“So, you’ve seen this horse, Mary?”Phil was saying.
“Oh, sure.”
“What does it look like?”
“Like any minute two men are gonna step out of it!”
The audience laughed, but the Corbin family wasn’t really listening.
Nate put down his spoon, wiped his face, and sat back. A wind had picked up outside that was harrying the windows. He looked at them long enough to see whether a tree was going to present itself through the glass, and when he was convinced it wasn’t, he turned his attention to Sheldon.
“Tomorrow’s September nineteenth. You lost some schooling but not much. Mirabelle can walk you to your school tomorrow, and she’ll continue on to the high school. They’re going to test you first thing and you need to do as well as you can, otherwise they’ll place you back a year and that means you’ll be living here a year longer, which isn’t something we need. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yes, sir,” said Sheldon.
“Abe has some old clothes. Somewhere,” he added, glancing at his son, who nodded. “He’ll find them for you, and you’ll comb your hair and make like you belong here. I don’t want any missteps or drama from any of you,” Nate said, looking squarely at Mirabelle this time. “I’ve got things on my mind and things I need to sort out. When I get home from work, I expect the three of you to be a help to me. I expect dinner on the table, homework to be done, and the chores completed. This family is going to keep moving its way up, so help me God; I don’t care what’s being thrown in our way to stop us. You all understand me?”
“What about my dad?” Sheldon said. His hands were clenched in his lap.
Nate didn’t look up at him. “We’re burying him tomorrow. Next to your mom and near Lucy.”
“I’m supposed to go to school?”
“We’re burying him after school. You need to take that test. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Mirabelle cleared the plates in silence.
“You’re all wrong. He’s a fine-looking horse. See, I got a picture right here.”
“Golly, look at him. But why’s he lying on his back?”
“You got the picture upside down.”
“Oh, look at that. He got up.”
* * *
Sheldon lay in bed after dinner with his arms crossed behind his head as Abe, shirtless and as taut as a Greek statue, crossed his legs and read the paper. Neither spoke. The ceiling above Sheldon’s head was white, and the paint was peeling along a single crack that meandered like a new river through an arctic frost. Sheldon and Joseph used to hunt in winter too when the boredom of the cobbler work during the cold season became too much.
“Let’s get out of here,” his father would say to him. He’d blow out the candle for effect and Sheldon would bounce up like a caged dog shown a new door with a field beyond.
Massachusetts winters could be powerfully harsh, but they were variable too. After ice storms came days of crackling beauty and blue skies. Their L.L.Bean boots would crunch through the frozen top layers into the powdery and loose snow beneath. If Sheldon was careful and lucky, he could leave behind absolutely perfect footprints.
His father would quiz him along the way, as much for education as conversation.
“What are we following?” he would ask Sheldon.
“Snowshoe hare.”
“How can you tell the snowshoe from a cottontail or jackrabbit?”
“Snowshoe’s got a much wider print. Toes farther apart.”
“And the cottontail?”
“Too easy.”
* * *
A rustling of the newspaper snapped Sheldon back to Hartford. The ceiling lost its magic. The woods vanished.
* * *
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Sheldon asked Abe, pulling the blanket up to his neck.
“You’ve shot a gun, right?” Abe asked him, putting the paper down. “You and Uncle Joe?”
“Lots of times. Why?”
“What’s it like?”
Sheldon knew that Abe considered his earlier and rural life both exotic and cool; significant somehow. Hunting. Trapping. Camping out. Shooting. His father, though, never did. Nothing to be proud of. Nothing inherently interesting. “Better the world didn’t have guns,” his father had once said. “But they’re here, so you might as well know how they work. There’s more to learn about the woods, though. That’s where the magic is.”
“It’s not really like anything else,” Sheldon said, snuggling into the bed more deeply. “It’s just . . . I don’t know.”
“Is it hard?” Abe asked.
“No. Anyone can do it. That’s the whole point. They’re made to be simple.”
“Right,” said Abe. He folded the newspaper. A giant advertisement for Chesterfields dominated the lower half of the page. A smiling woman was holding a cigarette from behind a globe; beneath it, the caption read CLEAR ACROSS THE MAP THEY SATISFY WITH MORE PLEASURE FOR MILLIONS. At the top of the page, the section heading read FEMININE TOPICS.
“You planning on shooting somebody, Abe?”
“Go to sleep, Sheldon. You got a big day tomorrow.”
* * *
But Sheldon couldn’t sleep. The strangeness of the house and the constant city noises kept him awake. After Abe had stopped moving, Sheldon slipped off the blanket and stole out of the room. He didn’t have a plan or destination in mind, but the cold floor and being vertical made him want to pee again, so he started walking along the bannister to the bathroom at the end of the hall.
As he padded almost silently on the worn rug, he caught sight of Mirabelle in the next room through a crack in the door. She was lying on her bed, back to the wall, reading a book. She wore a short flannel nightgown and her legs were bare. Her right leg was extended and the other—the one closest to Sheldon—was up. The book rested against her thigh.
