In his years with the company, William learned to put his fiscal knowledge into soapmaking terms: money was the great enzyme, society’s zinc catalyst. It allowed any source material to be turned into the product of your choice. It was your one war chest. It let you talk about the running balance in the abstract.
Money was a theory of universal conversion. Everything was procurable by the sacrifice of x units of any other object, effort, or interval of time that you might care to sacrifice for it. The history of humanity was the history of higher and higher orders of convertibility. Barter, money, insurance, corporations: equivalence for equivalence, transfers for transfers, until all cogs turned every other in the self-replenishing whole.
William never doubted for an instant that the solution to the labor upheaval would have to come down to money.
He attacked the issue like an algebra problem, operating simultaneously on both sides of the equation. He encouraged the company’s European agent to help raise immigrant interest. He subscribed to a consortium of companies whose posters in eight languages proclaimed how easy it was to find lucrative work in the booming American economy. The posters promised nothing. Nevertheless, they fed the growing frenzy of exodus from Europe. And as millions bolted for the far shore with nothing, wages in America fell proportionately.
But ultimately, William knew he had to deal with the workers’ demands. The cost of retraining replacements every eight months was itself breaking the bank. William thought long on the problem. He took it apart into its basic bits. Why would these men refuse to work with the same force that had made William Clare’s own ancestors rich as Croesus? Somehow labor had been split off from its results. Workers no longer believed in the ends of their own efforts. Another free hour, another twenty cents a week would do nothing to reinstate them. He had somehow to bring labor back into the fold, to sell it again on its role in the dream of expansion.
Full of method, checking his figures from every possible angle, William perfected a radical plan. He presented it to the board. The basic idea was absurdly simple, and the bookkeeping only slightly more complex. The workers had to be rejoined to the consequences of their own actions. Every adult male who worked for the firm for more than a year and who made more than five dollars a week should be allowed to participate in the company’s profits.
The idea burst upon the board with the force of a second anarchist’s bomb. The notion was nonsense, and worse than nonsense. It was out-and-out Red. It flew in the face of all that Clare, business, and America stood for. What kind of outfit would need to add such a ruinous cost to its books? The best way to keep the unruly workers in order was to show them the long line of hungry men waiting at the gate.
William, unruffled, took out his slide rule and calmed the board down. Profit-sharing would not increase cost but lower it. The men would only be earning a share of their own increased efficiency. By reinstating the incentive of self-interest, Clare could make labor see that the welfare of the firm was labor’s own welfare. The men had to start working not for some overgrown and insensate corporation but for themselves. If the bosses paid out bonuses in proportion to increased profit, then workers would take their destinies back into their own hands and align themselves with the interests of productivity.
The company would keep its own share, of course. Profit would be split between labor and the firm in the same ratio of wages to total manufacturing and marketing costs. If better work made more dollars, there would be more for everyone all around. If not, the company would not be out anything. At last, even the most scandalized on the board saw that this was a no-lose proposition.
William expected an easier sale to the workers. But suspicion among the hourly wage earners outran all of management’s objections. Profit-sharing was a ruse, a scam, a way to compromise and further enslave labor. William addressed the workers’ representatives, showing how the idea was actually a bit Red around the edges. And so it was: a plan as conflicted in interests as the mother impulse of profit herself.
The workers remained wary right up until the initial disbursements. The first annual Profit Picnic took place concurrently at all Clare locations, on the new national Labor Day holiday, in 1897. Workers turned out in their weekend white. Brass bands filled park gazebos with “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and “Turkey in the Straw.” The company supplied the lemonade and peanuts, and Clare officials handed out the envelopes with theatrical fanfare.
Suddenly the abstraction of participatory capitalism began talking real money. Some folks made an extra dozen dollars, already nothing to sneeze at. But others pulled down hundreds: significant sums, enough of a boost to float the earner out of poverty and keep him there.
