In the Beauty of the Lilies (14 page)

“What sort of commercial quest would it be, Reverend Wilmot?”

“No longer reverend, my dear Mavie, and that explains the quest. Lacking a care of souls, I am going from door to door trying to sell subscriptions to twenty-four volumes of more fact than fancy called
The Popular Encyclopedia
. I dare say you would have no use for it.”

“Well, now, we can’t be altogether sure without hearing about it. Please—you must come in and let me give you a cup of tea at least. Many the cup I enjoyed in your own kitchen.”

“And many the cup you made and served, for rather little recompense.”

“You paid what others did, and always treated me kind. Mrs. Wilmot had a warm heart, and you were every inch the gentleman. Not every master is, I found out soon enough. I was sorry to leave your service, though you could say it’s turned out for the best.”

The parlor of the little house was tidy, and the furniture commonplace but not shabby, with an upholstered velour sofa the most elegant piece, decorated with antimacassars and two black pillows holding each a large rose in needlepoint. There were yellowed lace curtains at the windows, and a pair of the kind of florally decorated Austrian-porcelain vases one could buy for five dollars at Greene Brothers.

“Is this the home of your parents, Mavis?”

“Ah, no, they never had more than rooms, even when there were six of us. This is Mr. Czajkowski’s house, him and his mother and sister and now myself.”

“You?”

A blush tinged her thin-skinned Irish pallor, that pallor which extended even to the dulcet feminine forms of her lips. “We love one another, sir.”

“Without marriage?”

“I know, it grates on my family something fierce, but he says why let the priests run our lives, hand in hand with the rich as they are? With the world in chains, what’s free but love? I’ve come a long way in these few years, but I remember the talk around your table as getting me to thinking. Did you truly say you were no longer a reverend?”

“Yes, I gave it up, Mavis. Or you could say it gave me up.”

“How could that be? The fine big house, and you looking and acting the part like a man born to it.”

“Ah, acting the part, exactly. It often happens that men cannot hold on to what they were born to. I no longer measured up to even my own standards of good faith. These are hard days, for the old beliefs. I am glad that you and Mr.—”

“Czajkowski. It’s a name that made me stumble as well, at first—you can see why I’m in no hurry to make it mine. But I’m forgetting the tea.”

“Never mind the tea, please. Sit and tell me about yourself. Where are the others in the house?”

“Eva is out on the picket line over at the Dale mill; Joe’s mother is upstairs. She’s not well in the chest and needs tending; people say it’s the lint, all those years.”

“And … Joe? He is out on strike too?” Though conspicuously fuller in the body, Mavis was thinner in the face. This month of April had seen a new look slip into Paterson—the shifty-eyed, dry-mouthed look of people who had been too long on one meal a day, and that one meal provided by the fickle charity of Wobbly sympathizers in New York.

“Oh, no,” Mavis said, with a quick lilt of pride. “He’s a
foundryman for Danforth and Cooke, earning all of eighteen a week, and the shop solid union. Orders are backed up a year; people can do without silk, but they’ll never do without locomotives.”

“It would seem not. I’m happy for you, Mavis, and I know that Mrs. Wilmot will be too. She always said you were the brightest of our girls.” Clarence wondered, once it was out of his mouth, if this compliment wasn’t condescending. He was tired, he realized, now that he found a momentary space in which to rest, and he regretted declining the tea.

“A lot of girls, I can tell you, don’t show their brightness; it doesn’t sit well with the men, or with their betters of either sex. But one good thing about the strike, it’s let it out what women can do. This Mrs. Flynn fears neither man nor beast, and outtalks Haywood and Quinlan and Tresca right up there in front of thousands. When the men talk, we listen; but when it’s Mrs. Flynn on the platform, oh,” Mavis told him, framing a kind of quick window in the air between them with her childlike hands, and leaning toward where he sat heavily in the center of the new velour sofa, “it’s like hearing your own heart speaking.”

Clarence felt a pang of jealous discomfort, at this enraptured evocation of ideal preaching. When younger, he had been vain of his preaching, and of the judicious flair of exaggeration he would don with his vestments. A stately power of eloquence seemed to enter him from behind, and he became both actor and audience.

Mavis appeared unable to make herself sit down in the presence of her old employer. As if reading his mind, she set about making them tea, which took her but a few steps away, into a kitchen adjacent to the parlor. They did not need to suspend their conversation.

“Indeed, your own heart speaking?” he prompted.

