Gain
“Nulliparity?”
“Not your problem, Mrs. Bodey.”
“What does it mean?”
“The condition of never having given birth.”
“Childlessness?”
“Childlessness.”
“Can you get outbreaks of it?”
“Childlessness?”
“Ovarian cancer.”
“Clusters? No. We don’t see much if any clustering of ovarian. Although it’s interesting. Immigrants to this country do show higher incidence rates after living here about twenty years.”
She knows what Dr. Archer thinks of immigrants. But she assumes he’s telling her something like the truth. “That would sort of suggest an environmental reason, no?”
He extends his lower lip and shrugs. He gestures toward the NIH.
“But I’m not in any of those categories. None of that applies to me.”
“There is no evidence of ovarian cancer being caused by anything you might have read about in the newspaper.”
“Okay. Okay. Could I just ask one more thing, Doctor?”
He shrugs again: Go ahead. My job.
“Is there some other kind of anti-nausea pill that you aren’t giving me because they are too expensive?”
He smiles his slow, comprehending smile. Patients. “Who told you that?”
She will not throw Alan to the health care system police. “I’ve heard that there are these pills that cost . . . The pills you give me don’t seem to do . . .”
“What would you like to try? Did you get the name of something?”
She has no name. But she will try anything. At this point, she has learned to throw up at the mere sound of the food cart down the hall.
“You don’t know of any anti-nausea medication in pill form that costs a lot more than the ones that you’re giving me, but that works?”
He pulls out a catalog of medications. He is completely with-out emotional affect. “We can try something else. Here. How about these?”
“How expensive are those?”
“Would that make a difference to you?”
She leaves his office feeling a total fool. She’s actually looking forward to the drip. She will tell Alan about the new anti-nausea that Dr. Archer has prescribed. See if it’s the right one. She’s looking forward to getting caught up with Ruthie Tapelewsky. Ruthie makes her laugh. They can compare nauseas, blacking out, other side effects. She’ll ask Ruthie what kind of oral medication they give her to take home.
Twenty yards from the drip room she stops. Ruthie. Ruthie drives a forklift. There’s only one place in this wholly owned subsidiary of a city where she could do that.
Laura stumbles all over herself getting into the chemo room. But Ruthie isn’t there. She asks Alan, even before she asks him about the prescription. “Where’s Ruthie? Did she go on another schedule?”
Alan nods, the strangest kind of agreement. “Ruthie’s decided not to do any more chemotherapy just now.”
THE WORLD’S DOZEN MOST
LOVED VERSES
Contents
Abou Ben Adhem....................................................................................1
Charge of the Light Brigade, The..........................................................2
Concord...................................................................................................4
Isle of Beauty (Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder)......................5
Last Minstrel, The..................................................................................6
Lochinvar..............................................................................................8
Ode: To a Nightingale........................................................................10
Peace and Wonder.............................................................................12
Psalm of Life, A.................................................................................13
Santa Filomena (The Lady With the Lamp).....................................14
That Thing Which Death Can Never Own.......................................15
To a Mouse......................................................................................16
A Gift to You from the Clare Soap and Chemical Company.
Keep Clean, Be as Fruit, Earn Life, and Watch . . .
May Your Tribe Increase!
Peter Clare was the last company officer who did not work his way up through the ranks. After him, all the leaders of the firm, aside from the rare outsider, served their apprenticeships on the factory floor.
Peter was not the last Clare to put his hand to the Clare tiller. But he was the last to run it as a family business. And as that trading family’s third generation, he possessed all the obligatory eccentricity of inherited capital.
He was a sickly child. His vague illnesses varied in proportion to how much he liked his private tutor of the moment. In Julia Hazelwood’s eyes, all the unbridled promise of the American system swung in orbit around the boy. His mother’s constant overvaluation resulted in a permanent sense of inadequacy that led Peter to perform beyond his natural abilities.
Yet Peter was a kind of genius: a genius of the mundane. His waking imagination obsessed upon median existence. Because he so rarely got out into the germ-ridden world, the ordinary exercised upon him all the attraction of a lurid, third-rate, mock-classical slave girl statue. The squalid public was his Arabian Nights. In his mind, the banal and quotidian took on all the desirability of unrequited love.
If the hundreds of workers in Clare’s manufactories knew nothing else about the man who controlled their labor, they knew that Peter Clare kept himself sequestered, rarely seen by any but his closest aides. Even the most favored board members saw him face-to-face no more than four or five times a year. He grew in fabled reputation, a ghost of commerce. An angel.
In the general collapse of business in the 1870s, the firm fell into a downward slide. Factory soap reverted to exotic luxury. Clare’s strong suit was spent, its sprint run. By mid-decade, some on the board even talked of declaring insolvency. In turning to Peter, the company was fishing shamelessly for a miracle cure.
