Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  To Lowell, it was a charade, and one that he found peculiarly unpleasant. It annoyed him that, even though they recognized him and his car easily enough, he was forced by the very block of their bodies to stop, present his pass, and have it countersigned by the picket captain before he could proceed to enter a piece of property he owned—and which, by virtue of his ownership, as he considered, gave them the wherewithal to exist. This morning, it was more annoying than ever, and when the company guards finally opened the gates, he fairly ripped the gears out of the big Buick, hurtling it through.

  He parked in his usual place by the loading depot, and was hardly mollified by the warm good morning old Mack Seelly, one of the watchmen and a man who had started in the plant not too long after Lowell’s father built it, gave him. He stalked into the office wing, relaxing to the extent of lighting a cigarette only when he was in the self-service elevator and on his way up. He thought that it was something of a shame that he had not brought Elliott Abbott with him this morning, so that the doctor’s sentimentalism in terms of workers might come to rest on something concrete. In Lowell, who was not an easy man to like, there was a deep need for the liking of others; and even such small matters as the smiles of the girls in the office reassured him.

  The office wing of the Lowell Company had been added early in the nineteen-twenties, but the offices themselves, while spacious, were done in the dark oak and somber red of at least two decades before. There was nothing frivolous about them, nor was there any attempt at sophistication; and perhaps in unconscious opposition to his wife’s course at home, as well as for other reasons, Lowell left them completely alone. At the same time, he could not stomach the thought of sitting in the enormous room that had been his father’s; he handed it over to Tom Wilson, the plant manager, retaining Wilson’s office as his own.

  Now he was at his desk only a few minutes, staring idly and without a great deal of interest at the pile of mail, when Wilson entered, his face bisected with a broad grin, his out-thrust hand demanding Lowell’s, gripping it, “Good to see you back on the firing line, George.” Wilson was a given-name man, a fact that he implemented five years ago, when Lowell first met him. It was, “Welcome to the firing line, George” then, and it was some variant of the same ever since. In any case, Wilson did it well. He was a big man, not too tall, but big and fleshy, broad-shouldered, in his late forties, with a considerable paunch already developed. Three chins led down to his collar, and he had a booming, somewhat hoarse voice, a tremendous affinity for the Lowell Enterprises, and a security in himself, his way of life, his mission in life, and his position in life that Lowell at one and the same time despised and envied. Lowell did not like him; Wilson knew this, and considered it a challenge, respecting the dislike as coming from the type of man Lowell was, a type he admired highly—in a sense being proud of the dislike—and unswervingly determined to eliminate it.

  He sat down, alongside Lowell’s desk, and gave him a detailed report of what had occurred in the past two days, a series of facts in which Lowell was only formally interested. Pausing only to bite off the end of a cigar and light it, he went on to relate these facts to the situation in the country as a whole, the great wave of strikes, the possibilities of war with Russia, and the excess profits tax, which provided that if, during the current year, the profits of the corporation fell below the profits of 1939, the difference would be supplied by the government.

  “Which puts us in a sound position economically,” Wilson said. “Just on that simple basis of dollars and cents, it would almost pay us to keep the plant shut down. But that’s short-sighted thinking. I don’t like shortsighted thinking and planning. You agree with me there?”

  “I agree with you,” Lowell said. “I don’t intend to keep the plant shut down.” Actually, he had come to the decision that once it opened, once the strike was over, he would drop the operation of it into Wilson’s lap—and go away; for the rest of the winter, certainly, and perhaps for a longer time than that.

  “For one thing,” Wilson went on, “it’s going to breed trouble for the future. There’s nothing the commies like better than a strike; it’s meat and drink to them.”

  “I think that’s something less than the main problem,” Lowell said impatiently. He did not like red-baiting; he felt, instinctively, that there was something unclean in this inordinate urge to build a Communist menace. Aside from Joe Santana, the barber, who was a Communist and made no secret of it, he could not recall that he had ever seen a Communist, known one, or been faced with the problem of one—unless Elliott Abbott was one of them, a notion that he put aside at once, thinking that his anger against Elliott could at least be kept rational.

