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  years after the ‘67 riots, held on in the face of industry-wide economic

  realities and his father’s imprecations as long as he possibly could, but when

  he was unable to stop the erosion of the workmanship, which had deteriorated

  steadily since the riots, he’d given up, managing to get out more or less

  unharmed by the city’s collapse. All the Newark Maid factory had suffered in the

  four days of rioting were some broken windows, though fifty yards from the gate

  to his loading dock, out on West Market, two other buildings had been gutted by

  fire and abandoned.

  * * *

  “Taxes, corruption, and race. My old man’s litany. Anybody at all, people from

  all over the country who couldn’t care less about the fate of Newark, made no

  difference to him—whether it was down in Miami Beach at the condo, on a cruise

  ship in the Caribbean, they’d get an earful about his beloved old Newark,

  butchered to death by taxes, corruption, and race. My father was one of those

  Prince Street guys who loved that city all his life. What happened to Newark

  broke his heart.

  “It’s the worst city in the world, Skip,” the Swede was telling me. “Used to be

  the city where they manufactured everything. Now it’s the car-theft capital of

  the world. Did you know that? Not the most gruesome of the gruesome developments

  but it’s awful enough. The thieves live mostly in our old neighborhood. Black

  kids. Forty cars stolen in Newark every twenty-four hours. That’s the statistic.

  Something, isn’t it? And they’re murder weapons—once they’re stolen, they’re

  flying missiles. The target is anybody in the street— old people, toddlers,

  doesn’t matter. Out in front of our factory was the Indianapolis Speedway to

  them. That’s another reason we left. Four, five kids drooping out the windows,

  eighty miles an hour— right on Central Avenue. When my father bought the

  factory, there were trolley cars on Central Avenue. Further down were the auto

  showrooms. Central Cadillac. LaSalle. There was a factory where somebody was

  making something in every side street. Now there’s a liquor store in every

  street—a liquor store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church. Everything

  else in ruins or boarded up. But when my father bought the factory, a stone’s

  throw away Kiler made watercoolers, Fortgang made fire alarms, Lasky made

  corsets, Robbins made pillows, Honig made pen points—Christ, I sound like my

  father. But he was right—’The joint’s jumpin’,’ he used to say. The major

  industry now is car theft. Sit at a light in Newark, anywhere in Newark, and all

  you’re doing is looking around you. Bergen near Lyons is where I got rammed.

  Remember Henry’s, ‘the Sweet Shop,’ next to the Park Theater? Well, right there,

  where Henry’s used to be. Took my first high school date to Henry’s for a soda.

  In a booth there. Arlene Danziger. Took her for a black-and-white soda after the

  movie. But a black-and-white doesn’t mean a soda anymore on Bergen Street. It

  means the worst kind of hatred in the world. A car coming the wrong way on a

  one-way street and they ram me. Four kids drooping out the windows. Two of them

  get out, laughing, joking, and point a gun at my head. I hand over the keys and

  one of them takes off in my car. Right in front of what used to be Henry’s. It’s

  something horrible. They ram cop cars in broad daylight. Front-end collisions.

  To explode the air bags. Doughnuting. Heard of doughnuting? Doing doughnuts? You

  haven’t heard about this? This is what they steal the cars for. Top speed, they

  slam on the brakes, yank the emergency brake, twist the steering wheel, and the

  car starts spinning. Wheeling the car in circles at tremendous speeds. Killing

  pedestrians means nothing to them. Killing motorists means nothing to them.

  Killing themselves

  means nothing to them. The skid marks are enough to frighten you. They killed a

  woman right out in front of our place, same week my car was stolen. Doing a

  doughnut. I witnessed this. I was leaving for the day. Tremendous speed. The car

  groaning. Ungodly screeching. It was terrifying. It made my blood run cold. Just

  driving her own car out of 2nd Street, and this woman, young black woman, gets

  it. Mother of three kids. Two days later it’s one of my own employees. A black

  guy. But they don’t care, black, white doesn’t matter to them. They’ll kill

  anyone. Fellow named Clark Tyler, my shipping guy—all he’s doing is pulling out

  of our lot to go home. Twelve hours of surgery, four months in a hospital.

  Permanent disability. Head injuries, internal injuries, broken pelvis, broken

  shoulder, fractured spine. A high-speed chase, crazy kid in a stolen car and the

  cops are chasing him, and the kid plows right into him, crushes the driver’s-

  side door, and that’s it for Clark. Eighty miles an hour down Central Avenue.

