In the Beauty of the Lilies (12 page)

Clarence said, touching his black chest with all his spread fingertips in a gesture of disclaimer and, almost, martyrdom: “I did not
wish
to lose my faith; the reasons came upon me, irresistibly, from outside. They came from above.”

“Much of what we blame on the above comes from within,” Dreaver said, still soft-voiced but growing impatient. “Quench not the spirit, Mr. Wilmot. The elect are not spared passing through the valley of the shadow of death. The possibility of rebirth lies within you, if you but nurture it. Though both science and our own divines have sought to reason it away, I firmly believe in free will. We make our salvations, as well as our earthly fortunes. However, as moderator I truly have no choice in my disposition of your request. Is the necessity of at least one more year in the clergy so repugnant to you?”

“No—it is pleasant. I know the tasks; they are the only tasks I do know. My poor distressed family will be very pleased. I myself am relieved. But it seems to me you are directing me to behave with blatant hypocrisy.”

Dreaver became ever more official; his pallid eyes flashed. “I am asking you to carry for twelve more mere months responsibilities you solemnly vowed to undertake for a lifetime. Please, Mr. Wilmot—renounce your intellectual pride and give God’s grace a chance to do its work. This is not hypocrisy, but the meekness that every man in his work offers up to the order of things, whether divinely ordained or not.” Dreaver lowered his pained pale gaze, cleared his throat, and set the Book of Discipline aside. The stacked papers on his desktop were all smartly typed, as in the most modern offices.
He concluded, “The presbytery will be apprised of this conversation, and all its members shall pray that at the end of the year you will no longer wish to seek demission.”

Clarence boarded the train back to Newark with a light head beneath his straw boater. He had no choice; he had been commanded to take the easiest course left him. Swinging his arms, grasping lightly in alternating hands the curved brass handles fitted into the corners of the plush seats as he moved down the swaying aisle in search of a seat, he shed upon his fellow passengers the blessing that his reversed collar proclaimed had descended upon the world. Outside the grated, open windows, the Meadows and the two rivers and the trusses of their iron bridges skimmed past; gulls and ducks shared the waters and islands of the marsh, and red-winged blackbirds flickered from reed to bending reed. Miniature suns bobbled in the water beneath their wings. Then city buildings and dirty backyards crowded around the elevated tracks; weathered white letters on a brick wall welcomed the passengers to
NEWARK—HOME OF BALLANTINE ALE
. In his light-headed, celebratory mood, he impulsively disembarked at the Erie Railroad station and, walking a few blocks, found a saloon where in spite of his collar he enjoyed a cold draft ale and a hot sausage and sauerkraut on a roll. He strolled back to catch the 2:26 for Paterson, already basking in Stella’s relief and the children’s joy that for at least another year they were assured of the shelter of the parsonage and the respectability his position extended to them all.

Three years later, during the spring and much of the summer of 1913, a strike of the silk-workers paralyzed and galvanized Paterson, pitting twenty-five thousand workers against
three hundred silk manufacturers. Local 152 of the Industrial Workers of the World was the organizer. The strike had begun at the end of February and instantly widened when the police chief arrested three out-of-town IWW agitators at Turn Hall, on Ellison Street. Fifteen hundred assembled strikers had gone wild at seeing Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the clutches of the law; a steady hail of clubbing from mounted police did not disperse the mob that accompanied her to the station.

In March, the police installed cots at their headquarters and hired a cook and barber to accommodate the platoons of new around-the-clock officers, and the strikers, feeling the pinch and anticipating worse, established a General Relief Committee. The Purity Cooperative Company, a bakery founded eight years before by immigrant Jews, distributed thirty thousand loaves of bread free for each week of the strike. The Order of the Sons of Italy voted to levy its members enough to provide a thousand dollars a week. Picket lines were established to harass and shame scabs seeking to enter the shut-down mills. Big Bill Haywood, head of the IWW, came and went; Flynn was almost constantly in Paterson, throwing her voice over crowds of thousands, emboldening the women who emerged as leading spirits of the strike. Hannah Silverman, seventeen years of age, became the captain of the pickets at the Westerhoff mill on Van Houten Street. Twenty-three-year-old Mary Gasperano slapped a woman strikebreaker in the face and was arrested for the fifth time. A fourth of the more than two thousand persons arrested were women, women and girls like those of the Bamford ribbon mill, who ate lunch on the outdoor factory steps rain or shine, were locked out and docked a day’s pay if a minute late, were fined for such offenses as laughing and
opening a window, and half of whose pay was withheld to the end of the year by Joseph Bamford; if they left within that year, he kept it. Hoping to appeal to the workers’ patriotism, the manufacturers declared a Flag Day, flying American flags on their mills to welcome back employees. The employees did not return. The IWW distributed lapel cards reading
We wove the flag. We dyed the flag. We won’t scab under the flag
. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn told a crowd at Turn Hall that the IWW had brought all nationalities of this city together and represented the ideal spirit of America. As she tried to explain a red flag, a dyers’ helper leaped to his feet and held up his hand, dyed indelibly red by years of work, and cried that here was the red flag. The thousands in the hall cheered.

