Gain Read online

  Don says nothing. Just stares ahead, through the cars, at the other side of the tracks, a place whose existence he has begun to doubt. He considers having an asthma attack.

  Ellen nudges Tim in the ribs, a broad gesture visible even in the rearview mirror. “Daddy’s pissed.”

  “He’s not pissed. Pissed means drunk.”

  “Does not. That’s shit-faced.” Semi-suppressed giggles, covert glances monitoring to see if she’s over the line. She knows she’s over.

  At least the two of them have the excuse of actually being children. The only guiltless people in the culture of permanent adolescence are the adolescents. All day long, he has to deal with exactly this kind of acting out. Gets it from colleagues and donors alike. They all want to stamp their feet, throw a little tantrum, and get away with it. And his job is to stroke them for doing so. Good boy. Clever boy! Now just write me the check, will you?

  Every other lunch, he has to listen to some smartass drawl, “Say, Don. Why do you call what you do ‘Development’? Don’t you think you oughta just call it ‘Fund-raising’?” So pleased with themselves. So proud of their Midwestern caginess, guffawing with bits of baby back rib stuck between their teeth, baby back rib that Don pays for. His job is to laugh along, make the potential benefactor feel that he’s Milton Berle.

  And after a hard day’s development, he’s supposed to go out on some big-budget adolescent fantasy date with his current girlfriend. Forty-six years old, and he’s got a damn girlfriend. A twenty-eight-year-old arrested-development girlfriend who can’t stand his kids because he lets them get away with all the crap he won’t let her get away with. A girlfriend who’s jealous of his ex-wife, and an ex-wife who hates him for spending their entire marriage oppressing her.

  Terri, last night, calling three times with the same old rag until he just let the machine take it. “Don? Don, pick up. I know you’re there.” And again this morning, twice, threatening to break things off if he goes to see his ex-wife in the hospital. He should have asked to get that threat in writing.

  “Terri,” he reasoned with her. Mistake one. “The woman’s having an operation.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “Ter. It’s not like I’m getting back together with her or anything.” Not a Democrat’s chance in hell.

  “I don’t care if you get back together.” Even over the Princess phone, he could hear her stamping her Mary Janes on the shag. Only you can prevent nylon fires. “I just don’t think you should see her right after her operation.”

  He doesn’t think so either. But he can’t very well not. Certainly Laura’s boyfriend isn’t going to be much help on this one. For starters, the man’s wife might wonder why he’s hanging around Mercy for his evening’s entertainment.

  Besides, the kids want to see her right away. Or: ten years from now, they’ll want to have seen her right away. And who’s going to take the kids there, if not him?

  They’re thirty-six minutes late pulling into the parking garage—that extortion racket and major supplemental source of hospital income. Which means they’re thirty-nine minutes late getting to post-op. The place is a hotbed of sepsis. You can feel the stress hormones accumulate in little pools that slosh around the ankles of the people in the waiting room. Families and friends, rocked or reprieved at the rate of one new verdict every ten minutes.

  A great social equalizer, this room. Farmer, college counselor, banker, the whole factory gamut from fork operator up to division manager. The upper-level corporate guys probably have their own underground hospital somewhere. But everybody else has to wait his turn, civilized, each wrapped in his own consequences.

  The three of them enter the waiting room, impostors just slipping in to pick up a routine All-Clear. Tim latches on to an issue of Computer Entertainment. The magazine occupies him for a full twenty seconds, until he notices that it’s two months old. He throws it aside in disgust. Ellen camps out in front of the waiting room TV, tuned, for some godforsaken reason, to a hospital soap where some straight doctor has just tested positive for HIV.

  Don goes to the desk and reports in. The idiot nurse tongue-lashes him. “The surgeon came by to make the report ten minutes ago. We don’t have the time to do everything twice, sir.”

  Don grins and dutifully eats the abuse. It comes easy to him. How he earns a living. The nurse makes a big, victimized point of resummoning the surgeon. The surgeon is a woman, and something of a piece, even in the surgical scrubs. “I’m the ex-husband,” Don says, trying for extra credit.

