In the Beauty of the Lilies (4 page)

Of the present chief executive there was little notice save four lines stating that President Taft had signed the railroad bill but did not sign the statehood bill, mention that all the Taft family was headed for New Haven to be present at the graduation from Yale of young Robert A. Taft, and a fear expressed that Colonel Roosevelt’s return might open wider a breach in the Republican Party; as a sub-headline put it,
Former President May Assume a Dictatorial Air in Affairs of Nation to Which President Taft Will Not Tamely Submit
. On the sports page, the New York baseball team continued to sit comfortably atop the American League. The Giants held down second place in the National, and the Lyceums defeated the Totowas, 3 to 2. A sportswriter confidently boasted that in exactly two weeks Mr. Jim Jeffries would rid the white race of the embarrassment and outrage of a negro heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, whose disturbed condition was indicated by his recent carousing and refusal to train and his firing of his manager,
Mr. George Little. Ominously, the Japanese army, according to reports from a number of sources, appeared to be massing for an invasion of Korea. The world rolled onward, in other words, on its usual riotous course of bombast and deviltry, with or without God. Clarence felt not just forsaken but insulted, as when, still at Princeton, he had been spurned by a girl of good family whom he had decided to court. Eliza Cutler had been her name. The insult dwelt in the pit of his belly. To beguile himself from awareness of the sore and shameful void opened within him, Clarence pulled from his shelves not a volume to help him prepare for next Sunday’s sermon—the very prospect sickened him—but a squat book,
The Trimmed Lamp
, by the author O. Henry, who had died a few weeks ago, at an age only a few years more advanced than Clarence’s was now. Piqued by its Biblical allusion, the clergyman attempted to read the title story, which concerned two young city shop-girls with a man, Dan, between them, but before he could arrive at the twist and moral at the end dozed off in the arms of … nothingness.

The heat of the day relented with a forerunner of the evening breeze, which gently scraped the window shade against its frame. In his dreams, he seemed to be trying to fix a lock on his bedroom door, lest one of his children barge in upon his and Stella’s privacy. But the lock grew large and clumsy beneath his hands, curved and wooden to the touch, like an old ox yoke shaped by visible chisel-marks or like an axle to adjust or grease which he had perilously crowded himself beneath a heavy wagon’s underside. The great iron-tired wheel near his head creaked to turn, and he awoke with a start. There were brittle, chuckling noises from the dining room; the women had started to set the table. His mouth was parched; he wondered if he had been snoring. The now-crusty
wound of faithlessness was still there in his consciousness, like a muddy shirt allowed to dry where it had been tossed.
There is no God
. Croakily, Clarence ventured his first utterance aloud for these three hours. “Have mercy,” he whispered, smiling at the futile sound of it, his voice scratching at the air like a dog begging to be let in at the screen door.

“Mr. Dearholt, would you like to favor us by saying grace?”

The oval glasses, the confident broad false teeth, flashed. Dearholt had a voice preeningly rich and rounded, rebounding off the cavernous wet walls of his mouth. He often left his mouth half-open after an utterance, as if a delightful addendum might instantly set it in motion again. He responded, “Reverend Wilmot, I would never dare presume to do so at the table of a man of the cloth.”

Dare:
Did Clarence imagine a glint of danger there? Dearholt was the owner of a small mill—thirty employees, a dozen looms—and an expert in spotting weakness in both machines and operators. Clarence’s suggestion bordered on the eccentric, though he hoped it might pass for elaborate courtesy and habitual modesty. He had now a secret—God’s non-being—to protect. He bowed his head beneath the leaden silence above them, the rectangle of twelve downcast faces in the sickly yellow light of the scallop-edged Tiffany chandelier, and reached upward with his oddly roughened voice, which sounded fragile and muffled in his own ears. “Heavenly Father,” he began, blankly, and found in his practiced lexicon of sacred usage further words: “In these troubled times instruct us in Thine activating covenant and loving mercies so that we may render back unto Thee a worthy portion of the blessings which Thou bestowest, even to this meal and the fellowship
of our gathered company. We dare lift our voices in petition not through any merit of our own but by virtue of the gracious intercession of Thine only Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“Amen,” Dearholt loudly said, as if driving an extra nail into a shaky construction.

