Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [27]
It occurred to Evelyn one day that Harry might indeed love her. She was stunned. She tried to make a determination of the real truth of their relationship. Of the relationship of the three of them. For the first time she experienced acutely the sense of Stanford White’s death, the loss of Stanny. He would have been able to tell her what the truth was. He would have made a joke out of it. That was his way. He was a lusty old fuck and he loved a good laugh. She could drive him out of his mind, just as she could drive Harry out of his. But she felt more comfortable with Stanny White. He would leave her alone to go out and build something, whereas Harry would never leave her because he had nothing else to do. Harry was merely wealthy. She needed desperately to talk to someone and the only person she had ever been able to talk to was the man for whose death she was directly responsible. On her blue vellum Mrs. Harry K. Thaw stationery with raised letters she wrote Emma Goldman. What have I done? she said in the letter. The reply came back from California where Goldman was raising funds in defense of the militant McNamara brothers who were accused of blowing up the Los Angeles Times building: Don’t overestimate your role in the relationship those two men had with each other.
In the meantime Harry’s trial went to the jury. They could not come to a verdict. A new trial was ordered. Evelyn testified again, with the same words and the same gestures. When it was all over Harry K. Thaw was remanded for an indefinite period to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Almost immediately his lawyers negotiated for his divorce. Evelyn was ready. Her price was a million dollars. Then the private detectives came forward with their record of her infidelities with Mother’s Younger Brother and some others they had made up and the divorce was quietly concluded by the payment to Evelyn of twenty-five thousand. Evelyn sat on the bed in her hotel suite which she now had to give up and gazed at her evening slippers which she held in her hand. On this particular occasion Younger Brother’s endearments left her cold. She remembered what Goldman had told her on her last visit to New York. However much money you have gotten from Thaw it is only as much as he wanted to give you. It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. It is the way things work. Somehow every dollar paid over to you has resulted in his profit. And you will be left with a finite amount of money that you will spend and waste until you are as poor as when you started. She knew this was true. Even such money as she had, still the bulk of her fortune, left her with strange and inconclusive feelings. Some man would feign love, steal the money and break her heart. For this bitter insight she had only Goldman to thank, who had painted for her two pictures, one of greed and barbarity, starvation, injustice and death, as in the present national organizations of private capital, and the other of Utopian serenity, as in the loose ungoverned combinations of equals sharing their work and their wealth sensibly with one another. Evelyn made donations to Goldman’s anarchist magazine Mother Earth, to keep it going. She supported radical appeals that came to her from all over the country once it became underground gossip that she had been politicized. She gave money to the legal defense of labor leaders who had been thrown in jail. She gave money to the parents of children mutilated in mills and factories. Listlessly she doled out her hard-earned fortune. The public never knew this because she insisted on anonymity. She had no joy. She looked into the mirror and saw the unmistakable lineaments of womanhood coming into her girlish face. Her long beautiful neck seemed to her like an ungainly stalk upon which was perched a sad-eyed ridiculous head of a whore past her prime. She cried for the snuggling opportunities of a body like Stanford White