Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  “I want you to understand, Mr. Lowell, I came here because Wilson said it was a chance to get together about things. I don’t like a strike any better than you do, but I can’t act without the executive committee of the local. All I can do is listen.”

  “That’s all we expect you to do,” Lowell said.

  “You’re a family man, aren’t you, Bill?” Wilson wanted to know. “You don’t mind my calling you Bill?”

  “I been called worse,” Noska smiled. “I got a family—two kids.”

  “Church?”

  “As much as the next guy,” Noska said.

  Gelb said, “We’re not just beating around the bush, Bill. You’ve been in strikes before. You know it’s no picnic for anyone concerned.”

  “I said that.”

  “We want to get together and settle.”

  “It sure as hell didn’t look like that this morning,” Noska said.

  “Maybe I was a little hasty about pushing back that picket line. Mr. Lowell thought so, and I’m inclined to agree with him now. But if we can settle this business, a picket line becomes inconsequential.”

  “I’m pretty sincere about that, Noska,” Lowell added. “I want to wind this thing up as much as anyone else.”

  “I can only listen. I don’t make the decisions.”

  “You swing some weight,” Wilson smiled. “I’m a pretty good judge of men, and I know a man who swings his weight when I see one. And I don’t ask a lightweight to take on the heavyweight class. I don’t pull any bluffs, Bill—I’m a pretty honest man, and I like to dig right into a thing in the good old American way. That might disqualify me for diplomacy, but I never figured a down-to-earth American made a diplomat the way these foreigners do. If you ask me, we waste too much time with this diplomatic double-talk instead of getting right in there and saying just what we mean. So here’s what I mean—in plain American, there’s only one outfit stands to win anything out of this strike. That’s the commies.”

  Noska drew on his cigar and watched the smoke. Finally, he said, “They don’t run things.”

  “I’m not implying that they run your union. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who lets himself be pushed around by a lot of half-baked wild-hairs who ought to be sent back where they belong. I’m just saying, they’re the only ones who stand to gain anything out of this.”

  “I don’t see that,” Noska said slowly. “Maybe they’re out to get the gravy, and I guess when you come down to it, I don’t like that outfit any better than you do. But I don’t see it.”

  “This is my first strike,” Lowell said. “Believe me, Noska, as strange as it may sound, I’m the most disinterested party here, the most objective, I think. From where I stand, the longer you remain out, the more it hurts you. I can stand it. If necessary, I can close down the plant entirely. But what do you stand to gain? Would any pay raise make up for the weeks you are out?”

  “From the reds’ point of view, it’s something else,” Gelb put in. “I know those boys from way back. Their main interest is to grow. They want to take over, don’t they? All right, strikes are meat for them. Unemployment. Bad times. To hell with the union! To hell with the workers! They’re out for themselves. Any strike is their baby. I haven’t been there, but I’ll lay you ten to one that right at this minute they’re at your union headquarters selling the Daily Worker? Did I call it? Am I right?”

  Noska didn’t answer. He held the cigar in his hand, staring at the curl of smoke that came from the long ash.

  “Bringing food in. Every damn strike I’ve ever seen, there was food by the ton from the party. Just a poor little organization, can’t keep itself alive. Did you ever think to ask where that food comes from, Noska?”

  “You’d be eating caviar if it wasn’t a dead giveaway,” Wilson said.

