Timebends (39 page)

As time went by and season followed season outside the filthy windows of the packing room, which overlooked both the ailanthus trees growing up out of the backyards and a newly installed five-story bordello—we could wave to the naked young whores taking their sunbaths sitting cross-legged like Hindus on their beds in the morning—the sheer endurance and self-discipline of Chadick workers came to move me, although I knew enough not to have illusions about our being “the same.” On the hour-and-a-half trip in from Brooklyn every morning I was reading novels or the
Times,
a paper they would sometimes peruse with a certain suspicious daintiness, turning a page with their fingertips as though it were satin. And when Dora, in whom I had confided, let it out that I was saving to go to college, the moral they drew was that Jews did not drink up their pay, so that once again we were set apart. Besides, by intending to go to college I was not only trying to escape their common fate but implicitly stating that I was better than they. Still, their questions about my strange people were mostly about our family practices, for what impressed and baffled them a little was that an able-bodied guy like me was not being required to contribute to the family's upkeep but was instead allowed to save for his education. Most weeks, in fact, I banked thirteen out of my fifteen dollars' pay, figuring I could just make the required five-hundred mark by July or August of 1934, in time for the September semester at Michigan.

Only once did the mask of acceptance—if indeed it ought to be called that—slip. Fetching parts as usual out of a bin in the middle of a corridor, and failing to hear Huey's footsteps coming up behind me, I stepped back to clear the ladder's path and sent its wheel rolling over his toe. He was a heavy, flat-footed, slope-shouldered man and usually wore shoes with razor slits to ease the joints of his big toes. The pain shot his fist straight at my nose as he yelled, “You fucking …” I could hear “Jew” almost but not quite as I ducked and his fist jammed into a bin. It took a couple of minutes to free it, and his knuckles were bleeding from the shallow scratches of the sheet metal. Walking away with his handkerchief wrapped around his hand, he looked very peeved, but nothing more was ever said about it.

By the time I left Chadick-Delamater in August of 1934, I had
broken in Peter Damone, the first Italian to work there, a dour and proper young Sicilian who never smiled and was rapidly cordoned off from
all
intimate confidences, as I had been from some; and Dennis MacMahon, fresh off the boat, a young giant with a lovely brogue who pasted sheets of wrapping paper over the windows so that he would not have to be looking at whores all of his God-given days here. Dennis was soon struggling against becoming a drunk, as most of them had had to do at some time in their working lives, understandably, I thought, given that they knew there was absolutely no future for them here and at the same time that they had to be thankful for working at all in those days. The repression of anger, though, was not always successful.

With a figurative line of eager unemployed waiting to take our jobs should we ever complain about conditions, we learned to absorb blows to the ego without flinching. If one of us, for example, happened to pick up an order for brake lining, we had to cut it to size ourselves on an abrasive wheel without a guard, with no mask or goggles, even though the brake material was compressed asbestos as hard and brittle as brick. A cloud of stinking asbestos dust filled the work area and even drifted out to the front office from time to time, and once in a while the abrasive wheel would shatter and glass-sharp slivers would fly all over the packing room. It never occurred to me or anyone else that the risk involved might be abnormal. A piece of broken wheel hit me in the chest once, but since it was winter and never warmer than the high fifties or low sixties in the place, I had kept my windbreaker and sweater on and hardly felt the blow and simply proceeded to attach a new wheel and went right on cutting brake lining. The papers reported new unions being organized in various industries, but when I mentioned this to Huey and the other workers they looked at me with a certain apprehension at the prospect of conflict with the big boss (whom I would name “Mr. Eagle” in a play about this place written twenty years later, and whose real name I have long forgotten). Anyway, we knew we were unskilled and easily replaceable. The fact is we were quite like other workers then, even some skilled ones, in our lack of pride in what we were doing for a living. Had an organizer appeared we would have thought ourselves beneath consideration as union members.

