ALSO BY RICHARD POWERS
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Prisoner’s Dilemma
The Gold Bug Variations
Operation Wandering Soul
Galatea 2.2
Plowing the Dark
Day had a way of shaking Lacewood awake. Slapping it lightly, like a newborn. Rubbing its wrists and reviving it. On warm mornings, you remembered: this is why we do things. Make hay, here, while the sun shines. Work, for the night is coming. Work now, for there is no work in the place where you are going.
May made it seem as if no one in this town had ever sinned. Spring unlocked the casements. Light cured the oaks of lingering winter doubt, lifting new growth from out of nothing, leaving you free again to earn your keep. When the sun came out in Lacewood, you could live.
Lacewood’s trace began everywhere: London, Boston, Fiji, Disappointment Bay. But everywhere’s trail ended in this town, where folks made things. Some mornings, when the sun shone, history vanished. The long road of arrival disappeared, lost in the journey still in store.
At first, the town subsisted on the overhauled earth. Wild prairie weeds gave way to grain, a single strain of edible grass, grown on a scale that made even grass pay. Later, Lacewood graduated to human wizardry, thrived on alchemical transformation. Growth from bone meal and bat guano. Nourishment from shale. Breakthroughs followed one upon the other, as surely as May followed April.
There must have been a time when Lacewood did not mean Clare, Incorporated. But no one remembered it. No one alive was old enough to recall. The two names always came joined in the same breath. All the grace ever shed on Lacewood flowed through that company’s broad conduit. The big black boxes on the edge of town sieved diamonds from out of the mud. And Lacewood became the riches that it made.
Forever, for anyone who would listen, Lacewood liked to trot out the tale of how it tricked its way into fortune. At its deciding moment, when the town had to choose between the sleepy past and the tireless nineteenth century, it did not think twice. With the ease of one born to it, Lacewood took to subterfuge.
The townsfolk felt no qualms about their ruse, then or ever. If they felt anything, it was pride. They laid their snare for the fifth Mr. Clare, the namesake president of an Eastern firm that had lately outgrown its old markets. Clare Soap and Chemical was heading West, seeking new hosts. The fifth Mr. Clare was looking for the ideal site to build the burgeoning business’s latest plant.
Douglas Clare, Sr., secretly preferred the aroma of Lacewood to the scent of Peoria. Lacewood smelled clean and distilled. Peoria was a little too unctuous and pomaded. He liked this place for a number of reasons. But he kept mum, sporting the indifference of a cagey suitor.
The fifth Mr. Clare could not say exactly what he was looking for in a future site. But he always claimed he’d recognize the place when he laid eyes on it. Even that most resourceful businessman could not call this location central. But the country’s growth would yet center it. Lacewood sat on train lines connecting St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Louisville. It lay a reasonable freight haul away from Chicago, the West’s lone metropolis. And land in this vacancy was still dirt cheap.
Lacewood decided to doll itself up, to look like what it thought Clare wanted. Weeks before the visit, the town began papering over its crumbling warehouses with false fronts. Every boy over ten turned builder. The mayor even had two blocks of plaster edifices erected to fatten out anemic Main Street.
For the duration of the company tour, the town rented an old Consolidation locomotive. It ran the engine up and down the line at frequent intervals, rearranging the consist for the sake of drama. The freight even discharged a much fussed-over load at the suspiciously new station. Ten hours later, it returned from the other direction and hauled the crates of gravel away.
Clare and his advisers saw through the whole charade. One glance told the Easterners that the decaying antique hadn’t seen service in over a decade. Peoria had run much the same stunt. And its fake façades had been fancier.
But necessity drove Lacewood beyond Peoria’s wildest invention. Long in advance of its August inspection, Lacewood dammed up its sleepy little stretch of the Sawgak, just upriver of town. Ordinarily, the pathetic trickle didn’t even dampen the dust on a muskrat’s whiskers. But for four glorious days in the heat of late summer, the town council built itself a junior torrent.
At key intervals, Lacewood posted several fishers who passed as either entrepreneurs or sportsmen, depending on the light. With uncanny regularity, the anglers struggled to land a series of mighty northern pike: fat from off the land, food from nothing, from honest labor.
The fact that Esox lucius, the species these men pulled like clockwork from the synthetic rapids, had never on its own accord strayed south of Minnesota touched Mr. Clare. He admired the industry, the pathos in the stratagem. He could work with these people. They would work for him.
He glowered throughout the length of the inspection. He shook his head continually. At the last instant before heading back to Boston in his private Pullman—whose builder, up in Pullman, Illinois, had recently created an ingenious live-in factory town that supplied all his employees’ needs—Clare acquiesced. Sighing, he accepted the massive tax concessions proffered him in perpetuity, and closed the deal.
And that’s how Clare Soap and Chemical came to stay.
Years later, just in time to stave off the worst of the Great Depression, the globe’s largest producer of earth-moving equipment dropped its world headquarters down in Peoria. Caterpillar played for more than fifty straight profitable years and ran up its annual sales to over $13 billion by the game’s twilight, at century’s end.
But Lacewood never complained. Without Clare, the town would have dozed forever. It would have stayed a backwoods wasteland until the age of retrotourism. With Clare, Lacewood grew famous, part of an empire of three dozen production facilities in ten countries, “making answers, meeting needs.”
