Big Money (20 page)

Mary sat up sniveling. “Oh, George, you've got plenty of time. . . . I don't know why I've got a horror of getting married. . . . Everything gives me the horrors tonight.” “Poor little girl, it's probably the curse coming on,” said George and kissed her on the forehead. After he'd
gone home to his hotel she decided she'd go back to Colorado Springs to visit her mother for a while. Then she'd try to get some kind of newspaper job.

Before she could get off for the West she found that a month had gone by. Fear of having a baby began to obsess her. She didn't want to tell George about it because she knew he'd insist on their getting married. She couldn't wait. She didn't know any doctor she could go to. Late one night she went into the kitchenette to stick her head in the oven and tried to turn on the gas, but it seemed so inconvenient somehow and her feet felt so cold on the linoleum that she went back to bed.

Next day she got a letter from Ada Cohn all about what a wonderful time Ada was having in New York where she had the loveliest apartment and was working so hard on her violin and hoped to give a concert in Carnegie Hall next season. Without finishing reading the letter Mary French started packing her things. She got to the station in time to get the ten o'clock to New York. From the station she sent George a wire:
FRIEND SICK CALLED TO NEW YORK WRITING
.

She'd wired Ada and Ada met her at the Pennsylvania station in New York looking very handsome and rich. In the taxicab Mary told her that she had to lend her the money to have an abortion. Ada had a crying fit and said of course she'd lend her the money but who on earth could she go to? Honestly she wouldn't dare ask Dr. Kirstein about it because he was such a friend of her father's and mother's that he'd be dreadfully upset. “I won't have a baby. I won't have a baby,” Mary was muttering.

Ada had a fine threeroom apartment in the back of a building on Madison Avenue with a light tancolored carpet and a huge grandpiano and lots of plants in pots and flowers in vases. They ate their supper there and strode up and down the livingroom all evening trying to think. Ada sat at the piano and played Bach preludes to calm her nerves, she said, but she was so upset she couldn't follow her music. At last Mary wrote George a specialdelivery letter asking him what to do. Next evening she got a reply. George was brokenhearted, but he enclosed the address of a doctor. Mary gave the letter to Ada to read. “What a lovely letter. I don't blame him at all. He sounds like a fine sensitive beautiful nature.” “I hate him,” said Mary, driving her nails into the palms of her hands. “I hate him.”

Next morning she went down all alone to the doctor's and had the
operation. After it she went home in a taxicab and Ada put her to bed. Ada got on her nerves terribly tiptoeing in and out of the bedroom with her face wrinkled up. After about a week Mary French got up. She seemed to be all right, and started to go around New York looking for a job.

walk the streets and walk the streets inquiring of Coca-Cola signs Lucky Strike ads pricetags in storewindows scraps of overheard conversations stray tatters of newsprint yesterday's headlines sticking out of ashcans

for a set of figures a formula of action an address you don't quite know you've forgotten the number the street may be in Brooklyn a train leaving for somewhere a steamboat whistle stabbing your ears a job chalked up in front of an agency

to do to make there are more lives than walking desperate the streets hurry underdog do      make

a speech urging action in the crowded hall after hand-clapping the pats and smiles of others on the platform the scrape of chairs the expectant hush the few coughs during the first stuttering attempt to talk straight tough going the snatch for a slogan they are listening and then the easy climb slogan by slogan to applause (if somebody in your head didn't say liar to you and on Union Square

that time you leant from a soapbox over faces      avid young opinionated old the middleaged numb with overwork eyes bleared with newspaperreading      trying to tell them the straight dope      make them laugh tell them what they want to hear wave a flag whispers the internal agitator crazy to succeed)

you      suddenly      falter      ashamed      flush      red      break      out      in      sweat      why not tell these men stamping in the wind that we stand on a quicksand?      that doubt is the whetstone of understanding is too hard hurts instead of urging      picket John D. Rockefeller the bastard if the cops knock your blocks off it's all for the advancement of the human race      while I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might
pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy

and all the time in my pocket that letter from that collegeboy asking me to explain why being right which he admits      the radicals are in their private lives such shits

lie abed underdog (peeling the onion of doubt) with the book unread in your hand and swing on the seesaw maybe after all maybe topdog      make

money      you understood what he meant the old party with the white beard beside the crystal inkpot at the cleared varnished desk in the walnut office in whose voice boomed all the clergymen of childhood and shrilled the hosannahs of the offkey female choirs      All you say is very true but there's such a thing as sales      and I have daughters      I'm sure you too will end by thinking differently      make

money in New York (lipstick kissed off the lips of a girl fashionablydressed fragrant at five o'clock in a taxicab careening down Park Avenue when at the end of each crosstown street the west is flaming with gold and white smoke billows from the smokestacks of steamboats leaving port and the sky is lined with greenbacks

the riveters are quiet the trucks of the producers are shoved off onto the marginal avenues

winnings sing from every streetcorner

crackle in the ignitions of the cars swish smooth in ballbearings sparkle in the lights going on in the showwindows croak in the klaxons tootle in the horns of imported millionaire shining towncars

dollars are silky in her hair soft in her dress sprout in the elaborately contrived rosepetals that you kiss become pungent and crunchy in the speakeasy dinner sting shrill in the drinks

make loud the girlandmusic show set off the laughing jag in the cabaret swing in the shufflingshuffling orchestra click sharp in the hatcheck girl's goodnight)

if not why not? walking the streets rolling on your bed eyes sting from peeling the speculative onion of doubt if somebody in your head      topdog?      underdog?      didn't (and on Union Square) say liar to you

assembled to a service for the dear departed, the last half hour of devotion and remembrance of deeds done and work undone; the remembrance of friendship and love; of what was and what could have been. Why not use well that last half hour, why not make that last service as beautiful as Frank E. Campbell can make it at the funeral church (nonsectarian)

