It was Jerry Burnham who taught her to drink. He lived himself in a daily alcoholic haze carrying his drinks carefully and circumspectly like an acrobat walking across a tight wire with a tableful of dishes balanced on his head. He was so used to working his twentyfourhour newsservice that he attended to his wires and the business of his office as casually as he’d pay the check in one speakeasy before walking around the corner to another. His kidneys were shot and he was on the winewagon he said, but she often noticed whiskey on his breath when she went into his office. He was so exasperating that she’d swear to herself each time she went out with him it was the last. No more wasting time when every minute was precious. But the next time he’d ask her out she’d crumple up at once and smile and say yes and waste another evening drinking wine and listening to him ramble on. “It’ll all end in blindness and sudden death,” he said one night as he left her in a taxi at the corner of her street. “But who cares? Who in hell cares. . . ? Who on the bloody louseinfested globe gives one little small microscopic vestigial hoot?”
As courtdecision after courtdecision was lost and the rancid Boston spring warmed into summer and the governor’s commission reported adversely and no hope remained but a pardon from the governor himself, Mary worked more and more desperately hard. She wrote articles, she talked to politicians and ministers and argued with editors, she made speeches in unionhalls. She wrote her mother pitiful humiliating letters to get money out of her on all sorts of pretexts. Every cent she could scrape up went into the work of her committee. There were always stationery and stamps and telegrams and phonecalls to pay for. She spent long evenings trying to coax communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals into working together. Hurrying along the stonepaved streets she’d be whispering to herself, “They’ve got to be saved, they’ve got to be saved.” When at last she got to bed her dreams were full of impossible tasks; she was trying to glue a broken teapot together and as soon as she got one side of it mended the other side would come to pieces again, she was trying to mend a rent in her skirt and by the time the bottom was sewed the top had come undone again; she was trying to put together pieces of a torn typewritten sheet, the telegram was of the greatest importance, she couldn’t see, it was all a blur before her eyes; it was the evidence that would force a new trial, her eyes were too bad, when she had spelled out one word from the swollen throbbing letters she’d forgotten the last one; she was climbing a shaky hillside among black guttedlooking houses pitching at crazy angles where steelworkers lived, at each step she slid back, it was too steep, she was crying for help, yelling, sliding back. Then warm reassuring voices like Ben Compton’s when he was feeling well were telling her that Public Opinion wouldn’t allow it that after all Americans had a sense of Justice and Fair Play that the Workingclass would rise; she’d see crowded meetings, slogans, banners, glary billboards with letters pitching into perspective saying: Workers of the World Unite, she’d be marching in the middle of crowds in parades of protest. They Shall Not Die.
She’d wake up with a start, bathe and dress hurriedly and rush down to the office of the committee snatching up a glass of orangejuice and a cup of coffee on the way. She was always the first there; if she slackened her work for a moment she’d see their faces, the shoemaker’s sharplymodeled pale face with the flashing eyes and the fishpeddler’s philosophical mustaches and his musing unscared eyes. She’d see behind them the electric chair as clear as if it were standing in front of her desk in the stuffy crowded office.
July went by all too fast. August came. A growing crowd of all sorts of people began pouring through the office: old friends, wobblies who’d hitchhiked from the coast, politicians interested in the Italian vote, lawyers with suggestions for the defense, writers, outofwork newspapermen, cranks and phonies of all kinds attracted by rumors of an enormous defensefund. She came back one afternoon from speaking in a unionhall in Pawtucket and found G. H. Barrow sitting at her desk. He had written a great pile of personal telegrams to senators congressmen ministers laborleaders demanding that they join in the protest in the name of justice and civilization and the working-class, long telegrams and cables at top rates. She figured out the cost as she checked them off. She didn’t know how the committee could pay for them, but she handed them to the messengerboy waiting outside. She could hardly believe that those words had made her veins tingle only a few weeks before. It shocked her to think how meaningless they seemed to her now like the little cards you get from a onecent fortunetelling machine. For six months now she’d been reading and writing the same words every day.
Mary didn’t have time to be embarrassed meeting George Barrow. They went out together to get a plate of soup at a cafeteria talking about nothing but the case as if they’d never known each other before. Picketing the State House had begun again and as they came out of the restaurant Mary turned to him and said, “Well, George, how about going up and getting arrested. . . . There’s still time to make the afternoon papers. Your name would give us back the front page.”
He flushed red, and stood there in front of the restaurant in the noontime crowd looking tall and nervous and popeyed in his natty lightgrey suit. “But, my dear g-g-girl, I . . . if I thought it would do the slightest good I would . . . I’d get myself arrested or run over by a truck . . . but I think it would rob me of whatever usefulness I might have.”
Mary French looked him straight in the eye, her face white with fury. “I didn’t think you’d take the risk,” she said, clipping each word off and spitting it in his face. She turned her back on him and hurried to the office.
