Dissident Gardens (14 page)

“I was thinking,” said Moira or Maureen.

“Yes?”

“What you want is something more typical of the life of the city. Street-corner music, like doo-wop, which is all the rage. My brother’s in one of those groups. If you’re trying to find a voice for the workers of New York City, I doubt they’re likely to care for that square-dance or banjo-picking sound, when they’ve never seen a cornfield or a dust bowl in their lives.”

Of all indignities. That she should produce a historically apt critique of the Popular Front. What Lenny needed least was what he got. He spoke without turning his combusting face from elevator doors that refused to open. “I’m inclined to agree with you. The progressive’s sentimentalization of the rural farmer type who doesn’t actually pardon my French give a flying fuck about him, and who wouldn’t be worth organizing even if it were possible, is for me a matter of permanent deep distress. We ought to rally around some street-corner doo-wop for a change. I’ll take it under consideration.”

Lenin Angrush had short blunt thumbs. Unavoidable once you noticed them, lying as they did in hideous view of any observer. Where desire’s gaze fell, thumbs went questing next, for a baseball card or cat’s-eye marble, for a twist of licorice. Lenny was six when another kid first
pointed it out, a difference enough to register with the difference-tabulating engine of the collective grade-school mind of Sunnyside Gardens. In class, handed a pencil for his introduction to forming the alphabet, Lenny accepted it with a grip consisting of four fingers and a big toe. The teacher had to help him cultivate a unique approach. A person’s two thumbs, if you let yourself feel it, consisted of the out-grasping claws of the body, forming a pincer hinged right at the heart. Even in the sphere of solitary affairs, a thumb was hung out to dry when you dug in your nostril for a hanger or grasped pecker in fist. You had no option but to maul yourself with your own deformed instrument. So a crucial part of Lenny, industrious, animated, agile, a part defining his human difference from the animal kingdom, fell short. This one fact about himself might have stood for all else in a global account of his failings, had he granted himself that luxury. Some differently constituted person could sit home moping at his thumbs forever. Not Lenny. He comprehensively forgot them, so that he’d blink in genuine confusion if your gaze lingered there, let alone the rare times in adult life when someone remarked.

Why, then, in the presence of Tommy Gogan did Lenin Angrush discover himself persistently sitting on his thumbs? Thrusting them in blue-jeans pockets, masking them behind foam-webbed beer steins? Simple. Tommy’s relaxed elegant hand, spidering chords at the top of his Gibson’s neck. During kitchen-table conversation the folksinger sat with the guitar like an extension of his body, fingers shifting silently on frets even while his strumming hand gesticulated conversation or waved smoke-bannering cigarette or spaghetti-bannered fork. Miriam Zimmer had fallen in love with the sole profession in which Lenny’s small divergence mattered, the sole in which it counted as an infirmity. Lenny, traipsing after Mim through coffee-shop evenings, had been handed a guitar once. He handed it right back, knowing where his mittenish hands could and couldn’t go.

So now he sat, thumbs throbbing in concealment, watching Tommy form chords. As evenings dragged on the Irishman liked to lay a soundtrack of changes behind routine conversation, making a strings-damped talking blues of nearly any gibbering exchange, any wine-soaked, purposeless confusion. You hungry? Nawp, I cadged me one of them free cheeseburgers at the Caricature, dum, dum, dum.
Wait, how can you be opening for Van Ronk at the Gate of Horn on Tuesday when Van Ronk got eighty-sixed from the Gate of Horn, dum, dum, dum. Pass the salt, dum, dum, dum. Tommy Gogan, such that Lenny could make out, possessed no wild melodic gift. Those long, nearly double-jointed thumbs, which might have reached for a hundred chords, instead trudged endlessly over the same hoary folk clichés. C-A-minor-G, C-A-minor-G.
It’s not as though I have a stumpy prick!
Lenny wanted to scream. Why couldn’t saxophones be the craze?

