Edsel (9 page)

He smoothed down the pages on his clipboard. “Chances are you’re no longer borderline. I’d like to get you upstairs next week for tests. If it is diabetes mellitus, we’re going to have to sit down and discuss some changes in the way you live. Dramatic changes.”

A
ND THE LEAVES ON THE TREES
planted in boxes along Woodward Avenue went from sooty green to brackish orange and fell, and snow fell the color of rust and was pushed into piles like slag along the curbs, and the long coma of winter in southeastern Michigan passed into soggy spring, muddy, pot-holed spring; and young men in dirty yellow hard hats whose ancestors paddled birch canoes up the Detroit River laid plywood and plastic between the gaunt steel ribs on American Road in Dearborn and puttied sheets of glass the size of barn doors into their frames, and a wall of glass twelve stories tall and two city blocks wide glittered in the sun rising over the Ford Administration Center. Israel Zed conducted me on a tour of offices lined with silver-papered insulation while an April rain the consistency of thirty-weight oil smeared the windows and rataplaned the uninsulated roof. Everything smelled of sawdust and glue.

“This is where you’ll work. Unless you’re one of those who thinks a view is distracting.”

The view at the moment was of Wayne County farmland as seen through an aquarium. The fields were plowed quicksand and the scattered houses and barns looked hunkered down, their shingled roofs shining like wet asphalt. The room, doorless, naked-joisted, and floored with sheets of plywood stenciled BAY CITY LUMBER, looked as if it would hold enough hay to feed all the sodden cows on all those farms for a season. “How many do I share it with?” I asked.

“Nobody shares here. Let the Russians share. Believe me, you’ll need every square inch of it. You’ve got about six weeks to think about what kind of carpeting you want and whether you prefer wallpaper or paneling. I’m getting mahogany myself. I considered oak, but that’s too much like a synagogue. I understand you toured Rouge again yesterday. Did you see anything you hadn’t the first dozen times?”

I was growing accustomed to the way Zed changed subjects in midstream. “Not quite a dozen,” I said. “Nearer ten. This time I used the lapel pin and got down on the floor to talk to some foremen. Did you know they fired a worker last month for putting an empty Coke bottle in the box frame of a Fairlane to create a mysterious rattle? The foreman thinks he was paid by GM.”

His envelope-flap mouth dipped down, dragging creases from its corners to the sides of his Semitic nose. “You might want to stay away from the line for a while. The workers become suspicious when people in suits start hanging around.”

“I never wear a suit when I go to Rouge.”

“You don’t look like someone who doesn’t a lot of the time. And you don’t look like someone who’s accustomed to coveralls. They have a sense for that kind of thing.”

“I’m just trying to learn the business the way Mr. Ford said.”

“Hank’s different. He could cross a picket line alone during a nasty strike and the worst he’d get would be a disapproving look. Part of it’s the family mystique; mostly it has to do with his firing more than a thousand of Harry Bennett’s stooges as soon as he took over. If he has a fault it’s his tendency to forget that everyone didn’t come down from Mount Olympus with him.”

“Are you saying I’m in danger?” I didn’t ask the question with quite the sardonic quality I might have before the thing in Woolworth’s. The tape had been off my ribs for weeks but sometimes when I turned over in my sleep I still felt the pinch.

“Some of our present employees were on the scene when Bennett’s bullies kicked Walter Reuther down the steps of the Miller Road overpass in 1938,” he said. “In any case it wasn’t so long ago they won’t think history will repeat itself. At the very least they’ll be curious and ask questions you might not be able to answer convincingly. At the most—well, we’re automating as fast as we can, but it’s still a physical business, maintained and driven by brute force.”

“I thought we were all in the same boat.”

“The same boat, yes. But there are a great many decks between steerage and the bridge.” He brightened. “Would you like to see the car you’re selling?”

“You have one?”

“Kind of. Let’s go back to the old building.”

