The Daredevils (31 page)

“Ah,” said Charles. “I think I understand now.”

“Don't rush me! You don't know! Whatever you're thinking, it's quite wrong!”

“Rosemary
was
in fact shot by the soldiers.”

“No.”

“She is your martyr.”

“She spun away and staggered back up the steps to the door of the house. I followed. When we looked back, the man was gone. Confused and alarmed, suddenly, and to the edge of panic, we went into the house and found its kitchen. There around a table were three Wobblies. We knew they were Wobblies because they were extremely dangerous looking and handsome. Despite the dashing good looks, however, Rosemary was instantly struck by their similarity to the women at the well. ‘One Big Union,' said a big man, describing himself and his companions to her, telling her everything was going to be all right from now on. A woman told her that the young man who had saved her from her nearly fatal descent into unconsciousness was a friend of theirs. He was part of the One Big Union, but more specifically was from New Bedford. This she was told as if it meant something crucial to her understanding and well-being. ‘He's not exactly local, but it's not like he's from some mining camp in Colorado!' she laughed. ‘He grew up in a mill just like you two did. He writes songs for us. Did he play his guitar for you?' ‘No,' said Rosemary, as if she was confident of her place not just in the conversation but in the greater scheme of things, in life itself. ‘I'm afraid he didn't.' ‘You really missed a treat!' the woman assured
her with a kindly smile. They told her they would take us to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where an even bigger strike was taking place, if we wanted to go. They made it clear they wanted Rosemary to come with them, myself as well, nodding and smiling at me, and implied quite strongly that she would be considered highly valuable in a very short period of time, as the dreams of the One Big Union were beginning to be realized. So we went with them, Rosemary accepting a skirt from the woman and reconciling herself to the loss of her own, feeling a tremor of anxiety when she remembered what she was pretty sure she'd sewn into it. Someone had put the opera record back on upstairs, so that the last thing we ever heard in Willimantic, the door slamming shut on it, was ‘The Dance of the Hours.'”

“The woman wore a tall red hat pinned to her hair, and Rosemary snuggled so close to her in the car that she could study with her diseased but powerfully concentrated imagination the whorls and folds of the little enamel rose at the head of the pin. She perceived it as a living thing. The woman seemed to know a lot about her, and Rosemary accepted this without worry or question. The woman said she understood that Rosemary had been very helpful in not just the triggering of the strike but the priming of it. The men she'd been briefed by had put it just that way, she said, narrowing her eyes and clearly implying that there was something wrong with what she'd just said. ‘You will read Bakunin,' she said, ‘like I did, and Nechaev in the cool shadows of your delirium and in the bright fever of it, and you will believe as I did, for only an hour perhaps, or a day, but no longer, and say to yourself, honored sister, there are three classes of women. The first consists of empty-headed, senseless, and heartless women who must be exploited and made the slaves of men. The second consists of those who are eager and devoted and capable but not fully committed, who must be pushed until they do, or, more likely, perish.' I knew instantly, Charles, fatally, that I was part of the second group.”

“Balderdash.”

“‘In the third class,' the woman continued, ‘are the women who are truly ours, our jewels, whose help is indispensable. I underscore this last phrase, and urge you, honored sisters, to compare your own knowledge of what you have done and what you will do to this corrupt and poisonous passage and believe it for as short a time as you possibly can.' ‘Who is Nechaev?' asked Rosemary. The woman peered deeply into Rosemary's eyes as we jolted through Worcester and said, ‘He was a murderous twerp with a lot of moxie. You will find men like him all over the place.' She sat back and pretended to fan herself, though it was quite cold in the car. ‘Don't get me wrong, honey,' she said, ‘I am terribly interested in Mr. Bakunin's cult of violence, deeply so, it gives me goose bumps, but come, pull yourself together, we could not possibly have left you in that shit hole, we'll all go to Lawrence together, where the woolen mills are bigger than ten Willimantics or wherever we were. The strike there has shut the whole town down. Can you speak any foreign languages? It will come in handy, believe me, in Lawrence. Oh, you poor little things, you poor little women. There is another look, isn't there, in the bloodshot eyes of men when they see the only solution is to destroy and kill and maim and burn and pant like dogs in the light of the dying flames? When they lie down with us and how does it go? Jet the stuff of a superior race?'”

