Land of Dreams: A Novel (9 page)

“What has happened—do you suppose someone has died?” he said. “Shall I call over and see?”

“Don’t be such a nosey parker, Leo,” I snapped. “Get in there and finish all those studies. I’ll come in and check on you.”

He made a face, but went back to his books without thinking. I just thanked God that it was winter and our windows were closed. In the summer they were open all day, and Leo loved to gossip with our neighbors across the fire-escape door at the back. His mother had brought him up in the cold privilege of a big, isolated house with servants, and Leo loved the novelty of living where he was surrounded by people. For all that he was sensitive, he was turning into a friendly and outgoing young man, full of charm as well as good looks, although he seemed to relate better to adults than to boys of his own age, and would happily gossip for hours with the mothers of his peers while they played baseball in the alleys below.

The afternoon Pearl Harbor was attacked the whole of the United States was in shock, but I would not breathe a word to my sons of war or bombs, or of any potential danger to their father, until I was certain what was going on. Uncertainty was, quite simply, not on my agenda as a mother. The boys might choose what to have for dinner, but everything important was cut and dried and presented as a neatly wrapped package to them. As much as I loved them as my own, they were, in reality, both waifs abandoned by their mothers. It was my duty to make their lives secure, to make them believe that the world was a safe place.

As two hours turned to four, I kept on telling myself there was nothing wrong. The selfish man had not thought to call and reassure us that he was alive, which he surely must be. The CPUSA office would be open on Monday, and I would keep the boys from school until I had spoken to the office and they had reassured me that Charles was fine. I wanted to know he was safe; but, more than that, I wanted to speak to him myself, so that I could lift the shadow on my conscience that feared Charles did not think I cared for him enough to bother whether he lived or died.

I prepared a meal of ham and mashed potatoes for the boys, although I could not face eating myself.

“Are you all right, Mammy?” Leo asked when he saw that I wasn’t joining them.

“I’m fine, love,” I said. “I just don’t feel like eating.”

“Can we go to the park?” Tom asked.

“No, Tom, not today.”

“Pleeease . . .”

The phone rang and I ran to the hall, almost tripping over myself and grabbing the handset.

“Charles?”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone, then a man’s voice said, “Is that Mrs. Irvington? Mr. Charles Irvington’s wife?”

I knew immediately what had happened.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

Charles had been driving to the docks with three shipyard workers. It was not a Japanese bomb that hit them, but a misguided anti-aircraft shell. They were all killed. It had taken some time to identify Charles, and more time again for the CPUSA representative in Hawaii to be contacted.

It was the office manager in New York who called me. He asked me if I was sitting down.

I was shocked, but not as shocked as I might have been, had I received the call before I heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio. Bad things happen in life. Losing John had taught me that, and I cannot pretend that the death of my first husband wasn’t the first thing that entered my head. This was a terrible thing that had happened, a tragedy, but it could not compare to going out to feed the hens and coming back to find the love of my life dead in the kitchen, from a heart attack in his thirties. So my first reaction was more dismay than despair—followed by a presiding sense of guilt that I was not overcome with a widow’s grief.

My main concern was how to tell the boys, how to break it to them that their father was dead.

Charles had an easier relationship with Tom, even though Tom wasn’t his biological son, than he did with Leo. Tom was so young when I married Charles that he always thought of Charles as his actual father, and Charles adopted the boisterous toddler fully as his own. Leo was the image of his father—and perhaps his well-spoken, gentle teenage son reminded Charles of the life he had hoped to leave behind. Tom was a bawdier child, outgoing and affectionate; he demanded Charles’s attention in a simpler way. A man likes to mold his sons to his way of thinking, and Tom was younger than Leo. Charles could pick Tom up and throw him over his shoulder and, as the child screamed with delight, he would feel like a king. With Tom there were no lost years to make up for, no disappointments, no judgments, no history. Tom was another man’s son for him to impress; he was easy. Leo was a more difficult child for Charles to love, and in matters of love, I had learned, men like things to be as simple as possible.

