The Cure
On August 4, 1915, a Wednesday evening in the middle of a week-long engagement in Portland, Oregon, the anarchist Emma Goldman delivered a curiously somber address. Titled “Jealousy: Its Causes and a Possible Cure,” the lecture confused many of the attendees—mostly labor activists and assorted radicals—who expected another fierce diatribe against industrialists and warmongers, the rousing sort to which they’d been treated earlier in the week, meant to stir up passions and spark new calls for reform or revolution.
Instead, what they heard in the Scandinavian Socialist Hall on Fourth Avenue and Yamhill Street was a measured discourse on love and suffering, with references to Nietzsche, to Byron, Shelley, and Heine. None were surprised that Goldman condemned conventional marriage as an outdated system of property and subjugation, as she often had before, both in her speeches and in the pages of her magazine, Mother Earth. But now she suggested that jealousy, too, was a byproduct of stale convention—not a natural emotion born of real feeling, she said, but an imposition of “the sex monopoly.” For men, she went on, it was a result of conceit: in the bedroom, a man was “an imposter, a braggart,” believing he had no choice but to act like “the bull who must clash horns to win the cow.” A woman, on the other hand, feared economic damage to herself and her children if she didn’t fend off rivals, and in the process reduced herself to pettiness and envy. In both cases, Goldman argued, jealousy had nothing to do with love. Instead, she encouraged those in romantic unions, monogamous and free alike, to break the fetters of this shackling condition and “leave the doors of their love wide open” to roam as it pleased.
The packed auditorium was quiet when she finished, the requisite applause arriving only after a delay. Then the audience filed out silently, passing between columns of police officers who always stood watch over Goldman’s speeches, in the event that revolutionary mobs got out of control and marched on city hall with lit firebombs in hand. What had they just heard, exactly? Most didn’t understand how the causes of jealousy impacted their efforts to unionize, to resist those calling for Americans to join the war in Europe, to envision a future free of the state and its laws that bound them to poverty and servitude. Nor could they tease out a “cure” from Goldman’s words, unless it was simple resignation: turn a blind eye to your lover’s transgressions and carry on.
~
What only Goldman’s closest associates knew was that she herself had been long ravaged by jealousy. It had shaken her confidence, made her doubt her most deeply held values. It turned her into a fraud and a hypocrite, she believed, and delivering the speech was an act of desperation: perhaps speaking these words aloud would help her wrest free from what she had come to recognize as the cruel grip of an untamable beast.
She was forty-six then, a woman no taller than five feet, with a sturdy, peasant build and striking blue eyes, her accent still audible though she’d left Russia thirty years earlier. Newspapers around the country warned their readers about the danger she represented; the one in Portland suggested the government should eradicate her and her ilk the way orchardists eradicated coddling moths. When reporters came to interview her, ready to twist her words to make them sound as menacing as possible, she would open her coat and say, “Look, no dynamite. A true anarchist’s only bomb is education.”
She was also seven years into an affair with Ben Reitman, a Chicago physician already known when she met him as “the hobo doctor,” for his ministrations to the itinerant population of his South Side neighborhood. He was also called “the clap doctor,” for his work pioneering the treatment of venereal disease. As a boy he, too, had ridden the freights from one end of the country to another, and he understood the lives of vagrants first-hand; later in life, he’d write the fictional autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, Sister of the Road. He especially identified with brothel workers who’d fed and comforted him since he began wandering the streets at six years old and who’d also taught him the nuances of pleasure as soon as he was old enough to sport an erection.
Goldman was immediately taken with him, especially his long elegant fingers with dirty nails, his primitive good looks, his gruff manner and intense gaze. She’d long been an ardent advocate of free love, a stance they shared, but until she met Reitman sex was either painful or dull or at best vaguely uplifting. From the start with her hobo Ben, however, the experience was rapturous. She’d had no idea what delights could attend two bodies in concert with each other. She didn’t realize how consuming a face could become, or a male member, which she took to calling Willie. Love and passion came over her as a flood that didn’t abate after months or years. For the first time in her life, she wanted no other man.
