by John Updike
In May, the tide turned against the strikers. Patrick Quinlan, the first of the out-of-town leaders to be tried for advocating violence, was convicted. The police and Mayor McBride closed Turn and Helvetia Halls, on the grounds that the speakers there had abused the right of free speech. In retrospect, this loss of a rallying place was a crippling blow. Each striker faced alone his hunger, his unpaid rent, the mounting bills. The manufacturers held adamant; the bigger of them had begun decades ago to build annex mills in eastern Pennsylvania, where the wives and children of coal miners would work for lower wages than skilled workers had become accustomed to in the proud old industrial town of Paterson. With these Pennsylvania annexes the manufacturers were able to fill some of their orders.
Men like Lambert and Doherty and Bamford were old-fashioned nineteenth-century entrepreneurs driven by cutthroat competition to squeeze and drive their workers ruthlessly. The same pressures bore upon the smaller, newer silk manufacturers, Jewish in the main, some of whom might have settled, if the union could have trusted them to keep their agreements. The strikers’ goals were an eight-hour day and a twelve-dollar minimum weekly wage. The respectable classes of Paterson were solidly with the manufacturers against the spectre of revolution. Of the clergy, only the Reverend Joshua Gallaway, pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church on the corner of Prince and Grand Streets, spoke up for the strikers, saying to an audience in Turn Hall that “without strikes the oppression of the workers of the world will never cease.” The more common ecclesiastical view was that expressed by the Reverend W. C. Snodgrass, who preached that “the worker’s side was generally fairly conducted by the owners of industry.” No view was publicly expressed by Clarence Wilmot, who was treading the seething streets of Paterson as a salesman offering door to door a leather-bound set of facts and pictures called The Popular Encyclopedia, for three dollars fifteen cents a volume, paid monthly until all twenty-four volumes had been acquired, forming a priceless home library and a ladder of information up which any literate person, regardless of how early circumstances had compelled him to quit formal schooling, could climb toward improvement and higher status. Upon completion of payment, a handsome walnut-stained two-shelf case for housing The Popular Encyclopedia was delivered, gratis, to the home.
This job—hardly a job, since it earned no salary, just a thirty-percent commission, paid on receipt of funds, a dollar at a time, rather than upon the signing of a subscription—was being advertised in the Evening Standard when, as an early casualty of the diminished downtown business caused by the strike, Clarence had been released from the sales staff of Goldman’s Fine Clothiers for Gentlemen and Ladies, on Main Street. Prior to his position there, he had served out his year of probation in the Presbyterian clergy. On more than one occasion, finding himself waking Sunday morning without a voice, he had enlisted Stella as his substitute. Her sermons, drawing as much upon her Missouri girlhood as upon the Bible, were increasingly admired and enjoyed by the initially skeptical congregation. At the year’s end, Clarence had felt no renewal of his vocation. On the contrary, his sense of the emptiness and foolishness at the base of the universe floated like a veil before his eyes, numbed his tongue in social discourse, and proved so debilitating that he gasped for breath whenever the weather changed or day shaded into night. Evenings, after dinner, he almost always needed to lie down. He travelled again to Jersey City and, with the wry triumph of the negatively confirmed, described his condition to Thomas Dreaver, whose distress and surprise were disappointingly modest. Very well, then: the procedures of demission would be completed. The moderator had moved on in his mind, he had written Clarence off; like any good businessman, he must pocket his losses and look to the future.
Clarence sought to emulate him. The Wilmots had some small savings, the financial remnant of his fifth of the gravel-pit fortune when his older brother, Peter, decided to liquidate their gritty inheritance, and with these plus a loan secured on favorable terms from a banker friendly to Mr. Dearholt, they had bought a small wooden house out on East Twenty-seventh Street, with only a margin of yard but with Eastside Park eight blocks away, for the children to get their fresh air and exercise in. Teddy was their main concern; he was now ten, a heavy, quiet, apprehensive child with lackluster brown hair and eyes, who had taken on a paper route to help the family finances. Jared at nineteen was nearly through with his freshman year at Rutgers; he had seen that Princeton was beyond his family’s present reach, gone down to New Brunswick to apply and see about a scholarship, saved up his summer money from driving one of the Nagle Brothers ice wagons, gone out for the football team, and was down there now waiting on tables and playing second base on the freshman nine. One of his teammates’ father was a trader on the Wall Street stock market and had promised Jared a job as a trading-slip runner next summer. Once the days of his infancy were over, Jared had always seemed to Clarence another man in the house, with an uncomfortable resemblance—the same bushy fox-red eyebrows, the same decisive slash of a mouth, though not framed by a trimmed iron beard—to his own father. With his cocky, good-humored realism Jared had early grasped that his father, even before the collapse of his vocation, was not a person to lean on. The boy had caught, by some wireless telegraphy, the rhythm of the America to come, the nation constantly reinventing itself in cheerful ignorance of all the discouraging books in his father’s airless study. He was merry and distant and implacable, the ragtime tunes of the future jangling within him. When he deigned to come home, full of collegiate wisdom and new slang, he was treated by Stella and Esther as a source of authority, though the young man contributed nothing to the household and everything to his own advancement.
