American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “Here goes,” Monty said, lifting the candy to his mouth. He had to pry it loose with his teeth because it was stuck to his palm.

  In his seat at the table, rolling the candy around his mouth, Monty had a feeling not of déjà vu but rather of presque vu, a sense that he could almost remember this taste. It was literally on the tip of his tongue.

  All the elements of Panola Cola’s flavor were present, a little nutmeg, some vanilla, a little citrus, some caramel, a subtle trace of the coca plant’s sui generis extract. The difference was a sensation that, years later, would come to be known as mouthfeel. Soda involved the sense of touch as much as it did the sense of taste. This candy lacked the tactility of carbonation, that feel, exhilarating in its strangeness, of bubbles zooming all throughout the mouth. This was PanCola gone flat.

  Montgomery told Mr. Harrington, “Spot on, in my opinion. I’m of course more used to it being aerated, but the flavor’s all there, despite no carbon dioxide.” He placed the glistening candy on the edge of his soup saucer.

  “Thank you, Mr. Forster. I thought so myself. Indeed, I do feel there’s one flavor missing, but I don’t presume you’re willing to reveal the notorious secret ingredient.”

  “Would if I could. The old man’s never even told me.”

  “‘Upon this rock,’ I suppose. And sympathize,” said Mr. Harrington. “I’d rather like to meet your father. He sounds of my own mold.”

  “I’m sure the two of you will meet soon enough.”

  “Can I take that to mean you’ll agree to the contract?”

  Monty demurred. “I should see the factory before reaching a decision. Didn’t come all the way over here just for the fine company.” With a smile he raised his glass.

  Despite his objection that night, Monty knew he was going to agree to the contract with Harrington Limited, no matter the state of its factory. The agreement would prove lucrative for both parties. In the decade to come, Panola Cola would be introduced to Europe by way of Harrington Limited’s best-selling candy Pan-Tics®, an introduction that would be augmented when America entered a war lurching into motion that very night, June 5, 1934, as Adolf Hitler, less than a thousand miles to the east, decided Operation Hummingbird had a nice ring to it. Fate would inevitably show her unmerciful side. The prosperity that both the Harrington licensing agreement and the Second World War brought to the Forster family, turning them into royalty in a nation that had foresworn the system of estates, would create a sense of invincibility in the last Forster to run the Panola Cola Company, a character flaw made all the more tragic by the fact that it belonged to the accidental namesake of one Nicholas Harrington.

  As servants placed dishes of stargazy pie, fish heads protruding from the crust, before each diner, Sophie Harrington said, “Now that we’ve dispensed with business, shall we move on to topics a bit more pleasant? Tell us about my brother’s death in the war, Mr. Forster.”

  “Sophie, honestly,” said Mr. Harrington.

  “No, no. I’d very much like to hear about it. Couldn’t have been as sanitary as the Home Office would have us believe.”

  “Please accept my apologies, Mr. Forster. Sophie can be—”

  “It’s all right. Really, it is,” Monty said. He set down his fork, drank a long swallow of wine, filled his lungs with air, and turned toward Sophie. “Bullet to the base of his skull. German sniper. Hardly any pain. No spasms. Very little blood,” said Monty, somehow defying his legion impulses to break down. “I was looking into his eyes when he went. Before that moment, I thought we were doing the right thing over there, making the world a better place. Before that moment, I didn’t believe in the human soul.”

  Seconds passed. Monty caught up with his breath, chest rising and then falling, while staring at Sophie. “Good enough?” he asked.

  From his plate, the head of a pilchard, eyes cloudy, mouth agape, stared at Montgomery, as though in dumbfound, weary, justified reprehension of his conduct. Even without the fish he knew he had gone too far. How could he have been so cruel? This wasn’t the campaign trail. He wasn’t trying to win some debate.

  Sophie, barely moving her face that so closely resembled her brother’s, said, “I thank you for your candor,” her voice as impassive as her powdered cheeks, her smooth brow, her colorless lips, her fixed stare. She asked her father if she might be excused and did not bother to wait for an answer.

