be explained entirely as self-serving public relations but
may be seen as manifesting anthropologically identified
principle of potlatch observed operating in primitive social
systems throughout the world from northern forest aboriginals
to unclad natives of tropical paradises. The principle
regardless of currency of benefaction breadfruit pigs palm
fronds or dollars is that wealth is accumulated so that
it can be given away thus bringing honor to the giver.
I refer to an American landscape from every region of which
rise hospitals universities libraries museums planetaria
parks think-tanks and other institutions for the public weal
all of which are the benefactions of the utmost class.
I cite achievements F. W. Bennett in his lifetime the original
endowments of the Western miners’ Black Lung Research Facility,
Denver, Colorado. The Gymnasium of Miss Morris’ School,
Briarcliff Manor NY, the Mexican Silver Workers’ Church of the
Holy St. Clare, Popxacetl Mexico, The Bennett Library on the
grounds of Jordan College, Rhinebeck NY, the Bennett
Engineering Institute, Albany NY, plus numerous ongoing
benefactions of worthy charities and researches plus innumerable
acts of charity to individuals never publicized.
I attribute to F. W. Bennett in his death a last will and
testament of such public generosity as to receive acknowledgment
on the front page of the New York Times data available
upon request.
——
Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems
that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense
power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing
education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human
civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally
random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress
1and misery depression starvation and degradation are
inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage
of the population. The periods of economic stability also
ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom
and among the industrial Western democracies today despite
occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent
corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of
legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business
oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration
of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the
increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources
the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations
the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are
far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms
it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus
the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes
in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while
we may not admire always the personal motives of our business
leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the
good life as it comes down through our native American soil.
You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our country nor take
pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety
without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of
American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying
in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the
turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries
and no one will hurt you.
——
No claim for the perfection of F. W. Bennett, only that like
all men he was of his generation and reflected his times in
his person. We know that by the nineteen-fifties at an advanced
age he had come finally to see unions as partners in
enterprise and to cooperate fully on a first-name basis with
major labor leaders playing golf of course at that age he
only drove a ball twenty or thirty yards but they called him
Mr. Frank and with humor admired his sportif outfits the
beige-yellow slacks the brown-and-white shoes with the tassels
the Hawaiian shirt with his breasts showing. Note is made here
too that this man had a boyhood, after all, woke
in the astonishment of a bedsheet of sap suffered acne
had feelings which frightened him and he tried to suppress
was cruelly motivated by unthinking adults perhaps rebuffed
or humiliated by a teacher these experiences are not the
sole prerogative of the poor poverty is not a moral
endowment and a man who has the strength to help himself
can help others. I cite too the ordinary fears of
mortality the inspection of a fast-growing mole on the side
of the nose blood in the stool a painful injury or the
mournful witness of the slow death of a parent all this is
given to all men as well as the starting awake in the
nether hours of the night from such glutinous nightmare
that one’s self name relationships nationality place in life
all data of specificity wipe out amnesiatically asiatically you
don’t even know the idea human it is such a low hour of the
night and he shares that with all of us. I therefore declare
F. W. Bennett to embody the fullness of the perplexity of
living, as they say.
I cite here his voice which people who knew him only in his
later years believed to be ridden and cracked with his age
but in fact his voice had always been rather high reedy
with a gravelly consistency around its edges and some people
found this menacing but others thought it avuncular
especially after his operation for cataracts when they wear
those goggle glasses. But it was one of those voices of such
individual character that people who never heard it can
imagine it just by the mention of his name and those standing
in the great crush of honors at his funeral could believe
themselves likely to hear it for many years afterward as if a
man of this strong presence could not release his hold on
life except very very slowly and, buried or not, manifest
a half life, probably, of twenty-five thousand years.
I was on headlights. First I attached with four screws two metal frames the screws lay in a bin the frames met at the convergence of two small belts the left frame from the left belt the right down the line. Sometimes the pieces didn’t match, sometimes the wrong piece came down the wrong side and sometimes, the thread not being true, I had to hammer the screws in, everybody did.
Next I affixed the crossed pieces to the inside of a curl of tin shaped like a flowerpot. I then inserted through a hole in the pot about four feet of insulated wire that came to hand dangling from a big spool overhead. I snipped the wire with a pair of shears, knotted the wire so it wouldn’t slip and put the whole thing back on the line for the next man, who did the electrical connections, slapped on the chrome and sent it on to the main line for mounting on a fender.
That was the operation it’s what I did.
