No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  Agnes snapped a cookie in two with her front teeth. Mrs. Brundin had no idea—no more than Ernest and Thorberg—how it is to stop in a mining town and see your father demented by alcohol and your ragged brothers who have worked since they were eight. No idea what it is to turn your back on them a second time.

  The space between Colorado and Ohio had passed in a blur of sleeplessness and self-loathing.

  “Did you have time to go sight-seeing?” Mrs. Brundin asked. Agnes shook her head.

  She’d gotten off the train in Toledo to look up the pen pal whose handwriting she had copied in the schoolhouse on the mesa. He’d met her at the depot. Alighting from the train, she passed a short, fat man who stood behind the baggage cart. While she was searching for her educated, dashing pen pal, this little man came out from the shadows. He held onto the cart handle and introduced himself. It was another disappointment in a string of disappointments. After a cup of stale coffee over which he talked mostly about his mother and his Sunday School class, she thanked him for the books he’d sent her seven years earlier, said good-bye, and waited all night in the depot for the next train.

  “Thorberg should be here soon.”

  Mrs. Brundin didn’t ask her about Ernest. She probably didn’t understand this marriage that was not a marriage, and Agnes had no explanations and no blame. She’d lost him. She hadn’t wanted a husband, she admitted to herself. Today, however, she did. And she wanted a sister, but she was no longer confused about whose sister Thorberg was.

  When they were younger, when the clear air and bright sunlight of Arizona had drawn them together and she’d followed—who had she followed? Ernest or Thorberg?— to California, she thought she had a sister for life. But she had no sister, no brother, no father and no mother, no husband, no pen pal: No one but herself. She popped the rest of the cookie into her mouth.

  “I hope you’ll be comfortable here,” Mrs. Brundin said as she began to clear away the cups and saucers.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Agnes took the tray from Mrs. Brundin and carried it into the kitchen.

  “Where’s your soap?” she asked, and when Mrs. Brundin showed her, she began to wash the cups and saucers and went on to clean a pan that had been left to soak. She dried the last saucer and turned to hang up the tea towel. In the doorway stood Thorberg, tall, golden, a little older now, but Thorberg. Agnes dropped the towel and ran across the room.

  “Thor!” Tears broke the ice floe behind her eyes. She hugged Thorberg and cried against her shoulder, oblivious to Mrs. Brundin. “I’ve been fired from my job!” She pulled back to let Thorberg see her misery and sank onto a kitchen chair. Thorberg poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove.

  “It was my Socialist card!” Agnes wailed. In a broken narrative she described study groups led by the only Marxist lawyer in San Diego—”I don’t even understand Marx!”—and dreary Socialist dances in a cramped little room over a pool hall with earnest single-taxers who stepped on her feet and talked interminably about a classless society.

  “But you are a Socialist, aren’t you?” Thorberg said. “I’ve told all my friends about you.”

  “I’m a Socialist, all right, but I don’t like meetings. I’m for the poor!” She brightened momentarily. “I do like speeches! Emma Goldman … .”

  “Emma Goldman is an anarchist,” Thorberg corrected her. “What do you mean, ‘It was my Socialist card’?” She sugared her coffee and sat down at the table.

  “I lost my purse and President Hardy found it on the steps of the administration building. Of all people to find a Socialist card!” Agnes pulled a large handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and blew her nose.

  “You can carry your card in New York City without fear of reprisal,” Thorberg said with a touch of smugness.

  “And since I don’t have a job,” Agnes added, “no one can fire me.”

  Thorberg slowly lifted her mother’s fine China to her lips. Agnes thought Thorberg and the cup both lovely, with something of the same translucent strength. From out of nowhere came a buoyant optimism. Agnes smiled. “I’m glad to see you again.” She supposed Thorberg knew of the divorce; she supposed Mr. and Mrs. Brundin knew, too. Probably they had all known of the separations and Ernest’s unhappiness. Whether they had guessed at her own, she did not know. She had not talked about her fears and inabilities and distaste for marriage. She had not known how to talk about such things but carried them with her, like a baby on her back which she managed while she worked.

