It's good to know that freedom of speech is still in full swing in this country.
Then I bought a coffee and a chocolate-glazed doughnut, and took them outside to one of the benches provided by the management, placed handily right beside the garbage bin. There I sat, in the still-warm sunlight, basking like a turtle. People strolled by-two overfed women with a baby carriage, a younger, thinner woman in a black leather coat with silver studs in it like nail-heads and another one in her nose, three old geezers in windbreakers. I got the feeling they were staring at me. Am I still that notorious, or that paranoid? Or perhaps I'd merely been talking to myself out loud. It's hard to know. Does my voice simply flow out of me like air when I'm not paying attention? A shrivelled whispering, winter vines rustling, the sibilance of autumn wind in dry grass.
Who cares what people think, I told myself. If they want to listen in, they're welcome.
Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.
A dog came over; I gave it half of the doughnut. "Be my guest," I said to it. That's what Reenie would say when she caught you eavesdropping.
All through October-the October of 1934-there had been talk of what was going on at the button factory. Outside agitators were hanging around, it was said; they were stirring things up, especially among the young hotheads. There was talk of collective bargaining, of workers' rights, of unions. Unions were surely illegal, or closed-shop unions were-weren't they? No one seemed quite to know. In any case they had a whiff of brimstone about them.
The people doing the stirring up were ruffians and hired criminals (according to Mrs. Hillcoate). Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who'd signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organisers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money-any money at all-or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said.
It was also said that Father's factories were in trouble.
Both rumours-the outside agitators, the trouble-were publicly denied. Both were believed.
Father had laid off some of his workers in September-some of the younger ones, better able to fend for themselves, according to his theories-and had asked the remainder to accept shorter hours. There just wasn't enough business, he'd explained, to keep all the factories going at full production capacity. The customers weren't buying buttons, or not the kind of buttons made by Chase and Sons, which depended on high volumes to be profitable. Nor were they buying cheap, serviceable undergarments: they were mending instead, they were making do. Not everyone in the country was out of work, of course, but those with jobs did not feel very secure about holding on to them. Naturally they were saving their money up, rather than spending it. You couldn't blame them. You'd do the same in their place.
Arithmetic had entered the picture, with its many legs, its many spines and heads, its pitiless eyes made of zeroes. Two and two made four, was its message. But what if you didn't have two and two? Then things wouldn't add up. And they didn't add up, I couldn't get them to; I couldn't get the red numbers in the inventory books to turn black. This worried me horribly; it was as if it were my own personal fault. When I closed my eyes at night I could see the numbers on the page before me, laid out in rows on my square oak desk at the button factory-those rows of red numbers like so many mechanical caterpillars, munching away at what was left of the money. When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it-which was what had been going on at Chase and Sons for some time-this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour-without love, without justice, without mercy -but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter.
In the first week of December, Father announced a shutdown. It was temporary, he said. He hoped it would be very temporary. He talked about retreating and retrenching in order to regroup. He asked for understanding and patience, and was greeted with a watchful silence by the assembled workers. After the announcement he went back to Avilion and shut himself up in his turret and drank himself blind. Things were broken up there-glass objects. Bottles, no doubt. Laura and I sat in my room, on my bed, holding hands tightly and listening to the fury and grief rampaging around up there, right above our heads, like an interior thunderstorm. Father hadn't done anything on that grand a scale for some time.
He must have felt he'd let his men down. That he'd failed. That nothing he could do had been enough.
"I will pray for him," said Laura.
"Does God care?" I said. "I don't think he gives a tinker's damn, actually. If there is a God."
"You can't know that," said Laura, "until after."
After what? I knew well enough, we'd had this conversation before. After we're dead.
Several days after Father's announcement, the union revealed its power. There was already a core group of members, and now they wanted everyone in. A meeting was held outside the locked button factory and a call issued to all the workers to join up, because when Father reopened the factories, it was said, he would cut to the bone and they'd all be expected to take starvation wages. He was just like all the rest of them, he'd stuff his money into a bank in hard times like these, then sit on his hands until people were beaten down and driven right into the ground; then he'd seize the opportunity to grow fat off the backs of the workers. Him and his big house and fancy daughters-those frivolous parasites who lived off the sweat of the masses.
You could tell these so-called organisers were from out of town, said Reenie, who was telling us about all this as we sat at the kitchen table. (We'd stopped having meals in the dining room, because Father had stopped eating there. He was barricaded in his turret; Reenie took a tray up.
) Those roughnecks had no sense of what was decent, bringing the two of us into it like that, when everyone knew we had nothing to do with anything. She told us to pay no attention, which was easier said than done.
There were still some who were loyal to Father. At the meeting, we heard, there had been disagreements, then voices raised, then scuffling. Tempers were set loose. One man was kicked in the head, and carted off to the hospital with concussion. It was one of the strikers-they were calling themselvesthe strikers, now-but this injury was blamed on the strikers themselves, because once you started that sort of disruption, who could tell where it would end?
