Ragtime

1

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair. The best part of Father’s income was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks. Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visit the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner, Father and Mother went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. Grandfather fell asleep on the divan in the parlor. The Little Boy in the sailor blouse sat on the screened porch and waved away the flies. Down at the bottom of the hill Mother’s Younger Brother boarded the streetcar and rode to the end of the line. He was a lonely, withdrawn young man with blond moustaches, and was thought to be having difficulty finding himself. The end of the line was an empty field of tall marsh grasses. The air was salt. Mother’s Younger Brother in his white linen suit and boater rolled his trousers and walked barefoot in the salt marshes. Sea birds started and flew up. This was the time in our history when Winslow Homer was doing his painting. A certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard. Homer painted the light. It gave the sea a heavy dull menace and shone coldly on the rock and shoals of the New England coast. There were unexplained shipwrecks and brave towline rescues. Odd things went on in lighthouses and in shacks nestled in the wild beach plum. Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families. One read between the lines of the journals and gazettes. In New York City the papers were full of the shooting of the famous architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw, eccentric scion of a coke and railroad fortune. Harry K. Thaw was the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, the celebrated beauty who had once been Stanford White’s mistress. The shooting took place in the roof garden of the Madison Square Garden on 26th Street, a spectacular block-long building of yellow brick and terra cotta that White himself had designed in the Sevillian style. It was the opening night of a revue entitled Mamzelle Champagne, and as the chorus sang and danced the eccentric scion wearing on this summer night a straw boater and heavy black coat pulled a pistol and shot the famous architect three times in the head. On the roof. There were screams. Evelyn fainted. She had been a well-known artist’s model at the age of fifteen. Her underclothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants. And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

Mother’s Younger Brother was in love with Evelyn Nesbit. He had closely followed the scandal surrounding her name and had begun to reason that the death of her lover Stanford White and the imprisonment of her husband Harry K. Thaw left her in need of the attentions of a genteel middle-class young man with no money. He thought about her all the time. He was desperate to have her. In his room pinned on the wall was a newspaper drawing by Charles Dana Gibson entitled “The Eternal Question.” It showed Evelyn in profile, with a profusion of hair, one thick strand undone and fallen in the configuration of a question mark. Her downcast eye was embellished with a fallen ringlet that threw her brow in shadow. Her nose was delicately upturned. Her mouth was slightly pouted. Her long neck curved like a bird taking wing. Evelyn Nesbit had caused the death of one man and wrecked the life of another and from that he deduced that there was nothing in life worth having, worth wanting, but the embrace of her thin arms.

The afternoon was a blue haze. Tidewater seeped into his footprints. He bent down and found a perfect shell specimen, a variety not common to western Long Island Sound. It was a voluted pink and amber shell the shape of a thimble, and what he did in the hazy sun with the salt drying on his ankles was to throw his head back and drink the minute amount of sea water in the shell. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying like oboes, and behind him at the land end of the marsh, out of sight the tall grasses, the distant bell of the North Avenue streetcar tolled its warning.

Across town the little boy in the sailor suit was suddenly restless and began to measure the length of the porch. He trod with his toe upon the runner of the cane-backed rocking chair. He had reached that age of knowledge and wisdom in a child when it is not expected by the adults around him and consequently goes unrecognized. He read the newspaper daily and was currently following the dispute between the professional baseballers and a scientist that claimed that the curve of the ball was an optical illusion. He felt that the circumstances of his family’s life operated against his need to see things and to go to places. For instance, he had conceived an enormous interest in the works and career of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. But he had not been taken to a performance. Houdini was a headliner in the top vaudeville circuits. His audiences were poor people — carriers, peddlers, policemen, children. His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escape from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn’t stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

The little boy stood at the end of the porch and fixed his gaze on a bluebottle fly traversing the screen in a way that made it appear to be coming up the hill from North Avenue. The fly flew off. An automobile was coming up the hill from North Avenue. As it drew closer he saw it was a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout. He ran along the porch and stood at the top of the steps. The car came past his house, made a loud noise and swerved into the telephone pole. The little boy ran inside and called upstairs to his mother and father. Grandfather woke with a start. The boy ran back to the porch. The driver and the passenger were standing in the street looking at the car: it had big wheels with pneumatic tires and wooden spokes painted in black enamel. It had brass headlamps in front of the radiator and brass sidelamps over the fenders. It had tufted upholstery and double side entrances. It did not appear to be damaged. The driver was in livery. He folded back the hood and a geyser of white steam shot up with a hiss.

A number of people looked on from their front yards. But Father, adjusting the chain on his vest, went down to the sidewalk to see if there was something he could do. The car’s owner was Harry Houdini, the famous escape artist. He was spending the day driving through Westchester. He was thinking of buying some property. He was invited into the house while the radiator cooled. He surprised them with his modest, almost colorless demeanor. He seemed depressed. His success had brought into vaudeville a host of competitors. Consequently he had to think of more and more dangerous escapes He was a short, powerfully built man, an athlete obviously, with strong hands and with back and arm muscles that suggested themselves through the cut of his rumpled tweed suit which, though well tailored, was worn this day inappropriately. The thermometer read in the high eighties. Houdini had unruly stiff hair parted in the middle and clear blue eyes, which did not stop moving. He was very respectful to Mother and Father and spoke of his profession with diffidence. This struck them as appropriate. The little boy stared at him. Mother had ordered lemonade. It was brought into the parlor and Houdini drank it grateful. The room was kept cool by the awnings on the windows. The windows themselves were shut to keep out the heat. Houdini wanted to undo his collar. He felt trapped by the heavy square furnishings, the drapes and dark rugs, the oriental silk cushions, the green glass lampshades. There was a chaise with a zebra rug. Noticing Houdini’s gaze Father mentioned that he had shot that zebra on a hunting trip in Africa. Father was an amateur explorer of considerable reputation. He was president of the New York Explorers Club to which he made an annual disbursement. In fact in just a few days he would be leaving to carry the Club’s standard on the third Peary expedition to the Artic. You mean, Houdini said, you’re going with Peary to the Pole? God willing, Father replied. He sat back in his chair and lit a cigar. Houdini became voluble. He paced back and forth. He spoke of his own travels, his tours of Europe. But the Pole! he said. Now that’s something. You must be pretty good to get picked for that. He turned his blue eyes on Mother. And keeping the home fires burning ain’t so easy either, he said. He was not without charm. He smiled and Mother, a large blond woman, lowered her eyes. Houdini then spent a few minutes doing small deft tricks with objects at hand for the little boy. When he took his leave the entire family saw him to the door. Father and Grandfather shook his hand. Houdini walked down the path that ran under the big maple tree and then descended the stone steps that led to the street. The chauffeur was waiting, the car was parked correctly. Houdini climbed in the seat next to the driver and waved. People stood looking on from their yards. The little boy had followed the magician to the street and now stood at the front of the Pope-Toledo gazing at the distorted macrocephalic image of himself in the shiny brass fitting of the headlight. Houdini thought the boy comely, fair like his mother, and tow-headed, but a little soft-looking. He leaned over the side door. Goodbye, Sonny, he said holding out his hand. Warn the Duke, the little boy said. Then he ran off.

2

As it happened Houdini’s unexpected visit had interrupted Mother and Father’s coitus. There was no sign from Mother that it was now to be resumed. She fled to the garden. As the days passed and the time for Father’s departure approached, he waited for the mute sign that he might visit her bed. He knew that to make an overture of his own was to threaten the occasion. He was a burly man with strong appetites, but he appreciated his wife’s reluctance to assume the indelicate attitudes that answered to his needs. In the meantime the entire household girded for his departure. His gear had to be packed, arrangements had to be made for his absence from his business, and a thousand other details had to be seen to. Mother lifted the back of her wrist to her forehead and pushed aside a strand of hair. No one in the family was unmindful of the particular dangers to which Father would be exposed. Yet no one would have him stay because of them. The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. At dinner the night before he was to leave, the cuff of Mother’s sleeve brushed a spoon off the table, and she grew flushed. When the entire house was asleep he came to her room in the darkness. He was solemn and attentive as befitted the occasion. Mother shut her eyes and held her hands over her ears. Sweat from Father’s chin fell on her breasts. She started. She thought: Yet I know these are the happy years. And ahead of us are only great disasters.

The next morning everyone rode down to the New Rochelle railroad station to see Father off. Some of the office staff was there, and Father’s chief assistant made a short speech. There was a spattering of applause. The New York train arrived, five varnished dark green cars pulled by a Baldwin 4-4-0 with spoke engine truck wheels. The little boy stared as the wiper with its oilcan checked the brass drive pistons. He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and his smiling Father took his hand and shook it. Grandfather had to be restrained from lifting the bags. With the porter’s help Father and Mother’s Younger Brother laid the trunks aboard. Father shook the young man’s hand. He had given him a raise and a more responsible position with the firm. Keep your eye on things, Father said. The young man nodded. Mother beamed. She gently embraced her husband, who kissed her on the cheek. Standing on the rear platform of the last car, Father doffed his skimmer and waved goodbye as the train went around the bend.

The next morning, after a champagne breakfast with the press, the men of Peary’s polar expedition cast off the lines and their sturdy little ship, the Roosevelt, backed out of her berth into the East River. Fireboats sent up sprays of water which misted in rainbows as the early morning sun rose over the city. Passenger liners tooted their basso horns. It was not until some time later, when the Roosevelt had reached the open sea, that Father was persuaded of the actuality of the trip. As he stood at the railing there was transmitted to his bones the awesome unalterable rhythm of the ocean. A while later the Roosevelt passed an incoming transatlantic vessel packed to the railing with immigrants. Father watched the prow of the scaly broad-beamed vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky had turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs of granite and sliding terraces of slate. He watched the ship till he could see it no longer. Yet aboard her were only more customers, for the immigrant population set great store by the American flag.

3

Most of the immigrants came from Italy and Eastern Europe. They were taken in launches to Ellis Island. There, in a curiously ornate human warehouse of red brick and gray stone, they were tagged, given showers and arranged on benches in waiting pens. They were immediately sensitive to the enormous power of the immigration officials. These officials changed names they couldn’t pronounced and tore people from their families, consigning to a return voyage old folks, people with bad eyes, riffraff and also those who looked insolent. Such power was dazzling. The immigrants were reminded of home. They went into the streets and were somehow absorbed in the tenements. They were despised by New Yorkers. They were filthy and illiterate. They stank of fish and garlic. They had running sores. They had no honor and worked for next to nothing. They stole. They drank. They raped their own daughters. They killed each other casually. Among those who despised them the most were the second-generation Irish, whose fathers had been guilty of the same crimes. Irish kids pulled the beards of old Jews and knocked them down. They upended the pushcarts of Italian peddlers.

Every season of the year wagons came through the streets and picked bodies of derelicts. Late at night old ladies in babushkas came to the morgue looking for their husbands and sons. Corpses lay on tables of galvanized iron. From the bottom of each table a drainpipe extended to the floor. Around the rim of the table was a culvert. And into the culvert ran the water sprayed constantly over each body from an overhead faucet. The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears.

But somehow piano lessons began to be heard. People stitched themselves to the flag. They carved paving stones for the streets. They sang. They told jokes. The family lived in one room and everyone worked: Mameh, Tateh and The Little Girl in the pinafore. Mameh and the little girl sewed knee pants and got seventy cents a dozen. They sewed from the time they got up to the time they went to bed. Tateh made his living in the street. As time went on they got to know the city. One Sunday, in a wild impractical mood, they spent twelve cents for three fares on the streetcar and rode uptown. They walked on Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue and looked at the mansions. Their owner called them palaces. And that’s what they were, they were palaces. They had all been designed by Stanford White. Tateh was a socialist. He looked at the palaces and his heart was outraged. The family walked quickly. The police in their tall helmets looked at them. On these wide empty sidewalks in this part of the city the police did not like to see immigrants. Tateh explained that this was because an immigrant some years before had shot the steel millionaire Henry Frick in Pittsburg.