  “Now it’s my turn to beg your pardon,” Montgomery said once he was alone with Mr. Harrington. “There’s no excuse for my behavior just now.”

  “My daughter’s a willful young woman. Her mother was the same way—more so—thus my forbearing nature. Shall we retire to the smoking room? I don’t think I can eat a bite of this pie. I’ve no idea what the kitchen was thinking. Collywobble would be a more suitable name than stargazy.”

  Monty gave a mental tip of the hat to God. He had not been looking forward to pretending to enjoy that particular dish. In the smoking room, which lay just beyond an overdoor on the opposite side of the main hall, he accepted a glass of what tasted like liquid peat and, refusing a cigar, settled into the vegetable-tanned sheep’s leather of a club chair. “Good Scotch,” he said, thinking of his grandfather, who could distinguish, by smell alone, between the Highlands, Lowlands, Islay, Speyside, and Campbeltown, most of which tasted the same to Monty.

  “I’m pleased you like it,” Mr. Harrington said, swirling the amber contents of his glass. “It was a birthday present I gave myself last year.”

  “The bottle?”

  “The distillery.”

  Over the next hour, Mr. Harrington showed his investment to be financially prudent by drinking, as he pontificated on the confectionery trade, five glasses of Scotch. Monty kept himself to half that number, barely listening to the man, instead looking around the smoking room. On the mantel an ormolu timepiece struck ten o’clock. Spangled colors poured from a leadlight. In the corner a globe atop its floor stand collected dust.

  “But I’ll tell you why my daughter’s so unhappy,” Mr. Harrington said, apropos of nothing in their conversation, as far as Monty could tell. “She was raised among the haut monde, wanted for nothing, and yet, because she’s just three generations from working class, because her lineage does not have any ‘Right Honorables,’ she’ll always be an outsider. ‘So sorry. Back of the line for you, little woman.’ And your mother has a brother called Robert.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “Your people had the right idea. No lordships. No peerage. You are what you make of yourself.” Mr. Harrington took a gulp of his sixth whisky. “Yes, Mr. Forster, the world belongs to America now. Hope you take better care of it than we did.”

  Monty thought of disagreeing in order to be polite, but his host chose that moment to fall soundly asleep. His glass tumbler remained clutched in his hand. Just as Monty was about to relieve Mr. Harrington of it, careful not to spill what little whisky remained, a voice on the other side of the room said, “If you please, sir, I’ll see to him.”

  The butler, Samuel, stood in the doorway, a folded blanket in his arms. Don’t worry, the look on his face said. This happens all the time. Samuel walked across the room, removed the tumbler, placed it on a side table, unfolded the blanket, and situated it over Mr. Harrington. “Is there anything I can offer you, sir?” he said to Monty while placing a pillow behind his employer’s head.

  “No, thank you. Don’t mind me. I’ll find my room on my own. Good night.”

  In the main hall of the house, Monty got his bearings, turning from the fire burning in an ornate hearth—which back home would have been odd, given the time of year—to the Aubusson carpet in front of the staircase. He felt that lingering here would be inappropriate while the rest of the household was asleep. On his way toward the stairs, though, Monty came to an abrupt stop because, with a suddenness that sent a tremor through his body, he found himself in the presence of a ghost.

  The portrait of Nicholas must have been painted shortly before Britain e
ntered the war. It was given pride of place on the wall between a watercolor of indeterminate provenance and a landscape by one of the lesser Romanticists. In the half-length portrait, composed from a seated position, with oil paint, and framed in a detailed hardwood, Nicholas disproved a famous line from Dickens, how there were only two styles of portraits, “the serious and the smirk,” by coupling sealed lips with mischievous eyes. Monty could remember that same look from so many occasions, the morning they first met, the night they first kissed, but not from the one occasion he would never forget, when those lips were riven by shock, those eyes opening wide and then blinking slowly in disbelief.

