Big Money (57 page)

Ada's apartment came in very handy the night of the big meeting in Madison Square Garden to welcome the classwar prisoners released from Atlanta. Mary French who had been asked to sit on the platform overheard some members of the committee saying that they had no place to put up Ben Compton. They were looking for a quiet hideout where he could have a rest and shake the D.J. operatives who'd been following him around everywhere since he'd gotten to New York. Mary went up to them and in a whisper suggested her place. So after the meeting she waited in a yellow taxicab at the corner of Twentyninth and Madison until a tall pale man with a checked cap pulled way down over his face got in and sat down shakily beside her. When the cab started he put his steelrimmed glasses back on. “Look back and see if a grey sedan's following us,” he said. “I don't see anything,” said Mary. “Oh, you wouldn't know it if you saw it,” he grumbled.

To be on the safe side they left the cab at the Grand Central station and walked without speaking a way up Park Avenue and then west on a cross street and down Madison again. Mary plucked his sleeve to stop him in front of the door. Once in the apartment he made Mary shoot the bolt and let himself drop into a chair without taking off his cap or his overcoat.

He didn't say anything. His shoulders were shaking. Mary didn't like to stare at him. She didn't know what to do. She puttered around the livingroom, lit the gaslogs, smoked a cigarette and then she went into the kitchenette to make coffee. When she got back he'd taken off his things and was warming his bigknuckled hands at the gaslogs. “You must excuse me, comrade,” he said in a dry hoarse voice. “I'm all in.”

“Oh, don't mind me,” said Mary. “I thought you might want some coffee.”

“No coffee . . . hot milk,” he said hurriedly. His teeth were chattering as if he were cold. She came back with a cup of hot milk. “Could I have some sugar in it?” he said and almost smiled.

“Of course,” she said. “You made a magnificent speech, so restrained and kind of fiery. . . . It was the best in the whole meeting.” “You didn't think I seemed agitated? I was afraid I'd go to pieces and not be able to finish. . . . You're sure nobody knows this address, or the phonenumber? You're sure we weren't followed?” “I'm sure nobody'll find you here on Madison Avenue. . . . It's the last place they'd look.” “I know they are trailing me,” he said with a shudder and dropped into a chair again. They were silent for a long time. Mary could hear the gaslogs and the little sucking sips he drank the hot milk with. Then she said:

“It must have been terrible.”

He got to his feet and shook his head as if he didn't want to talk about it. He was a young man lankilybuilt, but he walked up and down in front of the gaslogs with a strangely elderly dragging walk. His face was white as a mushroom with sags of brownish skin under the eyes.

“You see,” he said, “it's like people who've been sick and have to learn to walk all over again . . . don't pay any attention.”

He drank several cups of hot milk and then he went to bed. She went into the other bedroom and closed the door and lay down on the bed with a pile of books and pamphlets. She had some legal details to look up.

She had just gotten sleepy and crawled under the covers herself when a knocking woke her. She snatched at her bathrobe and jumped up and opened the door. Ben Compton stood there trembling wearing a long unionsuit. He'd taken off his glasses and they'd left a red band across the bridge of his nose. His hair was rumpled and his knobby feet were bare. “Comrade,” he stammered, “d'you mind if I . . . d'you mind if I . . . d'you mind if I lie on the bed beside you? I can't sleep. I can't stay alone.” “You poor boy. . . . Get into bed, you are shivering,” she said. She lay down beside him still wearing her bathrobe and slippers.

“Shall I put out the light?” He nodded. “Would you like some aspirin?” He shook his head. She pulled the covers up under his chin as if
he were a child. He lay there on his back staring with wideopen black eyes at the ceiling. His teeth were clenched. She put her hand on his forehead as she would on a child's to see if he was feverish. He shuddered and drew away. “Don't touch me,” he said.

Mary put out the light and tried to compose herself to sleep on the bed beside him. After a while he grabbed her hand and held it tight. They lay there in the dark side by side staring up at the ceiling. Then she felt his grip on her hand loosen; he was dropping off to sleep. She lay there beside him with her eyes open. She was afraid the slightest stir might wake him. Every time she fell asleep she dreamed that detectives were breaking in the door and woke up with a shuddering start.

