Ragtime (5 page)

Emma Goldman’s subject was the great dramatist Ibsen in whose work, she said, lay all the instruments for the radical dissection of society. She was not a physically impressive woman, being small, thick-waisted, with a heavy-jawed masculine face. She wore horn-rimmed glasses that enlarged her eyes and suggested the constant outrage to her soul of the sights she saw. She had immense vitality and her voice rang, and Evelyn, after getting over her relief to discover that Goldman was simply a woman, and a rather small woman at that, was swept up by the oratory of powerful ideas that lifted her mind like a river. In the heat and constant excitement rising from the audience she allowed her shawl to drop to her shoulders. There were perhaps a hundred people present, all sitting on benches or standing along the walls while Goldman spoke from behind a table at the end of the room. The police department had stationed men prominently at the doors and at one point a police sergeant tried to stop Emma’s address, claiming she had been advertised to speak on the subject of the drama but instead was talking about Ibsen. Jeers and catcalls drove him from the hall. Goldman, however, did not join the laughter, knowing from experience what an embarrassed police force inevitably did. She spoke now with great rapidity and as she spoke her eyes ranged restlessly over the audience and came to stop, again and again, on the alabaster face of Evelyn Nesbit, who sat between Tateh and the little girl in the first row on the right, a position of honor as befitted Tateh’s office as president of the Socialist Artists’ Alliance. Love in freedom! Goldman cried. Those who like Mrs. Alving have paid with blood and tears for their spiritual awakening, repudiate marriage as an imposition, a shallow empty mockery. Some of the audience, including Tateh, shouted No! No! Comrades and brothers, Goldman said, can you socialists ignore the double bondage of one-half of the human race? Do you think the society that plunders your labor has no interest in the way you are asked to live with women? Not through freedom but through bondage? All the reformers talk today of the white slavery problem. But is white slavery is a problem, why is marriage not a problem? Is there no connection between the institution of marriage and the institution of the brothel? At mention of this word cries of Shame! Shame! filled the hall. Tateh had put his hands over his daughter’s ear and pressed her head to his side. A man stood and shouted. Goldman held up her hands for quiet. Comrades, let us disagree, of course, but not by losing our decorum to the extent that the police may have an excuse to interrupt us. People turning in their seats indeed saw now a dozen policemen in the crowd at the doors. The truth is, Goldman went on quickly, women may not vote, they may not love whom they want, they may not develop their minds and their spirits, they may not commit their lives to the spiritual adventure of life, comrades they may not! And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind? Must our fate always be physical? There sits among us this evening one of the most brilliant women in America, a woman forced by this capitalist society to find her genius in the exercise of sexual attraction—and she has done that, comrades, to an extent that a Pierpont Morgan and a John D. Rockefeller could envy. Yet her name is scandal and their names are intoned with reverence and respect by the toadying legislators of this society. Evelyn went cold. She wanted to pull the shawl over her head but was afraid she would draw attention to herself. She sat perfectly still, staring at her hands in her lap. At least the woman had had the grace not to look in her direction as she spoke. People in the audience who were craning their necks trying to locate the object of Goldman’s remarks were diverted now by a shout from the back of the hall. A phalanx of blue coats jammed through the doors. There was a scream. And suddenly the hall was a pandemonium. It was a typical conclusion to an Emma Goldman speech. Police poured down the center aisle. The anarchist stood calmly behind her table and put her papers in her brief case. Evelyn Nesbit felt Tateh’s eyes upon her and turned into the glare of his judgment. He was looking at her as she had seen him look upon a roach before he stepped on it. Then his old face seemed to collapse into another, more complex set of wrinkles and lines, his entire being settled into the last age before death, and his eyes, from the depth of his ancient skull, translated for her the whispered Yiddish that came from his broken lips. My life is desecrated by whores, is what he said. And grasping the hand of the little girl in the pinafore, he disappeared into the crowd.

