Gain

  “The theory is that certain ring-shaped molecules”—he shrugs—“ones with chlorine in them, get taken up into the tissue of women. The body turns them into something called xenoestrogen. Very long-lasting. These fake estrogens somehow trick the body, signal the reproductive system to start massive cell division. There’s a new study out.”

  She shakes her head, already miles away.

  “The thing is, these ring-chlorine things are found in certain pesticides.” He waits for her to respond.

  “And . . . ?” she says.

  “Don’t you see? That’s what they’re making down the street.”

  Also what every pristine cow pasture in the Northern Hemisphere is floating in. It doesn’t make sense to her. Like asking Who had the egg salad? after a free-for-all buffet.

  “Their stock is going through the basement,” Don offers. Coaxing her back, against her will, to the things of this world.

  “Why doesn’t the company just, just . . . ?”

  “Just settle? Hon, the case involves scores of people, each asking for a lot of money. It’s cheaper for them to fight on. They’ve got very deep pockets, and lots of lawyers who can throw smoke from now until Doomsday. Apparently, the fertilizer that Clare makes depends in part on chemicals that it buys from another firm. There’s some confusion about liability. It’s all a bit chaotic.”

  “But the scientists? The fake estrogen?”

  “Well, the company’s gone and gotten its own expert witnesses, of course. Scientists who say these other scientists are wrong. That the evidence doesn’t amount to anything. They have other studies. Ones that show that estrogen, even real estrogen, doesn’t even cause breast cancer, let alone ovarian . . .”

  His words are like lights on mountains, out an airplane window at dusk.

  “You mean, no one knows anything?”

  Don lifts his chin to correct her, then drops it. Incontestable, our total ignorance.

  “Don,” she gentles him. “How do you know all this? About the epidemiologists, and all? The papers haven’t mentioned any of this. Unless I’ve missed it,” she falters.

  He shrugs again. “Sources. They’re also going after Clarity Nature-All hair dye, and that Sof’n’Sure talc powder they used to make. Apparently, women who use it on their . . .”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve never . . .”

  “Also, a very common herbicide called Atra- . . .”

  Her plot of earth. Her flowers.

  Sue them, she thinks. Every penny they are worth. Break them up for parts.

  And in the next blink: a weird dream of peace. It makes no difference whether this business gave her cancer. They have given her everything else. Taken her life and molded it in every way imaginable, plus six degrees beyond imagining. Changed her life so greatly that not even cancer can change it more than halfway back.

  She must go before the end of the month. Before whatever new deadline they’ve set for her signature. She must become as light as she feels. As light as this thought. Cease eating, cease turning nutrient into mass. Start to convert flesh back into air and vapor. Recycle her body, return it to the breath that seeded it.

  “All right,” she tells him. “Okay. Anything.”

  Ford and U.S. Steel hammered Daimler-Benz, Krupp, and Mitsubishi. Dow ravaged I. G. Farben’s killer chemical works. Merck swallowed Bayer, while GE and Union Carbide blasted Mitsui and Sumitomo. The zaibatsu and the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungehauptamt hadn’t a prayer against the American assembly-line worker holding his hundred shares of Common.

  Clare, with its allies Lever, Colgate, and Procter and Gamble, scrubbed out of existence those German and Jap cottage industries that had hoped to convert the world to a soap made from unspeakable sources. Clare Soap and Chemical won the war.

  Or rather, Mrs. Consumer did. She won it in the pantry and on the stovetop and in the medicine chest. She fought the flat-out campaign, just as in that poster for the Fats and Oils Salvage Reclamation Drive: whacking that giant Kraut in the head with a greasy but indispensable frying pan.

  For with the onset of world holocaust, soap sprang up paramount. Wartime industry starved for it, to clean millions of uniforms, lubricate machinery, and pull off K.P. on a scale never before imagined. More important, after the Japs grabbed Malaya and Indonesia, soap kept the Allies in rubber tires, treads, floats, and gas masks. For the reclamation of old, ground-up rubber required emulsification with soap. One pound of soap reclaimed almost twenty pounds of essential war matériel.