  The car thief is twelve years old. To see over the wheel he has to roll up the

  * * *

  floor mats to sit on. Six months in Jamesburg and he’s back behind the wheel of

  another stolen car. No, that was it for me, too. My car’s robbed at gunpoint,

  they cripple Clark, the woman gets killed—that week did it. That was enough.”

  Newark Maid manufactured now exclusively in Puerto Rico. For a while, after

  leaving Newark, he’d contracted with the Communist government in Czechoslovakia

  and divided the work between his own factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and a Czech

  glove factory in Brno. However, when a plant that suited him went up for sale in

  Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, over near Mayagiiez, he’d bailed out on the Czechs,

  whose bureaucracy had been irritating from the start, and unified his

  manufacturing operation by purchasing a second Puerto Rico facility, another

  good-sized factory, moved in the machinery, started a training program, and

  hired an additional three hundred people. By the eighties, though, even Puerto

  Rico began to grow expensive and about everybody but Newark Maid fled to

  wherever in the Far East the labor force was abundant and cheap, to the

  Philippines first, then Korea and Taiwan, and now to China.

  26

  Even baseball gloves, the most American glove of all, which used to be made by

  friends of his father’s, the Denkerts up in Johnstown, New York, for a long time

  now had been manufactured in Korea. When the first guy left Gloversville, New

  York, in ‘52 or ‘53 and went to the Philippines to make gloves, they laughed at

  him, as though he were going to the moon. But when he died, around 1978, he had

  a factory there with four thousand workers and the whole industry had gone

  essentially from Gloversville to the Philippines. Up in Gloversville, when the

  Second World War began, there must have been ninety glove factories, big and

  small. Today there isn’t a one—all of them out of business or importers from

  abroad, “people who don’t know a fourchette from a thumb,” the Swede said.

  “They’re business people, they know if they need a hundred thousand pair of this

  and two hundred thousand pair of that in so many colors and so many sizes, but

  they don’t know the details on how to get it done.” “What’s a fourchette?” I

  asked. “The part of the gl
ove between the fingers. Those small oblong pieces

  between the fingers, they’re die-cut along with the thumbs—those are the

  fourchettes. Today you’ve got a lot of underqualified people, probably don’t

  know half what I knew when I was five, and they’re making some pretty big

  decisions. A guy buying deerskin, which can run up to maybe three dollars and

  fifty cents a foot for a garment grade, he’s buying this fine garment-grade

  deerskin to cut a little palm patch to go on a pair of ski gloves. I talked to

  him just the other day. A novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and

  he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and

  come out a long, long ways ahead. You multiply this over a large order, you’re

  talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew it. He could have

  put a hundred grand in his pocket.”

  The Swede found himself hanging on in P.R., he explained, the way he had hung on

  in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the

  intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could

  give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father’s

  days; but also, he had to admit, staying on because his family so much enjoyed

  the vacation home he’d built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not

  very far from the Ponce plant. The life the kids lived there they just loved …

  and off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving,

  catamaraning … and though it was clear from all he had just been telling me

  that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn’t appear to have any

  judgment at all as to what was and wasn’t interesting about his world. Or, for

  reasons I couldn’t understand, he didn’t want his world to be interesting. I

  would have given anything to get him back to Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins,

  * * *

  and Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove

  done, even back to the guy who’d paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of

  deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil

  way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of

  his boys on land and sea.

  While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in

  a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his

  prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds

  underweight.

  “The operation went okay?”

  “Just fine,” he replied.

  “A couple friends of mine,” I said, “didn’t emerge from that surgery as they’d

  hoped to. That operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get

  the cancer out.”

  “Yes, that happens, I know.”

  “One wound up impotent,” I said. “The other’s impotent and incontinent. Fellows

  my age. It’s been rough for them. Desolating. It can leave you in diapers.”

  The person I had referred to as “the other” was me. I’d had the surgery in

  Boston, and—except for confiding in a Boston friend who had helped me through

  the ordeal till I was back on my feet—when I returned to the house where I live

  alone, two and a half hours west of Boston, in the Berkshires, I had thought it

  best to

  28

  keep to myself both the fact that I’d had cancer and the ways it had left me

  impaired.

