Free The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus Page A

Confederacy who fled the newly United States for Brazil in 1867.” 1867 the year the Amazon opened to “international shipping.” Stockport is very conveniently located between New York City and Naugatuck, where he built his plants. It’s a nice drive.
    “The Somners were Union folk but, as John put it, ‘not opposed to hiring these our honorable cousins of a different mind.’”
    The plants were on a street known as Rubber Avenue. “John persuaded New Haven Railroad to add Stockport to its station line, tripling the value of John’s various real estate holdings and over the decades transformed the little hamlet to the bustling.”
    His plants in Naugatuck produced boots and gloves. Specialty gloves for telegraph linemen and hospital workers. Until Somner rubber gloves, hospital workers tended their patients bare. They experienced burns from antiseptic fluids, carbolic acids and bichloride of mercury. “The benefit of gloves to sterility was only later discovered.” Also, CONDOMS.
    John merged his company with six others to create American Rubber, a “monopolizing consortium.” Right before the 1896 creation of the Dow Industrial Average of twelve stocks, a coincidence, including American Rubber.
    “He became John Stepney Somner of New York, serving one term in the state senate, twice mounting failed gubernatorial runs.” By the first year of the new century, he’d added to his homes in Washington Square and Stockport a gaming retreat in Virginia, just south of DC, and a “monolithic estate on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, used only six weeks out of the year, which, “for reasons lost to time,” he named Apollo Court.”
    After the conference with his teacher, CeCe arranged for George to take his first private tour of the library, one evening it was closed; they ate a sandwich in the stern topiary garden at the side of the mansion, behind the ornate, black iron fence that separated them from the sidewalk. In the dim room of antique instruments, a docent unlocked the display cases. George was allowed to touch them all: the gittern and the sorna and the sitar. Sad, he thinks now, how his mother has always been immune to the pull of great music. Merely, unsentimentally, appreciative. But not George. George understands why it’s the highest of all arts, the only form that can set the soul free.
    The car winds into the upswing glint of midtown east. It begins to rain, a hot-anyway city rain, under a bright sun. The dank concrete pavement and the yellow warp of the walk signs through the pebbles of rain rolling down the outside of his window and the black umbrellas snapping up to obscure the faces of those caught on the crosswalk all remind him that he’s tired, that it’s been a week of sleepless nights. Still, he’s in a good mood. The silence in the car, the muffled city sounds outside—a jackhammer, the grind of the taxi’s brakes. The thought of Iris at home—he’s happy to be a commuter, a man with a house in the shade of a great white ash. A man in a marriage sliding through the wet city, the city transformed into the back of a submarine just risen from the water. To be alone but not alone, what better? At a red light he taps the glass separating himself from the driver. The panel recedes and he sees which of the men who drive him is at the wheel. He knows most in the rotation assigned to him. His driver’s license has been suspended twenty years—cocaine, hurricane—a status he has no pressing desire to dispute. It’s the old guy. How are the granddaughters? Fifth grade, already? Easy, careless, not caring about the answer, the driver not caring either, unified in the pleasantness of not caring about each other.
    At work, George ducks past the receptionist and heads down the narrow corridor toward Audrey, his assistant. She’s sitting in the tightest part of the U of her wraparound cubby, eating a pile of tuna out of wax paper and aluminum foil. The smell hangs in the hermetically vented hall.