Ragtime: A Novel

  Evelyn stood staring after them. It seemed to her that the light was racing away from her eyes. Her hand went out for something to hold. A now familiar voice said in her ear This way, come with me, and her arm was in the grip of Goldman herself. It was a grip of iron. Goldman led her through a small door behind the speaker’s table and just before the door closed Evelyn, letting a high thin wail from her throat, looked back and saw her shy blond young shadow fighting his way furiously in her direction. I am an old hand at this, Emma Goldman said leading her down a dark stairs. This is just an ordinary evening. The stairs gave onto the street around the corner from the entrance to the meeting hall. A police van passed them, its bell clanging; it turned the corner. Come, Emma Goldman said, linking her arm, and she walked Evelyn quickly away in the opposite direction.

  When Mother’s Younger Brother reached the street he just managed to see the two female figures passing under a streetlight two blocks away. He hurried after them. The evening was cool. The perspiration on his neck chilled him. A breeze whipped his duck trousers. He came to within a half-block of the two women and for some minutes followed them at this distance. They turned, suddenly, and went up the stone stairs of a brownstone. He ran now and when he reached the brownstone saw that it was a rooming house. He went inside and quietly went up the stairs, not knowing what room he was looking for but sure somehow he’d find it. On the second landing he backed into the shadowed recess of a door. Goldman, carrying a basin, passed on her way to the bathroom. He heard the sound of water running and found the open door to Goldman’s room. It was a small room and peeking around the door he saw Evelyn Nesbit sitting on the bed, her face in her hands. Sobs shook her body. The walls were a faded lilac print. An electric lamp at the bedside provided the only light. Hearing Goldman coming back Younger Brother soundlessly darted into the room and slipped into the closet. He left the closet door slightly ajar.

  Goldman placed the basin of water on the bedtable and shook out a thin starched face towel. Poor girl, she said, poor girl. Why don’t you let me refresh you a bit. I’m a nurse, you know, that’s how I support myself. I’ve followed your case in the newspapers. From the beginning I found myself admiring you. I couldn’t understand why. She unlaced Evelyn’s high-top shoes and slipped them off. Don’t you want to put your feet up? she said. That’s the way. Evelyn lay back on the pillows rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hand. She took the towel offered by Goldman. Oh, I hate to cry, she said. Crying makes me ugly. She wept into the towel. After all, Goldman went on, you’re nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed. But what kind of a victory has it been? The victory of the prostitute. And what have your consolations been? The consolations of cynicism, of scorn, of contempt for the human male. Why, I thought, should I feel such strong sisterhood with this woman? After all I have never accepted servitude. I have been free. I have fought all my life to be free. And I have never taken a man to bed without loving him, without taking him in love as a free human being, his equal, giving and taking in equal portions in love and freedom. I’ve probably slept with more men than you have. I’ve loved more men than you have. I bet it would shock you to know how free I’ve been, in what freedom I’ve lived my life. Because like all whores you value propriety. You are a creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

  No other words could have so quickly stemmed Evelyn’s tears. She lowered the towel from her face and stared at the stout little anarchist who now paced back and forth in front of the bed as she spoke. So why should I have felt such strong bonds between us? You are the embodiment in woman of everything I pity and abhor. When I saw you at my meeting I was ready to accept the mystical rule of all experience. You came because in such ways as the universe works, your life was destined to interact with my own. Through the vile depths of your own existence your heart has directed you to the anarchist movement.