Mr. Eagle was said to own several other firms, which was why he only appeared here one or two days a week. According to Dora he had gone to Princeton and was a yachtsman, which one could ascertain by glancing through the only clean windows in the place,
in the partition surrounding his little office up front; on the wall was a large etching of a sailboat at sea, a taunt to the eye in the heat of summer, for we of course not only had no air conditioning but also no fans, and the temperature on the three-foot-long thermometer with “Prestone” printed on it in blue and red hanging near the front counter often went over ninety degrees. It never occurred to anyone to ask Moulter to ask Eagle for a fan. Instead, a steady line of people kept moving in and out of the single toilet next to the packing table overlooking the whores, to lave their faces using the one tepid water tap over the grimy brown sink in there, the same that Mr. Eagle used himself. Nor did it seem an indignity when, on occasion, Mrs. Eagle, a rather sweetly polite young woman who always seemed airily dressed for a party in the middle of the day, would leave their two large and insane springer spaniels tied to the big cast-iron floor scale while she went off for a few hours of shopping. Since under the scale lived a venerable colony of gray mice with dozens of members, the tied dogs never ceased attacking the steel base and howling as though in the hunt over the countryside that was imprinted on their brains. Naturally the male of the pair occasionally pissed on the scale, leaving the question of who among us was supposed to clean this up, and our one sign of revolt was the unspoken decision to let it dry slowly all by itself. We had the pleasure of watching Mrs. Eagle having to negotiate the puddle when she returned to untie her animals and to thank us all for bearing with them, unaccustomed as they were to city life.

In
A Memory of Two Mondays,
my one-act play written as the fifties got under way, I tried to paint the picture, but it was only abroad that the play made a mark for itself—in Latin America, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and the less affluent countries of Europe, which still had such workers and conditions of work or could remember them. In New York in 1955 the stock market was on the rise and the dollar was the only legitimate money in the world and a play about workers was the last thing anybody wanted to think about. By the time I wrote the play I had had five plays produced on Broadway and had been embraced and, as I knew in my gut, rejected by what I still imagined was the peculiar aberration of American society known as the Eisenhower time. A play like this, I felt, with its implied assertion of human solidarity, was one way of insisting that something besides money-getting had to be real, if only as a memory of a long-gone era. But nostalgia, I suppose, is reserved for memories of pleasure, not pain or mere reality.

In any case, on the day I left Chadick-Delamater at the end of
the summer of 1934, Dora alone seemed to register the fact, just as only she had noted, two years earlier, that I had arrived. Even Dennis, my closest friend there, barely glanced up as I said goodbye to him while he wrapped up an axle. Jim Smith, the octogenarian onetime Indian fighter, went padding by with his cigar stub centered in his pursed mouth, his head tilted up as he read an order in his hand through his bifocals, and Johnny Drone, with the same blackheads around his nose that he had had two years earlier, wearing one of his three dark blue ties stiffened with soil, gave me a slight nod, shifted from one foot to the other as though standing on a hot boiler, and said, “You ought to look into accountancy.” There were now two new Irish parts clerks whom I had never gotten to know at all since they did hardly any work and disappeared for hours into the freight elevator to shoot craps with suckers they had found in the street. In order to aggravate the naive and pure Dennis, who, however, had long since lost the Irish country bloom of his cheeks, these two one late afternoon sat themselves down on his packing table and gave a loud and circumstantial account of how, on the previous weekend, they had taken a girl home from a dance in Paterson and each in turn had raped her while the other drove the borrowed truck. Dennis's outrage had led to the first and only knockdown fight in my time there. It brought Wesley Moulter running down from the front office hollering at Roach, one of the two clerks, who was pounding on Dennis's belly, while I pulled on Dennis, and Dora and a couple of other women screamed and threatened to call the cops, before the ordinary torpor of the place was restored.

One day in the mid-forties, some ten years after I had walked out of there to go to Michigan, I found myself a few blocks away, and for the first time in many years feeling a tug of curiosity about my relationship with these people, I decided to pay a sentimental visit. I walked over from Broadway, climbed the stairs, opened the steel door, and was surprised to see a wholly new atmosphere. The counter was now faced in dark plywood, and a paneled wall, declaring a new gentility, blocked off the public from the aisles of bins as well as from the office area that must still have existed somewhere behind it. A couple of mechanics were waiting to be served at the counter, and presently an overweight blond man came through the door from the rear to wait on them. It was Huey, but swollen with middle age, disguised by a decade of time. He wore a respectable shirt and tie now and had his shirt sleeves neatly rolled to mid-forearm in executive style, and without being able to
see his feet I was sure he was no longer wearing shoes with slits in them. The mechanics left with boxes of parts, and I came to the counter and nodded to him. He waited for me to give my order, and I said, “How are you, Huey?”