He rose swiftly in the business, although he had trouble telling a frame from a foot press. His father, Resolve, had lived to manipulate both cash and matter. Peter’s relation to the palpable, in contrast, bordered on the occult. He did not know an ether from an ester. He barely knew Sandusky from Somerville. He revered anyone who could work a shoehorn, let alone load a soap crate into a boxcar.
Yet if Peter did not always comprehend the company itself, he knew what the company promised the public’s imagination. He knew, better than any of his precursors, the purpose of Clare Soap and Chemical.
He understood soap’s destiny. He grasped the link between business and purification as only an industrious hypochondriac could. For Clare to survive, it would need to sell not just soap but Clare’s Native Balm. Not commodities but familiar friends.
In short, Clare had to offer a whole new way of living. It would have to train its clients to master filth and misery. Beating squalor was now a matter of life or death, for the American, for American enterprise, and finally for America at large.
Peter began to transform the company in 1876, the year that the fix robbed Tilden of the Presidency and reduced the democratic process to parody. The year of Custer’s Last Stand. The year two people independently sought to patent the telephone. The year that Silas Lapham discovered that business in this country would never be small again. The year of the American Centennial.
The scandal of the presidential election may have crushed the public belief that political ideals were above purchase. But Peter set himself the goal of crushing the public belief that purchase was beneath ideals. Yes, profiteers had sprung up in both business and politics. True, humanity’s worst knew how to exploit prosperity and make a mockery of it. Yet when a man tipped over
his bowl, surely it was wrong to fault the soup. What but more industry could cure these wrongs or better capitalize upon this inexhaustible land over which fate had given us dominion?
Clare turned out in force for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The firm took its place in the chorus of that vast paean to American mechanization for which Wagner himself wrote the overture. That great reviver of American hopes exceeded in grandeur the finest fair Europe herself had ever mounted. From exhibitors to foreign dignitaries to awed visitors: all proclaimed the colossus of the next century. Not even federal troops’ massacre of striking railroad workers in the fair’s wake could dispel the celebration’s spell of opulence.
For resonance, the Otis passenger elevator upstaged most other exhibitors. The Electro-Magnetic Orchestrion gave folks their first earful of the music of the future. But Clare’s Personality Diviner also managed to thrill its share of visitors. The mechanical catapult (inspired by Jewitt’s old foot press) randomly doled out one of a dozen varieties of soap to anyone who survived the line.
To its industrial competition at the great trade fair, Clare showed off just enough of Walpole chemical technology to elicit envy without evoking emulation. And Philadelphia also witnessed Peter’s first great innovation: the paper wrapper.
Samuel had long opposed the measure. A wrapper cheapened the product and added unnecessary cost. It was not the way gentlemen sold soap. When, just before the Philadelphia exposition, Samuel’s own son broke the tie and threw in with Peter, the old man capitulated. But in protest, Samuel, infirm and increasingly powerless, refused to travel out to see the greatest spectacle in the history of American business.
The first Native Balm wrapper featured a beautiful black-and-white engraving of the familiar Brave’s head. But underneath the cameo it also carried the words:
Safe—Hygienic
For country, town, city
Unwrapped soap, as it now turned out, harbored all sorts of potential health dangers that the American purchaser had never suspected. The Centennial Exposition bore raucous witness to the rise of plumbing and public waterworks, inventions fast moving America off the conquered land and into cities. The mass hygiene movement also turned out in force, ready to convert soap from an incidental indulgence to a cornerstone of rectified living.
Big soap required bigger soap works. At the same time, the rise of a national market decimated the number of soapmakers. From thousands of cottage industries at the moment when Resolve, Samuel, and Ennis built their first kettle, the number had skidded to three hundred and was still plummeting. Before Philadelphia, Clare seemed destined to be lost in the shakeout, its Native Balm heading the way of other sentimental curios.
Peter, the White Hermit, stopped the slide. He aligned Clare’s wrapped product with the forces of forward motion and decontamination: cleaner, surer, purer. Clare had for too long languished in mere technical competence. Now it began to manufacture the real seed that it was born for.
Peter launched an array of new varieties to supplement the Brave, so many varieties of soap that differences were not always apparent. The old names—Number 1, Number 2, mottled, white—no longer sufficed to supply a newly propertied class. In the olive and palm soaps alone, Peter introduced Queen, Princess Royal, Grand Duchess, Marquise, Margravine, and Contessa to those same backwoods Americans whose grandfathers had spilled blood to overthrow the monarchy a century before.
Just after the Centennial, Peter announced the first of those many outlandish publicity exercises dreamed up during long childhood quarantines. Boldly, with no fear of the odds, Peter sent his canary down into the mines of future business practice. And the fowl came back chirping happily for all it was worth.
Clare announced to an incredulous public that every tenth crate of Clare soap would have a gold dollar hidden in one of its cakes. Douglas disapproved of the circus stunt. Julia disliked marketing the element of chance. Old man Samuel smelled disaster. Such a giveaway would push the firm from ruin to damnation. Dispensing carloads of money could only spell the end of the merchandised world.
