The Pledge (24 page)

“I'm afraid not. We're going downhill fast. But I agree that we should postpone as long as possible. They haven't indicted yet.”

He had his first real fight with Molly the day after this. He had picked her up at the
Worker
offices on East Twelfth Street, and since it was a pleasant evening, they decided to walk downtown and find some place near Foley Square. Molly was silent and moody, and when he pressed her about her mood, she told him that twelve leaders of the Communist Party had been arrested and indicted under the Smith Act.

“What's the Smith Act?” he asked.

“Oh, Jesus God, you're a journalist and supposedly alive and you're asking me what the Smith Act is!”

“That's right. I know how to tie my shoelaces and I'm able to read. And what the devil makes you so damned hostile?”

“I grew that way. It's a part of my nature.”

“Bullshit.”

“I wonder if you'd say that to some of those titless beauties you courted.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“And I suppose that if Sylvia Kline was a male with a desiccated nose and desiccated balls, you would have crawled on your knees to her. But I'll tell you this — she wouldn't have sent you down into that nest of thieves without a lawyer.”

“Then why the devil didn't you introduce me to her before I went down to Washington?”

“Because you couldn't see anything but that Wall Street
gonif
your father sicked you onto.”

“Anything that isn't poverty, pure, unvarnished, and unwashed, is corrupt to you. Didn't it ever occur to you, my dear Molly, that you are a little crazy on this subject? Did it ever occur to you that your proletarian virtue might be as phony as that lousy committee?”

“Oh, beautiful. That's all I need today!”

“We're shouting at each other.”

“Otherwise, you don't hear me!” Molly yelled. “You don't hear anything!” She turned on her heel and strode off; passing people stopped to listen and look. A truck driver shouted, “I'm with you, baby!” Bruce started after her, taking long strides, and she turned on her heel and snapped, “Don't follow me. I have nothing to say to you. Nothing!”

“All right!” he shouted after her. “When you come to your senses, call me.”

But almost a week passed, and she did not call him. The newspapers were filled with the indictment of the twelve communist leaders. He had fallen into the habit of buying the
Daily Worker
when Molly didn't give him a copy so that he could read whatever she was writing, and between that and the
Tribune
, he discovered that the Smith Act had been passed in 1940, revised a month before the indictment, and that it proposed that anyone who conspired to teach the overthrow of the government by force and violence could be sentenced to five years' imprisonment.

During that time, Bruce called Mel Bronson three times. The first two calls were not returned. The third call was answered by Bronson's secretary, who made an appointment for Bruce three days in advance. But before then, Sylvia Kline called him, and they had their first session.

For Bruce, there was nothing very new in the first hour and a half he spent with Sylvia Kline. They went through the printed version of his hearing line by line, and then she questioned him carefully about his being visited by an FBI agent the year before. Finally, she said, “I can't go on with this, Bruce, if you're going to perform like a man at the point of death. What's happened between the last time I saw you and today? Did someone close to you die?”

“I can't talk about it.”

She studied him shrewdly for a long moment, and then said, “Molly?”

He shrugged.

“I'm your lawyer. Talk to me.”

“We had a ghastly, stupid fight.”

“So what? Everybody fights.”

“I suppose so,” he agreed. “Are you a communist?”

“Glory oh! What's gotten into you? You don't go around asking people whether they're communists. Not today.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, so miserably that she rose from behind her desk, came around to face him, bent, and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Cheers!”

It was very funny. He began to laugh.

“That's better. That's much better.”

“Do you kiss all your clients?”

“When they look the way you looked a few moments ago, yes, absolutely. Molly's a dear old friend. You're going to be married.”

“Huh!”

“What did you fight about? Come on — you can tell a lawyer anything.” She perched on the edge of her desk, studying him.

“The Smith Act. I asked her what it was? To me, it was a perfectly normal question. She blew her top, and awful led to worse. Marry me? I don't think she'll ever talk to me again.”

“Oh, she'll talk to you again, and if I didn't think so, I'd never let you out of this office. Now listen to me. You're older than me and maybe you're older than Molly, but we grew up different. We're the children of immigrants. We're street kids, and we have something called street smarts, for want of a better word. You may come to understand this, but you'll never feel it. We clawed our way up. We're educated differently, when we are educated. The tables I waited, the dishes I washed, the discovery that you can survive on four hours' sleep each night. You know what Molly's life was. My father was a tailor. He didn't own a shop or anything classy like that. He sat in a corner and repaired men's clothes, and I had to fight this miserable world on scholarship. I'm not complaining, I'm explaining Molly. We're close. We've talked this out for hours. You asked her what the Smith Act is. You're a writer. You exist as something more than a paid voice by virtue of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Do you know what the Smith Act does? It wipes out the First Amendment. Suppose a professor at Yale teaches Marxism. Suppose he discusses his teaching with another professor. Technically, they have both violated the Smith Act and they are each subject to five years' imprisonment. It used to be twenty years' imprisonment; last month they revised it down. Suppose someone had collaborated with you on your book and in your book you wrote about communism and Marxism. You're both in technical violation and subject to trial and imprisonment. This is the most vicious, fascist law that has ever been put on the books in all the history of this country, and it's not just you asking Molly what it meant — but the same lack of knowledge right across the country. Here's a law that can put her away for five years of her life, and you don't know about it. There's different kinds of education — and a big gap between you. You reached out and she reached out — it's a big gap.”

