by Philip Roth
ruler… . This is called a spud knife, dull, beveled to an edge but not
sharp… . Now he’s pulling the trank down like that, to the length again—
Harry likes to bet you that he’ll pull it right down to the pattern without even
touching the pattern, but I don’t bet him because I don’t like losing…. This
is called a fourchette…. See, all meticulously done. … He’s going to cut
yours and give it to me so we can take it down to the making department… .
This is called the slitter, honey. Only mechanical process in the whole thing. A
press and a die, and the slitter will take about four tranks at a time___
“Wow. This is an elaborate process,” said Rita.
“That it is. Hard really to make money in the glove business because it’s so
labor-intensive—a time-consuming process, many
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operations to be coordinated. Most of the glove businesses have been family
businesses. From father to son. Very traditional business. A product is a
product to most manufacturers. The guy who makes them doesn’t know anything
about them. The glove business isn’t like that. This business has a long, long
history.”
“Do other people feel the romance of the glove business the way you do, Mr.
Levov? You really are mad for this place and all the processes. I guess that’s
what makes you a happy man.”
“Am I?” he asked, and felt as though he were going to be dissected, cut into by
a knife, opened up and all his misery revealed. “I guess I am.”
“Are you the last of the Mohicans?”
“No, most of them, I believe, in this business have that same feeling for the
tradition, that same love. Because it does require a love and a legacy to
motivate somebody to stay in a business like this. You have to have strong ties
to it to be able to stick it out. Come on,” he said, having managed momentarily
to quash everything that was shadowing him and menacing him, succeeded still to
be able to speak with great precision despite her telling him he was a happy
man. “Let’s go back to the making room.”
This is the silking, that’s a story in itself, but this is what she’s going to
do first… . This is called a pique machine, it sews the finest stitch,
called pique, requires far more skill than the other stitches… . This is
called a polishing machine and that is called a stretcher and you are called
honey and I am called Daddy and this is called living and the other is called
dying and this is called madness and this is called mourning and this is called
hell, pure hell, and you have to have strong ties to be able to stick it out,
this is called trying-to-go-on-as-though-nothing-has-happened and this is called
paying-the-full-price-but-in-God’s-name-for-what, this is called wanting-to-be-
dead-and-wanting-to-nnd-her-and-to-kill-her-and-to-save-her-from-whatever-she-
is-going-through-wherever-on-earth-she-may-be-at-this-moment, this unbridled
outpouring is called blotting-out-everything and it does not work, I am half
insane, the shattering force of that bomb is too great… . And then
* * *
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they were back at his office again, waiting for Rita’s gloves to come from the
finishing department, and he was repeating to her a favorite observation of his
father’s, one that his father had read somewhere and always used to impress
visitors, and he heard himself repeating it, word for word, as his own. If only
he could get her to stay and not go, if he could keep on talking about gloves to
her, about gloves, about skins, about his horrible riddle, implore her, beg her,
Don’t leave me alone with this horrible riddle…. “Monkeys, gorillas, they have
brains and we have a brain, but they don’t have this thing, the thumb. They
can’t move it opposite the way we do. The inner digit on the hand of man, that
might be the distinguishing physical feature between ourselves and the rest of
the animals. And the glove protects that inner digit. The ladies’ glove, the
welder’s glove, the rubber glove, the baseball glove, et cetera. This is the
root of humanity, this opposable thumb. It enables us to make tools and build
cities and everything else. More than the brain. Maybe some other animals have
bigger brains in proportion to their bodies than we have. I don’t know. But the
hand itself is an intricate thing. It moves. There is no other part of a human
being that is clothed that is such a complex moving structure….” And that was
when Vicky popped in the door with the size-four finished gloves. “Here’s your
pair of gloves,” Vicky said, and gave them to the boss, who looked them over and
then leaned across the desk to show them to the girl. “See the seams? The width
of the sewing at the edge of the leather—that’s where the quality workmanship
is. This margin is probably about a thirty-second of an inch between the
stitching and the edge. And that requires a high skill level, far higher than
normal. If a glove is not well sewn, this edge might come to an eighth of an
inch. It also will not be straight. Look at how straight these seams are. This
is why a Newark Maid glove is a good glove, Rita. Because of the straight seams.
