You Were There Before My Eyes

by Maria Riva

  “Oh, Ebbely—no terrible var talk on dis fine New Year’s Day.”

  “Forgive me, my dear.”

  But the subject had been voiced and now lay heavy about the room. Carl was the first to break the silence. “There isn’t a man on the line by now who hasn’t lost someone back home.”

  “We are already shipping enough war materials to England—why can’t we just go over there and finish the job for them?”

  “Yes, we probably should have gone to war when they sank the Lusitania,” Ebbely agreed.

  “Thus speaks our only neutral.”

  “In this bloody war there can be no neutrals—I don’t give a damn what President Wilson says.” Johann ground out his cigarette.

  Fritz sighed, “Ja, we can’t hold out much longer …”

  Peter lit his cigarette. “The Boss said he will burn down the plant before he makes the machinery of war.”

  “Likely story,” Stan scoffed.

  John disagreed, “I think he means it.”

  “Henry Ford means whatever gets him a good newspaper headline.”

  Ebbely jumped into a brewing confrontation between John and Stan. “Talking about headlines—I read that Ford is blaming that woman for his Peace Ship fiasco. Says—and I quote—that ‘she took him in, used him to gain importance for herself like all the money-grabbing Jews.’”

  Hannah rose from the arm of her husband’s chair. “Ebbely—you hear? Young Mr. Edsel is now a fine married man. Fine vedding they had?”

  “And now because he’s secretary of the whole company, last August he signed personally a thirty-four-million-dollar contract for our rubber tires with Mr. Firestone … at just twenty-two! Imagine!” added Peter proudly.

  They were back to what suited them best—the subject they knew and trusted—and so talked shop, brought Ebbely up to date until Hannah announced, “Everybody! First supper of dis 1917 New Year! Ready! Come eat!”

  Lingering guilt that it was he who had unthinkingly broached the subject of war, Ebbely asked Fritz in private, what if anything he thought he could do to help their friends. There had always been a sage closeness between the two, completely separate from the frills and flourish of the little man’s affection for the other man’s wife.

  “Ebberhardt, my friend—I don’t think there is anything anyone can do. But it must be hard—not to be in the fight. Over there helping. Now I don’t have that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I come from the bad side—so I am not feeling guilty I’m not over there fighting for my old country. Here, this is my country now—for us Germans it is hard, but maybe also easier—know what I mean?”

  “You mean it is easier to turn your back on what is bad than to desert what is good?”

  “Ja, that’s what I mean.”

  “You have a point. What about Rudy? He’s Austrian—does he feel the way you do?”

  “You know I think he is already fighting a war—his own war—so he has no time for the Big One.”

  “Poor boy—what a waste.”

  “Ja, just when he made supervisor the Boss even spoke to him, called him ‘Rudy’—knew his name. Best Chassis Man I ever saw. Knows his trade.”

  “John seems to be doing alright.”

  “Ach, you know our John. Ever since he was a boy fresh off the boat—he never changed. He’s designing now—I don’t know what—but it’s not just tools no more. Even young Mr. Edsel thinks John is going places.”

  “If Henry Ford were really God …”

  “Our John would be a priest!” Fritz finished for him, laughing.

  “You ever hear from that annoying nephew of Hannah’s?”

  “No. Never. His parents think we did something to chase him away. Now you know we didn’t …”

  “Of course not. But—you weren’t sad when he went.”

  “Something about that boy—couldn’t put my finger on it—just a feeling …”

  “Aha—one of your famous feelings? A good or bad one?”

  “Bad.” Fritz said it softly.

  “Listen, take my word for it. Never have anything to do with him again—if he ever comes back, lock the door!”

  “Hey—I couldn’t do that …”

  “Well, you better! Because that’s a Hun—a real Hun—even if you aren’t!”

  “You think we’ll get into the war? Stan does.”

  “Well, of course the papers keep it quiet—but I hear rumors. There’re so many being killed they’re actually running out of men over there. If we don’t send them reinforcements this war may last until everyone is dead or crippled.”

  “Where you hear that?”

  “Here and there—I even heard rumors of mutiny—soldiers just refusing to go on killing, on all sides, just leaving the trenches.”

  “Mein Gott!”

  “I’ve been seriously thinking of joining up myself.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me! Do you know, the British are so desperate for men they now have a special battalion for little men—five feet and under?”

  “You’re joking!”

  “No, it’s true! I heard it in Baton Rouge from a very reliable source. They’re called the Bantams and in the trenches they dig a shelf for themselves to stand on so that they can see over the top to shoot!”

  “Hannah won’t let you.”

  “My dear Fritz—I admire, adore, even … cherish your wife—but there I would have to draw my masculine line.”

  “We come here because no war—then the Spanish-American start …”

  “That was just a skirmish compared …”

  “Ja—but killing is still killing. But I worry, so much is changing, know what I mean?”

  “Yes, but tell me …”

  “Well, first here our Highland Park—so nice a village it was—now even our big pond is too full for free and easy skating.”

