Old Glory (33 page)

I was introduced to my host, Brad Funk, a young man so deluded that he’d actually deserted a perfectly good city in Missouri to come to Muscatine, where he worked in the public relations section of the Grain Processing Corporation and was married to the onetime Pork Queen of Iowa. Mr. Funk made me feel old and grubby. He looked like the kind of man who would think nothing of jogging five miles before breakfast; an early-rising, nonsmoking,
Newsweek-
reading deep sleeper. I sensed an implicit criticism of my own tendency to make light of serious things in the way he questioned me, like a solemn graduate student knocking the daylights out of a Freshman English class.

Brad Funk was, frankly, worried. I had met plenty of kindly people who were worried for my safety on the journey; but no one so far had given me such a thorough grilling over my motives for making the trip. I had always seen my own reasons as private and obsessional. Funk, though, saw me as a potential representative of a whole class of people whom he feared and despised—all the metropolitan journalists and television scriptwriters who had conspired to represent the Midwest as a country of ignorant hicks and hayseeds. “Why is it that every time they show a bumpkin on a comedy show he’s supposed to come from Iowa?” What were my own “impressions”? Were they “favorable” or “unfavorable”?

“I’m not a newspaper reporter,” I said. “I’m just passing through, trying to watch what happens to
me.
”

“Just be fair to us.”

“But the whole idea of ‘fairness’ implies some sort of objective overview, as if I were in a position to pass neutral judgments. I’m not in that position.”

“But you’re going to write a book.”

“Yes, but it won’t be an ‘objective’ book. It’s not going to be the inside story on America. It might be the inside story on me, but that’s rather different.”

“I’m worried that you’re going to condescend to us.”

We stood on his lawn, wrangling awkwardly, while Brad Funk defended the Midwest against a whole raft of accusations I had never made. Indeed, I hadn’t realized until then that the area was half so vulnerable and prickly as he made it sound. And when he said “us” and “we,” he had taken it on himself to speak for a dozen or so entire states at a time.

“Look,” he said. “Back East, you’ve got the old top-heavy bureaucracy. Then on the West Coast you’ve got all the excesses of America. We’re the calm, thoughtful center. We can moderate between the extremes. We can see both sides of the argument. If you take us out of the United States, you drain all the basic common sense out of the country. I
know
what goes on in New York and Los Angeles. I can make judgments about them because here I’m at a remove.”

“But that doesn’t make you condescend to them?”

I could see that I’d earned a black mark for flippancy.

“In Muscatine, we’re ideally placed. Look: we want to see a New York show, we can catch it in Davenport. We want to listen to an orchestra concert, we go to Chicago. We want to shop at luxury stores, we go down to St. Louis. What I’m saying is, in the Midwest we’ve got the best of
everything.
”

“Well, that’s something I’d never think of claiming for London or anywhere else I’ve ever lived. All places are messier and more complicated than that. I bet Muscatine’s no closer to Paradise than North Kensington.”

“But people are never
fair
to the Midwest,” Funk said, brimming with protective anxiety for his region as if someone with careless hands, like me, could easily break it. My own experience of the Midwest suggested that it was far sturdier than he feared.

Yet this sense of slight and belittlement, this precarious pride was in tune with so much else that I’d heard in the last few weeks. It chimed, at one level, with the general mood of the Baptist church in Andalusia. At another, it linked up with a remark made by a man at a gas dock upriver. He’d been complaining about the way his business had fallen off since the rise in gas prices. This year, he’d said, there were far fewer boats about on the Mississippi than there were last year. “Folks now, they’re keeping pretty much to their own territory.” In American English, the word “territory” had always been associated with expanse, openness, the freedom to move out and on; now it had come to mean the small, threatened space of one’s own plot of ground. So in Brad Funk’s talk, even something as huge and rich as the Midwest—the classic “territory” in the old sense—could be seen as a vulnerable enclosure to be defended against the stranger.

In Davenport, I’d seen the television trailers for the latest invasion movie: they showed lidless, alien eyes pressed up against the picture windows of a suburban home. The screaming family huddled together, exposed to the horrid gaze of the creatures from outside. I had dutifully identified with the family when I watched those ads. I wondered now whether I should in fact have counted myself among the staring aliens.

