Ragtime

by E. L. Doctorow

  But the house with its bay windows and beveled corners and three dormers loomed out of the yard like a ship. The rolled awnings were lashed to the windows. He stood on the sidewalk in the morning of a brilliant November day. The fallen leaves were covered with frost and lay like lapping waves about the house. The wind blew. He had come back with a slight limp. He thought about preparing his homecoming lecture for the New York Explorers Club. He found he preferred to sit in the parlor, his feet near a small electric heater. Everyone in the family treated him like a convalescent. His son brought him beef tea. The boy had grown taller. He had lost some of his fat. He was becoming competent and useful. He intelligently discussed Halley’s Comet. Father felt childlike beside him.

  In the paper was the news of Teddy Roosevelt’s African safari. The great conservationist had bagged seventeen lions, eleven elephants, twenty-one rhinos, eight hippos, nine giraffes, forty-seven gazelles, twenty-nine zebras, and kudu, wildebeest, impala, eland, waterbuck, wart hog and bushbuck, beyond number.

  As for the business during Father’s absence, it seemed to have got on well. Mother could now speak crisply of such matters as unit cost, inventory and advertising. She had assumed executive responsibilities. She had made changes in certain billing procedures and contracted with four new sales agents in California and Oregon. Everything she had done stood up under his examination. He was astounded. On Mother’s bedside table was a volume entitled The Ladies’ Battle by Molly Elliot Seawell. He found also a pamphlet on the subject of family limitation and the author was Emma Goldman, the anarchist revolutionary. Down in the shop, under a translucent window, he discovered his brother-in-law hunched over a drawing table. Mother’s Younger Brother was losing his blond hair. He was pale, and thin, and more uncommunicative than ever. Most remarkable was the time he now spent at work, twelve and fifteen hours a day. He had taken for his province the fireworks division of the business and had designed dozens of new rockets, firewheels, and an unusual firecracker packed not cylindrically but in a spherical container. With its fuse looking like a stem it was named a Cherry Bomb. The two men went one morning to Younger Brother’s testing ground at the end of the trolley line, in the salt marshes. They wore heavy black coats and bowlers. Father stood on a slight rise at the edge of the tall grass. On a dried mud flat fifty yards away Younger Brother bent down and prepared his demonstration. He had arranged with Father that the first combustion would be that of the standard firecracker and the second of the cherry bomb design. He suddenly stood up, held one arm aloft and backed away a few paces. Father heard the faint pop of the firecracker after he saw a wisp of smoke erased by the wind. Younger Brother now moved forward again, bent down and backed away, this time more quickly. He held up two arms. An explosion then occurred like a bomb. Sea gulls were suddenly wheeling through the air and Father felt the after-concussion as a ringing in his ears. He was quite alarmed. When Younger Brother rejoined him, his face was flushed and his eyes glistened. Father suggested that perhaps the charge was too powerful and might do injury. I don’t want to produce something that would put a child’s eye out, Father said. Younger Brother said nothing but walked back to his proving ground and lit another cherry bomb, this time standing up a bare pace or two from the fuse. He stood as if in a shower bath, his face upturned to the water. He held out his arms. The bomb exploded. Again he bent down and again held out his arms. The bomb exploded. The birds turned in widening circles, soaring out over the Sound, swooping over whitecaps and hovering on the wind.

  The young man was in mourning. Gradually Evelyn Nesbit had become indifferent to him and when he persisted in his love she had become hostile. Finally one day she had gone off with a professional ragtime dancer. She left a note. They were going to put together an act. Brother brought home to his room in New Rochelle a wooden crate filled with silhouette portraits and a pair of small beige satin shoes that Evelyn had discarded. Once, standing in nothing but these shoes and white embroidered stockings, she had placed her hands on her thighs and stared at him over her shoulder. He lay on his bed for days after his return. At times he would grab himself as if to pull his sex out by the roots. He would pace his room and hold his hands over his ears and hum loudly when he heard her voice. He could not look at the silhouettes. He wanted to pack his heart with gunpowder and blow it up. Without warning one dawn he awoke with her scent in his nostrils. This of all his memories was the most vicious. He ran downstairs and threw the stack of silhouettes and the satin shoes in the trash can. Then he shaved and went off to the flag and fireworks factory.

  The silhouette portraits were recovered by his nephew.

  15

  The boy treasured anything discarded. He took his education peculiarly and lived an entirely secret intellectual life. He had his eye on his father’s Arctic journals but would not attempt to read them unless Father no longer cared about them. In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect. He looked over the silhouettes, examining them carefully, and chose one of them to hang on the inside of his wardrobe door. It was a study of the artist’s most frequent model, a girl with hair like a helmet and the posture of someone who might run at any moment. She wore the battered high-lace shoes and sagging socks of poor children. He hid the rest of the silhouette collection in the attic. He was alert not only to discarded materials but to unexpected events and coincidences. He learned nothing at school but he did well because nothing was demanded of him. His teacher was an iron-haired woman who trained her students in declamation and clapped her hands as they practiced in their notebooks the curved lines that were thought to encourage good penmanship. At home he showed a fondness for the Motor Boys books and rarely missed an issue of Wild West Weekly, and for some reason these tastes, which the family found unexceptional, were a comfort to them. Mother suspected he was a strange child, although she shared this sense of him with no one, not even Father. Any indication that her son was ordinary heartened her. She wished he had friends. Father was still not himself and Younger Brother was too tormented by his own concerns to be of use, so it was left to Grandfather to cultivate what might be the boy’s oddity or merely his independence of spirit.

