Children of Liberty

by Paullina Simons

  I’m studying to be a doctor too, Harry wanted to yell after her, vying for her attention. Maybe not a medical doctor, but an intellectual doctor, of thoughts and letters. Would you like to know what my doctoral thesis is on, which I’m desperately endeavoring to deliver on the first of May? Would you like me to sing it for you? “The limits of rationality … in Bakunin’s ‘God and the State’ … as compared with Marx’s … consciousness-altering, economic determinism as a material foundation … for all industrialized civiLIzaaaaation!” Does this impress you? Harry watched them as the boys caught up with the girls across the square, three varsity men standing encircled by five women, their athletic non-dialectical bodies turned toward the Italian Gibson girl who stood nearly eye to eye with them. Isn’t she a looker, Harry thought, turning away, walking briskly back toward Cambridge Common where Clarence was waiting with the car. No going to the river now. He needed to rush home and change or he was going to be late for dinner.

  The next day he told Clarence he would drive himself to Cambridge, where he stayed all day at Gore, eking out a few minutes on his thesis, staying until five, though his classes ended on Tuesdays before lunch, and then went out into the square to look for her. He checked the bulletin notices of events at Harvard for a list of upcoming speakers. He meandered for two more fruitless hours, and finally drove home.

  On Wednesday after lunch he got into the car and headed across the Charles to Simmons College on the far end of the Back Bay Fens. The Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds were very close to here. Perhaps she was interested in baseball? The 1905 season had just started. Two years ago a former Harvard pitching coach named Cy Young won nearly half of all the games the Boston Americans played and last year pitched the first-ever perfect game. Maybe Young’s prowess on the mound would impress an Italian girl. Harry had some time to think these thoughts as he walked in circles inside the small common grounds that connected the Simmons main college building and the Beatley Library. How was he going to find her? And if he did find her, how was he going to explain what he was doing in the middle of an all-women’s college? Was he going to have to fake an interest in the vacuous Sophie?

  Reluctantly he left. Not only did he not have a plan, but this was completely out of his area of expertise.

  But the next day, a Thursday, he was back at Simmons. He was hesitant to walk inside the main building, because it was full of women. He decided to walk the short blocks to Brookline Avenue where the dining hall and the residence halls were located. But that part of campus was even more full of women. At least at the college the professors were male.

  He inspected the girls at the dining hall serving food, and deduced none of them were her. Returning to the campus, he walked inside the main building. He explored the art gallery, the closed Office of Admissions, the conference rooms, the cafeteria. There was a community common room; she wasn’t in it. There was a tea room; not there either. He ventured into the wing with the music rooms. Maybe she had started playing a musical instrument. Nothing would surprise him anymore.

  When he didn’t find her playing the piano, he went to the college bookstore. He saw her immediately, behind the counter, busy with a sale. Puffed up by his amazing detective work, Harry hid triumphantly in the aisles, eyeing some books, and when his hands were suitably full of diverse and acceptable works, he stepped toward the counter, as casual as could be.

  “Harry.” She smiled. “Hello again. What are you doing here?”

  He laid his books on the counter. “I was buying tickets for the Boston Americans at the nearby Huntington Grounds and remembered I needed a few books for my dissertation. What are you doing here?”

  “I work here.” She glanced down at his choices. “What, the Crimson doesn’t sell Hobbes and Burke?”

  “I’m not at the Crimson now. You don’t work with your brother anymore?”

  “No.” She began to ring up his purchases. “I help out on the weekends sometimes.”

  “You don’t return to Lawrence often?”

  Guiltily she shrugged. “Not too often, as Mimoo never fails to remind me.”

  “You work every day?” He was peppering her with questions. Their transaction was almost over; he had a lot to ask.

  She told him she worked Tuesdays and Thursdays. He didn’t take his eyes off her. She looked a little more down-to-earth this evening; rather, a little more brought down to earth by her subdued work clothes—a maroon shirt and a dark green skirt. Colors of Simmons? Still she’d have to wear a hood in order to hide her hair, her mouth … “So how was Joe Ettor?”

