The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 45

Rye blushed again and looked down.

“I was so humiliated! I dragged her to the kitchen and we yelled at each other, but she wouldn’t budge. I had just turned your age, seventeen, which she thought was too young to travel to rough labor camps and western towns alone. Besides, she reminded me, I had promised that I would finish high school. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. High school? Should I ask Jack Jones and Vincent Saint John to wait a few months for the revolution while I took my exams in comportment and had my final piano recital? Or perhaps my mother preferred I stay home and marry a Newark bookkeeper who would spend the rest of his life fumbling at my skirts while I learned to boil cabbage?

“Mother threw her arms in the air. At the very least, I could admit there were choices in life other than bookkeeper’s wife and miner’s whore!”

Rye glanced around the soda fountain. The old man in tweed was peering over his newspaper again, but Gurley didn’t seem to care, in mid-performance, replaying this fight with her mother.

“I yelled back at her, ‘At least a whore has the good sense to get her money up front!’ ” Gurley shook her head. “Oh, it was a horrible thing to say. My father had never been much of a provider, except of stories. Mother slapped me. And I slapped her back. And she slapped me again. And I knew better than to go another round with Ann Gurley. We faced off like prizefighters in the kitchen while the great Vincent Saint John sat patiently in our parlor, awaiting my answer and listening to my father dither on about some speech he’d given about home rule back in 1890.

“That’s when my mother’s face changed. It was as if, in that moment, she suddenly became an older version of herself, and the rage drained from her eyes.

“ ‘I am going, Mother,’ I said.

“ ‘I know you are,’ she said. And she looked around this kitchen, this place she worked twelve hours a day, cooked three meals and sewed and darned for extra money, where she would live and die, and where I would have died, or some kitchen like it, had she not raised me to break out. She sighed and took my hand and said, ‘Give ’em hell, Gurley.’ ”

Rye’s ice cream soda was long gone, the glass licked so clean it barely needed washing.

“Look at me going on,” Gurley said. She slid her glass forward. “Please, finish mine. My stomach is unsettled.”

“No,” Rye said, “you should eat it.”

“For your birthday,” she said, “please.”

A woman passed by smiling, and Rye became aware that they must look like sweethearts, him in his secondhand lawyer’s clothes and bowler, Gurley in her big black coat—a young couple sharing an ice cream, not a pregnant nineteen-year-old revolutionary and a seventeen-year-old orphan who was days removed from a jail sweatbox. He imagined them as real sweethearts, and the thought caused him to blush.

He looked around the room, but no one else seemed to be looking at them. Even the tweed man with the bulbous nose had gotten up and left. Rye finished Gurley’s ice cream and they left the drugstore. Outside, a woman was leaning on a light post. She straightened when they came out.

It was the woman with the black eye Gurley had spoken to after her speech. “I followed you from the hall,” she said. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course,” Gurley said. “Ryan, this is Carol Anne.”

Carol Anne wouldn’t even look at him.

Gurley turned to him. “I’m sorry, Ryan, would you excuse us a moment?”

She walked the woman halfway down the block. On the sidewalk, people made a wide berth around the thin woman, but Gurley held her hand, nodded, and listened. Then Gurley reached into the pocket of the black coat, pulled something out, and pressed it into the woman’s hands. The woman shook her head no, but Gurley nodded as if she were insisting. She patted the woman’s hand and seemed surprised when she suddenly gave Gurley a hug.

The woman continued down the street. When she rounded the block, Gurley returned to Rye and took his arm again and they began walking back toward the hotel and boardinghouse.

“Did you see her eye?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rye said.

“Her sister’s husband did that and much worse, I’m afraid. She would be in danger if she didn’t leave, so I advised her to catch a train and get out of town immediately. She has family in California, cousins, so she’s going there.

“Oh, and another thing,” she added. “I had believed we raised two hundred fifty dollars tonight, but due to a bookkeeping error, it was closer to two hundred.”

They had reached the door of her boardinghouse. Rye could see through the window the house matron sitting next to a fire with a cup of tea. “A bookkeeping error,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

Rye looked at her closely. How had he imagined they might be sweethearts? She lived such a different life, not just married and expecting a child but commanding a union fight against a whole city, this slip of a girl who fired up rooms full of workers and decided on a whim to pay a poor beaten girl to get out of town. It seemed silly that he had imagined what it might be like to kiss her. What he wondered now was what it might be like to be her.

“I hope it was the priest’s money,” Rye said.

She stared at him a moment and a wide smile slowly spread on her face. “I don’t believe he donated,” she said.

“Too bad,” Rye said.

She enveloped him in a hug. “Thank you, Ryan,” she said into his ear. “I needed this. Happy birthday.”

Rye watched her walk up the steps, the matronly figure in the window rising to greet her.

He walked down the street to his own dank hotel, got his key from the ghost at the