American Dreams (18 page)

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'Since you like to drive, we'll try to find a driving job. I must warn you of one thing. I insist that men who work for me conduct themselves in a moral way at all times. No cursing, no carousing or brawling, nothing to bring shame on the organization or themselves. 1 have a saying: At Ford's we want to build men along with automobiles. Clear about that?'

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Carl said he was. 'Good.' Ford launched into a monologue to which he clearly expected his visitor to pay heed. 'There's a future at Ford. We're a dynamic company in a dynamic industry. Of course, my ideas are different from most of the other fellows turning out cars. They all want to cater to the well-to-do. Fancy touring models with high price tags. Not my way, not my notion. The cars we've marketed up to now, they're all right, but they still cost too much. I want to deliver a simple car, soundly made, speedy, dependable, but priced low enough for millions to afford it. That's where 1 see the big profits -- getting the car not to the elite but to the mul.

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titudes.'

He stroked a finger along his lower lip and smiled. It was a curious smile, cold and cynical.

'They think I'm crazy, the rich boys from Grosse Pointe. I know what they call me. Henry the Shiftless. Always tinkering. Never had a good idea in his life. We'll see. To be great is to be misunderstood, that's what Emerson said. I was put into this life for a purpose. I've lived before, you know. We've all lived before, many times.' As the night fell and cicadas began to whir, Carl's hair almost stood up. Ford was saying mad things in a perfectly sane voice.

'I believe in my last life I was a soldier, killed at Gettysburg the first or second of July, eighteen hundred and sixty-three. I was born into this present life at the end of that very same month, July 30. One life slipping into another, easy as the seasons changing.' Carl sat. in stupefied silence, haying no idea of how to reply. He was reprieved by the clatter of a tele 1

phone bell. Ford's wife called him through the screen. 'Take the number, Clara. I'll call back.'

He shook Carl's hand again. 'Report to the personnel department on Monday, seven a.m.'

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'Mr. Ford, thank you. Thanks very much.'

'Don't be late. Personnel will sign you up, settle what we're going to pay you. Frankly speaking, I like the cut of your sails. Just remember what I said about the behavior we expect. Thwe are no exceptions. Say, care for a cigar before you go?' m

'No, thanks, I don't usually -- well, sure.'

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Ford handed him a cigar as they strolled into the hall, held a match for him. Carl puffed. The cigar had a strange flavor, like tobacco adulterated with some chemical. He felt he should say something complimentary anyway. He was about to do so when the cigar exploded.

Ford slapped his thighs, convulsed. His wife rushed into the hall. 'Oh, no, Henry. Not this nice young man. My husband is an awful practical joker,' she said in an apologetic tone.

In a hall mirror Carl saw his singed eyebrows and the burst cigar growing out of his mouth like a weird flower. He plucked out the cigar and said,

'Yes, ma'am, I see.'

'Sense of humor's important to a man,' Ford said. 'Sign of a good character. No hard feelings, right?'

'Oh, no, sir.' He wondered how long it would take his eyebrows to grow out.

'Well, then, thanks for coming over. Oh, and don't forget. Go to the public library. Read some Emerson. Good night.'

In the lobby of the Ponchartrain, Carl said good night. The food and beer had left Paul logy, craving fresh air. 'I'll walk you to your place if it isn't in the next county.'

'Only about a mile. North of Gratiot. What they used to call the Kentucky district. It's nothing to see. A lodging house for single men. The neighborhood's run down.'

'Hell, I was raised in a rundown neighborhood. Lead on.'

They strolled up Woodward past dark office blocks and lighted saloons.

Carl said, 'When will your book be published here?'

'You know about that?'

'Mama wrote me.'

'It'll be next winter.' Paul hadn't mentioned the book. Carl was leading a fairly aimless life, self-indulgent, without a clear future. Talk of the book could be construed as Paul bragging about his success. He loved his cousin too much to risk making him feel bad.

He needn't have worried.

'That's wonderful. I can't wait to read it. I'm proud of you. The whole
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family's proud.'

Carl spoke truthfully about his neighborhood. Antoine Street was trash strewn, lined with ugly two-family houses, most with weedy yards, peeling paint, broken stoops or porch railings, the whole feebly lit by corner street Reunions

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lamps a block apart. Somewhere a baby squalled. Someone picked at a banjo. In the shadows a gaunt hound snarled at them. The dog's eyes glittered like yellow stones.

