by John Updike
“Aye, but they’re such beautiful machines now,” McDermott said, leaning his long head forward and his voice softening with tenderness. He had jutting half-white eyebrows and a chin with a dimple in the center like a scar healed. “They almost run themselves; the men in charge can go to sleep on their feet.”
How strange faces are, Clarence thought. If we were turned upside down, would our underparts do as well for identification—to express our identities, our souls? We would still congregate, still converse, with visages once thought obscene.
It was time for someone else to speak, but no one expected it to be Mrs. Caravello. “My husband,” she exclaimed. “Work with wet feet all day, all day! Come home so tired fall asleep in chair. Work kill him—kill him as if with gun!” And with an amusing vulgarism she held a plump hand in the air with a finger pointed like the barrel of a revolver.
“Mamma,” the older of the two girls reproached her, adding softly, blushing, “Silenzio è sorte nostra.”
Nothing cowed Dearholt. His smile broadened, to expose back teeth as perfect and porcelain as those in front. “Work is the way of the country, my good lady. Those afraid of work should have stayed home, in the old country, where the competition is less open, less honest and strenuous, and everyone is taken care of, deserving or not, the village idiot right along with the man of initiative. All dressed up, and nowhere to go, that’s present-day Europe for you. Those who don’t like it here are welcome to go back. Anybody in my plant I hear expressing anarchist ideas, out they go, Jew or Italian or whatever. No free rides, Mrs.”—her name escaped him—“that’s the way we do things here. I hear talk about worker ownership of the mills—we have it already! I was a worker, a bobbin boy, as I may have said. Catholina Lambert himself, head of Dexter, Lambert, began as a humble worker, back in Yorkshire. Doherty, Bamford, John Ryle himself, who got silk started here—all came from Macclesfield, back in the English mills.”
McDermott, at Mrs. Caravello’s side, confided the friendly fact, “Catholina Lambert built the Castle. Wonderful masonry and woodwork, up in the Castle.”
Dearholt kept at her, with his friendly fierce smile: “The English and Scots who got here faced a wilderness. They had to fight cannibalistic savages! Those of you who have come later are fortunate—Paterson holds no redmen, does it? We have cleared the way for you! Your children and grandchildren will thank us, my dear lady, even if you cannot find it presently in your heart to do so. Am I overstepping, Reverend? I mean everything I say kindly, to encourage all of my fellow Americans. Courage and faith, that’s all we need. Faith.” He made a fist and vibrated it. “There’s where the power to succeed comes from, in a land God has favored with such a wealth of opportunity.”
Mrs. Caravello misunderstood the gesture as hostile. She protested, “Rich think nothing but more rich here. Not like Italia—pittura, opera.”
Jared spoke up again, in his strident adolescent voice, seeking perhaps to save the Italian woman from too much attention. “Jamie Cressy got taken to the opera in New York City and said it was horrible. Everybody fat and screaming and he couldn’t understand a word.”
Stella now, as if to shelter her son, let her voice with its music from gentler climes sound out: “Oh, but the angelic harmonies the soprano and tenor make! And the bits of history you learn! It’s so much healthier, I think, than sitting in a dark smoky building watching the moving pictures, the way all the young people do nowadays! The young people you see on Market Street look pale as ghosts, and I blame the moving pictures—those, and cigarettes.”
Esther, now that the young people were beginning to speak, said, “Mother, it’s so embarrassing, with the real people on stage! They’re all so loud, and I always worry, what if somebody makes a mistake! With the motion pictures, everything is done perfectly, and it’s always the same! And you don’t have to get all dressed up to go!”
Clarence, though the debate before him seemed a carnivorous phantasmagoria projected on a wall of his inner void, felt obliged to answer his Building Committee chairman, who had asked if he was overstepping. “Not at all, Harlan,” he pronounced, belatedly, feeling thick-tongued and with a waxen distance placed between himself and these vigorous eyes, chewing mouths, clumps of hair. “What better place than the church premises for a frank expression of our views? Speak the truth in love, St. Paul enjoined.”