  “What in God’s name are they after?” Gelb said bewilderedly, “We got a pretty good land here. It has its imperfections—sure it has. But compared to Russia, it’s paradise. It’s a land of milk and honey, to use a Biblical phrase. If a man’s not too lazy to work, there’s a job for him. And, damn it all, if he is too lazy to work, there’s still relief. Maybe he won’t be a millionaire—how many of us are millionaires? Sure it’s not all perfect. Sure the niggers and the kikes get pushed around a little. But just turn the country over to the niggers and the kikes, the way the commies would like us to, and see what kind of a break a Christian American’ll get. Do you know what a commie is, Noska—he’s a sick man. He’s part of a disease. He’s a man who hates. What do we value, the church, the home, the land we live in—wipe it out, he says. Look at Spain, where the reds killed twenty thousand Catholic priests, murdered them in cold blood. Look at Russia—do you know that during the famine in the nineteen-twenties, they murdered twenty million Russian peasants? That’s the kind of a concentration camp they went to create right here. That’s why a strike is their baby. There’s a man in New York by the name of Jack Loman—belonged to the party himself at one time. A fine writer, a man of integrity, but taken into their net of illusions. He has stated—without any doubts attached—that every American Communist is an agent of the Soviet Government. I’d be a rich man if I had one per cent of the money Russia’s poured into this country, backing that outfit. There is another man, Johnny Frank, just a little while ago one of the biggest men in their outfit, but a believer, and he couldn’t see himself burning in hell for all time. He returned to the church, and he made some pretty astounding revelations when he pulled out of the party. Named the secret international agents who pull the strings in their outfit. Revealed a huge plot to get hold of the atom bomb and hand it over to the Russians, lock, stock, and barrel. They’re nice little babies, all right—just pleasant little boys. That’s why I say, nobody stands to win out of this but them.”

  Gelb finished off with the same tone of injured bewilderment that had marked the beginning of his outburst. Lowell stared at him, but he avoided Lowell’s eyes; glancing at young Norman, Lowell saw him a person captured, rapt, and all the time Gelb had spoken he had never taken his eyes off Gelb’s face. The silence hung like heavy lace until Noska muttered:

  “I don’t vote strikes. I don’t call them off.”

  “We understand that. We sat down to talk,” Wilson said seriously, “and I don’t think anything is lost when grown men sit down and talk things over. That’s the American way.”

  “A frank exchange of opinion,” Gelb said, “is the well-spring of democracy. We can still afford it; I say, God help a country that gets to a condition where it can’t.”

  So firm was the man’s voice, so forthright, so complete was the ring of truth, the querulous note of anxiety, the high pitch of indignation and conviction, that Lowell, in spite of himself, in spite of what had gone on the day before, found himself being carried away. The very triteness of Gelb’s and Wilson’s homilies and cliches added to the effect, and the silent adoration of Frank Norman was like a correct and ingenious prop, added casually at the last moment, yet becoming the central factor of cohesion and effect.

  “I think of this little part of New England,” Gelb continued, softly, the hard edges of him melting, a note of meditation clinging to his voice. “I think of the sufferings; the blood and sweat and tears of the generations who made this peaceful land. I think of the Pilgrims and the traditions of the Pilgrims and the banner of freedom they raised, for our children to inherit, and then I think of this dirty red scum. like a blot”—Gelb took a thick package of new bills out of his pocket and laid it on the table—“across the fair face of this free land.” Noska’s eyes fixed on the bills, and then swung up, moving from face to face, hanging on each for an instant, then back and fixing on Gelb. Gelb replaced the bills in his breast pocket.

  “I guess I got to go,” Noska said.

  To Lowell, it suddenly became unbelievable, cheap, tawdry, apparently staged. Noska must have known. He stood up and walked out of the room. Wilson started to speak, but Gelb gripped his arm, held him a moment, and then
rose and followed Noska. Lowell heard Gelb say, “I’m sorry, Bill. I should have known better. I shouldn’t have done that. It was a cheap, rotten thing to do.”

  17.Gelb delivered something that was in the way of an apology to Lowell. “Everything is simple until you get on the inside of it, Mr. Lowell. Then it becomes complex.”

  “I could go along with you until you tried to bribe him,” Lowell said. “It’s your work and you do it your way.”

  “I didn’t try to bribe him,” Gelb said matter-of-factly. “Any more than I tried to bribe Ryan. It’s a tactic and no more. If you think it’s a cheap one, perhaps you’re right.”

  “It’s your job,” Lowell told him. “I’m sick to death of this strike. If you can end it tomorrow, end it.”

  “But I’d like you to understand. If you can bribe a labor leader, then he’s too rotten and gone to be worth it. That’s a healthy young man. I want to get him to thinking. I want to get one idea clashing against another. He won’t sit still.”