As I put down the receiver, I took a deep breath in. As I exhaled, it came out in a loud sob and I clasped my hand to my mouth to quell the noise. The tears came automatically; the shock would not let me hold them in, after all. I took a moment to myself and cried some of it out, but I would not let go completely. After John died it had taken me a year before I started to grieve, then it had crippled me and I had taken to my bed in a dark depression. I was a mother now, and no such indulgences were possible. I would grieve for Charles properly, with dignity and respect—but first I had to look after the children.

I swept the palms of my hands across my face to push back the tears, then went into the living room and gathered Tom and Leo onto the settee.

“I have some sad news,” I said.

“Father is dead,” Leo blurted out.

Tom looked at him, blinking, waiting for an explanation.

“How did you . . . ?”

“I heard the news about Pearl Harbor, and he was in Hawaii, wasn’t he? Plus you’ve been crying.”

I was so taken aback, I didn’t know what to say. So I just sat between them and gathered them both by their waists into me.

Tom started to cry. I don’t think he was even sure why, but then Leo’s beautiful face collapsed in a grimace of grief and, unable to bear their pain, I started too. We sat like that and cried together for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, then they followed me to the kitchen and I made us all hot toast and butter, washed down with sweet milky tea.

That night they both slept in the bed with me.

“Is father in heaven with the angels?” Tom asked.

“He most certainly is,” I assured him.

And Tom seemed pleased that was that, replying, “Good—I don’t feel sad anymore.”

Leo said nothing more about it, but I knew that, in his private world, he was afraid I might abandon him, as both his birth mother and, in all honesty, his father had done—in his life, and now in his death.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Charles’s funeral was a nightmare to organize.

I rang his younger brother straightaway. The opposite of Charles, Edwin Irvington was a wealthy buffoon, who had to make good—when times got difficult financially—by taking a job in a bank. He turned out to be rather good at it and, although he had sold much of the land, he still lived in a grand family house in upstate New York. I liked Edwin. He was a bit of an upper-class fool, but he was a decent man and very fond of Charles. Leo had stayed with him and his family for much of his early life.

Edwin cried out in shock and broke down when I told him what had happened. After he had gathered himself, he said he would break the news himself to his parents.

“How’s Leo?” he asked.

“He’ll be all right,” I said.

“Let us know if we can do anything.” And, while I appreciated that the offer was made in good faith, he added the warning, “I expect my mother will be in touch with you.”

The following morning I got a call from The Plaza from Minnie Irvington, Charles’s mother. She did not bother addressing me by name or offering condolences. As far as Minnie was concerned, I was (and always would be) her errant son’s Irish whore—the font of all his socialist aspirations, and therefore all of her family’s ills.

“I need to know what time the—corpse—will be arriving, so that we can arrange to have—it—picked up by our family undertaker. We can make arrangements with regard to Leo after the funeral.”

The Irvingtons were an influential family. Although they had lost much of their fortune during the Great Depression, Charles’s parents nonetheless saw themselves as being of an elevated social class. While it was Edwin who had worked with his father and salvaged enough of their business to keep them out of the slums, Charles was their golden boy. Although he had turned his back on his parents at a young age (even organizing the shipyard union that his father believed had crippled his business, although good sense suggested the opposite was true), I knew that Charles’s death would turn him immediately back into their blond-haired, blue-eyed son.

Leo, in whom they had shown little interest in the five years since I had adopted him, was now their beloved grandson—a miniature Charles—and doubtless they had plans to turn him into some sort of Irvington heir to make up for Charles’s undoing of the family name. They were also terrified, I think, that, being Irish, I might give their son a Catholic burial before they had the chance to claim him back. Minnie Irvington may have been Charles’s mother and Leo’s grandmother, but in my opinion (and that of my late husband and adoptive son) she fell woefully short in both roles.

“I will let you know as soon as I am told myself,” I said, knowing full well that he was arriving on Wednesday morning, “and I’ll leave details of the funeral arrangements for you at The Plaza front desk,” I added.