  Monty’s vision melted the portrait of Nicholas. That mustache slicked with brilliantine became a dark streak of smutch, and those cheeks doused in sandalwood oil became two hazy daubs of yellow. He had only just managed to wipe away the tears when someone cleared their throat behind him.

  “Warm milk helps me get to sleep,” Sophie said, holding up a glass as proof. She was wearing a silver peignoir over a nightgown trimmed in tulle. “I take it Father passed out again?”

  “He may have had one too many.”

  “Would you believe he used to be a teetotaler?” She took a sip of milk, turning her lips, momentarily and disarmingly, a bluish-beige. “He only started after.”

  To end her sentence Sophie nodded at the portrait of Nicholas hanging on the wall. Although he was worried how he might react, Monty allowed himself to look at it again, those lips that had so often been puckered around a hard candy, that mustache like stove black, those eyes that hinted at what he had liked to call “ease of virtue.”

  “Listen, Miss Harrington. About dinner, I really would like to apol—”

  “Do see that you get a good night’s rest, Mr. Forster. Father has a busy day planned for the two of you.”

  Already halfway up the lengthy staircase, she was speaking to him over her shoulder. She had vanished into the upper floors before Monty thought to wish her a good night of rest as well. He walked across the hall to the fire. In front of it, he rubbed his hands together and then folded his arms across his chest, squeezing tightly, even though he wasn’t the least bit cold.

  4.5

  Robert in the Library with the Wrench—The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

  The cover of the July 3, 1964, issue of Life magazine featured an American flag made out of soda cans—red Coca-Cola and white PanCola and blue Pepsi-Cola—superimposed on which was the headline, for god, country, family, and soda pop.

  Robert studied the cover on microfiche at the school library. It was late April. For the past month, instead of working on the first chapter of his thesis, he had been researching the history of the Panola Cola Company, its mythic origin and unprecedented growth, its unequivocal reign and tragic demise, an activity that tempted, he was aware, Leo Marunga’s very possible, very dangerous wrath. Robert couldn’t help himself. Something about the company gave him the thrill he used to get from schoolwork. The inherent qualities of its product, that dramatically Manichean life span of soda, fizzy to flat, delicious to awful, in combination with the qualities inherent to historical records, the beauty of factuality, the authority of details, the poetry of specificity, allowed Robert to lose hours and even days at a time inside the narrative of PanCola. His imagination gave flesh to the bones of his research, enabling him to meet people he’d never known, to visit places he’d never been.

  Robert was particularly intrigued by the mystery of the secret ingredient. Trying to solve it felt like playing a game of Clue.

  All throughout his research, he’d been keeping a notebook on PanCola, replete with information he thought could help identify the ingredient, essentially a list of the potential suspects, rooms, and murder weapons. Perhaps one of the Panhandlers might know the secret. Called “drummers” in other industries because they drummed up trade, Panhandlers were salesmen who, indoctrinated by the “PanCola Bible” on company policies, traveled the railways across the nation, passing out coupons for free samples, overseeing advertisements, contracting soda fountain proprietors, and, according to the bible, “routing any venue that dares sell imitation or adulterated PanCola.” That last duty interested Robert. Panhandlers were trained to know the flavor of their product so well they could detect if even one ingredient had been substituted with an inferior version. The problem was only a few of them were left alive, and with each day those who remained dwindled further.

  What if the key lay in one of the buildings Houghton Forster erected in nearly every major city of the United States? With the Forster Investment Company, created in the early part of the twentieth century for procuring real estate, Houghton put his name on skyscrapers in Chicago, Tampa, Memphis, and Seattle. The Forster Building overlooked Bryant Park in midtown New York. Forster Hall on Peachtree Street enraged the company’s rival in Atlanta. The Forster Center became a tourist attraction in downtown Baltimore. In each building, like in the reliquary of a church, Houghton designated an area for displaying artifacts from the history of PanCola, such as the first bottle produced, early streetcar placards, signs made of steel and muslin and tin and oilcloth gone ragged, change trays, posters, calendars, the first church key bearing the company name, and even a life-size reproduction of Forster Rex-for-All. The relics were sold at auction when the company was liquidated. So now, Robert figured, evidence of the secret ingredient might be in an antique shop on a backstreet of Podunk, USA, collecting dust in a display case, situated between T. Nash Buckingham’s legendary twelve-gauge, Bo Whoop, and a Honus Wagner card some kid would buy for a dime and wedge into the spokes of his Schwinn.

