_Dear Kate_:
I am having the best time of any girl in the whole world. Oh, Kate, I do
love to dance, cause dancing is just a saying the nice-thoughts inside
of you with your body instead of your lips. And I think when you get
better thoughts you do better work. I know mine is different somehow,
cause even old, fat Casey who never throws you a decent word if he can
help it, said I'd do. When I used to dance in the joints around 14th
Street and over on Eighth Avenue I danced just the things I knew then,
which was cafes filled with cigarette smoke, booze on the tables and
puffy, bad faced men staring at me. My dancing was not good, just making
my feet go, but now I think about other things and I dance the buds
coming out on the pussey willows, the dog wood blossoms and the ripples
of the lake when the moon shines on it. I hear the crickets and the
katey-dids and the little peepers from the pond, and instead of
hard-faced girls puffing cigarette smoke into men's faces, I see Billy
with his curls hanging round his laughing face as he runs up the long
road to meet me when I come from the station. My body seems to have
grown softer with my feelings and it bends more easy and I believe I
have even changed my face. I don't feel that all the world is against me
and that I have to fight my way through it, cause I know I am loved and
trusted and there is always some one waiting for me at the gate. Why,
Kate, it changes your whole life to know there is some one caring for
you who won't try to do you the first chance they get, and if it makes
such a difference in your feelings, it is bound to make a difference in
your actions, and that is the reason when I dance, I sway and bend and
turn as light as if I was a fairy one reads about in story books. It
ain't dancing, it ain't work. It is just a telling all the world I'm
happy.
Dancing in these better places is not bad for a girl cause the
management don't make you talk to no one and won't let the men get
fresh. Of course I get a lot of notes and bids to dinner, but I don't
mind them cause I have had them all my life. The only difference now,
the spelling is good in these and they are supposed to come from
gentlemen. Yet I tear them up just as easy as I did the other kind. Mrs.
Smith is always scared about me. I showed her a mash note once and she
sure threw a fit, but I tell her she don't need to worry about me, I
know how to take care of myself all right, as I have been doing it all
my life. I seen too much crookedness and I have seen that it don't pay.
I never knew a girl yet that went the limit but landed hard some day on
the pavement. Even you was straight, Kate, your only trouble is that
your hands are too small, and when you married Jim and he showed you how
easy they went in other people's pockets, you kinda took to it natural.
I suppose that is because of father who is a born dip and it had to come
out again in some of the family. I wonder if lots of people ain't
crooked cause they don't know no better. I have been thinking a lot
lately about education. Mr. Smith was a teacher in a boy's school in
England, and he talks sometimes about the right kind of learning, and I
sit by and listen trying to hear all I can that will help Billy. Mr.
Smith says that if a boy has got the right kind of education, he will
just naturally choose the right things in life. He don't believe because
Billy's father and his grandfather are dips that that is any reason that
Billy should be one. He says, give him the right kind of schooling and
teachers that will understand him or show him what kind of books to read
and tell him the great things that have been done by other men, and that
he can do it if he tries, that it will make him ambitious and he will
naturally choose the right kind of a life instead of the wrong kind. He
will go with the right kind of people, instead of the wrong kind.
He wants to make Paul an electrical engineer, but first he wants him to
go to college and get a lot of book-learning, so when he is by himself
he will be willing to sit by the fire and read some book he loves
instead of chasing down the Great White Way to find amusement. He says a
man must know something besides his business or when he ain't working he
won't know what to do with himself. Them is the men, he says, that fill
the night restaurants and sets in the front row at the Burlesques. He
believes that if men were educated in the way they orter be, there would
not be no crookedness. That the upper story men and the dips and the
safe blowers most always ain't got no education, and they are crooked
because they don't know nothing different. He says ignorance makes a man
not able to tell right from wrong. I told him I knew lots of dips who
were clever, and he said, "Yes, that is so, but if they had been able to
train that cleverness in the right way when they was young, they would
not be dips now. They would use their brains in building up some
business that was on the square. They ain't never had the right chance,
so they can't be blamed." That is so, part of it, Kate. Lots of people I
know, feel it in their bones that crookedness don't pay, but they don't
know nothing else, cause they got in wrong at the start. Now if it is
all true that he says and education will make a man on the level, then
me for education. Billy is going to have it if I have to pour it down
him with a spoon. Billy is going to have just as good a chance as Paul.
I am getting to be such a tight wad that I am losing all my friends. I
won't buy a drink for no one, and I even shove the girls sweet Caporals
instead of Melachrino's when they come up to my room. Why, I squeeze a
nickle till it hollers, and I wear out three dollars of shoe leather
chasing up the street to find an eating joint where they will fill me up
for a quarter. Any way, Kate, your son is going to have a lot of
letters writ after his name, if his aunt Nan don't get the cholly hoss
in her legs, and lose her thirty bucks per week that she is making now.
Good-bye, Kate, I am coming to see you soon, and I will bring you some
pictures of the kid that we took when he went in swimming. He can float
on his back and Mr. Smith nearly scares a lung out of me learning him to
dive. I am thinking of you always.
_Nan_.