Girl of My Dreams (49 page)

“And tomorrow the world?” asked Greta Kimple.

“One sector at a time, we said in the Army, then we catch our breath.” Yancey was aware he was being kidded by someone who had no sense of humor. “As the poet said,” he added, “‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.'” That was his only reference to Yeats, and Greta Kimple, stony-hearted already and as interested in poetry as a toad is in a telephone, let it fly by her. Yancey was not the supercilious skeptic of Jubilee here, the courtly southern agnostic. This was a believer, and on his face passion had replaced doubt, which had abandoned him. He said he wanted to keep the land true to its promises, recalling Jefferson's ideal of a revolution to clean things up every generation. “I am certainly not radical enough,” Yancey concluded, this time quoting Lenin in Zurich before he embarked on his sealed train to the Finland Station in Russia.

“One can never be radical enough,” said Greta Kimple. “That is, one must try always to be as radical as reality.”

“At last I see,” said Mort Leech portentously, “that my war at Belleau Wood and the war you fought at Neuve Chapelle, Yancey Ballard, was only about a slaveholder called Germany, who owns a hundred slaves, fighting other slaveholders led by Britain and France, who own a thousand slaves, for a more equal distribution of slaves.”

“We now have in our possession,” Greta Kimple said, “nothing less than the skeleton key to unlock the mystery of human existence. Communism can do what five thousand years of history haven't accomplished.” She was becoming scriptural.

“But what about human nature, Yancey?” Mort Leech persisted, playing the shill with a trick question. “Surely you can't change human nature.”

“What is human nature?” Yancey answered. “Is it human nature to have kings and peons, masters and slaves? That's what the power brokers always say. That's what the plantation owners said where I come from in Alabama. No. There is no human nature that is unchangeable as the capitalists claim.”

“Good,” said Greta Kimple. Apparently Yancey had passed. “Technology and reason,” Kimple went on, “will produce the idea, the ideology, that we can be scientifically liberated and transformed. There is only science and progress, and Communism can direct both of them for the greater good of mankind. Human nature will be the result of evolving human effort.”

Now someone else objected. It was Poor Jim Bicker, possibly because he'd been cast off by our hostess, the widow Flower, in favor of the professor. “The Communist goals are an improvement on what we have,” he said, “but you can't reduce all human color and hope and endeavor to a monochromatic machine-made man.”

“Did I say that?” Greta Kimple replied. “Did anyone hear me say I want the gray individual? No, Comrades, I want to see human potential expanded because that's the only way to redden the planet. Already one sixth of the world's landmass is Red. That leaves five sixths. Can we do it, Comrades? I think we can.”

“Which,” Mort Leech carried on, “will permit life to be organized into a single model, subject to central planning. Man himself will be remade.” Leech now seemed to expand his girth as he drew deeply on his cigarette and pulled himself up to his full bulldozing altitude. “On to the other five sixths!” he shouted, having now reverted to his position of Party stalwart. He and Kimple picked up some applause in the room as if accepting bouquets. “Onward to the new man,” Leech finished his catechism.

“And woman,” Kimple said.

“Yes,” Sylvia agreed, “on to the other five sixths. But I don't want to be dictated to. I want the Party to be democratic, the vanguard of the working class, sure, but within a system that embraces other parties as well.”

“Nope,” Mort Leech said, his neck bulging out of his shirt collar. “What you call the democratic system is nothing but a shell game the capitalists play to keep everyone in line. Democracy has had its day, too bad it doesn't work. Class oppressors get a stranglehold on it, finance a smokescreen of lies, and only hide behind them. When you've found the truth, what's the point of permitting error? Would you let astronomers teach that the moon is made of green cheese?”

“The Dionne quintuplets,” Sylvia said, “have as much chance of convincing Americans to give up the ballot as Moscow does.”

“No, Moscow won't do it,” Greta Kimple said as if she'd been appointed to quell any disturbances from the one other woman in the conversation. “This will happen by our own strength as a Party within the United States. Stalin himself has said nothing important is decided by the soviets and other mass organizations, but by the Party alone.”

