Power (32 page)

“You don't worship women,” Lena answered tiredly. “These days, people don't even worship God—and as for his wife, she's been dead almost a year. He loves you and you love him—Oh, Christ, what am I wasting my breath for? I must be drunk. The hell with it!”

But things change; and if they say that people never change, they could also say with as much certainty, that people never remain the same. I suppose there was no woman I was ever as close to as Lena, but that took time. It took a basic revision in my own standards of morality, or of what passed for morality in a person like myself. Most importantly, it took a desire to understand Lena.

She lived with Mark Golden on and off for almost fifteen years; she left him and returned to him, and she loved him and hated him, as you well know. Dedication wears thin, and like war, it is interspersed with a good deal of boredom. She never had anything to do with Ben, because she did not like Ben and because adultery was not one of Ben's failings. Mark was much older than she was, and in a way, Mark was the most tragic figure of all—but that was my opinion and not Mark's. Years after this Christmas night of which I speak, Mark and I talked about it. He was so old then! Somewhere, youth had passed him by, somewhere far, far back in his life, but when we talked, he said that all in all, he considered that his life had been a useful and fruitful one.

“I did the kind of work that, for the most part, I'm not ashamed of,” he said to me. “After all, Dorothy, the most frightening thing about growing old is neither the nearness of death nor the infirmity age brings, but rather the realization that time is an illusion, and that the eternity of days and years that faced our youth is no more than the blink of an eye, only a moment, an elusive, fleeting moment. It's a hell of a thing to look back shamefully and regretfully, and at least I can say that I've had good years and some moments of happiness. All in all, it's on the black side of the ledger.”

Lena was there then. She said something about Ben Holt being remembered, while few would remember Mark Goldman.

“Why not?” Mark smiled. “The memories belong to him—God knows, he worked for them. Practically speaking, it doesn't matter to the dead whether they're remembered or not—not one single iota.”

That was years later. On the Christmas night I spoke of, I had little love for Lena; or, to tell the truth, for anyone else at our house. I can number and remember them, too. I was, for the moment, heartily sick of Alvin Cutter and his adolescent worship of me. I was tired to death of remembering not to be caught in a hallway or behind a piece of furniture with Fulton Grove, with his damn, roving, feeling hands and his dirty, little-boy lechery, and the sight of Jack Mullen's poor ghost of a wife, let out of captivity and allowed to take her marital position in the sight of mankind for one brief night, while her stud of a husband restrained himself, was more than I could bear.

I too had had some discussions with Mark Golden about the trade-union movement and how the heights of Jerusalem were always scaled by Class C human beings. Perhaps I was slower than most to learn a lesson of history, for after all, it was eight years since I had married Ben Holt and long enough that I had been living in Pomax; and my dreams of glory fractured slowly. Even the sight of familiar objects changes with time, and one falls into a pattern of observation that can only be forcibly shattered—as it was for me that evening as I watched Ben undress, watched this giant of a man with his thickening waistline sit on the edge of his bed, pull off one sock slowly, then the other, dropping them, leaving them there on the floor. I said to him,

“You could put them into the laundry bin as easily as I could.”

“Oh? I thought I'd wear them tomorrow.”

“The same socks?”

“The same socks. Yes, my dear. I'm just a lousy, uncultured miner who wears his socks two days in a row.”

“You're not a miner,” I said. “I'm sick of having you call yourself a coal miner every opportunity you have.”

“What?”

“I said you're not a miner. You haven't been for eight years.”

“What the hell are you getting at, Dotty?” he asked thickly. “What's eating you?”

“I just think that you've been out of the mines long enough to change your clothes when they're dirty.”

“What a cheap, lousy thing to say! If I didn't make allowances for your background—”

“What kind of allowances? What about my background?”

“The hell with it! Go to bed.”

“I want to know what kind of allowances you make?”

“Look, Dotty, this is no time for a philosophical discussion. I'm tired and you're irritated, so why don't we just both of us go to bed.”

