PART IV
January 10, 1959
MY DEAR ALVIN:
I have read all that you have written, and what am I to say? It is almost thirty-five years that we have known each other, and if I ever had any doubts that Alvin Cutter was a person of honesty and integrity, they have long vanished. So I know that you wrote honestly and as well as you knew how, and it makes me wonder whether any story of a man, written after his life has been lived, bears more than a shred of validity.
I must hasten to add that I question nothing you have put down. When I sum up the facts you have recorded, they are true enough, but the scholars will also do that and perhaps better than we could. We are not afraid of the facts, no matter how awful they are, but for some strange reason, we are afraid of people, who at their worst are still a little noble and a good deal wonderful. Or don’t you think so? It is so easy for us to spell out a thing like the incident at the Arrowhead Pit and to put it down on the record and to rest on the security of the past; but where the people in the incident are concerned, we prepare a host of reservations and are prepared to swear by them.
What traps us? I don’t think it is the bright public glare of a book in print, for it seems to me that these memoirs you are putting together will never be published, or at least not in our lifetimes—which are almost over anyway. Are you protecting the people concerned? But they are almost all dead, Alvin; Ben and Jack and Mark and poor Fulton Grove, who was never enough of a man to be a villain—and so many others whom we knew and worked with. Or are you, perhaps, protecting me? That too occurred to me, and it would fit in with that strange, Victorian sense of propriety which you brought with you to Pomax, but I want no protection, Alvin, and the union needs none.
Reading what you have written makes me wonder why so few, if any, have been able to make human beings out of the men who lead labor—that is, in books, yet in books the people on the other side of the struggle, the owners and operators, loom like giants, or, even better, like people of flesh and blood. Why are we like shadows, who look back at other shadows?
I think of Lena Kuscow, and that night you went with her to see what was happening out at the strip mine. Did it never occur to you that Lena wanted you so desperately that she would have gone to the edge of a live volcano to be with you? But of course that did not occur to you—because you never saw Lena, that strong, beautiful, and wasted vitality, full of hate and resentment and frustration. The union had meaning to her only in terms of what she was, what she had lost, and what she needed so desperately; and in that way, she was not so different from Benjamin Ren-well Holt.
You didn’t know that she was the first person ever to speak to me about you—knowing the two of us and what our thoughts were; something not so difficult to know. Ben also knew. Lena had begun to despise me, and perhaps there was a beginning of the same thing with Ben.
It happened that same Christmas Day, that day you wrote about at the end of the manuscript you sent me, when Lena and I were alone in the kitchen, the rest of you inside, and Lena turned to me and said,
“You’re a fool, Dorothy. I guess you know it.”
I told her that I didn’t know what she meant. You see, your idealization of me translated my fear and uncertainty into a virtue, and we were still in the pre-Freudian days then. I was a prim and, as I have often suspected, a none too wholesome woman. It terrified me to face things like that, and I suppose Lena also terrified me somewhat. So I retreated into ignorance, the beclouded ignorance that used to be a woman’s refuge, but had already worn thin in the 1920s.
“I mean Alvin Cutter,” Lena said.
“Well, what about Alvin Cutter? I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Lena.”
She had too much to drink that evening, but so had I; so had all of us; and even your own memory of the evening is beclouded, an alcoholic haze obscuring what really happened.
“Have you ever looked at life, Dorothy?” Lena demanded. “Have you ever faced up to it and examined it? Did you ever let yourself think of what kind of a joy ride it is to be Mrs. Ben Holt? Or did you ever take a good, long, clear look at Ben?”
I told her that it was none of her business and that it had nothing to do with Al Cutter.
“Dotty, this is Lena. Stop being a damn fool and a prig. Al is in love with you. He’s so much in love with you that he can’t sit in the same room with you and not let everyone know it.”
I said something about her having a nasty and inventive mind, protesting that I had never touched you, that you had never touched me, that we had never even kissed. “And,” I added, as a final touch, “he loved his wife. Maybe it was the kind of love you don’t understand, but he loved her. He worshiped her.”
“You don’t worship women,” Lena answered tiredly. “These days, people don’t even worship God—and as for his wife, she’s been dead almost a year. He loves you and you love him—Oh, Christ, what am I wasting my breath for? I must be drunk. The hell with it!”
But things change; and if they say that people never change, they could also say with as much certainty, that people never remain the same. I suppose there was no woman I was ever as close to as Lena, but that took time. It took a basic revision in my own standards of morality, or of what passed for morality in a person like myself. Most importantly, it took a desire to understand Lena.
She lived with Mark Golden on and off for almost fifteen years; she left him and returned to him, and she loved him and hated him, as you well know. Dedication wears thin, and like war, it is interspersed with a good deal of boredom. She never had anything to do with Ben, because she did not like Ben and because adultery was not one of Ben’s failings. Mark was much older than she was, and in a way, Mark was the most tragic figure of all—but that was my opinion and not Mark’s. Years after this Christmas night of which I speak, Mark and I talked about it. He was so old then! Somewhere, youth had passed him by, somewhere far, far back in his life, but when we talked, he said that all in all, he considered that his life had been a useful and fruitful one.