Lacewood joined the ride gladly, with both feet. It got the goose it bargained for, and more. For over a century, Clare laid countless clutches of eggs whose gold only the niggling would stoop to assay.
WELCOME TO LACEWOOD. POPULATION 92,400. ROTARY, ELKS,
LIONS. BOYHOOD HOME OF CALE TUFTS, OLYMPIC LEGEND. SISTER
CITY OF ROUEN, FRANCE, AND LUDHIANA, INDIA. SITE OF SAWGAK
COLLEGE. NORTH AMERICAN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS DIVISION
HEADQUARTERS, CLARE INTERNATIONAL
PLEASE BUCKLE UP
May, just before Memorial Day, just this side of millennium’s end. Up on North Riverside, on the good side of the river, a Lacewood woman works her garden. A woman who has never thought twice about Clare.
Sure she knows it: the name is second nature. Traders on the Frankfurt Bürse mouth “Clare” at the mention of Lacewood, the way they point and go “bang” whenever they meet someone from Chicago. Teens in Bangkok covet anything bearing the company’s logo. Whole shipping-container sunrooms in São Paulo are emblazoned with it. The firm built her entire town, and then some. She knows where her lunch comes from. Which side of her bread bears the non-dairy spread.
She drives past Clare’s Agricultural Division headquarters at least three times a week. The town cannot hold a corn boil without its corporate sponsor. The company cuts every other check, writes the headlines, sings the school fight song. It plays the organ at every wedding and packs the rice that rains down on the departing honeymooners. It staffs the hospital and funds the ultrasound sweep of uterine seas where Lacewood’s next of kin lie gray and ghostly, asleep in the deep.
She knows what it makes as well as anyone. Soap, fertilizers, cosmetics, comestibles: name your life-changing category of substances. But still, she knows Clare no better than she knows Grace or Dow. She does not work for the corporation or for anyone the corporation directly owns. Neither does any blood relation or any loved one.
The woman kneels in her garden, kneading her fifty square feet of earth. She coaxes up leaves, gets them to catch a teacupful of the two calories per cubic centimeter that the sun, in its improvident abundance, spills forever on the earth for no good reason except that it knew we were coming.
Some nasty bug has already begun to nibble her summer squash in the bud. Another goes after her beans. She responds with an arsenal of retaliations. Beer to ward off slugs. Lemon-scented dish soap in solution, spritzed liberally to counter beetle insurgencies. Home remedies. Stronger measures when strength is needed.
She transplants flowers outdoors from their starter beds. The work is play; the labor, love. This is the afternoon she slaves all week for. The therapeutic complement to the way she makes a living: moving families from starter homes into larger spreads.
Spring releases her. The early oriental poppies unwad like her children’s birthday crepe. The alpine columbine spread their two-toned trumpets, an ecstatic angel choir. Every growing thing looks like something else to her. Her mind hums as she weeds, hungry to match each plant with its right resemblance.
Tight, hard globes of Christmas ornament relax into peonies. Daisies already droop their tutus like sad, also-ran, Degas dancers. Bleeding hearts hang in group contrition. She urges them on, each to its colored destiny. No human act can match gardening. She would do it all day long, if she could.
The ballet school sponsors. The ones who pay for the TV that nobody ever watches. The annual scholarships for the erector-set kids at the high school. The trade-practice lawsuits she hasn’t the patience to follow, and the public service announcements she never entirely understands. The drop-dead-cute actress who has the affair with the guy next door in that series of funny commercials that everyone at the office knows by heart. The old company head who served in the cabinet during World War II. She hums the corporate theme song to herself sometimes, without realizing.
Two pots in her medicine cabinet bear the logo, one to apply and one to remove. Those jugs under the sink—Avoid Contact with Eyes—that never quite work as advertised. Shampoo, antacid, low-fat chips. The weather stripping, the grout between the quarry tiles, the nonstick in the nonstick pan, the light coat of deterrent she spreads on her garden. These and other incarnations play about her house, all but invisible.
This woman, forty-two years old, looks up into the gathering May sky and wrinkles her nose. Yesterday’s Post-Chronicle predicted azure. But no point in second-guessing yesterday, with today coming on like there’s no tomorrow. Her seedlings are further along than Memorial Day could have hoped. A dollar twenty-nine, two spritzes of lemon dish soap, and a little loving effort can still keep one in squash all summer.
The woman’s name is Laura Rowen Bodey. She is the newest member of Next Millennium Realty’s Million Dollar Movers Club. Her daughter has just turned seventeen, her son is twelve and a half. Her ex-husband does development for Sawgak College. She sees a married man, quietly and infrequently. Her life has no problem that five more years couldn’t solve.
A woman who has heard, yet has not heard. And on this day, no one but the six people who love her gives her a moment’s thought.
Business ran in the Clares’ blood long before the first one of them made a single thing.
That family flocked to commerce like finches to morning. They clung to the watery edge of existence: ports, always ports. They thrived in tidal pools, half salt, half sweet. Brackish, littoral. They lived less in cities than on the sea routes between them.
Clare was, from the first, transnational. Family merchants traded in England for the better part of a century, specializing in a bold shipping commerce that ruined and made their fortunes several times a year. Each generation refined the gamble. Jephthah Clare drank in gambling with his mother’s milk. He gambled the way he breathed.
