Gain

by Richard Powers

  The firm was again flush, thanks to the unholy trinity of Peter, Douglas, and their fast-rising protégé Hiram Nagel. Peter had discovered Nagel, a twenty-two-year-old land-grant-college boy, languishing in the Boston office answering complaint letters. Nagel had come up from Kentucky to make a buck in the business world. The young man at once demonstrated a remarkable ability to placate the common customer, an ability that threatened to ruin his career ambitions.

  No one had ever handled the losing proposition with half Hy’s aplomb. He could write to anyone—from Harvard divinity prof. to Sooner dung-shoveler—in his native tongue. And he could give all complainers exactly what they wanted, usually without costing the firm much more than a nickel. His letters made once-irate old ladies write back in teary contrition.

  Hiram Nagel became Clare’s boy with his finger in the dike. And in gratitude, the firm threatened to stick him with the thankless job forever.

  So good was Nagel at what he did that word of his legendary skills of appeasement reached Peter. The White Hermit himself paid a visit to the offices to meet the man. Nagel appalled him. Peter wrote in his journal:

  I would not have this man anywhere near my person, not even for short intervals. For dress, he chooses a screeching yellow plaid. His voice, while cheerful enough on the surface, is that of a farmer’s, forever nagging at a curd of recalcitrant phlegm. One must suppress the urge to tell him to spit and get it over with . . .

  Yet protected, say behind glass, I could have sat and studied him all afternoon. His jokes alone astonished me. His rousing inanities rolled out in an effortless stream, untaxed by the passage of hours . . .

  Peter, with an invalid’s fascination with the banal, had reached a conclusion too bizarre for anyone else at first to credit. The future of American business would be decided in the pages of popular print. Somehow he managed to get the board to vote the outrageous sum of $15,000 for the next year’s advertisements.

  Even more remarkably, he won approval for the creation of a full-time position of advertiser. Until then, the firm handed its copy over to agencies and newspaper space brokers, with perfunctory and indifferent results. Why not combine copywriter and advertisement designer into one, professional role, a man whose job it was to fit message to means and means to message?

  In the yellow-checked Nagel, Peter knew at once he had found the man for the job. He promoted the complaints scribe to the position that the two of them decided to call Director of Promotion. Nagel took to the job at once as if he’d invented it, for in fact he had.

  The working association between the general manager and his director of promotion was one of those fabled friendships between alien animal species. Those who knew both men sometimes figured that the chubby cherub pitchman allowed the sickly monk a glimpse of the normal, cider-swilling life that life had always denied him.

  For his part, Peter recognized Nagel’s instinctive grasp of the American class system. Here was a man who understood popular craving and anxiety. Nagel felt the new American appetites deep down, in the barometer of his own ample belly. Peter Clare may have known his customers the way an expert entomologist knows an exotic, collectible species. Hiram Nagel was the species.

  Hy, as he insisted that everyone call him, made the company as recognizable as its products. Clare had long been a person in the eyes of the law. Now it became one in the minds of its customers. As he had when answering complaints, Hy spoke to the public in its own words. His bible was the serial novel, as passed through Roget’s 1852 Thesaurus. The church of his diction held services in the penny theater.

  The messages Nagel cooked up for the jubilee campaign were simple ones. For the Ladies’ Bounteous Home and other family magazines, Hy crafted the anniversary as a Golden Wedding, with the discerning customer as the groom and those virginal bars of Clare soap as the blushing bride. For the big city dailies, he hawked the sound advice: GET ON THE GOLD STANDARD.

  In Harper’s, he claimed Every Race Has Its Golden Age, then let his talented stable of artists loose on imaginative and utterly anachronistic engravings of Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England, and Louis Quatorze France. The last oval showed the original profile of that high-collared, lace-shouldered, feather-capped visage that would in time become Clara Clear, America’s Ambassadress of Sweetheartiness. In this, her first incarnation, Clara simply gazed gratefully at the golden cake that let her recapture an unblemished purity.

