Ragtime (20 page)

But before the plan could be undertaken Sarah decided on a course of action of her own. As it happened, this particular season was the spring of an election year: a candidate on the national Republican ticket, Mr. Taft’s Vice-President, James Sherman, was to be in New Rochelle that evening to speak at a Republican party dinner to be held at the Tidewaters Hotel. She had remembered overhearing Father discuss his reasons for not attending the event. Knowing little of government, nor appreciating the degree of national unimportance of her Coalhouse’s trials, Sarah conceived the idea of petitioning the United States on his behalf. It was the second of the frightened and desperate acts provoked from her innocence. She waited in the evening until her child was safely asleep, and wrapping a shawl about her head, left the house without telling any member of the family and ran down the hill to North Avenue. She was shoeless. She ran swiftly as a child. She was prepared to run all the way to the hotel but instead found a streetcar coming along, its interior lights flickering, the driver tolling its bell angrily as she dashed across the tracks just in front of it. She paid the fare and rode downtown.

An evening wind came up and in the dark sky great
heavy clouds massed for a rainstorm. She stood in front of the hotel among a small crowd of people awaiting the arrival of the great man. Car after car drove up and gave forth this dignitary or that. A few windswept drops of rain spattered the sidewalk. A carpet had been laid from the curb to the hotel doors. Not only the local police in their white evening gloves but a platoon of militia were on hand, keeping the entrance cleared and pushing the crowd back from the street in anticipation of the arrival of the Vice-President’s car. The militia were in constant attendance, as well as plainclothesmen of the Secret Service which had been commissioned to protect presidents and vice-presidents by Theodore Roosevelt after the assassination of President McKinley. As a matter of fact Roosevelt had come out of retirement this season to run against his old friend Taft. Wilson was the Democratic candidate, Debs the Socialist, and the four campaigns whipped back and forth across the country, blowing up hopes on the land like the winds that ruffled the great plains. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just a week or so before, Roosevelt had arrived to make a speech. Leaving the railroad station and walking to a car he had been kept separate from a welcoming crowd. One man stepped out of the crowd and aimed a pistol at point-blank range. Shots rang out. A bullet tore through the spectacle case in Roosevelt’s breast pocket, ripped a hole in the fifty folded pages of his speech and lodged in his rib. He was stunned. The assassin was wrestled to the ground. There were shouts. Roosevelt examined his wound and was satisfied it was not serious. He went on to make
his speech before he allowed doctors to treat him. But the acrid smoke of the act still lingered in the public mind. Anyone commissioned to guard a personage could not help thinking of the shooting of Teddy Roosevelt. New York City’s mayor, William J. Gaynor, had been bloodied by an assassin’s bullets not too long before. Guns were going off everywhere.

When the Vice-President’s car, a Panhard, rolled up to the curb and the man himself stepped out, a cheer went up. Sunny Jim Sherman was a New York State politician with many friends in Westchester. He was a round balding man and in such ill health that he would not survive the campaign. Sarah broke through the line and ran toward him calling, in her confusion, President! President! Her arm was extended and her black hand reached toward him. He shrank from the contact. Perhaps in the dark windy evening of impending storm it seemed to Sherman’s guards that Sarah’s black hand was a weapon. A militiaman stepped forward and, with the deadly officiousness of armed men who protect the famous, brought the butt of his Springfield against Sarah’s chest as hard as he could. She fell. A Secret Service man jumped on top of her. The Vice-President disappeared into the hotel. In the confusion and shouting that followed, Sarah was put in a police wagon and driven away.

Sarah was held at the police station overnight. She was coughing blood and in the early-morning hours it occurred to the sergeant in charge that perhaps she ought to be looked at by a doctor. She had puzzled them all, answering no questions, looking at them with
eyes of fear and pain, and had one of them not recalled hearing her cry President! President! they were prepared to regard her as a deaf-mute. What were you doing, they asked her. What did you think you were doing? She was transferred to the hospital in the morning. It was a gray overcast day, the Vice-President was gone, the festivities were over, the street sweepers pushed their brooms in front of the hotel, and the charge against Sarah was reduced from attempted assassination to disturbing the peace. She lay in the hospital. Her sternum and several ribs were fractured. At home, on Broadview Avenue, Mother heard the baby cry and cry, and finally she went upstairs to see what was the matter. Some hours passed before the family’s alarms were connected by a police officer to the colored girl who had been put in the hospital. Father coming from his business and Mother from the house, they found Sarah in a bed on the public ward. She was sleeping, her forehead was dry and hot and a bubble of blood on the corner of her mouth inflated and deflated with each breath. By the next day Sarah had developed a pneumonia. They pieced together the story from the few things she said. She paid little attention to them and kept asking for Coalhouse. They arranged to have her placed in a private room. Not knowing where Coalhouse lived they put in a call to the Manhattan Casino and reached the manager of the Clef Club Orchestra. In this way Coalhouse was located and a few hours later he was sitting by Sarah’s bedside.

