Dissident Gardens (2 page)

Yet Rose took orders like a mad lobotomized waitress: A little milk, or cream? With sugar? Oh, you like it black, perhaps?
So do I
. Her tongue stayed stopped, wit unexpressed. A recording secretary, she recorded. Shorthanded her own tribunal as she would that of another, onto some distant mind’s tablet. Shorthand, even mental shorthand, an act of fingers scratching at some page barely registered by the mind itself. Here’s Rose Zimmer, née Angrush, the scourge of Sunnyside, she who ought to be punching like a boxer against the elastic shadows that filled her kitchen, these ghastly shades of doctrine, and she couldn’t care. This second trial was, really, only a lousy parody of the first. That first one,
that
had been something. Then, Rose was important in American Communism. Then, she’d been importantly Communistically married, about to be importantly Communistically divorced. Then, she’d been young. She wasn’t anymore.

Now mental pen quit scraping mental tablet. Rose receded even further from the events before her, a present life under assault of disarrangement. “Eaglin?” she said, interrupting some droning insinuation.

“Yes, Rose?”

“Come outside.”

The nervous glances that ensued, Eaglin quelled, using his brow like an orchestra conductor would a wand, to cease his players’ tuning. And then he and Rose stepped outside, into the air of the Gardens.

The ashtray was a pure fetish: obloid, smooth-polished black granite, weighing enough to use as a stop against a pressure-hinged door or indent a man’s skull. Finding it full yet again of Pall Mall stubs, you’d lug it to the kitchen with both hands to overturn it in Alma Zimmer’s trash. Then rinse it in the sink, for Alma, Rose’s unwilling mother-in-law, had made it plain she liked to see it come back gleaming again—never mind that three or four smokers, Albert’s comrades, might be waiting to stub by the time you returned. Imagine making room for that ashtray in your bags as you fled Lübeck! Alma had done so. Who knew who’d hoisted that baggage, whose wrists the ashtray and the load of paper-wrapped Meissen had strained? Surely not Alma’s. Porters, Rose supposed, and when no porter was available, Alma’s brother, Lukas, or Alma’s son, Albert. Albert Zimmer. Rose’s future husband, a rich Jew deluded he was German even as the Nazis marched.

And who could say what other treasure had been left behind, in favor of these things? The ashtray, souvenir of Alma’s deceased husband’s bank desk, was a chunk of German reality, imported against absurd obstacles, to prove the unreality of Alma’s present circumstance. That being: Broadway and Ninety-Second, the Knickerbocker Apartments. A one-bedroom on this island of Manhattan, furnished conspicuously with what could be saved apart from the ashtray, the half set of china, a crucial framed photograph or two (showing Alma among cousins, on Alpine vacations, they might as easily have been Nazi memorabilia to Rose’s eye), Viennese-lace curtains. An apartment less a home than a memorial to the life abandoned. Two windows staring onto Broadway traffic to replace a house placed high enough in Lübeck’s posh district to give panoramas of both river and mountains, next door to none other than the family home of Lübeck’s great scion Thomas Mann, the
Buddenbrooks
house. Alma and her banker had more than once conversed with the visiting author, across
the distance of two back porches. Another life. Before exile. Alma, formerly an opera singer on Lübeck’s greatest stages. Alma, flower of Lübeck. (Rose got her fill of this word, this holy name,
Lübeck
.) More German than German, barely Jew at all until the degraded sons of Bavaria had wrenched the nation to pieces. All this is what that ashtray knew, up to and likely including the exact sums Alma had used to buy herself and her brother, Lukas, and her son, Albert, escape to New York, at that last minute when, after the approaching nightmare had induced the banker’s heart attack, Alma’s and Albert’s denial had been torn from them:
Jew, not German
. Alma had had to sell it all, maybe was lucky even to keep the ashtray.

Here at the Knickerbocker was the “parlor,” the sole public room, really, where, sitting over cups of tea, Rose abased herself to Alma’s contempt in order to win grudging approval to marry. Albert was that much a mother’s boy. Here, the same room, Rose had then learned to open her voice at serious Communist meetings, to smoke and argue with the men, while Alma, sealed in her aristocratic German, unwilling or unable to learn English, had, gratifyingly, been reduced to a hostess for their cell’s meetings. And here, spring of ’47, was the site of Rose’s first living-room trial, the one that mattered, that changed everything. The meeting where, with classic party perversity, Albert, wrongly accused of spying when he was only an incompetent blabbermouth, was made a spy. The trial in which Albert was aided and abetted in flight from his family, his wife and seven-year-old daughter, by the party.

Where was Miriam? Right there. The daughter Albert was abandoning was the whole while in Alma’s bedroom. She sat through the trial as she’d sat through previous meetings, gobbling the foil-wrapped Mozartkugeln Alma always provided the granddaughter with whom she couldn’t converse in English, only coo at, to the solitary child’s increasingly evident boredom. Miriam sat amid a litter of the unwrapped foil, playing quietly with her rag doll, likely smearing it with the German chocolate, and understanding, God help her, who knew how little or much of the things she overheard. The expulsion that would reverse-exile her father from New York, from America forever.

As for Rose, her voice wasn’t for once available to be overheard.
Knowing, that day, that if she spoke she’d scream, Rose never said a word that would have given Miriam, as she listened from the next room, the least alarm. Nothing to alert her that this meeting was out of the ordinary, that the party men were handing down anything other than Albert and Rose’s next irritating errand, the next recalcitrant shop steward or union chief to pester with their pamphlets and talk, the next cultural gathering to uselessly infiltrate. If anything alarmed the seven-year-old girl, it would have been the
absence
of her mother’s voice.