  The surgeon flashes a relaxed, easy smile. She greets the kids, shakes everybody’s hands, then says, “Well, Mr. Bodey, your wife has cancer.”

  Dr. Jenkins continues to stand there talking, but someone has hit the mute button. Don hears only a few words. Something about a big cyst on the right ovary and a little one on the left. Or vice versa. And the big one was fine but the little one had this small, foraging wet spot on the surface.

  This Jenkins woman just doesn’t seem to be saying what she’s saying. Cancer. She smiles at the three of them, asking, “Is there anything else you need to know for now?” The way the pretty cashier at the Style Barn cocks her head and says, “Will that be all today?”

  Ninety-eight? he wants to ask. What about the 98 percent?

  But he says: “That’s all, thanks.”

  Dr. Jenkins disappears to her next case. In a flash, Ellen’s all over him. “What does that mean, Daddy? Mom has . . . ?”

  Tim says nothing. He won’t even look up.

  All Don can think about is having failed Laura. Blowing the only real favor she’s asked him since they split. Could you get any important details following the surgery? She didn’t want to miss anything while still doped.

  The news promotes them to floor seven. Oncology. He’s never even thought about the word, and now it’s his. They walk stunned, in a dream, ending up in front of 7020, the number somebody has scrawled on a piece of paper for them. But Laura is not there yet. The floor nurses deflect them to another little waiting room, different dated magazines, same daytime hospital soap.

  Don jumps up to check the room every ninety seconds. Each time, someone on staff sends him back to the waiting room. “Somebody’ll come get you when Miss Bodey gets set up.”

  Set up? Who will know to come get them? Miss Bodey? Is that what the chart says?

  He is returning to the waiting room, shagged off the floor for the sixth time, when he sees her. She’s on a gurney, being rolled out of the elevator. He does not recognize her. They’ve done something to her face. She’s all puffy, slack, serene. There’s something else wrong with it, too. She’s smiling.

  She swims up to see who this is, staring at her. And she’s smiling at him. She tries to take his hand, missing. She squeezes his three fingers, affectionate with terror. Harder than she has ever grasped him. She hasn’t a clue what’s happening. She hasn’t the faintest idea of where she is, or what she is, or why.

  “Don. Don.” She swings his hand back and forth as the nurses begin wheeling her gurney down the hall again. He lopes alongside, unable to extract his fingers from her grip.

  “What did they say?” she remembers to ask. “What did they tell you?”

  “Dr. Jenkins said the surgery went very well. She said they’re going to take you to this room down there at the end of the hall, where they’re going to get you set up and then she says you can . . .”

  She waves him off, exasperated. Donald. Not the time. Not the place.

  “Which side was the cancer on?”

  He doesn’t know. They told him, and he’s forgotten. He picks an ovary. “The right,” he tells her. “It’s on the right side.” Fifty-fifty odds now seem absurdly generous.

  A suite of magnets adhere to the refrigerator, their points comprising a Little Dipper:

  •

  Scott Tissue: The Trouble Began with Harsh Toilet Tissue

  •

  Cracker Jack: 5 cents. Surprise Inside

  • />
  Lysol disinfectant: Infection . . . the sly and deadly enemy of every home

  •

  Eight O’Clock Bean Coffee: Ground to order

  •

  Raid: Kills Bugs Dead

  •

  Light house: Armour’s Family Soap. Premium for Wrappers

  Collectibles from five decades, enamel on metal, they yellow in simulated age. Each holds in place some receipt, ticket, or reminder. Underneath the last—a light house advancing through the foaming waves, scrub brush in one hand and a bucket reading “Show me dirt” in the other—a note reads: Mom, Post-Op, Mercy, 3:30 Wed.

  Benjamin Clare returned to a Boston overhauled during his years at sea. He brought back little to show for the voyage but a sample of his namesake plant, the living contraband he was supposed to have surrendered to the government catalogers.