Looking between the houses toward the service alleys, Paul saw shacks that were evidently lived in; lanterns shone in several of them. The surroundings depressed him.

A white woman in a squeaky porch rocker watched them pass. In the next yard two black children played jacks in the dirt. Carl said, 'The street's what they called mixed. It's cheap to live here. Jesse, my riding mechanic, is a Negro. He has a little bachelor house two streets over. He keeps it tidier than most of these.'

'Do the colored and the white get along?'

'Pretty well. Most of the trouble comes from outside. Irish gangs run through and beat up people for sport. There's my place.' He pointed at a frame house at the end of the block. A man lay prone on the porch. A woman stood over him, weeping. 'Hey, that's my landlady.'

Carl dashed ahead. Paul followed quickly, through a gate in a low white fence with many pickets missing. The man on the porch raised his head, tried to raise himself. Blood dripped from his mouth. A couple of upper teeth hung by red threads. One slitted eye was puffed up big as a hen's egg. The man sprawled flat again. 'Oh, God, it hurts. I think they broke a rib.'

Carl said, 'Mrs. Gibbs, what happened to Ned?'

Mrs. Gibbs sobbed. 'He came home from the shop real late. He said they jumped him at the corner and dragged him in the alley. I'd already locked the back door. He had to crawl all the way around the house. He called me, but not loud enough. I didn't find him laying here till five minutes ago.'

,'Who did it? One of the gangs?'

After a struggle to raise his head again, the injured man tried to curse.

He only managed to spit more blood.

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'Oh, sure, the gangs,' the woman said with a bitter toss of her head. 'A gang sent by the E A., that's who. The foreman's threatened to fire Ned for being what they call quarrelsome, a troublemaker. You know my Ned, strong for a union shop. He speaks out.'

'Detroit's an open-shop town,' Carl said to Paul. 'The EA. can be pretty nasty about enforcing it.'

'What's the EA.?'

'Employers' Association of Detroit.' '

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'Do you have trouble like this?'

'Not at Ford's. My mechanic's had a brush or two at his foundry.

Listen, Paul, 1 have to lend a hand here. It was a swell evening.'

'I'll help you carry him inside.'

They lifted the moaning man carefully. Mrs. Gibbs held the screen door. They laid Gibbs in a mussed bed in a fetid bedroom. Mrs. Gibbs asked Carl to fetch Dr. Stein. 'I'll see you in the morning,' Paul said as they left. He turned toward the river. Carl trotted the other way.

Paul walked back to the Ponchartrain in the stillness of the night. In the distance an auto backfired. Or was it a pistol going off? A couple of minutes later a wailing siren suggested the answer.

A gaudy whore accosted him. Deep in thought, he waved her off with his cigar. On a picture screen in his head he saw the landlady crying, the blood running from her husband's mouth. Detroit, the booming auto capital, wasn't as peaceful as it seemed on the surface.

20 Model T

Friday morning, a taxi brought Paul to the Ford plant on Piquette Avenue, about three miles north of the city center. Tall white letters painted on the cornice of the brick building proclaimed the home of the CELEBRATED FORD AUTOMOBILE.

The plant was some four-hundred feet long and sixty or seventy wide, as dull and dreary as any manufactory anywhere in the world. Through
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the open windows came the sound of mallets pounding metal, the hum and whine of machine tools and motorized belts, a cacophony that made him crave earplugs. The air was a miasma of motor oil, gasoline, paint, and God knew what else. In a holding yard to his left, several boxy black autos were lined up. Another drove from behind the building, through the gate and parked. The driver ran back in the building. It wasn't Carl, he noticed.

Paul straightened his tie and lugged his case toward the factory entrance. A truck carrying axle assemblies rolled up behind him. Lettering on the cab said dodge Bros.

Entering, he turned left, past a bullpen of stenos and clerks and into a Model T

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small reception lobby at the end of the corridor. He asked for James Couzens, the man in charge of finance, bookkeeping, shipping, advertising, and sales for the company. Carl had warned Paul about Couzens, said that while virtually everyone at Ford liked Henry, most feared and despised Couzens, whose mistress was a balance sheet and whose temper could be volcanic.