Sheldon didn’t mean to stop and stare at her, but he did. Though only sixteen, Mirabelle looked to Sheldon like a grown woman, and he had never seen a woman’s perfect curve from beneath the knee to the panties. The closest he had ever come was with his mother and nothing about this was the same.
He was fixed to the spot. If he moved, she might look up, and if he stayed too long, she absolutely would. There would be no explaining it or apologizing for it. He began to tremble.
Mirabelle’s bent knee dropped slowly toward the bed and revealed a strip of pink satin.
When Sheldon looked, Mirabelle raised her eyes from the book and smirked at him.
Sheldon ran down the hall to the bathroom and closed the door too loudly. He turned on the faucet, and the water splashed out onto his pajama top and the waistband of his bottoms. Cursing, he placed a hand towel against the wet spots and tried to dry them, but it only pressed the cold water against his skin, which was probably just as well.
Calming himself down, he used the toilet, washed his hands, and—mustering what courage he could—walked back down the hall to his room, not looking at what was surely a mischievous and superior smile on his older cousin’s lips.
The Factory
THE NEXT MORNING, NATE sat with the three youths at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast on his plate. Everyone was eating in silence when Nate sighed; looked at Mirabelle, who did not look back; and then made an announcement. “It has been brought to my attention,” he said, each word feeling like an admission of usury and fraud and guilt, “that attending school on the day of Joseph’s funeral might raise eyebrows. For that reason, all three of you will be dismissed from school today.” Nate raised a finger to stave off any words from Sheldon. “And all tests and other matters will be rescheduled. I have placed a call to the school secretary, who has informed the principal, who will inform the teachers. However, I can’t have you wandering around the city, and I don’t trust you to stay home where you belong. Therefore, you are coming with me to the armory, where you will be put to work doing . . . something. I don’t know what. I’m sure
Mr. Henkler will have some ideas.” Nate picked up his coffee cup. “So, that’s that. We leave in half an hour.”
* * *
They dressed Sheldon in Abe’s old clothes. The white shirt was too long, so they doubled the cuffs back and buttoned them, tucking the shirttails deep into his trousers before wedging him into a gray sweater that could have been mistaken for his if no one looked too closely.
None of it mattered. Walking through the angular brick city beside Mirabelle guaranteed that no one would ever look too closely at Sheldon.
Mirabelle wore a wide-brimmed hat and long gloves that reached her elbows. Almost as tall and nearly the same size as her mother, Mirabelle had filled out more than was good for her at age sixteen. There was no going back to denim now. She was a child, but one with the swagger of an adult gone awry. Nate didn’t like it, but he needed a woman to explain to her what he didn’t like and there were none around.
Nate had wanted to purge all of Lucy’s belongings. Not because he was unemotional, but because ridding the house of the stuff would have reduced the risk that any of it might set him off. Tears had always flowed too easily in his family. When they were young, it had been Joseph who led them through the dark days of the Spanish flu after their parents had died. They had both sobbed, but it was Joseph who did so without shame. It was confusing to Nate: A battle-hardened soldier who still had the mud of France between his teeth had the capacity to cry? Had the war made him soft? Either way, Nate was embarrassed by it because gentiles rolled their eyes at the expressed emotions of the Jews.
They kept the clothing after Mirabelle seized the charity bag and gave her father a look as cold and murderous as death.
* * *
On the way to the armory, Mirabelle slipped her arm through her father’s as they walked. She gave her father a smile.
Sheldon saw it. He didn’t understand their relationship or whether every emotion she expressed was honest or calculated. But he was pretty sure they had the day off from school because of her.
* * *
Abe wore a suit and walked beside Sheldon through pools of brilliant sunlight and islands of darkened shadows, his face brightening and then hiding away as he strode down the busy Hartford street, his shoulders effortlessly rolling and dipping to avoid contact with the passersby who were on their way to change the world into something more amazing than it already was. He was an animal moving gracefully in his element.
Abe saw that Sheldon was staring at him and didn’t understand that he was the subject of Sheldon’s awe; he thought it was the energy of the city.
“You know the phrase ‘Yankee ingenuity’?” he asked Sheldon.
“I guess.”
“It’s because of Hartford,” Abe said, his hands in his pockets and looking to Sheldon like a man who owned a yacht. “In many ways, it’s because of Samuel Colt and his revolver. Colt was born here. Back in the 1860s, during the Civil War, he perfected precision manufacturing processes that allowed for the mass production of the guns. Out of that one industry came a set of skills that helped create a whole host of machine tools that could be used for making other things, tools like turret lathes, drill presses, and milling machines. Once those things started being made around here, all kinds of precision manufacturing came out of it and Hartford boomed. Really, the Colt Armory built this whole place. And then Richard Gatling and John Browning—they made guns too—got in on the game. From those innovations, we got Weed sewing machines, Royal and Underwood typewriters, Columbia bicycles, and even Pope automobiles. By the late 1800s, America had become the world’s economic superpower because we were constantly inventing and building and manufacturing the most complex machines. Hartford was the center of gravity for this. Not Boston. Not New York. Right here. People forget that because those places are bigger, but the ideas and the energy came from here.”
