Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  “He has to come back,” Ruth smiled. “It’s a long time since he made his reputation.”

  The phone rang, and Abbott went to answer it. It was Lowell, and he said, “I have to see you this morning, Elliott.”

  “How would noon do, twelve?”

  “It has to be now.”

  “Well—I usually make the rounds——”

  “Break into it for this. I tell you I have to see you, Elliott.”

  “All right. Suppose you come straight over.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  When Abbott returned to the kitchen, Ruth looked at him inquiringly. “Lowell,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and taking his seat at the table again.

  3.When Lowell came into Elliott Abbott’s office, it was like two men meeting again after a long while, old acquaintances more than friends, Abbott leaning forward over his desk to shake hands, his huge shoulders and shaggy head dwarfing the desk itself, his pale eyes regarding the other curiously—thinking that Lowell was short on both sleep and nerves, a guess not far from the mark. But to Lowell, with other things gone and those not yet gone on their way to it, this was still the only human being left now whom he had known, on and off, through his life, from earliest childhood, who could, at least to some degree, separate the man, Lowell, from certain things that were happening. And his first words, “Elliott, I’m in a rotten mess,” bore that out. Elliott, watching him, reacting only slightly to the fact that he was in a rotten mess, remained a tower, of strength. Let Gelb swill in his brains the fact that he was a Communist; Elliott was a strange man, just as he had been a strange, overlarge, shambling boy; but they knew each other, and without labels.

  “What is it?” Elliott asked.

  “Well, I’m sick, it’s that. A rotten, filthy thing—and who else am I to go to?” He was going to lie to Elliott, but he couldn’t—and in any case you don’t lie to your physician. It doesn’t make sense. Also, he was afraid; that was something Elliott could see, fear marked and apparent.

  “A lot of people are sick,” Abbott said, smiling very slightly. “More people are sick than you think. We go a little off the norm, and that’s a condition called sickness. We get bitten by a small bug, and that’s also a condition called sickness. It’s very widespread, George.” He stood up, spreading his big hands on the desk. “Let’s go inside and see.”

  It didn’t take him long, only a few minutes, and then he sat on an enameled stool, watching Lowell dress, rubbing his lips with the forefinger of one hand.

  “Is it what I think?” Lowell asked him.

  “I don’t know what you think, George. It’s not a very aristocratic disease. It’s a more or less universal condition of dirtiness that the lower classes call clap, a nasty name. I can say it in four syllables if you want me to.”

  “It’s not—”

  “No, not at all, if you take any comfort from the distinction. Also, this can be cured pretty easily. Very often, it can be made non-communicable in about three hours. Five years ago, it would have been different, but today it yields readily enough to penicillin. It’s as easily gotten rid of as a cold—more easily, actually.”

  Lowell stood there looking at him, the fear passing, the dependence passing, but Abbott did nothing except rub his lips.

  “Whatever you’re thinking,” Lowell began, “I would—”

  “I’m not thinking,” Abbott said. “It’s none of my business. I’m your physician. It’s my business to cure you if I can, that’s all.”

  “All right. If you want to look at it that way.”

  “What other way is there to look at it?”

  “None, I suppose. No other way. You never have any doubts, do you, Elliott?”

  “That’s not the point,” Abbott said shortly. “I’m not sermonizing. It’s none of my damn business.”

  “Would you tell me something?”

  “Anything I can tell you, I’ll be happy to,” Abbott said.

  “When did I contract this thing?”

  Abbott looked at him narrowly, answering, with no perceptible change in his voice, “About three days ago.”

  “Not last night?”

  “Not last night,” Abbott said. “Not the night before. It would have to be longer than that.”

  “You can be sure about that?”

  “That’s the history of this kind of thing. Maybe it could happen differently, but it hasn’t in my experience.”

