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Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families.
It was the opening night of a revue entitled Mamzelle Champagne, and as the chorus sang and danced the eccentric scion wearing on this summer night a straw boater and heavy black coat pulled out a pistol and shot the famous architect three times in the head. On the roof. There were screams. Evelyn fainted.
She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants. And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
Sound. It was a voluted pink and amber shell the shape of a thimble, and what he did in the hazy sun with the salt drying on his ankles was to throw his head back and drink the minute amount of sea water in the shell. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying like oboes, and behind him at the land end of the marsh, out of sight behind the tall grasses, the distant bell of the North Avenue streetcar tolled its warning.
He had reached that age of knowledge and wisdom in a child when it is not expected by the adults around him and consequently goes unrecognized.
He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was
...more
voluble.
macrocephalic
She thought: Yet I know these are the happy years. And ahead of us are only great disasters.
doffed
The corpses lay on tables of galvanized iron. From the bottom of each table a drainpipe extended to the floor. Around the rim of the table was a culvert. And into the culvert ran the water sprayed constantly over each body from an overhead faucet. The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears.
When she was alone like this she sang softly to herself in a high sweet thin voice. Her songs had no words.
kissed her face and tasted the salt of her tears.
After he left, the family, not daring to move, remained in the position in which they had been photographed. They waited for life to change. They waited for their transformation.
parqueted
She knew better than anyone how innocent Harry was. She had agreed to testify in his behalf for the sum of two hundred thousand dollars. And her price for a divorce was going to be even higher. She ran her fingertips over the car upholstery. Her tears dried. A strange bitter exaltation suffused her, a cold victory grin of the heart.
room. One day he decided his chair was facing in the wrong direction.
He was immensely muscular and agile and professionally courageous. Yet to the wealthy all this was nothing.
Stuyvesant Fish of 78th Street, who wanted to book Houdini for a private party. Mrs. Fish was one of the Four Hundred.
clerestory
The terrible clatter of horses and wagons, the clanking and screeching of streetcars, the horns of automobiles. At the wheel of an open Marmon, Brill drove the Freudians around Manhattan. At one point, on Fifth Avenue, Freud felt as if he was being observed; raising his eyes he found some children staring down at him from the top of a double-decker bus.
Do we find ways to quiet the nose? How does its presence impact our well-being?
jodhpurs.
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.
Why did he drive her from the home? Shame?
Tateh said no one mourns like a child,
Comrades, let us disagree, of course, but not by losing our decorum to the extent that the police may have an excuse to interrupt us.
Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind? Must our fate always be physical?
My life is desecrated by whores, is what he said. And grasping the hand of the little girl in the pinafore, he disappeared into the crowd.
closet door slightly ajar. Goldman placed the basin of water on the bedtable and shook out a thin starched face towel. Poor girl, she said, poor girl. Why don’t you let me refresh you a bit.
Through the vile depths of your own existence your heart has directed you to the anarchist movement.
And if you don’t find them, perhaps that will be for the best.
Interesting, as this noted she believes in an ultimate authority. Ironic for an anarchist.
She remembered Brother when he was younger than her own son. She took care of him. On rainy days they played secret pretending games in the hayloft, in the sweet warmth, with the horses snorting and nickering below them.
Ask dad: what are some of your fondest childhood memories?
alone in her modern awninged home at the top of the hill on fashionable Broadview Avenue with only her small son and her ancient father, she felt deserted by the race of males and furious with herself for the nostalgia that swept through her without warning at any hour of the day or night.
the grease spots on the envelope were worked into every fiber of the paper by his small hands. The letter was now translucent.
Mother’s face had turned so pale and suffered such an intense expression that all the bones of her face appeared to have grown and the opulently beautiful woman he revered was shockingly haggard, like someone ancient.
It was small and wrinkled and its eyes were closed. It was a brown baby and had been bound tight in a cotton blanket.
Ask dad: did you see a lot of racism when you were growing up?
remonstrations
When the sun set that evening it lay at the bottom of the hill as if it had rolled there. It was blood red. Late at night the boy woke and found his mother sitting beside the bed looking at him, her golden hair plaited and her large breasts soft against his arm when she leaned over to kiss him.
Such an experience heightened her motherly instinct and gratitude for her son.
There was no question that the Esquimos were primitives. They were affectionate, gentle, emotional, trustworthy and full of pranks.
Assumes superiority based on American ideals; Patriotism
Peary and most of the men withdrew to the theoretical considerations of his system and so protected themselves against their fear.
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
Peary defined the virtues of Esquimos as loyalty and obedience, roughly the same virtues one sought in the dogs. When the time came for the final run for the Pole, now only a hundred miles away, Peary did indeed choose Henson to go with him; and Henson chose the Esquimos who in his judgment were the best boys, the most loyal and devoted to the Commander. The balance of the party was turned around and sent home.
Pieces of Father froze very casually and Peary said this was the fate of some men in the North and nothing could be done about it.
Because of the light the faces are indistinguishable, seen only as black blanks framed by caribou fur.
offal
America was a great farting country.
an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.
She needed desperately to talk to someone and the only person she had ever been able to talk to was the man for whose death she was directly responsible.
Throwing their few clothes in a musty suitcase whose strap had long since rotted away, he tied a piece of clothesline around the suitcase, took the girl by the hand and left the two-room flat on Hester Street forever.
As the car moved off, the little girl watched the boy pass backward in her sight. She stood on the
rear platform of the trolley car and watched him until she could no longer see him. His eyes had been blue and yellow and dark green, like a school globe.
I will be interested to see how this comes back into play.
