Terrible Virtue (4 page)

“Helps what?”

“Her limp.”

“Her limp!” I wrestled my voice under control again. “Peggy does not have a limp. She has the normal—the perfectly normal—unsteadiness of a toddler learning to walk.”

“The doctor—” he started again, but I didn't let him finish. I picked up the brace and, holding it away from me as if it were contaminated, crossed the kitchen to the back door.

“Where are you going?”

I didn't answer.

He started after me, but I was too fast for him. I slammed the door behind me.

It was only two blocks to the river. I ran the first block, then, when I was sure he wasn't after me, slowed down. Sometimes I think Bill was a little afraid of me.

A sliver of moon glowed dully through a thin scrim of clouds. The water flowed black and oily in the dim light. As I stood staring down at it, I felt the steel of the brace icy in my hand.

I wound my arm back the way my brothers had taught me when they'd deigned to play ball with me. The brace was heavy, but I put all my strength into it as I arced my arm forward, opened my hand, and let it fly. The splash broke the silence. A spray of phosphorescence exploded into the night. I went on standing there until the water went smooth again.

SIX WEEKS LATER,
we welded the last pieces of glass into the rose window. Two days after that, on a snowy morning in December, we moved into the dream house. It wasn't quite finished, but who needs insulation when you have a rose window glowing at the top of the stairs? As I directed the movers—the sofa there, the end table there, the armoire upstairs—I tried to ignore the slushy footprints they tracked across the gleaming hardwood floor. Helga, the German maid, kept mopping.

They deposited the last boxes and left. The wind rattled the expensive windows Bill had insisted on installing, and beyond them snow swirled, but he cranked up the furnace, and we climbed the stairs to our new bedroom.

He closed the door behind us, and we stood grinning at each other. We had come a long way from moonlit fields, dripping trees, and borrowed barns and garages, but our desire was still as
fierce and raw as it had been in the open air. We got into the big new bed and set about consecrating our dream house.

THE SHOUTS CRASHED
into my sleep.
“Feuer! Feuer!”
the maid's voice rose from downstairs. I grabbed a robe and sprinted down the hall to Peggy's room. Bill was right behind me, heading for the boys across the hall. But I wasn't accustomed to the new house, and in the darkness I careened against one wall, banged into another, and stumbled on. Smoke blinded me. The crackling of flames was loud as thunder. My hands groped for the doorknob, found it, and pushed open the door. I could barely make out the crib in the smoky darkness. I grabbed Peggy and the bedclothes in a single movement and, hugging her to me with one arm, felt my way out of the room. Through the smoke, I made out Bill with a boy in each arm.

I retraced my way back down the unfamiliar hall to where the stairs should be and reached out a foot, praying there would be something beneath it. When I felt the first step, I pounded down. Flames leapt from the kitchen, licking their way along the hall. I buried Peggy's face against my chest and hurdled through the front door. My slippers sank into the snow. I began to run.

“Keep going,” Bill shouted.

I heard the boys' terrified cries behind me. Peggy's screams seemed to come from my own throat. The wind-whipped fire roared above us. I hunched myself around her to shield her from the falling debris and kept running. A terrifying noise, like the world cracking open, split the night. Only when we were across
the street, standing shivering in a neighbor's yard among a group of women with nightdresses hanging out of their coats and faces rosy with the reflection of the flames, did I turn to look back. A dazzling glass shower, red as blood, was still raining down.

When we went back the next morning, the shards of the rose window lay in the snow, the afterbirth of Bill's dream.

BILL AND I
stood side by side in the sooty snow, watching the insurance investigator pick through the charred detritus of what was supposed to have been our future. Finally he made his way back to us, looked down, and nudged a piece of red glass with the toe of his boot, then looked up into the blindingly white winter sky. I glanced from him to Bill. Bill's face was as gray as the ash-dusted snow, but two circles of red burned in his cheeks. I've often wondered if he knew what was coming.

“The furnace pipes,” the insurance man said.

Bill went on staring at him. The patches of red on his cheeks burned brighter.

“What about the furnace pipes?” I asked.

“There was no asbestos wrapping around them.”

The three of us stood silent in the chill acrid air. The adjuster did not need to say anything more. Bill was too ashamed to speak. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, the accusations would fly out. Or perhaps I feared I'd say something worse. I was, I suddenly realized, relieved to be free of the perfect house. Hope bounced above me in the winter morning like a child's balloon.

W
E PACKED THE
few possessions we had salvaged and moved back to New York. We told people we wanted to be at the heart of the radical movement and the world of art. That was true. Ideas and isms raced through the city faster than the flames that had whipped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. On street corners, labor leaders and anarchists and socialists climbed up on soapboxes and made the ground tremble beneath their feet. At the Armory, Cézanne and Seurat and
Nude Descending a Staircase
would soon stand the world on its head. But money was a problem too. We had overspent on the dream house. We were up to our ears in debt.

We took an apartment on West 135th Street. It was only a railroad flat with a parlor, kitchen, and bedrooms opening off a long hall, which the children loved chasing one another up and down, but the ceilings were high and the rooms light-filled. My mother-in-law moved in with us. Bill's father had recently died, and we felt responsible for her, but the arrangement also meant she could look after the children while I returned to work. I wasn't accredited as a registered nurse, but the Henry Street Settlement and other social organizations sent me out to fill in as
a practical nurse. Sometimes my sister Ethel recommended me for jobs too.

