ferns before their unfurling, or about the Spanish singer whose picture her mother kept glued to the inside of her drawer of petticoats and stockings, or that grief and ecstasy are the same in time. And the things she says shift inside and remind him of the great sculptor he once watched work. Of the sharp metallic sound of his chisel and its stop at a tiny chunk of marble spinning off across the floor. She’d cared about what she let drop no more than the sculptor noticed those pebbles whizzing by him, and the commotion, all the visitors, all around.
Did she really share that same spirit, the same concentration, that same gathering in the center as Rodin? Jimmy Roberts had told her that. A silly thing to say.
Say that Jimmy Roberts was just a city dweller romanticizing Nature and one of her daughters. Say that his love (if that is its name) had not been tested by life. But even here, in gray tangling New York, weather surprises people. Love surprises. Thunderstorms come in November without warning. Here, more than he ever had in the country, Jimmy Roberts notices the people who live in accord with the weather, with rain and thunder, crying with the sky, hearts thudding as if to leap out of their casing. (And so forth, Nature all metaphor we need.) Irony, he thinks, that the inhabitants of those windowless, crowded rooms—that is how the reformers always write of them: thirty people, men women children, packed into one room without even a window—live most in the weather, its heat and its cold. Wet seeps through, spotting mold and drawing lines across the plaster walls, dripping puddles. Nature wins out—whether or not there’s a frame through which to watch it. But there will be time enough for him to tell more of that story, inside with her.
For wouldn’t he open the door and say, Shall we? And wouldn’t there be chairs for them to sit together? And a table for them to lean across? And years or hours for them to talk?
A trickle of rain has slipped all the way down her spine to her waist. She blinks and takes cover, leaning up against the building, under the awning, bending to withdraw a handkerchief from her bag.
Dare she?
It was all very well for Jimmy Roberts, but could she—did women do such things?—walk straight into Justus Schwab’s saloon?
Justus Schwab’s saloon was and was not the place the word suggests— cabbage stew and coffee could be had there, not just drink, and after Justus himself died of the tuberculosis in the winter of 1900, his wife (who, like Emerson, survived the disease that took the beloved) carried on for some years in exactly the same manner, until she and many of their friends grew too old for such work and such play.
This demise was yet in the future when Mary Jane Elmer stood outside in the rain. It was no matter to her that chronicles of the anarchist history of the early twentieth century make no mention of Schwab’s eventual closing, or that the Appleton’s Dictionary of Greater New York Samuel had given her failed to list the place among the city’s eating establishments. Nor that the woman who walked out the door, laughing in a group of men, was Emma Goldman.
Mary saw only a woman like her—simply, plainly dressed. In late 1899, Emma Goldman had still managed to avoid having her photograph in the daily papers, though she had already done enough time at Blackwell’s Island to have begun carrying a good book everywhere, in case the police tried to cart her off again. Didn’t she ask for it, clucked the dailies, saying the things she did? Associating with free lovers and bomb-makers. Still, she had yet to be called the worst names (that boy anarchist had not yet shot President McKinley).
Had Mary known it was Emma Goldman, she’d have looked more closely, because she understood from Jimmy Roberts’s letters that it was she who had inspired him to abandon the life his family had intended for him. (If the abandonment and resolution of one person can ever be laid at the feet of another.)
As it was, Mary noticed a woman laughing. That was enough. More than enough. The woman whose name she did not know gave both permission—proof the establishment fit for a woman—and lure— laughter: laughter! So it was that Mary Jane Elmer (née Ware) entered Justus Schwab’s First Street saloon, shyly.
I’m comfortable here, Jimmy Roberts had written her. It’s become more my place than what’s called my own (I am not of this city’s Four Hundred, whatever else you might say of my pedigree). Talk here with a person from anywhere in the world, Mary. Writers, artists, anarchists—they all make it home.
She heads for a back table, a bit away from the crowd, near a man hidden behind a newspaper. She finds herself expecting Edwin (though he must be at the Academy by now). Here in a place where she very well could find Jimmy Roberts, she can no longer imagine him. He is no longer a boy. Perhaps she would not know him.
The giant red-haired man behind the counter raises his brow. When he sees that she won’t call her order out to him, he comes over to ask what she would like.
She has money. “Get something for yourself, Mary,” Samuel had told her. He probably meant something like one of Alice’s dresses.
“Something warm,” she answers the man, as though his question were a matter too trivial for her, as though she entered such establishments every day.
She withdraws the green notebook from her carpetbag and carefully folds back the first page, pressing it down to reveal the little nubs of Samuel’s red silk that bind the pages, the same color thread as the whip-snaps she’s braided all week. After all these years, the same dye lot. She frowns, surveying the writing inside—entries of years, ending with Effie’s birth—and flips the book over and opens it from the other side. Slowly, deliberately, she writes:
Every Past Thing Becomes Strange.
She has been thinking that ever since the journey from Shelburne to New York, on that enormous train. It was not the first time she had seen one. She’d gone to the station with Edwin and Effie and Maud to pick up or drop off Samuel several times a month. So it wasn’t the only time she’d felt the anticipation, and the rush of air and noise so powerful it obliterated all the nervousness of waiting and replaced it with a pounding audible more in her heart than her ears. A thudding straight through her. But this time it was she and Edwin who stepped aboard. An act tantamount to saying, Yes, I bind myself to this engine and all of its terrible, puffing speed. Yes, I pledge myself to the new century and all strangeness to come.
She had said these things to herself. I am committed to living—she said this, afraid she was courting death. To step on a train! She hadn’t any right to expect to survive that first jolt of speed. We are not particularly designed for velocity. Our pace is that of our own two feet. Even a horse’s trot could make Mary feel she was fooling time, pulling a sly trick on Mother Nature, who, though generally tolerant of deviance, was nevertheless known to assert her will. Mary might be caught out and punished, like the time her sister Lucy had dared her and she had jumped on Master, no saddle, holding the stallion’s mane and gripping his belly with her knees like a wild boy. This train put even that galloping to shame. The only one of her family who’d ever gone this far south was her father, and he had not come back.
As the train pulled out, a wrenching deep in her belly. Edwin. Husband. He reached out to hold her hand, and she understood then their leaving. Felt the weight that had been pushed aside by packing and ordering and planning.
She studied his hand closely as the train pulled forward out of the station, as if, before turning her face to the window, she had to take the measure of this ground—the long, bony fingers of his capable hands, his eye’s instruments, usually in thrall to his concentrated gaze, but still now, gripping