The local police, who had neighbors and friends among the strikers, were relatively gentle, and broke bones but never took a striker’s life. In April, however, one of the hated special detectives hired from the O’Brien Detective Agency of Newark by the Weidmann Silk Dyeing Company, while putting a group of strikebreakers on a trolley car outside the mill in the Riverside section, fired shots to intimidate an angry crowd of dyers’ helpers and killed an employed file-worker, Valentino Modestino, as he stood on the stoop of his own house. The detective was never indicted. The manufacturers owned the police, and the courts. Thousands marched to the Laurel Grove Cemetery and dropped red carnations on Modestino’s grave. Red ribbons were worn by the workers, red flags were waved.

Five weeks after the abortive Flag Day, the American Federation of Labor, a relatively conservative trade union that had already enlisted the well-paid, anti-strike loom-fixers, twisters, and warpers, sent John Golden to seduce the strikers away from the socialist IWW, but his scheduled meeting at
the Fifth Regiment Armory was swamped by heckling Wobblies waving their red handkerchiefs and their little red books of membership. The strikers’ days were filled with meetings—every weekday morning the ribbon weavers met at Helvetia Hall and the dyers’ helpers and broad-silk weavers at Turn Hall, being addressed by the out-of-town “jawsmiths”—and speaking themselves, at first shyly, then vociferously, in Italian, German, Polish, English, Dutch, Yiddish, even Arabic. Afternoons, there were shop meetings of smaller groups at Probst Hall, the Union Athletic Club, Degalman’s Hall, the Workingmen’s Institute. Sunday afternoons, there were giant gatherings across the river in the streetcar suburb of Haledon, which had a socialist mayor and one policeman, who weighed ninety pounds. Spring burgeoned as the strike aged. There were brass bands, mass singing, romance. Flynn, who was blue-eyed and dark-haired and twenty-two and separated from her husband, conducted an affair with the Italian-born anarchist Carlo Tresca, with whom she had fallen in love during the 1912 woolworkers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. On one occasion a meeting in Helvetia Hall was interrupted by the complaint, “Mr. Chairman, there is love going on here,” and a vote was taken to expel a young couple who had been kissing.

In May, the tide turned against the strikers. Patrick Quinlan, the first of the out-of-town leaders to be tried for advocating violence, was convicted. The police and Mayor McBride closed Turn and Helvetia Halls, on the grounds that the speakers there had abused the right of free speech. In retrospect, this loss of a rallying place was a crippling blow. Each striker faced alone his hunger, his unpaid rent, the mounting bills. The manufacturers held adamant; the bigger of them had begun decades ago to build annex mills in eastern
Pennsylvania, where the wives and children of coal miners would work for lower wages than skilled workers had become accustomed to in the proud old industrial town of Paterson. With these Pennsylvania annexes the manufacturers were able to fill some of their orders.

Men like Lambert and Doherty and Bamford were old-fashioned nineteenth-century entrepreneurs driven by cutthroat competition to squeeze and drive their workers ruthlessly. The same pressures bore upon the smaller, newer silk manufacturers, Jewish in the main, some of whom might have settled, if the union could have trusted them to keep their agreements. The strikers’ goals were an eight-hour day and a twelve-dollar minimum weekly wage. The respectable classes of Paterson were solidly with the manufacturers against the spectre of revolution. Of the clergy, only the Reverend Joshua Gallaway, pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church on the corner of Prince and Grand Streets, spoke up for the strikers, saying to an audience in Turn Hall that “without strikes the oppression of the workers of the world will never cease.” The more common ecclesiastical view was that expressed by the Reverend W. C. Snodgrass, who preached that “the worker’s side was generally fairly conducted by the owners of industry.” No view was publicly expressed by Clarence Wilmot, who was treading the seething streets of Paterson as a salesman offering door to door a leather-bound set of facts and pictures called
The Popular Encyclopedia
, for three dollars fifteen cents a volume, paid monthly until all twenty-four volumes had been acquired, forming a priceless home library and a ladder of information up which any literate person, regardless of how early circumstances had compelled him to quit formal schooling, could climb toward improvement and higher status. Upon completion of payment, a
handsome walnut-stained two-shelf case for housing
The Popular Encyclopedia
was delivered, gratis, to the home.

