Edsel (3 page)

Nothing about it, line or time, should have surprised me. In my youth, we had fought a war to put the world back the way it was before the war started, only to find that the fighting itself had changed it radically and forever. It began with men in paper collars waltzing with women in toe-length hems to “After the Ball” and ended with those same men tipping up hip flasks and watching women’s reflections on glossy tabletops as they wriggled to “The Black Bottom” in brief skirts and no underwear. Now we had gone to war again, first with cavalry, then with rockets. If nothing much changed between FDR’s snooty profile on a newsreel screen and Frankie Orr’s humble face on the box in the living room, from that point forward nothing stayed put. Clark Gable’s cocky grin dissolved into Marlon Brando’s Neanderthal pout. Buicks sprouted holes that had no function. Sing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as loudly as she could, Patti Page couldn’t drown out a groin-beat with roots in Africa thumping up from the South, childish and primitive, that caused an age group we didn’t know existed, something called a Teen Ager, to tear apart the seats and rip the sconces off the walls of theaters where “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” pulsed beneath the credits of
The Blackboard Jungle.
The Russians, who claimed to have invented everything from air travel to the Flo-Thru tea bag, suddenly left off trading the Czar’s cufflinks for coarse bread and booted a football-size sphere studded with spikes beyond our atmosphere, adding the Space Race to the Arms Race and throwing the course of all our lives into high gear. Furniture, hitherto solidly grounded to the floor, canted backward and began to float on spidery metal legs. Block-shaped, cozy corner markets stretched and flattened like everything else into air-conditioned barns lined with aisles stacked to the ceilings with fourteen more varieties of everything than anyone required. And then there was the shadow of that acacia-shaped cloud in the East, shading all our futures with sense-memories of those vaporized crowds in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Only we didn’t
really
believe it, because if General Motors thought there was anything to it they wouldn’t be offering two-year financing on the Chevy Bel-Air. So we dug fallout shelters and hired Joe McCarthy to sweep commies out from under the bed and sang along to the example of Burt, the animated TV turtle:

Duck—and cover!

Duck—and cover!

He did what we all must learn to do;

You and you and you and you—

Duck—and cover!

You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization.
I still can’t explain it, or why it seems more appropriate the further the time slips behind.

In the fall of 1954—I remember the year because it was Fred Hutchinson’s last season managing the Tigers and I had his autograph on my scorecard from the last at-home game with the Yankees—I paused on my way to my car to fill out the roll of film in my Argus and changed my destiny. The picture happened to show a dusty yellow Caterpillar climbing a hill of rubble in the condemned section south of Jefferson where the new Civic Center was going in, against the granite pile of the Penobscot Building, whose sawhorses I had detoured around back in 1928 when it was under construction. It turned out to be the best shot on a roll of blurred images of a rookie named Kaline attempting to steal second and a number of unidentified plays snapped from behind the sunburned bald head in the seat in front of me, but I didn’t think about it from the first time I saw it in the drugstore where I had the film developed until Slauson & Nichols needed one more picture to complete the brochure it was putting together for the Detroit Chamber of Commerce.

It was one of those “Dynamic Detroit” pamphlets available in racks at the airport and bookstore local interest sections, with a historical text written by a steel-haired retired lady journalist with nicotine-colored lipstick and progressive puff about the city’s future provided by the flacks at Slauson, of which I was still one. The drugstore bag containing the photograph I’d taken was in the top drawer of the desk where I’d stashed it the day I picked it up, and I was moving it to get to an eraser when a lightbulb flared over my head just like in
Morty Meekle
. When I showed the picture to the art director, a narrow-shouldered grump named Fleenor with a Hitler moustache and black hair parted in the middle like Tom Dewey’s, he glanced at it, skated it across the top of his desk toward me, and told me to convince him with a caption.

