The Secret (26 page)

Ariana joined the conversation. I was to learn that she was an anti-sweatshop activist. She was on a crusade and had influenced Roger to join her. “They violate every law on the books,” she said. “Wages and hours, sanitary conditions, immigration … The only way to enforce the laws effectively is to trace the merchandise up the line to the ultimate retailer. And that’s the tack that’s going to be taken.”

“Are you saying we’re liable to criminal prosecution?”

“It’s possible,” said Roger. “Of course we can always defend on the rationale that we didn’t know about working conditions at the manufacturing end.”

“Okay.”

“But how much bad publicity can we take? The news media will savage us. They don’t much like our line of business anyway.”

He was right. Before long Kathie Lee Gifford would be savaged, and her line was not erotic lingerie and S-M devices.

“I’ll take the matter up with my father,” I said.

*   *   *

“You think I’m dumb?” my father asked irritably when I raised the subject. We were having dinner in Vicky’s and my house in Greenwich. Our Connecticut address had not ceased to annoy him. I knew by then how he had vetoed a prep school for me, and he thought our home in the Riverside section of Greenwich was no suitable place for his son, much less for Vittoria Castellano Lucchese Cooper. (One evening when we were grilling steaks over charcoal on the patio—this was an enterprise he scorned, since he believed that Peter Luger’s Steak House was the only place where you could get a steak really cooked right—he took note of the friendly wave of a neighbor and asked, “Y’think he’ll wave hello when he finds out who you are?”)

“You’ve never seen a sweatshop, have you? Well, I have, but I can’t take you to see one because we don’t have anything to do with them anymore. New York wages-and-hours laws? New York sanitary laws? New York fire laws? U.S. immigration laws? None of that has anything to do with us. Hey. The handcuffs and stuff like that are made in this country, in little factories that meet every requirement of those laws you’re talking about. Hell, police departments buy the same things from the same shops, and so do the FBI and federal marshals. I figured out the dangers in dealing with sweatshops a long time ago. Hey, Melissa, pull off your panties and hand them here.”

The ever-complaisant Melissa reached beneath the table, pulled off her G-string panties, and handed them to my father.

He stared at the label, then handed them to me. The label read:

CHEEKS

Made in U.S.A.

Exclusively for Cheeks

“‘Made in U.S.A.,’” he said. “Now, where in the U.S.A. you figure?”

I shook my head. I knew he was driving at something significant, but I couldn’t imagine what.

“Okay. Made on the Island of Saipan, part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas … a United States protectorate. That’s way-the-hell out in the Pacific, and I don’t know what kind of conditions their workers work under—except this, except that I know they work under the laws of the Commonwealth. What’s more, the U.S. granted their legislature the right to make their own immigration laws, so their workers don’t need green cards. They sell stuff cheap, and there’s no import tax.”

“It’s stretching things a little to say this stuff is made in the U.S.A.,” Vicky said wryly as she squinted at the label.

“Folks like that good ol’ ‘Made in U.S.A.’ label,” my father said, smiling slyly. “Hey, Vicky, if you don’t mind, let’s see what label you’re wearing.”

Vicky glanced at me. Since she could pull down her panties under the table, she did and handed them to me. That label read:

CHEEKS

Made in Hong Kong

Exclusively for Cheeks

My father glanced at the label. “See? We don’t deal in sweatshop merchandise. Everything we import is perfectly legal under the laws of its place of origin.”

“Legal, maybe,” I said. “But when word gets out that girls and women work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for thirty cents an hour—which sometimes isn’t even paid—and live in filthy barracks under armed guard, like prisoners in a reformatory, the publicity may be ruinous.”

“Son, you worry too much,” he said.

*   *   *

Three weeks after that evening, our bedside telephone rang after two in the morning.

I picked it up, and at first I couldn’t imagine who was on the line. All I could hear was uncontrolled sobbing. A voice tried to break through, and I realized it was my father.

I couldn’t understand his words at first. Then I did.
“Melissa is dead!”

I drove to New York. Vicky would follow after she arranged for a baby-sitter.

