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By Root 5121 0

his salary couldn’t support these tastes. Broadway was alive with lights and entertainments and everyone connected with the theatre and charged by its excitement lived to the limit. He learned where to find women who would go to bed with him for a modest price. One of these places was the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. They walked in twos whenever the weather was mild. The days were beginning to lengthen. In cold luxurious sunsets they strolled about the fountain, shadows filling the great steps, the water already black, the paving stones brown and pink. He amused them by taking them seriously. He was gentle with them and they didn’t mind his oddity because it was gentle. He would take a woman to his hotel room and then sit in a chair with one shoe in his hand and completely forget about her. Or he would not attempt to make love but only inspect her intimate places. He drank wine until he was insensible. He dined in steakhouses with sawdust on the floor. He went to cellar clubs in Hell’s Kitchen where hoodlums bought everyone drinks. He walked Manhattan at night, his eyes devouring passers-by. He stared in the windows of restaurants and sat in hotel lobbies, his restless eyes picking out motion and color before it defined itself.

Eventually he found the offices of the Mother Earth magazine published by Emma Goldman. They were on 13th Street in a brownstone that served now as the anarchist’s residence when she was in New York. He stood in the street under the lamppost and stared at the windows. He did this for several nights. Finally a man came out of the door, walked down the steps and crossed the street to where he stood. He was a tall cadaverous man, with long hair and a string tie. He said It gets cold in the evenings—come in, we have no secrets. And Younger Brother was led across the street and up the steps.

It turned out that in his vigil he had been mistaken for a police spy. He was treated with elaborate irony. He was offered tea. Numbers of people were standing about in the apartment in their hats and coats. Then Goldman appeared in a doorway and her attention was directed to him. Good God, she said. That’s no policeman. She began to laugh. She was putting on a hat and setting it in place with hatpins. He was thrilled that she remembered him. Come with us, she called.

A while later Younger Brother found himself in the Cooper Union down near the Bowery. The hall was hot, crowded to overflowing. There were lots of foreigners. Men wore their derbies though indoors. It was a great stinking congress garlicked and perfumed in its own perspiration. It had met in support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn’t known there was a Mexican Revolution. Men waved their fists. They stood on benches. Speaker after speaker arose. Some spoke in languages other than English. They were not translated. He had trouble hearing. What seemed to have happened was that the Mexican peons had spontaneously revolted against Díaz the President of Mexico for the past thirty-five years. They needed guns. They needed ammunition. They were striking from the hills, attacking the Federals and the supply trains with wooden staves and muzzle-loading muskets. He thought about this. Finally Emma Goldman got up to speak. Of all the orators she was the best. The hall went quiet as she described the complicity of the wealthy landowners and the despised tyrant Díaz, the subjugation of the peons, the poverty and starvation and, most shameful of all, the presence of representatives of American business firms in the national counsels of the Mexican government. Her voice was strong. As she moved her head and gesticulated the light flashed from her glasses. He pushed his way forward to be closer to her. She described one Emiliano Zapata, a simple farmer of the Morelos district who had turned revolutionary because he had no choice. He wore the share farmer’s bleached pajama coat and trousers, bound over the chest with bandoleers and belted with a cartridge belt. My comrades, she cried, that is not a foreign costume. There are no foreign lands. There is no Mexican