Dissident Gardens (23 page)

Say it, Albert, now, go ahead and say it. Explain that to scrape their potatoes from clods of earth makes them activists.

“Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”

Did anyone, among the sun-slackened arrangements of bodies on blankets, shout out any protest at the tired slogan? Did they interrupt with requests that he speak in Yiddish or for something more nourishing than recruitment ideology? No, they lay paralyzed by his flattery. Though Rose supposed others here might be silenced by a cynicism not unlike her own. For now, as the fulsome arrangement of People’s Front clichés were produced, Rose felt herself not only turning off to Albert as she’d been briefly turned on but experiencing a revising revelation about the facts of their mission here today. It was that which caused the cord of adamancy she’d felt within her now to move like a band to her throat, imposing not only silence but a struggle even to breathe.

For she realized now that this speech of his was a party errand, product of a party command. No surprise in that. Ostrow and Samanowitz not merely tour guides but Albert’s party contacts.

Albert’s sudden learning to drive, bumping into curbs for a month seeking his license, that had been a party errand, too. Which meant, as she followed the logic, that the whole proposition to move here had been a party errand, one originating not in recent days but known to him months before springing it upon her. She could hear every word, as if in a stream the secret dictation now poured into her ear. Consider the situation of a town full of abject Jews, ringed by the yahoo suspicion that they were Reds, as if merely to erect their winsome farm and factory dream was equal to traitorous affiliation with the Soviet. Given this plight, and their terrible weakness, why wouldn’t this town choose the strength that came from the party? Why not opt for the support that would then flow from New York, and from farther east than New York. This was a chance to enlist a fully CP municipality, America’s first!

And not one word of any of it had been made known to Rose, despite her place, ostensibly at Albert’s side, in their cell.

All these specifics suffused into the general knowledge of what she already knew: the things a party cell required of its women. In regular behavior the women were always to avow and affirm the primary myth, which stated that in the gleaming future toward which their efforts all pointed, the divisions and inequities between man and woman would be effortlessly solved. Meanwhile, in the nearer term, the party, with its genius for skulduggery, routinely destroyed the tender trust of a marriage between so-called equals.

As if Albert had ever been capable of inhabiting such a trust in the first place. Rose doubted it.

“On this day, of all days—” What in God’s name was he talking about? Then Rose squared Albert’s words with the limp bunting arraying the riser on which he stood. All day she’d been seeing the flags, thrust out on poles and draped from porch rails, yet only registered them as a trite irritant, at a level well beneath the range of her exasperation at the foliage. Yet of course, this day of all days. Their Packard expedition rearranged itself one last time and shame flooded Rose’s body, both at her obtuseness and at her therefore helpless participation in the most inane of rituals.

It was the Fourth of July.

How then, if it was the party’s desire that they live in the Jersey Homesteads, did they land in Sunnyside Gardens instead?

They’d underestimated Rose’s strength.

If the cell’s intentions had been conveyed to Rose only by the secret telephone of her husband, she’d reverse the charges. Let the cell hear from her by means of the same telephone.
No
. A fairly simple message, requiring no Soviet cipher to unravel.

For Rose, a student of
no
, this was a sort of graduation day, a dissertation in one syllable. A
no
of her own personal devising, no longer merely the
no
of her inheritance, the
no
of her forebears. With it she need be audible not merely to Albert but to some functionary in Moscow, one who could be envisioned as standing with a seashell
to his ear, monitoring her husband through oceanic vastnesses. Rose had to make her reply audible against the force of a command she herself affirmed as historical in its imperatives, rather than pretending it didn’t exist. To refuse was to say: I exist not only to subsume myself to this cause but to flourish within it,
and I want no chickens
.

Construction of this
no
was under way before they’d reboarded the Packard’s long front seat and waved farewell to their hosts. It was under way even before the conclusion of Albert’s speech. Rose had lifted herself in full view of her orator husband and all else and gone and seated herself in the cool leaf-shade of the car’s running board, to commune with a chapter of
Lincoln
. Let them come and tell her she’d in some way failed
Communism
or
Americanism
by refusing mud and straw and sunburn: No. In Rose’s private researches, which converted the glad-hander’s shuck of the Popular Front into something true and real, she abided with both Communism and Americanism at a depth no farmer’s plow could touch, not of topsoil but of mysterious intellectual root. Sandburg had isolated a passage from Lincoln’s message to Congress in December 1861: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration …” This, six years before
Das Kapital
.

The other point, you dummies, was that
The Prairie Years
came first. Lincoln had put log cabins behind him, in favor of cities, of civilization—not the reverse!

So Rose’s walkout on Albert’s Fourth of July address was mere overture. They rode in silence from the Homesteads to New York, apart from a refreshed attack on his driving.

“You’re like a painter, daubing at the thing.”

“Which?”

“The automobile’s pedal. You approach it with feathery little brushstrokes—add a bit more blue to this corner, Señor Picasso.”

“I rather doubt Picasso has a critic standing beside him as he works.”

“A more steady application of pressure might be more to the liking of Yetta’s chopped liver where it presently resides high in my throat.”

“You’ve got nothing to say about my speech? I thought it went well.”

