Power (34 page)

“Hold on, Dotty—please try to see this thing clearly and calmly.”

“I am clear, calm, and also stupid,” I replied. “I have just listened to Ben with both ears, but I am obviously too stupid to understand what he was saying.”

“That is not what I meant at all, child, and you know it.”

“First of all, Father, I am not a child. I am thirty-one years old, the mother of three children, and rubbed raw around the edges. Secondly, I know what you meant. You meant that there are two worlds and two moralities, one for men and one for women. And never the twain shall meet.”

“For heaven's sake, Dotty, I only call you a child to delude myself into thinking that I am still fairly young. And furthermore, when you talk that kind of suffragette nonsense, you remind me of your Aunt Alice Aimesley. Now to get back to this other thing, I don't know Cutter but I do know Mark Golden, and I have yet to hear of him mixed up in any kind of dubious business—”

“Nothing is dubious when you do it for the union. Am I right, Ben?”

Ben shook his head wearily. “I don't know what you're talking about, Dotty. At this point, there's not much difference between my leadership and the existence of the union. If the leadership goes, there won't even be scraps for anyone else to pick up and use. It's rotten enough, these days, to be a miner with the union in existence, as weak and shattered as the union is. I hate to think of what the conditions would be if there were no union.”

“Be truthful, Ben,” I said softly. “What you can't see is the absence of your leadership.”

“All right,” he nodded. “I can't see that.”

“So Mark and Al lie and scheme and degrade themselves in an idiotic little plot and Gus Empek is deflated into an empty sack—a man as decent as any who work with you, made a buffoon and a clown, and you're the man of the hour because you took Jack Brady's gun away again, and—Oh, my God, Ben, why do you do it? Why do you have to do it? Why is the leadership of that union so important to you?”

Both men sat there in silence, a long, long silence, and then Ben said,

“You don't understand, Dotty. Joe is right. You just don't understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

“How? I've tried. Suppose I told you that if I had lost out there in Chicago, I wouldn't want to live. Would you understand?”

“No.”

“Would you believe me?” he asked softly, and it took me a while before I answered,

“Yes, I guess I'd believe you, Ben.”

Later that evening, Ben pleaded fatigue from his journey and excused himself to go to bed. Father and I stayed in the parlor for a little while, he with the small end of a brandy and a cigar, and myself with my nostalgic memories of youth. After we had been sitting in silence for a while, Father said to me,

“I find it disturbing, Dotty.”

“What in particular?”

“Nothing in particular and everything. The way you and Ben tear and claw at each other. What has happened to you, and what has happened to Ben—”

“Marriages may be made in heaven, Father. But there's a good deal of hell in working them out. You know that as well as I do.”

“Do I, Dotty? Perhaps I had a more fortunate marriage than most. I used to believe that love solved a good many things. Forgive a prying old man if I ask you whether you still love Ben.”

“I don't know,” I replied slowly.

“How can you not know, Dotty? Isn't this something one knows? Always?”

“I'm not sure. It's harder to love a living person than a dead person.”

The reaction, to my surprise, was of a man who had been struck in the face, and he said, “That was cruel and uncalled for, Dotty.”

“Of course—I know! I'm so stupid!” I went over to him and put my arms around him from behind. “But I didn't mean what you think, Daddy dear. Sometimes I love Ben, not the way I loved him at the beginning, yet sometimes I love him, and sometimes I hate him. But mostly, there's just a dead, dull feeling that isn't love and isn't hate, and at best, it's pity.”

“Pity? Good heavens, girl, how can you pity Ben?”

“What Ben? The Ben you used to know? That great hulking coal miner who walked in here one day and proceeded to instruct us in the realities of war and history and man's destiny? Upstairs, there's a man with graying hair—a man who's getting fat and short-winded and tired, and whose life and dreams are running down the drain like sand. Daddy, you don't know how I prayed for him to lose this election—for him to be free of this curse, this damned need!”

“And do you think for one moment, Dotty, that if Ben lost this election, he'd be free?”

