Big Money (18 page)

Then one afternoon in early September Mr. Healy called Mary French into his private office and asked her to sit down. When he went over and closed the door tight Mary thought for a second he was going to make indecent proposals to her, but instead he said in his most tired fatherly manner, “Now, Miss French, I have an assignment for you that I don't want you to take unless you really want to. I've got a daughter myself and I hope when she grows up she'll be a nice simple wellbroughtup girl like you are. So honestly if I thought it was demeaning I wouldn't ask you to do it . . . you know that. We're strictly the family newspaper . . . we let the other fellers pull the rough stuff. . . . You know an item never goes through my desk that I don't think of my own wife and daughters, how would I like to have them read it.”

Ted Healy was a large round blackhaired man with a rolling grey eye like a codfish's eye. “What's the story, Mr. Healy?” asked Mary briskly; she'd made up her mind it must be something about the whiteslave traffic. “Well, these damned agitators, you know they're trying to start a strike. . . . Well, they've opened a publicity office downtown. I'm scared to send one of the boys down . . . might get into some trouble with those gorillas . . . I don't want a dead reporter on my front page. . . . But sending you down . . . You know you're not working for a paper, you're a socialservice worker, want to get both sides of the story. . . . A sweet innocent looking girl can't possibly come to any harm. . . . Well, I want to get the lowdown on the people working there . . . what part of Russia they were born in, how they got
into this country in the first place . . . where the money comes from . . . prison records, you know. . . . Get all the dope you can. It'll make a magnificent Sunday feature.”

“I'm very much interested in industrial relations it's a wonderful assignment. . . . But, Mr. Healy, aren't conditions pretty bad in the mills?”

Mr. Healy jumped to his feet and began striding up and down the office. “I've got all the dope on that. . . . Those damn guineas are making more money than they ever made in their lives, they buy stocks, they buy washingmachines and silk stockings for their women and they send money back to the old folks. While our boys were risking their lives in the trenches, they held down all the good jobs and most of 'em are enemy aliens at that. Those guineas are welloff, don't you forget it. The one thing they can't buy is brains. That's how those agitators get at 'em. They talk their language and fill 'em up with a lot of notions about how all they need to do is stop working and they can take possession of this country that we've built up into the greatest country in the world. . . . I don't hold it against the poor devils of guineas, they're just ignorant; but those reds who accept the hospitality of our country and then go around spreading their devilish propaganda . . . My god, if they were sincere I could forgive 'em, but they're just in it for the money like anybody else. We have absolute proof that they're paid by Russian reds with money and jewels they've stole over there; and they're not content with that, they go around shaking down those poor ignorant guineas . . . Well, all I can say is shooting's too good for 'em.” Ted Healy was red in the face. A boy in a green eyeshade burst in with a big bunch of flimsy. Mary French got to her feet. “I'll get right after it, Mr. Healy,” she said.

She got off the car at the wrong corner and stumbled up the uneven pavement of a steep broad cobbled street of little gimcrack stores poolrooms barbershops and Italian spaghetti-parlors. A gusty wind whirled dust and excelsior and old papers. Outside of an un-painted doorway foreignlooking men stood talking in low voices in knots of three or four. Before she could get up her nerve to go up the long steep dirty narrow stairs she looked for a minute into the photographer's window below at the tinted enlargements of babies with too-pink cheeks and the family groups and the ramrodstiff bridal couples. Upstairs she paused in the littered hall. From offices on both sides came a sound of typing and arguing voices. In the dark she ran
into a young man. “Hello,” he said in a gruff voice she liked, “are you the lady from New York?”

“Not exactly. I'm from Colorado.”

“There was a lady from New York comin' to help us with some publicity. I thought maybe you was her.”

“That's just what I came for.”

