Big Money (58 page)

She threw herself into her work for the strikecommittee harder than ever. Sometimes for weeks she only slept four or five hours a night. She took to smoking a great deal. There was always a cigarette resting on a corner of her typewriter. The fine ash dropped into the pages as they came from the multigraph machine. Whenever she could be spared from the office she went around collecting money from wealthy women, inducing prominent liberals to come and get arrested on the picketline, coaxing articles out of newspapermen, traveling around the country to find charitable people to go on bail-bonds. The strikers, the men and women and children on picketlines, in soupkitchens, being interviewed in the dreary front parlors of their homes stripped of furniture they hadn't been able to make the last payment on, the buses full of scabs, the cops and deputies with sawedoff shotguns guarding the tall palings of the silent enormously-extended oblongs of the blackwindowed millbuildings, passed in a sort of dreamy haze before her, like a show on the stage, in the middle of the continuous typing and multigraphing, the writing of letters and working up of petitions, the long grind of officework that took up her days and nights.

She and Ben had no life together at all any more. She thrilled to him the way the workers did at meetings when he'd come to the platform in a tumult of stamping and applause and talk to them with flushed cheeks and shining eyes talking clearly directly to each man and woman, encouraging them, warning them, explaining the economic setup to them. The millgirls were all crazy about him. In spite of herself Mary French would get a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the way they looked at him and at the way some big buxom freshlooking woman would stop him sometimes in the hall outside
the office and put her hand on his arm and make him pay attention to her. Mary working away at her desk with her tongue bitter and her mouth dry from too much smoking would look at her yellowstained fingers and push her untidy uncurled hair off her forehead and feel badlydressed and faded and unattractive. If he'd give her one smile just for her before he bawled her out before the whole office because the leaflets weren't ready, she'd feel happy all day. But mostly he seemed to have forgotten that they'd ever been lovers.

After the A.F. of L. officials from Washington in expensive overcoats and silk mufflers who smoked twentyfivecent cigars and spat on the floor of the office had taken the strike out of Ben's hands and settled it, he came back to the room on Fourth Street late one night just as Mary was going to bed. His eyes were redrimmed from lack of sleep and his cheeks were sunken and grey. “Oh, Ben,” she said and burst out crying. He was cold and bitter and desperate. He sat for hours on the edge of her bed telling her in a sharp monotonous voice about the sellout and the wrangles between the leftwingers and the oldline socialists and laborleaders, and how now that it was all over here was his trial for contempt of court coming up. “I feel so bad about spending the workers' money on my defense. . . . I'd as soon go to jail as not . . . but it's the precedent. . . . We've got to fight every case and it's the one way we can use the liberal lawyers, the lousy fakers. . . . And it costs so much and the union's broke and I don't like to have them spend the money on me . . . but they say that if we win my case then the cases against the other boys will all be dropped. . . .” “The thing to do,” she said, smoothing his hair off his forehead, “is to relax a little.” “You should be telling me?” he said and started to unlace his shoes.

It was a long time before she could get him to get into bed. He sat there halfundressed in the dark shivering and talking about the errors that had been committed in the strike. When at last he'd taken his clothes off and stood up to lay them on a chair he looked like a skeleton in the broad swath of grey glare that cut across the room from the streetlight outside her window. She burst out crying all over again at the sunken look of his chest and the deep hollows inside his collarbone. “What's the matter, girl?” Ben said gruffly. “You crying because you haven't got a Valentino to go to bed with you?” “Nonsense, Ben, I was just thinking you needed fattening up . . . you poor
kid, you work so hard.” “You'll be going off with a goodlooking young bondsalesman one of these days, like you were used to back in Colorado Springs. . . . I know what to expect . . . I don't give a damn . . . I can make the fight alone.” “Oh, Ben, don't talk like that . . . you know I'm heart and soul . . .” She drew him to her. Suddenly he kissed her.

Next morning they quarreled bitterly while they were dressing, about the value of her researchwork. She said that after all he couldn't talk; the strike hadn't been such a wild success. He went out without eating his breakfast. She went uptown in a clenched fury of misery, threw up her job and a few days later went down to Boston to work on the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the new committee that had just been formed.

She'd never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums back of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case was won, she'd write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers' shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she'd observe life. She'd never fall for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.

Her job was keeping in touch with newspapermen and trying to get favorable items into the press. It was uphill work. Although most of the newspapermen who had any connection with the case thought the two had been wrongly convicted they tended to say that they were just two wop anarchists, so what the hell? After she'd been out to Dedham jail to talk to Sacco and to Charlestown to talk to Vanzetti, she tried to tell the U.P. man what she felt about them one Saturday night when he was taking her out to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street.

He was the only one of the newspapermen she got really friendly with. He was an awful drunk but he'd seen a great deal and he had a gentle detached manner that she liked. He liked her for some reason, though he kidded her unmercifully about what he called her youthful fanaticism. When he'd ask her out to dinner and make her drink a lot of red wine she'd tell herself that it wasn't really a waste of time, that it
was important for her to keep in touch with the press services. His name was Jerry Burnham.

“But, Jerry, how can you stand it? If the State of Massachusetts can kill those two innocent men in the face of the protest of the whole world it'll mean that there never will be any justice in America ever again.” “When was there any to begin with?” he said with a mirthless giggle, leaning over to fill up her glass. “Ever heard of Tom Mooney?” The curly white of his hair gave a strangely youthful look to his puffy red face. “But there's something so peaceful, so honest about them; you get such a feeling of greatness out of them. Honestly they are great men.” “Everything you say makes it more remarkable that they weren't executed years ago.” “But the workingpeople, the common people, they won't allow it.” “It's the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of greatmen. . . . If it's not going too far back I'd like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ?”