Jephthah fled the mother country in a hurry, on a wager gone wrong. He left in 1802, the year the aristocrat du Pont, escaping the French turmoil, set up his gunpowder mill in Delaware. Jephthah Clare ran from a more prosaic chaos: not wrongdoing, exactly, but failure to share inside knowledge of a collapse in sugar beet prices with an excitable trading partner upon whom he had just settled a considerable shipment. After his house in Liverpool burned, Jephthah thought it wise not to await further repayment.
He, his wife, and three small children sailed unannounced. They stowed away on one of Clare’s own packet traders. For the length of the crossing, the family slept on a cargo of Wedgwood Egyptian stoneware. The pain of the passage eased as soon as they and the plates disembarked upon India Wharf, in Boston, America. That thorny pallet of freight paid the family’s way toward a comfort that outlasted all memory of the uncomfortable voyage.
The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.
—EMERSON, “Works and Days”
Jephthah Clare cared not where he landed, so long as he could reach the all-delivering ocean. He sold his Wedgwood plates and leased a countinghouse adjacent to Long Wharf. Starting with that one salvaged packet, rechristened the Rough Bed, he commenced one of the most lucrative schemes in the long and august history of commercial laundering.
France and Britain, eternally at war, blockaded each other’s colonial trade. Clare sent the Rough Bed down to Jamaica and loaded it with coffee and molasses. He called these barrels back up to Boston Harbor, where they became, by the magic of paperwork, American coffee, American treacle. These he could then take to London, where the pinched combatants paid hand over fist for their deliverance. In the interests of fair play, he now and then took American rum to Le Havre, courtesy of Guadeloupe.
This dress-up game lasted for a full four years. Jephthah Clare extracted his markup both coming and going. When the belligerents at last closed down the trickery in 1807, Jephthah cursed Jefferson’s embargo and turned smuggler. For every ship impounded, two more came in to pay the bribes and ransom, with a little bit left over.
That margin secured him a house in Temple Place. From this base, Jephthah strolled out daily to his favored haunts in Merchants Row. He struck deals in Topliff’s Reading Rooms. He traded gossip in the Exchange, learning which packets had come in and which were overdue. He waited for the semaphores from Nantasket to reach the sentry on Constitution Wharf with word of the Favored, the North Port, the New Jerusalem.
When the embargo at last grew too risky to flout, Clare fell back upon longer runs. He dispatched New England goods to the Oregon country. There he exchanged his stock for furs. These furs he sent across the Pacific, to Canton, where his hong could not get enough of them. Furs bought tea in profuse bouquets. Tea came back home at a profit sufficient to buy ten new shipments of cheap New England goods. For truly:
The one thing Home cannot supply
Is that which hails from far away.
The sheer markup of distance sufficed to begin the whole self-enriching triangle all over again.
The world had to be circumnavigated before the humblest washerwoman could sip from her ragged cup. The mystery of it all sometimes visited Jephthah at night. It played in his drafty thoughts as he and his uncomprehending Sarah lay under the eiderdown in their timbered bedroom, tight against the night’s worst incursions. He, the Oregon trapper, the Chinese hong: everyone prospered. Each of them thought he’d gotten the better end of the deal. Now, how could that be? Where had the profit come from? Who paid for their mutual enrichment?
The port of Fayal, in the Azores, turned whale oil into wine. A trip to the Sandwich Islands sufficed to change percussion-cap rifles into sandalwood. Everyone everywhere wanted what was only to be had somewhere else. Jephthah shipped Dutch herring to Charleston and Boston cod to Lisbon. For a while, he made a fortune selling white silk hats from France to New York gentlemen, until his competitors bought up a shipment and gave them away free to Negroes, discrediting the style.
Yet the man who moved these goods around the globe could not sell to Ohio. The prospect had no profit in it. The nine dollars that moved a ton of goods from Europe to Boston moved that same ton no more than thirty miles inland.
But on the sea, Jephthah engaged in the entire range of merchanting. He owned some ships outright and hired others. He bought and sold on his own account, acted as another’s commissioned agent, exported and imported, traded with jobbers and factors. At times, he even vended directly to shopkeepers. He shipped and insured and financed, open to any deal or part thereof.
A memory for trustworthiness and great patience for paper labyrinths saw him through many setbacks. Competence returned cash, and cash bought competence. Jephthah handled cotton and indigo and potash. But above all else, he dealt in risk. Profit equaled uncertainty times distance. The harder it was to haul a thing to where it humanly belonged, the more one made.
Jephthah loved best those deals that others deplored. He joined a venture to ship ice to Martinique, lately ravaged by yellow fever. In this, neither altruism nor profit moved him. He took on the trade simply because all his fellow merchants considered it mad. Whatever the mind of man stood unanimous against probably had some merit to it.
He tithed to charity, an easy speculation in both good and bad weather. It carried almost no downside risk, while the potential upside was considerable. Ten percent of a thousand might conceivably swamp the thousand a thousandfold in returned investment. Ten percent of nothing, on the other hand, cost a man nothing.
THINGS TO DO TODAY
Sixteen rectangles run across a two-page spread, bordered like a colonial sampler. Each carries one imperative underneath a familiar package.