We took the elevator down, a proper one this time, although the shaft was still open and the fragile-looking cable arrangement that suspended the car exposed. I would never again ride one without picturing those slender threads. Zed’s big Lincoln Premiere was waiting, navy and chrome with tail fins and Turbo-Drive, and we boated away on its slightly soupy suspension. The front seat was comfortable and the interior smelled like a rich man’s office, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to turn around and see a coffin stretched out in back. Cars, like everything else in a nation that had once prided itself upon vertical growth, had begun to flatten and lengthen, which in turn led to lower, wider garages and houses to match. Having devoured the rest of the world with its military and industrial might, the whole country was stretching itself out like a lion in the sun. It was getting so the only place you could comfortably wear a hat was outdoors. More and more men and women seemed to be leaving them at home. Despite the ubiquity of Eisenhower in his sail-brimmed fedora and Ralph Kramden golf cap, we were starting to look like a society of shoe clerks.

In the Schaeffer Road complex we walked down the corridor Henry II had stalked a decade before, poking his large round head into offices and firing men as he went, past Edsel’s old office where his son had holed up to plan his strategy to seize control of the company from the deranged patriarch who had built it, to the design department, a room the size of a gymnasium that always reminded me less of the creative branch of a world-class corporation than a kindergarten classroom, complete with blackboards and cork walls tacked all over with colored construction paper cut into exotic shapes and square yellow oak tables smeared with paint and dried modeling clay. The linoleum floor was littered with scissored scraps of paper and the air smelled of turpentine and library paste. The room contained a half-dozen young men and one woman dressed identically in dungarees with their shirttails out; the uniform of the generation coming to power. Two were seated at drawing boards with their chins in their hands. A third was sprawled on a burst green Naugahyde sofa folding an intricate paper airplane—I think it was a Supersabre—out of what looked like an inter-office memo. Two more leaned on the windowsill sipping from king-size coffee mugs and watching a nuthatch pecking at birdseed scattered on the other side of the glass, and one sat on a stool in the far corner with his hands dangling between his knees and his head tipped so far back I could see the hairs in his nostrils flutter as he snored. This was the most secret department of the tightest-lipped industry in the world outside of munitions, an industry whose sales showrooms papered their windows when the new models were in lest the daring configurations leak to the outside world before the bombast and fanfare. The door to the room stood open day and night, sheets of flimsy cloth protected the scale models from unauthorized scrutiny, and the personnel resembled zoo animals snoozing in the heat of a lazy summer afternoon. Artistic people were the same all over. A dash of talent sprinkled at random insured them for life against the rigors of responsibility.

The ranking presence, whose name I never quite caught, turned out to be the aircraft engineer on the sofa, a pudgy twenty-odd with a scattering of golden hairs on his upper lip, who when Zed addressed him launched his creation into a high looping arc ending in an oblique trajectory, and got up with most of the noises a bear must make leaving its den in the spring. We had met before, but Zed introduced us again. The feel of the young man’s languid hand in mine told me he didn’t remember me from the priest who baptized him. At Zed’s request he closed the door to the corridor—it creaked on its disused hinges like
Shock Theater
—and led the way to the largest of the tables, where he whisked the cover off a terra-cotta clay model the size of a bedpan.

It was a top-down convertible, longer, lower, and wider than the Lincoln Premiere, with double-yolk headlights, long indentations along the rear fenders that made me think of speed lines in a comic strip, and a prominent front bumper split to make room for the horse-collar grille. Even the embossed lettering and the vertical streaks in the upholstery were represented. It was artistic work of more than just skill and talent. In Italy during the Renaissance its creator would have had a royal dispensation and a shot at everlasting life wherever art was celebrated. Being born four hundred years late had netted him a place on the Ford payroll and the kind of immortality that lasted until the next model change.

“Citation,” Zed pointed out, in his pride mistaking the real object of my admiration. “Top of the line. You’ll have a steel model on your desk next week. By then you’ll be out from behind the curtain, at least where your fellow employees are concerned. We’re beginning motivational training the week after that. Sell them on the car they’ll be selling. A little refinement of Hank’s, courtesy of a chief petty officer whose duty included preparing men psychologically to win the war. The principles are the same, even if the end result in those days was somewhat messier.”

“Let’s hope,” I said. “The grille looks even funnier in three dimensions.”

“Jack Reith borrowed that little number from the army.” The languorous young man spoke of his division superior with a yawn in his voice. “He served under Hap Arnold, so they let him poke around. He says the new jet fighters have a front end just like it. Keeps their engines nice and cool when they strafe commies.”

