Big Money (70 page)

“The judge is reforming me,” laughed Mary's mother coyly.

Mary was so nervous she felt she was going to scream. The heavy buttery food, the suave attentions of the waiter and the fatherly geniality of the judge made her almost gag. “Look, Mother,” she said, “if you really have a little money to spare you might let me have something for our milkfund. After all miners' children aren't guilty of anything.”

“My dear, I've already made substantial contributions to the Red Cross. . . . After all, we've had a miners' strike out in Colorado on our hands much worse than in Pennsylvania. . . . I've always felt, Mary dear, that if you were interested in labor conditions the place for you was home in Colorado Springs. If you must study that sort of thing there was never any need to come East for it.”

“Even the I.W.W. has reared its ugly head again,” said the judge.

“I don't happen to approve of the tactics of the I.W.W.,” said Mary stiffly.

“I should hope not,” said her mother.

“But, Mother, don't you think you could let me have a couple of hundred dollars?”

“To spend on these dreadful agitators, they may not be I Won't Works but they're just as bad.”

“I'll promise that every cent goes into milk for the babies.”

“But that's just handing the miners over to these miserable Russian agitators. Naturally if they can give milk to the children it makes them popular, puts them in a position where they can mislead these poor miserable foreigners worse than ever.” The judge leaned forward across the table and put his blueveined hand in its white starched cuff on Mary's mother's hand. “It's not that we lack sympathy with the plight of the miners' women and children, or that we don't understand the dreadful conditions of the whole mining industry . . . we know altogether too much about that, don't we, Hilda? But . . .”

Mary suddenly found that she'd folded her napkin and gotten trembling to her feet. “I don't see any reason for further prolonging this interview, that must be painful to you, Mother, as it is to me. . . .”

“Perhaps I can arbitrate,” said the judge, smiling, getting to his feet with his napkin in his hand.

Mary felt a desperate tight feeling like a metal ring round her head. “I've got to go, Mother . . . I don't feel very well today. Have a nice trip. . . . I don't want to argue.” Before they could stop her she was off down the hall and on her way down in the elevator.

Mary felt so upset she had to talk to somebody so she went to a telephone booth and called up Ada. Ada's voice was full of sobs, she said something dreadful had happened and that she'd called off her party and that Mary must come up to see her immediately. Even before Ada opened the door of the apartment on Madison Avenue Mary got a whiff of the Forêt Vierge perfume Ada had taken to using when she first came to New York. Ada opened the door wearing a green and pink flowered silk wrapper with all sorts of little tassels hanging from it. She fell on Mary's neck. Her eyes were red and she sniffed as she talked. “Why, what's the matter, Ada?” asked Mary coolly. “Darling, I've just had the most dreadful row with Hjalmar. We have parted forever. . . . Of course I had to call off the party because I was giving it for him.”

“Who's Hjalmar?”

“He's somebody very beautiful . . . and very hateful. . . . But let's talk about you, Mary darling . . . I do hope you 've made it up with your mother and Judge Blake.”

“I just walked out. . . . What's the use of arguing? They're on one side of the barricades and I'm on the other.”

Ada strode up and down the room. “Oh, I hate talk like that. . . . It makes me feel awful. . . . At least you'll have a drink. . . . I've got to drink, I've been too nervous to practice all day.”

Mary stayed all afternoon at Ada's drinking ginrickeys and eating the sandwiches and little cakes that had been laid out in the kitchenette for the party and talking about old times and Ada's unhappy loveaffair. Ada made Mary read all his letters and Mary said he was a damn fool and good riddance. Then Ada cried and Mary told her she ought to be ashamed of herself, she didn't know what real misery was. Ada was very meek about it and went to her desk and wrote out a check in a shaky hand for a hundred dollars for the miners' milkfund. Ada had some supper sent up for them from the uptown Longchamps and declared she'd spent the happiest afternoon in years. She made Mary promise to come to her concert in the small hall at the Aeolian the following week. When Mary was going Ada made her take a couple of dollars for a taxi. They were both reeling a little in the hall waiting for the elevator. “We've just gotten to be a pair of old topers,” said Ada gaily. It was a good thing Mary had decided to take a taxi because she found it hard to stand on her feet.

