John Passos - 1919

“Oh, how can you talk so silly, Edwin, they’re not white people and they never will be. They’s just like Mexicans or somethin’, or niggers.” She caught herself up and swallowed the last word. The colored elevator boy was drowsing on a bench right behind her.

“If you’re not the benightedest little heathen I ever saw,” said Edwin teasingly. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you, well, have you ever thought that Christ was a Jew?”

“Well, I’m fallin’ down with sleep and can’t argue with you but I know you’re wrong.” She went into the elevator and the colored elevator boy got up yawning and stretching. The last she saw of Edwin in the rapidly decreasing patch of light between the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the vestibule he was shaking his fist at her. She threw him a kiss without meaning to.

When she got in the apartment, Ada, who was reading in the livingroom, scolded her a little for being so late, but she pleaded that she was too tired and sleepy to be scolded. “What do you think of Edwin Vinal, Ada?” “Why, my dear, I think he’s a splendid young fellow, a little restless maybe, but he’ll settle down…. Why?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Daughter, yawning, “Good night, Ada darlin’.”

She took a hot bath and put a lot of perfume on and went to bed, but she couldn’t go to sleep. Her legs ached from the greasy pavements and she could feel the walls of the tenements sweating lust and filth and the smell of crowded bodies closing in on her, in spite of the perfume she still had the rank garbagy smell in her nose, and the dazzle of street lights and faces pricked her eyes. When she went to sleep she dreamed she had rouged her lips and was walking up and down, up and down with a gun in her handbag; Joe Washburn walked by and she kept catching at his arm to try to make him stop but he kept walking by without looking at her and so did Dad and they wouldn’t look when a big Jew with a beard kept getting closer to her and he smelt horrid of the East Side and garlic and waterclosets and she tried to get the gun out of her bag to shoot him and he had his arms around her and was pulling her face close to his. She couldn’t get the gun out of the handbag and behind the roaring clatter of the subway in her ears was Edwin Vinal’s voice saying, “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? You’re entirely wrong… a Christian, aren’t you? Have you ever thought that Christ would have been just like them if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have been born of decent people… a Christian, aren’t you….”

Ada, standing over her in a nightgown, woke her up, “What can be the matter, child?” “I was having a nightmare… isn’t that silly?” said Daughter and sat boltupright in bed. “Did I yell bloody murder?” “I bet you children were out eating Welsh Rabbit, that’s why you were so late,” said Ada, and went back to her room laughing.

That spring Daughter coached a girls’ basketball team at a Y.W.C.A. in the Bronx, and got engaged to Edwin Vinal. She told him she didn’t want to marry anybody for a couple of years yet, and he said he didn’t care about carnal marriage but that the important thing was for them to plan a life of service together. Sunday evenings, when the weather got good, they would go and cook a steak together in Palisades Park and sit there looking through the trees at the lights coming on in the great toothed rockrim of the city and talk about what was good and evil and what real love was. Coming back they’d stand hand in hand in the bow of the ferry boat among the crowd of boyscouts and hikers and picnickers and look at the great sweep of lighted buildings fading away into the ruddy haze down the North River and talk about all the terrible conditions in the city. Edwin would kiss her on the forehead when he said Goodnight and she’d go up in the elevator feeling that the kiss was a dedication.

At the end of June she went home to spend three months on the ranch, but she was very unhappy there that summer. Somehow she couldn’t get around to telling Dad about her engagement. When Joe Washburn came out to spend a week the boys made her furious teasing her about him and telling her that he was engaged to a girl in Oklahoma City, and she got so mad she wouldn’t speak to them and was barely civil to Joe. She insisted on riding a mean little pinto that bucked and threw her once or twice. She drove the car right through a gate one night and busted both lamps to smithereens. When Dad scolded her about her recklessness she’d tell him he oughtn’t to care because she was going back east to earn her own living and he’d be rid of her. Joe Washburn treated her with the same grave kindness as always, and sometimes when she was acting crazy she’d catch a funny understanding kidding gleam in his keen eyes that would make her feel suddenly all weak and silly inside. The night before he left the boys cornered a rattler on the rockpile behind the corral and Daughter dared Joe to pick it up and snap its head off. Joe ran for a forked stick and caught the snake with a jab behind the head and threw it with all his might against the wall of the little smokehouse. As it lay wriggling on the grass with a broken back Bud took its head off with a hoe. It had six rattles and a button. “Daughter,” Joe drawled, looking her in the face with his steady smiling stare, “sometimes you talk like you didn’t have good sense.”

“You’re yaller, that’s what’s the matter with you,” she said.

“Daughter, you’re crazy… you apologize to Joe,” yelled Bud, running up red in the face with the dead snake in his hand. She turned and went into the ranchhouse and threw herself on her bed. She didn’t come out of her room till after Joe had left in the morning.

The week before she left to go back to Columbia she was good as gold and tried to make it up to Dad and the boys by baking cakes for them and attending to the housekeeping for having acted so mean and crazy all summer. She met Ada in Dallas and they engaged a section together. She’d been hoping that Joe would come down to the station to see them off, but he was in Oklahoma City on oil business. On her way north she wrote him a long letter saying she didn’t know what had gotten into her that day with the rattler and wouldn’t he please forgive her.

Daughter worked hard that autumn. She’d gotten herself admitted to the School of Journalism, in spite of Edwin’s disapproval. He wanted her to study to be a teacher or social worker, but she said journalism offered more opportunity. They more or less broke off over it; although they saw each other a good deal, they didn’t talk so much about being engaged. There was a boy named Webb Cruthers studying journalism that Daughter got to be good friends with although Ada said he was no good and wouldn’t let her bring him to the house. He was shorter than she, had dark hair and looked about fifteen although he said he was twentyone. He had a creamy white skin that made people call him Babyface, and a funny confidential way of talking as if he didn’t take what he was saying altogether seriously himself. He said he was an anarchist and talked all the time about politics and the war. He used to take her down to the East Side, too, but it was more fun than going with Edwin. Webb always wanted to go in somewhere to get a drink and talk to people. He took her to saloons and to Romanian rathskellers and Arabian restaurants and more places than she’d ever imagined. He knew everybody everywhere and seemed to manage to make people trust him for the check, because he hardly ever had any money, and when they’d spent whatever she had with her Webb would have to charge the rest. Daughter didn’t drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and if he began to get too obstreperous, she’d make him take her to the nearest subway and go on home. Then next day he’d be a little weak and trembly and tell her about his hangover and funny stories about adventures he’d had when he was tight. He always had pamphlets in his pockets about socialism and syndicalism and copies of Mother Earth or The Masses.