Clarkton (24 page)

2.
A
s he closed the front door of his house be
hind him, Max Goldstein realized how long it was since he had left home at this hour, the more so in the sunless and biting cold of a December morning, a small departure from the normal course of things; but for him almost an adventure in itself. In the empty and lonely Sunday streets, there was only the cart of the milkman coming back from his deliveries, and the only sound was the click-clock of the horse's hoofs. There is no wind at such a moment, when the night is finished and the day not yet begun—or so the legend goes—and the air is cold and heavy and tired from cold darkness.

Goldstein had wrapped himself in a long, alpaca-lined coat; he had a scarf around his neck, and a hunting cap pulled tight down, and if anyone had seen him, they would have thought of an intelligent, well-trained bear, and like a bear he ambled slowly to the corner and then down the three blocks to Elliott Abbott's home. Lights were on in the old frame house, yet he rang the bell sheepishly and showed an apologetic face to Frances Colby when she answered. “It's early,” he said inanely. “It's very early, isn't it?”

“Six forty-five.”

“I thought it was a little later.”

“It's exactly six forty-five,” she said emphatically. She had a housecoat on, and she was not in a good mood.

“I thought I'd come around for coffee. Liz is asleep.”

“Well, come in,” she said. “Don't stand there all morning. Come in.” And she led him inside to the kitchen, to where. Abbott, his wife, and Mike Sawyer were sitting and drinking coffee and eating hotcakes and syrup. Abbott grinned when he saw Goldstein, and said, “Good morning, Max,” and Goldstein smiled back foolishly. The others said good morning, and Ruth got up and set a place for Goldstein, while Frances Colby poured batter onto the griddle.

“You want orange juice?” Ruth said to him.

“Just coffee. I find I don't have any appetite in the morning. I suppose I could eat a hotcake or two. It's good to have something on your stomach, isn't it, Doc?”

“Some say so,” Abbott smiled. “With you I think it's just academic. Have you turned your back on legality?”

“I couldn't sleep,” Goldstein answered uncomfortably.

“I don't wonder. You probably had gas pains.”

“No—I just got to thinking. I got to thinking that one thing I'll never get over is a hankering for the bench. Even something like chief magistrate. I used to be a good lawyer once.”

“You going with us, Max?”

“I guess so,” Goldstein nodded mournfully, carefully layering the hotcakes Frances put in front of him with a great helping of syrup. “You know, heroes are made, not born. It's maybe five years since I got up at this hour of the morning; with me, it's an undertaking of some proportions, and at this moment I feel foolish. I don't think there's much sense to this. But Elliott never forgives someone who doesn't do what Elliott considers the honorable thing to do. These are very good hotcakes,” he said to Frances Colby. “Elliott has cold and ancient Puritan blood. He is also an ascetic, which does—”

“You talk more damn nonsense,” Ruth interrupted. “Max, Elliott wasn't angry at you.”

“I'm angry at myself,” Goldstein muttered through a mouthful of pancake. “I'm too old and too fat for wars, marches, and counter-marches. It was my own revered ancestor, Bar Kochba, who said, Gather around me the young men, those of bold mien and brave countenance, and I will forge them into a mighty sword for freedom. Jew or no Jew, I could have had old Lowell's business these past fifteen years, ánd ten years ago it wouldn't have been as fantastic as now to consider a Jewish governor for Massachusetts. I'm not complaining, I'm merely speculating. For young Sawyer here to amble up Concord Way is an ordinary thing; for me, it's an adventure fit for Cervantes.”

“Why don't you stop talking so much and finish your breakfast?” Ruth said.

