stocks, they buy washingmachines and silk stockings
for their women and they send money back to the
old folks. While our boys were risking their lives
in the trenches, they held down all the good jobs
and most of 'em are enemy aliens at that. Those
hunkies are well off, don't you forget it....
I don't
hold it against the poor devils of hunkies, they're
just ignorant; but those birds who accept the hospi-
tality of our country and then go around spreading
their devilish red propaganda ... well all I can say
is, shooting's too good for 'em." Mr. Healy was
red in the face. A boy in a green eyeshade burst in
with a big bunch of flimsy. Mary French got to her
feet. "I'll get right after it, Mr. Healy," she said.
She got off the car at the wrong corner and stum-
bled up the uneven pavement of a steep broad cob-
bled street of little jimcrack stores poolrooms bar-
bershops and Italian spaghetti parlors. A gusty wind
blew dust and excelsior and old papers. Outside of
an unpainted doorway foreignlooking men stood
talking in low voices in knots of two or three. Be-
fore she could get up her nerve to go up the long
steep dirty narrow stairs she looked for a minute
into the photographer's window at the tinted en-
largements of babies with too-pink cheeks and fam-
ily groups and the ramrodstiff bridal couples. At the
head of the stairs she paused in the littered hall.
From offices on both sides came a sound of typing
and deep voices. She was still hesitantly moving for-
ward when she ran into a young man in the dark.
"Hello," he said in a gruff voice she liked. "Are you
the lady from New York?"
"Not exactly, I'm from Colorado."
"There was a lady from New York coming to
help us with some publicity. I thought maybe you
was her."
"That's just what I came for."
"Come in, I'm just Gus Moscowski. I'm kinder
the office boy." He opened one of the closed doors
for her into a small dusty office piled with stacked-
up papers and filled up with a large table covered
with clippings at which two young men in glasses
sat in their shirtsleeves. "Here are the regular
guys." All the time she was talking to the others
she couldn't keep her eyes off him. He had blond
close-cropped hair and very blue eyes and a big
bearcub look in his cheap serge suit shiny at the
elbows and knees. The young men answered her
questions so politely that she couldn't help telling
them she was trying to do a feature story for the
Times-Sentinel.
They laughed their heads off.
"But Mr. Healy said he wanted a fair well-
rounded picture. He just thinks the men are being
misled." Mary found herself laughing too.
"Gus," said the older man, "you take this young
lady around and show her some of the sights ....
After all Ted Healy may have lost his mind. First
here's what Ted Healy's friends did to Fanny Sel-
lers."
4
She couldn't look at the photograph that he poked
under her nose; "What had she done?"
"Tried to organize the working class, that's the
worst crime you can commit in this man's country."
It was a relief to be out on the street again, hur-
rying along while Gus Moscowski shambled grin-
ning beside her. "Well I guess I'd better take you
first to see how folks live on forty-two cents an hour.
Too bad you can't talk Polish. I'm a Polack myself."
"Y ou must have been born in this country."
"Sure, highschool graduate. If I can get the dough
I want to take engineering at Carnegie Tech ....
I
dunno why I string along with these damn Polacks."
He looked her straight in the face and grinned when
he said that.
She smiled back at him. "I understand why," she
said.
He made a gesture with his elbow as they turned
a corner past a group of ragged kids making mud-
pies; they were pale flabby filthy little kids -with
pouches under their eyes. Mary turned her eyes
away but she'd seen them, as she'd seen the photo-
graph of the dead woman with her head caved in.
"Get an eyeful of cesspool alley, the land of oppor-
tunity," Gus Moscowski said way down in his throat.
That night when she got off the streetcar at the
corner nearest Mrs. Gansemeyer's her legs were
trembling and the small of her back ached. She went
right up to her room and hurried into bed. She was
too tired to eat or to sit up listening to Lois Speyer's
line of sarcastic gossip. She couldn't sleep. She lay
in her sagging bed listening to the voices of the
boarders rocking on the porch below and to the
hooting of engines and the clank of shunted freight.
cars down in the valley, seeing again the shapeless
broken shoes and the worn hands folded over dirty
aprons and the sharp anxious beadiness of women's
eyes, feeling the quake underfoot of the crazy stair-
ways zigzagging up and down the hills black and
hare as slagpiles where the steelworkers lived in
jumbled shanties and big black rows of smokegn:Jwed
clapboarded houses, in her nose the stench of cranky
backhousc.s and kitchens with cabbage cooking and
clothes boilhg" and unwashed children and drying
diapers. She slept by fits and starts and would wake
up with Gus Moscowski's warm tough voice in her
head, and her whole body tingling with the hard
fuzzy bearcub feel of him when his arms brushed
against her arm or he put out his big hand to steady
her at a place where the boardwalk had broken
through and she'd started to slip in the loose shaly
slide underneath. V\'hen she fell solidly asleep she
went on dreaming about him. She woke up early
feeling happy because she was going to meet him
again right after breakfast.
That afternoon she went back to the office to
write the piece. Just like Mr. Healy had said, she
put in all she could find out about the boys running
the publicity bureau. The nearest to Russia any of
MAY,
1936