“When the workers of the world unite,” Mr. Kleist advised Mr. Dearholt and Mr. McDermott, “let’s see how you and your kind like being stretched. Come the revolution, see how the bosses like being stretched on the rack.”
“Welcome to the industrial revolution, Mr. Kleist,” Dearholt said, beaming at his own humor. “The better the machines become, the fewer workers we’re going to need. Those who don’t take the work that’s offered, at a wage that keeps wholesale prices competitive, are welcome to try the bread line, or to go find gold nuggets in Alaska!”
“Invention’s a force altogether for the good,” gentle McDermott urged everyone. He had long brown teeth crowded in the front like a beaver’s. A paste of masticated food stuck in their irregularities. “Already it’s made the world a tenfold better place, and there’s more to come, believe you me. What they can do with those Jacquard cards!—they’ll soon be running an entire assembly line.”
“And where is the benefit for those without capital?” Kleist asked, his aggressiveness somewhat softened as Stella’s sweet ham and three kinds of potatoes percolated through his digestive system. “What profits invention makes possible are gobbled up at the top, and squandered on yachts and mansions and marrying off their daughters to dukes and counts overseas!”
“Not at all, Mr. Kleist, not at all,” Dearholt said, playing now the Christian placator. “The very clothes you are wearing—a century ago, only a gentleman could have afforded that suit. The profits from ever more sophisticated machines come straight to you, the consumer, in the form of cheaper goods. Even the poorest among us benefits, though he may not know it.”
Done unto one of the least of these, Clarence remembered. Ah, but there is no God.
Little Teddy, gazing from the far end of the table into his father’s face, burst into tears. Clarence heard the child distinctly whimper, as Stella bowed over the boy, “Dad looks funny.”
Stella glanced toward her husband, but unlike her son did not see into him, just registered with satisfaction the fact that an appropriately dressed man was filling the space at the head of her splendidly supplied and dressed table. The younger Caravello daughter, who had been casting her limpid long-lashed eyes sideways toward Jared, now spoke up, claiming her American rights. “I like America,” she said, in an English scarcely accented. “It is a hard country but you are free. Back in Italy, Papa used to say, there were three tyrants—the padre, the signore, and il tempo, the weather. Here there is only one tyrant, money. And a man with money can belong to himself.” She faltered, alarmed by the circle of silent attention she had commanded and perhaps uncertain if her last sentence had been grammatical. “In the old country others always owned you; there was always fear. They used God to make fear.”
“Silenzio, Sophia,” her sister hissed.
“I think that’s very well said,” Stella announced, in a voice so syrupy and complacent that Clarence doubted she had been listening. In a sharper voice she called, “Mavie. It’s time to clear, dear.” To Clarence their young Irish maid loomed, in the muddy rainbow glow of the Tiffany lampshade, as an angel, pallid and meek and neutral, above the garish faces of his guests, her childish fumbling fingers floating the disgusting plates away, stacking them on the oval serving tray on its folding stand. Surely the loaded tray would be too heavy, with its thick plates and ponderous pronged accompaniment of silver, for her to lift. But she did it, with a pained wince of a saintly pale-lipped smile that only he observed; with stiffened back she bore off the tray through the swinging kitchen doors, to its fate of hot suds and, for the silver, Parlor Pride polish. The table talk, having inflicted in its clash so m
any cuts to heal, had fallen quiet, and Clarence dismally perceived that it was his hostly duty to start it up again, upon an innocuous topic. He cleared his throat and said, “I read in the Evening Times where young Teddy Roosevelt and his bride won’t be returning, after their honeymoon, to the East. He’s going to take up residence in San Francisco, where he’s to be the district manager for the Hartford Carpet Company.”
“My lands,” Stella said, rising to assist Mavis in bringing the dessert but wishing to help her husband revive the conversation. “They might get swallowed up by another earthquake.”
“Disasters are everywhere, Mrs. Wilmot,” Dearholt assured her, “as your good husband has earlier stated. Even in our own proud city we have suffered, since the turn of the century, a fire gutting the entire downtown, two furious floods, and an actual cyclone! Still, Paterson prospers as never before. Two hundred silk plants, over five hundred manufacturing establishments in all, producing upward of sixty millions in annual product value!”