“I know it sounds grand, but when she calls up the world that might be, instead of the one that is, you can hardly keep from crying at the beauty of it. Women equal, and not slaves kept in the kitchen, and children not having to go into the mills at the age of eight or nine, and there being no workers and owners, because the workers are the owners, and everything an equal partnership …” She trailed off, her utopian vision eclipsed by the rituals of the teapot—the warming of the pot with simmered water poured from the battered kettle lifted from the new-fangled porcelain-sided gas stove that Mr. Czajkowski had earned with his forging of locomotives, the quick swishing and pouring out, the careful measurement of the tablespoons of the shreds of Pekoe tea, and the repouring of the hot water preparatory to the steeping. Whole nations in Asia and Africa, Clarence recalled missionary reports stating, were economically consecrated to the white man’s coffee and tea, to the great detriment of the native agriculture and diet.

“And yet,” he said, playing a gentle devil’s advocate to keep up the flow of delightful liveliness from his hostess, “Mrs. Flynn herself, as a wife and mother, appears to have deserted both Mr. Flynn and their infant, for the romantic charms of Signor Tresca.”

Rosiness did reappear on Mavis’s cheeks, and reddened her throat with quickened spirit. “You know what she says, when people charge her with free love? ‘Better that than slave love.’ If she wins for women a bit more of self-respect, and daily wages closer to what men receive, then she has been mother to a million happy babies.”

He wondered if he dared allude to the baby perceptibly lodged behind her apron, and instead sighed in impotent
irony. “My dear, it gladdens me to see you so inspired, so resolute. I am too old, and too Presbyterian in my mental habits, to take much hope from any of this world’s prophecies. The strike is failing, you know—the big mills are meeting orders out of their annexes in Allentown and Easton, and the little mills are tied to the bigger. There are too many competing plants—none can afford to concede an eight-hour day.”

This bleak opinion was echoed from the pages of the Paterson
Evening News
, which until April had been, if not downright pro-strike, the main purveyor of the strikers’ announcements. Mavis responded by silently serving the tea, setting the tray on the low oval table before the sofa. She brought a hard chair set against the parlor wall and seated herself on it to pour. Her freckled forearms were nicely rounded; her touch on the teapot was sweetly practiced. Settling back, her face on a level with his, she bestowed upon him a confidential smile, a broad sad stretching of her lips that granted the world’s capacity to baffle us. “And how does Mrs. Wilmot feel about your being no longer among the clergy?”

Was this subtle revenge for his predicting the failure of the strike? “She doesn’t like it,” he confessed. “How could she? Her goals in life were all achieved; she had no doubts about anything. She cannot imagine why I would indulge such an unfortunate change of heart. She is very conscious of how fallen in status the children are, and how desperate our finances have become. And these things of course are a great weariness to me as well. A
great
weariness, of which sometimes I think I must simply curl up and die. You do not have to be a factory worker, Mavis, to learn how utterly the world can cast you out, once your usefulness is over.”

“Tell me about your books,” she said, sitting a touch more upright, with a lovely and prim elongation of her white neck, and a two-handed gesture of subduing her wiry, cedar-colored hair.

“Books? My books destroyed me. Books are the bane of mankind, I tell myself at least once a day.”

“The books you sell, door to door.”

“Oh, those. Quite worthless, really. A less expensive American imitation of a British encyclopedia—an arrangement, in alphabetical order, of articles on everything. An encyclopedia, you might say, is a blasphemy—a commercially inspired attempt to play God, by creating in print a replica of Creation.”

“I have heard the word ‘encyclopedia.’ ”

“Of course you have, Mavis. It’s in the air now, along with radiotelegraphy and flying machines. Encyclopedias began, more or less, with a Frenchman called Diderot, who set out to demonstrate that materialism was a complete system, accounting for everything under the sun. He was wrong in some details, of course, but basically he succeeded. You don’t want these books, Mavis.”

“And how much do they cost?”

“Three dollars fifteen cents a month until the full set of twenty-four is obtained in two years’ time,” he told her automatically. “There are twenty-five thousand separate alphabetical entries, nearly ten thousand steel engravings. Everything you or your children want to look up, it’s in there, if not as a separate article, listed in the index. You don’t want it, I swear to you—it’s the last thing you want. All the information there can be, and it breaks your heart at the end, because it leaves you as alone and bewildered as you were not knowing anything.”

“Sir, does it have a name?”

