Gain

  She never knew what this place really looked like while she was living in it. Now that she lives elsewhere, she cannot believe what she sees. Once you learn a new word, it’s everywhere. The world is a registered copyright.

  On her way to the bath—surely it cannot hurt anyone if she bathes—she goes to the linen closet. Linen closet, that last refuge of her mother, the pristine hangout of buttons, thread, tissue, hot water bottles, all that is innocent and obsolete, now crawling with trade names like crabs in a bucket. She simply wants to fetch a clean towel to dry herself off. But she can’t find one that’s not already spoken for, that isn’t embroidered with someone else’s monogram.

  Shoving aside a stack of facecloths, she stumbles by archaeological accident on a small stockpile of yellowing soap. Siamese triplets. Three bath-size bars. The $1.79 suggested retail price is crossed out and overprinted, by the same press, with a red 99 cents.

  She stares at the archaic, nineteenth-century brand. When could she possibly have bought soap? Soap, which everybody now knows is the worst possible thing for your skin. She graduated to scrubs and exfoliants and gels years ago. Someone has come into her house and planted this thing without her knowing.

  Then it comes back to her. She bought it in a back-to-basics fit, about six months ago, when she first began to wonder whether her cancer might come from products. When she thought it might not be too late to go clean.

  She pulls open the old-fashioned paper wrapper and slides out the white casket. She takes it up close to her face. It seems scraped all over, gouged by some glacier, some cranky whittler. The perfect cake is not perfect at all. If a machine cut this, the machine was drunk. The bevel drifts down one edge like a sand castle’s seeping parapet. The soap’s skin is everywhere dimpled, scratched all over by the factory’s fingernails. A tiny piece of one corner has come unchunked, flaked off like shale, leaving a rough, clayey pocket against the polished white.

  The impression of the paper wrapper folds across the two ends. The back harbors two rectangular incisions, variable depths, mysterious as Stonehenge. She has never looked at soap before.

  Across the front, a single word calls her back to Sunday school:

  Lux

  She sets the bar down, returns to the wrapper for more explanation. The Pure Beauty Soap. Four point five ounces. 127.6 grams. A bar code clumps up in irregular strands, like stringy wet hair, held taut. Questions or comments? Call toll-free 1-800-598-5005. Made in USA, copyrighted the year she probably first got sick without knowing. Distributed by Lever Brothers Co.

  Her dad’s old brand. The one that bought their house, fed and clothed them, put her and her brother through school, paid for her folks’ retirement. She can’t remember choosing it.

  To hell with VCRs and garage openers and microwaves: how do you make this, this little block of angel lard? She knew what this stuff was, once. She’s sure she knew, instinctively, before she even thought twice about it . . .

  Days pass without her help. March comes in. The month when she needs to get back out to restart the gardening. She’s already six weeks behind on the forcings and indoor beddings. She must start the valerian and forget-me-nots, prune her butterfly bush, divide and propagate the euphorbia and phlox. She putters in the basement, under the grow lights. She wants to get better. She will make this deal, any deal, if they will just let her grow these plants. She will give up flowers. She will go to 100 percent vegetables this year: only useful things, for canning and preserving.

  Dr. Archer orders a second-look surgery. Because the procedure is available to them. Because it is all that’s available to them. Because we have to do all the things we know how, do anything that might help, however little. Because we cannot stop until we have done all we can possibly do.

  We know that sometimes when the trail of history leads through dark valleys the traces of cleanliness along the road are scarce, but when the trail leads along the ridges in the sunlight the evidences of cleanliness are many . . .

  We live today in the sunlight, one sign of which is our increasing use of soap and water and our growing knowledge of the joys and benefits of cleanliness. It has been suggested that historians of the future looking back to our times will mark this as one of the outstanding contributions we have made to the advancement of civilization. It may well be that they will call this age in which we live the “Age of the Bath.”