Paul sat on a bench and read through two issues of Motor Age before Couzens came out of his corner office. He was a pudgy man with pincenez and a cold, patrician manner. He shook Paul's hand without smiling.

'This going to take long?1

'It shouldn't. The light's fine this morning.'

'You can't do any filming inside, we have secrets to protect.'

'You covered that in your letter.'

Couzens acted as though he hadn't heard. 'This is a busy plant. We roll out twenty-five cars a day.'

Bristling, Paul said, 'Mr. Couzens, my pictures are shown in hundreds of theaters in the U.S. and Europe. I thought the company wanted publicity for the Model T.'

'Henry's the one who wants publicity. He arranged this. I just did the paperwork.'

'Maybe I'd better talk to him.'

'I'll take you up. He went to body painting and trimming a while ago.

Leave that case here. Follow me.'

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Couzens led him down the hall past the main entrance. Not completely boorish, he pointed out things as they went along. 'Employment office.

Our machine shop. Bar stock storage. In there we keep cushions, running boards, tops, steering columns. This is shipping. This is the electrical department - magneto assembly.'

He rang a bell to bring down a freight elevator. Paul said, 'My cousin works here. Carl Crown. He's a driver'

'I recognize the name.'

'Would you happen to know where he is?'

'We have 346 employees. I don't keep track of all of them.'

The rattling elevator dropped into sight. Behfhd the gate was a shiny black Model T with its motor ticking. Couzens opened the gate, and they stood aside as the auto rolled across the wide aisle and out the door.

'Where did that come from?' Paul asked.

'Manufacturing. Top floor' Couzens slammed the gate and punched the button. Paul was getting angry. He figured Couzens for some kind of idiot 112

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bookkeeper who knew nothing about the power and reach of moving pictures.

Henry

Ford couldn't be found at the noxious paint booths on the second floor. They backtracked through another large machine shop, a storage area for frames and axles, a chassis-assembly room. Finally they were back at the north end of the building above Couzens's office. 'Design and experimental tool room,7 he said, leading Paul through a closed door into a combined office and drafting room crowded with drawing tables and blackboards chalked with diagrams and sketches of parts.

'Well, well. There's Henry where you least expect to find him.'

Ford's corner office consisted of a plain desk and a few utilitarian furnishings.

Ford saw them outside his door, jumped up, came out with a quick, energetic step. Men in the room worked in shirtsleeves, but Ford wore his coat and vest.

'You must be Crown. Henry Ford. Very happy you're here.' They shook. 'I'll take over, Jim.'

'Good. I have work to do.' Couzens pivoted like a soldier and marched off without saying goodbye.

Paul said, 'I saw a Model T in the elevator, Mr. Ford. How's the reception
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been so far?'

'Call me Henry. Or Hank. The reception couldn't get much better. We ran our first ad a week ago today. In the Saturday mail we had over a thousand inquiries. Envelopes full of cash have come in all week. It's price, don't you see? Our Model F touring car sold for a thousand dollars.

The Model K, six cylinders with a torque drive, that was twenty-eight hundred.

I designed those cars for the shareholders because they pounded the table and insisted. This one I designed for myself. The price is low, but we'll drive it down even more. Let me show you around.'

'If it isn't too much trouble.' The remark came out unexpectedly sour.

'Too much trouble to show off our prize offspring? Not on your life.'

Ford laid an arm on Paul's shoulder as if they were old friends. Put the lanky man in overalls and plow shoes, you'd take him for a hick. But he had charm. It worked on Paul like a drugstore nostrum. His anger popped like a boil, gone.

On the third floor, small areas were devoted to wood-pattern making and storage of frames and axles. The rest of the floor was final assembly.

Chassis with wheels and motors in place stood in a row on either side, Model T

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facing inward. A long line of these stretched away down a wide center aisle. The cars nearest Paul and Ford were the least complete.

The assembly floor was noisy, everyone running about like mad worker bees. Gangs of men pushed rolling carts along the line, stopping to lift a fender or dashboard out of the cart and mount it before moving to the next car. At the head of the line a finished Model T with everything in place and connected drove into the elevator. Ford kept up a running commentary: