Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  But for all that Frank’s father worked in the radius of Wall Street, Frank himself met only girls who lived in Jackson Heights and who went to the same high school as he did. In college, he met a number of boys who were a good deal richer than he was, but he discovered it was not easy to make friends of them and to enter their social world, even though his respect for them was calculated and complete. It wasn’t until the army that his horizons really opened, and when he returned, Mr. Bruce Caldert obtained for him the position with Leopold and James, who, in the brief period he had worked for them, had only the best to report of his honesty, integrity, and ambition. In so many words, his ambition was to be rich; he did not abase that ambition and make it a mundane thing; he admired rich people; he admired the industry and the courage that brought them their riches, and he admired the graceful and laudable process they made of life. He was only twenty-five years old, and he was thankful that he lived in a land of such unlimited opportunity.

  Frank Norman’s chief charm was that he was neither a cynic nor a blackguard—and together they became a virtue. He was a person peculiarly gifted by the gods. He was an American, a white American; he was a Protestant-Episcopalian; he was educated; he had never in all his life wanted for anything within reason; he had been a Boy Scout and achieved the rank of Eagle; he had never doubted that money was the good body of all virtue; he respected American women, but admitted the fact that Irish and Jewish and Italian girls like to go to bed with men; he hated Soviet Russia in the matter-of-fact way a good Christian hates the devil; he connected masturbation, depravity, homosexuality, and marijuana smoking, and dismissed them by the fact of connection; he believed sincerely that poor people were lazy and that industrial workers were the rejects of society; and he was secure in the knowledge that next to Henry Ford, Thomas Edison was the greatest product of the twentieth century.

  For these and for other reasons, he wanted desperately to do the right thing with Fern Lowell. He wanted her to see him for the clean-cut and manly person he was, but along with that he sensed that her world was as strange to him as the monstrous and subversive underworld which Communists, enemy agents, union organizers, and others of like ilk inhabited. The only factor which helped to assuage his uneasiness was the knowledge of her fall from grace, the intimations of vague yet profound crimes which had caused her expulsion from school. Though he forgave her these crimes—he would have forgiven a Lowell anything—they helped to make her more attainable, his none-too-organized reasoning coming to the conclusion that the stain on her character made her less desirable, not to him, but to others. On the other hand, he had enough sense to tell himself that he must be more than usually wary of advances. An equitable balance between the two extremes would be about right, he thought.

  After he had said that he liked steaks, that he was glad she liked them, and that the one thing they had certainly missed overseas was a good steak, the wogs not even knowing about steaks and most of them being forbidden to even eat meat, just like vegetarians, he spoke about Fern’s mother, whom he had met that evening. (It always made him feel good when someone admired his mother.) “She’s a wonderful woman,” he said. “She has real dignity.”

  “That’s a funny thing for you to say,” Fern smiled. “Most people think Mother is very beautiful. She is.”

  “I know. But you’d be surprised, Fern—can I call you Fern?—how in my work you get to look for what’s underneath the surface and what people’s real character is.”

  “Of course you can call me Fern. Did you think I would want you to call me Miss Lowell—all evening, Miss Lowell this and Miss Lowell that? What did you mean before when you said wogs?”

  “Well, in the East—you know, I was with OSS in their big camp at Ceylon—well, in the East, you know, they’re mostly niggers just like here in the South, and the GI’s got to call them wogs, just a name. I don’t know how it started.”

  “Were you in Ceylon?”

  “In Burma, too.”

  “I guess you saw so much—you don’t want to talk about that, do you?”

  “It’s a funny thing,” Norman said, “but most people don’t want to listen. I don’t mind talking about it—I guess I like to. They’re very interesting countries out there, only not very civilized, and nothing like American efficiency. But everything is different, and life doesn’t mean much out there—I mean the natives. Do you know, there are four hundred and fifty million people, just in a place like India? I guess it’s pretty lucky they’re not very efficient, because how long do you think we’d last if all those people who don’t care anything about life and death had the atom bomb and other things?”

  “Let’s talk about the moon,” Fern said.

  “It does seem that whatever you talk about, you always get around to the atom bomb. I’ve been working hard over at the plant. This is a wonderful treat, just like a furlough in the army. That’s a wonderful moon, too.”

  “You’re a funny boy,” Fern said, “you’re so serious. I’ve been trying to guess what you’re doing there at the plant. Is it really some sort of secret-agent thing? Is that why Mr. Gelb looks like Ronald Colman or Bulldog Drummond or something? He would be so perfect for Hollywood!”

  “Mr. Gelb is a very fine man—he’s my boss. I guess he’s one of the finest and smartest men I’ve ever known. We’re not secret agents or anything of the sort,” Norman said, with comfortable doubt in his tones. “My own job is maintenance—in other words, the proper upkeep and protection of a plant on strike. It’s a branch of industrial engineering, you might say. I took my degree in industrial engineering, and along with my OSS experience, this is the sort of thing I want to do. I like it.”