Ethel had left her husband and children, come to New York to study nursing at Mount Sinai, and, unlike me, finished her training. But she managed to lose custody of her son and daughter in the bargain. The day she was served with the papers, she came to our apartment, weeping for her children, raging against her in-laws who'd taken them away, and spinning schemes to get them back.

That night I dreamed I'd lost my own children, not through a custody battle but through my own carelessness. They kept slipping out of my grasp or fading into the distance or getting lost. I awoke trembling, padded down the hall to the room where they slept, and stood listening to their breathing. I squinted into the darkness to make out their forms in the beds. I lifted the blanket that Stuart had kicked off and covered him. I adjusted the pillow that Grant had buried his face in so deeply I feared he'd suffocate. I laid my hand on Peggy's forehead checking for the fever I always feared would return. As I got back into bed, Bill turned to me and asked what was wrong.

“I was just checking on the children.”

He smiled sleepily as he drew me to him. “And you were the woman who didn't want to be a mother.”

BILL HATED MY
going back to work, especially when I had to get up out of a warm bed at odd hours for an emergency case or didn't get home from night duty until dawn. I never told him
how much I loved it. The cry of
The nurse is here! The nurse is here!
ringing through the halls, up the stairs, and out the windows to the neighboring buildings thrilled me. I was doing something important.

We joined Local Number Five of the Socialist Party. I was an anarchist by instinct, or at least experience. Growing up in the middle of a family of eleven children had taught me all I needed to know about sharing limited resources. I preferred personal freedom. But Bill persuaded me that as long as man had to compete for food and shelter and other needs, individualism was self-indulgence at best, a sure road to destruction at worst. I remembered my poor hungry brothers vying for the last piece of meat, when we had meat, and knew he was right.

Every night the headquarters of the local, which was above a grocery store, erupted in volcanoes of Italian-, Russian-, German-, Spanish-, and Yiddish-accented debates. Smaller gatherings in members' apartments were even more heated. At first I was afraid to speak up. The men and women at those meetings thought fast and talked even faster. Some had gone to jail for their beliefs. One, John Reed, had gone to Harvard College to discover his convictions. In the tenements I was a savior. Here I was just a wife and mother with a seething but ill-defined rage against injustice. I suppose that was how I came up with the scheme to save the Lawrence strike. It was so obvious that you didn't have to have an education to think of it. You only had to have children. It was like the old chestnut that Big Bill Haywood, the notorious Wobbly leader who was there that night, was always spouting about socialism. It was so clear and simple, he liked to say, that no intellectual could understand it.

The night I spoke up started with the usual ritual of those evenings in cold-water flats and railroad apartments. As people arrived,
they dropped their loose change on a tray or in a bowl left out for the purpose. Later in the evening, when throats were dry from arguing and heads spinning with theories, two or three guests would take the kitty, head to the nearest grocery or saloon, and return with beer and sandwiches. Perhaps the beer did it. Without it I might not have had the courage to speak up. Not that I drank much that night or any other, at least at that stage of my life. Children of drunks rarely do, unless they're drunks themselves.

Silky-smooth John Reed with his Harvard accent and bristly Big Bill Haywood with his milky blind eye, which everyone assumed was the upshot of a labor scuffle but was really the result of a childhood accident, were arguing about how to keep the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike going. The workers were disheartened, the weather was freezing, and the pickets were threatening to give up the fight and go back to work.

“It's the children,” I said.

The two men went on arguing. Apparently my voice was not within their range of hearing.

“It's the children,” I repeated, “not the bosses or the goons, who will break the strike.”

Bill, not Big Bill but my Bill, was staring at me. He'd heard. “Listen,” he shouted, “listen to Margaret. She has an excellent point.”

As the noise died and people turned to me, my anger about the dream house and the brace and the dozens of other disappointments evaporated, and I remembered why I'd married him.

“It's one thing to march on a picket line,” I began.

“What?” someone shouted.

“Speak up,” Bill Haywood thundered.

“It's one thing to march on a picket line,” I repeated in a voice I hadn't heard since I'd been on the Claverack debating team.
“Everyone in this room has put up with the cold and hunger and misery of that. It's something else to see your children's bellies swelling . . .” I thought of my children sleeping safely a few blocks away. My sister Ethel, who was there that night, caught my eye, but I looked away and went on. “. . . and hear their racking coughs, and watch them growing weaker every day.”

“Margaret's right,” John Reed called across the room.

“Only a mother could think of that,” Big Bill shouted.

A few days later, I was part of a delegation that took the midnight train to Lawrence to bring back one hundred and nineteen sickly, malnourished, lice-ridden children, many barefoot and without coats or underwear in the depths of winter. Officials in Lawrence were so furious we barely got out with our lives. They used billy clubs to prevent a second delegation from taking another contingent.

Newspaper headlines blared the shame. Congress scheduled an inquiry and invited me down to Washington to testify. The nurse from New York, the papers called me. I am also a mother, I told them.

A photographer came to the apartment to get a picture of me with my own children. The boys were out playing, but I woke Peggy from her nap and dressed her in a smocked velvet dress that Bill's mother had made for her. I was wearing velvet that day too. I sat half turned to the camera with Peggy in my lap. Most children, awakened from a nap, would be fretful, but my daughter smiled to beat the band, waved to the photographer, then sat absolutely still when he told her to.

The photograph ran with a quote from me beneath it. “Until every mother cares for all children as she does for her own, there will be no social justice in the world.”