Clarkton (5 page)

“It's your affair, George.”

“Which means we can't discuss it—which means that suddenly, even to you, I'm a
Daily Worker
cartoon of a boss, sucking the blood from his workers!”

Handling the chessmen, fingering their smooth ivory surfaces, Abbott watched him. “No, not at all,” reflecting that the chessmen had the tactile attraction of Chinese fingering pieces, all the world and its problems and conflicts absurdly simplified into a few black and white toys. “Only that it was yours to work out,” Abbott said. “I couldn't help you.”

“You know what the plant means to me. You know that it means precisely nothing, that it never has.”

“I know that you're a very rich man without it. I always respected in you, George, the quality of being a rich man and a human being at the same time. I never knew enough rich men to come to such “a conclusion independently.”

“I didn't want the plant. I thought that during the war it served a function, made me useful. I wanted to be of some use.”

It was very painful for Lowell to talk like that, and Abbott was quite conscious of the fact. Abbott was also aware that in 1944 the Lowell Company had earned something over two million dollars net profit, in 1945 only slightly less. Lowell knew; they looked at each other and it remained unspoken.

“You would have wanted me to settle the thing the first day,” Lowell said.

“Or before the first day. As I said, it's your affair. I don't know what I'd do in your place—I've never been in your place. My own problems are fairly simple, to decide if a person's sick and what ails him. Yours are more complicated. But I see these people who work for you asking for a raise, and I hear you tell me that the plant means nothing to you. I don't like strikes—I don't like them any more than you do, and I feel them in a sort of way. A lot of people get sick and hurt during a strike. But I also don't understand what is the principle involved here.”

“They're the highest-paid workers in the state”—but without conviction. Lowell had not wanted this, this direction, this sort of probing.

“And the lowest-paid worker in Massachusetts earns more than the highest-paid worker in India or China. What does that add up to? What does it mean to you to fight this thing out? They'll win in the end; they'll win because if they're pushed back, there's nothing for them. That's less important than what this thing is doing to you.”

“In other words, I'm becoming—”

“You're not becoming anything,” Abbott sighed. “Things are being done to you. You put yourself in a current; it's a current of decay, of rot. Somebody hits you, and you react. You have to react.”

“They could have their raise,” Lowell said. He was relaxed again, inside of himself, where there was security and strength. “Curiously enough, Elliott, I meant what I said about the plant. I don't want it; I never did, any more than I wanted this house. But I think sometimes, Elliott, that you live in an abstraction; everything works out in an abstraction. In life it doesn't. I lock up the doors of the house because it's mine. The plant is mine too. My father made it and. built it. It's true I left it to Wilson to decide if the raise they wanted was a fair raise; Wilson thought it wasn't: but in the last analysis, I agree. I don't want to be told what to do.”

Abbott remained silent, and the silence was something new between them, something irrational and alive that grew and increased. Finally, it had to be broken and Lowell broke it, lighting a cigarette, smiling, and saying:

“Let me put it this way, Elliott. We're old friends, and we should be able to understand each other.”

“We should,” Abbott said.

“I walked into the plant five years ago for the first time since I was eighteen. I didn't like it when I was eighteen; I hated it. And on that first day, five years ago, a Knox blocker repeated and the dinker lost his thumb. If he had been a little slower, I suppose it would have been his hand, but in any case, there on the spot, I wanted to be rid of it, close it down and let it rot.”

“I remember,” Elliott said. “That was Charley Brank.”

“But I couldn't close it down. I couldn't let it rot. It existed outside of me. I couldn't put a town to death. It's my plant, my responsibility. I've wanted to run away from that for five years, but I couldn't.”

“But you never put Charley Brank to work again,” Elliott said. “He didn't want to close down the plant. He wanted to heal up and go back to work.”

“If it would solve anything,” Lowell said, “they could go back to work tomorrow. It wouldn't solve anything, any more than it would for me to run away. It's either mine or theirs.”

