So I was back hanging around the house again, despairingly scanning the few help-wanted ads in the Times each morning. In those days it was routine for an ad to specify “White” or “Gentile” or sometimes “Chr.” And the eye soon trained itself to zip down a column and to stop only at the ads with no such warning—for that is what it was to me, a warning to stay away. It was a time when to be a Jew was to be a little bit black too; the two groups still understood one another. There were even ads specifying “Protestant” and, very rarely, “Cath. firm,” as though the city consisted of clans terrified of each other’s impurities. My disdain for such clannishness probably helped move me later to marry a gentile girl.
One morning I was excited to see an ad with no warning symbols calling for a stock clerk at fifteen dollars a week in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. The phone number and address seemed familiar. It was Chadick-Delamater. I instantly called Sam Shapse to ask permission to use him as a reference, and he of course agreed. “But I want you to be sure to let me know what they tell you when you apply.” I had no idea what lay behind his instruction.
I recognized Wesley Moulter, the manager, from my frequent pickups there in the past. I sat beside his desk all scrubbed and wearing my one tie, feet flat on the floor to conceal the hole in my shoe sole, and told him about my experience working for Shapse. Moulter at thirty was in charge of the whole place, at a salary of thirty-six dollars a week. As a sign of his executive status he wore a striped tie, had his collar buttoned, and rolled his sleeves neatly up two turns to mid-forearm; the ordinary help rolled their sleeves up above the elbow. A serious fellow but not cheerless, he had dense, tightly curled reddish hair and a square flat face and a thick neck. His desk was set beside a window overlooking the street, a few feet from where the bookkeepers, three women and one man, bent to their tasks. The walls of this white-collar area were bare cement block, and my eye as I talked with Moulter detected some daylight in the mortar joints. He gave me five minutes, nodded once or twice, took my phone number, and said he would let me know.
I did nothing all next day but hang around near the phone in our dining room, which, like anything one stares at long enough, began to become animate, the living spirit of a mockingly obdurate silence. My desire for the job spread over me like an itch that I was trying to forget. The fifteen-dollar salary was not only three more than the going rate for a “boy” but proof of how high-class a firm Chadick was. And indeed from my vantage point as a truck driver it had always had a certain panache, handling the best brands—Bear ignitions, Timken roller bearings, Detroit axles, Brown and Lipe transmissions, Packard-Lackard ignition wires, Prestone antifreeze, Gates gaskets and radiator hoses, Perfect Circle piston rings and wrist pins—these were heavy names that bespoke grave and established firms solid as rock. On entering Chadick, one walked on a concrete floor unlike the splintery floors in other auto warehouses. The place was always swept and had a banklike decorum, as in the offices of Brooklyn Union Gas, where we would go to pay our monthly bills. Obviously they were offering fifteen dollars instead of twelve because they expected more from whomever they hired, and I, standing at the starting line, was crouched and ready to go in this, the beginning of my eighteenth year, but the phone did not ring.
As I sobered up, the inevitable reason for that silence was plain, but it did not particularly dishearten me, I think; such exclusion was not yet given the name of discrimination and was merely the natural order of things. It simply meant that I would have to probe for another way into the American world.
That evening Sam Shapse phoned to ask if I had been hired, and when I told him I hadn’t, he said, “You are going to have that job. You know more about the business than any boy they’re likely to find. It’s because you’re Jewish. But most of their customers are Jews, and I am going to call them first thing in the morning. You get ready to go down there, you hear?”
Moulter called in the middle of the next morning and gave me the good news, and I was on the trolley rocketing down Gravesend Avenue to the subway stop at Church and then up to Times Square and a change to the local train to Sixty-sixth Street, then a short trot over to Sixty-third and up the steel stairs into that quiet, cool establishment. Except for Moulter and one other, they were all Irish, all of them to a man and woman, and as I began to move among them I practically had to stand still to be sniffed, for there had never been one of my kind in this pen before.
