Gain

by Richard Powers

  Ellen shoots her a startled grimace. “No, Mother dearest.” She drops into a camp flash of Judy Garland. “We have the very best Harvest Fair in the world, right here in our own backyard!”

  Illness has shown Laura at least one thing: she will lose her girl forever if she goes on taking her for a girl. Cancer has opened her daughter to her, clear as a spied-upon diary. Ellen, well over in the red zone, deep into all the illicit experiments whose outcomes could still go either way.

  A year from now, Ellen will either be going to college or nodding spiked out on somebody’s toilet. She’ll base her choice on the available evidence, and so far, mainstream existence has made an overwhelming case for all-annihilating stupidity.

  “Not the fair,” Laura tsks. She whisks at Ellen, using the playful push as an excuse to grab and hold her daughter’s upper arm. “I mean, look. Is it just me? Everybody’s sick. It’s like some kind of plague.”

  Ellen’s already convinced. She doesn’t even need to look around. “I told you, Mom.” Adolescent delivery, a point too piercing for adulthood. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “You think it’s just here? Just near . . . ?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. You think they have any fat, filthy, money-grubbing capitalists in Decatur?”

  Laura stops. She stares at the flesh of her flesh, this chameleon. Ellen? Who planted that tirade in her? It must be the time of life. At seventeen, cheerleaders can turn Trotskyite somewhere between fourth and fifth period.

  The outburst feels vaguely profane, like something Laura’s own mother might have washed her mouth out with soap for uttering. She feels her daughter’s brassy strength, the strength of seventeen, and wants to deliver herself to its care. You think so? You think? I’m not just scapegoating?

  Before they can get into the topic of Decatur industry, a man Laura’s age draws up to them.

  “Excuse me. I’m a counselor over at Mercy. Haven’t I seen you on the Oncology floor?”

  He gives his name, which Laura fails to hang on to. Wholly unabashed, he strikes up a conversation about his own seven-year struggle with leukemia, now in remission. She tells him as much about her cancer as she cares to share with a total stranger. Leaving, he says, “We have a little group that meets twice a week, if you’d like to join us.”

  “Oh. No thank you,” Laura pleads. “No thank you. Thanks.”

  Ellen flees to the dried-cornstalk-doll booth in embarrassment. She drifts back only after the man leaves.

  “My God, Ellen. Can you believe that? What on earth is happening? We were just talking . . . It’s like he . . .”

  “Hel-lo? Mother. Get a grip. He probably heard us.”

  Laura drops her eyes to the snickering grass. “Yeah. Well. I guess you’re right.” Her daughter, protecting her from the obvious.

  Ellen lifts her mother’s chin and looks her in the eye. “Say, hey. Baby. You come here often? What’s your cell type?”

  “Wanna go grab a cisplatin somewhere?” Laura mimics. The two of them hide their guilty giggles in each other’s shoulders.

  Laura sobers first. “Why now? I’m sure I didn’t know anyone with cancer until I turned thirty.”

  Tim materializes at their side. He, too, eavesdropping at a distance. “Actually,” he stutters. “Actually, there’s been a slight decrease in ovarian cancer since 1970.”

  Laura looks at this child, her boy. Thirteen next month. In the basin of her lungs, a tight tumor breaks, clods crumbling into powder. And somewhere to the north, in her throat, her eyes rain down dry rain.

  “You are a freak,” Ellen reassures her brother. “That’s what you are.” She puts her arm around him, under cover of irony. More amazing still, he suffers it. Arm in arm: not since they were two and six.

  “Where did you learn that, honey?”

  Tim shrugs. “I don’t know. The Net. Doing an oral report. Most other kinds are up, though. Skin cancer has almost doubled.”

  “Oh, really?” Ellen asks. Her Wellesley accent, almost perfect. “How interesting. Tell me more.”

  “Do you want something to eat?” Laura asks. Distract them back to this Harvest Fair, the last booth of childhood. Time enough for all the uglier stuff later.

  Tim looks at Ellen, who looks at Tim. They shrug together, on cue.

