let Daddy conduct the tour, okay?” Merry as a little girl reveling in the
dazzling idea of stealing time. Merry flitting from floor to floor, so proud and
proprietary, flaunting her familiarity with all the employees, unaware as yet of
the desecration of dignity inherent to the ruthless exploitation of the worker
by the profit-hungry boss who unjustly owns the means of production.
No wonder he felt so untamed, craving to spill over with talk. Momentarily it
was then again—nothing blown up, nothing ruined. As a family they still flew the
flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from
slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to self-confident,
accomplished, independent father to the highest high flier of them all, the
fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself. No wonder he
couldn’t shut up. It was impossible to shut up. The Swede was giving in to the
ordinary human wish to live once again in the past—to spend a self-deluding,
harmless few moments back in the wholesome striving of the past, when the family
endured by a truth in no way grounded in abetting destruction but rather in
eluding and outlasting destruction, overcom-
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ing its mysterious inroads by creating the Utopia of a rational existence.
* * *
He heard her asking, “How many come in a shipment?”
“How many skins? A couple of thousand dozen skins.”
“A bale is how many?”
He liked finding that she was interested in every last detail. Yes, talking to
this attentive student up from Wharton, he was suddenly able to like something
as he had not been able to like anything, to bear anything, even to understand
anything he’d come up against for four lifeless months. He’d felt himself
instead to be perishing of everything. “Oh, a hundred and twenty skins,” he
replied.
She continued taking notes as she asked, “They come right to your shipping
department?”
“They come to the tannery. The tannery is a contractor. We buy the material and
then we give it to them, and we give them the process to use and then they
convert it into leather for us. My grandfather and my father worked in the
tannery right here in Newark. So did I, for six months, when I started in the
business. Ever been inside a tannery?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you’ve got to go to a tannery if you’re going to write about leather.
I’ll set that up for you if you’d like that. They’re primitive places. The
technology has improved things, but what you’ll see isn’t that different from
what you would have seen hundreds of years ago. Awful work. Said to be the
oldest industry of which relics have been found anywhere. Six-thousand-year-old
relics of tanning found somewhere—Turkey, I believe. First clothing was just
skins that were tanned by smoking them. I told you it was an interesting subject
once you get into it. My father is the leather scholar. He’s who you should be
talking to, but he’s living in Florida now. Start my father off about gloves and
he’ll talk for two days running. That’s typical, by the way. Glovemen love the
trade and everything about it. Tell me, have you ever seen anything
manufactured, Miss Cohen?”
“I can’t say I have.”
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“Never seen anything made?”
“Saw my mother make a cake when I was a kid.”
He laughed. She had made him laugh. A feisty innocent, eager to learn. His
daughter was easily a foot taller than Rita Cohen, fair where she was dark, but
otherwise Rita Cohen, homely little thing though she was, had begun to remind
him of Merry before her repugnance set in and she began to become their enemy.
The good-natured intelligence that would just waft out of her and into the house
when she came home from school overbrimming with what she’d learned in class.
How she remembered everything. Everything neatly taken down in her notebook and
memorized overnight.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to bring you right through
the whole process. Come on. We’re going to make you a pair of gloves and you’re
going to watch them being made from start to finish. What size do you wear?”
“I don’t know. Small.”
* * *
He’d gotten up from the desk and come around and taken hold of her hand. “Very
small. I’m guessing you’re a four.” He’d already got from the top drawer of his
desk a measuring tape with a D ring at one end, and now he put it around her
hand, threaded the other end through the D ring, and pulled the tape around her
palm. “We’ll see what kind of guesser I am. Close your hand.” She made a fist,
causing the hand to slightly expand, and he read the size in French inches.
“Four it is. In a ladies’ size that’s as small as they come. Anything smaller is
a child’s. Come on. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
He felt as though he’d stepped right back into the mouth of the past as they
started, side by side, up the wooden steps of the old stairwell. He heard
himself telling her (while simultaneously hearing his father telling her), “You
always sort your skins at the northern side of the factory, where there’s no
direct sunlight. That way you can really study the skins for quality. Where the
sunlight comes in you can’t see. The cutting room and the sorting, always on the
northern side. Sorting at the top. The second floor the cutting. And
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the first floor, where you came, the making. Bottom floor finishing and
shipping. We’re going to work our way from the top down.”
