for a few days before going back into the mêlée. And what exactly are you going back to do, Elisabeth?”
“Well, I certainly won’t be sewing sandbag sacks, that is for sure!”
They cackle and clap and swat the air with their gloves and fans. I drink and look around. Nim is by the door ordering one of the hired men down to the kitchen. Her hair is looped and she’s put earrings in, but apart from that, she’s the selfsame: sensible petticoat, two pleats in her dress. It’s said she’s had many suitors and could have made a good match more than once, even with the shame of Frederick’s bastard hanging over her, but here she has stayed, devoted and constant, both when the wages have come and when they haven’t. She sees me looking and comes over.
“Your glass is empty, Mrs. Burns,” she says, taking it from me and replacing it with a full one from a passing salver.
“Thanks, Helen,” I says, for that’s her real name; I know it to be so.
“Lizzie!”—Jenny is calling—“I was just about to give the ladies a tour of the upstairs. Do join us.”
“Well, thanks, Jenny, that sounds nice, only—”
Laughing, Tussy takes my arm. “Don’t be such a bore, Mohme. Lizzie is going to stay here with me. The band is going to start soon, and the men aren’t nearly drunk enough to dance, so I’m relying on Lizzie to be my partner.”
Tussy leads me to the bay window where the band has set up. “Music, please!” she cries, and they start up. She spins me from one side of the empty floor to the other till, three songs later, I start hacking and I’ve to sit down.
After a time—no sooner do I finish one drink than another is pressured on me—the women come back from upstairs. “Finally!” says a voice, and the men approach with outstretched hands. I refuse the two who ask me up.
“Maybe the next one,” I says. “I need the rest.”
But the truer truth is, I’ve become interested in what’s happening by the second fireplace; to get up now would be to miss it. It appears the woman Dmitrieff is telling something of her life. Sat on an easy chair like it’s a throne, enough space between her legs to fit a violin-cello, she has the place rapt. Frederick, Karl, and some others have made a ring round her and are fighting with each other to laugh loudest at her utterings. I strain my ear to catch a scrap.
“So I said, I only married you to get a passport, and he said, Well, I only married you for your—”
She widens her eyes in mock horror and peers down at her bust, as if noticing for the first time how smooth and well-looking it is.
Now there’s a body to contend with.
Refusing another round of dancing, I rise and make for the empty chair beside her. But Jenny, who must have been watching too, is faster. She slips through the band of men and takes Dmitrieff’s hand.
“If none of these men are brave enough to ask you up, then you shall have to make do with me.”
Dmitrieff laughs. “Oh, Mrs. Marx, I thought you would never ask!”
The two skip to the floor, and the men look after them, murmuring and scratching and wondering why all women aren’t like them.
Stranded now on a bit of empty carpet, I hasten to the nearest free seat. I watch the array over the lip of my glass: Jenny and Dmitrieff, Karl and Goegg, Frederick and Janey, Tussy and Dalby, Tomanowski and Lessner, Jaclard and Eccarius, Dr. Allen and his wife, the Lormiers, and maybe ten others, swaying and reeling. The number dawns on me: thirty or more altogether. A good way to clear off those who are due a visit, but the expense must be—well, it must be effin’ mighty.
Of course, it’s easy to spend when you haven’t done a tap to have it. Three hundred and fifty pounds a year, in three installments, straight from Frederick’s accounts, that’s what they get. I’m sure they think it’s a secret; I’m sure they think I’m oblivious because I’m unable to make out what Frederick writes in the books. But in our house, having keen ears is just as good as having snooping eyes of your own, for half of the time he’s forgetting to speak in the German; half of the time he’s shouting through the walls instead of keeping his talk to a whisper; and the other half of the time he’s at the street door barking orders to messengers and letter carriers; it was never going to be long before I caught wind. Three hundred and fifty pounds is the digit, and that’s before the gifts and the sneaky envelopes; that’s before he sweeps in to level the bills and promises-to-pay that they leave to pile up on their desks and dressers and drawers (and not, where they ought be, on their memory and their morals).
Careless charity is what the world would call it, if it knew. Helping those who beg and not those who really need the help. And who needs the help more—can someone please tell me?—than Nim’s son? Lord knows what condition of roof that boy is living under, and yet I don’t see a single tormented penny leaving the house in his direction. Would Frederick even know where to send it? One day justice will have to be done the poor lad; one day he’ll have to be cut his sliver.
“You know, there’s a story told about them,” I says, turning to the man sat beside me.
“About whom, madam?” he says, his breath wafting through his moustache.
“The Marxes.”
“Ah, yes. Such a remarkable family. Stories are bound to be told about them.”
By the fireplace, Karl has taken up the fire blower and is making smutty jokes with it. Watching him brings a smile—like a secret understanding—to the man’s face.
“You one of the Party?” I says.
His smile drops. “The Party?”
“You know, the International.”
“Madam, the International is not a party. It is an association. A free association of workingmen.”
I make a face to say I stand humble and corrected. He accepts it with a nod. Brings his glass under the hair of his lip to suck from it.
“Well, sir, the story I’m thinking about—”
“Is almost certainly just that, a story. Tittle-tattle from the bread queue.”
“You haven’t heard it yet.”
“I don’t need to hear it to know that it’s false.”
“If it’s false I tell it, it’s false I got it.”
“Precisely.”
I take a sup and ponder this a moment. “Only I don’t believe this one is false. And if you only listened a minute, I’m sure you’d find you agree.”
He shakes his head and groans.
“The way it goes is, her mother, I mean Jenny’s mother, gave them some money for their honeymoon, and they took it with them in a chest.”
“Please, madam, must we do this?”
“And what they did was, they left the chest open on the table in the different hotel rooms they stayed in, so that any old body who visited them could take as much