12.
I
n the entrance way, as they were leaving
, Elliott kissed Lois and George kissed Ruth, as was their custom, with warmth and without self-consciousness, and then Lowell waited in the cold to see whether Elliott would be able to start the car easily. He waved as they drove off, but Ruth. Abbott, who had watched Elliott swear softly as he ground the starter, kept her eyes on her husband, instead of waving back, as she would have. She was thinking that it took a good deal to upset him, and for that reason, when she asked about what had taken place in the library, she phrased her question very carefully.

“We spoke about the strike,” Elliott said. “Will you light a cigarette for me? You should have come in there. There was no need for George to get me into a corner.”

“He wanted to very much,” lighting the cigarette, placing it between his lips, and letting her fingers stay there just a moment. “I know he did.”

“Was it an argument?”

“It was nothing. It was no damn good.”

She said, with no note of complaint or condemnation, but matter-of-factly, “Are you going to let this thing break it up? I like those people.”

“It's being done, Ruth. I don't say yes or no. I don't pull strings. I am constantly amazed by human capacity for change. I know what's happening to George, but that doesn't make it possible for me to prevent it from happening.”

“Does George know?”

Elliott shrugged, and from there they drove on home in silence. When they reached their house a few minutes later, a white clapboard affair at First and Poplar, the lights were on in the waiting room, and the doctor found his irritation added to by the prospect of a late call. But by the time he had put his car under the “roof,” a shed-like affair at the side of the house, built in the past century so that people might step out of their carriage and avoid a wetting, his petulance was over; and to let Ruth know, he said to her:

“If it's a long journey, you'll drive me, won't you?”

She nodded. They were twenty years married and childless; she was his nurse, and could tell a case of measles or croup as well as he could; she was used to him, and she had done without him, and knew how that was too.

As they came into the house, Frances Colby, cook, maid, and everything else about their home, emerged in wrapper and curlers, and told them, “It's not a patient. It's. Danny Ryan and somebody else with him, so I put them in the waiting room. Can I go to bed?”

“You can go to bed,” Elliott said.

“Do you want to give them coffee? I didn't, because if you give Danny coffee, he'll be here all night. I didn't know if you wanted him all night.”

“Ruth will make the coffee. Go to bed.”

“Just as you please. It's your house; it's your waiting room; it's your coffee.” She trailed away, a stout woman of fifty with an enormous bosom that had nursed nine children. She had started at sixteen, and now the children were grown, married, dead, and strayed, and her attachment to the Abbotts was both permanent and indefinite.

Danny Ryan grinned as the doctor and his wife came into the waiting room. He was a very small man, five feet four inches high, and he appeared to derive an endless amusement in measuring himself against Abbott, the very fact of their juxtaposition delighting him. His age was somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, he being that kind of a dry man whose shrinkage is good and leathery. He had blue eyes in a dark face, and he was and had been these past six years a dinker in the big plant; half of two fingers on his right hand had gone for that. He introduced the man with him, younger than he, worried looking, a heavy chin and a mass of black hair. “This is Mike Sawyer,” he told the Abbotts. “Mike is the new full-time, working out of Springfield. I guess you never met Mike before, but he knows about you.”

Both Elliott and his wife shook hands with Sawyer, who said, “I met you once in Spain, but that was so long ago I guess you forgot. I was in the South, but I got scurvy real bad and they sent me up and you examined me. I remember you said something about how does it feel to have teeth like beads strung too loose, but I guess you forgot.”

Elliott said, no, he didn't remember, but he was glad to meet Sawyer again, and he hoped he would like Massachusetts.

“I'll like it by and by, but it's always the same when you get into a new place. Everything happens all at once, just to welcome you.”

“It never fails in a new place,” Danny Ryan said.

“But it'll work out. And it's pretty country around here. I never worked in country as nice as this.”

Ruth asked him where he had been before, and he said in the army. He had been discharged five weeks before, but if they needed people, what were you going to do?