“I did the kind of work that, for the most part, I’m not ashamed of,” he said to me. “After all, Dorothy, the most frightening thing about growing old is neither the nearness of death nor the infirmity age brings, but rather the realization that time is an illusion, and that the eternity of days and years that faced our youth is no more than the blink of an eye, only a moment, an elusive, fleeting moment. It’s a hell of a thing to look back shamefully and regretfully, and at least I can say that I’ve had good years and some moments of happiness. All in all, it’s on the black side of the ledger.”
Lena was there then. She said something about Ben Holt being remembered, while few would remember Mark Goldman.
“Why not?” Mark smiled. “The memories belong to him—God knows, he worked for them. Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter to the dead whether they’re remembered or not—not one single iota.”
That was years later. On the Christmas night I spoke of, I had little love for Lena; or, to tell the truth, for anyone else at our house. I can number and remember them, too. I was, for the moment, heartily sick of Alvin Cutter and his adolescent worship of me. I was tired to death of remembering not to be caught in a hallway or behind a piece of furniture with Fulton Grove, with his damn, roving, feeling hands and his dirty, little-boy lechery, and the sight of Jack Mullen’s poor ghost of a wife, let out of captivity and allowed to take her marital position in the sight of mankind for one brief night, while her stud of a husband restrained himself, was more than I could bear.
I too had had some discussions with Mark Golden about the trade-union movement and how the heights of Jerusalem were always scaled by Class C human beings. Perhaps I was slower than most to learn a lesson of history, for after all, it was eight years since I had married Ben Holt and long enough that I had been living in Pomax; and my dreams of glory fractured slowly. Even the sight of familiar objects changes with time, and one falls into a pattern of observation that can only be forcibly shattered—as it was for me that evening as I watched Ben undress, watched this giant of a man with his thickening waistline sit on the edge of his bed, pull off one sock slowly, then the other, dropping them, leaving them there on the floor. I said to him,
“You could put them into the laundry bin as easily as I could.”
“Oh? I thought I’d wear them tomorrow.”
“The same socks?”
“The same socks. Yes, my dear. I’m just a lousy, uncultured miner who wears his socks two days in a row.”
“You’re not a miner,” I said. “I’m sick of having you call yourself a coal miner every opportunity you have.”
“What?”
“I said you’re not a miner. You haven’t been for eight years.”
“What the hell are you getting at, Dotty?” he asked thickly. “What’s eating you?”
“I just think that you’ve been out of the mines long enough to change your clothes when they’re dirty.”
“What a cheap, lousy thing to say! If I didn’t make allowances for your background—”
“What kind of allowances? What about my background?”
“The hell with it! Go to bed.”
“I want to know what kind of allowances you make?”
“Look, Dotty, this is no time for a philosophical discussion. I’m tired and you’re irritated, so why don’t we just both of us go to bed.”
“What is the time for a philosophical discussion, Ben, or any other kind of discussion? Morning, noon, night—perhaps in those good comfortable after-dinner hours that a man spends with his wife and family? But since this is the first evening you’ve been here in two weeks, I think this is it. I’m a little drunk, therefore I am also a little philosophical.”
“Knock it off, Dotty!”
“Not for the world. I want to know what kind of allowances you make for me.”
“All right.” He stared at me thoughtfully, his eyes tired and bloodshot, and as he looked at that moment, so help me, I had it in my heart to throw away the whole charade and be only pleased with the fact that we were together this night. But I didn’t, and Ben said, “I make allowances for the fact that you were a spoiled brat brought up with a silver spoon in your mouth, and with not enough sense or perception to know what it means to be a worker or to try to build a trade union.”
“Why did you marry a spoiled brat, Ben?”
“Because I loved you.”
“Or because you couldn’t bear the thought of a miner’s daughter? Which is it? And if you ever did win a decent life for the miners, I suppose you’d look at them with contempt because they could give their children some decent clothes and an education and three meals a day—which to you is a silver spoon in a kid’s mouth.”
“God damn it, don’t twist my words!”
“Then don’t twist the facts. Don’t call me a spoiled brat. You know better. I had a maid for a while, but now I’m running this house by myself and raising three children and doing the cooking and cleaning, and without any expense accounts and steaks in hotel restaurants and bootleg whisky and Pullman compartments and all the rest of what goes with the good fight, as your friend, Fulton Grove, loves to call it. And furthermore, you can tell Mr. Grove that the next time he tries to paw me—”
“That son of a bitch! I’ll—”
“Hold onto your hurt pride, Ben. For once, you listen. Because on top of all that, I’ve managed to spend almost an hour or two every day at the Central Soup Kitchen since this strike began, and I know something about people, which is almost as important as knowing about miners, because they’re also people—which I think you’ve forgotten. Just as you so conveniently forgot that those poor devils in Arrowhead Pit were people—”
“Oh no! Damn it, no! You’re not going to bring up this Arrowhead thing—not tonight at an hour past midnight. It’s Christmas, Dotty. Can’t you get it through your head that this is Christmas?”
