by D. W. Buffa
We were sitting in the commons late in the afternoon, after our last class, one of the few we had together. Browning was reading the paper. He put it down.
“You think that’s not true?” he said with a challenging look, though I had not said a word and, so far as I knew, had not changed expression. The truth of it was, I had barely heard what he said. I was stirring a cup of coffee with one hand while I jotted down in a notebook something from class I was afraid I would otherwise forget.
“It’s true, Antonelli. Every word of it.” Browning leaned back, raising his chin. His eyes fastened on something out the window, something he saw in the swirling late-autumn snow. A wry grin, the look of someone remembering a shrewd remark he had once made—or perhaps had wanted to make, but had to hold back—a remark that if he had made it might have had some tremendous, but not entirely unexpected, consequence, started across his small, rather impish mouth. “Think of it! The automobile! It was supposed to be this great liberating phenomenon. Freedom. Everyone could go everywhere—whenever they wanted. Freedom. And it became the means by which we imprisoned ourselves.”
Browning’s eyes came back to mine, but did not stay. He stretched out his legs, wedged his hands between his thighs and bent his head to the side. A pensive smile played at the soft corners of his mouth. He looked out the windows. The snow was coming harder in the dying light, like white stars falling on a slate gray night. He looked back, not at me, but at the rows of law students, their jackets still on, sipping hot coffee, hunched over their books like quick-fingered scriveners bent to their task.
“I did not read it myself—though I should—the whole thing, I mean; but a teacher of mine once read to me…” His eyes darted to mine, an apology grinning in his eyes. “Read to the class a line from a letter of Jefferson’s in which he complained that the Americans were becoming soft and effeminate by spending too much time on horseback. An Indian, Jefferson insisted, could cover fifty miles on foot faster than a white man could on horse.” He paused, a languid expression on his face. “I get a little tired just thinking about walking through this damn blizzard back to the dorm.” he glanced out the window and winced. Straightening up, he put both elbows on the table and lapsed into a brooding silence. I began to scribble another fragmentary thought on the notebook page.
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” I looked up and found him nodding at what I was doing. “Civil Procedure.” A look of disgust swept over his face. Then, as if he had become aware of his own reaction, and that it was more, far more emphatic than he had meant, he laughed. “It doesn’t make any sense. Before anyone knows anything about the law—what it is—they insist on trying to teach you the process by which it is applied. You have to know a thing—what it looks like—before you can take it apart. Stern knew that. Seems simple enough—you’d think everyone would.”
Slowly, Browning sagged back against the chair, like a balloon that had been blown full up but had not been tied, the air gradually, almost imperceptibly, allowed to escape. His legs, rather spindly from the knees down but thick in the thigh, stretched straight out. He crossed his right ankle over his left, the way he always did. It was never the other way around, always right over left and always rolling his hip slightly in that same direction, balancing himself with an exquisite sensibility on the front edge of the chair. He folded his arms, or rather, let his left hand dangle palm up in his lap while he grasped the elbow of that arm with his other hand. With his head bent to the left, his eyes traced a path down to his oxblood loafers. It did not matter how cold it might be, or how hot, whether it was raining or snowing, whether the sun was baking the sidewalk chalk white, Browning wore that same pair of shoes.
“I like them,” he said with a shrug of indifference the one time, in a feeble attempt at humor, I made some remark. I did not know that Browning’s left foot was slightly misshapen and two sizes larger than the right. The loafers, however, were exactly the same length. All his shoes—and he must have had dozens of them, but he had only that pair and the ones he wore when he had to get dressed up at school—had been specially constructed to appear the same size on the outside. Browning walked slowly, a lazy, unhurried gait, and, as I only later discovered, was in constant pain. The same shoe that masked the size, twisted the ball of his foot back toward his heel and held it there in a viselike grip.
Browning’s head sank down on his chest, rolling back and forth. His eyes, half closed, seemed bent on some calculation behind those narrow slits. The cupid-bow mouth, pushed farther out by the concentrated effort of the task, took on the rueful aspect of a parrot’s crooked beak. He began to speak in that low, distant voice he had. It was uncanny, the way it held you, rapt and attentive, straining to hear. It was like stumbling across someone in the night, holding forth in some private dialogue of their own. No, that leaves something out, something important. It was like a soliloquy by one of Shakespeare’s characters, talking out loud to himself, knowing that he was surrounded by an audience intent on listening to every word. The only spontaneous remarks Thomas Browning ever made were, I suspect, always well rehearsed.
“That was the dream,” he was saying. “It’s always been the dream in America, the dream of the freedom to go, to leave everything behind, to go on to the next dream, and the one after that; to find that place where you can have the life you’ve always wanted, the one that deep down you know is yours by right.”
The snow outside was falling in clumps, lit by the lights that flickered and died and flickered again from deep inside the darkness on the far side of the Charles River, a quarter mile away.