“And forty thousand men and women paid starvation wages for the privilege of being slowly worked to death,” Kleist interjected, his eyes narrowing in amused expectation of protest from the representatives of ownership and management. He had turned his radicalism, it seemed to Clarence, into a social trick. A performing monkey on a string of ready indignation.
With painful seriousness McDermott rose to the bait: “Starvation wages, far from it, for the skilled workmen. A good loom-fixer, or a Jacquard-card puncher, or even a broad-silk weaver, they’re up another level or two from your average dyer fresh off the boat from Genoa.”
“Bosses’ toadies, twice as bad as the bosses,” Kleist hissed.
Well, Clarence reflected, of God’s existence or non-existence, what did it all amount to but the paper-thin difference between death as the end of it all, no worse than a long untroubled sleep, the end of desire as well as capability, and death as the beginning of fresh adventures, a life beyond imagining, full in God’s sight, and grotesque to picture—the scramble of Resurrection, the open-mouthed monotony of eternal choral praise? For most men this was all religion was, this gamble at the back of their minds, with little to lose but an hour or so on Sunday mornings. But for him, alas, it was a livelihood, and his manhood’s foundation. There is no God, no foundation. The floor of his stomach chafed, overfull.
Mavis and Stella brought in the dessert, two pies hot from the oven, a mince and an apple, the slices of apple laid one upon another as tidily as a fish’s overlapping scales, and heaped up high beneath a blanket of cinnamon and brown sugar and piecrust thumbed at the edges to a kind of baked spiral. He had often seen Stella’s plump hands do the trick, running around the rim of the pie in less than a minute. Mavis carried on her tray the pies and between them a crystal bowl of the season’s first strawberries and a side-dish of whipped cream twirled to a peak like a heterodox church’s white spire. In spite of the panic gnawing at his stomach, Clarence felt in his mouth a welcoming rush of saliva.
The other members of the Church Building Requirements Committee arrived in time to be offered coffee and dessert if they wished. The late arrivals endeavored quickly to take on the conviviality of those elect who had dined together. The mingled, forcefully amiable faces and voices pecked at Clarence’s muffled awareness. Kleist merrily escorted the Caravellos out into the warm evening, where light still lingered on the streets; Stella and the two committee wives retired to the parlor while Clarence ushered his committeemen into his study, where chairs were grouped away from his desk. The meeting, after a prayer for guidance offered by the chairman, Mr. Dearholt, debated the wisdom of the new two-story Sunday-school and church-social wing, which could be built on an adjacent lot, extending through to Fair Street, prudently acquired in the wake of the 1902 fire against the possibility of just such an expansion. The cost would come to a mere nineteen thousand dollars, it was estimated by a reliable contractor known to Mr. Dearholt—indeed, his brother-in-law. Such an addition not only would relieve the gloomy cramping of the present basement Sunday-school rooms but would provide a well-lit and up-to-date upstairs space rentable to suitable outside groups for an amount whose pleasant effects on the budget would vary according to the renter’s means and worthiness. The space would accommodate fellowship dinners and educational events and musical evenings which would attract, in the competitive bustle of respectable Paterson, new young members. Young members are the lifeblood of any church if it is to serve the needs of coming generations. “Growth, growth,” Mr. Dearholt pronounced emphatically. “Any organization that is not growing is dying, though it may take years for it to realize the fact. The Congregational Church over on Auburn Street is an example. One day, to coin a phrase, it woke up dead!”
A chuckle ran through the committee, which seemed inclined to agree. Clarence found the prospect unutterably depressing. The unbuilt annex sat like a stone across his chest: the workmen, the excavations, the noise, the dust, the debt to be financed, the thousand details to be wrangled through, the disappearance from this section of the city of the pleasant little rectangle of green shade, with its stucco birdbath in a bed of impatiens, its signboard announcing the coming services and the week’s religious motto, its wrought-iron bench for the contemplative of whatever denomination. His face must have expressed dismay and discouragement, for all turned to him in expectation of having their enthusiasm checked.
