The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  “But Mom, I toldcha a policeman took one,” Enoch said, proud as if he’d got ten dollars for the doll. “I give it to him—he’s onu regular patrol. Don’tcha worry, I’ll sell um; when the changeover’s done an it’s clost to Christmas I bet I could sell a million—well, a couple a hundred enyhow—right around here inu project. A lot a people likes um but they say they ain’t got no money.”

  “And so you give one to a cop that’s got money,” Gertie cried, anger darkening her eyes. She remembered how Mrs. Schultz had wanted one, and she hadn’t given it to her.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Enoch said, still proud. “That regular patrol car, it went by me real slow, anu one a driven he ast me where I got th dolls an what I was a doen. I told him my pop was outa work an we’d made um an I was sellen um fer to git money to go to school. An I jumped one fer him, an he took it an jumped it an acted like he kinda liked it; an I says, ‘Wouldn’cha like one fer yu little girl?’ An he says, laughen kinda, ‘How’dju know I hadda little girl?’ An I says, ‘I jist figgered.’ An him an that other cop, they both laughed, but he kept th doll un said, ‘Watch traffic an short-changers, son, an don’t go into strange houses er strange neighborhoods by yerself.’

  “An, Mom, he ast me my name an where I lived—recken he’ll recollect; an I’ll have a cop speaken tu me by name just like some does to Casimir er Mr. Daly.”

  Gertie’s anger choked her, but Whit, taking the cool of the evening on his stoop, called: “You’re maken a fine beginnen, boy. They won’t be alla-time a watchen yu now—pesteren yu about sales tax an sich.”

  “That’s what I figgered,” Enoch said. “I don’t guess they is a—a—a peddler’s protective association like they is for—they call um fruit vendors—you know, like Joe. That Bommarita kid, I heared um a braggen one day that nobody never bothered Joe—he belongs to this association. He don’t hafta pay no dues to no union ner nothen. Joe an his kind, they don’t fool with jist cops; they’ve got um a councilman—that kid said.”

  Whit smiled, listening too intently. “I wonder does th teamsters know all that—them teamsters, why they’ve got a state congressman.” He added, cautiously, “So I’ve heared.”

  “But ole man Flint’s got him a congressman in Washington, an a newspaper broadcaster on u radio says whatever he pays him to say,” Enoch said, then remembered to add quickly when Clovis looked at him, “So I’ve heared.”

  “So what?” Whit said, smiling. “Didn’tcha know that these big automobile companies is gonna buy um a man an sell him tuyu fer President someday jist like they sell new cars.”

  “Not me, brother,” Enoch said.

  Clovis, who had been draped over the fence listening, guessed they’d better get busy and make more dolls. Gertie continued silent; the thumb was just barely touching the man’s chest, for his elbow was close against his side—kind of huddled into himself like Max when she went away—maybe the thumb oughtn’t to be touching. That might throw his elbow out too much. She fled from the plans for more dolls, and from Whit who now that he was not working seemed almost to have become an extra member of the household; she was watering the flowers, having picked up the hose that at first had seemed such an unhandy thing, while her thoughts went round and round the man’s empty hand.

  She smelled the marigolds and the wet earth above the garbage can smells, and smiled on the white asters beginning to bloom under Victor’s kitchen window, dark, like the rest of his unit. She’d seen little of him since the war had ended; cars were crying for steel and he was working many double shifts. She stepped onto his bottom step to water the asters and Victor said from the darkness behind the kitchen screen door, “You an her was friendly. She say anything tuyu about where she’d go?”

  She saw his outline dim behind the screen; he sat huddled into himself on one of the too small kitchen chairs, well back from the screen like a man trying to hide. “If I could find her,” he went on when she did not answer, “she’d come back tu me. S’funny t’ing—twice she went to mass wit’ me—pretty soon she’d married me—that is, wit’ u priest—them other marriages ain’t nutten. If I could find her, she’d come back to me.”

  “Yes, she would,” Gertie said, and added, “She wanted th sea.”

  “Which sea? What sea?” he asked in anger. “I gotta pick out one—an go.”