  “Come on. What do you say? Corn dog? Apple cider? It’s on me.”

  “Y-yum.” Ellen smacks her lips. “Sulfites! My fave.”

  Laura pulls them over to the open tent, into its last-chance smells of charcoal and canvas. She pushes them down on a green plastic picnic table bench, recycled from gallon milk jugs to look almost like painted wood. She takes their orders as if she were still a twenty-year-old short-order waitress in peak condition.

  She gives the order to a hangdog teen, who needs her to repeat it twice. Rummaging for her wallet, she stumbles across a photocopy from the library she has filed away in her purse for no reason, for safekeeping. An article from the clippings file, another filler item buried on page 12, reading “Cancer Tracks Chemicals, Not Chance, Workers Claim.”

  Three years ago, Roberto Santiago, Paula Meyers, and Willy Liu worked in the same production facility in Clare’s Agricultural Products Division, just west of town. Roberto inspected and loaded stock. Paula operated a bagging machine. Willy cleaned the equipment that made Clare’s BugBlaster™ seed-coating crop enhancer. They made between $7 and $9 an hour. All three felt lucky to have a job.

  Today, Roberto has a tumor in his testicle, Paula is fighting cervical cancer, and Willy is dead.

  It’s dated the year that Ellen entered high school. Roberto and Paula might even have made it to this year’s fair, behind Laura somewhere in this food line, waiting for the slow woman to find her cash and pay.

  Three different diseases, Laura knows. Thanks to Dr. Archer. And the three people weren’t exactly working the same job. Her disease is another matter altogether. And she has never gotten closer to that plant than to drive past it in a sport utility vehicle filled with grocery bags.

  The Xerox has been getting in her way for the last two weeks, floating into her fingers every time she fishes for anything. She can’t bring herself to throw it away. But she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Keeping it, maybe, to show Ruthie or that Christian soul Janine, if she ever sees either woman again.

  By the time the bonfire starts, it’s already dark. They pull up close to it, the three of them. As close as comfortable. Don finds them out, joins them, eyes lit by the yellow-orange flame. A flame the size of a softball infield. Even Tim and Ellen start to chatter and grin.

  The whole town turns out to witness this group pact of anticipation. Pledge, promise of who knows what: something about to happen, the reason behind autumn, the point of arrival for the whole calendar’s long coast and collapse. The flames lift their fuel’s half-spent sparks backwards, coil them up their own crazed updraft, and for this minute no one here is a day beyond eight. Community fire, older than any of them, older, still, than all of them laid end to end. And if that thrilled hint of things to come has never yet in all those years delivered, the whole of Lacewood feels, tonight around the fire, less reneged on than postponed. Any year now. This year.

  The blaze’s tamed threat takes even Laura out of herself long enough to quit her list-making. The branch office manager, whom she once shook hands with. Ellen’s junior-high language arts teacher. That colleague of Don’s. The obits in the Post-Chronicle that she has taken to reading now, even before Engagements and Real Estate. Who won’t get sick, finally? Who won’t at last host a tumor, if something else doesn’t take them first? Comes with the territory. Where we live.

  Whatever happens from here on, tonight excites her. Now feels warm upon her face. Don leans over to her in the oranged dark to tell her something, his peace as palpable as hers. Like some bon-fire from ten years before. Like no human has ever been foolish. Like there’s no such thing as forgiveness. Like there’s nothing to forgive.

  “Have you hear
d the news?” he whispers.

  “What news?” Just the idea of news now seems a moving violation.

  “Lawsuit against the company. Against Clare.”

  THE CHILDREN’S NEW CRUSADE

  CHILD (on the front stoop, suppliant): “May I please have your old NATIVE BALM SOAP wrappers? If I send 20 to Clare Soap Company in Boston, Massachusetts, they will send me some colored pencils and a drawing pad.”

  LADY (in open doorway): “I am sorry, I cannot. For my own children are collecting those very wrappers for the same purpose.”

