Ragtime

by E. L. Doctorow

  The old man, weeping and biting his lip, turned to Evelyn and saw now that she too was moved. For a moment everyone standing there on the corner shared his misfortune—Evelyn, the chauffeur, the workingman, the woman in the black shawl, the onlookers. Then one person walked away. Then another. The crowd dispersed. Evelyn made her way to the little girl still sitting at the curb. She knelt down, her eyes dewy, and looked into the face of the dry-eyed girl. Hey pumpkin, she said.

  Thus began Evelyn Nesbit’s concern for the thirty-two-year-old geriatric artist and his daughter. The man had a long Jewish name that she couldn’t pronounce so she took to calling him Tateh, the name by which the little girl called him. Tateh was president of the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side. He was a proud man. Evelyn discovered that there was no way to approach him except by coming to have her silhouette done. Over a period of two weeks the old man executed a hundred and forty silhouette portraits of Evelyn. After each one she would hand him fifteen cents. Sometimes she demanded a portrait of the little girl. Tateh executed over ninety of these, and he took more time with them. Then Evelyn asked for double portraits of herself and the little girl. At this the old man looked directly at her and a terrible Hebraic judgment seemed to flash from his eyes. Nevertheless he did as he was asked. As time went on it became apparent to Evelyn that while people sometimes stopped to watch the old man work, very few people asked to have their portraits done. He began to create more and more intricate silhouettes, full-figured, with backgrounds, of Evelyn, of the little girl, of a drayman’s horse plodding by, of five men in stiff collars sitting in an open car. With his scissors he suggested not merely outlines but textures, moods, character, despair. Most of these are today in private collections. Evelyn came nearly every afternoon and stayed for as long as she could. She dressed down to be as inconspicuous as possible. Following a Thaw practice she paid great sums of money to the chauffeur to keep him quiet. Gossip columnists began to infer from Evelyn’s disappearances that she was engaging in reckless liaisons, and her name was linked with dozens of men around town. The less she was seen the more slanderous the reports became. She didn’t care. She sneaked off to her new love interest on the Lower East Side. She wore a shawl over her head and a tattered black moth-eaten sweater over her shirtwaist; the chauffeur kept these for her under the car rug. She went to Tateh’s corner, stood for her portrait and feasted her eyes on the little girl at the end of the clothesline. She was infatuated. And all this time there was no man in her life other than her mad husband, Harry K. Thaw. Unless she wanted to consider her secret admirer, the young man with the high cheekbones and blond moustaches who followed her everywhere she went. She had seen him first at Tateh’s corner, standing across the street and turning his eyes away when she challenged him with her gaze. She knew her mother-in-law employed private detectives but she decided he was too shy to be a detective. He had learned where she lived and what her daily routine was, but he never approached her. She felt not intimidated by his attention but protected. Intuitively she felt his admiration like a keenness in her own breath. At night she dreamed of the little girl, woke up, thought of her. Plans for the future flashed in her mind like fireworks and quickly disappeared. She was anxious, overwrought, aroused, unaccountably happy. She would testify on her husband’s behalf and do it well. She was hopeful that he would be found guilty and locked up for life.

  The little girl in the pinafore held her hand but would not say anything to her. Even to Tateh she spoke few words. Tateh said no one mourns like a child, not even a lover. Evelyn realized that the old man’s pride would have driven her off long ago if he had not perceived that her attentions to the little girl were helpful. One day Evelyn came for her portrait and neither father nor daughter was to be seen. Fortunately she had learned where they lived, on Hester Street, over a public bath. She went there now, walking quickly, not daring to think what was the matter. Hester Street was a teeming marketplace of peddlers who sold vegetables and fruits and chickens and breads from pushcarts lined up along the curb. The sidewalks were glutted with shoppers, overflowing garbage cans stood in ranks beside the entrance stairs of every house. Bedding hung from fire escapes. Evelyn rushed up a flight of iron stairs and into a dark incredibly foul-smelling hallway. Tateh and the little girl lived on the top floor, in two small rooms in the back. She knocked on the door. She knocked again. A moment later it opened a crack; there was a chain latch in place. What is the matter, Evelyn said. Let me in.