Rise and Shine
(Viva-cleanse)
Put On a Happy Face
(Clarity Pore Purifier)
Make Some Noise with Those Pots and Pans
(Slickote Surface)
Provide for the Common Defense
(Compleet Daily Supplements)
Clear the Air
(Blue Spruce Vapogard)
Hit the Road, Jack
(All-Weather Gravel-Grippers)
Bring Home the Bacon
(Heat ‘n’ Eat)
Clean Up Your Act
(Sterisol)
Be Fruitful and
(Multi-pli Maxiwipes)
Tie One On
(Infinistik)
Put Your Best Foot Forward
(Leather Lifts)
Shed a Little Lite on the Subject
(Fat-Fighter Spreads)
Soothe the Savage Breast
(Gastrel Caps)
Hold Everything
(Lok-Toppers)
Cover All Your Bases
(Clareglow No-fume Enamel)
Party ’til the Cows Come Home
(Partifest Non-dari Treats)
The Consumer Goods Group
CLARE MATERIAL SOLUTIONS
At last, conflagration came home. Embargo failed to keep Europe’s blood from America’s doorstep. But Jephthah Clare saw, even in Mr. Madison’s War, new chances for expansion. The old tithing speculator spread his risks, taking his certainty from the world’s confusion.
When his high-seas routes began piling up losses, he placed himself in the service of the United States and turned to privateering. He passed along to the government a share of the spoils his ships picked from slower British merchantmen. This pirate tax bought both his nation’s blessing and its weapons.
War’s end found the family with markets in burghs that had not existed until the chaos of 1812 sprouted them. Only Irénée du Pont, whose gunpowder mills held his belligerent country captive, came through the conflict sadder about peace.
One by one, Jephthah honed his sons to begin life’s journey as sassafras and come back home as sterling. He sent Samuel, the eldest, to sea to graduate. Resolve, the middle boy, finished his education in the business, apprenticed to the countinghouse. Jephthah’s first daughter, Rachael, went to a Liverpool cotton factor in exchange for ten years of favorable credit.
American-born Benjamin attended Harvard College, even finishing a degree. Business steady, Jephthah let his youngest drift into advanced study of Botany. The mere existence of such a field instilled in Jephthah a scornful pride. Two other American-born Clares failed to outlive the school of their infant diseases.
Clare and Sons had only to hold up their hands and let the magic skein of trade loop itself around their outstretched fingers. Nothing new arose along the self-replenishing arc except the ad valorem matching of the needy with the need. But whatever value the Clares added by moving goods to their proper locales, the events of 1828 conspired to negate. In that year, all liquidity threatened to evaporate.
The laws of God shipped cotton to Liverpool and sent it back to Boston as whole cloth. The laws of the fledgling Senate rose up and inquired: whither, and why? Could not government simply say how much a thing would cost, and thereby make worth’s rivers run down hills of our own devising?
But the Tariff of Abominations turned on its makers, erasing twenty years of native industry in one stroke. Sowing protection reaped disaster. Prices for raw materials and fabricated goods exploded overnight. Yankee commerce burst in air as convincingly as Key’s celebrated bombs. Tax now sucked all advantage from Clare’s intricate system of interlocking runs. The voyages out paid too little to foot the crippling return leg. Receipts failed to pay off costs. Trade no longer even broke even.
Clare the Elder grinned at having lost the last roll of the dice. He made ready to deliver himself to earth’s long deficit. For his wife, he arranged what hedges against destitution he could. Then he headed for the coffeehouses on Long Wharf to wait for the winds to change. He left it to his sons to tidy up the last entries in Abomination’s double ledger.
Funerals are for the living. Her mother liked to say that. More times than Laura cares to remember. Death was different, a lifetime ago.
She leans in to the mirror, trying not to block her own light. It should be easier, making up in full daylight. Her eyelids say otherwise. She closes one, touches the tip of a pinkie to adjust the indigo. They used to go to a funeral every other week, when she was little. Kind of gone out of fashion these days.
She lightens the lines at her eyes’ east and west, wresting her girlhood’s gaze back from its wrinkled halo. She stares into the silvered glass, looking for herself at age ten. Hearing: Funerals are for the living. Thinking: Funerals are for my mother.
She tries to imagine her father in a dark suit, shaking hands, standing about looking solemn. Bearing a coffin or driving in the cortege. Doing the heavy lifting, that bare minimum of the joint tenancy contract that males always get away with. But he does not come back to her, even that much.
Her mother runs all her memory’s funerals. Baking the stupid spinach casseroles. Washing the picked-over plates that people leave all over the dead person’s home. Shushing the shrieks. Keeping the collapsing widows from flinging themselves into the open dirt hole. Visiting the deserted, three times a month for the rest of her own abbreviated days.
Laura worries her mascara brush through miniature arcs. She flicks her lashes like a fresco restorer, returning what time has hidden. She tilts her head against the harsh fluorescence, and suddenly that missing girl stares back at her, caught in mid-girl’s thought. Funerals are for my mother. I’ll never have to do any of this. Look at polio. Look at smallpox. Disease is just a passing holdover from when we lived wrong. It’s all been a terrible mistake. My parents and their friends: the last generation that will have to die.
