Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

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.

Evelyn Nesbit had caused the death of one man and wrecked the life of another and from that he deduced that there was nothing in life worth having, worth wanting, but the embrace of her thin arms.

Gulls wheeled overhead, crying like oboes,

It was not until some time later, when the Roosevelt had reached the open sea, that Father was persuaded of the actuality of the trip. As he stood at the railing there was transmitted to his bones the awesome unalterable rhythm of the ocean.

Mist like an inverted rain rose from the falls.

The entire population seemed to him over-powered, brash and rude. The vulgar wholesale appropriation of European art and architecture regardless of period or country he found appalling. He had seen in our careless commingling of great wealth and great poverty the chaos of an entropic European civilization. He sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.

She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.

There was no question that the Esquimos were primitives. They were affectionate, gentle, emotional, trustworthy and full of pranks. They loved to laugh and sing.

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.

The weather was a constant torment, the wind blowing so sharply at fifty or sixty degrees below zero that the air itself seemed to have changed its physical nature, being now unassimilable crystals in one’s lungs.

Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

All he could do was commit his life to hers and work to satisfy her smallest whim. She loved him but she wanted someone who would treat her badly and whom she could treat badly. She longed for a challenge to her wit, she longed to have her ambitions aroused once again.

The audiences were enthusiastic. The papers give lots of space. He had never known such feelings of dissatisfaction. He wondered why he had devoted his life to mindless entertainment. The audiences cheered.

He gave his wife the fur of a white polar bear. He pulled Arctic treasures from his trunk—notebooks of his journals, their covers curling at the corners, their pages stiff as pages that have been wet; a signed photograph of Commander Peary; a bone harpoon tip; three or four tins of unused tea—incredible treasures in the North, but here in the parlor the embarrassing possessions of a savage.

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.

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

He listened with fascination to the Victrola and played the same record over and over, whatever it happened to be, as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event.

In fact he continued the practice not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication. He would gaze at himself until there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one. The sensation was of being disembodied. He was no longer anything exact as a person. He had the dizzying feeling of separating from himself endlessly. He would entrance himself so deeply in this process that he would be unable to come out of it even though his mind was lucid. He would have to rely on some outside stimulus, a loud noise or a change in the light coming through the window, to capture his attention and make him whole again.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

Pierpont Morgan was that classic American hero, a man born to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and ruthlessness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight.

I do not think you can be so insolent as to believe your achievements are the result only of your own effort. Did you attribute your success in this manner, I would warn you, sir, of the terrible price to be paid. You would find yourself stranded on the edge of the world and see as no other man the emptiness of the firmament.

Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music.

You think you are special, losing your lover. It happens every day.

This way you can feel sorry for yourself, she said. And what a delicious emotion that is. I’ll tell you something. In this room tonight you saw my present lover but also two of my former lovers. We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being. Why can’t you accept your own freedom? Why do you have to cling to someone in order to live?

Thus with continuous concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked him by its closeness.

Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil.

His mother had been dead for some months but every morning he awoke with his wound as fresh and painful as if she had died the night before.

He had saved the letters she had written to him over the years and now had them translated into English and typed so that he could read them easily and relive them without fear of their turning to dust from overuse.

He wondered if his dislike for Coalhouse Walker, which had been instantaneous, was based not on the man’s color but on his being engaged in an act of courtship, a suspenseful enterprise that suggested the best of life was yet to come.

Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she no longer waited for it. During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.

Life excited him. He dwelled on his own sensations and liked to talk about them: the taste of the wine or the way the candle flames multiplied in the crystal chandeliers. His simple delight in everything was infectious and soon Mother and Father wore constant smiles on their faces. They had forgotten themselves. It was enormously pleasurable to see the world as the Baron did, alive to every moment.

Goldman smiled and shook her head. The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer.

If the royal families were not melancholic they were hysterical. They overturned wineglasses or stuttered or screamed at servants. He watched. The conviction came over him that they were obsolete. They were all related, from one country to the next. They had been marrying one another for so many centuries that they had bred into themselves just the qualities, ignorance and idiocy, they could least afford.