“It must have been terrible.”
He got to his feet and shook his head as if he didn’t want to talk about it. He was a young man lankilybuilt, but he walked up and down in front of the gaslogs with a strangely elderly dragging walk. His face was white as a mushroom with sags of brownish skin under the eyes.
“You see,” he said, “it’s like people who’ve been sick and have to learn to walk all over again . . . don’t pay any attention.”
He drank several cups of hot milk and then he went to bed. She went into the other bedroom and closed the door and lay down on the bed with a pile of books and pamphlets. She had some legal details to look up.
She had just gotten sleepy and crawled under the covers herself when a knocking woke her. She snatched at her bathrobe and jumped up and opened the door. Ben Compton stood there trembling wearing a long unionsuit. He’d taken off his glasses and they’d left a red band across the bridge of his nose. His hair was rumpled and his knobby feet were bare. “Comrade,” he stammered, “d’you mind if I . . . d’you mind if I . . . d’you mind if I lie on the bed beside you? I can’t sleep. I can’t stay alone.” “You poor boy. . . . Get into bed, you are shivering,” she said. She lay down beside him still wearing her bathrobe and slippers.
“Shall I put out the light?” He nodded. “Would you like some aspirin?” He shook his head. She pulled the covers up under his chin as if he were a child. He lay there on his back staring with wideopen black eyes at the ceiling. His teeth were clenched. She put her hand on his forehead as she would on a child’s to see if he was feverish. He shuddered and drew away. “Don’t touch me,” he said.
Mary put out the light and tried to compose herself to sleep on the bed beside him. After a while he grabbed her hand and held it tight. They lay there in the dark side by side staring up at the ceiling. Then she felt his grip on her hand loosen; he was dropping off to sleep. She lay there beside him with her eyes open. She was afraid the slightest stir might wake him. Every time she fell asleep she dreamed that detectives were breaking in the door and woke up with a shuddering start.
Next morning when she went out to go to the office he was still asleep. She left a latchkey for him and a note explaining that there was food and coffee in the icebox. When she got home that afternoon her heart beat fast as she went up the elevator.
Her first thought after she’d opened the door was that he’d gone. The bedroom was empty. Then she noticed that the bathroom door was closed and that a sound of humming came from there. She tapped. “That you, Comrade Compton?” she said.
“Be right out.” His voice sounded firmer, more like the deep rich voice he’d addressed the meeting in. He came out smiling, long pale legs bristling with black hairs sticking oddly out from under Mary’s lavender bathrobe.
“Hello, I’ve been taking a hot bath. This is the third I’ve taken. Doctor said they were a good thing. . . . You know, relax. . . .” He pulled out a pinkleather edition of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray from under his arm and shook it in front of her. “Reading this tripe. . . . I feel better. . . . Say, comrade, whose apartment is this anyway?”
“A friend of mine who’s a violinist. . . . She’s away till fall.” “I wish she was here to play for us. I’d love to hear some good music. . . . Maybe you’re musical.” Mary shook her head.
“Could you eat some supper? I’ve brought some in.” “I’ll try . . . nothing too rich . . . I’ve gotten very dyspeptic. . . . So you thought I spoke all right?” “I thought it was wonderful,” she said.
“After supper I’ll look at the papers you brought in. . . . If the kept press only wouldn’t always garble what we say.”
She heated some peasoup and made toast and bacon and eggs and he ate up everything she gave him. While they were eating they had a nice cozy talk about the movement. She told him about her experiences in the great steelstrike. She could see he was beginning to take an interest in her. They’d hardly finished eating before he began to turn white. He went to the bathroom and threw up.
“Ben, you poor kid,” she said when he came back looking haggard and shaky. “It’s awful.”
“Funny,” he said in a weak voice. “When I was in the Bergen County jail over there in Jersey I came out feeling fine . . . but this time it’s hit me.” “Did they treat you badly?” His teeth clenched and the muscles of his jaw stiffened, but he shook his head. Suddenly he grabbed her hand and his eyes filled with tears. “Mary French, you’re being too good to me,” he said. Mary couldn’t help throwing her arms around him and hugging him. “You don’t know what it means to find a . . . to find a sweet girl comrade,” he said, pushing her gently away. “Now let me see what the papers did to what I said.”