  —GRACE T. HALLOCK, A Tale of Soap and Water

  Lacewood’s sole moment of legatee’s doubt came during the summer of 1932. Men gathered in barbershops and soda shops, forgoing haircuts and Cokes, for such frills had long disappeared into luxury. Women milled about at the A & P or at the fountain in front of the courthouse, each scared soul searching the other for explanations and shushing any brave individual who dared to speak the unspeakable.

  But a few folks did say what everybody else wondered: Lace-wood was better off without the damn factory. Better off before people had come off the land. The town was no better than a bunch of domesticated rabbits, living it up and praising the good life until the fattening hand came down on you with a club. That’s what the “free” in free enterprise meant. Free to be the stooge of any enterprising crook who knew the system.

  Others gainsaid the gainsayers. Depression wasn’t Clare’s fault. If it was, why were all those dust bowl Okies pouring off the land and heading here? Two score more of them every day, lining up in front of the Lacewood factory gates. Philo, Homer, Mantooga—all the neighboring farm towns were bellying up even worse than Lacewood. Farms failing left and right, all by their lonesome. At least the factory gave Lacewood some buffer, a little bit of mooring in the cyclone.

  Debate went on throughout that summer and fall. Half the town damned the company and the other half fled in fear from the words that, spoken out loud, would surely bring down a real curse upon them. Those who lifted their eyes past the town’s borders saw that the source of their damnation had, if anything, spared them half the misery of the wider world.

  By Independence Day, four fifths of the wealth traded on the New York Stock Exchange had vanished into the thinnest of atmospheres. The Jazz Age took a quick refresher course in the imaginary value of equities. Clare’s stock tracked this average drop downward with all the tenacity of a bloodhound puppy. By summer’s end, the worth of the entire, far-flung manufacturing empire was less than the book value of the Illinois factories four years before.

  Alone among the corporate brass, William Clare had seen the shape of things to come. The careful financier knew all about bookkeeping by mass hypnotism. Throughout the twenties, he sold off his shares in steady, disciplined lots. By the peak, he’d gotten far more than fair market value for his portion. When all hell broke loose, he dumped the rest of his worthless paper, enjoyed a year of ship-spotting off Nantucket, and returned to business to serve briefly on the board of Gillette just before his happy death as a traitor to his family in 1931.

  Douglas II was less hurt by the plunge in his net worth than by the reception of his monograph, The Dream of the Romanesque. Scholars laughed at the work because it was written by a businessman. And businessmen by and large failed to read it because it appeared to be about old stones. Douglas retired from the firm to the Greek island of Soundetos. There, in comfortable if reduced circumstances, he took to financing his own amateur forays into classical archaeology.

  Everyone else whom the company bound together went to the cleaners. And the folks in the khaki shirts got cleaned longest and hardest of all. All the sorters and sifters and gauge-tenders and packers and haulers who had been forced into buying company shares at a discount now watched helplessly as their precious nest eggs cracked into the national omelet. Workers who had built their retirements for forty years came up empty-handed, the victims of the distributed pyramiding swindle of capital.

  The Clare Guarantee of Full Employment worked right up until the moment that it stopped guaranteeing anything. Direct sale no longer absorbed overproduction, for there were no longer
any buyers with credit left to absorb direct sales. Ten by ten, then hundreds by hundreds, workers got their walking papers. Each salary that disappeared cut by another small fraction the disposable income that might have lifted Clare from its slump.

  Prosperity turned back into potash, on no provocation except whiplash and mob psychology. Those who lost their jobs, who were now losing their balloon-frame homes, began to wonder how else disaster could have happened if not through the faults of ownership itself. The map in the Lacewood Titles Office had been filled in. The world had gone fully professionalized. And the result was a third of the adult male population sporting sandwich boards that read “Will Work for Food,” in the middle of the richest cropland in the world.

  By the fall of 1932, Lacewood was as radicalized as a conservative farm town would ever get. Folks who would not have stooped to slip bread and water under Debs’s prison bars lined up to vote for Norman Thomas. And the revolution would have prevailed, society would have transformed itself at last, had not Roosevelt come along and stolen the best lumber out from underneath the militant Socialists and turned it into mainstream party planks.