  The world’s change is forever occluded by our own, so intent is the heart upon its private voyage out. At first, Ben felt that something had happened to him while he was away. In fact, he had stood still, while the world of his brothers had disappeared forever into its replacement.

  At thirty, he suddenly found himself obeying Jesus’ stipulation to take no thought for the morrow. For the morrow—that dream of progress his countrymen woke to—had gotten away from Ben in his absence. The morrow had grown tendrils beyond any vintner’s power to cultivate.

  Jephthah Clare’s sons were the last generation to assume that time would bring no fundamental changes to the game of existence. But on some unknown afternoon during Ben Clare’s long voyage, a new two-stroke engine had somehow split the future from its mother tenses and set it up, like some ingrate rebel colony, on independent soil.

  The country did itself over in steam. Steam: the world’s first new power source since the dawn of time: so slight, so obvious, so long overlooked that no one could say whether the engine was discovered or invented. A separate condensing chamber and governor—twinned iron planets rising to dampen with greater drag the faster they spun—with these small changes, time took off.

  Life now headed, via a web of steam-cut canals, deep into the interior. No later chaos would ever match this one for speed and violence: the first upheaval of advancement without advance warning. The back-pressure of governed steam eructed in railroad. Schuylkill, Delaware, Mohawk, and Hudson: every Valley exalted, and every hill laid low. Rail threatened to render distance no more than a quaint abstraction. America at last split open its continental nut. Populace consolidated; the week vanished into hours.

  In turn, the energies released by this energy launched ocean steamships and set machine presses stamping out the tools needed to make their own replacements. Infant factories forged a self-cleaning steel plow, which beat a reaper, which called out for vulcanized rubber, which set in inexorable motion a sewing machine that left half of Boston out of work, turning upon itself, poor against poorer.

  The patented spread of power sprang New England from its Puritan swaddling. Never very good with mere abiding, the Yankee made his escape into this giddy game of ever-accreting crack-the-whip, still diligent, still mindful, still industrious. The windbreaks against old pilgrim winters, the stockades of hard-won subsistence were now mere antechambers for more stately mansions.

  All the resourcefulness that simple survival once required now came free for reinvestment. Like a maturing treasury bill, Adam’s expiring curse called out for new capital targets to absorb it. For the first time in history, it seemed that life’s weight might lift a little before this generation passed away.

  This dream moved into the Clare works during Ben’s absence and took up residence there. Jewitt had begun to tinker with the steam engine, learning how to make that beast do useful work. Already he’d succeeded in forcing gaseous water to drive a shaft powerful enough to mill and extrude soap. This same automated crank seemed capable of propelling the very engine of history.

  This was the churning landscape that Ben Clare fell back into, from out of his Antarctic scentlessness. He cleared quarantine and returned to Cambridge in August of 1842. He spent two months simply trying to reorient himself. Much had he traveled in the western isles, but could only look with silent and wild surmise upon the sight of home.

  He left to some future Plutarch the task of sorting out Whig from Democrat, Clay from Calhoun. He left the parties to fight each other the way the city’s rival volunteer firefighters fought each other for the privilege of putting out a blaze. He saved the full horror of his bewilderment for Development in all its naked glory.

  He learned of that hatter’s son, self-schooled Peter Cooper, busy changing the American landscape more than any single person since the founders. Cooper’s metal tendrils now pushed outward from the Hub like threads from the universe’s germ cell. Each year lengthened the track’s probe. Trains snaked West, toward the endless grass, at last conquering for Boston its first real agricultural base.

  He discovered the Tappans’ nationwide credit agency. To his horror, Ben heard how, for a small fee, these men would determine which of humanity was worth monetary risk and which was not.

  He read of the collapse of a nearby mill on the Waltham model. Two hundred girls died inside. He could not keep track of the accelerating factory explosions in Brooklyn and Baltimore. He only noted that the industrialists always managed to escape prosecution on the grounds that their works had done more cumulative good than harm.