Next morning when she went out to go to the office he was still asleep. She left a latchkey for him and a note explaining that there was food and coffee in the icebox. When she got home that afternoon her heart beat fast as she went up the elevator.

Her first thought after she'd opened the door was that he'd gone. The bedroom was empty. Then she noticed that the bathroom door was closed and that a sound of humming came from there. She tapped. “That you, Comrade Compton?” she said.

“Be right out.” His voice sounded firmer, more like the deep rich voice he'd addressed the meeting in. He came out smiling, long pale legs bristling with black hairs sticking oddly out from under Mary's lavender bathrobe.

“Hello, I've been taking a hot bath. This is the third I've taken. Doctor said they were a good thing. . . . You know, relax. . . .” He pulled out a pinkleather edition of Oscar Wilde's
Dorian Gray
from under his arm and shook it in front of her. “Reading this tripe. . . . I feel better. . . . Say, comrade, whose apartment is this anyway?”

“A friend of mine who's a violinist. . . . She's away till fall.” “I wish she was here to play for us. I'd love to hear some good music. . . . Maybe you're musical.” Mary shook her head.

“Could you eat some supper? I've brought some in.” “I'll try . . . nothing too rich . . . I've gotten very dyspeptic. . . . So you thought I spoke all right?” “I thought it was wonderful,” she said.

“After supper I'll look at the papers you brought in. . . . If the kept press only wouldn't always garble what we say.”

She heated some peasoup and made toast and bacon and eggs and he ate up everything she gave him. While they were eating they had a
nice cozy talk about the movement. She told him about her experiences in the great steelstrike. She could see he was beginning to take an interest in her. They'd hardly finished eating before he began to turn white. He went to the bathroom and threw up.

“Ben, you poor kid,” she said when he came back looking haggard and shaky. “It's awful.”

“Funny,” he said in a weak voice. “When I was in the Bergen County jail over there in Jersey I came out feeling fine . . . but this time it's hit me.” “Did they treat you badly?” His teeth clenched and the muscles of his jaw stiffened, but he shook his head. Suddenly he grabbed her hand and his eyes filled with tears. “Mary French, you're being too good to me,” he said. Mary couldn't help throwing her arms around him and hugging him. “You don't know what it means to find a . . . to find a sweet girl comrade,” he said, pushing her gently away. “Now let me see what the papers did to what I said.”

After Ben had been hiding out in the apartment for about a week the two of them decided one Saturday night that they loved each other. Mary was happier than she'd ever been in her life. They romped around like kids all Sunday and went out walking in the park to hear the band play in the evening. They threw sponges at each other in the bathroom and teased each other while they were getting undressed; they slept tightly clasped in each other's arms.

In spite of never going out except at night, in the next few days Ben's cheeks began to have a little color in them and his step began to get some spring into it. “You've made me feel like a man again, Mary,” he'd tell her a dozen times a day. “Now I'm beginning to feel like I could do something again. After all the revolutionary labor movement's just beginning in this country. The tide's going to turn, you watch. It's begun with Lenin and Trotzky's victories in Russia.” There was something moving to Mary in the way he pronounced those three words: Lenin, Trotzky, Russia.

After a couple of weeks he began to go to conferences with radical leaders. She never knew if she'd find him in or not when she got home from work. Sometimes it was three or four in the morning before he came in tired and haggard. Always his pockets bulged with literature and leaflets. Ada's fancy livingroom gradually filled up with badlyprinted newspapers and pamphlets and mimeographed sheets. On the mantelpiece among Ada's dresdenchina figures playing musical instruments were stacked the three volumes of
Capital
with places
marked in them with pencils. In the evening he'd read Mary pieces of a pamphlet he was working on, modeled on Lenin's
What's to Be Done?
and ask her with knitted brows if he was clear, if simple workers would understand what he meant.

