Midnight in the Doll Factory
New York, 1957
Dave and his big ideas, Jimmy thought as he looked over the company ledgers. The company had done fine when it focused on the cheap plastic self-walking dolls that sold at souvenir stands and street fairs. But Dave, he had a higher aspiration. He wanted to compete with Ideal and Vogue and Uneeda. He wanted a dress-me doll who could wear all of the fashions of the day. They’d have a catalog showing the doll in all her outfits -- a red taffeta prom dress with a matching crinoline, a cowgirl outfit, a white stole made of real rabbit fur -- and little girls would demand to own every last bangle and stocking.
Now, the company owed thousands to a creditor and there wasn’t enough to pay the guy back. Jimmy took off his green eyeshade and switched off the light on his desk. He loosened his necktie and then tightened it again. He slipped on his sport coat and walked down the hall to Dave’s office to deliver the news. A radio on the secretary’s desk played “Come and Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings.
Jimmy had tried to talk Dave out of investing the company’s funds in a whole new doll, especially after he announced that it wouldn’t be just one doll. The company would have an entire family of dolls. Vogue had the teenage Jill, baby Ginette, Jill’s friend Jan and Jan’s boyfriend Jeff. But before all of those came Ginny, the middle sister between Jill and Ginette and the center of her own miniature universe. There was hardly a girl in the country who didn’t own or covet her own Ginny. There was ballerina Ginny and roller-skating Ginny. There was Ginny in a kilt, Ginny on a surfboard and Ginny in an Eskimo’s parka. You could even put Ginny in a black nun’s habit.
“If we want to compete with the big boys,” Dave had said, “We need our own Ginny. Our own Tammy. Our own Miss Revlon. Once we have that, we’ll have our baby doll and our boy doll and our special collectible dolls.”
The company invested thousands in new molds, an eye-setter and a sewing machine that would stitch a full head of hair right into a rubber scalp. They hired designers to draw the costumes and seamstresses to pattern, cut and sew them. After several months, they created a chubby-kneed doll in a red velvet skating dress trimmed with silver rickrack and white pompoms. She wore tiny ice skates and had plump cheeks. Dave decided to call her Candy.
Dave engaged the services of a Madison Avenue advertising firm who came up with the idea to put candy canes on all of her packaging and created the tagline that read, Candy: The sweetest little girl in the world.
They had everything they needed to make a big splash just in time for Christmas 1956. But there was one problem: Candy’s eyebrows had a downward slant and her face was more jowly than plump. She wasn’t a pink-cheeked eight-year-old like Ginny or a budding ingenue like Jill. She was an ornery hausfrau annoyed that you didn’t pick up your socks. Christmas of ‘56 was a bust.
Jimmy found Dave in his office with his back to the door, staring out the window at the traffic on 5th Avenue. A Candy doll stood on Dave’s desk wearing tiny silk socks, rubber Mary Janes and a red-and-white striped dress. Next to her was an open bottle of scotch that was almost empty.
“Dave,” Jimmy said, but Dave said nothing. “Dave,” Jimmy said, louder this time, and Dave turned around, highball glass gripped tightly in his right hand. Dave’s eyes were red and the front of his shirt was rumpled.
“I’ve been going over the books --”
“Save it, Jimmy,” Dave said. “I know what you’re going to say. I have a plan to deal with it.” Dave slumped down in his chair. He picked up the Candy doll and gently tipped her backward so that her eyes closed. For years, the company only made dolls with eyes that were painted on. The original self-walking dolls were attached to a string with a weight on the end of it. When you stretched the string across a tabletop and let the weight dangle over the edge, the doll would ‘walk’ by itself. There were ugly, fat elves with molded plastic hair, but they cost a lot less to produce than Candy did.
“A plan?” Jimmy asked. Rain hit the office window, blurring the green stoplight on the street below. The light changed, and all the green droplets turned yellow.
“Look, don’t take this the wrong way,” Dave said, “but the less you know about the plan, the better.”
Jimmy nodded and backed out of Dave’s office. He took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped out into the rain. He heard the sound of the subway trains rumbling under the street. He sprinted down the stairs and made it through the turnstile just in time to dash through the subway doors before they closed. He rode the train to Union Square and changed to another that would take him to East Williamsburg. The company had its offices at the Toy Center on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, but the factory was on McKibben Street in Brooklyn.
