t the end of the ball game a great anxiety came over Father. He felt it had been stupid to leave his wife alone. But as they left the park borne by the streaming crowd he realized his son had taken his hand. He felt an uplift of his spirit. On the open trolley he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. Arriving in New Rochelle they walked briskly from the train station and when they came in the door they gave a loud hello! and for the first time in days Father felt like himself. Mother appeared from the back of the house. Her hair was bound, she was groomed and smiling and neat. She embraced him and said Look, I have something to show you. Her face was radiant. She stepped aside and walking down the hall, holding the hand of the housemaid, was Sarah’s child in his nightshirt. He tottered and swung against her skirt, righted himself and looked at Father in triumph. Everyone laughed. We can’t hold him, Mother said. He wants to walk everywhere.
The boy knelt and held out his arms and the child shook his hand free of the housemaid and lurched toward him, picking up speed as he went, outracing his instability and falling happily against the boy’s chest.
A kind of resolute serenity carried them through the evening. In the quiet of Mother’s room toward midnight she and father discussed everything on their minds. The chances were that Coalhouse would continue for some time to elude capture. In that case they foresaw a community from which they would be increasingly alienated. Already a few of Mother’s acquaintances from her service league had reacted to the publicity given the family. She dreaded actions of spite and bitterness in which Sarah’s baby would be taken away under protection of a vengeful authority. Father could not deny that might happen. But they were in this moment so calmly in possession of themselves that there was no need for false assurances or for either of them to dissemble an optimism not truly felt. Father said he would not put it past the authorities to decide to use the child in some way to persuade Coalhouse to surrender. What we have to do, Father said, is get away. But how can we, Mother said. My father is invalid, school is not yet out, we have just taken on the responsibilities of a household staff. Each of these problems she enumerated with her right index finger tolling the fingers of the left hand. So she had been thinking the same thing and Father now perceived that she awaited his solutions in good faith. He told her to leave everything to him. His assumption of responsibility produced in her warm feelings of gratitude. Their conversation reminding them that they were after all friends of long standing, they went to bed and spent the night together. She let him make love to her, responding with such cooperative huggings and movements of her hips, and with so many caresses of encouragement to represent her best wishes to have him succeed in his efforts, that he felt for the first time in many months she appreciated she had a good man in her arms.
The answer to everything seemed to be Atlantic City. Father located a fine hotel there, the Breakers, which had available a suite of rooms facing the ocean for something less than would be expected, the season having barely begun. The South Jersey shore was easy to reach, a few hours by rail, not too near, but not too far to keep him from going back Sunday evening as his business dictated. The change of air would do everyone good. Grandfather’s doctor, who had submitted him to the latest orthopedic procedure fro broken hips, a metallic pin implanted like a internal splint, advised them that he should be on his crutches or in his chair as much as possible, bed rest comprising the greatest danger for one of his age. The boy would have to leave school a few weeks early but was so adept at his studies that this was not considered a serious disadvantage. The house would not be closed with the covering up of furniture and shutting off of rooms this required, but maintained with the staff for those periods in which Father would have to be in New Rochelle. The housekeeper would stay with mother at the shore. She was a stolid, conscientious Negro woman who would provide, in addition, the obvious and erroneous explanation for the presence of a brown child in their party.
Thus armed with a plan of action the family prepared for their departure. They maintained a good cheer that became almost hysterical as the situation grew in its ugliness. The new Police Chief, a retired inspector from the New York City Department of Homicide, proposed lines of investigation that were ominous. His first day in the job he told reporters that the explosive used on Municipal Station No. 2 was very sophisticated, a combination of gun cotton and fulminate of mercury that could only have been concocted by someone who knew his stuff, which Coalhouse Walker, a piano player, did not. He asked where the Negro got the money for the car he used or for the assistance of a gang of colored men all armed and all presumably motivated by hard cash. He has to pay his cohorts. He has expenses. Where does he get his money? Where does he stay between his mad raids on this gentle city? I know a half-dozen Reds I would love to have in detention here. I bet I would get some of my answers.
These remarks, which were widely disseminated, had in their suggestion of a conspiracy of radicals the worst possible effect on an already agitated townspeople. Militia patrolled the streets. There were several instances of abuse of Negroes who were seen out of their neighborhoods. There was rash of false alarms from fireboxes all over the city, each bringing out engines with police guards and a convoy of reporters in cars. Reporters were everywhere, and along with the troopers and the highly visible police in their wagons, produced in the community a painfully swollen sense of itself. The churches on Sunday morning had never known such crowds. The hospital emergency room reported a higher than usual number of household accident victims. People were burning themselves, cutting themselves, tripping on rugs and falling down flights of stairs. Several men were brought in with gun wounds inflicted in the cleaning and handling of old weapons.
Meanwhile the press seemed to be ahead of the authorities in dealing with the specifics of Coalhouse’s letters. Probably for the pictures it would make they agitated for several editions to raise the Model T from Firehouse Pond. This was finally done. A crane was move to the site and the automobile was brought up like a monstrous artifact, mud dripping from its tires, water and slime pouring out of its hood. It was swung over to the bank and deposited on the ground for everyone to see.
But now the authorities were embarrassed. The Ford stood as tangible proof of the black man’s grievance. Waterlogged and wrecked, it offended the sensibilities of anyone who respected machines and valued what they could do. After its picture was published people began to come and see it in such numbers that the police had to cordon off the area. Feeling that they had compromised themselves the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen issued a new series of condemnations of the colored madman and said that to negotiate with him in any way at all, to face him with less than an implacable demand that he surrender himself, would be to invite every renegade and radical and black man in the country to flout the law and spit upon the American flag.
Even if there was at this point a public demand for a strategy of negotiation, which there was not — not even the press suggested it — no one could had any idea of how to get in touch with the killer. Coalhouse had not announced how much time he granted them till the next attack. Indeed, there was an opinion delivered by an alienist hired by the New York World that the second of the letters, signed Coalhouse Walker, President, Provisional American Government, was much advanced beyond the first in its signals of mental deterioration, and that to deal with someone in the throes of a progressive delusionary madness as if he were open to reason would be a tragic mistake.