  Facts bombarded him. A printer in Alton, Illinois, had been killed for defying the abolition Gag Rule. A mob consigned his presses to the bottom of the Mississippi. Congress had just granted the portrait painter Morse $60,000 to continue his telegraphic research, providing he spent at least half the money on systematic investigations into animal magnetism, where the big payoffs surely lay.

  Replete with news, Ben crossed over the river to pay his respects to industry. He walked through Boston’s burial grounds in a calculated dream: Copp’s Hill, King’s Chapel, the Old Granary. Graves: yesterday’s ritual devotion had become today’s real estate lament.

  In Milk Street, he passed a new ready-to-wear clothier proclaiming “Shirts for the Million.” Swaying in the sea breeze, the shop’s shingle read: “Naked Was I and Ye Clothed Me.” Surely it ought to have read: “Consider the Lilies of the Field.” For in Ben’s understanding of industry, human enterprise now doomed itself as inexorably as air dooms iron.

  At Temple Place, he found his brothers hard at their labor. They took the prodigal out to Roxbury, for a tour of what had grown into a small pod of structures. Soap, too, had built its own head of steam, and candles profited from the memory of recent desperation.

  The Clare works had expanded beyond all recognition. Ennis’s monster kettle now seemed almost modest by the day’s standard. Resolve stocked a small store to cater to his workers’ needs, extending them advances against their wages. Some workers got together in their slow hours, late in the evenings, once a week, for self-improvement sessions. Samuel even published their writings, the marvel of European visitors. Americans were not amazed: of course their very factory laborers would rise to poetry.

  While Ben had been at sea, Clare’s sons perfected an imitation of the marked-up English soap they had briefly imported. With scale and machinery, costs began to fall like oaks at a homestead. The homegrown look-alike came to market at a good price, selling to those who lacked only the right accoutrements to pass themselves off above their station. Samuel and Resolve vended the look and feel of wealth without the expense.

  Time had dredged and widened the old distribution channels. The firm now sold as far out as Concord. Slabs and sticks even found their way into towns that four years before could not have purchased anything, let alone rehabilitated waste fat.

  New ingredients raised the quality of the Clares’ wares. Soda ash gave them a more consistent product. They had to import it from the hated English, who cornered the magical Leblanc process, making cheap, superior alkali from sulfur and salt water. But the Clares were in no position
to argue. They now made half a dozen laundry and scouring soaps, not to mention the toilet variety. For reliability at that volume, they would have bought supplies from far more unsavory peddlers.

  Ben nodded politely throughout the tour, as if he followed his brothers’ explanations. In truth, both the enhanced techniques and the expanded marketing now exceeded his grasp. He noted only that his brothers had shaken off the shame of manufacture. They would not return to merchanting now if they could. Lather now lent luster to the name Clare.

  The bemused botanist listened intently to the intelligences. He smiled when it seemed appropriate. He wagged his head, that field scientist’s gesture for mystified impatience with material particulars. Business had been a cipher to Benjamin even before his watery passage. After island ethnography, trade now struck him as an arcane branch of religion.

  A short tour of industry, he figured, would repay the tedium incurred. Suffer the family enterprise’s anatomy, for it buttered his bread and paid for the good that would transcend it. Obeisance came easy on this delicate visit. He could listen all day and into tomorrow, if that was how long the tour of the works took. And after the tour, he would come into fat’s inheritance.

  For he planned to continue the vegetal studies begun in the Pacific basin. He hoped to build a Cambridge hothouse where he might cultivate the root given him by the King of Feejee. He had begun a paper for the National Botanic Society, weighing the evidence for those many claims the Feejeeans settled upon his species. And for all that, he would need his third of the family capital.

  Money? His brother Resolve pretended to reflect upon the request. By all means. The older man pushed his sibling on ahead of him, off the factory floor, up to the bookkeeping office. With a show of quiet method, Resolve dropped the ponderous, brown-ribbed register onto the head clerk’s desk and levered it open.

  Where do you suggest we find this surplus cash? Exactly which department would you recommend debiting? Here, here: tell me how to itemize the cost. Where to enter the outlay into the ledger. Over what period to amortize the expense.