A crisis came to the family when somebody delivered a letter telling them the little girl would have to go to school. This meant they could not make ends meet. Helplessly, Mameh and Tateh took their child to the school. She was enrolled and went off each day. Tateh roamed the streets. He didn’t know what to do. He had a peddler’s business. Never could he find a place at the curb that was profitable. While he was gone Mameh sat by the window with her stack of cut cloth and pedaled the sewing machine. She was a petite dark-eyed woman with wavy brown hair which she parted in the middle and tied behind her neck in a bun. When she was alone like this she sang softly to herself in a high sweet thin voice. Her song had no words. One afternoon she took her finished work to the loft on Stanton Street. The owner invited her into his office. He looked at the piece goods carefully and said she had done well. He counted out the money, adding a dollar more that she deserved. This he explained was because she was such a good-looking woman. He smiled. He touched Mameh’s breast. Mameh fled, taking the dollar. The next time the same thing happened. She told Tateh she was doing more work. She became accustomed to the hands of her employer. One day with two weeks’ rent due she let the man have his way on a cutting table. He kissed her face and tasted the salt of her tears.

At this time in history Jacob Riis, a tireless newspaper reporter and reformer, wrote about the need of housing for the poor. They lived too many to a room. There was no sanitation. The streets reeked of shit. Children died of mild colds or slight rashes. Children died on beds made from two kitchen chairs pushed together. They died on floors. Many people believed that filth and starvation and disease were what the immigrant got for his moral degeneracy. But Riis believed in air shafts. Air shafts, light and air, would bring health. He went around climbing dark stairs and knocking on doors and taking flash photos of indigent families in their dwellings. He held up the flash pan and put his head under the hood and a picture exploded. After he left, the family, not daring to move, remained in position in which they had been photographed. They waited for life to change. They waited for their transformation. Riis made color maps of Manhattan’s ethnic populations. Dull gray was for Jews — their favorite color, he said. Red was for the swarthy Italian. Blur for the thrifty German. Black for the African. Green for the Irishman. And yellow for the cat-clean Chinaman, a cat also in his traits of cruel cunning and savage fury when aroused. Add dashes of color fro Finns, Arabs, Greeks, and so on, and you have a crazy quilt, Riis cried, a crazy quilt of humanity!

One day Riis decided to interview Stanford White the eminent architect. He wanted to ask White if he’d ever designed housing for the poor. He wanted his ideas on public housing, on air shafts, on light. He found White down at the docks looking at arriving shipments of architectural furnishings. Riis marveled at what was coming out of the holds of the ships: whole facades of Florentine palaces and Athenian atria, stone by marked stone; paintings, statuary, tapestries, carved and painted ceilings in crates, tiled patios, marble fountains, marble stairs and balustrades, parqueted floors and silk wall panels; cannon, pennants, suits of armor, crossbows and other ancient weaponry; beds, armoires, chases, refectory tables, sideboards, harpsichords; barrels of glassware, silver, goldplate, porcelain and china; boxes of church ornaments, boxes of rare books, snuffboxes. White, a robust burly man with reddish brush-cut hair turning gray, went about smacking the backs of the handlers with his rolled-up umbrella. Careful, you fools! he shouted. Riis wanted to ask him his questions. Housing for the poor was Riis’s story. But he had a vision of the dismantling of Europe, the uncluttering of ancient lands, the birth of a new aesthetic in European art and architecture. He himself was a Dane.

That evening White went to the opening night of Mamzelle Champagne at the roof garden at Madison Square. This was early in the month of June and by the end of the month a serious heat wave had begun to kill infants all over the slums. The tenements glowed like furnaces and the tenants had no water to drink. The sink at the bottom of the stairs was dry. Fathers raced through the streets looking for ice. Tammany Hall had been destroyed by reformers but the hustlers on the ward still cornered the ice supply and sold little chips of it at exorbitant prices. Pillows were placed on the sidewalks. Families slept on stoops and in doorways. Horses collapsed and died in the streets. The Department of Sanitation sent drays around the city to drag away horses that had died. But it was not an efficient service. Horses exploded in the heat. Their exposed intestines heaved with rats. And up though the slum alleys, through the gray clothes hanging listlessly on lines strung across air shafts, rose the smell of fried fish.

4

In the killing summer heat politicians up for reelection invited their followers to outings in the country. Toward the end of July one candidate led a parade through the streets of the Fourth Ward. He wore a gardenia in his lapel. A band played a Sousa march. The members of the candidate’s Benevolent Association followed the band and the entire procession made its way to the river where everyone boarded the steamer Grand Republic, which then set a course up the Long Island Sound to Rye, New York, just beyond New Rochelle. The steamer overloaded with perhaps five thousand men, listed badly to starboard. The sun was hot. The passengers jammed the decks and crowded the railing for a breath of air. The water was like glass. At Rye everyone disembarked for another parade to the Pavilion, where at picnic tables the traditional fish chowder was served by a small army of waiters in white full-length aprons. After the luncheon speeches were made from a band shell. The band shell was decorated with patriotic bunting. This has been provided by Father’s firm. There were also banners with the candidate’s name spelled in gold and small American flags on gold sticks that were given as favor at each table. The men of the Benevolent Association spent the afternoon consuming beer from kegs on tap, playing baseball and throwing horseshoes. The meadows of Rye were dotted with men dozing on the grass under their derbies. In the evening another meal was served and a military band played a concert, and then came the culmination of the entertainment: a display of fireworks. Mother’s Younger Brother had come here to supervise personally this aspect of the event. He liked to design fireworks. They were the only part of the business that really interested him. Rockets went up booming in the close electric evening air. Heat lightening flashed over the Sound. A great wheel of spinning fire seemed to roll over the water. A woman’s profile, like a new constellation, embossed the night sky. Showers of light, red and white and blue, fell like stars and burst again, like bombs, over the old steamer down at the water. Everyone cheered. When the fireworks were concluded torches were lit to mark the way to the dock. On the trip home the old steamer listed to port. Among her passengers was Mother’s Young Brother, who had leapt lightly aboard at the last possible moment. He stepped over men lying asleep on the deck. He stood at the rail up at the prow and lifted his head to the breeze coming up over the black water. He turned his intense eyes on the black night and thought of Evelyn.

Now at this time Evelyn Nesbit was daily rehearsing the testimony she would give in her husband’s forthcoming trial for the murder of Stanford White. She had not only to deal with Thaw in her almost daily visits to the Tombs, the city jail where he was kept, but with his lawyers, of whom there were several; with his mother, a regal Pittsburgh dowager who despised her; and with her own mother, whose greediest dreams of connived wealth she had surpassed. The press followed her every move. She tried to live quietly in a small residential hotel. She tried not to think how Stanford White looked with his face shot away. She took her meals in her rooms. She rehearsed her lines. She retired early believing that sleep would improve her skin tone. She was bored. She ordered clothes from her dressmaker. The key to the defense of Harry K. Thaw would be that he had become temporarily deranged by the story she had told him about her ruination at the age of fifteen. She was an artist’s model and aspiring actress. Stanford White had invited her to his apartment in the tower of Madison Square Garden and offered her champagne. The champagne was drugged. When she woke up the following morning the effulgence of White’s manhood lay over her thighs like a baker’s glaze.

But it was going to be difficult to persuade a jury that Harry K. Thaw became deranged only upon the telling of that tale. He was a violent man who all his life had created incidents in restaurants. He drove cars up sidewalks. He was suicidal and had once consumed an entire bottle of laudanum. He kept syringes in a silver case. He injected things into himself. He has a habit of clenching his fists and beating them against his temples. He was imperious, possessive and insanely jealous. Before they were married he had concocted a scheme whereby Evelyn was to sign an affidavit accusing Stanford White of beating her. She refused and told White about it. Harry’s next move was to take her to Europe where he could have her without worrying if White was to have his turn when he was through. Her mother went along as chaperone. They sailed on the Kronprinzessin Cecile. In Southampton Harry paid of Evelyn’s mother and took Evelyn alone to the Continent. Eventually they arrived at an ancient mountain castle in Austria that Harry had rented — the Schloss Katzenstein. Their first night in the Schloss he pulled off her robe, threw her across the bed and applied a dog whip to her buttocks and the back of her thighs. Her shrieks echoed down the corridors and stone stairwells. The German servants in their quarters listened, grew flushed, opened bottles of Goldwasser and copulated. Shocking red welts disfigured Evelyn’s flesh. She cried and whimpered all night. In the morning Harry returned to her room, this time with a razor strop. She was bedridden for weeks. During her convalescence he brought her stereopticon slides of the Black Forest and the Austrian Alps. He was gentle when he made love to her and mindful of the tender places. Nevertheless she decided their relationship had gone beyond its tacit understanding. She demanded to be sent home. She sailed back to America alone on the Carmania, her mother having long since returned. When she reached New York she immediately went to see Stanford White and told him what had happened. She showed him the traces of a laceration across the flesh of the inside of her right thigh. Oh my, oh my, Stanford White said. He kissed the spot. She showed him a tiny yellow and purple discoloration on the face of her left buttock where it curved toward the cleft. How awful, Stanford White said. He kissed the spot. The following morning he sent her to a lawyer who prepared an affidavit as to what happened in the Schloss Katzenstein. Evelyn signed the affidavit. Now, darling, when Harry comes home you show him that, Stanny White said smiling broadly. She followed his instructions. Harry K. Thaw read the affidavit, turned pale and immediately proposed marriage. She had only been in the chorus but she had done as well as any of the Floradora girls.

And now Harry, in jail, was on public display. His cell was on Murderer’s Row, the top tier of the cavernous Tombs. Each evening the guards brought him the papers so that he could follow his favorite team, the Pittsburg Nationals, and their star Honus Wagner. Only when he had read about the ball games would be read about himself. He went through every paper — the World, the Tribune, the Times, the Evening Post, the Journal, the Herald. When he finished reading a paper he would fold it up, stand at the bars and flip it over the rail of the cellblock promenade so that it came apart, fluttering in pieces six stories down through the central vault, or well, around which the cellblock tiers were arranged. His behavior fascinated the guards. It was seldom they had people of this class. Thaw was not really fond of the jail fare so they brought in his meals from Delmonico’s. He liked to feel clean so they passed along a change of clothes delivered each morning to the jail doors by his valet. He disliked Negroes so they made sure no Negro prisoner was lodged near his cell. Thaw was not unmindful of the guards’ kindness. He showed his gratitude not discreetly but with impeccable style, crumpling and tossing twenty-dollar bills at his feet and telling them what swine they were as they stooped to retrieve the money. They were very happy. Reporters asked their views when they left the Tombs at the end of a shift. And each afternoon when Evelyn arrived looking crisp in her high-collared shirtwaist and pleated linen skirt the husband and wife would be permitted to stroll back and forth across the Bridge of Sights, the iron catwalk that connected the Tombs with the Criminal Courts Building. Thaw walked with a dipping, pigeon-toed gait, like someone with brain damage. He had the wide mouth and doll eyes of a Victorian closet queen. Sometimes they saw him gesticulate wildly while Evelyn stood with her head bowed, her face in shadow under her hat. Sometimes he would ask for the use of the consultation room. The guard whose station was just outside the consultation room door with its small porthole window claimed that Thaw sometimes cried and sometimes he held Evelyn’s hand. Sometimes he paced back and forth and beat his fists against his temples while she gazed through the barred window. Once he demanded proof of her devotion and it turned out nothing else would do but a fellatio. Abutted by Thaw’s belly Evelyn’s broad-brimmed hat with its topping of dried flowers in tulle slowly tore away from her coiffure. Afterward he brushed the sawdust from the front of her skirt and gave her some bills from his money clip.

Evelyn told reporters who met her outside the Tombs that her husband Harry K. Thaw was innocent. His trial will prove my husband Harry K. Thaw is innocent, she said one day stepping into the electric hansom provided her by her august mother-in-law. The chauffeur closed the door. In the privacy of the car she wept. She knew better than anyone how innocent Harry was. She had agreed to testify in his behalf for the sum of two hundred thousand dollars. And her price for a divorce was going to be even higher. She ran her fingertips over the car upholstery. He tears dried. A strange bitter exaltation suffused her, a cold victory grin of the heart. She had grown up playing in the streets of a Pennsylvania coal town. She was the Gaudens statue Stanny White had put at the top of the tower of Madison Square Garden, a glorious bronze nude Diana, he bow drawn, her face in the skies.