  Finally, the Indian came out of retirement one last time. Nagel had the Brave proclaim, with the dignity of an ancient senior statesman, to readers of the Saturday Evening Post:

  There Is Balm in Gilead

  What worked for your forefathers will still work for you today.

  Only in nursling America could fifty years pass itself off as venerable. Yet life in America had changed beyond recognition since Ennis’s first slab of soap. Not one of the firm’s founders could have done business in this altered world, however much their own creed of good business had brought this world into being.

  The country had ballooned beyond recognition. Its inhabitants had increased almost fourfold. Where once only one in ten had lived in a city, now one in every four made their home there. Great circular flows of know-how and resource shod the barefoot boy and plunged Ragged Dick into gentility. Ready wares drove further affluence; and affluence spurred demand for ready wares.

  The terms of existence had eased beyond telling. Yet ease upped the ante on the whole notion of existing. It no longer sufficed that an infant merely survive to adulthood. Now hope required that the child move from farm to fortune by fighting his patrimony of filth and disease with all the new tools at boom time’s disposal.

  Once upon a time, three Boston merchants had transformed a South Seas plant into a noble native cure-all. Now it fell to Nagel to market a package that looked forward and not back. His new glistening solvent had to deny all animal antecedents. Those people who had only recently lost their own art of rendering dead animal fat needed to believe that no creature ever once died for their clean hands.

  In short, Nagel now had to sell the self-reliant public the virtue of the manmade and managed. He folded and glued those commodities into each Native Balm machine-cut wrapper. Soap was nothing if not reasonable regulation, the key to mankind’s rehabilitation from natural squalor.

  Gifford, the buyer of European refinement, showered Hy with undisguised contempt. He never understood how Peter Clare, who had been born rich, could abide even a casual business association with a man who wore yellow check. But Gifford never dared to suggest killing the prize milch cow in the interests of sprucing up the dairy.

  Gifford and Nagel did conspire to produce one lasting promotional item. For many years, Clare inserted cardboard Collectible Art Cards under its wrappers: “a valued gift that outlives the purchase.” A generation of Americans grew up learning their great masters from these colored cardboard squares. Proud starter homes turned themselves into domestic museums, their walls warmed by Delacroix. Rembrandt angels visited the kitchens of the working class, their dog-eared drapery darkened by the soot of coal burners.

  Early in this campaign, the cards were straight reproductions of the classics, marred only by the limits of cheap printing. In later years, everything about the Gainsborough or de Hooch or Millais remained picture-perfect except for one small bar of Clare tucked inoffensively away, almost unnoticed, behind the matron’s apron, the boy’s bubbles, the hem of the Apostles’ garments.

  Nagel wanted not so much to sell the thing as to peddle the virtue of buying. For this, he needed more than florid images and noble profiles. He learned from Pears of London, the invader from across the seas, how the trick might be done. Pears got the drop on American soapmakers by employing the famed Henry Ward Beecher. Pears got Beecher to proclaim on record the many virtues of Anglo-Saxon rationality and foam. When attacked for this apparent conflict of interests in serving two masters, Beecher replied:

  If cleanliness is next to Godliness, soap must be consid
ered as a means of Grace, and a clergyman who recommends moral things should be willing to recommend soap. I am told that my commendation of Pears Soap has opened for it a large sale in the United States. I am willing to stand by every word in favor of it that I ever uttered. A man must be fastidious indeed who is not satisfied with it.

  The genius of the move struck Nagel at once. Clare needed its own ex-abolitionist preacher to make such testimonials. If it could find one, like Beecher, who had recently been acquitted in a long and scandalous adultery trial, so much the better.

  The search was on for prominent witnesses to the virtues of sane living. By the end of the decade, Nagel had elicited sermons from Julienne Healy, the irresistible stage siren; the renowned midget Baby Alice; and World Heavyweight Champion John L. Sullivan. But Clare’s prize spokesman was the disgruntled General Hancock, late of Gettysburg and the Missouri Indian campaigns, rehabilitator of Louisiana, then at an end of a long and distinguished life of public service. Hancock had recently come up a few thousand votes shy of the Presidency. With Clare, he was happy to find himself on a ballot he could carry.

