It was a long time before she could get him to get into bed. He sat there halfundressed in the dark shivering and talking about the errors that had been committed in the strike. When at last he’d taken his clothes off and stood up to lay them on a chair he looked like a skeleton in the broad swath of grey glare that cut across the room from the streetlight outside her window. She burst out crying all over again at the sunken look of his chest and the deep hollows inside his collarbone. “What’s the matter, girl?” Ben said gruffly. “You crying because you haven’t got a Valentino to go to bed with you?” “Nonsense, Ben, I was just thinking you needed fattening up… you poor kid, you work so hard.” “You’ll be going off with a goodlooking young bondsalesman one of these days, like you were used to back in Colorado Springs… I know what to expect… I don’t give a damn… I can make the fight alone.” “Oh, Ben, don’t talk like that… you know I’m heart and soul…” She drew him to her. Suddenly he kissed her.
Next morning they quarreled bitterly while they were dressing, about the value of her researchwork. She said that after all he couldn’t talk; the strike hadn’t been such a wild success. He went out without eating his breakfast. She went uptown in a clenched fury of misery, threw up her job and a few days later went down to Boston to work on the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the new committee that had just been formed.
She’d never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums back of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case was won, she’d write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers’ shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she’d observe life. She’d never fall for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.
Her job was keeping in touch with newspapermen and trying to get favorable items into the press. It was uphill work. Although most of the newspapermen who had any connection with the case thought the two had been wrongly convicted they tended to say that they were just two wop anarchists, so what the hell? After she’d been out to Dedham jail to talk to Sacco and to Charlestown to talk to Vanzetti, she tried to tell the U.P. man what she felt about them one Saturday night when he was taking her out to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street.
He was the only one of the newspapermen she got really friendly with. He was an awful drunk but he’d seen a great deal and he had a gentle detached manner that she liked. He liked her for some reason, though he kidded her unmercifully about what he called her youthful fanaticism. When he’d ask her out to dinner and make her drink a lot of red wine she’d tell herself that it wasn’t really a waste of time, that it was important for her to keep in touch with the press services. His name was Jerry Burnham.
“But, Jerry, how can you stand it? If the State of Massachusetts can kill those two innocent men in the face of the protest of the whole world it’ll mean that there never will be any justice in America ever again.” “When was there any to begin with?” he said with a mirthless giggle, leaning over to fill up her glass. “Ever heard of Tom Mooney?” The curly white of his hair gave a strangely youthful look to his puffy red face. “But there’s something so peaceful, so honest about them; you get such a feeling of greatness out of them. Honestly they are great men.” “Everything you say makes it more remarkable that they weren’t executed years ago.” “But the workingpeople, the common people, they won’t allow it.” “It’s the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of greatmen… If it’s not going too far back I’d like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ?”
It was Jerry Burnham who taught her to drink. He lived himself in a daily alcoholic haze carrying his drinks carefully and circumspectly like an acrobat walking across a tight wire with a tableful of dishes balanced on his head. He was so used to working his twentyfourhour newsservice that he attended to his wires and the business of his office as casually as he’d pay the check in one speakeasy before walking around the corner to another. His kidneys were shot and he was on the winewagon he said, but she often noticed whiskey on his breath when she went into his office. He was so exasperating that she’d swear to herself each time she went out with him it was the last. No more wasting time when every minute was precious. But the next time he’d ask her out she’d crumple up at once and smile and say yes and waste another evening drinking wine and listening to him ramble on. “It’ll all end in blindness and sudden death,” he said one night as he left her in a taxi at the corner of her street. “But who cares? Who in hell cares…? Who on the bloody louseinfested globe gives one little small microscopic vestigial hoot?”
As courtdecision after courtdecision was lost and the rancid Boston spring warmed into summer and the governor’s commission reported adversely and no hope remained but a pardon from the governor himself, Mary worked more and more desperately hard. She wrote articles, she talked to politicians and ministers and argued with editors, she made speeches in unionhalls. She wrote her mother pitiful humiliating letters to get money out of her on all sorts of pretexts. Every cent she could scrape up went into the work of her committee. There were always stationery and stamps and telegrams and phonecalls to pay for. She spent long evenings trying to coax communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals into working together. Hurrying along the stonepaved streets she’d be whispering to herself, “They’ve got to be saved, they’ve got to be saved.” When at last she got to bed her dreams were full of impossible tasks; she was trying to glue a broken teapot together and as soon as she got one side of it mended the other side would come to pieces again, she was trying to mend a rent in her skirt and by the time the bottom was sewed the top had come undone again; she was trying to put together pieces of a torn typewritten sheet, the telegram was of the greatest importance, she couldn’t see, it was all a blur before her eyes; it was the evidence that would force a new trial, her eyes were too bad, when she had spelled out one word from the swollen throbbing letters she’d forgotten the last one; she was climbing a shaky hillside among black guttedlooking houses pitching at crazy angles where steelworkers lived, at each step she slid back, it was too steep, she was crying for help, yelling, sliding back. Then warm reassuring voices like Ben Compton’s when he was feeling well were telling her that Public Opinion wouldn’t allow it that after all Americans had a sense of Justice and Fair Play that the Workingclass would rise; she’d see crowded meetings, slogans, banners, glary billboards with letters pitching into perspective saying: Workers of the World Unite, she’d be marching in the middle of crowds in parades of protest. They Shall Not Die.
She’d wake up with a start, bathe and dress hurriedly and rush down to the office of the committee snatching up a glass of orangejuice and a cup of coffee on the way. She was always the first there; if she slackened her work for a moment she’d see their faces, the shoemaker’s sharplymodeled pale face with the flashing eyes and the fishpeddler’s philosophical mustaches and his musing unscared eyes. She’d see behind them the electric chair as clear as if it were standing in front of her desk in the stuffy crowded office.