At one time or another, all of Grandma’s grandchildren got their mouths
washed with the lie soap--all but me. Why I was spared, I’ve often
wondered. It wasn’t for lack of provocation, that’s certain. I’ve
thought perhaps Grandma had an intuitive grasp of scientific method,
and kept me as a control. Or ... well, so far as I know, Grandma was
the only one of the family in her generation who possessed the secret
of the lie soap, and she didn’t pass it on to any of her children, who
were all sober, truthful, financially unsuccessful citizens. But I’m
pretty sure that Grandma herself never got the lie soap treatment as a
child.
I grew up, and summers on the farm receded into memory. I went to
college, specialized in chemistry, and emerged with rosy visions of
science remaking the world. I fell then, naturally into a research
job with Gorley and Gorley, who at that time were one of the bigger
companies making chemicals, synthetics, cleansers, pharmaceuticals and
the like.
The laboratories which I shared with a number of other young and
not-so-young research men were magnificent, their chrome-and-porcelain
splendor making the university labs where we’d studied seem small and
dingy by comparison.
Here I had the facilities and--assigned work being light at the
time--the spare time to follow up a project of which I’d become
enamored in school--a line on antibiotic synthesis. I almost lived in
that lab for some weeks, at the end of which time I had sufficient
promising results to make up a summary of them, together with an urgent
request for materials needed to carry the investigation through to a
successful conclusion.
I submitted this report to the Coordinator, a fussy, harassed little
man, who nervously promised to call it to the attention of the front
office, and assigned me to work on the problem of producing a red
detergent powder that would not make pink suds.
Time went by, and nothing happened. Naturally I reminded the
Coordinator, but he assured me that the matter had merely slipped his
mind. To make a sad story short, I finally found out how things worked.
Communications between the research department and the front office,
i.e. the sales department, went only one way.
When the latter had decided just what sort of epoch-making miracle of
modern science the buying public was ripe for, word would come down,
and if we happened to have such a miracle on hand, well and good.
Otherwise, we could produce it, or a reasonable faсsimile thereof, in
time for the scheduled start of the advertising campaign.
It was O’Brien who first explained this system in full to me. O’Brien
was an Assistant Sales Manager and an advertising man from way back.
But he was also a human being.
“Over there with your test tubes, kid,” he said bluntly. “You’re
playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Sometimes you hit, oftener you
miss. But you’re never quite sure in advance. Right?”
I had to admit he had hit on a pretty fair description of scientific
research in general.
“But,” said O’Brien, “by us in Sales it’s _hit, hit, hit_, all the
time. We can’t wait for you boys to get that tail pinned on straight.
But sometimes you do, don’t you?” Hе sighed.
“God help us, some of the characters I associate with don’t even know
that. They can’t see any difference between having something to sell
and having to sell something. So when you _do_ hit, let me know, and
I’ll see what I can do at my end.”
He was as good as his word, too. A couple of times when we’d fumbled
around and come up with a product that people really needed, something
to keep them from dying, for instance, or to make not dying worth their
while, he went to bat for us in the sales department.
I’ve described at length the situation at Gorley and Gorley, first
because it had a direct bearing on what happened later, and second
because it was typical of a way of life which is past, and which the
younger generation nowadays has difficulty even in imagining. I’m
referring, of course, to the middle of the twentieth century with its
feverish atmosphere of compulsory Progress or a reasonable facsimile
thereof and of the glitter that was sometimes gold.
It was the era of the false front, the false rear and the questionable
middle, of scandal, slander, and the Hard Sell. It was also the Age of
the Big Lie, as somebody called it. But it was even more the age of the
little half-truth.
During those years when I was growing up--a painful process then,
though it doesn’t seem to be so any more--my education prоgressed along
other lines as well.
There was my baptism of politics. I joined with the enthusiasts working
for nomination of a reform slate of candidates against those of the
city machine. We were too innocent to know that it was an unpropitious
time. For one thing, it wasn’t a Presidential year and the vote was
bound to be light, and for another, the last reform administration was
still too fresh in public memory, and the machine was riding high.
The opposition called us idealistic crackpots, conniving scoundrels,
and dimwits who didn’t know what it was all about. They had the money
and they spent it on a flood of lies from the platform, through the
mail, and from sound trucks that rolled bellowing through the streets.
Finally, our candidates were snowed under in the primaries and not so
much as a reform dogcatcher appeared on the ticket.
That was another bruising experience for an easy bruiser such as I
was. After the crescendo of activity, the speeches, the leaflets, the
house-to-house canvasses, after the starry-eyed phrases about cleaning
up local government as a first step toward cleaning up the country and
the world....
I took a freshly disillusioned look at that world. It was a world
where the leaders of great nations daily pointed to one another
as conspirators plotting to exterminate the human race, and where
“security” and fear grew rankly intertwined as the ordinary man learned
to swallow the idea that _he_ couldn’t be trusted with the truth about
anything really important. It was a world where, consequently, the
scaremongers, the inside scoopers, and the genuine conspirators throve
mightily.
And, finally, there was Alice.
* * * * *
Alice was in the bookkeeping department at Gorley and Gorley. She
didn’t have the kind of looks that make cover photographers and movie
scouts drool and lunge. But she had something, a spontaneous allure, a
magnetism that must surely have upset the IBM machines she worked with.
