Clarkton (26 page)

“Well, they're at the gate again.”

Norman joined him, and they both watched the seven or eight hundred workers in their circular march in front of the east gate.

“What are we going to do about it?” Norman asked uncertainly.

“Nothing right now. We'll hit them again—but when they've lost their edge. When they think they've won. The thing for you to do, son, is to go see that girl of yours and spend Sunday as it should be spent. Shake this place out of your bones. I hear they've got a place up in the hills. Get her to ride you up there. Breathe fresh air. And let me do the worrying.”

“I just feel that we messed it up. Mr. Leopold had confidence in me. I remember him telling me that he didn't expect people to make mistakes, and that the firm didn't forgive mistakes.”

“Only God is that perfect,” Gelb said reflectively; “not Leopold and James, by any means.” Then he added, “And I sometimes wonder about God.” He waved his cigar at the picket line. “I don't know that we made a mistake, Frank. The commies call this thing class warfare. That's something to remember. This is just a little bit of a skirmish—remember that
sitzkrieg
they had in France, in 'thirty-nine and 'forty. A k'nuck and a Jew are dead—well, Jews have died before and so have k'nucks, and they will again, I suppose. This December is the end of a quiet year, and a little skirmish like this looks like a big thing. It isn't, Frank. There's a lot of sense in what the reds say, providing you have a point of view. I've said that before, and I'll say it again. The time will come when we'll have to squeeze them”—he crushed the cigar in his powerful fingers—“like this, and when that time comes, well, Leopold and James are realistic people. If there's any talking to do, let me do it. For the time being, I give the orders and you take them—understand?”

Norman nodded, and Gelb told him, “Go out and find that girl. How're your expenses?”

“Not bad,” Norman answered, unable to resist the buoyant energy of the older man. “I have about twenty dollars left.”

“Well, just call on me if you run short. For the time being, Lowell wants us to hang around. That doesn't disappoint you?”

“No, Sir. I like this town.”

“Suppose we have dinner this evening. There's no need to worry about today. Nothing else is going to happen today.”

“Yes, Sir. Would seven o'clock at the hotel do?”

“Make it six-thirty. And good luck and good hunting.”

9.
I
t was almost noon before Abbott was able to
get into his car with Ruth and Mike Sawyer, and pull away from the union hall, and when Ruth asked him about Mrs. Craig's baby, he answered either she had it by herself or someone else had ushered it into the world, and that it wasn't only Mrs. Craig's baby, but the patients too.

“They can wait, I think,” Ruth said. “I want to see Liz Goldstein.”

“Where did they take him?”

“Joe and I took him down to the barber shop,” Mike Sawyer said slowly. “We couldn't think of any other place. We didn't want to take him home and wake up his wife and tell her.”

“Someone told her, I guess?”

“Hannah did.”

“Then drive aver to the barber shop,” Ruth said.

“It had to be Max,” Abbott said. “We needled him and prodded him until he came. It had to be him.”

“It could have been anyone else; it had to be someone,” Ruth said.

“I guess so. But it wasn't for Max. It wasn't his kind of a thing. He wasn't made for that.”

“Who is?” Sawyer said shortly.

“No one, I suppose. Only you think that way about some people, but not about Max Goldstein.”

“You don't think that way about anyone,” Ruth reminded him. “You don't think that way, Elliott, that's all. You get out of the habit of thinking that way. If we had thought that way, it wouldn't have been a question with Max of do you want to come or don't you want to come. Max was a very brave man. He was fat and lazy and old—I don't mean old in years, but old because he talked himself out of struggle—but he wasn't afraid of anything.”

They came to the barber shop. Abbott and Ruth had not been hurt, but Mike Sawyer had taken a welt across the forehead from a nightstick, and there was a big lump there now, his whole head aching. “You remind me to give you some Anacin inside,” Abbott said. There was a little crowd in front of the store. They pushed through, but had to knock on the door and wait until Joe Santana had peered through the drawn shades. Then he opened the door for them and locked it behind them. About a dozen people were in the shop. With a barber's sheet covering it, Max Goldstein's body lay on the long bench where Santana's customers would sit to wait for their shaves and haircuts. The men and women in the store itself were somber faced and worried looking; from the apartment behind came the sound of a woman's incessant and uncontrolled moans.