The Funks were planning to turn their own house into a self-sufficient fortress. Mrs. Funk was now a teacher of Home Ec and preferred people to forget that she had once been the Pork Queen of Iowa. She was a born-again conservationist and talked of Waste in almost exactly the same terms as the Baptists spoke of Sin and Disbelief. She was going to dig a solar pond in the backyard. She showed me its outlines on the grass. She explained how there was going to be a layer of fresh water here, and a layer of salt water there, and how the warmed salt water was going to circulate like blood through the house. She was going to install solar panels in the roof. Then she was going to block up the windows of the house.

“Do you know how much energy we waste just through windows?” Her eyes were wide with moral indignation at the thought of this reckless
dissipation of vital fluids. She blazed with the force of energy saving as an essentially theological doctrine. It was possible, I suppose, that her scheme might in time cut down the family fuel bills, but that wasn’t its main point. It was an act of atonement for past sins. America had been prodigal, had squandered its patrimony like a rake in a Thackeray novel. Now it was going to do penance. It was going to keep to its own territory. It was going to blot out the view from the window. It was going to live in a dark, solar-heated box like a contrite sinner in his cell. That, at any rate, was the general theological drift of the thing. In the meantime, though, there was more beer in the barrel and the sound of big Joe singing “Careless Love” on the veranda and the spitting of the wieners on the barbecue grill.

Rain clogged the screen outside my window. The broken clouds were running north at speed overhead. The wind harped and groaned in the telegraph wires; it tore at the American flags on their poles; it gusted noisily around the gable ends of the hotel, shaking the rickety jungle gym of rusted balconies and fire-escape ladders. In the street below, a truck went by, its tires
shush-shushing
in the wet:
WIEDEMANN INDUSTRIES INC. FIBERGLASS BAPTISTRIES, CHURCH SPIRES, STEEPLES, CROSSES
.

Marooned in my room, I studied the Yellow Pages of the Muscatine directory, looking for someone to call up on the phone. The surnames there gave away a good deal about the town’s history: Kokemuller, Grossklaus, Hahn, Fuhlman, Kranz, Behlen, Smit, Hammann, Elkar, Maeglin, Schwinn, Krogstad, Larsen, Toborg, Blaesing … But the names of their businesses were all-American: Chuck’s, Bob’s, Don’s, Ken’s, Jerry’s, Glen’s, Tony’s, Kathy’s, Jean’s, Smiley’s, Bart’s, Gary’s, Dan’s, Joe’s. Names like this had been as important as clothes when it came to transforming the immigrant into the American. Mail-order fashion, distributed by firms like Sears and J. C. Penney (or their nineteenth-century forebears), had enabled more or less everyone to dress alike. The shortened first name had allowed Swedes, Germans, Dutchmen, Poles to emerge clean-shaven of all those extra syllables which would have betrayed their original nationality. I found the J & K Button Company. Its box had no names at all. Jorkenheim & Klute? Johnson & King? Joe & Kathy? Javitz & Krogstad? They were clearly hiding something. When I got through to the proprietor, all he said was “Hi, Jayunkay?” Perhaps he was a freshly settled boat person.

The factory was two blocks away down Mississippi Drive; a wet fight against the driving wind. The river was in a dirty mood, churning
between its banks, ribbed with scuds of yellow froth. Ocean breakers smashed against the levee, and plumes of spray blew over the railroad tracks. A big tow had moored off Muscatine Island, hugging what little lee shore it could find: in weather like this even the tows were beaten by the river; their barges were liable to break apart and sink or wreck themselves on sandbars.

The button factory was gaunt and stooped: four narrow stories of dripping brick and cross-eyed windows. Inside, it was a vertical maze of machinery linked by steep wooden stairways with gangs of women in head scarves doing peculiar things to bits of plastic. It did not, as I’d hoped, make buttons from Mississippi clam shells anymore; that had stopped in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the building had managed to keep in touch with its past. Most of what was happening inside it now was a simple extension of the old techniques of making pearl buttons from clams, and it had stayed in the same German family since it had started.

