Gain

by Richard Powers

  Business will pick up. She just has to ride things out. Try to pick up the pace, whenever she can. Keep everything managed. Try to look as good as she can. She drinks those cans of Ensure so she doesn’t seem totally gaunt and wasted. She boosts her arsenal of headgear, trying to find some turban that won’t look totally ridiculous with a two-piece suit. She even goes with a tawny wig, one that fits her without making her face seem like a plastic taxidermist’s inset.

  In the mirror, she hikes up the edges of nausea’s mouth. Yanks at her cheek muscles, like trying to ring the bell at the state fair. She can almost make it as high as pleasant bewilderment. About that cancerous color she can do nothing. That slight sulfurous tint, like a bad black-and-blue mark three weeks after impact.

  Her client list seems as full as ever. The pool of houses is not especially great for this time of year, but prices are livable. She would blame some downturn, some break in the cycle, except that everyone else seems to be doing fine. Grace is all over her listings. Phyllis polishes off that funky Victorian on Main that Laura piddled around with for weeks.

  Her boss asks her to lunch. Wouldn’t have set off any alarms if he hadn’t made reservations at Fallcreek. Lindsey never eats at Fallcreek unless it’s bad news or a big account. These days, Laura doesn’t qualify as the latter.

  “It’s just lunch,” he tells her, on the drive over. “You didn’t have to dress up.”

  “Lindsey! This is my work suit. This is what I always wear.”

  “Is it? Oh, listen. I love this song.”

  Laura listens. It’s easier than talking. The song is some throbbing bass thing that Ellen might get off on. Lindsey ought to be listening to light classics. He’s forty-four if he’s a day. The song is sung by a girl who sounds as if she’s eight years old and addicted to heroin.

  “What do you like about it?” she asks.

  Lindsey looks at her sidelong and laughs. “Are you kidding?”

  At the restaurant, the hostess tells them there will be a ten-minute wait.

  “We have reservations,” Lindsey tells the woman.

  “I know. We have you right at the top of the list.”

  “What’s a reservation?” Lindsey demands. “I mean, what does that word mean, ‘reservation’?”

  The hostess is frantic with calm. “You can sit at the bar and order drinks if you like. We’ll call you when we have your table cleared, sir.”

  Lindsey looks at Laura: Can you believe this?

  “I know,” Laura says. “It’s okay.”

  They sit in the packed bar, Lindsey complaining about the house red, and Laura nursing a seltzer. “Would you like to take a little break?” he proposes, apropos of nothing.

  “Break?” she asks.

  “Sure. Go play. Someplace warm.”

  “I’ve got kids, Lindsey.”

  “Bring ’em. Relax somewhere. Vacation. Get better.”

  “I’ve got a closing on Thursday and two inspections next week.”

  “Oh, finish whatever you’re winding up.”

  “And all the other stuff I’m in the middle of?”

  “I’ve spoken to the girls. They’re ready to help.”

  She tries to slow things down. Worse than she thought. She can’t seem to think fast enough. “You want me to stop working?”

  “Just for a while. I’m not saying you shouldn’t come back later. When you feel like it.”

  “I feel like it now, Lindsey.”

  “I don’t think that people, people . . . who are dealing with what you are dealing with should have to try to sell houses on top of it.”

  “Bald people, you mean?”

  He looks away. Out the window. There is no window. “A lot of people have been upset, Laura. Upset for you, of course.”

  “People? What people? You mean the other agents?”

  “I mean people. The people we work with. The people we work for.”

  “Clients?” A hand rises up to worry her mouth. “Has anyone said anything?”

  He smiles at her. He moves to put his hand on her shoulder, but she wills him not to.

  “I’m still making money. Aren’t I still making money? Lindsey?”

  “You are . . . making some money.”

  “Not enough. Not enough? Lindsey, how much . . . ?”

  Lindsey nurses the house red, which has all of a sudden improved in quality. “It’s a per-broker averages thing. We need to be more competitive. Millennium is about to convert from a partnership to a . . .”