One Sunday in August he made her go with him to Coney Island where he'd made an appointment to meet his folks; he'd figured it would be easier to see them in a crowded place. He didn't want the dicks to trail him home and then be bothering the old people or his sister who had a good job as secretary to a prominent businessman. When they met it was some time before the Comptons noticed Mary at all. They sat at a big round table at Stauch's and drank nearbeer. Mary found it hard to sit still in her chair when the Comptons all turned their eyes on her at once. The old people were very polite with gentle manners but she could see that they wished she hadn't come. Ben's sister Gladys gave her one hard mean stare and then paid no attention to her. Ben's brother Sam, a stout prosperouslooking Jew who Ben had said had a small business, a sweatshop probably, was polite and oily. Only Izzy, the youngest brother, looked anything like a workingman and he was more likely a gangster. He treated her with kidding familiarity, she could see he thought of her as Ben's moll. They all admired Ben, she could see; he was the bright boy, the scholar, but they felt sorry about his radicalism as if it was an unfortunate sickness he had contracted. Still his name in the paper, the applause in Madison Square Garden, the speeches calling him a workingclass hero had impressed them. After Ben and Mary had left the Comptons and were going into the subwaystation, Ben said bitterly in her ear, “Well, that's the Jewish family. . . . What do you think of it? Some straitjacket. . . . It'ud be the same if I killed a man or ran a string of whorehouses . . . even in the movement you can't break away from them.” “But, Ben, it's got its good side . . . they'd do anything in the world for you . . . my mother and me we really hate each other.”

Ben needed clothes and so did Mary; she never had any of the money from the job left over from week to week, so for the first time in her life she wrote her mother asking for five hundred dollars. Her mother sent back a check with a rather nice letter saying that she'd been made Republican State Committeewoman and that she admired Mary's independence because she'd always believed women had just as much right as men to earn their own living and maybe women in politics would have a better influence than she'd once thought, and
certainly Mary was showing grit in carving out a career for herself, but she did hope she'd soon come around to seeing that she could have just as interesting a career if she'd come back to Colorado Springs and occupy the social position her mother's situation entitled her to. Ben was so delighted when he saw the check he didn't ask what Mary had got the money for. “Five hundred bucks is just what I needed,” he said. “I hadn't wanted to tell you but they want me to lead a strike over in Bayonne . . . rayonworkers . . . you know, the old munitionplants made over to make artificial silk. . . . It's a tough town and the workers are so poor they can't pay their union dues . . . but they've got a fine radical union over there. It's important to get a foothold in the new industries . . . that's where the old sellout organizations of the A.F. of L. are failing. . . . Five hundred bucks'll take care of the printing bill.”

“Oh, Ben, you are not rested yet. I'm so afraid they'll arrest you again.”

He kissed her. “Nothing to worry about.”

“But, Ben, I wanted you to get some clothes.”

“This is a fine suit. What's the matter with this suit? Didn't Uncle Sam give me this suit himself? . . . Once we get things going we'll get you over to do publicity for us . . . enlarge your knowledge of the clothing industry. Oh, Mary, you're a wonderful girl to have raised that money.”

That fall when Ada came back, Mary moved out and got herself a couple of small rooms on West Fourth Street in the Village, so that Ben could have some place to go when he came over to New York. That winter she worked tremendously hard, still handling her old job and at the same time doing publicity for the strikes Ben led in several Jersey towns. “That's nothing to how hard we'll have to work when we have soviets in America,” Ben would say when she'd ask him didn't he think they'd do better work if they didn't always try to do so many things at once.

She never knew when Ben was going to turn up. Sometimes he'd be there every night for a week and sometimes he would be away for a month and she'd only hear from him through newsreleases about meetings, picketlines broken up, injunctions fought in the courts. Once they decided they'd get married and have a baby, but the comrades were calling for Ben to come and organize the towns around
Passaic and he said it would distract him from his work and that they were young and that there'd be plenty of time for that sort of thing after the revolution. Now was the time to fight. Of course she could have the baby if she wanted to but it would spoil her usefulness in the struggle for several months and he didn't think this was the time for it. It was the first time they'd quarreled. She said he was heartless. He said they had to sacrifice their personal feelings for the working-class, and stormed out of the house in a temper. In the end she had an abortion but she had to write her mother again for money to pay for it.