“Tell them to walk away,” Danny Ryan said. “Off—don't bother me. If I been in the army four years, I get on my back and say, walk off, don't disturb. I want to rest.”

Sawyer grinned, and Ruth went to the kitchen to start the coffee. Abbott asked them if they'd have cigars, and Sawyer shook his head, but Ryan accepted with great formality, a ripe, rich, Irish sort of formality that had in it just a touch of disdain, the very faintest quality of mockery, and then bit off the end, lit it, and took his first puff with solid appreciation. The doctor had a cigar he had wanted all evening, but had resisted because he knew Lois could not bear the smell, and would not have mentioned it, but would have simply borne it with such quiet suffering as would eventually have killed the evening for everyone present. Now they all sat in the big, deep, overstuffed and ugly chairs of the waiting room, tacitly avoiding the subject until Ruth returned, and being so full of it that they could not very well discuss anything else. After a minute or two, Ryan went over to the radio and turned it on; he was quick and birdlike, filled with a nervous energy that not only became apparent to others; but pricked them unpleasantly. The loudspeaker whimpered:

“Put me in your arms and rock me, I'm cradled in your heartstrings, baby; please don't drop me down and shock me …”

“Just a few minutes for the coffee,” Ruth said, coming back into the room and in a sense restoring it, knitting each of the three men into place with a glance, but looking at Sawyer longer than at the others. Sawyer was puzzled by her; her body was young, but her freckled face was dry and not pretty at first, and she was too exactly the type who would be at home in a place like Clarkton and correctly the wife of a big, amiable, slow-moving back-country medic like Abbott. But for Ryan, she was something else as Sawyer realized from the way Ryan snapped off the radio and said:

“It's awful late to bother you folks, Ruth, but this is going to be a bother, even if all the storekeepers are full of love for the strikers and the police are like silk and honey, which is a lot of malarkey, if you ask me—and there I disagree with Sawyer here who says the essential nature of this strike is different. Like hell it's different!”

He looked at Sawyer, who, somewhat abashed, said, “OK, suppose we argue later. Tell the story.”

“All right. Sawyer here came into town for a meeting tonight. Just a routine thing with the trade union people, and it didn't have to be anything else but routine because everything is going all right. But he's new in the district, and it's a wise thing to get around and keep in touch with things. Also, they got four tons of canned goods in a public collection in Worcester, and we had to arrange a way to get a truck over there and bring back the stuff, also in a way so that nobody would have any doubts who arranged it—because I feel if we can't get credit at least for that, we should go put our faces in the mud and leave them there. Also, we had a special meeting of the strike committee this afternoon, and they're so dizzy with success, the way they tied up the plant, they should stand on gyroscopes not on the ground. After the meeting, I walked over to case the picket line at the First Avenue gate with Joey Raye—”; he explained to Abbott, “You know him, I think, Doc. He's a big, heavy-set Negro, who works in the service department, and a very good guy. He set up the whole soup kitchen outfit, and he's the kind of a guy people don't think about a lot, doesn't talk too good, but damn solid underneath. Well, we're standing there when a car drives up with a pass and the picket captain lets it through, no trouble or nothing. But there are two guys in back of the car, and Joey Raye recognizes one of them and tells me it's Hamilton Gelb. Does that ring a bell?”

Watching Ruth Abbott, Sawyer noticed the amazing change that took place when she smiled. Ryan couldn't talk and stand still at the same time; three sentences were out and he was all over the room, and that was when Ruth Abbott began to grin. She wasn't laughing at him, merely enjoying the quality of the little man, and suddenly she was alive and alert—and curiously enough, to Sawyer, she was a woman for the first time, breasts and thighs and legs, and a placid serenity underneath that would not be disturbed. Looking from her to her husband, Sawyer wondered where was the strength and what was the relationship.

“What kind of a bell?” she asked.

“A nice rich-toned bell. Go back to 'thirty-six, 'thirty-seven, 'thirty-eight.”