  “Ernest and I are divorced,” she said.

  Thorberg calmly swallowed her coffee. “He wrote us the news. It’s time for you to lead your separate lives.” She rose from the table in a languid movement. “Let’s join Mother.” But Agnes was reluctant to leave the kitchen. Though Mr. and Mrs. Brundin were hospitable, as kind as their daughter and son, she wasn’t sure they liked her.

  “In a few days you can come and stay with me in the Village,” Thorberg said under her breath. “I have a set of friends you’ll like. They’re very advanced politically. Don’t say anything to Mother.”

  Mrs. Brundin sat in the living room working on a piece of white linen stretched between embroidery hoops. She had put on her glasses and looked peaceful.

  “Where’s Dad?” Thorberg asked.

  “Upstairs.” Mrs. Brundin’s silver needle caught the light and glittered above the linen like a quick slant of rain. “Thorberg tells me you’re a teacher, then,” she said to Agnes.

  “My certificate expired,” said Agnes. She watched Thorberg cross to the stairway and disappear.

  “You won’t be looking for a teaching position, then?” Mrs. Brundin concentrated on her embroidery.

  “No.”

  “What, then?” Agnes wondered if Mrs. Brundin always said “then” at the end of her sentences.

  “A secretary.”

  “Do you like secretarial work, then?”

  “No,” said Agnes. “But I need a job.”

  Mrs. Brundin looked over her glasses. “Ernest says you brought your sister to San Diego from Colorado and that, without you, she would not be in school.”

  “My sister’s almost ready to graduate and be a teacher. And she’ll have a certificate and be able to take care of herself. Then she and I can help our younger brothers.” The pride she felt in Myrtle surprised her.

  “And where are your brothers, then?”

  Agnes walked to the window. “In Trinidad, Colorado. Myrtle and I are going to help them go to school, my sister and I, and then they won’t have to work for other people.” She knew, as she spoke, that she and Myrtle had made no such plans. Mother would call it lying. Actually, it was a double lie, because it was already too late to help the boys as they needed to be helped.

  “They’re very fortunate boys to have sisters like you, then.”

  Agnes turned back to the room. Here the lying ended. “They’re not fortunate boys. They lost their mother, their father is a drunk … .” She stopped. And their sister abandoned them. “They are poor,” she concluded. The murmured voices of Thorberg and Mr. Brundin carried downstairs.

  Mrs. Brundin rested the embroidery hoops in her lap. “Ernest is very fond of you, Agnes.” Ernest’s mother was not going to cry; Ernest’s mother held her emotion as in a deep bowl; the bowl would not break.

  Soon Thorberg and Mr. Brundin came downstairs and entered the living room. Ernest’s father was smiling. When he smiled he resembled his son. He took a chair near his wife and, for the first time, looked directly at Agnes.

  “Agnes is going to find a job as a secretary, then,” Mrs. Brundin said. “She needs a hat and white gloves for her interview.”

  And wearing the hat and gloves, Agnes found a job as typist for The Graphic Magazine. Shortly after, she moved in with Thorberg, who was no longer married to the Rumanian. It was a lovely apartment just off Washington Square, with a blue rug, a piano, fresh flowers, and diaphanous curtains that made the outside world look blurry and beautiful. At first Agnes
sat in the corner chair listening to brilliant Greenwich Village people discuss their writing, their painting, their politics, their restaurants and tearooms, their relationships, their neuroses. Where did they find the time ? she wondered. Didn’t they have to work?

  When Thorberg’s friends discovered that Agnes had grown up in mining camps, they sought her out.

  “Did you live near Ludlow?” asked a young man, coming to sit on the floor beside her chair in the corner. He stretched his long legs out in front of him, turned onto his side, and literally lay at her feet, his elbow braced against the blue carpet, his head supported by one soft, pale hand.