Esther, who had grown into a tall, slender, and pale echo of her father, with her mother’s rich head of chestnut hair transmuted to a less luxurious strawberry blond, was a month from high-school graduation, and not so caught up in the whirl of commencement and its semi-sacred ceremonies—darkened and complicated this spring by the strike and its plurality of deprivations as they reverberated into the lives of the young—as to have failed to seek employment. She had switched, two years ago, to the secretarial course, and hoped to find employment typing for one of the city’s law or merchandising firms. Had her father kept to his own employment, resources might have been found to send her to the Normal School on Nineteenth Avenue, for she had the scholastic aptitude and the steady, erect benevolence of a born teacher. But she was a girl, whose best destiny was marriage, and the route whereby she reached it was among the lesser of the many uncertainties that Clarence faced.
He had not fully grasped how far his resignation from the church would drop him in the social scale; he had somehow imagined proceeding by inertia along the same paths of respectability, only without the encumbrance of hypocritical pretense. Robert Ingersoll had written stirringly of freeing the clergy; well, now he was free—free to sink. He had vaguely thought that, with his languages and love of print’s silent song, he might find an appropriate niche as an instructor, in a genteel, private boys’ school. It was what he should have become in the first place, had not his father’s rock-hard faith insisted that his son go seek an otherworldly profit. As Clarence imagined his new future, he would be, liberated from the dead black shroud of the Geneva gown but otherwise ministerial, deferred to by a lively pack of secular choir boys as he evangelized for the Latin classics or the English poets, or individualized the vague parade of the grim-lipped American presidents as they evolved from Washington to Wilson. But his locally notorious apostasy, he soon realized, put a shudder into headmasters and boards of trustees. It was not so much, they or their representatives assured him, his beliefs or lack of them—this was a free country, after all. There would be no difficulty had he never made a public profession or accepted a call to preach and serve; but since he had, and had demitted, a whiff of betrayal clung to him. He had deserted his post. The world can accommodate many sincere opinions but has no lasting use for turncoats. Having made such a point of renunciation, with a piou
s wife at his side and a disheartened congregation spread before him, why would he, in his fury of faithlessness, not seek to propagandize credulous children? The climate of the times was against him. The immigrant hordes had brought to America German radicalism and Italian anarchism and Semitic materialism; this was no time for native-born Protestants to grow lax and abandon the sublime values and articles of faith that had induced God to shower down upon them the blessings due a chosen people. It was Harlan Dearholt who with genial frankness explained the nuances of feeling behind the sometimes curt rejections that set the limits to Clarence’s professional prospects. He alone of Clarence’s former parishioners continued to engage him in intercourse; besides helping him arrange the home loan, he headed Clarence, in the more prosperous atmosphere of 1911, to Goldman’s Clothiers, where the former parson’s natural courtesy and dignity of bearing enhanced the store but did not lift his wages as high as the twelve weekly dollars the strikers would demand. Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God’s specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.
Setting out in late winter, when the soot-speckled triangles of old snow were easily mistaken for the bedraggled pieces of newspaper and strike propaganda that blew everywhere, he had first essayed the more fashionable blocks on the East Side, and had met there mostly doors quickly shut by frightened-looking maids, on orders he could hear shouted within rooms curtained from view. In some houses where affluent boredom welcomed a visitor, he met a disposition to make of him the morning’s entertainment. The encyclopedia company, which was located not in one of the capitals of the East but in forward-looking St. Louis, supplied to its apostles, along with a smart briefcase holding order forms and sample pages, a glossy handbook that listed for memorization the merits of its product—the more than thirty million words, the twenty-five thousand separate alphabetical entries from Aachen to Zwickau, the close to ten thousand illustrative steel engravings, diagrams, and maps, the over a thousand individual contributors, eighty-five percent of them American citizens, in sharp contrast with an unnamed competitor, whose contributors and emphasis were preponderantly British. The enterprise even had a brute industrial dimension, measured in the hundreds of compositors needed to set the text, the tons of metal involved in the type, the miles and miles of thread to sew the sheets together, the tons of ink and glue—twice as many tons, it turned out, of glue as of ink. Heads of learned societies, members of the United States Congress, learned professors eminent the world over—even these were not spared quantification. Some prospective customers listened respectfully to his tumble of information; some cut him short; most didn’t let him in the door. He thought he would grow inured to rejection and scorn, as in his former profession he had grown inured to tales of misery and discontent from his parishioners, but something unhealing and unduly proud in him continually winced at the angrily shut door, the sardonic dismissal. More than one smug householder from the eastern parts of Paterson walked him to the study and unkindly showed him the haughty leather spines—so impeccably ordered on their tall shelf as to suggest that the treasury of knowledge was merely worshipped, never consulted—of the eleventh edition of The Encyclopœdia Britannica. Then it was his to protest, in a gambit foreseen by his salesman’s handbook, “Oh, but the Popular is edited entirely by Americans, and is much superior on American subjects. It has an American slant throughout, as well as being written in a more accessible language, and over a dollar a volume less expensive. If you have any young persons in the household—”
“The young persons are grown and flown. There’s only me and my missus, and when we want accessible language we’ll go down to the Question Mark Bar and hear it spoken by the disgruntled workingmen and their anarchist friends.” He laughed, this bespectacled, sallow retired accountant or clerk, his life spent in inky cuffs and green eyeshade in some secluded upper cell of a mill whose battalions of machinery throbbed and shrieked below him. “I don’t envy you your task,” the man genially conceded, showing Clarence the door without the offer of coffee and cake which his initial hospitality had suggested might be coming, “trying to sell books of knowledge in a city where ignorance is up on a high horse, and two in three can’t even speak the king’s English let alone read it. I don’t know what the country’s coming to, Mr—?”
