Gain Page 3

  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 freed
om 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.”

  Blackout.

  Investment Services

  CLARE MATERIAL SOLUTIONS

  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.

  And just as quickly, Resolve knew what he was dealing with.

  From whom did you buy these? he asked.

  Ennis thought a moment. The words came out one by one, like tapers cracked from the mold. He sold for no man but himself.

  You made these candles?

  The question brought Ennis up short. Who wanted to know? They were good candles, his jaw contended.

  Resolve offered to buy all the candles upon Ennis’s wedge.

  The bid only fired Ennis’s suspicion. He agreed to a sale, but for not a penny less than the price previously agreed upon.

  The words both bewildered Clare and confirmed him. Could the fellow make soap as well? A good toilet soap? At—at something of a commensurate price?

  Ennis snorted. Could a horse make mules? Soap and candles were the same line of work. In fact, his stearin candlemaking, as a happy by-product, produced a red oil that would make a better soap than half the rubbish that people in these parts got away with selling.

  Saying even this much, Ennis fell into horrified silence. He st
ood penitent, swinging on that flapping barn door, watching his mare bolt happily down the lane.

  Resolve smiled and asked if he could see the man’s candle works. Ennis refused.

  Resolve smiled again and asked if Ennis cared for a drink. Ennis did not.

  That red oil, Resolve asked, stone-faced. The words caused his antagonist to study his shoes and drift off.

  Resolve inspected Ennis’s carrying wedge. He calculated the cost of rendered fat, the number of candles a lone man might make, the hours in a day, the time it would take to sell as many candles as one could carry. He did several quick products in his head. He extrapolated outward, to include the costs of this man’s apparatus. He then figured how much cheaper these stearin candles might come into existence at, say, ten times this man’s production rate.

  Sight unseen, Resolve Clare offered to buy all the equipment Ennis now owned, plus a figure that would comfortably cover all Ennis’s costs for a year.

  The Irishman stared at him. You want to give me this? This money?

  My brother and I, yes, would like you to come into a business with us. Making candles. And soap.

  Surely this mechanic was the kind of man who saw that a right fit needed no preaching. Yet Ennis insisted on thinking. He thought so long that Resolve began to recalculate. Then resignation clouded the laborer’s face. At last, Ennis declared that he would take the cost of his equipment as well as the suggested salary. But he demanded a third, smaller sum, up front, in cash.

  For a long time afterward, it irked Resolve. Not the pitiful extra sum that Ennis had held out for. The Clare brothers paid Ennis’s demand without a second thought. But Resolve hated the idea that he had misjudged the man. He would have staked the Clare reputation on his sense that this Ennis was above bargaining. But the man had bargained.