The whole process of button making was nicely contained and comprehensible. It started at the bottom of the factory and rose, machine by machine, to the top. On the first floor, the liquid plastic was poured into an oil drum, mixed with dye and hardener, and slopped into a centrifuge like a big spin-dryer, where it was whirled around until it formed an even, translucent sheet of soft rubbery stuff. The sheet was passed into a machine that punched it into a thousand or so round button blanks; the blanks were fed on a conveyor belt into an oven where they were baked hard; then they were cooled and sent on up to the next floor. Here more machines drilled needle holes in them and carved patterns on their fronts and backs. They were polished in a tumbling vat of wooden shoe pegs, and on the top floor they were sorted into cardboard boxes. They looked like pretty trinkets, colored rose, shot pearl, smoke, primrose, cornflower blue, amber and scarlet. I would never have guessed that such a quantity of technology and expertise had gone into the making of every button on my shirtfront.

“And that’s what you used to do to clams?” I said, fingering a jade-green button on which an elaborately scrolled pattern had been carved.

“Yep. Only they did it all by hand then.” Mr. Jayunkay had said very little. He had pointed out each machine, then stood by while I inspected it, alternately touching his trim mustache and his Elks pin.

“But how have you managed to stay on in business when almost every other button factory on the river has been closed for years?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I guess buttons just run in the blood.”

Something—buttons perhaps, or some instinctive, saving sense of history—did run in Muscatine’s blood. The button factory was only the most obvious symbol of the town’s old knack of keeping up a line of continuity with what had gone before. One could feel its reluctance to let go of anything that had served it well. It stuck by its buttons; it stuck by its old hotel; it went on using its river wharves. It was unfashionably loyal to its small downtown stores. There
was
a shopping mall out on the Interstate, but it had done surprisingly little damage to the family businesses along Second, Third and Fourth Streets. The old city had aged gracefully, letting the ivy grow up its walls. At the same time it had managed to absorb a clutch of big new industrial plants which, along with the buttons, the grain elevators and the truck gardens and fruit farms on the town’s rim, gave Muscatine its air of being comfortably, unflashily rich. Most towns on the Mississippi had been outfaced by the river. They’d had their boom, and then they’d dwindled, looking shabby and temporary beside that enormous drift of water at their doorsteps. Muscatine, though, had the pride of a place that had always got along fine with the river, able to match it on equal terms. I hoped the wind would go on blowing hard: it was good to be weather-bound in Muscatine.

For a day or two at least, I could pretend that I wasn’t really a vagrant. I had a date to look forward to in the evening. At the Funks’ housewarming I’d met a schoolteacher named Judith and invited her to dinner. For Judith I had my whiskers trimmed at the barbershop, my trousers freshly pressed at the cleaner’s; I knotted my necktie in three different ways, pared my dirty traveler’s fingernails down to their quicks, overdid the Eau Sauvage, then fell into a state not far from panic. She had made her date with a grown-up; would she notice that the person she had actually landed was a nervous teen-ager with senile teeth? It seemed hopelessly probable that she would; and I set to trying to wash off the worst of the cologne. I restored a few years to my age with an X-rated shot of bourbon and soda.

Judith too, I saw, had been to the hairdresser’s since yesterday. Her hair contained her pointed face like a wimple. Its ends had been chamfered to a polished edge of dull gold around her cheeks. In her white woolen coat and big tortoiseshell glasses, she looked as if she’d been unable to decide whether she was supposed to be a college girl or a middle-aged schoolmarm. I liked her indecision. The serious glasses (she’d been wearing contacts the day before) gave her a funny owlishness when otherwise she would have been just plainly pretty.

She was sorry she was late. She’d had these … things … to do.
The kids had been real bad. She felt kinda nutso. She had a sandpapery Iowa voice. In ten or twenty years’ time it would sound like a rasp; but now it was nicely, lightly dry.

It felt as if it had been an age since I had been half of a couple. I’d dined too much alone with books broken open on their spines. With Judith, for an hour or two, I could play at being husbandly again, fussing over her white coat, hanging on every detail of her day at the elementary school, quizzing her on the names of the particular beasts in her class. I would willingly have beaten little Gary around the ears for her, and put my boot hard into Glen’s fat behind. Our heads came close in consultation over the wine list, her beveled hair swinging forward to hide her face.