Evelyn stood staring after them. It seemed to her that the light was racing away from her eyes. Her hand went out for something to hold. A now familiar voice said in her ear This way, come with me, and her arm was in the grip of Goldman herself. It was a grip of iron. Goldman led her through a small door behind the speaker’s table and just before the door closed Evelyn, letting a high thin wail from her throat, looked back and saw her shy blond young shadow fighting his way furiously in her direction. I am an old hand at this, Emma Goldman said leading her down a dark stairs. This is just an ordinary evening. The stair gave onto the street around the corner from the entrance to the meeting hall. A police van passed them, its bell clanging; it turned the corner. Come, Emma Goldman said, linking her arm, and she walked Evelyn quickly away in the opposite direction.

When Mother’s Young Brother reached the street he just managed to see the two female figures passing under a streetlight two blocks away. He hurried after them. The evening was cool. The perspiration on his neck chilled him. A breeze whipped his duck trousers. He came to within a half-block of the two women and for some minutes followed them at this distance. They turned, suddenly, and went up the stone stairs of a brownstone. He ran now and when he reached the brownstone saw that it was a rooming house. He went inside and quietly went up the stairs, not knowing what room he was looking for but sure somehow he’d find it. On the second landing he backed into the shadowed recess of a door. Goldman, carrying a basin, passed on her way to the bathroom. He heard the sound of water running and found the open door to Goldman’s room. It was a small room and peeking around the door he saw Evelyn Nesbit sitting on the bed, her face on her hands. Sobs shook her body. The wall were a faded lilac print. An electric lamp at the bedside provided the only light. Hearing Goldman coming back Younger Brother soundlessly darted into the room and slipped into the closet. He left the closet door slightly ajar.

Goldman placed the basin of water on the bedtable and shook out a thin starched face towel. Poor girl, she said, poor girl. Why don’t you let me refresh you a bit. I’m a nurse, you know, that’s how I support myself. I’ve followed your case in the newspapers. From the beginning I found myself admiring you. I couldn’t understand why. She unlaced Evelyn’s high-top shoes and slipped them off. Don’t you want to put your feet up? she said. That’s the way. Evelyn lay back on the pillows rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hand. She took the towel offered by Goldman. Oh, I hate to cry, she said. Crying makes me ugly. She wept into the towel. After all, Goldman went on, you’re nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed. But what a kind of victory has it been? The victory of the prostitute. And what have your consolations been? The consolation of cynicism, of scorn, of contempt for the human male. Why, I thought, should I feel such strong sisterhood with this woman? After all I have never accepted servitude. I have been free. I have fought all my life to be free. And I have never taken a man to bed without loving him, without taking him in love as a free human being, his equal, giving and taking in equal portions in love and freedom. I’ve probably slept with more men than you have. I’ve loved more men than you have. I bet it would shock you to know how free I’ve been, in what freedom I’ve lived my life. Because like all whores you value propriety. You are a creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

No other words could have so quickly stemmed Evelyn’s tears. She lowered the towel from her face and stared at the stout little anarchist who now paced back and forth in front of the bed as she spoke. So why should I have felt such strong bonds between us? You are the embodiment in woman of everything I pity and abhor. When I saw you at my meeting I was ready to accept the mystical rule of all experience. You came because in such ways as the universe works, your life was destined to interact with my own. Through the vile depths of your existence your heart has directed you to the anarchist movement.

