“Who is Shakespeare? Who is Vera! That’s the question!”
“Tittering laughter failed to discourage Belasco. ‘If there’s an audience and they applaud, you are acting.’ ‘And if they throw rotten vegetables?’ ‘You are still acting, but less. ’ he searched for the right word, ‘popularly.’ ‘Oh, Mr. Belasco,’ said Rosemary coquettishly, ‘you say that to all your little Joans of Arc.’ And the titters became whoops and guffaws. He’d made a nearly identical sally at Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, whom the novelist Theodore Dreiser had called ‘the Eastside Joan of Arc,’ and who had brushed him famously aside saying she preferred to ‘speak her own piece.’ Though we hadn’t known it until several weeks later, it was Gurley herself who had rescued us from Willimantic. Belasco settled back in his chair and smiled good-naturedly, undeterred. He was smitten not only with Rosemary’s ungainly allure but with what he called ‘real realism, genuine objects—’”
“‘Real realism!’ Don’t make me laugh!”
“—genuine objects on his stages and not props, walls that did not shake when doors were slammed, an apple pie one could eat and not painted card-board. If he was going to do a show about a poor little mill girl, he wanted a poor little mill girl to play the part, wearing her own authentic clothing, usufructuary rights to which he was willing to pay handsomely for. He had astonished beggars in this very way—”
“Yes, yes, I know the ridiculous story.”
“—his assistants stripping the shirts off their backs as he peeled notes from a wad.
“The idea of a play about the Paterson silk workers did take hold that night. It would be a pageant, a series of more or less static tableau-like scenes depicting important episodes in the life of the strike, as vast and emotionally resonant as any ten productions in a cathedral by the great visionary of the theater Max Reinhardt, because it was real, with hundreds of workers onstage, playing themselves, moving from sorrow and desperation to triumph and glory via courage and principle. One of the wealthy intellectuals, John Reed, who had acceptable credentials as a daredevil journalist — he had ridden with the infamous bandido generale Pancho Villa, and had been in jail with scores of rank-and-filers in Paterson — made himself responsible for the mise-en-scène, both financial and artistic. A light-hearted lothario, he saw a lovely weird target painted on Rosemary’s back, and endeavored to be the salient feature in a world that she was surely experiencing as more and more delightful by the second.”
“‘Although it may indeed happen,’ I once read aloud to Rosemary, ‘that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A.’”
“You—what’s that you’re saying?”
“I have to stop and think about it for quite some time—”
“I can’t believe I heard what I just heard.”
“—and all the thinking I’ve done about in the past never seems available to me or applicable when once again I turn to it, but that sums up our feelings quite as fully as is humanly possible. At least for me. At least in that wonderful moment when I am able to return to it, to think it again. We did not want to be caught up in belief and disbelief — and yet at the same time we wanted to act, we wanted to live! And you can’t live freely and fully, you can’t act boldly and easily, if you don’t properly believe in something. Conversing in this way, we — Rosemary, myself, and a friend of John Reed’s — turned on Twenty-Third and walked up Madison to the Garden, its yellow bricks and terracotta fading in the twilight while at the top of the tower, thirty-two stories high, the Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana swiveled back and forth two or three degrees in the gusty spring wind and caught the last red light of the setting sun. We entered the ground-floor arcades and I said that I liked arches, liked looking at them and walking through them. As the baffled wind blew through those arches, following us, gently carrying us, Rosemary asked me why I felt that way, but I had no answer. It was no great secret, I suggested, that people were drawn to archways, but whatever it was that was at work in that kind of architecture, I felt it very strongly. ‘It makes me feel soft and safe,’ I said, an admission that would have astounded if not choked us — we were Wobblies! — in any other circumstances. John Reed’s friend suggested—”
“Jules Beveridge.”
“—suggested we visit Seville and Florence someday, see the loggias and porticos and so on. ‘I’m not even sure what those things are or where those places are in the world,’ Rosemary admitted with candor equal to my own, ‘but I’d go there in a second. Anywhere in the world, I would.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘With you.’”
“Jules wondered if there was a lift to the top of the tower. Thirty-two stories seemed a great deal to ask, especially without authorization, but it turned out that we could get to the parapets and columns surrounding the little space, the lantern, it was called, beneath the many-tonned but mobile Diana, almost without moving a muscle. Thus was the horrible noise of the city swallowed up. It was another world altogether. The city was not real. All we could hear was a faint but steady grinding of stone on stone, and the wind, buffeting one ear and then, turning to consider another aspect of the island city, the other. The arm of the ancient goddess moved above us, in the upper corners, as it were, of our eyes. There were fewer and fewer people in the lantern lookout, night had swallowed up the city, there were only a few floating streams of light. ‘Or we could just stay up here,’ murmured Rosemary. Jules had his arm around her. ‘We could move to San Francisco.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We could just stay up here. We could move to San Francisco.’ Diana groaned and creaked in the darkness and stone just above our heads. A week or two later, up in the lantern again, Rosemary had an idea, an image of something that might happen and somehow matter. We went down a flight of narrow stairs, painfully, then another and another until they came to a room that appeared to cater to unused utility: electricity! And based on what Jules thought he understood from his engineers he had come to know and to talk to about this and that, he thought it could easily be drawn from this room. A little old man, so quiet and still we hadn’t known he was in the room, Rosemary and I at least, Jules giving a faint impression of prior meetings if not old acquaintance, began to speak from a tiny triangular desk in a dark corner. When Diana had been unveiled twenty years earlier, they had draped her legs and belly with ten thousand incandescent electric bulbs, so that her lovely breasts and forbidding face could be seen by anyone who cared to look up, all night long. Jules said we were associated with the Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, which would be performed in less than a week, surely the old man knew of this spectacle? Yes, yes, he thought he did. Well, we were wondering if Diana might be somehow relit, to help us advertise our show. The old man said that she would be lit now, lit eternally, if he had anything to say about it, but that the scandal of gigantic titties lighting up Manhattan, mesmerizing people and drawing them nearer and nearer her magnificent safety like a lighthouse — it had been too much for decent people to bear. Three hours later we were in the offices of the Passaic Weekly. Rosemary took care of a neglected duty — using a typewriter to make daily reports of news gathered shop by shop, job by job, everybody from the native-born, highly-skilled, and relatively well-paid ribbon workers and weavers, to the immigrant loomfixers and twisters and horizontal warpers — while Jules and I sought and found old light-bulb boards, electrical wire, flashers, and fuses. When he had everything he thought he needed, we hired a wagon, though it was nearly midnight now, and brought it all to the apartment in the Village he shared with John Reed, put as much as we could in three suitcases, and locked them in his bedroom. Then we had a late supper. It was the first time in our lives when we could count on all the food we wanted whenever we wanted it, and we never tired of eating. When we finished eating, we walked to the Garden and ascended the tower once more. It made all the sense in the world as we listened rapturously to the sound of the goddess atop her little six-pillared lantern, grinding from one minute of perspective to the next. Here is what I see now. Here is what I see now. Here is what I see for a moment then never again. The lantern was evidently something of an attraction and was filled with people even at that late hour, the lift going ceaselessly up and down, up and down, up and down, but Jules was quite sure there would be a slack period in the wee hours when they could rig their lights. Secreting the contents of the suitcases wherever we could, here and there in the tower’s highest rooms, another three suitcases each day, we waited for opening night.”