Forty minutes later, Jimmy climbed the stairs to the street level at the Morgan Avenue stop. The rain had stopped, but the humidity remained in the air like an ex-lover’s perfume. He slipped out of his sport coat and draped it over his arm. The McKibben Street factory had large windows made of sixteen square panes each. Some of them were cracked, all were grimy. In spite of the windows, the factory always seemed to be dark inside. The air in the factory smelled of plastic and paint. Jimmy walked past racks where injection-molded limbs hung to dry, past rows of eyeless heads, and long tables of fabric waiting to be cut.
He found his girlfriend, Ruby, at her station, where she held blank doll heads up to a stencil through which she airbrushed eyebrows and lips onto Candy’s face. Her name was really Rufina, but she had changed it to sound more American.
“Jimmy!” She said, a smile spreading across her face, her dark eyes sparkling. “Come stai?” Her smile quickly disappeared. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Jimmy put his hand on her shoulder. When he leaned in to whisper in her ear, he breathed in her scent: lemon and white iris. “Clock out for the day,” he said.
Ruby frowned. “I can’t, you know that.”
“Then do it as soon as you can,” he said. “I have something I need to tell you. Meet me at that spot around the corner from here.”
Ruby’s eyebrows knitted. Jimmy could tell she wanted him to just say it now, but all around them, girls cut, sewed, painted, poured, trimmed and measured. He didn’t want to alarm them. He gave Ruby’s arm a gentle squeeze and walked out of the factory.
Around the corner from the factory, there was a windowless bar with sawdust on the floor. Jimmy ordered a beer and checked his watch. He’d met Ruby several months earlier at the company picnic in Central Park. Her mother and father had come from Sicily and she lived with them on the Italian side of Astoria in Queens. Jimmy had moved to New York to go to Columbia, leaving his family behind in Toledo. He wasn’t sure whether they would accept any girl who wasn’t an Ohio Presbyterian, but it was too soon to propose anyway.
An hour later, Ruby joined him at the bar.
“What was so important?” she asked as she ordered a martini with two olives.
“It’s the company, Rub,” Jimmy said. “It’s in trouble.”
“What are you talking about?” She put an olive up to her lips and sucked out the pimento. Watching her full lips pucker as she did this made him want to buy her a whole jar of olives and stare at her until there was nothing left but brine. He knew it was silly, but there was only so much you could get a good Catholic girl to do.
“We’re not breaking even. And we’ve got this debt that we can’t pay off. Dave told me he has some sort of plan to deal with it.”
“What kind of plan?”
Ruby picked up her glass and threw back what was left of her drink and signaled the bartender for another. She plucked an olive from her fresh drink and traced it with her tongue before closing her lips around it and drawing in her cheeks.
Jimmy paused, waiting for her to finish extracting the pimento before he went on. “I don’t know. But I don’t think it means anything good. For you, for me, for anyone at the company.”
Ruby set her glass down. “So what you saying?”
“I’m saying we should start looking for new jobs. I'm saying we should resign. Now.”
Ruby stared at him. The red light from a neon sign behind her highlighted the edges of her wavy auburn hair.
“It’s the Titanic, Rub,” Jimmy said. “And there are no lifeboats.”
In Manhattan, Dave paced the floor in the back room of a bar on Broome Street. The owners of Valentine Dolls had agreed to meet him there. Bal Dolls, Inc. was over. Dave knew that. But he had a plan to get out of it without letting Bal’s creditors take him to the cleaners. Valentine had everything: a teenage fashion doll to compete with Vogue’s Jill. A crying, peeing baby doll that was a knockoff of Ideal’s Betsy Wetsy. They even had a Ginny type with the same chubby knees and curled wig, with a face just different enough to be its own thing and not a complete knockoff. Loyal customers who would buy outfit after outfit.
Dave lit a cigarette, smoked it down to a nub, then lit another. He remembered the wide-eyed look on that kid, Jimmy. He was a great accountant and had a long career ahead of him. He was also still young enough to have stupid College-Boy ideals. If Dave had told Jimmy the plan to sell all of Bal’s assets to Valentine, Jimmy would be on the phone to some state bureaucrat before he could finish the sentence. It was always the big-eyed kids who turned out to be rats.
Minutes later, Ben and Harry arrived. A waiter took their orders and shut the door behind him when he left.
“I’ll sell you everything we’ve got,” said Dave. “Everything at 307 McKibben. Name your price.”
Dave handed over a sheet that listed everything at the Brooklyn factory:
2 gluing stands
1 spreading machine for heads
1 eye-setting machine and air compressor
1 reamer -- mounted on bench
1 merrow machine
1 snap machine
1 button machine
Packing tables
Cutting tables
Fluorescent lights
Shipping desk
“That includes all the fabric, all the trimmings -- rickrack, lace, pompoms,” Dave said. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
Ben and Harry traded glances. Harry wrote something down on a scrap of paper and handed it to Dave.
