Big Money (19 page)

“I'd worry him if I could git my hands on him. . . . A woikin'man ain't got no right to have a wife and family.”

“He can have a girl. . . .” Her voice failed. She felt her heart beating so hard as she walked along beside him over the uneven pavement she was afraid he'd hear it.

“Girls aplenty.” Gus laughed. “They're free and easy, Polish girls are. That's one good thing.”

“I wish . . .” Mary heard her voice saying.

“Well, goodnight. Rest good, you look all in.” He'd given her a pat on the shoulder and he'd turned and gone off with his long shambling stride. She was at the door of her house. When she got in her room she threw herself on the bed and cried.

It was several weeks later that Gus Moscowski was arrested distributing leaflets in Braddock. She saw him brought up before the squire, in the dirty courtroom packed close with the grey uniforms of statetroopers, and sentenced to five years. His arm was in a sling and there was a scab of clotted blood on the towy stubble on the back of his head. His blue eyes caught hers in the crowd and he grinned and gave her a jaunty wave of a big hand. “So that's how it is, is it?” snarled a voice beside her. “Well, you've had the last piece of c——k you get outa dat baby.”

There was a hulking grey trooper on either side of her. They hustled her out of court and marched her down to the interurban trolleystop. She didn't say anything but she couldn't keep back the tears. She hadn't known men could talk to women like that. “Come on now, loosen up, me an' Steve here we're twice the men. . . . You ought to have better sense than to be spreadin' your legs for that punk.”

At last the Pittsburgh trolley came and they put her on it with a warning that if they ever saw her around again they'd have her up for soliciting. As the car pulled out she saw them turn away slapping each other on the back and laughing. She sat there hunched up in the seat in the back of the car with her stomach churning and her face set. Back at the office all she said was that the cossacks had run her out of the courthouse.

When she heard that George Barrow was in town with the Senatorial Investigating Commission, she went to him at once. She waited for him in the lobby of the Schenley. The still winter evening was one
block of black iron cold. She was shivering in her thin coat. She was deadtired. It seemed weeks since she'd slept. It was warm in the big quiet hotel lobby, through her thin paper soles she could feel the thick nap of the carpet. There must have been a bridgeparty somewhere in the hotel because groups of welldressed middleaged women that reminded her of her mother kept going through the lobby. She let herself drop into a deep chair by a radiator and started at once to drowse off.

“You poor little girl, I can see you've been working. . . . This is different from socialservice work, I'll bet.” She opened her eyes. George had on a furlined coat with a furcollar out of which his thin neck and long knobby face stuck out comically like the head of a marabou stork. She got up. “Oh, Mr. Barrow . . . I mean George.” He took her hand in his left hand and patted it gently with his right. “Now I know what the frontline trenches are like,” she said, laughing at his kind comical look. “You're laughing at my furcoat. . . . Wouldn't help the Amalgamated if I got pneumonia, would it? . . . Why haven't you got a warmcoat? . . . Sweet little Mary French. . . . Just exactly the person I wanted to see. . . . Do you mind if we go up to the room? I don't like to talk here, too many eavesdroppers.”

Upstairs in his square warm room with pink hangings and pink lights he helped her off with her coat. He stood there frowning and weighing it in his hand. “You've got to get a warm coat,” he said. After he'd ordered tea for her from the waiter he rather ostentatiously left the door into the hall open. They settled down on either side of a little table at the foot of the bed that was littered with newspapers and typewritten sheets. “Well, well, well,” he said. “This is a great pleasure for a lonely old codger like me. What would you think of having dinner with the senator? . . . To see how the other half lives.”