She looks again, and the girl is gone. Her face has become her mother’s, despite the blush. She sports her mother’s little tics and turns. Her voice is her mother’s, even this afternoon, trying to console Ellen, telling her that funerals were for the living.
Her first must have been Uncle Robert. Laura, maybe eight. Her uncle, a T-shirted ex-Marine in those three stray Polaroids. A healthy ten years younger at death than she is now.
Would you like to go to the wake? that voice, now hers, asked her.
The question, too much to answer.
That’s fine, sweetie. Sometimes people like to remember others the way they …
No, no: her horror, squeezing up into her throat like puked sour milk. Panic jamming the exits, like a crowd in a burning theater. Wake? They’re going to try to wake him?
Later that year, the funeral of a man at church who got electrocuted in a lake in Wisconsin. Distant enough to turn out without much distress. Laura and little Scotty, starting middle school, there just to learn forever never to swim in a thunderstorm.
After that, her last surviving grandparent, her father’s mother. A merciful death, by any measure. Surely better off, wherever she was going, than in her body during its last four years.
Worst was her mother’s sister, a closed-casket car wreck. The death was easy. What it did to the living almost killed her. Watching her mother in her grief. The woman she knew best in the world, an utter stranger. Her mother’s own funeral was a blessing in comparison.
Then Don’s mother, who even before Laura and Don got married liked to send Laura Christmas cans of high-fat Virginia nuts signed “Love, Mom.” That absurdity of the surgeon’s: the operation was a success, but she died in recovery.
The thought strikes her as she finishes her face. As she makes her lips look as if she has done nothing to them. Ellen’s first funeral, and she’s already twice as old as Laura was at her first. But Laura’s first was a vague abstraction. Ellen’s first is her girlfriend Nan.
Everyone knew, and no one admitted. Nan at the end, almost invisible. Away most weeks, until Laura lost track. The last four months, chasing specialists, up in Minneapolis, out in Boston. Then wasting at home, eclipsed in her growing bed, body a brown curl of hair snipped and laid upon the pillow.
The girl that died was half the size of the girl four years ago, the one Laura met when she sold the Liebers that split-level on the rolling lot across from what was then still cornfield. Ellen had come on the last house visit prior to closing. The real estate agent’s braided, same-age kid: probably helped nail down the deal.
The two girls hated each other. Some altercation involving one of them flinging the other’s Malibu Ken Grungewear out the Aerostar’s window. A year and a half later, they were inseparable, swapping wardrobes all the way down to each other’s favorite shoes and socks. Nan still used shoes, still walking then.
Ellen’s port-wine birth stain, meeting Nan’s almost imperceptible limp. Say anything about either one of us and you’re toast. An unspoken mutual defense contract, binding them together for life.
But birth stain lifted. Four trips under the laser lightened Ellen’s shame. Plastic surgeons burned her crimson temple back to normal. Nan cheered the emergence of her friend’s belated beauty, even as unstoppable rot ate away her muscles.
Ellen was their designated emissary, in the last months. Their runner, their diplomat, their spy. Launching forays for both girls into the kingdom of boys and boy products. Returning her awful intelligence reports at regular intervals. Seeking advice, long after Nan could reply. Nan, paralyzed foal, bent in the bed sheets, peering up through unfocusing disks, gurgling her guttural placeholders for delight.
Laura followed Nan’s downward progress, in all the things her daughter wouldn’t tell her. All the scraps from silence’s table. The specialists were a bust. Nan weakened with each meal she failed to work down her throat. Her muscles frayed like shoelaces tugged on beyond their allotted span.
The grapevine passed along the updates, with all the meticulous attention it pays to the grim. No one could claim ignorance. But no one followed out the girl’s curve to the only place it could land. No one once practiced for this early graduation.
Tim refuses to go to the service. “I’d rather remember her how she was.” In fact, he’d rather stay home and play on the computer. He’s been logging way too many on-line hours these days. Laura needs to start rationing him, force him outside, get him a bike or something equally archaic.
She chooses a natural, leafy scent that will not clash with massed funeral bouquets. Ellen is a mess. “Honey, not a sweatshirt. Don’t you want to look nice?”
“No.”
She wants to look the way they used to look. She wants to wear what they wore, when they wore things together.
“Let me at least fix your hair.”
“Don’t you dare touch it,” Ellen threatens.
Late, they scramble to the funeral home. Laura scrapes the front bumper on the curb, pulling up too hard. They find two metal bridge chairs at the back, for the overflow crowd. Ellen slams down, begins instantly to pulp her program to shreds. Folding and refolding, a desperate origami attempt to flush the leaden words into flight. Laura sneaks sidelong looks at her, every three minutes. Her daughter’s neck droops forward like an aster in September, choked under pollen’s profusion.
The preacher—who obviously didn’t know that little girl from Eve—delivers from the makeshift pulpit every Nan Lieber story that he could collect from grief. Fierce Nan, insisting on a block and tackle for the tree house. Imaginative Nan, inventing elaborate tales of her past lives. Studious Nan, just before leaving school for good, entering herself as an exhibit in the student science fair.
The memorial seems designed for no purpose but to torment the survivors. Laura watches the stunned parents up front, slack in emergency’s sudden vacuum. The stoic living kids next to them. The stranger doing the eulogy tortures them all with trophy portraits they’ll never now be free of.