He had wakened to go to the bathroom and had returned to bed to discover that Melissa was not breathing. She had suffered a sudden, massive brain hemorrhage.

It was almost as if he had suffered it himself. My father would never again be the same.

43

It was Vicky who conceived the idea of our flying out to Saipan, then down to Hong Kong, to see if sweatshop conditions were as bad as Ariana Middleton said they were—so bad as to risk our becoming involved in a damaging scandal. Actually, what she had in mind was that my father should spend two or three weeks away from home, to help him recover from the loss of Melissa. Traveling to such an outlandishly remote place as Saipan, then to so exotic a place as Hong Kong, would claim all his attention for a while.

He and I were alone together for more time than we had ever been since my mother died, and I learned more about my father than I had ever known before.

He told me how his Uncle Harry had stolen his girlfriend Kitty Benson and married her. He told me how Harry had stolen the money from his parents’ life-insurance policies. He told me about rebuilding Jeeps in Paris.

I asked him about my mother.

“Well … you have to understand it was tough times in Europe. Even after
I
got to Paris, after the war had moved on north, I saw girls scrounging in garbage cans for scraps of food. I mean regular girls, trying to go to school and so on. Your Aunt Therèse had let a Kraut soldier feed her and had suffered painful consequences. Your mother made her living the best way she could. Yes, she danced nude. The first time I ever saw her she was naked and gorgeous, and I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. But there was no funny business on the side. We shared an apartment. At first that was just because it was the only way we could afford such nice digs. Then—well, you know.”

During the flight I told him that Vicky was pregnant again. “You’ve got to stop that,” he said to me rather gruffly. “She’s too old for it. You’ll kill her.”

“I offered to have a vasectomy,” I said. “She wouldn’t hear of it, said I was too young. But she had her tubes tied.”

“You listen to what she says. She’s got good sense. I knew when I introduced you to her that she’d be good for you.”

“I’ll always be grateful that you introduced me to her.”

“Okay. So don’t mess around. It was all right to mess around with Tinkerbell, but don’t you do it with Vicky.”

“I never have.”

“I messed around on Melissa once. I regret it more than anything that’s ever happened to me except your mother’s death.”

The travel was a burden on me, let alone on my father. Too many hours in the air, even if we did go first class. We spent one night in Tokyo, which was no great privilege, and then flew down to Saipan.

Sweatshop conditions there were worse than Ariana Middleton had described. Or so we assumed, since we were denied access to the shops where goods that would have our label sewn in were manufactured. The shops were surrounded by barbed wire, as were the barracks where the workers lived—young women, many from the Philippines, others from wherever work was scarce. Sweatshops. In New York, temperatures usually did not rise much above eighty. On Saipan they rose as high as a hundred ten and sometimes higher.

But we stayed in a luxurious modern hotel, comfortably air-conditioned, and took a late-afternoon dip in a pool shaded by palms and other tropical vegetation. We could have strolled on a white-sand beach.

I was conscious of the island’s history, all but invisible now. It had been a League of Nations mandate, assigned to Japan. The Japanese had fortified it heavily. United States forces had blasted it from the air and from the sea, had come ashore, and had killed the tens of thousands of Japanese in its bunkers. I remembered TV documentaries showing flame throwers filling bunkers with fire, then seeing burning Japanese running out. I could not remember the numbers but knew that very many young Americans had died taking Saipan.

After the war, the United States had governed it as a United Nations trusteeship. In 1986 a Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas was formed. Saipan and Tinian—from where the Bomb was flown to Hiroshima—were parts of this commonwealth. It elected its own governor and legislature, but it was a United States protectorate. That was what gave it the special status that allowed it to produce goods in slave-labor conditions and ship them to the States without restriction.

We were guests for dinner with George Alexander, president of a company called Alexander Products. He was the same man Charlie Han had mentioned in his testimony when he was on trial for labor-law violations. Charlie had testified he didn’t know where Alexander was, and maybe he didn’t. Anyway,
we
now knew where he was.