Dave’s tobacco-stained fingers trembled as he unfolded the scrap of paper. He looked at the number, then looked up at Ben and Harry. He nodded.
The next morning, Ruby turned off her alarm and went back to sleep. She was quitting anyway, so it wouldn’t matter so much if she showed up a little bit late. When she finally got out of bed, she found her sister, Donata (she went by Donna), in the kitchen sipping coffee.
“You’re up late,” Donna said as she poured a cup for Ruby and slid it across the table.
“I’m giving notice today,” she said as she straightened her stockings. “I don’t need to be on time to give notice.” She looked up at Donna to see her reaction. Behind her, rows of cherries, peaches and grapes danced across the new wallpaper.
“What? You can’t quit.”
“Jimmy says the company is going to shut down.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Your medigan told you that? I don’t know why you bother with him. If you don’t end it soon, Mom and Dad are going to ship you to Catania to find a husband.”
Ruby ignored Donna’s barb. “There are other doll factories in New York. There’s one out in Hollis. I’ll just go out there and apply.”
“That’s an hour away from here,” Donna said.
Ruby shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get my own apartment.” She pulled back the yellow chintz curtain and saw the rain pelting the sidewalk.
“Let me borrow your umbrella,” she said.
To get to the factory in Brooklyn, Ruby had to ride the Broadway line into Manhattan, then take the Lexington Avenue line down to Union Square, and finally transfer to the Canarsie line. When she arrived at the factory, she noticed that it was unusually quiet. On most days, a dozen Singer sewing machines whirred in unison and steam hissed from the machines that cooked molded rubber heads. Now, all she heard was the rain battering the leaves above her head and the distant traffic on Morgan Avenue.
A padlock and chain were looped around the door handle. Ruby pulled a bobby pin from her hair and slipped it into the lock. Two boyfriends ago, she’d learned how to pick locks. The shank popped loose and she unwound the chain. Her footsteps echoed as she stepped into the silent doll factory. She walked slowly past the time card rack and the punch clock. The last time stamp on all of the cards was from quitting time the previous day. As she turned the corner, expecting to navigate the narrow aisle that led to her station, she instead found herself in a wide open space, with the tall, paned windows staring blankly at her on three sides.
Everything was gone! The rows of tables where the seamstresses cut patterns, the bolts of fabric, the sewing machines, the molds, Ruby’s stencils and airbrushes, even the limbs that yesterday were hung up to dry -- all of it, gone. Ruby wrapped her arms around herself as she walked around the empty floor. A small object caught the light that streamed through the dirty windows. She bent to pick it up: an eye. She slipped it into her pocket.
In Manhattan, Jimmy arrived at the office with his resignation letter in hand. The elevator operator gave Jimmy a silent nod and pressed for his floor. As soon as Jimmy stepped off the elevator, he could hear the phones jangling. The receptionist sat at her desk, answering call after call. Jimmy watched as she twisted the phone cord around her fingertips until they turned purple.
“Everybody who works at the factory has been calling,” she told Jimmy. “The doors are locked. They’ve been calling all morning.”
Jimmy thought of Ruby and wondered if she was already home. Then, he remembered Dave’s red eyes and the fingerprints that smudged his highball glass.
“Where is Dave?”
Before the receptionist could answer, the phone jangled again. Jimmy walked past her and made his way toward Dave’s office. Dave’s secretary was gone, her typewriter covered in beige canvas just as she had left it the night before. Jimmy opened the door and found that all of Dave’s personal effects -- pictures of his family, a painting of Venice, a bowling trophy -- were gone. The bottle of Scotch too. All that was left was the Candy doll in the striped dress laying face down on the desk. Jimmy picked her up and smoothed her hair.
He tore up his resignation letter and let the pieces flutter into the trash can.
At Idlewild, Dave boarded a plane bound for Florida. A stewardess in a powder blue uniform brought him a brandy. He closed his eyes. It had been a long night. Harry and Ben gave him three thousand dollars and sent a crew of workmen into the McKibbin Street factory to haul it all away.
Dave’s father had started Bal Dolls. It was just toward the end of the Great Depression when he got an idea for a doll that could walk on its own. He realized that if he made them from celluloid, they’d be cheap to manufacture and the company could sell them at a low price to families that didn’t have much. For years, the company made a solid revenue, but Dave knew that today’s kids didn’t want those kinds of toys anymore. Their parents could afford the dolls with sleep eyes, Saran hair and trunks full of tiny dresses.