Nesbit shook her head. You don’t understand, she said. Tears filled her eyes once again. She told Goldman about the little girl in the pinafore. She told her of Tateh and her secret life in the slums. And now I have lost them, she said. I have lost my urchin. She wept bitterly. Goldman sat down in the rocking chair beside the bed and placed her hands on her knees. She leaned toward Evelyn Nesbit. All right, if I had not pointed you out your Tateh wouldn’t have run off. But what of it? Don’t worry. Truth is better than lies. When you find them again you’ll be able to deal with them honestly, as the person you really are. And if you don’t find them, perhaps
that
will be for the best. Who can say who are the instrumentalities and who are the people. Which of us causes, and lives in others to cause, and which of us is meant thereby to live. That is exactly my point. Do you know at one time in my life I walked the streets to sell my body? You are the first person I have ever told. Fortunately I was spotted for the novice that I was and sent home. It was on 14th Street. I tried to look like a streetwalker and I fooled no one. I don’t suppose the name Alexander Berkman means anything to you. Evelyn shook her head. When Berkman and I were in our early twenties we were lovers and revolutionaries together. There was a strike in Pittsburg. At the Homestead steel plant of Mr. Carnegie. And Mr. Carnegie decided to break the union. So he ran off for a European vacation and had his chief toady, that infamous piece of scum Henry Clay Frick, do the job. Frick imported an army of Pinkertons. The workers were on strike to protest the cutting of wages. The plant is on the Monongahela River and Frick towed his Pinkertons up the river and landed them at the plant from the river. There was a pitched battle. It was a war. When it was over ten were dead and dozens and dozens were wounded. The Pinkertons were driven off. So then Frick was able to get the government working for him and the state militia came in to surround the workers. At this point Berkman and I decided on our
attentat
. We would give the beleaguered workers heart. We would revolutionize their struggle. We would kill Frick. But we were in New York and we had no money. We needed money for a railroad ticket and for a gun. And that’s when I put on embroidered underwear and walked 14th Street. An old man gave me ten dollars and told me to go home. I borrowed the rest. But I would have done it if I had to. It was for the
attentat
. It was for Berkman and the revolution. I embraced him at the station. He planned to shoot Frick and take his own life at his trial. I ran after the departing train. We only had money for one ticket. He said only one person was needed for the job. He barged into Frick’s office in Pittsburg and shot the bastard three times. In the neck, in the shoulder. There was blood. Frick collapsed. Men ran in. They took the gun. He had a knife. He put something in his mouth. They pinned him to the ground. They pried open his jaws. It was a capsule of fulminate of mercury. All he had to do was chew on the capsule and the room would have blown up and everyone in it. They held his head back. They remove the capsule. They beat him unconscious.

Evelyn had sat up in bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. Goldman stared at the floor. He was in prison eighteen years, she said, many of them in solitary, in a dungeon. I visited him once. I could never bear to visit him again. And that bastard Frick survived and became a hero in the press and the public turned against the workers and the strike was broken. It was said we set back the American labor movement forty years. There was another anarchist, Most, an older man whom I revered. He denounced Berkman and me in his newspaper. The next time I saw Most at a meeting I was prepared. I had bought a horsewhip. I horsewhipped him in front of everyone. Then I broke the whip and threw it in his face. Berkman got out only last year. His hair is gone. He is the color of parchment. My darling young man walks with a stoop. His eyes are like coal pits. We are friend in principle only. Our hearts no longer beat together. What he endured in that prison I can only imagine. Living in darkness, in wet, tied up and left to lie in his own filth. Evelyn’s arm had gone out to the older woman and Goldman now took her hand and held it tightly. We know, don’t we, both of us, what it means to have a man in jail. The two women looked at each other. There was silence for some moments. Of course, your man is a pervert, a parasite, a leech, a foul loathsome sybarite, Goldman said. Evelyn laughed. An insane pig, Goldman said, with a twisted shrunken little pig’s mentality. Now they were both laughing. Yes, I hate him, Evelyn cried. Goldman grew reflective. But there are correspondences, you see, our lives correspond, our spirits touch each other like notes in harmony, and in the total human fate we are sisters. Do you understand that, Evelyn Nesbit? She stood and touched Nesbit’s face. Do you see that, my beautiful girl?