“I can’t get it out of my head. I’m full of carols. This is the one day of the year when the human race gets together on the proposition that we stop being animals for twenty-four hours. But it’s past midnight, so we can return to being ourselves. And as for Arrowhead, I agree with you. Put it away. Put it away, Ben Holt, and forget about it—”
I said it was shattered. It’s shattered and pieced together again, and people go on living. I went on living with Ben, and people admired us. You see, there was one fact about Ben that was inescapable: he never looked at another woman, and thereby, through all of his life, no breath of scandal was ever whispered about him. That’s how the smart designation came into being, Caesar and Caesar’s wife. It’s a peculiar measure of morality that marks us. He said about Lena once, “She’s a tramp.” Ben lived in a world of good women and tramps, and you fell into one category or another, and I suppose he demonstrated some kind of profound wisdom in marrying someone who would remain a “good woman.”
I don’t find the truth painful any more, and I am ready to admit that during those years, I wanted the union to die. I wanted it broken because I had a dream that if it were ever to be broken, Ben and I would be released, and we could leave Pomax and I could forget that I had ever seen a coal mine. So year after year, ’25, ’26, ’27, ’28, and ’29, I watched the membership shrink—I watched it go down from a hundred thousand to forty thousand, yet by then I knew that it would make no difference. I knew that if there were five coal miners left who were ready to sign cards in the Miners Union, Ben Holt would be on the scene to lead them.
It would be wrong to say that I felt nothing for him, no sympathy, no love; the truth is that I felt a great deal indeed, and there were moments of great warmth and closeness between us. A marriage like ours is composed of ten thousand rivets and strings and knots, and when one breaks, another takes over the strain, and when something snaps, something else adheres. If I just pluck memories out of a grab bag, I can find moments again and again. If the steak in the Pullman dining car cost eight dollars, there were other times when he spent his last penny to buy some toy for the children, or some piece of inexpensive costume jewelry for me. He was a sentimentalist and Lena once characterized him as a “slob.” It was cruel but in some ways true; he was also a strong man driven by some wild urgency which I never understood. To you, Alvin, finally, it was his lust for power. I wish I could explain it that easily. In the past I did. But now I doubt much that I knew then.
Also, during those years, I had no time to brood over things. To raise three children, as I did, and to keep a home going, meant a state of utter exhaustion at the end of each day. The days and the months went by—and always, it was Ben Holt fighting for his life. In 1927, a reporter from a St. Louis paper came to Pomax to interview me. She was a bright, sharp young thing, and I remember that she began the interview by asking me how it felt to be Ben’s wife. I was supposed to answer that in one short, specific sentence.
You will remember that I spent the summer of 1928 at Father’s house in Ringman. I brought the children with me. Ben had to borrow the money for our train fare to Pennsylvania, and while such a summer was a good thing for the children, the plain truth of it was that we couldn’t figure out any way to stay alive in Pomax. At that time, you were in Chicago, preparing for the union’s national convention. Ben put us on the train for Pennsylvania, and then went on to Chicago.
I am sure you read Kingsley Rowe’s article in last month’s National Post, about Ben and those years in the 1920s. Just in case you missed it, I am enclosing a cutting about the time I speak of. Rowe isn’t very dependable when it comes to facts, nor did he take the time to ask me to verify anything. But I thought you would be amused by it, as an example of the reality versus the historical hindsight. Also, there is a real disposition to be kind to Ben, now that he is dead. Could that be part of a national disposition of ours—to ennoble when dead those we hated most alive? Anyway, here is the article:
That was the year when Ben Holt, president of the International Miners Union, faced the daily fare of his union members during the era of the twenties—starvation. As far as his own pantry went, he was no better than a miner. It was empty. Like any miner, he had to contemplate the pinched faces of his own children and hear them whimper for food. But in one way, at least, his own situation was better than most, for he had the unwavering support of his loyal and devoted wife, Dorothy Holt.
There were few families like the Holts, close, tight, inseparable. Whatever arrows his enemies hurled against him, they admired his family and admitted his position as a family man and a good father. So it was not with an easy heart or without denting his hard core of pride, that Ben Holt made the decision to send his family to his father-in-law’s home at Ringman, while he went on to Chicago alone. At least there, they would have a roof over their heads and find nourishment.
Once in Chicago, Holt faced the most critical situation of his entire career. Never before or since that summer convention of 1928 was Benjamin Renwell Holt closer to losing his place as the leader of the International Miners Union. For three years, his once powerful union had been torn by strikes, lockouts, and internecine warfare. Its great membership, shortly before close to four hundred thousand, had shrunk to less than fifty thousand. Its various locals had asserted their autonomy, bringing additional disunity into the union. Its treasury was bankrupt—indeed, money had to be borrowed to pay the expenses of the convention.