Two of the foam-webbed empties on the White Horse’s table tonight were Lenny’s own. Having guzzled what he’d usually nurse, on an empty stomach, too, he swam in his beer and his grudges and the bar’s sweaty beatnik roar and gloom. Lenny’d worked the conspiracy’s algorithm in his head, waiting for Mim and Tommy’s spontaneous confab to thin out (See ya lads tomorrow, hey don’t stick me with the check, dum, dum, dum). Then, when at last he faced the happy couple alone across the scarred wooden table, Lenny spelled it out for them. Mim’s head tipped to Tommy’s shoulder, bobbing slightly as he strummed. The formerly bold young woman, the flame of Sunnyside, now seeming to wish to merge with the shoulder of her god, to blend her dark hair into his hoodlum’s sharkskin jacket, which he wore over a white shirt and loosened tie, despite the heat, believing himself to be Paul Newman, apparently.

“J. Edgar Hoover made a deal with Wagner and Moses to kill the league.”

“Eh, sorry?” (dum, dum, dum)

“Shea’s a stooge. Branch Rickey too. The FBI’s in bed with the syndicate that runs the major leagues. They coughed up a team to halt Socialist baseball.”

Miriam piped up without raising her head from the folksinger’s shoulder, voice coming from a frizzy baffle of hair that cloaked her eyes from Lenny’s view. “Is the whole FBI required to explain why Shea put the kibosh on your Proletarians?”

“The prospect of a new league threatened them enough that Hoover even stood up to the Yankees, to force the National League into their market. Maybe in fact there was a backdoor deal with the Yankees—watch,
I predict we’ll see Shea’s glorified farm team sell its best players uptown, like a local branch of the Kansas City Athletics.”

“Is there a place for Whittaker Chambers in your scheme? I think he’s feeling a little lonely.”

“What about Franz Kafka?” (dum, dum, dum)

“Feh to you both.”

“He’d make a heck of a stopshort.” (dum, dum, dum)

“Shortstop, you uneducated mick. You ought to show some respect for the pastime of your adopted land. And I’d like Kafka better in right field, where his lousy attitude wouldn’t infect the whole diamond. Another round for us here, when you can.” This last to the bar’s girl, who came clearing their glasses onto a tray balanced overhead as she wound through the maelstrom. Lenny needed another place to hide his thumb.

He slurped the top off another ale and then something broke in him, something like a chunk or facing of ice or stone shearing off a cliff and shattering in a valley distantly below. He couldn’t catch it before it fell, couldn’t issue any warnings to those humans like ants so minuscule beneath. Only watch it fall.

“To see you neo-ethnics cavort you’d think it was 1936 all over again.”

“Neo-ethnics?” Dum, dum, stop. The folksinger was at least alert enough to sense when a bucketload of ire was directed at him even if in a language beyond his reckoning.

“You Appalachians. You gaseous yodelers. You plow humpers. The entire fershlugginer diversion represented by the WPA years, when the left fell utterly into Comrade Roosevelt’s grip, and every formerly sharp-eyed urbanist went chasing after some oil-rigging cowboy with charcoal and a sketch pad, or shoved a reel recorder under the nose of some illiterate sharecropper clutching a one-string guitar. The party seeking solidarity with the
folk
. Your music is the gasping cartoon the Popular Front left in its sorry wake.”

The trigger, the blow that had loosened this cascade, had come hours earlier, when Shea’s secretary handed Lenny the box with the neatly rewound reel, the tape containing Tommy’s useless theme song. It now lay in his briefcase, with his ledger and the rare coins, at
his feet here in the White Horse. Other shames, pertaining to the secretary’s allure, the closing of Lenny’s head near to a point where he’d detected not only her scent but her warmth emanating, that whisper of possibility, these too were tightly containerized, caulked, and salted like radioactive material in some depth of his recollection’s seafloor.

“My music can do all that?” said Gogan. “I’d sure like to be able to make a cartoon gasp.”

“Sing it with me: Shall We Gather at the River and Drown the Radiant Future in Its Infancy?”

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

“No, you don’t, not personally. Because you’re folk music’s walking advertisement for eternal innocence with a hayseed in its teeth. You don’t know, but Mim understands me completely.”

“Too completely,” said Miriam.

“You prefer Paul Robeson?” asked Gogan, infuriatingly benign.

