For the first time, Arthur seemed sad. “I grew up poor.” He gestured to the cramped, leaky garret. “Now I live in luxury. Petits fours all the time.” He reached into the soapy water for a cup and his fingers brushed Mabel’s.
Mabel’s cheeks flushed. She kept her eyes on her task.
“My mother died when I was five. My father when I was eight. My older brother, Paul, raised me after that. I went to school till I was eleven, and then I left school and worked in the textiles factory with him. Twelve hours a day. It was Paulie who started the Secret Six.”
Mabel passed Arthur a cup. “He did?”
Arthur nodded.
“Where is your brother now?”
“In prison.” Arthur wiped the towel across the coffee cup with care. “He was tired of seeing friends living in two-room shacks with their families while management fat cats lived well. The Bureau was after him for every little thing—he couldn’t walk to the corner store for bread without being followed. He got fed up. So he sent a bomb to a congressman. The congressman’s secretary opened the package, though. It blew off her hands.”
Mabel grimaced, imagining the poor secretary. It was all coming back to her now. “I remember. It was in all the papers. My parents were very upset. They said violence like that gives radicals a bad name. Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have …”
“It’s okay.” Arthur pulled the plug from the sink and watched the dirty water swirl down.
“Isn’t he to be executed?” Mabel asked gingerly.
“By firing squad,” Arthur said, gently drying Mabel’s soapy hands with a rag. “Unless his appeal goes through.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Arthur smiled. “You can come back tomorrow.”
Mabel’s stomach did a flip-flop. “Of course. I’m sure there’s all manner of, um, plans to make. With the Six. Of course.”
Arthur still smiled. “Mm-hmm.”
Mabel was so nervous she backed up and bumped into the table. “Sorry.” She reached for her gloves. Blueprints peeked out from underneath a workers’ newspaper. “What’s this?”
Quickly, Arthur grabbed the blueprints away, rolling them into a tight paper club. “It’s nothing.”
And suddenly, Mabel felt dumb again. After they’d opened up to each other, she’d assumed a closeness; she’d overstepped. “Gee, it’s late. I-I’d better go,” she said, walking briskly to the door.
“Mabel, wait! I’m sorry. I’m just … not accustomed to trusting people.” Arthur took hold of Mabel’s hand, and a tingle traveled up her arm and made her neck buzzy. “With my brother’s situation, you can understand. See, I want to stage a protest. At the Future of America Exhibition. Jake Marlowe is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with American capitalism. That exhibition is a wicked lie—it’s amoral—when good men are dying in his mine with no hope of participating in the pretty future he’s building.”
Mabel liked how passionate Arthur was. He wasn’t the most handsome man she’d ever seen, not like Jericho. But Arthur had principles and courage. That was attractive. “I could help you spread the word about the protest.”
“Not just yet,” Arthur said, locking the blueprints in a trunk. “Let’s get you home. Wouldn’t want your parents to have another reason to hate me.”
“You don’t have to see me home,” Mabel said.
Arthur raised an eyebrow. “You said there was a fella following you.”
“Maybe I was wrong. I don’t know.” Mabel felt a bit silly now. Perhaps he’d only been walking the same direction she had.
“Well,” Arthur said, reaching for his coat, “I’m not taking any chances.”
“Extra! Extra! Two Men Drowned in Hell Gate Waters Off Ward’s Island!” a newsie called as they neared the Sixth Avenue train. “Ghosts in the Asylum, Patients Say! Haunted Hospital! Monsters in the Madhouse!” Eager readers swarmed the boy, tossing their nickels and grabbing the hot sheets.
Arthur jerked a thumb at them. “That’s what sells newspapers these days,” he said, and shook his head as they climbed the steps to the train. “Do you know why people make up ghost stories?”
There were many things Mabel could say to that, but she didn’t want Arthur to know about her work at the museum and think her foolish. She settled on, “Why?”
“Because it’s easier than believing that ordinary people can be cruel and downright evil,” Arthur said.
The minute she got home to the Bennington, Mabel knocked on Will Fitzgerald’s door.
“Mabel!” Sam said. “Say, this is a nice surprise.”
“Sam, could you steal me a movie camera?”
Sam’s eyebrows went up. “That is, without a doubt, the most interesting question I’ve been asked today. And considering the day involved talk about ghosts and the end of the world, that’s saying something.”
Jericho came up behind Sam, and Mabel caught her breath. She wished she could just stop liking him. It would be so much easier. “Why do you need a movie camera?” he asked.
“I can assure you, it’s for a good cause.”
“You wouldn’t take on a cause if it weren’t good,” Jericho said, and Mabel wasn’t entirely sure it was meant as a compliment.
“You don’t really have to steal it, but I figured you might know somebody,” Mabel said. “You always know somebody, Sam.”
Sam stroked his chin. “That’s true. Come to think of it, I do know a fella owes me a favor. If he’s not in jail or hasn’t been shot by a jealous girlfriend, I can get it for you.”
“Thanks, Sam. I owe you.” Mabel kissed Sam on the cheek, stealing a glance at Jericho as she did. Take that, Jericho.
On her way back to her apartment, Mabel reflected on Arthur’s comment about the human capacity for evil. She wasn’t naive; she’d seen plenty of bad. What Jake Marlowe and his management were doing to the workers in the name of profit was certainly cruel, if not evil. But sometimes evil was made up of small acts: cheating someone out of their due or ignoring a wrong, like during the Palmer Raids, when agents had pulled people from their homes to deport them and their neighbors had looked the other way. The longer those smaller acts of wrong went unchallenged, the more they compounded into a monster. But there had to be a counterbalance to that, and it was the human capacity for good. For kindness and self-sacrifice and justice. Toward helping your neighbor because, after all, weren’t we all in this world together? Those, too, were often small acts. Like Arthur leaving his garret to travel uptown—far out of his way—just to make sure that Mabel got home all right. That was good. That was unselfish. It made Mabel like Arthur all the more. It made her want to be an even better person. And those small acts of good carried forward with a breathtaking momentum. Over time, they could change the world for the better. Mabel believed that, perhaps more fervently than any prayer.
Before she’d even reached her apartment, Mabel could hear her father’s typewriter keys clacking away.
“Hello, Papa,” she said, breezing through the door, stopping to kiss his cheek.