Fulton Grove, already embarked on his quick climb to power in the hierarchy of the National Confederation of Labor, led the assault of that strong organization against the Miners Union. As his allies, chartered by the National Confederation, Gus Empek’s Associated Miners Union invaded the convention hall to demand a merger with the International Miners Union and representation on the top-echelon committees. There was the moment when Ben Holt faced not only dethronement, but permanent exile from the ranks of the American labor movement. Not alone Gus Empek, but Jack Brady and half a dozen brawny leaders of the Associated Miners joined in a charge up to the platform, to shoulder Mark Golden, union attorney, away from the microphone and seize the attention of the assembled delegates.
At one side of the stage, Ben Holt sat in thoughtful silence, flanked on one hand by veteran Jack Mullen and on the other by his public-relations expert and assistant, Alvin Cutter. No one of the three said anything or appeared in the least disturbed, nor did Ben Holt appear in the least annoyed. Neither did he make any attempt to defend the microphone or regain it. Jack Brady, of the Associated Miners, had begun to introduce Gus Empek and extol his virtues, when Ben Holt arose lazily, stretched, yawned, and then slowly sauntered toward stage center. Jack Brady glanced at him nervously, and suddenly began to claim the right of free speech without interference. The six husky Associated Miners started toward the two men.
Suddenly, Ben Holt reached up to the lapel of Brady’s jacket, and, calling into play that extraordinary strength of his, ripped off not only the lapel, but half of Brady’s jacket, exposing the shoulder holster and gun that Brady always wore. As the Associated Miners’ strong-arm men began their rush toward the microphone, Ben Holt roared out, in a voice that shook the rafters of the auditorium,
“What is this—a miners’ convention or a meeting of Chicago hoodlums? Since when are cheap gunmen allowed to address this convention! I took that gun away from Brady four years ago in Pomax, and I’m taking it away again!”
And with that, Ben tore off the holster and flung gun and holster onto the stage. His roaring voice had stopped the muscle men cold in their tracks. Now he turned his back on them and walked to his seat without another word. But even if he had spoken, no one would have heard him. Pandemonium reigned in the hall as the delegates charged up to the stage and forcibly ejected the Associated Miners. Through all that, Ben Holt never moved, only sat there with an expression of utter disgust on his face.
So there is the cutting and the story, Alvin, and were you going to tell it as Kingsley Rowe did, in the same simpering style the National Post uses to force any man of stature or individuality into the Madison Avenue mold—even a trade-union leader, safely dead? Or were you going to tell the truth?
Or are you saying to yourself now, that I am on both sides of the fence, worshiping Ben and hating him, loving him and despising him, and that it makes no sense? But it makes a great deal of sense, my dear Alvin—the only sense in my whole life with Ben. And as for the truth, I do know it, wholly and completely.
You may remember that from Chicago, Ben came to Ringman. By then, the children and I had been at Father’s house in Ringman for three weeks, and those three weeks had worked wonders for all of us. Kingsley Rowe’s picture of the “pinched” faces of my children, as they “whimpered” with hunger leaves something to be desired in terms of the truth. I have seen hunger and even starvation among miners too often to suggest that my children ever knew either. The worst that ever happened was a flattening of their diet, with perhaps too little good protein and too much starch, oatmeal twice a day and almost no eggs or milk or meat, but that is a far cry from either hunger or starvation.
However, after three weeks of fresh farm milk and eggs, orange juice and all the meat and chicken they could eat—as well as the freedom of the house and the fields—the children glowed, and some of the growing network of lines on my own face were being ironed out. When Ben arrived and saw me, his grin of pleasure was so real and boyish that my equanimity only increased. He was to remain with us in Ringman for a full week, the first real vacation he had taken in years, and I had a wistful hope that somehow we could go back to our first days together in Ringman and make new beginnings. But isn’t that always the hope, twice-lived youths and new beginnings?
Father had always liked Ben. My father recognized no virtue as superior to intelligence, and he was ready to forgive a myriad of sins, so long as the sinner was well salted with common sense. Next to boors and hypocrites, he hated fools most, and once he had gotten over the shock of Ben Holt marrying his daughter, he was rather pleased with the notion of having his daughter dedicate her life to what he regarded as a high social service. While he knew a great deal about coal miners and the Miners Union, I don’t think he ever had the vaguest notion of how we lived or what life with Ben Holt was. He had noted Ben’s increase in salary to five and then eight thousand a year. We had not bothered to inform him or the world that subsequently it shrank back to five thousand, then to four and now to two thousand a year—when there was enough money in the treasury to pay the forty dollars a week.