It was a sort of relief when she was arrested herself. She’d planned to keep out of sight of the cops as she had been told her work was too valuable to lose, but she’d had to run up the hill with a set of placards for a new batch of picketers who had gone off without them. There was nobody in the office she could send. She was just crossing Beacon Street when two large polite cops suddenly appeared, one on each side of her. One of them said, “Sorry, miss, please come quietly,” and she found herself sitting in the dark patrolwagon. Driving to the policestation she had a soothing sense of helplessness and irresponsibility. It was the first time in weeks she had felt herself relax. At the Joy Street station they booked her but they didn’t put her in a cell. She sat on a bench opposite the window with two Jewish garmentworkers and a welldressed woman in a flowered summer dress with a string of pearls round her neck and watched the men picketers pouring through into the cells. The cops were polite, everybody was jolly; it seemed like a kind of game, it was hard to believe anything real was at stake.
In a crowd that had just been unloaded from the wagon on the steep street outside the policestation she caught sight of a tall man she recognized as Donald Stevens from his picture in the Daily. A redfaced cop held on to each of his arms. His shirt was torn open at the neck and his necktie had a stringy look as if somebody had been yanking on it. The first thing Mary thought was how handsomely he held himself. He had steelgrey hair and a brown outdoorlooking skin and luminous grey eyes over high cheekbones. When he was led away from the desk she followed his broad shoulders with her eyes into the gloom of the cells. The woman next to her whispered in an awed voice that he was being held for inciting to riot instead of sauntering and loitering like the rest. Five thousand dollars bail. He had tried to hold a meeting on Boston Common.
Mary had been there about a halfhour when little Mr. Feinstein from the office came round with a tall fashionablydressed man in a linen suit who put up the bail for her. At the same time Donald Stevens was bailed out. The four of them walked down the hill from the policestation together. At the corner the man in the linen suit said, “You two were too useful to leave in there all day. . . . Perhaps we’ll see you at the Bellevue . . . suite D, second floor.” Then he waved his hand and left them. Mary was so anxious to talk to Donald Stevens she didn’t think to ask the man’s name. Events were going past her faster than she could focus her mind on them.
Mary plucked at Donald Ste
vens’ sleeve, she and Mr. Feinstein both had to hurry to keep up with his long stride. “I’m Mary French,” she said. “What can we do? . . . We’ve got to do something.” He turned to her with a broad smile as if he’d seen her for the first time. “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You’re a plucky little girl . . . you’ve been putting up a real fight in spite of your liberal committee.” “But they’ve done the best they could,” she said.
“We’ve got to get the entire workingclass of Boston out on the streets,” said Stevens in his deep rattling voice.
“We’ve gotten out the garmentworkers but that’s all.”
He struck his open palm with his fist. “What about the Italians? What about the North End? Where’s your office? Look what we did in New York. Why can’t you do it here?” He leaned over towards her with a caressing confidential manner. Right away the feeling of being tired and harassed left her, without thinking she put her hand on his arm. “We’ll go and talk to your committee; then we’ll talk to the Italian committee. Then we’ll shake up the unions.” “But, Don, we’ve only got thirty hours,” said Mr. Feinstein in a dry tired voice. “I have more confidence in political pressure being applied to the governor. You know he has presidential aspirations. I think the governor’s going to commute the sentences.”
At the office Mary found Jerry Burnham waiting for her. “Well, Joan of Arc,” he said, “I was just going down to bail you out. But I see they’ve turned you loose.” Jerry and Donald Stevens had evidently known each other before. “Well, Jerry,” said Donald Stevens savagely, “doesn’t this shake you out of your cynical pose a little?”
“I don’t see why it should. It’s nothing new to me that college-presidents are skunks.”
Donald Stevens drew off against the wall as if he were holding himself back from giving Jerry a punch in the jaw. “I can’t see how any man who has any manhood left can help getting red . . . even a pettybourgeois journalist.”
“My dear Don, you ought to know by this time that we hocked our manhood for a brass check about the time of the first world war . . . that is if we had any . . . I suppose there’d bevarious opinions about that.” Donald Stevens had already swung on into the inner office. Mary found herself looking into Jerry’s reddening face, not knowing what to say. “Well, Mary, if you have a need for a pickup during the day . . . I should think you would need it . . . I’ll be at the oldstand.” “Oh, I won’t have time,” Mary said coldly. She could hear Donald Stevens’ deep voice from the inner office. She hurried on after him.
The lawyers had failed. Talking, wrangling, arguing about how a lastminute protest could be organized Mary could feel the hours ebb ing, the hours of these men’s lives. She felt the minutes dripping away as actually as if they were bleeding from her own wrists. She felt weak and sick. She couldn’t think of anything. It was a relief to be out in the street trotting to keep up with Donald Stevens’ big stride. They made a round of the committees. It was nearly noon, nothing was done. Down on Hanover Street a palefaced Italian in a shabby Ford sedan hailed them. Stevens opened the door of the car. “Comrade French, this is Comrade Strozzi . . . he’s going to drive us around.” “Are you a citizen?” she asked with an anxious frown. Strozzi shook his head and smiled a thinlipped smile. “Maybe they give me a free trip back to the Italy,” he said.