Coincidentally this was the time in our history when the morose novelist Theodore Dreiser was suffering terribly from the bad reviews and negligible sales of his first book, Sister Carrie. Dreiser was out of work and too ashamed to see anyone. He rented a furnished room in Brooklyn and went to live there. He took to sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. One day he decided his chair was facing in the wrong direction. Raising his weight from the chair, he lifted it with his two hands and turned to the right, to align it properly. For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair. The light faded on the dirty window of the furnished room. Through the night Dreiser turned his chair in circles seeking the proper alignment.

5

The impending Thaw trial was not the only excitement down at the Tombs. Two of the guards in their spare time had fashioned new leg irons that they claimed were better than the standard equipment. To prove it they challenged Harry Houdini himself to put them to the test. The magician arrived one morning at the office of the Warden of the Tombs and was photographed shaking the hand of the Warden and standing between the two smiling guards with his arms around their shoulders. He traded quips with reporters. He gave out lots of free tickets. He held the leg irons under the light and examined them carefully. He accepted the challenge. He would escape from the irons at the following night’s performance at the Keith Hippodrome. With the press crowded around, Houdini now proposed his own challenge: that then and there he be stripped and locked in a cell and his clothing placed outside the cell; if everyone would then leave he would contrive to escape from the cell and appear fully dressed in the Warden’s office within five minutes. The Warden demurred. Houdini professed astonishment. After all he, Houdini, had accepted the guards’ challenge without hesitation: was the Warden not confident of his own jail? The reporters took Houdini’s side. Knowing what the newspapers could do with his refusal to go along with the stunt the Warden gave in. He believed in fact his cells were secure. The walls of his office were pale green. Photographs of his wife and his mother stood on the desk. A humidor with cigars and a decanter of Irish whiskey stood on a table behind his desk. He picked up his new telephone and holding the shaft in one hand and the earpiece with the other he looked significantly at the reporters.

A while later Houdini was led, stark naked, up the six flights of stairs to Murderer’s Row on the top tier of the jail. There were fewer inhabitants on this tier and the cells were believed to be escape-proof. The guard locked Houdini in an empty cell. They placed his clothing in a neat pile on the promenade, beyond his reach. Then the guards and the accompanying reporters withdrew and, as they had agreed, went back to the Warden’s office. Houdini carried in various places on his person small steel wires and bits of spring steel. This time he ran his palm along the sole of his foot and extracted from a slot in the callus of his left heel a strip of metal about a quarter-inch wide and one and a half inches long. From his thick hair he withdrew a piece of stiff wire which he fitted around the strip metal as a handle. He stuck his hand through the bars, inserted the makeshift key in the lock and twisted it slowly clockwise. The cell door swung open. At that moment Houdini realized that across the vault of gloom the cell directly opposite was lighted and occupied. A prisoner sat there staring at him. The prisoner had a broad flat face with a porcine nose, a wide mouth, and eyes that seemed unnaturally bright and large. He had coarse hair combed back from an oddly crescent hairline. Houdini, a vaudevillian, thought of the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The prisoner was sitting at a table laid with linen and service. On the table were the remains of a large meal. An empty bottle of champagne was stuck upside down in a cooler. The iron cot was covered with a quilted spread and throw pillows. A Regency armoire stood against the stone wall. The ceiling fixture had been ornamented with a Tiffany lampshade. Houdini could not help staring. The prisoner’s cell glowed like a stage in the perpetual dusk of the cavernous prison. The prisoner stood up and waved, a stately gesture, and his wide mouth offered the trace of a smile. Quickly Houdini began to dress. He put on his briefs, his trousers, his socks and garters and shoes. Across the well the prisoner began to undress. Houdini put on his undershirt, his shirt, his collar. He tied his tie and set the stock pin. He snapped his suspenders in place and pulled on his jacket. The prisoner was now naked as Houdini had been. The prisoner came up to the front of his cell and raising his arms in a shockingly obscene manner he thrust his hips forward and flapped his penis between the bars. Houdini rushed down the promenade, fumblingly unlocked the cellblock door and closed it behind him.

Houdini was to tell no one of this strange confrontation. He went through the celebrations of his jailhouse feat in an uncharacteristically quiet, even subdued manner. Not even the lines at the box office following the stories in the evening papers could cheer him up. Escaping from the leg irons in the two minutes gave him no pleasure at all. Days passed before he realized that the grotesque mimic on Murderer’s Row had to have been the killer Harry K. Thaw. People who did not respond to hi art profoundly distressed Houdini. He had come to realize they were invariably of the upper classes. Always they broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish. Houdini had high inchoate ambition and every development in technology made him restless. On the shabby confines of a stage he would create wonder and awe. Meanwhile men were beginning to take planes into the air, or race automobiles that went sixty miles an hour. A man like Roosevelt had run at the Spanish on San Juan Hill and now sent a fleet of white battleships steaming around the world, battleships as white as his teeth. The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool. Yet his self-imposed training, his dedication to the perfection of what he did, reflected an American ideal. He kept himself as trim as an athlete. He did not smoke or drink. Pound for pound he was as strong as any man he had ever run up against. He could tighten his stomach muscles and with a smile invite anyone at all to punch him there as hard as they liked. He was immensely muscular and agile and professionally courageous. Yet to the wealthy all this was nothing.

New in Houdini’s act was an escape in which he released himself from an office safe and then opened the safe to reveal, handcuffed, the assistant who had been onstage a moment before. It was a great success. One evening after the performance Houdini’s manager told him of being called by Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish of 78th Street, who wanted to book Houdini for a private party. Mrs. Fish was one of the Four Hundred. She was famous for her wit. Once she had given a ball at which everyone had to talk baby talk. Mrs. Fish was throwing a commemorative ball in honor of her friend the late Stanford White, the architect of her home. He had designed her home in the style of a doge palace. A doge was the chief magistrate in the republic of Genoa or Venice. I won’t have nothing to do with those people, Houdini told his manager. Dutifully the manager reported to Mrs. Fish that Houdini was not available. She doubled the fee. The ball was held on a Monday evening. It was the first big event of the new season. About nine o’clock Houdini drove up in a hired Pierce Arrow. He was accompanied by his manager and his assistant. Behind the car a truck carrying his equipment. The entourage was shown to the trade entrance.

Unknown to Houdini, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish has also engaged for the evening the entire sideshow of the Barnum and Bailey circus. She liked to shock fuddy-duddies. Houdini was led into some sort of waiting room where he found himself encircled by a mob of freaks all of whom had heard of him and wanted to touch him. Creatures with scaled iridescent skins and hands attached to their shoulders, midgets with the voices of telephones, Siamese twin sisters who leaned in opposite directions, a man who lifted weights from iron rings permanently attached to his breasts. Houdini removed his cape and his top hat and his white gloves and handed them to the assistant. He slumped in a chair. His grips were waiting for instructions. The freaks yattered at him.

But the room itself was very beautiful, with carved wood ceilings and Flemish tapestries of Actaeon being torn apart by dogs.

Early in his career Houdini had worked in a small circus in western Pennsylvania. He recalled his loyalties now in order to regain his composure. One of the midgets, a woman, separated herself from the rest and got everyone to step back a few paces. She turned out to be the eminent Lavinia Warren, the widow of General Tom Thumb, the most famous midget of all. Lavinia Warren Thumb was dressed in a magnificent gown supplied by Mrs. Fish: it was supposed to be a joke on Mrs. Fish’s nemesis, Mrs. William Astor, who had worn the identical design the previous spring. Lavinia Thumb was coifed in the Astor manner and wore glittering copies of the Astor jewels. She was nearly y years old and carried herself with dignity. Upon her wedding fifty years ago before she and Colonel Thumb had been received in the White House by the Lincolns. Houdini wanted to cry. Lavinia was no longer working in the circus but she had come down to New York from her home in Bridgeport, a clapboard house with escalloped bargeboards and a window’s walk, which cost something to maintain. That was why she had taken this evening’s job. She lived in Bridgeport to be near the grave of her husband, who had died many years before and was commemorated in stone atop a monumental columns in Mountain Grove Cemetery. Lavinia was two feet tall. She came to Houdini’s knees. Her voice had deepened with age and she now spoke in the tones of a normal twenty-year-old girl. She had sparkling blue eyes, silver-white hair and the finest of wrinkles on her clear white skin. Houdini was reminded of his mother. Come on, kid, do a coupla numbers for us, Lavinia said.

Houdini entertained the circus folks with sleight of hand and some simple tricks. He put a billiard ball in his mouth, closed his mouth, opened it, and the billiard ball was gone. He closed his mouth and opened it again and removed the billiard ball. He stuck an ordinary sewing needle into his cheek and pulled it through the inner side. He opened his hand and produced a live chick. He withdrew from his ear a stream of colored silk. The freaks were delighted. They applauded and laughed. When he felt he had discharged his responsibilities, Houdini rose and told his manager he would not perform for Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. There were remonstrations. Houdini stormed out of the door. Crystal light dazzled his eyes. He was in the grand ballroom of the doge palace. A string orchestra played from a balcony. Great pale red drapes framed the clerestory windows and four hundred people were waltzing on a marble floor. Shading his eyes he saw bearing down on him Mrs. Fish herself, a clutch of jeweled feathers rising from her piled hair, roped of pearls swinging pendulously from her neck, a witticism forming on her lip like the bubbles of an epileptic.

Despite such experiences Houdini never developed what we think of as political consciousness. He could not reason from his own hurt feelings. To the end he would be almost totally unaware of the design of his career, the great map of revolution laid out by his life. He was a Jew. His real name was Erich Weiss. He was passionately in love with ancient mother whom he had installed in his brownstone home on West 113th Street. In fact Sigmund Freud had just arrived in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln and James McNeill Whistler. Of course Freud’s immediate reception in America was not auspicious. A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.

6

Freud arrived in New York on the Lloyd liner George Washington. He was accompanied by his disciples Jung and Ferenczi, both some years his junior. They were met at the dock by two more younger Freudians, Drs. Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill. The entire party dined at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden. There were potted palms. A piano violin duo played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. Everyone talked around Freud, glancing at him continuously to gauge his mood. He ate cup custard. Brill and Jones undertook to play host for the visit. In the days following they showed Freud Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum and Chinatown. Catlike Chinamen gazed at them out of dark shops. There were glass cabinets filled with litchi nuts. The party went to one of the silent films so popular in stores and nickelodeons around the city. White smoke rose from the barrels of rifles and men wearing lipstick and rouge fell backwards clutching their chests. At least, Freud thought, it is silent. What oppressed him about the New World was its noise. The terrible clatter of horses and wagons, the clanking and screeching of streetcars, the horns of automobiles. At the wheel of an open Marmon, Brill drove the Freudians around Manhattan. At one point, on Fifth Avenue, Freud felt as if he was being observed; raising his eyes he found some children staring down at him from the top of a double-decker bus.

