Edsel (7 page)

Genius or lunatic, Henry had possessed both the energy and the wherewithal to translate the megalomania of every child’s egocentric wish-dream into the dizzying world-within-a-world of River Rouge.

When you stepped out of the relative quiet of the Administration Building and waded across the narrow strip of marsh behind it, you jumped a fence onto an insane farm where rubble grew like wheat and ashes flew like chaff; where stacks stood in dense rows like cornstalks and the lowing of noon whistles and diesel horns made you think of crazed livestock. Somewhere in that graysward of brick and slag, 63,000 men and women slammed doors, ran forklifts, tugged levers, poured steel, raised and lowered blocks, stacked crates, sprayed paint, stoked coal, placed calls, pulled chains, pushed buttons, threaded wires, turned screws, caught rivets, twirled knobs, pounded keys, tightened nuts, swept, polished, examined, tested, discussed, scribbled, cranked, pedaled, stamped, and watched the clock; but you could wander that vast compound of whizzing belts, throbbing locomotives, belching chimneys, and gliding ships and never lay eyes upon a single living organism. I had been there before, although not as a Ford employee, and every time I went I’d felt like a character in one of those post-apocalypse tales in
Amazing Stories
, abandoned in an extinct civilization whose machines mindlessly continued to perform their functions years after their last human benefactor had gone to his reward. There was a heart-sickening perpetuity about the place that convinced you of your own obsolescence.

Lord knew, I was familiar with all the numbers. Researching Rouge for “Detroit the Dynamic,” I had discovered that 100 miles of railroad wound through that self-contained kingdom like some throttled-up version of a child’s tabletop train layout, transporting 25,000 tons of ore per trip from the docks where great ships registered to Ford put in to Ford’s own steel mills and coke ovens—manned, along with Ford’s glass plant and paper mill, by the owners of the 22,000 Fords provided for in the employee parking lot; but statistics scarcely prepared the first-time visitor for either the magnitude of the complex or its realization of Henry’s flagrant dream of total autonomy. Raw iron came in one end and chugged out the other molded into the shape of shiny new cars. In between was chained chaos. I had accompanied Charlie Chaplin on a tour of the place guided personally by the owner, and watched them try to communicate by sign language against the horrendous din. The result had been
Modern Times
, Chaplin’s unfunny paean to industry gone stark raving nuts at the expense of humanity. This was River Rouge at its brain-numbing peak, before Antitrust rolled up its meddlesome sleeves and began hacking away at the dream, downsizing it to mortal proportions and divvying it up among the carrion birds which for decades had circled the sky over Ford Country, searching for the odd open wound or exposed bit of entrail to pluck at and thus begin the feeding frenzy. The feast would continue, joined by the heirs to the Carnegies and the Duponts and all the other natural enemies from Ford’s Paleozoic period, but in that dank early winter in the middle of the middle decade of the twentieth century the vision was still largely intact, and gray in the shadow of the hatchet-faced former machinist’s-apprentice whose lapel pin I now wore.

Tours of Rouge had been a fixture almost since its inception, when a harried foreman had complained to Henry that the VIP visits he had been conducting were disruptive to the workers; his response was to make the visits a regular feature, open to the public, until the workers no longer noticed them. By then, of course, the old Yankee found there was profit in spectacle, and the tours became permanent, followed by the construction of the Ford Rotunda with its exhibits delineating the history of the world beginning with Henry’s backyard in Dearborn, which in turn had led to Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, those twin monuments to American industrial ingenuity, complete with the first tiny Ford plant, the workshop where Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb and the gramophone, and the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. And Dearborn became a sort of popup Modern Testament, the Gospel According to St. Henry, admission one dollar (children 12 and under, fifty cents). The whole thing was a seamless combination of reality and mythology constructed along the lines of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, with the object of elevating the robber barons of the Industrial Revolution to the status of authentic American heroes; which, if the truth be told, they were, possessing all the concomitant scoundrelly attributes of a Wild Bill Hickok or an Ethan Allen. There is no quality control on God’s assembly line.