After Ben had been hiding out in the apartment for about a week the two of them decided one Saturday night that they loved each other. Mary was happier than she’d ever been in her life. They romped around like kids all Sunday and went out walking in the park to hear the band play in the evening. They threw sponges at each other in the bathroom and teased each other while they were getting undressed; they slept tightly clasped in each other’s arms.
In spite of never going out except at night, in the next few days Ben’s cheeks began to have a little color in them and his step began to get some spring into it. “You’ve made me feel like a man again, Mary,” he’d tell her a dozen times a day. “Now I’m beginning to feel like I could do something again. After all the revolutionary labor movement’s just beginning in this country. The tide’s going to turn, you watch. It’s begun with Lenin and Trotzky’s victories in Russia.” There was something moving to Mary in the way he pronounced those three words: Lenin, Trotzky, Russia.
After a couple of weeks he began to go to conferences with radical leaders. She never knew if she’d find him in or not when she got home from work. Sometimes it was three or four in the morning before he came in tired and haggard. Always his pockets bulged with literature and leaflets. Ada’s fancy livingroom gradually filled up with badlyprinted newspapers and pamphlets and mimeographed sheets. On the mantelpiece among Ada’s dresdenchina figures playing musical instruments were stacked the three volumes of Capital with places marked in them with pencils. In the evening he’d read Mary pieces of a pamphlet he was working on, modeled on Lenin’s What’s to Be Done? and ask her with knitted brows if he was clear, if simple workers would understand what he meant.
One Sunday in August he made her go with him to Coney Island where he’d made an appointment to meet his folks; he’d figured it would be easier to see them in a crowded place. He didn’t want the dicks to trail him home and then be bothering the old people or his sister who had a good job as secretary to a prominent businessman. When they met it was some time before the Comptons noticed Mary at all. They sat at a big round table at Stauch’s and drank nearbeer. Mary found it hard to sit still in her chair when the Comptons all turned their eyes on her at once. The old people were very polite with gentle manners but she could see that they wished she hadn’t come. Ben’s sister Gladys gave her one hard mean stare and then paid no attention to her. Ben’s brother Sam, a stout prosperouslooking Jew who Ben had said had a small business, a sweatshop probably, was polite and oily. Only Izzy, the youngest brother, looked anything like a workingman and he was more likely a gangster. He treated her with kidding familiarity, she could see he thought of her as Ben’s moll. They all admired Ben, she could see; he was the bright boy, the scholar, but they felt sorry about his radicalism as if it was an unfortunate sickness he had contracted. Still his name in the paper, the applause in Madison Square Garden, the speeches calling him a workingclass hero had impressed them. After Ben and Mary had left the Comptons and were going into the subwaystation, Ben said bitterly in her ear, “Well, that’s the Jewish family. . . . What do you think of it? Some straitjacket. . . . It’ud be the same if I killed a man or ran a string of whorehouses . . . even in the movement you can’t break away from them.” “But, Ben, it’s got its good side . . . they’d do anything in
the world for you . . . my mother and me we really hate each other.”
Ben needed clothes and so did Mary; she never had any of the money from the job left over from week to week, so for the first time in her life she wrote her mother asking for five hundred dollars. Her mother sent back a check with a rather nice letter saying that she’d been made Republican State Committeewoman and that she admired Mary’s independence because she’d always believed women had just as much right as men to earn their own living and maybe women in politics would have a better influence than she’d once thought, and certainly Mary was showing grit in carving out a career for herself, but she did hope she’d soon come around to seeing that she could have just as interesting a career if she’d come back to Colorado Springs and occupy the social position her mother’s situation entitled her to. Ben was so delighted when he saw the check he didn’t ask what Mary had got the money for. “Five hundred bucks is just what I needed,” he said. “I hadn’t wanted to tell you but they want me to lead a strike over in Bayonne . . . rayonworkers . . . you know, the old munitionplants made over to make artificial silk. . . . It’s a tough town and the workers are so poor they can’t pay their union dues . . . but they’ve got a fine radical union over there. It’s important to get a foothold in the new industries . . . that’s where the old sellout organizations of the A.F. of L. are failing. . . . Five hundred bucks’ll take care of the printing bill.”
