The Body In The Big Apple Read Online Free PDF Page B

inspired.
    â€œTodd had dropped out of NYU to work full-time in the movement, and he was collecting Nathan Fox’s speeches into a book. He promised he’d help me find Fox. He’d met him once someplace in Minnesota the year before. He wouldn’t tell me where Daddy was then, but he said he’d let Fox know I wanted to see him. Todd thought it was pretty cool that I was Fox’s daughter. He made me feel proud. I’d never felt anything like that about Jason, even when I thought I was his daughter. All the comrades had adopted Russian names as nicknames. While they were waiting to go into the factories, one girl, Olga, was teaching herself to set type. She had a little printing press. They would write all these pamphlets and go to some factories in New Jersey and pass them out at the gates. I used to fold and staple.”
    â€œI think they’d been setting type by computer for quite a while by then,” Faith observed, acutely aware that while she was going to various cotillions, Emma had been experiencing a very different sort of life that spring. Certainly one less boring, although folding and stapling might have become somewhat repetitious.
    â€œWell, nobody told Olga.” Emma pulled her mink closer as they walked briskly across the park toward the West Side. There wasn’t any snow on the ground,although flurries were predicted. The trees looked cheerless, their branches gray spikes against the leaden winter sky. “I got pregnant with Todd. It seemed like the thing to do—sleep with him, I mean. The comrades were all terribly chummy that way. They explained to me that sex was merely a physical act and monogamy was a bourgeois institution, though Todd didn’t want me to sleep with anyone else, fortunately. I’d graduated from folding and stapling to working on a little article about Emma Goldman for a pamphlet when Poppy found me. She told everybody how old I really was, and Todd was pretty scared. I’d said I was twenty-one.”
    â€œAnd they believed you!” Faith said incredulously. Emma didn’t look twenty-one now. A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past them. An elderly couple was bundled up in lap robes, clearly enjoying the ride.
    â€œThey look so happy,” Emma said wistfully. “It must be nice to have normal parents. They look like somebody’s parents, don’t they?”
    Faith steered her back to the conversation. “And when Poppy got you home, you found out you were pregnant.”
    â€œYes. She’d been very nice to me until then. I think she felt guilty; plus, she was truly worried about what had happened to me. But you know my mother. She’s so used to people doing whatever she says that she totally freaked when I said I wasn’t going to have an abortion. I was going to keep the baby. I mean, she’d had me out of wedlock, although technically she was in it, but you know what I mean?”
    Faith did. What better way to get back at your mother—and Jason—than first to get pregnant and next plan to raise the baby yourself? She also had asneaking suspicion that Emma may have wanted to have someone she could well and truly call her own.
    â€œShe told me we were going to Dr. Bernardo for a checkup, just to make sure I was all right. You know who he is, right?”
    Dr. Bernardo had been taking care of inconvenient problems for New York ladies in Poppy’s circle for years, and Faith had indeed heard of him.
    â€œWhen I got to his office, it turned out she’d scheduled an abortion, so of course we had a huge scene, but I did go home again. The comrades hadn’t exactly been into solidarity after Poppy had talked to them. I called them, told them what had happened, but they were sort of ‘See you later,’ and I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”
    Again, Faith told her, “I wish I had known.”
    â€œI wish you had, too. Poppy yelled at me all the way back to