  Though born to run the firm, Douglas Clare I came up through the ranks. While still a child, he cleaned and swept his father’s offices. Learning to write, he spent a year as a copyist. At thirteen, he drove a horse-drawn dray back and forth between Roxbury and the Boston docks. Later, he shoveled rosin at the factory for his uncle Resolve, eleven hours a day.

  As soon as Douglas was old enough, Samuel farmed the boy out as an apprentice to a series of sales representatives. There, on the road, in various American cities from New York to Pittsburgh, Douglas learned the task of getting goods into the hands of the public.

  Douglas’s patrimony was never in doubt. But the distance he traveled, from shoveler to president, never failed to impress those he did business with. Inside the firm and out, he emanated an authority grounded on calluses. People always remarked upon his height. Like his father, he stayed emaciated well into old age. But unlike Samuel, Douglas rarely slept. He sometimes closed his eyes for twenty minutes while seated behind his desk. But the first word would bring him back to full concentration.

  Douglas was responsible for implementing the policy that required all new hires to start life on the factory floor. His own famous job history did wonders for labor relations at Clare. Because of Douglas, every wagon boy drove his team tirelessly for years, happily calculating his own outside shot at the big money.

  He seemed impervious to pain. He never got cold. He walked the two miles from his house to the offices, even in the depths of winter, every working day until the day he dropped dead. In a practice that would have confounded the Clare founders, he conducted business on the Sabbath. He never took his eyes off the person he spoke with. He dispatched his few, well-chosen words like bursts of advance cavalry.

  In stark contrast to the first generation, he believed in modernization’s unfailing ability to justify its costs. He installed gaslights to replace the absurd lard-oil lamps the firm had clung to for five too many years. In season, he wired up even the remote offices with telephones. Then he forced his staff to use them, damn the trepidation and the costs. His Aunt Julia lived to see that first phone link between Boston and Walpole. She died proclaiming it the tool by which democracy would finally be realized.

  Democracy, to Douglas, was neither here nor there. We the people, however, did interest him considerably. His years on the road convinced him that a business was neither inventory nor equipment nor licenses nor any other item in the typical assets column. Business was your employees, no more nor less. The sum total of your laboring armies. No idea, no effort, no chemistry, no freight hauling, no magic transformation of fat to cleansing foam—none of this happened without someone to do it.

  The greater your human assets, the better your chance of survival. People had to feel they were part of something bigger than themselves, something growing. For Douglas Clare, growth was an end unto itself. Nothing in creation asked why bud relaxed into leaf or calf exploded into cow. Douglas had no more use for why than nature had. Each morning on awakening, Douglas simply thanked whoever ran the show for this chance he’d been given to preside over the firm’s passage into gangly young adulthood.

  Since the first Roxbury works, the Clares had pursued horizontal integration. Samuel and Resolve had delighted in buying up their strapped local competitors to grab their equipment, sack their inventory, steal their skilled labor, or simply put them out on the stoop. Laissez-faire and the rise of public companies made the horizontal game at once wider and more nuanced.

  Douglas now attempted vertical integration on a vast scale. He pursued Neeland’s great chemical loop, with the entire firm as but one reagent. Those manufacturers who survived the scramble to century’s end would have to make their own sources and buy up their own outlets. And in between start and finish, they would need to make one process’s ends into another’s means.

  An architectural vision of wholeness drove Douglas. Combination kept him awake and warm well into old age. Clare could make the alkali that would furnish the soap whose wastes would flesh out the fertilizer that would boost the crops that made the whiskey to feed to the day laborers who kept the alkali factory humming. What’s more, in time, the company could acquire its own wholesalers and bring on board a whole sales force, breaking the jobbers’ stranglehold by selling directly to the stores. Why sit still on a single link when you could grab the whole chain?

  As the firm grew, Douglas liked to scout out new land purchases by faking picnics. He and two or three assistants—who all received excursion bonuses—would travel out to the prospective site with elaborate prop baskets, perfect right down to the boiled eggs and the marble-carbonated bottled sodas. Once, his own children out of reach at boarding school, Douglas even went to the extreme of renting a pair of pinafored cherubs for added cover.