“Come in, I'm just Gus Moscowski. I'm kinder the officeboy.” He opened one of the closed doors for her into a small dusty office piled with stackedup papers and filled up with a large table covered with clippings at which two young men in glasses sat in their shirtsleeves. “Here are the regular guys.” All the time she was talking to the others she couldn't keep her eyes off him. He had blond closecropped hair and very blue eyes and a big bearcub look in his cheap serge suit shiny at the elbows and knees. The young men answered her questions so politely that she couldn't help telling them she was trying to do a feature story for the
Times-Sentinel.
They laughed their heads off. “But Mr. Healy said he wanted a fair wellrounded picture. He just thinks the men are being misled.” Mary found herself laughing too. “Gus,” said the older man, “you take this young lady around and show her some of the sights. . . . After all Ted Healy may have lost his mind. First here's what Ted Healy's friends did to Fanny Sellers.” She couldn't look at the photograph that he poked under her nose. “What had she done?” “Tried to organize the workingclass, that's the worst crime you can commit in this man's country.”

It was a relief to be out on the street again, hurrying along while Gus Moscowski shambled grinning beside her. “Well, I guess I'd better take you first to see how folks live on fortytwo cents an hour. Too bad you can't talk Polish. I'm a Polack myself.” “You must have been born in this country.” “Sure, highschool graduate. If I can get the dough I want to take engineering at Carnegie Tech. . . . I dunno why I string along with these damn Polacks.” He looked her straight in the face and grinned when he said that. She smiled back at him. “I understand why,” she said. He made a gesture with his elbow as they turned a corner past a group of ragged kids making mudpies; they were pale flabby filthy little kids with pouches under their eyes. Mary turned her eyes away but she'd seen them, as she'd seen the photograph of the dead woman with her head caved in. “Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity,” Gus Moscowski said way down in his throat.

That night when she got off the streetcar at the corner nearest Mrs. Gansemeyer's her legs were trembling and the small of her back ached. She went right up to her room and hurried into bed. She was too tired to eat or to sit up listening to Lois Speyer's line of sarcastic gossip. She couldn't sleep. She lay in her sagging bed listening to the voices of the boarders rocking on the porch below and to the hooting of engines and the clank of shunted freightcars down in the valley, seeing again the shapeless broken shoes and the worn hands folded over dirty aprons and the sharp anxious beadiness of women's eyes, feeling the quake underfoot of the crazy stairways zigzagging up and down the hills black and bare as slagpiles where the steelworkers lived in jumbled shanties and big black rows of smokegnawed clapboarded houses, in her nose the stench of cranky backhouses and kitchens with cabbage cooking and clothes boiling and unwashed children and drying diapers. She slept by fits and starts and would wake up with Gus Moscowski's warm tough voice in her head, and her whole body tingling with the hard fuzzy bearcub feel of him when his arm brushed against her arm or he put out his big hand to steady her at a place where the boardwalk had broken through and she'd started to slip in the loose shaly slide underneath. When she fell solidly asleep she went on dreaming about him. She woke up early feeling happy because she was going to meet him again right after breakfast.

That afternoon she went back to the office to write the piece. Just the way Ted Healy had said, she put in all she could find out about the boys running the publicity bureau. The nearest to Russia any of them came from was Canarsie, Long Island. She tried to get in both sides of the question, even called them “possibly misguided.”

About a minute after she'd sent it in to the Sunday editor she was called to the city desk. Ted Healy had on a green eyeshade and was bent over a swirl of galleys. Mary could see her copy on top of the pile of papers under his elbow. Somebody had scrawled across the top of it in red pencil: Why wish this on me? “Well, young lady,” he said without looking up, “you've written a firstrate propaganda piece for the
Nation
or some other parlorpink sheet in New York, but what the devil do you think we can do with it? This is Pittsburgh.” He got to his feet and held out his hand. “Goodby, Miss French, I wish I had some way of using you because you're a mighty smart girl . . . and smart girl reporters are rare. . . . I've sent your slip to the cashier. . . .” Before Mary French could get her breath she was out on the pavement with
an extra week's salary in her pocketbook, which after all was pretty white of old Ted Healy.