  “Oh, we didn’t stay for him,” she said. “They wanted to go out walking instead.” She rolled her eyes, as if she just couldn’t believe it. “The boys were all done with speeches after Mother Jones. She put them off politics for good.”

  “Did she?” They went out walking! “I’m surprised she didn’t put them off women.”

  Gina laughed. “Yes, she kept hammering at the men about how they needed to work more and be paid more while we stayed home and took care of their babies.”

  “The progressive varsity boys didn’t like that?”

  Gina took his money, making sure he put it down on the counter first so she wouldn’t touch his hand. He noted that, the auspicious properness of it. It seemed so deliberate.

  “They’re just in it for the good time at the moment,” she said, giving him back change.

  “And who can blame them?” He took his books and changed the subject. “Huntington Grounds are quite special.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said laconically.

  “So you’ve been? You like baseball?”

  She shrugged. “We can’t really afford it. Sophie and I saw the opening game a few weeks ago. We stood on the street and looked over the fence. And what do you know, the police came to shoo us away. As if we’re not allowed to stand on a public avenue. It’s preposterous.”

  “I guess they didn’t want you watching the game for free,” said Harry.

  “That’s what they said. But we’re on the street! Last I checked we are allowed to walk down city blocks without being harassed by the police. They told us we were loitering because we were standing in one place. Said they would arrest us if we didn’t start moving. I said to them, if they didn’t want us to see the game, why didn’t they build the wall higher?” She laughed.

  “Let’s hope Charles Taylor, the owner of the Boston Americans, doesn’t take your advice.” He stepped closer to the counter. “Perhaps you and Sophie or any of your other friends would like to catch a game sometime?”

  “Perhaps.” She sounded non-committal. “You’ll have to explain the rules to me first.”

  “All right. Now?”

  She smiled as if thinking of something else.

  “When are you getting off?”

  “At six.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was five-thirty. “I’ll wait,” he said, moving to the edge of the counter.

  She helped a few more customers, adjusting the buttons on her elaborate sleeves.

  “They must pay you well at the bookstore,” he said.

  “Not really. I make spending money for the week; why do you say that?”

  He pointed to her clothes. “Some fine thread you’re wearing today. The other day too,” he said carefully. It was out of line to mention a woman’s attire. She was making him forget his manners! She was making him forget a lot of things. Perhaps he could be saved by her ignorance of the inappropriateness of his observations.

  “Well, thank you. But no, I get these from sewing. I make dresses for the girls in my residence and their mothers and aunts and cousins, and in return they pay me with silk and linen and combed cotton.” She smiled. “Good bargain, right?”

  He appraised her even more fully, if that were possible. Velvet too, he wanted to add, noticing the soft ivory fringe on her sleeves, her neckline, her waist, the ribbons in her hair. “No one can do that at an urban college,” he said. “You have to know how to sew.”
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br />   “Fortunately I do. Pippa taught me well.” Her smile faded. “She went back to Sicily, you know. Her father died—she wasn’t in great health and wanted to stop working. She left three years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Your mother liked the company.”

  “Yes. Makes it harder on me when I don’t want to go home.”

  Harry was grateful a customer came up to pay and the conversation shifted. “You must be an excellent dressmaker. And there I thought all you knew was how to spin wool.” It caught in his throat to mention it so casually.

  “I know a little bit more than that.” She smiled. “I don’t spin wool anymore. Those days are behind me.”

  Why did that make him sentimental and foolish? “You don’t dye yarn either?” He glanced at her hands, white, soft, unblemished.

  “No. No touching wool anymore. I sew now.”

  He stood silently, trying to calm his whirr of regret and nostalgia. She was grown up. She didn’t spin scarves from blueberries anymore for the grave man with the clipboard. It was the romance of it he had found so heart-stopping, the mystery of the thing he didn’t understand at all. There was no way to tell her this.