  She begins to cry. Then harder, because of how stupid it is, to cry here, the very place he brought her so that she wouldn’t be able to cry.

  “I wear these scarves. I’m spending a fortune on the damn scarves.”

  She can’t control herself. She sits there sobbing, proving Lindsey’s point. Women exist on this earth just to prove men’s points. She only hopes it’s killing him, to be stared at in public.

  “Go ahead,” he tells her. “Cry. It’s good for you. Not healthy to keep all that bottled up.”

  She goes flinty. She will not do anything that this man thinks is good for her.

  “Just a little sick leave, Laura. Of course we’ll hold your job for you. For when you come back. When you’re better.”

  “What am I supposed to do for cash?”

  “We can get you a little cash. For starters.”

  They get their table, at last. After it’s no longer necessary. After all their business has been transacted.

  “Have whatever you want,” Lindsey encourages her. “It’s on Millennium.”

  She has the garden salad. Picks at it and wonders what garden these leaves could possibly have come out of, looking like that, at this time of year.

  The beautiful Fallcreek dining rooms occupy one of Clare International’s original Lacewood offices. (Back then they were still just Clare Soap. In the case next to our brass NCR cash register from the turn of the century, note the “half box” of Clare Candles: “Still only a dollar!”)

  Our double-height hammer-beam ceilings were specially built to accommodate the firm’s old-style wall-mounted mahogany filing shelves, a section of which are still visible on the north wall. The print of the McCormick harvester over the fireplace, ca. 1850, hung in the offices of Douglas Clare, Sr. The tintype of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893) shows the “Manufactures and Liberal Arts” building, where Clare Soap exhibited. The stained glass in the alcove to the southeast is from the original factory chapel, torn down in the 1930s, when the company moved to its present location . . .

  We want your meal here at Fallcreek to be the best that dining has to offer. Please do not hesitate to ask for anything. For fun, casual dining, visit our other location, The Old Mill Race, on West Gifford, by Northlake Mall.

  Neeland’s laboratory tinkered away at all the processes that a manufacturer could wish to perfect. Turning soda and animal waste to balm. Sulfur and soda to bright bleaches and colors. Gaslight waste to fertilizer. Medicaments from bicarbonate and lime.

  Chemistry arose from its own saved seed. The surplus of each harvest left the furrow a little longer for the next year. Industrial science raised up the race of man, lifting it to the heights of the tallest brick smokestack for a look around.

  All things chemical came from some other chemical thing. Man might learn to become matter’s investment banker. Our task on this earth was to discover the paths available to the recombining elements, and clear them. Hack back the undergrowth and free the trapped expedition.

  Eventually, Neeland’s string of successes in the lab landed him an unwelcome promotion. The Clares ultimately begged him to manage, first the new “chemical detersive” line, then all of Walpole’s soap products, then the entire plant itself. For a long time, Neeland chafed under the yoke of this responsibility. At first, he detested presiding over laboring men. But after a while, he discovered how much the human personality resembled caustic compounds. One could produce the most unexpected properties from the most un
likely substances, given the right admixtures. Once Neeland came to see each person he managed in terms of his reactive potentials, he rose to the occasion with laconic skill.

  Neeland made from chemistry a business that resembled it. People wanted the substances that Clare released and the compounds it assembled. The public bought this breeding mare’s continuous foals. And as clients lined up to purchase their needed nostrums, the flow of incoming cash financed further feats. Buyer and seller enriched each other, enlarging the loop of leg-ups that linked them. Wealth made it easier to make more of the same.

  Clare’s warehouses and factories, twenty separate buildings in all, stretched from Boston to Harrisburg. They, too, fed off one another. After each national panic or recession—in ’37, ’43, ’57, ’60, ’65—sales always managed to rebound somehow. Business changed to meet the upheavals that business instigated. Those oil presses and kettles and tanks, the drying racks and coloring pens combined to answer any question that human need threw at them.