  “It must be exciting,” Fern smiled; she couldn’t keep from smiling, he was so straightforward and sincere. She thought he was the nicest boy she had known in a long time, and she was pleased that he was so good looking too.

  They reached the Club, parked, and went into the big, rambling colonial building. Norman had been to country clubs two or three times with his friends, but they were resplendent gray-stone and stucco affairs in Westchester; this one was almost mean by comparison, but he sensed that it might be even more correct, in the same way the old New England house the Lowells lived in was undoubtedly correct. It was very warmly furnished inside, with glowing fires in almost every room. The bar, where Fern took him, was set up like a great old kitchen, with a six-foot hearth and long deal tables. He ordered a scotch and soda and Fern had a martini. He noticed that she knew most of the people there, but said hello casually, without troubling to introduce him.

  “There’s usually a dance here on Saturday nights,” she told him. “There is one tonight. We can either do that, or go out to the toboggan run. They light it up, and it’s fun at night. It’s not a real toboggan run, but just a long slide with one curve and a winch to draw you up. But it’s very exciting, really.”

  “That would be nice,” he said. “Anything you want to do would be nice.”

  20.Joe Santana usually closed up his shop at six. By six-fifteen, supper was on the table, and by half-past seven or a quarter to eight, the dishes were washed, wiped, and put away, the kids were in bed, and that best hour of the evening had come, when he could put on his slippers, stretch out in the easy chair, light his first cigar—he never smoked during the day, when he worked—and turn on the radio, dialing in a news broadcast, or one of the commentators, or a quiz show; and at the same time holding a newspaper in his lap, or a book or a magazine, in case the radio should prove disappointing. He liked the quiz shows best. As he said to his wife one time, “The hunger for knowledge is very basic. Everybody wants to know. What makes us different from animals? What produces a man like Dante or a people like the Italian people? Without doubt, the hunger for knowledge.” More often than not, the commentators made him angry, but he listened consistently and took a certain mild satisfaction from the punishment he had to undergo.

  Both he and his wife were easygoing people, grateful for the securi
ty the store and the apartment behind it provided. If it had ever occurred to Joe Santana to think about it, he would have stated that he was a happy man, a singularly happy man, with two such fine and healthy children, a reasonable living, and a wife who cooked manacotti like no one else on earth. He had come to this out of a childhood of poverty, hunger, and beatings; he said to his wife once, “The way I remember, my pop was never nice to the kids. He loved us, but he was never nice to us. I don’t understand it.”

  But tonight he was worried. He sometimes wondered why he, like almost all Communists he knew, should value the peace of his home so much and should like trouble so little. Out of the small Italian he had, he could quote one old-country proverb fully: “You can’t call trouble by a good name.” When he told his wife there would be a meeting in their place that night, she shook her head, “I’m afraid.” “It’s logical,” he answered. “I sometimes envy people who are not afraid. On the other hand, I sometimes have contempt for them.”

  “You live so quiet in a little town like this,” Hannah said, “that when something happens the way it happened to Danny Ryan today, it can drive you crazy.”

  “It happens.”

  “But I know Sally Curzon. I was in the A-and-P this morning, and there she was with her little girl, and she said she would have to be bringing in all the kids for haircuts.”

  “That kind of reasoning baffles me,” Santana smiled. “The Third Reich was not a place where people’s hair grew down to their shoulders.”

  “But the way she said it. Danny isn’t a stranger here. This isn’t a town where people are afraid. This isn’t a town where there are those gangs of hoodlums, like in Boston and Worcester. What’s happening, Joe?”

  He shrugged and decided to smoke a cigar after all. It was only eight, and there was still a full half-hour before the meeting would start. “I sometimes speculate on what is happening,” he said meditatively. “I sense it. My pop, he used to tell me how in the old country, the water witches would walk around with an olive branch in their fingers. When they came over water, no one would see the branch move, but they sensed it. That is, of course, providing you believe in such old-fashioned superstition, which I, naturally, don’t. But something is happening, which I sense. Maybe this is just the beginning, with a little piece breaking off here and there. Something big is dying and something else is being born, and we get a backwash of it here, which is only natural. It is just as natural that we should be nervous. A world in motion creates nervousness.”

  21.Danny Ryan and Joey Raye were waiting in the littered executive office of the local when Bill Noska walked in, his big body loose, his face sad and querulous. He looked at them wonderingly and then he sat down behind his desk. “Where in hell were you?” Danny Ryan asked. Noska stared at him. “Did they hurt you bad?” “It’s a pleasure,” Ryan said, and momentarily Joey Raye grinned. “I like to be beat. I like to take it. I’m a dog for punishment.” He gave Noska a brief description, and the big blond man shook his head and said, “The dirty bastards.”

  “I wish I believed you meant it,” Ryan said.

  “Why?”

  “There’s talk you had a meeting with Wilson,” Joey Raye said flatly.