Reitman joined her on her speaking tours and soon acted as her manager and promoter. Her friends and fellow activists hated him. He was a brute, a showman, and he had no grasp of political philosophy. He didn’t care about their cause, or any cause, only about being close to the center of attention. He bullied and taunted, made crude jokes at the most serious moments, turned Goldman into a blushing, tittering child. To Goldman, however, he was indispensable. Without his efforts, sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening, she would have been regularly turned away from lecture halls, had her engagements canceled at the last moment. He was also, she believed, the complete embodiment of anarchism, which wasn’t just a matter of words and ideas but of action and feeling. What mattered was freedom, both internal and external, and Reitman, a decade her junior, was as free as anyone she’d ever met. He was no more beholden to any particular group or faction than he was to the stale mores of the day. He did what he believed was best, and most of the time he put the needs of the downtrodden before all others.
He also happened to be what we would now term a sex addict. He’d already been married once, had abandoned his wife and daughter while traveling in Europe, and had taken dozens—if not hundreds—of lovers before meeting Goldman. No matter how many hours they spent frolicking in hotel rooms from Philadelphia to Seattle, Baltimore to Santa Fe, no matter how earnestly he answered her steamy letters—“I press you to my body close with my hot burning legs,” she wrote in one; “I embrace your precious head”—with salacious affection and claims of devotion, he couldn’t last more than a few days without seeking to bury his precious head between other burning legs. As soon as they arrived in a new city, he began to scheme about his next tryst. He often ducked out with another woman the moment Emma took the stage, returning to the hall just as it erupted in applause, his clothes reeking of perfume and sweat, lipstick smeared on his collar, teeth marks on his neck.
Far from letting the doors of love hang open, Emma would afterward rage and weep and ask why he sought out bodies other than her own when she gave hers so willingly, so enthusiastically. To convince him he needed no one else, she would throw herself on him as soon as they stepped into their room, stripping off his clothes and taking his precious head into her mouth even when she could taste another woman on it. In return he’d moan and whimper and call her Mommy, but he made no promises of fidelity. She was disgusted with herself as much as with him, disgusted with love and intimacy, with ideals and actions alike. To the rest of the world she was “the Red Queen” and “High Priestess of Anarchism,” but in the face of a desire she couldn’t control, she was nothing more than a beggar and a slave.
~
If nothing else, she hoped the speech might give her solace. Even if she couldn’t follow her own advice, perhaps the words would at least begin to seep inside of her and loosen the ragged claws around her heart. And maybe sharing the burden of her suffering with an audience, however obliquely, might alleviate some of its weight.
But when she finished, she felt only deflated. This time Reitman wasn’t in the hall to hear the muted applause. Failing to find a willing partner without paying, he’d slipped off to the red light district north of Burnside Street, a few blocks away, and while Emma detailed the gender-based roots of jealousy, he plunged his precious head between the indifferent legs of a nineteen-year-old Norwegian who charged him two dollars for the whole night.
Backstage, furor and agony returned to Emma in full. Her Portland sponsor, the lawyer Charles Erskine Scott Wood, muttered some words about how stimulating her talk was, how it left him much to ponder. His smile, if he had one, was hidden behind dense whiskers. He escorted her back to the rooming house where he’d booked her for the week. And noting her clenched jaw and sad gaze, he offered to stay. He was twenty-five years older than Reitman, distinguished and charming, and if not exactly a committed anarchist—he’d dedicated his life to protecting civil liberties, but he’d also run for Senate as a Democrat—he’d been a loyal champion of Emma since her first West Coast tour a decade earlier. He had too many names, she thought, and the initials he used on his stationary seemed absurdly pretentious, so she simply called him Wood, which had become a tawdry joke between her and Reitman: if Willie ever goes soft, she’d say, maybe I’ll try Wood. She knew he was estranged from his wife and involved with a young suffragist poet, and influenced as he was by Emma’s speeches on free love, he would likely have offered the comfort and tenderness—or vengeance—she needed.
But even if Reitman caught them in bed together, he wouldn’t have taken it as betrayal or punishment. He would have instead pressed her for a description of Wood’s capacities, would have delighted in the details and then asked her to call him by the lawyer’s name the next time they made love. Nothing daunted him, except perhaps her threats to leave him behind the next time she went on tour; the worst thing for him was to be shut out of possible excitement. But those threats she could never sustain beyond a furious night. The thought of traveling without him instantly exhausted her. Go right ahead, he’d say whenever she joked about sleeping with Wood. It might be just what you need.