  “Yes—I noticed—certainly more crowded than it was last year.”

  “See. And the plant—sure I know it’s all great big business—we make lots of money—everybody gets rich—even us—but now just hard labor—standing—like Stan said long ago—what monkeys can do—but the men are not monkeys in the brain and … ! I see sometimes a sort of no complaining suffering—not just because of this war—something else—and that worries me. Ach, I talk too much!” Fritz smiled apologetically. Ebbely shook his head, motioned him to continue. “Well, I have this feeling …” Fritz held up a hand as Ebbely reacted. “Don’t get excited like Zoltan. No, this one is not for one thing—this is like for everything. Hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “Well, like I said—here too many new people—at work too many—even in the city of Detroit too many now—and every day more come and more—everywhere everything is changing—even in the whole world after this butcher’s war will never be like it used to be.”

  “True, quite true. I hear some say the mass slaughter over there will be the end to all war. Can you believe that?”

  Fritz repacked his pipe. “Do you?”

  Ebbely shifted in his chair. “I want to. What a human tragedy it would be if it isn’t.”

  “In the old country I read too many history books.”

  Ebbely smiled, “Is that the German in you talking or the Jew?”

  “Ach—you know Ebberhardt—I never think of that being separated.”

  “You should, my friend—I think you should.”

  “Why?” asked Fritz, his innocence startled.

  “Just a feeling—mine this time, my friend.”

  Hannah slid open the parlor doors. “What you doing you two?”

  Ebbely jumped out of his chair. “I know, I know—wash up for supper—right, my Lady Fair?”

  “Right, my second favorite Bubbele and take dis Fritz wit you.”
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  “Yes, Mama!” they caroled as they scampered up the stairs.

  “Ah! It must be Noodle Day! There you are, Tall Lady!” Ebbely broke off in mid-riff.

  Jane hesitated in the doorway. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “You don’t. Someone listening puts me on my metal. Come sit. Anything special you want to hear?”

  “I like your jazz when you play it slow.”

  “That’s what’s called the blues. Got the blues, Jane?”

  “I don’t understand. What is blues?”

  “When you’re sad—and you feel low and your heart aches with too much longing of the hopeless kind.”

  “Then you’re blue?”

  “Then you’re blue.”

  “Why music?”

  “It helps. In your homeland don’t people wail when someone dies?”

  “What is wail? That’s a word I don’t know.”

  “A lament, a cry to the Heavens or to God, if you prefer.”

  “Oh. In Italy, down in the south they do that all the time—but that’s not music.”

  “Still it’s an expression of sorrow. Here in our South, slaves created glorious music out of their sorrows. Their music has words that tell stories—listen …”

  When he was done, Jane—not knowing why she felt she must whisper, asked, “Ebbely, what was that?!”

  “A spiritual.”

  “Not the blues?”

  “A spiritual uplifts the spirit—reaches out to hope. The blues is a human complaint—a sadness that simply exists.”

  Jane wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

  “Have you ever seen a slave, Ebbely? What are they like?”

  “Oh, child, where did you get your schooling?”

  “The Benedictine nuns taught us.”

  “Any American history?”

  “No! Oh, Christopher Columbus, of course.”

  “That’s because he was an Italian no doubt.” Ebbely chuckled running his fingers over the keys. “What about Abraham Lincoln? Ring a bell?”

  Jane frowned, concentrating. “I think he was a very good American president.”

  “Right! You can go to the head of the class!”

  “Please don’t joke, Ebbely—you cannot imagine how I hate not knowing things I should know—that others know already. I wish I could go to school here—not Mr. Ford’s—but a real one and learn everything. I thought when I came—but now …”

  “You are just a dutiful wife and mother. So now you’re blue?”

  “Yes, I think I must be—but that’s not right, is it?”

  “Dissatisfaction with the mundane is never wrong.”

  Again Jane had trouble understanding the words and his meaning. Too shy to keep on showing her ignorance, she sat quietly in her chair and listened as Rumpelstiltskin played ragtime, which confused her even further.

  16

  Already her third winter as mistress of her own home, everyday life was becoming routine. The washing, mending, ironing, cleaning, cooking—interrupted by sequenced child caring—all had their allotted time, their necessary depletion of energy. As Jane had promised—she did it well, without complaint. Her marriage too had become set in its ways—a union based on conformity, a connubial friendship if not a sexual one; it sufficed. If this young mountain stranger ever needed raw emotion, her work as one of Hannah’s Watchers at times supplied her a forfeit of it. Each time she left the stifling slums it resulted in reaffirming her gratitude to the man who provided for her and their children. Those nights when he took her—that persistent disappointment for what she herself could not identify the origin of—never compared with what John gave her in daily tangibles.

  John was also unemotionally content. Never having loved a woman as wife and mother, the less complicated she made it—the more natural the result seemed. If he had been a modern man and therefore obligated by contemplative fashion to question his feelings, he might have become confused by the intricacy of being so comfortable within what had every right to be an uncomfortable union. But he was a man of his time, his expected duty, to provide, protect those in his keeping, once assigned, this difficult task accomplished, his male duty done, no one—least of all he—expected of himself further effort.