That they did. And he was happy. He could not help himself. It was not right. It
was not real. Something must be done to stop this. But she was busy taking
notes, and he could not stop—a girl who knew the value of hard work and paying
attention, and interested in the right things, interested in the preparation of
leather and the manufacture of gloves, and to stop himself was impossible.
When someone is suffering as the Swede was suffering, asking him to be undeluded
by a momentary uplifting, however dubious its rationale, is asking an awful lot.
In the cutting room, there were twenty-five men at work, about six to a table,
and the Swede led her over to the oldest of them, whom he introduced as “the
Master,” a small, bald fellow with a hearing aid who continued working at a
rectangular piece of leather—”That’s the piece the glove is made from,” said the
Swede, “called a trank”—working at it with a ruler and shears all the time that
the Swede was telling her just who this Master was. With a light heart. Still
floating free. Doing nothing to stop it. Letting his father’s patter flow.
The cutting room was where the Swede had got inspired to follow his father into
gloves, the place where he believed he’d grown from a boy into a man. The
cutting room, up high and full of light, had been his favorite spot in the
factory since he was just a kid and the old European cutters came to work
identically dressed in three-piece suits, starched white shirts, ties,
suspenders, and cuff links. Each cutter would
carefully remove the suit coat and
hang it in the closet, but no one in the Swede’s memory had ever removed the
tie, and only a very few descended to the informality of removing the vest, let
alone turning up shirtsleeves, before donning a fresh white apron and getting
down to the first skin, unrolling it from the dampened muslin cloth and
beginning the work of stretching. The wall of big windows to the north
illuminated the hardwood cutting tables with the cool, even light you needed for
grading and matching and cutting skins. The polished smoothness of the table’s
125
rounded edge, worked smooth over the years from all the animal skins stretched
across it and pulled to length, was so provocative to the boy that he always had
to restrain himself from rushing to press the concavity of his cheek against the
convexity of the wood—restrained himself until he was alone. There was a blurry
* * *
line of footprints worn into the wood floor where the men stood all day at the
cutting tables, and when no one else was up there he liked to go and stand with
his shoes where the floor was worn away. Watching the cutters work, he knew that
they were the elite and that they knew it and the boss knew it. Though they
considered themselves to be men more aristocratic than anyone around, including
the boss, a cutter’s working hand was proudly calloused from cutting with his
big, heavy shears. Beneath those white shirts were arms and chests and shoulders
full of a workingman’s strength—powerful they had to be, to pull and pull on
leather all their lives, to squeeze out of every skin every inch of leather
there was.
A lot of licking went on, a lot of saliva went into every glove, but, as his
father joked, “The customer never knows it.” The cutter would spit into the dry
inking material in which he rubbed the brush for the stencil that numbered the
pieces he cut from each trank. Having cut a pair of gloves, he would touch his
finger to his tongue so as to wet the numbered pieces, to stick them together
before they were rubber-banded for the sewing forelady and the sewers. What the
boy never got over were those first German cutters employed by Newark Maid, who
used to keep a schooner of beer beside them and sip from it, they said, “to keep
the whistle wet” and their saliva flowing. Quickly enough Lou Levov had done
away with the beer, but the saliva? No. Nobody could want to do away with the
saliva. That was part and parcel of all that they loved, the son and heir no
less than the founding father.
“Harry can cut a glove as good as any of them.” Harry, the Master, stood
directly beside the Swede, indifferent to his boss’s words and doing his work.
“He’s only been forty-one years with Newark Maid but he works at it. The cutter
has to visualize how the skin is going to realize itself into the maximum number
of gloves.
