| Miss Rita Cohen, a tiny, pale-skinned
girl who looked half the age of Seymour's daughter, Marie, but claimed to be
some six years older, came to his factory one day. She was dressed in overalls
and big ugly shoes, and a bush of wiry hair framed her pretty face. She was so
tiny, so young that he could barely believe that she was at the University of
Pennsylvania, doing research into the leather industry in New Jersey for her
master's degree. Three or four times a year someone either phoned Seymour or wrote to him to ask permission to see his factory, and occasionally he would assist a student by answering questions over the phone or, if the student struck him as especially serious, by offering a brief tour. Rita Cohen was nearly as small, he thought, as the children from Marie's third-year class, who'd been brought 50 kilometres from their rural schoolhouse one day, all those years ago, so that Marie's daddy could show them how he made gloves, show them especially Marie's favourite spot, the laying-off table, where, at the end of the process, the men shaped and pressed each and every glove by pulling it carefully down over steam-heated brass hands. The hands were dangerously hot and they were shiny and they stuck straight up from the table in a row, thin-looking, like hands that had been flattened. As a little girl, Marie was captivated by their strangeness and called them the "pancake hands". He heard Rita asking, "How many pieces come in a shipment?" "How many? Between twenty and twenty-five thousand. " She continued taking notes as she asked, "They come direct to your shipping department?" He liked finding that she was interested in every last detail. "They come to the tannery. The tannery is a contractor. We buy the material and they make it into the right kind of leather for us to use. My grandfather and father worked in the tannery right here in town. So did I, for six months, when I started in the business. Ever been inside a tannery?" "Not yet. " "Well, you've got to go to a tannery if you're going to write about leather. I'll set that up for you if you'd like that. They're primitive places. The technology has improved things, but what you'll see isn't that different from what you'd have seen hundreds of years ago. Awful work. It's said to be the oldest industry of which remains have been found anywhere. Six-thousand-year-old relics of tanning found somewhere—Turkey, I believe. The first clothing was just skins that were tanned by smoking them. I told you it was an interesting subject once you get into it. My father is the leather scholar; he's the one you should be talking to. Start my father off about gloves and he'll talk for two days. That's typical, by the way: glovemen love the trade and everything about it. Tell me, have you ever seen anything being manufactured, Miss Cohen?" "I can't say I have. " "Never seen anything made?" "I saw my mother make a cake when I was a child. " He laughed. She had made him laugh. An innocent with spirit, eager to learn. His daughter was easily 30 cm taller than Rita Cohen, and fair where she was dark, but otherwise Rita Cohen had begun to remind him of Marie. The good-natured intelligence that would just waft out of her and into the house when she came home from school, full of what she'd learned in class. How she remembered everything. Everything neatly taken down in her notebook and memorised overnight. "I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to take you right through the whole process. Come on. We're going to make you a pair of gloves and you're going to watch them being made from start to finish. What size do you wear?" QUESTIONS: |