Brill drove the party down to the Lower East Side with its Yiddish theatres and pushcarts and elevated trains. The fearsome elevated rumbled past the windows of tenements in which people were expected to live. The windows shook, the very buildings shook. Freud had to relieve himself and nobody seemed to be able to tell him where a public facility could be found. They all had to enter a dairy restaurant and order sour cream with vegetables so that Freud could go to the bathroom. Later, back in the car, they pulled up to a corner to watch a street artist at work, an old man who with nothing but a scissors and paper made miniature silhouette portraits for a few cents. Standing for her portrait was a beautiful well-dressed woman. The excitable Ferenczi, masking his admiration for the woman’s good looks, declared to his colleagues in the car his happiness at finding the ancient art of silhouette flourishing on the streets of New York. Freud, clamping his teeth on his cigar, said nothing. The motor idled. Only Jung noticed the little girl in the pinafore standing slightly behind the young woman and holding her hand. The little girl peeked at Jung and the shaven-headed Jung, who was already disagreeing on certain crucial matters with his beloved mentor, looked through hid thick steel-rimmed spectacles at the lovely child and experienced what he realized was a shock of recognition, although at the moment he could not have explained why. Brill pressed the gear pedal and the party continued on its tour. Their ultimate destination was Coney Island, a long way out of the city. They arrived in the late afternoon and immediately embarked on a tour of the three great amusement parks, beginning with Steeplechase and going on to Dreamland and finally late at night to the towers and domes, outlined in electric bulbs, of Luna Park. The dignified visitors rode the shoot-the-chutes and Freud and Jung took a boat together through the tunnel of Love. The day came to a close only when Freud tired and had one of the fainting fits that had lately plagued him when in Jung’s presence. A few days later the party journeyed to Worcester for Freud’s lectures. When the lectures were completed Freud was persuaded to make an expedition to the great natural wonder of Niagara Falls. They arrived at the falls on an overcast day. Thousands of newly married couples stood, in pairs, watching the great cascades. Mist like an inverted rain rose from the falls. There was a high wire strung from one shore to the other and some manic in ballet slippers and tights was walking the wire, keeping his balance with a parasol. Freud shook his head. Later the party went to the Cave of Winds. There, at an underground footbridge, a guide motioned the others back and took Freud’s elbow. Let the old fellow go first, the guide said. The great doctor, age fifty-three, decided at this moment that he had enough of America. With his disciples he sailed back to Germany on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. He had really gotten used to the food or the scarcity of American public facilities. He believed the trip had ruined both his stomach and his bladder. The entire population seemed to him over-powered, brash and rude. The vulgar wholesale appropriation of European art and architecture regardless of period or country he found appalling. He had seen in our careless commingling of great wealth and great poverty the chaos of an entropic European civilization. He sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.

At the time of course not a few people on those sores were ready to agree with him. Millions of men were out of work. Those fortunate enough to have jobs were dared to form unions. Courts enjoined them, police busted their heads, their leaders were jailed and new men took their jobs. A union was an affront to God. The laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one wealthy man, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country. If all else failed the troops were called out. Armories rose in every city of the country. In the coal fields a miner made a dollar sixty a day if he could dig three tons. He lived in the company’s shacks and bought his food from the company stores. On the tobacco farms Negroes stripped tobacco leaves thirteen hours a day and earned six cents an hour, man, woman or child. Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed; they had to be counseled to stay alert. In the mines they worked as sorters of coal and sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes; they were warned to keep their wits about them. One hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred children were mutilated. There seemed to be quotas for these things. There seemed to be quotas for death by starvation. There were oil trusts and banking trusts and railroad trusts and beef trusts and steel trusts. It became fashionable to honor the poor. At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamp. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor garden look like dirt farms and ding rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoke cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.

7

One day after a visit to the Tombs Evelyn Nesbit happened to notice through the rear window of the electric hansom that for the first time in days none of the reporters were following. Usually Hearst and Pulitzer reporters dogged her in packs.

On an impulse she told the driver to turn and go east. A servant of Harry Thaw’s mother, the driver permitted himself a frown. Evelyn took no notice. The car moved through the city, its motor humming in the warm afternoon. It was a black Detroit Electric with hard rubber tires. After a while through the window Evelyn saw the peddlers and pushcarts of the Lower East Side.

Dark-eyed faces peered into the hansom. Men with big moustaches smiled through their gold teeth. Street workers sat on the curbs in the heat and fanned themselves with their derbies. Boys in knickers ran alongside the car with bulky loads of piecework on their shoulders. Evelyn saw stores with Hebrew signs in the windows, the Hebrew letters looking to her eyes like arrangements of bones. She saw the iron fire escaped on the tenements as tiers of cellblocks. Nags in their yokes lifted their bowed necks to gaze at her. Ragmen struggling with their great junk-loaded two-wheeled carts, women selling breads from baskets carried in their arms: they all looked. The driver was nervous. He wore gray livery with black leather jodhpurs. A girl in a pinafore and high-laced shoes sat playing in the muck along the curbstone. A little dirty-faced girl. Stop the car, Evelyn said. The driver run around and opened her door. Evelyn stepped into the street. She knelt down. The girl has straight black hair that fitted her head like a helmet. She had olive skin and eyes so brown they were black. She gazed at Evelyn without curiosity. She was the most beautiful child Evelyn had ever seen. A piece of clothesline was tied around her wrist. Evelyn stood up, followed the clothesline, and found herself looking into the face of a mad old man with a closely cropped gray beard. The end of the line was tied around the old man’s waist. He wore a soft cap and a collar with a tie. He stood on the sidewalk in front of a display cart of framed silhouette portraits pinned to a black velvet curtain. He was a silhouette artist. With nothing but a small scissors and some glue he would make your image by cutting a piece of white paper and mounting it on a black background. The whole thing with the frame cost fifteen cents. Fifteen cents, lady, the old man said. Why do you have this child tied with a rope, Evelyn said. The old man gazed at her finery. He laughed and shook his head and talked to himself in Yiddish. He turned his back to her. A crowd had gathered when the car stopped. A tall workingman stepped forward and removed his hat with respect before translating for Evelyn what the old man had said. Please, missus, he said, so the little girl is not stolen from him. Evelyn had the feeling the translator was also something of a diplomat. The old artist was laughing bitterly and thrusting his chin in her direction, obviously commenting on her. He says the rich lady may not be aware that young girls in the slums are stolen every day from their parents and sold into slavery. Evelyn was shocked. This child can’t be more than ten, she said. The old man began to shout and pointed across the street at a tenement house, and turned and pointed toward the corner and turned and pointed to the other corner. Please, missus, the tall workingman said, married women, children, anyone they can get their hands on. They defile them and then in shame the female gives her life to vagrancy. Houses on this very street are used for this purpose. Where are the child’s parents, Evelyn demanded. The old man was now talking to the crowd, beating his breast and pointing his finger in the air. A woman in a black shawl shook her head and moaned in sympathy. The old man took off his hat and tugged at his hair. Even the tall workingman forgot to translate, so moved was he by the account. Please, missus, he finally said, this man himself is the child’s father. He pointed to the artist’s torn sleeve. His own wife, to feed them, offered herself and he has now driven her from his home and mourns her as we mourn the dead. His hair has turned white in the last month. He is thirty-two years old.

The old man, weeping and biting his lip, turned to Evelyn and saw now that she too was moved. For a moment everyone standing there on the corner shared his misfortune — Evelyn, the chauffeur, the workingman, the woman in the black shawl, the onlookers. Then one person walked away. Then another. The crowd dispersed. Evelyn made her way to the little girl still sitting at the curb. She knelt down, her eyes dewy, and looked into the face of the dry-eyed girl. Hey pumpkin, she said.

Thus began Evelyn Nesbit’s concern for the thirty-two-year-old geriatric artist and his daughter. The man had a long Jewish name that she couldn’t pronounce so she took to calling him Tateh, the name by which the little girl called him. Tateh was president of the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side. He was a proud man. Evelyn discovered that there was no way to approach him except by coming to have her silhouette done. Over a period of two weeks the old man executed a hundred and forty silhouette portraits of Evelyn. After each one she would hand him fifteen cents. Sometimes she demanded a portrait of the little girl. Tateh executed over ninety of these, and he took more time with them. Then Evelyn asked for double portraits of herself and the little girl. At this the old man looked directly at her and a terrible Hebraic judgment seemed to flash from his eyes. Nevertheless he did as he was asked. As time went on it became apparent to Evelyn that while people sometimes stopped to watch the old man work, very few people asked to have their portraits done. He began to create more and more intricate silhouettes, full-figured, with backgrounds, of Evelyn, of the little girl, of a drayman’s horse plodding by, of five men in stiff collars sitting in an open car. With his scissors he suggested not merely outlines but textures, moods, character, despair. Most of these are today in private collections. Evelyn came nearly every afternoon and stayed for as long as she could. She dressed down to be as inconspicuous as possible. Following a Thaw practice she paid great sums of money to the chauffeur to keep him quiet. Gossip columnists began to interfere from Evelyn’s disappearances that she was engaging in reckless liaisons, and her name was linked with dozen of men around town. The less she was seen the more slanderous the reports became. She didn’t care. She sneaked off to her new love interest on the Lower East Side. She wore a shawl over her head and tattered black moth-eaten sweater over her shirtwaist; the chauffeur kept these for her under the car rug. She went to Tateh’s corner, stood for her portrait and feasted her eyes on the little girl at the end of the clothesline. She was infatuated. And all this time there was no man in her life other than her mad husband, Harry K. Thaw. Unless she wanted to consider her secret admirer, the young man with the high cheekbones and blond moustaches who followed her everywhere she went. She had seen him first at Tateh’ corner, standing across the street and turning his eyes away when she challenged him with her gaze. She knew her mother-in-law employed private detectives but she decided he was too shy to be a detective. He had learned where she lived and what her daily routine was, but he never approached her. She felt not intimidated by his attention but protected. Intuitively she felt his admiration like a keenness in her own breath. At night she dreamed of the little girl, woke up, thought of her. Plans for the future flashed in her mind like fireworks and quickly disappeared. She was anxious, overwrought, aroused, unaccountably happy. She would testify on her husband’s behalf and do it well. She was hopeful that he would be found guilty and locked up for life.

The little girl in the pinafore held her hand but would not say anything to her. Even to Tateh she spoke few words. Tateh said no one mourns like a child, not even a lover. Evelyn realized that the old man’s pride would have driven her off long ago if he had not perceived that he attention to the little girl were helpful. One day Evelyn came for her portrait and neither father nor daughter was to be seen. Fortunately she had learned where they lived, on Hester Street, over a public bath. She went there now, walking quickly, not daring to think what was the matter. Hester Street was teeming marketplace of peddlers who sold vegetables and fruits and chickens and breads from pushcarts lined up along the curb. The sidewalks were glutted with shoppers, overflowing garbage cans stood in ranks beside the entrance stairs of every house. Bedding hung from fire escapes. Evelyn rushed up a flight of iron stairs and into a dark incredibly foul-smelling hallway. Tateh and the little girl lived on the top floor, in two small rooms in the back. She knocked on the door. She knocked again. A moment later it opened a crack; there was a chain latch in place. What is the matter, Evelyn said. Let me in.

Tateh was scandalized by her visit. He stood in only his shirt and pants held up by suspenders and he wore house slippers. He insisted that the font door be left open despite the rank winds that blew up the stairwell, and quickly put on his jacket and shoes. He hurriedly made up his cot, throwing over it a brightly colored spread. The little girl lay on a brass bed in the other room. She was ill with a fever. The two rooms were lit by candle. The bedroom, although it had a window, was almost as dark as the front room. It looked out on an air shaft. The whole place was no bigger than a closet. Yet as Evelyn’s eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness she perceived that the home was scrupulously clean. Her arrival had caused a storm of consternation in the old artist, who paced up and down in the candlelight and did not know what to do about her. In great agitation he smoked a cigarette which he held between his thumb and forefinger, palm up, in the European style. I will stay with the child, Evelyn insisted, while you go to work. Finally the old man gave in, if only to avoid the terrible strain on himself of her presence in his home. He rushed out carrying his display stand with his black velvet curtains folded over his arms and his wooden box, like a suitcase, that held his materials. Evelyn closed the door after him. She looked at the glass cabinet, at the few cups and plates of chipped crockery. She examined the bedding in the drawers, the scrubbed oak table and chairs where the family ate. There was a pile of unfinished knee pants on a sewing machine by the bedroom window. The machine had a filigreed iron treadle. The window in the bedroom sparkled with the reflection of the candle. The brass of the thin little bed was shining. Evelyn felt a strong kinship with the departed mother. The girl looked at her from the pillows and neither smiled nor said anything. Evelyn removed the shawl, the old sweater, and put them down on a chair. In a packing crate laid on its end beside the bed, like an end table, books in Yiddish were stacked tightly. There were books in English too, on socialism, and pamphlets on the covers of which workingmen with powerful linked arms were marching forward. None of them looked like the frail white-haired Tateh. There were no mirrors on the walls and no photographs anywhere of the family, of the missing wife and mother. She found a tub of galvanized tin in the front room. She found a pail and went down the stairs and drew from the sink on the ground floor a pail of water. She warmed the water on the coal stove in the front room and went into the bedroom with the tub, the pail of water and a thin starched towel. The little girl clutched the covers about her. Evelyn gently removed the covers and sat her up on the edge of the bed and raised her nightgown and stood her up and lifted the nightgown over her head, feeling like the sun the warm exhalations of her young body. Come stand a moment in the tub, she said and knelt in front of the girl and bathed her with the warm water scooping it in her hands and caressing the child with her hands of water and doing it again, on her tawny shoulders, her nut-brown budded nipples, her face, her downy back, her thin thighs, the smooth slope of her stomach, her girlhood, the sluiced water from her young fevered body falling like rain in the tub as Evelyn bathed her with her hands. Then with the towel folded in quarters she gently patted the little girl dry and dressed her afresh in another gown she had found in the drawer — a larger gown this time of thin cotton, much too big, funny, so that the girl laughed. Evelyn smoothed the sheets and plumped up the pillows and settled the girl in the bed again and felt her forehead and it was cool. The little girl’s dark eyes shone in the dusk. Evelyn combed her black hair and touched her face and leaned over her, and the little girl’s arms went around Evelyn’s neck and she kissed her on the lips.