They sing the girl’s favorite songs. They read from her favorite books, then her letters. Funerals are for the living, to punish them for all that they’ve failed to do for the dead.
Ellen refuses to go to the graveside. Laura would sit in the car herself, if she could get away with it. The casket could be carried by two underage pizza delivery boys. The baby brother himself could place it high up in the crook of a tree for safekeeping. This package not sold by volume. Some settling of contents may occur during handling.
The words spoken on the world’s rim scatter mercifully in the spring air. Impatiens line the neighboring stones, flowering already, a week further along than hers. Forced in greenhouses, probably. Earth falls on the girl, as softly as the girl falls into the earth.
Don skulks awkwardly at the back of the mourning ring. Light blue suit, so wrong that it’s not even worth being weary over. Permanent press, permanently wrinkled. Guilty obligation brings him here. Here for their daughter’s grief, at least, if never for her triumphs. Laura gestures toward the car, trying not to hold his eyes. She gives them fifteen minutes. Too generous by five.
They follow the parade of mourners back to the Liebers’ house. The house Laura sold them, how long ago? Convenient to all locations. A cruel joke, now that it has become the median strip of a major thoroughfare. A LumberLand sprouts from the farmer’s headland that once fronted them. A hulking Computer Toys mother ship and 120,000 square feet of Food Universe set down across the widened intersection.
Stoplights march down an empty Broadway out to nothing on the horizon, a sight gag until the next expansion, four months from now. Harbingers of Phases III and IV, future transformations already planned well out into the next millennium. Wishes in a fairy tale that malevolently come true.
It’s all private interests on the planning board. The town’s four richest land-grabbers, jiggling with the zoning. The Liebers will never get out now, never recover the price she got them in for. Stuck forever in a three-bedroom split-level, Nan’s bedroom an unbearable, uncleanable shrine.
Laura pulls up at the curb. They walk up the driveway, past the Lieber car, bumper sticker reading: “My Child Is an Honor Student at Lacewood West.” Laura and Ellen enter the perfect place, head into the kitchen by instinct. There, Laura helps set out the breads and cakes, the dips and vegetable sticks. Ellen stands staring at the high-tide watermarks of growth penciled on the inside of the doorframe: Greg, age 8. Greg, 16. Nan, age 10. Nan, 11. Growth’s Christmas Club balance, socked away, compounding for the future. The leapfrog laddering of days.
Adults pass through this branded doorframe, stopping to offer Ellen sounds of non-binding kindness. Laura takes Ellen’s shoulder, turns her away from the doorway’s stripes, tries to steer her back into the gathering. Ellen, not even furious, shrugs off her grip. Inconsolable now, unimpeachable. Gone for good.
Laura wants to tell her a truth bigger than the one she has just discovered. She wants to tell her daughter to give thanks for this first unlikelihood and say goodbye. But any words would be worse than the captions in real estate brochures. Finally, you just have to see the place. She gives Ellen a mother’s hardest gift. She leaves her alone with disclosure.
They drive home through the no-man’s-land of the north side of town. They skip past the new multiplex cinema, where famous actors play a variety of young adults with heroically surmountable handicaps. You can go your entire life without thinking twice about, say, Scottish nationalism, or astronauts, or those people trapped in that horrible mine collapse. And suddenly there are a dozen movies about it. In the air, somehow.
They pass the new Herefordshire subdivision, and the Clear Stream one. That little ski hill they’re making out of all the artificial lake dredging. Two new interstate inns go up beside the Old Farms strip, for no reason that Laura has heard of. The town is exploding, without any good explanation.
They take the west route, past Clare Research Park. Mistake. Ellen gazes at the palace of swept steel and bronzed glass.
“Will Nan’s father go back to work tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.” Meaning yes.
Laura watches the hatred form in her daughter’s eyes. Hatred of everything. Of all business as usual.
Ellen snarls like a baffled house pet, wrongfully punished. She says nothing the whole way home. She even refuses to push the garage door opener, a ritual pleasure since forever.
Tim has gone out, miraculously, leaving no message. Laura, alone, drifts to the computer. She closes the windows from her son’s games, begins to massage last week’s contact tickler file. Ellen sits picking at the macramé table runner until it’s ruined. Silent, frozen, giving her answer to life’s exam: it’s not worth getting close to people.
After some time, Laura looks up. “Ellen.” Patient. Defensive.
The girl shrugs: it’s self-evident. Beyond arguing. She takes the stairs slowly and closes the door to her room.
The girl is so young, too young to hold on to today’s rage. So many more pencil marks ahead of her, each leaping from the last’s shoulder. They will crawl up the doorframe, around the molding, out the window, and off. And Nan, frozen, small, will fall into the past. She will stay behind, preserved, a tiny museum mummy, shrinking each year by inches, until she vanishes.
The Blairs are asking one hundred thirty-two for the Cape Cod on Windsor. Nate Webber will make some kind of silly counter in the neighborhood of one oh two five. The trick will be keeping the Blairs from having a pique fit, while bringing them down enough to make Mr. Webber feel he’s getting away with something.
Laura spins the mouse in tight, idle circles. She watches the cursor’s ghostly vapor trail dart across her screen. You’ll see, she apologizes to her child, now upstairs with the door closed, well out of earshot of this silence. Someday. The dead want nothing of us but that we live.