Mary never remembered what they did the rest of the day. They drove all over the poorer Boston suburbs. Often the men they were looking for were out. A great deal of the time she spent in phonebooths calling wrong numbers. She couldn’t seem to do anything right. She looked with numb staring eyes out of eyelids that felt like sandpaper at the men and women crowding into the office. Stevens had lost the irritated stinging manner he’d had at first. He argued with tradeunion officials, socialists, ministers, lawyers, with an aloof sarcastic coolness. “After all they are brave men. It doesn’t matter whether they are saved or not any more, it’s the power of the workingclass that’s got to be saved,” he’d say. Everywhere there was the same opinion. A demonstration will mean violence, will spoil the chance that the governor will commute at the last moment. Mary had lost all her initiative. Suddenly she’d become Donald Stevens’ secretary. She was least unhappy when she was running small errands for him.
Late that night she went through all the Italian restaurants on Hanover Street looking for an anarchist Stevens wanted to see. Every place was empty. There was a hush over everything. Death watch. People kept away from each other as if to avoid some contagion. At the back of a room in a little upstairs speakeasy she saw Jerry Burnham sitting alone at a table with a jigger of whiskey and a bottle of gingerale in front of him. His face was white as a napkin and he was teetering gently in his chair. He stared at her without seeing her. The waiter was bending over him shaking him. He was hopelessly drunk.
It was a relief to run back to the office where Stevens was still trying to line up a general strike. He gave her a searching look when she came in. “Failed again,” she said bitterly. He put down the telephone receiver, got to his feet, strode over to the line of hooks on the grimy yellow wall and got down his hat and coat. “Mary French, you’re deadtired. I’m going to take you home.”
They had to walk around several blocks to avoid the cordon of police guarding the State House. “Ever played tug of war?” Don was saying. “You pull with all your might but the other guys are heavier and you feel yourself being dragged their way. You’re being pulled forward faster than you’re pulling back. . . . Don’t let me talk like a defeatist. . . . We’re not a couple of goddamned liberals,” he said and burst into a dry laugh. “Don’t you hate lawyers?” They were standing in front of the bowfronted brick house where she had her room. “Goodnight, Don,” she said. “Goodnight, Mary, try and sleep.”
Monday was like another Sunday. She woke late. It was an agony getting out of bed. It was a fight to put on her clothes, to go down to the office and face the defeated eyes. The people she met on the street seemed to look away from her when she passed them. Death watch. The streets were quiet, even the traffic seemed muffled as if the whole city were under the terror of dying that night. The day passed in a monotonous mumble of words, columns in newspapers, telephone calls. Death watch. That night she had a moment of fierce excitement when she and Don started for Charlestown to join the protest parade. She hadn’t expected they’d be so many. Gusts of singing, scattered bars of the International burst and faded above the packed heads between the blank windows of the dingy houses. Death watch. On one side of her was a little man with eyeglasses who said he was a musicteacher, on the other a Jewish girl, a member of the Ladies’ Fullfashioned Hosiery Workers. They linked arms. Don was in the front rank, a little ahead. They were crossing the bridge. They were walking on cobbles on a badlylighted street under an elevated structure. Trains roared overhead. “Only a few blocks from Charlestown jail,” a voice yelled.
This time the cops were using their clubs. There was the clatter of the horses’ hoofs on the cobbles and the whack thud whack thud of the clubs. And way off the jangle jangle of patrolwagons. Mary was terribly scared. A big truck was bearing down on her. She jumped to one side out of the way behind one of the girder supports. Two cops had hold of her. She clung to the grimy girder. A cop was cracking her on the hand with his club. She wasn’t much hurt, she was in a patrolwagon, she’d lost her hat and her hair had come down. She caught herself thinking that she ought to have her hair bobbed if she was going to do much of this sort of thing. “Anybody know where Don Stevens is?” Don’s voice came a little shakily from the blackness in front. “That you, Mary?” “How are you, Don?” “O.K. Sure. A little battered round the head an’ ears.” “He’s bleedin’ terrible,” came another man’s voice. “Comrades, let’s sing,” Don’s voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:
Arise ye prisoners of starvation . . .
Newsreel LXVI
HOLMES DENI
ES STAY
A better world’s in birth
Tiny Wasps Imported From Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle
BOY CARRIED MILE DOWN SEWER; SHOT OUT ALIVE
CHICAGO BARS MEETINGS
For justice thunders condemnation
Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals
Arise rejected of the earth
PARIS BRUSSELS MOSCOW GENEVA ADD THEIR VOICES
It is the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days
The International Party
SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE
Shall be the human race.
Big Money Page 45