Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [80]
“There may be some merit in that,” Mironson says quietly.
“Marvelous,” Vivian says, as though this small victory held no personal significance whatsoever. “Then should we just put our heads together for a few minutes, you and I, and come up with a series of questions and answers? Or do you want to do it yourself?”
But Mironson isn’t quite through yet. “What is at stake here, Miss Burton . . .”
“Oh, do call me Vivian,” she says.
Mironson crosses his arms over his chest, the paper he was dictating from dangling from a hand. “. . . is nothing less than a way of life and the future of this country. I don’t expect you to be able to see the importance of such a critical overturning of this way of life, being so mired in the capitalist class yourself. By definition, you cannot see. And while one can admire your charity and generosity, and it goes without saying how grateful we are, I cannot possibly expect you to understand the underlying significance of what is happening here and all over the country.”
McDermott looks sharply over at Mironson and opens his mouth as if to speak, but Vivian puts up a hand to signal she can handle this on her own. “I do see what you’re saying, Mr. Mironson. May I call you Louis? It sounds so, I don’t know, notcomradely not to be on a first-name basis,” she says.
“Yes, of course,” he says.
“You have a wonderful way of putting things, Louis. And, really, I was just wondering, where did you go to school? You’re obviously marvelously educated.”
“I don’t think where I was educated is at all the point here.”
“Oh, but it’s precisely my point,” says Vivian, decorously crossing her legs.
Honora thinks that Mironson cannot refuse to answer the question. “I went to Yale,” he says finally.
“Ah,” Vivian says. “On scholarship?”
“No,” he says.
Vivian nods, her penny-colored hair aglow in the morning sunlight. “Is it too personal a question to ask what your father does? Or did?”
Mironson hesitates. “He was a shoe manufacturer.”
“He actually made the shoes himself, or he owned the company?”
“My grandfather started the company in Brockton, Massachusetts. He made the shoes himself.”
“But your father?”
Mironson straightens his tie. “He owned the company.”
“Never made a shoe.”
“I can’t say never.”
“Would it be fair to say, then, that you grew up ‘mired in the capitalist class’?”
Mironson removes a handkerchief from his pocket. “I’m a Jew, Miss Burton,” he says. “My class-consciousness is very different from yours.”
“Oh, did I miss something here?” Vivian asks sweetly. “Jews can’t be capitalists?”
“I’ve been studying this for years,” Mironson says, wiping his brow. “I’ve been working at this all my adult life. I’ve been to Moscow. I’ve worked with Eugene Debs.”
“Of course,” says Vivian. “And I cannot say how much I admire your dedication. We all admire your dedication. And without you, I imagine that the men in this room would be hopelessly lost. But as to being able to understand what’s at stake . . .” She pauses. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Capitalist owns textile company and makes huge amount of money and lives across the river in big house with Frigidaire and GE washing machine and Packard and Chris-Craft motor yacht while employing hundreds of workers to whom he pays pitiful wages, all the while thinking it perfectly normal that they should live in hideously filthy tenements with no running water and no indoor plumbing and not enough money to feed their children. How am I doing so far?”
The tension in the room reminds Honora of the aftermath of a thunderclap: full of sound and yet intensely silent.
“And then said capitalist decides for whatever reason,” Vivian continues, “— perhaps his business is not doing well, perhaps he wants a trip to Havana — to cut his workers’ pay ten percent so as to increase profits for himself. And, mirabile dictu, the workers mind!”
Mironson says nothing, but Honora can see a small twitch at