Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [18]
’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 Pittsburgh. 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 Pittsburgh 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 stabbed Frick in the leg. They took the 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 removed 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 friends 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