This was the day Evelyn Nesbit considered kidnapping the little girl and leaving Tateh to his fate. The old artist had never inquired of her name and knew nothing about her. It could be done. Instead she threw herself into the family’s life with redoubled effort, coming with food, linens and whatever else she could move past the old man’s tormented pride. She was insane with the desire to become one of them and drew Tateh out in conversation and learned from the girl how to sew knee pants. For hours each day, each evening, she lived as a woman in the Jewish slums, and was driven home by the Thaw chauffeur from a prearranged place many blocks away, always in despair. She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.

8

One day Tateh invited her to a meeting of which the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side was a part sponsor, along with seven other organizations. It was an important event. The features speaker was to be none other than Emma Goldman. Carefully Tateh explained that although he was unalterably opposed to Goldman, she being an anarchist and he a socialist, he had great respect for her personal courage and integrity; and that he had therefore agreed that some sort of temporary accord between the socialists and the anarchists was advisable, if only for the evening, because the funds raised for the occasion would go to support the shirtwaist makers, who were then on strike, and the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who was going to be condemned and executed by the Spanish government for fomenting general strike in Spain. In five minutes Evelyn was immersed in the bracing linguistics of radical idealism. She didn’t dare confess to Tateh that she had no idea socialism and anarchism were not the same thing, or that the thought of seeing the notorious Emma Goldman frightened her. She pulled her shawl over her head, and holding the little girl’s hand tightly, walked behind Tateh as he strode north to the Workingmen’s Hall on East 14th Street. But she did at one point turned around to see if her strange shy admirer was following, and he was, half a block behind, his lean face hidden in the shadows of his straw boater.

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.

9

In New Rochelle, Mother had for days brooded about her brother. He had called on the telephone from New York once or twice but would not say why he had gone away or where he was staying or when he would return. He mumbled. He was close-mouthed. She was furious with him. He did not respond to anger. Since his calls she had taken the extreme step of going into his room and looking around. As always it was neat. There was his table with the machine for stringing tennis racquets. There were his scull oars in brackets on the wall. He kept his own room and there was not a speck of dust even now in his absence. His hairbrushes on the bureau top. His ivory shoehorn. a small shell shaped like a thimble, with some grains of sand stuck to it. She had never seen that before. A picture from a magazine pinned to the wall, the drawing by Charles Dana Gibson of that Evelyn Nesbit creature. He had packed nothing, his shirts and collars filled the drawer. She closed the door guiltily. He was a strange young man. He never made friends. He was solitary and impassive except for a streak of indolence which he either could not hide or did not care to. She knew Father found that indolence disturbing. Nevertheless he had promoted him to greater responsibility.

She could not share her worries with Grandfather, who had sired the young man at a late age and was now totally separated from any practical perception of life. Grandfather was in his nineties. He was a retired professor of Greek and Latin who had taught generations of Episcopal seminarians at Shady Grove College in central Ohio. He was a country classicist. He had known John Brown when he was a boy in Hudson County in the Western Reserve and he would tell you that twenty times a day if you let him. More and more since Father’s departure Mother thought of the old Ohio homestead. The summers there were gravid with promise and red-winged blackbirds flew up from the hay meadows. The furnishings of the house were spare, and county-made. Ladderback chairs of pine. Polished wood floors of wide boards fastened with dowels. She had loved that house. She and Young Brother played on the floor by the light of the fire. In their games she always instructed him. In winter their horse Bessie was hitched to the sleigh and bells were tied to her collar and they skimmed over the thick wet Ohio snowfalls. She remembered Brother when he was younger than her own son. She took care of him. On rainy days they played secret pretending games in the hayloft, in the sweet warmth, with the horses snorting and nickering below them. On Sunday morning she wore her pink dress and the purest white pantaloons and went to church with a heart beating with excitement. She was a large-boned child with high cheekbones and gray eyes that slanted. She had lived in Shady Grove all her life except for four years at boarding school in Cleveland. She had always presumed she would marry one of the seminarians. But in her last year at school she had met Father. He was traveling through the Midwest to make local sales connections for his flag and bunting business trips. When they married and she came East she brought her father with her. And then because Brother had not been able to settle himself he too had joined the household in New Rochelle. And now in this season of life, alone in her modern awninged home at the top of the hill on fashionable Broadview Avenue with only her small son and her ancient father, she felt deserted by the race of males and furious with herself for the nostalgia that swept through her without warning at any hour of the day or night. A letter had arrived from the Republican Inaugural Committee inquiring if the firm would care to bid on the decoration and fireworks contract for the inauguration parade and ball the following January, when Mr. Taft was expected to succeed Mr. Roosevelt. It was an historical moment for the business and neither Father nor Young Brother was on hand. She fled to the garden for solace. This was the late September of the year and all the heavy swaying flowers were in bloom, salvia, chrysanthemum and marigold. She walked along the borders of the yard, her hands clasped. From an upstairs window the little boy watched her. He noted that the forward motion of her body was transmitted to her clothes laterally. The hem of her skirt swayed from side to side, brushing the leaves of grass. He held in his hand a letter from his father that had been posted from Cape York in northwest Greenland. It had been brought back to the United States by the supply ship Erik, which had transported to Greenland thirty-five tons of whale meat for Commander Peary’s dogs. Mother had copied the letter and thrown the original in the garbage because it strongly suggested the smell of dead whale. The boy had retrieved the letter and as time passed, the grease spots on the envelope were worked into every fiber of the paper by his small hands. The letter was now translucent.

As the boy watched his mother she came out of the dappled shade of the maple trees, and her golden hair, which she wore piled on her head in the style of the day, flared like the sun. She stood for a moment as if listening to something. She brought her hand up to her ears and slowly, by the flower bed, dropped to her knees. Then she began to paw the ground. The little boy left the window and raced downstairs. He went through the kitchen and out the back door. He found himself following the Irish housemaid, who was running through the yard wiping her hands on her apron.

Mother had dug something up. She was brushing the dirt from a bundle which she held on her lap. The maid let out a scream and crossed herself. The little boy tried to get a look at it, whatever it was, but Mother and the maid were on the ground, brushing the dirt off, and for a moment he couldn’t get past them. Mother’s face had turned so pale and suffered such an intense expression that all the bones of her face appeared to have grown and the opulently beautiful woman he revered was shockingly haggard, like someone ancient. He saw, as they brushed the dirt away, that it was an infant. Dirt was in his eyes, in its mouth. It was small and wrinkled and its eyes were closed. It was a brown baby and had been bound tight in a cotton blanket. Mother freed its arms. It made a small weak cry, and the two women grew hysterical. The maid ran into the house. The boy followed his mother to the house, running alongside her as the small arms of the brown baby waved in the air.

The women washed the baby in a basin on the kitchen table. It was bloody, an unwashed newborn boy. The maid examined the cord and said it had been bitten. They swaddled it in towels, and Mother ran to the front hall to phone the doctor. The boy watched the infant closely to see was breathing. It barely moved. Then its tiny fingers grasped the towels. Its head slowly turned as if through its closed eyes it had found something to look at.

When the doctor came in his Ford Doctor’s Car he was shown into the kitchen. He held his stethoscope to the small bony rib cage. He opened the mouth and poked his finger down the throat. These people, he said. He shook his head. The muscles of his cheeks pulled in his mouth at the corners. Mother described for him the circumstances of the discovery: how he had heard a cry coming from her feet, from the earth, and thought at the moment she had heard it that she had not heard it at all. And what if I had walked on, she said to herself. The doctor asked for some hot water. He removed an instrument from his bag. The maid tightly clutched the small cross that hung from her neck on a chain. The doorbell rang and the boy followed her into the front hall. The police had arrived. Mother came out and explained the circumstances once again. The policeman asked if he could use the telephone. The telephone was on a table near the front door. He removed his helmet, picked up the phone and put the receiver to his ear and waited for the operator. He winked at the boy.

Within an hour a black woman was found in the cellar of a home on the next block. She was a washwoman who worked in the neighborhood. She sat outside the house in the police ambulance and Mother brought the baby out to her. When the woman took the baby in her arms she began to cry. Mother was shocked by her youth. She had a child’s face, a guileless brown beautiful face. She was the color of dark chocolate and her hair looked chopped and uncared for. She was being attended by a nurse. Mother stepped back on the sidewalk. Where will you take her, she said to the doctor. To the charity ward, he said. And eventually she will have to stand charges. What charges, Mother said. Well, attempted murder, I should think. Does she have family, Mother said. No, ma’am, the policeman said. Not so’s we know. The doctor pulled down on the rim of his derby and walked to his car and put his bag on the seat. Mother took a deep breath. I will take the responsibility, she said. Please bring her inside. And despite the best advice of the doctor and the remonstrations of the police, she would not change her mind.

So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She canceled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in her parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. The Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, of chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened. She went to the window. Every morning these washwomen came up the hill from the trolley line on North Avenue and fanned into the houses. Traveling Italian gardeners kept the lawns trim. Icemen walked alongside their wagons, their horses straining in their traces to pull the creaking ice wagons up the hill.

When the sun set that evening it lay at the bottom of the hill as if it had rolled there. It was blood red. Late at night the boy woke and found his mother sitting beside the bed looking at him, her golden hair plaited and her large breasts soft against his arm when she leaned over to kiss him.