Outside, on the street, it was almost ninety degrees. Even his seersucker jacket was unbearable, and he removed his tie, stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket, and then slung the jacket over his shoulder, holding it by the loop. He had to think, and that meant he had to walk. He had to retrace his steps and see what brought him to where he was now. He had to resurrect that long hot day he had spent on a bicycle with Ashoka Majumdar. What exactly had happened to him? Suppose he had remained in Europe? What strange need led him to flee Europe after hanging in right through to the final victory? His colleagues had a ball wallowing in the immensity of Germany's defeat, the slaying of the Nazi dragon, the total horror of the concentration camps. He had seen a concentration camp liberated. Had he fled from that? Or had he sought a balance of justice in a world where there was no justice? What had happened in his mind when he heard the first rumor that the British had engineered a famine that took the lives of six million people? Six million Indians, six million Jews, twenty million Russians.

He turned his thoughts to Legerman. Suppose he had never met Harold Legerman? If he had been trapped, where was the trap set? But there was no trap. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was his mind that had steered him to his destiny, not Legerman, not Molly, not Greenberg. He thought about communism and the Communist Party. He had no belief in communism, no real knowledge of what it meant. He had a healthy distaste for Stalin, but on the other hand he had witnessed the war. He saw the core of the Russian army wiped out or taken prisoner by the Nazis, and then he saw them produce another army and wipe the Nazis from the face of the earth.

But it was India that had brought about the deepest change. Suddenly, he ceased to see the war as a struggle between right and wrong — it had lost that semiromantic shape and had become of a piece, a great killing, the greatest killing since civilization began, fifty million men and women and children eliminated, wiped from the face of the earth. He recalled his father mentioning that when he, his father, had been in grade school, the population of the United States had only been slightly more than fifty million, so Bruce could make an image of every man, woman, and child in his own country put to death. He was slow to hate, and mostly his hate had been reserved for the Nazis. All other evil withered before this. Still —

Molly never argued the case of communism. She had made the situation plain to him from the beginning: “I am what I am,” she told him, “and I have certain loyalties. This isn't my way anymore. It got derailed a long time ago, and the whispers I hear about Stalin make me ill. But this is something you don't have to share with me. You're not a communist, and I don't want you to be one.”

Not that there was much chance that he ever would be one, but what was he? He was someone who had never heard of the Smith Act, yet by what he had heard today, it was a monstrous inversion of the whole principle of free speech. Before he left Sylvia Kline's office, he had asked her if she thought the twelve communist leaders would be convicted.

“Of course they will. Do you think that any jury in this country could be put together that would acquit them?”

And then he had asked her, “Could any jury be put together that would acquit me?”

“I don't know,” she had answered slowly.

It was too hot to walk. His shirt was soaked with sweat. His own apartment boasted only an antique shower, hand-held. In his parents' house, there was a splendid shower, a large, comfortable stall shower. His mother and father had left a few days ago for their summer place on Indian Lake in the Adirondacks after futilely urging him to accompany them, and he decided to take advantage of the stall shower. It was odd at this moment to make that decision and to excuse it on the basis of heat. He suspended all thought while he sat in the cab that took him uptown, but later, prowling through the big apartment in which he had spent his growing and formative years, the shades drawn, the place so dark and cool, he was able to face the fact that he was looking at his childhood. Here was where he had been shaped by two loving and strict people, but always shaped, protected, sent as a small boy to the Allen Stevenson School, then to Choate, and then to Williams, and shaped as a Boy Scout in between. As he had once expounded to Molly, “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” They had both burst into laughter. “Can you believe it?” he had asked her.

The truth was that he believed it, and remembering his troop of Boy Scouts and what a foul bunch a good part of them had turned out to be, he still believed it; and nowhere, not even in the most secret apologetic places of the heart, could Molly believe it or not wonder how many of the men on the Un-American Committee and in and about the White House and various and sundry city halls had been Boy Scouts.

I don't ask her to change, he said to himself. I don't ask her to be like me; I only ask her to try to comprehend me as I am trying to comprehend her.

He took his shower. It was fine to stand under the cleansing gush of water, and scrub himself with soap and then wash himself so clean. What had Kingsley said? Something like “Who will be clean will be clean.” He had discussed Kingsley with Molly once, presuming that she knew nothing of him, but she exploded, “That disgusting, brainless upper-class fool!” “Oh, not that much; too much,” he had protested. He found a loophole once with Proust. She had never read Proust. “That witless titmouse. I have only so much time on earth. I don't have time to read Proust.” “But you've never read him. How can you stand in judgment?” “Exactly,” she had replied, at her most provoking; and then she burst into laughter. How do you travel from him to her, from her to him?

He dried himself and dressed, dropping his wet shirt into the laundry basket and borrowing one of his father's. His father wore fifteen and a half; Bruce wore sixteen and a half, but as long as the collar was not buttoned, it would be snug but wearable. Not since his college days, when he still spent his holidays at home, had Bruce worn one of his father's shirts. He came out of it with a shock. What in hell am I doing? he asked himself. Am I frightened and trying to crawl back into my childhood?

He scribbled a note to his father and placed it on the desk in the study. It was twilight when he left the apartment and walked downtown along Riverside Drive. It was certainly the most beautiful avenue in New York, but slowly sinking into decay as the town houses in the side streets became rooming houses and were let to drug pushers and prostitutes. Then the sun sank behind the Jersey shore, and Bruce walked over to Broadway, where he found a cab to take him home.

When he entered his apartment, the lights were on, and for a moment he drew back in surprise and fear; but then he saw that it was Molly. She was sprawled in a chair.

She stood up and went into his arms, and they stood, locking their embrace tighter and tighter.

“Oh, God, I love you so much,” she said.

“Yes. I know.”

“Do you love me? Do you want me at all?”

“I can't go on living without you. Don't you know that? Don't you?”

“I whisper it to myself — sometimes.”