  Tateh was scandalized by her visit. He stood in only his shirt and pants held up by suspenders and he wore house slippers. He insisted that the front door be left open despite the rank winds that blew up the stairwell, and quickly put on his jacket and shoes. He hurriedly made up his cot, throwing over it a brightly colored spread. The little girl lay on a brass bed in the other room. She was ill with a fever. The two rooms were lit by candle. The bedroom, although it had a window, was almost as dark as the front room. It looked out on an air shaft. The whole place was no bigger than a closet. Yet as Evelyn’s eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness she perceived that the home was scrupulously clean. Her arrival had caused a storm of consternation in the old artist, who paced up and down in the candlelight and did not know what to do about her. In great agitation he smoked a cigarette which he held between his thumb and forefinger, palm up, in the European style. I will stay with the child, Evelyn insisted, while you go to work. Finally the old man gave in, if only to avoid the terrible strain on himself of her presence in his home. He rushed out carrying his display stand with its black velvet curtains folded over his arms and his wooden box, like a suitcase, that held his materials. Evelyn closed the door after him. She looked at the glass cabinet, at the few cups and plates of chipped crockery. She examined the bedding in the drawers, the scrubbed oak table and chairs where the family ate. There was a pile of unfinished knee pants on a sewing machine by the bedroom window. The machine had a filigreed iron treadle. The window in the bedroom sparkled with the reflection of the candle. The brass of the thin little bed was shining. Evelyn felt a strong kinship with the departed mother. The girl looked at her from the pillows and neither smiled nor said anything. Evelyn removed the shawl, the old sweater, and put them down on a chair. In a packing crate laid on its end beside the bed, like an end table, books in Yiddish were stacked tightly. There were books in English too, on socialism, and pamphlets on the covers of which workingmen with powerful linked arms were marching forward. None of them looked like the frail white-haired Tateh. There were no mirrors on the walls and no photographs anywhere of the family, of the missing wife and mother. She found a tub of galvanized tin in the front room. She found a pail and went down the stairs and drew from the sink on the ground floor a pail of water. She warmed the water on the coal stove in the front room and went into the bedroom with the tub, the pail of water and a thin starched towel. The little girl clutched the covers about her. Evelyn gently removed the covers and sat her up on the edge of the bed and raised her nightgown and stood her up and lifted the nightgown over her head, feeling like the sun the warm exhalations of her young body. Come stand a moment in the tub, she said and knelt in front of the girl and bathed her with the warm water scooping it in her hands and caressing the child with her hands of water and doing it again, on her tawny shoulders, her nut-brown budded nipples, her face, her downy back, her thin thighs, the smooth slope of her stomach, her girlhood, the sluiced water from her young fevered body falling like rain in the tub as Evelyn bathed her with her hands. Then with the towel folded in quarters she gently patted the little girl dry and dressed her afresh in another gown she had found in the drawer—a larger gown this time of thin cotton, much too big, funny, so that the girl laughed. Evelyn smoothed the sheets and plumped up the pillows and settled the girl in the bed again and felt her forehead and it was cool. The little girl’s dark eyes shone in the dusk. Evelyn combed her black hair and touched her face and leaned over her, and the little girl’s arms went around Evelyn’s nec
k and she kissed her on the lips.

  This was the day Evelyn Nesbit considered kidnapping the little girl and leaving Tateh to his fate. The old artist had never inquired of her name and knew nothing about her. It could be done. Instead she threw herself into the family’s life with redoubled effort, coming with food, linens and whatever else she could move past the old man’s tormented pride. She was insane with the desire to become one of them and drew Tateh out in conversation and learned from the girl how to sew knee pants. For hours each day, each evening, she lived as a woman in the Jewish slums, and was driven home by the Thaw chauffeur from a prearranged place many blocks away, always in despair. She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.

  8

  One day Tateh invited her to a meeting of which the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side was a part sponsor, along with seven other organizations. It was an important event. The featured speaker was to be none other than Emma Goldman. Carefully Tateh explained that although he was unalterably opposed to Goldman, she being an anarchist and he a socialist, he had great respect for her personal courage and integrity; and that he had therefore agreed that some sort of temporary accord between the socialists and the anarchists was advisable, if only for the evening, because the funds raised for the occasion would go to support the shirtwaist makers, who were then on strike, and the steelworkers at McKeesport, Pennsylvania, who were on strike, and the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who was going to be condemned and executed by the Spanish government for fomenting a general strike in Spain. In five minutes Evelyn was immersed in the bracing linguistics of radical idealism. She didn’t dare confess to Tateh that she had had no idea socialism and anarchism were not the same thing, or that the thought of seeing the notorious Emma Goldman frightened her. She pulled her shawl over her head, and holding the little girl’s hand tightly, walked behind Tateh as he strode north to the Workingmen’s Hall on East 14th Street. But she did at one point turn around to see if her strange shy admirer was following, and he was, half a block behind, his lean face hidden in the shadow of his straw boater.