  Nesbit shook her head. You don’t understand, she said. Tears filled her eyes once again. She told Goldman about the little girl in the pinafore. She told her of Tateh and her secret life in the slums. And now I have lost them, she said. I have lost my urchin. She wept bitterly. Goldman sat down in the rocking chair beside the bed and placed her hands on her knees. She leaned toward Evelyn Nesbit. All right, if I had not pointed you out your Tateh wouldn’t have run off. But what of it? Don’t worry. Truth is better than lies. When you find them again you’ll be able to deal with them honestly, as the person you really are. And if you don’t find them, perhaps that will be for the best. Who can say who are the instrumentalities and who are the people. Which of us causes, and lives in others to cause, and which of us is meant thereby to live. That is exactly my point. Do you know at one time in my life I walked the streets to sell my body? You are the first person I have ever told. Fortunately I was spotted for the novice that I was and sent home. It was on 14th Street. I tried to look like a streetwalker and I fooled no one. I don’t suppose the name Alexander Berkman means anything to you. Evelyn shook her head. When Berkman and I were in our early twenties we were lovers and revolutionaries together. There was a strike in Pittsburgh. At the Homestead steel plant of Mr. Carnegie. And Mr. Carnegie decided to break the union. So he ran off for a European vacation and had his chief toady, that infamous piece of scum Henry Clay Frick, do the job. Frick imported an army of Pinkertons. The workers were on strike to protest the cutting of wages. The plant is on the Monongahela River and Frick towed his Pinkertons up the river and landed them at the plant from the river. There was a pitched battle. It was a war. When it was over ten were dead and dozens and dozens were wounded. The Pinkertons were driven off. So then Frick was able to get the government working for him and the state militia came in to surround the workers. At this point Berkman and I decided on our attentat. We would give the beleaguered workers heart. We would revolutionize their struggle. We would kill Frick. But we were in New York and we had no money. We needed money for a railroad ticket and for a gun. And that’s when I put on embroidered underwear and walked 14th Street. An old man gave me ten dollars and told me to go home. I borrowed the rest. But I would have done it if I had to. It was for the attentat. It was for Berkman and the revolution. I embraced him at the station. He planned to shoot Frick and take his own life at his trial. I ran after the departing train. We only had money for one ticket. He said only one person was needed for the job. He barged into Frick’s office in Pittsburgh and shot the bastard three times. In the neck, in the shoulder. There was blood. Frick collapsed. Men ran in. They took the gun. He had a knife. He stabbed Frick in the leg. They took the knife. He put something in his mouth. They pinned him to the ground. They pried open his jaws. It was a capsule of fulminate of mercury. All he had to do was chew on the capsule and the room would have blown up and everyone in it. They held his head back. They removed the capsule. They beat him unconscious.

  Evelyn had sat up in bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. Goldman stared at the floor. He was in prison eighteen years, she said, many of them in solitary, in a dungeon. I visited him once. I could never bear to visit him again. And that bastard Frick survived and became a hero in the press and the public turned against the workers and the strike was broken. It was said we set back the American labor movement forty years. There was another anarchist, Most, an older man whom I revered. He denounced Berkman and me in his newspaper. The next time I saw Most at a meeting I was prepared. I had bought a horsewhip. I horsewhipped him in front of everyone. Then I broke the whip and threw it in his face. Berkman got out only last year. His hair is gone. He is the color of parchment. My darling young man walks with a stoop. His eyes are like coal pits. We are friends in principle only. Our hearts no longer beat together. What he endured in that prison I can only imagine. Living in darkness, in wet, tied up and left to lie in his own filth. Evelyn’s arm had gone out to the older woman and Goldman
now took her hand and held it tightly. We know, don’t we, both of us, what it means to have a man in jail. The two women looked at each other. There was silence for some moments. Of course, your man is a pervert, a parasite, a leech, a foul loathsome sybarite, Goldman said. Evelyn laughed. An insane pig, Goldman said, with a twisted shrunken little pig’s mentality. Now they were both laughing. Yes, I hate him, Evelyn cried. Goldman grew reflective. But there are correspondences, you see, our lives correspond, our spirits touch each other like notes in harmony, and in the total human fate we are sisters. Do you understand that, Evelyn Nesbit? She stood and touched Nesbit’s face. Do you see that, my beautiful girl?

