But who gives a shit about the emergency room of...
But who gives a shit about the emergency room of a community hospital out in the sticks? Who gives a shit about a rural general store whose owner has been running it since 1921? We're talking about humanity! When has there ever been progress for humanity without a few small mishaps and mistakes? The people are angry and they have spoken! Violence will be met by violence, regardless of consequences, until the people are liberated! Fascist America down one post office, facility completely destroyed
Except, as it happened, Hamlin's was not an official Upost office nor were the Hamlins Upostal employees--theirs was merely a postal station contracted, for x number of dollars, to handle a little postal business on the sideHamlin's was no more a government installation than the office where your accountant makes out your tax formsBut that is a mere technicality to world revolutionariesFacility destroyed! Eleven hundred Old Rimrock residents forced, for a full year and a half, to drive five miles to buy their stamps and to get packages weighed and to send anything registered or special deliveryThat'll show Lyndon Johnson who's boss
They were laughing at himLife was laughing at himConlon had said, "You are as much the victims of this tragedy as we areThe difference is that for us, though recovery will take time, we will survive as a familyWe will survive as a loving familyWe will survive with our memories intact and with our memories to sustain usIt will not be any easier for us than it will be for you to make sense of something so senselessBut we are the replicas bolsas same family we were when Fred was here, and we will survive
The clarity and force with which she implied that the Swede and his family would not survive made him wonder, in the weeks that followed, if her kindness and her compassion were so all-encompassing as he had wanted at first to believe
He never went to see her again
He told his secretary that he was going over to New York, to the Czech mission, where he'd already had preliminary discussions about a trip to Czechoslovakia later in the fallIn New York he had examined specimen gloves as well as shoes, belts, pocketbooks, and wallets manufactured in Czechoslovakia, and now the Czechs were working up plans for him to visit factories in Brno and Bratislava so he could see the glove setup firsthand and examine a more extensive sample of their work while it was in production and when it came off the floorThere was no longer any question that in Czechoslovakia leather apparel could be more cheaply made than in Newark or Puerto Rico--and probably better made, tooThe workmanship that had begun falling off in the Newark plant since the riots had continued to deteriorate, especially once Vicky retired as making room foreladyEven granting that what he'd seen at the Czech mission might not be representative of day-to-day production, it had been impressive enoughBack in the thirties the Czechs had flooded the American market with fine gloves, over the years excellent Czech cutters had been employed by Newark Maid, and the machinist who for thirty years had been employed full-time tending Newark Maid's saddle christian dior sewing machines, keeping those workhorses running--replacing worn-out shafts, levers, throat plates, bobbins, endlessly adjusting each machine's timing and tension--was a Czech, a wonderful worker, expert with every glove machine on earth, able to fix anythingEven though the Swede had assured his father he had no intention of signing over any aspect of their operation to a Communist government until he'd returned with a thorough report, he was confident that pulling out of Newark wasn't far down the line
Dawn by this time had her new face and had begun the startling comeback, and as for Merrywell, Merry dear, Merry darling, my precious one-and-only Merry-child, how can I possibly remain on Central Avenue struggling to keep my production up, taking the beating we're taking there from black people who care nothing any longer about the quality of my product--people who are careless, people who've got me over a barrel because they know there's nobody trainable left in Newark to replace them--for fear that if I leave Central Avenue you will call me a racist and never see me again? I have waited so long to see you again, your mother has waited, Grandpa and Grandma have waited, we have all been waiting twenty-four hours a day every day of every year for five years to see you or to hear from you or somehow to get some word of you, and we can postpone our lives no longerMother is a new womanIf we are ever again going to live, now is when we must begin
Nonetheless, he was waiting not for the pleasant consul at the Czech mission to welcome him with a glass of gucci book bags slivovitz (as his father or his wife would think if they happened to phone the office) but across from the dog and cat hospital on New Tersey Railroad Avenue, a ten-minute car ride from the Newark Maid factoryAnd for years? In Newark, for years? Merry was living in the one place in the world he would never have guessed had he been given a thousand guessesWas he deficient in intelligence, or was she so provocative, so perverse, so insane he still could not imagine anything she might do? Was he deficient also in imagination? What father wouldn't be? It was preposterousHis daughter was living in Newark, working across the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, and not at the end of the Ironbound where the Portuguese were reclaiming the poor Down Neck streets but here at the Ironbound's westernmost edge, in the shadow of the railroad viaduct that closed off Railroad Avenue all along the western side of the streetThat grim fortification was the city's Chinese wall, brownstone boulders piled twenty feet high, strung out for more than a mile and intersected only by half a dozen foul underpassesAlong this forsaken street, as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian length of unguarded wall barren even of graffitiBut for the wilted weeds that managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city's prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness
On the east side of the street, the dark old white prada bag factories--Civil War factories, foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys pumping smoke for a hundred years--were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblockThese were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out goods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombsIt was Newark that was entombed there, a city that was not going to stir againThe pyramids of Newark: as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty's burial edifice has every historical right to be
The rioters hadn't crossed beneath the elevated railroad tracks--if they had, these factories, the whole block of them, would be burned-out rubble like the West Market Street factories back of Newark Maid
His father used to tell him, "Brownstone and brickThere was the businessBrownstone quarried right hereKnow that? Out by Belleville, north along the riverThis city's got everythingWhat a business that must have beenThe guy who sold Newark brownstone and brick--he was sittin' pretty
On Saturday mornings, the Swede would drive Down Neck alongside his father to pick up the week's finished gloves from the Italian families paid to do piecework in their homesAs the car bounced along the streets paved with bricks, past one poor little Ik frame house after another, the massive railroad viaduct remained brokenly within gucci clearance vi