  “That’s no crime.”

  “It’s no crime, but it don’t sound too good.”

  Noska said, “Why in hell don’t you wait until I sell out, Danny, before you hand it to me?”

  “It’s too late then.”

  “What I hate most about a red,” Noska said, “is this goddamned aloof, superior attitude which says that anybody could be bought but one of you guys.”

  “Did they try to buy you?” Joey Raye asked softly.

  “Feller by the name of Gelb,” Noska said moodily.

  “A sweet guy. He did the talking and he let Curzon do the mauling.”

  “Yeah. I remembered him from Pittsburgh. I worked in a mill there in ’thirty-five.”

  “But effective,” Ryan said. “Maybe you’ll listen to me now and put two thousand people up against that gate.”

  “They got the law,” Noska said wearily.

  “What are they going to do—arrest two thousand people? What in hell is wrong with you, Bill?”

  .”I just don’t like to be pushed around by you babies!” Noska said savagely. “I don’t like to be pushed around by Gelb and Wilson and I don’t like to be pushed around by you guys! I want the membership to run this strike, not a little clique of reds!”

  “You want us to pull out?” Joey Raye asked quietly.

  “I want you to stop trying to take over.”

  “Who says that? Wilson?” Ryan asked.

  “I say it!”

  “Why?” Ryan demanded, getting up, going over to the desk, and standing there with both hands on it. “Why do you say it? You know me a long time. You know Joey a long time. What in Christ’s name do we want to take over, and why? Sure I’m a Communist. I never denied it. You know it—Wilson knows it too. I’m a Communist because I see every goddamned thing in this civilization of ours produced by the workers, coming out of their sweat and their work. I’m a worker. I always been a worker. I been a worker since I’m ten years old. I’m a Communist because I don’t see anybody else willing to get his face pushed in or his throat cut or a bullet in his head because he’s for the workers. I don’t see anybody else who won’t sell out.”

  “You mean I’m selling out?” Noska said coldly.

  “The hell I do! I’m trying to get you to think, to use your head, to stop letting all that crap you hear split us wide open.”

  “It seems to me maybe you split us wider,” Noska said.

  “Do we? Who got the merchants in town to support the strike? Who set up the food kitchens? Who’s been working day and night to bring in food, feed the salamanders, set up entertainment, keep the picket lines going? Answer that one.”

  “That’s the point—for what you get out of it,” Noska said wearily.

  “All right, all right, Bill. Look—you ain’t made to believe that anybody does anything for nothing. I don’t blame you, see. You live in a country that’s got only one value, one standard, one measure, the buck. The quick buck, the sharp buck, the easy buck. Lay it on the line, printed in green, with a picture of Washington on it. That pays off, that tells the story. In other words, Moscow pays us, and we’re in this racket for what comes out of it. But let me say something else—you and me, we’re both Catholics. I broke with the church, you didn’t. But we can talk the same language. I can talk about the brotherhood of man, and it ain’t like I’m talking Chinese to you. I don’t like to talk about it, because if ever a line was butchered out of meaning, it’s that brotherhood-of-man stuff. But there’s only one place I met with the brotherhood of man, and that’s in the Communist Party! Sure we have our lice. We got all kinds. We got a movement out of the people, and you don’t get saints in the people. We got, right at this moment, a louse here in town who’s selling us out—yeah, and selling out the union too. But what we got, at its worst, is still the best damn thing this society ever produced.”

  “I don’t buy it, Danny,” Noska said.

  “I don’t ask you to buy it. I just ask you to keep your mind open—keep it open.”

  22.Lowell and his wife had dinner together at home. It was one of those dinners where they sat across the table from each other, tasted their food, and exchanged a word or two now and then. The words were formal and polite. If Lois said of the weather, “Snow in New England is miserable. I don’t know why people are romantic about it,” Lowell agreed. When it cut deeper, and she told him that she was going south, he nodded, “I guess that would be best.” “I thought of Arizona,” she said, leaving it at that, as if to indicate how many memories Arizona held for her; and Lowell only nodded again. He didn’t care. It held no relationship now to the incident of the little Italian girl in town. He was not even ashamed of that; by some alchemy of his system, it had retreated into the gray wardrobe of things that had happened but were shapeless and
colorless, the woman he had left in the hotel in New York, the girl before that in Boston, the girl he met on the train going to join Lois in Canada some months before, and before that and before that, the endless, futile, muddy search that tortured his senses and mocked at his dreams, the hotel ceilings, the beige walls, the innerspring beds with the innersprings coming through, the Do Not Disturb signs, the Gideon Bibles, the cheap fishnet curtains, the supercilious, half-contemptuous expression on the faces of numberless bellhops and elevator men, the treasure hunt with no treasure—it evened out, like a flat plain with never a hump or a hillock of earth to break it. He sat there at the dinner table, watching Lois, and thinking of how Wilson envied and admired him and how Curzon crawled before him.