“Oh, Ben, you are not rested yet. I’m so afraid they’ll arrest you again.”
He kissed her. “Nothing to worry about.”
“But, Ben, I wanted you to get some clothes.”
“This is a fine suit. What’s the matter with this suit? Didn’t Uncle Sam give me this suit himself? . . . Once we get things going we’ll get you over to do publicity for us . . . enlarge your knowledge of the clothing industry. Oh, Mary, you’re a wonderful girl to have raised that money.”
That fall when Ada came back, Mary moved out and got herself a couple of small rooms on West Fourth Street in the Village, so that Ben could have some place to go when he came over to New York. That winter she worked tremendously hard, still handling her old job and at the same time doing publicity for the strikes Ben led in several Jersey towns. “That’s nothing to how hard we’ll have to work when we have soviets in America,” Ben would say when she’d ask him didn’t he think they’d do better work if they didn’t always try to do so many things at once.
She never knew when Ben was going to turn up. Sometimes he’d be there every night for a week and sometimes he would be away for a month and she’d only hear from him through newsreleases about meetings, picketlines broken up, injunctions fought in the courts. Once they decided they’d get married and have a baby, but the comrades were calling for Ben to come and organize the towns around Passaic and he said it would distract him from his work and that they were young and that there’d be plenty of time for that sort of thing after the revolution. Now was the time to fight. Of course she could have the baby if she wanted to but it would spoil her usefulness in the struggle for several months and he didn’t think this was the time for it. It was the first time they’d quarreled. She said he was heartless. He said they had to sacrifice their personal feelings for the working-class, and stormed out of the house in a temper. In the end she had an abortion but she had to write her mother again for money to pay for it.
She threw herself into her work for the strikecommittee harder than ever. Sometimes for weeks she only slept four or five hours a night. She took to smoking a great deal. There was always a cigarette resting on a corner of her typewriter. The fine ash dropped into the pages as they came from the multigraph machine. Whenever she could be spared from the office she went around collecting money from wealthy women, inducing prominent liberals to come and get arrested on the picketline, coaxing articles out of newspapermen, traveling around the country to find charitable people to go on bail-bonds. The strikers, the men and women and children on picketlines, in soupkitchens, being interviewed in the dreary front parlors of their homes stripped of furniture they hadn’t been able to make the last payment on, the buses full of scabs, the cops and deputies with sawedoff shotguns guarding the tall palings of the silent enormously-extended oblongs of the blackwindowed millbuildings, passed in a sort of dreamy haze before her, like a show on the stage, in the middle of the continuous typing and multigraphing, the writing of letters and working up of petitions, the long grind of officework that took up her days and nights.
She and Ben had no life together at all any more. She thrilled to him the way the workers did at meetings when he’d come to the platform in a tumult of stamping and applause and talk to them with flushed cheeks and shining eyes talking clearly directly to each man and woman, encouraging them, warning them, explaining the economic setup to them. The millgirls were all crazy about him. In spite of herself Mary French would get a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the way they looked at him and at the way some big buxom freshlooking woman would stop him sometimes in the hall outside the office and put her hand on his arm and make him pay attention to her. Mary working away at her desk with her tongue bitter and her mouth dry from too much smoking would look at her yellowstained fingers and push her untidy uncurled hair off her forehead and feel badlydressed and faded and unattractive. If he’d give her one smile just for her before he bawled her out before the whole office because the leaflets weren’t ready, she’d feel happy all day. But mostly he seemed to have forgotten that they’d ever been lovers.
