Bellweather began gliding around the table, topping off their champagne flutes. They had already toasted the partnership: now it was time to toast a victory that was all but in their laps. They could see it, smell it, taste it. After a moment, he lifted his flute and, smiling broadly, said, “Here’s to Jack and his holy grail.”
“Hear, hear,” they all chanted.
8
Tuesday night meant chicken barbecue at the plant, a weekly event that nearly all of Perry Arvan’s employees and wives made a point to attend. It was a tradition, a ritual. Something Perry had instituted decades before, back when Arvan Chemicals was a desperate start-up with five employees struggling to build a long-shot dream.
In the early years, Marge, Perry’s lovely young wife, kept the books and performed the secretarial chores. Then the kids came and she stepped back and encouraged him to hire a professional bookkeeper. His sons and daughter worked at the plant almost from infancy. Now his grandchildren were dropping by after school, doing odd jobs and learning the trade in the bottom-up route Perry insisted they follow. It was a family place, cradle to grave, always had been, and he fought hard to keep it that way. Nearly three-quarters of his employees were relatives of each other, in one way or another. Sons and daughters hauled vats of chemicals right beside their fathers and mothers. “Uncle This” and “Auntie That” were frequently bellowed about the plant. These days, increasingly, grandchildren of employees he’d known for more than forty years were on the payroll.
As always, Perry stood by the door, warmly greeting everybody who entered. He knew them all by name. He knew their children, where they lived, had attended many of their weddings and stood somberly at the funerals of their kin. They came to him with their problems and tragedies, and he knew those, too.
The world around him had changed, not much for the better, Perry thought. After attending Princeton University for his undergraduate, his master’s, and his doctorate in thermochemistry, he had made the easy decision to plant his dream a few miles down the road, in Trenton.
Trenton was a roaring factory town back then, home to countless small, bustling firms, like his, that fed the fabulous appetites of larger companies, from the great automobile manufacturers in Detroit to the vast array of large chemical firms sprinkled around New Jersey. “Trenton makes, the world takes,” boasted the proud lights on the big bridge that spanned the sluggish, muddy Delaware River to Pennsylvania.
A sad joke these days. A glittering homage to irony. Trenton had long since been eclipsed as a manufacturing center, then entered a period of steep decline. A city that once bragged of almost as many diemakers as Detroit could now only boast of having almost as many murderers, drive-by killers, and muggers. It seemed to Perry that the town had become little more than a swamp of abandoned warehouses, blighted blocks, and unhappy, desolate, drug-addled people.
Perry had watched it all with sad awareness; the decay came fast and cruel. Once-bountiful parks became drugstores where the hopeless bought from the desperate, snorting white stuff up their nostrils or pushing dirty needles in their veins. The only businesses that expanded were bars, racing to keep up with the swift upsurge in drunks. The abrupt eruption of crime and gangs simply overwhelmed the police force. Kids were shot down in school. There was a flood of muggings and rapes and stickups. The local hospitals overflowed with addicts and overdoses and shooting victims who, too often, were children.
He mourned the passing of a once great town. Perry had been sorely tempted to pack up and move a thousand times. But he stayed. Trenton was his home. Arvan Chemicals was one of the last of the breed and proud of it, a place of employment from birth to death, where hard work was rewarded, where families stayed and struggled together.
“Evening, Perry,” Marcus Washington said, pumping hard with his left hand. Perry smiled back and offered his customary “Welcome to the big bake.” One of the many old-timers, Marcus had joined Arvan back in 1968 after an ill-fated tour in Vietnam, where he lost his right eye and the lower part of his right arm. He was desperate for work, horribly scarred, and despite his mangled condition and the manual nature of factory work, Perry took him on. Marcus had never once given him cause to regret that decision.
“Marcus, Angela. Chicken’s still on the grill, but you know where the drinks are.”
“That’s exactly what I need, a drink,” Angela grunted as she stoutly shoved her way past. “Maybe two or three.”
A drink? Oh no, that’s the last thing you need, Perry was tempted to shout, but pursed his lips and smiled at her anyway. It wouldn’t help, wouldn’t make any difference at all. She and Marcus had met in the plant. He worked on the floor, Angela clerked in shipping. They actually held their wedding in the factory, a big to-do with the whole place bedecked with flowers and shiny gold crepe, the works. Back then Angela was a pretty girl, petite, flirty, a smile-a-minute type. After three dispiriting miscarriages, they finally produced a little boy, a tousle-headed, freckly little redhead named Danny, who was their pride and joy.
Poor Danny lived to the ripe age of eight before he fell ill with a painful blood disease nobody could identify or treat, much less cure. Perry and the workers scraped together what money they could afford to help defray the increasingly expensive treatments. In the end, though, young Danny passed away, screaming in agony. Marcus swallowed the pain and soldiered on. He’d lost pieces of himself in Vietnam; he’d learned to endure loss. But Angela turned moody, sour, and unhappy, ballooned in weight, and adopted booze to assuage her grief. She was so big now she waddled. She took to wearing spandex tights and was quite a sight.
She frequently got drunk at these events and made a damn fool of herself. And that was okay, too. Family. All one big family, they understood, and forgiveness came easy.
Marge sidled up beside him. “Seven o’clock, dear,” she whispered, seizing his arm and tugging him inside. “Time for you to get a drink and eat.”
Perry stole another glance at the parking lot. He saw no latecomers so he nodded and allowed Marge to drag him through the big doors. They held hands and strolled together through the reception area, then entered what the workers fondly called “Perry’s Versailles.”
Arvan had started out in a small red-brick building on a corner lot. Over the years, more buildings had been added to the cluster as the business grew from a drip of a dream into a prosperous midsize enterprise, and the plant expanded from one small building into a vast maze of vats and mixing tanks and labs. Perry had personally overseen every detail of the expansion, always adhering to his red-brick rule; every building had thirty-foot ceilings, red-brick walls inside and out, large swinging windows for safety purposes, with everything situated around a large green courtyard, which now was totally surrounded and enclosed. Given the array of dangerous chemicals, safety and security were always foremost and no expense was spared: the complex now resembled a fortress.
On Sundays, he and Marge and whatever workers cared to contribute tended the gardens inside the courtyard. Trees and bushes and exotic shrubs had been imported from around the world, meticulously chosen by Perry; no matter the season, something was always in bloom. But in springtime the little courtyard exploded with colors and leaves and tendrils of unimaginable assortment. A dozen fountains and ten koi ponds were sprinkled around, along with too many stone benches to count.
It seemed that as the streets around the plant grew rougher, uglier, and more dilapidated, Perry’s gardens flowered into even more of a paradise. The barbecue was always held in the courtyard, and tonight was no different. Two hundred workers and their families were already milling about, drinking and spreading whatever hot rumors they had picked up this week.