PART II OF III
Lucille Lavon returned to Fort Stockton in the spring of 1945 because the United States Army had finally managed to send Levi home.
It had taken more than two years.
There had been forms, letters, delays and explanations written in the peculiar language governments use when discussing things too terrible for ordinary words. Levi had been buried overseas after his death in North Africa, and for a long while Lucille had accepted that because there was nothing else to accept. Eventually the Army offered families the choice of leaving their dead where they had fallen or bringing them home. Lucille chose home.
She rode the train south from Detroit carrying one suitcase and wearing a black dress she had purchased specifically for the occasion. The trip seemed longer than she remembered, although she knew that was impossible. Texas appeared outside the window by degrees, first as geography and then as memory, until finally the country flattened and dried and became the place where she had once expected to spend the rest of her life.
Fort Stockton looked different.
Not different from Detroit. Different from Fort Stockton.
The depot seemed smaller. Dickinson Boulevard seemed narrower. The storefronts looked tired and the distances between things somehow shorter. Dust moved along the curb in little spirals while the enormous sky pressed down over everything, and Lucille wondered how she had once believed this place was large enough to contain an entire life.
People remembered her. That was both comforting and exhausting.
At the funeral, women she had known since childhood embraced her and told her how sorry they were. Men removed their hats. Someone from Levi’s old job came. Someone from school brought flowers. The minister spoke about sacrifice and eternity, and Lucille listened politely because everyone had worked very hard to provide words for something words could not repair.
When it was over, she stood beside Levi’s grave after everyone else had begun walking toward their cars.
For years she had imagined his return. Sometimes he stepped off a train wearing his uniform. Sometimes he appeared unexpectedly at her parents’ front door. Sometimes he was older, although Lucille never quite managed to decide what older Levi looked like.
Now she knew.
Levi would always be twenty-seven.
“I’m going back to Detroit,” she told him.
The wind moved through the cemetery grass.
“I think you’d understand.”
She waited a moment, almost expecting one of his smart remarks.
None came.
Lucille boarded the northbound train two days later and never returned to Fort Stockton.
Detroit was home now.
It took her a while to admit it.
The war ended that summer, and America began the enormous, complicated business of becoming ordinary again. Men came home by the millions. Some returned exactly as they had left, or at least appeared to. Others returned with missing limbs, damaged lungs, nightmares or silences their families gradually learned not to question. Factories that had spent four years producing the machinery of war began dismantling it and trying to remember how to make refrigerators, washing machines and automobiles.
The women who had filled those factories were expected to remember something too.
Home.
Rosie the Riveter had been useful when America needed bombers and tanks. Now the advertisements began suggesting that perhaps Rosie would enjoy a new electric mixer.
At Lincoln, returning veterans reclaimed jobs they had left behind. Lucille understood. She had worked beside women whose husbands were among those men, and nobody needed to explain what had been promised to them. The country owed its veterans something more substantial than a parade.
What irritated her was the assumption that every woman surrendering a factory job had a husband and kitchen waiting somewhere to receive her.
Lucille had neither.
Her floor manager, Frank Haskell, solved the problem before it became one.
“You’re not going back on the line anyway.”
Lucille looked across his desk. “I’m not?”
“No.”
“That’s usually the sort of thing they tell the employee.”
Haskell ignored that. “You’re too good for the line.”
“Yesterday I was good enough.”
“Yesterday we needed you there.”
“And today?”
“Today I need somebody upstairs to understand you’re worth keeping.”
Haskell made telephone calls. He spoke to a superintendent who spoke to somebody else who spoke to somebody whose office had carpeting, which in the Ford Motor Company represented a considerable elevation in authority. A few good words traveled upward.
Several days later, Lucille was offered an office position.
She took it.
Then she enrolled in evening secretarial courses because Lucille had learned during the war that being given an opportunity and being prepared for one were entirely different things.
She learned shorthand, business correspondence and typing at speeds she had previously considered evidence of nervous illness. She learned filing systems and bookkeeping and discovered that office machines could be every bit as temperamental as factory machinery while being considerably less honest about it.
She also moved out of her parents’ house.
Her apartment occupied the second floor of a red-brick building containing sixteen units, eight upstairs and eight down. It had a living room, bedroom, kitchenette and bathroom, all of which belonged entirely to Lucille for as long as she paid the rent.
Her mother regarded this as a personal rejection.
“There’s plenty of room here.”
“I know.”
“You could save money.”
“I know.”
“Your father likes having you here.”
Her father, sitting behind the Detroit Free Press, wisely declined to participate.
Lucille kissed her mother. “I’m twenty-nine years old.”