Entering the Rotunda the morning after my meeting with the Deuce, I transferred the magic pin from my buttonhole to a side pocket. I wanted to make my first salaried visit incognito with the rubes, who that day comprised a young couple still admiring each other’s wedding band, a mixed group of grayheads wearing comfortable clothes and walking shoes, and a gaggle of pre-pubescent girls in green rompers bookended fore and aft by nuns in black habits. I was in line waiting my turn inside the door when a hand touched my arm.

“Mr. Minor?”

I turned to face a thirty-year-old model in a blue blazer and pleated skirt like stewardesses wore, only without an emblem of any kind. Her hair was black, brushed behind her ears, and she had gray eyes, a color that fascinated me, coming as I did from a muddy-eyed race. Her lips were painted fire-engine red, not my favorite shade by a long shot but serviceable on her, and she bad high cheekbones that gave her face an Asian cast, although her skin was pale to the point of translucence. There was about her a certain quiet confidence in the impression she was making, slightly ameliorated by a youthful self-consciousness that saved her from conceit, and I had been acquainted with her for several minutes before I realized she had a withered left arm. A skillful tailor had cut that sleeve short and full to soften the contrast, but when she gestured with it I noticed that it was at least six inches shorter than its mate, with stunted fingers and a pudgy palm like a child’s. And I knew without thinking about it that she was a victim of polio, the disease that had crippled a President and threatened to slap great gaping holes in a generation.

“I’m Janet Sherman, Mr. Zed’s personal secretary. He asked me to escort you on your tour of the plant.”

I shook her good hand, cool and smooth, the nails painted red to match her lipstick but trimmed short like any good typist’s. “How did you recognize me?”

“Mr. Zed described you.”

“I won’t ask how.”

“Would you like to start here and look at the exhibits? This is where the regular tour begins.”

“Thanks, but I’ve seen the first car Ford built. It doesn’t look the same without Henry sitting in it.”

“In that case I guess we can dispense with the ride on the miniature test track. It’s thrilling but hardly edifying. Is there a particular place you want to see?”

“The whole
schmeer
.”

“Everything?”

“Well, skip the test track. I rode through a machine-gun battle once and every trip since has been anticlimactic. Let’s start with the hot steel.”

“But that’s the standard tour. You could have just gone in with everyone else.”

“I was in line when you showed up. I still can. I guess you’ve got better things to do than hold my hand.”

“No, I’m cleared for the day.” A fissure appeared in her high marble brow. “We can skip the stamping plant. A lot of people find it disturbing; all that noise, after the heat of the foundry. Some of the older tourists—”

“I’m fifty-five,” I said. “Not a hundred. I can take off my coat and stick my fingers in my ears. If you need a note from my doctor—”

“
Caramba!
” She gestured with both hands like Ricky Ricardo, and that’s when I noticed the withered arm. “Let’s go.”

I accompanied her down the front steps and into the parking lot, where she unlocked the passenger’s side of a new sky-blue Lincoln Capri convertible and clattered around to the driver’s side on three-inch heels. On a metallic day when our breath made gray jets she wore no coat, and I felt old in my fleece-lined leather jacket. The current generation seemed impervious to the extremes of climate, going bareheaded in January and wearing pink angora in the gluey heat of August. Some kind of revolution was in the making and I couldn’t shake the conviction that I was the enemy.

The plastic seat was cold and stiff and the windows began to cloud as soon as we were both shut in, but the heat came on instantly when she turned the key and switched on the blower. I was just old enough to appreciate the improvement over the black boxes of my youth, which when they finally warmed up roasted the passengers in front while compelling those behind to wrap themselves in the ubiquitous backseat blanket. As for the rest, I missed warm durable mohair, ugly as it was, and I couldn’t comprehend the functions of half the instruments in the dash.

She drove well and without awkwardness, even though shifting required extending her short left arm its entire length to grasp the steering wheel while she worked the lever with her right. I noticed she drove a steady ten miles over the fifteen-miles-per-hour limit posted throughout the complex. She hummed the whole while in a way that suggested she was unaware she was humming. We were pulling into the lot outside the steel mill when I finally identified the tune: “Sixteen Tons.”