10

Actually Father wrote every day during the long winter months, letters for delayed transmission which took the form of entries in his journal. In this way he measured the uninterrupted flow of twilight darkness. The members of the expedition lived in surprising comfort aboard the Roosevelt, which had been lifted in its berth by the winter floes until it sat like a walnut in icing. Peary lived the most comfortably of all. He had a player piano in his stateroom. He was a large man with a heavy torso and thick red hair turning gray. He wore a long moustache. In a previous expedition he had lost his toes. He walked with an odd gait, a kind of shuffle, pushing his feet along the floor without lifting them. He pedaled his player piano with toeless feet. He was supplied with rolls of the best Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml numbers as well as a medley of Bowdoin College songs and a version of The Minute Waltz of Chopin which he could pump out in forty-eight seconds. But the winter months were not given to idleness. There were hunting sorties for musk ox; there were sledges to be built, and the base camp had to be set up ninety miles away, at Cape Columbia, the point from which the actual polar dash across the sea ice would be made. Everyone had to get used to handling dog teams and building igloo shelters. Peary’s Negro assistant, Mathew Henson, supervised the training. After numbers of expeditions, Peary had developed a system. Every last detail of their lives in the Artic represented his considered judgment and was part of the system. The material and designs of the sledges, the food that was to the eaten, the tins in which the food was to be carried, the manner in which the tins were to be lashed to the sledges, the kind of under- and over-clothing that was to be worn, the means of harnessing the dogs, the kinds of knives and guns to carry, the kinds of matches and the means of keeping them dry, the design of the eye guards to be used against snow blindness, and so on. Peary loved to discuss his system. In its essentials — that is, in the use of dogs and sledges and the wearing of fur clothing and the living off local fauna — Peary’s system merely adopted the Esquimo way of life. Father realized this with a start one day. As it happened he had been standing on the quarter-deck observing Peary soundly scold one of the Esquimo men who had not done his assigned chore properly. Then Peary shuffled back along the deck, passing Father and saying to him They’re children and they have to be treated like children. Father tended to agree with this view, for it suggested a consensus. He recalled an observation made in the Philippines ten years before where he had fought under General Leonard F. Wood against the Moro guerrillas. Our little brown brothers have to be taught a lesson, a staff officer had said, sticking a campaign pin in a map. There was no question that the Eskimos were primitives. They were affectionate, gentle, emotional, trustworthy and full of pranks. They loved to laugh and sing. In the deepest part of the winter of continuous night, when terrible storms tore rocks from the cliffs, and winds shrieked, and it was so desolately cold that Father hallucinated that his skin was burning, Peary and most of the men withdrew to the theoretical considerations of his system and so protected themselves against their fear. The Esquimos, who had no system but merely lived here, suffered the terrors of their universe. Sometimes the Eskimo women would unaccountably tear off their clothes and run into the black storms howling and rolling on the ice. Their husbands had forcibly to restrain them from killing themselves. Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through

But there seemed in this icebound winter night a force that gripped you by the neck and faced you into it. The Esquimo families lived all over the ship, camping on the decks and in the holds. They were not discreet in their intercourse. They cohabitated without even undressing, through vents in their furs, and they went at it with grunts and shouts of fierce joy. One day Father came upon a couple and was shocked to see the wife thrusting her hip upwards to the thrust of her husband. An uncanny animal song came from her throat. This was something he could not write in his journal except in a kind of code. The woman was actually pushing back. It stunned him that she could react this way. This filthy toothless Esquimo woman with the flat brow and the eyes pressed upward by her cheekbones, singing her song and pushing back. He thought of Mother’s fastidiousness, her grooming and her intelligence, and found himself resenting this primitive woman’s claim to the gender.

The spring came, finally, and it was Peary’s assistant, Mathew Henson, who called to Father one morning and pointed aft. A thin ray of light was in the southern sky. In the days that followed, distinctions in the kinds of darkness could be made, and these became more and more pronounced. Finally one morning there rose above the horizon a blurred and blood-red sun, not round but elliptically misshapen, like something born. Everyone became happy. Glorious colors, pink and green and yellow, lay upon the snow peaks, and the entire bleak magnificent world offered itself to who would take it. The sky gradually turned blue and Peary said the time had come to conquer the Pole.

The day before the expedition was to leave, Father went along with Mathew Henson and three of the Eskimos to the bird cliffs half a day’s journey from the coast. They climbed the cliffs with sealskin bags hung over their shoulders and collected dozen of eggs, a great delicacy in the Artic. When the bird flew up, chattering and circling, it was as if a portion of the rock cliff had come away. Father had never seen so many birds. They were fulmar and auk. The Eskimos held out nets between then and the birds flew into the nets and became entangled. The nets were taken up at the corners and became sacks of immobile weighted feathers chirping piteously. When the men had caught all they could carry, they made the descent and straightaway slaughtered the birds. The fulmar, about the size of gulls, were wrung at the neck. But what amazed Father was the means by which the small and inoffensive auk was done in. One simply nudged the tiny heart in its breast. Father watched it done and then tried it himself. He held an auk in one hand and with his thumb gently squeezed the beating breast. Its head slumped and it was dead. The Eskimos loved the auklet and customarily pickled it in sealskins.

On the way back to camp Father and Mathew Henson discussed what the men under Peary always discussed — who would have the honor of actually going to the Pole with him. Before the embarkation from New York the Commander had made it quite clear to everyone that he and he alone was to discover the Pole: their glory would be in support. I’ve spent my life planning for that moment, Peary said, and I’m going to have it for myself. This seemed to Father a reasonable point of view. He had the diffidence of the amateur before the professional. But it was Mathew Henson’s view that someone besides Esquimos would have to go to the top with the Commander, and he thought, with all the respect, it would be himself. Actually Father believed Henson had a good case. Henson had been with Peary on his previous expeditions and he was an astute and formidable Artic explorer in his own right. He knew how to drive the dogs almost as well as an Eskimo, he knew how to repair sledges, build camps, he had great physical strength and boasted many skills. But Father found himself unaccountably resenting Henson’s presumption and he asked the Negro how he knew he would be chosen. They had breasted a ridge along the trail and stood resting the dogs for a moment as they looked over a great white plain of snow. At that moment the sun broke through the overcast and the entire earth flashed like a mirror. Well, sir Mathew Henson said with a smile, I just know.

The next day the expedition set out due north across the polar ice. They were arranged in separate parties consisting of a white man or two, a group of Eskimo boys, a pack of dogs and four or five sledges. Each party except Peary’s was to serve for a week as pioneer or trailbreaker to the rest of the expedition. Eventually, each of them was to peel off and head back to land, leaving Peary and his boys to make the last hundred miles or so in fresh, relatively rested condition. That was the system. The big work was in breaking trail. This was hazardous and backbreaking labor. Ridges of ice had to be hacked away with a pickax, heavy sledges had to be hauled and pushed up ice inclines and then held against precipitous descents. Each sled carried over six hundred pounds of tools and provisions. When it broke, it had to be unloaded and repaired by lashing the broken parts together — work that required an ungloved hand. There were leads of water that had to be crossed or waited out. The ice floes came together with great cracks, like the sound of cannon, and rumbled underfoot like the voice of the ocean itself. Inexplicable fogs blocked out the sun. Sometimes there was nothing to do but crawl across thin sheets of forming ice; no one wanted to be caught on a drifting ice floe. The weather was a constant torment, the wind blowing so sharply at fifty or sixty degrees below zero that the air itself seemed to have changed its physical nature, being now unassimilable crystals in one’s lungs. Each breath left its solid residue in the beard or on the frozen edges of the fur hoods. Everyone wore the prescribed soft sealskin shoes, the bear fur trousers and the hooded caribou jackets, but even these indigenous materials turned brittle in the frost. The sun now stood above the horizon twenty-four hours a day. At the end of a day’s travel, perhaps fifteen miles of arduous effort, the pioneer group would make camp, build igloos for the pursuing expedition, feed the dogs, untangle their iced-up traces, light the alcohol cooker to brew tea, and fall to a meal of frozen pemmican and crackers. Slowly through the month of March the Peary expedition made its way due north. One by one a party would turn back, its obligations now to beat the return trail as thoroughly as possible to make it easier for the parties who would follows. Peary would bring up the lag each day on the outgoing run and immediately occupy one of the igloos built for him by Henson. In the meantime Henson took care of Peary’s dogs, repaired broken sledges, made supper, dealt with the Eskimos, many of whom were now becoming difficult. Peary defined the virtues of Eskimos as loyalty and obedience, roughly the same virtues one sought in the dogs. When the time came for the final run for the Pole, now only a hundred miles away, Peary did indeed choose Henson to go with him, and Henson chose the Esquimos who in his judgment were the best boys, the most loyal and devoted to the Commander. The balance of the party was turned around and sent home.

Father had long since gone back. He has pioneered the very first week. He had proven not the sturdiest member of the expedition. This was from no lack of heart, as Peary told him before sending him home, but from the tendency of his extremities to freeze easily. Father’s left heel, for instance, froze every day, no matter what he did to protect it. Each evening in camp he would thaw it out painfully and treat it as best he could, and each morning it would freeze up again. So too with one of his knees and a small area on the top of his hand. Pieces of Father froze very casually and Peary said this was the fate of some men in the North and nothing could be done about it. Peary was not an unkind commander, and he liked Father. During the long winter months aboard the Roosevelt, they had discovered themselves members of the same national collegiate fraternity, and this was no light bond between them. But after a lifetime of effort Peary was impatient to get his task done. Father’s society had paid a good sum into the Peary chest, and for it they got their man to seventy-two degrees, forty-six minutes, a very respectable way. Before he left, Father presented the Commander with an American flag he had manufactured for the occasion. It was pure silk and a good size, but when folded had no more bulk than a large handkerchief. Peary thanked him, put the flag inside his furs and, after warning Father to look out for the leads, sent him on his return journey to the Roosevelt in the company of three bad-tempered Eskimos.

But now Peary was within a day’s travel of his lifelong goal. Driving Henson and the Eskimos mercilessly, he had refused to let them sleep more than one hour or two at the end of each arduous day. Now the sun shone brightly, the sky was clear; there was a full moon in the blue sky and the great ice thighs of the earth heaved and shuddered and rose toward the moon. At midmorning of April 9, Peary called a halt. He ordered Henson to build a snow shield to protect him while he took his observations. Peary lay on his stomach and with a pan of mercury and a sextant, some paper and a pencil, he calculated his position. It did not satisfy him. He walked further along the floe and took another sighting. This did not satisfy him. All day long Peary shuffled back and forth over the ice, a mile one way, two miles another, and made his observations. No one observation satisfied him. He would walk a few steps due north and find himself going due south. On this watery planet the sliding sea refused to be fixed. He couldn’t find the exact place to say this spot, here, is the North Pole. Nevertheless there was no question that they were there. All the observations together indicated that. Give three cheers, my boy, he told Henson. And let’s fly the flag. Henson and the Esquimos cheered loudly but could not be heard in the howling wind. The flag snapped and rippled. Peary posed Henson and the Eskimos in front of the flag and took their picture. It shows five stubby figures wrapped in furs, the flag set in a paleocrystic peak behind them that might suggest a real physical Pole. Because of the light the faces are indistinguishable, seen only as black blanks framed by caribou fur.

11

Back home a momentous change was coming over the United States. There was a new President, William Howard Taft, and he took office weighing three hundred and thirty-two pounds. All over the country men began to look at themselves. They were used to drinking great quantities of beer. They customarily devoured loaves of bread and ate prodigiously of the sausage meats of poured offal that lay on the lunch counters of the saloons. The august Pierpont Morgan would routinely consume seven- and eight-course dinners. He ate breakfast of steaks and chops, eggs, pancakes, broiled fish, rolls and butter, fresh fruit and cream. The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime. Women went into hospitals to die of bursts bladders, collapsed lungs, overtaxed hearts and meningitis of the spine. There was a heavy traffic to the spas and sulphur springs, where the purgative was valued as an inducement to the appetite. America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. His great figure immediately expressed the apotheosis of that style of man. Thereafter fashion would go the other way and only poor people would be stout.

In this regard, as in most others, Evelyn Nesbit was ahead of her time. Her former chief lover Stanford White had been a fashionably burly man, and her husband Harry K. Thaw though not as large was nevertheless soft and wide, but her new lover, Mother’s Younger Brother, was as lean and hard as a young tree. They made love slowly and sinuously, humping each other into such supple states of orgasm that they found very little reason to talk the rest of the time they were together. It was characteristic of Evelyn that she could not resist someone who was so strongly attracted to her. She led Younger Brother around the Lower East Side in a futile search for Tateh and the little girl. The flat on Hester Street had been abandoned. Evelyn took up the lease and paid the landlord for the pitiful furnishings. She spent hours sitting by the window on the air shaft. She would touch things, a blanket, a plate, like a blind person trying to read with her fingers. Then she would break down and be soothed by Mother’s Younger Brother in the narrow brass bed.

When the trial of Harry K. Thaw began, Evelyn was photographed arriving at the courthouse. In the courtroom, where no photographers were allowed, she was drawn by artists for the illustrated. She could hear the scratching of the steel pens. She took the witness stand and described herself at fifteen pumping her legs in a red velvet swing while a wealthy architect caught his breath at the sight of her exposed calves. She was resolute and held her head high. She was dressed in impeccable taste. Her testimony created the first sex goddess in American history. Two elements of the society realized this. The first was the business community, specifically a group of accountants and cloak and suit manufacturers who also dabbled in the exhibition of moving pictures, or picture shows as they were called. Some of these men saw the way Evelyn’s face on the front page of a newspaper sold out the edition. They realized that there was a process of magnification by which news events established certain individuals in the public consciousness as larger than life. These were the individuals who represented one desirable human characteristic to the exclusion of all others. The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium. If they could, more people would pay money for the picture shows. Thus did Evelyn provide the inspiration for the concept of the movie star system and the model for every sex goddess from Theda Bara to Marilyn Monroe. The second group of people to perceive Evelyn’s importance was made up of various trade union leaders, anarchists and socialists, who correctly prophesied that she would in the long run be a greater threat to the workingman’s interests than mine owners or steel manufacturers. In Seattle, for instance, Emma Goldman spoke to an I. W. W. local and cited Evelyn Nesbit as a daughter of the working class whose life was a lesson in the way all daughters and sisters of poor men were used for the pleasure of the wealthy. The men in her audience guffawed and shouted out lewd remarks and broke into laughter. There were militant workers, too, unionists with a radical awareness of their situation. Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.