“That isn’t old.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Then what’s your point?”
“My point is I’d like to find out whether I can burn my own supper without somebody standing behind me explaining how.”
Her father coughed into the newspaper.
The apartment became hers quickly. Levi’s photograph went onto the dresser, but not beside the bed. His Army wristwatch, returned among his effects, remained in a drawer. Lucille did not hide either one. She simply stopped arranging her life around them.
By 1946, Ford Motor Company itself was attempting something similar.
Henry Ford II had inherited a company that needed more than automobiles. It needed management. He began bringing in young men who spoke a new language of planning, controls, forecasting and financial analysis, including ten former Army Air Forces officers who would eventually become known as the Whiz Kids. They were young, confident, educated and alarmingly fond of numbers.
Lucille saw them occasionally.
They looked to her like men who had been issued slide rules at birth.
Her own boss, Thomas Donovan, wasn’t one of them, although he reported upward into the expanding organization they were helping create. He was thirty-four when Lucille began working for him, unmarried, dark-haired and possessed of the unusual managerial habit of asking questions because he genuinely wanted the answers.
On Lucille’s third day he handed her a memorandum.
“What do you think?”
She read it.
“I think Mr. Halpern is going to be angry.”
Donovan looked surprised. “Why?”
“Because you’re telling him his numbers are wrong.”
“They are wrong.”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“You’ve used three pages to tell him.”
Donovan stared at her.
Lucille handed it back. “If you’re going to make a man angry, Mr. Donovan, there’s no reason to tire him out first.”
He rewrote it in one page.
Mr. Halpern was still angry.
That was the beginning.
Over the next several years Donovan moved through a succession of increasingly important assignments, and every time he moved, Lucille moved with him. He arranged raises without making her ask. He made sure her name appeared on work she had actually done, at least on those documents where secretaries were permitted names. He discovered that Lucille could remember the substance of a meeting better than most men who attended it and that she possessed an instinct for separating what people said from what they meant.
Lucille discovered that Donovan never raised his voice when somebody made a mistake, although he could become terrifyingly quiet when somebody lied.
They continued calling one another Mr. Donovan and Mrs. Lavon.
Neither suggested changing that.
By 1950, Donovan had acquired one of the privileges of his improving position: a company automobile.
It was a new Mercury Monterey coupe finished in Cortaro Red with a black vinyl-covered roof, and Lucille stopped beside it the first evening he offered her a ride home after they had worked late.
“That’s yours?”
“Technically, it’s Ford’s.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Donovan looked at the Mercury as though encountering it for the first time. “Is it?”
Lucille turned toward him. “You don’t deserve this car.”
“I’ve had it three weeks.”
“And you haven’t noticed it yet.”
He opened the passenger door. “Perhaps you should ride along and explain it to me.”
The Mercury had the substantial, confident shape of postwar America. Chrome surrounded the grille and traveled along the sides. Whitewalls stood beneath fender skirts, and the black roof made the Cortaro Red body appear richer. Inside, beige cloth and black vinyl were edged with red piping. The dashboard contained an AM radio and clock, and the column-shifted three-speed offered Touch-O-Matic overdrive. It was a handsome automobile, considerably flashier than anything Levi would ever have purchased without first spending six months calculating the cost of gasoline.
Lucille liked it immediately.
She liked riding with Donovan too, although she was careful never to examine that fact closely.
When they worked late, he sometimes took her to dinner afterward. Usually it was the London Chop House, already a Detroit institution, or Jacoby’s German Biergarten, which had been serving Detroiters since long before either of them arrived in the city.
Their dinners remained professionally defensible.
Mostly.
Donovan discussed work. Lucille discussed work. Occasionally they discussed books, movies or whatever Jack Benny had said the previous Sunday. He learned she preferred Glenn Miller to Guy Lombardo. She learned he disliked olives with an intensity usually reserved for international communism.
Neither discussed why an unmarried man and an attractive widow could have dinner together twice a month for several years without ever once deciding whether they were having dinner together.
One evening Donovan drove her home from the London Chop House, and Lucille ran her hand lightly across the Mercury’s dashboard.
“This really is a beautiful automobile.”
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“Of course, it’s nothing like the last Continental that came off the line when I started at Lincoln.”
Donovan glanced toward her. “What Continental?”
Lucille told him.
She described that February morning in 1942, the factory being torn apart for war production and the women arriving in work clothes. Then she described the automobile: dark green over tan, enormous hood, whitewall tires, rear-mounted spare, gold-colored instrument panel and twelve cylinders under the hood.