Candy should’ve taken Bal right into the Sixties. What the hell had gone wrong? He only knew that he intended to be very far from New York by the time his creditors realized what had happened. He’d go to Havana, maybe, or Acapulco. He’d make up his mind once his Pan Am jet touched down in Miami.
In the afternoon, the rain began to let up. Ruby returned home after a long subway ride back from Hollis. The Ideal company had made her a job offer on the spot and she was due to start in the morning. Ideal made the Saucy Walker, Betsy Wetsy and Little Miss Revlon dolls -- to name just a few. They wouldn’t just pack up everything they owned and skulk away in the middle of the night. The man who interviewed her all but guaranteed it.
Ruby took a pitcher of lemonade from the fridge and buttered a slice of bread. A pad of paper next to the telephone had a note scribbled on it.
Rufina -- call Jimmy.
She picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect her to Sterling-5670. As she waited, she reached into her pocket and felt a pebble. She pulled it out and realized it was the eye she’d found in the factory earlier. The iris was a clear, crystal blue, and the pupil was no bigger than a peppercorn.
She set the eye on the edge of the table and watched it roll.
Two years later, Ruby sat in the back of the courtroom, watching Jimmy on the witness stand. It was the first time she’d seen him since he’d told her he was moving back to Ohio. He’d had a job offer in his hometown, he said, and after everything that had happened at Bal Dolls, he just didn’t much like New York anymore.
He didn’t ask Ruby to go with him.
She watched as he pulled a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. A slim gold band on his finger caught the light.
The factory where Ruby worked was humming and bright, churning out hundreds of units every hour. She painted lips, eyebrows and hair onto the molded rubber head of baby dolls; every day, dozens of eyeless faces sat on a drying rack, watching her as she worked. She met Carlo, who was one of the factory maintenance technicians when he came to fix her airbrush. The small diamond he’d given her gave off a dull sheen under courtroom lights.
Dave, the former owner of the company, sat at a table at the front of the room, flanked by lawyers. Ruby could only see the back of his head, but she recognized the gray streak in his hair.
“You informed the defendant of the company’s outstanding debt, is that correct?” The lawyer asked.
“That’s correct,” Jimmy said.
“And the sale took place on the evening of November 12, 1957?”
“I wasn’t there,” Jimmy said. “So I don’t know what happened. But Dave -- the defendant -- was gone the next day, and the workers at the factory in Brooklyn were locked out.”
It was then that Jimmy’s eyes locked on Ruby. A slight smile pulled up the corners of his mouth. Ruby smiled broadly and waved.
After the court adjourned for the day, Ruby stood on the rain-slicked steps of the courthouse, balancing an umbrella on her shoulder while she lit a cigarette. When she looked up, she saw Jimmy standing in front of her.
“Buy you a drink?” He asked. “For old time’s sake.”
At a tavern down the street, Ruby learned all about Jimmy’s wife, Meredith and their two-month-old, Jennifer.
“Meredith wanted to name the baby Candace -- Candy. I told her there was no way in hell.”
Ruby laughed and fished an olive out of her martini. The Candy dolls had completely disappeared from stores. The company that bought out Bal’s stock didn’t resume production. It was like the chubby-kneed girl with the plastic hair and annoyed eyebrows never happened.
“So what happens now?”
Jimmy ran a hand through his hair. “It’s up to the jury, but it doesn’t look good for Dave. I think he’s going to have to pay.” Jimmy swallowed the last of his beer and leaned forward, speaking in a hushed voice. “The lawyers for the other guy thought I was in on it. During the deposition, they grilled me for hours. They kept asking me about the secret meeting where the sale took place and about moving the stuff out of the factory. I told them over and over that I didn’t know anything. They finally decided to believe me, but I’m telling you Rub, I almost cried.”
Ruby patted his wrist but withdrew her hand before he could take hold of it.
“But it’s over now,” she said. “Right?”
Jimmy sat back and nodded. “It’s over now,” he agreed.
They walked out into the rain. Ruby unfolded her umbrella, and Jimmy stood under it with her until a taxi pulled up. Jimmy got into the car and waved as he shut the door. Once the taillights disappeared, Ruby sprinted to the subway station.
She didn’t want to keep Carlo waiting.
I really enjoyed that one!
So descriptive and putting me on a place where I wanted to keep reading.