  “I lived near Ludlow,” said Agnes. She didn’t bother to tell him it was the Dalagua coal camp where she’d lived. Dalagua would mean no more to him than the North Pole. Another young man who smoked a pipe joined the first young man, and then a woman with cropped hair who wore a sack dress and brown socks and sandals came to sit on the floor, and soon all three were firing questions at her and she found herself telling them that yes, she’d been in Colorado, very near Ludlow, in fact, on the day of the Massacre, when actually she hadn’t been anywhere near Ludlow but was teaching typing in San Diego.

  “John Reed took a trip to Ludlow to see the site of the strike and Massacre,” said the first young man, shifting his long, lean body on the blue rug. “He gave a talk at the Liberal Club. He said even now, two years later, the damage, the charred ground, is positively devastating.”

  Agnes closed her eyes. During a strike in 1914 the government militia had poured coal oil on miners’ tents and set fire to them. Women and children were trapped and burned to death. Thirty-two people died, people like herself and Mother and the children. Thinking about it now, her hard shell of work and will power disintegrated and she felt weak as jelly.

  “Who’s John Reed?”

  “You don’t know who John Reed is?” murmured the young woman in the sack dress.

  “John Reed is a brilliant reporter, a Socialist, an activist,” said the man with the pipe.

  Suddenly Agnes blurted out, “I wasn’t living in Ludlow at the time.” The truth was important in this pretty room.

  “But you said you were there,” objected the woman.

  “Well, I wasn’t. I wasn’t anywhere near. I was teaching typing in San Diego. But I did live in Trinidad and Dalagua and Tercio, and miners do spend their lives underground so mine owners can stay rich.” Her passion seemed too strong for the room, too personal. Her speech was too western. There was a silence.

  Half-interested, half-embarrassed, the man standing by her chair took his pipe out of his mouth. “Thorberg says you’re working at TheGraphic.” At least he was still standing, the only one of the three not wallowing on the floor. Agnes nodded.

  “You must come over to TheMasses,” said the one who was stretched out on the carpet. He looked as if he might fall asleep from superiority.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a splendid paper,” said the woman. “Socialist. They have the courage to speak out against the war. The government is forever hounding them.”

  “Are you in the editorial department at The Graphic?” asked the prone man lazily.

  “I’m a—book reviewer,” said Agnes, and she got up from her chair before the woman could ask what books she’d reviewed.

  “Charming girl, eh?” she heard the man with the pipe say as she left her corner for Thorberg’s room where she would wait out the party. She did not want to be charming. She had no intention of being charming. She didn’t keep up her grueling schedule, typing by day, attending classes at New York University by night, to be charming.

  On a Saturday she met Red, a seaman on shore leave, and felt a brief reprieve from the pressures of work and school. After he had taken her to dinner she invited him back to the apartment where Thorberg’s friends asked him endless questions about his duties, his pay, how he was treated at sea. They crowded around him and clapped him on the back.

  “This is better than Mabel Dodge’s salon,” someone said. Red made a great hit, a real man from the working class, right there in Thorberg’s living room. He told them he was against the ship owners and the capitalists. But he knew and Agnes knew that he was saving his money to buy a hardware store, for he had spent all dinner talking about his dreams for the future, and those dreams had not included Socialism.

  “Let’s go to Polly Holladay’s,” someone suggested. Everyone agreed. Agnes and Red got their coats. But it turned out that Thorberg and her friends hadn’t really intended to leave the comfortable apartment just yet. The talk turned to Freud and the psychological complexes Thorberg’s friends were continually discovering in themselves.

  “They think,” Agnes remarked to her sailor as they left for the movies, “that when I’ve been here longer I’ll achieve a complex, too.”

  Late that night when Red kissed her in the shadows of Thorberg’s apartment house, Agnes kissed him back. She would miss this man she could understand. And since she did not have to marry him, she enjoyed his mouth on hers. When he asked her to spend the night with him, she grappled with the old fear, forced herself to consider sex, and finally said she couldn’t spend the entire night, Thorberg might worry about where she was, but she wouldn’t mind visiting him. She needed to go home first, she told him.

