Dissident Gardens

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Lethem

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

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and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Jacket design by Ben Wiseman
Jacket illustration © Grant Faint/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lethem, Jonathan.

Dissident gardens : a novel / Jonathan Lethem.

   pages cm

1. Women radicals—Fiction. 2. Urban fiction. I. Title.

PS3562.E8544D67 2013

813′.54—dc23

2013021139

eISBN: 978-0-385-53494-9

v3.1

Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist Party
. There stood the ultimatum, the absurd sum total of the message conveyed to Rose Zimmer by the cabal gathered in her Sunnyside Gardens kitchen that evening. Late fall, 1955.

Sol Eaglin, Important Communist, had rung her telephone. A “committee” wished to see her; no, they’d be happy, delighted, to come to her home, this evening, after their own conference just across the Gardens—was ten too late? This a command, not a question. Yes, Sol knew how hard Rose labored, what her sleep was worth. He promised they wouldn’t stay long.

How did it happen? Easy. Routine, in fact. These things happened every day. You could get exiled from the cause for blowing your nose or blinking at suspicious intervals. Now, after so long, Rose’s turn. She’d cracked the kitchen window to hear their approach. Brewed some coffee. Sounds of the Gardens filtered in, smokers, lovers, teenagers sulking in the communal lanes. Though winter’s dark had clamped itself over the neighborhood hours ago, this early November night was uncannily balmy and inviting, last pulse of the earth’s recollection of summer. Other kitchen windows were spilled to the lanes, voices mingled: Rose’s plentiful enemies, fewer friends, others, so many others, simply tolerated. Yet comrades all. According Rose
their respect even through their dislike. Respect to be robbed from her by the committee now entering her kitchen.

There were five, including Eaglin. They’d overdressed, overcompensated with vests and jackets, now arraying themselves on her chairs like some Soviet oil painting, postured as if on some
intellectual
assignment. In pursuit of that chimera, the Dialectical Whosis, when really there was to be no dialectic here. Only dictatorship. And the taking of dictation. Still, Rose sought to be forgiving. These men were too young, apart from Eaglin, to have survived like she had the intellectual somersaults of the thirties, the onset of European Fascism and of the Popular Front; they’d been children during the war. They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who’d become slaves of party groupspeak. None mattered in this room except the sole independent or thoughtful among them, a true and famous
organizer
, after all, a man of the factory floors, Sol Eaglin. And Rose Zimmer’s former lover. Eaglin in his bow tie, hairline now gone behind his high cranium’s arc like the winter’s sun setting. Eaglin the only among them man enough
not
to meet her eye, the only to grasp anything of the shame of it.

Here was Communist habit, Communist ritual: the living-room trial, the respectable lynch mob that availed themselves of your hospitality while dropping some grenade of party policy on your commitment, lifting a butter knife to slather a piece of toast and using it in passing to sever you from that to which you’d given your life. Yet that it was Communist habit and ritual didn’t mean these boys were good at it, or comfortable: Rose was the veteran. She’d suffered one such trial eight years ago. They sweated; she felt only exhaustion at their hemming and throat-clearing.

The oil painting made small talk. One leaned over and noodled with Rose’s Abraham Lincoln shrine, the small three-legged table bearing her original six-volume Carl Sandburg, a photograph of herself and her daughter at the memorial’s statue in D.C., propped in a little frame, and a commemorative fake cent-piece the circumference of a slice of liverwurst. The young man was fair, like Rose’s first husband—her only husband, yet Rose’s brain persistently offered this slippage, as though some next life lay before her, waiting to be enumerated. The man hefted the medallion and tilted his head idiotically,
as if being impressed with the weight of the thing constituted a promising avenue of discourse.

“Honest Abe, then?” he said.

“Put it down.”

He produced an injured look. “We’re aware you’re a civil rights enthusiast, Mrs. Zimmer.”

It was typical of such an evening that every remark found itself getting to the point, whether it wished to or not. Here was the crime the party had invented for Rose, then: excess zeal in the cause of Negro equality. In the thirties she’d been what would later be called, by Red-baiters, a
premature anti-Fascist
. Now? A too-sensuous egalitarian.

“I had a few slaves,” said Rose, “but I freed them.” At best, a poke at Sol Eaglin. Certainly lost on the young man.

