Jailbird

14

"I was his circulation manager," said Mary Kathleen to Leland Clewes very loudly. "Wasn't I a good circulation manager, Walter?"

"Yes — you certainly were," I said. That was how we met: She presented herself at the tiny office of The Bay State Progressive in Cambridge at the start of my senior year, saying that she would do absolutely anything I told her to do, as long as it would improve the condition of the working class. I made her circulation manager, put her in charge of handing out the paper at factory gates and along breadlines and so on. She had been a scrawny little thing back then, but tough and cheerful and highly visible because of her bright red hair. She was such a hater of capitalism, because her mother was one of the women who died of radium poisoning after working for the Wyatt Clock Company. Her father had gone blind after drinking wood alcohol while a night watchman in a shoe-polish factory.

Now what was left of Mary Kathleen bowed her head, responded modestly to my having agreed that she had been a good circulation manager, and presented her pate to Leland Clewes and me. She had a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar. The tonsure that fringed it was sparse and white.

Leland Clewes would tell me later that he almost fainted. He had never seen a woman's bald spot before.

It was too much for him. He closed his blue eyes and he turned away. When he manfully faced us again, he avoided looking directly at Mary Kathleen — just as the mythological Perseus had avoided looking at the Gorgon's head.

"We must get together soon," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"You'll be hearing from me soon," he said.

"I hope so," I said.

"Must rush," he said.

"I understand," I said.

"Take care," he said.

"I will," I said.

He was gone.

Mary Kathleen's shopping bags were still banked around my legs. I was as immobilized and eye-catching as Saint Joan of Arc at the stake. Mary Kathleen still grasped my wrist, and she would not lower her voice.

"Now that I've found you, Walter," she cried, "I'll never let you go again!"

Nowhere in the world was this sort of theater being done anymore. For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.

"You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter," she cried. "But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?"

I may have made some responsive sound. "Bluh," perhaps, or "fluh . . . "

"Look at me in the eye, Walter," she said.

Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O'Looney wasn't the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentent murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.

Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.

Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.

"Hug her," said a woman in the crowd.

I did so.

I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I mysellf began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning — in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.