Power (31 page)

“It does seem that the only way to meet each other is to resort to bicycles. It's been so very hot, and this place is cool and delightful, don't you think?”

“It's a very nice place,” I agreed. “I didn't know it existed until today.”

“Neither did I. So it does seem that fate is determined for us to meet each other. Tell me what you have been doing all this time.”

We sat down on a fallen tree trunk, and I talked more than I had in a long time. She listened well, as if truly interested—which she might have been—while I poured out my experiences. At last, I paused to protest that certainly I was boring her to tears.

“No, you're not boring me,” she said softly. “Not at all, Mr. Cutter.”

“You never talk about yourself.”

“No? I suppose I don't. I lead a very uneventful life, Mr. Cutter, which is mostly occupied with the raising of three children.”

“Still, you're Ben Holt's wife—”

“Yes, I'm Ben Holt's wife, as you put it, Mr. Cutter. And Ben is in the way of being an idol of yours, isn't he, Mr. Cutter?”

“Well, I wouldn't put it just that way—not an idol exactly. I think he's quite a man—”

“And therefore, his wife must be quite a woman?”

“You're laughing at me, aren't you?” I said.

“No, not laughing, Mr. Cutter. I have nothing to laugh at, not even your attempt to bestow some glamour upon me as the wife of Ben Holt. When have you last seen Ben, Mr. Cutter?”

“A week ago, just before he left for Colorado.”

“That was when I saw him—and before then, not for weeks, and when he's here in Pomax, Mr. Cutter, if we have two hours of Ben at dinner, we are fortunate. Do you feel that I shouldn't speak of this to you or to anyone else? That it's an act of betrayal toward Ben?”

“No—well, no. I mean—”

“I'm a very lonely woman, Mr. Cutter, and I don't talk about myself because there is nothing that I want very much to discuss. I married a trade-union leader, and I live in Pomax, Illinois, and all of this is of my choosing and I should have nothing to complain about. At least, that is the way I see it, and at this moment I thoroughly despise myself.”

“Why?” I cried. “For heaven's sake, why?”

“Because I am so delighted to have you here with me—to have the companionship of a man and a human being, even for a few hours.”

We were both silent for a while after that. She was not the type of woman who resorts to tears, and I don't know that I have ever seen her weep. After a time, I said,

“If that's the case, do you suppose that you could call me Al? And that I could call you Dorothy?”

Turning to me, she smiled and asked me, “How old are you, Al? I knew, but I've forgotten.”

“I was twenty-seven last week.”

“I'm only six months older than you, but it feels like so much more. You're very nice, you know.”

We walked most of the way back to Pomax, wheeling our bicycles, just slowly and talking about one thing and another as if we had known each other a very long time. We made a tentative appointment to meet a week later and ride together.

 

26

The following Sunday, we rode out to the Arrowhead Pit. At one time, I had been certain that I would never want to see this place again as long as I lived, and now something drew me back there. I think Dorothy felt the same way, because she made no protest when I suggested that we go there. When we came to the mine, we wheeled our bikes up to the edge of the crater, looked at it for a little while, and then turned away. It had not changed very much. The road had been repaired, and the mine was being worked again, and there were more trucks and a second steam shovel down at the bottom. Non-union men were working the mine, and as far as this place was concerned, the strike was over.

As we walked away from there, Dorothy said, “I don't feel anything. That's strange.”

“Not so strange. I don't feel anything much. It's just like a dream, that's all.”

“Is a great deal of life just like a dream, Al? I feel that way sometimes.”

“I don't know. I wonder.”

“I've never asked you about your wife, Al. Is it something you don't want to talk about?”

“I don't like to talk to most people about it. As far as you're concerned, Dorothy—I don't think there's anything I couldn't talk to you about.”

“You loved her very much, didn't you?”

“Yes, I did. Very much.”

“Ben told me about how you met—how she was hurt and you took her through that roadblock to the hospital. I'm ashamed of the way I complained last week. You must be lonely.”

