The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 44

“All right,” he said, and gripped her hand. “But I’m still not singing.”

When everyone had left the hall, Gurley took Rye’s arm, and he walked her down the busy street toward her boardinghouse.

“You did a fine job today, Ryan,” she said.

“You’re the best speaker I ever heard,” he said.

She took the compliment without comment. Rye remembered what Lem Brand had said, that Gurley didn’t care about workers like him. “But I wanted to ask. Do you think you could change one thing in your speech?”

She stopped walking and turned to face him.

“You keep calling me a sixteen-year-old orphan,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She touched her chest. “Is it terribly demeaning? At times the story overwhelms me and I get carried away.”

“No, I understand that. It’s just . . .” He hesitated. “Well, today I’m seventeen.”

The hand that had been on her heart now covered her mouth. And when she removed it, she was smiling. “Come on,” she said, and she pulled him up Second Avenue, through the mist, dodging the streetcar-auto-and-horse-hustle. At Yesler Way, she steered him into a building with a fancy scripted sign: G. O. GUY DRUG STORE.

Gurley spread both hands on the soda counter and beamed. “My gentleman friend and I are celebrating, and we would like two ice cream sodas.”

Gentleman friend! Rye watched the man at the counter produce two big glasses, thin at the bottom, wide at the top. He pulled vanilla sodas from the tap and dropped two plops of ice cream in each, the soda fizzing around them.

They carried their ice cream sodas to a wrought iron table, Rye reluctant to take a bite. He’d had ice cream and he’d had soda and liked them so much separately that he worried they’d be ruined together. But the soda made the ice cream melt slowly and the ice cream made the soda colder. It was creamy and delicious, and he felt another pang of guilt about having such a treat while his brother sat in jail.

Gurley was stirring hers slowly. “My mother used to take us for ice cream sodas when she earned a little extra from sewing. We didn’t tell Father.” She hummed at the memory and finally took a bite. “Ryan? Do you ever think back with regret on the choices you’ve made?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Had he made choices? He hadn’t really thought of it that way. Since his mother died, he’d bounced from job to flop to train—sleep here, sleep there—was that a choice? There were things he felt bad about, stealing chickens from an icebox, letting a tramp press against him on a cold night, but really, the first choice he remembered making was to step on the soapbox after Gig got knocked from it.

Then Rye thought about Lem Brand’s warm library, the twenty dollars in his hand. There was a choice. And a regret. He had tried to tell Brand nothing important that day—only things that were already in the newspaper—but he knew what he’d done was wrong. He looked up at Gurley now, worried that the guilt was written on his face. But she was lost in her own thoughts.

“When I was fifteen, my mother took me to see Vincent Saint John speak about the labor troubles in the west. He was dashing. I couldn’t stop staring at his mangled hand—he’d been shot in a dispute in Minnesota.” She laughed, then leaned forward, confiding. “It’s a grave disappointment: the discovery that you have a type.”

Not long after that, she said, a note arrived at her house from a Broadway producer named David Belasco. “He’d read about my arrest in the newspaper, and he invited Mother and me to see a play he was staging, The Girl of the Golden West, about a frontier saloon woman who falls for a notorious outlaw. It was a terrible play, although I must confess some stirring when the outlaw came on. Blanche Bates played the girl, and I recall my mother saying, ‘Well, at least her bosom can act.’ ”

Rye glanced around the soda fountain, but the only person listening was an older man with a bulbous red nose, wearing a tweed suit, who sat over Gurley’s shoulder. He had lowered his newspaper at the word bosom but now lifted it back up.

“After the play, we were led upstairs to Belasco’s office, and he asked if I might be interested in a career as an actress. He was producing a play about a young labor activist, and he thought having the real ‘East Side Joan of Arc’ could generate great publicity. ‘No, thank you,’ I told him, ‘and anyway, I’m from the Bronx.’ ” Gurley shook her head at the memory. “Mother was furious with me. Here was my chance for an independent life, on the stage! But I told her I would choose my own path and that she should not pass off her unlived ambitions to me.

“The next year, I went to my first IWW convention. That trip changed me, the factories, the mining camps, the great stands of forest and mountains. I just wanted to keep traveling, going west, one more train stop. I did not want to go home, Ryan. It was like . . . falling in love.”

She smiled at the memory. “And that’s where I met Jack. He was a miner and a union organizer on the Mesabi Range. His eyes, oh, I can’t tell you. So when Vincent Saint John suggested I take a speaking tour of the west, starting in Minnesota, I jumped at the chance.

“But my parents were furious, and Mr. Saint John came to plead my case and to reassure them. He said I would stay in decent boardinghouses with matrons and that he would have two men assigned to my security. As he explained all of this, though, my mother just stood in our living room with her arms crossed. ‘And who,’ she said, ‘will you assign to