McQuade nodded.
“Well, come on over. The older cutters are working on the right, over there. They handle all the expensive materials, where mistakes would be costly. Like Spanish Sapphire silk, for example. We couldn’t trust that to an apprentice cutter. Or even lace, for that matter. Cutting reptiles is a different story. When we’re cutting alligator, say, we put the men on time. We can’t afford the rushing that accompanies piece-work, not with reptile skins as high as they are. Now, the apprentice cutters are over here. They’re cutting linings and fleece and backstays and sock linings and cushions and some of the cheaper fabrics for uppers. They’re not as good as our older cutters, you see, but they learn by experience. Come on over and we’ll watch one.”
They worked their way over through an aisle, dodging the runners who were carrying armloads of fabric and leather, dodging the boys and girls who were busily extracting patterns from the drawers.
Griff stopped alongside one of the cutters, a muscular boy who stood almost as tall as McQuade, black hair curling on his head and in the open V of his shirt collar. His sleeves were rolled up, and his sinewy arms were covered with the same dense black growth.
“Hello, Charlie,” Griff said. “How goes it?”
Charlie Fields looked up quickly. “Oh, hello, Mr. Griffin,” he said. Griff was surprised at the formality because he knew Charlie well, and they’d been on a first-name, coffee-drinking, dirty-joke-telling basis for a good long while now. Charlie glanced uneasily at McQuade then, and Griff suddenly got the picture. He remembered Max’s cool formality in the elevator, and Jimmy’s nervousness just now in the Leather Room, and then he remembered telling Benny Compo about the visitor from Georgia. Benny had probably passed the word to the other foremen, and the word had sped along the factory floors. Titanic is here; on your toes! And, forgetting his own earlier panic, Griff found the factory reaction somewhat amusing. Jefferson McQuade was turning out to be a hell of a nice guy, and there was certainly no reason to fear him.
“Charlie,” he said, “would you mind showing Mr. McQuade that knife you’re using?”
“Not at all,” Charlie said nervously. He picked up the knife from the cutting bench and handed it to Griff handle-first. The handle looked like the wooden handle of a manual can opener, round and squat. The blade was a short, hooked piece of curving metal, looking like an extended half moon.
“This is razor-sharp,” Griff said. “It has to be in order to cut through some of the leathers that come out of the Leather Room.”
McQuade-glanced at the knife and then took it from Griff, hefting it on the palm of his hand, as if he were choosing a weapon for a duel. “It looks sharp enough,” he said respectfully.
“What are you cutting, Charlie?” Griff asked.
“Sock linings,” Charlie said. “Shall I cut one for you, Mr. Griffin?”
“Would you, please?”
McQuade handed the knife back to Charlie, and Charlie picked up the brass-bound pattern of the sock lining and placed it on the pale blue fabric. Quickly and expertly, he traced the pattern with the sharp edge of the cutting knife. He pulled the pattern away then and lifted the gracefully feminine sock lining from the bench, leaving the imprint of the sole in the remainder of the fabric, like a wet footprint on a blue tile floor.
“Simple as that,” Griff said. “Thanks, Charlie.” He turned back to McQuade and said, “All of those people are doing the same thing, cutting. Come along, will you?”
McQuade turned his head over his shoulder and smiled. “Thanks for your trouble, Charlie,” he said, and followed Griff.
“So, that’s the Cutting Room,” Griff said, walking over toward the sewing machines, “and here’s Prefitting, where all these girls are working. They do the very basic putting together, the elementary stuff, stitching vamp to quarter, and upper to lining, oh, all the preliminary work before the material goes down to Fitting on the seventh floor. Come on over and take a look.” He led McQuade to one of the sewing machines, and the girl at it looked up and then lowered her eyes quickly. Her hands fumbled with the shoe upper as she placed it in position under the needle, ready to stitch it to the lining. McQuade watched attentively for a moment, and Griff said, “That’s all there is to it. We can take the stairway down, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” McQuade said.
He took him down to Fitting, and he heard his own voice droning on, explaining, explaining. McQuade’s face became expressionless. At regular intervals, he asked interested, pertinent questions, or nodded, or said, “I see,” or “Of course,” or “I understand,” or “Yes,” or “Uh-huh,” but his face remained expressionless throughout the tour.
“…putting in the steel shank here in this department. You’ll never find this in a cheap shoe, Mr. McQuade. This piece of steel in its sleeve is put into the breasting of the shoe here, so that the shoe won’t snap in two some day. Then this cork is glued on either side of the shank, to level it off so that the heel and sole can be…”
“Yes, I see.”
The smells of the factory assailed their nostrils, a new smell, a different smell for each department, the smells Griff would never tire of, the smells he loved. The smell of good rich leather, and the smell of benzine, and the smell of rubber cement, and the smell of ether, and the smell of compo, and the smell of machines and men.
“…is where the sole is glued to the shoe. You’ll see here on the assembly line these leather cushions which inflate with air and press the glued sole tightly to the inner sole. The last, you understand, is still in the shoe during all these operations. The last is not pulled until later. You saw how the uppers were tacked to the last upstairs, remember? That machine that spits tacks into the leather? Well, that last is not removed until the shoe…”
“Of course.”
And the sights of the factory. The fellow doing pinking, with a collection of Marilyn Monroe pinups behind his machine, arranged with painstaking care on two large sheets of cardboard, the most famous pose placed prominently in the center. The old newspapers tacked on the wall behind a machine in the Stock-fitting Department: YANKEES WIN. — IT’S IKE! — SKIRTS GO HIGHER THIS YEAR. The nude calendars everywhere. In Assembly, a calendar exhibiting a naked girl with really remarkable mammary glands, a calendar distributed by GRAINGER’S HARDWARE COMPANY, and on either side of the girl’s magnificent body, the penciled comment: “Some hardware!” The sink near the stairway leading down from Lasting, a dirty, filth-encrusted. sink above which a crayoned sign warned: “Keep this sink clean; It is used by lasters and bed lasters. Thank you.” The union posters on every floor of the factory, the fire hoses in the hallways, the numbers on the racks, 15, 16, 17, announcing the priority each lot of shoes enjoyed, gaily printed on green, yellow, and pink cards.
And the people. The people of the factory. The people bent over glue pots, their fingers encrusted with the stuff. The people shoving leather soles into folding machines, the people stitching and the people sewing, and the people trimming and cutting and stamping and wiping and binding and cleaning and drying and tacking and pulling and talking and laughing; the Puerto Rican women with their full breasts in low-cut smocks, the sweat beaded on their breasts, the gold crosses dangling in the valley of shadow; the mental defective on the fourth floor whom one of the Kahns had hired out of generosity, pushing his racks full of shoes; the people clipping tickets, pink shreds and white shreds, shreds that meant money, one cent, or one cent four mills, or two cents, or two cents two mills, clipped from the work ticket and shoved into a bench drawer, or put into a cigar box, people doing their jobs quickly, adding up the cents, adding up the tenths of a cent; the man at the sanding machine, expertly smoothing the breasting of a shoe, his fingers wrapped in adhesive bandages to forestall any accidents; the man standing near the Muller machine, the machine inoperative, its wide doors open, its red bulb glowing, its leather hanging inside like sides of miniature beef in a butcher shop, waiting to be softened. The people, the people sweating and grinning, intent or indifferent, their laughter suddenly silenced whenever the man from Titanic walked through the floor.