Free Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Mother took a deep breath. I will take the responsibility, she said. Please bring her inside. And despite the best advice of the doctor and the remonstrations of the police, she would not change her mind.
    So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She canceled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in her parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. The Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, of chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened. She went to the window. Every morning these washwomen came up the hill from the trolley line on North Avenue and fanned into the houses. Traveling Italian gardeners kept the lawns trim. Icemen walked alongside their wagons, their horses straining in their traces to pull the creaking ice wagons up the hill.
    When the sun set that evening it lay at the bottom of the hill as if it had rolled there. It was blood red. Late at night the boy woke and found his mother sitting beside the bed looking at him, her golden hair plaited and her large breasts soft against his arm when she leaned over to kiss him.
    10
    Actually Father wrote every day during the long winter months, letters for delayed transmission which took the form of entries in his journal. In this way he measured the uninterrupted flow of twilight darkness. The members of the expedition lived in surprising comfort aboard the Roosevelt , which had been lifted in its berth by the winter floes until it sat like a walnut in icing. Peary lived the most comfortably of all. He had a player piano in his stateroom. He was a large man with a heavy torso and thick red hair turning gray. He wore a long moustache. In a previous expedition he had lost his toes. He walked with an odd gait, a kind of shuffle, pushing his feet along the floor without lifting them. He pedaled his player piano with toeless feet. He was supplied with rolls of the best Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml numbers as well as a medley of Bowdoin College songs and a version of The Minute Waltz of Chopin which he could pump out in forty-eight seconds. But the winter months were not given to idleness. There were hunting sorties for musk ox; there were sledges to be built, and the base camp had to be set up ninety miles away, at Cape Columbia, the point from which the actual polar dash across the sea ice would be made. Everyone had to get used to handling dog teams and building igloo shelters. Peary’s Negro assistant, Mathew Henson, supervised the training. After numbers of expeditions, Peary had developed a system. Every last detail of their lives in the Artic represented his considered judgment and was part of the system. The material and designs of the sledges, the food that was to the eaten, the tins in which the food was to be carried, the manner in which the tins were to be lashed to the sledges, the kind of under- and over-clothing that was to be worn, the means of harnessing the dogs, the kinds of knives and guns to carry, the kinds of matches and the means of keeping them dry, the design of the eye guards to be used against snow blindness, and so on. Peary loved to discuss his system. In its essentials—that is, in the use of dogs and sledges and the wearing of fur clothing and the living off local fauna—Peary’s system merely adopted the Esquimo way of life. Father realized this with a start one day. As it happened he had been standing on the quarter-deck observing Peary soundly scold one of the Esquimo men who had not done his assigned chore properly. Then Peary shuffled back along the deck, passing Father and saying to him