“He was an
Irvington
,” she said, “and he will be buried as such.”

“He was my husband,” I said, “and a great man, and I will give him the funeral he would have wanted—and there will be no arrangements regarding Leo, who is my son by law. You are welcome to come and visit him here at our home in Chelsea, by appointment with me.”

“You’ll hear from our lawyers by the end of the day,” she said.

“Crack on ahead and do that, why don’t you?” I said in my best Irish drawl. “I look forward to hearing from them.” And I hung up.

Next on the phone was the CPUSA, which was equally determined to take over. Although the Communist Party had played an important role in setting up unions and starting a labor movement, it had never really succeeded in bringing America’s workingman around to its political agenda. Men were happy to take support and organizational expertise from the communists, but they drew the line when it came to joining the Communist Party itself.

Charles Irvington was the jewel in their crown. The son of a wealthy industrialist, he eschewed a life of privilege for his beliefs. Charles’s death was an opportunity for the failed bureaucrats of this failed party to make a martyr out of their best union negotiator.

Charles was a fully paid-up member of the CPUSA, but while he agreed with the overall principles of equality and justice, I knew he was deeply cynical about what he saw as the petty ideologies that stood in the way of communism becoming a popular belief system. He had started out in the Socialist Party of America and, when he became disillusioned with them, had simply defected to their rivals, the CPUSA. In truth Charles, despite espousing politics as his motivation, was never a party player. His loyalty was always with the people, not the principles. He saw his fellow members as little more than civil servants, but he needed their organizations to employ him to do the work he loved, and he was enough of a politician himself to never let on how little he thought of them. If Charles had been a more ambitious type of man, he would certainly have been party leader. With his good looks and charm, he possibly had what it took to lead the communists into mainstream American politics. The party bosses knew that and, while Charles could not be persuaded to take a public role while he was alive, they were determined to make a communist hero of him in death.

The CPUSA had taken responsibility for Charles’s body in Hawaii. Respectfully deferring to me at every turn, they had arranged and paid for him to be embalmed, dressed in a suit and put into an expensive mahogany coffin, and then organized for the body to be transported back to New York.

By all news accounts, the attack had caused the worst kind of carnage.

Body parts around the harbor were being buried in mass graves. Hundreds of people were missing and assumed dead, while badly burned corpses remained unidentifiable. Charles and the shipyard workers were matched to the car they were in, and were quickly missed by the people they were going to meet. Having been hit by falling debris, their car had collided with a wall; but, protected from the worst excesses of fire, their bodies were still intact. It was a small mercy, but a mercy nonetheless.

I was grateful for all that the party had done, but I was not wrong in assuming that there was a proviso attached to their generosity.

“Although Charles had been working with our Hawaiian comrades on the withdrawal of the U.S. armed forces, since Germany attacked Russia, things have changed. Perhaps Charles’s untimely death was no coincidence. The Comintern believes . . .”

I wasn’t going to listen to this nonsense.

“Frankly, I don’t much care what the Comintern believes. Charles was negotiating with plantation owners for better conditions and wages for Hawaiian workers—that is all.”

They weren’t going to give up that easily. This was wartime, and dead bodies were valuable political currency.

“The Comintern believes that Comrade Irvington’s death offers us an opportunity to show ourselves allied with . . .”

“When the body arrives in New York tomorrow, I would like it brought directly to my undertakers,” I asserted. I would not be bullied by some petty bureaucrat.

“Provision has already been made with an excellent firm, on behalf of the Comin—”

“Well, unmake it,” I snapped. “Charles will be buried, by me, in a place and with a funeral home of my choosing.”

I thanked the speaker for all his help, and he said he would have to get somebody else to call me to finalize delivery of the body—doubtless a more senior figure, to further try and persuade me to let them give my husband a “hero’s funeral,” which would have driven his family insane and presented him to the world as a political zealot, which I knew he was not.