  First, the President brought back booze, that distraction beyond value. Then, almost instantly, he went on a shark hunt. Two successive, sweeping securities acts lowered the boom on all the clever riggers of the big money. It was time, Roosevelt declared, for business to play by the rules and remember the original purpose of doing business. What that purpose was, neither Roosevelt nor anyone else ever ventured to recall.

  Clare, which had always held its cards close to the chest, at first chafed against the call for additional disclosure and registration. In the chaos of Hiram Nagel’s death and the retreat of the last founding-family partners, some of the board pushed for getting out of the game entirely rather than playing by Roosevelt’s new rules.

  But even at bargain-basement rates, a cash-poor Clare had too much outstanding stock to buy back and go private. The company simply couldn’t afford to go unlisted. Control slipped, at least temporarily, from the discredited children of Nagel back to the next generation of desperate dike-pluggers in Finance. Finally, Kenneth L. Waxman, the most capable of William’s bean-counting protégés, arose to steady the helm and get the firm back on a production footing.

  “Our product,” Waxman was fond of saying, “is confidence.” He ran his own version of Roosevelt’s jobs-creation programs, reopening whole sections of his idle giant factories on subsidized apprenticeships. He figured out how to turn Roosevelt’s business meddling into a company asset, on both sides of the ledger. In short order, Ken Waxman learned how to run Clare on a shorter leash as if the whole yard were still theirs to bury bones in.

  For its part, Lacewood labor continued to assemble all the packaged confidence that management fed it the specs for. Forced by law, the workweek fell to forty-eight hours. To the dismay of desperate families, children were swept from the factory floors. The Wagner Act legitimated the process of collective bargaining. Now the strapped factory could deny its employees as a group as well as individually.

  For the first time in history, working Lacewood had an ally in the White House. By ’36, if desperation had not yet lessened, it was at least under attack with enough governmental vigor that Lacewood turned out to help the once-despised poor little rich boy from New York to the biggest landslide in history. Landon, decrying the new infringements on American liberties, got trounced. Yet the New Deal marked little more than the latest corrections in a maturing market.

  Suffering brings out the showman in a person, and the Great Depression turned America into the world’s great performer. Sound propelled cinema into a heavy industry, the Depression’s Native Balm. In the year that Lacewood sent FDR back to the White House, the Cinema on Lincoln and the Rialto on Main combined to outgross all other town concessions, not counting Clare. All unemployed Illinois lined up to watch Charlie Chan go to the opera, Mr. Deeds go to Washington, Fred and Ginger follow the fleet, Nick and Nora reprise the perfect marriage, Weissmuller and O’Sullivan cavort half-naked through the jungle, Kern and Hammerstein take the show on the boat, Errol, Nigel, Donald, and 597 other brave souls ride into the valley of death, and Duke Mantee, “the last great apostle of rugged individualism,” make life miserable for everyone.

  Modern Times opened to a greatly amused factory audience. Roughshod rode the assembly line for weeks following the run, as every joker and his oil can perfected his Charlie imitation.

  But the happy invention that kept the town from banding together to follow Charlie’s red flag was yet another Clare promotion. The company’s new hit product was at least as amusing as the talkies, and incredibly, it came free to any home that could afford a radio. As most homes in Lacewood would have sooner gone without running water than forsake this free gift, the listening audience quickly grew to include almost every home within the city limits.

  No minutes ever recorded just which underpaid executive genius first came up with the idea for The Henry Happel Hour, although several stepped forward over the years to claim the honor. The show seemed to emerge intact from out of the oaken radio cabinet itself: unscripted, full-blown, and from the first as rich and capricious as one’s own life was empty and dull. And yet the very emptiness of Lacewood’s existence itself formed the basis of the Happel Hour’s endless caprice.