The winds of trade never did change for Jephthah Clare. Life’s point drained from him as his seaborne trade withered under the tariff. A furious ingenuity, if not dementia, settled into his mind.
He took to living at Topliff’s, trying to interest financiers and captains in mad ventures to escape taxation, visionary risks that made the Lord of all Creation seem a mere jobber. Shipping soiled laundry across the Pacific for scouring. Serving up muddy tortoise sweetmeats to France. Hauling African termites to Canada to clear the northern forests. All Clare needed was backing.
He died still awaiting those backers. It fell to Clare’s sons to devise a practical plan for surviving Abomination. Samuel chafed against the injustice. America, he raged, had fought the Revolution over a tax now dwarfed by the one it levied on itself. Resolve, his cooler brother, pointed out that a second revolution would probably be prohibitively expensive.
The punitive tariff aimed to protect New England’s infant textile industry. The fully integrated Waltham model factory brought whipper, willow, picker, lapper, breaker, winder, finisher, drawing frame, double speeder, stretcher, carder, throstle spinner, speeder, warper, dresser, loom, bleacher, printworks, cutter, sewer, and sundry other intermediaries into a continuous operation. Steam, water, thundering machinery, and small girls’ hands took production from fiber to finished garment. And tariff meant to shepherd that garment to market.
Yet the tax wiped out all potential export profit by making it too expensive to haul any cargo back. Ships could not pay for themselves if empty for half their time at sea. The age of the all-purpose merchant was ending. Trade had lost its status as favored child. Law now preferred the bastard manufactory to the pedigreed countinghouse. Yet how could manufacture flourish, without trade?
Some solution, Samuel insisted, must exist. A God that fashioned a mind capable of conceiving salvation while denying it that deliverance would have long since derived all available amusement from the arrangement and closed up shop. Resolve agreed, but added only that the burden of salvation lay not with the Creator but on their own ingenuity.
What trade good might still command prices inflated to twenty times its real worth? Resolve put the question to Benjamin, whose interest in the practical concerns of his older brothers was exactly nil. The youngest son had sought in Harvard a refuge from this same family business that now tapped him for answers.
But Vanitas was always Veritas’s most driven student. Benjamin took the tariff problem across the river to his students’ quarters in Brattle Street, Cambridge. He rode back to Temple Place some days later with his reply: the only imports that tariff could not wither were those absolute necessities. Twenty times invaluable was still invaluable.
Several disastrous cargo runs proved this conclusion wrong. For nothing could be counted a necessity in this newfound land. Any foreign-supplied need, rendered so exorbitant, quickly gave place to cottage commerce. Self-reliance tolled the death knell of sale by extortion.
Benjamin returned to his tropical phyla, more than ever convinced of commercial futility. But while sketching the Vanda orchid’s leaves, their ever-higher laddering conversions of light’s energies, he grasped in a blink the perversity of economics. He looked upon that place where money parted from value, where polishing might bring out the best knot in the American grain.
Ben returned to Boston with the prize his brothers sought. The answer lay not with necessities but with their very opposites. Frivolity: the only merchandise whose sales could survive a frivolous increase in price.
This time, the market bore theory out. Most of the family’s packet runs now lost money with foolish consistency. The small but intriguing exception involved an unlikely import called Pech’s Soap. Pech’s Cleansing Ovals cured an itch that Americans did not even know they had until the scratch announced it.
Pech’s Soap, in its native England, was a mild toilet soap for the middle classes. Unlike domestic soft soaps, it left no residue on the skin. It smelled citified, proficient, slightly tart, slightly sweet. Smooth, consistent, sophisticated, it glowed a pleasant, pale orange. Beyond that, it was just soap. Clare and Sons would not have touched the product, but for the need to fill their empty holds upon return from London.
No one in his right mind would pay to import soap. Waste fats, potash, and brine: a household produced soap as the body made excrement. Importing taxed soap made as little sense as bottling spring water or charging a fee for air.
But on this side of the Atlantic, the Tariff of Abominations suddenly marked up the banal into the realm of luxury. Pech’s Soap grew exotic, exclusive, foreign without the taint of immigration.
Samuel and Resolve’s promotional strategy resembled Jesus swearing His disciples to silence over the latest miracle. The impertinent price bore witness to some hidden amplitude: the perfect, extravagant gift. For objection to extravagance could not hold out against something so practical as soap. Pech’s left on the skin the cachet of forgivable indulgence, the corsage of a giddy night of courtship dried and pressed into the family Bible.
In a land where a third of everything ownable lay in the hands of a mere one percent, the very ruinous price of import produced a premium that domestic soapmakers couldn’t duplicate. Too, purchase had something antinomian to it, a vote against the tyranny of majority rule. Freedom of choice meant freedom to choose economic irrationality. Available in the United States of America by exclusive arrangement with Jephthah Clare and Sons, Long Wharf, Boston.
For two brief shipments, Pech’s Soap helped to offset the Clares’ mounting losses. But the windfall was not to last. Imitating importers fought for a sliver of Clare’s elite niche, finding products to peddle that were just as English and machine-perfect. And the flood of imitations defeated the very exclusivity that Cleansing Ovals had so briefly serviced.
As Tocqueville, the French chevalier, was just then discovering, no blooded aristocracy matched the economic meritocracy for harshness.