Yet, that awkward duty discharged through a dryness like chalk powder in his mouth, Clarence found he had a fair appetite. The sweet ham with its congenial tang of cider vinegar, the steaming bowls of vegetables glazed with melting butter and sugar in Stella’s rich Southern style, the three sorts of potatoes—mashed, boiled, and “Dutch” fried—and the long suspended field of glittering silver and glasses seemed to bid him live at his own wake. Present at the meal, while pale little Mavis hesitantly served, were his wife and three children, Jared, Esther, and Theodore; Mr. and Mrs. Dearholt; Mr. and Mrs. McDermott, he also of the Building Requirements Committee; Mrs. Caravello, with her two dark-eyed, dark-browed teen-aged daughters, Maria and Sophia; and Mr. Kleist, the recently fired broad-silk weaver, a wiry, edgy German of about fifty, bristling with grievances and theoretical remedies.

Mrs. Caravello’s husband had been a dyer’s helper who had died prematurely of the damp, the cold and the heat, and the vicious chemicals of the job, which could strip a man’s skin from his hands and stain his skin beyond the reach of any soap. Caravello had been, like many of the immigrants from northern Italy, resolutely anti-clerical, and his shy, buxom widow had showed up one Sunday in a back pew of the Presbyterian church guiltily, as if betraying her husband’s ghost but unable to control her need for God’s society. Clarence was embarrassed by her—her halting English, her humid
heavy good looks, the dark gauzy hair on her forearms and upper lip—but Stella’s impulsive embrace had swept her up and installed her among her many parish pets; the two daughters, themselves nubile, were a few months ago baptized in the creed of Calvin at a private weekday ceremony around the marble font in the empty church. The three Italians, scattered about the dining table, formed pockets of silence, yet with their glowing olive skins, and hair centrally parted and pulled tautly back into shining buns, and curvacious lowered lashes, they were disturbing presences, radiating the life force in their wordless sexual need.

The born Protestants worked around them, snapping at each other. Clarence followed the conversation, when he could, almost with amusement, hearing all the voices, including his own, distantly, as if his ears were plugged with wax. At times his hearing withdrew entirely, while his mind turned away and visited the new emptiness within him, marvelling at its extent, grandeur, and searing persistence.
There is no God
.

“Troubled times,” Dearholt quoted back at him with an uptilted chin. “What do you see troubled about them, Reverend? I would call these exceptionally good times, for the U.S. of A. and the city of Paterson both. The silk business is going full tilt and the locomotive works will come out of their slump as sure as I’m sitting here—it
has
to happen, what could possibly replace rail as the cheapest, fastest way to move bodies and freight across this enormous nation? Alexander Hamilton was dead right, the Passaic Falls make this the finest manufacturing site in the Western world; it just took a century or so for the reality to catch up to the vision.” This must be from a speech he was accustomed to delivering, for as he gave it his bright, slightly protuberant eyes and flashing spectacles roved merrily around the faces at the table. “Why,” he went on,
“we’re becoming such a showplace they’re making movies right in on Garrett Mountain; any number of people I’ve talked to have seen Mary Pickford, ducking in and out of that little hotel over on Barclay Street, owned by Bill Ruffing and George Marion. The actors use it for changing rooms.”

Clarence felt obliged to interject another voice. “I suppose, Harlan,” he began, and with several awkward ahems scraped away at the hoarsening obstruction that clung to his vocal cords. “I suppose there are always fortunates to whom no time appears troubled. But for the run of mankind, if we take to heart what I was just reading in the
Evening Times
, misery is more the rule than the exception. Floods, revolutions coming and going, armies poised to invade. The faster the telegraph wires bring the news to us, the worse it seems. Locally, shootings, drunken misbehavior, drugs, conflict between the races.”