  As she had been talking Goldman’s eyes reacted to something in Evelyn’s posture. Are you wearing a corset? she now asked. Evelyn nodded. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Look at me, even with my figure I have not one foundation garment, I wear everything loose and free-flowing, I give my body the freedom to breathe and to be. That’s what I mean, you’re a creature of their making. You have no more need of stays than a wood nymph. She took Nesbit’s hands and sat her up on the edge of the bed. She felt her waist. My God, stays like steel. Your waist is pinched tighter than a purse string. Stand up. Evelyn stood up obediently and Goldman with a nurse’s expertise swiftly unbuttoned her shirtwaist and removed it. She unclasped Evelyn’s skirt and had her step out of it. She untied the strings of her petticoat and removed it. Evelyn wore a light corset around her waist. The top of the corset pushed up her bosom. The bottom was attached to straps which went between her thighs. The corset was laced in the back. It is ironic that you are thought of in homes all over America as a licentious shameless wanton, Goldman said pulling the laces out of the grommets, loosening the garment and pulling it down Evelyn’s legs. Step out, she said. Evelyn obeyed. Her undershift remained stuck to her body in the pattern of the stays. Breathe, Goldman commanded, raise your arms, stretch your legs and breathe. Evelyn obeyed. Goldman plucked at the shift, then lifted it over her head. Then she knelt and slid Evelyn’s lace-trimmed underdrawers to her feet. Step out, she commanded. Evelyn did so. She now stood nude in the lamplight except for her black embroidered cotton stockings which were held up by elastic bands around the thighs. Goldman rolled the stockings down and Evelyn stepped out of her stockings. She held her arms across her breasts. Goldman stood and turned her around slowly for inspection, a frown on her face. Look at that, it’s amazing you have any circulation at all. Marks of the stays ran vertically like welts around Nesbit’s waist. The evidence of garters could be seen in the red lines running around the tops of her thighs. Women kill themselves, Goldman said. She turned back the bedcovers. She took from the top of the bureau a small black bag of the kind that doctors carried. A superb body like this and look what you do to it. Lie down. Evelyn sat down on the bed and looked at what was coming out of the black bag. On your stomach, Goldman said. She was holding a bottle and tilting the contents of the bottle into her cupped hand. Evelyn lay down on her stomach and Goldman applied the liquid where the marks of the stays reddened the flesh. Ow, Evelyn cried. It stings! This is an astringent—the first thing is to restore circulation, Goldman explained as she rubbed Evelyn’s back and buttocks and thighs. Evelyn was squirming and her flesh cringing with each application. She buried her face in the pillow to smother her cries. I know, I know, Goldman said. But you will thank me. Under Goldman’s vigorous rubbing Evelyn’s flesh seemed to spring into its fullest conformations. She was shivering now and her buttocks were clenched against the invigorating chill of the astringent. Her legs squeezed together. Goldman now took from her bag a bottle of massage oil and began to knead Evelyn’s neck and shoulders and back, her thighs and calves and the soles of her feet. Gradually Evelyn relaxed and her flesh shook and quivered under the emphatic skill of Goldman’s hands. Goldman rubbed the oil into her skin until her body found its own natural rosy white being and began to stir with self-perception. Turn over, Goldman commanded. Evelyn’s hair was now undone and lay on the pillow about her face. Her eyes were closed and her lips stretched in an involuntary smile as Goldman massaged her breasts, her stomach, her legs. Yes, even this, Emma Goldman said, briskly passing her hand over the mons. You must have the courage to live. The bedside lamp seemed to dim for a moment. Evelyn put her own hands on her breasts and her palms rotated the nipples. Her hands swam down along her flanks. She rubbed her hips. Her feet pointed like a dancer’s and her toes curled. Her pelvis rose from the bed as if seeking something in the air. Goldman was now at the bureau, capping her bottled emollient, her back to Evelyn as the younger woman began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea. At this moment a hoarse unearthly cry issued from the walls, the closet door flew open and Mother’s Younger Brother fell into the room, his face twisted in a paroxysm of saintly mortification. He was clutching in his hands, as if trying to choke it, a rampant penis which, scornful of his intentions, whipped him about the floor, launching to his cries of ecstasy or despair, great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over Evelyn in her bed like falling ticker tape.