Soap is a desperately ordinary substance to us. It is almost as omnipresent as air and water. It is so common that it is difficult to imagine life without it. Yet soap is probably the greatest medical discovery in history …
Not until modern industry came along to demonstrate the virtues of mass production did soap become the property of all the people.
—Into a Second Century with Procter and Gamble, 1944, no author
Crowds forever packed the public landing, within spitting distance from the slip where Clare’s packets tied. They must have milled there in force the afternoon the Sea Change came in and the Irishman Ennis and his wife set foot in the New World.
The harrowing crossing had been but a pleasure cruise, compared to the privation it freed those two from. All the way out, man and wife celebrated their escape from bondage. For seven years, Robert Emmet Ennis had been another man’s indentured servant, bound “to abstain fully from drink and fornication and theatre and all other excess … and to serve his Master gladly in all requests both day and night.” In exchange, the grubbing English master had kept the letter of his word, instructing Ennis “in the fine art of chandlery.”
For half an ocean, nothing could touch the pair. They sailed to a place where their own labor would reap their own increase. Soon the strength of their backs and the force of their spirits would settle the measure of their fate.
This thought took them three-quarters of the way to Georges Bank. There Cathleen began to defecate what, by landfall, became a stream of silty water. But by the time they entered Boston Harbor, Cathleen, delirious with fever, thought she was entering the Kingdom of God on earth.
Her annihilated body held out until it touched soil. And on the public dock of that sweet prospect, amid a crowd not so much indifferent as busy, Cathleen Ennis succumbed to fulfillment and dehydration.
Her husband camped out by the wasted corpse. He stood watch over her, smoking a clay pipe, studying the three hundred yards of America he could see. Their life together here, in this all-possible place, had come to this one, impossible end.
Your wife is sick, a concerned merchant slowed down enough to inform him.
My wife is dead, Ennis assured his new countryman.
After a while, the harbormaster demanded he remove the corpse.
Where? Ennis asked. Why?
The Charitable Irish Society helped the man find lodging in the North End, walking distance from the pier where his wife had come to port. As charity cases went, Ennis was a king. He had both a little money and a stock in trade: magic beans of no small worth in this fairy-tale place. All he now lacked was a reason to go on living.
The warren that he lived in crawled with the unemployed. Machines had eliminated some. Others had lost the scramble for employment to their fellow desperate thousands, streaming in through all the country’s ports. Only the promise of unlimited land—the hopes of another lottery farther West—siphoned off the squalid overflow and averted certain revolution.
A month sufficed to teach Ennis the ropes. No social pyramid was more steeply pitched, more needle-tipped than this one. America rigged the race for the swift. Ennis no longer cared to win that race. But he owed it to the memory of his wife, the myth they once shared, not to be eaten alive.
He sank his entire remaining purse into equipment, a starving man spending his last dinner dollar on a new recipe. In a ragged lot behind his building, he hung a cast iron kettle with wooden sides above a boiling pit. The frames, molds, and wick plaiter filled his rented room, taking up the space his wife would have lived in.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF A GRAYING AMERICA
Two older but distinguished men in tennis outfits, at the net, rackets at rest, shake hands after a fierce volley. The drier one jokes, “Another set?”
The other pants gamely, “I thought you’d never ask.”
A male voice-over intones, “By early next century, more Americans will be retired than will be working.”
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And so one frigid night in 1830, a bull Irishman trawled through Temple Place toting on his back a wooden wedge full of candles. He’d found those privileged enclaves of the city where no one had boiled their own animal fats for a generation or more. Some nights, those neighborhoods favored him with a sale. For every class of people needed clear and lasting light. And those with some leisure used more light than most.
Resolve Clare answered Ennis’s knock on that discreet, Federal-style door. He made to send the peddler away before the latter could begin to hawk his wares. But Samuel, noting the poor man’s shoes, intervened. He purchased the modest minimum that politeness allowed. The peddler thanked the men and pushed on into the frozen black.
No sooner did their door shut upon night than Clare’s sons fell to arguing. Resolve upbraided his brother. Hadn’t they agreed to guard against unnecessary expenses until some fresh cash came in?
Samuel demurred. Nothing was necessary if not candles.
Not these candles, his brother argued. We have a stock of good light.
We are not yet so destitute that we can’t help those less fortunate than ourselves.
We will be, Resolve insisted, if we take to throwing good money after cheap tallow dips.
The candles turned out to be no cheap tallow. They were no luxurious spermaceti, either. Yet they gave off a hard, cold light. Firm to the touch, they burned almost as slowly and cleanly as the best-boiled whale oil.
More than once, Resolve asked his brother how much they had paid for the sticks. Samuel, more than once, shook his bewildered head at the answer.
For the space of a week, Resolve kept a vigil. He could not remember the precise day or hour the Irishman had come through. There was no means of finding the man again except to watch the street and lie in wait. Days went by, and the chandler did not return. Their parsimony had driven him away.
Only by chance did Resolve find his quarry. He saw the Irishman from afar, toting his candle wedge near the fish market. He chased down the peddler and identified himself: a customer who had bought a few candles from him some weeks before.
Ennis immediately offered to refund the purchase price. Some defect of wick or wax might somehow have escaped his examination.