It was Jerry Burnham who taught her to drink. He lived himself in a daily alcoholic haze carrying his drinks carefully and circumspectly like an acrobat walking across a tight wire with a tableful of dishes balanced on his head. He was so used to working his twentyfourhour newsservice that he attended to his wires and the business of his office as casually as he'd pay the check in one speakeasy before walking around the corner to another. His kidneys were shot and he was on the winewagon he said, but she often noticed whiskey on his breath when she went into his office. He was so exasperating that she'd swear to herself each time she went out with him it was the last. No more wasting time when every minute was precious. But the next time he'd ask her out she'd crumple up at once and smile and say yes and waste another evening drinking wine and listening to him ramble on. “It'll all end in blindness and sudden death,” he said one night as he left her in a taxi at the corner of her street. “But who cares? Who in hell cares. . . ? Who on the bloody louseinfested globe gives one little small microscopic vestigial hoot?”

As courtdecision after courtdecision was lost and the rancid Boston spring warmed into summer and the governor's commission reported adversely and no hope remained but a pardon from the governor himself, Mary worked more and more desperately hard. She wrote articles, she talked to politicians and ministers and argued
with editors, she made speeches in unionhalls. She wrote her mother pitiful humiliating letters to get money out of her on all sorts of pretexts. Every cent she could scrape up went into the work of her committee. There were always stationery and stamps and telegrams and phonecalls to pay for. She spent long evenings trying to coax communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals into working together. Hurrying along the stonepaved streets she'd be whispering to herself, “They've got to be saved, they've got to be saved.” When at last she got to bed her dreams were full of impossible tasks; she was trying to glue a broken teapot together and as soon as she got one side of it mended the other side would come to pieces again, she was trying to mend a rent in her skirt and by the time the bottom was sewed the top had come undone again; she was trying to put together pieces of a torn typewritten sheet, the telegram was of the greatest importance, she couldn't see, it was all a blur before her eyes; it was the evidence that would force a new trial, her eyes were too bad, when she had spelled out one word from the swollen throbbing letters she'd forgotten the last one; she was climbing a shaky hillside among black guttedlooking houses pitching at crazy angles where steelworkers lived, at each step she slid back, it was too steep, she was crying for help, yelling, sliding back. Then warm reassuring voices like Ben Compton's when he was feeling well were telling her that Public Opinion wouldn't allow it that after all Americans had a sense of Justice and Fair Play that the Workingclass would rise; she'd see crowded meetings, slogans, banners, glary billboards with letters pitching into perspective saying: Workers of the World Unite, she'd be marching in the middle of crowds in parades of protest. They Shall Not Die.

She'd wake up with a start, bathe and dress hurriedly and rush down to the office of the committee snatching up a glass of orangejuice and a cup of coffee on the way. She was always the first there; if she slackened her work for a moment she'd see their faces, the shoemaker's sharplymodeled pale face with the flashing eyes and the fishpeddler's philosophical mustaches and his musing unscared eyes. She'd see behind them the electric chair as clear as if it were standing in front of her desk in the stuffy crowded office.

July went by all too fast. August came. A growing crowd of all sorts of people began pouring through the office: old friends, wobblies who'd hitchhiked from the coast, politicians interested in the Italian
vote, lawyers with suggestions for the defense, writers, outofwork newspapermen, cranks and phonies of all kinds attracted by rumors of an enormous defensefund. She came back one afternoon from speaking in a unionhall in Pawtucket and found G. H. Barrow sitting at her desk. He had written a great pile of personal telegrams to senators congressmen ministers laborleaders demanding that they join in the protest in the name of justice and civilization and the working-class, long telegrams and cables at top rates. She figured out the cost as she checked them off. She didn't know how the committee could pay for them, but she handed them to the messengerboy waiting outside. She could hardly believe that those words had made her veins tingle only a few weeks before. It shocked her to think how meaningless they seemed to her now like the little cards you get from a onecent fortunetelling machine. For six months now she'd been reading and writing the same words every day.

Mary didn't have time to be embarrassed meeting George Barrow. They went out together to get a plate of soup at a cafeteria talking about nothing but the case as if they'd never known each other before. Picketing the State House had begun again and as they came out of the restaurant Mary turned to him and said, “Well, George, how about going up and getting arrested. . . . There's still time to make the afternoon papers. Your name would give us back the front page.”

He flushed red, and stood there in front of the restaurant in the noontime crowd looking tall and nervous and popeyed in his natty lightgrey suit. “But, my dear g-g-girl, I . . . if I thought it would do the slightest good I would . . . I'd get myself arrested or run over by a truck . . . but I think it would rob me of whatever usefulness I might have.”

Mary French looked him straight in the eye, her face white with fury. “I didn't think you'd take the risk,” she said, clipping each word off and spitting it in his face. She turned her back on him and hurried to the office.

It was a sort of relief when she was arrested herself. She'd planned to keep out of sight of the cops as she had been told her work was too valuable to lose, but she'd had to run up the hill with a set of placards for a new batch of picketers who had gone off without them. There was nobody in the office she could send. She was just crossing Beacon Street when two large polite cops suddenly appeared, one on each
side of her. One of them said, “Sorry, miss, please come quietly,” and she found herself sitting in the dark patrolwagon. Driving to the policestation she had a soothing sense of helplessness and irresponsibility. It was the first time in weeks she had felt herself relax. At the Joy Street station they booked her but they didn't put her in a cell. She sat on a bench opposite the window with two Jewish garmentworkers and a welldressed woman in a flowered summer dress with a string of pearls round her neck and watched the men picketers pouring through into the cells. The cops were polite, everybody was jolly; it seemed like a kind of game, it was hard to believe anything real was at stake.