Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

She saw brown horses loping in the sun. A thin layer of chalk dust settled on her face, like a mask, whitening her complexion, bringing out her large moist eyes, the redness of her mouth, and Tateh was momentarily shocked by a vision of her maturity. The car barreled along its tracks down the side of the road, and whenever it approached an intersection its air horn blew. Once it stopped and took on a load of produce. Riders crowded the aisle. The little girl could not wait for the speed to be up. Tateh realized she was happy. She loved the trip. Holding the suitcase on his lap with just one arm Tateh put the other around his child.

I love how it says that she is his Because it shows in this moment what is affection for her as like as a daughter.

tumbrils

I’m Harry Houdini, he told the admissions desk, and I’ve got to see that sandhog.

would issue from his head bandages a weak or perhaps only decorous groan. Houdini cleared his throat. I’m Harry Houdini, he said to the family, I escape for a living, that’s my profession, I’m an escapologist. But let me tell you I’ve never done an escape that can touch this one. He pointed to the bed.

There was a kind of act that used the real world for its stage. He couldn’t touch it. For all his achievements he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician.

What was the sense of his life if people walked out of the theatre and forgot him?

The old theatre people went wild. He was unsatisfied.

Shows an understanding that even the best accomplishments won't satisfy. I think i realized that after HS running.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn’t seem to know who Houdini was. He congratulated him on the invention of the aeroplane.

When Father returned to New Rochelle he walked up the front steps of his home, passed under the giant Norwegian maples and found his wife holding a brown baby in her arms.

What was strangest of all was the mirror in his bath: it gave back the gaunt, bearded face of a derelict, a man who lacked a home.

them. On the Northern arc of the world was a darkness and a coldness that had crept upon him and rounded his shoulders.

convalescent.

He found also a pamphlet on the subject of family limitation and the author was Emma Goldman, the anarchist revolutionary.

At times he would grab himself as if to pull his sex out by the roots.

He wanted to pack his heart with gunpowder and blow it up. Without warning one dawn he awoke with her scent in his nostrils. This of all his memories was the most vicious. He ran downstairs and threw the stack of silhouettes and the satin shoes in the trash can. Then he shaved and went off to the flag and fireworks factory.

In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect.

And what of his own father, the burly self-confident man who had gone away, and came back gaunt and hunched and bearded? Or

He refused to enroll her in school—it was easier here than in New York to avoid the authorities—

textile mill in Lawrence was virtually shut down. Tateh was overjoyed. We were going to starve to death or freeze to death, he told his daughter. Now we’ll be shot to death.

stratagems

vouchsafed

Only one thing served to remind Pierpont Morgan of his humanity and that was a chronic skin disease that had colonized his nose and made of it a strawberry of the award-winning giant type grown by California’s wizard of horticulture Luther Burbank.

stele,

Ford ate well but he did not touch the wine. He finished before his host. He gazed frankly at the Morgan nose.

Individuals participate in their species and in their genus.

prisca theologia, secret wisdom.

who had suffered his McGuffey like the rest of them.

pantasote

Mother now had cause to remember the expression on the faces of the Ohio seminarians who called on her when she was a girl of seventeen.

intransigence.

When Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House he gave dinner to Booker T. Washington. Surely we can serve tea to Coalhouse Walker Jr.

This piano is badly in need of a tuning, he said. Father’s face reddened.

Of all of them he was the only one who knew ragtime. He had heard it in his nightlife period in New York. He had never expected to hear it in his sister’s home.

The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being. The music filled the stairwell to the third floor where the mute and unforgiving Sarah sat with her hands folded and listened with the door open.

He was now visiting the family and each time brought them up on the news of his doings of the previous six days, never once assuming anything but their total and consuming interest.

He was holding the punch ladle and it began to click against the side of the bowl. He couldn’t seem to let go of it. He gazed at his hand with a peculiar smile on his face. They did not want my momma to speak in Kansas City or Los Angeles or Spokane, he said. But she spoke. We know every jail. We win every case. My momma will speak in San Diego. He laughed as if he couldn’t believe his own hand shook as it did. The ladle clicked against the bowl.

Is he having a flashback or is he deranged? What is going on here?

with her thumb and mashed away a tear. So tragic, so tragic.

See him as a pet project and a tragic man who lost his love

Younger Brother saw himself standing in line to shake the hand of William McKinley. A handkerchief was wrapped around his hand. In the handkerchief was a gun. McKinley fell back. Blood dyed his vest. There were screams.

Huh???

syncopating

He had created himself in the teeth of such feelings.

The Chief of the company was distinguished by a white military cap he wore at a cocky angle.

pugnacious

ingratiate

Are there any colored lawyers here? Coalhouse asked. I don’t know of one, Father said. But any lawyer who loves justice will do, I should think. He paused. I will underwrite the expense, he said in a gruff voice.

He had never confided in them or shared his hopes or feelings and so they saw no marked change in his behavior. Mother did ask him to join them in the parlor after dinner when he had no plans for the evening. He tried this. He heard them address him, heard himself answer. He saw them in their suffocating parlor with its chaise and its mounted heads and fringed lampshades and he felt he couldn’t breathe. He despised them. He thought they were complacent, ordinary and inconsiderate.

The young man rushed from the room convinced he was strangling to death.

Did it all just seem ludicrously insignificant to him?

stevedore.

date we can’t

Interesting to read more of the narrator's voice here

mellifluous

sepulchral