Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage Is adapted from the novel Aloft by Chang-rae Lee (@2004 by Chang-rae Lee).

For most of my life I worked in the family business, Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, a masonry company that my grandfather started in the Depression and that my father and uncles gradually turned into a landscaping company that I maintained and that my son Jack has plans for expanding into a publicly traded specialty home improvement enterprise to be renamed Battle Brothers Excalibur, L.L.C., replete with a glossy annual report and standby telephone operators and an Internet website.

The family name was originally Battaglia, but my father and uncles decided early on to change their name to Battle for the usual reasons immigrants and others like them will do, for the sake of familiarity and ease of use and to herald a new and optimistic beginning, which is anyone’s right, whether warranted or not.

Battle, too, is a nice name for a business, because it’s simple and memorable, ethnically indistinct, and then squarely patriotic, though in a subtle sort of way, Customers—Jack says clients—have the sense we’re fighters, that we have an inner resolve, that we’ll soldier through all obstacles to get the job done, and done right (this last line can actually be found in the latest company brochure). My father insists that the idea for the name originated with him, and for just the connotations I’ve mentioned, which I don’t doubt, as he was always the savviest businessman of his brothers, and talked incessantly through my youth about the awesome power of words. But it’s not just marketing—for the most part the tag has been true, though certainly more so in my father’s generation than my own, probably more in mine than in Jack’s; but this is world history and I’m not going to rail on about the degradation of standards or the work ethic. My father and uncles did their work in their time, and I did mine, and Jack will do his at this post-turn-of-the-millennium moment, and who can say who will have had the hardest go?

Sometimes I think Jack’s is a tough slot, given the never-ending onslaught of instant information and the general wisdom these days that if you don’t “grow” your business at a certain heady rate it will wither and die. Good for him that for the last four years he has seemed to be practically printing money, what with all the trucks out every day and him needing to hire extra help literally off the street each morning. Now with the economy in the doldrums he probably wishes he hadn’t built his mega-mini-mansion but he doesn’t seem concerned.

I do sometimes worry about Jack, and wonder if he’s grinding too hard for the dollars. Just sit down with him to lunch sometime and you’ll see all the digital hardware come unclipped from his belt and onto the table, the pager and cell phone and electronic notepad and memo-to-self recorder. At least my father and uncles had the twin angels of innocence and ignorance to guide them and the devil of hard times to keep working against. I merely inherited what they had already made fairly prosperous, and did what I could not to ruin anything, though my girlfriend Rita often pointed out that I had the least enviable position, given that I really had no choice in the matter, expected as I was to sustain something I never had a genuine interest in. This is mostly true. I had no great love for brick and mortar.

In all fairness, however, I’m Hank (The Tank) Battle’s son, with the main difference between him and me being that I was never able to summon his first-strike arrogance, nor develop the necessary armature for the inevitable fallout from oneself. I made a fine living from Battle Brothers. I always worked hard, if not passionately. I never took what was given to me for granted, or thought anything or anyone was below me. I was not a quitter. In these regards, I have no regrets.

When I sold out my shares in Battle Brothers four years ago I hadn’t fully realized that there was no place left for me to go, and decided, on the suggestion of my daughter Theresa, citing my extensive résumé as a “passenger,” that I ought to try my hand at being a travel professional, which, it turns out, despite her snide deconstructive terminology, was just my calling. For long before I donned my travel agent’s blazer I could speak to most every notable sight in every notable town in this shrinking touristical world, I knew the better ranks of inns and hotels and tour and cruise operators, and I knew which all-inclusives and play-and-stay packages offered good value or were just plain sorry and cheap.