Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

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.

Abutted by Thaw’s belly Evelyn’s broad-brimmed hat with its topping of dried flowers in tulle slowly tore away from her coiffure. Afterwards he brushed the sawdust from the front of her skirt and gave her some bills from his money clip.

Coincidentally this was the time in our history when the morose novelist Theodore

Dreiser was suffering terribly from the bad reviews and negligible sales of his first book, Sister Carrie. Dreiser was out of work, broke and too ashamed to see anyone. He

a witticism forming on her lips like the bubbles of an epileptic.

At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.

At least, Freud thought, it is silent. What oppressed him about the New World was its noise. The terrible clatter of horses and wagons, the clanking and screeching of streetcars, the horns of automobiles.

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.

A union was an affront to God. The laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one wealthy man, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country.

Tateh said no one mourns like a child, not even a lover.

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.

This filthy toothless Esquimo woman with the flat brow and the eyes pressed upwards by her cheekbones, singing her song and pushing back. He thought of Mother’s fastidiousness, her grooming and her intelligence, and found himself resenting this primitive woman’s claim to the gender.

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. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs,

It occurred to Evelyn one day that Harry might indeed love her. She was stunned. She tried to make a determination of the real truth of their relationship.

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 electric light bulbs of each vaudeville house rippled in a particular pattern. A ring of light spun around the rims of her pupils.

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 headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.

discarded. He took his education peculiarly and lived an entirely secret intellectual life.

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

But the boy’s eyes saw only the tracks made by the skaters, traces quickly erased of moments past, journeys taken.

The value of the duplicable event was everywhere perceived. Every town had its ice-cream soda fountain of Belgian marble.

The employer of many men, a good number of them foreign-born, he had long believed that most human beings were too dumb to make a good living.

From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture—not only that the parts of the finished product be interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts.

He had sensed in Ford’s achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet.

He was hoping the collected energy of their minds might buckle the walls of his home. Rockefeller startled him with the news that he was chronically constipated and did a lot of his thinking on the toilet. Carnegie dozed over his brandy. Harriman uttered inanities. Gathered in this one room the business elite could think of nothing to say. How they appalled him. How his heart quaked.

He heard through his brain the electric winds of an empty universe.

He felt if there was something more than he knew, it lay in the past rather than in the present, of whose total bankruptcy of existence he was confident.

He had no illusions that Ford was a gentleman. He recognized him for a shrewd provincial, as uneducated as a piece of wood. But he thought he saw in Ford’s use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism.

So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone. Ford pondered this. Exceptin the Jews, he muttered. Morgan didn’t think he had heard correctly. I beg your pardon, he said.

Do you believe in God? That’s my business, Ford said. Well and good, Morgan said, I would not expect any man of your intelligence to embrace such a common idea.

The earliest recorded mention of special people born in each age to ease the sufferings of humankind with their prisca theologia comes to us through the Greek in the translated writings of the Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus.

It was called An Eastern Fakir’s Eternal Wisdom, published by the Franklin Novelty Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And in this book, which cost me just twenty-five cents, I found everything I needed to set my mind at rest. Reincarnation is the only belief I hold, Mr. Morgan. I explain my genius this way—some of us have just lived more times than others.

About a year after this extraordinary meeting Morgan made his trip to Egypt. Although Ford did not go with him he had conceded the possibility of an awesome lineage.

And together they had managed to found the most secret and exclusive club in America, The Pyramid, of which they were the only members. It endowed certain researches which persist to this day.

She said to Father I think what we are witnessing is, in fact, a courtship of the most stubborn Christian kind. Father replied Yes, if you can call a courtship what has already produced a child.

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.

Younger Brother understood the love in some hearts as a physical tenderness in that part of the body, a flaw in the physiological being equivalent to rickets of the bones or a disposition of the lungs to congest.

The appearance of these magnificent lovers in the family’s life had been startling; the conflict of their wills had exercised an almost hypnotic effect.

You would sit across the dinner table from each other in bondage, in terrible bondage to what you thought was love.

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?

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.

The screeching and pounding of metal on metal where the two cars joined was the syncopating right hand. It was a suicide rag.

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.

She had no guile and could act only in total and helpless response to what she felt. If she loved she acted in love, if she was betrayed she was destroyed.

Spiritual fraud had been rampant in the United States since 1848

But there was an interesting susceptibility to occult ideas of the most famous pragmatists in the land. Of course it was all very hush-hush. A rumor in certain circles had it that Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford had formed a secret society.

One news story came out claiming the new invention was something called a vacuum tube by which Edison hoped to receive messages from dead people.