“A large-mouth bass has the same front end. I wouldn’t want to drive one.”

The sun set in Israel Zed’s big face. He thanked the young man, asked him to replace the cover, and dumped a large meaty hand onto my left shoulder, steering me out into the corridor. Walking beside me with his head down and the yarmulke showing, he looked like the rabbi-in-residence for the Green Bay Packers.

“I think you should know I went out on a limb when I suggested you for this job.” His rich voice carried further when he lowered it. “Hank likes young men. You belong to Bennett’s generation. If this new miracle machine turns out half as hard to sell to America as you were to Mr. Ford—well, the point is I couldn’t lose because I had faith in you. The world’s greatest sharper couldn’t sell hot biscuits to Eskimos if he doesn’t believe in them. I’m starting to think—correct me if I’m wrong—that you have doubts about this car.”

“I’m fifty-five years old, Mr. Zed. I have doubts about everything.” I wanted to leave it at that; I couldn’t. “You won’t be sorry you fought for me. I’ve already put most of my own time into this job, on top of all the company’s.”

“Time isn’t as important as attitude. You need to stop thinking of this as a job. Before the war, a car was just something you needed to get from here to there. All it took to sell one was to beat the other guy’s price. Now people are on the move, buying houses in what we used to call the country and shuttling to and from the city every day. Bob Briefcase drives twenty miles to go to work. Wife Betty drives ten miles to the supermarket and another twenty-five picking up and delivering Cub Scouts. That means two cars in the garage. When vacation time comes, Bob, Betty, and the Cub Scout throw everything into the trunk and a travel trailer and hit the open road. After two years of this they’re sick of both cars and ready for something jazzier with fins and a dashboard loaded with dials and gauges. Money’s no problem; they can always swing another loan at the bank and pay it off on time. It’s our responsibility to have something worthy of their expectations waiting for them when they enter the showroom. It’s not so much a job as a sacred trust.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Neither did I, until I was in too deep to back out. We’re last-century boys, you and I. When we were born, the horse count in this country was higher than the human population. The city was a place you went to buy oats. Today our parents wouldn’t be able to understand more than one word out of ten in a normal conversation. That’s how far we’ve come in just fifty years. I have a wife and two sons in Baltimore who haven’t seen me more than a few days out of the year since I came to work for Ford. Believe me, if I’d worked this hard on the forty-eight campaign that would be Tom Dewey thumbing his nose at Khrushchev instead of Old Baldy.”

“I heard it was his moustache.”

“I tried to get him to shave it.” He waved his free hand. “Another reason I chose you is you have no family. No distractions means more concentration. But you can’t put it up when you go home. When you cut your finger you have to bleed Hi-Test or it’s no go.”

We stopped near the staircase at the end of the corridor and faced each other. Somewhere in the building someone dropped a pencil, a distinctive clatter that can’t be mistaken for anything else and carries like thunder.

“Count on me.”

Zed beamed. He had perfect teeth, as even as the stones at Arlington. “I was positive I could. Everyone needs some talking now and then.”

We shook hands and he went downstairs. Alone in that drafty hall I felt a cold spot between my shoulder blades, as if I were being watched. The curious onlooker might have been the me that I was twenty years before.

The telephone on my desk was ringing when I entered the office.

“Hi, Connie. This is Janet Sherman.”

“Hi. If you’re looking for your boss he just left.”

“I know. He has a one o’clock with Mr. Ford. Actually I’m calling you. I had a lunch date but he just canceled. I didn’t bring mine today and I hate eating alone in restaurants. Are you free?”

“Janet, are you picking me up?”

Pause. “I’m sorry. I thought—never mind.”

“Don’t hang up. It was a bum joke. Where would you like to eat?”

“I was thinking Greektown. The Greasy Gardens?”

The Grecian Gardens, in the very shadow of Detroit Police Headquarters, was the most visible of all the restaurants in that brief stretch of Monroe Street left behind by the city’s once-massive Greek community. It was also the payoff point for every cop on Frankie Orr’s pad. My experience with those places was that with all that guaranteed traffic, the proprietors didn’t lose much sleep thinking up ways to improve the service or cuisine.