  Glycerin, too, the ancient Clare by-product, shot to the top of the procurement list. Paints, dynamite, smokeless powder, and nitroglycerin, not to mention plasma and sulfa drugs, all clamored for their fix of the stuff. There was no end to what the war asked for, or what destruction needed.

  Keeping the soap business in business grew into a matter of national civil defense. Everyone had to do his part. Roger Shacklehurst, Clare’s general manager for manufacturing, joined the directors of the Fat Salvage Committee. Disney released the film Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Firing Line. Clare’s radio programs hammered home the drive relentlessly. And patriotic families everywhere were conscripted into production. They saved their every used fat dripping, to return to their butchers, who surrendered it to the national renderers, Clare among them.

  By collecting a billion pounds of fat and supplying a good 13 percent of needed grease, the country’s house wives saved the soap industry. Ladies! the radios teased. Get your fat cans down to the grocery store!

  The resulting steady supply of recovered materials prevented the government from having to ration consumer soap. With coconut and palm oil impossible to come by, the wartime quality of Clare’s home brands did fall noticeably across the whole product line. “Snowdrop Soap has gone to WAR!” Any complaint would have been treason.

  Mobilized Snowdrop made a virtue of necessity and a business of shortage. Lard-o helped extend expensive meat and make it more digestible. Pearl Paste changed its tube, “For the Finer Effort.” Wartime was no time to waste precious fabric. Oxygon helped extend the life of wartime clothes: “One wartime secret Uncle Sam wants you to tell everyone!” Wartime colors, too, were more valuable and needed more protection. “Don’t waste soap!” Marge Happel scolded her listeners. “Use only high-lather brands. Get more suds from less bar, saving precious fats for the front. And that way you’ll also save our boys’ precious lives.”

  With its own rallying cry, Clare returned the favor of the wartime drive. It held a national soap-carving contest on patriotic themes. Contestants applied in one of four categories: children, artists, amateurs, and wounded veterans. The winner collected in war bonds. When, in 1942, the Department of Justice charged the Big Four soapmakers with price-fixing and controlling raw materials, Clare settled by giving away an extra $20,000 in bonds to government causes.

  The company also donated rafts of supplies to the Red Cross and helped stock home-front canteens. It cheerfully surrendered more than three thousand of its finest and strongest workers to uniform. And like the country at large, it made its own material sacrifices, scrapping its multimillion contracts with Axis companies like so much silk stocking scrapped for parachutes.

  Clare’s draftees entered the fray at all levels, from potato peelers to government advisers. Kenneth Waxman himself was rewarded for his remarkable turnaround tenure during the Depression by being named assistant secretary of commerce under Jesse Jones. When the Germans razed Clare’s Lille works in the sweep to Paris in 1940, Waxman was still Clare’s CEO. Three years later, from the highest circle of government, Waxman gave his unequivocal support as the Air Corps bombed Clare’s Münster factory into rubble.

  The Liverpool plant survived, only to be shut down by raw material shortages.

  And when the Army Ordnance staff approached the firm in top secret about making a further sacrifice, the company’s acting executive committee did not hesitate. “We will do whatever the country needs,” their joint letter declared. What the country
needed was a major facility for loading medium-caliber artillery shells.

  The Army, in its massive expansion, looked to Clare as a logical affiliate. No one had more experience in mass-manufacturing and packaging small units. Clare had the experience and the know-how. And it possessed an even greater military asset: skilled management. As Waxman put it, “A man who can juggle apples knows exactly what to do with an orange.”

  Clare management took to war work as it had to the Depression. The Clare training school—promotion up through its mobilized ranks—turned out talent by the trainload. A ladder more powerful than the sum of its rungs, the company hierarchy harnessed and coordinated its every constituent skill.

  The Army asked for a sweeping new factory fitted out with state-of-the-art belt-assembly lines. Clare’s Defense Facility team studied the arsenals in Jersey and Georgia and Texas. It performed reams of time-motion analysis and shot reels of film. At last it decided that it could outperform the military’s requested output by 40 percent, simply by retooling the existing Lacewood plant.