I was still using the old Royal I’d liberated from the offices of the old
Banner
when the sheriff was in the hall; black and silver and dinged all over from the times it had danced off its rickety stand, it had outgrown the bounds of linear order and begun to turn out copy that looked like ransom notes. My fingers had rubbed the letters clean off several of the keys and the space gear was worn to the extent that when I hit the lever I never knew whether I was triple-spacing or about to strike over the line I’d just typed, but I had a lot more things wrong with me, and in those days we didn’t get a divorce just because the wife’s breasts hung like onions and her feet were as cold as river stones. Besides, those new electric jobs made whirring noises when you switched them on, waiting for you to create. It was pressure I didn’t need. I rolled a fresh sheet of Rexall stock into the machine and typed:

Like a vital organ, the city is forever regenerating itself, replacing old cells with new, proud of its history but dedicated to its future.

I was glaring at this bit of non-rhyming doggerel, loathing it, when Fleenor crept up behind me on his Neoprene soles, breathing Maxwell House fumes over my shoulder as he read. Without warning he reached past my head and tore the sheet out of the platen. The racheting noise sounded like a game of Russian Roulette. I never saw the line again until the brochure came back from the printers. I didn’t like it any better in Bodoni bold than I had in faded pica.

A lot of nothing happened for a while after that. The brochures were picked up by a pair of Wayne State University student volunteers in butch cuts and pink crew-neck sweaters and I forgot about them as soon as they were out of sight. Slauson & Nichols landed the Armor-Bilt Aluminum Siding account, I did some down-and-dirty research into Howard Pyle and Harold Lamb and came up with a knighthood-in-flower theme, complete with a moat and a drawbridge and a gleaming white aluminum-clad castle that had as much to do with the practical applications of the product as a grubby downtown construction project had to do with the regenerative properties of the human liver. It had taken me years and a couple of trips to the unemployment office to learn that advertising copy is best written sideways. One of Fleenor’s drafting-board jockeys came back with a sketch of the castle surrounded by pastel balloons labeled Flamingo, Twilit Gray, Celery, Gulf Stream Blue, Canary, and Sand Beige.

“Why would anyone want celery-colored aluminum siding?” I asked.

The artist, a beatnik complete with goatee and a paint-streaked sweatshirt with the sleeves rucked up past his elbows, moved his shoulders. “Why would anyone want aluminum siding?”

“Whatever happened to white?”

“Shows the fallout. You want to initial this or what?”

I initialed the sketch and he slouched on out, sandals slapping the soles of his bare feet like Japanese fans. I wondered how he explained flamingo-pink aluminum siding to his friends at the coffeehouse. I wondered when was the last time I had promoted something someone could use. I wondered if I should sneak out and go home and clean out my refrigerator, the last white one east of Woodward Avenue.

The telephone, a Depression-era relic of black steel with a receiver the size of an army boot, jangled. I considered waiting it out, then got up and put it out of its misery. My office mate, the owner’s son-in-law, never came in before two o’clock and I spent much of my time taking messages from his legion of close cousins who all seemed to be stewardesses on layover from San Francisco.

“Doug’s in a meeting.”

Air stirred on the other end. “And who might Doug be?”

One of those microphone-trained voices, bounding up from the diaphragm and trundling out of the mouth like a big ball bearing; an original echo.

“A guy who’s in a meeting. This is Connie Minor. What can I do for you?”

“You can come see me when you have time. My name is Israel Zed. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Minor, I’ve had the devil’s own time tracking you down.”

The name struck a dull chord, a rubber mallet bumping a bell wrapped in wool. For no clear reason I saw a flash of red-white-and-blue bunting and confetti hailing down. I said, “I’ve been here right along. Do you have something you need advertised?”

“In a manner of speaking. Can you meet me at the Ford Motor Company Administrative Center Sunday morning at eight? I apologize for the choice of days, but I’m flying to Washington Monday and I can’t work Saturday.”

“On Schaeffer in Dearborn?”

“No, the new one. It’s on American Road near Michigan.”

I hung up.

It rang again two minutes later. I was looking for a telephone number in my desk but I went over and caught it on one.

“Bad gag, brother,” I said. “As long as you were planning to get me out to a weedlot, you should have passed yourself off as Joe McCarthy or Clarabelle, someone whose name I could place. If you’re out to rob me you dialed the wrong number. I haven’t had more than forty dollars in my pocket at any one time since the Bank Holiday.”

“I assure you, I’m calling from the center right now.” He didn’t sound upset at having to call back.