  “But last night,” Lowell said dully, “I could have—”

  “You could have,” Abbott nodded. “It was communicable then.” There was no feeling in his voice, no judgment, no anger. He still sat on the stool, his hand cupped around his chin, regarding Lowell with quiet interest. “It’s curable in you,” Abbott said. “It’s curable in anyone else.”

  “Last night,” Lowell began, a somnambulistic quality in his voice, “I was—”

  “I’d rather not know about it,” Abbott said.

  For the first time since they had met that morning, Lowell smiled. “How long have you been waiting for this opportunity, Elliott?” he demanded. “I’ve been watching you and Fern for a year now.”

  “Have you?”

  “I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I shouldn’t have said it. I slept about four hours last night, Elliott. This damned strike—”

  “It doesn’t matter. Forget about it.”

  Lowell shook his head. He felt sleepy, very sleepy—detached from everything he said, like a third person listening. Maybe it was being sick that made him that way.

  “I’ll run a test and let you know in a few hours,” Abbott told him, rising and opening the door to his office. “Meanwhile, as I said, the injection should take effect and you ought to be rid of this thing by evening. Have the prescription filled out, and take one tablet every three hours. I wouldn’t overdo things today. I’d get to bed early. You need sleep.”

  “Thanks,” Lowell said. Abbott didn’t say anything, and in the consulting room Lowell picked up his hat and coat, stood a moment, and then said:

  “I don’t want it to finish up this way, Elliott. I don’t have many friends.”

  “None of us do,” Abbott answered evenly.

  “Can I ask you one question?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Are you a Communist, Elliott?”

  “You’ve known me a long time. You never asked me that before.”

  “I know,” Lowell said helplessly.

  “I’m a Communist,” Abbott said.

  “I don’t mean what you believe or what you think. They have an organization, haven’t they?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And—”

  “I belong to it,” Abbott said. “Card and all. Is that what you want to ask me?”

  Lowell nodded miserably. He put on his hat and coat, turned, and walked out. Abbott sat down at his desk and sat there fully five minutes, staring at his blotter, turning his desk pen over and over, making little dabs of ink with it. Then he went back into the kitchen, where Ruth and Mike Sawyer were sitting, smoking, watching Frances Colby mix a batter.

  “They eat good,” Frances was saying to Mike. “No boughten bread, no siree. Made. No boughten cake. Made. My poor pa would turn over in his grave if he saw me at my age, with the work I do. So I tell them, social principles begin at home. The equality of man begins at home. My pa had a farm in New Hampshire, and we had a hired man who once shook hands with Gene Debs, and I swear to the nation that he drove us all out of our minds. Wouldn’t eat with us. Every hired man we had just as long back as we had the farm sat down at the kitchen table to eat along with us, but not him. No siree. We was the propertied class and he had what he called class consciousness, and that was that, and if he worked for us, then by God he worked for us, and he wasn’t going to take any social graces instead of the twenty-five dollars a month he claimed we was exploiting out of him. Well, we had
no peace and no rest until the harvest was in, and then Pa takes up a rake handle and declares that he’s going to make that class consciousness stick.”

  “Did he?” Sawyer asked.

  “Well, you can just bet your boots we had to get a new hired man. It set Pa against Socialists.”

  “What is it?” Ruth said to Elliott. “You didn’t blow up at George, did you?”

  “Almost. It isn’t that.” He looked puzzled and worried.

  “What then?”

  “George knows I’m in the party. He was carrying it like a cross. And he didn’t know a week ago.” Abbott had the feeling that he himself had not been entirely aware of it a week ago.

  4.The early morning had been fair, but a wind from the mountains was blowing cold and strong by now, lacing the sky with a promise of snow. Dry leaves and bits of rubbish skidded down Concord Way, and those hearty folk who had come out with sweaters and light jackets were on their way home for more sturdy covering.