For the first few years, the bonuses were a resounding success. Profit Picnics remained enormously popular, both for the envelopes and for the social diversions that began to mark the holidays. But within half a decade, the annual premium began to seem an entitlement. The source of the payouts vanished in antiquity.
Productivity settled back down to indifferent levels, spurting up just a bit before the Labor Day fest, for ceremonial reasons. When profits fell and the sums shrank to nothing, workers complained bitterly about the loss of their money.
William hit upon a new plan to restore the sense of personal incentive. All workers were to receive annual review ratings based on performance, loyalty, seniority, and attitude. Those workers earning an A rating would receive a double dividend, B’s would get a single, C’s a half, and D’s nothing. This system played for some years, but grew increasingly Byzantine and cumbersome.
In 1910, William launched a motivational scheme that the company continued to use, with slight variation, for the rest of its existence. The year’s performance would be rewarded in company shares. These the shorter-sighted employees could sell for cash. But those who held and worked hard could watch their investment bloom in proportion to a job well done.
In this way, labor came on board more fully than ever before. Employees began to work for themselves, in every sense of the phrase. The company became theirs in a bankable manner. Profit-sharing at long last succeeded, so long as William and his successors each year made sure to dilute the shares paid out to labor with ones paid back to management.
. . . Finally, it must be said that uncountable men and women are better off, and generations of children will be born into a healthier world because of the work that he, in his fastidious life, managed. No man could seek more.
—from Peter Clare’s obituary in the Boston Transcript, 1900
The unseasonable cold lessens, leaving them in just Christmas.
Laura hasn’t had the energy to prepare, or the time either, though she’s not doing anything now but recuperating. She’s simply let the holiday catch her unaware. And so, for once, Christmas doesn’t plunge her into the depression of good cheer.
Millennium invites her to the office party, knowing full well she has to decline. Happily, for that matter. Horrible thing; horrible idea, the office Christmas party. All those would-be dieters slamming down cream cheese wreaths and pecan-cholesterol nuggets, listening to disco-synthesized CDs to honor the birth of the world’s Saviour.
Didn’t Jesus say to turn our backs on all this? Store up treasures somewhere else. Give Caesar back his trinkets. How did He wind up here, official state sponsor of our chief retail season? It’s as if buying and eternal life were somehow flip sides of the same thing. Christianity’s genes must be as supple as a wolf’s, breeding everything from chihuahuas to great Danes. And there’s no help for us now but a little hair of the one that bit us.
She’s going to no parties. Just rolling over in bed is a full morning’s activity. The three steps to the downstairs bathroom exhaust her. Fortunately, she’s almost stopped producing bodily waste. She can walk, but with great pain. The hospital sends a wheelchair, which she rapidly learns to need.
She looks like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. She knows she’s scary, because the kids start asking if the
y can do anything for her. Something to eat? Something to drink? But all she can get down is the canned vitamin shakes. Tim pours one into the Christmas crystal for her, dressing it up with a Santa swizzle stick.
Don calls every other night. “It’s going to get really cold tonight,” he warns her. All these years, and the temperature still panics him. The original Chicken Little. Always a killer heat wave, a polar storm. “Make sure to leave your taps open a little,” he nags.
Always the outside threat, the perpetual vigil of maintenance against the world’s danger. She would rag him back, tease him a little, if she could find the strength. But he’s right, he’s right, and he has been forever. Now she barely raises the stamina to thank him and hang up.
Her old friends call, too. Those who can stomach the awkwardness. Steph breaks down on the phone. “Hey, Lola. I can come out right away. I already have a reservation.”
Laura tells her not to be silly.
Hannah, the other third of the once-inseparable Three Sheets, can’t even talk about it. “Down one for me,” she instructs Laura.
“Two olives,” Laura growls back the password.
Brother Scotty is in periodic touch. He’s a comfort, most of all his absolute, unspoken assumption that she’s on the mend.