They talked and talked. Now and then he slipped a little whiskey in her tea. He was very kind, said he was sure all the boys could be gotten out of jail as soon as the strike was settled and that it virtually was settled. He'd just been over in Youngstown talking to Fitzpatrick. He thought he'd just about convinced him that the only thing to do was to get the men back to work. He had Judge Gary's own private assurance that nobody would be discriminated against and that experts were working on the problem of an eighthour day. As soon as the technical difficulties could be overcome the whole picture of the steelworker's life would change radically for the better. Then and
there he offered to put Mary French on the payroll as his secretary. He said her actual experience with conditions would be invaluable in influencing legislation. If the great effort of the underpaid steel-workers wasn't to be lost it would have to be incorporated in legislation. The center of the fight was moving to Washington. He felt the time was ripe in the senate. She said her first obligation was to the strikecommittee. “But, my dear sweet child,” George Barrow said, gently patting the back of her hand, “in a few days there won't be any strikecommittee.”

The senator was a southerner with irongrey hair and white spats who looked at Mary French when he first came in the room as if he thought she was going to plant a bomb under the big bulge of his creamcolored vest, but his fatherly respectful delicate flowerofwomanhood manner was soothing. They ordered dinner brought up to George's room. The senator kidded George in a heavy rotund way about his dangerous Bolsheviki friends. They'd been putting away a good deal of rye and the smoky air of George's room was rich with whiskey. When she left them to go down to the office again they were talking about taking in a burlesque show.

The bunch down at the office looked haggard and sour. When she told them about G. H. Barrow's offer they told her to jump at it; of course it would be wonderful to have her working for them in Washington and besides they wouldn't be able to pay even her expenses any more. She finished her release and glumly said goodnight. That night she slept better than she had for weeks though all the way home she was haunted by Gus Moscowski's blue eyes and his fair head with the blood clotted on it and his jaunty grin when his eyes met hers in the courtroom. She had decided that the best way to get the boys out of jail was to go to Washington with George.

Next morning George called her up at the office first thing and asked her what about the job. She said she'd take it. He said would fifty a week be all right; maybe he could raise it to seventyfive later. She said it was more than she'd ever made in her life. He said he wanted her to come right around to the Schenley; he had something important for her to do. When she got there he met her in the lobby with a hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “The first thing I want you to do, sweet girl, is to go buy yourself a warm overcoat. Here's two weeks' salary in advance. . . . You won't be any good to me as a secretary if you catch your death of pneumonia the first day.”

On the parlorcar going to Washington he handed over to her two big square black suitcases full of testimony. “Don't think for a moment there's no work connected with this job,” he said, fishing out manila envelope after manila envelope full of closely typed stenographers' notes on onionskin paper. “The other stuff was more romantic,” he said, sharpening a pencil, “but this in the longrange view is more useful.”

“I wonder,” said Mary.

“Mary dear, you are very young . . . and very sweet.” He sat back in his greenplush armchair looking at her a long time with his bulging eyes while the snowy hills streaked with green of lichened rocks and laced black with bare branches of trees filed by outside. Then he blurted out wouldn't it be fun if they got married when they got to Washington. She shook her head and went back to the problem of strikers' defense but she couldn't help smiling at him when she said she didn't want to get married just yet; he'd been so kind. She felt he was a real friend.

In Washington she fixed herself up a little apartment in a house on H Street that was being sublet cheap by Democratic officeholders who were moving out. She often cooked supper for George there. She'd never done any cooking before except camp cooking, but George was quite an expert and knew how to make Italian spaghetti and chiliconcarne and oysterstew and real French bouillabaisse. He'd get wine from the Rumanian Embassy and they'd have very cozy meals together after long days working in the office. He talked and talked about love and the importance of a healthy sexlife for men and women, so that at last she let him. He was so tender and gentle that for a while she thought maybe she really loved him. He knew all about contraceptives and was very nice and humorous about them. Sleeping with a man didn't make as much difference in her life as she'd expected it would.

The day after Harding's inauguration two seedylooking men in shapeless grey caps shuffled up to her in the lobby of the little building on G Street where George's office was. One of them was Gus Moscowski. His cheeks were hollow and he looked tired and dirty. “Hello, Miss French,” he said. “Meet the kid brother . . . not the one that scabbed, this one's on the up and up. . . . You sure do look well.” “Oh, Gus, they let you out.” He nodded. “New trial, cases dismissed. . . . But I tell you it's no fun in that cooler.” She took them up
to George's office. “I'm sure Mr. Barrow'll want to get firsthand news of the steelworkers.”