High above my head the windows of the great shed hung open like bins and the sun came through the meshed glass already broken down, each element of light attached to its own atom of dust and there was no light except
on the dust and between was black space, like the night around stars. Mr. Autobody Bennett was a big man who could do that to light, make the universe punch in like the rest of us.
And all around me the noise of running machines, conveyor belts, the creaking of pulleys, screeching of worked metal, shouts, the great gongs of autobodies on the line, the blast of acetylene riveting, the rattling of moving treads, the cries of mistakes and mysterious intentions.
And then continuously multiplied the same sounds repeated compounded by echoes. An interesting philosophical problem: I didn’t know at any moment what I heard was what was happening or what had already happened.
It was enough to make me think of my father. The man was a fucking hero.
Then they speed things up and I’m going too slow I drop one of the tin pots on the wrong side of the belt the guy there is throwing tires on wheel rims and giving the tubes a pump or two of air he ignores my shouts he can’t take the time. And then the foreman is coming down the line to pay me a call I can’t hear him but I don’t have to—a red bulging neck of rage.
And then they stop coddling us and throw the throttle to full and this is how I handle it: I am Fred Astaire in top hat and tails tossing up the screws into the holes, bouncing the frames on the floor and catching them in my top hat of tin. I twirl the headlight kick it on the belt with a backward flip of my heel. I never stop moving and when the belt is too slow for me I jump up and stomp it along faster, my arms outstretched. Soon everyone in the plant has picked up on my routine—everyone is dancing! The foreman comes pirouetting along, putting stars next to each name on his clipboard. And descending from the steel rafter by insulated wire to dance backward on the moving parade of car bodies, Mr. Bennett himself in white tie and tails. He’s singing with a smile, he’s flinging money from his hands like Stardust.
Shit, how many more hours of this … I thought of Clara I thought of us driving to California in the spring. And then I thought, What if she just left, what if she met someone and said to him, How do I get out of here?
And then I resolved not to think at all, if I couldn’t think well of Clara, I’d turn my mind from her knowing I was racked, knowing I couldn’t physically feel hope in this hammering noise. But I didn’t have to try not to think, by the middle of the afternoon my bones were vibrating like tuning forks. And so it had me, Bennett Autobody, just where it wanted me and I was screwed to the machines taking their form a mile away in the big shed, those black cars composed bit by bit from our life and the gift of opposition of thumb and forefinger, those precious vehicles, each one a hearse.
On the other hand everyone had the same problem I heard stories of people hauling off on a foreman, or pissing on the cars, or taking a sledge hammer to them, good stories, wonderful stories, probably not true. But the telling of them was important. I was the youngest on my line, jokes were made about that—what a woman could still hope for from someone my age. Jokes were important.
The line was a complex society with standards of conduct honor serious moral judgment. You did your work but didn’t kiss ass, you stood up for yourself when you had to but didn’t whine or complain, you kept your eyes open and your mouth shut, you didn’t make outlandish claims brag threaten.
Yet none of this was visible when we pressed through the gates in the evening, a nameless faceless surge of men in soft caps in full flight.
Clara and I lived on Railroad, the street of the endless two-family bungalows. I had my choice—to take the streetcar, which was faster, or walk and save the carfare.
I ran.
I stopped only long enough to pick up a movie magazine or True Confessions, I liked to bring her small surprises keep her busy keep her occupied.
Sometimes I’d find her waiting at the window looking out the window—the dark industrial sky, the great bobbing crowd of men flowing down Railroad Street making a whispering sound on the cobblestones like some dry Midwestern sea—and she’d be holding her arms, the bleak mass life scared her as some elemental force she hadn’t known, not even realized by the way she stood and watched that she gave it her deference.
We ate things heated from cans. We had two plates two cups two spoons two knives two forks. Our mansion was furnished army-camp fashion by the company. Behind the back porch was the outhouse.
We stayed in the kitchen till bedtime, I tossed pieces of coal in the stove, it never seemed to be enough. Clara sat reading, she wore her fur jacket she wore it all the time. She was fair and couldn’t take the cold, the winter had done something to her face, coarsened it, rubbed the glamour from it. Five minutes out of doors her eyes watered, her cheeks flamed up. She didn’t use make-up anymore.
All of it was all right with me. I still couldn’t take my eyes off her. I tried to remember the insolent girl with the wineglass in her hand and the firelight in her eyes.
“I’m glad you’re laughing,” she said.
I had a scheme for getting us from kitchen to bed. I heated water in the black coffee pot and then ran the pot like a hot iron over the mattress. I undressed her under the covers.