With Ben’s arrival, Father was as excited as a boy at the prospect of having someone at the dinner table each night for seven nights, with whom to discuss politics, history, the situation in labor, the international situation, plus whatever other abstruse subjects might be raised. By now, Norah was nine years old, Sam seven, and little Ben six. Father loved his grandchildren, but there was no denying that they were a trial for an entire summer; he expected to find repayment in Ben and he looked forward impatiently to our first dinner. And when we had finally seated ourselves, Ben already beginning to look like the elder statesman with his graying hair and increasing girth, Father couldn’t suppress a smile of delight.
“I’ve looked forward to this for a long time,” he said. “You’ve been too long away and too far away.”
We agreed, and our talk filled in the years and the empty spaces, and that took us through most of the meal. It wasn’t until Mrs. Privit’s excellent roast had been cleared away that we got to the convention.
“I want to hear all about it,” Father said. “The whole story—the inside story, if you don’t mind, Ben.”
“How do you know there is any inside story?” I wanted to know, a little annoyed with Father’s habit of romanticizing things that were not in the least romantic.
“Because there certainly is, Dotty, make no mistake. Am I right, Ben?”
“You could be right.”
“There you are. Why, you couldn’t read the papers without reading between the lines. They not only had written Ben off; they had printed his obituary. He was finished. He didn’t have a chance in the world, and the only question was who would fall heir to the fragments of the union. Would it be Gus Empek? Or would it be Fulton Grove, called back by acclamation?”
Ben’s laughter roared his appreciation. Father filled their wineglasses, and said, “And the gun, Ben! My word, that was lovely—that was as gracious and fine as anything.”
“And the interesting thing is,” said Ben, “that the newspapers were not so far from wrong. So far as we could see, it was the end of everything—and I was there to be the roasted goose. That’s the history of the miners, isn’t it—break your heart and back for them, and when you’re down, they’ll stamp on your face.”
“That’s what they did to Tom Hennesy, who founded the union,” Father agreed, “and a saintlier man never lived. They did it to Joe Kempton and they did it to McClellen.”
“Miners,” Ben sighed. “Hate—suspicion—and mistrust, their definition of any man who leads them. I swear, sir, I had no place to turn, no idea, no notion—only the simple fact that a union which once numbered almost four hundred thousand members was now down to a handful. No one cared to remember that it was a handful when I became president, and that I had built it up to where it was. Oh no—that was nothing anyone wanted to remember. They wanted a victim, and they wanted to tear him into pieces. Empek knew that. Grove knew it. And I knew it too.”
“Then you knew that Empek would try to raid you?” Father nodded.
“Not quite,” Ben replied. “No, that took a little doing.”
“Ben, what on earth do you mean?” I asked him.
“Dotty, Dotty,” Ben grinned, “wake up. The bad things happen, no matter what. But when something helps, it’s because you make it happen.”
“And you engineered that whole thing?” I whispered.
“Myself? No. The truth is, it wasn’t even my idea. It came from our own pillar of integrity, Alvin Cutter.”
“No. I don’t believe it.”
“Then you’ll ask him,” Ben said flatly.
“It’s your story of what happened that I want to hear, Ben,” Father said.
“All right, sir. I tell it from the point of view of hopelessness, sheer hopelessness. We sat there in a hotel room in Chicago—Jack Mullen, Oscar Suzic, Mark Golden—you know who they are?” Father nodded. “There was Lena Kuscow; she’s Golden’s secretary and a sort of prop for all of us, and Al Cutter—he’s the man I met eight years ago down in West Virginia. I believe you know that story. We sat there and beat our brains out and talked around in circles and tried to see some way out, but there wasn’t any way out. Then Cutter recalled an incident that had happened some years back in the railroad station at Pomax. I don’t want to go into all the details of that, but at that time, Gus Empek and Jack Brady wanted a meeting with me, and they were afraid to show in Pomax, the way feeling there ran against them. So we met in the baggage room at the railroad station. Now Jack Brady is a man with a gun. That’s a sickness, like being a rummy, but it takes the form of needing a gun and wearing a gun. I read an article by a doctor, once, who said it was an expression of sexual impotence, and that the gun became a phallic symbol of some sort, but whether that’s the case or not, I don’t know. I do know that Jack Brady would no more walk around without his gun than walk naked. He never shot anyone, but the gun is his need. That day when we met in the baggage room, Brady lost his head and went for his gun, and I took it away from him—and that was the incident Cutter recalled. He kept harping on it, even though I got annoyed and told him to forget it. Then he said to me, Ben, what would happen if you took that gun away from Brady up there on the stage? I mean, suppose he tried to draw on you, and you took his gun away in front of the whole convention? By golly, wouldn’t that take the delegates’ minds off you and switch all the irritation to Gus Empek and Jack Brady and maybe Fulton Grove as well?
“I told him that he was crazy, and so did everyone else except Mark, who seemed to be fascinated with the idea. Mark insisted that we pay some attention to Cutter’s notion and find out what Cutter had in mind. Cutter didn’t have any of the details worked out at that point, only the picture of what should happen up there on the platform, and then the two of them convinced me that maybe it should happen and that there might be a way to make it happen. So we put our heads together and spent half the night hashing it out and putting the pieces together in working order. The result of it was that we worked out a crazy, kid routine that no one in his right mind would fall for, but then greedy men at a convention are not exactly in their right minds.”