Because of the fine leather. It’s well tanned. It’s soft. It’s pliable. Smells
like the inside of a new car. I love good leather, I love fine gloves, and I was
brought up on the idea of making the best glove possible. It’s in my blood, and
nothing gives me greater pleasure”—he clutched at his own
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effusiveness the way a sick person clutches at any sign of health, no matter how
minute—”than giving you these lovely gloves. Here,” he said, “with our
compliments,” and, smiling, he presented the gloves to the girl, who excitedly
pulled them onto her little hands— “Slowly, slowly… always draw on a pair of
gloves by the fingers,” he told her, “afterward the thumb, then draw the wrist
down in place … always the first time draw them on slowly”—and she looked up
and, smiling back at him with the pleasure that any child takes in receiving a
gift, showed him with her hands in the air how beautiful the gloves looked, how
beautifully they fit. “Close your hand, make a fist,” the Swede said. “Feel how
the glove expands where your hand expands and nicely adjusts to your size?
That’s what the cutter does when he does his job right—no stretch left in the
length, he’s pulled that all out at the table because you don’t want the fingers
to stretch, but an exactly measured amount of hidden stretch left in the width.
That stretch in the width is a precise calculation.”
“Yes, yes, it’s wonderful, absolutely perfect,” she told him, opening and
closing her hands in turn. “God bless the precise calculators of this world,”
she said, laughing, “who leave stretch hidden in the width,” and only after
Vicky had shut the door to his glass-enclosed office and headed back into the
racket of the making department did Rita add, very softly, “She wants her Audrey
Hepburn scrap-book.”
* * *
The next morning the Swede met Rita at the Newark airport parking lot to give
her the scrapbook. From his office he had fir
st driven to Branch Brook Park,
miles in the opposite direction from the airport, where he’d got out of the car
to take a solitary walk. He strolled along where the Japanese cherry trees were
blooming. For a while he sat on a bench, watching the old people with their
dogs. Then, back in the car, he just began to drive—through Italian north Newark
and on up to Belleville, making right turns for half an hour until he determined
that he was not being followed. Rita had warned him not to make his way to their
rendezvous otherwise.
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The second week, at the airport parking lot, he handed over the ballet slippers
and the leotard Merry had last worn at age fourteen. Three days after that it
was her stuttering diary.
“Surely,” he said, having decided that now, with the diary in his hands, the
time had come to repeat the words his wife had spoken to him before each of his
meetings with Rita, meetings in which he had scrupulously done nothing other
than what Rita asked and deliberately asked nothing of her in return—”surely you
can now tell me something about Merry. If not where she is, how she is.”
“I surely cannot,” Rita said sourly.
“I’d like to speak with her.”
“Well, she wouldn’t like to speak with you.”
“But if she wants these things … why else would she want these things?”
“Because they’re hers.”
“So are we hers, Miss.”
“Not to hear her tell it.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“She hates you.”
“Does she?” he asked lightly.
“She thinks you ought to be shot.”
“Yes, that too?”
“What do you pay the workers in your factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico? What do you
pay the workers who stitch gloves for you in Hong Kong and Taiwan? What do you
pay the women going blind in the Philippines hand-stitching designs to satisfy
the ladies shopping at Bonwit’s? You’re nothing but a shitty little capitalist
who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind
the nigger-proof security gates of his mansion.”
Till now the Swede had been civil and soft-spoken with Rita no matter how
menacing she was determined to be. Rita was all they had, she was indispensable,
and though he did not expect to change her any by keeping his emotions to
himself, each time he steeled himself to show no desperation. Taunting him was
the project she had set herself; imposing her will on this conservatively
dressed
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* * *
success story six feet three inches tall and worth millions clearly provided her
with one of life’s great moments. But then it was all great moments these days.
They had Merry, sixteen-year-old stuttering Merry. They had a live human being
and her family to play with. Rita was no longer an ordinary wavering mortal, let
alone a novice in life, but a creature in clandestine harmony with the brutal
way of the world, entitled, in the name of historical justice, to be just as
sinister as the capitalist oppressor Swede Levov.