  Thorberg had bought her a pessary. From the New Feminine Alliance, Agnes had learned more about her body than she wanted to know. Modern young women owe a debt to their mothers and grandmothers and their daughters and not least themselves, Thorberg said, to reject their submissive roles. There were no standards for men, she maintained, that a woman cannot adopt for her own. Agnes decided that Red was the man she would try out the new standard on. She didn’t care to be charming, but she did want to be free. She gritted her teeth. If necessary, she could out-Greenwich-Village Greenwich Village.

  Red went back to sea. Now Agnes no longer sat in the corner chair during Thorberg’s evenings. She was invited to lectures and art shows and dances at the Liberal Club. Two young men, one short, one lanky, took her to see the building on Washington Place where more than a hundred women workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company burned to death. A fire had started in the bolts of cloth, the short man told her, and the women died because they couldn’t get out of the locked factory. That was back in 1911, added the lanky one, implying that things were much better now that it was 1917. Both men were relaxed and confident and seemed to have a great deal of leisure. The fire in the shirtwaist factory interested them, but Agnes thought the flames they felt were not hot; the women they heard were not screaming.

  But even though the two young men seemed like children to Agnes, stunted and adolescent in some way, fancy in outward style, deficient in hard experience, she slept with them, one on one occasion, the other on another. She had been a child with Ernest, she knew now; not a woman. She sensed a great lack in herself and tried to make up for it. She began to practice sex in order to feel like a free and modern woman. She grasped at affairs in order to feel loved, for Ernest had loved her; she might never find anyone who loved her half so much.

  17

  Manhattan 1917

  A tall man wearing a white turban stepped onto the stage. He seated himself in a high-backed chair behind the lectern. His face glowed like dark, polished wood. With his legs crossed, his expression contemplative, he gazed out at the audience and waited for the introduction to end.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began. “Friends of India. The Indians are a chivalrous people.” His voice and accent moved like a deep river with a fast current. “They will not disturb England as long as she is engaged with Germany.” He paused. “The struggle after the war—and make no mistake, the war will come to an end—might, however, be even more bitter and sustained.”

  He spoke of Indian villages deteriorating under British rule and of what it cost India to remain loyal to England. “The money-lender, who before the advent of British rule held an extremely subordinate position in the village c
ommunity, has suddenly come to occupy the first place. He owns the best lands and the best houses and holds the bodies and souls of the agriculturists in mortgage.” In his face was sorrow and a great purpose.

  Unable to afford a ticket, Agnes had slipped into the auditorium by a side door and mingled with the crowd waiting to hear Lala Lajpat Rai speak at Columbia University on the subject “India During and After the War”. Now, from a seat in the center section near the front, she listened to the Lion of the Punjab, aware of his height, his leanness, the scar on one cheek. She thought him so ugly that he was beautiful. Plunged into the river of his speech, Agnes felt that, until now, she had never understood anything. She breathed carefully, as if the air in the auditorium needed to be conserved. In her bones she knew what it meant to be looked down on. To be oppressed. The knowledge extended further back than herself. She was Mother, looked down on for a lifetime, not just by her husband, but by her own family. After her marriage, the Rallses held Sarah Lydia in silent contempt. Before she was ten, Agnes knew that Mother wasn’t a Ralls any longer but had been penetrated by something strange and unlucky from Father’s side. She knew why Mother’s eyes were always sad. Mother was India.

  It seemed that this man extended his muscular brown hand to Agnes, stronger and more beautiful than the pasty hands of the Socialists she knew. It seemed to her that he lifted his face with its high cheek bones, gleaming black mustache, and asked her to join him in helping India.

  “You see,” Agnes pleaded an hour later, “there is so much I need to learn about your country.”

  Lajpat Rai, who had half-turned away and started up the aisle in the nearly empty auditorium, turned back at the passion in her voice. He studied her face for a long, solemn moment. “I cannot say no to someone who wants to learn,” he finally said. “I am at home on Sunday.” And he handed her his card.

  On Sunday Agnes walked east through Village streets, a stiff March wind blowing litter and leaves before her. She stopped at a door in a Lower East Side tenement. When Lajpat Rai opened it, she followed him into the kitchen-sitting room of a small apartment.