“Hold on and let me guess,” Father chuckled. “You dropped an apple into the lap of the National Confederation of Labor.”
“Exactly. They were in the same hotel, and there was nothing in the world they—by they, I mean Fulton Grove and two other members of the executive who were present as observers—nothing in the world they desired more than the demise of Ben Holt and Ben Holt’s friends. I was the bone that stuck in their craw—the leader of a union that insisted on being an industrial union in the face of their damn craft unions and didn’t play ball in their lousy genteel league. They were wrong, but they had gotten it into their heads that if they could only get rid of me, everything would be on ice for them. Well, we decided that Mark Golden and Al Cutter would go to them and hand them our union. It made sense in a way. Al and Mark were not miners; they hadn’t come up the hard way; they held jobs with the union, and what was more natural than for them to look for something else when the union became a sinking ship? So the next day, Al and Mark met with Fulton and his playmates. Fulton’s own notion of tactics was as subtle as his Sunday-school mind. He planned to demand time on the platform and to offer the delegates the full support of the National Confederation, providing that they dumped Ben Holt.
“Al and Mark said that this would never work, and that the delegates would not throw me out unless they had someone there ready to replace me. Now Gus Empek and his crowd were already at the convention, and there had been quite a battle in the credentials committee as to whether or not they should be admitted. The fact that they were given observers’ credentials was a defeat for me, and this was something Fulton Grove knew. But Fulton had enough sense to know that there was a difference between an observer and a candidate for international leadership. Empek’s name still had the stink of Arrowhead all over it, and although that was four years ago, time had not rubbed it clean. It was the job of Mark and Al to talk Fulton into believing that Gus Empek and Jack Brady could make a real bid for leadership—and I guess they were pretty damned eloquent. They worked out the whole approach with Fulton at first, and then subsequently with Brady and Empek.
“And that was the way it happened,” Ben finished. “It was staged perfectly. It went through perfectly—and it ended just precisely as we planned for it to end. If we hadn’t intervened at the very end, I think the delegates would have killed every last one of those Associated Miners—”
Father was rising now, and he led the way into the parlor, for the brandy and coffee, and cigars for himself and Ben. That harked back to the old days when Ben would dine with us, yet I wondered whether then, a decade and a half ago, Father would have listened to a story like this, nodding and grinning his approval. Ben had to point out that I didn’t approve. He read my face more easily than Father did, and perhaps he had his own guilts where I was concerned. Father interpreted this as an expression of my own anxiety over the incident of the gun.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think Ben was ever in any danger, as far as Jack Brady was concerned. I think Ben described Brady very well—except for one thing that is perhaps a little clearer to a woman. Brady lives with fear. I don’t know about the rest of it, but to me, that’s the main reason for the gun. Brady couldn’t use it. He’s a coward—poor devil.”
“There are better candidates for your sympathy than Jack Brady,” Ben growled.
“I imagine so. I’d rather not name them.”
“Now just what is that supposed to mean?” Ben demanded, angry and hurt that I had taken the wind out of such a fine and clever story. Father was a little upset too, and he hastened to say,
“One moment, Dotty—you can’t make a moral judgment of this thing Ben did, because I am not sure you understand it at all.”
“What!”
Ben threw up his hands in despair, and let Father know that there was no arguing with me, not when I had made up my mind about anything. Father said,
“Hold on, Dotty—please try to see this thing clearly and calmly.”
“I am clear, calm, and also stupid,” I replied. “I have just listened to Ben with both ears, but I am obviously too stupid to understand what he was saying.”
“That is not what I meant at all, child, and you know it.”
“First of all, Father, I am not a child. I am thirty-one years old, the mother of three children, and rubbed raw around the edges. Secondly, I know what you meant. You meant that there are two worlds and two moralities, one for men and one for women. And never the twain shall meet.”
“For heaven’s sake, Dotty, I only call you a child to delude myself into thinking that I am still fairly young. And furthermore, when you talk that kind of suffragette nonsense, you remind me of your Aunt Alice Aimesley. Now to get back to this other thing, I don’t know Cutter but I do know Mark Golden, and I have yet to hear of him mixed up in any kind of dubious business—”
“Nothing is dubious when you do it for the union. Am I right, Ben?”
Ben shook his head wearily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dotty. At this point, there’s not much difference between my leadership and the existence of the union. If the leadership goes, there won’t even be scraps for anyone else to pick up and use. It’s rotten enough, these days, to be a miner with the union in existence, as weak and shattered as the union is. I hate to think of what the conditions would be if there were no union.”
“Be truthful, Ben,” I said softly. “What you can’t see is the absence of your leadership.”
“All right,” he nodded. “I can’t see that.”