  This early twentieth-century male knew exactly what society demanded of him. His lack of needing to continually search for inner confirmation bred a male confidence that at its best was utterly captivating to his women—at its worst could be indescribably cruel. Like most men of those times, he felt that being dependent on a man was preordained as a woman’s destiny—except for a few mavericks who challenged it or those who obliged it only to survive.

  But for Jane, freedom had been her sought-after lover and as with most romantic needs, what exactly the achievement of her dream would entail had been made opaque by the sheer desperate wanting of it. Now no longer a dissatisfied girl—simply a dissatisfied woman whose acquired responsibilities she handled better than her uncertainties, at the age of nearly twenty-one Jane was ready for love and didn’t know it. If she had, she wouldn’t have known what that required either. That the possibility existed that she could fall in love with the man who had married her for their mutual convenience was quite beyond her emotional capabilities. Yet he stood in the doorway of her future’s maturity—and she, forever distrustful of what she needed most—saw only the provider not the man.

  January was ending when Imperial Germany notified the United States that the forced, selective moratorium decreed by Woodrow Wilson on its submarine warfare was null and void. Therefore, on February 1 its U-boat wolf packs would resume their hunt, sink any and all Atlantic shipping regardless of nationality. Adding, as a magnanimous gesture, that neutral America would be permitted safe passage of one ship a week if it identified itself by displaying a designated ensign of red and white zebra stripes or if its hull was painted in a similar pattern. Left with no further diplomatic maneuvers or choice, President Wilson severed diplomatic ties and asked Congress for a declaration of war.

  While the nation waited, Henry Ford announced to the press, “I cannot believe that war will come, but in the event of a declaration of war, I will place our factory at the disposal of the United States government and will operate without one cent of profit.” And the Ford Motor Company increased the speed of its assembly lines.

  Even before John could read of it in his Italian-American newspaper or Carl and Peter in their Polish ones, Fritz heard from his Russians that their czar had abdicated, and starving peasants rioting for bread had been shot down by the dreaded Cossacks. Mother Russia was in the grip of a fledgling revolution.

  Finally on April 6, the United States entered the Great War as combatant—its president rechristening it the “war to end all wars,” America’s mission “to make the world safe for democracy.” And overnight Fritz and Hannah became Huns. The zealot’s cry “The only good Hun is a dead Hun” frightening them.

  Within days, the Ford Motor Company stopped all civilian production, dedicated its workforce to the execution of government war contracts. As with the Five-Dollar-Day, once again Detroit and its Ford Motor Company became the beckoning pot of gold for desperate men. This time instead of an influx of mostly immigrants, now migrants from out of the deep South turned parts of the inner city and some of the surrounding outskirts into shantytowns.

  “My friends, we are fast becoming a classless society,” Zoltan settled in his chair.

  John had invited his friends home after work to discuss the latest news and was about to answer him when Ebbely interrupted him. “That’s a load of … how can I put this politely? Will crap do?”

  “Ebbely, you actually don’t believe that?”

  “No, John.”

  “Well, from Stan I would have expected it, but from you, why? You’re not a radical.”

  “What is a radical?”

&nb
sp; “A troublemaker. A unionist …”

  Stan was ready to challenge that, when Carl changed the subject. “The darkies are overrunning the city. One of my men told me in the rooming houses they now sleep in shifts. Three shifts, so, three men to one cot.”

  “What happens on Sundays?”

  “The last Saturday shift man gets the cot and the others sleep on the floor.”

  “All single men?” asked Ebbely.

  “Yes. Those that brought families are huddled in slapped up lean-tos.”

  “Well, that should supply our busy inspectors with righteous fodder!”

  “Stan, why are you so dead set against … ?”

  Johann interrupted, “He’s not the only one, John. Have you seen that little black book they carry around with them?”

  “No.”

  “Well, my friend, let me open your eyes …”

  “Yes, John,” Ebbely’s voice held censure, “you really should investigate these goings-on before …”

  “And what’s so terrible in helping these people to a decent life? We’ve been doing it with the others for years!”

  “Ah, that magic word help.”

  “Now even a word is wrong?”

  Zoltan cleared his throat. “John, there is a dangerous chasm between helping and forcing.”

  “You too?”

  “Yes, John—me too! Sometimes your blind devotion to Ford is simply childish.”

  Johann leaned back in his chair. “Okay—don’t take our word for it—go ask some of the women.”

  “Oh, what would they know—they always exaggerate the least little incident and they …”

  Stan interrupted. “Well, that is true—Serafina gives me blazing hell for the slightest …”

  “You should live a day in my house, Stan.” Peter joined a topic he was versed in. “I get the ‘Well, my first husband didn’t hang his pants on the bedpost—he knew what was proper behavior!’ Nothing like a widow to make a second man feel no good.”

  “You think you’ve got something to complain about? Ever live under one roof with Irish temper? My God, my Rosie throws things—at me!”