Pears fame so cleanly put it: “Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell it.”
A series of posters all bear the same look: sepia and gilt-edged, a vanished world somewhat naïve but wholly right-hearted. Each one is an irised page torn from some family scrapbook. One snippet of old advertisement ends: Highest Prices Paid for Tallow. A slightly crinkled photo shows a man in thick mustache and blacksmith’s apron in front of a complex nest of pipes labeled “Recovery Unit.” A fragment of paper label promises:Save and send us 10 Native Balm Wrappers, and we will mail you a beautiful reproduction of this artwork, postage paid.
The series appear on bilboards, in magazines, and in fifteen-second spots. Each entry bears the same captioned refrain:
“We recycled before the word even existed.”
Jane Lauter wins the agents’ Florida trip this year. Laura doesn’t come close. Even Phyllis Gant beats out Laura’s total—Phyllis, who tries to show prefabs to college professors and palatial golf course spreads to assembly-line workers.
Not that Laura has any great desire to go back to Orlando. She hated it last year, when she won by a mile, although Tim did dote on Epcot and Ellen didn’t seem to mind strutting around the pool in a string bikini. But Laura came back home from the all-expenses-paid vacation a total basket case, jittery with entertainment, mouthing that old joke: Second prize, two weeks.
Even if she’d won this year, what good would it have done? She would have just thrown up all over the Small World ride. But it’s the principle. Laura’s as good an agent as Millennium has had for a long time. She has grown to be as productive as anyone, as far as the house part goes. And she’s better with more kinds of people than anyone in the office. They toss her all the problem cases, the people going into retirement homes who don’t really want to sell, the young, childless couples who like to look at houses on Sundays as a hobby. And she does as much business with the castoffs as some agents do with the plums.
She has to be good. It’s not just a second income for her. She’s not just paying taxes on her husband’s take-home so that the family can afford that matching fleet of Jet Skis. She’s supporting two kids, shouldering her half of their upkeep.
At the same time, it’s more than just making a living. Orlando can go down in a killer-whale synchronized feeding frenzy for all she cares. But she needs something from this job, some small corner, some recovered scrap of her life that she has made, that she excels at, that’s hers. She likes the stupid little maroon Millennium jacket that clashes with everything. She looks good in it. She got to the Million Dollar Movers Club faster than any Lacewood agent ever. She’s been there the last three years running. Until this year.
Yes, she has missed
some days. But fewer with each round of chemo, despite Dr. Archer’s warnings about cumulative results. This last time out, just three full days and a couple of afternoons. And even on those, she’s tried to work at home some, on the computer. Her energy flags, and she moves a little slower at everything. But she shows properties almost as often as she did before getting sick.
It’s just that she doesn’t seem to do as well per showing as she used to.
Grace Wambaugh, who talks to her more now, since coming by to sell her herbal remedies, tells her, “You ought to be proud. Going through all that, and still managing to turn a little profit for the company.”
Grace. She probably doesn’t mean to be insulting. Or at least not noticeably rude. Besides, she’s right: there’s a lot to feel good about. But all Laura can feel is a vague anxiety. A pit in her surgically evacuated viscera at having missed her quota.
In part, it’s a money thing. Totally irrational, of course. She’s still making enough to cover most everything. Her credit cards have lots of carrying room, and there’s more than enough in the savings to tide the three of them over until she’s back to full strength. And even if they have to tighten their belts a little, even if they have to make adjustments . . . It wouldn’t kill the kids to go without a new concert ticket or CD-ROM every other week.
The thing that terrifies her is having to go to Don. To tell him she’s having money trouble. The last time she had to do that, the man gloated for weeks. Acted like it proved everything he ever said about her. Like it vindicated his entire life, confirmed every prediction he made about their splitting up. Like a jury just acquitted him on overwhelming evidence. She couldn’t bear it.
She could still wait tables. The chemo hasn’t done anything much to her legs yet. She’d rather moonlight at McDonald’s than ask Don for more money. She’d rather get back with Ken. But at this point, she’d rather die than get back with Ken.
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