  All these apostles testified in print that their lives would not be half what they were in a world where Clare did not offer its commodities to a grateful populace.

  Don starts calling her again. He calls her three times the following week. Like when he wanted to sue Dr. Jenkins for cruel and unusual optimism. Exactly the same excitement, but without the canary-yellow dress to explain his interest.

  “I really think you ought to look into this case,” he tells her. Two cases, really. A civil action by a handful of workers at the Clare plant, each suffering from some form of cancer. And a class action, some kind of People of Lacewood v. Clare, seeking redress for those toxic discharges in the EPA report. “It wouldn’t kill you to take an interest in all this,” Don says.

  “What do you want me to do, Don?”

  “It’s not what I want. What I want has nothing to do with anything.”

  “Okay. What kind of interest should I be taking?”

  “Well, I think all of this has some pretty direct concern to you, don’t you think?”

  Why? she wants to ask. Why?

  “They’re looking for people with any kind of unaccountable health complaints. They’ve set up this number that you can call—”

  “What do you mean unaccountable? I’ve got ovarian cancer, Don. Twenty-five thousand women get it every year.” And half that number die.

  “Yeah. But why? You’re young. You had your children young. You’re on the Pill. You were on the Pill,” he corrects. Giving until it hurts. “You’re not an immigrant. You’re not an Ashkenazi. Are you? Nobody in your family has ever come near the disease.”

  Until now, she thinks. Until now.

  “They just want you to answer a few questions,” Don wheedles. “Why not let them decide whether your chart has any interest to the case.”

  “I’m not a chart, Don. And the last thing in the world I want is to get mixed up with a pack of jackal lawyers.”

  “Who’s asking you to get mixed up? Just tell them the facts. Just get your name on the list of claimants—”

  “Know what looks good on a lawyer, Don?” She cannot keep from giggling. And not at the stupid riddle. “A Doberman.”

  “Very funny,” he growls. He told her that one. Over the drink they went out for, to seal the divorce. She hadn’t laughed then.

  “Timing, Don. It’s all in the timing.”

  “Look, Loofa, it’s not like they’re going to haul your ass in front of the jury.”

  “What did you call me?”

  Slowly, hearing himself this time: “Loofa. Loopie.”

  “Lo,” she adds. “La. Laurish.”

  “I called you Laurish?”

  “I always hated that one. And they will.”

  “What? Who will what?”

  “They will. Haul my ass in front of a jury. If they like my story, that is. If they don’t, they’ll probably charge me $250 an hour for the pleasure of the consult.”

  “Laura, they won’t. You want me to look into this thing? I’ll look into it.”

  “Don’t bother, Don,” she tells him, not knowing why she bothers.

  She makes a note to go to the library. To look up the cases and read all she can about them. Not just in what Ellen has started calling the Joke-Comical. She’ll have a look at the Chicago and Indy papers, too. Marian will show her how to keep up with stories about this suit, without her having to deal through Don. What is it about men that they always have easier access to useful facts?

  She uses an orange Post-It. Orange, the color she reserves for “Get on it.”

  Clare Lawsuits

  Library

  She sticks the note on the lower left corner of her bathroom mirror, where she’s forced to see it whenever she looks at herself. It goads her to get up, get over the lethargy that pins her to her bed. It scolds her to get outside, to find the strength to make it down the block.

  Problem is, she no longer has the strength to look in the mirror. Or the desire. She knows exactly the changeling cuckoo she will see there, the chick with its blasted tufts of down. She sees too much of her limp and withered skin already, without the aid of reflection. And now that the note hangs there nagging at her, she may never look in the glass again.