  Emma Goldman’s subject was the great dramatist Ibsen in whose work, she said, lay all the instruments for the radical dissection of society. She was not a physically impressive woman, being small, thick-waisted, with a heavy-jawed masculine face. She wore hornrimmed glasses that enlarged her eyes and suggested the constant outrage to her soul of the sights she saw. She had immense vitality and her voice rang, and Evelyn, after getting over her relief to discover that Goldman was simply a woman, and a rather small woman at that, was swept up by the oratory of powerful ideas that lifted her mind like a river. In the heat and constant excitement rising from the audience she allowed her shawl to drop to her shoulders. There were perhaps a hundred people present, all sitting on benches or standing along the walls while Goldman spoke from behind a table at the end of the room. The police department had stationed men prominently at the doors and at one point a police sergeant tried to stop Emma’s address, claiming she had been advertised to speak on the subject of the drama but instead was talking about Ibsen. Jeers and catcalls drove him from the hall. Goldman, however, did not join the laughter, knowing from experience what an embarrassed police force inevitably did. She spoke now with great rapidity and as she spoke her eyes ranged restlessly over the audience and came to stop, again and again, on the alabaster face of Evelyn Nesbit, who sat between Tateh and the little girl in the first row on the right, a position of honor as befitted Tateh’s office as president of the Socialist Artists’ Alliance. Love in freedom! Goldman cried. Those who like Mrs. Alving have paid with blood and tears for their spiritual awakening, repudiate marriage as an imposition, a shallow empty mockery. Some of the audience, including Tateh, shouted No! No! Comrades and brothers, Goldman said, can you socialists ignore the double bondage of one-half of the human race? Do you think the society that plunders your labor has no interest in the way you are asked to live with women? Not through freedom but through bondage? All the reformers talk today of the white slavery problem. But if white slavery is a problem, why is marriage not a problem? Is there no connection between the institution of marriage and the institution of the brothel? At mention of this word cries of Shame! Shame! filled the hall. Tateh had put his hands over his daughter’s ear and pressed her head to his side. A man stood and shouted. Goldman held up her hands for quiet. Comrades, let us disagree, of course, but not by losing our decorum to the extent that the police may have an excuse to interrupt us. People turning in their seats indeed saw now a dozen policemen in the crowd at the doors. The truth is, Goldman went on quickly, women may not vote, they may not love whom they want, they may not develop their minds and their spirits, they may not commit their lives to the spiritual adventure of life, comrades they may not! And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind? Must our fate always be physical? There sits among us this evening one of the most brilliant women in America, a woman forced by this capitalist society to find her genius in the exercise of her sexual attraction—and she has done that, comrades, to an extent that a Pierpont Morgan and a John D. Rockefeller could envy. Yet her name is scandal and their names are intoned with reverence and respect by the toadying legislators of this society. Evelyn went cold. She wanted to pull the shawl over her head but was afraid she would draw attention to herself. She sat perfectly still, staring at her hands in her lap. At least the woman had had the grace not to look in her direction as she spoke. People in the audience who were craning their necks trying to locate the object of Goldman’s remarks were diverted now by a shout from the back of the hall. A phalanx of blue coats jammed through the doors. There was a scream. And suddenly the hall was pandemonium. It was a typical conclusion to an Emma Goldman speech. Police poured down the center aisle. The anarchist stood calmly behind her table and put her papers in her brief case. Evelyn Nesbit felt Tateh’s eyes upon her and turned into the glare of his judgment. He was looking at her as she had seen him look upon a roach before he stepped on it. Then his old face seemed to collapse into another, more complex set of wrinkles and lines, his entire being settled into the last age before death, and his eyes, from the depths of his ancient skull, translated for her the whispered Yiddish that came from his broken lips: My life is desecrated by whores, is what he said. And grasping the hand of the little girl in the pinafore, he disappeared into the crowd.