The three women bookkeepers were the first to relent; one of them, Dora, found me working behind a pile of axles. A spinster (as thin and with the same nearly transparent wrists as the Baroness Blixen, with whom, a quarter-century on, I would spend an afternoon), Dora whispered through her buck teeth and what I got to know as the perpetual cold in her nose that I would like it here, that it was an awfully nice place to work. I was grateful to her for that, but I realized that my job of locating parts in five stories of bins to fill the orders impaled on a spike on the desk of the sixty-five-year-old packing boss, Gus—he had the same mustache as Kaiser Wilhelm and fierce white eyebrows and a belly that looked as solid as a medicine ball—the job would only be easy once I knew where the stock was. Such welcome as I had been given soon wore thin as the other workers grew tired of being asked where I should look for various items. So at quarter past five, when everyone had left, I started at the end of one aisle of storage bins, climbed the rolling ladder, and peered into each one to see what lay inside. Soon I heard heel taps on the concrete floor and, looking down, saw Wesley Moulter making his way around the foot of my ladder toward the bathroom, a linen towel over his wrist. I nodded a greeting to him, about to explain my no doubt praiseworthy purpose in staying late, but before I could speak he grinned up at me with a cool, untroubled gaze and said, “Figuring on owning the place?” and continued on down the aisle to the toilet.
The coldness in my belly did not warm up until I was halfway back to Brooklyn. Maybe I shouldn’t try to buck the dislike I now realized must be the general feeling for me there. Dora’s little visit, it occurred to me, had been meant to show me that she was not like the others, but what a frail ally! I said nothing to the family at dinner; there was no point spoiling their relief at my landing a job. Kermit, always romantic about business, thought I had taken a fabulous step forward in being employed by such a fine company. Of course we all knew that without Sam Shapse’s intervention I would not have been hired, but the psychological principle of reality denial was already doing its work. I desperately wanted the Chadick job and feared that a season of idleness would weaken me, as it was doing to so many guys in the neighborhood who had no money to continue in school, and the objective need created the necessary attitude—I denied that Wesley Moulter, my boss, hated my presence, and when I came in to work next morning I cheerfully nodded to anyone who looked like a candidate for a friendly hello, and went around the place energetically filling orders. In the quiet periods, when there were no orders to fill and men stood around the packing table in the back of the loft, I quickly learned how to stand on the sidelines, looking and listening and uncharacteristically keeping my young mouth shut rather than seeming to ask for their friendship or even toleration.
But in a few weeks I was trading inanities just like the rest of them. They had caught on that I was really no smarter than they were, dumber in some ways, in fact; for the fear of the Jew is first of all the fear of his intelligence, which is mysterious and devilish and can embarrass and ensnare the unwary. It is the fear, too, of people who appear not to live by one’s own rules, a mirror image of the Jew’s estimate of the gentile. I would learn at Chadick’s how to hold the hand of a man whose wife had almost lost her newborn baby’s life in their unheated Weehawken flat the night before; he was so distressed—hours afterward, when he had time to realize what had nearly happened—that he suddenly began to shake, his face looking split as if by a stroke. This was Huey, a large blond lisping stock clerk of twenty-eight who even normally was in a suppressed state of desperation from trying to feed his
four children on eighteen dollars a week.
As time went by and season followed season outside the filthy windows of the packing room, which overlooked both the ailanthus trees growing up out of the backyards and a newly installed five-story bordello—we could wave to the naked young whores taking their sunbaths sitting cross-legged like Hindus on their beds in the morning—the sheer endurance and self-discipline of Chadick workers came to move me, although I knew enough not to have illusions about our being “the same.” On the hour-and-a-half trip in from Brooklyn every morning I was reading novels or the Times, a paper they would sometimes peruse with a certain suspicious daintiness, turning a page with their fingertips as though it were satin. And when Dora, in whom I had confided, let it out that I was saving to go to college, the moral they drew was that Jews did not drink up their pay, so that once again we were set apart. Besides, by intending to go to college I was not only trying to escape their common fate but implicitly stating that I was better than they. Still, their questions about my strange people were mostly about our family practices, for what impressed and baffled them a little was that an able-bodied guy like me was not being required to contribute to the family’s upkeep but was instead allowed to save for his education. Most weeks, in fact, I banked thirteen out of my fifteen dollars’ pay, figuring I could just make the required five-hundred mark by July or August of 1934, in time for the September semester at Michigan.