“No. It's been lonely, but I'm all right now.”

“What does all right mean, Al?” I glanced at her sharply, and she added, “I want to know. Maybe I want to say that I am also all right now.”

“Well—it means—I don't know. I suppose it means that I've learned how to live with myself, how to be alone.”

“Philosophically? Is that it, Al? Do you look forward to long, comfortable years of being alone?”

“No,” I snapped.

“I'm sorry, Al. We'll forget that we ever spoke about this.”

Now I tried to apologize and persuade her that she did not understand.

“What don't I understand, Al?”

Of course she knew. She knew and she was pushing me toward it, and that was because she couldn't help herself any more than I could, and she was pressing toward the point where I would say, “Because I love you, Dorothy Holt. Because I am caught in something that makes me sick with shame and guilt, for it seems to me that all at once I am betraying a man I have come to consider the best friend I have in the world, and betraying my wife's memory too.” And it was in no spirit of virtue that I refused to be pushed the last bit into an open expression. It was because I knew that at such a point, it would be over between us.

Then, after that, I lived with Dorothy Holt more than I lived with Laura. Laura was dead and Dorothy Holt was alive. But it was a question of dreams, and I lived with Dorothy Holt nowhere else but in my dreams, quite sensibly aware in my waking moments that she was the wife of Benjamin R. Holt, the mother of three children and the last person in the world who could make any constructive difference in my life. Or perhaps my waking approach was less sensible than hopeless.

I was glad that the work I did was demanding. As the summer drew to a close, the strike in Pomax collapsed, and at a meeting of the International leadership and Egypt's local leadership, it was decided to vote a back-to-work order and see what could be salvaged of union membership. At this point, the beginning of an increasing despair that was to continue for years to come, only Ben Holt remained confident and unshaken. His ferocity and brutal handling of all opposition changed into something almost as gentle as it was enduring. He coaxed, supported, and had faith. In southern Illinois, the heart and strength of the union movement, we had lost 50 per cent of our membership. What it would be in the rest of the country, we could only guess—and expect the worst. But when Fulton Grove raised the question of the total destruction of the union, Ben, without anger, replied,

“That never happens—not any more. They may get rid of you and me, Fulton, but not of the union. It will survive.”

It survived. By November, we had completed a national membership-and-dues drive. From better than three hundred thousand members, the union had shrunk to a total national membership of a hundred and six thousand. And of those, almost half were black-listed, locked out of work.

I saw Dorothy during that time, but only once when Ben was not present, and that was when some business took me to her house, and I stayed for supper and spent the evening playing with the children and then talking. Nothing passed between us.

Christmas at Ben's house could have been bleak and dismal, but he was determined that it should not be so—even though he had just begun that fight for his life, as leader of the International Miners Union, which lasted through 1925 until January of 1926. This night, he had invited Mark, Lena, Jack Mullen, and Oscar Suzic and myself to be with him. Grove was also there. He was to leave for Chicago the following day to make, as we learned later, final plans to leave the Miners Union for a good-paying job with the National Confederation of Labor. For the first time I met Mullen's wife, a shy, pale wisp of a woman who always moved quietly in the background of his life. It was a good evening, even though we had all of us recently taken a 50 per cent pay cut, and it was the time when Ben Holt was at his best. Whatever went on within him, on the surface his heart was high. To his children, he was the big, shaggy giant who, if they saw him only infrequently, was nevertheless a wonderful person to have at home with them on Christmas, playing with them and singing carols.

At dinner, we toasted each other from a bottle of bootleg wine that Mark Golden had provided, good, imported French wine. “Nineteen twenty-five,” Ben said. “The best year—the year we win!”

Outside, snow fell, a white blanket over the scarred and barren plains of Egypt.

PART
IV

1

January 10, 1959

M
Y DEAR
A
LVIN:

I have read all that you have written, and what am I to say? It is almost thirty-five years that we have known each other, and if I ever had any doubts that Alvin Cutter was a person of honesty and integrity, they have long vanished. So I know that you wrote honestly and as well as you knew how, and it makes me wonder whether any story of a man, written after his life has been lived, bears more than a shred of validity.

I must hasten to add that I question nothing you have put down. When I sum up the facts you have recorded, they are true enough, but the scholars will also do that and perhaps better than we could. We are not afraid of the facts, no matter how awful they are, but for some strange reason, we are afraid of people, who at their worst are still a little noble and a good deal wonderful. Or don't you think so? It is so easy for us to spell out a thing like the incident at the Arrowhead Pit and to put it down on the record and to rest on the security of the past; but where the people in the incident are concerned, we prepare a host of reservations and are prepared to swear by them.

What traps us? I don't think it is the bright public glare of a book in print, for it seems to me that these memoirs you are putting together will never be published, or at least not in our lifetimes—which are almost over anyway. Are you protecting the people concerned? But they are almost all dead, Alvin; Ben and Jack and Mark and poor Fulton Grove, who was never enough of a man to be a villain—and so many others whom we knew and worked with. Or are you, perhaps, protecting me? That too occurred to me, and it would fit in with that strange, Victorian sense of propriety which you brought with you to Pomax, but I want no protection, Alvin, and the union needs none.

Reading what you have written makes me wonder why so few, if any, have been able to make human beings out of the men who lead labor—that is, in books, yet in books the people on the other side of the struggle, the owners and operators, loom like giants, or, even better, like people of flesh and blood. Why are we like shadows, who look back at other shadows?

I think of Lena Kuscow, and that night you went with her to see what was happening out at the strip mine. Did it never occur to you that Lena wanted you so desperately that she would have gone to the edge of a live volcano to be with you? But of course that did not occur to you—because you never saw Lena, that strong, beautiful, and wasted vitality, full of hate and resentment and frustration. The union had meaning to her only in terms of what she was, what she had lost, and what she needed so desperately; and in that way, she was not so different from Benjamin Ren-well Holt.

You didn't know that she was the first person ever to speak to me about you—knowing the two of us and what our thoughts were; something not so difficult to know. Ben also knew. Lena had begun to despise me, and perhaps there was a beginning of the same thing with Ben.

It happened that same Christmas Day, that day you wrote about at the end of the manuscript you sent me, when Lena and I were alone in the kitchen, the rest of you inside, and Lena turned to me and said,

“You're a fool, Dorothy. I guess you know it.”

I told her that I didn't know what she meant. You see, your idealization of me translated my fear and uncertainty into a virtue, and we were still in the pre-Freudian days then. I was a prim and, as I have often suspected, a none too wholesome woman. It terrified me to face things like that, and I suppose Lena also terrified me somewhat. So I retreated into ignorance, the beclouded ignorance that used to be a woman's refuge, but had already worn thin in the 1920s.

“I mean Alvin Cutter,” Lena said.

“Well, what about Alvin Cutter? I really don't know what you're talking about, Lena.”

She had too much to drink that evening, but so had I; so had all of us; and even your own memory of the evening is beclouded, an alcoholic haze obscuring what really happened.

“Have you ever looked at life, Dorothy?” Lena demanded. “Have you ever faced up to it and examined it? Did you ever let yourself think of what kind of a joy ride it is to be Mrs. Ben Holt? Or did you ever take a good, long, clear look at Ben?”

I told her that it was none of her business and that it had nothing to do with Al Cutter.

“Dotty, this is Lena. Stop being a damn fool and a prig. Al is in love with you. He's so much in love with you that he can't sit in the same room with you and not let everyone know it.”

I said something about her having a nasty and inventive mind, protesting that I had never touched you, that you had never touched me, that we had never even kissed. “And,” I added, as a final touch, “he loved his wife. Maybe it was the kind of love you don't understand, but he loved her. He worshiped her.”