  9

  In New Rochelle, Mother had for days brooded about her brother. He had called on the telephone from New York once or twice but would not say why he had gone away or where he was staying or when he would return. He mumbled. He was close-mouthed. She was furious with him. He did not respond to anger. Since his calls she had taken the extreme step of going into his room and looking around. As always it was neat. There was his table with the machine for stringing tennis racquets. There were his scull oars in brackets on the wall. He kept his own room and there was not a speck of dust even now in his absence. His hairbrushes on the bureau top. His ivory shoehorn. A small shell shaped like a thimble, with some grains of sand stuck to it. She had never seen that before. A picture from a magazine pinned to the wall, the drawing by Charles Dana Gibson of that Evelyn Nesbit creature. He had packed nothing, his shirts and collars filled the drawer. She closed the door guiltily. He was a strange young man. He never made friends. He was solitary and impassive except for a streak of indolence which he either could not hide or did not care to. She knew Father found that indolence disturbing. Nevertheless he had promoted him to greater responsibility.

  She could not share her worries with Grandfather, who had sired the young man at a late age and was now totally separated from any practical perception of life. Grandfather was in his nineties. He was a retired professor of Greek and Latin who had taught generations of Episcopal seminarians at Shady Grove College in central Ohio. He was a country classicist. He had known John Brown when he was a boy in Hudson County in the Western Reserve and would tell you that twenty times a day if you let him. More and more since Father’s departure Mother thought of the old Ohio homestead. The summers there were gravid with promise and red-winged blackbirds flew up from the hay meadows. The furnishings of the house were spare, and country-made. Ladderback chairs of pine. Polished wood floors of wide boards fastened with dowels. She had loved that house. She and Younger Brother played on the floor by the light of the fire. In their games she always instructed him. In winter their horse Bessie was hitched to the sleigh and bells were tied to her collar and they skimmed over the thick wet Ohio snowfalls. She remembered Brother when he was younger than her own son. She took care of him. On rainy days they played secret pretending games in the hayloft, in the sweet warmth, with the horses snorting and nickering below them. On Sunday morning she wore her pink dress and the purest white pantaloons and went to church with a heart beating with excitement. She was a large-boned child with high cheekbones and gray eyes that slanted. She had lived in Shady Grove all her life except for four years at boarding school in Cleveland. She had always presumed she would marry one of the seminarians. But in her last year at school she had met Father. He was traveling through the Midwest to make local sales connections for his flag and bunting business. He called on her at Shady Grove on two successive business trips. When they married and she came East she br
ought her father with her. And then because Brother had not been able to settle himself he too had joined the household in New Rochelle. And now in this season of life, alone in her modern awninged home at the top of the hill on fashionable Broadview Avenue with only her small son and her ancient father, she felt deserted by the race of males and furious with herself for the nostalgia that swept through her without warning at any hour of the day or night. A letter had arrived from the Republican Inaugural Committee inquiring if the firm would care to bid on the decoration and fireworks contract for the inauguration parade and ball the following January, when Mr. Taft was expected to succeed Mr. Roosevelt. It was an historic moment for the business and neither Father nor Younger Brother was on hand. She fled to the garden for solace. This was the late September of the year and all the heavy swaying flowers were in bloom, salvia, chrysanthemum and marigold. She walked along the borders of the yard, her hands clasped. From an upstairs window the little boy watched her. He noted that the forward motion of her body was transmitted to her clothes laterally. The hem of her skirt swayed from side to side, brushing the leaves of grass. He held in his hand a letter from his father that had been posted from Cape York in northwest Greenland. It had been brought back to the United States by the supply ship Erik, which had transported to Greenland thirty-five tons of whale meat for Commander Peary’s dogs. Mother had copied the letter and thrown the original in the garbage because it strongly suggested the smell of dead whale. The boy had retrieved the letter and as time passed, the grease spots on the envelope were worked into every fiber of the paper by his small hands. The letter was now translucent.