Only once did the mask of acceptance—if indeed it ought to be called that—slip. Fetching parts as usual out of a bin in the middle of a corridor, and failing to hear Huey’s footsteps coming up behind me, I stepped back to clear the ladder’s path and sent its wheel rolling over his toe. He was a heavy, flat-footed, slope-shouldered man and usually wore shoes with razor slits to ease the joints of his big toes. The pain shot his fist straight at my nose as he yelled, “You fucking …” I could hear “Jew” almost but not quite as I ducked and his fist jammed into a bin. It took a couple of minutes to free it, and his knuckles were bleeding from the shallow scratches of the sheet metal. Walking away with his handkerchief wrapped around his hand, he looked very peeved, but nothing more was ever said about it.
By the time I left Chadick-Delamater in August of 1934, I had broken in Peter Damone, the first Italian to work there, a dour and proper young Sicilian who never smiled and was rapidly cordoned off from all intimate confidences, as I had been from some; and Dennis MacMahon, fresh off the boat, a young giant with a lovely brogue who pasted sheets of wrapping paper over the windows so that he would not have to be looking at whores all of his God-given days here. Dennis was soon struggling against becoming a drunk, as most of them had had to do at some time in their working lives, understandably, I thought, given that they knew there was absolutely no future for them here and at the same time that they had to be thankful for working at all in those days. The repression of anger, though, was not always successful.
With a figurative line of eager unemployed waiting to take our jobs should we ever complain about conditions, we learned to absorb blows to the ego without flinching. If one of us, for example, happened to pick up an order for brake lining, we had to cut it to size ourselves on an abrasive wheel without a guard, with no mask or goggles, even though the brake material was compressed asbestos as hard and brittle as brick. A cloud of stinking asbestos dust filled the work area and even drifted out to the front office from time to time, and once in a while the abrasive wheel would shatter and glass-sharp slivers would fly all over the packing room. It never occurred to me or anyone else that the risk involved might be abnormal. A piece of broken wheel hit me in the chest once, but since it was winter and never warmer than the high fifties or low sixties in the place, I had kept my windbreaker and sweater on and hardly felt the blow and simply proceeded to attach a new wheel and went right on cutting brake lining. The papers reported new unions being organized in various industries, but when I mentioned this to Huey and the other workers they looked at me with a certain apprehension at the prospect of conflict with the big boss (whom I would name “Mr. Eagle” in a play about this place written twenty years later, and whose real name I have long forgotten). Anyway, we knew we were unskilled and easily replaceable. The fact is we were quite like other workers then, even some skilled ones, in our lack of pride in what we were doing for a living. Had an organizer appeared we would have thought ourselves beneath consideration as union members.
Mr. Eagle was said to own several other firms, which was why he only appeared here one or two days a week. According to Dora he had gone to Princeton and was a yachtsman, which one could ascertain by glancing through the only clean windows in the place, in the partition surrounding his little office up front; on the wall was a large etching of a sailboat at sea, a taunt to the eye in the heat of summer, for we of course not only had no air conditioning but also no fans, and the temperature on the three-foot-long thermometer with “Prestone” printed on it in blue and red hanging near the front counter often went over ninety degrees. It never occurred to anyone to ask Moulter to ask Eagle for a fan. Instead, a steady line of people kept moving in and out of the single toilet next to the packing table overlooking the whores, to lave their faces using the one tepid water tap over the grimy brown sink in there, the same that Mr. Eagle used himself. Nor did it seem an indignity when, on occasion, Mrs. Eagle, a rather sweetly polite young woman who always seemed airily dressed for a party in the middle of the day, would leave their two large and insane springer spaniels tied to the big cast-iron floor scale while she went off for a few hours of shopping. Since under the scale lived a venerable colony of gray mice with dozens of members, the tied dogs never ceased attacking the steel base and howling as though in the hunt over the countryside that was imprinted on their brains. Naturally the male of the pair occasionally pissed on the scale, leaving the question of who among us was supposed to clean this up, and our one sign of revolt was the unspoken decision to let it dry slowly all by itself. We had the pleasure of watching Mrs. Eagle having to negotiate the puddle when she returned to untie her animals and to thank us all for bearing with them, unaccustomed as they were to city life.