“Paul Robeson’s an intellectual, and I prefer him, yes. As I do Fletcher Henderson and King Oliver, not for their politics, which are unknown to me, but for their innate dignity, speaking as it does of a better world to come. Your preference I suppose is for the barefoot indigent from the Delta, a moaning teddy bear you can cuddle. You know, I heard the Yankees still keep a Negro boy in the dugout to touch for good luck on their way to the plate.”

“Shut up now, Lenny.”

Saying it, Miriam had raised her head from the folksinger’s shoulder. Tommy Gogan stared across the table, his fingers still around the guitar’s neck. Lenny would have liked to have hurt him, but Gogan might be unhurtable. Lenny reached below the table and produced the reel from his briefcase, shoved it across between the sweating steins. “Here, it was useless, less than useless. Write me a new folk song, when you think of it, called ‘Ignorance Is Bliss.’ ”

“Beat it, Lenny. Go home to Queens.”

She could command him to shut up, to beat it, only because no one was listening. In one of Lenny Angrush’s regular milieus—the chess shop, the coin shop, the City College cafeteria, amid some accidental confluence of former party regulars in adjacent Sunnyside backyards, which though newly fenced were helplessly communal, Kropotkin’s
Gardens by deep design and which no boundary, no white picket or cyclone fence or high border of roses could corrupt, possibly even in a car of the 7 train as it pulled a horde from Grand Central toward the teetering sun-blazed platform of Queensboro Plaza—in any of these, Lenny’s rant, his tone rising to indignation, would have gathered over-hearers. Kibitzers, leaning in to contribute their own grudges, their own angle of attack. Those enmeshed in history and not without a yawp of their own. Giving air to indignities new and eternal, they’d have taken exception to no small portion of Lenny’s argument, sure. They’d have also pounded home his point for him, wagged a finger or several at the folksinger for his lack of historical grasp. The point being, Lenny would have kindled a spark. Here, nothing. The White Horse, home instead to drunken painters and poets and teenagers with Trotsky beards who might not know Trotsky’s name if they heard it, here Lenny’s cascade was just another beatnik word-painting, a splash in the general muddle. If nearby listeners made out any specifics they’d have likely taken it as mere patter. A Lord Buckley or Brother Theodore stand-up routine, something in quote marks. Only Miriam heard him and knew what it meant and that it mattered, and so she was liberated by the lack of dialectical context to command him to put a sock in it.

“It’s simply that the naïveté perturbs me,” Lenny said, and knew he was sulking. He’d come to be among fellow travelers, seeking consolation for the travesty in Shea’s office, yet was the cause of a workers’ revolution any less dead here in the White Horse than in that office? Likely not.

“I hear and obey,” he said, rising, clutching briefcase to chest, a Roman’s shield for brazening through the pub’s rising throngs to the door. “I return to the homeland, to the solace of my pauper’s bed, and to the orange juices and buttered rolls of morning. Remember me when I’m gone. We who are about to die blow you a raspberry, preferably out of the ass.” The tape reel in its box Lenny left floating, a vacated life raft amid the shipwreck of beer steins.

“So long, Cousin Lenny. Sorry the tune didn’t cut it with the bigwigs.” (dum, dum, dum)

Lenin Angrush was eight years old when the swaddled girl was lowered into his arms. To him still yesterday. Lenny’s ma and Cousin Rose sentineled in the general vicinity, rattling teacups, railing. Probably, if considered from a grown perspective, they’d never stepped farther away than from where in a swift gesture they could reclaim the infant from the boy who’d been made to wash his hands and swear gentleness. Yet at that moment when the bundle was placed on Lenny’s lap, cradled in his crossed legs, it was as though those teacups rattled from distant shores—Lenny and Miriam were on their own island together, that was how it felt to him. Lenny’s attentiveness shrunken to pinpoint in the gaze between his and the girl’s. The brown of her eyes. Tiny bubble at the corner of her lip. The beaming of her presence, into his. Miriam soothed the calamity Lenin Angrush at eight years old could only understand as the root of himself always, now identified by her effect on him as something soothable, a storming sea of unrest he lived inside but which was not him. At least not when he clung to this girl and they arrived together at this island. The voices distant were nonetheless distinct.