That winter the situation of the miners in the Pittsburgh district got worse and worse. Evictions began. Families with little children were living in tents and in brokendown unheated tarpaper barracks. Mary lived in a feeling of nightmare, writing letters, mimeographing appeals, making speeches at meetings of clothing and fur workers, canvassing wealthy liberals. The money that came in was never enough. She took no salary for her work so she had to get Ada to lend her money to pay her rent. She was thin and haggard and coughed all the time. Too many cigarettes, she'd explain. Eddy Spellman and Rudy Goldfarb worried about her. She could see they'd decided she wasn't eating enough because she was all the time finding on the corner of her desk a paper bag of sandwiches or a carton of coffee that one of them had brought in. Once Eddy brought her a big package of smearcase that his mother had made up home near Scranton. She
couldn't eat it; she felt guilty every time she saw it sprouting green mold in the icebox that had no ice in it because she'd given up cooking now that Don was away.

One evening Rudy came into the office with smiles all over his face. Eddy was leaning over packing the old clothes into bales as usual for his next trip. Rudy gave him a light kick in the seat of the pants. “Hay you, Trotzkyite,” said Eddy, jumping at him and pulling out his necktie. “Smile when you say that,” said Rudy, pummeling him. They were all laughing. Mary felt like an oldmaid schoolteacher watching the boys roughhousing in front of her desk. “Meeting comes to order,” she said. “They tried to hang it on me but they couldn't,” said Rudy, panting, straightening his necktie and his mussed hair. “But what I was going to say, Comrade French, was that I thought you might like to know that a certain comrade is getting in on the
Aquitania
tomorrow . . . touristclass.” “Rudy, are you sure?” “Saw the cable.”

Mary got to the dock too early and had to wait two hours. She tried to read the afternoon papers but her eyes wouldn't follow the print. It was too hot in the receptionroom and too cold outside. She fidgeted around miserably until at last she saw the enormous black sheetiron wall sliding with its rows of lighted portholes past the openings in the wharfbuilding. Her hands and feet were icy. Her whole body ached to feel his arms around her, for the rasp of his deep voice in her ears. All the time a vague worry flitted in the back of her head because she hadn't had a letter from him while he'd been away.

Suddenly there he was coming down the gangplank alone, with the old wicker suitcase in his hand. He had on a new belted German raincoat but the same checked cap. She was face to face with him. He gave her a little hug but he didn't kiss her. There was something odd in his voice. “Hello, Mary . . . I didn't expect to find you here. . . . I don't want to be noticed, you know.” His voice had a low furtive sound in her ears. He was nervously changing his suitcase from one hand to the other. “See you in a few days . . . I'm going to be pretty busy.” She turned without a word and ran down the wharf. She hurried breathless along the crosstown street to the Ninth Avenue el. When she opened her door the new turkeyred curtains were like a blow from a whip in her face.

She couldn't go back to the office. She couldn't bear the thought of facing the boys and the people she knew, the people who had known them together. She called up and said she had a bad case of grippe
and would have to stay in bed a couple of days. She stayed all day in the blank misery of the narrow rooms. Towards evening she dozed off to sleep on the couch. She woke up with a start thinking she heard a step in the hall outside. It wasn't Don, the steps went on up the next flight. After that she didn't sleep any more.

The next morning the phone woke her just when she settled herself in bed to drowse a little. It was Sylvia Goldstein saying she was sorry Mary had the grippe and asking if there was anything she could do. Oh, no, she was fine, she was just going to stay in bed all day, Mary answered in a dead voice. “Well, I suppose you knew all the time about Comrade Stevens and Comrade Lichfield . . . you two were always so close . . . they were married in Moscow . . . she's an English comrade . . . she spoke at the big meeting at the Bronx Casino last night . . . she's got a great shock of redhair . . . stunning but some of the girls think it's dyed. Lots of the comrades didn't know you and Comrade Stevens had brokenup . . . isn't it sad things like that have to happen in the movement?” “Oh, that was a long time ago. . . . Goodby, Sylvia,” said Mary harshly and hung up. She called up a bootlegger she knew and told him to send her up a bottle of gin.