  “Yes and no—don’t underestimate those babies,” Wilson nodded, his voice taking on that slightly patronizing air it always assumed sooner or later when he spoke to Lowell. “Ham Gelb could say a word or two about that. But what I’m thinking about is the whole character of our operation here in Clarkton. Until 1932, your father never had any trouble with these folks. As a matter of fact, he made them feel they were all one big family, not in a soft way, you understand; there was an iron fist in the velvet glove; but he interested them in profit-sharing and all that kind of thing, and there just never was any trouble to speak about. Well, there was plenty of trouble in the ’thirties, when the union came in, until the war brought it back to normalcy. These are high-paid, skilled workers we got here, and I like to run a plant without any trouble. But if this strike stretches out too far, they’re going to become mean. You’d be surprised at how mean nice people can become, George. That’s one part of it; the other is the market. I want to settle this and get into the market.”

  “Who is Ham Gelb?” Lowell asked.

  Wilson seemed surprised for a moment; he leaned forward, looking keenly at Lowell, then he sucked at his cigar, relaxed, and grinned.

  “It doesn’t have to remain a secret,” Lowell said.

  “You picked him.”

  “What do you mean, I picked him?”

  Wilson stared at Lowell again, changed, became apologetic and intimate. “I thought you picked him out yourself. He’s one of the two men Leopold and James sent up here. He’s one of their best men too, a very smart apple. I thought you asked specifically for him. The other one is just a young squirt called Frank Norman, but Gelb more than makes up for that. I stopped worrying when Gelb got here. I want you to meet him.”

  5.After Mike Sawyer had been shaved, introduced to Joe Santana, to his seven-year-old daughter, who was leaving for school, to his five-year-old son, who was finger-painting himself and most of his room and as much of the barber shop as he could get to, past Joe’s guard, and to Hannah, who persuaded him to come back that evening for a real Italian dinner, Danny Ryan suggested that they walk back up the valley toward the plant, stopping in at the two main soup kitchens—so that Sawyer could see how that was organized and how well the system was running.

  “And it’s no hayride here,” Ryan said. “It’s not like a situation you’d have in New York or in Boston, or even in a place like Worcester, where you got a community to fall back on. When we go out on strike here, the whole town goes out, and we got to scrounge down in our own pockets.”

  Sawyer realized that, and he suggested that something might be done to get mass support from the entire western half of the state.

  “We got a little already,” Ryan said, “with that truckload coming in today. Later on, we’ll want more.”

  The first soup kitchen, just around the corner of Fir Street, was under the direction of a Greek, Sam Saropoles, a big, dark man, who had lost two sons in the war as well as almost all of his relatives in the resistance back in the old country. Worry had taken off weight, and his flesh hung in loose folds, but he had a grin for Ryan, and a warm handshake for Mike Sawyer. The soup kitchen was set up in an empty, ancient store, one that had been unoccupied for years. A union crew had set it to rights, given the inside a coat of whitewash, put a coal stove in the rear, an
d erected a long sawboard table which could seat about forty people at once. The place was warm, too warm when they came in out of the cold air, and heavy with the smell of food.

  About a dozen men and women were sitting at the table, dipping into steaming bowls of stew. A rail of beaverboard, about four feet high, separated the cooking section from the eating section, and behind this, three women and two men stirred pots, washed dishes, and peeled vegetables. Saropoles led them into the makeshift kitchen, and introduced them to each of the workers in turn. For the day shift, chief cook was Max Levy, who had learned the trade in the army, and who told them proudly that during the day before, this one kitchen had fed six hundred and fifty-two people with four hundred and twenty soups, five hundred and fifteen solid dishes, sixty-two dozen doughnuts, thirty-five dozen rolls, not to mention one thousand three hundred and nineteen cups of coffee.