“So Mark and Al lie and scheme and degrade themselves in an idiotic little plot and Gus Empek is deflated into an empty sack—a man as decent as any who work with you, made a buffoon and a clown, and you’re the man of the hour because you took Jack Brady’s gun away again, and—Oh, my God, Ben, why do you do it? Why do you have to do it? Why is the leadership of that union so important to you?”
Both men sat there in silence, a long, long silence, and then Ben said,
“You don’t understand, Dotty. Joe is right. You just don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand.”
“How? I’ve tried. Suppose I told you that if I had lost out there in Chicago, I wouldn’t want to live. Would you understand?”
“No.”
“Would you believe me?” he asked softly, and it took me a while before I answered,
“Yes, I guess I’d believe you, Ben.”
Later that evening, Ben pleaded fatigue from his journey and excused himself to go to bed. Father and I stayed in the parlor for a little while, he with the small end of a brandy and a cigar, and myself with my nostalgic memories of youth. After we had been sitting in silence for a while, Father said to me,
“I find it disturbing, Dotty.”
“What in particular?”
“Nothing in particular and everything. The way you and Ben tear and claw at each other. What has happened to you, and what has happened to Ben—”
“Marriages may be made in heaven, Father. But there’s a good deal of hell in working them out. You know that as well as I do.”
“Do I, Dotty? Perhaps I had a more fortunate marriage than most. I used to believe that love solved a good many things. Forgive a prying old man if I ask you whether you still love Ben.”
“I don’t know,” I replied slowly.
“How can you not know, Dotty? Isn’t this something one knows? Always?”
“I’m not sure. It’s harder to love a living person than a dead person.”
The reaction, to my surprise, was of a man who had been struck in the face, and he said, “That was cruel and uncalled for, Dotty.”
“Of course—I know! I’m so stupid!” I went over to him and put my arms around him from behind. “But I didn’t mean what you think, Daddy dear. Sometimes I love Ben, not the way I loved him at the beginning, yet sometimes I love him, and sometimes I hate him. But mostly, there’s just a dead, dull feeling that isn’t love and isn’t hate, and at best, it’s pity.”
“Pity? Good heavens, girl, how can you pity Ben?”
“What Ben? The Ben you used to know? That great hulking coal miner who walked in here one day and proceeded to instruct us in the realities of war and history and man’s destiny? Upstairs, there’s a man with graying hair—a man who’s getting fat and short-winded and tired, and whose life and dreams are running down the drain like sand. Daddy, you don’t know how I prayed for him to lose this election—for him to be free of this curse, this damned need!”
“And do you think for one moment, Dotty, that if Ben lost this election, he’d be free?”
I let go of my father, walked over to the piano, and turned to face this slim, gentle person, who through all of my life had been so wise and understanding—and who now could not begin to comprehend my own situation.
“Daddy,” I said, “Ben is sick. It’s not like heart trouble or consumption, but it’s a sickness all the same. From as far back as I know him, and before that too, he dreamed of only one thing—power. It was bread and butter and meat and drink to him. It was all and everything—power!”
“Dotty—Dotty darling, you’re wrong. That’s one small part of Ben. I don’t deny he wanted power. But what for? That’s the important question—what for? So that he could take this devil’s curse of mining and turn it into something human and bearable, so that he could feed the hungry and clothe the poor, so that he could ease man’s suffering. That’s a noble purpose and a noble cause, Dotty—and I know of no one who has ventured his fortune and dedicated his abilities to a higher end. This is the fact. Then how can you say that all Ben lives for is power?”
“Because everything else is subject to the main thing, which is power. That’s why he felt that he would rather die than be driven out of the leadership.”
“Power over what, Dotty? Ben’s fortunes are low. The union has shrunk to a handful, and it grows smaller month by month. You told me that yourself. Everywhere, Ben is cursed and reviled by the men of money and power. No, don’t accuse him of what he opposes. Ben carries half the world on his shoulders. Don’t make it harder for him, Dotty. Please.”
So argument was pointless, and we were a thousand miles apart. I kissed him good night and went upstairs. We had my old room, which had been furnished from the first with twin beds, perhaps in the hope of a sister who never came, but practically for girlhood friends who remained overnight. Nothing in it had been changed since I married and left the house. The same pink wallpaper over the white wainscot, the same Dutch hooked rugs on the floor, the same blue and white furniture, the same brass student lamp, and on the walls, the three Maxfield Parrish prints that I loved so much.
Ben sat on one of the beds, his shoes off, his face contemplative, and he glanced up and smiled as I entered. I said that I thought he would have been asleep by now.
“I’ve just been sitting here and thinking, Dotty. What a wonderful room this is! Someday, before she gets too old for it, I would want Norah to have a room like this.”
“I don’t think one is ever too old for it.”
“Well—you know what I mean, Dotty. Norah’s nine already. A few years more, and she’ll have to have a young lady’s room, all stiff and polished.”
“Did you look in at the children?”
He nodded. “Sound asleep. Good food, sunshine—and kids sleep well, I guess. Who decorated and furnished this room, Dotty?”