In A Memory of Two Mondays, my one-act play written as the fifties got under way, I tried to paint the picture, but it was only abroad that the play made a mark for itself—in Latin America, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and the less affluent countries of Europe, which still had such workers and conditions of work or could remember them. In New York in 1955 the stock market was on the rise and the dollar was the only legitimate money in the world and a play about workers was the last thing anybody wanted to think about. By the time I wrote the play I had had five plays produced on Broadway and had been embraced and, as I knew in my gut, rejected by what I still imagined was the peculiar aberration of American society known as the Eisenhower time. A play like this, I felt, with its implied assertion of human solidarity, was one way of insisting that something besides money-getting had to be real, if only as a memory of a long-gone era. But nostalgia, I suppose, is reserved for memories of pleasure, not pain or mere reality.
In any case, on the day I left Chadick-Delamater at the end of the summer of 1934, Dora alone seemed to register the fact, just as only she had noted, two years earlier, that I had arrived. Even Dennis, my closest friend there, barely glanced up as I said goodbye to him while he wrapped up an axle. Jim Smith, the octogenarian onetime Indian fighter, went padding by with his cigar stub centered in his pursed mouth, his head tilted up as he read an order in his hand through his bifocals, and Johnny Drone, with the same blackheads around his nose that he had had two years earlier, wearing one of his three dark blue ties stiffened with soil, gave me a slight nod, shifted from one foot to the other as though standing on a hot boiler, and said, “You ought to look into accountancy.” There were now two new Irish parts clerks whom I had never gotten to know at all since they did hardly any work and disappeared for hours into the freight elevator to shoot craps with suckers they had found in the street. In order to a
ggravate the naive and pure Dennis, who, however, had long since lost the Irish country bloom of his cheeks, these two one late afternoon sat themselves down on his packing table and gave a loud and circumstantial account of how, on the previous weekend, they had taken a girl home from a dance in Paterson and each in turn had raped her while the other drove the borrowed truck. Dennis’s outrage had led to the first and only knockdown fight in my time there. It brought Wesley Moulter running down from the front office hollering at Roach, one of the two clerks, who was pounding on Dennis’s belly, while I pulled on Dennis, and Dora and a couple of other women screamed and threatened to call the cops, before the ordinary torpor of the place was restored.
One day in the mid-forties, some ten years after I had walked out of there to go to Michigan, I found myself a few blocks away, and for the first time in many years feeling a tug of curiosity about my relationship with these people, I decided to pay a sentimental visit. I walked over from Broadway, climbed the stairs, opened the steel door, and was surprised to see a wholly new atmosphere. The counter was now faced in dark plywood, and a paneled wall, declaring a new gentility, blocked off the public from the aisles of bins as well as from the office area that must still have existed somewhere behind it. A couple of mechanics were waiting to be served at the counter, and presently an overweight blond man came through the door from the rear to wait on them. It was Huey, but swollen with middle age, disguised by a decade of time. He wore a respectable shirt and tie now and had his shirt sleeves neatly rolled to mid-forearm in executive style, and without being able to see his feet I was sure he was no longer wearing shoes with slits in them. The mechanics left with boxes of parts, and I came to the counter and nodded to him. He waited for me to give my order, and I said, “How are you, Huey?”
Nonrecognition flattened his gaze, and a surprising suspicion, too. I was embarrassed to have to tell him my name. He was busy, obviously. “What’d you want?” he asked, still expecting me to order. I explained that I had worked here for two years. Like the Depression itself, my time at Chadick was a dream now; he not only did not remember me but seemed irritated at being forced to wonder what I was up to. His honed lack of interest in even trying to recall depressed me, and the conversation began to stumble, and after only a couple of minutes I left, closing the steel door behind me for the last time. There was the same anonymous scent of steel as on my first arrival and my departure, a scent that reminded me of the Navy Yard and factories, and one that I would always find stimulating, promising a kind of comradeship of makers and builders, but depressing in the end as each man is left exactly where he began—alone.
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