This is where Abe’s optimism and bright mood shifted.
“Dad’s job is right at the center of the place where it started,” Abe said. “And he thinks it’s because some magnanimous German is promoting the local Jew up the lines because he’s so good at his job. But everything I see when I look out the window tells me that’s not how the world works. We got the Mob watching the house, and we got the German giving my father a fancy job that no Jew has ever come close to having before. And it’s not just some accounting job, which isn’t here or there. It’s this unwinnable assignment to save Colt’s reputation. I mean, think about it. A Jew being told to save Colt’s reputation? That’s nuts. He’s being set up. If things work out, Henkler takes the credit. But if things don’t work out . . . guess what? It’s blame-the-Jew time. I think Henkler’s already reckoned he’s going to fail, and that’s why he hired Dad. So now we’ve got an Italian outside the window and a German in the office squeezing Nate Corbin. There’s no way to win, because winning pisses off the Mob and losing activates Colt to blame Dad. What I’m saying—if all of this is too much for your twelve-year-old brain—is that we’re fucked.”
Sheldon half listened to Abe and his conspiracy theory about the Axis powers closing in on their family. He wasn’t convinced. Did Henkler even know Uncle Nate was Jewish? After all, Nate had changed his name to Corbin. So maybe all of this was imaginary. Sheldon didn’t want to ask Abe, though. Abe was too certain to question. And besides, all these ideas were abstract to him compared to the hard facts he’d recently been dealt.
As Sheldon walked among the throngs of people down to the promenade next to the Connecticut River that led to Coltsville, he was taking in the enormity of an East Coast metropolis while scanning the city streets for the man with the mustache.
* * *
They arrived close to nine o’clock. Sheldon paused to take it in. The Colt Armory was the largest single building Sheldon had ever seen up close. It wasn’t tall, but it was wide. Very, very, very wide. Standing in front of it with the river behind him, Sheldon thought it was a mile wide as he gazed at the building’s bright-white turret topped with a blue onion dome trimmed in gold. To Sheldon, this looked like something straight from The Arabian Nights, not New England. It had magic and mystery written all over it.
“Inside, kids, I don’t want to be late,” said Uncle Nate.
* * *
Nate walked his children and nephew through the main building, narrating a tour he had given to a thousand dignitaries as the heavy, rhythmic pounding of enormous industrial machinery set the pacing of their steps.
“The motive power for the entire operation is that steam engine. The cylinder is thirty-six inches in diameter. It has a seven-foot stroke, a thirty-foot-in-diameter flywheel, and it weighs in at seven tons. The steam comes from two cylindrical boilers, each twenty-two feet long and seven feet in diameter. The power is carried to the machinery upstairs by a belt working off the flywheel that is one hundred eighteen feet long by twenty-two inches wide and travels at the rate of two thousand five hundred feet per minute. All that power drives machines for chambering cylinders, turning and shaping them, boring barrels, milling lock frames, and drilling mortises and so on.
“This place,” said Nate, “is a miracle of engineering and science and innovation. This building alone helped put America on the world map. Welcome to Colt.”
Sheldon, Abe, and Mirabelle followed their father up a flight of wide stairs to the machinery floor. As they turned to continue their upward climb, Sheldon looked down a corridor five hundred feet long with a sixteen-foot ceiling and what Abe would later tell him were one hundred and ten windows.
“We’ve been here before, obviously,” Abe said to Sheldon, as they climbed up to the assembling department and then into the offices where Nate was planning to barricade them for the morning. “He’s saying all this for your benefit.”
Mirabelle was saying good morning to a man in his eighties. Abe said, “That’s William Cluff. He started here in 1874 when he was nineteen. He knows everything and everyone. He’s been here for sixty-four years, if you can believe it.”
* *
*
UPSTAIRS IN THE OPERATIONS ROOM, Carl Henkler heard a commotion moving toward his office door and—in preparation for the inevitable—removed his reading glasses, folded them, and closed the ledger he’d been studying as Nate Corbin, his tall son, his beautiful daughter, and a boy in badly fitting clothes entered his office. He knew about Nate’s brother’s death and surmised that the boy was the orphaned nephew. He did not envy a man caring for three children alone. Henkler barely saw his children during the week and he was glad for it, convinced that leaving their rearing to his wife was best for all concerned. A father provides the conditions; the mother provides the service. For Corbin, his hands were now filled with both. It was not a reasonable position to place a man, though no one had chosen this, so Henkler tried to be sympathetic.
“Mr. Henkler,” said Nate, too officious for Abe’s liking. “You’ve met my son, Abe, and my daughter, Mirabelle, before. This is Sheldon, my nephew. I mentioned my brother last week.”
Carl Henkler stood, and after screwing a cap back onto a fountain pen, he moved to the front of his desk, placed his hands behind his back, and nodded. “Yes, tough times indeed. I’m sorry for your loss, Master Corbin,” he said, addressing Sheldon as he’d never been addressed before.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 6