The 42nd Parallel

Mac

By Thanksgiving Mac had beaten his way to Sacramento, where he got a job smashing crates in a dried fruit warehouse. By the first of the year he’d saved up enough to buy a suit of dark clothes and take the steamboat down the river to San Francisco.

It was around eight in the evening when he got in. With his suitcase in his hand, he walked up Market Street from the dock. The streets were full of lights. Young men and pretty girls in brightcolored dresses were walking fast through a big yanking wind that fluttered dresses and scarfs, slapped color into cheeks, blew grit and papers into the air. There were Chinamen, Wops, Portuguese, Japs in the streets. People were hustling to shows and restaurants. Music came out of the doors of bars, frying, buttery foodsmells from restaurants, smells of winecasks and beer. Mac wanted to go on a party but he only had four dollars so he went and got a room at the Y and ate some soggy pie and coffee in the deserted cafeteria downstairs.

When he got up in the bare bedroom like something in a hospital he opened the window, but it only gave on an airshaft. The room smelt of some sort of cleaning fluid and when he lay down on the bed the blanket smelt of formaldehyde. He felt too well. He could feel the prancing blood steam all through him. He wanted to talk to somebody, to go to a dance or have a drink with a fellow he knew or kid a girl somewhere. The smell of rouge and musky facepowder in the room of those girls in Seattle came back to him. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed swinging his legs. Then he decided to go out, but before he went he put his money in his suitcase and locked it up. Lonely as a ghost he walked up and down the streets until he was deadtired; he walked fast not looking to the right or left, brushing past painted girls at streetcorners, touts that tried to put addresscards into his hand, drunks that tried to pick fights with him, panhandlers whining for a handout. Then, bitter and cold and tired, he went back to his room and fell into bed.

Next day he went out and got a job in a small printshop run and owned by a baldheaded Italian with big whiskers and a flowing black tie, named Bonello. Bonello told him he had been a redshirt with Garibaldi and was now an anarchist. Ferrer was his great hero; he hired Mac because he thought he might make a convert out of him. All that winter Mac worked at Bonello’s, ate spaghetti and drank red wine and talked revolution with him and his friends in the evening, went to Socialist picnics or libertarian meetings on Sundays. Saturday nights he went round to whorehouses with a fellow named Miller whom he’d met at the Y. Miller was studying to be a dentist. He got to be friends with a girl named Maisie Spencer who worked in the millinery department at the Emporium. Sundays she used to try to get him to go to church. She was a quiet girl with big blue eyes that she turned up to him with an unbelieving smile when he talked revolution to her. She had tiny regular pearly teeth and dressed prettily. After a while she got so that she did not bother him so much about church. She liked to have him take her to hear the band play at the Presidio or to look at the statuary in Sutro Park.

The morning of the earthquake Mac’s first thought, when he got over his own terrible scare, was for Maisie. The house where her folks lived on Mariposa Street was still standing when he got there, but everyone had cleared out. It was not till the third day, three days of smoke and crashing timbers and dynamiting he spent working in a firefighting squad, that he found her in a provision line at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The Spencers were living in a tent near the shattered greenhouses.

She didn’t recognise him because his hair and eyebrows were singed and his clothes were in tatters and he was soot from head to foot. He’d never kissed her before, but he took her in his arms before everybody and kissed her. When he let her go her face was all sooty from his. Some of the people in the line laughed and clapped, but the old woman right behind, who had her hair done in a pompadour askew so that the rat showed through and who wore two padded pink silk dressing gowns one above the other, said spitefully, “Now you’ll have to go and wash your face.”

After that they considered themselves engaged, but they couldn’t get married, because Bonello’s printshop had been gutted with the rest of the block it stood in, and Mac was out of a job. Maisie used to let him kiss her and hug her in dark doorways when he took her home at night, but further than that he gave up trying to go.

In the fall he got a job on the Bulletin. That was night work and he hardly ever saw Maisie except Sundays, but they began to talk about getting married after Christmas. When he was away from her he felt somehow sore at Maisie most of the time, but when he was with her he melted absolutely. He tried to get her to read pamphlets on socialism, but she laughed and looked up at him with her big intimate blue eyes and said it was too deep for her. She liked to go to the theater and eat in restaurants where the linen was starched and there were waiters in dress suits.

