Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [17]
This was the day Evelyn Nesbit considered kidnapping the little girl and leaving Tateh to his fate. The old artist had never inquired of her name and knew nothing about her. It could be done. Instead she threw herself into the family’s life with redoubled effort, coming with food, linens and whatever else she could move past the old man’s tormented pride. She was insane with the desire to become one of them and drew Tateh out in conversation and learned from the girl how to sew knee pants. For hours each day, each evening, she lived as a woman in the Jewish slums, and was driven home by the Thaw chauffeur from a prearranged place many blocks away, always in despair. She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.
8
One day Tateh invited her to a meeting of which the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side was a part sponsor, along with seven other organizations. It was an important event. The featured speaker was to be none other than Emma Goldman. Carefully Tateh explained that although he was unalterably opposed to Goldman, she being an anarchist and he a socialist, he had great respect for her personal courage and integrity; and that he had therefore agreed that some sort of temporary accord between the socialists and the anarchists was advisable, if only for the evening, because the funds raised for the occasion would go to support the shirtwaist makers, who were then on strike, and the steelworkers at McKeesport, Pennsylvania, who were on strike, and the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who was going to be condemned and executed by the Spanish government for fomenting a general strike in Spain. In five minutes Evelyn was immersed in the bracing linguistics of radical idealism. She didn’t dare confess to Tateh that she had had no idea socialism and anarchism were not the same thing, or that the thought of seeing the notorious Emma Goldman frightened her. She pulled her shawl over her head, and holding the little girl’s hand tightly, walked behind Tateh as he strode north to the Workingmen’s Hall on East 14th Street. But she did at one point turn around to see if her strange shy admirer was following, and he was, half a block behind, his lean face hidden in the shadow of his straw boater.
Emma Goldman’s subject was the great dramatist Ibsen in whose work, she said, lay all the instruments for the radical dissection of society. She was not a physically impressive woman, being small, thick-waisted, with a heavy-jawed masculine face. She wore hornrimmed glasses that enlarged her eyes and suggested the constant outrage to her soul of the sights she saw. She had immense vitality and her voice rang, and Evelyn, after getting over her relief to discover that Goldman was simply a woman, and a rather small woman at that, was swept up by the oratory of powerful ideas that lifted her mind like a river. In the heat and constant excitement rising from the audience she allowed her shawl to drop to her shoulders. There were perhaps a hundred people present, all sitting on benches or standing along the walls while Goldman spoke from behind a table at the end of the room. The police department had stationed men prominently at the doors and at one point a police sergeant tried to stop Emma’s