The next afternoon there was a light rap on the door and when Mary opened it a crack there was Ada wreathed in silver fox and breathing out a great gust of Forêt Vierge. “Oh, Mary darling, I knew something was the matter. . . . You know sometimes I'm quite psychic. And when you didn't come to my concert, first I was mad but then I said to myself I know the poor darling's sick. So I just went right down to your office. There was the handsomest boy there and I just made him tell me where you lived. He said you were sick with the grippe and so I came right over. My dear, why aren't you in bed? You look a sight.”

“I'm all right,” mumbled Mary numbly, pushing the stringy hair off her face. “I been . . . making plans . . . about how we can handle this relief situation better.”

“Well, you're just coming up right away to my spare bedroom and let me pet you up a little. . . . I don't believe it's grippe, I think it's overwork. . . . If you're not careful you'll be having a nervous breakdown.” “Maybe sumpen like that.” Mary couldn't articulate her words. She didn't seem to have any will of her own any more; she did everything Ada told her. When she was settled in Ada's clean lavendersmelling spare bed they sent out for some barbital and it put
her to sleep. Mary stayed there several days eating the meals Ada's maid brought her, drinking all the drinks Ada would give her, listening to the continual scrape of violin practice that came from the other room all morning. But at night she couldn't sleep without filling herself up with dope. She didn't seem to have any will left. It would take her a half an hour to decide to get up to go to the toilet.

After she'd been at Ada's a week she began to feel she ought to go home. She began to be impatient of Ada's sly references to unhappy loveaffairs and broken hearts and the beauty of abnegation and would snap Ada's head off whenever she started it. “That's fine,” Ada would say. “You are getting your meanness back.” For some time Ada had been bringing up the subject of somebody she knew who'd been crazy about Mary for years and who was dying to see her again. Finally Mary gave in and said she would go to a cocktail party at Eveline Johnson's where Ada said she knew he'd be. “And Eveline gives the most wonderful parties. I don't know how she does it because she never has any money, but all the most interesting people in New York will be there. They always are. Radicals too, you know. Eveline can't live without her little group of reds.”

Mary wore one of Ada's dresses that didn't fit her very well and went out in the morning to have her hair curled at Saks's where Ada always had hers curled. They had some cocktails at Ada's place before they went. At the last minute Mary said she wouldn't go because she'd finally got it out of Ada that it was George Barrow who was going to be at the party. Ada made Mary drink another cocktail and a reckless feeling came over her and she said all right, let's get a move on.

There was a smiling colored maid in a fancy lace cap and apron at the door of the house who took them down the hall to a bedroom full of coats and furs where they were to take off their wraps. As Ada was doing her face at the dressingtable Mary whispered in her ear, “Just think what our reliefcommittee could do with the money that woman wastes on senseless entertaining.” “But she's a darling,” Ada whispered back excitedly. “Honestly, you'll like her.” The door had opened behind their backs letting in a racketing gust of voices, laughs, tinkle of glasses, a whiff of perfume and toast and cigarettesmoke and gin. “Oh, Ada,” came a ringing voice. “Eveline darling, how lovely you look. . . . This is Mary French, you know I said I'd bring her. . . . She's my oldest friend.” Mary found herself shaking hands with a tall slender woman in a pearlgrey dress. Her face was
very white and her lips were very red and her long large eyes were exaggerated with mascara. “So nice of you to come,” Eveline Johnson said and sat down suddenly among the furs and wraps on the bed. “It sounds like a lovely party,” cried Ada.

“I hate parties. I don't know why I give them,” said Eveline Johnson. “Well, I guess I've got to go back to the menagerie. . . . Oh, Ada, I'm so tired.”

Mary found herself studying the harsh desperate lines under the makeup round Mrs. Johnson's mouth and the strained tenseness of the cords of her neck. Their silly life tells on them, she was saying to herself.

“What about the play?” Ada was asking. “I was so excited when I heard about it.”