  George Clark Lowell turned his coat collar up as the wind struck him, put his head down, and walked across the street to where his car was parked. When he was sitting behind the wheel, he lit a cigarette, smoked it with long, nervous gasps, took four or five long drags, and then threw it aside. He started the car and drove out of the eastern end of Clarkton, into the country. The very act of leaving the town at this moment was so expressive of his need to remove and absolve himself, that it filled him with self-pity and emotional understanding of himself—a feeling which he extended to Abbott and then even to his wife, a somewhat maudlin stage that increased his desire for a drink to a point of desperation. He thought of Rose Antonini, with a gush of pity that embraced her, and he began to consider what he could do for her, some splendid and gracious gesture short of informing her that in all probability she had a case of venereal disease. But it did not seem real or actual, and he, like most people, did not realistically believe in the communication of disease, even when it was proven; and beyond that he could also tell himself that she had had it before and would no doubt have it again. But in his thoughts of her, it rose like a wall, and he had to accept the fact that it would never again be as it was the evening before.

  Nevertheless, he had a great, watery tenderness for her, that he would express in some fashion; and if he wished to do that, even the objective facts of the matter would justify his action, she being Clark’s girl, at least at one time so that a consideration would not be looked at askance. It made him even sadder to think that Elliott, at best, would not even come close to understanding what he could feel for a little Italian girl who worked in his plant; in order to know that, Elliott would have to understand the complicated inner purity that a man can preserve, going to bed with a whore in a New York hotel, but despising her and himself too, and then willing—indeed driven—to uproot the world because another woman turned him into fire, with such a carnal love as he had not known with anyone else before; man was weak and strong and proud and willful and repentant. He could understand Elliott in terms of his daughter, Fern, and yet Elliott could not understand him.

  Five miles out of Clarkton, he pulled in at a grimy gin-mill, set behind a service station, and had a whisky sour—a very bad whisky sour—and then a second one. There was only the bartender at this time of the morning, and he served up the drinks with a silent and somewhat contemptuous aloofness. Lowell’s pity increased. He turned the fact that Elliott was a Communist over and over in his mind. That was enough reason for Elliott to hate him, but he could proudly assert that it was not enough reason for him to hate Elliott.

  5.From a window in Wilson’s office, Frank Norman watched Fern drive her roadster into the picket line, display her pass, and come through the gate.

  “Miss Lowell,” he said to Wilson, who sat at his desk, deliberately signing a pile of papers.

  “Uh-huh. She’s a bright girl. A little too smart for my taste.”

  “Pretty, too.”

  “She’s pretty, all right. She needs a tight rein. I don’t like to talk about Mr. Lowell—a damn fine man, you understand me, cream of the earth, but easygoing—but she has the bit in him, not he in her.”

  “I understand she got in some trouble,” Norman said slowly.

  “It’s around town, otherwise I wouldn’t breathe it. If there’s one thing I got contempt for, it’s men who talk about women.”

  “I agree with you there,” Norman said. “Wholeheartedly.”

  “But it’s around town,” Wilson said. He liked Norman. Not like Gelb, not Gelb’s caliber, not Gelb’s type, but a clean-cut, fine lad who was living this job with such verve, such integrity that he made Wilson the more youthful just for being with him. Also, he was modest and humble about his army service, and he had as much polite respect for Wilson as he might have had for one of his officers in the service. All during the war years, Wilson had felt abashed and uneasy in the presence of men his age in uniform, captains and majors and colonels and generals. There was no reason, he felt, why if he had only been given the chance he couldn’t have done as well and even better; and one of the greatest reliefs of the war’s end was that he could put this corroding envy behind him.

  “That’s a pity, Sir,” Norman said.

  Another thing he liked about Norman, that occasional, winning, respectful use of the word Sir. “It happens in a town like this. She got into a scrape at college, and they threw her out. I suppose Mr. Lowell could have ironed it out, but she was just too damned headstrong.”

  Norman looked at him inquiringly.

