The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 80
When she was done, she went out and got one more bowl of warm water. She rinsed me again and patted me dry. She got powder and oil and cream and rubbed these into my arms and chest and hair and face. I watched her walk across the room to the bureau to get the clothes that Edith had brought earlier—her narrow waist and back, her long neck—and when Ursula returned to the bed, I was roused again.
“There he is.” She whispered it this time, and she let me remove her clothes and we went at each other, soft and hard, slow and frenzied. We played like fancy honeymooners in that flophouse bed.
When we were done, she lay with her head on my chest. We talked quietly, her words buzzing my skin. She said if I managed to put some weight back on and went easy on the drink, she might see me again.
“I’ll try,” I said. “But maybe . . .”
There was no need to finish that sentence.
I looked around the room. “Is this really your hotel?”
“A woman owns nothing in this world except her memories,” she said.
“What’s that mean?” We lay there another moment, breathing each other in. If I could’ve stayed anywhere in the world, it was there. But I couldn’t.
I looked down at the top of her head. “Tell me everything,” I said.
For almost an hour, she talked. Told me where she grew up. How she became an actress. How she fell in love with a grifter. How she met Edith and how she became Ursula the Great. And how, once she’d arrived in Spokane, Lem Brand offered her part of this hotel. Through it all, I just listened.
When she was done, I asked, “Is that everything?”
“No.” She laughed and fell back onto my chest. “It’s never everything, Gig. But it’s probably enough.”
Part IV
The wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.
—Jack London, White Fang
31
In the days after Gig left, Rye began to see that he was living in a particular moment in history.
Maybe this was obvious to other people, but it had never occurred to him. It was a strange, unwieldy thought, like opening a book and seeing yourself in its pages. Seemingly unrelated events—meeting Early Reston at the river that day, the free speech riot, Ursula the Great taking him to meet Lem Brand, traveling with Gurley Flynn, smuggling her story out to Seattle, maybe even Gig’s disappearance—these moments seemed linked, like events leading up to a war. And he supposed that was what they were in, a war—this skirmish between the IWW and the city was part of a larger battle fought in a thousand places, between company and labor, between rich and poor, between forces and sides he wasn’t sure he had understood before.
Part of this new perspective came from the fact that Rye was trying to read War and Peace in the evenings at Mrs. Ricci’s house and on his lunch breaks at the machine shop. He’d started the book when he realized that Gig was not coming back, in the hope that it would tell him something about his brother—if not where he’d gone, at least maybe why.
Over the next few weeks, he read slowly, five or six pages a day, jotting down words he didn’t know on a small notepad, then looking them up on Saturday afternoons in the big Carnegie Library dictionary. At the shop, the Orlando brothers took little interest in the book he was reading during breaks, but Dominic tried to follow along at least with the basic plot, and he would look over Rye’s shoulder and ask, “What’s happening in your book now?” and Rye would say, “Andrey’s about to leave,” and Dominic would say, “Where’s Napoleon?” and Rye would say, “Still on his way,” and Dominic would answer, “Well, keep me posted,” and go back to his work.
One day Dominic’s wife came in with a rhubarb pie for lunch while Rye was reading in the shop. He looked at the tall, dark-haired woman and she stared back at him, recognition arriving for both of them at the same moment.
“You were Jules’s friend!” Gemma Tursi said.
“I’m sorry,” Rye said, feeling again the sorrow of her uncle’s death and the guilt of him and Fred Moore trying to convince her to further the IWW cause.
“No,” she said, “I should have invited you in for a meal. Jules would’ve liked that.” And now she smiled. “But look. I get to remedy that. Won’t you come for dinner this Sunday?”
“Thank you,” Rye said. He was happy for the invitation. Sundays were the hardest days because he didn’t work. Rye would do chores for Mrs. Ricci and then spend most of the day reading War and Peace by the fire, staring out the window and wondering what his brother was doing—maybe sitting around some jungle cook fire, drinking from a communal bottle. He wondered if Gig wished he’d taken War and Peace with him, or if he’d found another book in the big floater library.
Rye wasn’t always sure he understood Tolstoy, but he was surprised at how much he enjoyed reading him, from the first moments of Anna Pavlovna’s soiree to meeting the beautiful Natasha and the dashing Prince Andrey and the thoughtful Pierre. He liked picturing the fancy clothing and fabulous mansions and grand palaces, larger even than Lem Brand’s big house (When Natasha ran out of the drawing room she only ran as far as the conservatory). He tried to imagine a house so big you got tired running from one room to the next. The language seemed musical, and