  18.Lowell drove to the same gin-mill where he had drinks that morning. The snow had stopped; the clouds were breaking in a deep-purple indecision, and from one spot of blue sky, long rays of sunlight came down to salve the white hills. In the unearthly afternoon light, the landscape was both beautiful and melancholy, and it put Lowell into a pensive and introspective mood. He was a sensitive man, sensitive to beauty, to colors, to sound, to the very quality of the air, which can have so certain an effect upon some and so little effect upon others. Sometimes, in such a mood, it seemed to Lowell that he was the only human being alive in a vast and indescribable loneliness and that all of the world was a dream only he experienced. At such times, a youthful, indeed an adolescent tenderness would take hold of him, and he would experience a misery that was closer to happiness than unhappiness. He liked this feeling, and secretly prided himself upon it, indulging it whenever he could. When it was upon him, a puritanical glow would take hold of him, a high resolve that he often considered the heritage of some ancient and God-fearing New England ancestor. Nor was this asceticism disturbed by contradictions, or by the elements or happenings of life, or by what he had or had not done; quite to the contrary, it was directed toward the ennobling potential within himself, and it lived and nourished itself in that rarefied atmosphere for whatever length of time it persisted.

  That was his mood now, when he drove to the gin-mill. He parked his car to one side, and then stood by it for a while, in the wonderfully clean and sweet-smelling air. Now, in this brief moment, he was able to think of Clark without regrets; there was no existence worth weeping for; everything was for a day or a moment. He felt both sad and happy as he went inside, nodded at the bartender, and called Rose Antonini from the phone booth. A tired voice, heavy with an Italian accent, with the trials, tribulations, and unregretted days of the past, answered, listened, and then said, “All right. Now you wait a minute. You wait a minute, huh? I get her.”

  “This is George,” he told the girl.

  “George?”

  “George Lowell.”

  “Oh.” That was all she said.

  “I have to see you,” he told her.

  “Well, I can’t see you. Not today.”

  “I have to see you. Now.”

  “Well, I can’t. I can’t talk here. I can’t see you now.”

  “You must! Don’t you understand that you must! Do you want me to come to your house? I must see you.”

  “No—don’t come to my house.” There was a silence again, and then, “Where can I meet you?”

  “You know where François’ is? It’s a filling station and saloon a little out of town—”

  “I know.”

  “The bus will let you off there.”

  “I know. I can’t talk now.” Then she hung up. Lowell went back outside and stood by his car, smoking, watching the last shreds of the clouds carded and tossed from the sky. But after about ten or fifteen minutes, he began to be chilled, and he got back in the car to wait. The station-attendant came over and asked him wasn’t there anything he could do for him? but Lowell gave him a dollar, and said no, it was all right, he was waiting for someone. The mood, so delicious, so right, so sweet, began to leave him; it was almost forty minutes now since he had called; he began to feel like a fool, a reaction which he recognized and at the same time fought, countering it with speculation as to where they might go. He thought of the lodge and rejected the thought. It was right for the day before, when it happened, out of the heat with which it had happened—but not for now, not for the puritanical mood that possessed him. He decided that he would take her to dinner somewhere and talk with her; they had hardly said twenty words in the time they were together, but he was certain that the way he felt now, he could get inside of her, find her soul, breathe life into it, and draw it forth to blossom in the same beauty that her body possessed.

  He ran out of cigarettes and went into the bar to buy more. About three or four men were there, drinking beer, men in the mackinaws, hunting caps, and corduroy breeches of the Massachusetts countryside in wintertime. “Ain’t turned up yet?” the bartender asked. The men looked at him curiously.

  After an hour, he started the engine of his car, and then he saw the bus stop, a little past the station, and saw her get off. She wore slacks under the same fur coat. She wore big mittens with rabbit fur on the outside, and she had a silk kerchief wrapped around her head for a hat. In the street, he might not have recognized her, and seeing her like this, he experienced a wave of revulsion. But his long wait forced him to carry through; indeed, the necessity was actually greater than ever now. He opened the door of the car, and she slipped in next to him, but when he tried to kiss her, it was awkward and bumbling, and she pulled away, shaking her head.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Why did you make me come all the way out here?”

