Tateh invites Evelyn to attend a socialist meeting where Emma Goldman is scheduled to speak. Mother’s Younger Brother begins following Evelyn without her knowledge, and Evelyn cares more closely for the Little Girl. Evelyn begins making regular visits to Tateh, who refuses to talk to Evelyn unless she is paying for her portrait out of pride. Evelyn Nesbit is driving through the Lower East Side when she notices the Little Girl, and she immediately becomes obsessed with the Little Girl’s beauty. The Little Girl becomes sick, and Tateh becomes frustrated that his silhouette business cannot support them. Mameh decides to engage in prostitution in a desperate attempt to help her family, but is exiled when Tateh learns what she has done. The family quickly becomes disenfranchised with the American dream, living in conditions of extreme poverty. The family passes Father’s ship as they enter Ellis Island, and quickly find themselves as residents of a tenement house. The family members are identified as Mameh, Tateh, and the Little Girl. The next storyline that the reader is introduced to is that of an immigrant family from Eastern Europe. The Little Boy tells Houdini to “warn the duke!” Father is leaving to go on an expedition to the North Pole with Peary, and is leaving his firework business in the care of Mother and Mother’s Younger Brother. Houdini’s car breaks down and he pays a short visit to the family. Harry Houdini is dissatisfied with his social standing and yearns to be accepted into the upper class. It is introduced that Mother’s Younger Brother has become infatuated with Evelyn Nesbit, a woman who is the center of a scandal involving her husband and her late lover. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. They visit the fleet carrying white parasols. That was the style, that was the way people lived. “Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. Doctrow opens with an introduction to a generic, white, upper class family in the early 1900s, consisting of members such as Mother, Father, Grandfather, Little Boy, and Mother’s Younger Brother. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.” (Doctorow Ch. “Because like all whores you value propriety.
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