I met Alice, was magnetized, polarized, and lost. Lost and happy. When
I proposed to her, and she said _Yes_, I felt that my good fortune was
_too_ good to be true. And it was. Some three weeks later she handed
back the ring. She couldn’t marry me. It had all been a mistake, and so
on.
Two days afterward I encountered her by accident in a corridor at the
plant. She wore another ring, with a bigger diamond. I stopped her, and
roughly demanded: “Who?”
Stumblingly, she told me. He was a junior executive, a
young-man-who-would-go-far with family connections and stock in the
company. Alice was a smart girl, and she’d simply bettered herself. I
guess I said some rather bitter things on that subject.
“No, Oliver,” she insisted. “It’s not like that at all. It’s just that
I don’t love you. I never did.” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
When I’d cooled down a bit, I realized that she was being honest with
me after a fashion. She was lying to me in just the same terms she was
lying to herself. And at the same time, recalling little details of her
behavior, I realized why.
Alice was afraid. Her people had been poor, and she knew what it meant.
Anyway, who _wasn’t_ afraid in those days, except for the feeble-minded
and some of the insane? So she was looking for security, a place to
hide, in that world of the nineteen-fifties where there wasn’t any
place to hide. But what was the use of telling her that?
I did some serious drinking, enough to convince me that I wasn’t cut
out to make a career of it. It was during the sobering-up process that
I got the Idea. I wonder how many of the thoughts that changed the
world have been fathered by hangovers?
I had some days’ vacation with pay coming, so it was comparatively
easy. I took a plane, a train, and a ramshackle bus. I then swung in on
a grapevine and there I was, walking up the familiar path to the old
farmhouse door, where I hadn’t been for a span of years that astonished
me when I counted them.
Grandma was out in the back yard hanging out a wash of patched work
shirts and faded blue overalls. She said without surprise, “How do,
Oliver,” and went right on finishing her task, while I watched with
suppressed impatience.
* * * * *
Finally she picked up the empty clothes basket and led the way into the
house. It was getting dusk, so she lit a kerosene lamp in the kitchen,
where supper was simmering on the cast-iron range.
“Grandma,” I fumbled, “I came down here--”
“I can see that,” Grandma interrupted. “How do you like my
new teeth, Oliver?” She grinned at me alarmingly. “Today’s my
birthday--ninety-first or ninety-fourth or something like that, I
forget--so I went to town and got me my new teeth. Pretty, eh, boy?
Figure they ought to do me another ten or twelve years.”
“Yes, Grandma,” I said, a little dazedly.
She peered at me searchingly. “Well, Oliver? Speak up. You’ve got
troubles written all over you.”
I’d more or less rehearsed a persuasive speech, but sitting there in
Grandma’s lamplit kitchen I felt as if the years had fallen away and I
was like a little boy who had run away from home and come back sorry.
In considerable disorder I poured out the story of how I’d gone out
into the world and what I’d found it like. I covered all of it, my work
and how little it amounted to compared to what it could have meant to
me, and my experience with the way people were governed--even Alice.
Above all, I told her how at every turning I had been lied to, and had
heard people lie to one another, and seen them lie to themselves.
Grandma nodded once or twice as she listened, which encouraged me.
I remembered a scrap from the arguments I’d meant to muster: “Some
philosopher once said that a lie is the Original Sin itself. Without
it, all other crimes become impossible.”
“So,” Grandma broke in, “you want the recipe for my lie soap.”
“Uh ... yes, that’s right,” I admitted, “It’s the answer. Your
ancestors and mine had no right to hold it back this long. Look,
Grandma. The company I work for makes mouth washes, toothpastes, and
the like. Millions of people use their products; and if a new ‘miracle
ingredient’ were publicized the right way, other companies with more
millions of customers would have to adopt it too.”
I was counting on O’Brien. I’d explain it to him squarely, and somehow
we’d manage to put it over.
Grandma got up to stir a kettle. She took her time, while I held my
breath. Finally she said, “I’m going to give you the recipe, Oliver--”
My heart leaped.
“--but not for ten or twenty years yet. Not until you’ve learned a
mite of caution. I was your age once, myself, and I thought how nice
it would be to make the world over tomorrow morning, and sit down and
admire it tomorrow afternoon. Now I know better, and so will you.”
I pleaded and argued, but it was no use. The old lady was adamant.
Finally I fell glumly silent, while Grandma went about setting the
table for supper.
On the train coming down I’d bought a newspaper out of sheer habit,
and, preoccupied, hadn’t even opened it. It lay now on the table, and
Grandma picked it up to glance at the headlines. Suddenly I realized
she’d been standing motionless, staring at the paper, for a remarkably
long time. There was a look I’d never seen before on her wrinkled face.
I heard her whisper to herself, “_The Moon!_” But that didn’t make any
sense until I looked over her shoulder and read:
_Air Force Rocket Lands on Moon_
Still I didn’t understand Grandma’s agitation. I said banally, “Well,
we’ve known for quite a while they were going to try it.”
“The Moon!” Grandma repeated. She went on wanderingly, “You know, that
just reminds me of one night in a buggy....” Her voice trailed off, and
she brooded darkly, which was strange indeed in her.
Then she let the paper fall, and said briskly, “I’ve changed my mind,
Oliver.”
“You mean--”
“Yes. You can have the lie soap. I’ll write the recipe out and give it
to you for a birthday present.”