  While the factory was being overhauled, the line workers practiced stuffing shells with a mix of fertilizer, cotton seed, and brown sugar that perfectly matched the consistency of explosive powder. Clever automated component assembly kept to an absolute minimum the number of feminine hands that the line required. Clare chemists refined a process for reclaiming TNT, and X-ray quality control on casings helped reduce costs even more. When the first 60 mm trench mortar shell rolled off the line months ahead of schedule, a patriotic Clare delivered its product for half the price that the Army had specified.

  War settled on Clare the new structure that expanded affairs demanded. Taking a cue from the Allied Command, the company went floridly decentralized. Clare birthed up vice presidents even faster than the Italians bred generals. The pyramid broadened at the middle: more executives, more operators, more divisions: food products, paper products, drugs, toiletries. Its streamlined phalanxes forged a new aggressiveness, both in making products and in moving them.

  Forced wartime efficiencies left the firm slim, trim, and ready for the atomic age. In part because there had been so little to spend it on, Clare’s cash surplus, by Nagasaki, was almost twice what it had been before Pearl. For four long years, the nation had held itself in check, rationed, a seed of winter wheat under snow. By the last blast, it broke out buying, ready to bury the past in a new era of long-promised prosperity.

  When Waxman tried to return from the war cabinet to commercial life, he found a business that had moved on by its own accord. The old internal battle of succession had flared up again in his absence. Palace revolution deposed him in favor of Robert Kaufman, head of Marketing. The sons of Nagel were back in charge, and would stay there throughout the coming glory years.

  Chronic shortages in fat continued to hamstring soap production after V-J Day. But by then, quotas and rationing had taught the housewife the many virtues of synthetic substitutes. Consumers were turning eagerly away from nature toward something more reliable. Buyers were ready to embrace a product built specifically for their needs. When an R and D fluke called tripolyphosphate proved to have inexhaustible building action, Clare labs turned the molecule inside out until they got it to do their bidding. A quarter-million man-hours later, they announced the first truly successful, all-purpose, all-synthetic soapless soap. And with it, they turned the age of deterrence into the age of detergent.

  The tower-blown, spray-dried, immaculate molecules truly consummated an ancient aspiration: Resolve’s reverie, Benjamin’s dream, James Neeland’s vision of a perpetual chemical engine. A race that could make everything from scratch would be beholden to no one. All bottlenecks would vanish. Life would be at nothing’s mercy.

  Yet freedom carried a crushing sticker price. Soap was now made with staggering efficiency in gleaming steel continuous hydrolizer plants. Conversion to new phosphate detergents would require junking much of that investment and starting all over again. The executive committee debated whether Clare could afford an outlay on that scale. But of course, it could afford the outlay’s alternative even less.

  “If we don’t do this,” Robert Kaufman declared, “someone else is going to make us wish we had. Better to go down swinging than get beaten to the punch.” The result was all-water, all-purpose Awe, Clare’s most successful new introduction of the twentieth century.

  Awe plants rose one by one, their profits plowed back into the next ground-breaking. Gleaming detergent-drying towers rose in Albany, Greensboro, Detroit, Rapid City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Turin, Vancouver, Caracas, and Mexico City. Castro would confiscate the Havana works shortly after the fall of Batista.

  The capacity of any one of these proliferating germ centers exceeded the entire production of the firm just thirty years before. And not one housed anything remotely resembling a kettle. Fats and crutchers and drying racks vanished, replaced by continuous sprayers and coolers and huge field tanks of alkylbenzene and other petrochemical derivatives. Scarcity no longer dictated how people would live or what goods they could make. Freedom was within easy reach.

  The two-tiered design of the firm—personal and industrial—now paid off in spades. Clare became its own chemical pipeline, one that supported simultaneous vertical and horizontal integration without limits. Once more retooled, the modern agricultural division took off, enjoying all the advantages of a late starter and aided by Lacewood’s increasingly central, well-serviced location. As the family farm, forced into new economies of scale, vanished into agribusiness’s combine, Clare was there with a series of packaged solutions: Capsure, Pest Ban, Lariat, Hoe-down, HarVaster.