Gus made a gesture of pushing something away with his hand. “We ain't steelworkers, we're bums. . . . Your friends the senators sure sold us out pretty. Every sonofabitch ever walked across the street with a striker's blacklisted. The old man got his job back, way back at fifty cents instead of a dollar ten after the priest made him kiss the book and promise not to join the union. . . . Lots of people goin' back to the old country. Me an' the kid we pulled out, went down to Baltimore to git a job on a boat somewheres but the seamen are piled up tendeep on the wharf. . . . So we thought we might as well take in the 'nauguration and see how the fat boys looked.”

Mary tried to get them to take some money but they shook their heads and said, “We don't need a handout, we can woik.” They were just going when George came in. He didn't seem any too pleased to see them, and began to lecture them on violence; if the strikers hadn't threatened violence and allowed themselves to be misled by a lot of Bolshevik agitators, the men who were really negotiating a settlement from the inside would have been able to get them much better terms. “I won't argue with you, Mr. Barrow. I suppose you think Father Kazinski was a red and that it was Fanny Sellers that bashed in the head of a statetrooper. An' then you say you're on the side of the woikin'man.”

“And, George, even the senate committee admitted that the violence was by the deputies and statetroopers. . . . I saw it myself after all,” put in Mary.

“Of course, boys . . . I know what you're up against. . . . I hold no brief for the Steel Trust. . . . But, Mary, what I want to impress on these boys is that the workingman is often his own worst enemy in these things.”

“The woikin' man gits f'rooked whatever way you look at it,” said Gus, “and I don't know whether it's his friends or his enemies does the worst rookin'. . . . Well, we got to git a move on.”

“Boys, I'm sorry I've got so much pressing business to do. I'd like to hear about your experiences. Maybe some other time,” said George, settling down at his desk.

As they left Mary French followed them to the door and whispered to Gus, “And what about Carnegie Tech?” His eyes didn't seem so blue as they'd seemed before he went to jail. “Well, what about it?” said
Gus without looking at her and gently closed the groundglass door behind him.

That night while they were eating supper Mary suddenly got to her feet and said, “George, we're as responsible as anybody for selling out the steelworkers.” “Nonsense, Mary, it's the fault of the leaders who picked the wrong minute for the strike and then let the bosses hang a lot of crazy revolutionary notions on them. Organized labor gets stung every time it mixes in politics. Gompers knows that. We all did our best for 'em.”

Mary French started to walk back and forth in the room. She was suddenly bitterly uncontrollably angry. “That's the way they used to talk back in Colorado Springs. I might better go back and live with Mother and do charitywork. It would be better than making a living off the workingclass.”

She walked back and forth. He went on sitting there at the table she'd fixed so carefully with flowers and a white cloth, drinking little sips of wine and putting first a little butter on the corner of a cracker and then a piece of Roquefort cheese and then biting it off and then another bit of butter and another piece of cheese, munching slowly all the time. She could feel his bulging eyes traveling over her body. “We're just laborfakers,” she yelled in his face, and ran into the bedroom.

He stood over her still chewing on the cheese and crackers as he nervously patted the back of her shoulder. “What a spiteful thing to say. . . . My child, you mustn't be so hysterical. . . . This isn't the first strike that's ever come out badly. . . . Even this time there's a gain. Fairminded people all over the country have been horrified by the ruthless violence of the steelbarons. It will influence legislation. . . . Sit up and have a glass of wine. . . . Now, Mary, why don't we get married? It's too silly living like this. I have some small investments. I saw a nice little house for sale in Georgetown just the other day. This is just the time now to buy a house when prices are dropping . . . personnel being cut out of all the departments. . . . After all I've reached an age when I have a right to settle down and have a wife and kids. . . . I don't want to wait till it's too late.”