The Pledge (18 page)

“They don't call it crime. But that's a thought. Are you really serious?”

“Of course I am. If you come into court with a left-wing lawyer, you're testifying against yourself. Now according to this subpoena, you testify in executive session. That means your lawyer does not go into the room where you'll testify. He'll be sitting outside, and you can come out to consult him, but mostly you're on your own.”

Bruce nodded. “American History One. What the textbooks called the Star Chamber system. It's a tired notion, but doesn't the Constitution sort of forbid that kind of thing?”

“In a courtroom, sure. This is not a court and you're not on trial.”

“Beautiful.”

She smiled. “Well, maybe not beautiful. Nice. Poor, dear Bruce. Don't you think you could learn to dissemble — just a bit? I do love you so.”

Bruce's father responded differently from what Bruce had expected. Bruce was there the following night for dinner, and after the meal he maneuvered his father into his consulting room. His mother readily accepted such exclusion. She disliked the discussion of anything political. Hers was a fragile world that had begun to disintegrate in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Once in Dr. Bacon's office, the door closed behind him, Bruce took out the subpoena and passed it over to his father. Dr. Bacon read it carefully, occasionally glancing up at his son as if to refresh his memory. When he finished, he said, “You'd better tell me about this, Bruce.”

It was a long story. He began with Bengal, and then added all the various steps since then. His father listened intently, without interrupting, and then took a cigar from the humidor on his desk. He looked inquiringly at his son.

“I had one last night at Molly's place. That does it for a while.”

“This Molly — you intend to marry her?”

“I don't know. We don't talk about marriage.”

“Let's go back to the subpoena. I read the papers, so I'm not overly surprised, but they can't be so stupid that they think you're a communist.”

“No — or maybe they're just that stupid.”

Dr. Bacon studied his cigar for a long moment. “You know, Bruce, a lot of strange things are going on these days. Old friend of mine, Claud Fergeson by name, came down from Cornell for a small operation, resetting a poorly set finger that he broke last year. He teaches physics at the college, and he has a national reputation in the nuclear field. Well, he tells me that they called him down to Washington about a month ago, and he appeared before the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the question they asked him was what would be the result of one hundred atom bombs exploded simultaneously in a restricted area. Would the explosion ignite the atmosphere and end life on earth? Would it make Europe, for example, uninhabitable? Would the wind carry the fallout to us? Obviously, they were talking about an atomic raid on Russia. He said it made his skin crawl, these automatons in uniform, rigid, mindless faces discussing the pros and cons of ending life on earth. I've been a Republican all my life, and I regard this wretched little man in the White House as one of the less pleasant accidents of history, but Fergy is a Democrat, way-out liberal left, and he's shaking in his boots.”

“What did he tell them?”

“He said no one knew, no one could even anticipate what might happen. Then Fergy learned that at least a dozen physicists he knew had been called down to the Joint Chiefs and asked the same question. Strange times. Now let's get back to this subpoena. I'll talk to Frank Britain tomorrow. By all means, he must represent you, and he will. I've operated on him and on his wife, so I have a pound of flesh to obligate him. He'll take care of things. On the other hand — your mother. I'll have to tell her.”

“After I leave — please, Dad.”

“As you wish. I can sympathize with that. She'll be very distraught. And on that, you never answered my question. Do you intend to marry Molly Maguire?”

“I told you, Dad, it hasn't come up.”

“Stop the nonsense, Bruce,” he said sharply. “You see one woman month after month, you sleep with her, you cling to her — you have damn well thought about whether or not you want to marry her.”

“I've thought about it.”

“Well?”

“I'm afraid to ask her.”

“You'll get over that. Meanwhile, make a date with your mother to bring her here to dinner.”

“What! Oh, no, Dad.”

“You're not being very practical, Bruce.”

“Dad, she's a communist, a Catholic, shanty Irish background, her mother's a scrubwoman in an office building in Boston, one sister's a hairdresser and the other one is a nun, and both her father and her mother came over here from county Mayo in Ireland, and you want me to bring her here and introduce her to Mom?”

“Are you going to marry her?”

“I hope so, someday.”

“Then sooner or later we have to meet her. Don't worry about your mother. She's survived worse. And how come she's a Catholic? I thought communists were atheists.”

“I don't know exactly what she is that way. It's complicated. You really want me to bring her here?”

“I do.”

Bruce sighed and said, “OK, if that's what you want.”

Molly reacted warily to the invitation. “It's the wrong time,” she said. “It's walking into a spider web in the best of times, but with the subpoena hanging over you, it's the worst of times.”

This was two days later. They were having lunch at Tony Marino's place on Eighth Street, and Bruce was on his way to his appointment with Frank Britain at three o'clock.

“Then we'll put it off,” Bruce agreed.

“Why do they want to meet me?”

“I guess they think I intend to marry you.”

“Oh? Don't you have to ask me first?”

“Well,” Bruce said uneasily, “I mean, that was my father's notion. I told him I haven't asked you.”

“Why haven't you? It's over a year since we met.”

“Why haven't I?” Bruce considered it. “I figured you'd say no. That would make things very uncomfortable.”

“Ask me.”

“Just like that?”

“Any way you like.”

“All right. Would you?”

“Sure. Now let's talk about this lawyer —”

“Wait a minute! Hold onl” Bruce shouted. Heads turned from all over the restaurant. Molly put her finger to her lips, and Bruce said in a hoarse whisper, “I asked you to marry me.”

“I said sure.”

He shook his head bewilderedly.

“I said I'd marry you, dear Bruce. You asked me. I said yes, sure. Whenever you want. Now let's talk about Frank Britain. The name is dubious, but since he's a classy lawyer, we won't fault his name. Now these guys charge a bundle. Who's paying the bills?”