  The old man was very thin and stooped, and he emitted a mildewed smell, possibly because he had few clothes and refused to buy or accept anything new. Also his eyes were constantly watering. But he would sit in the parlor and tell the boy stories from Ovid. They were stories of people who became animals or trees or statues. They were stories of transformation. Women turned into sunflowers, spiders, bats, birds; men turned into snakes, pigs, stones and even thin air. The boy did not know he was hearing Ovid, and it would not have mattered if he had known. Grandfather’s stories proposed to him that the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else. The old man’s narrative would often drift from English to Latin without his being aware of it, as if he were reading to one of his classes of forty years before, so that it appeared nothing was immune to the principle of volatility, not even language.

  The boy thought of his grandfather as a discarded treasure. He accepted the stories as images of truth, and therefore as propositions that could be tested. He found proof in his own experience of the instability of both things and people. He could look at the hairbrush on the bureau and it would sometimes slide off the edge and fall to the floor. If he raised the window in his room it might shut itself at the moment he thought the room was getting cold. He liked to go to the moving picture shows downtown at the New Rochelle Theatre on Main Street. He knew the principles of photography but saw also that moving pictures depended on the capacity of humans, animals or objects to forfeit portions of themselves, residues of shadow and light which they left behind. He listened with fascination to the Victrola and played the same record over and over, whatever it happened to be, as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event.

  And then he took to studying himself in the mirror, perhaps expecting some change to take place before his eyes. He could n
ot see that he was taller than he had been even a few months before, or that his hair was darkening. Mother noticed his new attention to himself and understood it as the vanity of a boy beginning to think of himself as a man. Certainly he had passed the age of sailor suits. Always discreet, she said nothing. But she was very pleased. In fact he continued the practice not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication. He would gaze at himself until there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one. The sensation was of being disembodied. He was no longer anything exact as a person. He had the dizzying feeling of separating from himself endlessly. He would entrance himself so deeply in this process that he would be unable to come out of it even though his mind was lucid. He would have to rely on some outside stimulus, a loud noise or a change in the light coming through the window, to capture his attention and make him whole again.

  And what of his own father, the burly self-confident man who had gone away, and came back gaunt and hunched and bearded? Or of his uncle shedding his hair and his lassitude? Down at the bottom of the Broadview Avenue hill one day the city fathers unveiled a bronze statue of some old Dutch governor, a fierce-looking man with a square-topped hat, a cape, pantaloons and buckled shoes. The family was on hand for that. There were other statues in the city parks and the boy knew them all. He believed that statues were one way of transforming humans and in some cases horses. Yet even statues did not remain the same but turned different colors or lost bits and pieces of themselves.

  It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

  The winter turned extremely cold and dry and the ponds of New Rochelle became ideal for skating. On Saturdays and Sundays, Mother and Younger Brother and the boy would skate on the pond in the woods at the bottom of Paine Avenue, the street adjoining Broadview. Younger Brother would skate off by himself, taking long solemn and graceful strides across the ice, his hands behind his back, his head bowed. Mother wore a fur hat and a long black coat and held her hands in a muff and skated with her son holding her arm. She hoped to divert him from his lonely indoor pursuits. It was a merry scene with children and adults from all over the neighborhood skating over the white ice, long colorful scarves streaming from their necks, cheeks and noses red. People fell and laughed and were picked up. Dogs struggled to keep their balance as they followed the children about. There was the constant cut-cut of the skate blades on the ice. Some families had wicker chairs on runners for the elderly or less daring, and these were pushed about with solicitude. But the boy’s eyes saw only the tracks made by the skaters, traces quickly erased of moments past, journeys taken.

  16

  This same winter found Tateh and his daughter in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They had come there the previous autumn, having heard there were jobs. Tateh stood in front of a loom for fifty-six hours a week. His pay was just under six dollars. The family lived in a wooden tenement on a hill. They had no heat. They occupied one room overlooking an alley in which residents customarily dumped their garbage. He feared she would fall victim to the low-class elements of the neighborhood. He refused to enroll her in school—it was easier here than in New York to avoid the authorities—and made her stay home when he was not there to go out with her. After work he’d walk with her for an hour through the dark streets. She became thoughtful. She held her shoulders straight and walked like a woman. He was torturing himself anticipating her maturity. At such time when the girl becomes a woman she needs a mother to instruct her. Would she have to go through this difficult change alone? Alternatively, if he found someone to marry, how would she take to the new person? It might be the worst thing in the world for her.