She only looked out the window. Let Albert interpret the force of a
no
chiseled in the stone of Rose’s glare, a
no
in smoke signals emitting from her ears. A
no
inscribed, that night and weeks after, in semaphore postures of unavailability in their marriage bed. Let him pass that one along. Comrades, in the contest between the allure of chickens and the prospect of my wife’s legs ever again parting, I have reluctantly but with swelling resolve concluded against chickens.

Then, living in the battleground of her
no
, Rose gave Albert a glimpse of a possible accord. An armistice, that was to say, between herself and the unseen presences searching for Albert’s usefulness to the party. Look, Rose told him, more or less flatly, if they intend to implant us, make us a party worm in the bud of Utopia, why not Utopia with a skyline? Why not with a place you could buy a pack of cigarettes within walking distance, from those who’d happily sell the cigarettes to Jews? Idealists had already forged a suburb, the city equivalent of Brown’s Homesteads, so why be stranded in Jersey? Don’t you see that Sunnyside Gardens is where the city Reds go?

As with the Homesteads, the Gardens was populated by history-stunned Jews whose immigrant journey needed a stop. Rose had already gotten familiar with the place. A few distaff Angrushes lived there, including Rose’s older cousin Zalman and his wife and their moon-eyed boy named for Lenin. How would
that
go over in the Monroe Township school district, I ask you?

The Gardens were sanctified as a leftist social laboratory by Lewis Mumford and Eleanor Roosevelt. If Mumford and Roosevelt were merely Pink, not Red, wasn’t the usurpation of Pink by Red precisely what the Popular Front was meant to accomplish? To ally and align with such progressive sentiments as already floated in American life, in a community such as the Homesteads or the Gardens. Like a man on the make who says he just wants to be friends, then gets on the couch and next thing you know your clothes are off. Nine months later, out pops a proletariat! So why not stay in the city? Sunnyside Gardens could form the simultaneous rejection, inversion, and satisfaction of Albert Zimmer’s Jersey Homesteads trial balloon.

The Gardens and the Homestead might really be the exact same place, only tugged inside out like a sock.

In New Jersey the concrete-bunker homes huddled surrounded by road and field and forest, expanse of land dwarfing the blot of attempted civilization, making it puny and precarious.

In Queens the family homes surrounded a communal garden wherein muddy vegetable beds could be given lip service within a theater of urbanity. They also offered a nice whiff of exclusivity, of social arrival. The Gardens were half Kropotkin commune and half Gramercy Park. Like her marriage, even if foolish Albert had mistaken himself for something other than aristocracy!

So what if Rose had wrecked Albert’s party career at one stroke? Wrecked inasmuch as he’d bent not to the cell but to Rose, hence was proven weak or untrustworthy (as though bending to them would have proven otherwise!). Better they learn what she knew. Anyhow, Rose knew she’d rescued his career as much as she’d wrecked it, by ending his drift through the Manhattan ranks where his contacts might go on forever imagining that given his loquacity and cuff links, given Alma’s apartment—her granite ashtray and Meissen salvage—he possessed either money or deep influence to donate to the cause. He possessed neither. Rose was the stronger of the two, no matter what fantasies about Albert their cell entertained. In Sunnyside
she
could perhaps accomplish something.

Sunnyside then. It was decided, by the end of that July. With help from Sol Eaglin, a party man with a foothold, they had a lease on Forty-Sixth Street by mid-August. Albert’s new vehicle operator’s license burrowed into his billfold’s depths, for safety’s sake, before he ever got his leather soles anywhere near the cast-iron accelerator of a John Deere.

Utopia was better when equipped with a subway stop so you could go screaming back to reality for five cents.

The timing? Sublime catastrophe of irony. Rose and Albert and their imaginary baby moved into the apartment the same day the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced, the Popular Front wrecked in one stroke of the pen.

Rose and Albert in the mouth of history, shaken like a mouse in a cat’s.

The war overturned the life of a recruiting Communist in Sunnyside as anywhere else, the Popular Front’s precarious rhetorical line dismantled overnight in the face of the pact. Go ahead, sell Hitler to your typical fellow traveler—he who, emboldened by anti-Fascism, had tiptoed into the party. He who was tearing up his pamphlets the next day, hearing of Stalin’s reversal, his expedient embrace of Nazis. Europe, melting in a rain of nightmares, dictated that young men become soldiers on real fronts. And that Reds become Jews again.

Albert, isolated in this way, never took to the life of the Gardens.

Began decamping, by means of the elevated subway, to his old life almost immediately.

There to commit his various unnameable offenses, the offenses of an aristocratic lush with a German accent, running from an unhappy marriage to the barrooms of Manhattan.

“Loose lips sink ships” was the phrase. Well, they could also get you sunk in American Communism.

Meanwhile, Rose stuck. Who’d guess four decades, more, could descend from the strength of saying
no
to New Jersey? Rose Angrush Zimmer, having propelled herself from the rank of the sisters squabbling in a Brooklyn candy shop’s back room, had, in marrying Albert, hardly bargained for this outer-borough destiny. Yet entrenched in the vast
no
of Queens, one made a life.