I let go of my father, walked over to the piano, and turned to face this slim, gentle person, who through all of my life had been so wise and understanding—and who now could not begin to comprehend my own situation.

“Daddy,” I said, “Ben is sick. It's not like heart trouble or consumption, but it's a sickness all the same. From as far back as I know him, and before that too, he dreamed of only one thing—power. It was bread and butter and meat and drink to him. It was all and everything—power!”

“Dotty—Dotty darling, you're wrong. That's one small part of Ben. I don't deny he wanted power. But what for? That's the important question—what for? So that he could take this devil's curse of mining and turn it into something human and bearable, so that he could feed the hungry and clothe the poor, so that he could ease man's suffering. That's a noble purpose and a noble cause, Dotty—and I know of no one who has ventured his fortune and dedicated his abilities to a higher end. This is the fact. Then how can you say that all Ben lives for is power?”

“Because everything else is subject to the main thing, which is power. That's why he felt that he would rather die than be driven out of the leadership.”

“Power over what, Dotty? Ben's fortunes are low. The union has shrunk to a handful, and it grows smaller month by month. You told me that yourself. Everywhere, Ben is cursed and reviled by the men of money and power. No, don't accuse him of what he opposes. Ben carries half the world on his shoulders. Don't make it harder for him, Dotty. Please.”

So argument was pointless, and we were a thousand miles apart. I kissed him good night and went upstairs. We had my old room, which had been furnished from the first with twin beds, perhaps in the hope of a sister who never came, but practically for girlhood friends who remained overnight. Nothing in it had been changed since I married and left the house. The same pink wallpaper over the white wainscot, the same Dutch hooked rugs on the floor, the same blue and white furniture, the same brass student lamp, and on the walls, the three Maxfield Parrish prints that I loved so much.

Ben sat on one of the beds, his shoes off, his face contemplative, and he glanced up and smiled as I entered. I said that I thought he would have been asleep by now.

“I've just been sitting here and thinking, Dotty. What a wonderful room this is! Someday, before she gets too old for it, I would want Norah to have a room like this.”

“I don't think one is ever too old for it.”

“Well—you know what I mean, Dotty. Norah's nine already. A few years more, and she'll have to have a young lady's room, all stiff and polished.”

“Did you look in at the children?”

He nodded. “Sound asleep. Good food, sunshine—and kids sleep well, I guess. Who decorated and furnished this room, Dotty?”

“My mother.”

“She must have been wonderful. Do you remember her well?”

“Not too well. Sometimes better—well, you know how it is. The years dull things.” I had begun to take off my clothes, not facing Ben as he said,

“You're very angry with me, aren't you, Dotty?”

“Not very angry, no. Perhaps a little upset. We're both tired, Ben, and I'd rather not talk about it any more tonight.”

“About what happened in Chicago?”

“That. Other things.”

“Dotty?”

“What, Ben?”

“Is it because of Al Cutter?”

“Ben, what on earth are you talking about?”

“I mean, is it because—I mean because of you and Al Cutter?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Dotty, for Christ's sake, do you love Al Cutter? Is that it?”

“You're not serious, Ben.”

“I am.”

“Well, I don't love Al Cutter, Ben. I'm not a schoolgirl. I don't look at someone and decide that he's the hero of my dreams. I'm a long-married woman, thirty-one years old and with three children, and I do my own cooking and cleaning. Add it up, Ben. Also, Al Cutter never kissed me, never spoke words of love to me—never even indicated that he had any desire for me.”

Suddenly, Ben put his face in his hands, his body wracked with sobs, and through his hands muttered, “Oh, Jesus, Dotty—oh, Jesus God, I've never been so low before in all my life. I didn't win anything there in Chicago. I crawled through on my belly with a few broken pieces in my hands, and I was afraid—oh, I was afraid, and all the time I was thinking, I'll lose here and with Dotty too, and then everything's gone, and I have nothing—nothing.” I went over to him, and he looked up at me and said, “Don't leave me, Dotty—please. Never leave me.”