“I grew up with this town. Dearborn dies at the end of American. Past that point there’s nothing but cows and silos. A windmill’s the closest thing to a skyscraper for a dozen blocks.”

“I didn’t call you to discuss architecture, Mr. Minor. I suggest you look me up and if you don’t like what you find out you can sleep in Sunday morning. Otherwise I look forward to meeting you at eight o’clock at the windmill.” The connection broke.

I went back to my desk and continued looking for the telephone number. After a couple of minutes of rummaging I realized I’d forgotten whose number I was looking for and why. I stepped out the door that hadn’t been closed since I’d been working there and down the hallway to Research, where I found Agnes DeFilippo sitting on her heels behind a work table stacked three feet high with manila folders, riffling through the debris in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. They were nice heels, three inches high with slings across the back. In that position, the long muscle in her right thigh stood out like a coaxial cable beneath her A-line skirt and I felt the beginnings of my first erection in a week. She was fifty, looked thirty-six, tinted her hair blond, swept it up, and shaved her eyebrows for the Peggy Lee look. We’d gone to lunch twice and I’d been working myself up to ask her out for dinner, the next stage before bed, when she’d kiboshed the whole thing by telling me I looked just like J. Edgar Hoover. She had a husband she never talked about and a son at West Point.

She looked up at me, red-faced from the effort of separating two drawers’ worth of files jammed into one drawer, and stuck out her lower lip to blow a yellow tendril out of one eye. “Get a good look?”

I held up both palms. “Sue me. I haven’t seen my African
National Geographics
in months. I need whatever we’ve got on a party named Israel Zed.”

She punched the drawer shut and stood, two inches taller than I; but then almost everyone was, with or without heels. Her eyes closed. Behind that unlined kitten face was a mainframe computer that would have turned John Foster Dulles apple-green with envy. The files in the windowless little room were just props.

“Truman’s ambassador to Palestine at the end of the war,” she said without opening her eyes. “When the British started shooting Jewish emigrants he quit, mugwumped to the other side, and ran Tom Dewey’s campaign in 1948. Zed and Dewey sang together in a college quartet at Michigan. Last I heard he was some kind of PR flack for Hank the Deuce at Ford’s.”

“What do you know about the Ford Administration Center?”

Her eyes opened. “Building or Center?”

“There are two?”

“Well, sort of. Don’t you follow the news?”

“Newspapers depress me when I’m not in them. I’m still trying to figure out how to get the picture on my new Motorola from jitterbugging all over the screen.”

“You ought to get out more, Connie. ‘Like a vital organ, the city is forever regenerating itself...’”

“Go to hell, Agnes.” I left.

I
WAS STILL DRIVING MY
1946 Studebaker sedan. Weather and Michigan road salt had scoured its royal blue finish down to the red primer, turning it the listless purple of old serge; it came off like chalk on my fingers whenever I touched it. The hood tapered to a point like the nacelle of a P-38, making it stand out further against the bulbous designs of the day, and I had taken a hit on the driver’s door that jammed the latch and required all my weight to force it open from inside, raising hell with my bursitis. The radio buzzed like a housefly trapped without hope and there was a leak in the vent under the dash that released a trickle of ice-cold water onto my ankle every time I took a tight corner. The whole frame chattered like a set of wind-up teeth whenever the speedometer crept above fifty. I’d made three appointments to have the front end realigned and canceled them all. I was sure any substantial investment in the car’s maintenance would be followed by an immediate and complete breakdown.

Dearborn, Henry the Great’s town and the birthplace of the Model T and America’s discovery of the wheel, was, like most of suburban Detroit and indeed the city itself beyond its brief eruption of downtown skyscrapers, a horizontal town, four stories tall at its highest and very much in keeping with the new trend away from the vertical. It would as soon support a colossus of the type required for the administration of a company like Ford as Ike’s scalp would grow hair. In spite of Agnes DeFilippo’s hints to the contrary, I felt that morning like the guest of honor at a snipe hunt. Waiting for the light to change at Myrtle I caught a farmer looking at me from behind the wheel of a Dodge stake truck loaded with alfalfa, nose-heavy and chin-shy under the bill of his Allis-Chalmers baseball cap, and I was sure from his expression he was in on the joke.