Ragtime (4 page)

7

One day after a visit to the Tombs Evelyn Nesbit happened to notice through the rear window of the electric hansom that for the first time in days none of the reporters were following. Usually Hearst and Pulitzer reporters dogged her in packs.

On an impulse she told the driver to turn and go east. A servant of Harry Thaw’s mother, the driver permitted himself a frown. Evelyn took no notice. The car moved through the city, its motor humming in the warm afternoon. It was a black Detroit Electric with hard rubber tires. After a while through the window Evelyn saw the peddlers and pushcarts of the Lower East Side.

Dark-eyed faces peered into the hansom. Men with big moustaches smiled through their gold teeth. Street workers sat on the curbs in the heat and fanned themselves with their derbies. Boys in knickers ran alongside the car with bulky loads of piecework on their shoulders. Evelyn saw stores with Hebrew signs in the windows, the Hebrew letters looking to her eyes like arrangements of bones. She saw the iron fire escaped on the tenements as tiers of cellblocks. Nags in their yokes lifted their bowed necks to gaze at her. Ragmen struggling with their great junk-loaded two-wheeled carts, women selling breads from baskets carried in their arms: they all looked. The driver was nervous. He wore gray livery with black leather jodhpurs. A girl in a pinafore and high-laced shoes sat playing in the muck along the curbstone. A little dirty-faced girl. Stop the car, Evelyn said. The driver run around and opened her door. Evelyn stepped into the street. She knelt down. The girl has straight black hair that fitted her head like a helmet. She had olive skin and eyes so brown they were black. She gazed at Evelyn without curiosity. She was the most beautiful child Evelyn had ever seen. A piece of clothesline was tied around her wrist. Evelyn stood up, followed the clothesline, and found herself looking into the face of a mad old man with a closely cropped gray beard. The end of the line was tied around the old man’s waist. He wore a soft cap and a collar with a tie. He stood on the sidewalk in front of a display cart of framed silhouette portraits pinned to a black velvet curtain. He was a silhouette artist. With nothing but a small scissors and some glue he would make your image by cutting a piece of white paper and mounting it on a black background. The whole thing with the frame cost fifteen cents. Fifteen cents, lady, the old man said. Why do you have this child tied with a rope, Evelyn said. The old man gazed at her finery. He laughed and shook his head and talked to himself in Yiddish. He turned his back to her. A crowd had gathered when the car stopped. A tall workingman stepped forward and removed his hat with respect before translating for Evelyn what the old man had said. Please, missus, he said, so the little girl is not stolen from him. Evelyn had the feeling the translator was also something of a diplomat. The old artist was laughing bitterly and thrusting his chin in her direction, obviously commenting on her. He says the rich lady may not be aware that young girls in the slums are stolen every day from their parents and sold into slavery. Evelyn was shocked. This child can’t be more than ten, she said. The old man began to shout and pointed across the street at a tenement house, and turned and pointed toward the corner and turned and pointed to the other corner. Please, missus, the tall workingman said, married women, children, anyone they can get their hands on. They defile them and then in shame the female gives her life to vagrancy. Houses on this very street are used for this purpose. Where are the child’s parents, Evelyn demanded. The old man was now talking to the crowd, beating his breast and pointing his finger in the air. A woman in a black shawl shook her head and moaned in sympathy. The old man took off his hat and tugged at his hair. Even the tall workingman forgot to translate, so moved was he by the account. Please, missus, he finally said, this man himself is the child’s father. He pointed to the artist’s torn sleeve. His own wife, to feed them, offered herself and he has now driven her from his home and mourns her as we mourn the dead. His hair has turned white in the last month. He is thirty-two years old.

The old man, weeping and biting his lip, turned to Evelyn and saw now that she too was moved. For a moment everyone standing there on the corner shared his misfortune—Evelyn, the chauffeur, the workingman, the woman in the black shawl, the onlookers. Then one person walked away. Then another. The crowd dispersed. Evelyn made her way to the little girl still sitting at the curb. She knelt down, her eyes dewy, and looked into the face of the dry-eyed girl. Hey pumpkin, she said.