“It wearies me,” he confessed, “the thought of so much effort and expense directed to a merely material end. Nineteen thousand dollars: such a sum would support a score of families for a year, or would enable a foreign mission to relieve only Heaven knows how much misery in one of the Asian famines. I think of the interest, the running expenses, that will be with us far into the future, a burden upon our children’s children. The Psalmist admonishes, ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.’ Is a church effective in direct proportion to its physical size? Please ask yourselves, gentlemen, how much of your sudden passion for building is rooted in motives of competition and envy. Just because Trinity Methodist, our good neighbor further up Broadway, has expanded, and reconstructed its entire chancel the better to display the voices of its paid choir, does not oblige us to match them, dollar for dollar. Surely our Presbyterianism is not so crassly worldly as that.” He permitted himself a dry theological jest. “The Methodists are, after all, followers of Arminius, who argued against thrifty Calvin and said men were free to spend. Seriously, a church is a community whose strength lies in purity and zeal, not in its buildings. The present edifice sits harmoniously on its lot, and the leftover green park is a kind of gift we make to the neighborhood in general, to the weary passersby.” Weary himself, he sighed.
The eyes of the committee fastened on him with an oppressive brightness and curiosity, detecting in his very cadence something already defeated. Not one voice sprang up to argue against him. Mr. McDermott at last said quietly, kindly, “Ah, but how will purity and zeal be known, unless we make of them an outward and visible sign? Our buildings are the means by which we announce ourselves in Paterson. Visible prosperity is not a virtue, of course not, but Calvin’s creed allows that it may be a sign of God’s grace.” His tone was not accusatory but softly probing, like a doctor’s.
And Clarence did feel sick, not just in his stomach but in his chest, always his frailest part, since a boyhood fever and a spell of what they called consumption. He took breath with a little difficulty, and could not shake the touch of hoarseness. “My friends,” he said, “the church belongs to you, and not to me. That’s the meaning of Presbyterianism. I am a teaching elder, but you are the ruling elders. I am with you only for the length of my call, whereas many of you have been baptized here and will be buried here; this is the church of your lifetimes. I just wonder”—he scraped away an obstruction in his throat—“if going forward in a very practical way is not sometimes”—again, he struggled to clear his voice—“a path of avoidance, avoidance of the deeper issues.…” He trailed off.
The committee, their voices coming to the rescue, briskly agreed to establish a subcommittee to look, in view of the minister’s lack of enthusiasm, more closely into the likely costs, both immediate and continuing. A friendly conference with the Trinity Methodists, as to the drawbacks and results of their own expansion, might not be out of the question. Of course, you can bet that—and they named several industrial aristocrats who sat prominently among the Methodists—contributed heavily. Some said as much as half of the needed total came from two or three pledges. Mr. Dearholt, his oval glasses flashing, in his clarion voice ventured to hope that no lesser generosity might be met with in their own ranks. Their parish was not impoverished, though the three older Presbyterian churches in the city of course offered stiff competition and contained many of the oldest and most distinguished families. He would take the liberty of informally inquiring, here and there, among sound and discreet men whose acquaintance he happened to enjoy. Might he make an approach—non-binding, of course—to an architect experienced in ecclesiastical additions? Nothing less than full Gothic, in matching rough-faced brownstone, was his own personal vision—an imposing addition that would blend seamlessly with the existent structure, whose beauty and integrity our pastor quite rightly cherished.
Clarence felt that he was mentioned with a touch of orotund gravity, as if he had, in some sense, passed on. With Dearholt on the subcommittee, the thrust of its report was in no doubt, only the details. Still, he was relieved, as the meeting concluded in a jocular mood, to have put off to a future meeting any real decision. Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. He marvelled at himself, how the diction of belief had still risen to his lips. Perhaps this afternoon’s revelation would sink harmlessly down within him, to join in unspoken, half-forgotten depths the grotesque sexual dreams and nocturnal emissions of his youth.