  Her body scares her now. Alien infestation. A pink, bare, cave newt, bald down to her plastic pubes. Clammy and numb and going deaf. Her memory is shot; she cannot form complete thoughts. She weeps or rages at random. No one can tell her how much of the changes come from the cancer, how much from the chemo, how much from the meds used to soften the chemo, how much from the whiplash of coming off those meds, or how much from having her sex organs yanked out by the roots and replaced by more pills. Whatever the cause, she no longer recognizes the scraps of person left to her.

  The sight of her PICC line under its swatch of plastic tape repulses her. She still blanches at the thought of that plastic tube running up the inside of her arm and into her chest. She can just bare the catheter now without feeling like the star attraction at a frat-house kegger. But she blesses the thing every time they have to stick her for anything.

  She can look at the scar now, at least. The gash across her gut with its staple notches, yard markers on a football field. She couldn’t bear it when she first came out. Could not glimpse the cut without feeling like something out of a slasher film, stitched together out of graveyard parts.

  The scar has lightened. Once it was livid, a blood-gorged leech licking the cream of her belly. Now scar and the skin it straddles compromise on a dingy reddish-brown. The scar is less jarring than her pelvis, jutting up through her skin. She would have killed once, for this much waist definition. Now she owns the elusive grand prize: visible hipbones. She’s as much of a skeleton as any jeans-ad waif, only she sports this gash in her sagging skin.

  Her bones come up everywhere through what’s left of her threadbare padding. She cannot sit on anything solid. Even the recliner hurts after the first minute. Taking a bath is out of the question: the spike of her tail grinds on the porcelain.

  How easy weight loss is, once you know the trick. The opposite of twenty-seven, when she woke up one day and could no longer eat without paying. Slammed into reverse, after all these years of fighting. All the special diets. The pills, the books, the videotapes, the exercise cycles. The artificial-fat chips that gave her the trots if she tried to eat more than half an ounce. Now, there’s your ultimate saltwater thirst quencher: substitute junk food, that you still have to eat in moderation.

  She has to fight to put weight back on. Has to throw out the old tapes and pills and buy a whole new, opposite lineup. At first she went to the hospital shop for them. But after about two weeks she realized that she could get the exact same $14.95 diet supplement for $9.95 at Pure Succor down on Angleton. The health food store marks things up only about double, as opposed to triple at the hospital. And it carries a full line of those specia
lty shakes and snacks, products for the growing niche group who need to buck the dieting tide. It’s mostly the same stuff the Cross Trainer store sells as “High Energy,” only at the cancer section of Pure Succor the labels say “High Calorie.”

  She calls Grace Wambaugh, her friend the herbal Fuller Brush saleswoman. She orders the four-month booster plan, enough to see her past the end of the chemotherapy. It’s more of a superstition than anything else. She can’t keep most of the tablets down anyway.

  She asks Grace for a pain program. The hospital stuff just stones her, then makes her edgy and paranoid when she stops taking it. It doesn’t do more than muffle the anguish at most.

  “You shouldn’t try to mask the symptoms,” Grace tells her over the phone. “You shouldn’t take stuff for pain. You have to treat the causes, not the manifestations.”

  Laura plots to tip over the woman’s pyramids and grind her crystals into little bits. No New Age court in the land would convict her.

  Her old stoicism dissolves, just when she needs it. Her whole life, she’s fought to win this high threshold. Even Don used to admire how tough she was. She never complained. Couldn’t afford to. She never even noticed. She never had time to notice. Now she sees where being good has gotten her.

  For months now, she’s held off the fatigue, even when fatigue was so great she couldn’t think straight. Every day she forced herself out of bed, even if only to crawl back two hours later, winded and depleted. She went to work on days when she could not keep her eyes from crossing in agony. She did the shopping on days when just shoving the stick shift around felt like a supermodel’s aerobics video. Now she has nothing left. And the course has just begun toying with her.

  “Describe the pain,” Dr. Archer asks her. “Is it sharp or dull? Local or general?”

  “Just pain,” she says. “Bad. From the bottom of my ribs to the top of my thighs.”