  At 8 p.m. every Thursday, the town would go dead, even deader than the usual background static of small-town deadness. Lights in the diners would go out. The bowling alley fell to a hush so profound you could not hear a pin drop. Homes pulled themselves together around the receiver like a shawl on pinched shoulders. Only the second shift at the factory showed any signs of continued life, and even these men had sets installed here and there around the plant, awaiting the rich and jocular baritone announcer’s rolling tones: “The Henry Happel Hour. Starring . . . Henry Happel!”

  Perhaps the gales of laughter from the sophisticated New York studio audience were what so vindicated Lacewood’s prosaic existence and turned it into the stuff of brilliant burlesque. For Henry Happel and his hopeless family lived in none other than Dunnville, Illinois, a thinly disguised Lacewood, recognizable even to those who had never heard of the original. Through the miracle of wireless broadcast, Lacewooders could see themselves in their own mind’s eye, raised from blandness and redeemed by high myth.

  Luckless hero Henry worked as a “shift-fitter” at the nearby fertilizer factory, a gag that never failed to reduce profane, tobacco-spitting, tattooed, three-hundred-pound clean-and-jerkers to tears of defenseless mirth. Henry’s relentlessly status-conscious wife, Marge, though finally good-hearted, hatched a continuous scheme for getting and staying one fashion step ahead of all the other yokel wives. Daughter Betty lived only for getting pinned, while her beefy-sounding brothers, Biff and Hank Jr., who attended the Big U on a football scholarship, pretty much failed to follow the action in an infinite variety of creative ways.

  Greater Dunnville was a complete menagerie of types: the last bastion of a vanishing communal America looking in one another’s windows and living in one another’s pockets. To most listeners, the Happel microcosm felt denser and more real than the universe it mimicked. “Brought to you by Snowdrop Soap. Untouched by human hands until you break open the wrapper.” Marge loved Snowdrop, because it was cheap and classy at the same time. Betty thought it upped her odds of getting pinned, by making her smell “Franch.” Biff and Hank Jr. liked to toss wet cakes of it around in the yard. If you could catch one of those slippery little white things, no pigskin in the world was going to give you trouble.

  While Lacewood had never made Snowdrop per se, it worked for the same logo. It made the fertilizer that grew the corn that fed the cow that sacrificed the fat to the company kettles that cooked the soap that put funny little Dunnville on the map of American consciousness. And of that, Henry Happel’s real-life models were abundantly proud. They made Clare, and Clare made soap, and soap made radio, and radio made Lacewood famous. And so th
e town basked, happy in its haplessness, held up to the loving ridicule of a nation.

  Brought to you by Snowdrop, Gristo, Tar Baby, FlapperJack Pancake Mix, Mentine Gargle and Breath Repairer: as if these things themselves were doing the bringing. Through radio, these names grew as easy to flesh out as any phantom, as real as the Shadow, Jack Armstrong, Jack Benny, Ma Perkins, or Kate Smith.

  Each brand was a wooden puppet longing to be a little boy. The best of them grew lives of their own, until not even their most devoted listeners could say who made them anymore. America knew what Gristo brought you, but not who brought you Gristo.

  Behind this happy front, the world economy lay in ruins. Clare’s capital value contracted to a third of its pre-Depression peak. Junior executives banded together on graveyard humor. They bet on who would be next to the gallows. They started office pools to guess the day and month when the firm would go under. They began clamoring for a strong man, someone who’d have the strength to lower the massive hatchet their common salvation required.

  In a dark time, soap learned the supreme selling tactic of fear. For fear boosted the desire for the protection soap offered. Americans learned to keep their soap dish dry and press the last slivers together for a few extra uses. Some even reverted to the atavistic knowledge of making their own.

  The same desperate parsimony trickled up through Clare’s corporate ranks. Janitors were instructed to extinguish all unneeded lights and unplug all frivolous appliances. Clerks had to turn in old pencil stubs in order to qualify for new pencils.

  These years scarred the next generation of company leadership, branding the firm with a frugality that would last for another three decades. The managers who did best were those who learned to squeeze every last penny until it sang. All departments cut back their budgets to the bedrock. All except for marketing and research.