“What is the time for a philosophical discussion, Ben, or any other kind of discussion? Morning, noon, night—perhaps in those good comfortable after-dinner hours that a man spends with his wife and family? But since this is the first evening you've been here in two weeks, I think this is it. I'm a little drunk, therefore I am also a little philosophical.”

“Knock it off, Dotty!”

“Not for the world. I want to know what kind of allowances you make for me.”

“All right.” He stared at me thoughtfully, his eyes tired and bloodshot, and as he looked at that moment, so help me, I had it in my heart to throw away the whole charade and be only pleased with the fact that we were together this night. But I didn't, and Ben said, “I make allowances for the fact that you were a spoiled brat brought up with a silver spoon in your mouth, and with not enough sense or perception to know what it means to be a worker or to try to build a trade union.”

“Why did you marry a spoiled brat, Ben?”

“Because I loved you.”

“Or because you couldn't bear the thought of a miner's daughter? Which is it? And if you ever did win a decent life for the miners, I suppose you'd look at them with contempt because they could give their children some decent clothes and an education and three meals a day—which to you is a silver spoon in a kid's mouth.”

“God damn it, don't twist my words!”

“Then don't twist the facts. Don't call me a spoiled brat. You know better. I had a maid for a while, but now I'm running this house by myself and raising three children and doing the cooking and cleaning, and without any expense accounts and steaks in hotel restaurants and bootleg whisky and Pullman compartments and all the rest of what goes with the good fight, as your friend, Fulton Grove, loves to call it. And furthermore, you can tell Mr. Grove that the next time he tries to paw me—”

“That son of a bitch! I'll—”

“Hold onto your hurt pride, Ben. For once, you listen. Because on top of all that, I've managed to spend almost an hour or two every day at the Central Soup Kitchen since this strike began, and I know something about people, which is almost as important as knowing about miners, because they're also people—which I think you've forgotten. Just as you so conveniently forgot that those poor devils in Arrowhead Pit were people—”

“Oh no! Damn it, no! You're not going to bring up this Arrowhead thing—not tonight at an hour past midnight. It's Christmas, Dotty. Can't you get it through your head that this is Christmas?”

“I can't get it out of my head. I'm full of carols. This is the one day of the year when the human race gets together on the proposition that we stop being animals for twenty-four hours. But it's past midnight, so we can return to being ourselves. And as for Arrowhead, I agree with you. Put it away. Put it away, Ben Holt, and forget about it—”

I said it was shattered. It's shattered and pieced together again, and people go on living. I went on living with Ben, and people admired us. You see, there was one fact about Ben that was inescapable: he never looked at another woman, and thereby, through all of his life, no breath of scandal was ever whispered about him. That's how the smart designation came into being, Caesar and Caesar's wife. It's a peculiar measure of morality that marks us. He said about Lena once, “She's a tramp.” Ben lived in a world of good women and tramps, and you fell into one category or another, and I suppose he demonstrated some kind of profound wisdom in marrying someone who would remain a “good woman.”

I don't find the truth painful any more, and I am ready to admit that during those years, I wanted the union to die. I wanted it broken because I had a dream that if it were ever to be broken, Ben and I would be released, and we could leave Pomax and I could forget that I had ever seen a coal mine. So year after year, '25, '26, '27, '28, and '29, I watched the membership shrink—I watched it go down from a hundred thousand to forty thousand, yet by then I knew that it would make no difference. I knew that if there were five coal miners left who were ready to sign cards in the Miners Union, Ben Holt would be on the scene to lead them.

It would be wrong to say that I felt nothing for him, no sympathy, no love; the truth is that I felt a great deal indeed, and there were moments of great warmth and closeness between us. A marriage like ours is composed of ten thousand rivets and strings and knots, and when one breaks, another takes over the strain, and when something snaps, something else adheres. If I just pluck memories out of a grab bag, I can find moments again and again. If the steak in the Pullman dining car cost eight dollars, there were other times when he spent his last penny to buy some toy for the children, or some piece of inexpensive costume jewelry for me. He was a sentimentalist and Lena once characterized him as a “slob.” It was cruel but in some ways true; he was also a strong man driven by some wild urgency which I never understood. To you, Alvin, finally, it was his lust for power. I wish I could explain it that easily. In the past I did. But now I doubt much that I knew then.