The unreality of being in the hands of this child! This loathsome kid with a
head full of fantasies about “the working class”! This tiny being who took up
not even as much space in the car as the Levov sheepdog, pretending that she was
striding on the world stage! This utterly insignificant pebble! What was the
whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as
identification with the oppressed? Her weighty responsibility to the workers of
the world! Egoistic pathology bristled out of her like the hair that nuttily
proclaimed, “I go wherever I want, as far as I want—all that matters is what I
want!” Yes, the nonsensical hair constituted half of their revolutionary
ideology, about as sound a justification for her actions as the other half—the
exaggerated jargon about changing the world. She was twenty-two years old, no
more than five feet tall, and off on a reckless adventure with a very potent
thing way beyond her comprehension called power. Not the least need of thought.
Thought just paled away beside their ignorance. They were omniscient without
even thinking. No wonder his tremendous effort to hide his agitation was
thwarted momentarily by uncontrollable rage, and sharply he said to her—as
though he were not joined to her maniacally uncompromising mission in the most
unimaginable way, as though it could matter to him that she enjoyed thinking the
worst of him—”You have no idea what you’re talking about! American firms make
gloves in the Philippines and Hong Kong and Taiwan and India and Pakistan and
all over the place—but not mine! I own two factories. Two. One of my factories
you visited in Newark. You saw how unhappy my employees were. That’s why they’ve
worked for us for forty years, because they’re
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exploited so miserably. The factory in Puerto Rico employs two hundred and sixty
people, Miss Cohen—people we have trained, trained from scratch, people we
trust, people who before we came to Ponce had barely enough work to go around.
We furnish employment where there was a shortage of employment, we have taught
needle skills to Caribbean people who had few if any of these skills. You know
nothing. You know nothing about anything—you didn’t even know what a factory was
till I showed you one!”
“I know what a plantation is, Mr. Legree—I mean, Mr. Levov. I know what it means
to run a plantation. You take good care of your niggers. Of course you do. It’s
called paternal capitalism. You own ‘em, you sleep with ‘em, and when you’re
finished with ‘em you toss ‘em out. Lynch ‘em only when necessary. Use them for
your sport and use them for your profit—”
“Please, I haven’t two minutes’ interest in childish cliches. You don’t know
what a factory is, you don’t know what manufacturing is, you don’t know what
capital is, you don’t know what labor is, you haven’t the faintest idea what it
is to be employed or what it is to be unemployed. You have no idea what work is.
You’ve never held a job in your life, and if you even cared to find one, you
wouldn’t last a single day, not as a worker, not as a manager, not as an owner.
Enough nonsense. I want you to tell me where my daughter is. That is all I want
to hear from you. She needs help, she needs serious help, not ridiculous
cliches. I want you to tell me where I can find her!”
* * *
“Merry never wants to see you again. Or that mother.”
“You don’t know anything about Merry’s mother.”
“Lady Dawn? Lady Dawn of the Manor? I know all there is to know about Lady Dawn.
So ashamed of her class origins she has to make her daughter into a debutante.”
“Merry shoveled cowshit from the time she was six. You don’t know what you’re
talking about. Merry was in the 4-H Club. Merry rode tractors. Merry—”
“Fake. All fake. The daughter of the beauty queen and the cap-
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tain of the football team—what kind of nightmare is that for a girl with a soul?
The little shirtwaist dresses, the little shoes, the little this and the little
that. Always playing with her hair. You think she wanted to fix Merry’s hair
because she loved her and the way she looked or because she was disgusted with
her, disgusted she couldn’t have a baby beauty queen that could grow up in her
own image to become Miss Rimrock? Merry has to have dancing lessons. Merry has
to have tennis lessons. I’m surprised she didn’t get a nose job.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Why do you think Merry had the hots for Audrey Hepburn? Because she thought
that was the best chance she had with that vain little mother of hers. Miss
Vanity of 1949. Hard to believe you could fit so much vanity into that cutesy
figure. Oh, but it does, it fits, all right. Just doesn’t leave much room for
Merry, does it?”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“No imagination for somebody who isn’t beautiful and lovable and desirable.
None. The frivolous, trivial beauty-queen mentality and no imagination for her
own daughter. ‘I don’t want to see anything messy, I don’t want to see anything
dark.’ But the world isn’t like that, Dawnie dear—it is messy, it is dark. It’s
hideous!”
“Merry’s mother works a farm all day. She works with animals all day, she works
with farm machinery all day, she works from six a.m. to—
“Fake. Fake. Fake. She works a farm like a fucking upper-class—”
“You don’t know anything about any of this. Where is my daughter? Where is she?