Evan Hunter - Sons

“Two thousand, six hundred and sixty-five,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Four million men walked off their jobs, that’s a rather impressive figure, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here at Ramsey-Warner, we did not have a single strike in 1919”

“No, sir.”

“Nor do we intend to have one this year, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tyler,” he said, “Rumsey-Warner is letting you go.”

I don’t know what I had anticipated. I’d had no idea where his conversation was leading, no clue as to why he’d been throwing strike statistics at me. I guess I’d thought for a single soaring moment that he’d been telling me about Ramsey-Wamer’s good fortune only as a prelude to giving me a raise or a promotion, I guess that’s what I secretly thought and hoped. I looked at him now in stunned silence, his brown suit blending with the warm comfort of the room, his face impassive, brown eyes watching me from behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

“This is Wednesday...”

“Sir, did you say...?”

“... but you may draw your wages to the end of the week. I think you’ll agree that’s more than is called for.”

“Sir, I don’t understand...”

“Yes, what is it you don’t understand, Tyler?”

“I don’t understand...”

“We no longer have need of your services, I thought I’d expressed myself quite clearly.”

“But I thought...”

“Yes, what did you think, Tyler?”

“I thought I was doing my job, I thought...”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Moreland said.

“I’ve never missed a day, I’ve always...”

“Tyler,” Mr. Moreland said, “we do not want a strike here in 1920, is that clear?”

“Yes, but...”

“Your sympathies are well known around this mill. If you want my advice...”

“My sympathies?”

“A man can’t go around talking the way you do, and not...”

“What sympathies?”

“... expect word to get back to Management. There’s no place at Ramsey-Warner for radical ideas.”

“Radical?”

“Yes, radical, now damn it, Tyler, you’re trying my patience.”

“Sir,” I said, “I’m not a Communist, if that’s what you’re...”

“Did I say you were a Communist?”

“No, but...”

“I did not say you were a Communist, nor do I know whether you’re a member of the Party or not. It has been estimated by the National Security League, however, that there are 600,000 resident Communists here in America, and I can assure you, Tyler, that we don’t want any of them here at this mill. Now if you want my advice, you’ll draw your wages and be quietly grateful for our generosity, that’s my advice to you.”

“Sir,” I said, “this is America. A person can...”

“Yes,” Mr. Moreland answered, “and we’re damn well going to keep it that way.”

There was dazzling sunshine in the yard outside. It reflected from the flat gray of the buildings, so that the walls surrounding me seemed so many mirrors bouncing back light without image. Allen, I thought. Allen Garrett told them. Allen is the only person I’ve ever considered a real friend here, the only person with whom I’ve exchanged ideas, it must have been Allen who said I was a radical. Stunned, I walked across the sunlit yard and tried hopelessly to reconstruct every conversation we’d ever had. “They are little Lenins,” I remember quoting sarcastically, “little Trotskys in our midst,” this was at the beginning of the month, when we were talking about the New York State Assembly’s vote to expel its five elected Socialist members. Yes, of course, oh God, and Allen had quoted in rebuttal a clipping from the Times, sent to him by his uncle in New York, “It was an American vote altogether, a patriotic and conservative vote. An immense majority of the American people will approve and sanction the Assembly’s action,” and I had told him that the Times was crazy, and so was his uncle, and so was he. And hadn’t (no, it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t have been Allen who’d cost me my job) but hadn’t we argued only last week about those two Italians up in Massachusetts, whatever their names were, who had supposedly committed murder and armed robbery, but who were also — coincidentally — radicals who’d taken part in several strikes and who’d organized some kind of protest against the Department of Justice? Hadn’t I said, Oh God, what hadn’t I said, what hadn’t I felt free to discuss with my good friend Allen Garrett?

When I got back to the conveyer belt, he was rolling a log off toward the woodpecker. He squinted down at me from where he stood on the platform, sunlight slabbing his eyes, and said, “What’d Moreland want?”

“I’ve been canned,” I said.

“Why?” Allen asked, looking genuinely shocked.

I did not think it would be difficult to find another job.

We were in the midst of what seemed like lasting prosperity, and even though some gloomy forecasters were predicting a full-scale depression before the end of the year (based, I supposed, upon the recent collapse of farm prices) I could not imagine unemployment walking hand-in-hand with inflation. So in that second week of a Chicago May that quickened my step and elevated my spirits, I put on my best suit each morning, with a clean white shirt and collar, tic held in place by a stickpin made from a pearl my mother had given me as a wedding present, and went off to seek work. I left the house early every day, trying to get to as many mills as possible, but I was usually home by two or three o’clock, and it was Nancy who suggested that the Grzyimeks downstairs must have thought I was a gangster selling illegal whiskey or something, since I kept such elegant hours. I encouraged this idea all during my second week of job-hunting, tipping my hat to Mrs. Grzymek whenever I met her in the hallway, affecting the air of a very successful if somewhat shady businessman off to a strategy meeting, after which I would have lunch at the Commercial Club and then come home in time for an afternoon nap. But at the end of the second futile week of hunting, Mrs. Grzymek ran into Nancy at the butcher’s, and asked, “Has your husband found work yet?” puncturing even that balloon. We had fifty-six dollars in the bank when I lost the job, and by the last week in May, we were down to thirty-two. I was getting just a trifle nervous. Moreover, Nancy was beginning to nag me about not having seen the Garretts in all this time. Sounding like a phonograph record of my own arguments, and probably ticking off the points on her fingers one by one (we were in bed when she treated me to this particular sermon, and I could not see her in the dark) she explained that (1) I was reacting quite hysterically to a climate of suspicion and fear, (2) I was behaving as abominably as Mr. Moreland had, and (3) I was condemning and hanging poor Allen without even giving him the opportunity to defend himself. I politely said, “Pardon?” and rolled over and went to sleep. I had more pressing things on my mind than Allen Garrett’s supposedly injured feelings.

It was raining when I woke up the next morning. The bedroom was chilly and damp. I did not want to get out of bed. I did not want to travel in the rain to Ogden Avenue, where I had a job interview with a Mr. McInerny of Dill-Holderness International. But I thought of those thirty-two dwindling dollars in the bank, and I thought of how tempted I had recently been by a recurring classified advertisement in the Tribune for a washroom attendant at the Blackstone Theater. So I pulled on a pair of trousers over my cotton nightshirt, and went into the hall to perform my morning toilette, even as Bertram A. Tyler might have done in Paris, France, before leaving for his highly profitable automobile agency on the Avenue Neuilly. Then I shaved and dressed myself in the clothes that had so successfully fooled Mrs. Grzymek, kissed Nancy on the cheek, and went out into the rain. I was drenched before I reached the streetcar depot.