John Passos - Big Money

“You two go out an’ eat,” said Eddy. “I’ll finish up… I’m bunkin’ here anyway. Saves the price of a flop… You feed Miss Mary up good, Comrade Stevens. We don’t want her gettin’ sick… If all the real partymembers worked like she does we’d have… hell, we’d have the finest kind of a revolution by the spring of the year.”

They went out laughing, and walked down to Bleecker Street and settled happily at a table in an Italian restaurant and ordered up the seventyfivecent dinner and a bottle of wine. “You’ve got a great admirer in Eddy,” Don said, smiling at her across the table.

A couple of weeks later Mary came home one icy winter evening to find Don busy packing his grip. She couldn’t help letting out a cry, her nerves were getting harder and harder to control. “Oh, Don, it’s not Pittsburgh yet?” Don shook his head and went on packing. When he had closed up his wicker suitcase he came over to her and put his arm round her shoulder. “I’ve got to go across to the other side with… you know who… essential party business.”

“Oh, Don, I’d love to go too. I’ve never been to Russia or anywhere.” “I’ll only be gone a month. We’re sailing at midnight… and Mary darling… if anybody asks after me I’m in Pittsburgh, see?” Mary started to cry. “I’ll have to say I don’t know where you are… I know I can’t ever get away with a lie.” “Mary dear, it’ll just be a few days… don’t be a little silly.” Mary smiled through her tears. “But I am… I’m an awful little silly.” He kissed her and patted her gently on the back. Then he picked up his suitcase and hurried out of the room with a big checked cap pulled down over his eyes.

Mary walked up and down the narrow room with her lips twitching, fighting to keep down the hysterical sobs. To give herself something to do she began to plan how she could fix up the apartment so that it wouldn’t look so dreary when Don came back. She pulled out the couch and pushed it across the window like a windowseat. Then she pulled the table out in front of it and grouped the chairs round the table. She made up her mind she’d paint the woodwork white and get turkeyred for the curtains.

Next morning she was in the middle of drinking her coffee out of a cracked cup without a saucer, feeling bitterly lonely in the empty apartment when the telephone rang. At first she didn’t recognize whose voice it was. She was confused and kept stammering, “Who is it, please?” into the receiver. “But, Mary,” the voice was saying in an exasperated tone, “you must know who I am. It’s Ben Compton… bee ee enn… Ben. I’ve got to see you about something. Where could I meet you? Not at your place.” Mary tried to keep her voice from sounding stiff and chilly. “I’ve got to be uptown today. I’ve got to have lunch with a woman who may give some money to the miners. It’s a horrible waste of time but I can’t help it. She won’t give a cent unless I listen to her sad story. How about meeting me in front of the Public Library at two thirty?” “Better say inside… It’s about zero out today. I just got up out of bed from the flu.”

Mary hardly knew Ben he looked so much older. There was grey in the hair spilling out untidily from under his cap. He stooped and peered into her face querulously through his thick glasses. He didn’t shake hands. “Well, I might as well tell you… you’ll know it soon enough if you don’t know it already… I’ve been expelled from the party… oppositionist… exceptionalism… a lot of nonsense… Well, that doesn’t matter, I’m still a revolutionist… I’ll continue to work outside of the party.”

“Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry,” was all Mary could find to say. “You know I don’t know anything except what I read in the Daily . It all seems too terrible to me.” “Let’s go out, that guard’s watching us.” Outside Ben began to shiver from the cold. His wrists stuck out red from his frayed green overcoat with sleeves much too short for his long arms. “Oh, where can we go?” Mary kept saying.

Finally they went down into a basement automat and sat talking in low voices over a cup of coffee. “I didn’t want to go to your place because I didn’t want to meet Stevens… Stevens and me have never been friends, you know that… Now he’s in with the comintern crowd. He’ll make the centralcommittee when they’ve cleaned out all the brains.”

“But, Ben, people can have differences of opinion and still…”

“A party of yesmen… that’ll be great… But, Mary, I had to see you… I feel so lonely suddenly… you know, cut off from every You know if we hadn’t been fools we’d have had that baby that time… we’d still love each other… Mary, you were very lovely to me when I first got out of jail… Say, where’s your friend Ada, the musician who had that fancy apartment?”

“Oh, she’s as silly as ever… running around with some fool violinist or other.”

“I’ve always liked music… I ought to have kept you, Mary.”

“A lot of water’s run under the bridge since then,” said Mary coldly.

“Are you happy with Stevens? I haven’t any right to ask.”

“But, Ben, what’s the use of raking all this old stuff up?”

“You see, often a young guy thinks, I’ll sacrifice everything, and then when he is cut off all that side of his life, he’s not as good as he was, do you see? For the first time in my life I have no contact. I thought maybe you could get me in on reliefwork somehow. The discipline isn’t so strict in the relief organizations.”

“I don’t think they want any disrupting influences in the I.L.D.,” said Mary.

“So I’m a disrupter to you too… All right, in the end the workingclass will judge between us.”

“Let’s not talk about it, Ben.”

“I’d like you to put it up to Stevens and ask him to sound out the properquarters… that’s not much to ask, is it?”

“But Don’s not here at present.” Before she could catch herself she’d blurted it out.

Ben looked her in the eye with a sudden sharp look.

“He hasn’t by any chance sailed for Moscow with certain other comrades?”

“He’s gone to Pittsburgh on secret partywork and for God’s sake shut up about it. You just got hold of me to pump me.” She got to her feet, her face flaming. “Well, goodby, Mr. Compton… You don’t happen to be a stoolpigeon as well as a disrupter, do you?”

Ben Compton’s face broke in pieces suddenly the way a child’s face does when it is just going to bawl. He sat there staring at her, senselessly scraping the spoon round and round in the empty coffeemug. She was halfway up the stairs when on an impulse she went back and stood for a second looking down at his bowed head. “Ben,” she said in a gentler voice, “I shouldn’t have said that… without proof… I don’t believe it.” Ben Compton didn’t look up. She went up the stairs again out into the stinging wind and hurried down Fortysecond Street in the afternoon crowd and took the subway down to Union Square.

The last day of the year Mary French got a telegram at the office from Ada Cohn. PLEASE PLEASE COMMUNICATE YOUR MOTHER IN TOWN AT PLAZA SAILING SOON WANTS TO SEE YOU DOESN’T KNOW ADDRESS WHAT SHALL I TELL HER. Newyearsday there wasn’t much doing at the office. Mary was the only one who had turned up, so in the middle of the morning she called up the Plaza and asked for Mrs. French. No such party staying there. Next she called up Ada. Ada talked and talked about how Mary’s mother had married again, a Judge Blake, a very prominent man, a retired federal circuit judge, such an attractive man with a white vandyke beard and Ada had to see Mary and Mrs. Blake had been so sweet to her and they’d asked her to dinner at the Plaza and wanted to know all about Mary and that she’d had to admit that she never saw her although she was her best friend and she’d been to a newyearseve party and had such a headache she couldn’t practice and she’d invited some lovely people in that afternoon and wouldn’t Mary come, she’d be sure to like them.