U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [401]
""Tried to organize the workinaclass, that's the worst crime you can commit in this man's country."
It was a relief to be out on the street again, hurrying along while Gus Moscowski shambled grinning beside her.
"Wel , I guess I'd better take you first to see how folks live on fortytwo cents an hour. Too bad you can't talk Polish. I'm a Polack myself.""You must have been born in this country.""Sure, highschool graduate. If I can get the dough I want to take engineering at Carnegie Tech.
. . . I dunno why I string along with these damn Po-lacks." He looked her straight in the face and grinned when he said that. She smiled back at him. "I understand why," she said. He made a gesture with his elbow as they turned a corner past a group of ragged kids making mud-pies; they were pale flabby filthy little kids with pouches under their eyes. Mary turned her eyes away but she'd seen them, as she'd seen the photograph of the dead woman with her head caved in. "Git an eyeful of cesspool
-135-al ey the land of opportunity," Gus Moscowski said way down in his throat. That night when she got off the streetcar at the corner nearest Mrs. Gansemeyer's her legs were trembling and the smal of her back ached. She went right up to her room and hurried into bed. She was too tired to eat or to sit up listening to Lois Speyer's line of sarcastic gossip. She couldn't sleep. She lay in her sagging bed listening to the voices of the boarders rocking on the porch below and to the hooting of engines and the clank of shunted freight-cars down in the val ey, seeing again the shapeless broken shoes and the worn hands folded over dirty aprons and the sharp anxious beadiness of women's eyes, feeling the quake underfoot of the crazy stairways zigzagging up and down the hil s black and bare as slagpiles where the steelworkers lived in jumbled shanties and big black rows of smoke-gnawed clapboarded houses, in her nose the stench of cranky backhouses and kitchens with cabbage cooking and clothes boiling and unwashed children and drying diapers. She slept by fits and starts and would wake up with Gus Moscowski's warm tough voice in her head, and her whole body tingling with the hard fuzzy bearcub feel of him when his arm brushed against her arm or he put out his big hand to steady her at a place where the boardwalk had broken through and she'd started to slip in the loose shaly slide underneath. When she fel solidly asleep she went on dreaming about him. She woke up early feeling happy because she was going to meet him again right after break-fast. That afternoon she went back to the office to write the piece. Just the way Ted Healy had said, she put in al she could find out about the boys running the publicity bureau. The nearest to Russia any of them came from was Canarsie, Long Island. She tried to get in both sides of the ques-tion, even cal ed them
"possibly misguided." About a minute after she'd sent it in to the Sunday edi--136-tor she was cal ed to the city desk. Ted Healy had on a green eyeshade and was bent over a swirl of gal eys. Mary could see her copy on top of the pile of papers under his elbow. Somebody had scrawled across the top of it in red pencil: Why wish this on me? "Wel , young lady," he said without looking up, "you've written a firstrate propaganda piece for the Nation or some other parlorpink sheet in New York, but what the devil do you think we can do with it? This is Pittsburgh." He got to his feet and held out his hand. "Goodby, Miss French, I wish I had some way of using you because you're a mighty smart girl . . . and smart girl reporters are rare. . . . I've sent your slip to the cashier. . . ." Before Mary French could get her breath she was out on the pavement with an extra week's salary in her pocketbook, which after al was pretty white of old Ted Healy.
That night Lois Speyer looked aghast when Mary told her she'd been fired, but when Mary told Lois that she'd gone down and gotten a job doing publicity for the Amalgamated Lois burst into tears. "I said you'd lost your mind and it's true. . . . Either I'l