“But not by the Party in Moscow?” I asked, tentative as ever, my only contribution to the dialogue. Taking in this heady scene of my superiors, I was nervous, smothered, elated, a teenager at a dance with an erection he can't subdue.

“Moscow has almost twenty years' experience,” Mort Leech said, reclaiming the floor to put down a potentially unruly conscript, if that's what I was becoming. “Once they have laid down general guidelines, we Americans will take it from there.”

Sylvia pulled me toward the canapé spread. “Where coal miners and garment workers are concerned I'm redder than they are,” she said, “but I'm becoming afraid we may have to save Communism from the Communists. Another drink, Sweetie?”

Sweetie? I thought as I headed for the bar. I passed a tall man with brilliantined hair wearing a double-breasted suit, looking gloomy and out of place. It was Hurd Dawn, the head scene designer at Jubilee. I was surprised to see him at a Party gathering; he'd always looked like the essence of acquisitive capitalism to me, cocky and well satisfied with himself. Dawn was asking a woman if he could see her the following evening. This revealed a truth about the Party to me; it was also a singles market where you could go to a meeting one night and find a date for the next. “I thought we could have some fun,” Dawn said to the woman. “Well then, I suppose we don't always have to be so serious,” she said, “so why not?” “Good,” he said, “I need something to look forward to. Just lost my job as head scene designer at Jubilee.”

I was amazed, remembering Hurd Dawn strutting so proudly around the Jubilee lot that I had thought he was Mossy Zangwill himself when I first came to work there.

Tutor Beedleman, smiling and familiar, suddenly popped up like a tin face in a shooting gallery. Dapper, short, scrappy, eager. Always faintly amused. “Owen, my dear man,” said Tutor, “so invigorating to find you at the circus. Can anyone tell me what we're all doing here? What is the goddam balance between liberty and compulsion anyway? If everything is provided by the state, what's the incentive to work? Yet if everything is privately owned there's no incentive to better yourself because the rich have it all locked up and bettering yourself is impossible. Reds or Republicans, what'll it be?”

“You're leaving out a big category,” I said.

“Oh, I hate the Democrats,” he said. “I want to wipe that jut-jawed smile off FDR's smug sunny face. I'll go for an extreme solution, Big Business and Wall Street, or Workers of the World Unite. Nothing in between.”

“You're pulling my leg,” I said.

“Now that you mention it, wouldn't that be fun? We should try it sometime.”

“Was Hurd Dawn fired?” I asked. “Is that possible?”

“Too big for his britches is what Dunster Clapp said. Mossy went along with it because he wants to show New York he can trim staff. The younger boys in set design make about a quarter of Hurd's salary, and they can do the job. Go find your girlfriend.”

Tutor's wild, mild eye began to rove like the glance of a wallflower desperately searching, imploring faces to ask her for the next dance.

Wandering among the faithful with a drink in each hand, I had a flash of what had really brought me to Gloriana Onslow Flower's house. It wasn't Sylvia's invitation alone, nor even her rescuing me from Mossy's vengefulness. No, what had truly propelled me to the party was the affair between Amos Zangwill and Palmyra Millevoix. I said their full names to myself as a distancing tactic. It didn't work. They hovered more closely than ever. Pammy would be an even bigger star here than on the Jubilee lot, Mossy an even bigger threat. Thank God they weren't at the party. I worked, slaved when ordered, for one, and was in love, infatuated certainly, obsessed I suppose, with the other. But in my mind they were to stay separate. I hated picturing them even in the same room.

Instead, they had united. I couldn't help feeling the union—parental? I quivered—was against me. I knew how irrational this was, but that was the nature of obsession. My sense was of being helpless before conquering powers. I was here looking for help among those who represented the helpless. The hostile forces of the nation personalized themselves into Mossy, with Pammy as his moll. I despised him, scorned her. Not daring to confront my boss, I could enlist in the fight against bossism, capitalism itself. I was suddenly furious at Mossy, a delayed reaction to his brutal treatment that afternoon, with an anger so strong it surfaced as a kind of dilating righteousness.

I reverse zoomed my anger, went wide with it, and saw the whole world as vassal to self-anointed, capricious power. I was famished for a philosophy, a faith. And my hunger zoomed in now on the Party, the Party that would rid the world of itself. Reader, I became a Red that night.