Thus began Evelyn Nesbit’s concern for the thirty-two-year-old geriatric artist and his daughter. The man had a long Jewish name that she couldn’t pronounce so she took to calling him Tateh, the name by which the little girl called him. Tateh was president of the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side. He was a proud man. Evelyn discovered that there was no way to approach him except by coming to have her silhouette done. Over a period of two weeks the old man executed a hundred and forty silhouette portraits of Evelyn. After each one she would hand him fifteen cents. Sometimes she demanded a portrait of the little girl. Tateh executed over ninety of these, and he took more time with them. Then Evelyn asked for double portraits of herself and the little girl. At this the old man looked directly at her and a terrible Hebraic judgment seemed to flash from his eyes. Nevertheless he did as he was asked. As time went on it became apparent to Evelyn that while people sometimes stopped to watch the old man work, very few people asked to have their portraits done. He began to create more and more intricate silhouettes, full-figured, with backgrounds, of Evelyn, of the little girl, of a drayman’s horse plodding by, of five men in stiff collars sitting in an open car. With his scissors he suggested not merely outlines but textures, moods, character, despair. Most of these are today in private collections. Evelyn came nearly every afternoon and stayed for as long as she could. She dressed down to be as inconspicuous as possible. Following a Thaw practice she paid great sums of money to the chauffeur to keep him quiet. Gossip columnists began to interfere from Evelyn’s disappearances that she was engaging in reckless liaisons, and her name was linked with dozen of men around town. The less she was seen the more slanderous the reports became. She didn’t care. She sneaked off to her new love interest on the Lower East Side. She wore a shawl over her head and tattered black moth-eaten sweater over her shirtwaist; the chauffeur kept these for her under the car rug. She went to Tateh’s corner, stood for her portrait and feasted her eyes on the little girl at the end of the clothesline. She was infatuated. And all this time there was no man in her life other than her mad husband, Harry K. Thaw. Unless she wanted to consider her secret admirer, the young man with the high cheekbones and blond moustaches who followed her everywhere she went. She had seen him first at Tateh’ corner, standing across the street and turning his eyes away when she challenged him with her gaze. She knew her mother-in-law employed private detectives but she decided he was too shy to be a detective. He had learned where she lived and what her daily routine was, but he never approached her. She felt not intimidated by his attention but protected. Intuitively she felt his admiration like a keenness in her own breath. At night she dreamed of the little girl, woke up, thought of her. Plans for the future flashed in her mind like fireworks and quickly disappeared. She was anxious, overwrought, aroused, unaccountably happy. She would testify on her husband’s behalf and do it well. She was hopeful that he would be found guilty and locked up for life.

The little girl in the pinafore held her hand but would not say anything to her. Even to Tateh she spoke few words. Tateh said no one mourns like a child, not even a lover. Evelyn realized that the old man’s pride would have driven her off long ago if he had not perceived that he attention to the little girl were helpful. One day Evelyn came for her portrait and neither father nor daughter was to be seen. Fortunately she had learned where they lived, on Hester Street, over a public bath. She went there now, walking quickly, not daring to think what was the matter. Hester Street was teeming marketplace of peddlers who sold vegetables and fruits and chickens and breads from pushcarts lined up along the curb. The sidewalks were glutted with shoppers, overflowing garbage cans stood in ranks beside the entrance stairs of every house. Bedding hung from fire escapes. Evelyn rushed up a flight of iron stairs and into a dark incredibly foul-smelling hallway. Tateh and the little girl lived on the top floor, in two small rooms in the back. She knocked on the door. She knocked again. A moment later it opened a crack; there was a chain latch in place. What is the matter, Evelyn said. Let me in.