  Then again maybe the ingredient’s identity was already in his notes. It could be the magnolia flower. In the Harvard Crimson, following her graduation, Imogene Forster was referred to as the Magnolia Flower of Cambridge, though Robert suspected that was a result of the crush the article’s author, Barry Rojas, clearly had on her. “It had been right under my nose the whole time,” Imogene wrote in Ms. Panola Cola regarding her deduction, four months into her tenure as the company president, of the ingredient’s identity. What if it were bay leaves? In an interview for the Ladies’ Home Journal, Annabelle Forster was quoted as saying, “I remember the moment I fell in love with Houghton. He wrote in a letter, ‘I want to be the bay leaf in your gumbo.’ Sounds silly, I know, but it worked, mostly because he didn’t say he wanted me to be the bay leaf in his gumbo.” The ingredient could even be hidden in plain sight, referenced, perhaps, in one of Ramsey Forster’s last books, A Tumbler of Kentuckians or An Anecdote of Pub Dwellers, both of which seemed, after the fact, to foretell the plunge from sobriety that led to her death.

  At the library that day, going over his research, Robert was struck less by the clues, each suspect, room, and weapon, than by how they all fit together so well, creating a network of causality, an entanglement of chance and fate unbelievable but true, each coincidence, he thought, proving a fool of anyone who says, “You can’t make this stuff up,” because of course you could. The mystery no longer felt like a board game but rather like another form of entertainment. Robert didn’t know what form exactly until he looked at his notes on PanCola Too. He suspected, based on the animosity Imogene Forster held toward her brother, that she had refused to tell him the identity of the secret ingredient, which meant PanCola Too had been a product of necessity rather than foolishness. When Imogene regained control of the company after Nicholas’s death, she changed Panola Cola back to the original, labeling it the Heritage Formula—the abbreviation for which Robert wrote off as a red herring—and using a new catchphrase, “Tastes Classic!” Hundreds of articles were published on the situation, but a line from one in particular stood out from the rest.

  “Why read fiction? Why go to movies?” Jesse Meyers noted in a special edition of Beverage Digest. “[The] soft drink industry has enough roller-coaster plot-dips to make novelists drool.”

  4.6

  The Member(s) of the Wedding—How to Catch a Doodl
ebug—The Un-Cola—Cotton’s a Good Boy—Die Freizeit-Klasse in Amerika—Royal Teague’s Funeral—(A Not Quite the) Delta Wedding

  On a back road of Panola County, Lance Forster told his father about his fiancée, Karen DeWitt, whom the two men, father in the driver’s seat and son in the passenger’s seat, were on their way to pick up at the Batesville train station. He concluded, “Petite little thing, Protestant, but she’s got those big, floppy, Jewish-girl boobs, you know?”

  Houghton’s face remained deadpan. “Be sure to put that in your vows.”

  Few people close to the family would have guessed that, of all the Forster marriages, excluding the first two—Tewksbury to Fiona, Houghton to Annabelle—the one to last the longest and feature a reasonable facsimile of love would turn out to be Lance’s. The marriage of Ramsey and Arthur lasted only five years. Monty never actually loved Sarah. Neither Harold, Imogene, nor Nicholas ever married. Even though he would not stay faithful to her, being nearly incapable of such a thing, Lance did, in his own way, love Karen, remaining monogamous in that emotion throughout all eight years of their marriage. He was genuinely looking forward to having her as his wife the afternoon he and his father drove to the train station to meet the 3:27 from Memphis. The wedding, to be held on May 21, 1955, was three days away.