Eaglin stepped in, as he’d been destined to all along, to “handle” her. “Where’s Miriam tonight?” he asked, acting as though his knowledge of her daughter’s name mitigated his incongruous presence in Rose’s life: neither friend nor foe, despite that they’d a hundred times groped at each other’s forms in the darkness. Eaglin was a mere bland operative, an automaton of party policy. Tonight was definite proof, like she’d needed proof. You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma.

Or, for that matter, the concrete of police work.

Nor, incidentally, had she dislodged either man from his wife.

Rose shrugged in reply. “At the age she’s reached I shouldn’t ever know her location, apparently.” Miriam, the prodigy, was fifteen. Having skipped one grade already she was a high-school sophomore, and a virtual runaway. Miriam lived in other families’ homes and in the dining hall at Queens College, flirting with Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual phonies, boys who’d a year or two before been scratching their nuts and slapping one another with rolled-up comic books on spinning stools in soda fountains or on the elevated trains, the kind of boys who fell silent, who even quaked, when they shared sidewalks with Rose Zimmer.

“Playing footsie with Cousin Lenny?”

“Sol, the one thing I can say with assurance is she’s anywhere but with Cousin Lenny.” It was Rose’s second cousin Lenin Angrush
who’d in fact gifted Rose with the bogus giant penny. A numismatist, he called himself. Lenny, getting the time of day from fifteen-year-old Miriam? He could dream.

“Let’s not waste any more time,” suggested the young man who’d been at her Lincoln stuff. Rose shouldn’t underestimate the brutal authority of youth: He had some. Eaglin wasn’t the sole power in the room just for being the sole power Rose chose to acknowledge. This young fellow was eager to distinguish himself, likely in the context of some jousting with others present, for status as Eaglin’s protégé. That itself, only a prelude to stabbing Eaglin in the back. Surely that was it.

Poor Sol, really. Still neck-deep in the paranoid muck.

Rose poured them coffee, this brave cohort who’d come to declare she’d picked the wrong Negro. They were talking; she really ought to listen to the verdict. Short of severing the affiliation, Rose would no longer be welcome to the privilege of acting as recording secretary at meetings with union officials, including the union at her own workplace, Real’s Radish & Pickle. Her last duty in the party, stripped. There at Real’s, Rose enjoyed the honor of serving in horrified silence as her ham-fisted comrades bullied workers whose daily facts, whose solidarities, forged side-by-side plunging elbow-deep in barrels of chill salt brine, put to shame the abstractions of the posturing organizers, those arrayed in their dapper suspenders and unwrinkled plaid, not knowing enough to be unashamed of these Halloween-hayride proletarian costumes.

These men in her apartment, they could needless to say go to hell.

Yet Rose’s usual fury was inadequate to the occasion. This kitchenful of moral bandits, even Eaglin, appeared to her sealed in distance, voices dim. The room’s events unspooled before her as if scripted, something happening not to her but to another. A one-act play, worthy of Sunnyside’s Socialist theater troupe, set in Rose’s kitchen and starring her body—her body’s behaviors being the matter under disputation—but no further portion. Heart, if bosom contained one anymore, not in attendance.
Rose no longer here
. This excommunication something that had already long ago been concluded. She warmed and refilled coffee, gracing the lynch mob with use of her mother-in-law’s Meissen china, even while they alluded, in terms just
oblique enough to salve their own shame but not hers, to Rose’s sex life. Presumed to tell her who to fuck. Who
not
to fuck, exactly. Or, not to fuck at all. Not to make her own bedroom solidarities with men who, unlike themselves, had the stature and self-possession to want her, to be undeferential to Rose.

For these occupiers of her kitchen, even in their executioner’s errand, were pathetically deferential: to Rose’s force, to her history, to her chest twice the circumference of theirs. She who’d marched in protest of Hitler’s New York birthday party on Fifth Avenue, while American brownshirts pelted her with rotten vegetables. She who’d marched for blacks practically before they marched for themselves. Bringing revolution to Negroes, fine. To have one particular black cop in her sheets, not so fine. Oh hypocrites! Their incessant, mealy-mouthed usage, again and again droning out of the fog of their talk, was “associations.” They were troubled by her associations. They meant, of course, the
association
of her rapidly aging Jew Communist vagina with the black lieutenant’s sturdy and affectionate penis.