“Wilmot.”
“Wilmot. Somehow that name rings a bell. Your face was familiar, too, when I came to the door. I don’t as a rule entertain drummers, understand. Ada, that’s my missus, is terrified of letting a stranger in, the way burglaries are rising these days, with the strikers feeling the pinch—and they’ll feel it worse, mind you me, when the industry gives the reds a shaking out!”
“You can never be too careful, sir. I appreciate your allowing me admittance. Permit me to give you my card, in case you think of anyone who might be interested in subscribing to a down-to-earth encyclopedia, written and edited to patriotic native tastes and yet containing all the world’s essential knowledge.”
“Wilmot,” the man repeated.
“My father was a farmer, like his father before him, in the middle of the state, around Hopewell. His people before the Civil War had been New Yorkers, old-fashioned merchants.”
“You’ve come a good way from them,” said the little withered accountant, more registering a deficit than seeking to be unpleasant. Clarence was out the door gratefully, into a raw spring day, under chill rolls of cloud spitting shreds of snow that might be flecks of chimney ash.
Contrary to what he had expected, it was in the working-class districts, neighborhoods close to the river and the Erie Railroad tracks, amid the little clapboard houses with sagging stoops and drawn shades, that he achieved now and then a sale. “My English, not good. Never can read. But my children, maybe. Already they speak good.”
“Whatever they want to know, they’ll find in here,” Clarence said, tapping his tinted photograph of the complete set. “For the twentieth century, these books are what the Bible was for”—he rejected “bygone times” as perhaps too idiomatic—“times long ago.”
“I know nothing,” said his possible customer, a wiry Polish Jew with expressive gnarled hands, “just knitting. In old country, since boy”—a hand held at belt level—“know to knit. Father told me, Come to silk mill. He knew knitting, I learned knitting. I come here. Now knitting business bad. Too many mills, making same silk. My boy—no. Go to school, learn from books. I tell him. In America, people learn from books. Not like old country, everybody held in place”—a yellow, veiny fist, held rigidly in mid-air, and the other hand laid on top of it, captive and captor—“never change. Here, change.” He removed the left hand, the fist floated upward, its fingers relaxing. “Each man make new self.”
Clarence was too eager; a tremor shook the promotional papers he fanned before the man. “Popular,” he said. “The word comes from populus, the word for ‘people.’ For just three dollars and fifteen cents each month, you receive one volume, and at the end of two years have the complete set, in a handsome box that is free. Your children can look up everything they need for their schoolwork. They will get high marks.” He restrained himself from shouting; he was straining his throat.
The man’s stained, muscular hands, warped to be the guiding parts of a machine, limply waved away the prospectus, the contract. “Not good time now, mister. Strike. No money anywhere, no money for food. Come back when strike won. Then, lots of money. You a good man. I like your ideas. America the best country.”
In another modest house, entered through a tiny screened porch not six feet back from the pavement—a patch of front yard at this time of year brightened by a few crocuses and early dandelions—a tiny well-spoken woman in a buttoned housedress asked him, “Isn’t it anti-Catholic? We wouldn’t want
to have that in the house.”
“Madame, not at all. The editors have taken pains to make the articles on religion uniformly respectful and studiously neutral. No child’s faith, of whatever denomination, would be disturbed by studying these pages. Facts—The Popular Encyclopedia contains nothing but facts, the facts of the world, clearly and straightforwardly presented.” Saying this, he seemed to be sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.
A few blocks away, and sounding closer, a booing rose to a roaring sound; the police were trying to break up a picket line, or perhaps some poor scab, shaming himself to keep his family in bread, had dared a gesture of defiance at the mob of his former co-workers. It was the mindless bloodthirsty roar of a crowd at a football game, a boxing match, a coliseum where Christians were being tortured and dismembered; it seemed at its distance to rise and keep rising, a wave of terrible mass, with all the weight of the human ocean driving it to tower and topple.
“But does it tell how His Holy Father is infallible? Does it give due reverence to the saints, or pass them off as less than forever blessed? Does it make out Luther and those others to be heretics?”
“It gives balanced accounts, I am certain, of all the religious controversies that have existed since Arius argued with Athanasius. Remember, madame, that the orthodox Christian creeds were hammered out point by point, and on every point both sides of the debate should be presented.”