She auditioned for the Schola Cantorum at the Metropolitan Opera House and was accepted, the youngest voice the choir had ever had, it looked like her dreams were coming true. But she couldn’t go on tour with them because she couldn’t leave her job, so they dropped her. Her mother said: “If God wanted you to have lessons, God would have made them possible.” She was like the heroines in all those musicals who starve and suffer unnoticed, until one night the star gets a sore throat and can’t go on, and against the better judgment of the fat cigar-chewing manager, the heroine takes over, wins the hearts of millions. Only Ethel never took over. She wasn’t there when the star got a sore throat. She married Julius Rosenberg, typed up spy notes, and got sentenced to the electric chair instead. What happens to us in life seems, in retrospect, inevitable. And much of it is, the main patterns anyway. And yet we are full of potential, there are many patterns in us, and there are significant moments in life when we can choose among those parts of ourselves we might fulfill. What if I had met her years ago? I could have recommended her for a scholarship at Whittier, she might have studied music like Ola, they might’ve even been friends, we could have acted in plays together. She was just a year behind me, having skipped a year, she was very bright, and I was virtually running Whittier College from my freshman year on, it would have been easy — Dr. Dexter would have admired the suggestion, bringing a poor girl from the Eastern ghettos out to the clean air and warm sunshine of Southern California, I’d have probably got special mention in the yearbook for arranging it. We could have taken walks and talked about all my student activities: the fraternity, football, debate and theater, politics — she might have helped me with my studies. I didn’t really need help, but I was always getting depressed about them, and she could have kept me going.
I breathed the June air deeply, feeling the campus palm trees swaying gently overhead, and wondered if Ethel, too, a dreamer like myself breathing this same air, was being similarly moved, similarly drawn back into this trance of timelessness, on this, her last day on earth, falling in love all over again with life itself, or at least a dream of life? “Now I kneel down to a crevice in the concrete, filled with earth painstakingly accumulated from the underpart of moss, small velvety crumbs of which cling to the damp cool parts of the yard where the sun’s rays rarely penetrate. In this crevice an apple seed which I planted, and have watered patiently, is sprouting bravely. All my love, darling.” Just the thing to take root and crack up the concrete, I thought, the prison people must love it.
In the Horatio Alger novels, in spite of everything, the heroines were always saved at last by rich uncles. Ethel didn’t have a rich uncle. Neither did I, growing up — except for Grandpa Milhous’s money which put me through school, we were as poor as any other middle-class family — but later I got adopted. By teachers, businessmen, Herbert Hoover, eventually Uncle Sam himself. I was successful with old men, she wasn’t. Was this it, then? Was this the reason that that serious little curly-headed girl watering an apple seed in a prison exercise yard was going to get 2000 volts bolted through her brain tonight? A missing character, a lost “closing scene”? Or had the story taken a wrong turn somewhere, putting her beyond the reach of rich uncles? That night she got attacked by that old guy from The Valiant cast, for example, or the day they knocked her down with fire hoses on Bleecker Street.
What would I have done, I wondered — what would have become of me if they’d knocked me down with those hoses? Ethel was just sixteen years old, a sensitive little girl with a pretty voice and big dark eyes, trusting, innocent, bright and lively. She didn’t want to change the world, she wanted to love it, to sing to it, to give herself to it. Just like me. But it was 1931, the unemployed were marching on Washington, her family was wretchedly poor, and there was a job to be had: as clerk in a paper-box factory on Bleecker Street. “You’ll never get ahead!” her mother had screamed at her, pushing her out the door. “There’s no place in life for arty people!” But all right, she would get a job, share her money with the family, and still somehow save aside enough to take music lessons, maybe even go to the university, enter theater — it happened in the movies every day. But when she got to the factory, there were already a thousand people there ahead of her, trying to get the same job. I knew how she felt, I’d been through this, too, that Christmas in New York, trying to land a job with a law firm. But in her case, there was no private interview, there was a riot. The police were called and the crowds were broken up with fire hoses. Ethel was knocked down twice.
I tried to imagine this scene, but it was confusing. I thought of the street as narrow with little restaurants and movie houses, but I knew that further east, near Lafayette Street and the Bowery, it didn’t look like this. Rows of plain dirty brick buildings, I thought, five or six stories high, a lot of fire escapes, balconies, drainpipes, green paint. The street would be clotted with trucks, not to mention the rampaging mob, yet I felt the trees around, blue sky, room to run. I could see the police springing down out of their patrol wagons, faces alert, turned up, catching the sun, hands on their sticks or at their belts, tense yet exultant, like footballers taking the field, could see the hoses uncoiling from fire trucks, connected to fire hydrants that looked like stubby circumcised peckers, could feel the hoses suddenly fattening with surging water, could sense the excitement of the crowd, men mostly, tough and angry, and big women — where was Ethel? I saw her, small, all but lost in the huge crowd, an uncertain child, wanting to run, yet drawn obediently toward the job she’d been sent to ask for, thus moving neither with the crowd nor against it, and so isolated, a tempting target, framed in the solid arched doorway of a dingy yellow brick building, a kind of warehouse or something — and the guy with the hose, blasting away at the big broads, the clumsy old men, spies her standing there, legs spread, eyes wide open, clutching a handbag to her small breasts, and slowly he bends that big gray snake of his — I run toward her: “Ethel! Look out!” She looks up — but too late, the spray hits her full in the face and down she goes, kicking against the current, the jet blasts up her skirt, driving her, skidding on her backside, to the wall — I throw myself in front of her, absorbing the brunt of the spray. It slams hard against my butt, my head, I’m thrown against her, we tumble together in the driving shower, she clutches me to hang on, I fall between her legs, but I keep my back to the spray and she manages, protected, to scramble to her feet. “Run!” I say. “Get away while you can!” She grabs my hand. “Come!” she cries. Her voice is small, almost strident. Somehow, we’re out of the spray and running free, past the milling angry crowds, wheeling vehicles — then suddenly it hits us again, from a different direction maybe, knocks our feet out from under us, she’s down and hurt, skirt up around her waist, I pick her up, plunge forward through the driving spray, duck behind a car, then around a corner: safe!