My memories of that hangarlike room were cast in orange. Actually it was gray and buff brown, like every other factory since the invention of the steam engine, a color that happened rather than being planned; but the walls and ceiling and the forest of posts that separated them writhed in the reflected glow from the vats of molten steel, which for all the world could have passed for tomato soup coming to a boil. There, workers in hard hats, gauntlets, and thick denims soaked through with sweat stirred cascades of iron pellets shaped like rabbit droppings into the mix, skinned off the impurities when they floated to the top, and poured the steel, no longer red now but white-hot, into molds to form ingots the size and shape of refrigerators.

“The ingots weigh between five and sixteen tons,” said Miss Sherman, apparently still oblivious to the tune she had been humming moments before we mounted the high catwalk. “Sixteen hours from now the steel we’re looking at will be gassed up and driven off the line.”

One of the men stirring the steel glanced up at us without stopping his labor. We were a few minutes ahead of the regular tour, alone on the catwalk, and he probably thought we were VIPs. His face was burned a deep cherry red and carried no expression. I thought of the faces I had seen in photographs of the survivors of Hitler’s death camps, of their lack of hope or relief or any other sign that they knew they had been rescued. Then I remembered his hourly wage was higher than mine and I decided I was trying to get too much out of a face I had never seen before and would probably never see again.

On to the other end of the building and the stamping plant, where the temperature went down and the decibel level soared. Far below the catwalk, workers, many of them women, fed sheets of steel into machines whose piledriver-like stampers rose between gleaming hydraulic lifters and slammed back down, punching out fenders and door panels with a noise like freight trains colliding. Miss Sherman leaned in and cupped her hands around her mouth. I smelled tuberose.

“If you’re wondering how they stand the noise, most of them are married.”

I gave her a look that made her blush. She leaned in again.

“I’ve taken the tour six times. Someone always asks and that’s the standard answer.”

I shouted back. “It was the standard answer in nineteen thirty-two.”

We walked out of the plant, out into the quiet and natural light and clear welcome cold of the Michigan winter. “Next stop, assembly,” she said, fishing her keys out of her pocket.

The Dearborn Assembly Plant was half a mile long. In honor of the sixteenth hour in the conception, gestation, and birth of the automobile, we shuffled along the catwalk, following one of the fifty-three Fairlanes rolling off the line per minute from chassis to finished automobile. Torches splattered sparks, air wrenches whimpered, doors slammed like firecrackers going off in close order. Windshield, engine block, seats, steering column, and all the rest of the fifteen thousand parts joined as smoothly as a demolished building reassembling itself when the film is run backward through the projector. Of all the hundreds of thousands of hours that came and went at Rouge, the sixteenth was the least plausible, the hardest to explain, the most like magic. At the end of the tour a red-and-white Fairlane glistening like water took on gas and burbled away, driven by an employee in white cotton coveralls with the Ford logo scripted across the back.

Miss Sherman consulted her wristwatch, a man’s model with a big luminous dial. “Just short of two hours. We beat the regular tour by five minutes. You don’t ask many questions.”

“I used to gig frogs here before the plant was built. When the last Model T rolled off the line I covered it for the Detroit
Times.
If there’s anything you want to know; all you have to do is ask.”

“I don’t understand. I had a ton of letters to get out, and if I know the temporaries in this town most of them will be there waiting when I get back. Why did Mr. Zed assign me to shepherd you if you know more about the place than Mr. Ford?”

“Ask him. I came here planning to go through with the suckers.”

“I will. Believe me, I will. Are you hungry?”

“Are you buying?”

“Mr. Zed’s buying. I draw up his expense sheets. How about Carl’s Chop House?”

“Janet, you are a corporate drudge after my own heart.” We left the place of miracles.

T
HAT
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
I
TOOK
Agnes DeFilippo to see
Woman’s World
at the Fox. Clifton Webb played the president of an automobile company who invites three prospective vice-presidents and their wives to New York City for the purpose of identifying the pick of the litter. It was one of those TechniStereoScope jobs without a mountain range or a cast of thousands to justify the wide screen, so the actresses all wore big poofy skirts and the actors spent most of their time standing around large rooms with ten feet separating them hoisting martinis to use up space. The feature was sandwiched between a Coming Attractions trailer for
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
and a Popeye cartoon from the Roosevelt administration. Afterward we reported to the snack counter at Woolworth’s for hamburgers and coffee.