  “Well,” said the Swede, “I got off easy, I guess.”

  “I’d say you did,” I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of

  self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wanted. To respect

  everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be

  inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by

  incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by anger … life just unraveling

  for the Swede like a fluffy ball of yarn.

  This line of thinking brought me back to his letter, his request for

  professional advice about the tribute to his father that he was trying to write.

  I wasn’t myself going to bring up the tribute, and yet the pilzzle remained not

  only as to why he didn’t but as to why, if he didn’t, he had written me about it

  in the first place. I could only conclude—given what I now knew of this life

  neither overly rich in contrasts nor troubled too much by contradiction—that the

  letter and its contents had to do with the operation, with something

  uncharacteristic that arose in him afterward, some surprising new emotion that

  had come to the fore. Yes, I thought, the letter grew out of Swede Levov’s

  belated discovery of what it means to be not healthy but sick, to be not strong

  but weak; what it means to not look great—what physical shame is, what

  humiliation is, what the gruesome is, what extinction is, what it is like to ask

  “Why?” Betrayed all at once by a wonderful body that had furnished him only with

  assurance and had constituted the bulk of his advantage over others, he had

  momentarily lost his equilibrium and had clutched at me, of all people, as a

  means of grasping his dead father and calling up the father’s power to protect

  him. For a moment his nerve was shattered, and this man who, as far as I could

  * * *

  tell, used himself mainly to conceal himself had been transformed into an

  impulsive, devitalized being in dire need of a blessing. Death had burst into

  the dream of his life (as, for the second time in ten years, it had burst into

  mine), and the things that disquiet men our age disquieted even him.

  29

  I wondered if he was willing any longer to recall the sickbed vulnerability that

  had made certain inevitabilities as real for him as the exterior of his family’s

  life, to remember the shadow that had insinuated itself like a virulent icing

  between the layers and layers of contentment. Yet he’d showed up for our dinner

  date. Did that mean the unendurable wasn’t blotted out, the safeguards weren’t

  back in place, the emergency wasn’t yet over? Or was showing up and going

  blithely on about everything that was endurable his way of purging the last of

  his fears? The more I thought about this simple-seeming soul sitting across from

  me eating zabaglione and exuding sincerity, the farther from him my thinking

  carried me. The man within the man was scarcely perceptible to me. I could not

  make sense of him. I couldn’t imagine him at all, having come down with my own

  strain of the Swede’s disorder: the inability to draw conclusions about anything

  but exteriors. Rooting around trying to figure this guy out is ridiculous, I

  told myself. This is the jar you cannot open. This guy cannot be cracked by

  thinking. That’s the mystery of his mystery. It’s like trying to get something

  out of Michelangelo’s David.

  I’d given him my number in my letter—why hadn’t he called to break the date if

  he was no longer deformed by the prospect of death? Once it was all back to how

  it had always been, once he’d recovered that special luminosity that had never

  failed to win whatever he wanted, what use did he have for me? No, his letter, I

  thou
ght, cannot be the whole story—if it were, he wouldn’t have come. Something

  remains of the rash urge to change things. Something that overtook him in the

  hospital is still there. An unexam-ined existence no longer serves his needs. He

  wants something recorded. That’s why he’s turned to me: to record what might

  otherwise be forgotten. Omitted and forgotten. What could it be?

  Or maybe he was just a happy man. Happy people exist too. Why shouldn’t they?

  All the scattershot speculation about the Swede’s motives was only my

  professional impatience, my trying to imbue Swede Levov with something like the

  tendentious meaning Tolstoy assigned to Ivan Ilych, so belittled by the author

  in the uncharitable

  story in which he sets out to heartlessly expose, in clinical terms, what it is

  to be ordinary. Ivan Ilych is the well-placed high-court official who leads “a

  decorous life approved of by society” and who on his deathbed, in the depths of

  his unceasing agony and terror, thinks, “‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to

  have done.’” Ivan Ilych’s life, writes Tolstoy, summarizing, right at the

  outset, his judgment of the presiding judge with the delightful St. Petersburg

  house and a handsome salary of three thousand rubles a year and friends all of

  good social position, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most

  terrible. Maybe so. Maybe in Russia in 1886. But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in

  1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after

  their morning round of golf and start to crow, “It doesn’t get any better than

  this,” they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.

  Swede Levov’s life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and