But the cloistered boy understood his beloved average mind. He dressed up recently freed Negroes in multicolored costumes to distribute handbills. And consumers flocked to the lottery. Apostate Clare customers came back to the fold, wondering why they had ever left. Those who had never before realized the qualities of Native Balm had occasion to discover the soap’s many merits.
As with the best of trades, everybody won. Those cakes that bore no coins cost no more than they ever had, and they lathered as well as ever. People who bought up stocks of losing lottery tickets lost nothing: soap did not go bad, and one could never own too much of it. A closetful was, in fact, a practical hedge against inflation. And as free compensation simply for buying what you needed anyway, each buyer got that outside shot at striking the mother lode. The public scooped up crates, one hundred cakes in each. A one-in-a-thousand shot at buried treasure: the odds seemed almost too generous.
Here was the very dream that had forged a nation. The same dream could save a stagnating soap outfit without even working up a sweat. The country had been settled on speculation. A homesteading roulette: the entire mid-continent marked off into square tracts independent of terrain and sold at fire-sale prices to the nearest venture capitalist. For a hundred years, the government had lived off that sale. Now that the map had filled in and ownership solidified, the game could trickle down to all those who hadn’t won the bigger one.
Shrewd shoppers thought they could detect the store shelves’ heaviest cake by heft. And when they cut open their claim and came up empty-handed, they headed back to the store to roll again. Enough buyers struck a vein to keep the fire of speculation burning in the general imagination. Those who lucked into the small fortune could pour their principal back into another chance at compounding. Capital, as Karl Marx recently noted, was truly magic: value that envalued and expanded itself, like those self-renewing cornucopias of the fairy tales.
Throughout Peter’s Golden Giveaway, the nation’s use of all soaps expanded faster than national wealth. Clare’s miniature land grab did not drive the national cleanliness craze so much as it happily exploited an already growing concern. Clare’s customers might or might not have lathered longer in their race to the cake’s golden core. But even after the golden lodes dried up, most customers were left with the lingering sense that they had never previously gotten as clean as they ought. Newly urban America, whatever its brand of choice, everywhere learned this upward calibration of the immaculate.
The success of the stunt surprised everyone but Peter. For he had done the math in advance. A dollar per thousand bars represented only a modest outlay for advertising, an item that Peter introduced to the standing budget. Sales had only to increase by 15 percent for the firm to recoup the expense and break even.
Sales jumped by over a fifth. The surge itself gained its own attention, and further fixed Clare’s name in the public mind. As volume grew, production costs came down, making the soap even more attractive. At the end of the day, Peter’s hazard paid a return that any investor would consider healthy, however one calculated return.
Clare had always set aside nominal funds for announcing its goods to wholesalers and distributors. It had long printed page circulars, trade press notices, newspaper squibs. It had even engaged a New York promotional agent to build a presence there. But permanently budgeting a tenth of a penny per bar to appeal directly to the consumer would have sunk the Roxbury works. Since then, the world had changed immeasurably, and business had changed it. Now Peter’s eccentric vision was not just affordable. It was indispensable.
The need to purchase allegiance was yet another omen of the coming way of life that only Peter, in his shut-in strangeness, could read. The American was fast becoming something as far from his pioneer stock as the pioneer was from his European forebear. The rails were down, the wires up, the prairies tamed, the far ocean reached. The earth had become a factory. Humankind scrambled
to emulate the productive reliability of its machines.
Cleanliness arose from its machine birth, milled to certain precise standards, packaged to preserve its integrity. Dependable, perfect, abundant: a pristine profusion. Nothing like it had ever before graced this earth. Clare soap lathered and cleansed and even softened. It helped to ensure the higher sanitation that a new pace of life required. And in its innermost core it carried a golden bonus: the prize of proper management, a rightly realized life.
Peter’s next invention was the popular pamphlet series The World’s Dozen Most X Verses. Most loved. Most stirring. Most beautiful. Grocers gave the booklets out free to their best customers. Lots of folks already knew many of these poems by heart. But no one had ever before won them as rewards.
Peter’s genius seized upon the truth more easily than his asthmatic lungs inhaled the dust-filled air. He saw it written in fiery, eye-catching letters upon the future’s wall. Bathing, laundering, the new craze for private plumbing, the promise of coming prosperity, direct consumer advertising—all were of a single piece. All parts of the same unlikely but adapting creature. All Promotion, as we lived and breathed.
The world trades on a foolish optimism. When Laura first started out at Millennium, she thought every person who walked through the door was a prospect. Every phone call was a sale. Every person who picked up a flier needed something by the end of the month. The mailman delivering the office mail was going to make her an offer on one of her listings in the window.
Early on, whenever she showed a place, she believed each expression of delight. She’d wrap up the deal in her head, pleasing everyone, solving all objections. She’d buy new wallpaper for her front room with the commission even before the prospect called back with a counter.