Nonrecognition flattened his gaze, and a surprising suspicion, too. I was embarrassed to have to tell him my name. He was busy, obviously. “What'd you want?” he asked, still expecting me to order. I explained that I had worked here for two years. Like the Depression itself, my time at Chadick was a dream now; he not only did not remember me but seemed irritated at being forced to wonder what I was up to. His honed lack of interest in even trying to recall depressed me, and the conversation began to stumble, and after only a couple of minutes I left, closing the steel door behind me for the last time. There was the same anonymous scent of steel as on my first arrival and my departure, a scent that reminded me of the Navy Yard and factories, and one that I would always find stimulating, promising a kind of comradeship of makers and builders, but depressing in the end as each man is left exactly where he began—alone.

Walking away that afternoon, I wondered what I had expected from a return to Chadick-Delamater. To show off to them that I had made it and was a writer now, with a failed Broadway play and a novel,
Focus,
that a surprising number of people had bought? Yes, but it was more than boasting; I had really wanted somehow to stop time, I think, perhaps to steal back from it what it had stolen from us, but Huey's failure—or refusal—to remember had thrown me right back on myself again. It was terribly strange that the whole crew should have stayed so fixed in my mind while I had vanished from theirs. How could Huey have wiped out so completely the memory of my gripping his hand to steady him during his sudden fit of fear after his baby had nearly died in his freezing flat, or even that he had thrown a punch at me? Is this, I wondered, why writing exists—as a proof against oblivion? And not just for the writer himself but also for all the others who swim in the depths where the sun of the culture never penetrates?

I bought a paper and walked down Broadway reading it. The bleeding of Russia was of staggering proportions, but the war was slowly turning against Germany. There was talk of losing half a million Americans in the onslaught against Japan that would be coming up one day soon. I had been turned down for military service twice now. My brother was somewhere in Europe. Yet the city seemed weirdly unaffected. What meaning had all this blood-letting?
If my brother died, would it make a difference? As a non-combatant I had time for such questions. And I thought that in secret people did worry about the meaning of things but were too unsure to admit it, going along instead with the official pretensions to an overwhelming national purpose that would someday justify everything. I wished I could speak for those people, say what they lacked the art to say.

In the eight years since winning my first Hopwood Award in 1936,1 had written four or five full-length plays; the novel version of
The Man Who Had All the Luck; Situation Normal,
a book of reportage about army training drawn from my research for my screenplay
The Story of GI Joe;
and some two dozen radio plays on which I had been making my living. I was walking through the city in wartime feeling the inevitable unease of the survivor. I had even tried to serve by applying for a job with the Office of War Information, the propaganda and intelligence agency, but with my school-book French and no connections I apparently had nothing to offer and was turned down. I seemed to be part of nothing, no class, no influential group; it was like high school perpetually, with everybody else rushing to one or another club or conference with a teacher, and me still trying to figure out what was happening. I was only sure that writing was not a matter of invention; I could not be the Dickens of
The Book of Knowledge,
his head surrounded with portraits of characters that had miraculously sprung from it. The city I knew was incoherent, yet its throttled speech seemed to implore some significance for the sacrifices that drenched the papers every day. And psychologically situated as I was—a young, fit man barred from a war others were dying in, equipped with a lifelong anguish of self-blame that sometimes verged on a pathological sense of responsibility—it was probably inevitable that the selfishness, cheating, and economic rapacity on the home front should have cut into me with its contrast to the soldiers' sacrifices and the holiness of the Allied cause. I was a stretched string waiting to be plucked, waiting, as it turned out, for
All My Sons,
which, as I have said, was set off by the last person in the world I could imagine being inspired by—Mary's mother, Mrs. Slattery.