  The picnic ruse always supplied Douglas with a long afternoon of anonymous investigation. He’d pace through the woods with a shotgun or wander about the meadows waving a badminton racket. He wanted a chance to inspect the goods without someone inspecting him. Douglas needed to see, up close, exactly what was for sale, without the seller getting all excited and putting up the price.

  In this way, he bought the land for the Allegheny soda works and the firm’s big Jersey warehouses. Douglas felt no shame in this ruse. He simply preferred to play a smaller game rather than fooling around with a bigger one. Picnicking over, he could go to the seller with an offer that was both informed and firm.

  Prior to every purchase, Douglas made elaborate, months-long calculations. Each new site meant corporate life or death. Growth could come neither a month too soon nor a month too late. Ten miles to the north or south of the future’s rightful path, and a new site might sink them.

  Douglas would figure and refigure the ledger, employing elaborate, gothic formulae. He’d hedge and waffle, qualify and demur. Then, in an afternoon of chicken wings and soda on a spread blanket, the thing was done. For in the end, no decision was easier. Long after his death, Douglas’s famous take on the matter still served as one of the company’s guiding phrases. “When in doubt, take two steps West.”

  In 1881, the firm broke ground in Sandusky, Ohio, for its largest factory ever. Douglas was there to turn the first spade of earth. The spot could not have been worse for a picnic. But it fit the spreading needs of the company to a T.

  Lacewood, of course, lay too far West to haul rented children. Furthermore, the towns in that part of the world were still so small and far-flung that even the most discreet picnic basket only served to make a person more conspicuous. But by the time Clare came calling in the Midwest, many residents already knew the surname. A fair number of progressive Lacewooders used one or another of the soaps regularly, whether they needed to or not.

  When Douglas Clare stepped off the train in Lacewood, he discovered to his reserved delight that he did not have to buy this land. The town put itself up for auction. Its denizens went all out to sell him on the place, with their dammed-up rivers and their fishing for iced, imported northern pike.

  The place was determined not to remain a farming hamlet forever. Lacewood knew that what it wouldn’t sell, Peoria would cash in on. Those who refused to choose the Gilded Age would be left gelded.

  Douglas took a few days to size up the prospects. Lacewood lay on an exploding confluence of rails that turned the surrounding grain wastes into well-organized hinterlands for urban clearinghouses. It sat within reasonable shipping distance of several essential ma
terials: sulfur up from Texas, lead from Galena, anthracite and petroleum oil from western Pennsylvania.

  The inland seaway to Chicago opened the whole region to cheap Eastern manufacture. The East in turn needed what this West could be made to grow. Lacewood sat close to dead center of the country’s agricultural future. One could not get closer to the market for Clare’s new fertilizers without going past it.

  Land here was still cheap, by Eastern standards. This appealed to Douglas, not so much on grounds of economy, but out of sheer business foresight. Over the long haul, a manufacturer had to lead the next burst of speculation, not follow it. Douglas, ever a long-hauler, made elaborate predictions for the way the region would develop. Most of them turned out utterly wrong.

  Truth be told, the town had no great virtue to recommend it over any other prospective site. But there it was, central, vacant, ready to be made over. And more than anything else, Douglas found in Lacewood an irreplaceable asset: a labor force worth going out of one’s way to enlist.

  Clare turned fifty in 1881, to great public fanfare of its own generating. As a corporation, it was but a scant teenager. But if one dated life from conception, from the moment that Samuel hand-delivered that first two pounds of Irish widower’s soap, a full half century had passed into lather.

  By the jubilee year, the heavy expansion of the seventies came into its own. At last the shriek of production costs quieted to a whimper. American-made soda—Clare’s included—using the cheaper Solvay process, was blowing the lid off the feeble and filthy British Leblanc monopoly. Soap proliferated, cheaper, better, and cleaner than ever.

  Each dollar of income plowed back into capital investment now paid for itself in increased yields within three years. Douglas’s direct volume discount plan eased Clare into wholesaling and made its consumer products competitive out West. Peter’s creative kickbacks with the railroads kept carrying rates low enough that merely chasing geography could turn a profit.