“When we got to Lawrence, we were immediately put to work: we were to mind the children, the ones who were hungry, the ones who were cold, the ones who were lost, the ones whose mothers and fathers were off rioting. Rosemary hatched a plan and insisted money be raised specifically and solely for her plan. It was a fantasy she had nursed for as long as she could remember, she told me, and then the others: to get the children out of danger. Money was found, and Rosemary's job became one of getting the children, more than one hundred of them, on a train bound for Philadelphia, where sponsor families would care for them until the strike was over. Management spies got wind of the plan, and it was quickly publicized as one in which the children, following a pied piper, would be precipitated off
cliffs. When the day of departure came, however, there was no need of a cliff. At the station, mounted policemen bore down on the children and their mothers like Cossacks, herding them at first then knocking them flat with deft little movements of their great horses. Guns were fired into the air over shrieking little heads and several policemen lost their heads: they began laying about themselves with light batons, clubbing people to the ground indiscriminately. Panic overtook the brigade and the flight of the children out of Lawrence seemed doomed. The police and their henchmen managed to create a no man's land of the platform, charging up and down the length of the train upon their steeds, while cops on foot waded into the swarming hysterical crowd with whistles and fists. Rosemary entered the no man's land. It was the greatest thing I have ever seen and will ever see anybody do. Three horsemen galloped toward her, fast as they could go. She was four feet tall and they were twelve feet tall—something like that. They were going thirty miles an hour, and Rosemary was standing still. Look at this.”

Vera handed Charles an old newspaper clipping that she kept in a frame. The headline read: LITTLE GIRL DEFIES COSSACKS. A grainy, faded yellow, and torn photograph shows a train shape on the right, crowd shape on the left, a little girl half-standing, blurry with motion, a beached whale—the fallen horseman and his horse—in front of her, and two wide-eyed horsemen, still mounted, the whites of their eyes dominating their gray shapes, staring down at them.

“‘I felt,' she once told me, ‘like a chicken buried up to my neck in the ground, waiting for them to come pluck my 'iddle head off. They came, I stayed, they came, I stayed. I stayed and stayed and still they came. The station was shaking with the thunder of their hooves, a ton of horses and riders bearing down on me, and still I stayed. At the last second, they reined back. One of them wasn't paying close enough attention, I guess, and he went over the top of his mount. Landed at my feet. Actually rolled into me and knocked me down. That's when the picture was taken. Just as I was scrambling to my feet.'”
“For this show of fearlessness she was broadly denounced and publicly humiliated. Not only mill owners and conservative newspaper editors, but prominent socialists and leaders of mainstream unions—even some theorists within the dreaded IWW itself—had characterized ‘the evacuation of the children' as a sensational stunt. ‘It was a sordid piece of advertising. Parents were bullied and children all but abducted from their homes,' a House investigative committee in Washington, DC, was told. ‘We are to the labor movement what the high diver is to the circus,' an old white-bearded Wobbly told us, in a stern but grandfatherly way. ‘Our big mouths can bind an audience with spells of hellfire and brimstone as surely as any old wild-eyed Puritan scourge. We can foam at the mouth like mad dogs and wink at the same time, and the audience cries out for more, and more, and more, and finally gets bored with thrills and marvels and goes home and the workers remain unorganized. We are like drunkards: very amusing until we take a swing at somebody and pass out.' Nobody formally blamed Rosemary, and certainly there were many who all but canonized her on the spot, myself included, but because she was the girl in the photograph, she endured, as proxy or figurehead, a great deal of frustrated haranguing and oblique vituperation. She was only vaguely aware of it, but was being used in some way as a pawn between Wobblies based in Chicago, who were thought of by Wobblies based in Detroit as lawless boys playing at revolution, who in turn characterized the Wobblies based in Detroit as parlor-room socialists with sticks up their asses.”

“Yes. These characterizations persist. My masters at the MCPS speak in those flights of rhetoric as well.”

