Gain

by Richard Powers

  All the British knew was how to undersell. And this they knew cold, on account of their advanced alkali industry. America suffered from a superabundance of potash: lyes leached from wood ash, burnt seaweed, waste wool—all the hydroxides and carbonates that littered the American woodlands the way buffalo littered the endless plains. Lacking this natural blessing, English soap-and candlemakers were thrown back upon ingenuity. After the Frenchman Leblanc stumbled upon a formula for making soda out of table salt, Albion leaped upon the process and engineered it into functional reality:

  2NaCl + H2SO4 = Na2SO4 + 2HCl

  Na2SO4 + 2C = Na2S + 2CO 2

  Na2S + CaCO3 = CaS + Na2CO3

  The symbols traipsed across the page, as cryptic as the skittering beetle code in that story by Mr. Poe from the Philadelphia Dollar Weekly. The first equation was a cotillion, a quadrille of decoupling and recoupling. Na and Cl parted amicably, grabbing the split partners of 2H and SO4 to forge new squares while still balancing beautifully across the equal sign. The second spun a sprightly Roger de Coverley, the terpsichorean set-and-a-half breaking down longways in the winding hey, SO4 cracking into two new dancers of its own right, with never a leg being gained or lost.

  The third equation spun to another dos-à-dos, still balanced, yet changing everything. This time, the recombining partners found, in their new mates, a net increment of worth left behind in the retort. The human hand led matter into a more beneficial state, leaving Britain with a booming trade and bringing to the world hitherto unimaginable riches.

  For half a century, these three equations were the international chemical industry. Salt and sulfuric acid in; calcium sulfide and all-useful alkaline soda out. A wave of the invisible hand turned the commonplace into the invaluable. The scientific age at last stabilized the old fairy story. Man now spun worth from worthlessness, gold from dross.

  What was good for the supplier was good for the purchaser. Plentiful and consistent alkali passed down the chain of consumption, enriching all intermediaries. It made for a better and cheaper soap, the whole world gaining.

  The Clares applauded the alkali process’s transforming dance. Yet they did not fancy anyone else’s distant empire calling the tune. Native Balm at last gave them the first hint of how to beat the industrious British at their own game. The brown and aromatic herbal soap with its secret healing extract might make of that chemical quadrille a brisk New England square dance. Might turn that sprightly Roger de Coverley into raucous Virginia reel.

  Native Balm soap with secret extract of Healing Root

  will cure several cutaneous and dermal disorders,

  including, but not limited to, pimples, Salt Rheum,

  freckling and discoloration, Etc.

  It will remove Tetter, heal ruptures and boils,

  firm the muscle, and prevent many further diseases

  of the skin as well as graver bodily illnesses.

  Native Balm is a Consummate, and unequaled,

  fully warranted article for washing and cleaning,

  and for the overall promotion of the Body’s

  Health.

  Native Balm Soap with extract of Healing Root spread by word of mouth. Its fame traveled infinitely slower than Morse’s idle theological banter spread down the copper wires. Yet over time, regional salesmen refused to leave the Hub without ample stocks.

  Within the decade, general stores as far away as Ohio began to ask their jobbers for the bar with the Indian head on it. The Brave eventually made cameo appearances in jingle and joke. If, as the slogans soon put it, soap was the measure of civilization, Native Balm, in its peak years, became the measure of soap.

  The factory system’s best trick lay in releasing nature’s secret of simple beneficence. Nowhere did any promotional matter claim that this bygone savage knew the first thing about soap’s existence. Imagination and the health movement supplied that suggestion. The Indian never worried about his complexion. It was up to the savvy purchaser to recover that state of worry-free grace.

  Ordinary soaps, especially the homemade, merely cleaned your skin. Native Balm not only removed those same harmful oils and impurities from the integument. With its herbal extract it also restored chemical balances that modern living forfeited, correcting and returning the skin to its state of initial purity.

  In time, its appeal cut across social strata, from Astor to ash tender. Taverners lathered it on. Scions summering at Sulphur Springs compared cosmetic results. The noble Indian profile stamped on each otherwise plain bar proclaimed, even to the illiterate, the revival of powerful, primitive arts.