  Hoary Samuel saw no reason why the corporation—no longer his to control—could not go on self-propagating forever. Soap had caught on in prospering America, more than anyone could have predicted. The clients could be counted on to generate a steady demand. Each year brought increases in efficiency. Supplies grew cheaper. Distribution deepened into old soils, while putting off shoots to start new colonies. Competition shook out smaller firms, while latecomers could not hope to win a foothold in ground so densely planted.

  Samuel toured Neeland’s labs, shaking his head. He tried to follow his enterprise as it expanded into unlikely cousin substances. Fertilizers, dyes, finishes: some new elixir, this time next year.

  Not every part of this diversifying font turned a profit. Even the old mainstay, Native Balm, had its unprofitable quarters. The world’s work lay still all before them. Simple selling remained an eternal challenge. Commerce had yet to surrender herself past the first hint of consent. And yet for Samuel, life had forever lost its first flush of innovation. Success was a done deal. Already the glow of consummation shone its managed beam as far down the pike as Samuel cared to cast his eye.

  The game was as good as solved.

  Samuel had never lacked for either courage or hunger. He leaped from merchant to manufacturer without a backward glance. He watched as war turned manufacturing from a living means to the meaning for living. He marched down that war’s sunken road to his own destiny. He pursued the routed past with the victor’s whoop at things to come.

  But through all these changes, Samuel remained a son of his childhood. Though he brought the old agrarian era to an end, he could not escape it. He needed to know what happened next. He had built his whole life toward outcome. And the moment that outcome settled into the routine of well-tuned pistons, life’s engine gave in.

  The man who helped found the company had never desired to run it. Wealthy beyond wonder, he’d never wanted money. All Samuel ever wanted to do was to change the rules of material existence. To cleanse the multitudes and complete the journey of days.

  He had lived long enough to see the constitutional amendment preventing any law that would abridge the privileges and immunities of Clare, Incorporated, that legally created person. Such a law guaranteed the immortality dreamed of by the poets and prophets. Beyond seeing due process granted to a collective activity, anything else poor Sam Clare might live to witness seemed irrelevant.

  The invention of the corporation killed Samuel’s dream of progress by completing it. There was nothing left for the experiment but its success. Sometimes in Temple Place, closing his eyes, Samuel could almost see that far shore where things would come to their necessary end.

  As for his own life, Samuel no longer feared what must soon happen to him. It seemed to him that nothing significant could possibly change with death. Death changed a man no more than the alkali process did sulfur. Spent inheritance somehow flowed back into the hopper, scrap to be recovered. Commerce promoted those who passed away to the supreme silent partners: his father, his brothers, Ennis, all the bygone soapmakers whose recipes Ennis had gleaned. In that company of spirits, Samuel would preside over future board meetings from beyond the grave, like Bentham’s watchful skeleton perched in its glass display case.

  And in the measure of earthly time left to him, Clare’s president had simply to stay out from beneath the wheels of change. He tinkered with designs for the company letterhead. He toyed with endowments to the school that Benjamin once subsidized. On occasion, he even wrote letters to irate customers.

  His family humored him in the exercise of that office. He was their company’s ceremonial diplomat. Composite bodies might still need a titular head. Yet from Samuel’s vantage, a corporation president had precious little to say about the firm’s development. A bad one could no doubt undo half a century’s advancement and dissolve rock-solid earnings like soap in water. But a good one could do no better than unleash the collective enterprise. The best ones no doubt came to believe that the will of that collective was their own will.

  If ever a chief executive tested the idea of his own necessity, it was Clare’s first chief executive. The man had never fully recovered from his renunciation of worldly business. Office recalled Samuel to the realities of revenue and cost. Even the largely honorary title forced him to grapple with how enormously the sphere of business had compounded in two decades.

  The aged and bewildered Dorcas did not protest her husband’s brief comeback. Her patient, weekly wait for the Rapture once again found much cause to accelerate its expectation. The President’s death, the San Francisco quake, the golden spike completing the continent-spanning railroad: all signs agreed. The world was once again about to end soon. And soon enough, Dorcas’s world did.

