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By Root 9372 0

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’s. And all the while Mother’s Younger Brother solemnly and in his doggish silent way stood to wait upon her. He didn’t know the meaning of comfort. He couldn’t tease her or talk baby talk to her. He couldn’t tell her how to look at a diamond, or take her to a restaurant where the maitre d’fawned over him. All he could do was commit his life to hers and work to satisfy her smallest whim. She loved him but she wanted someone who would treat her badly and whom she could treat badly. She longed for a challenge to her wit, she longed to have her ambitions aroused once again.

12

And what of Tateh and his little girl? After that meeting the old artist sat one night and one A day in his flat and he did not eat or say anything, brooding, as he smoked endlessly his Sobrany cigarettes, on the brutal luck of his life. Every once in a while he would look at his child, and seeing the sure destruction of her incredible beauty in his continuing victimization he would clutch her to him and tears would fill his eyes. The little girl quietly prepared their simple meals in ways so reminiscent of the movements of his wife that finally he could bear the situation no longer. Throwing their few clothes in a musty suitcase whose strap had long since rotted away, he tied a piece of clothesline around the suitcase, took the girl by the hand and left the two-room flat on Hester Street forever. They walked to the corner and boarded the No. 12 streetcar for Union Square. At Union Square they transferred to the No. 8 and rode north up Broadway. The early evening was warm and all the windows of the trolley were lowered. The streets were crowded with cabs and cars and their horns blew at one another. Trolleys went along in clusters, their bells ringing, the flashes of electricity from their pantographs crackling along the overhead wires in minute intensifications of the heat lightning that flattened the sky over the darkening, sultry city. Tateh had no idea where he was going. The little girl held his hand tightly. Her dark eyes stared solemnly at the parades of people strolling along Broadway, the men in boaters and blue blazers and white ducks, the women in white summer frocks. The electric light bulbs of each vaudeville house rippled in a particular pattern. A ring of light spun around the rims of her pupils. Three hours later they were on a streetcar moving north along Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The moon was out, the temperature had dropped, and the trolley clipped along the broad reaches of this wide boulevard with only occasional stops. They passed grassy lots interspersed with blocks of row houses still under construction. Finally the lights disappeared entirely and the little girl realized they were traveling along the edges of a great hillside cemetery. The stones and vaults standing against the cold night sky suggested to her the fate of her mother. For the first time she asked her Tateh where they were going. He pulled the window shut against the cold wind whistling now through the ratcheting, rocking trolley. They were the only passengers. Sha, he said to her. Close your eyes. Distributed in his pockets and in his shoes were his life savings, some thirty dollars. He had decided