  Native Balm Soap entered the homes of the poor as well as the middle class. Patent medicine at a factory price, home remedy in a box: it crossed over the line dividing these two worlds, selling each side its own desires. In a world that washed up with death, soap was the chief weapon against disease and fever. And Native Balm spared lives while saving pennies. It appealed to the freed Negro and even made inroads into the desperate immigrant nests of Boston’s North End and New York’s Five Points.

  It fought William Colgate and Son down the seaboard. It worked its way out west, as far as Chicago, where trade with the Sac, Fox, and Natchez had recently been forever wiped out. There it competed with some success against the brothers-in-law Procter and Gamble, whose Mottled German and Oleine had good head starts. Peddlers purchased lots on their way out to work the Indian Territory.

  The national dance craze boosted use, as did the rise of photography. No one wanted skin they had to worry about. The steady accumulation of personal wealth only fed the national dream of one day spending oneself free of prosperity.

  As much as they sold soap, the Clares also sold dependability, which is to say trust by its married name. Buying no longer involved a gamble. Any bar stamped with the Brave was in every way indistinguishable from any other.

  Native Balm Soap grossed $40,000 in its first full year of sales. In the years thereafter, the company grew almost as fast as the country itself. As candles disappeared, various native unguents took their place. “How are you off for soap?” went the era’s favorite sass. To those in the business, the link between cleanser and cash—the whole idea of “cleaning up”—was never less than literal.

  The Red Man worked a change on all the lives that had brought him into being. The Clare factory swelled to a hundred workers, then another hundred. Jewitt retired at fifty, to a heaven of novels. Later, in his waning years, he produced a book of his own, about a dynasty of insidious Boston Brahmin manufacturers. The book sold well, though not as well as Native Balm.

  Ennis, promoted to operations manager, amassed enough capital to build his wife a small mausoleum. A monument paid for by cleanliness, hygiene that might have saved her life, as it now saved so many others. Ben Clare now tended to his beloved Cambridge greenhouses with his brothers’ blessings. His life neaped and ebbed to the hushed surf of a solitude bought by soap.

  The Red Man never worried about cash, Resolve told his small band of employees. Why should you? The 1860 edition of Biography of the Wealthiest Men of Boston listed all the Clares. But Resolve was the wealthiest of the three. He stood in every way at the height of his powers. He was fixed for soap forever.

  His own father had brought his family to the colonies on a pallet of Wedgwood plates. Jephthah Clare’s world had vanished in steam, slaughtered like kine straying across time’s thundering tracks. But Resolve had ported the Clare capital over into new worlds, widening that wealth beyond imagining. His own daughter had even risen to the gentility of published poetry, albeit a volume secretly subsidized by the company coffers.

  By all measures, business left him with nothing left to do.

  Samuel was too aged and benign to be of much more use. Ben had paid his dues; the soap works had gotten more out of the chemist than anyone ever expected. But Peter, Douglas, William—the next generation—would in time mind the store, sell the soap, tend the production runs. And after them: other Clare fathers, other Clare sons.<
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  A businessman must know his every purpose. He must know every detail, must keep all his goals well defined, while still keeping the shape of ultimate arrival somewhat obscure. Resolve’s mistake was in letting himself arrive.

  Resolve Clare died six weeks after Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter. The death certificate indicated natural causes. But he died, in fact, of fulfillment.

  She follows the week of the treatment with a week of vomiting, a week of debilitating nausea, and a week of mere massive fatigue, during which her chief illness consists of knowing that next week is treatment week again.

  “It’s just like the ancient past,” Tim decides, “when everybody was sick all the time?” The first little glint of analog interest in his eyes she has seen for months. “I had to do this report, for science? Man, you wouldn’t believe what those olden guys used to do for medicine. The barber used to be the surgeon? And he’d cut you up with razors, to let your blood out. Or they’d stick leeches all over you. Or they’d make you eat little bits of mercury, even though—”

  “Sweetie. Sweetheart. You like science?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Better than poetry?” she teases.