  “… Which is our main problem,” Levy said. “Coffee. That way, it ain’t no different from the army. You got coffee, and you got a piece of the morale problem solved, and we got a break with five hundred pounds a buddy of mine in Spring-field sends me. I call him up, and he tells me, he don’t sympathize with me, but it gives him such satisfaction to find me behind a stove again that he’s willing to drop five hundred pounds down the hole, but that ain’t going to last forever.”

  “Max is a good cook in an American way, which is what they teach them in the army, you know, with no inspiration,” Saropoles said, “but he’s too modern. You haven’t got enough headaches running a place like this, he’s got to introduce vitamins and proteins. How in hell are we going to find vitamins and proteins if this damn thing lasts six months? I remember I was working in Ohio during the big steel strike back after the last war, and we got a hundredweight of peas and a hundredweight of blackeyed beans, and by God, we fed a thousand men out of those two bags with whatever trimmings we could dig up.…”

  6.Curzon was waiting for the people from the plant when they came down to police headquarters, and he shook hands with each of them eagerly, telling Lowell, “I knew your father well, Mr. Lowell. A fine man—a really fine man, like you don’t meet many of these days,” and then led them into his office. Coming into the place, Lowell had felt a strange, somewhat remote apprehensiveness: he realized, a while later, that it was at least thirty years since he had come into this ugly gray-stone pile that reared its Victorian-Gothic spires alongside the Morrisana Hotel, equally old, equally ugly, but in a more mellow ochre. At that time, he and Elliott had done something—although for the life of him he could not think what it was—and a policeman had led the two boys here, put them in a room, and left them alone for two hours until it was discovered that he was Lowell’s son, after which there were ample apologies and a wiping-out of the whole incident. But he did remember that his own cockiness had not been enough to overcome Elliott’s fears, and that enough of those fears had been communicated to him for him to retain this feeling he had now, three decades later. As he thought about it, he was also quite certain that was the only occasion he had ever been inside a police station, a thought that made him smile now, that restored some of the comfortable normalcy of life which had been removed in the past several days. He watched Gelb as they walked into Curzon’s office, a big, square room with high windows, ancient green lamps, and musty mahogany furniture, deciding that Gelb, with his iron-gray hair, his faultless brown worsted, handkerchief in pocket, his square shoulders and neatly trimmed mustache, looked far more the executive than either Wilson or himself; and he reflected that Wilson was not far from wrong when he had predicted the confidence that Gelb could inspire.

  Both Gelb and Frank Norman had been pleasantly different from what he had expected. Norman looked like a clean-cut undergraduate, short haircut, good posture, intelligent speech, the sort of person he would have accepted without question if Fern had brought him home. His specialty was maintenance, and now they had left him at the plant, to watch the operation of the maintenance crew, to acquaint himself with the various guards, and to get the general feel of the place. Lowell had liked the genuine humility with which he asked questions and accepted information.

  Now, as they seated themselves in Jack Curzon's office, Wilson asked the police chief, “Is Freddy Butler here?”

  “I didn’t know you wanted him here.”

  “You didn’t know I wanted him,” Wilson said. “We only got the whole damned plant tied up, but we want to spend the morning talking with you. We can talk about what a nice sunny day it is for this time of winter.”

  Curzon had been talked to by Wilson before, but he didn’t like it in front of Gelb and Lowell, and he had a feeling that Wilson was putting on a performance for the benefit of Gelb. His lips tightened, but while he was trying to think of just the right thing to say to Wilson, something subtle enough to reestablish himself with the other and yet not make for open defiance of the plant manager, Gelb stepped into the gap and said:

  “No reason why Jack can’t get Butler over here now, while we wait, is there? I’m sure we have enough to talk about.” He was better at first names than Wilson; and Curzon, who had been prepared to admire him, found himself liking him.

  “It’s not good for him to come here,” Curzon said apologetically. “If someone sees him come in, he’s got to have an excuse.”

  “Then suppose you give him an excuse,” Wilson said.

  Curzon picked up the phone. “Okay. If that’s the way you want it, okay.”