  “They is a heap a seas,” Gertie said, turning away, watering other flowers, and for a moment it was quiet and she was alone; children still played in the hot steel-tinged twilight, but they were in alleys other than her own. The aloneness lasted only a moment, then a voice was calling, “Mrs. Nevels.”

  She answered, and Mrs. Schultz, her voice gay and brisk as always, said, “I was watering my window box, and I thought you were in your flowers,” and she came on, explaining that she had thought it over, and would take a doll after all; it wasn’t easy these days to find anything substantial and well made. She couldn’t buy new sheets yet anyway, so now she would use some of her sheet money, and if she got a chance at sheets she’d take their money out of the house down-payment money.

  Gertie pushed back a strong impulse to give her one, but in the end offered only to paint it and fix it just as Mrs. Schultz directed.

  She told Clovis of the doll order when she went indoors, and he was pleased. “You could have a little steady income—if you can make th things cheap enough but still nice enough that a lot a people’ull want em.”

  “Yes,” she said, but with no enthusiasm, studying now the thumb of the uplifted hand in the block of wood. She held her own just below her breasts, then dropped it quickly; her hand would never be like that; she had two hands now, one reaching out making people drop into it money that might have gone for down payments. She felt heavy and tired and old.

  Some life returned to her next day in the excitement of a car with a telegram: Clovis was to report for work on the three o’clock shift that afternoon.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE HEAT WAVE WENT as suddenly as it came, and she was cold now in the twilights watering the flowers—cold in late August; and she told herself it was only a spell of cool weather, but she knew in her heart it wasn’t, for by the parking lot and in the vacant land the wild asters and the goldenrod had long since bloomed, and now stood smoke-darkened and dried. She would think at times of the closeness of winter, when she would be forever shut up in the steamy, smelly indoors, with snow above Cassie, the wind crying in the telephone wires, and the Icy Heart purring and purring. She would shiver, then remember the block of wood; this winter was the time for which she had waited so long; she would bring the man’s face out from its long hiding.

  Here and there were vacant units from which people had moved away, but there had been no great rush of workers to go back home. Many families had at least one jobholder, such as Mr. Daly or a steel man like Victor, unaffected by the changeover. Still, there were idle men in the alleys, and many families had no one working, but lived on unemployment insurance. More and more as the unemployment mounted, Gertie was aware of something among many of the people around her that, if not envy, was close to it.

  The new woman who had got Mrs. Anderson’s unit, two bedrooms for her four children, sometimes gave her sharp envious glances, and one day in Gertie’s hearing remarked in her broken English to Mrs. Daly that Detroit certainly loved the hillbillies: there was a hillbilly family close by with only three kids, but they had three bedrooms, and the man hadn’t had to go to war, and now he was working through the changeover. But Mrs. Daly sighed, and said only, “Maybe that family lost some kids.”

  Mr. Daly, however, was one of the loudest of the many who complained about hillbillies in Detroit. One afternoon, when he had finished somewhat early his work of driving a garbage truck, he stood in the alley almost in front of the Miller walk, and loudly remarked, “They’s plenty a native-born Detroiters walking a streets without jobs, while hillbillies wot don’t belong here works.”

  Mrs. Miller, who, as if vacationing from the three years she had spent
almost continually within doors, either in the factory or over the housework, was now much in the alley, gossiping and watching her children, heard and cried: “Oh, yeah? You never did see them ads an signs an letters beggen all th people back home to come up here an save democracy fer you all. They done it ina last war, too. Now you can git along without us, so’s you cain’t git shet a us quick enough. Want us to go back home an raise another crop a youngens at no cost to you an Detroit, so’s they’ll be all ready to save you when you start another war—huh? We been comen up here to save Detroit ever since th War a 1812.” She stood, hands on hips and looked at him, a proud defiant woman—and strong. She hadn’t missed a day from sickness in all her three years of factory work. “I almost wish I was stayen. I’d help make Detroit into a honest-to-God American town stid uv a place run by Catholic foreigners.”