Evelyn didn’t know what to do with such remarks. She continued to testify as she had contracted to do. She made appearances with the Thaw family and produced by means of glances and small gestures of devotion images of a wife. She portrayed Harry as the victim of an irrepressible urge to find honor for himself and his young bride. She performed flawlessly. She heard the scratch of the steel drawing pens. Legal bystanders in spectacles and celluloid collars stroked their moustaches. Everyone in the courtroom wore black. She wondered at this huge establishment of legal people who lay waiting in their lives for conventions such as this. Judges and lawyers and bailiffs and policemen and wardens and jurymen: they had all known there would be a trial for them. She heard the scratches. Waiting in the corridors were alienists prepared to testify that Harry was insane. This was the one line of defense he would not permit. He could not bring himself to do it. His august mother wanted him to make that plea. She was afraid that if he did not he would go to the electric chair. Evelyn watched him at the defense table. She wondered what in the world could ever put to ease that enraged heart. Harry kept his facial expressions keyed to the testimony. When something was funny he smiled. When it was sad he dropped his eyes. When Stanford White’s name was mentioned he furrowed his brow. He arranged himself in attitudes of contrition alternated with heads-up confidence and even burning righteousness. This activity required all his concentration. Going in and out of the courtroom he was calm and courteous, the picture of rationality.

It occurred to Evelyn one day that Harry might indeed love her. She was stunned. She tried to make a determination of the real truth of their relationship. Of the relationship of the three of them. For the first time she experienced acutely the sense of Stanford White’s death, the loss of Stanny. He would have been able to tell her what the truth was. He would have made a joke out of it. That was his way. He was a lusty old fuck and he loved a good laugh. She could drive him out of his mind, just as she could drive Harry out of his. But she felt more comfortable with Stanny White. He would leave her alone to go out and build something, whereas Harry would never leave her because he had nothing else to do. Harry was merely wealthy. She needed desperately to talk to someone and the only person she had ever been able to talk to was the man for whose death she was directly responsible. On her blue vellum Mrs. Harry K. Thaw stationery with raised letters she wrote Emma Goldman. What have I done? she said in the letter. The reply came back from California where Goldman was raising funds in defense of the militant McNamara brothers who were accused of blowing up the Los Angeles Times building: Don’t overestimate your role in the relationship those two men had with each other.

In the meantime Harry’s trial went to the jury. They could not come to a verdict. A new trial was ordered. Evelyn testified again, with the same words and the same gestures. When it was all over Harry K. Thaw was remanded for an indefinite period to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Almost immediately his lawyers negotiated for his divorce. Evelyn was ready. Her price was a million dollars. Then the private detectives came forward with their record of her infidelities with Mother’s Younger Brother and some others they had made up and the divorce was quietly concluded by the payment to Evelyn of twenty-five thousand. Evelyn sat on the bed in her hotel suite which she now had to give up and gazed at her evening slippers which she held in her hand. On this particular occasion Younger Brother’s endearments left her cold. She remembered what Goldman had told her on her last visit to New York. However much money you have gotten from Thaw it is only as much as he wanted to give you. It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. It is the way things work. Somehow every dollar paid over to you has resulted in his profit. And you will be left with a finite amount of money that you will spend and waste until you are as poor as when you started. She new this was true. Even such money as she had, still the bulk of her fortune, left her with strange and inconclusive feelings. Some man would feign love, steal the money and break her heart. For this bitter insight she had only Goldman to thank, who had painted for her two pictures, one of greed and barbarity, starvation, injustice and death, as in the present national organizations of private capital, and the other of utopian serenity, as in the loose ungoverned combinations of equals sharing their work and their wealth sensibly with one another. Evelyn made donations to Goldman’s anarchist magazine Mother Earth, to keep it going. She supported radical appeals that came to her from all over the country once it became underground gossip that she had been politicized. She gave money to the legal defense of labor leaders who had been thrown in jail. She gave money to the parents of children mutilated in mills and factories. Listlessly she doled out her hard-earned fortune. The public never knew this because she insisted in anonymity. She had no joy. She looked into the mirror and saw the unmistakable lineaments of womanhood coming into her girlish face. Her long beautiful neck seemed to her like an ungainly stalk upon which was perched a sad-eyed ridiculous head of a whore past her prime. She cried fro the snuggling opportunities of a body like Stanford White’s. And all the while Mother’s Younger Brother solemnly and in his doggish silent way stood to wait upon her. He didn’t know the meaning of comfort. He couldn’t tease her or talk baby talk to her. He couldn’t tell her how to look at a diamond, or take her to a restaurant where the maître d’ fawned over him. All he could do was commit his life to hers and work to satisfy her smallest whim. She loved him but she wanted someone who would treat her badly and whom she could treat badly. She longed for a challenge to her wit, she longed to have her ambitions aroused once again.

12

And what of Tateh and his little girl? After that meeting the old artist sat one night and one day in his flat and he did not eat or say anything, brooding as he smoked endlessly his Sobrany cigarettes, on the brutal luck of his life. Every once in a while he would look at his child, and seeing the sure destruction of her incredible beauty in his continuing victimization he would clutch her to him and tears would fill his eyes. The little girl quietly prepared their simple meals in ways so reminiscent of the movements of his wife that finally he could bear the situation no longer. Throwing their few clothes in a musty suitcase whose strap had long since rotted away, he tied a piece of clothesline around the suitcase, took the girl by the hand and left the two-room flat on Hester Street forever. They walked to the corner and boarded the No. 12 streetcar for Union Square. At Union Square they transferred to the No. 8 and rode north up Broadway. The early evening was warm and all the windows of the trolley were lowered. The streets were crowded with cabs and cars and their horns blew at one another. Trolleys went along in clusters, their bells ringing, the flashes of electricity from their pantographs crackling along the overhead wires in minute intensifications of the heat lightning that flattened the sky over the darkening, sultry city. Tateh had no idea where he was going. The little girl held his hand tightly. Her dark eyes stared solemnly at the parades of people strolling along Broadway, the men in boaters and blue blazers and white ducks, the women in white summer frocks. The electric light bulbs of each vaudeville house rippled in a particular pattern. A ring of light spun around the rims of her pupils. Three hours later they were on a streetcar moving north along Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The moon was out, the temperature had dropped, and the trolley clipped along the broad reaches of this wide boulevard with only occasional stops. They passed grassy lots interspersed with blocks of row houses still under construction. Finally the lights disappeared entirely and the little girl realized they were traveling along the edges of a great hillside cemetery. The stones and vaults standing against the cold night sky suggested to her the fate of her mother. For the first time she asked her Tateh where they were going. He pulled the window shut against the cold wind whistling now through the ratcheting, rocking trolley. They were the only passengers. Sha, he said to her. Close your eyes. Distributed in his pockets and his shoes were his life savings, some thirty dollars. He had decided to leave New York, the city that had ruined his life. There was in these days of our history a highly developed system of interurban street railway lines. One could travel great distances on hard rush seats or wooden benches by taking each line to its terminus and transferring to the next. Tateh did not know anything about the routes. He only planned to keep on going as far as each streetcar would take him.

In the early hours of the first morning of their trip they crossed the city line into Mount Vernon, New York, and there learned that the next service would not begin till daylight. They found a small park and slept in the band shell. In the morning they washed and refreshed themselves in a public facility. As the sun came up they boarded a bright red and yellow streetcar, and the conductor greeted them cheerfully. Tateh paid a nickel for himself, two cents for the child. On the wooden floor of the car, at the rear, were staked crates filled with wet and glistening quart bottles of milk. Tateh offered to buy one. The conductor looked at him and then at the little girl and told him to take one out but did not wait to be paid for it. He pulled a cord, the trolley bell rang, and the car lurched into motion. The conductor sang. He was a robust big-bellied man with a tenor voice. He had a change-making machine strapped to his belt. A while later the streetcar entered the city of New Rochelle, New York, and slowly made its way up Main Street. Traffic was heavier now, the sun was up, and the small city was abustle. It was explained to Tateh that if he wanted to ride through he had to transfer to the Post Road Shore Line at the corner of North Avenue. This was done by paying another penny for each transfer. Tateh and the little girl got off at the corner of Main Street and North Avenue and waited for the connecting trolley. A boy and his mother passed by. The little girl looked at the boy. He was tow-headed. He wore a sailor blouse, dark blue knickers, white socks and polished white shoes. His hand was in his mother’s hand and as he passed the little girl standing with her ancient father, the boy’s eyes looked into hers. At this moment the Post Road streetcar appeared and Tateh holding the little girl firmly by the wrist walked into the street and stepped aboard. As the car moved off, the little girl watched the boy pass backward in her sight. She stood on the rear platform of the trolley car and watched him until she could no longer see him. His eyes had been blue and yellow and dark green, like a school globe. The streetcar went up the Post Road, along the Long Island Sound shoreline to the Connecticut border. In Greenwich, Connecticut, they transferred to another car. This took them up through the cities of Stamford, Norwalk and then to Bridgeport, the burial place of Tom Thumb. By now they knew how to tell when the end of the line was approaching. The conductor would walk back through the car and reverse the empty seats, going along the aisle and yanking the handles attached to the seat backs without breaking stride. At Bridgeport they transferred again. The tracks turned inland. They stopped for the night in New Haven, Connecticut. They slept in a rooming house and had breakfast in the landlady’s dining room. Tateh furiously brushed his trousers and jacket and soft cap before going downstairs. He tied a bow tie around his frayed collar. He made sure the little girl wore her clean pinafore. It was a rooming house for university students and some of them were at the table. They wore gold spectacles and turtleneck sweaters. After breakfast the old artist and his daughter walked to the streetcar tracks and resumed their journey. A car of the Springfield Traction Company took them to New Britain and then to the city of Hartford. The car slowly swung through the narrow streets of Hartford, the clapboard houses of the city seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Then they were on the outskirts and racing along north to Springfield, Massachusetts. The great wooden car swayed from side to side. The wind flew in their faces. They sped along the edges of open fields from which birds started and settled as they passed. The little girl saw herds of grazing cows. She saw brown horses loping in the sun. A thin layer of chalk dust settled on her face, like a mask, whitening her complexion, bringing out her large moist eyes, the redness of her mouth, and Tateh was momentarily shocked by a vision of her maturity. The car barreled along its tracks down the side of the road, and whenever it approached an intersection its air horn blew. Once it stopped and took on a load of produce. Riders crowded the aisle. The little girl could not wait for the speed to be up. Tateh realized she was happy. She loved the trip. Holding the suitcase on his lap with just one arm Tateh put the other around his child. He found himself smiling. The wind blew in his face and filed his mouth. The car threatened to jump off the tracks. It banged from side to side and everyone laughed. Tateh laughed. He saw the village of his youth going by now, some versts beyond the meadow. There was a church steeple seen above the hill. As a child he loved wagons, he loved the rides on the big tumbrils in summer moonlight, the bodies of children falling over one another in the hard bumping wagons. He looked around at the riders on the trolley and for the first time since coming to America he thought it might be possible to live here. In Springfield they bought bread and cheese and boarded a modern dark green car of the Worcester Electric Street Railway. Tateh realized now that he was going at least as far as Boston. He computed the cost of all fares. I would come to two dollars and forty cents for him, just over a dollar for the child. The trolley hummed along the dirt roads, the sun behind it now going down in the Berkshires. Stands of fir trees threw long shadows. They passed a single oarsman in a scull on a very quiet broad stream. They saw a great dripping millwheel turning slowly over a creek. The shadows deepened. The little girl fell asleep. Tateh clutched the suitcase on his lap and kept his eyes on the tracks ahead, shining now in the single beam of the powerful electric headlamp on the front of the car.

