What It Takes (58 page)

See, it wasn’t really funny to Dick, or crazy, or impossible. ... You do not, can not, get up at five-thirty—again—in another shitty motel room, to work another six events for the next sixteen hours ...
again
... if you think the system is absurd ... not for years at a time, like Dick did. If the system has absurdities, or discomforts, well, you just bore through them, or ignore them, or get by with a quick chuckle ... just as Dick chuckled by the needy question in those members’ solemn eyes: the system had to be absurd—right? Impossible, crazy—right? (Otherwise, why you? Why not me?
I’ve been here ten years longer
!)

No, Dick already knew this much about the system: it would be
greeaaat, fiiine ... had to be:
it was just a matter of
attitude
.

This is what Gephardt had always known, took it in with mother’s milk: with the right attitude, you could do anything. And Gephardt’s attitude was ...
perfect
.

“Tell you a story,” Dick said late one night, while he bounced up and down and sideways in a shitty four-seater airplane—no heat in the back—over Iowa, on the way to another shitty motel room and five hours’ sleep before he got up to do it again.

“The Air Force had these bases up in Alaska, way up, Arctic,
freezing
up there. And they noticed, the Eskimos, the native guys, could work out there—three hours, six hours—whatever you needed. But the guys from the lower forty-eight states, you’d put ’em out there, and after an hour, they’d be finished,
frozen stiff
, just couldn’t do it ... same clothes, same jobs, everything ...

“So they ran these tests, physical exams, complete work-ups, everything—nothing. They couldn’t find any physical differences at all. So then they ran psychological tests, the whole battery—the Pentagon, right? You know how they do things. But they had to find out: What was the difference?

“You know what they found? ...”

Now the chipmunks leapt up on Gephardt’s cheeks, and he started to cackle, loud,
hackhackhack ... this
was funny:

“The Eskimos, the natives,
hackhackhackhack
, what they found? ... THEY EXPECT TO BE COLD! ...”

Hackhackhackhackheeheehee.

That was the issue at home: attitude. That’s what it always came down to. It wasn’t nasty—not often—but after decades on the same course, any steady stream will cut deep into rock. Thing was, Loreen Gephardt could see no place for pessimism, for complaint. What good did that do? But Lou, her husband, father to her two sons—a good man, a fine man, but ... sometimes, he was so
sour
.

“Lou! No one wants to hear all that,” she’d call out from the kitchen when Lou was on one of his streaks—some screed about Harry Truman and the damn Democrats ruining the country, or the way the big shots laid out the roads, so they could make the money, steal all the money, and to hell with the little people ...

“Lou, you’ve made your point! ...”

Thing was, Lou was a talker. He’d tell long stories, then follow up with long explanations, and ... sometimes, seemed like he never stopped. That was always the way with his talk.

Amid the dour and taciturn Gephardt clan, in Washington, Missouri, Lou was a talker without peer. He was the star of the one-room schoolhouse, the kid who got to school early, to light the stove for the teacher. And he always meant to finish high school, and go to the city, to St. Louis, forty miles to the east, to enter business, to earn his bread by his gift of gab, and to see the big, bright world. Heck, Washington didn’t have a single electric light till after the Second World War. While Lou was there, it was coal-oil lamps, and horse-and-buggy into town on Saturdays. The Gephardt farm wasn’t bad, in the scheme of the local economy, but there wasn’t much cash money for a family with six kids ... as Lou, the oldest boy, found out when his dad died of typhoid at the age of forty-four, and Louis, then fourteen, was pulled out of high school and set to tending the farm.

He became the man of the family, a man of care, before his time. And he worked at it—no quit in him—up before dawn, aching by dark. That didn’t mean he liked it, no ... nor would he ever forget how his mother pulled him out of school—took away his chance to shine, his chance ... no, how could he forget?

As soon as a couple of his brothers could do a man’s work, and an uncle showed up to help out ... Lou was off to St. Louis, where he enrolled in Brown’s Business College—just a trade school, really, for bookkeeping and clerkly skills of the office. That was fine with Lou.

If there was one thing he knew by his early twenties—as he’d be glad to tell you, volubly, in no uncertain terms, in detail, and at length, maybe more than once—he loved the land ... but he’d had enough of rising in the chill before dawn, and he would work at whatever he had to, henceforth, to rise in God’s daylight, to use his head, to earn a living in a white shirt and tie, and ...