Ellen takes to studying near her. Crawling up to the foot of the sofa bed in the evenings with a beat-up copy of Romeo and Juliet.
“Oh,” Laura says, remembering. Remembering the play, and that Montague she read it with. “Oh. What do you think of it?”
“It’s okay, I guess. Too many clichés, though. I thought Shakespeare would be, like, you know: a little more original?”
They watch TV together, the three of them. A family again, if only because Laura has pitched a permanent base camp in the living room. The kids pop microwave popcorn. The smell of the seared fake butter disgusts her. But she says nothing.
They sit through all the old specials. A bankrupt Jimmy Stewart readies to jump into an icy river. Edmund Gwenn goes on trial for deeply inappropriate conduct at Macy’s. She, Ellen, and Tim look on, stunned, like hurricane victims huddled over a cellar crystal set.
“If you’ve recently received a serious diagnosis,” somebody like Kirk Douglas tells them between reels, “then this invaluable series of medical reference videos can give you knowledge and peace of mind. Try Volume One, Living with the News, for thirty days at no risk . . .”
She tries to imagine thirty days without risk. Even thirty seconds, with peace of mind, or anything that could remotely pass for it. We must be mad; that’s the only possible explanation. Thinking we could housebreak life, beat the kinks out of it, teach it to behave. Complete, collective, species-wide insanity.
She wants them to have a tree. But there’s no way. She doesn’t want to impose on anyone, and she can’t ride with Ellen, even as far as Prairie Orchards. She dreams of the kids reverting to pioneers, dragging one back for miles across the snow. She should just call Don, but then he’d want to decorate, and she cannot bear old times, not just now . . .
Then it happens, as in the best and worst of scripts. Tim, taking the trash out one night after microwave dinner, returns with a scared little grin. “There’s a tree on the back steps.”
“Liar,” his sister calls out, so fast it can only be reflex. But she’s out on the porch in a flash, that old fallback habit of checking. She comes back in gentle, a little spooked. “It’s true, Mom. It’s just lying out there. What should we do with it?”
“What do you think?” Laura laughs, pain flecking her insides. Guilt, gratitude, relief, maybe even a little remorse. But she will take this gift, no questions asked. Like a child’s petals in a forgetting pocket. They have a tree. Sap in the house. They’re good for another year.
She can only sit up in the recliner and direct them. “Make it nice,” she scolds. “Turn it a little. No, the other direction: bald spot toward the wall. More red up top, I think. Don’t we have another string of lights? That pretty tin angel belonged to your nana. It’s very old. Oh, that one! I knitted that when I was pregnant with you, Ellen. It’s supposed to be a shepherd. God, it’s time to put that one out to pasture.”
This once, the kids refuse to do as she tells them, although they do mercifully cover the wretched ornament with tinsel. Tim gets a chair, steadies it for his sister with the star.
She calls Don, on the cordless, now kept next to the sofa bed. “Thank you,” she tells him. “It’s beautiful.” All she has strength for. “Come see.”
She blows the wad: presents by mail order. Amazingly, the money she set aside to get her through spring is almost gone. She has lived so many years without worrying about cash that she can’t quite believe real need. She cannot bring herself to imagine being without, despite how much closer to without she has come.
When it’s gone, it’s gone. The kids can go live with Don. Beyond that, she doesn’t care. She doesn’t need anything more.
For Tim, she gets a 3-D video graphics accelerator with two megs of VRAM. She has no idea what it is, except that he wants it more than he wants friends. For Ellen, she gets that long-coveted boutique leather skirt and vest whose worst consequence Laura hopes will be pregnancy.
They open the presents on Christmas Eve. The kids—God knows where they have gotten the cash—shower her with small things. Chocolate-covered peanuts to fatten her, books on positive thinking, long spy stories, more visualization tapes. She opens them one after the other, smiling and thanking without respite, trying not to look at either the gifts or the givers.