About that time he went one night to hear Upton Sinclair speak about the Chicago stockyards. Next to him was a young man in dungarees. He had a nose like a hawk and gray eyes and deep creases under his cheekbones and talked in a slow drawl. His name was Fred Hoff. After the lecture they went and had a beer together and talked. Fred Hoff belonged to the new revolutionary organization called The Industrial Workers of the World. He read Mac the preamble over a second glass of beer. Fred Hoff had just hit town as donkeyengine man on a freighter. He was sick of the bum grub and hard life on the sea. He still had his pay in his pocket and he was bound he wouldn’t blow it in on a bust. He’d heard that there was a miners’ strike in Goldfield and he thought he’d go up there and see what he could do. He made Mac feel that he was leading a pretty stodgy life helping print lies against the working class. “Godalmighty, man, you’re just the kind o’ stuff we need out there. We’re goin’ to publish a paper in Goldfield, Nevada.”

That night Mac went round to the local and filled out a card, and went home to his boarding house with his head swimming. I was just on the point of selling out to the sons of bitches, he said to himself.

The next Sunday he and Maisie had been planning to go up the Scenic Railway to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Mac was terribly sleepy when his alarmclock got him out of bed. They had to start early because he had to be on the job again that night. As he walked to the ferrystation where he was going to meet her at nine the clank of the presses was still in his head, and the sour smell of ink and paper bruised under the presses, and on top of that the smell of the hall of the house he’d been in with a couple of the fellows, the smell of moldy rooms and sloppails and the smell of armpits and the dressingtable of the frizzyhaired girl he’d had on the clammy bed and the taste of the stale beer they’d drunk and the cooing mechanical voice, “Goodnight, dearie, come round soon.”

“God, I’m a swine,” he said to himself.

For once it was a clear morning, all the colors in the street shone like bits of glass. God, he was sick of whoring round. If Maisie would only be a sport, if Maisie was only a rebel you could talk to like you could to a friend. And how the hell was he going to tell her he was throwing up his job?

She was waiting for him at the ferry looking like a Gibson girl with her neat sailorblue dress and picture hat. They didn’t have time to say anything as they had to run for the ferry. Once on the ferryboat she lifted up her face to be kissed. Her lips were cool and her gloved hand rested so lightly on his. At Sausalito they took the trolleycar and changed and she kept smiling at him when they ran to get good places in the scenic car and they felt so alone in the roaring immensity of tawny mountain and blue sky and sea. They’d never been so happy together. She ran ahead of him all the way to the top. At the observatory they were both breathless. They stood against a wall out of sight of the other people and she let him kiss her all over her face, all over her face and neck.

Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the valleys and the shadowed mountains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shrilling through everything. A churning mass of fog was welling up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. “Oh, this scares me, Fainy!” Then suddenly he told her that he’d given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. “But I thought you loved me, Fenian… Do you think it’s been easy for me waitin’ for you all this time, wantin’ you and lovin’ you? Oh, I thought you loved me!”

He put his arm round her. He couldn’t say anything. They started walking towards the gravity car.

“I don’t want all those people to see I’ve been crying. We were so happy before. Let’s walk down to Muir Woods.” “It’s pretty far, Maisie.” “I don’t care; I want to.” “Gee, you’re a good sport, Maisie.” They started down the footpath and the mist blotted out everything.

After a couple of hours they stopped to rest. They left the path and found a patch of grass in the middle of a big thicket of cistus. The mist was all around but it was bright overhead and they could feel the warmth of the sun through it. “Ouch, I’ve got blisters,” she said and made a funny face that made him laugh. “It can’t be so awful far now,” he said; “honest, Maisie.” He wanted to explain to her about the strike and the wobblies and why he was going to Goldfield, but he couldn’t. All he could do was kiss her. Her mouth clung to his lips and her arms were tight round his neck.

“Honest, it won’t make any difference about our gettin’ married; honest, it won’t… Maisie, I’m crazy about you… Maisie, do let me… You must let me… Honest, you don’t know how terrible it is for me, lovin’ you like this and you never lettin’ me.”

He got up and smoothed down her dress. She lay there with her eyes closed and her face white; he was afraid she had fainted. He kneeled down and kissed her gently on the cheek. She smiled ever so little and pulled his head down and ruffled his hair. “Little husband,” she said. After a while they got to their feet and walked through the redwood grove, without seeing it, to the trolleystation. Going home on the ferry they decided they’d get married inside of the week. Mac promised not to go to Nevada.

Next morning he got up feeling depressed. He was selling out. When he was shaving in the bathroom he looked at himself in the mirror and said, half aloud: “You bastard, you’re selling out to the sons of bitches.”

He went back to his room and wrote Maisie a letter.

DEAR MAISIE:

Honestly you mustn’t think for one minute I don’t love you ever so much, but I promised to go to Goldfield to help the gang run that paper and I’ve got to do it. I’ll send you my address as soon as I get there and if you really need me on account of anything, I’ll come right back, honestly I will.

A whole lot of kisses and love

FAINY

He went down to the Bulletin office and drew his pay, packed his bag and went down to the station to see when he could get a train for Goldfield, Nevada.