That night Lois Speyer looked aghast when Mary told her she'd been fired, but when Mary told Lois that she'd gone down and gotten a job doing publicity for the Amalgamated Lois burst into tears. “I said you'd lost your mind and it's true. . . . Either I'll have to move out of this boardinghouse or you will . . . and I won't be able to go around with you like I've been doing.” “How ridiculous, Lois.” “Darling, you don't know Pittsburgh. I don't care about those miserable strikers but I absolutely have got to hold onto my job. . . . You know I just have to send money home. . . . Oh, we were just beginning to have such fun and now you have to go and spoil everything.”

“If you'd seen what I've seen you'd talk differently,” said Mary French coldly. They were never very good friends again after that.

Gus Moscowski found her a room with heavy lace curtains in the windows in the house of a Polish storekeeper who was a cousin of his father's. He escorted her solemnly back there from the office nights when they worked late, and they always did work late.

Mary French had never worked so hard in her life. She wrote releases, got up statistics on t.b., undernourishment of children, sanitary conditions, crime, took trips on interurban trolleys and slow locals to Rankin and Braddock and Homestead and Bessemer and as far as Youngstown and Steubenville and Gary, took notes on speeches of Foster and Fitzpatrick, saw meetings broken up and the troopers in their darkgrey uniforms moving in a line down the unpaved alleys of company patches, beating up men and women with their clubs, kicking children out of their way, chasing old men off their front stoops. “And to think,” said Gus of the troopers, “that the sonsabitches are lousy Polacks themselves most of 'em. Now ain't that just like a Polack?”

She interviewed metropolitan newspapermen, spent hours trying to wheedle A.P. and U.P. men into sending straight stories, smoothed out the grammar in the Englishlanguage leaflets. The fall flew by before she knew it. The Amalgamated could only pay the barest expenses, her clothes were in awful shape, there was no curl in her hair, at night she couldn't sleep for the memory of the things she'd seen, the jailings, the bloody heads, the wreck of some family's parlor, sofa cut open, chairs smashed, chinacloset hacked to pieces with an ax, after the troopers had been through looking for “literature.” She
hardly knew herself when she looked at her face in the greenspotted giltframed mirror over the washstand as she hurriedly dressed in the morning. She had a haggard desperate look. She was beginning to look like a striker herself.

She hardly knew herself either when Gus's voice gave her cold shivers or when whether she felt good or not that day depended on how often he smiled when he spoke to her; it didn't seem like herself at all the way that whenever her mind was free for a moment, she began to imagine him coming close to her, putting his arms around her, his lips, his big hard hands. When that feeling came on she would have to close her eyes and would feel herself dizzily reeling. Then she'd force her eyes open and fly at her typing and after a while would feel cool and clear again.

The day Mary French admitted to herself for the first time that the highpaid workers weren't coming out and that the lowpaid workers were going to lose their strike she hardly dared look Gus in the face when he called for her to take her home. It was a muggy drizzly outofseason November night. As they walked along the street without saying anything the fog suddenly glowed red in the direction of the mills. “There they go,” said Gus. The glow grew and grew, first pink then orange. Mary nodded and said nothing. “What can you do when the woikin'class won't stick together. Every kind of damn foreigner thinks the others is bums and the 'Mericans they think everybody's a bum 'cept you an' me. Wasn't so long ago we was all foreigners in this man's country. Christ, I dunno why I string along wid 'em.”

“Gus, what would you do if we lost the strike? I mean you personally.”

“I'll be on the black books all right. Means I couldn't get me another job in the metaltrades not if I was the last guy on earth. . . . Hell, I dunno. Take a false name an' join the Navy, I guess. They say a guy kin get a real good eddication in the Navy.”

“I guess we oughtn't to talk about it. . . . Me, I don't know what I'll do.”

“You kin go anywheres and git a job on a paper like you had. . . . I wish I had your schoolin'. . . . I bet you'll be glad to be quit of this bunch of hunkies.”

“They are the workingclass, Gus.”

“Sure, if we could only git more sense into our damn heads. . . . You know I've got an own brother scabbin' right to this day.”

“He's probably worried about his wife and family.”