John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

“If it wasn’t for the kids… Hell, Fred Hoff was right when he bawled me out and said a revolutionist oughtn’t to marry.”

Eventually Mac got a job as linotype operator on The Times , and things at the house were a little better, but he never had any spare money, as everything had to go into paying debts and interest on mortgages. It was night work again, and he hardly ever saw Maisie and the kids any more. Sundays Maisie would take little Ed to brother Bill’s and he and Rose would go for walks or take trolleytrips. That was the best part of the week. Saturday nights he’d sometimes get to a lecture or go down to chat with the boys at the I.W.W. local, but he was scared to be seen round in radical company too much for fear of losing his job. The boys thought he was pretty yellow but put up with him because they thought of him as an old timer.

He got occasional letters from Milly telling him about Uncle Tim’s health. She had married a man named Cohen who was a registered accountant and worked in one of the offices at the stockyards. Uncle Tim lived with them. Mac would have liked to bring him down to live with him in Los Angeles, but he knew that it would only mean squabbling with Maisie. Milly’s letters were pretty depressing. She felt funny, she said, to be married to a Jew. Uncle Tim was always poorly. The doctor said it was the drink, but whenever they gave him any money he drank it right up. She wished she could have children. Fainie was lucky, she thought, to have such nice children. She was afraid that poor Uncle Tim wasn’t long for this world.

The same day that the papers carried the murder of Madero in Mexico City, Mac got a wire from Milly that Uncle Tim was dead and please to wire money for the funeral. Mac went to the savingsbank and drew out $53.75 he had in an account for the children’s schooling and took it down to the Western Union and wired fifty to her. Maisie didn’t find out until the baby’s birthday came round, when she went down to deposit five dollars birthday money from brother Bill.

That night when Mac let himself in by the latchkey he was surprised to find the light on in the hall. Maisie was sitting half asleep on the hall settee with a blanket wrapped round her waiting for him. He was pleased to see her and went up to kiss her. “What’s the matter, baby?” he said. She pushed him away from her and jumped to her feet.

“You thief,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep till I told you what I thought of you. I suppose you’ve been spending it on drink or on some other woman. That’s why I never see you any more.”

“Maisie, calm down, old girl… What’s the matter; let’s talk about it quietly.”

“I’ll get a divorce, that’s what I’ll do. Stealing money from your own children to make yourself a bum with… your own poor little…”

Mac drew himself up and clenched his fists. He spoke very quietly, although his lips were trembling.

“Maisie, I had an absolute right to take out that money. I’ll deposit some more in a week or two, and it’s none of your damn business.”

“A fat chance you saving up fifty dollars; you aren’t man enough to make a decent living for your wife and children so you have to take it out of your poor little innocent children’s bank account,” Maisie broke out into dry sobbing.

“Maisie, that’s enough of that… I’m about through.”

“I’m the one that’s through with you and your ungodly socialistic talk. That never got nobody anywheres, and the lowdown bums you go around with… I wish to God I’d never married you. I never would have, you can be damn well sure of that if I hadn’t got caught the way I did.”

“Maisie, don’t talk like that.”

Maisie walked straight up to him, her eyes wide and feverish.

“This house is in my name; don’t forget that.”

“All right, I’m through.”

Before he knew it he had slammed the door behind him and was walking down the block. It began to rain. Each raindrop made a splatter the size of a silver dollar in the dust of the street. It looked like stage rain round the arclight. Mac couldn’t think where to go. Drenched, he walked and walked. At one corner there was a clump of palms in a yard that gave a certain amount of shelter. He stood there a long time shivering. He was almost crying thinking of the warm gentleness of Maisie when he used to pull the cover a little way back and slip into bed beside her asleep when he got home from work in the clanking sour printing plant, her breasts, the feel of the nipples through the thin nightgown; the kids in their cots out on the sleepingporch, him leaning over to kiss each of the little warm foreheads. “Well, I’m through,” he said aloud as if he were speaking to somebody else. Then only did the thought come to him, “I’m free to see the country now, to work for the movement, to go on the bum again.”

Finally he went to Ben Evans’ boarding house. It was a long time before he could get anybody to come to the door. When he finally got in Ben sat up in bed and looked at him stupid with sleep. “What the hell?” “Say, Ben, I’ve just broken up housekeepin’… I’m goin’ to Mexico.” “Are the cops after you? For crissake, this wasn’t any place to come.” “No, it’s just my wife.” Ben laughed. “Oh, for the love of Mike!” “Say, Ben, do you want to come to Mexico and see the revolution?” “What the hell could you do in Mexico?… Anyway, the boys elected me secretary of local 257… I got to stay here an’ earn my seventeenfifty. Say, you’re soaked; take your clothes off and put on my workclothes hangin’ on the back of the door… You better get some sleep. I’ll move over.”

Mac stayed in town two weeks until they could get a man to take his place at the linotype. He wrote Maisie that he was going away and that he’d send her money to help support the kids as soon as he was in a position to. Then one morning he got on the train with twentyfive dollars in his pocket and a ticket to Yuma, Arizona. Yuma turned out to be hotter’n the hinges of hell. A guy at the railroad men’s boarding house told him he’d sure die of thirst if he tried going into Mexico there, and nobody knew anything about the revolution, anyway. So he beat his way along the Southern Pacific to El Paso. Hell had broken loose across the border, everybody said. The bandits were likely to take Juarez at any moment. They shot Americans on sight. The bars of El Paso were full of ranchers and mining men bemoaning the good old days when Porfirio Diaz was in power and a white man could make money in Mexico. So it was with beating heart that Mac walked across the international bridge into the dusty-bustling adobe streets of Juarez.

Mac walked around looking at the small trolleycars and the mules and the wafts daubed with seablue and the peon women squatting behind piles of fruit in the marketplace and the crumbling scrollface churches and the deep bars open to the street. Everything was strange and the air was peppery to his nostrils and he was wondering what he was going to do next. It was late afternoon of an April day. Mac was sweating in his blue flannel shirt. His body felt gritty and itchy and he wanted a bath. “Gettin’ too old for this kinda stuff,” he told himself. At last he found the house of a man named Ricardo Perez whom one of the Mexican anarchists in Los Angeles had told him to look up. He had trouble finding him in the big house with an untidy courtyard, on the edge of town. None of the women hanging out clothes seemed to understand Mac’s lingo. At last Mac heard a voice from above in carefully modulated English. “Come up if you are looking for Ricardo Perez… please… I am Ricardo Perez.” Mac looked up and saw a tall bronzecolored grayhaired man in an old tan duster leaning from the top gallery of the courtyard. He went up the iron steps. The tall man shook hands with him.