Staring at her, studying her as if he had never seen her before, his mouth slightly open, he offered a picture of oafishness. He was trying to think.

“Bruce?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm just trying to put it together. You said you'd marry me whenever I wanted to. Do I have that right?”

“More or less.”

“What do you mean, more or less? You're not reneging?”

“I mean not today. You have to see your lawyer today.”

“Yes, of course. You asked me something about him.”

“I asked you who's paying him? Also, what is he charging you?”

“I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about marriage.”

“Bruce, will you get your head back on? Who's paying for this?”

“I am.”

“All right. But before you say a word or he does, ask what it's going to cost you. That's the trouble with you rich kids. You never ask what anything costs.”

“Right. We ought to decide which apartment we want to give up.”

“Pay your check,” Molly said. “I'll see you tonight.”

Bruce paid the check, kissed her passionately once they were outside the restaurant, and then strode downtown, barely conscious of where he was going, far more conscious of the fact that Molly Maguire intended to marry him. Well, at least no one could say he had stumbled into this one. They had been together for over a year; they knew each other if not entirely, at least with some depth and understanding, and if there were problems, they would be worked out. That there were problems he could not deny. She was a communist; he was at best a fairly committed liberal who believed strongly in the type of government that existed in the land of his birth; but she was not a fanatical communist. She disagreed with too much that the Party was doing to be bound and chained to the movement. She wanted some peace in her life, and from the glowing manner she spoke about her hairdresser sister's children, he felt that she wanted children of her own. She was almost as old as Bruce, and she had mentioned her fear of losing her childbearing years, of allowing them to slip away. She was so much of a woman, full-breasted, wide-hipped, shaped to bear children easily; and just as easily, as Bruce saw her in her parents' land, to do the work of a woman bound to the soil. It would work out. He called to mind the night Pete Seeger sat in her apartment with his banjo, singing, and there was a song about John Brown freeing the slaves at Harpers Ferry, and the refrain said, “America's working folks are all remembering of the day,” and after Pete and Ronnie left, he and Molly had talked about the songs, and he said to Molly, “The trouble with your songs is that you lie to yourselves, and then you believe the lies. Your whole program is threaded with those lies —”

Molly was enraged and demanded to know what lies, and he had said to her, “Well, that line about America's working folks remembering the day John Brown was hanged. It's a lie. They don't even know who John Brown was, and they don't give two damns that he was hanged, and all that talk about the working class, and the workers don't give a damn for your Party and they're not lifting a finger to stop what's happening to it, and in Germany the workers supported Hitler, and where are they today, with the red hunters running loose like madmen, and McCarthy sounding off like a demented Mussolini? Has one trade union lifted their voice against the committee or in support of your party? You lie to yourselves as much as the government lies to the people.”

He had expected an explosion after that, but nothing of the kind took place. Instead, she remained silent, staring at him, her wonderful pale eyes misting, and then finally said, “It's true, isn't it?”

Well, she would do what she had to do, and she wouldn't demand any meaningless sacrifice on his part. Meanwhile, as these thoughts were going through his head, he had been walking downtown with long, energetic strides. It was a cool, sunny day, the weather of the best of days in New York, and his heart beat in measure to the sounds of the street and the sweetness of the air — a sweetness that blows in on the wind from the bay. He walked down Broadway to where the high building that housed Lennox, Britain, Delloway, and Jones stood within sight of the Battery. It was a high-rise, but distinguished, not like the new glass towers going up uptown, but a big, solid pile of limestone, granite, and white brick. The bronze plate outside that announced the firm's presence contained not only the names of the founders and their children, the present senior partners, but thirty-two associated members of the firm; and inside, they occupied three full floors of offices.

Bruce dwindled as he entered here. He had been around, but this was new to him, a rarefied region paved with gold. A beautiful young woman, seated behind not a desk but a delicate and venerable Adam table, her hair dyed a quiet ash blond, took his name and asked him to be seated in the outer waiting room, and from there another beautiful young woman escorted him to an inner waiting room, where the décor was Queen Anne rather than Adam. Presently, Frank Britain appeared and escorted him to his office, furnished in rather heavy Chippendale and boasting a splendid view of the harbor. Britain himself was a tall, cadaverous man in his sixties, at least six feet and three inches in height, taller than Bruce, who topped six feet, with a long, narrow head and a fine, well-modulated voice. He greeted Bruce with a warm handshake and put him in a mahogany signer's chair that might have come from Convention Hall in Philadelphia. They faced each other across his desk, and Britain smiled pleasantly, a smile that removed him from American Gothic and made him quite human.

“So you're Bill Bacon's boy, and I hear you put your foot in one of Washington's new bear traps.”

“I didn't step into it. It reached up and grabbed me.”

“Let me see the subpoena,” Britain said.

Bruce handed it to him. He studied it thoughtfully for a minute or two, and then he gave it back to Bruce. “I don't think it's anything to worry about. It's part of the lunacy that's been going around since the war. Now, your dad told me something of your predicament, but I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind.”

“Go ahead,” Bruce said.

“I'll start with the first question they'll throw at you: Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

“No to both.”

“Good. That dears the air. Now, Bruce, you know what they mean when they speak of a communist front? An organization of mostly noncommunists organized or directed by communists or so accused. Belong to any such thing?”

“I'm a card-carrying member of only one organization, the Newspaper Guild. That's it. I carry a library card and a Social Security card.”

“Fine,” Britain said. “Just fine. Your dad tells me that you have honorable intentions toward a young lady who writes for the
Daily Worker.”

“We'll be married one day soon.”

“And I presume she'll give up her job on the
Worker?”

“I hope so,” Bruce said. “I sure hope so.”

“And how do you feel about communists?”