  Each additive secured a new round of record crops for less human capital. Some part of each bumper harvest made its way back into Clare foodstuffs, at ever-better prices. And as the dollars flowed into Lacewood, so did the hospital, the college, the secondary businesses.

  Advancements in corporate management and merchandising kept pace with the rush of new technologies. Douglas Sr.’s old scheme of internal promotion responded to the exploding demand for talent. The best and brightest, those who most understood the rising tide of goods, rose rapidly into the niches that needed them. One could advance from salesman or engineer to brand manager to divisional head to VP almost as fast as the new fatty alcohols could be sulfonated.

  Robert Kaufman, only fifty, ascended just that meteorically. But the hour had unquestionably found its right man. Kaufman exhorted his forces, “We must sell our promotions as vigorously as we sell our products.” Vigor spread across the country in a series of stunts, from scrubbing national monuments to showering cities with free samples from the air. “Our line is desire,” Kaufman asserted, “every bit as much as it is manufacturing. We are in the ‘Awe’ business in more ways than one.”

  Throughout the golden era, Clare’s product lines grew tenfold. The pruned company tree burst forth in new branches. There was Glow, the magical white toothpaste for those who couldn’t always brush when they wanted, and Chlorocleen, the verdant, wintergreen, bacteria-killing wonder. There was Liquid Sun dish soap and Mista shampoo in an unbreakable tube. There were hair-altering formulas for every race, color, creed, and trichological conviction. There were home permanent kits, kits for medium, tight, loose, sprightly, or insouciant curls and waves. There were mother-daughter kits, kits with neutralizers, kits for frizzled and sizzled hair, quick and convenient kits, kits requiring rods, pins, coils, and foil, all delivering yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s styles.

  There were facial cleansers, creams, masks, spreads, and lotions. Pure washes, washes with miracle XR-50, and washes whose chief virtue was their $10 million rollout. A floor cleaner and a glass cleaner and a tile cleaner and a counter cleaner. Detergents for dishwashers. Detergents with fluorescent additives and optical brighteners and free tea towels right in the box. High sudsers and low sudsers, for durables and dainties. Synthetic soaps for each new synthetic fabric. Powders and sheets and shavings, blue and white and
yellow, that left no curd and needed no rinsing. Fluids that simply proclaimed, “It’s here, It’s clear!” And that sufficed.

  Skill in manufacture, the technology of making things were no longer the issue. The issue was fitting the itch to the scratch: bottling thirst’s salt water. The old war of material efficiency became a war to make and convey ever-finer distinctions. Clare could answer just about any of the public’s needs. But doing so required figuring out how the public saw and thought.

  A team of eager consumer brand managers got together to found the Market Research Department. The new science entered the merchandising loop from the opposite end. Clare could reduce the risk and expense of marketing a new product by learning, in advance, what would sell without needing selling. It made no difference how good or useful a product was. What mattered was what the populace thought it needed.

  Like the best of fifties gumshoes, MR wanted just the facts. It aimed not to influence but to observe. It sought data over desired results, method over merchandising, and statistics over wish. The best way to decide what might be was to learn what already was. Toward that end, MR built its carefully controlled test markets—less markets than measuring tapes. It did not care whether Devota or Claretone sank or swam. It simply counted the bubbles.

  Marketing, then, could work no end of wonders with the indifferent data. But the greatest merchandising prize to come from the Market Research Department was the idea of market research itself. By the time Sputnik left the earth, the industry of needs creation had learned to see the blind taste test as its own product. The men who gave us the bomb and cured polio were more than a match for the problems of daily existence. Science had to sell science, scientifically. And the resulting combination serviced huge sectors of the psychic economy.

  “The modern woman,” the modern ad declared, “is no longer the slave of the laundry room. Chemistry has freed her, giving her time to concentrate on those things she really wants to do, like looking great. And behind that dynamite party dress, our drudge turned diva feels pretty good about everything she got done this morning!”