“My mother.”
“She must have been wonderful. Do you remember her well?”
“Not too well. Sometimes better—well, you know how it is. The years dull things.” I had begun to take off my clothes, not facing Ben as he said,
“You’re very angry with me, aren’t you, Dotty?”
“Not very angry, no. Perhaps a little upset. We’re both tired, Ben, and I’d rather not talk about it any more tonight.”
“About what happened in Chicago?”
“That. Other things.”
“Dotty?”
“What, Ben?”
“Is it because of Al Cutter?”
“Ben, what on earth are you talking about?”
“I mean, is it because—I mean because of you and Al Cutter?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, Dotty, for Christ’s sake, do you love Al Cutter? Is that it?”
“You’re not serious, Ben.”
“I am.”
“Well, I don’t love Al Cutter, Ben. I’m not a schoolgirl. I don’t look at someone and decide that he’s the hero of my dreams. I’m a long-married woman, thirty-one years old and with three children, and I do my own cooking and cleaning. Add it up, Ben. Also, Al Cutter never kissed me, never spoke words of love to me—never even indicated that he had any desire for me.”
Suddenly, Ben put his face in his hands, his body wracked with sobs, and through his hands muttered, “Oh, Jesus, Dotty—oh, Jesus God, I’ve never been so low before in all my life. I didn’t win anything there in Chicago. I crawled through on my belly with a few broken pieces in my hands, and I was afraid—oh, I was afraid, and all the time I was thinking, I’ll lose here and with Dotty too, and then everything’s gone, and I have nothing—nothing.” I went over to him, and he looked up at me and said, “Don’t leave me, Dotty—please. Never leave me.”
Pressing his head to my waist, I stroked his hair and promised that I would never leave him.
Promises are broken, Al, so it was not simply the promise. It was more than that—I think you understand how much more, and it’s not simple or easy either, not to be defined in terms of the faithful wife whose love for Ben Holt never faltered, but a complex of things that made it impossible, over all those years, for there to be anything between you and me. That’s a part of the truth, isn’t it—the complex, snarled truth that any life demands if it is to be explained? And yet short of the truth, for it would also be a lie to say that there was nothing between yourself and me. But it’s not the way you write it, Al, obvious and direct, one thing coming properly after the other.
And here this letter has stretched on and on, so that I hardly remember the beginning any more. Was I making a point, Alvin, my dear, that this is a story you can’t tell? But that would be true of any story, wouldn’t it, and how do you follow a human soul through all of its torment and self-deceit? I don’t know. There’s too much to explain, and I would not want to have to explain why Ben and I were so lighthearted the following day. We laid the children down for their afternoon nap, and then he and I went out for a long walk, myself in a yellow cotton dress and Ben in blue denims and a miner’s shirt. We walked all the way to Belfast Ridge, and up to the top of it, and standing there, we looked down into the valley, through the warm summer haze at the smoke of the collieries, groping for the beginning and praying, I suppose, for some destiny.
Either you accept the fact that people, in and of themselves, have no importance or that they have all importance. If Ben had been written off in the seats of the mighty, I at least felt, at that moment, that we had returned to each other. If it was an illusion, it was a pleasant illusion on that summer afternoon back in Ringman, just as my dreams were pleasant illusions, dreams of Ben not too old to take up the study of law—and the two of us living in the Ringman house. Father would have been happy to have us there, and the children would grow up as I grew up. These are old dreams, recently warmed over.
I paused in this letter to search for something, and now I have found it. Perhaps you remember the interview Fulton Grove gave the press after the convention was over. His reward for his labors was a vice-presidency in the National Confederation of Labor, and he was being questioned on Ben Holt and the Miners Union. Here is the clipping:
“And what do you think of Ben Holt’s victory, Mr. Grove?”
“Victory? It was a poor imitation of a victory, if you ask me. Who was it said, ‘Another such victory and I am undone’? Or something of that sort. As far as I am concerned, Ben Holt is undone right here and now.”
“Then you ascribe no importance to his victory?”
“It was a trick. There isn’t an honest bone in Ben Holt’s body. It was staged and planned from A to Z.”
“Would you care to comment on the future of the International Miners Union?”
“Under Ben Holt, it has no future. Today, it’s as fraudulent as Ben Holt. If they quoted true membership figures, they would not show a corporal’s guard. It’s a splinter, not a union. And the sooner the coal miners wake up to the fact that Ben Holt is leading them to utter disaster, the better off the entire industry will be.”
There it was, my dear Alvin, the official point of view, which held that Ben was finished—yet I had the feeling that day of someone renewed, and I think that I was very much in love with my husband as we stood on Belfast Ridge.
So much for my comments, and I hope I have not turned you from the rest of the story. Tell all of it.
This letter she signed “Your dear friend, Dorothy Holt,” and it summed up our relationship, as it also summed me up, a dry old man, looking backward a long, long distance, and trying to untangle a tangled story.