The voice that crosscut through every room and situation, the voice never stilled, for once stilled.

If anything alarmed Miriam, it certainly would have been this: the absence of her mother’s voice even when her mother paused in the doorway, on a trip bearing the unbearable ashtray from kitchen to parlor, and hovered there, stared at the girl with tight lips, possibly moist eyes though she’d have disclaimed this, then leaned to fondle her daughter’s head, to mold her hand along the darling skull to the small hairs at the neck. Spoke not a word, most uncharacteristically, about the minefield of foil. Instead, still clutching the ashtray like a bludgeon, impulsively grabbed at one of the few remaining Mozartkugeln, bared it of wrapper, and grimacing, gobbled it whole, then stepped from the doorway still unspeaking, to return the ashtray to its place before any smoker’s ash grew unsupportably long.

If the girl recalled it—unlikely—it would have been the sole instance in a lifetime that she’d seen a piece of German chocolate cross her mother’s lips.

From that day it would be just the two of them, mother and daughter, in the Gardens apartment.

In Rose’s constellation of memory, this was Ursa Major, the
real
trial. Something of which to be mordantly proud: that the top men in New York Communism had taken notice of Albert and decided he needed correction, needed to be adjusted, from the status of dissolute husband and father, a Commie lush conducting “meetings” at McSorley’s tavern—where he’d been overheard by visiting undercover Soviets!—and pressed into service overseas. Returned to Germany, where his courtly manners made him an asset instead of a sore thumb. A dandy Jew with a trace of German accent tainting his English? Not
of such terrific value to an American Communist Party looking to get folksy with the workers. A native German with impeccable English and total dedication, willing to repatriate? Of maximal attractiveness to the new society forming in the ragged shadows and rubble.

So Albert was sent to become an East German citizen and spy.

Rose could really savor the pomp and menace of the committee who’d come to Alma’s little parlor to drink tea and put the seal on the destruction of her marriage. She could shroud herself properly in this memory, of the trial that had cost her everything, sent her slinking back to her candy-store peasant family to admit that no, you couldn’t hold a man, couldn’t, at last, keep that posh refugee. See? Rose’s marriage, minus God, had flopped. And so she’d been cast into her life’s purgatory: Real’s Radish & Pickle, single-motherhood, and Queens without Manhattan, exile to that suburb of the enraged. And Albert Zimmer escaped back to Europe. What was Rose’s failed marriage except evidence, against the whole fable of American history, that European chains could never be shrugged off?

And what, after all, were Albert Zimmer and Rose Angrush but an implausibility briefly entertained? Tolerated for an instant before being demolished, dismantled from at least three directions at once: her family, his family, and the party. The high assimilated German joining up with Rose the Polack, Rose the Russian, Rose the immigrant, second-generation Brooklyn Jew? Unlike every comedy ever devised by Jewish writers mocking class difference from the sanctuary of Hollywood, these were divisions that exactly
couldn’t
be closed by the bonds of love. This wasn’t
screwball
, it was
you’re screwed
. Not
It Happened One Night
but
It Happened Never
.

How came it even to attempt happening?

Simple. At a packed meeting hall near Gramercy Park, under a high ornate ceiling echoing with voices, a mole met a mole. Rose seated
there
, on one side, in one creaky wooden folding chair; Albert seated
here
, across the room, in the same sort of chair. Both seeking to take the meeting’s floor, to steer its innocence and idealism in a given direction, both eager to run back to their contacts and brag of
enlisting the group, and both obstructed, largely, by the other. Oh, it was ripe: Albert and Rose discovered each other because they’d been assigned, by their separate and poorly coordinated cells, to insinuate themselves into the same organization, the Gramercy Park Young People’s League. To introduce the possibility of solidarity with the coming workers’ revolution into this vague, well-intentioned gathering.

Both therefore forced, at some point, to bite a tongue and hear the other. Until, as they tussled for dominance in pursuit of an identical outcome, some other form of tussle emerged in the thinking of both, and the hall’s other occupants melted away into irrelevance. Albert thinking: Who is this young Emma Goldman, this zaftig Brooklyn shtetl girl in the hand-sewn dress, covering the Yiddish parts of her speech with elegant rhetoric, with comical double-feature at the Loew’s Britishisms? Rose thinking: Who is this fair Germanic professorially handsome fellow in suspenders and gold-rimmed glasses—and can he possibly be, as he claims in his speech, Jewish? This was, you did have to admit, screwball comedy, but such as no Red-leaning Jew playwright, vamoosed to Hollywood, would ever dare committing to paper: Sent to convert the Young People of Gramercy, the two lost sight of their marks, becoming each other’s marks instead.

Their infatuation was above all a meeting of two intellects gleaming with the same exalted certainties, two wills emboldened by the same great cause, and they were still uncovering this extent of their political sympathies (though “political” was too limited a term, insufficient to describe what joining the greatest movement of human history had done for their sense of what life itself was
for
), gabbing a mile a minute, barely able to stop talking to eat the food that sat cooling on the table where she’d cooked it for him in the kitchen of his flat, or to sip the wine they’d poured but in their intoxication with the cause hardly needed, when Albert first unbuttoned her dress and his trousers. So the tussle, begun in full public view, now was consummated behind closed doors.