  Throughout Samuel’s blundering tenure, Julia Hazelwood continued to run the company from the wings. She never remarried, nor did she ever give the possibility a thought. She needed no warm body other than the corporate one.

  Julia’s passion for politics slid easily into a passion for rational management. Her knowledge of business settled out in the kettle of experience. She harbored no material ambitions aside from those she nursed for the ghostly and disembodied Peter, her firstborn boy. She neglected her other children, tending to the welfare of her youngest, William, only as a worst-case insurance policy.

  Immediately after the war, the company might almost have run itself. Ether and the federal government had seen fats through their lean years. Peace returned Clare to its faithful consumers, without forcing it to abandon its new industrial markets. The soldiers who’d slept upon those factory-made packing crates emblazoned with Clare’s new emblem stayed loyal to that lucky Indian head long after the last army field hospital vanished.

  But as that logo grew in repute, it began to spring up on crates that had never been near a Clare factory. WARNING! a hail of grocer trade sheets proclaimed:

  Diverse and unscrupulous counterfeit manufacturers are attempting to pass off their goods as Clare commodities. They are not! These mimics do not sell Balm, but rather mere soap. Demand only the genuine Clare Quality, and be careful that you receive it. Accept no imitations.

  Counterfeiters at last forced the firm to register its noble Brave with the U.S. Patent Office. Within a year, Clare pressed its first trade infringement suit. After a time, Peter and Douglas almost began to welcome the chance for legal action, if only for the cheap publicity that such prosecution provided.

  Native Balm seemed set to resume its climb toward wider recognition. Sales outpaced the surge in national population. The nation’s appetite for native remedies soared after the government sent General Sheridan to the territories to improve the Indians.

  Native Balm Bitter Tonic appeared, over Neeland’s scientific objections. The tonic cured a bewildering array of ailments including headache, neuralgia, women’s difficulties, and certain forms of abdominal distress. On the label, two inked men discussed the lay of the land:

  “Why not take Native Balm Bitter
Tonic?”

  “I shall, for Unneeded Suffering is a thing of the past.”

  The age’s cadence fell to the bold. Operations seemed likely to grow beyond even Julia’s predictions. The speed and structure of American life had altered under its own heat and pressure.

  Capital’s long-predicted lift-off was at hand. From the Grant Administration on down to the speculating bootblack, the country swam in cheap credit and even cheaper debit. Money made money, simply by spending itself. Seed plus feed now easily exceeded need. Who could number the millions that the future might sprout?

  The moment soon produced the men equal to it. Gould and Fisk discreetly asked the government to let them corner the nation’s gold market. After all, the law of the land had always been there in the past, eager to grease the freest of enterprising wheels.

  But this time, inexplicably, government declined the invitation. The federals opened the national tap, washing Wall Street down with a flowing river of gold. Grant thwarted the robber barons’ gold plot, but at the cost of Black Friday. Overnight, the glory train derailed into material reality’s steepest defile.

  The public briefly saw the light: if gold was now worth so little, how much could worth itself be worth? Credit dried up overnight. Savings vanished. Sales contracted. Businesses defaulted, pulling apart the shoddy blanket of interlocking debt. Just as quickly as it had embraced prosperity, the nation pulled frenzy tightly around its shoulders and entered the sixteenth national depression since Independence.

  Even in the soap trade, receipts fell off sharply when growth’s bills came due. A deep contraction of all commerce reduced orders for Clare products. Crates stamped with the law-protected Indian stacked up in expensive warehouses. Shift foremen reported hearing the workers’ stomachs conversing above the ravenous factory steam.

  Clare had weathered depressions in the past. But in the past, the merchant inventors had always found some new means of turning trade. Now trade was left without any new trick to turn. Candles were dying fast, killed off by gas. Soap was reverting to superfluity.