  “Thing is,” she told him, “I have a paper due tomorrow on Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “I know a lot about Poe,” said Harry. “He was melancholy. I’ll help you write it. I’ll walk you to your residence hall, if you like. Where do you live?”

  “Evans. But, um, I’m not going there.” She glanced at her pocket watch. “Emma Goldman is speaking at seven o’clock.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?” The white teeth were on full display. “Old South, of course!”

  “Of course. But what about the paper on ‘Annabel Lee’ you simply have to deliver by tomorrow?”

  “It’s on ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ actually.” She shrugged. “Goldman can’t wait. But Poe is dead. He can.”

  “Ah.”

  “Did you maybe want to … come?”

  “To hear Emma Goldman?”

  “She’s riveting. Have you ever heard her speak?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” he admitted. “But that may be deliberate. I don’t think much of her politics.” He didn’t want to tell Gina the extent of the stinging contempt he held for the anarchists. She seemed so blithely enamored with them. For some reason, women found all that talk of liberty appealing.

  “Oh no, she’s splendid.” Gina got her long green coat from the closet, her matching bag and said goodbye to her manager.

  “Isn’t Emma Goldman the one who wouldn’t condemn Czolgosz for assassinating President McKinley?” Harry held her coat open for her, almost touching her as she slipped her arms inside the sleeves.

  “She’s the one, but she got a bad knock for that. She condemned, just—not promptly.” Gina buttoned her coat and adjusted her hat. “I do have to run though.”

  “Did you make the coat too?”

  “Of course.”

  Harry clicked his tongue in admiration. “Are you meeting your friends?”

  “Often they come, but not always.”

  Now it was his turn to shrug. “Fine, let’s go hear this Emma Goldman.” If there was even a small possibility of her friends not coming, he would drag himself to Iceland to hear the lover of imprisoned Alexander Berkman.

  They walked out to the Fenway. “We’ll have to catch a trolley car,” she said squinting down the avenue for one.

  “How about if we get into my car instead and I’ll drive us?”

  “Oh!” That delighted her briefly as if she was relieved. “So you finally did get a car. Well, congratulations. Is it a Benz like you wanted?”

  “Well remembered. Unfortunately no, it’s an Olds Curved Dash Runabout.”

  “Well, still, must be convenient.”

  “It is. It’s even better when Clarence drives me, then I don’t have to worry about leaving the vehicle. But he’s been busy with my father lately.”

  The car was a souped-up horse carriage with the fixed engine crank in the middle between the one long seat. But it had an overhead canopy and side curtains, and a mother-in-law seat in the back. “I don’t have a mother-in-law,” Harry clarified. “It’s just what they call it.”

  “Oh, I know,” Gina said. “So how fast can this baby smoke along?”

  He laughed. “It can get up to twenty-five miles an hour. It’s got exactly one cylinder and five horsepower.”

  “Let’s see what it can do.”

  But once inside the car, she sat primly, her hands on her books on her lap. He tried to impress her by driving nearly 20 mph. She remained neutral.

  “Your mother lets you live by yourself in a dormitory?” Harry asked.

  They turned onto Commonwealth. He slowed down. He didn’t want to get downtown too quickly.

  “Not by myself. With three other girls. You’ve met them. Sophie, Julia and Miranda.”

  “Still.”

  “She wasn’t happy about it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I should think not. Nor your brother.”

  “Luckily for me, Salvo has become embroiled with so many girls at once that in between that and the restaurants, he simply doesn’t have time to chaperone his twenty-year-old sister.”

  Things had changed in big ways and small from five years ago. She was so self-possessed, so unflappable.

  “Harry?”

  “Excuse me, please. What did you ask?”

  “So what are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Teaching economics at Harvard and …” He was going to tell her about becoming a doctor. She had been so taken with Esther’s choice of spouse.

