by Mark Helprin
Their networks were invisible, and they seemed to know one another whether they did or not. They inspected everyone who passed, and controlled their building entrances like guards at the White House. They worked sporadically, the casts they supervised changed every few minutes, and they could speak in concussive bursts that enabled them to carry on a conversation with someone across the street and a hundred feet down the block as if they were standing shoulder to shoulder. They greeted one another explosively. “Hey! Vinnie!” they might shout, as if Vinnie, whom they had seen half an hour before, had just come back from the dead. “Hey hey hey!”
He—Harry, not Vinnie, not yet—could have joined the Harvard Club, sat in its vast main room and, surrounded by crimson and gold and bathed in the cocktail light of late afternoon, listened to the ticking of the clock and the play of the fire. He could have gone there pretending to have arrived, the rough edges of the city smoothed and its sharp sounds muted. But each time he received an invitation from the Harvard Club to join he was seduced instead by the industrial lofts stacked one upon another, their society, their industry, and their vitality, and he postponed his application for the time when he could do little but rest in the kind of comfortable chair that is to the end of life what a cradle is to the beginning.
Although the unwritten code was that if you were in a suit you took the lobby elevators and pressed buttons, he preferred to ride with the freight. And now, because the freight elevator was waiting disengaged at street level, he seized the webbing strap with which to part the gates, pulled it down, and watched one rise and the other fall until he could step through. Then he cleared them and guided to the fourteenth floor the immense box in which, though it could have held the weight of three or four elephants, he was the only passenger. The whole fourteenth floor was his, not leased but owned by Copeland Leather, and other than Cornell he was the only one who had been present since its beginnings. Having played there as a child, he knew the place in microscopic detail as only a child can. Though it changed day by day according to the needs of the moment, though walls were put up and taken down, lights and machines moved, reorganizations accomplished, and though he had been largely absent for six years before the war and entirely so for four years during the war itself, it was imprinted on him as on no one else. He was aware of things there that adults skated over, having learned them in other places and filed them away. Despite the changes, he could have found his way in the dark, as one can in one’s childhood home, and he was as comfortable here in his early thirties as he had been at six.
The loft was a rectangle of approximately twenty thousand square feet, and its north and south sides had rows of windows that went all the way up to a twelve-foot ceiling. The core, around which the workspaces were arranged, comprised the ventilating ducts and electrical panels, storage, bathrooms, the passenger elevators, and offices. The freight elevator was at the eastern, windowless base of the rectangle. The gate that faced south into the street opened on the ground floor only: inside, access to the lofts was via a west-facing gate on the elevator’s longer side.
No signs or receptionist greeted a visitor arriving on the fourteenth floor, who found himself in a workshop as busy as a Central American market. Depending upon health, the vacation schedule, and whether the leather buyer was in or out, up to forty-eight people would be at work on a given day: a leather buyer, supply clerk, wood joiner, boxer/packer, stock manager, mechanic, two sweepers/cleaners, three leather cutters, three hardware fabricators, two truck drivers/deliverymen, six stainers/waxers/polishers, two bookkeepers, Cornell, Harry, and twenty-two leathersmiths.
No one had ever taken a census, but had one been taken it would have identified the largest ethnic grouping as Italian, then, in the terms of the day, Porto Rican, Jewish, Colored, Irish, and Protestant, meaning anything from Dutch and English to Czech, German, and Scandinavian. The Jews were all Russian, and one of the cutters was Chinese. Meyer Copeland had offered his workers a choice between ownership without voting rights of half the company, or unionization. Even apart from their dividends, their wages were higher than union scale. This created a source of ongoing conflict with the unions themselves, which didn’t know what to make of Copeland Leather and tabled the question, carving out an exception that existed year by year not by right but by sufferance. Some in the union leadership viewed what Meyer had done as a noble socialist experiment, others as a clever capitalist trick, and they could never come to agreement, because it was neither.
Production was arranged in a circle. At the left of the freight elevator, purchased leather was received, inspected, sorted, and held for the short term if it were soon to be used. Each flat or roll was viewed under incandescent, fluorescent, ultraviolet, and natural south light because north light was too even. The buyer, who had seen it before, used his hands and eyes and could tell certain things by smell. The next step was the cutting room, where long-experienced cutters placed their patterns on the leather so that the finer surfaces would be exposed most conspicuously in the final product.
The cut and patterned leather then went to the twenty-two leathersmiths according to their specialties, and they did the bending, fitting, and stitching, mating the occasional wood frames provided by the joiner, and the brass and nickel hardware provided by the metal fabricators, to the briefcase, handbag, belt, or valise. Wallets, portfolios, and blotters required neither wood nor brass. The leathersmithing stage was by far the most time-consuming and took up the most physical space, with each leatherworker stitching, cutting, planing at his own capacious bench, his bank of machines, and his cabinet of tools.