Tateh was scandalized by her visit. He stood in only his shirt and pants held up by suspenders and he wore house slippers. He insisted that the font door be left open despite the rank winds that blew up the stairwell, and quickly put on his jacket and shoes. He hurriedly made up his cot, throwing over it a brightly colored spread. The little girl lay on a brass bed in the other room. She was ill with a fever. The two rooms were lit by candle. The bedroom, although it had a window, was almost as dark as the front room. It looked out on an air shaft. The whole place was no bigger than a closet. Yet as Evelyn’s eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness she perceived that the home was scrupulously clean. Her arrival had caused a storm of consternation in the old artist, who paced up and down in the candlelight and did not know what to do about her. In great agitation he smoked a cigarette which he held between his thumb and forefinger, palm up, in the European style. I will stay with the child, Evelyn insisted, while you go to work. Finally the old man gave in, if only to avoid the terrible strain on himself of her presence in his home. He rushed out carrying his display stand with his black velvet curtains folded over his arms and his wooden box, like a suitcase, that held his materials. Evelyn closed the door after him. She looked at the glass cabinet, at the few cups and plates of chipped crockery. She examined the bedding in the drawers, the scrubbed oak table and chairs where the family ate. There was a pile of unfinished knee pants on a sewing machine by the bedroom window. The machine had a filigreed iron treadle. The window in the bedroom sparkled with the reflection of the candle. The brass of the thin little bed was shining. Evelyn felt a strong kinship with the departed mother. The girl looked at her from the pillows and neither smiled nor said anything. Evelyn removed the shawl, the old sweater, and put them down on a chair. In a packing crate laid on its end beside the bed, like an end table, books in Yiddish were stacked tightly. There were books in English too, on socialism, and pamphlets on the covers of which workingmen with powerful linked arms were marching forward. None of them looked like the frail white-haired Tateh. There were no mirrors on the walls and no photographs anywhere of the family, of the missing wife and mother. She found a tub of galvanized tin in the front room. She found a pail and went down the stairs and drew from the sink on the ground floor a pail of water. She warmed the water on the coal stove in the front room and went into the bedroom with the tub, the pail of water and a thin starched towel. The little girl clutched the covers about her. Evelyn gently removed the covers and sat her up on the edge of the bed and raised her nightgown and stood her up and lifted the nightgown over her head, feeling like the sun the warm exhalations of her young body. Come stand a moment in the tub, she said and knelt in front of the girl and bathed her with the warm water scooping it in her hands and caressing the child with her hands of water and doing it again, on her tawny shoulders, her nut-brown budded nipples, her face, her downy back, her thin thighs, the smooth slope of her stomach, her girlhood, the sluiced water from her young fevered body falling like rain in the tub as Evelyn bathed her with her hands. Then with the towel folded in quarters she gently patted the little girl dry and dressed her afresh in another gown she had found in the drawer—a larger gown this time of thin cotton, much too big, funny, so that the girl laughed. Evelyn smoothed the sheets and plumped up the pillows and settled the girl in the bed again and felt her forehead and it was cool. The little girl’s dark eyes shone in the dusk. Evelyn combed her black hair and touched her face and leaned over her, and the little girl’s arms went around Evelyn’s neck and she kissed her on the lips.

This was the day Evelyn Nesbit considered kidnapping the little girl and leaving Tateh to his fate. The old artist had never inquired of her name and knew nothing about her. It could be done. Instead she threw herself into the family’s life with redoubled effort, coming with food, linens and whatever else she could move past the old man’s tormented pride. She was insane with the desire to become one of them and drew Tateh out in conversation and learned from the girl how to sew knee pants. For hours each day, each evening, she lived as a woman in the Jewish slums, and was driven home by the Thaw chauffeur from a prearranged place many blocks away, always in despair. She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.

8

One day Tateh invited her to a meeting of which the Socialist Artists’ Alliance of the Lower East Side was a part sponsor, along with seven other organizations. It was an important event. The features speaker was to be none other than Emma Goldman. Carefully Tateh explained that although he was unalterably opposed to Goldman, she being an anarchist and he a socialist, he had great respect for her personal courage and integrity; and that he had therefore agreed that some sort of temporary accord between the socialists and the anarchists was advisable, if only for the evening, because the funds raised for the occasion would go to support the shirtwaist makers, who were then on strike, and the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who was going to be condemned and executed by the Spanish government for fomenting general strike in Spain. In five minutes Evelyn was immersed in the bracing linguistics of radical idealism. She didn’t dare confess to Tateh that she had no idea socialism and anarchism were not the same thing, or that the thought of seeing the notorious Emma Goldman frightened her. She pulled her shawl over her head, and holding the little girl’s hand tightly, walked behind Tateh as he strode north to the Workingmen’s Hall on East 14th Street. But she did at one point turned around to see if her strange shy admirer was following, and he was, half a block behind, his lean face hidden in the shadows of his straw boater.