“Stern—the old man—always thought he was an instrument of God. He did not believe in any organized religion.” Under his breath, Browning emitted a helpless laugh, a commentary on the bewildering beliefs of men. “That would have meant admitting the possibility that God had not been waiting all this time for him. It was the way he explained his genius, the fact—the seemingly undeniable fact—that he had almost single-handedly changed the world. Him! An immigrant from Wales who had come here when he was twelve—an orphan whose father died in the mines, whose mother died giving birth to one of her innumerable sons—sent off to America by some distant relative with a ticket in steerage and one change of clothes. He never went to school a day in his life. He learned to read and write somehow on his own. So how do you explain going from that to becoming the principal architect of the modern world? Do you think he ever thought it was just by chance?—That it was an accident that it was he and not someone else? That’s what it was, of course; but it’s easier to believe that it’s because you’ve been chosen, given something no one else has been given so you can do something no one else could do. So Stern believed in God—but, mark you, only because of his absolute conviction that God believed in him.”
I looked at Browning, watching the way he always seemed to keep his eyes focused somewhere else, as if beneath that affable exterior he was a little afraid of letting anyone get too close.
“You talk about him—your grandfather—as if he were already dead.”
Browning raised his head and looked at me. He was not irritated by what I had said or offended that I would say it. He seemed to be thinking about whether it was true, and what it meant if it were.
“You think he was ever alive?”
Browning pulled his legs up beneath the table and placed the flat of his hand on top of it, ready to get up. I thought he was going and I turned back to the notebook, trying to remember more of the things I should have written down.
“You take almost verbatim notes in class,” remarked Browning as if he were puzzled anyone would think it worth the time. “Why do you then take more, sit there like this after every class and write and write as if your life depended on remembering everything that was said?” Something on the page caught his eye. He grabbed the notebook, turning it toward him so he could see it clearly. “Good God, Antonelli! You’re writing down the questions some other student asked in class?” he must have rea
lized how it sounded, disparaging the effort of someone for whom law school at Harvard was the chance of a lifetime and not something that could be left or taken on a whim. He became suddenly expansive and generous.
“You’re right to do it like this,” he said with a smile full of warmth. “And you’re lucky, too—to want something bad enough to work so hard.” His head moved slowly to the side. His eyes swept cautiously around the commons. “Everyone here works hard, but not for the same reason. You want to be good at it. Most of them,” he said, jutting out his chin at the crowd, “want what comes from doing well at it.”
Browning pushed the notebook back. He began to get up, and then, with a grudging, self-deprecatory smile, sank back into the chair.
“Listen to me—passing judgment on what other people want to do with their lives. As if I had ever made any better decision about my own.” He crossed his good foot, his normal foot, over the other, covering it from view. “As if I had ever made any decision about much of anything.”
The cup of coffee he had brought to the table and from which he had taken one or two sips had long since grown cold, but he had forgotten, or I thought he had. Staring straight ahead, he lifted the cup slowly to his mouth and took a drink and then put it down, completely oblivious of either its temperature or taste.
“There was no choice.” I looked up. Browning had not moved. He was still staring into the middle distance, as if he had just remembered something that explained what he had been trying to say. “Not once it started. Don’t you see? Once it started, no one could stop it. That’s what the old man never understood: that it wasn’t Stern that did it, that he wasn’t on some mission from God—that once it started what happened next was inevitable, and that it really was just a matter of chance, and that if it had not been Stern it would have been someone else. He was right about this, though: He was an instrument, not of God, but of a power, a force, that had been brought into the world and set into motion a long time before the old man had ever thought about building cars, a long time before he was born.”
Thomas Browning, the third-generation Stern, the first lineal male descendant, the one whom the old man had as it were picked from the cradle to be his heir apparent, rested his weight forward on his left arm.
“But if he had known that, known that he was as much a replaceable part as any of the things that were mass produced for one of his machines, it would not have been him. That’s the illusion, the great self-deception, the belief in your own importance—this astonishing egotism that makes you think you’re the chosen instrument of providence— that excuses every ruthless cruelty you commit, wiping out your competitors, destroying anyone who gets in your way. And doing it all without a second thought.
Who knows how many men old Stern drove to suicide? I doubt he ever noticed; and if he did, believe me, he did not care. It was the rule of life: Conquer or die.”
Browning paused, hesitated, reconsidering what he had said. His face was right in front of mine, bent close. He looked over first one shoulder, then the other.
“No, I think I’m wrong,” he said . “I think he did notice; and I think he did care. I think he cared a lot when he drove someone first to bankruptcy and then, because of it, to death. I think it gave him a thrill to feel that he had that much power, that if he put his mind to it he could leave someone with no other way out. It was the look on his face, the empty depravity in his eyes, the way a wolf waits, waiting for you to grow weaker and more afraid, before it moves in for the kill.” Browning raised his eyes from the floor and then, in a brief show of defiance, raised his chin. “I saw that look a lot when I was growing up. That look was meant for me. He needed me because he had to have someone keep what he had made alive; he hated me because in his twisted mind, he was sure there should have been some way that instead of me, it could have been him. He hated me because he was an old man and I was not.”
Browning leaned back against the chair, made a vague gesture with his hand and shook his head.