In the next step, the leather was stained, dried, waxed, and polished. Then it sat and breathed for a while in an area between the wood and metal shops until it was wheeled past the business offices in the middle of the north side and brought to the boxer and packer, who put each item in a felt bag, wrapped it in crisp tissue paper, and placed it in a deep brown, navy blue, and gold Copeland Leather box. These were then stored in a set of large rooms with high shelves, and were eventually packed into cartons for shipment to accounts all over the country and the world, not least the Copeland Leather store on Madison Avenue just north of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Villard Houses. There, two ancient Yankees, though one was pretty much Dutch, gentlemen’s gentlemen whom Meyer Copeland had pirated from Brooks Brothers, somehow did a land-office business at a slow and dignified pace. Working on commission, they did very well, as they deserved, for they were the face of Copeland Leather to its loyal and habitual clientele.
Henry Livingston, the one who despite his name was pretty much Dutch, spoke in the ancient and elevated New York dialect in which Catherine spoke. And he knew how to use his speech as a kind of lullaby by which to mesmerize into buying briefcases the stockbrokers, lawyers, and rentiers who had come in for just a wallet. Both salesmen, if one could call them that, were silver-templed and tall, their heads held erect and thrown back like a pigeon’s. Henry Livingston’s colleague, Thaxton Thrale, was as intimidating as the headmaster of Groton or St. Paul’s, as tall as a Masai, and as dour as a hogshead of lemon juice. His almost total silence, in combination with his doubting, provisionally contemptuous glance, made the carriage trade so desperate for his approval that they spent money like demons. That was the trick. Henry was the soft cop and Thaxton the hard. Henry lived on Park Avenue, and Thaxton in Ardsley, in a greystone house, with a pale and terrified wife who jumped like a cat when he twitched, and three children who called him sir.
Though Harry often stopped by the store to see how things were going, and though ultimately he was in control, they were to the company what chiefs are to the navy, of low rank but admirals in their own right.
Cornell had known Harry since the infant Harry had learned to walk, and had always been as affectionately tough with him as an uncle. “Well,” he said without looking up, as Harry swept into the office on Monday morning, ruddy and smelling of chlorine, “it’s sleeping beauty.”
“I w
asn’t sleeping, I was swimming.”
“I know. I can smell the chlorine.”
“What am I supposed to do, cut the leather a second time?”
Cornell turned and looked at him directly. “You’re supposed to do something,” he said, and turned back to the work at his desk.
“When I said I’d need a year, you didn’t object.”
“Why a year?” Cornell asked, pivoting in his almost-yellow swivel chair, which squealed like a mouse. “I was in the First War. I went to work the day after I got back. Right here.” He paused and, to be clear, added, “Not here, when we were in Paterson.”
“It’s different.”
“Why is that?”
“How long were you in the army? How long were you overseas? And how old were you?” Harry asked, knowing that Cornell, who was Jesuitically precise, would know exactly.
“When we entered the war I was your age now. I was in the army a little over a year, and in France for seven months.”
“There’s the difference. When we entered the war this time I was twenty-six. I was in the army for four years. And I was overseas for more than three. I need the time, because I don’t know what to make of what happened. It isn’t that I don’t understand it: I’ll probably never understand it. It’s that I haven’t yet absorbed it. I need a rest not because I’m tired but because of what I’ve seen, and there’s no direction in which, at present, I have ambition.”
“Necessity will show you that direction or you’ll live a wasted life.”
“It hasn’t ’til now. The business is running efficiently: I couldn’t manage it the way you do. I have no desire to duplicate what you do. I don’t even know if I want to stay. I know how it works, but to cut or stretch as well as they can”—he meant the workers beyond the glass partitions—“would take twenty years, and what would be the point?”
“We’re running efficiently,” Cornell said, “but selling less.”
“We’re not a mechanized business, we’re a craft. The only way to compete with people whose labor costs are a fifth of ours or less,” Harry said, “is for all of us to take less. The workers are closer to the margin, so you and I would really have to tighten, but the two of us can hardly do it all. If we reduce their wages, the unions will rescind the exception and strike us. We’ll go out of business or pay up, after which we’ll go out of business anyway, just as we may now if the trend continues. I don’t know what to do. It’ll take Europe decades before it catches up to us and prices align. Maybe never.”
“There could be another war in Europe,” Cornell said. “We’ve just had two.”
“Stalin would attend,” Harry added, “as Russia has yet to demobilize. But if there were another war, when it ended and we stopped making belts for generals we’d be right where we are now.”
“If we were a different kind of business, if we were an industry, we could pay off Congress and they would raise tariffs to protect us,” Cornell said. “But we’re too little. We don’t matter like General Electric.”
“I wouldn’t want to be General Electric.”
“That’s not the point.” Cornell stared out the window, into the north light. “The store’s okay.”
“Because we’ve got the only two clerks in New York who don’t raid the till. It’s a miracle.”
“We could open in other cities.”
