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By Root 5030 0

and bailiffs and policemen and wardens and jurymen: they had all known there would be a trial for them. She heard the scratches. Waiting in the corridors were alienists prepared to testify that Harry was insane. This was the one line of defense he would not permit. He could not bring himself to do it. His august mother wanted him to make that plea. She was afraid that if he did not he would go to the electric chair. Evelyn watched him at the defense table. She wondered what in the world could ever put to ease that enraged heart. Harry kept his facial expressions keyed to the testimony. When something was funny he smiled. When it was sad he dropped his eyes. When Stanford White’s name was mentioned he furrowed his brow. He arranged himself in attitudes of contrition alternated with heads-up confidence and even burning righteousness. This activity required all his concentration. Going in and out of the courtroom he was calm and courteous, the picture of rationality.

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