U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [500]
trying to get favorable items into the press. It was uphil 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 hel ?
After she'd been out to
-450-Dedham jail to talk to Sacco and to Charlestown to talk to Vanzetti, she tried to tel 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 real y 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 unmerciful y about what he cal ed her youthful fanaticism. When he'd ask her out to dinner and make her drink a lot of red wine she'd tel herself that it wasn't real y a waste of time, that it was important for her to keep in touch with the press services. His name was Jerry Burn-ham.
"But, Jerry, how can you stand it? If the State of Mas-sachusetts can kil those two innocent men in the face of the protest of the whole world it'l mean that there never wil be any justice in America ever again.""When was there any to begin with?" he said with a mirthless giggle, leaning over to fil 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 al ow it.""It's the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of great men. . . . 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 careful y 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 newsserv--451-ice that he attended to his wires and the business of his office as casual y 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 her-self 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'l al 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 hel cares . . . ? Who on the bloody louseinfested globe gives one little smal 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 unionhal s. She wrote her mother piti-ful humiliating letters to get money out of her on al 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 phonecal s to pay for. She spent long evenings trying to coax communists, socialists, anar-chists, 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 ful 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