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 hers.
He has held her hand many times, yet she does not often pause to think of it.
Somewhere in Connecticut, it must have been, she no longer minded the train’s speed. Would the past now seem slow? When they returned home next spring, would she be impatient holding the horse’s reins up in front of his picture wagon, the back full of frames and photographs and crayons and paints?
She nods her thanks to the red-haired man, who smiles at her and makes a teasing gesture of peeking into her notebook—a motion that at once pays her the compliment, I want to know, and at the same time assures that he would never look. She takes a grateful sip of the steaming cider, and then spreads both her hands on the table. How strange they look. This morning at the whip-snap machine, her right hand gripping the black-handled wheel and left the braided whip, her hands had seemed part of his unwieldy invention and not her own body. She watched the two five-fingered instruments—small, they are, and her fingernails never glowed as pink as he had made them in her portrait—one turning the crank, the other moving back and forth, her eye no longer following the three strands becoming one braid. They had been three: Edwin and Mary and Effie. Two strands don’t hold without the third to braid them. No, she chides herself, for harmful metaphor. No. Two strands might very well be plied together; she had done so herself, countless times.
Every Past Thing Becomes Strange. Her sentence has a word for each finger, like Effie’s hand on the keys of their upright piano, reciting the notes as she pressed—C, D, E, F, G—and back down G, F, E, D, C. Cat, Dog, Elephant, Finch, Goat. Goat, Finch, Effie did clap.
Come Down Eddie For Good—Good For Eddie Did Come.
She hopes good will come for him. She is not at all sure what sentence she wants to follow Every Past Thing, so she contemplates her husband. Her mind a hush, a prayer, she thinks, though she has not prayed since the war of her childhood, the War against the South, when her mother had cursed and forsworn any further mention of God. Mary conjures him, Edwin, as she’d once invented God: with a paintbrush in his hand, of course, his fine dark brows slightly furrowed, his dark eyes fixed on something she can’t see. She is interested, suddenly, in this difficulty: how, busy looking so intently at him, she can’t possibly see what he sees; staring can bring her no closer to the mystery he is. He would be interested in a puzzle like that. He would line up his magic glass, to see the world upside down and his own stare given back, all of that at once, in one painting.
After she writes Strange atop a new page, she stops and looks about. She skips several pages—would that be enough room?—and writes Becomes. After delineating this space and thinking for some minutes about Strangeness and Becoming, and what notes she might another day make about both, she turns another leaf. Thing. And adds an S—for wouldn’t that be more fruitful?
Thing(s)—
A business card that says Artist—His.
A Secret—Mine. And one not mine.
Bones—Hers, under the earth, with her woolen blanket embroidered with rosebuds, with Thos. Jefferson’s Black Hollyhock seeds and my mother’s missing serving spoon with the