I loved it cold, I loved the way she came to me when it was cold, as if she couldn’t get close enough. But this particular evening I remember she stopped me in my lovemaking, she put her arm on my shoulder and said Shhh.
“You hear that?” she said.
“What?”
“Next door. They’ve got a radio.”
I lay on my back and listened. I heard the wind blowing the snow in gusts along Railroad Street. Sometimes the snow came in through the cracks and in the morning you’d find it lying like dust inside the front door.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“Listen.”
And then I heard it, very softly through the wall, it was dance music, the swing band of a warmer world, it made me think of men and women on a terrace under a full moon.
Their place—the mirror of our three rooms—astounds me. No trace of company domicile, it’s all been washed from the walls and strained from the light coming in off the street. We sit on stuffed horsehair chairs, there is a matching sofa, behind the sofa a lamp with a square translucent shade of the deco design. A braided rug covers the parlor floor and glass curtains adorn the windows. Amazing. On the desk in the corner a private phone. Who would have thought people on Railroad Street had their own phones?
The subtle giving to the newcomers of their protection. Lyle James smiles sitting on the sofa with his hands on his overalled knees, he’s one of those crackers, hair like steel wool, reddish going to gray, a face of freckles so that he appears to be behind them looking from his pink-lidded eyes through them as from some prison of his own innocence, buckteeth smiling.
What does he see? In Jacksontown, crossroads of the world, he thinks he’ll see everything given enough time. These two are just getting their legs, the boy looking at her as if she’s sick about to die, or have a fit, but it’s his fit more likely, that’s what’s important to this boy, not how he feels but how she feels. And she, one spooked little old girl, she smokes her cigarettes, crosses her legs, stares at the floor, that’s the way it is with folks from the East.
Mrs. James comes in from the kitchen holding a platter with chocolate cake and cups and saucers and napkins. Another freckled-face redhead, but a pretty one with light eyes, a plump mouth sullen in a child, provocative in a woman. Which is she? She is very shy, blushing when her husband boasts that she baked the cake herself. She wears an unbuttoned sweater over her dress, school shoes, ankle socks.
We’re all Bennett people, neighbors, fellow workers, this is Clara, hello, this is Sandy, hi, Clara, this is Lyle, this is Joe.
They are Southerners, like so many of them here, but with my tenacity, I recognize it, they talk slower but feel the same. He must be thirty-five, a lot older than his wife, crow’s-feet under the freckles, they act dumb but I don’t believe it.
I detected the sly rube who liked to take city slickers.
Clara talks to the wife. Clara in t
his conversation is the older woman from New York, Mrs. James maybe sixteen years old stands in awe of that sophistication. And then a baby is brought out, the child wife has a baby!
The establishment of them sitting modestly for our admiration: people are strong, they prove themselves. You see, Clara? You can wrest life from a machine and walk away.
“’A course,” he was saying, “all this work ain’t just the season. You wouldn’t know but they was a wildcat strike last summer. Quite a to-do at the main gate. The company brought in strikebreakers. A feller was killed. They closed the plant down, fired everone. Everone!”
I nod, this is man talk.
The baby began to cry, the young mother unbuttoned and gave her breast right in the parlor, neither of them made anything of it. I glanced at Clara. She was intent. She watched the infant suck, she watched the mother and child. Expressed in Sandy James’ face just that absorption in the task as the doll mother’s in her solemn game.
“I started out in trim,” Lyle says. “Now I hang doors. You get a few more cents a hour. Hands don’t cut up so bad. Lemme see your hands,” he said. I held them out, swollen paws, a thousand cuts. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s it.”
After a while he went over to the radio we had heard, obviously his pride and joy, a Philco console of burled wood big as a jukebox. A circular dial lit up green when he turned it on, it had regular and shortwave broadcasts, and a magic tuning eye like a cat’s green eye with a white pupil that grew narrow when he brought in a station.
He had turned it on as casual as he could be and while it warmed up consulted a newspaper. “How ’bout Mr. First Nighter,” he said, “seein as you folks’re from New York,” he said to Clara.
Yes, they had culture!
We sat in dutiful appreciation and listened. Mrs. James had put her baby back to bed and sat now, a child herself, cross-legged on the floor right in front of the speaker, she wanted to get in there behind the cloth with those people.
In the casual grant of their warmth and circumstances we are so installed in the life as to have neighbors, we have started to live in their assumptions. I look at Clara she is way ahead of me, she is wearing her gold band.