As she had been talking Goldman’s eyes reacted to something in Evelyn’s posture. Are you wearing a corset? she now asked. Evelyn nodded. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Look at me, even with my figure I have not one foundation garment, I wear everything loose and free-flowing, I give my body the freedom to breathe and to be. That’s what I mean, you’re a creature of their making. You have no more need of stays than a wood nymph. She took Nesbit’s hands and sat her up on the edge of the bed. She felt her waist. My God, stays like steel. Your waist is pinched tighter than a purse string. Stand up. Evelyn stood up obediently and Goldman with a nurse’s expertise swiftly unbuttoned her shirtwaist and removed it. She unclasped Evelyn’s skirt and had her step out of it. She untied the strings of her petticoat and removed it. Evelyn wore a light corset around her waist. The top of the corset pushed up her bosom. The bottom was attached to straps which went between her thighs. The corset was laced in the back. It is ironic that you are thought of in homes all over America as a licentious shameless wanton, Goldman said pulling the laces out of the grommets, loosening the garment and pulling it down Evelyn’s legs. Step out, she said. Evelyn obeyed. Her undershift remained stuck to her body in the pattern of the stays. Breathe, Goldman commanded, raise your arms, stretch your legs and breathe. Evelyn obeyed. Goldman plucked at the shift, then lifted it over her head. Then she knelt and slid Evelyn’s lace-trimmed underdrawer to her feet. Step out, she commanded. Evelyn did so. She now stood nude in the lamplight except for her black embroidered cotton stockings which were held up by elastic bands around the thighs. Goldman rolled the stockings down and Evelyn stepped out of her stockings. She held her arms across her breasts. Goldman stood and turned her around slowly for inspection. a frown on her face. Look at that, it’s amazing you have any circulation at all. Marks of the stays ran vertically like welts around Nesbit’s waist. The evidence of garters could be seen in the red lines running around the tops of her thighs. Women kill themselves, Goldman said. She turned back the bedcovers. She took from the top of the bureau a small black bag of the kind that doctors carried. A superb body like this and look what you do to it. Lie down. Evelyn sat down on the bed and looked at what was coming out of the black bag. On your stomach, Goldman said. She was holding a bottle and tilting the contents of the bottle into her cupped hand. Evelyn lay down on her stomach and Goldman applied the liquid here the marks of the stays reddened the flesh. Ow, Evelyn cried. It stings! This is an astringent—the first thing is to restore circulation, Goldman explained as she rubbed Evelyn’s back and buttocks and thighs. Evelyn was squirming and her flesh cringing with each application. She buried her face in the pillow to smother her cries. I know, I know, Goldman said. But you will thank me. Under Goldman’s vigorous rubbing Evelyn’s flesh seemed to spring into its fullest conformations. She was shivering now and her buttocks were clenched against the invigorating chill of the astringent. Her legs squeezed together. Goldman now took from her bag a bottle of massage oil and began to knead Evelyn’s neck and shoulders and back, her thighs and calves and the soles of her feet. Gradually Evelyn relaxed and her flesh shook and quivered under the emphatic skill of Goldman’s hands. Goldman rubbed the oil into the skin until her body found its own natural rosy white being and began to stir with self-perception. Turn over, Goldman commanded. Evelyn’s hair was now undone and lay on the pillow about her face. Her eyes were closed and her lips stretched in an involuntary smile as Goldman massaged her breasts, her stomach, her legs. Yes, even this, Emma Goldman said, briskly passing had hand over the mons. You must have the courage to live. The bedside lamp seemed to dim for a moment. Evelyn put her own hands on her breasts and her palms rotated the nipples. Her hands swam down along her flanks. She rubbed her hips. Her feet pointed like a dancer’s and her toes curled. Her pelvis rose from the bed as if seeking something in the air. Goldman was now at the bureau, capping her bottled emollient, her back to Evelyn as the younger woman began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea. At this moment a hoarse unearthly cry issued from the walls, the closet door flew open and Mother’s Younger Brother fell into the room, his face twisted in a paroxysm of saintly mortification. He was clutching in his hands, as if trying to choke it, a rampant penis which, scornful of his intentions, whipped him about the floor, launching to his cries of ecstasy or despair, great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over Evelyn in her bed like falling ticker tape.