The senator was a southerner with irongrey hair and white spats who looked at Mary French when he first came in the room as if he thought she was going to plant a bomb under the big bulge of his creamcolored vest, but his fatherly respectful delicate flowerofwomanhood manner was soothing. They ordered dinner brought up to George’s room. The senator kidded George in a heavy rotund way about his dangerous Bolsheviki friends. They’d been putting away a good deal of rye and the smoky air of George’s room was rich with whiskey. When she left them to go down to the office again they were talking about taking in a burlesque show.
The bunch down at the office looked haggard and sour. When she told them about G. H. Barrow’s offer they told her to jump at it; of course it would be wonderful to have her working for them in Washington and besides they wouldn’t be able to pay even her expenses any more. She finished her release and glumly said goodnight. That night she slept better than she had for weeks though all the way home she was haunted by Gus Moscowski’s blue eyes and his fair head with the blood clotted on it and his jaunty grin when his eyes met hers in the courtroom. She had decided that the best way to get the boys out of jail was to go to Washington with George.
Next morning George called her up at the office first thing and asked her what about the job. She said she’d take it. He said would fifty a week be all right; maybe he could raise it to seventyfive later. She said it was more than she’d ever made in her life. He said he wanted her to come right around to the Schenley; he had something important for her to do. When she got there he met her in the lobby with a hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “The first thing I want you to do, sweet girl, is to go buy yourself a warm overcoat. Here’s two weeks’ salary in advance. . . . You won’t be any good to me as a secretary if you catch your death of pneumonia the first day.”
On the parlorcar going to Washington he handed over to her two big square black suitcases full of testimony. “Don’t think for a moment there’s no work connected with this job,” he said, fishing out manila envelope after manila envelope full of closely typed stenographers’ notes on onionskin paper. “The other stuff was more romantic,” he said, sharpening a pencil, “but this in the longrange view is more useful.”
“I wonder,” said Mary.
“Mary dear, you are very young . . . and very sweet.” He sat back in his greenplush armchair looking at her a long time with his bulging eyes while the snowy hills streaked with green of lichened rocks and laced black with bare branches of trees filed by outside. Then he blurted out wouldn’t it be fun if they got married when they got to Washington. She shook her head and went back to the problem of strikers’ defense but she couldn’t help smiling at him when she said she didn’t want to get married just yet; he’d been so kind. She felt he was a real friend.
In Washington she fixed herself up a little apartment in a house on H Street that was being sublet cheap by Democratic officeholders who were moving out. She often cooked supper for George there. She’d never done any cooking before except camp cooking, but George was quite an expert and knew how to make Italian spaghetti and chiliconcarne and oysterstew and real French bouillabaisse. He’d get wine from the Rumanian Embassy and they’d have very cozy meals together after long days working in the office. He talked and talked about love and the importance of a healthy sexlife for men and women, so that at last she let him. He was so tender and gentle that for a while she thought maybe she really loved him. He knew all about contraceptives and was very nice and humorous about them. Sleeping with a man didn’t make as much difference in her life as she’d expected it would.
The day after Harding’s inauguration two seedylooking men in shapeless grey caps shuffled up to her in the lobby of the little building on G Street where George’s office was. One of them was Gus Moscowski. His cheeks were hollow and he looked tired and dirty. “Hello, Miss French,” he said. “Meet the kid brother . . . not the one that scabbed, this one’s on the up and up. . . . You sure do look well.” “Oh, Gus, they let you out.” He nodded. “New trial, cases dismissed. . . . But I tell you it’s no fun in that cooler.” She took them up to George’s office. “I’m sure Mr. Barrow’ll want to get firsthand news of the steelworkers.”
Gus made a gesture of pushing something away with his hand. “We ain’t steelworkers, we’re bums. . . . Your friends the senators sure sold us out pretty. Every sonofabitch ever walked across the street with a striker’s blacklisted. The old man got his job back, way back at fifty cents instead of a dollar ten after the priest made him kiss the book and promise not to join the union. . . . Lots of people goin’ back to the old country. Me an’ the kid we pulled out, went down to Baltimore to git a job on a boat somewheres but the seamen are piled up tendeep on the wharf. . . . So we thought we might as well take in the ’nauguration and see how the fat boys looked.”
Mary tried to get them to take some money but they shook their heads and said, “We don’t need a handout, we can woik.” They were just going when George came in. He didn’t seem any too pleased to see them, and began to lecture them on violence; if the strikers hadn’t threatened violence and allowed themselves to be misled by a lot of Bolshevik agitators, the men who were really negotiating a settlement from the inside would have been able to get them much better terms. “I won’t argue with you, Mr. Barrow. I suppose you think Father Kazinski was a red and that it was Fanny Sellers that bashed in the head of a statetrooper. An’ then you say you’re on the side of the woikin’man.”