George Alexander was a cue-ball bald man and appeared for dinner in a linen blue blazer, white shirt, and rep tie. For him, Saipan was an exile. He lived well there, making big money. It was a haven for George Alexander.

It had been he, that afternoon, who had refused to allow us to see his working people at work. “They’re excitable,” he had said. “A visitor slows them down for an hour.”

We had been sitting in his spartan office. An air conditioner had been laboring in a window, but it was still stifling hot, and we were sweating.

“Are the workshops air-conditioned?” I had asked.

He had smiled broadly. “These are
tropical
people,” he had said. “Air-conditioning gives them colds, sinusitis, bronchitis, even pneumonia. They refuse to work in air-conditioned rooms. They think there is something unnatural about air-conditioning.”

“Why the barbed wire?” I had asked.

“Predators,” he said. “Our workers are primitive young women, and every pilot or ship crewman can take advantage of them.”

Over dinner he said something a little different. “I wasn’t exactly honest with you when I said you couldn’t see inside our shops. You see … it
is
hot in the shops. The girls don’t want air-conditioning, but they do what they do on their home islands—which is that they strip down to the minimum. Men fly down here from Tokyo just to see the naked girls working in our shops. Needless to say, I do not put
our
girls on display. I guess some operators do, but Alexander does not.”

Bullshitting my father was not a good idea. We were in Tokyo only one night before flying on to Hong Kong, but that was long enough for him to wire New York to cancel every contract with Alexander.

On the flight to Hong Kong he talked about Melissa.

“She was just the finest kind of girl you could imagine. I swear to you, as God is my witness, that I never touched her while your mother was alive. That’s a tribute to your mother, not to me. You know by now how things get. I mean, domestic. I should have married her. We loved each other. Why do the women I love die so young?”

He told me a lot more about his days in Paris. He made me understand why Buddy was so good a friend.

“Every man would like to think there’s somebody he could count on if everything went to shit. Buddy and I don’t have much in common, except some life experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything, but I know if the shit hit the fan Buddy would be there for me. And I’d be there for him. It’s been an odd friendship, some ways. Buddy just showed up one day when I was still very young, and he befriended me instantly. I’ve often wondered why. My good luck, as far as I’m concerned.”

We landed at Hong Kong’s adventurous airport, Kai Tak, coming in on an approach so low over the city that, as they used to say, you could look in apartment windows and see what TV shows people were watching. That is an exaggeration. But you could see if they were watching TV or not.

We checked into the plush Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

I wish I could have spent more time in Hong Kong on that visit. I have never seen a more fascinating city. It was at that time still a British colony, but it was emphatically a Chinese city. If we define a building over fifty stories as a high-rise, there were at least two in Hong Kong for every one in Manhattan. The harbor was one of the busiest in the world, crowded with cruise ships, container ships, and tankers, among which the little Star Ferries hurried back and forth between Hong Kong and Kowloon. The streets, subtropical and hot, were jammed with traffic. The population exceeded six million people, the vast, vast majority of them busy, well-dressed Chinese, jostling each other as they hurried purposefully up and down steep and narrow streets and along broad boulevards as well. No one knew really how many people lived there because the so-called I.I.s, illegal immigrants, were an uncountable additional element of the population. One had a sense that anything was for sale there,
anything,
in a community more cosmopolitan than any other I have ever seen.

But that was the impression of a mere three days in Hong Kong.

My father was not so impressed. “Goddamned anthill,” he grumbled. He did not understand that the city had one of the most active stock exchanges in Asia, some of the biggest banks in the world, and that half the world’s billionaires lived there. He did not understand, either, that Cheeks, though an important customer to a few makers of clothing, was small-time in Hong Kong business terms.

Our contact was Henry Wu, owner of a shop that made some of our most exotic merchandise. Everything from Wu was of meticulously high quality—and cost twice what we had imported from Saipan. We met him for lunch at Luk Yu Tea Shop, a dim sum restaurant. Dim sum were little dumplings filled with all kinds of things: shrimp, vegetables, chicken, fish, and so on. It was a typical Hong Kong lunch.