“I’ll never forget that car,” she said. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
Donovan looked at her.
Lucille was smiling.
He had seen her smile hundreds of times, but not like this. For several seconds the years seemed to fall away and the woman beside him was twenty-five again, standing on a factory floor before the telegram and the funeral and the black Ford sedan.
Donovan looked back at the road.
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean the Continental.”
“So do I.”
The answer stayed with him.
Two mornings later Lucille entered his office carrying accounting reports.
“That Continental I told you about at dinner the other night….”
“The green one.”
She stopped.
“The last one off the line in ’42,” he added.
“You remembered.”
“You were fairly descriptive.”
Lucille placed the reports on his desk. “Why did we stop building them?”
“We didn’t. Not immediately. They came back after the war.”
“I know. Until ’48.”
That was true. Continental production resumed from 1946 through 1948, but the old car belonged fundamentally to the prewar world. Its low-volume, highly individualized construction was expensive, its styling needed complete renewal, and the man who had championed it, Edsel Ford, had died in 1943. Ford itself describes those factors as central to the original Continental’s disappearance.
Lucille leaned against the edge of Donovan’s desk.
“America’s booming. Cadillac is selling everything it can build. People have money again. Why don’t we have something like it?”
“We have Lincoln.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Donovan smiled.
Lucille continued. “I’m talking about something somebody sees once and remembers eight years later. Something you don’t need but want anyway.”
“That’s not much of a business case.”
“I’m your secretary. Business cases are your department.”
She returned to her desk.
Donovan looked at the reports she had delivered.
Then he looked at the closed door.
The Continental followed him into a meeting three days later.
It wasn’t an important meeting by Ford standards, which meant only six men were present and nobody named Ford. They were discussing product planning, competitive position and the extraordinary postwar expansion of the automobile market when Donovan mentioned Cadillac.
Then Packard.
Then Lincoln.
Finally he mentioned the Continental.
One executive dismissed it immediately. Too expensive. Too limited. Too much hand labor.
Donovan agreed with all three points.
“Then why are we discussing it?”
“Because my secretary asked me a question I couldn’t answer.”
That produced exactly the reaction he expected.
“Your secretary?”
“My secretary.”
Someone laughed.
Donovan didn’t.
He laid several figures on the table concerning the upper end of the automobile market and the value of prestige products whose influence extended beyond their sales volume.
“What she actually asked,” Donovan said, “was why Ford Motor Company doesn’t build the best automobile in America.”
That stopped the laughter.
The conversation didn’t create the Continental Mark II. History rarely works that neatly, and automotive history almost never does. Ideas arrive from several directions, collide with other ideas, acquire champions and budgets, and eventually emerge wearing the name of somebody sufficiently important to be photographed beside them.
But the question traveled.
Eventually it reached people working on Ford’s special-product ambitions, and in 1952 William Clay Ford, Edsel Ford’s youngest son, was placed in charge of Special Product Operations and the effort to create a successor worthy of the Continental name.
Lucille heard about it from Donovan.
He appeared beside her desk one afternoon.
“Mrs. Lavon.”
“Mr. Donovan.”
“They’re looking seriously at Continental.”
She stopped typing.
“The Continental?”
“A new one.”
For once Lucille had nothing to say.
Donovan enjoyed this enormously.
“I believe this may be the first time I’ve rendered you speechless.”
“Don’t become accustomed to it.”
The project grew.
Design proposals were solicited. Clay models appeared. Executives debated proportions, quality, cost and whether America would support an automobile positioned beyond even Lincoln and Cadillac. In May 1953, John Reinhart’s proposal was selected, and by the following year the operation had evolved into the Continental Division, separate from Lincoln and under William Clay Ford’s direction.
Lucille followed every development she could.
Nobody invited her to styling reviews. Nobody asked her opinion about wheelbase or roof height. Her name appeared nowhere in the project’s official history. She remained Mrs. Lavon, secretary to Thomas Donovan, earning sixty dollars a week and typing memoranda for men who earned considerably more.
She didn’t mind.
Well, she minded a little.
She was human.
Donovan occasionally brought her scraps of information.
“They’ve chosen the design.”
“What does it look like?”
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“Then why are you standing here?”
He lowered his voice. “Long hood. Very clean sides. Not much chrome.”
Lucille smiled.
“Rear spare?”
“Sort of.”
That smile again.
Donovan had become rather fond of causing it.
By then their relationship had acquired the comfortable ambiguity of something neither was willing to name. He knew when Lucille had skipped lunch. She knew when he was worried before he did. He kept aspirin in his desk because she occasionally developed headaches after long days. She kept his preferred brand of coffee in the office because the company cafeteria’s coffee, in her judgment, represented an actionable offense.