126
Then he has to cut it. Takes great skill to cut a glove right. Table cutting is
an art. No two skins are alike. The skins all come in different according to
each animal’s diet and age, every one different as far as stretchability goes,
and the skill involved in making every glove come out like every other is
amazing. Same thing with the sewing. Kind of work people don’t want to do
anymore. You |s can’t just take a sewer who knows how to run a traditional
sewing V. machine, or knows how to sew dresses, and start her here on
gloves. She has to go through a three- or four-month training process, has u
to have finger dexterity, has to have patience, and it’s six months |
before she’s proficient and reaches even eighty percent efficiency. | Glove
sewing is a tremendously complicated procedure. If you h want to make a
better glove, you have to spend money and train ki workers. Takes a lot of
hard work and attention, all the twists and turns where the finger crotches are
sewn—it’s very hard. In the days when my father first opened a glove shop, the
people were in it for life—Harry’s the last of them. This cutting room is one of
the last in this hemisphere. Our production is still always full. We still have
people here who know what they’re doing. Nobody cuts gloves this way anymore,
not in this country, where hardly anybody’s left to i f cut them, and not
anywhere else either, except maybe in a little I family-run shop in Naples
or Grenoble. These were people, the % people who worked here, who were in it for
life. They were born into the glove industry and they died in the glove
industry. Today we’re constantly retraining people. Today our economy is such
that people take a job here and if something comes along for another fifty cents
an hour, they’re gone.”
She wrote all this down.
} “When I first came into the business and my father sent me up here to
learn how to cut, all I did was stand right here at the cutting ‘ table and
* * *
the ground up. My father started me literally sweeping the floors. Went through
every single department, getting a feel for each operation and why it was being
done. From Harry I learned how to cut a glove. I wouldn’t say I was a proficient
glove
· 127 ·
¦ 1 11
cutter. If I cut two, three pairs a day it was a lot, but I learned the
rudimentary principles—right, Harry? A demanding teacher, this fellow. When he
shows you how to do something, he goes all the way. Learning from Harry almost
made me yearn for my old man. First day I came up here Harry set me straight—he
told me that down where he lived boys would come to his door and say, ‘Could you
teach me to be a glove cutter?’ and he would tell them, ‘You’ve got to pay me
fifteen thousand first, because that’s how much time and leather you’re going to
destroy till you get to the point where you can make the minimum wage.’ I
watched him for a full two months before he let me anywhere near a hide. An
average table cutter will cut three, three and a half dozen a day. A good, fast
table cutter will cut five dozen a day. Harry was cutting five and a half dozen
a day. ‘You think I’m good?’ he told me. ‘You should have seen my dad.’ Then he
told me about his father and the tall man from Barnum and Bailey. Remember,
Harry?” Harry nodded. “When the Barnum and Bailey circus came to Newark …
this is 1917,1918?” Harry nodded again without stopping his work. “Well, they
came to town and they had a tall man, approaching nine feet or so, and Harry’s
father saw him one day in the street, walking along the street, at Broad and
Market, and he got so excited he ran over to the tall man and he took his
shoelace off his own shoe, measured the guy’s hand right out there on the
street, and he went home and made up a perfect size-seventeen pair of gloves.
Harry’s father cut it and his mom sewed it, and they went over to the circus and
gave the gloves to the tall man, and the whole family got free seats, and a big
story about Harry’s dad ran in the Newark News the next day.”
Harry corrected him. “The Star-Eagle.”
“
Right, before it merged with the Ledger.”
“Wonderful,” the girl said, laughing. “Your father must have been very skilled.”
“Couldn’t speak a word of English,” Harry told her.
“He couldn’t? Well, that just goes to show, you don’t have to
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know English,” she said, “to cut a perfect pair of gloves for a man nine feet
tall.”
Harry didn’t laugh but the Swede did, laughed and put his arm around her. “This
is Rita. We’re going to make her a dress glove, size four. Black or brown,
honey?”
“Brown?”
From a wrapped-up bundle of hides dampening beside Harry, he picked one out in a
pale shade of brown. “This is a tough color to get,” the Swede told her.
“British tan. You can see, there’s all sorts of variation in the color—see how
light it is there, how dark it is down there? Okay. This is sheepskin. What you
* * *
saw in my office was pickled. This has been tanned. This is leather. But you can
still see the animal. If you were to look at the animal,” he said, “here it is—
the head, the butt, the front legs, the hind legs, and here’s the back, where
the leather is harder and thicker, as it is over our own backbones… .”
Honey. He began calling her honey up in the cutting room and he could not stop,
and this even before he understood that by standing beside her he was as close
to Merry as he had been since the general store blew up and his honey
disappeared. This is a French ruler, it’s about an inch longer than an American