  “Are you sorry you came?”

  “I don’t care, now that I’m here.”

  “I had to see you,” he said. “I had to talk to you. I want you to drive out somewhere and have dinner with me.”

  “I’m not dressed to go out to dinner,” she said.

  “We can go to a place where it won’t matter.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me what you have to tell me right here?”

  “It wasn’t any single thing I had to tell you,” he explained slowly.

  “Then why—”

  “I had to speak to you. I had to talk to you, don’t you understand?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.” Her voice was flat and emotionless, offhand and uninterested. She looked at her watch.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked, feeling wholly a fool, yet with the compulsion driving him.

  “Yes—if you want to.”

  He kissed her with closed lips.

  “If you want to take me up to that place where we were last night sometime, that would be nice,” she told him complacently. “It would be nice to spend a weekend there sometime. But not now. I’m not free today. I got to go back.”

  Silent, he sat there beside her for almost a minute. Then he nodded and said, “I’ll drive you back.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she said.

  “I want to drive you back.”

  “I live on Maple Street, but you don’t have to go all the way. You could drop me off at Chestnut and First Avenue.”

  It hadn’t occurred to him before that she would be ashamed to be seen with him. He turned the car around, started back, asking her:

  “Don’t you care for me at all, Rose?”

  “I like you,” she said flatly. “It would be nice to go up to the country with you again sometime.”

  19.Fank Norman took Fern to dinner at the Club, or it might be said that she took him, since it was his first visit to the Club and they went in her car. Norman had hoped that she would ask him to drive, but Fern loved driving and it never entered her mind. She told him, when they started off, “Actually, it’s the only club, because the oth
er one, the one over at Southdale, which has eighteen holes—this one only has nine, and they’re bad—and more of everything, you understand, went under so badly during the depression that they opened up to everyone, Jews included. But here the food is wonderful, especially their steaks, which they do over hickory logs, and they always manage to have them too.”

  Norman wanted desperately to say the right thing; he had never known a girl like Fern before, and he was also highly conscious of the fact that he had never known anyone like her. That she did not conform with his ideas of what she should be like, he put down to her being not merely a rich girl, but a rich girl whose name was Lowell, which he equated to a feeling he had since he was here, that if your name was Lowell in Clarkton, you did what you pleased, and what pleased you pleased others. Frank Norman had never had a date with a rich girl before—that is, a girl who came from one of the families he admired so fervently. He had grown up in Jackson Heights, in a neat red-brick house that was attached to another red-brick house, both of them half timbered and built in 1926 to sell at seventeen thousand dollars for the pair, or nine thousand dollars apiece. If Frank had heard his father say it once, he had heard him say a thousand times that his greatest mistake was not to have bought the pair and been able to take interest and taxes out of the other, and thereby live rent free. Frank’s father was now office manager of Brady, Lance, Caldert & Simpson, a brokerage firm at 160 Broadway, in New York City, at the salary of seven thousand four hundred dollars a year; and he had started at the same firm thirty-three years before at only four dollars a week. During all of that time, he had never experienced a day’s layoff or unemployment, not even during the period in 1929 when Brady, Lance, Caldert & Simpson had literally suspended operations for eighteen weeks, for during that time his salary continued. He had started with the firm as office boy and subsequently become a runner, filing clerk, clerk, bookkeeper, assistant head bookkeeper, cashier, personnel manager, and finally office manager. This, like the many “begats” which introduce the various parts of the Old Testament, had literally become a part of Frank Norman’s lineage, and as meaningful to him as to his father, who had told him often enough, in the times when Frank was as yet too young to comprehend fully, “I’m a five-thousand-dollar-a-year man. I know it, and those who employ me know it. It’s an important thing, Frank, to know your own worth, not to underestimate it, not to overestimate.” This, of course, was abandoned as a credo when Norman’s salary went to six and to seven thousand.