“And, George, even the senate committee admitted that the violence was by the deputies and statetroopers. . . . I saw it myself after all,” put in Mary.
“Of course, boys . . . I know what you’re up against. . . . I hold no brief for the Steel Trust. . . . But, Mary, what I want to impress on these boys is that the workingman is often his own worst enemy in these things.”
“The woikin’ man gits f’rooked whatever way you look at it,” said Gus, “and I don’t know whether it’s his friends or his enemies does the worst rookin’. . . . Well, we got to git a move on.”
“Boys, I’m sorry I’ve got so much pressing business to do. I’d like to hear about your experiences. Maybe some other time,” said George, settling down at his desk.
As they left Mary French followed them to the door and whispered to Gus, “And what about Carnegie Tech?” His eyes didn’t seem so blue as they’d seemed before he went to jail. “Well, what about it?” said Gus without looking at her and gently closed the groundglass door behind him.
That night while they were eating supper Mary suddenly got to her feet and said, “George, we’re as responsible as anybody for selling out the steelworkers.” “Nonsense, Mary, it’s the fault of the leaders who picked the wrong minute for the strike and then let the bosses hang a lot of crazy revolutionary notions on them. Organized labor gets stung every time it mixes in politics. Gompers knows that. We all did our best for ’em.”
Mary French started to walk back and forth in the room. She was suddenly bitterly uncontrollably angry. “That’s the way they used to talk back in Colorado Springs. I might better go back and live with Mother and do charitywork. It would be better than making a living off the workingclass.”
She walked back and forth. He went on sitting there at the table she’d fixed so carefully with flowers and a white cloth, drinking little sips of wine and putting first a little butter on the corner of a cracker and then a piece of Roquefort cheese and then biting it off and then another bit of butter and another piece of cheese, munching slowly all the time. She could feel his bulging eyes traveling over her body. “We’re just laborfakers,” she yelled in his face, and ran into the bedroom.
He stood over her still chewing on the cheese and crackers as he nervously patted the back of her shoulder. “What a spiteful thing to say. . . . My child, you mustn’t be so hysterical. . . . This isn’t the first strike that’s ever come out badly. . . . Even this time there’s a gain. Fairminded people all over the country have been horrified by the ruthless
violence of the steelbarons. It will influence legislation. . . . Sit up and have a glass of wine. . . . Now, Mary, why don’t we get married? It’s too silly living like this. I have some small investments. I saw a nice little house for sale in Georgetown just the other day. This is just the time now to buy a house when prices are dropping . . . personnel being cut out of all the departments. . . . After all I’ve reached an age when I have a right to settle down and have a wife and kids. . . . I don’t want to wait till it’s too late.”
Mary sat up sniveling. “Oh, George, you’ve got plenty of time. . . . I don’t know why I’ve got a horror of getting married. . . . Everything gives me the horrors tonight.” “Poor little girl, it’s probably the curse coming on,” said George and kissed her on the forehead. After he’d gone home to his hotel she decided she’d go back to Colorado Springs to visit her mother for a while. Then she’d try to get some kind of newspaper job.
Before she could get off for the West she found that a month had gone by. Fear of having a baby began to obsess her. She didn’t want to tell George about it because she knew he’d insist on their getting married. She couldn’t wait. She didn’t know any doctor she could go to. Late one night she went into the kitchenette to stick her head in the oven and tried to turn on the gas, but it seemed so inconvenient somehow and her feet felt so cold on the linoleum that she went back to bed.
Next day she got a letter from Ada Cohn all about what a wonderful time Ada was having in New York where she had the loveliest apartment and was working so hard on her violin and hoped to give a concert in Carnegie Hall next season. Without finishing reading the letter Mary French started packing her things. She got to the station in time to get the ten o’clock to New York. From the station she sent George a wire: FRIEND SICK CALLED TO NEW YORK WRITING.
She’d wired Ada and Ada met her at the Pennsylvania station in New York looking very handsome and rich. In the taxicab Mary told her that she had to lend her the money to have an abortion. Ada had a crying fit and said of course she’d lend her the money but who on earth could she go to? Honestly she wouldn’t dare ask Dr. Kirstein about it because he was such a friend of her father’s and mother’s that he’d be dreadfully upset. “I won’t have a baby. I won’t have a baby,” Mary was muttering.
Ada had a fine threeroom apartment in the back of a building on Madison Avenue with a light tancolored carpet and a huge grandpiano and lots of plants in pots and flowers in vases. They ate their supper there and strode up and down the livingroom all evening trying to think. Ada sat at the piano and played Bach preludes to calm her nerves, she said, but she was so upset she couldn’t follow her music. At last Mary wrote George a specialdelivery letter asking him what to do. Next evening she got a reply. George was brokenhearted, but he enclosed the address of a doctor. Mary gave the letter to Ada to read. “What a lovely letter. I don’t blame him at all. He sounds like a fine sensitive beautiful nature.” “I hate him,” said Mary, driving her nails into the palms of her hands. “I hate him.”