  “Beats the sulfite out of poetry.”

  “How’s come?” Like he used to say for everything, until he was ten. How’s come you do that? How’s come that happened?

  “Cooler stuff. You can do things with it.”

  Medieval: he’s right. Bloodletting and mercury. Sometimes when she wakes, for several seconds, she cannot say whose life she has been spirited into. She lies fetal, crumpled into the no-crumple comforter, all stick and corn silk, one of those burial mound mummies that so spooked her on grade-school field trips, before they closed the mounds forever.

  Often she lies awake through the entire night. When she does somehow drift off, she sometimes dreams ravishing music. So much richer than any music she has ever heard that it wakes her up in fright.

  She suffers the drive-by assaults of friends and acquaintances, people who would never drop in were she not sick, but who refuse to say the word when they do visit. Get together, to ignore the rhino at the table.

  Grace Wambaugh, a colleague at the office who never speaks to her, shows up with a case full of herbal remedies. “This one’s ginkgo biloba, from the tree. It’ll repair your brain-blood flow. For any memory or absentmindedness. The ginger can help with nausea. Here’s some echinacea, to boost your immunity system. You could probably use a little boosting about now. This one is called ephedra, although you may know it as mahuang or epitonin. It’ll get your energy levels back up.

  “You take these,” Grace tells her, tumbling a small mountain of plastic sample containers onto Laura’s coffee table. “My gift. If you need any more, you just call me, anytime. And maybe someday you’ll do the same for folks who you know who, you know, aren’t feeling too well.”

  “This is awfully kind of you, Grace,” Laura says. It touches her, this cold woman, coming to bring her these cures. All plants: the gardener in her has always believed in the health value of green things. And even if these remedies come closer to patent medicine than to nature, this stranger’s concern works its own medicine.

  “Thank you, Grace. I’m . . . I really appreciate this.”

  Only after the visit, when Laura looks over the material that Grace has left behind with the bottles, does she realize. It’s an Amway scheme.

  The jewel-like gel caplets stink like rotting squirrel meat. Before chemo, she never knew how weird the world smells. Never suspected that a crust of white bread really tastes like chrome. Until getting sick, she took edible things at face value. Now they gang up, show her what’s under the hood. Just like that old film. The Scent of Dorian Gray. The thing may look like a firm, fresh, golden banana. But just underneath the slick disguise, it’s worms smeared on wet concrete.

  This universal left shift of aroma makes it harder and harder to drag herself down to breakfast. She knows she’s in trouble when even Ellen starts beating her to the kitchen in the mornings. Ellen’s in the breakfast nook when Laura comes down after her first night of valerian-supplement-assisted insomnia. On a Sunday morning. After a Saturday night. It must be close to noon. Ellen, crouched over a cereal box. Proof that the age of print is not yet dead.

  “Good morrow, Mama-san. Hey, Mom? I gotta read you something. Did you know that modern, industrial-era grains have been weakened and degraded by mass agricultural practices? I’m not kidding. Listen to this. It says right here. Monocrop inbreeding. ‘Only archaic grains like spelt and quinoa give you . . . ’”

  Her daughter’s idea of a peace offering. Mom, Mom, Mom. Look at me. Play with me. Don’t you dare pull anything. Continuous performance, not daring to stop for a second.

  “Not awake yet, Ellie.” Not asleep yet from yesterday, actually.

  “All is forgiven, Mother Unit.” Cyborg drone, now. “We will assist you in achieving consciousness.” Ellen swings behind Laura’s chair and begins to knead the mother unit’s shoulders. In her previous life, Laura would have lapped up this touch. Now it just hurts, although she says nothing.

  From can’t-stand-to-be-in-the-same-county to this constant touching and banter. An abrupt one-eighty, in just about as many hours. It’s the hair loss that did it. The patch at the crown of her head. The little, pink, cured-pork rind of Mother’s bared scalp brings it home to Ellen: this is really happening.