“No cash, Cornell. With our sales the banks won’t loan us any money, and we couldn’t afford the interest anyway. At this point they probably wouldn’t lend to us if we were doing well. I have a hundred thousand dollars to my name. With that we could open stores in Chicago and Boston. People know Copeland Leather. We’d probably do all right. But it’s all the money I have, and if we open stores, we lose accounts.”
“We’re losing them anyway.”
“So maybe we’ll do that. But it makes me nervous, because if it didn’t work I’d have no reserves, either for the business or myself. And where can we get a Henry or a Thaxton? There aren’t people like them anymore, who have the manner and appearance of a chairman of the board but will work in a store and behave like a butler.”
“They make them in Boston,” Cornell said, “but we’d have to import them to Chicago. And we know New York, Harry, we don’t know any other city. We could really sink fast. Maybe we should sell to that schmuck from Cyprus.”
“That sounds like a musical,” Harry said. “That Schmuck from Cyprus.”
“It would pass our problems on to him, and keep everyone employed.”
“You think so?”
“No. He’d take the name, the store, the accounts, and move all the production to Europe.”
“I wish my father were here.”
“Maybe for his sake it’s better that he’s not.”
“You don’t think he’d know what to do?”
“He might, but that’s not the point. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean today.”
“Oh. Today. Today, I’m going to meet a girl.”
The very second he turned north on Seventh Avenue, though he was still in the garment district and had to take care not to be battered by high-velocity clothing racks, everything changed to the world of the theater—a world that, though not part of it, he and so many others knew almost as much as their own. It was theater’s task as it portrayed its audiences to make them its intimates, and it succeeded so well that just the turning of a corner and moving in anticipation toward Times Square made him see differently. In the many ugly buildings, behind garish marquees, on narrow, undistinguished streets, worlds were in production, plays that when they opened were like new life and when they closed were like death.
When Catherine had told him, on the phone, that she was an actress rehearsing in a musical destined for Broadway, he was surprised. Although he knew little about her, it seemed that she was the kind of person who would not have been an actress. He suspected that though she was now poor, as she had intimated more than once, she had at one time been of a class that could look down upon a lot of things, and that, therefore, for her to have entered the theater would mean that she must have a transcendent understanding of dignity and was directed by a strong sense of what was real. For the poetry of the theater was that by indirection it found directions out, that with the conflagration of artifice and insincerity it generated a coherent light in which were held truths that can elude even the light of day. People who were comfortable and long established, or wanted to be, often did not understand this. But now, despite her well-spokenness and aristocratic bearing, she may have been forced to it. Perhaps her family had lost everything in the Crash and the Depression. If he could help her, he would. If he could give her security and provide for her, he would. If he could give her everything, he would. He already loved her.
He arrived at the stage door an hour early, because the time he spent at the loft had not passed quickly and because of that he had left before he might have. “Is this the rehearsal for Homecoming?” he asked the doorkeeper, a man who looked at anyone who asked any question to which he himself knew the answer as if that person were an idiot for asking a question the answer to which was already known.
“Yeah.”
“Miss Sedley?” Harry could hear the music coming from within. As it was being coaxed into shape it stopped and started in a way that audiences never know.
“Yeah.”
“I’m supposed to meet her,” he said.
“So?”
“I just wanted to know.”
“Why?”
“So you would know that I’m supposed to be here. I’m supposed to meet her at six.”
“You’re early.”
“I know.” He was getting uncomfortable.
“You’re going to stand here for an hour? Why not go get a hot dog?”
“I don’t want a hot dog. We’re going to have dinner.”
“So why don’t you go in and sit down?”
“I can go in?”
&nb
sp; “What is it, Fort Knox?”
As Harry passed him, he heard the doorkeeper say “Stupid!” under his breath. It was okay, for the doorkeeper now had the satisfaction that would enable him to get through the rest of the day and go back to his grave in the Bronx, and it hadn’t cost Harry a thing.
The drawing room had been raised to clear the stage for the maneuvers of a chorus, and in semi-darkness, illuminated in the absence of scenery only by the stage lights reflecting from the boards and the players, he found a seat in the back and sat down unnoticed. Five minutes after he had settled in, the director commanded that Catherine do the song that just a day before she had accomplished with such stunning perfection. She appeared, rouged and lit as if the production had really made it to Broadway, which, in fact, this was. They rehearsed in makeup so as not to be disturbed by it later. Harry figured this out, having often been told to “train like you fight.”
The music began. First it was a short, deep bow from the string section, and then it rhythmically took to the waves. But it would recede, leaving Catherine’s voice alone to fill the theater and arrest every onlooker. Twelve beats after her introduction, she began to sing. Onstage, the light, the color, and her song exaggerated her presence almost beyond belief. And though he knew that her speaking voice was beautiful, when she had spoken to him she had not been singing. Her voice was so trained that it was able to carry throughout the theater the deepest emotion and truth, powerfully and yet gently, her enunciation clear, silken, and strong. On occasion she lessened the clarity and misted her expression, only to go back into the clear, which gave her a range for which musicology had yet to come up with a name, for there was no term for the glory within reach only of a woman’s voice.