I said: I’m sad.
I started to cry and he told me not to and he kissed me again and I said there was no way to stop, that I must cry, I must.
He said: Then if you must, I am going to have to insist you tell me everything. You can’t go halfway. Let’s just finish this. Tell me now or forever hold your peace. Just get rid of it, and then we’ll be done.
So I told him about Louis dying, and how he had been a criminal, and how he had made me a criminal too, in one way or another, but that I had not fought too hard against it. And it started to feel good, to say these things, even as sad and awful as they were. I told him that my sister had gone mad years ago and I tried to help her as much as I could, but also that I hated her, too, I hated her for making me suffer as much as she did. I told him that Tee had died, and that I had loved her, and now that love was gone, and that I had tried so hard to be the person she wanted me to be and it hadn’t mattered in the end, she died anyway, and what was the point in being your very best if all love dies?
He said: Not all love dies. Here I am with you now. Here we are together, Mazie.
It didn’t feel real to me when he said that. He was listening but he wasn’t hearing me, or he was saying the thing he thought I wanted to hear, but that wasn’t it at all. It was not the right thing. And so I told him finally about the baby I had lost, nearly eight years ago, the baby that had been his. I told him how I had kept the baby a secret except from my family, and that I would have given it to Rosie and Louis to keep as their own, and he started to say something but then he stopped himself because I saw him working it out in his head, that there was a baby, and then there wasn’t, and I told him that the baby had died, died inside of me while I slept, and I told him about the mattress, how it was suddenly soaked with blood, how it turned red, I woke up, and it was red and sticky and I was wet with my blood, the insides of me turned out, and I had bled so much I nearly died, but also it wasn’t just losing all the blood that was killing me, it was the sadness, and the guilt, and the broken heart.
This was when he started to cry. He asked if it had been a boy or a girl and I told him a boy. He told me that he was sorry I had gone through that and if he had known I was with child he would have done the right thing by me and I told him that we had only met once, there was no right thing or wrong thing, and it was a good thing he hadn’t because he’d probably be sitting in a hotel room with a different woman now, being the kind of man he was. That stung him, and I didn’t mean to sting him, only I suppose I did. He told me there was no need for that, and I apologized.
He said: It was my child too.
I said: It’s nobody’s baby anymore.
The next part came from a place of sadness and us both being animals like we are. We removed just enough clothing for us to put all our parts together. I wasn’t even wet enough for him to fit inside me easily but then very suddenly I was. I didn’t look at him and he didn’t look at me. I stared out over his shoulder, my legs wrapped around the small of his back. I couldn’t tell if it was making me feel better or worse. Better, worse, worse, better. It didn’t seem possible that I could feel either.
After, I couldn’t stay there with him. I didn’t want to wake up in his arms. I didn’t want to talk to him anymore about the things I had just told him. I told him I had to leave, and he didn’t argue, because he was thinking his own thoughts, about his lost son, probably, and the son he had now. I told him I’d see him around and he said the same and it was like a good-bye only more like a lie.
And then I walked home from his hotel, all the way downtown, and it was cold, and it tasted bitter, and I liked it. And then I saw it, truly, for the first time, the way this city has changed. It’s lost its pride. There’s bums everywhere, and there’s drunks everywhere, and it’s filthy, and people are hungry. It’s not just in the tenements, it’s everywhere. I ain’t never seen anything like it. I was lifting my skirt up over the men in the gutters, but there were children there too, and women, and they were spread out all over the island. Maybe I’ve been blind because I’ve been mourning, or maybe I’ve just been trapped in my little cage for too long, because it is only just now that I am seeing how much trouble this city of mine is in.
I thought of Tee walking next to me, and what she would have thought about it all. Her habit gathered up around her as she bent to help. We never would have made it home, she would have stopped and helped each person. She couldn’t turn down a soul.
I fished in my pocket, and I squatted down next to a man on the sidewalk. There was a cut on his cheek. Stubble, dirt, dried blood. Blood on his collar and coat. He was shivering. Everyone on the streets was shivering.
I handed him a quarter.
I said: This is for a bed to sleep in.
I handed him another quarter.
I said: This is for a meal.
I handed him a final quarter.
I said: And this is for a drink or two.
That last part Tee wouldn’t have approved of, but Tee never knew how to have a good time.
8. Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Mazie Phillips-Gordon
The younger ones still have a chance to change their lives, and I’ll lend them a hand if they like. But too many of the older men, they’ve been on the road so long they wouldn’t know what to do with a proper home if they had one. The concrete feels right under their bodies. Their discomfort has become their comfort.
Elio Ferrante
Is it weird that I love teaching the Depression the most out of all the eras? I think part of it has to do with it being the most. Like it was the longest and the worst and it was global and terrible, and these kids only know how to pay attention to superlatives. Also the idea of businessmen jumping out of buildings freaks them out. Breadlines freak them out, too. A lot of these kids have had experience with food stamps, and then I get to tell them it was because of the Depression that food stamps were even created in the first place. This speaks to them. The image of New York City in trouble, with so many people down on their luck, that genuinely speaks to them also. They weren’t here for the seventies and eighties, which is when I was a kid, and when New York City was still, pardon my language, a shit show. But the idea that it exists, that so much of New York City was in trouble that there were breadlines everywhere, it freaks them out, it makes them pay attention, and more than anything I like it when I have a classroom of eyeballs facing forward. All those heads up, listening to what I have to say, I love it. I wish I could teach the Depression all year long.
Mazie’s Diary, February 1, 1930
Now I’m back regular at the theater, and Rudy and I met this morning about business. He said it’s no good. First, people were coming to the theater to forget their worries, but now the money’s run out. He thinks it’ll be bad for a while. Gloom and doom on that poor man’s face. Pale-faced Rudy, he is. The faintest sliver of a man.
I said to Rudy: We’ll run it at a loss for a while if we have to. We’re not closing this theater down. We won’t put the people who’ve worked here out on their behinds like everybody else.
I talked to Rosie about it all over dinner tonight.
I said: Who knows when it will pick up?
She said: We won’t close it.
I said: No, of course we won’t.
She said: I’ll sell all my jewelry, and whatever else I need to. Louis loved that theater.
I said: And those people are our family.
She said: I don’t even understand why we’re having this discussion.