“That's Liz—Hannah's with her,” Santana explained. “I put them back there and sent the kids over to their grandma. Then I locked the door, so the place wouldn't look like a New York subway car. That wouldn't do no good, would it? Anyway, the ILD man's coming over, and I wanted to stall until he gets here. He's bringing photographers with him and also a whole crew to get testimony. That's why I didn't call the undertaker, and if Curzon wants the body, he's going to have a fight. I don't know about Lamar, but I figure Max would want us to fight for it every inch.”

“What ILD man?” Abbott asked.

“Dettinger from Boston,” Sawyer said. “I called him about a half-hour after it happened, and he's been in touch with the CIO council. He chartered a plane, and he ought to get here soon.”

“You'd better go in and see Liz,” Santana told the doctor. “She's out of her head. I never thought she needed him so much. It's like you shot every bit of foundation right out from under her.” Joey Raye, who was standing there, added, “It's awful sad, Doc. I never seen a woman take on so.”

“I'll give her something to quiet her,” Abbott agreed.

“It's a funny thing about Max,” Joe Santana said. “Never had a family and always drifting around and killing time here and there. Like what they used to call a cracker-barrel philosopher, in other words, a guy who got an itch if he stayed at home. But that woman's going to die, sure as God.”

“Don't talk like a fool,” Ruth said, going inside, Abbott following her. “He is a fool,” Ruth said to her husband. “You can put up with Joe Santana most of the time, but at a time like this, he's impossible.”

“Take it easy,” Abbott answered softly. “This isn't the worst we've seen or are going to see, is it, Ruth? You're letting it get under your skin. Take it easy. Joe's a very good guy. Joe's a wonderful guy.”

“He's a fool,” Ruth said.

The door to the bedroom was closed. Abbott opened it and stepped inside, Ruth with him. The tiny blonde woman on the bed saw them, paused in her plaintive weeping, and managed to get out the words:

“Elliott, you saw him and he's all right?”

Hannah Santana looked at the doctor, who shook his big head.

“But they don't know he's dead. Only a doctor knows that.”

“He's dead, Lizzie darling,” Abbott said gently. “He's not in any pain—he never, had any pain. He died right away, the same as going to sleep.”

Hannah held the woman in her arms, rocking her back and forth, as if she actually were the thin-faced child she resembled, while Ruth prepared the hypodermic. Elizabeth Goldstein made no protest when Abbott slid the needle into her thigh.

“She'll be quiet in a few minutes,” he said. “You stay with her, Ruth.” He tried not to think anything, not to feel anything, not to reason with himself as he went out of the bedroom and back into the barber shop. He tried not to remember how Max Goldstein had come that morning and drunk coffee with them. He tried not to recall how he and the others who had missed the pomp and circumstance of the first great war to end all wars had stood at the railroad station and watched Maxie Goldstein, the fighting Jew, as they called him then, come back to the embracing glory of a New England milltown. You took Thoreau and Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes and you took the burden of man's black shame for two thousand years, and you compounded them in the foothills of the Berkshires, and you sifted them into a checker game and a somnolent Yankee stereotype who remembered the truth and glory that had made a bad tune with words by Francis Scott Key the anthem of the persecuted and oppressed in every nation of the earth. He tried not to remember that, or the endless arguments he had had with Max Goldstein—so long ago, now—to convince him that they were no friends of men who thought well and clearly, yet bided by the fireside.

“Well, the ashes are cold now,” he reflected, and tried to rationalize the fact that a fantastically fat man with a bad heart would not have lived very long anyway.

“He has no relatives, has he?” he asked Joe Santana.

“None that I know about, Elliott. The old man and the old woman are dead and he never spoke about anyone else.”