  “Economics, really?” she repeated. “So Emma should be fascinating for you.”

  “I said economics, not politics. And you’re on first name basis with her?”

  She chuckled. Harry was flummoxed. Now he didn’t know how to bring up his idiotic doctorate.

  She picked up one of his books off the seat. “So what’s a devout Marxist like you doing reading Reflections on the Revolution?”

  Was she teasing him? He almost drove off the road. “Hardly devout,” he said slowly, trying to focus on the dark space in front of him whooshing by. “And I read Burke only so I can refute him.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “What about you?” He reached over to glance at her books when they stopped at a light. “Mikhail Bakunin? Really?” Harry leafed through the rest. “Chernyshevsky? Mary Wollstonecraft—of her I approve.”

  “Have you read her Vindication of the Rights of Woman?”

  Honestly, Harry was going to crash into one of the brownstones on Commonwealth if she didn’t stop. “I may have perused it. But why the Russian anarchists?”

  “They have so much to say. Also Emma recommended them.”

  “I see.”

  “Chernyshevsky is almost deliberately abstract, but Bakunin is quite provocative, though I don’t agree with many of the things he wrote and believed.”

  “I should hope not.”

  She shook her head. “He advocated collective anarchy, but I think it was just his way of using the collective as the authoritarian power he decried in world governments.”

  Harry muttered something unintelligible.

  “He opposed Karl Marx,” Gina went on. “Yet created another system of oppression. If I were braver, I’d ask Emma this question. She takes questions at the end but I never manage to speak up.”

  “Well, crowded meeting halls can be intimidating.”

  “Wait till you see how many people will be there!” She clutched her books excitedly.

  “Bakunin was a peasant,” said Harry. “All well and good in the Russia of the last century. But the rest of the world is industrialized. The serfs have been long freed.”

  “So you know a little bit about Bakunin?”

  An ideal segue. But he couldn’t insert his neatly fitting doctoral dissertation topic into their discussion now. Because now it seemed
mean to wave the banner of his postgraduate education and his years’ long expertise on Bakunin and Marx in front of her flushed and eager face. Mean and unchivalrous.

  “Chernyshevsky is better, don’t you think?” She went on without waiting for his answer. “Deeper philosophy.”

  “Son of a priest who became a radical atheist? I suppose.”

  “You really know your anarchists, Harry.”

  “What’s more remarkable, Gina, is how well you know yours.”

  The car ride was over much too soon.

  Inside the meeting hall it was noisy and crowded. “Even better attended than Ben’s mother’s meetings,” Gina cheerfully pointed out. He felt lucky to find two seats together.

  “I haven’t been inside in many years,” Harry said.

  “Funny, because I come every week. They’re always having lectures here of one kind or another.”

  The talk was titled “Anarchism as it Really is.” He flapped the brochure shut just in case a derisive sound tripped from his tongue.

  Goldman had several speakers before her, but when she finally came onstage, close to eight o’clock, she received a ten-minute standing ovation, none louder than from the young woman next to him. The adoring smile on Gina’s face alternately amused and enthralled Harry. Personally he found Emma Goldman homely.

  “She’s not going to win any beauty pageants, is she?” he said to Gina while they were still standing and clapping.

  “Really?” she said. “Then why does she have a constant parade of lovers around her?”

  “I cannot account for other men’s taste,” said Harry. Goldman’s hair was messy, her glasses obscuring, her clothes dowdy. She was short and bulky. She didn’t even venture the ten steps up into the wineglass lectern, but stood instead eight inches above ground on a makeshift podium. “And she already has a lover,” Harry reminded Gina. “He’s in prison for murder.”

  “Well, she can hardly be expected to wait for him, can she? She is a sensualist.”

  “Emma Goldman is a sensualist?” Harry didn’t know what he was more astonished by: that Goldman would be so defined or that the Sicilian Aphrodite next to him would so define her.