 

BODY TIED IN BAG IS FOUND FLOATING

 

Chinatown my Chinatown where the lights are low

    
Hearts that know no other land

         
Drifting to and fro

 

APOPLEXY BRINGS END WHILE WIFE READS TO HIM

 

Mrs. Harding was reading to him in a low soothing voice. It had been hoped that he would go to sleep under that influence

 

DAUGHERTY IN CHARGE

 

All alone

    
By the telephone

         
Waiting for a ring

 

Two Women's Bodies in Slayer's Baggage

 

WORKERS MARCH ON REICHSTAG
CITY IN DARKNESS

 

RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT SUICIDE ENDS IN
FAILURE AT THE BELMONT

 

Pershing Dances Tango in the Argentine

 

HARDING TRAIN CRAWLS FIFTY MILES THROUGH
MASSED CHICAGO CROWDS

 

Girl Out of Work Dies from Poison

 

MANY SEE COOLIDGE BUT FEW HEAR HIM

 

If you knew Susie

    
Like I know Susie

         
Oh oh oh what a girl

In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs. Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing made her so nervous that she declared to her children that she couldn't keep anything on her stomach but a little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the bitterness and recriminations of the family row,

into a world of gaslit boardinghouses kept by ruined southern belles and railroadmagnates and swinging doors and whiskery men nibbling cloves to hide the whiskey on their breaths and brass spittoons and fourwheel cabs and basques and bustles and long ruffled trailing skirts (in which lecturehall and concertroom, under the domination of ladies of culture, were the centers of aspiring life)

she bore a daughter whom she named after herself Isadora.

The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted feminist and an atheist, a passionate follower of Bob Ingersoll's lectures and writings; for God read Nature; for duty beauty,
and only man is vile.

Mrs. Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets and conventions and manmade laws. She gave pianolessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens.

The Duncans were always in debt.

The rent was always due.

 

Isadora's earliest memories were of wheedling grocers and butchers and landlords and selling little things her mother had made from door to door,

helping hand valises out of back windows when they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel boardinghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco.

The little Duncans and their mother were a clan; it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren't Catholics any more or Presbyterians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists.

 

When the children were quite young they managed to stir up interest among their neighbors by giving theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren't ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn't afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own.

 

They moved to Chicago, Isadora got a job dancing to
The Washington Post
at the Masonic Temple Roof Garden for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went to see Augustin Daly and told him she'd discovered

the Dance

and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth in a production of
Midsummer Night's Dream
with Ada Rehan.

 

The family followed her to New York. They rented a big room in Carnegie Hall, put mattresses in the corners, hung drapes on the wall and invented the first Greenwich Village studio.

They were never more than one jump ahead of the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeople out of bills, standing the landlady up for the rent, coaxing handouts out of rich philistines.

Isadora arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin

danced to readings of Omar Khayyam for society women at
Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned they lost all their trunks and the very long bill they owed and sailed for London on a cattleboat

to escape the materialism of their native America.

 

In London at the British Museum

they discovered the Greeks;

the Dance was Greek.

Under the smoky chimneypots of London, in the soot-coated squares they danced in muslin tunics, they copied poses from Greek vases, went to lectures, artgalleries, concerts, plays, sopped up in a winter fifty years of Victorian culture.

Back to the Greeks.

 

Whenever they were put out of their lodgings for nonpayment of rent Isadora led them to the best hotel and engaged a suite and sent the waiters scurrying for lobster and champagne and fruits outofseason; nothing was too good for Artists, Duncans, Greeks;

and the nineties London liked her gall.

In Kensington and even in Mayfair she danced at parties in private houses,

the Britishers, Prince Edward down,

were carried away by her preraphaelite beauty

her lusty American innocence

her California accent.

 

After London, Paris during the great exposition of nineteen hundred. She danced with Loïe Fuller. She was still a virgin too shy to return the advances of Rodin the great master, completely baffled by the extraordinary behavior of Loïe Fuller's circle of crackbrained invert beauties. The Duncans were vegetarians, suspicious of vulgarity and men and materialism. Raymond made them all sandals.

Isadora and her mother and her brother Raymond went about Europe in sandals and fillets and Greek tunics

staying at the best hotels leading the Greek life of nature in a flutter of unpaid bills.

 

Isadora's first solo recital was at a theater in Budapest;

after that she was the diva, had a loveaffair with a leading actor; in Munich the students took the horses out of her carriage. Everything was flowers and handclapping and champagne suppers. In Berlin she was the rage.