Abbott went over to the bench and lifted back the sheet. The steel-jacketed revolver bullet left only a small hole in Goldstein's head. The features had that placid repose of the dead, and the eyes were closed. For a minute or two, Elliott Abbott stood there, looking down at his old friend and comrade, and thinking that all the splendid and grand things, marked off in a literary way for such occasions, are no good at all, but only a goodbye and a good voyage.

10.
A
t four o'clock that afternoon, Mike Sawyer
was ready to leave, sitting in Abbott's waiting room, valpack beside him, smoking a cigarette, and getting a few last-moment things set before train time. The three days he had spent in Clarkton seemed a much longer time than that, and looking at Ruth Abbott, her husband, and Danny Ryan, he had the feeling that he had known them for a time that could not be measured in terms of minutes or hours or days or years, for those were standards that did not apply. Where there is a continuity in people, he told himself, time is not easily measurable, and you found good comrades, knew them, and then left them, whether in Spain, in North Africa, in Italy, or in France, or on the good earth of these States, where there had been Sawyers for three hundred years. Some, you passed a word with, and some you lived and fought with for a period of years, and some you never saw again, and some you did. And some, like Ryan, cut your heart out with resentment and contempt, and some, like this doctor's wife, who had a girl's figure and a freckled face, looked at you, and there was more in a look than in Ryan's words.

The fact that he would be back in Clarkton within the next two weeks—certainly within that time if the strike was not won—did not change the quality of leaving. Something here was struggling and growing and building, and he had to go off to another place. Now he allowed himself to think about Ruth Abbott; now he allowed himself to let go and say to himself, this doctor's wife is all and more than I ever wanted in a woman, for me, not for anyone else, not for him or for Ryan or for anyone else, but for me, and it won't be. It won't begin; it won't end. It won't be.

He tried to think of something he could say to Ryan that would make it possible to start clean when he returned, but his words sounded inanely commonplace, words about his being glad he was on this job and here. “I wanted some place like Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburgh, but now I'd rather stay where I am.”

“When you come down to it,” Ryan said, “it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference where you are—until you get a family and settle down. And even if you have a family, it doesn't change it essentially.”

“I guess not.”

“We'll do all right,” Ruth said. “This is the first thing that really hit us, and we weren't prepared or thinking that way, but we're all right now. We'll stay all right.”

“We'll stay all right,” Danny Ryan agreed.

They were blaming him. He had come into Clarkton for a few hours, a new, harassed, partly bewildered district organizer for the Communist Party of the United States, and he had stayed three days, letting more work than he knew what to do with pile up elsewhere, four other strikes, meetings, situations of one sort or another, food collections with small and overworked resources, guidance for this crisis or that one—a harried, scrambling sort of a program which he was supposed to unscramble, make sense of, put to rights on thirty-five dollars a week with five dollars more for expenses, and be at the same time what the press of the nation described so meticulously and decisively as the mastermind of a tightly knit and ominously disciplined organization, the tool of Moscow, created to overthrow the institutions in which free men believed. And here, in his lap, at the start, when he had no other plan than to try and acquaint himself with the problems and needs of the few hundred people in his district, was a situation like this one. He was supposed to have been a leader; but he had done no leading; he had made no decisions of any consequence. He was a few weeks out of the army, where everyone but he had made the decisions, and now this was in his lap, a strike of five thousand workers, the death of two, a massacre like the things that had not happened since the nineteen-thirties, the real possibility of a long, agonizing, painful strike, a strike born in violence and continuing in violence—and he had to walk out of it, leave it, because there were other places, other towns, other plants. He had no sense of organization now; he was in this warm, well-lit room now, but soon he would be alone, with the responsibility only his. What he did, because somewhere deep as his soul was the printed necessity for him to do it, was this thing that had become like a crying, aching conscience in America, the tiny group of men and women, cursed and blessed, as other groups were once, stretching back as far as man's memory did: he, as an individual, had to be that organization, know its problems and the problems of the world too, and solve them. But he had solved nothing, and they were blaming him.