  Shifting, wincing, Laura suffers the raw press of her daughter’s hands willing her softer. At the same time, she tries to sort through the pile of yesterday’s junk mail and catalogs. All she gets anymore. She’s even started to get junk E-mail.

  “Mom, Mom. Don’t throw that out. Didn’t you read what it says? ‘This may be your last issue of our free catalog, if you don’t order.’ ”

  “Ellie.”

  “And then again, it may not. Ooh, look! Little fake security systems. Just stick this remarkably lame-looking plastic template to the side of your house, and it might trick a blind, reality-challenged burglar into thinking that your house is protected by alarms.”

  “Providing he’s not on the same national advertising mass-mailing lists as you are.”

  “Shrewd mom. Savvy mom. Don’t let them catch you napping.”

  “I wish they could catch me napping.”

  Ellen leans around, face in her face. “Trouble again last night? Did you try eating that lady’s herbs?”

  “I ate the one for sleep problems. Maybe I should eat the ‘Carnal Appetite Booster.’ ”

  “She gave you that? Lemme see.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Laura looks over the flier ads while Ellen grows newly entranced with hammering her clavicle. She catalog-shops for the new sofa she ordered last week, just to see how much better she might have done somewhere else. She tries to concentrate, to cull the good deals from the good copy.

  “Remind me again,” she asks her daughter. “Which is stronger: Mega, Super, or Ultra?”

  “Mom! Get real. Which do you think?”

  She doesn’t know what to think. Thinking is increasingly beyond her. She studies the stack of no-risk offers. She imagines a house full of complimentary magazine issues. Like her bookshelf when she was growing up, all the fifty-nine-cent Aardvark to Azimuth volumes her mother never followed up on. If she’d only gone to a college where she could have specialized in the early part of the alphabet. If she’d only gotten a disease that started with “A.”

  Free, Mrs. Laur A. Bodey. No obligation. If you aren’t satisfied, just mark “cancel” across the invoice and this free issue is yours to keep. As far as she can see, the only catch is the minor humiliation of having to punch out the little sticker and put it in the premarked circle. But even that is part of the sell. Back in real estate school, they taught her that people actually like to get involved. Like to insert the irrelevant tab in the unnecessary slot. Makes you feel that you’re doing something to earn the prize.

  She wonders if it’s immo
ral to take one of these offers, knowing full well that you have no intention of subscribing. But no; that’s the deal. That’s the promotion. They’re betting you’ll change your mind, or that you’ll forget and pay the invoice by accident. They’re so sure it’s ad money well spent that they sell their mailing lists to one another, even after you’ve stiffed them. Or maybe they sell your name because you stiffed them, to stiff the other outfits they’re selling the mailing lists to.

  But then, how is it that she gets second offers from the same place? Hit me again. Of course, they’re all set to cheat her back. They lose her cancellations, keep sending her issues. She’s canceled this Amateur Gardening three or four times—by print, fax, and 1-800 order line—and still keeps getting copies. Like they think that one day she’ll throw in the towel and put her savings back into circulation. Share the wealth. Better for everyone.

  She has a look at the latest issue: another cover story on the composting controversy. She tries to follow the feature article, threading its way down the page between ads like a column of cavalry down an ambush-studded defile.

  With some effort, she gets to her feet. She moves across the kitchen, absently pursuing her belated health diet. High fiber. Antioxidants. Better late than never.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to have coffee,” Ellen rags her.

  “I can have coffee.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to have any coffee until after you were done with all that medicine crap.”

  “I can have a cup of coffee, Ellen.”

  Her daughter storms out of the kitchen in a huff. The clowny nonaggression, the pact against hair loss follow behind her.

  Laura decides to spend Sunday the way the day was meant to be spent. She will go sink her feet in the season’s last mud. She can bend over now without busting a gut. The garden is a nightmare of neglect. Her plants have forgotten that a hand ever tended them.

  But the lightest workout winds her. She goes around back and gets a lawn chair. She winnows for a while, then sits for a while. Soon she is sitting more than she is winnowing. Then she winnows while sitting down.