13

Tracks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails. There were long-distance locomotive railroads and interurban electric railroads and street railways and elevated railroads, all laying their steel stripes on the land, crisscrossing like the texture of an indefatigable civilization. And in Boston and New York there were even railroad under the streets, new rapid-transit subway systems transporting thousands of people every day. In New York, in fact, the success of the Manhattan subway had created a demand for a line to Brooklyn. Accordingly an engineering miracle was taking place, the construction of a tunnel under the East River from Brooklyn to the Battery. Sandhogs working behind a hydraulic shield excavated riverbed silt inch by inch and installed linking sections of cast-iron tubes as they went. The digging chamber was filled with compressed air pumped in from the surface. The work was dangerous. The men who did the work, the sandhogs, were considered heroes. Working under the river they were subject to horrible destinies. One typical hazard was the blowout, a situation in which the compressed air found a weakness in the roof of the tunnel and escaped with a violent rush. One day there was a blowout so explosive that it sucked four workmen out of the tunnel and blew them through twenty feet of river silt and shot them up through the river itself forty feet into the air on the crest of a geyser. Only one of the men survived. The freak accident made headlines in all papers, and when Harry Houdini read the accounts over his morning coffee he hurried dressed and rushed downtown to Bellevue Hospital where it was said the surviving worker had been taken. I’m Harry Houdini, he told the admissions desk, and I’ve got to see that sandhog. Two nurses conferred behind the desk and while they did he stole a glance at the charts and ran up the stairs. You can’t come up here, a flinty nurse told him as he strode down a ward filled with sick and dying men. Chutes of cheerful morning sun leaned like buttresses from the high dirty windows of the ward. Clustered about the bed of the heroic sandhog was his family — a wife, an old mother in a babushka, two strapping sons. A doctor was in attendance. The man in the bed was swathed in bandaged from his head to his feet. His arms, in casts, were supported in traction as was one encased leg. Every few moments there would issue from his head bandages a weak or perhaps only decorous groan. Houdini cleared his throat. I’m Harry Houdini, he said to the family, I escape for a living, that’s my profession, I’m an escapologist. But let me tell you I’ve never done an escape that can touch this one. He pointed to the bed. The family looked at him without expression on their stolid Slavic faces. The grandmother without taking her eyes off Houdini said something in a foreign language — a question it was, because one of the sons answered in kind and said Houdini’s name. They continued to look at him. I came to offer my respects, Houdini said. They all had flat faces, broad brows, eyes set widely apart. They did not return his smile. How did you get in here, the doctor said. I’ll only be a minute, Houdini said, I just want to ask him something. I think you better leave, the doctor said. Houdini turned to the family. I want to know how it felt. I want to know what he did to get to the surface. He was the only one to make it. He must have done something. I would like to know, it means a lot to me. He took out his wallet, removed some bills. I think you could probably use this. Go ahead, take it, I would like to help. The family continued to gaze at him. A sound came from the figure on the bed. One of the sons leaned over and put his ear down. He listened a moment and nodded. He went to the other son and said something to him. They were big fellows, over six feet, with chests like barrels. No rough stuff, the doctor said. Houdini found himself lifted by the arms and walked down the aisle of the ward with his feet just failing to touch the floor. He made a decision not to resist. He knew the tricks of self-defense, there were ways he could best these oafs; but this was a hospital after all.

Houdini walked through the streets. His ears burned with humiliation. He wore a hat with the brim turned down. He wore a tight-fitting double-breasted linen jacket and he kept his hands in the pockets of the jacket. He wore tan trousers and brown and white shoes with pointed toes. It was a chilly autumn afternoon and most people wore coats. He moved swiftly through the crowded New York streets. He was incredibly lithe. There was a kind of act that used the real world for its stage. He couldn’t touch it. For all his achievement he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician. What was the sense of his life if people walked out of the theatre and forgot him? The headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.

Houdini decided to concentrate on his outdoor exploits. Going on tour he escaped from a packing case nailed shut and tied with ropes that had been lowered into the freezing Detroit River. He had himself lowered into rivers in Boston and Philadelphia. Ice floated in the rivers. He practiced for the freezing river escapes by sitting in his bathtub at home with blocks of ice dropped in there by the iceman. But nothing was changed. He decided to do a European tour. He had gotten his start in Europe when he had been unable to crack the big-time vaudeville circuits in the States. In some peculiar way, he still felt, the people in Europe understood him better than his own countrymen. A few days before his departure he agreed to do a benefit for old magicians and retired theatre folk. He wanted to surprise them with a new escape. He hired a team of orderlies from Bellevue to come up on the stage and wrap him from head to foot in bandages. This was done. Then they wound him in numbers of sheets and then they strapped him to a hospital bed. Then they poured water over him to weigh down the wrappings. Houdini escaped. The old theatre people went wild. He was unsatisfied.

Houdini was to sail for Europe on the Imperator, an immense German vessel with a figurehead — an odd thing for a modern three-stack passenger line. The figurehead was a crowned eagle with its claws embedded in the world. Houdini’s ancient mother, Mrs. Weiss, came down to the pier to see him off. She was a neat little woman in black. He kissed her and hugged her and kissed her hands and went up the gangplank. He ran back down the gangplank and kissed her again, holding her face in his hands and kissing her eyes. She nodded and patted him. He ran up the gangplank and waved. He wasn’t sure she could see him. As the great liner backed into the river he stood at the rail and waved. He waved his cap to attract her attention. It was obvious she could not see him. He shouted, ridiculously, because the ship’s engines were churning up the river water. He continued to watch her small black figure and ran around to the port deck when tugs faced the ship downriver. She stood on the pier, a frail sweet old lady, and watched the ship drift out of her vision. She enjoyed her son’s devotions. Once he had come to her and had her hold out her apron. Into the apron he poured fifty shiny gold dollars. He was a good boy. She returned by cab to their home on 113th Street to wait for him.

Houdini opened his European tour at the Hansa Theatre in Hamburg. The audiences were enthusiastic. The papers gave him lots of space. He had never known such feelings of dissatisfaction. He wondered why he had devoted his life to mindless entertainment. The audiences cheered. After every show there was always a small crowd at the stage entrance. He was short with them. Then one day he attended the public demonstration of a French-made flying machine, a Voisin, a beautiful biplane with boxed wings, a box rudder and three delicately strutted bicycle wheels. The aviator flew it over a race track and landed on the infield, and the next day his feat was described in the newspapers. Houdini moved decisively. Within a week he was the owner of a new Voisin biplane. It had cost him five thousand dollars. It came complete with a French mechanic who gave instructions in the art of flying. He secured the use of an army parade grounds outside Hamburg. In all the countries in which he played he always got on well with the military. Soldiers everywhere were fans of his. Each morning at dawn he would drive to the parade grounds and sit at the controls of the Voisin while the French mechanic lectured him on the function and purpose of the levers and pedals within reach of the pilot. The plane was directed by means of a large steering wheel mounted in the vertical position and attached by a shaft to the front rudder. The pilot sat behind the front rudder on a little seat between the two wings. Behind him was the engine, and behind the engine was the propeller. The Voisin was made of wood. The wings were covered in fabric stretched taut and sized with varnish. The struts connecting the double wings were paneled with the same material. The Voisin looked like a box kite. Houdini had his name painted in block letters on the outside panels of the wings and on the rear elevators. He could hardly wait for his first flight. The patient mechanic drilled him in the various operations required to get the machine aloft, maintaining it in flight and land it. Every night Houdini did his act and every morning at dawn he went out for his lesson. Finally one morning when the red sky was clear and the mechanic judged the wind conditions to be right, they pushed the machine out of its shed and faced it into the breeze. Houdini climbed into the pilot’s seat, turned his cap backward and pulled it down tight. He clutched the wheel. His eyes narrowed in concentration, he set his jaw firmly and he turned his head and nodded to the mechanic, who spun the wood propeller. The engine fired. It was an Enfield 80-horsepower job, supposedly better than the one the Wrights themselves were using. Hardly daring to breathe, Houdini throttled the engine, idled it, throttled it again. Finally he held up his thumb. The mechanic ducked under the wings and pulled the wheel chocks. The craft slowly moved forward. Houdini breathed faster and faster as the Voisin picked up speed. Soon it was bumping along the ground and he could feel the sensitive wings take on an intelligence of their own, as if a disembodied presence had joined the enterprise. The machine lifted off the ground. He thought he was dreaming. He had to willfully restrain his emotions, commanding himself sternly to keep the wings level, to keep the throttle continuously in touch with the speed of the flight. He was flying! His feet worked the pedals, he clasped the control wheel and gently the rudder in front of him tilted down and the machine climbed the sky. He dared to look down: the earth was fifty feet below him. He no longer heard the ratcheting engine behind his ear. He felt the wind in his face and discovered he was shouting. The guy wires seemed to sing, then great wings above and below him nodded and dipped and played in the air with their incredibly gentle intelligence. The bicycle wheels spun slowly, idly in the breeze. He was flying over a stand of trees. Gaining confidence he put the craft into a difficult maneuver, a bank. The Voisin described a wide circle around the parade grounds. The he could see the mechanic standing in the distance, by the shed, raising both arms in salute. Coolly, Houdini leveled the wings, slipped under his breeze and began his descent. The moment the wheels touched down, the crudeness of the impact offended him. And when the machine rolled to a stop he wanted only to be airborne again.

On subsequent flights Houdini stayed in the air as much as ten or twelve minutes. That was virtually to challenge the fuel capacity of the plane. He seemed at times to drift as if suspended from the clouds over his head. He was able to see whole villages nestled below in the German countryside, and to follow his own shadow down incredibly straight roads lined with hedgerows. Once he flew high enough to be able to see in the distance the medieval skyline of Hamburg with flashes of the Elbe River. He was tremendously proud of his aeroplane. He wanted to make flying history. Young officers from the local casern began to come to the parade grounds to watch Houdini fly. He got to know some of them by name. And then the Commandant, whose permission had been required for the use of the parade grounds, asked Houdini if he would be interested in giving a few lectures to these young officers on the art of flying. The magician rapidly agreed. He arranged his schedule accordingly and began a series of informal sessions. He liked the young officers. They were highly intelligent and very respectful. They laughed at his jokes. His German was faulty and Yiddish-inflected but they seemed not to notice.

One morning after a flight Houdini taxied his plane to the shed and noticed waiting there a Mercedes staff car carrying general officers of the Imperial German Army. Before he could disembark his friend the Commandant stood up from the jump seat of the car, saluted him and asked him in a most formal manner if he would mind taking the Voisin up again for a demonstration flight. Houdini looked at the two elderly men, heavily medaled, sitting in the rear of the car. They nodded at him. Sitting at attention in the front seat next to the driver was an enlisted man who wore the spiked helmet and held a carbine across his lap. At this moment a white Daimler landau with an enclosed carriage for the passengers slowly pulled up behind the staff car. Its brass fittings were polished to a brilliance and even its white wooden wheel spokes were clean. A gold-fringed flag of rank flew from the right front fender. Houdini could not see into the passenger cab. Of course, he said. He ordered his mechanic to refuel and in a few minutes was aloft once more, making wide stately banks around the field. He tried to imagine how he must look from the ground. He felt the thrill of performance. He whirred over the cars at a height of a hundred feet and came around again at fifty feet waggling his wings and waving. He flew for whoever it was in that white car.

When he landed he was escorted to the big Daimler. The chauffeur opened the door and stood at attention. Sitting in the car was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke was dressed in the uniform of a field marshal of the Austrian Army. He held in the crook of his palm a plumed helmet. His hair was cut very short and flat on top, like a brush. He had large waxed moustaches that curled upward and he gazed at Houdini with stupid heavy-lidded eyes. Sitting next to him was his wife, the Countess Sophie, a stately matron yawning delicately behind a gloved hand. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn’t seem to know who Houdini was. He congratulated him on the invention of the aeroplane.