For after the majority is achieved and the union... For after the majority is achieved and the union recognized, the leaders make a decision not to strike
Hearn, you don't understand, you can't afford to give a condemnation, you're just a dilettante in labor, and things that seem simple to you aren't
Well, what's the use of building up the union if we're not going to strike? This way it's just dues out of the pay envelopes
Listen, I know this outfit we're up againstIf we strike they'll drop their recognition, fire the lot of us, and pull in a bunch of scabs, this's a mill town, don't forget
And we'll throw them right up against the NLRB
Sure, and after eight months there'll be a decision in our favor, and what the hell are the men going to do in the meantime?
Then why have started the union, and given the men all that bullshit? Because of higher politics?
You don't know enough about it to judgeThe CIO would have been in here next year, Starkley's outfit, Red all the way throughYou've got to build fences, you're being a kid about it, you want everything simple, do this and get that, well, I'll tell you it won't work that way, you got to build a fence around those boys
The editorship is out, and this too, and the others, he realizesA dilettante skipping around sewersEverything is crapped up, everything is phony, everything curdles when you touch itIt has not been the
dolce and gabbana knock off experience itselfThere was the other thing, unfocused, the yearning for what?
On an impulse he goes back to Chicago for a few weeks with his parents
Now, Bob, there's no use kidding around, you been out working and know what the goddam score is, you might as well come in with me, what with these war contracts with Europe, and the armies we're building I can use you, I'm getting so goddam big I don't even know all the damn factories I got a finger in, and it's gonna be getting bigger and biggerI tell you it's different from the way it used to be when I was a kid, everything's tied up now, you know, it sorta gets out of hand, I get a funny feeling when I think of how big the whole works is, it's all consolidated, I can tell youYou're my son, and you're just like me, the only reason you been dicking around is there ain't anything big enough for you to get your teeth inAnd he wonders, feels the stirrings of the deeper urgeI want to think about it
Everything is lousy, so at least why not do it in a big way?
He meets Sally Tendecker Randolph at a party, talks to her in a corner
Oh, sure, Bob, I'm domesticated nowTwo children, and Don (a prep-school classmate) is putting on weight, you won't recognize himIt brings back memories looking at you
After the preliminaries they have a casual affair and he drifts around on the outskirts of her
ladies omega watches group for a month, and then two(The few weeks have elongatedThey are nearly all married with one or two children and governesses and the children are sometimes seen at bedtimeThere is a migratory party almost every night from house to house along Lake Shore Drive, and the wives and husbands are always mixed, always drunkIt is all done in a random, rather irritable kind of lust, and the petting is more frequent than the cuckolding
And once a week or so there is usually a nice public quarrel, or a drunken bathos which grates his spine
Now look, old man, Don Randolph says to him, you and Sally used to be great friends, maybe you are still by God I don't know (the drunken accusing stare) but the truth is Sally and I love each other, a great passion, I've been fooling around and I'm a dog, woman in our office, and Alec Johnson's wife, Beverly, you were there you saw us coming back in the car, stopped off at her house, oh God, wonderful, but I'm a dog, no moral fiber, and I'm(starting to weep) Wonderful children, Sally's a bitch to themHe stands up, lumbers along the dance floor to separate Sally from her partner
The Randolphs are at it again, someone gigglesAnd the thing lurches in his head, and Hearn discovers he is drunk
You remember me, Bob, Sally says, you know what capabilities I have, what talentI tell you there's nothing can stop
prada borse me, but Don's impossible, he'd like to keep me in a rut, and my Lord he's perverted, the things I could tell you about him, and sullen, we went a month and a half one time without touching each other, and you know really he's no good in the business, my father much as told me that, it's just tied down with children and nothing really, you know nothing really I mean definite I can get my teeth into, if I were a man, and I have to make an appointment to get braces for Dorothy's teeth, and I'm always worried about cancer, you can't imagine what a deep worry that is for a woman, somehow I just don't keep up with things, once there was an Air Corps lieutenant, young but really very nice, very sweet, oh, but so na?ve, you can't imagine how old I feel, I envy you, Bob, if I were a man
He knows this thing will not take either, the Lake Shore and conventions and entertaining men who bore him, the rigidity of an office, and eluding his mother's matches, transforming the impulse into carloads and contacts, the campaign contributions and representatives, senators, who are amenable, the Pullman cars, and the tennis courts, the absorption in golf, the particular hotels, and the odor of liquor and carpeting in a suiteBehind it there is the primal satisfaction, but he has learned too many other things on the way
New York again, and a job doing
paolo gucci women's watches copy for a radio network, but this is a stopgap and he knows itRather abstractedly, without any deep feeling, he does a lot of work for Bundles for Britain, and follows the newspaper headlines of the advance on Moscow, thinks not very seriously of joining the partyAt night sometimes he throws off his covers and lies naked on his bed feeling the late fall air eddy through the window, listening with a somber ache to the harbor sounds that float in on the fogA month before Pearl Harbor he enlists in the Army
On the troop transport, which slips under the Golden Gate Bridge and heads out into the Pacific on a chill winter twilight two years later, he stands on deck and stares at San Francisco, fading away like dying logs in a fireplaceAfter a time he can see only the gaunt dark line of land still separating the water from the deepening nightThe waves splash coldly against the hullIn the old one he has looked and looked and butted his head against the wall of his own making
He ducks into a hatchway and lights a cigaretteThere is the phrase "I'm seeking for something" but it gives the process an importance it doesn't really possess, he thinksYou never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant
Somewhere in America now were the cities, and the refuse sitting on the steps, the electric lights and the obeisance to
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