  Mr. Daly turned white with fury; Mrs. Bommarita, cleaning her garbage can, stopped transfixed with lifted broom, while Mrs. Miller continued to stand hands on hips, smiling, “You think I don’t know who runs things, even th schools an—”

  Miller was thundering through the screen, “Nancy, shut up an git in!”

  Mrs. Miller smiled and turned to her husband. “What’sa difference? We’re goen home; we don’t have to have jobs no more. I made up my mind all that time I hadda pay dues to a union I hadda join an listen to a priest-quoten steward, an be bawled out by a foreman with a cross under his shirt, I’d tell off—”

  She slammed the door behind her; and the alley, even Mr. Daly, was for a moment still. Sophronie’s hands, taking clothes off the line, went faster as she gave Mr. Daly a swift sidewise glance, as if afraid he might read in her what she was thinking. Gertie stared down at the doll she was sanding; she wished Nancy Miller had kept still; there’d be more fighting and fussing among the children, and Clovis would quarrel at her a little more for “huggling up” to Mrs. Daly. It was the first time she’d ever heard the word “Catholic” mentioned aloud in the alley. The things Mrs. Miller said, and worse, were dealt with in whispers under the noise of radios. If the tool-and-die man chanced to be around when Whit and Miller and Clovis had such talk in the kitchen he would shut them up with a: “Cut it, boys. Talk like that’s a good way to bust th union. We all gotta hang together. Not all Catholics are Joseph Dalys.” They would be still, though Whit’s smiling silence at such times was worse than any words he might have said.

  Only a few minutes after Nancy Miller’s outburst, Clovis came home, though he hadn’t been gone three hours. “They was some kind a walkout—electricians jarren around claimen th machine setter-uppers was a doen part a their work—so they sent us all home. That danged old man Flint,” and he looked so pestered, so disgusted, that Gertie did not press him for further explanations. Only yesterday he had said it looked like steady work for him; there were rows and rows of small lathes and punch presses out of the grease and onto the floor waiting for him and other repairmen. She only sighed and set up supper.

  Like most workers on the three-to-twelve shift, Clovis ate a hearty meal around two o’clock, and so was not hungry at the family’s regular supper-time; but tonight he sat with them and sipped coffee, and gradually some of the anger left him, and he talked enough that she learned what ailed him. “‘Yu tryen to git in good with that foreman?’ he asks me, hateful-like. And I hadn’t knowed that little piece—two screws an a bolt an she’s on—was tu be put on by a tool-an-die man. I thought th foreman when he showed me had it under machine repair. ‘Foreman sucken, huh?’ that steward says. ‘Tryen tu save th company money doen tool-an-die work on a repairman’s pay.’”

  “Mebbe you’ll git shifted agin,” Gertie comforted.

  Clovis yawned, all the anger gone from him. “Then I’d most likely git a mean foreman agin. Th one I’ve got now’s a good feller—but that steward, they’s a election comen up an he wants his faction in, an Bender’s out; that steward, he claims Bender an his bunch is all commies, allus crappen around, th steward says, wanten us to take a strike vote, some’s a sayen.”

  “Why?” Gertie asked.

  Clovis shook his head wearily. “Gert, time an agin I’ve told ye I don’t know nothen about the union’s business. Mebbe they oughta strike—Whit thinks so, an so does that tool-an-die man; they’re both buddies a Bender’s frum away back.” He got up, and went for the evening’s paper, spread as usual on the floor, open at the comics. “I’d sooner take Bender’s word fer things than that steward’s; Bender’s got a right to crap; he’s on a grievance committee.”

  Gertie wondered what was a grievance committee, but kept silent. The fear that always came over her when Clovis did not work his regular hours had laid hold of her so that she could not eat. She could hardly wait until the meal was finished so that she could clean up the kitchen and begin sanding the pieces of a new batch of dolls Clovis had cut some days ago.

  However, tonight Clovis frowned on the sanding and told her to leave it be; the tool-and-die man was fixing her up some sanding wheels. They could work from the same motor as the saw, and not only was there a set to get off the old paint and smooth up the wood but one that would round off the sawed edges and make the dolls look more genuinely hand-carved.