  They’only had to wait a few minutes before Butler appeared, for it turned out that the man Curzon sent after him ran into him on the street, only three blocks away. Lowell said almost nothing during that time, sitting there and listening to Gelb and Wilson and Curzon talk. The idea of Butler’s working for Wilson in the fashion he did was not one that Lowell found palatable, but he accepted it in the same way he had accepted Wilson’s insistence that he take measures to protect his property through Leopold and James. The very fact that no one involved in these matters, except for himself, had any notion or feeling that they were more or less than routine, assured him that his own sensitivity was ridiculous; and the headache he was beginning to develop was only added proof that he would have been content enough to let things take their course, provided only that he did not have to participate. Such headaches were familiar signatures of a situation, and he answered by telling himself that from here until it was over, he would know what Wilson was doing, whether it was pleasant or not.

  Gelb was commenting on the fact that it was a very nice town. “A satisfying town to live in,” he said. “I like a town this size. It has a healthy atmosphere.”

  “It’s a good place to raise a family,” Curzon said. He told Gelb about something his little girl had done that morning, and Gelb laughed with just the right degree of appreciation, enough to satisfy Curzon yet restrained sufficiently to assure both Wilson and Lowell that he, Gelb, had measured the man. In all truth, Curzon was not hard to measure, a fact that made Lowell feel just a little sorry for him.

  “And the place has quite a history, too,” Wilson informed Gelb. “If you have a chance, you should go out and see the old blockhouse on North Hill. When Professor Adams was here, two years ago, he spoke at Rotary and emphasized the fact that in his opinion the old blockhouse is the finest piece of pre-colonial reconstruction in all Massachusetts. The project was financed by Mr. Lowell’s father in 1928. There are two brass cannon over there that wére brought all the way up from New Orleans, where they were under water for two hundred years.”

  “Under water?” Gelb inquired.

  “Sunk. They were sunk all that time, which made them just the right period. I mean, they were in a ship and sunk. They had to get them with a diving bell, and it cost four thousand two hundred and twenty dollars, with shipping charges.”

  Lowell felt relieved when an officer entered, shepherding Butler in front of him. He was surprised to see how much like an essentially decent person Butler looked and acted. The thin, redheaded man had a careworn,
anxious face, but the only sign of nervousness he betrayed was a constant turning of his cap in his hands. After Curzon had seated him along-side the desk, Gelb rose, walked over, leaned against the desk, and smiled in a particularly reassuring way.

  “This is nothing special and nothing to worry about, Butler,” he said gently. “I’m new in town, and I wanted to ask some questions, that’s all.” He had a bedside inflection, an innate gift of relaxing people.

  “Sure, Mr. Gelb.”

  “We met before?”

  “I seen you in Youngstowh, but maybe I wouldn’t have recognized you if I didn’t know you was in town.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s all over town,” Butler said, and Gelb, showing steel for the first time since Lowell had met him, snapped at Wilson:

  “I thought this would be kept quiet!”

  “So help me God, the only one who knew you were here was Mr. Lowell himself. I only told Curzon a few hours ago.”

  “That’s right,” Curzon said. “That’s right, Mr. Gelb.”

  Watching Butler, Lowell wondered what was the mark of a dishonest man. This was a quiet and respectable working-man who didn’t want trouble, and who therefore cooperated with the legally appointed and elected authorities, yet along with that Lowell had to probe for reasons. He wondered whether that thought ever occurred to Gelb or Wilson or Curzon.

  Gelb walked away from the desk, dropped into a chair, and asked Butler, his voice gentle again, “Where did it start?”

  “I couldn’t say, Mr. Gelb. Maybe somebody recognized you.”

  “Maybe,” Gelb nodded. “Are people talking?”

  “They’re curious,” Butler said.

  Jack Curzon said, “I don’t see where it hurts any if they’re curious.”

  Smiling a little, Gelb said softly, “Suppose you had to tell me one thing and only one thing—I mean something I don’t know—about this strike, Butler, what would it be?”