“You said he was as much a replaceable part as any of the things he ever produced for one of his machines.”
I was not sure Browning was listening, but as soon as I finished, his head snapped around.
“And you can recite from memory the question that moron asked in class, can’t you?” he remarked with a good-natured laugh. “You have a kind of instant recall for things you hear, don’t you?” he asked seriously. “Not a photographic memory—more like a… ‘phonographic ear.’ You’re cursed, Antonelli. You’ll spend the rest of your life with all these things people have said—things they can’t remember ever saying—floating around in your brain. The noise will make you crazy.” He squinted at me, as if he wanted to examine me more closely. A flash of light came into his eyes. “Or can you switch it off and on at will? Like a phonograph record—turn it on, play the part you want, then turn it off. Is it like that?”
I cut him off. “As much a replaceable part,” I repeated as I bent forward, insisting on a response. Browning raised his eyebrows and drew the fingers of his left hand across his mouth, moving them slowly back and forth until he had clearly in mind what he wanted to say.
“Once you could move things—once things could move themselves—inanimate things—then there was no turning back. The first car—a few miles an hour, that was all; barely enough to keep ahead of someone moving at a normal walk. But that did not matter. It was too late. Ever read Adam Smith and the part about the pins—remember? When each man made a pin from start to finish: cutting the wire, rolling it round, sharpening one end into a point, flattening the other into a head, sticking each one he made into a paper that held a dozen or more, each man in a day could make, let us say, X. But now, change things around. Let one man do nothing but cut the wire, another do nothing but sharpen points, another flatten heads; in other words, divide everything into the simplest tasks and make each man do only one and production rises to a hundred, or five hundred times, what it was before. And that was something that involved nothing but human hands. Now add to that the power to move things to the people who worked on them, so they can stay in a single spot and not have to waste motion, that is to say, time, moving from one place to the next. We’re not making pins anymore; we’re making machines, making them on assembly lines. The machines are being moved as they are being built. The production itself is in motion. The motion produces the machines that produce the power of—motion. That’s what I meant. That’s what Stern never understood: Once inanimate things were given the power of motion, there was a new force in the world, a force that nothing could resist. The machines would keep getting better, while the human beings who made them, each of them performing a narrow task, too tired at the end of it to think of anything, would get worse. Stern did not think about any of that. For him they were all part of the vast machine that made the machines. Stern worried only about how he could keep the whole thing in motion after he was gone—as if he or anyone else could have done anything to stop it. That’s why I’ve always been a failure in old Stern’s eyes: because I could not see the point in any of the things he thought it was so important I do.”
Browning pressed his lips together and tightened his eyes. “He couldn’t stand it that I might have a mind of my own. When you get right down to it, he did not really think anyone did. They were all machines to him.”
CHAPTER 4
The cab stopped in front of one of those sedate gray buildings in which the forgotten descendants of fabulously wealthy and sometimes notorious people lived in the private splendor of rooms with high ceilings and the most valuable thing in New York: a view of Central Park. In the late afternoon, while being nearly struck dumb by the uncanny resemblance between what Amedeo Modigliani had seen in a young man of his acquaintance and what I remembered of someone I once knew, Thomas Browning had been here, or could have been here, just a few blocks down the street.
The doorman, dressed in a green jacket with gold braid, greeted the agent by name. “Good evening, Mr. Powell,” h
e said as he held open the door. “You’re expected.”
I was not surprised that Thomas Browning was here, on the top two floors. Riding up in the elevator, it seemed odd that I had not put it together before. Browning had never really lived anywhere else. Michigan, where Zachary Stern helped build the auto industry and make the country the dominant industrial power in the world, was what Hudson Bay had been to John Jacob Astor or what the oil fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio had been to John D. Rockefeller: the place where they came from, the place where they made their money; the place where some of them, like the Fords and the Sterns, built enormous mansions that dwarfed everything around. But they did not stay there, not the second generation and certainly not the third. They came to New York where they lived as part of the only aristocracy America allowed, in which neither nobility, something acquired by birth, nor talent, something useful only if it was something you could sell, but money and massive amounts of it gave you your place.
From the time he was old enough to escape the iron discipline of his grandfather, Thomas Browning had probably not spent more than six months in the state he never failed to call home. He had gone to Princeton for his undergraduate degree, and then straight to Harvard to study law. He spent his summers and most of his holidays in New York, and if I had not thought anything about it at the time, it was because I had been more interested in the life I was leading than in what he was doing in his. After Harvard he went to England where he studied at the London School of Economics, or at least attended classes, because he had not gotten a degree. He went a few other places as well.
The first time I heard of him being back in Michigan was when he took over the company, the one built by his brilliant and crazy grandfather, the one intended to perpetuate his name. When I read the accounts of Thomas Browning’s first speech to the shareholders as the new president of Stern Motors, I wondered if he had been tempted to change it and let the memory of the old man die a well-deserved death. I did not think there was any particular significance in the accompanying report that the new president would maintain offices in both Detroit and New York.