window. Imitation wood paneling covered the walls and a lot of furniture upholstered in green with glittering gold threads stood around on thin steel legs trying to look as if it were floating eight inches above the floor. The most expensive thing in the room was a combination TV and hi-fi phonograph in a pickled wood cabinet the size of a coffin. Family pictures and a bowling trophy stood on top of it. The room was spotless, and illuminated entirely by indirect lights in the ceiling and a Christmas-tree floor lamp in a corner. All the windows were covered.
A medium-built light-haired woman with sad eyes appeared inside an arch on the other side of the room while the big guard was patting me down for weapons. She wore a blue apron over a sweater and slacks and kneaded a checked dish towel in her hands.
“It’s Jake, May,” Pierpont said. “Walter’s expecting.”
She turned and left with a snap that said everything I needed to know about her opinion of the little man in the big hat. I never saw Mrs. Reuther again, and I’m told it’s my loss. She was a fixture on every UAW picket line since the wedding, handing out fat ham sandwiches and pouring steaming coffee from an army of Thermoses. They say her first reaction after a shotgun charge obliterated a window in her kitchen in the spring of 1948 was to throw her arms around her severely wounded husband.
When nothing more lethal than three sticks of Beechnut gum turned up on my person, the Negro stepped away and I accompanied Pierpont around a blind corner, down another flight of steps, and into a basement room. Here a low ceiling textured like cottage cheese swallowed all sound, deadening even the sharp clatter of billiard balls colliding on blue felt.
This room was the darkest yet. Even the welled windows near the ceiling had been painted over, leaving only a yellow circle on the pool table from a Tiffany-shaded fixture suspended from a chain above it. The man in white shirtsleeves pursuing the balls with a short cue was invisible from the neck up until he leaned down for a difficult bank shot. Then the light caught a pair of slightly puffed eyes under pale brows, a nothing sort of a nose, full lips curved like a woman’s, and cheeks shaped like parentheses. In a couple of years they would be full-fledged jowls, and if his metabolism went to hell as thoroughly as mine had he would be Winston Churchill by the end of the decade.
It wasn’t a face you’d remember on short acquaintance, but the intentness in the eyes as he lined up the shot was familiar enough from newsreels and the papers. Ten years older than Henry Ford II, Walter Reuther, national president of the United Auto Workers and Ford’s frequent adversary at negotiation talks, looked and acted five years younger. There was an electric energy in his step as he moved around the table that seemed beyond the powers of the bearlike Boy King at any age.
And he was a good pool player, skinning the three-ball past the eight on a two-cushion shot to sink it in the corner. I was just bad enough at the game to appreciate the shot, because he made it look easy. What I couldn’t figure out, as he paused to chalk his cue, was the presence of a child’s flesh-colored rubber ball slightly bigger than a walnut balanced on the end of the table. It looked like a hatchling belonging to one of the ivories on the felt.
The squeaking of the chalk was the loudest sound in the room. Pierpont stood in the gloom with his fingers curled at his sides, waiting for Reuther to speak, and I was aware of the silent looming attendance of the huge guard behind us in the shallow hallway at the base of the stairs. There was something imperial about that waiting quiet, but given the remoteness of that subterranean room with its painted windows in that anonymous neighborhood it was less like Versailles than St. Helena. I had heard that since the attempt at assassination this Man of the Common Worker had become more difficult to get close
A medium-built light-haired woman with sad eyes appeared inside an arch on the other side of the room while the big guard was patting me down for weapons. She wore a blue apron over a sweater and slacks and kneaded a checked dish towel in her hands.
“It’s Jake, May,” Pierpont said. “Walter’s expecting.”
She turned and left with a snap that said everything I needed to know about her opinion of the little man in the big hat. I never saw Mrs. Reuther again, and I’m told it’s my loss. She was a fixture on every UAW picket line since the wedding, handing out fat ham sandwiches and pouring steaming coffee from an army of Thermoses. They say her first reaction after a shotgun charge obliterated a window in her kitchen in the spring of 1948 was to throw her arms around her severely wounded husband.
When nothing more lethal than three sticks of Beechnut gum turned up on my person, the Negro stepped away and I accompanied Pierpont around a blind corner, down another flight of steps, and into a basement room. Here a low ceiling textured like cottage cheese swallowed all sound, deadening even the sharp clatter of billiard balls colliding on blue felt.
This room was the darkest yet. Even the welled windows near the ceiling had been painted over, leaving only a yellow circle on the pool table from a Tiffany-shaded fixture suspended from a chain above it. The man in white shirtsleeves pursuing the balls with a short cue was invisible from the neck up until he leaned down for a difficult bank shot. Then the light caught a pair of slightly puffed eyes under pale brows, a nothing sort of a nose, full lips curved like a woman’s, and cheeks shaped like parentheses. In a couple of years they would be full-fledged jowls, and if his metabolism went to hell as thoroughly as mine had he would be Winston Churchill by the end of the decade.
It wasn’t a face you’d remember on short acquaintance, but the intentness in the eyes as he lined up the shot was familiar enough from newsreels and the papers. Ten years older than Henry Ford II, Walter Reuther, national president of the United Auto Workers and Ford’s frequent adversary at negotiation talks, looked and acted five years younger. There was an electric energy in his step as he moved around the table that seemed beyond the powers of the bearlike Boy King at any age.
And he was a good pool player, skinning the three-ball past the eight on a two-cushion shot to sink it in the corner. I was just bad enough at the game to appreciate the shot, because he made it look easy. What I couldn’t figure out, as he paused to chalk his cue, was the presence of a child’s flesh-colored rubber ball slightly bigger than a walnut balanced on the end of the table. It looked like a hatchling belonging to one of the ivories on the felt.
The squeaking of the chalk was the loudest sound in the room. Pierpont stood in the gloom with his fingers curled at his sides, waiting for Reuther to speak, and I was aware of the silent looming attendance of the huge guard behind us in the shallow hallway at the base of the stairs. There was something imperial about that waiting quiet, but given the remoteness of that subterranean room with its painted windows in that anonymous neighborhood it was less like Versailles than St. Helena. I had heard that since the attempt at assassination this Man of the Common Worker had become more difficult to get close
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