“Can we go to the carol service?” Ellen begs. Unlikely request, stricken with eagerness. The girl locks on her mother’s eyes, and neither can let the other down. Laura grinds her dry shoulders together and upward: How? “Let’s try it,” Ellen says. “Oregon Trail. You be the wagon.”
Tim eyes his present hungrily. “Can I just . . . ?”
“Sure, Slim,” his sister tells him. “It’s all rerun numbers anyway. We’ll hum them for you when we get home.” She gives her bro a peck on the head. He parodies smooching sounds as she heads for the door.
Laura reaches back into a hidden reserve and makes it upright as far as the driveway. Ellen is waiting for her there with the chair. They roll on the twisty and obliterated sidewalk. The wheels, hardened rubber, slip against the fossilized snow. It’s hard going, in the frozen dark. Each curb is a sheer cliff face. The way is blacker and slower than they bargained for. They fight the sidewalk for blocks, Ellen battling each slush-up and jam. Laura tries to help, walking, kicking, and skiing by turns, until she is limp and expended anyway. Then the sidewalk ends altogether.
The later it gets, the worse the going. “Damn it,” the girl curses the world’s redesigners. “You can’t walk anywhere anymore.” They are both iced over now, Polartec coats or no. Too far past the halfway point to turn back, but too late to make any service tonight or anytime in the near future.
Ellen slips and bloodies her nose on the chair’s handgrip. “Damn it,” she says. “Damn it. I’m bleeding.” And breaks into tears, tears at her failure to get her mother where they always go on Christmas. Her failure to bring this night into the stable of continuous years.
Trapped in the chair, Laura cannot reach her. How to tell her daughter, redeem her with the lesson of all defeated plans? This, these are our terms of credit, uncertain, unsecured, unmanageable, and therefore past price. The very opposite of all we hope for. We lose, finally. We don’t even get to roll.
“Look up,” she tells her. She does so herself, and it’s like singing. Funny, how well you can see it all, and even better, seated way down here. Fuzzy, dispersed, uncollectable, polluted with all the light that this frightened crust is desperate to generate.
“Put me on the ground.”
“Mom? Don’t be crazy. I’m freezing. I’m bleeding. I can’t take this anymore.” Ellen stamps in place, slaps her sides, slipping into panic. “Please. Don’t go nuts on me.”
“I’m fine, sweetie. Rea
lly. Put me on the ground. I want to make an angel.”
Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.
—JOHN JAY CHAPMAN (1862–1933), Practical Agitation, 1898
The Sociology Section of the Personnel Department saw that only those workers who lived decent, clean, and well-regulated lives qualified for profit-sharing. And the workers’ best model for orderly living had to be their parent employer.
William’s insights into the workforce compelled a radical rearrangement of the way Clare did business. Times had again changed for business, or rather, business had worked another change upon time. The days of people working for other people were over. The company was no longer a band joined together for a common purpose. The company was a structure whose purpose was to make more of the same.
Labor had long since come to realize certain truths about its standing in production. The job position filled the person more than the person filled the job. Now it was time for the firm’s structure to admit what its constituent parts had long ago gathered.
The national hysteria following McKinley’s assassination confirmed that the age of empire needed an overhauled structure. Closer to home, Peter’s death marked Clare’s own timely torch-passing. The way was clear for the firm’s long-overdue reorganization.
The upper brass, behind Douglas, set about revamping the corporate hierarchy to accommodate life in the new century. Douglas and his men subdivided the old geo graph i cal job definitions into functional ones. It no longer made sense to govern the firm as if it were a loose set of physical outfits. Walpole, Boston, Schenectady, Albany, Sandusky, Chicago, and Lacewood were not independent cottage industries, each with its own guild governor. Clare was not a set of plants; it was a set of purposes.
The world had grown both more specialized and more concentrated. No person could do his partner’s task any longer, or even know what his partner did. But every hand was bound more tightly than ever into the complex task of making ever more and more elaborate products.