That was the way Lou went at talking, doggedly plowing up furrow after furrow of talk about his point until an acre of soil lay bare. That’s the way he went at everything, which was in the tradition of the Gephardts of Washington, Missouri ... but it did not cut much mustard in St. Louis with Mrs. Stella Cassell. Stella was a woman of the city, who took a lively interest in people, which translated to an interest in lively people, and there was just something stolid about that young Mr. Gephardt that gave her pause, when he showed up at her door.

Mrs. Cassell’s husband, King St. Clair Cassell, was a railroad man who worked the Pullmans out of Union Station. So, rather than languish as a railroad widow, Stella Cassell took in boarders, and cooked for them, cared for them, along with her children ... and the big house on Vernon Avenue was always the liveliest place. It was at church that Lou Gephardt heard about Mrs. Cassell’s, and so, that Sunday afternoon, he presented himself at the door, to ask for a room. And Stella Cassell told him there were no vacancies, at present.

Then, next Sunday, he showed up again. And she turned him away. And he showed up again. And she told him there would be no room ... but he turned up again, and again, and again. So finally, just to have an end to this, she took him in, and let him sleep on the third floor, with her son. So Lou Gephardt moved into the Cassell family quarters, and there he met Loreen, the family’s oldest daughter, who was just as lively and popular as her mother, and beautiful to boot, so Lou asked her out for a date ... she refused. So he asked her again, and she turned him down. And he asked her again, and she said she didn’t think it was a good idea. And he asked again, and she said no.

For
two years,
while he lived in her very household ... Loreen kept telling this Gephardt no. For two years ... until she finally said yes. And they went out on a date, and then another. Sometimes, they’d go to the grand Ambassador Theater, where in those days you’d see a spectacular show: Ginger Rogers and Ed Lowry, singing and dancing as the featured act, and a whole vaudeville troupe, and a sing-along with the organist, and then, finally, the movie. And on the way home, they’d stop at Garavelli’s, for honey-baked ham on rye—Lou knew something about food: he was quite particular about his produce, the freshness, the varieties, all of which, of course, he’d explain ... and it was, well, interesting. Sometimes, she’d go back with him to Washington, Missouri, where he was a drummer in the town orchestra. Lou would go up on the bandstand to play, and Loreen would dance with all the men of the town. And that was interesting, too. Very interesting: in fact, that’s where she decided.

There was something the townsfolk said about the Gephardts, stuck in her mind: “Good stock ...” That’s how they put it, in that farm town ... like she was shopping for stud. They didn’t say, lovely family ... distinction, charm, beauty, wealth—no—but, good stock.

And Loreen thought that over. Lou was steadily, persistently proposing: they were of age and prospects were good. Even through the depths of the Great Depression, he’d persevered, and now held a territory, selling insurance, for a fine company out of New York, the Metropolitan Life. Loreen thought, surely, they could make a go of it. (Loreen was generally of the opinion that with application, and trust in the Lord, one could do anything.) If she could lend to Lou just a touch of her own sunny, determined faith, well then, they’d do fine. So, she accepted his proposal, and they set out to raise a family. That was the mission for Loreen.

And they were happy. Loreen, like her mother, was a prodigious doer in the home. Lou was a proud head of household—just the role to which he’d been raised. And every morning, he dressed carefully in his white shirt, dark suit, to set out for his territory. In those days, life insurance was a door-to-door business (and sometimes up the stairs to the third- and fourth-floor apartments), and Lou’s territory was hardly rich—a narrow southside neighborhood of Brewery Dutch, second-generation Germans, who’d left high school to make beer for Anheuser-Busch, to make cardboard cartons for Gaylord Box, or pound nails into leather for International Shoe. Lou’s major “product” was Industrial Debit Insurance—designed for the working man, who could pay a quarter or fifty cents a week. The agent came by every week to collect, and the coverage was good for that week. A twenty-five-cent policy would yield about a thousand dollars in coverage for a newborn infant. A forty-year-old man might get five hundred dollars’ coverage for his forty cents a week. It was really just burial insurance, but it was all the certainty those families could buy.