After the A.F. of L. officials from Washington in expensive overcoats and silk mufflers who smoked twentyfivecent cigars and spat on the floor of the office had taken the strike out of Ben’s hands and settled it, he came back to the room on Fourth Street late one night just as Mary was going to bed. His eyes were redrimmed from lack of sleep and his cheeks were sunken and grey. “Oh, Ben,” she said and burst out crying. He was cold and bitter and desperate. He sat for hours on the edge of her bed telling her in a sharp monotonous voice about the sellout and the wrangles between the leftwingers and the oldline socialists and laborleaders, and how now that it was all over here was his trial for contempt of court coming up. “I feel so bad about spending the workers’ money on my defense. . . . I’d as soon go to jail as not . . . but it’s the precedent. . . . We’ve got to fight every case and it’s the one way we can use the liberal lawyers, the lousy fakers. . . . And it costs so much and the union’s broke and I don’t like to have them spend the money on me . . . but they say that if we win my case then the cases against the other boys will all be dropped. . . .” “The thing to do,” she said, smoothing his hair off his forehead, “is to relax a little.” “You should be telling me?” he said and started to unlace his shoes.
It was a long time before she could get him to get into bed. He sat there halfundressed in the dark shivering and talking about the errors that had been committed in the strike. When at last he’d taken his clothes off and stood up to lay them on a chair he looked like a skeleton in the broad swath of grey glare that cut across the room from the streetlight outside her window. She burst out crying all over again at the sunken look of his chest and the deep hollows inside his collarbone. “What’s the matter, girl?” Ben said gruffly. “You crying because you haven’t got a Valentino to go to bed with you?” “Nonsense, Ben, I was just thinking you needed fattening up . . . you poor kid, you work so hard.” “You’ll be going off with a goodlooking young bondsalesman one of these days, like you were used to back in Colorado Springs. . . . I know what to expect . . . I don’t give a damn . . . I can make the fight alone.” “Oh, Ben, don’t talk like that . . . you know I’m heart and soul . . .” She drew him to her. Suddenly he kissed her.
Next morning they quarreled bitterly while they were dressing, about the value of her researchwork. She said that after all he couldn’t talk; the strike hadn’t been such a wild success. He went out without eating his breakfast. She went uptown in a clenched fury of misery, threw up her job and a few da
ys later went down to Boston to work on the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the new committee that had just been formed.
She’d never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums back of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case was won, she’d write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers’ shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she’d observe life. She’d never fall for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.
Her job was keeping in touch with newspapermen and trying to get favorable items into the press. It was uphill work. Although most of the newspapermen who had any connection with the case thought the two had been wrongly convicted they tended to say that they were just two wop anarchists, so what the hell? After she’d been out to Dedham jail to talk to Sacco and to Charlestown to talk to Vanzetti, she tried to tell the U.P. man what she felt about them one Saturday night when he was taking her out to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street.
He was the only one of the newspapermen she got really friendly with. He was an awful drunk but he’d seen a great deal and he had a gentle detached manner that she liked. He liked her for some reason, though he kidded her unmercifully about what he called her youthful fanaticism. When he’d ask her out to dinner and make her drink a lot of red wine she’d tell herself that it wasn’t really a waste of time, that it was important for her to keep in touch with the press services. His name was Jerry Burnham.
“But, Jerry, how can you stand it? If the State of Massachusetts can kill those two innocent men in the face of the protest of the whole world it’ll mean that there never will be any justice in America ever again.” “When was there any to begin with?” he said with a mirthless giggle, leaning over to fill up her glass. “Ever heard of Tom Mooney?” The curly white of his hair gave a strangely youthful look to his puffy red face. “But there’s something so peaceful, so honest about them; you get such a feeling of greatness out of them. Honestly they are great men.” “Everything you say makes it more remarkable that they weren’t executed years ago.” “But the workingpeople, the common people, they won’t allow it.” “It’s the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of greatmen. . . . If it’s not going too far back I’d like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ?”
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