Better not to start. Better to keep your mouth shut. Much better.
Callie Fitzsimmons came to see Father. She was very worried about him, she said. She was worried that he was going down the drain. Morally, is what she meant. How could he treat his workers in this cavalier and also cheapskate fashion? Father told her to face reality. He called her a Job's comforter. He also said, Who put you up to this, one of your pinko pals? She said she had come on her own hook, out of love, because although a capitalist he'd always been a decent man, but now she found he'd turned into a heartless plutocrat. He said you couldn't be a plutocrat if you were broke. She said he could liquidate his assets. He said his assets weren't worth much more than her ass, which as far as he could tell she'd been giving away for nothing to anybody who'd asked. She said he hadn't scorned the free handouts. He said yes, but the hidden costs had been too high-first all the food in his house for her artistic pals, then his blood and now his soul. She called him a bourgeois reactionary. He called her a corpse fly. By that time they were shouting at each other. Then there was a slamming of doors, and a car skidded away down the gravel, and that was the end of that.
Was Reenie glad or sorry? Sorry. She hadn't liked Callie, but she'd got used to her, and Callie had been good for Father once upon a time. Who would replace her? Some other floozie, and better the devil you know.
The next week there was a call for a general strike, to show solidarity with the Chase and Sons workers. All stores and businesses must close, was the edict. All public services must be shut down. The telephones, the mail delivery. No milk, no bread, no ice. (Who was issuing these edicts? No one thought they were really coming from the man who actually spoke the words of them. This man claimed to be local, right from our own town, and was once thought to be-he was a Morton, a Morgan, something like that-but surely it had become clear that he was not local, not underneath it. He couldn't have been, to behave like that. Who was his grandfather, anyway?)
So it was not this man. He was not the brains behind it, said Reenie, because he did not have any brains to begin with. Dark forces were at work.
Laura was worried about Alex Thomas. He was mixed up in it somehow, she said. She knew he was. He was bound to be, according to his lights.
In the early afternoon of that same day, Richard Griffen arrived at Avilion in a car, with two other cars accompanying him. They were large cars, sleek and low-slung. There were five other men altogether, four of them quite big, in dark overcoats and grey fedoras. Richard Griffen and one of the men went into Father's study, along with Father. Two of the others posted themselves at the house doors, front and back, and two went off somewhere in one of the expensive cars. Laura and I watched the comings and goings of the cars from Laura's bedroom window. We'd been told to keep out of the way, which meant out of earshot as well. When we asked Reenie what was going on, she looked worried, and said our guess was as good as hers, but she was keeping her ear to the track.
Richard Griffen did not stay to dinner. When he left, two of the cars went with him. The third one stayed behind, and three of the big men stayed with it. They took up unobtrusive residence in the former chauffeur's quarters, over the garage.
They were detectives, said Reenie. They must be. That was why they always had their overcoats on: it hid the guns, which they kept in their armpits. The guns were revolvers. She knew this from her various magazines. She said they were there to protect us, and if we saw anyone out of the ordinary creeping around the garden at night-besides these three men, of course-we were to scream.
The next day there was rioting, along the main streets of the town. Many men present at it had never been seen before, or if they had been seen, they hadn't been remembered. Who'd remember a tramp? But some of them hadn't been tramps, they'd been international agitators in disguise. They'd been spying, all along. How had they got here so quickly? On the tops of trains, it was said. That was how men like them travelled around.
The rioting started at a rally outside the town hall. First there were speeches in which goons and company thugs were mentioned; then Father, rendered in cardboard and wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar-not things he ever did-was burned in effigy, to loud cheering. Two rag dolls in frilly pink dresses were soaked in kerosene and tossed onto the flames as well. They were supposed to be us-Laura and me, said Reenie. Jokes had been made about them being hot little dollies. (Laura's strolls around town with Alex had not gone unremarked.) It was Ron Hincks who'd told her this, said Reenie, thinking she should know. He said the two of us shouldn't go downtown right now because feelings were running high and you never knew. He said we should stay at Avilion, where we would be safe. He said it was a crying shame about the dolls, and he'd like to get his hands on whoever had cooked that one up.
Those main-street stores and businesses that had refused to close down had their windows broken. Then the ones that had closed also had their windows broken. After that, looting took place, and matters got severely out of hand. The newspaper was invaded and the offices wrecked; Elwood Murray was roughed up, and the machines in the printing shop at the back were smashed. His darkroom escaped, but his camera did not. It was a mournful time for him, which we heard all about, many times, afterwards.
That night the button factory caught on fire. Flames shot out the windows on the lower floor: I couldn't see them from my room, but the fire truck clanged past, going to the rescue. I was dismayed and frightened, of course, but I have to admit there was something exciting about this as well. As I was listening to the clanging, and to the distant shouts from the same direction, I heard someone coming up the back stairs.