Pressing his head to my waist, I stroked his hair and promised that I would never leave him.

Promises are broken, Al, so it was not simply the promise. It was more than that—I think you understand how much more, and it's not simple or easy either, not to be defined in terms of the faithful wife whose love for Ben Holt never faltered, but a complex of things that made it impossible, over all those years, for there to be anything between you and me. That's a part of the truth, isn't it—the complex, snarled truth that any life demands if it is to be explained? And yet short of the truth, for it would also be a lie to say that there was nothing between yourself and me. But it's not the way you write it, Al, obvious and direct, one thing coming properly after the other.

And here this letter has stretched on and on, so that I hardly remember the beginning any more. Was I making a point, Alvin, my dear, that this is a story you can't tell? But that would be true of any story, wouldn't it, and how do you follow a human soul through all of its torment and self-deceit? I don't know. There's too much to explain, and I would not want to have to explain why Ben and I were so lighthearted the following day. We laid the children down for their afternoon nap, and then he and I went out for a long walk, myself in a yellow cotton dress and Ben in blue denims and a miner's shirt. We walked all the way to Belfast Ridge, and up to the top of it, and standing there, we looked down into the valley, through the warm summer haze at the smoke of the collieries, groping for the beginning and praying, I suppose, for some destiny.

Either you accept the fact that people, in and of themselves, have no importance or that they have all importance. If Ben had been written off in the seats of the mighty, I at least felt, at that moment, that we had returned to each other. If it was an illusion, it was a pleasant illusion on that summer afternoon back in Ringman, just as my dreams were pleasant illusions, dreams of Ben not too old to take up the study of law—and the two of us living in the Ringman house. Father would have been happy to have us there, and the children would grow up as I grew up. These are old dreams, recently warmed over.

I paused in this letter to search for something, and now I have found it. Perhaps you remember the interview Fulton Grove gave the press after the convention was over. His reward for his labors was a vice-presidency in the National Confederation of Labor, and he was being questioned on Ben Holt and the Miners Union. Here is the clipping:

“And what do you think of Ben Holt's victory, Mr. Grove?”

“Victory? It was a poor imitation of a victory, if you ask me. Who was it said, ‘Another such victory and I am undone'? Or something of that sort. As far as I am concerned, Ben Holt is undone right here and now.”

“Then you ascribe no importance to his victory?”

“It was a trick. There isn't an honest bone in Ben Holt's body. It was staged and planned from A to Z.”

“Would you care to comment on the future of the International Miners Union?”

“Under Ben Holt, it has no future. Today, it's as fraudulent as Ben Holt. If they quoted true membership figures, they would not show a corporal's guard. It's a splinter, not a union. And the sooner the coal miners wake up to the fact that Ben Holt is leading them to utter disaster, the better off the entire industry will be.”

There it was, my dear Alvin, the official point of view, which held that Ben was finished—yet I had the feeling that day of someone renewed, and I think that I was very much in love with my husband as we stood on Belfast Ridge.

So much for my comments, and I hope I have not turned you from the rest of the story. Tell all of it.

 

2

This letter she signed “Your dear friend, Dorothy Holt,” and it summed up our relationship, as it also summed me up, a dry old man, looking backward a long, long distance, and trying to untangle a tangled story.

PART
V

1

A liberal acquaintance with the bottom poses the question: “What happens then?” The answer is that nothing very much happens and you remain there—which is nevertheless an enlightenment to many. It's as far as you go. I bought a suit in 1928, and it was still wearable in 1933 when I traveled by bus from Marietta, Ohio, to Pomax, Illinois. It was a gray sharkskin suit, and it had a pleasant shine all over it and it bagged at the knees, and it was also the last suit I had purchased up to this time. When the bus stopped for the passengers to refresh themselves, I bought a ham sandwich for ten cents and a cup of coffee for a nickel. It satisfied my hunger. In any case, my stomach, like the stomachs of so many at that time, appeared not only to have reduced itself in size but to have developed an aversion to rich and nourishing food.