This job—hardly a job, since it earned no salary, just a thirty-percent commission, paid on receipt of funds, a dollar at a time, rather than upon the signing of a subscription—was being advertised in the
Evening Standard
when, as an early casualty of the diminished downtown business caused by the strike, Clarence had been released from the sales staff of Goldman’s Fine Clothiers for Gentlemen and Ladies, on Main Street. Prior to his position there, he had served out his year of probation in the Presbyterian clergy. On more than one occasion, finding himself waking Sunday morning without a voice, he had enlisted Stella as his substitute. Her sermons, drawing as much upon her Missouri girlhood as upon the Bible, were increasingly admired and enjoyed by the initially skeptical congregation. At the year’s end, Clarence had felt no renewal of his vocation. On the contrary, his sense of the emptiness and foolishness at the base of the universe floated like a veil before his eyes, numbed his tongue in social discourse, and proved so debilitating that he gasped for breath whenever the weather changed or day shaded into night. Evenings, after dinner, he almost always needed to lie down. He travelled again to Jersey City and, with the wry triumph of the negatively confirmed, described his condition to Thomas Dreaver, whose distress and surprise were disappointingly modest. Very well, then: the procedures of demission would be completed. The moderator had moved on in his mind, he had written Clarence off; like any good businessman, he must pocket his losses and look to the future.

Clarence sought to emulate him. The Wilmots had some small savings, the financial remnant of his fifth of the gravel-pit fortune when his older brother, Peter, decided to liquidate
their gritty inheritance, and with these plus a loan secured on favorable terms from a banker friendly to Mr. Dearholt, they had bought a small wooden house out on East Twenty-seventh Street, with only a margin of yard but with Eastside Park eight blocks away, for the children to get their fresh air and exercise in. Teddy was their main concern; he was now ten, a heavy, quiet, apprehensive child with lackluster brown hair and eyes, who had taken on a paper route to help the family finances. Jared at nineteen was nearly through with his freshman year at Rutgers; he had seen that Princeton was beyond his family’s present reach, gone down to New Brunswick to apply and see about a scholarship, saved up his summer money from driving one of the Nagle Brothers ice wagons, gone out for the football team, and was down there now waiting on tables and playing second base on the freshman nine. One of his teammates’ father was a trader on the Wall Street stock market and had promised Jared a job as a trading-slip runner next summer. Once the days of his infancy were over, Jared had always seemed to Clarence another man in the house, with an uncomfortable resemblance—the same bushy fox-red eyebrows, the same decisive slash of a mouth, though not framed by a trimmed iron beard—to his own father. With his cocky, good-humored realism Jared had early grasped that his father, even before the collapse of his vocation, was not a person to lean on. The boy had caught, by some wireless telegraphy, the rhythm of the America to come, the nation constantly reinventing itself in cheerful ignorance of all the discouraging books in his father’s airless study. He was merry and distant and implacable, the ragtime tunes of the future jangling within him. When he deigned to come home, full of collegiate wisdom and new slang, he was treated by Stella and Esther as a source of authority, though the young man contributed
nothing to the household and everything to his own advancement.

Esther, who had grown into a tall, slender, and pale echo of her father, with her mother’s rich head of chestnut hair transmuted to a less luxurious strawberry blond, was a month from high-school graduation, and not so caught up in the whirl of commencement and its semi-sacred ceremonies—darkened and complicated this spring by the strike and its plurality of deprivations as they reverberated into the lives of the young—as to have failed to seek employment. She had switched, two years ago, to the secretarial course, and hoped to find employment typing for one of the city’s law or merchandising firms. Had her father kept to his own employment, resources might have been found to send her to the Normal School on Nineteenth Avenue, for she had the scholastic aptitude and the steady, erect benevolence of a born teacher. But she was a girl, whose best destiny was marriage, and the route whereby she reached it was among the lesser of the many uncertainties that Clarence faced.