U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [537]
It was a long time before she could get him to get into bed. He sat there halfundressed in the dark shivering and talking about the errors that had been committed in the strike. When at last he'd taken his clothes off and stood up to lay them on a chair he looked like a skeleton in the broad swath of grey glare that cut across the room from the streetlight outside her window. She burst out crying al over again at the sunken look of his chest and the deep hol ows inside his col arbone. "What's the matter, girl?" Ben said gruffly.
"You crying because you haven't
-449-got a Valentino to go to bed with you?""Nonsense, Ben, I was just thinking you needed fattening up . . . you poor kid, you work so hard,""You'l be going off with a goodlooking young bondsalesman one of these days, like you were used to back in Colorado Springs. . . . I know what to expect . . . I don't give a damn . . . I can make the fight alone.""Oh, Ben, don't talk like that . . . you know I'm heart and soul . . ." She drew him to her. Sud-denly he kissed her. Next morning they quarreled bitterly while they were dressing, about the value of her researchwork. She said that after al he couldn't talk; the strike hadn't been such a wild success. He went out without eating his breakfast. She went uptown in a clenched fury of misery, threw up her job and a few days later went down to Boston to work on the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the new committee that had just been formed.
She'd never been in Boston before. The town these
sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums back of Beacon Hil and decided that when the case was won, she'd write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty sta-tioners' shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smel of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she'd observe life. She'd never fal for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought her-self some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.
Her job was keeping in touch with newspapermen and
trying to get favorable items into the press. It was uphil work. Although most of the newspapermen who had any connection with the case thought the two had been wrongly convicted they tended to say that they were just two wop anarchists, so what the hel ?
After she'd been out to
-450-Dedham jail to talk to Sacco and to Charlestown to talk to Vanzetti, she tried to tel the U.P. man what she felt about them one Saturday night when he was taking her out to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street. He was the only one of the newspapermen she got real y friendly with. He was an awful drunk but he'd seen a great deal and he had a gentle detached manner that she liked. He liked her for some reason, though he kidded her unmerciful y about what he cal ed her youthful fanaticism. When he'd ask her out to dinner and make her drink a lot of red wine she'd tel herself that it wasn't real y a waste of time, that it was important for her to keep in touch with the press services. His name was Jerry Burn-ham.
"But, Jerry, how can you stand it? If the State of Mas-sachusetts can kil those two innocent men in the face of the protest of the whole world it'l mean that there never wil be any justice in America ever again.""When was there any to begin with?" he said with a mirthless giggle, leaning over to fil up her glass. "Ever heard of Tom Mooney?" The curly white of his hair gave a strangely youthful look to his puffy red face. "But there's something so peaceful, so honest about them; you get such a feeling of greatness out of them. Honestly they are great men."
"Everything you say makes it more remarkable that they weren't executed years ago.""But the workingpeople, the common people, they won't al ow it.""It's the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of great men. . . . If it's