In the dusty street outside the rooming house, in the failing light of a mid-summer evening, she wished she could believe it were true. Wood held out his arm for her to take and offered a sympathetic look, a hint of prurience in the arch of his dark eyebrows. But she found his dignified Western countenance unappealing. His thick graying hair and beard reminded her too much of rabbis and Talmud scholars in the ghettos of her childhood, first in Kovno and then in Konigsberg, where she went to work in factories to support her father’s failing business ventures. Ben shared her heritage and joined her in rejecting it; there was nothing of the ghetto left in him. Wood had none of Ben’s mischievous fire, nor his unseemly habit of asking directly for whatever he craved. Just a raised arm and eyebrow, tentative enough to be played off as innocent if she failed to respond to them.
No, she wouldn’t replace Willie with Wood. She’d do without both. She refused the arm, said goodnight, and spent the rest of the evening alone. Freedom, she decided, remained an impossible dream, far out of reach.
~
Without it, she slept poorly, and when she awoke, Reitman still hadn’t returned. She tried to work on this evening’s speech—a defense of homosexuality that was sure to bring cries of outrage—but the words kept blurring in front of her. She was troubled by the memories Wood’s beard had recalled, those overcrowded streets full of Jewish peddlers and storekeepers and factory hands shouting greetings or insults, where everyone’s expectations had oppressed her—all a girl needed to learn was how to make gefilte fish and babies, her father had told her when she expressed a desire to go to school—and yet where she’d never felt this lonely, not for a moment.
So before breakfast she rode the streetcar to South Portland, a neighborhood of row houses packed with Jews from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary. People who looked and sounded like her even if they didn’t share a single sentiment she spouted from the stage of the Scandinavian Socialist Hall. Here they still lived as her family had forty years earlier, women sweeping the stairs leading to their shabby homes, men wheeling carts full of cabbages down rutted streets. She stepped into a grocery like the one her father had opened in Konigsberg and lost due to poor management after less than a year. The smell of dill and beets and greens just beginning to rot filled her with a nostalgia that only deepened her sadness, made her doubt all the visions she’d had of a different life than the one she’d been handed.
The shop owner called to her in Yiddish, assuming, because of her Eastern dress and boots, that she was new not only to the neighborhood but to the country. She remembered enough of the language to reply with a brief greeting, to ask for a roll and a wedge of cheese. While he prepared it, a pair of women entered, one old and bent-backed, the other young and pregnant. They, too, said hello in Yiddish, asked if she’d just arrived in the city. Neither of them would have known the name Emma Goldman if she spoke it, so instead she played along, said she’d come from Vilna, by way of New York. Could they recommend a kosher butcher? she asked, and they argued among themselves, the old one insisting on Fenske, the young on Meyer. They’d both accepted their lives without question, Emma thought, living as property of their husbands, serving only to produce and raise offspring. Something she couldn’t have done if she’d wanted to: during her brief, disastrous marriage at eighteen, a doctor had told her she was barren. She wondered if these women experienced the pettiness and envy she’d described in her speech. She wondered if their husbands ever stayed out all night.
On a bench outside the store, she ate her roll and cheese, watching people going about their lives without any inkling that they could be more free than they were, that they could nurture any dreams other than those in which they strove to rise from sweatshop worker to sweatshop owner. None of them wanted what she had to offer, and maybe she, too, would be better off letting go of the ideals that had driven her these last twenty-five years, that had made her shake off the chains wrapped around her at birth only to land her in an even smaller, darker cell than any she’d previously imagined. The roll was slightly stale, the cheese had a hint of mold. Her mouth was dry. She swallowed with difficulty. If she quit being Emma Goldman now, what could she be instead?
Before she finished eating, the two women emerged, both with loaded sacks on their arms. The old woman leaned against the younger, the younger walked with legs spread apart to make room for the enormous lump of her belly. They both wished her well. Emma watched them move down the street, trying to glimpse their misery. But they only appeared content as they continued arguing about the best butcher, as if they could go on doing so all day without any other desires interfering. Along with the taste of stale bread and moldy cheese, in her mouth grew a bitterness so sharp she needed a place to spit. And it wasn’t only in her mouth, but in her throat, too, and down in her stomach. It was everywhere Ben had touched her, everywhere he’d left his mark, her whole body rejecting the pleasure that brought so much pain, or the pain that was payment for pleasure. She wanted no more of either, and the urgency of getting rid of them propelled her off the bench and across the store’s porch. But before she reached the railing, it doubled her over, the chewed-up roll and cheese and last night’s meal splattering the rough boards and dripping from her chin.