  “I hope you’re paying him fer all his trouble,” Gertie said, and in spite of all her hatred for the contraptions he made, she suddenly wished the tool-and-die man would come tonight. Since Clovis had gone on the three-to-twelve shift, she had seen the man but seldom, and strangely enough had missed him, though he had never talked much with her. Still, he had been kind, always asking about herself and the children, even about Reuben sometimes, and lately he had taken more and more interest in the man coming out of the block of wood. The last time his words had made a joke and he had smiled, but his eyes were thoughtful, fixed on the hands. “Well,” he had asked, “can’t he make up his mind? Will he keep it or give it back?”

  “He’s thinken about it,” she had said.

  He had given a little headshake, still studying the wood. “I’ll bet he already knows he’s made up his mind to give it away,” he had said.

  It was Saturday evening, three nights later, with Clovis home on his regular time off, before the tool-and-die man came up the alley from the parking lot. Gertie was out watering flowers, though it was late with most of the children in from the alleys; and even as she smiled toward him she wondered all at once why it was that on all his visits he had come only after dark; and if it were true that Sophronie would not let him come to her place, for now that she was laid off and home of evenings he never went there.

  She called to him in greeting as he came through the gate, and they stood a moment talking about the weather and the flowers. He turned then toward the kitchen door, but just as he stood on the stoop, caught in the shaft of light through the screen, a voice called: “Well, well, if it ain’t mu old pal. I thought yu’d be in Moscow.” It was Mr. Daly, a blur of white shirt front and dark trousers by Gertie’s gate.

  The tool-and-die man turned, his voice easy, pleasant. “No,” he said, “I never got that far. England mostly, and then Africa, till they sent me home.”

  Mr. Daly laughed. “Ain’tcha th disappointed one? Yu stunk so wit politics th army couldn’t stand yu no longer.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” the other said. “Mostly it was shrapnel in my leg—and my age,” and he started to open the door, but stopped and turned about and listened as Mr. Daly said:

  “Back in mu ole sinful, foolish days I always liked youse—in spite u yu color—now.” He stopped, laughed, then spoke more loudly. “I don’t wanta say it out loud where so many can hear—might give some people u bad impression a wot kind a friends some a th hillbillies in this alley keeps—but I jus wanta give youse a li’l friendly warning.” He stopped, then spoke more loudly. “Youse commies hadda picnic true du war—but just youse wait an see. Du red squad ain’t dead—an Father Moneyhan, he’ll be warning his people agin. I’ll be selling his literature—an them that tears it up now, why we can call um
bydu proper name—commies.”

  Those who had missed the earlier part of the speech, heard the last, and certainly the last word, for Mr. Daly flung it over his shoulder in a great shout as he went on up the alley on the way to his regular Saturday night’s amusement, followed by mass, if he were sober enough, in the early hours of Sunday morning. The tool-and-die man was still a moment, looking after him, then said as he went through the door, “And they told me Hitler was dead.”

  Gertie, still watering her flowers, heard Sophronie’s troubled whispering as she stood in her darkened kitchen door; there were sounds of a muted scuffle and heavy breathing, then Whit came down his steps and around and through her gate, and his voice was gay and ringing as, without waiting to open her screen, he called a greeting to the tool-and-die man.

  She lingered a long time among the flowers, though the spraying hose was so cold it hurt her hands, and all her body grew ashiver from the evening’s chill. She did not want the whispers or Whit’s hate-filled glittering eyes, but when she did go in it was as if Mr. Daly had never spoken in the alley, for the men were deep in talk of union politics.

  They never noticed her, and she went on into the living room, but even there she heard their troubled talk, mostly now about Bender. Whit thought he ought to have a bodyguard; in fact he felt it so strongly that after a little further talk he said: “I could drive slow ahead a him fer a few nights; he lives on this side a town, an I’m ginerally through setten pins before he comes off his shift.”

  Gertie waited, but could hear no word of dissent from the other two. She wished Clovis were not on the same shift as this man the others liked so well. Then Whit was saying: “Let em kill Bender; we’d still go out on strike. Th—”