Also, during those years, I had no time to brood over things. To raise three children, as I did, and to keep a home going, meant a state of utter exhaustion at the end of each day. The days and the months went by—and always, it was Ben Holt fighting for his life. In 1927, a reporter from a St. Louis paper came to Pomax to interview me. She was a bright, sharp young thing, and I remember that she began the interview by asking me how it felt to be Ben's wife. I was supposed to answer that in one short, specific sentence.

You will remember that I spent the summer of 1928 at Father's house in Ringman. I brought the children with me. Ben had to borrow the money for our train fare to Pennsylvania, and while such a summer was a good thing for the children, the plain truth of it was that we couldn't figure out any way to stay alive in Pomax. At that time, you were in Chicago, preparing for the union's national convention. Ben put us on the train for Pennsylvania, and then went on to Chicago.

I am sure you read Kingsley Rowe's article in last month's
National Post
, about Ben and those years in the 1920s. Just in case you missed it, I am enclosing a cutting about the time I speak of. Rowe isn't very dependable when it comes to facts, nor did he take the time to ask me to verify anything. But I thought you would be amused by it, as an example of the reality versus the historical hindsight. Also, there is a real disposition to be kind to Ben, now that he is dead. Could that be part of a national disposition of ours—to ennoble when dead those we hated most alive? Anyway, here is the article:

That was the year when Ben Holt, president of the International Miners Union, faced the daily fare of his union members during the era of the twenties—starvation. As far as his own pantry went, he was no better than a miner. It was empty. Like any miner, he had to contemplate the pinched faces of his own children and hear them whimper for food. But in one way, at least, his own situation was better than most, for he had the unwavering support of his loyal and devoted wife, Dorothy Holt.

There were few families like the Holts, close, tight, inseparable. Whatever arrows his enemies hurled against him, they admired his family and admitted his position as a family man and a good father. So it was not with an easy heart or without denting his hard core of pride, that Ben Holt made the decision to send his family to his father-in-law's home at Ringman, while he went on to Chicago alone. At least there, they would have a roof over their heads and find nourishment.

Once in Chicago, Holt faced the most critical situation of his entire career. Never before or since that summer convention of 1928 was Benjamin Renwell Holt closer to losing his place as the leader of the International Miners Union. For three years, his once powerful union had been torn by strikes, lockouts, and internecine warfare. Its great membership, shortly before close to four hundred thousand, had shrunk to less than fifty thousand. Its various locals had asserted their autonomy, bringing additional disunity into the union. Its treasury was bankrupt—indeed, money had to be borrowed to pay the expenses of the convention.

Fulton Grove, already embarked on his quick climb to power in the hierarchy of the National Confederation of Labor, led the assault of that strong organization against the Miners Union. As his allies, chartered by the National Confederation, Gus Empek's Associated Miners Union invaded the convention hall to demand a merger with the International Miners Union and representation on the top-echelon committees. There was the moment when Ben Holt faced not only dethronement, but permanent exile from the ranks of the American labor movement. Not alone Gus Empek, but Jack Brady and half a dozen brawny leaders of the Associated Miners joined in a charge up to the platform, to shoulder Mark Golden, union attorney, away from the microphone and seize the attention of the assembled delegates.

At one side of the stage, Ben Holt sat in thoughtful silence, flanked on one hand by veteran Jack Mullen and on the other by his public-relations expert and assistant, Alvin Cutter. No one of the three said anything or appeared in the least disturbed, nor did Ben Holt appear in the least annoyed. Neither did he make any attempt to defend the microphone or regain it. Jack Brady, of the Associated Miners, had begun to introduce Gus Empek and extol his virtues, when Ben Holt arose lazily, stretched, yawned, and then slowly sauntered toward stage center. Jack Brady glanced at him nervously, and suddenly began to claim the right of free speech without interference. The six husky Associated Miners started toward the two men.