Next morning she went down all alone to the doctor’s and had the operation. After it she went home in a taxicab and Ada put her to bed. Ada got on her nerves terribly tiptoeing in and out of the bedroom with her face wrinkled up. After about a week Mary French got up. She seemed to be all right, and started to go around New York looking for a job.
The Camera Eye (46)
walk the streets and walk the streets inquiring of Coca-Cola signs Lucky Strike ads pricetags in storewindows scraps of overheard conversations stray tatters of newsprint yesterday’s headlines sticking out of ashcans
for a set of figures a formula of action an address you don’t quite know you’ve forgotten the number the street may be in Brooklyn a train leaving for somewhere a steamboat whistle stabbing your ears a job chalked up in front of an agency
to do to make there are more lives than walking desperate the streets hurry underdog do make
a speech urging action in the crowded hall after hand-clapping the pats and smiles of others on the platform the scrape of chairs the expectant hush the few coughs during the first stuttering attempt to talk straight tough going the snatch for a slogan they are listening and then the easy climb slogan by slogan to applause (if somebody in your head didn’t say liar to you and on Union Square
that time you leant from a soapbox over faces avid young opinionated old the middleaged numb with overwork eyes bleared with newspaperreading trying to tell them the straight dope make them laugh tell them what they want to hear wave a flag whispers the internal agitator crazy to succeed)
you suddenly falter ashamed flush red break out in sweat why not tell these men stamping in the wind that we stand on a quicksand? that doubt is the whetstone of understanding is too hard hurts instead of urging picket John D. Rockefeller the bastard if the cops knock your blocks off it’s all for the advancement of the human race while I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy
and all the time in my pocket that letter from that collegeboy asking me to explain why being right which he admits the radicals are in their private lives such shits
lie abed underdog (peeling the onion of doubt) with the book unread in your hand and swing on the seesaw maybe after all maybe topdog make
money you understood what he meant the old party with the white beard beside the crystal inkpot at the cleared varnished desk in the walnut office in whose voice boomed all the clergymen of childhood and shrilled the hosannahs of the offkey female choirs All you say is very true but there’s such a thing as sales and I have daughters I’m sure you too will end by thinking differently make
money in New York (lipstick kissed off the lips of a girl fashionablydressed fragrant at five o’clock in a taxicab careening down Park Avenue when at the end of each crosstown street the west is flaming with gold and white smoke billows from the smokestacks of steamboats leaving port and the sky is lined with greenbacks
the riveters are quiet the trucks of the producers are shoved off onto the marginal avenues
winnings sing from every streetcorner
crackle in the ignitions of the cars swish smooth in ballbearings sparkle in the lights going on in the showwindows croak in the klaxons tootle in the horns of imported millionaire shining towncars
dollars are silky in her hair soft in her dress sprout in the elaborately contrived rosepetals that you kiss become pungent and crunchy in the speakeasy dinner sting shrill in the drinks
make loud the girlandmusic show set off the laughing jag in the cabaret swing in the shufflingshuffling orchestra click sharp in the hatcheck girl’s goodnight)
if not why not? walking the streets rolling on your bed eyes sting from peeling the speculative onion of doubt if somebody in your head topdog? underdog? didn’t (and on Union Square) say liar to you
Newsreel LII
assembled to a service for the dear departed, the last half hour of devotion and remembrance of deeds done and work undone; the remembrance of friendship and love; of what was and what could have been. Why not use well that last half hour, why not make that last service as beautiful as Frank E. Campbell can make it at the funeral church (nonsectarian)
BODY TIED IN BAG IS FOUND FLOATING
Chinatown my Chinatown where the lights are low
Hearts that know no other land
Drifting to and fro
APOPLEXY BRINGS END WHILE WIFE READS TO HIM
Mrs. Harding was reading to him in a low soothing voice. It had been hoped that he would go to sleep under that influence
DAUGHERTY IN CHARGE
All alone
By the telephone
Waiting for a ring
Two Women’s Bodies in Slayer’s Baggage
WORKERS MARCH ON REICHSTAG
CITY IN DARKNESS
RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT
SUICIDE ENDS IN
FAILURE AT THE BELMONT
Pershing Dances Tango in the Argentine
HARDING TRAIN CRAWLS FIFTY MILES THROUGH
MASSED CHICAGO CROWDS
Girl Out of Work Dies from Poison
MANY SEE COOLIDGE BUT FEW HEAR HIM
If you knew Susie
Like I know Susie
Oh oh oh what a girl
Art and Isadora
In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs. Isadora O’Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing made her so nervous that she declared to her children that she couldn’t keep anything on her stomach but a little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the bitterness and recriminations of the family row,
Big Money Page 15