Clarence laughed. “The
Popular Encyclopedia
, but it hasn’t been very popular in Paterson, not on any street I’ve walked, and I’ve walked most of them. It’s written for the common man, they say—as if the common man cares for anything but his bucket of suds and his five-cent cigar. I’ve sold so few we’ve had to send Teddy some days down to the workers’ relief tent, so he’d get a square meal and not stunt his growth. Oh, how the mighty—but I was never mighty, is the odd thing. God doesn’t need a big target, He can hit an hour-old infant square on the nose. But, then, excuse me, I shouldn’t be blaspheming. I shouldn’t still be using that terrible old word ‘God.’ ”

Finding himself close to tears, he wondered, as he often had in the pulpit, how much of a shameless actor he was. The very material was so theatrical—the rending of garments, the ashes on the head, the kiss of betrayal in the garden, the crying out on the Cross.

“We could afford the three dollars. In addition to what Joe brings home, I still hire out, when Eva is here to look after Matka, and can until—” She blushed once more, in confession of her warm blood.

“The baby comes,” he finished for her.

“I want those books for him. Or her.”

“Mavis, you don’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I don’t, Mr. Wilmot. I’m in my house here.” Embarrassed at this spark of temper, the girl looked away, at the corner of the sofa where the needlepointed rose bloomed. “Could you leave me some of your materials, to discuss with Joe? Tell me honestly, though—would these books be a fair start? I know we must look ignorant and common to you.”

His face felt enormous, vaporous, as his sales pitch was dragged from him. “Yes, a fair start. The people in St. Louis who put it together are honest workmen. There is more in these books than either of us can ever know. As of the year of our Lord 1913, the facts are here.”

“Well, then.”

“But can you afford—You mustn’t subscribe because—”

You pity me
. He couldn’t say it, but she heard it. Mavis’s pale lips compressed as she bowed her head—her loosely bundled hair haloed by filaments of pure light—to the china pot, and asked, “More tea? If you fight off all your customers like you do me, I don’t wonder, Mr. Wilmot, there aren’t many of them. Be sure to leave any forms that Joe and I should sign.”

Within a week, the forms came through, and his dollar-a-month commission, but after this particular sale Clarence’s discouragement deepened, and the trouble in his breathing apparatus bit deeper into his vitality. His body as he dragged it up and down the paved slopes of Paterson grew heavier, though in fact he was losing weight. The rarity of sales drove him, by trolley car and hired buggy, to the neighboring towns of Clifton and Totowa and Hawthorne, but with no better luck than on the East Side streets of Paterson; those with money stocked their own libraries and distrusted goods that had to come importuning at the door. The very name
Popular
had been made suspect, to the ears of the middle class, by the socialist rhetoric of the strike. More than once, when the householder or his delegate came to the door Clarence’s voice froze in his throat, and, after a few stammered words that courted rejection, he turned away. As the summer lengthened, the defeat of the strike settled over the city like the stultifying heat, muting the excited sounds of booing and shouting, of rally and massed song, of police whistles shrilling
and the hooves of mounted police cantering through the tight streets threaded among the mills. Only the roar of the Falls persisted. By August, in a ragged series of surrenders, the mills went back to work, the dyers’ helpers caving in as their families’ hunger mounted, the broad-silk weavers accepting what promises they could get from plant to plant, and the ribbon weavers following a week or so later, with a militant residue holding out even longer for at least a nine-hour day. Soon they too surrendered. Then began the manufacturers’ counteroffensive of stretching and blacklisting, and the eddies of recrimination among the Wobbly leaders as they felt their high tide of national influence ebb, never to return.

During this summer Clarence took his own defeat indoors, deserting the sunny harsh streets of door-to-door rejection for the shadowy interiors of those moving-picture houses that, like museums of tawdry curiosities, opened their doors during the day. The worshippers within these catacombs sat scattered and silent. In 1913 there were increasingly many such houses, along Main and Market Streets: the Lyric Theatre, the Grand, the Bijou, the Apollo, the Royale, and the Washington Show, the largest and newest, at 137 Main. Some of the original nickelodeons had already passed into history: the Paterson Show, on Market, and the Nicolet, at Main and Van Houten, which had displayed the latest pictures from France in the era when Georges Méliès and the Pathé and Lumière brothers had led the fledgling industry. However, the Kinetoscope and the Wonderful Projectoscope had been invented by Thomas Edison right down the road in West Orange, and Edison’s assistant, Edwin S. Porter, had filmed
The Great Train Robbery
in New Jersey, transforming the locale with a few guns and cowboy hats into the Wild West: the “movies” were above all American. When Clarence had paid
his nickel—one of the brand-new Indian-head nickels, with a buffalo hulking on the reverse side—and settled into his hard chair in the dark, carefully placing his leather salesman’s case upright between his ankles, it was as if his eyes drank a flickering liquor. The passionate, comical, swift-moving action on the screen, speckled with bright scratches, entered him like an essential food which he had been hitherto denied.