Of course, the agents were authorized, eager, to sell Regular Insurance—say, a five-thousand-dollar policy with a premium of a hundred fifty a year. But there were few takers in those days, before the war, when times were tight. Some agents tried to pump up their policies, overloading their families with coverage, but Geppy (as his fellow insurance men called him) was conservative, and steady: sometimes (to Loreen’s great dismay) he’d talk a family out of extra coverage. Geppy played the game fair and square: the trick was to stay in touch with your families, to know who was expecting a new child, which wage-earner had just won a raise; a good agent would become a friend, a financial and family counselor ... and Geppy was good. In fact, this was just the sort of steady, chatty, incremental business that Lou Gephardt was made for ... but then, the business changed. Now the big shots in New York weren’t so interested in nickels and quarters; they wanted to sell major policies—no more Industrial Debit; they consolidated offices, let go a lot of men in the neighborhoods, and just when things with Lou seemed so good, just when Loreen’s prayers were answered and she was pregnant with their first son (the Lord does hear the prayers of the faithful—both of her children would be boys) ... then Metropolitan Life pulled the rug, and Lou Gephardt was tumbled out of work.

Oh, he tried to find something congenial, something like his territory for Metropolitan Life. But the way the big shots were running things then, he knew the odds were against him. He’d put on his white shirt, his suit, and he’d go out hunting work, but there was none ... nothing in his line, anyway. The only offer he got was a job with the Pevely Dairy ... a horse and wagon, and up before dawn—that was the
last
damned thing he wanted. So he held out. He dug in his German farmer heels and turned down the milk-wagon job. And he put on his white shirt again, and tried all over town ... but nothing. And he tried again—Lou always persisted—but no soap. Problem was, Lou and Loreen didn’t have much cushion. It was week to week, in the best of times, and now ... times were not the best. In their apartment, upstairs on Gaynor Avenue, Loreen was feeling desperate.

“Lou, you have to take something ...” she’d say.

“Lou, you could just try the dairy. It doesn’t have to be for long ...”

“Lou, I don’t see how you can just turn your nose up at a
job
. You have a family now ...”

Lou had always had a family. Lou had always taken care of a family. Lou had always ... but not this time. No way he was going to wrestle with a horse all day ...
no way
!

Until Loreen played her trump card, and told him she was going out to look for work—herself, his pregnant wife, going out to work, if he wouldn’t. ...

So he took the milk-wagon job. Wasn’t forever, she told him; but it was ... or it seemed forever, for nine long years, every morning, up at three, out to wrestle with the horse and the harness and the ice—big blocks of ice that the drivers had to chop at the depot ... and the clinking crates of milk, and the goddam horse—ran away from him one day, had to chase the beast all over the streets ... nine years, and he hated every day of it.

And that’s when Lou became convinced—didn’t matter what she said anymore—he knew: the world was set up to screw you in the end, the big shots would beat you, if you gave ’em half a chance ... the way people get treated ... it could make you ...

Well, what it made him was angry, but that couldn’t come out, could it? Not in that house, with the boys, and Loreen, and they were all good Christians, and Lou was a good husband ... and he wasn’t angry at Loreen—was he?

No, it had to be the big shots, and the way of the world, which Lou would explain, at length, if you asked, or sometimes even if you didn’t ... until Loreen could not stand any more of his sour talk.

“Lou! No one wants to hear all that!”

“Lou, don’t you have anything positive to say?”

Well, no, he did not. He had his farmer heels dug into the earth. And it didn’t matter anymore what she said. Whatever she said bounced right off Lou Gephardt’s solid milkman shoulders ... and straight into his son’s breast.

Jane had to run to catch him—literally. She had to get up in the mornings at five or five-thirty, and put on sneakers and run with him, up their street in Virginia, to the cul-de-sac, and back. Jane
hated
to run: a very smart woman was Jane Gephardt, and sensible—never could see the point of doing something that felt so much better when you stopped ... but that was the only way to talk with Dick about this President business. Once he got to the office, he was a man possessed: and these days, he wasn’t even going to the office—it was the airport instead. He was on the road, pecking and sniffing at this White House race for two or three years before he gingerly brought up the subject with her. So, now, gamely, she laced up her sneakers ... anyway, they couldn’t talk like this in front of the kids.