The Pledge (22 page)

“The war with Germany was over,” Bruce said angrily, “and so far as I know, we were not at war with Russia. They were our allies.”

“We are always at war with Russia,” Rankin said.

“The war with Japan was still on,” Nixon put in. “The British were our allies.”

Bruce was silent, thinking that, once again, he had taken their bait. But how to avoid it? He had spent hours with Majumdar. They had spoken of many things, and it was no breach of faith on Majumdar's part to quote him so long as he quoted him correctly. And he had. Nevertheless, Bruce felt himself being entangled in a spider's web of intrigue. Why would a committee of the House of Representatives have information from British Intelligence? So far, he had published nothing on the situation in Calcutta. What was happening, and where did he stand?

Crown was studying his notes. “Milton Greenberg,” he said. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Yes, I know Mr. Greenberg. He works for the
New York Daily News.”

“No longer, you'll be pleased to know. He refused to sign a loyalty oath and he was discharged. How do you know Mr. Greenberg?”

“I met him in India and subsequently in New York.”

“Did he ask you to appear before the Broadway Forum?”

“Yes.”

“Is he a member of the Communist Party?”

“I have no idea,” Bruce said.

“I'd like you to confine your answer to a simple yes or no.”

“That makes no sense,” Bruce said. “How can I say yes or no when I don't know?”

“Then you refuse to either affirm it or deny it?”

“What the hell are you up to?” Bruce exploded. “You know damned well that I can't give you a yes or a no answer!”

“Very well. We'll continue. Harold Legerman. When you spent time with him in Calcutta, he was a sergeant in the United States Army. Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“Is Harold Legerman a member of the Communist Party?”

“I don't know.”

“Once again,” Crown said very deliberately, “I am seeking a yes or no answer.”

The anger had gone. You can't be sensible if you're angry, Bruce told himself. Quietly, quietly. “You know, Mr. Crown, that a yes or no answer is impossible and that I will not give you a yes or no answer.”

“Speak up,” Congressman Wood said. “I don't hear you. Please speak up. Did you say that this here Legerman is a communist?” His accent was even broader than Rankin's.

“No, sir.”

“Then you're saying he is not a communist?”

“No, sir. I told Mr. Crown here that I did not know whether Mr. Legerman was or was not a communist.”

“Well, don't think you have us there, sonny. Just don't think so at all.”

“Molly Maguire,” Crown said.

Finally, at long last, Molly Maguire. Did they know that she was sitting outside in the waiting room? Probably not, and without a subpoena they could not even ask her the time of day. What had she said? They were afraid to subpoena any member of the press, whether from the
Daily Worker
or the
New York Times.
It made sense.

“Do you know her?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you know that she is an employee of the
Daily Worker?”

A long moment went by, while Bruce worked desperately to put his thoughts, his life, and his principles together. The moment stretched out. He went back to when he was a kid in the best of all possible worlds. He was a funny kind of kid, without anger or hostility. He was sent to camp, and he won the award for all-around camper. He never had to work very hard at being a good athlete. The body had been given to him, and he took care of it, even though, apart from summer camp, he had no particular interest in athletics. He read everything he could lay hands on. He became the editor of his college paper, and the forces railed at him because he refused to be judgmental. He could see both sides of a question all too easily. He believed in motherhood, God, true love, and country, and when they played “America the Beautiful,” he felt prickles on his scalp. Even when an old reporter on the
Tribune
said to him, “Bacon, you are the epitome of what Mencken calls
Boobus Americanus
, but how you combine it with a degree of intelligence, I don't know,” it did not shake him. It took a war to strip him of almost every illusion, but somehow he maintained his view of his country, even though it was tarnished somewhat. Coming home from the horrors of a Europe destroyed by war and an Asia ridden with poverty and misery, he had embraced the cleanliness, the orderliness, the beauty and comfort of America.

“Mr. Bacon!” Crown said sharply.

“Yes — I'm sorry. I was thinking.”

“Concerning one Molly Maguire, I asked you whether you know that she's an employee of the
Daily Worker?”

“You know that as well as I do, and your question is pointless. Now I have something to say to you. Since I am here as a witness before a congressional committee, I will answer any —”

Nixon cut him off. “Will you please answer the question!”

“I will answer any question about myself. I will not answer any question about Molly Maguire. I have broken no law. Neither has she, and under the law and usage of this land, I am not required indeed to answer any of your questions. If I do, I degrade myself.”

“Is Molly Maguire a member of the Communist Party?” Crown asked.

“I have watched and written about a world conflict to rid this earth of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. I find your tactics no different from his —”

They were all shouting at him at once now.

“Damn you filthy bastards!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Listen to me! You disgrace the Congress of the United States!”

“Call the marshal! Call the marshal!” Nixon was yelling. “Call the marshal!”

“You foul this nation! You sicken me!”

Someone must have pressed a button, for the marshal entered now and took Bruce, who was on his feet, looming over the table, by the arm and said, firmly, “Come along, young feller. If you resist, it spells a lot of trouble.”

The energy and anger collapsed, and Bruce allowed himself to be led out of the hearing room, meek as a lamb now. In the waiting room, the guard said to Molly, “He's yours?”

Molly nodded.

