U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [538]
It was Jerry Burnham who taught her to drink. He
lived himself in a daily alcoholic haze carrying his drinks careful y and circumspectly like an acrobat walking across a tight wire with a tableful of dishes balanced on his head. He was so used to working his twentyfourhour newsserv--451-ice that he attended to his wires and the business of his office as casual y as he'd pay the check in one speakeasy before walking around the corner to another. His kidneys were shot and he was on the winewagon he said, but she often noticed whiskey on his breath when she went into his office. He was so exasperating that she'd swear to her-self each time she went out with him it was the last. No more wasting time when every minute was precious. But the next time he'd ask her out she'd crumple up at once and smile and say yes and waste another evening drinking wine and listening to him ramble on. "It'l al end in blindness and sudden death," he said one night as he left her in a taxi at the corner of her street. "But who cares?
Who in hel cares . . . ? Who on the bloody louseinfested globe gives one little smal microscopic vestigial hoot?" As courtdecision after courtdecision was lost and the rancid Boston spring warmed into summer and the governor's commission reported adversely and no hope remained but a pardon from the governor himself, Mary worked more and more desperately hard. She wrote articles, she talked to politicians and ministers and argued with editors, she made speeches in unionhal s. She wrote her mother piti-ful humiliating letters to get money out of her on al sorts of pretexts. Every cent she could scrape up went into the work of her committee. There were always stationery and stamps and telegrams and phonecal s to pay for. She spent long evenings trying to coax communists, socialists, anar-chists, liberals into working together. Hurrying along the stonepaved streets she'd be whispering to herself, "They've got to be saved, they've got to be saved." When at last she got to bed her dreams were ful of impossible tasks; she was trying to glue a broken teapot together and as soon as she got one side of it mended the other side would come to pieces again, she was trying to mend a rent in her skirt and by the time the bottom was sewed the top had come undone again; she was trying to put together pieces
-452-of a torn typewritten sheet, the telegram was of the great est importance, she couldn't see, it was al a blur before her eyes; it was the evidence that would force a new trial, her eyes were too bad, when she had spel ed out one word from the swol en throbbing letters she'd for-gotten the last one; she was climbing a shaky hil side among black guttedlooking houses pitching at crazy angles where steelworkers lived, at each step she slid back, it was too steep, she was crying for help, yel ing, sliding back. Then warm reassuring voices like Ben Compton's when he was feeling wel were tel ing her that Public Opinion wouldn't al ow it that after al Americans' had a sense of Justice and Fair Play that the Workingclass would rise; she'd see crowded meetings, slogans, banners, glary bil -boards with letters pitching into perspective saying: Work-ers of the World Unite, she'd be marching in the middle of crowds in parades of protest. They Shal Not Die. She'd wake up with a start, bathe and dress hurriedly and rush down to the office of the committee snatching up a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee on the way. She was always the first there; if she slackened her work for a moment she'd see their faces, the shoemaker's sharply-modeled pale face with the flashing eyes and the fish-peddler's philosophical mustaches and his musing unscared eyes. She'd see behind them the electric chair as clear as if it were standing in front of her desk in the stuffy crowded office.
July went by al too fast. August came. A growing
crowd of al sorts of people began pouring through the office: old friends, wobblies who'd hitchhiked from the