3.
I
t gave Joe Santana a good feeling to see the
people, even though they were slow in coming at first. A good many of them went to the early mass, and those didn't begin to assemble at the soup kitchens until well after eight o'clock. Others went to the local headquarters instead of to their soup kitchen, so that by half-past eight at least seven or eight hundred people were standing around waiting at the corner of Oak and Fourth. Joe himself went over to Sam Saropoleś place quite early, and helped Sam boil coffee and make toast—for which there were plenty of takers-when mass broke. The soup kitchen filled up to capacity, with a steady interchange as well, and they ran out of bread, broke into their doughnuts and cake, ran out of that, and then got out a case of zweiback that had been donated by a Taunton grocer. “By God,” Saropoles complained bitterly, “there's one thing about that O'Malley, he sure as hell gives them an appetite. You don't have the church on your neck one way, you got it in another.” “It's the nervousness that gives them an appetite,” Joe said. “You got to expect that.” “You got to expect them to eat us out of a week's rations to establish one mass picket line?”

The sun rose with an icy and metallic glory, and the bells at the Protestant Episcopal church, which was all the way over eastward, on the other side of town, began to toll out the sweet notes of
The Bells of Saint Mary's.
It was a strange and unusual Sunday morning for Clarkton, with so many people on the streets, so many clumps of them here and there, more people than it would have seemed that the town could hold, and through them and among them the townsfolk who did not work at the plant, and some that did too, going to church in their Sunday clothes, and not a policeman in sight but the one radįo car Jack Curzon had cruising slowly back and forth through the streets. There were hundreds of children who had turned out to see the sight, and they were making a great holiday thing of it. A whole contingent of young workers who were veterans were got out in uniform, carrying their own flag and a big banner which said,
OK
—
if it takes more than Anzio, Tarawa, and Normandy!

At a quarter to nine, Danny Ryan, driving Renoir's 1931 Ford sedan, pulled up at Saropoles' kitchen, pushed his way in, and told the Greek, “The whole thing's screwed up for the march up the street. We got more than a thousand at Oak and Fourth, so why don't you send your gang up there, and we'll start out from there instead, and give Curzon less of a chance to tear into us.”

“I don't see any cops,” Saropoles said. “I don't think they make a damn bit of trouble for us, Danny.”

“Well, don't think too hard, Sam. There's sure as hell a lot of them up at the plant.”

Meanwhile, Noska was handling the press at the union's executive offices. Young Jimmy Campbell was there from the Clarkton
Minuteman
, as well as two reporters from Worcester who had come in on the morning train, one from the
Times
, and the other the AP man, both of them taking a chance on a telephone call Betty Sullivan, the local's promotion person, had put through. David Broom, a local accountant who worked for two wire services on space rates, was also there. The little office was crowded, and the reporters kept firing questions at Noska, a practice they believed, by scripture of film and book, to be a necessary one. Bill Noska said, again and again:

“Nothing's going to happen. It's an interference with our simple, legal right to picket. We intend to picket, that's all.”

“But what about that crowd outside?”

“We have the right to assemble in mass,” Noska said slowly and stubbornly, biting each word.

“What do you think of Tom Wilson's charge that the whole thing is being engineered by Communists?”

Still biting the words, Noska said, “If Tom Wiļson thinks I ain't president of the union, or I run it crooked, or I'm pushed around by a lot of reds, and if he says that, then he's a dirty liar.”

4.
T
here was a tone of quiet formality in the
Lowell home on this Sunday morning. After Lowell had shaved and showered and dressed himself, he felt better and cleaner, and in at least some condition to face the problems that would have to be faced, and he was even able to accept the cold aloofness of Fern's manner. To a degree, he felt better than he had for a number of days, rather tired, but better too. When he came down to the gun room, his wife and daughter were already there, and he was able to say:

“Good morning, Fern. Good morning, Lois.”

Fern didn't answer, but Lois said, “Hello, George,” matter-of-factly, and he was relieved to see that Lois was all right, that there was not going to be a scene, and that they could react like civilized human beings again. He had just a slight headache, but he had taken some aspirin for it and it would go away soon. He drank his orańge juice, poured his coffee; and said something about the weather.

“I know how you feel about church,” Lois said, “but they're having the memorial services for Pearl Harbor, and I sponsored them—”

“If you want me to go, I'll go,” he nodded.

“They're going to unveil several plaques, and Clark's is one of them.”

“I'm not going,” Fern said.