“One of the more dashing and devilishly handsome Italian men from Chicago befriended Rosemary in Lawrence, began to school her, and, after he'd secured an abortion for her, to sleep with her. By the time we arrived in Paterson, New Jersey, for a strike by silk workers that would last nearly half a year and include twenty-five thousand weavers, loomfixers, twisters, and warpers, she was again pregnant and again in charge, at least nominally and picturesquely, of ‘the evacuation of the children.' Many years, a lifetime, and
no time at all, seemed to have been passed—or rather, a moment was imperceptibly repeating. Rosemary found it nearly impossible to fix herself in a secure and ordinary sense of time and place, in the life of the community—on which fixing, of course, sanity, almost solely, depends. The irony of her situation was lost on no one, and the belief that her first child had been aborted not by a doctor but the fat Irish cop who fell off his horse and knocked her down, became common, and eventually legendary. Some versions even had her shoved off the platform and under the wheels of the train, which had just begun to move, or within days and not months of delivery, that she had given birth to a dead baby in the cloakroom of the station. She was also informally apprenticed to the editor of the
Passaic Weekly Issue,
a socialist who was shortly to write an editorial critical of Paterson policemen that would land him in prison for fifteen years. In the course of becoming something like the press secretary for the Chicago IWW, she found some purchase, entered into some valuable routine, and remained more or less sound.”

“This sounds unmistakably like you. Your life.”

“She learned to defend herself calmly and articulately: she had hurt and coerced no one, she had not even argued with people, she had simply stood there looking out for the children, who would tell you if you cared to speak to them of lives the stink of which would never leave their nostrils. And in this way she began to develop as well a persona and philosophy: ‘If you cannot obey'—she wrote with the aid of the PW editor, who had also begun to fuck her—‘you cannot command. I have found in my short life almost no one whom I wish to obey, and therefore must decline command. Obedience and commandment are the surest means of terror I know.' She was something like a pacifist-anarchist, and people who could not conceive of anarchism as anything other than deeply, inherently violent—that is to say, nearly everybody, found her paradoxical stance, in a word, fascinating. Lusty young men who liked to sing songs in bars about mining camp massacres and stage free-speech fights on street corners were particularly mesmerized by her, though it seemed to me she was growing less beautiful—more crazy-looking, sometimes even scarily so, with her huge bright
eyes and the dark exhausted flesh surrounding them, lank, unkempt hair that not even the sturdiest hats could organize, the long, sharp nose, the extraordinary curves of her mouth, the big pigeon-toed feet and big-palmed, long-fingered hands. She had a charismatic but self-effacing presence: people liked, even longed, to be near her. One night at Mabel Dodge's fashionable Greenwich Village salon, the Broadway producer David Belasco declared he would find a vehicle for her ascent to stardom. ‘I can't act,' said Rosemary. ‘Even speaking in a room like this makes me nervous.' The room was blindingly white, from a burning white porcelain chandelier to a polar-bear-skin rug before a white marble fireplace, wherein pale birch logs appeared to give off pure white flames. The furniture was delicate and Florentine. Rosemary was a dark, quiet, untidy center of gravity.

‘Ah, but we've all seen you act!' shouted Belasco, referring to her stand against the mounted policemen. ‘That's not acting,' said Rosemary. ‘There's acting,' said Belasco, ‘and there's acting. Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage.' ‘Who,' asked Rosemary, ‘is Shakespeare?'”

“Who is Shakespeare? Who is Vera! That's the question!”

“Tittering laughter failed to discourage Belasco. ‘If there's an audience and they applaud, you are acting.' ‘And if they throw rotten vegetables?' ‘You are still acting, but less . . .' he searched for the right word, ‘popularly.'
‘Oh, Mr. Belasco,'
said Rosemary coquettishly, ‘you say that to all your little Joans of Arc.' And the titters became whoops and guffaws. He'd made a nearly identical sally at Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, whom the novelist Theodore Dreiser had called ‘the Eastside Joan of Arc,' and who had brushed him famously aside saying she preferred to ‘speak her own piece.' Though we hadn't known it until several weeks later, it was Gurley herself who had rescued us from Willimantic. Belasco settled back in his chair and smiled good-naturedly, undeterred. He was smitten not only with Rosemary's ungainly allure but with what he called ‘real realism, genuine objects—'”