I almost tripped over Sylvia. She was talking to Bruno Leonard, who looked like he was trying to become an ex-professor, a new Hollywood native. I felt a stab when I saw them together, almost nose to nose. As Mossy had taken my love, this CCNY refugee would now steal my date. Sylvia noticed and with two deft motions took her gimlet with one hand and slipped the other under my elbow.

“You thought I was horning in on your girl,” Bruno said. “Oh no, don't object, I saw. We are territorial souls all of us. I'm a senior figure, Sylvia herself may have a month or so on you. We transfer everything, Owen, can't help ourselves. Just because I've gone over to Marx doesn't mean I've forgotten what I learned from Freud. I believe the widow de-Flowered will presently want me to sing for my supper—and much more.”

“I wasn't jealous,” I lied as soon as Bruno left us.

“I'm flattered,” Sylvia said. “To Bruno, all his friends are intimates. But they change. Purposes, decisions, ambitions, sweethearts all exist to be changed. Life is a party Bruno gives, and if you don't keep showing up he feels betrayed. Since he's become an appendage of our hostess, I see him less now than when he first came west and was snapped up as an exotic creature who could actually talk ideas and tell us about the radicals on the East Coast.”

Gloriana herself, treasuring every second and all insults to her class, at last cruised to the center of her gathering. Gently tinkling her Champagne glass with a silver spoon to command attention, Gloriana crooned to the room at large. “Comes the revolution,” she said in a voice whose bluster would have offended her Bostonian relatives even more than her words, “the man we're about to listen to will be honored as our homegrown American prophet. We're all red, white and blue patriots here, are we not?” A couple of hisses and an amiable boo interrupted the hostess. “No, really we are—red for our politics, white for the motion picture screens, blue for our country in the Depression. The Depression that progressive thought and policies can lift us out of. Our guest this evening is a man whose visions can forge a new reality, and if you don't mind being herded into the lanai I think you'll agree that Professor Bruno Leonard makes both common and uncommon sense.”

Bertrand the butler had set up a humidor for use as a podium, and the professor began with modesty, however posed, as he drew us into his orbit. If you had photographed him that night you'd have said, yes, this exile from the East has miraculously managed it, he looks like both of them, this is the perfect marriage of Lenin and Trotsky. “I'm Professor Bruno Leonard from the City College of New York,” he began, “and I count for nothing in our mutual struggle. At CCNY I teach history and government, hoping my humble efforts can help change the first and overthrow the second.”

A fat character actor of no note, Gates Billings, applauded and was immediately stared down. If Edward G. Robinson had done the same thing the whole room would have joined him. But Robinson was far too courteous and too good a listener.

“Revolution is an art,” Leonard continued, “and I am not an artist. Many of you are, however, which is why the revolution comes looking for you. In your motion picture art, timing is everything. So is it with revolution. Like a captain when a turbulent wind howls, the revolutionist trims his sail when he must. Other times, when the day is fair and the breeze blows in the right direction, the sails are billowed for full speed ahead. This is where we are today as we face a worldwide depression whose causes and cures are social, economic and political. Our sails catch the wind in 1934.”

“‘Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State.'” Too many cocktails had regressed Yeatsman to a schoolboy Longfellow quoter. Bruno Leonard drew his mouth into the unsteady grin of someone who isn't sure whether he's receiving ridicule or approval.

“Roosevelt and his crowd look at the world through a straw,” the professor continued. “From their high perches they peer down and see only tiny pieces of the picture. We Reds see the picture whole. Why? because we look from the bottom up, without straws, we see the expanse of class injury, the enhanced eyesight centuries of pain have conferred on the workers, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised.”

Coming down a notable notch and several octaves, Bruno wooed the fearful among us. “Boys and girls, here's what I say. Most of what you read and hear about Russia are Hearst's lies and in Los Angeles it is especially the Chandlers' rot. Remember how they helped frame Tom Mooney. But some of what they say is true. The Soviet Union is not summer camp. It can't afford to play softball with the rest of the world hating it, plotting against it, led by the industrialists and the fascists.”