  “I don’t know what it was. A lot of rumors, a lot of cheap gossip, but I don’t know what it was and neither, I guess, does anyone else here in town. There’s one thing about the Lowells—damned fine people, you understand, same family as the Lowells you read about all the time—they don’t wear their sorrows on their sleeves. Had a son who was killed in the war, shot in that business at the Bulge, but the way they took it, you’d never know. You ask me, son, that’s the mark of a man, not how he stands up when everything’s going just as smooth as can be, but how he stands up when bad weather sets in. That’s when gumption’s needed, and that’s when the yellow streak shows through. If a man’s got a yellow streak in him, that’s when it’s going to come out. But I guess you had plenty of proof of that overseas.…”

  Fern came in then, her cheeks flushed with the cold, the excitement of going through the picket line and being in the silent, struck plant still on her. She wore a skirt and jacket of yellow suede, a rough brown sweater, low-heeled shoes, and a long scarf knit of the same wool as the sweater. It was the first time Norman had really seen her, except for the glimpse from the window, and now, dressed as she was, her hair so windblown and casual, he was both excited and pleased with her. He had not dreamed that she would be so pretty, and the thought of knowing her and dating her made his assignment here close to perfect.

  “Hello, Tom,” she said to Wilson. “I just had to come down. My heart almost stopped beating when I pulled into the gate. But, you know, they were very nice about it. Who’s this?”

  “Fern, I want you to meet Frank Norman, one of the industrial consultants your dad sent up from New York. This is Miss Lowell, Frank.”

  He said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Lowell. And you bet they were very nice about it. There would be the devil to pay if they weren’t.”

  Fern walked to the window and looked out. “This tones it down, doesn’t it? I can’t understand how, if you wanted to open the plant, those few people would prevent you.”

  “If we wanted to open, Fern—” Wilson said. “Frank, here are the warrants. Suppose you bring them into Gelb for his okay. Then you can see if Curzon sent over the men.”

  “You’re not going, are you, Miss Lowell?” Norman asked.

  “Why?”

  “Well, you might be interested. We’re going to back that picket line up from the gate, and there might be some excitement. You’ll have a perfect view of it from this window.”

  6.Usually, an
hour or two before noon, Danny Ryan would walk from the union headquarters on Oak Street over to Concord Way, and then up the main street to Birch, where company property began. Westward, from Birch Street, there were about four hundred yards of weed-grown meadow before you came to the gates of the Lowell Company, and this meadow stretched north to the creek and south to the main line of the railroad, the right-of-way being fenced there with a heavy nine-foot wire. This meadow was put to no better use than an occasional wandering cow or goat might improvise, and it was liberally dotted with half a century’s accumulation of junk, metal too rusty even for scrap, rotten shacks, and just plain garbage. At one time, in 1928, the elder Lowell was going to put up a model company development, but the crash cut into that when only the foundations were dug, and a line of these holes still gaped, muddy pits that bred mosquitoes in the summertime. The roads that led to the four plant gates cut through this meadow, and were marked PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING, as was the meadow itself, with ancient, rain-dampened signs.

  Sometimes, Danny would go up to the plant alone; sometimes with Bill Noska or some other shop official, sometimes with Joey Raye. Today, the big Negro was with him, and the two of them had just turned the corner onto the main street, when they met Father O’Malley, who grinned cheerfully, offered his hand first to Ryan and then to Raye, and then asked them where they were bound for on this fine winter’s morning.

  “Just thought we’d push over to the gates and look at things,” Ryan said. “Joey here has got his crew building a mobile hot coffee and sinker canteen out of an old Ford suburban the local bought, and he wants to case the gates and see what the old cow should carry.”

  “Mind if I walk along a bit?” Father O’Malley asked.

  “Not at all,” Raye said. Ryan didn’t say anything, and Father O’Malley fell in alongside of him, kneading his ribs with an elbow and saying:

  “I get under that thin Irish skin of yours, don’t I, Ryan? You’re asking yourself, what the devil will people say when they see you walking along with the priest? Is this a sellout, or what is it? That’s a thin Irish skin and a misconception, Ryan. I haven’t lost my flock to that extent yet.”