  The dismal wooden tenements lay in endless rows. Everyone from Europe was there—the Italians, the Poles, the Belgians, the Russian Jews. The feeling was not good between the different groups. One day the biggest of the mills, American Woolen Company, gave out envelopes with short pay, and a tremor went through the workers in the plant. Several Italian workers left their machines. They ran through the mill calling for a strike. They pulled out wires and threw lumps of coal through the windows. Others followed them. The anger spread. Throughout the city people left their machines. Those who couldn’t make up their minds were carried along in the momentum. In three days every textile mill in Lawrence was virtually shut down.

  Tateh was overjoyed. We were going to starve to death or freeze to death, he told his daughter. Now we’ll be shot to death. But people from the I.W.W. who knew how to run a strike quickly came up from New York and organized things. A strike committee was formed with every one of the races represented and the message went out to the workers: no violence. Taking the girl with him Tateh joined the thousands of pickets encircling the mill, a massive brick building that went on for blocks. They trudged under the cold gray sky. Trolley cars came down the street, the drivers peering at the sight of thousands of marchers moving silently through the snow. Overhead the telephone and telegraph wires drooped with ice. Militia with rifles nervously guarded the mill gates. The militia all had overcoats.

  There were many incidents. A woman worker was shot in the street. The only ones with guns were the police and the militia, but the two strike leaders, Ettor and Giovanetti, were arrested for complicity in the shooting. They were put in jail pending their trial. Something of the sort had been expected. Tateh went down to the train station to be on hand for the arrival in Lawrence of replacements for Ettor and Giovanetti. There was an immense crowd. Out of the train stepped Big Bill Haywood, the most famous Wobbly of them all. He was a Westerner and wore a stetson which he now removed and waved. A cheer went up. Haywood raised his hands for quiet. He spoke. His voice was magnificent. There is no foreigner here except the capitalists, he said. The place went wild. Afterward everyone marched through the streets and sang the Internationale. The girl had never seen her Tateh so inflamed. She liked the strike because it got her out of the room. She held his hand.

  But the battle went on week after week. Relief committees had set up kitchens in every neighborhood. It’s not charity, a woman told Tateh when, after the child received her portion, he refused his. The bosses want you weak, therefore you have to be strong. The people who help us today will need our help tomorrow. On the picket line each cold day they wrapped their scarves around their necks and stamped their feet in the cold snow. The girl’s little cloak was threadbare. Tateh volunteered for service on the strike display committee and got them off the cold streets by designing posters. The posters were very beautiful. But the man in charge told him they were not right. We don’t want art, the man said. We want something to stir the anger. We want to keep the fires stoked. Tateh had drawn pickets, stark figures with their feet in snow. He had drawn families huddled in their tenements. He switched to lettering. All for one and one for all. He felt better. At night he took home scraps of paper, oak tag, pens and India ink, and to take the child’s mind off their troubles he began to entertain her with silhouette drawings. He created a streetcar scene, the people getting on and off. She loved it. She leaned it against her bed pillow and looked at it from different angles. This gave him an inspiration. He did several studies of the streetcar and when he held them together and flipped the pages it appeared as if the streetcar came down the tracks from a distance and stopped so that the people could get on and off. His own delight matched the girl’s. She gazed at him with such serene approval that he had a fever to create for her. He brought home more scrap paper. He imagined her on ice skates. In two nights he made a hundred and twenty silhouettes on pages not bigger than his hand. He bound them with string. She held the little book and governed the pages with her thumb and watched herself skating away and skating back, gliding into a figure eight, returning, pirouetting and making a lovely bow to her audience. Tateh held her and wept to feel her frail body, her soft lips on his face. What if the truth was that he could do nothing more for her tha
n make pictures? What if they just went on this way in varying degrees of unrealized hope? She would grow up and curse his name.

  Meanwhile the strike had become famous. Reporters arrived daily from all over the country. Support was coming in from other cities. But there was a growing weakness in the unity of the strike front. A man with children found it difficult to keep his courage and resolve. A plan was put into effect whereby children of strikers were to be sent to other cities to board with families in sympathy with the strike. Hundreds of families in Boston and New York and Philadelphia offered to take them in. Others sent money. Every family was carefully checked by the strike committee. The parents of the children had to sign permission forms. The experiment began. Wealthy women came up from New York to escort the first hundred on the train. Each child had had a medical examination and wore a new outfit of clothes. They arrived at Grand Central Station in New York like a religious army. A crowd met them and for a moment everyone held the picture of the children hand in hand staring resolutely ahead as if toward the awful fate industrial America had prepared for them. The press coverage was enormous. The mill owners in Lawrence realized that of all the stratagems devised by the workers this one, the children’s crusade, was the most damaging. If it was allowed to go on, national sentiment would swing to the workingmen and the owners would have to give in. This would mean an increase in wages that would bring some workers up to eight dollars a week. They would get extra pay for overtime and for machine speed-ups. They would get off without any punishment for their strike. It was unthinkable. The mill owners knew who were the stewards of civilization and the source of progress and prosperity in the city of Lawrence. For the good of the country and the American democratic system they resolved there would be no more children’s crusades.