Lowell felt aloof and wise and slightly sorry for both of them, and he told himself that he didn't want to see Lois hurt any more. Actually, he was beginning to accept the fact that there would be a resolution of this without a divorce or a separation; separated from it by a day, he realized it was not so different from other incidents that had happened, and there was always a resolution, and there would be one now too. “You must go, Fern,” he told her kindly. “I know how you feel about it.”

“You don't know.” But beyond that, she didn't argue. A certain mood settled, over them, and they finished their breakfast with hardly more than a few words spoken. After breakfast, Lois stepped into the living room, and when Lowell followed her there, he saw that she had been crying a little. She dabbed at her eyes as he took her around the waist, and when he kissed her, feeling that each movement of his body, arms, and lips must be consciously and carefully directed, she whispered, “What rotten things you can do, George.” “I know.” “I don't want to think about it, George.” “I know,” he said.

Fern was waiting for them after all; they got into the car, Lois driving, and Lowell looking at her with a numb and hopeless sense of being back, being within himself again, but knowing too that it couldn't be any other way. Lois avoided the town, swinging in a circle along the old turnpike. When they came to the church, the parking space was already full, and inside the Reverend Ellis Whitford had just begun his sermon. Abashed, they slid into their pew, and almost immediately Lowell's face assumed the tight, expressionless, somewhat stupid look that he reserved for those not-too-frequent occasions when he sat in the House of God. He had a hatred for church that he never fully formulated, never completely allowed into those upper and conscious spaces of his mind. It was compounded out of childhood, birth and death, formless fears and musty odors, the shape of the flower-banked coffin in funeral services, the great space of the stained-glass window above the pulpit, the huge ladies' hats that blocked his vision in childhood days, and the idea of God, the stately, bearded, masculine, heavy-muscled God, depicted in such bright colors in the Sunday-school slides of his boyhood. In the quiet of common sense, he could reject this, substituting for it an amorphous and timid concept of benignity that produced immortality, a sexless, brooding, shapeless immortality which took the edge off extinction and no more; but here in church, no matter how many years passed, the God of Israel, the God of Moses, Michelangelo, Oliver Cromwell, Governor Winthrop, the God of justice and stern passion returned to plague and cauterize him. His antidote was to lapse into a stately and dignified daze, a coma that was almost completely thoughtless, recording words without recording meaning. Ladies seeing him that way, bolt upright, so intent and handsome and lean, envied Lois and pitied him for the loss of Clark and the ápostasy of Fern. The Reverend Whitford, a small, pudgy, earnest, and deep-voiced gentleman, who had noticed the entrance of the Lowells—the church was a small one—felt very much the same, and dwelt on the question of sacrifice.

“The Great Emancipator,” he was saying, “was a singular example and a divine manifestation of man in God's image, a face graven with the sorrows of all mankind, a soul sweet with the implications of life unending. We should inquire into the full meaning of his words when he spoke of those honored dead who do not die in vain. Is it not considered by so many—those who in New York are called the sophisticated—a cliche, a homily, to remind ourselves that the smallest sparrow does not fall to earth and falling elude the blessed sight of God and of his gentle Son, Jesus Christ, our Redeemer? It is a fact, but I, for one, am not afraid of cliches, of homilies, of the good words that my grandmother and my great-grandmother spoke on this old and hallowed New England soil; I am not sophisticated, and I say, thank God for that. I have not yet lost faith in my God and in His omnipresence and His omnipotence. Those are mighty words for a mighty concept. In the ancient days, when men were pagan and unredeemed, bloody sacrifices were offered up on idolatrous altars, but a sacrifice can be sweet as honey in the eyes of the Lord our God. What of those honored dead, who gave the ultimate of man's ability to give? Are they to be unrewarded? Are we to believe the cold-and so-called scientific observations of today?” The Reverend Whitford paused and looked from face to face, earnestly and searchingly; he found George Lowell's eyes, fixed on them a moment, studied them, and then passed on, recalling in passing the old wives' tale of the time George Washington went to church, soon after his inauguration, and was so soundly ticked off by the pastor that he never went again. So the Reverend Whitford allowed only a moment for effect and continued, a heavy note of scorn entering his voice: