The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

I went from there to the Administration Building. To the office of Jacob Voorhees no less, since he had deigned me the honor of an audience. Or, to be more accurate, had insisted on it. I had, during my brief time spent in the yard, overheard stray references to him as the Old Man. When I entered his office I found that the references were not simply a manner of speaking, they were literally and entirely a description of him.

  He was a very old man, well on into his seventies, I judged, and all his years were evident in the dry, wrinkled skin of his throat, which rose out of an old-fashioned hard collar like a turtle’s neck rising out of its carapace. But there is old age and old age, and his was the kind with electricity in it, a sharp awareness of what goes on around it, a fierce grasping at every moment, and a relish in it. His eyes were bright blue chips of glass, startling to see in that mummified face, his lips a thin pale line, his white hair parted exactly in the center and showing at its part the yellow skull beneath. He wore a spotlessly clean black suit of a style long outmoded, and just above the meticulous knot of his black necktie could be seen a handsome pearl collarbutton. It was as if he had been clothed for the coffin, a withered and flawless tribute to time and the undertaker’s art. Only the brittle, searching force in him belied that. You could feel it across the room.

  He sat like that behind his bare desk in his bare office, and in the only other seat in the room sprawled a lank, rumpled, weather-beaten man in filthy work clothes with an old golfing cap on his head, a sad Scandinavian Abraham Lincoln. Jacob Voorhees said to him, “This is the young man I told you about, Mr. Andressen,” and Andressen said in a voice with the distant echo of the fjords in it, “Maybe so, but there is nothing on day shift for him. The Korean business is finished, production is down, we are laying off, not putting on. And it is not like with that Gennaro fellow, Mr. Voorhees. I cannot go to the union again and tell them it is only a couple of months, it means good publicity, and they will listen. They will not listen. They have twenty men with seniority waiting to be shaped up. There is no room for football players here now.”

  “Well, that’s something,” I said, but my heart sank. “I don’t play football.”

  Neither Voorhees nor Andressen looked at me. “What about nights?” Voorhees said, and Andressen took his time thinking about this.

  “Well, maybe nights,” he said at last. “He can fetch and carry for the Indian. He can be a firewatch. The Indian would like that maybe.”

  “Do you hear, young man?” Voorhees said to me. “You can work on the second shift for the Indian. He’s the snapper on that shift—the foreman.”

  “He is the five-eighths,” said Andressen. “He does not get snapper’s money. He should, but he does not.”

  “Whatever money he gets,” Voorhees said to me, “he’s in charge, and you’ll be put on the books as firewatch for him. I hope you know that there’s nothing lower here than a firewatch. Ordinarily he’s a rummy who hasn’t the perseverance to go through the park hunting up used cigar butts, and we sit him in a corner with a bucket of water to keep the insurance company happy. But the insurance company doesn’t bother us nights, and you’re going to do whatever the Indian wants you to do. He might try to teach you shipbuilding, and he might not. But if he tells you to clean out the toilets you’ll do it, and do it stylishly so that he’s happy about it. There’s only a few men on nights here—fitters, riveters, and welders—so you’ll have your work cut out keeping him happy. Does that opportunity interest you?”

  “Yes.”

  “At least for one night it will. Well, I’ve done my duty by your father; I can’t do any more than that. For the rest we’ll see. I don’t know why it is, but it seems to me that every time I attend a lunch at India House your father is there asking a favor of me. I am not beholden to your father, young man. I knew your grandfather—no, it would be your great-grandfather—but I don’t see why that marks me out as an employment agency for useless young bloods. I don’t like to be bullied because of past acquaintance. Your great-grandfather was a bully-boy—do you know what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was a bully-boy, but he could never bully me. He was an old man and I was younger than you are now when I first did business with him, but he learned soon enough that you can’t push a Dutchman around. Don’t ever think you can. Do you know why I’m doing this favor for your father?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll tell you why. It’s not to encourage your mucker pose, it’s because I happen to be a father myself. Look at that,” he said, and pointed a scrawny hand covered with liver marks at the wall behind me. I turned and saw the yellowing photograph of a young man in an unfamiliar uniform. A naval uniform of some sort. “That is my son Willem,” said Voorhees. “The last I saw of him was thirty years ago, and that’s what I’m trying to spare your father. He was a fine boy, my son.” He darted a hard, searching glance at Andressen, who shifted a little in his chair. “Wasn’t he, Mr. Andressen?”

  “Oh, a fine boy,” said Andressen. “A little wild maybe, but a fine smart boy.”

  Voorhees nodded at me. “Did you hear that? There was nothing that boy couldn’t do when he put his mind to it, but he itched and he twitched all the time, the way all young fools do. When the war came along in fourteen he itched and he twitched until he got himself into the British Navy, and then he could be happy trying to kill himself running a PT boat. Do you know what that is?”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s a stick of wood with a motor at one end and a torpedo at the other and a couple of fools inside to run it. But he ran it well enough to come home after the war and then he could itch and twitch again, putting a knife through me, making me old before my time. Do you recognize yourself in all this, young man? Do you see why I pity your father, who is the last man in the world to ask for anyone’s pity?”

  I didn’t have to wonder how my father must have presented his case against me. I knew. I said, “If your son only wanted to take a job of his own choosing would you have minded?”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Voorhees said. “What matters is that the son heeds the father and learns from him. My son refused me that, just as you’re refusing it to your father. And what are the consequences? He walked out into the world thirty years ago and disappeared from my sight. He’s alive, that much I’m sure of—”

  “He is doing all right wherever he is,” said Andressen soothingly.

  “But to have turned away from me,” Voorhees said to me, not with resentment, but as if he were asking an old, old question whose answer was just beyond reach. “That’s the thing. The cruelty of it. When you think of it like that are you proud of taking the dirty job I can give you?”

  “No,” I said, “but it’s a job.”

  Voorhees sat for a long time looking at me, his hands resting on the desk before him, his forefingers alternately tapping away a slow rhythm. “Well,” he said, “I told your father I’d talk to you and I’ve done it. I can do no more. You say it’s a job, and so it is. Come over here and look at it.”

  He pushed himself out of his chair with an effort and went to the window behind him, and I followed him there. The office was on the top floor of the building; through its window I had a fine view of the action going on below, of the harbor and bay beyond, of a landfall in the distance across the water. The shipyard lay in the outline of a tightly strung bow. The curve of waterfront was the bow, and it extended from a canal at one side to a broad inlet at the other—the Basin, as I later learned it was called. From this bow a series of piers and the vast wooden bulk of a drydock jutted into the water, and beyond the drydock were two ship’s ways, one of which held the incomplete skeleton of a small boat. A tugboat probably, to judge from its shape.

  The string to this bow was the line of buildings, shops, and sheds arrayed between the canal and the Basin. There seemed to be no logical order in their arrangement, and since they varied in size and shape from small wooden shanties to a couple of gigantic steel structure
s that resembled airplane hangars they presented to my inexperienced eye a scene of total confusion. A confusion compounded by the network of railroad tracks running between and around the buildings and bearing jib-cranes which puffed, snorted, rumbled, and screeched back and forth like hungry steel dinosaurs searching for a feeding place. I looked at all of this with the feeling that it would take me a year just to learn my way around it.

  Voorhees said: “When I showed this to your friend Gennaro he didn’t seem much interested. I’m afraid he had the feeling I was wasting his precious time. Is that how you feel?”

  “No.”

  “I hope not. Your father said you had some skill at drawing. Do you?”

  “Not enough to work at it,” I said.

  “Well, the first sign of intelligence is recognizing your limitations. But allowing for the failure of the hand, the eye may still be there. If you apply it to what you’re seeing now you will observe it makes a very neat picture. Very neat. The steel you’ll be working on comes into that canal. We work all our own plates here, we have nothing to do with swindling prefabricating contractors. Over there is the pattern shop where the blueprints are made. Over there is the mold loft where templates are made from the blueprints. You’ll have nothing to do with them unless you’re sent over to sweep them out. That big building beyond is the plating shop where the plates are shaped and cut from the templates, and beyond that is the forge where they’ll make you anything from a bossplate to a paperclip. You don’t know what a bossplate is, do you?”

  “No.”

  The old man’s pale lips twisted sourly at this demonstration of ignorance. “It’s the plate that’s shaped around the propeller shaft at the stern, got a belly on it like half an egg. It takes a skilled man to work it, too, not a shipyard bum. For that matter, it takes a skilled man to have any part of making a tugboat hull. The reason is that a tugboat is the only thing on the water today that makes sense. It’s all of a piece. It is not a floating box or a can or a set of tanks stuck together. It is a boat the way God intended boats to be made. You can count the flat plates in it on the fingers of one hand. It’s all curves, and every curve has a reason. Mr. Andressen will bear me out on that. A thousand years ago his people built wooden hulls no bigger than these and they were good enough to cross the North Atlantic without shipping water. Am I right, Mr. Andressen?”

  I gathered from Andressen’s expression that unlike Voorhees he was not a fanatic on the subject. “Oh,” he said with a straight face, “they might have shipped a little water.”

  Voorhees flicked a razor-edged look at him. “Don’t try to be facetious at my expense while you’re with me, Mr. Andressen. You’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re out of the room. All I wanted you to tell this young man was your opinion of a tugboat as a proper boat. Especially the kind of tug we build here.”

  “Sure, it’s a proper boat,” said Andressen. “As far as the Voorhees hull goes there are anyhow six hundred tugs in New York port, and Voorhees built plenty of them. If they weren’t good we wouldn’t be building them.”

  The old man liked the sound of that. “You hear that, young man? And we not only build them for others, we build and operate them for ourselves. And barges as well. And on that drydock we can take any thirty-five-hundred-ton ship afloat and do a cheaper and better job of repairs on it than any other yard in the port. Yes, and that includes International beyond the Basin there and Slade on the other side of the canal with all their concrete underfoot and chromium and gewgaws. And their fancy boards of directors. And their docks that can take eighty thousand tons of useless floating hotel so that somebody can put new tiles in the swimming pools! As far as they’re concerned we’re an eyesore here. We’re mud in the winter and dust in the summer, and they’d like nothing better than to get their greedy hands on us to turn out another nickel of profit every year for their stockholders. But stockholders don’t build boats, young man, and I do. If I last out this winter my family will have been building boats in this yard for a hundred years and never with any stockholders voting yes or no for them. Your great-grandfather must be turning over in his grave at what happened to his business, but there’s still some of us take pride in holding on to what’s ours. You can learn a lesson from that, young man, the way my son should have. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” I said, and the words sounded in my ears like a nuptial vow. I wasn’t sure what I was marrying—whether it was Voorhees’ shipyard, or the memory of my ancestors and their defunct brickyard, or the cranky and passionate affection that Jacob Voorhees bore for his beleaguered business—but the feeling of high ceremony was in me at that moment, mixed with an almost uncontrollable need to laugh. I managed, fortunately, to choke it down before it could do any harm. I had already seen the consequences when Andressen’s Norse sense of humor got the better of him.

  “All right then,” Voorhees said in dismissal. “You’ll start with the Indian this afternoon, you’ll do what he wants you to do, and if he doesn’t like you, out you go.”

  I said, “Is he really an Indian, or is that what he’s called?”

  “He’s a Mohawk down from the St. Regis Reservation,” Voorhees said. “He’s all Indian, but when you talk to him his name is Guion. Joseph Guion. And he’s married to a Jewess, so be careful about expressing your opinions on Jews before him. I don’t hold with Jews myself, but I can tell you out of the wisdom of my years that it pays to be diplomatic at times. After all, it’s his own business. He probably couldn’t find a Pocahontas around here, so he settled for a Becky, and, for all I know, Mohawks and Brooklyn Jews all come from the same Lost Tribe. Anyhow, be discreet about it. And when you see your father tell him I’ve done him his favor, and now I wash my hands of it. Good day to you, young man, good day to you, Mr. Andressen, I have work to do. I’ve wasted enough of the little time remaining to me on earth.”

  Andressen followed close behind me as I went down the stairs. “Little time remaining,” he kept saying under his breath, testing it with different inflections, slyly savoring it. “Little time remaining. Ho!”

  As if it were the finest joke he had ever heard in his life.

  I doubt that there was ever an Indian who looked more like an Indian than Joe Guion. I found him by following the general direction given me by a departing day worker when I re-entered the shipyard gate late that afternoon, and by working my way over and around piles of rusting steel plates, stacks of wood reeking of creosote, cinder heaps, and a tangle of cables, wires, and compressed-air hoses which hissed at me from their couplings like warning puff adders. The yard was almost deserted now; of all the cranes I had seen that morning trundling back and forth, only one showed signs of life. It stood near the way on which rested the framework of the partly built boat, black smoke belching from its stack, and near it stood Guion, the center of a small circle of men.

  He had the flat face, the jutting nose, the pronounced cheekbones hewn to the classical Indian mold, and his eyes, so black that there was almost no definition between pupil and iris, seemed pushed to a slant by the thrust of those cheekbones. His hair was black, too, a glistening sooty black, and it had been cut so short that it stood up brushlike on his head. And his skin was darkly brown, the mahogany brown that Ben used to work so hard to achieve each summer. I could not help thinking of Ben when I looked at Guion. Ben had been tall and lithe where Guion was short and square, but they shared the same ease of gesture and manner, the same hard good-looks, the same quality of being in command of the situation whatever the situation was. Comparing them in my mind’s eye I found that Guion did not come off badly at all.

  I waited until he had finished giving the men around him their instructions, and when they had gone their way I went over to him and told him who I was. Close up I saw that he was not as young as I had thought him to be at first glance. He was probably nearer forty than thirty.

  He took his time surveying me from head to foot and then said, “You’re not what I expected. Not much, anyhow.” />
  “What did you expect?”

  “Well, Andressen sort of gave me the idea you were some kind of wild-eyed college kid. You talk college, but you don’t look like any wild-eyed kid to me. And the papers were full of this Gennaro thing when it happened, so I had some of my own ideas, too.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “What’s the difference? Gennaro was a great guy, wasn’t he?”

  “Did you get to know him when he was here?”

  “He was on days. If you last here you’ll find out this shift don’t have much to do with days. But I follow football. Used to play some when I was in the Seabees—you know, the Navy construction outfit. You been in the service yet?”

  “I was turned down. I had scarlet fever when I was a kid and it did something to one of my eardrums. Not serious, but enough to keep me out.”

  “Your good luck. Andressen told me the old man gave you the works when you were up there with him—the big talk. What did you think about it?”

  “Well,” I said, “he seems to like his tugboats.”

  “He likes his money, the old bugger. He gives everybody that talk so they won’t bother him about money, they’ll be glad to work for nothing on these tin ducks or on those tubs he gets in drydock. Did he tell you all about how Slade is trying to squeeze him out? How once this yard is gone there won’t be anybody around to make real boats any more?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That shows you. The old son of a bitch is on Slade’s board of directors himself. And on the board of half the banks in Brooklyn. The only thing gets him is he’s got nobody in the family to leave the yard to. He outlived a couple of daughters and his son ain’t been seen around for years. He’s a bug on this family business, and it kills him to think Slade’ll take over when he’s gone. You see this place here? It kills him to put a dime into it. He’s got the best shipbuilding men in town here, but when it comes to safety or equipment or lighting or anything we need, we can go beg. You go tell him you need more lights at night or blowers so you won’t choke in the double bottoms or something to fill in the mudholes you fall into all over this place, and he tells you we got the best safety record of any yard in New York. He says that when the men know it’s dangerous they take better care. How can you beat him?”