Once, after dinner at Jacoby’s, Donovan walked Lucille to the entrance of her apartment building.
It was raining.
They stood beneath the awning while the Mercury idled at the curb.
“Good night, Mrs. Lavon.”
“Good night, Mr. Donovan.”
Neither moved.
There are distances measured in miles and distances measured in inches. The second variety can be considerably more difficult to cross.
Lucille finally smiled.
“You’ll get wet.”
“So will you.”
“I live here.”
“An advantage I hadn’t considered.”
She went inside.
Donovan stood beneath the awning another moment before returning to the Mercury.
Neither mentioned it Monday.
In October 1955, the Continental Mark II was introduced to the world. The production car that followed was not officially a Lincoln at all. Continental had become its own Ford Motor Company division, and the Mark II stood above Lincoln as an American attempt to build an automobile without ordinary compromises. Its price was $9,695, and air conditioning could push it beyond ten thousand dollars. It was built in low volume with extraordinary attention to materials, fit, finish, inspection and testing.
Lucille saw one before the public did.
Donovan arranged it.
He told her they had an appointment after work and refused to explain further. Instead of driving toward downtown, he took her to a Ford facility where a security man checked his credentials and waved the Mercury through.
“Where are we going?”
“Dinner.”
“This isn’t the London Chop House.”
“They’ve moved.”
“Apparently into automobile manufacturing.”
Donovan parked.
Inside, beneath bright lights, sat a Continental Mark II.
Lucille stopped.
For a moment Donovan watched her rather than the automobile.
The Mark II did not resemble the 1942 Continental literally. It couldn’t. Thirteen years separated them, and the world that produced one no longer existed. But the proportions spoke the same language. The hood was long, the roof restrained, the sides remarkably clean for an era increasingly addicted to chrome. The suggestion of a continental spare was incorporated into the rear deck rather than strapped onto it.
It had dignity.
That was the word Lucille finally found.
“Dignity.”
Donovan nodded. “That’s what they’re hoping.”
She walked slowly around it.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I thought you might approve.”
Lucille looked through the glass at the interior and then back at Donovan.
“Did I do this?”
It was the question he had known she would eventually ask.
“No.”
Her face changed slightly.
Donovan continued.
“But you asked me why we weren’t doing it.”
Lucille waited.
“I asked somebody else. Then somebody else asked somebody above him. I don’t know where your question stopped being your question.”
“Probably fairly early.”
“Probably.”
She looked back at the Continental.
“That’s how companies work.”
“That’s how companies take credit.”
Lucille laughed softly.
Donovan stepped beside her.
“For whatever it’s worth, Mrs. Lavon, I remember where I heard it.”
That was enough.
The Mark II would last only two model years. Ford would build 3,005 of them. The company would lose money on every one, and the Continental Division itself would disappear as the economics of producing an almost hand-built American luxury automobile proved exactly as unforgiving as the men in that meeting had predicted.
But failure is an imprecise word.
The Mark II became one of the most celebrated American luxury automobiles of its era, bought by industrialists, entertainers, politicians and royalty. Its restrained design stood apart from the chrome and fins gathering elsewhere in Detroit, and the Continental name would remain part of Ford’s vocabulary for generations. Even Ford’s own historical account now describes the Mark II as one of the greatest automobiles it ever built.
Lucille knew none of that yet.
She knew only that she was standing beside a beautiful automobile that existed partly because somebody, somewhere, had remembered that beauty had once mattered.
Donovan stood beside her.
“You know,” he said, “I think the old green one would still be prettier.”
Lucille turned toward him.
“You never saw it.”
“No.”
“Then how could you possibly know?”
He put his hands into his coat pockets.
“Because I’ve seen your face when you talk about it.”
Lucille looked away.
For several seconds neither said anything.
Thirteen years earlier, she had stood beside another Continental in another Ford factory. She had been twenty-five, married to Levi, newly arrived from Fort Stockton and still foolish enough to believe that waiting patiently was one of the ways people could control what happened next.
She no longer believed that.
Some things ended whether you were ready or not. Wars. Marriages. Automobile lines. Lives. Other things appeared afterward, not as replacements, because nothing important was ever truly replaced, but as evidence that an ending had not exhausted all the possibilities.
Lucille reached out and rested her fingertips lightly against the Mark II’s roof.
“Mr. Donovan?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lavon?”
“You still owe me dinner.”
He smiled.
“I believe I do.”
They walked back toward the Cortaro Red Mercury together.
Not touching.
Not yet.