And while she was still down on her knees, a boy appeared, no more than twelve, with a mop and bucket and an amused look of disgust as he edged her out of the way and shoved her mess into the street. He must have been the owner’s son, she knew that, but with the headache and chill that followed another round of futile gagging, she couldn’t help thinking it was the young Ben, the boy hobo, abandoned by his father and left to roam the streets by a single mother who struggled to keep him and his younger sister from starving. There were no expectations for him, no limitations. How much easier to find freedom in a world that allowed a boy like him to climb from hospital janitor to licensed doctor, as well as to follow his father’s path in shrugging off a family without any consequences.
And yet he could still anticipate her needs, attend to her in a way no one else ever had. With a few quick strokes of his mop, he erased all signs of her distress. She was shaky when she stood, the sunlight too bright in her eyes, but she felt more buoyant all the same, as if she’d finally emptied out some of what had been dragging her down.
She handed the boy a coin, found her way back to the streetcar, and returned to her rented room. There, a sleeping Reitman awaited her, along with her unfinished speech on homosexuality. If only loving women and their bodies were an option for her. Reitman turned over when she shut the door, muttered, I’m sorry, Mommy, and went back to snoring. His mouth hung open, his mustache barely masking the boyishness that still dominated his features and mannerisms, his bare shoulders covered in a fine down that gave way to curly black hair on his chest. While she watched, spittle leaked from his lips onto the pillow they shared. She fought off another wave of nausea, pulled a chair up to her desk, and wrote.
~
The next night, according to all those in attendance, as well as the newspaper reports that followed, Goldman returned to full form, delivering a fiery lecture on the necessity of a woman’s right to birth control, a subject she’d addressed on numerous occasions in recent years. This time Reitman was in attendance, watching from the wings. In the middle of the speech, a plainclothes officer crossed the stage to deliver a warrant charging the two of them with distributing obscene materials. Goldman insisted the officer read the warrant out loud to the audience. He did so, in a shaky voice, face covered in sweat; despite being twice Goldman’s size, he shrank beside her, as if diminished by her shadow. Afterward, she surrendered to him, allowed him to handcuff her and lead her out of the auditorium to a booming chorus of outraged cries and jeers. Dragged out beside her, Reitman shouted gleeful profanity at the terrified policeman. Emma whispered, Who will Willie think about in his cell?
Most audience members had already forgotten her speech on jealousy, and those who didn’t simply considered it an aberration, or else an intentional mid-week lull to raise anticipation for a raucous Friday night. In either case, the real Goldman was back, they believed, and they followed the officer and the handcuffed couple down the street to the city jail, still chanting and tossing crumpled programs. In the morning, Goldman and Reitman were found guilty of “dispensing literature of an illegal character” and charged a hundred dollar fine. Wood defended them passionately before an appeals judge, who overturned the ruling and reprimanded officials targeting Goldman for their prudery. You can stand in the way of the future, Reitman called as they left the courtroom, paraphrasing something she’d said in a speech months earlier, but you can’t stop it from arriving.
Willie saved by Wood, Emma muttered that night in their rooming house, once more opening her legs to receive him, hungry and overjoyed yet also on the verge of despair. Prison was the only thing she could imagine that would keep him from other women, her only defense, even if it meant he was kept from her, too. Covered by his huge body, moving with his thrusts, all she could picture was a cage, with thick bars to seal him inside.
But as it turned out, even prison wasn’t enough. That winter, back in New York, they were both arrested again. While incarcerated, Reitman received numerous visits from a woman he’d later marry. By then, the U.S. had entered the war in Europe, and when she was released, Goldman found new purpose in speaking against conscription, which led to another indictment. Reitman, abandoning birth control—in practice, if not as a political aim—fathered a second child. The U.S. government deported Goldman to the country she’d fled at sixteen years old, where, with great anticipation, she witnessed the unfolding of a revolution that turned out to be another false hope. In exile, she found new lovers, new obsessions. After some years, Reitman’s hold on her eased, until one day she awoke to find it entirely gone. Though they corresponded late in life, she never saw him again.