“Then take him along and buy him a cup of coffee.” He waited until they had left the waiting room and then watched them as they went down the corridor to the elevator. Molly said nothing. Bruce said nothing. They reached the street, and then Bruce said, “All right, I'll —”

She touched his lips. “No. We need a couple of double martinis, and we'll find that in the hotel bar. Until then, well, the door was by no means soundproof. When you shouted, ‘Damn you filthy bastards,' they heard you all over the building.”

“You heard it?”

“And much more.”

“Oh, Lord. Why don't you dump me and run?”

“Oh, no.” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “You're lovely. It's not your fault that God gave you a pincushion instead of a brain.”

It was one o'clock, and the bar at the hotel had just opened. Bruce wondered whether they shouldn't have lunch first.

“Oh, no. Gin now, lunch later,” Molly said. “My world is very shaky.”

“If you say so,” he agreed meekly.

“Come on, love,” Molly said. “I can't have you groveling every time you do what any decent red-blooded white Protestant American boy would do.” The drinks came. “Mud in your eye,” Molly said. “Now tell me all about it. The shouting I heard. What came before it?”

“You don't want me to tell you first how I flubbed it?”

“We'll save that. Start at the beginning.”

“Yes. Well, that's the strange part of it. First, you know, the stuff you hear all over the place, which is a sort of a cliché at this point. Were you ever and are you now a member? Then, out of left field, we're back in India, and they begin to throw Indian names at me.”

“Names you knew?”

“Two of them, yes. You remember I told you about Professor Chatterjee and Ashoka Majumdar? Those were two of the names. I said yes, I knew them. The other names were strange to me. Then, again out of left field, they bring in British Intelligence.”

“Hold on. What do you mean, they bring in British Intelligence? How do they bring in British Intelligence?”

“I'll explain.”

“You mean they had someone in there from British Intelligence? If they did, it invalidates everything.” This with great excitement.

“Will you slow down? I'll explain. Do you remember my telling you about the communist newspaper Majumdar worked for?”

“Of course I do. It filled me with guilt. I would fall asleep at night asking myself what I was doing here where nobody really needed me when I should be out there doing what your Majumdar does.”

“Well, evidently Majumdar printed a few sentences from our discussions in the paper. Something to the effect of did I believe that the British helped organize the famine? I said that I suspected it was so but that I had no evidence. Now this character, Crown, he's counsel for the committee, has the translation and reads it to me, and then Rankin and Nixon get into the act, scolding me for thinking bad thoughts about our British cousins, and then they drop it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“And up until now,” Molly said, “you've been a proper, upstanding young man. How did you manage to louse it all up and start calling them names?”

“It just turned into shit, if you'll forgive the expression. You know, Molly, just living your life normally, if there is such a thing, you dissemble constantly. You're polite to people you detest, you lie a hundred times a day — no, I'm not tired, when you can't keep your eyes open; he's great, when he's really a louse; very interesting, when the thing is pure garbage — and you live with it so easily you forget you're doing it. So there I am, going along with this idiot committee, trying not to think how utterly ridiculous and profane this whole procedure is, and your name comes up. So I told them to forget it. I said I'll answer any questions about myself, but I will not become an informer on Molly Maguire.”

“Beautiful,” Molly said softly. “You beautiful dumb bastard. I want to cry. I think I'm going to cry. Give me a handkerchief or something.”

He gave her his handkerchief. He had never seen her cry before.

Through her tears, she mumbled, “And you're not even Irish. You have to be Irish to do anything as stupid as that. You're very noble and you're going to jail. What in hell did you think you were accomplishing?”

“I wasn't trying to accomplish anything. For God's sake, Molly, give me a break.”

She dried her eyes and pushed her drink away.

“You're really mad.”

“Mad? No, I'm not mad. I'm just trying to figure out how I got mixed up with a Boy Scout. Why in hell couldn't you do what we planned? They know all there is to know about both of us. They know I'm a communist.”

“Since when does knowledge take the curse off an informer? Must I be an informer to exist in this cockeyed, lunatic world?”

“Ah, Jesus,” Molly said, “it's almost two, and checkout time is three. Let's go upstairs and make love and forget that those bastards and their lousy committee even exist.”

“I'm with you.”

“When I was a kid,” Molly said, “I read
Pilgrim's Progress.”

“I know,” Bruce said.

“Pay the check, and then let's get upstairs and make one good thing happen to us in this stinking city.”

AS
SUCH THINGS GO

   

A
BOUT TEN DAYS
after Bruce returned from Washington, Dave Buttonfield, the managing editor of the
Tribune
, telephoned and asked him to stop by at his office. Six months earlier, Bruce would have presumed that Buttonfield had decided to rehire him, but by now, Bruce realized that the world he lived in at the moment did not function that way, and in this, he was right. Buttonfield handed Bruce a sheet of paper and informed him that it had just come over the AP wire. The AP dispatch said that the House of Representatives had just voted to cite Bruce Nathaniel Bacon for contempt. It went on to say that the House Committee on Un-American Activities had reason to believe that Mr. Bacon was linked to the international communist conspiracy, and that during the war he had cooperated with the Communist Party of Bengal.

“We thought,” Buttonfield said, “that before we printed this, we ought to hear your side of the story and give you a chance to state your own case. Is there any truth in it?”

“Are you asking me that with a straight face?”

“Yes.”

“Then the answer is no. No truth in it. I'm not a communist. If there's an international communist conspiracy, I don't know one damned thing about it, and during the war, I was a correspondent of this paper. That's it.”