Mother and Father waited outside the room. When they looked in again Coalhouse was on his knees beside
the bed. His head was bowed and with his two hands he held the hand of Sarah. They retreated. Afterward they heard the sepulchral sounds of a grown man’s grief. Mother went home. She held the baby constantly. The family was devastated. They could not seem to keep warm. Everyone wore sweaters. Younger Brother fired the furnace. Toward the end of the week Sarah died.

T
he funeral was made in Harlem. It was lavish. Sarah’s coffin was bronze. The hearse was a custom Pierce Arrow Opera Coach with an elongated passenger compartment and a driver’s cab open to the weather. The top was railed with brass and banked with masses of flowers. Black ribbon flew from the four corners of the roof. The car was so highly polished the boy could see in its rear doors a reflection of the entire street. Everything was black including the sky. The street curved to a precipitous horizon. There were several town cars for carrying the mourners to the cemetery. The mourners were mostly musicians, associates of Coalhouse in the Clef Club Orchestra. They were Negro men with closely cropped hair, tightly buttoned dark suits, rounded collars and black ties. The women with them wore dresses that brushed the tops of their shoes, wide-brimmed hats, and small furs around their shoulders. When the mourners were in the cars and the doors were shut and the chauffeurs had got in behind their wheels, everyone heard a fanfare and there came up the street to take its place in the procession an open omnibus with a five-piece brass band in tuxedos. Coalhouse Walker paid for the funeral
with the money he had saved for his wedding. He had secured a plot for Sarah through his membership in the Negro Musicians’ Benevolent Association. The cemetery was in Brooklyn. The band played dirges through the quiet streets of Harlem and all the way downtown. The cortege moved slowly. Children ran behind it and people on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The band played as the cars slowly crossed the Brooklyn Bridge high over the East River. Passengers on the trolley cars along the outer lanes of the bridge stood up in their seats to see the grand parade. The sun shone. Gulls rose from the water. They flew between the suspension cables and settled along the railing as the last of the cars went by.

S
pring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover. But the spring was joyful and even in pain he wore a smile. Everywhere the sap rose and the birds sang. Upstate, at Matteawan State Prison Farm, Harry K. Thaw nimbly jumped over a ditch in a road and stepped on the running board of a waiting Locomobile. He hooked his elbow about the roof post, gave an exultant cry, and the car drove off. Thaw escaped to Canada, leaving a trail of outraged
waitresses and stunned
hôteliers
. He abducted and whipped a teenage boy—he was beginning to work out his problems. Eventually he came back across the border. He was discovered on a train near Buffalo and ran through the cars giggling and panting as police detectives set up pursuit. In the dining car he turned and threw heavy silvered individual coffeepots he plucked from the tables of astonished diners. He climbed up between the cars and ran along the top of the train in a kind of simian lope, leaping down upon the observation platform and standing with his arms outstretched to the sun as the police burst through the door and grabbed him.

Thaw would not divulge the name of the person who helped him escape. Just call me Houdini, he said. An enterprising reporter decided to find the great magician and solicit a comment. He was that kind of reporter expert in the stupid and inconsequential news story so loved by the papers of the time. Houdini was found in a cemetery in Queens where he was observing the spring on his knees beside his mother’s grave. He looked up with the swollen and laughable face of grief. The reporter stole away. All around the graveyard the dogwood was in flower and the fallen magnolia petals lay in circles under the trees.

Houdini wore a black wool suit and the sleeve of the jacket was torn near the shoulder. His mother had been dead for some months but every morning he awoke with his wound as fresh and painful as if she had died the night before. He had canceled several bookings. He shaved only when he remembered to, which was not
often, and with his reddened eyes and stubble and baggy suit he looked like anything but the snappy magician of international fame.

It is a Jewish custom to leave small stones at the gravesite to show that a visit has been made. Mrs. Cecelia Weiss’s burial mound was covered with pebbles and small stones, one upon another, so that a kind of pyramid was forming. He thought of her at rest in the coffin under the earth. He wept bitterly. He wanted to be next to her. He remembered his attempt to escape from a coffin, the terror when he realized he could not. The coffin had a trick lid but he had not anticipated the weight of the earth. He had clawed at the earth, feeling its monumental weight. He had screamed into its impenetrable silence. He knew what it was to be sealed in the earth but he felt now it was the only place for him. What good was life without his beloved little mother?

He hated the spring. The air filled his nose and mouth like clotted soil.

In his brownstone on 113th Street near Riverside Drive, Houdini arranged framed photographs of his mother to suggest her continuing presence. One close-up he laid on the pillow of her bed. He placed an enlarged photo of her seated in a chair and smiling in the very chair in which she had posed. There was a picture of her in a hat and coat walking up the stairs from the street to the front door. He hung this on the inside of the door. One of her prized possessions had been an oak music box with a glass window in its lid so that one could see the large tined disc in rotation. There
were several discs to choose from, but her favorite had been the one that played “Gaudeamus Igitur” on one side and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” on the other. Houdini cranked up the music box and played these tunes every evening. He dreamed they were her voice. He had saved the letters she had written to him over the years and now had them translated into English and typed so that he could read them easily and relive them without fear of their turning to dust from overuse. He stood in the door of her closet and breathed the redolence of her wardrobe.