“You sound discouraged, my friend,” Dearholt genially barked back. “Struggle and survival, it’s been ever the way of the world. I enjoy it; it tests a good Christian’s mettle.” He swivelled his head, mouth ajar, as if projecting a beam of light from a lighthouse.

“And what, sir, may I ask now,” Kleist broke in, with a Teutonic accent that made him seem more aggressive than perhaps he meant to be, “do struggle and survival have to do with being a Christian? Turn the other cheek and trust in the Lord, that’s the message as I understand it was handed out.”

“Fight the good fight, Mr. Kleist. Jesus was no namby-pamby. He knew life was a ceaseless battle—read the parable of the seeds. He warned us right out, He came to bring a sword.”

“Yes, but did He intend the sword to be always in the hands of the rich?”

“If it’s me you’re referring to, my good friend, I’m far from rich, as my missus here will attest. We live within our means and set a table more modest than this one here at the good reverend’s. I worked my way up from bobbin boy and when I graduated to a loom gave twelve hours a day of hard labor for half the weekly wage the weavers of today are grumbling at. Ask the men and women I employ if I’m not on the floor before they show up and if I’m not doing my figures when they’re safe at home, or more likely squandering their pay in the corner saloon.”

“As it happens, Mr. Dearholt, I
do
know men fortunate enough, if that’s the word, to have been in your employ, and they tell me there’s nobody keeps a stricter watch on the offminutes and there’s nobody keener on stretching.”

Mr. McDermott, halfway down the table, announced, “I’m not certain, sir, that all at this table know what stretching is.” He was a loom-fixer for Empire Silk—a tall man, gentle and precise, who loved the looms, though their clatter had taken away some of his hearing.

“You can’t live in Paterson,” Clarence heard himself saying, as if on the other side of a wall, his own hearing having difficulty, “and not know about stretching.”

Jared, his older son, sixteen at his last birthday, laughed at the far end of the table, as though his father had made more of a jest than intended. Jared was a quick, hazel-eyed, predatory boy, more like his grandfather Jared than like Clarence. He was seated next to the older Caravello daughter and may have felt obliged by that to call attention to himself. Seated next to his mother, little Teddy, whose eyes were chocolate-brown like hers but without the merry gleam—little lusterless passive pools of watchfulness instead—looked toward his father worriedly, sensing the grown man’s distress and disorientation.
Tonight even Teddy’s lovingness struck Clarence as a bothersome burden.

“Stretching,” McDermott was going on with his Scots pedantry, aiming his explanation most directly at the noncomprehending Italian widow, “signifies raising the ratio of machines to operators, which has become possible with all the marvellous improvements in the looms. The first improvement was the changeover from hand-power in the Eighteen-eighties, and then, more recently, the invention of these devices that stop the loom when a shuttle thread breaks, or when a warp end breaks. Before, you see, the operator had to spot the break and stop the loom himself. So a man now can operate two machines instead of one, and receive a higher pay.”

“But far from
twice
the pay,” Mr. Kleist added in his pushing German voice, “though they do twice the work.”

“No, now—not twice; let’s not exaggerate. The gain of productivity amounts at most to two-thirds.”

“Regardless of the exact figures,” Mr. Dearholt impatiently intervened, “the point is that the fools resist progress at every point, just as the Luddites did a century ago. Men never learn: progress is inevitable, and everyone benefits by it in the long run. The anarchist mentality you see in Paterson now would have us all still walking the fields with wooden plows, looking at the rear end of a horse.”

Kleist’s face, a bit concave, like Punch’s or the man in the moon’s, went rigid with the effort to keep his temper, and to organize his angry tumble of thoughts. “The men that own the plants benefit, there’s no argument there. But those same weavers that accepted the stretch-in for higher pay, within a few years they saw their pay back to where it was, and them having twice the machines to run.”

“Competition, Mr. Kleist, competition,” Dearholt smilingly
responded. “The costs in Paterson must be equal to those in the mills of New England and Pennsylvania, or there will be no jobs for anyone. It’s the owners who must cope with the costs and try to keep Paterson industry competitive. The generals look after the soldiers, that’s the way it must be, or the battle is lost.”