Irrepressible (17 page)

 

BACK IN ENGLAND, Muv wrote faithfully about family matters. They all had enough to eat, though the fare was plain. Home-baked bread, eggs, and milk. Pam sent vegetables from her farm. She telegraphed the good news when Debo had a daughter named Emma. Decca wrote that Dinky was well-cared-for by Mrs. Betts, and she was feeling at home in San Francisco: “I feel that in my job here I’m working for the cause I always believed in —the destruction of fascism—& that all my friends are working for the same thing, & that I’m really happier than I would be in England. I do long to see you all, & to show you the beautiful Donk, but I think you’ll admit that it wouldn’t be a good plan for me to come & live at Swinbrook.”

 

AS AN OFFICIAL of the OPA and author of the ban on pleasure travel ordinance, Bob could hardly make the case that he had to pursue his lover across the country. Instead, he organized an agency-related trip. Booking a precious seat (no berths available) on a streamliner, he spent much of his time across the three thousand miles working on his marriage proposal to Decca. Had he realized the depth of her interest in him, he would have shaped up earlier. He had never met anyone like her before. Until he started college, he had only ever dated Jewish girls; he hadn’t even had any “real connection”
with a non-Jewish girl. He wasn’t biased. It was always just a matter of
common ground
, as his mother might have said.

 

THE OAKLAND TRAIN platform was just as crowded as Washington’s with servicemen and women and just as hectic, its loudspeaker squawking train numbers. Four months had passed since Decca and Bob’s ambivalent leave-taking. This time, neither of them started with a joke. All around them, couples and families and friends were kissing hello and good-bye. Once Bob put his valise down and they stood eye to eye, there was the welcome kiss, the glad-to-see-you kiss, and the clinging, passionate kiss, after which we will draw a veil. As Decca told it, she wasted no time before asking his “intentions.” Bob had no need of the persuasive argument he had built over three thousand miles. He had just to declare that he meant to “marry you, and move out here to live.”

Crossing over to the city, they found themselves on the Embarcadero. Decca suggested they have a drink at Izzy Gomez’s, a restaurant as full of poets and journalists as it was of racing touts. Izzy himself had been having a bonanza year—raking it in after
Life
magazine had named him one of 1943 San Francisco’s “most colorful characters,” so there were tourists peeking in as well as servicemen on liberty. The decor was all very Barbary Coast: rough plank walls and sawdust floors, the steaks cut thick, and the coarse, local wine potent. Decca would have known some of the locals by then, and Izzy, a romantic, ordered free drinks all around to celebrate the happy couple. From there, the pair went back to introduce Bob to Mrs. Betts and to tell Dinky that Bob would be staying.

A
FEW DAYS LATER, Decca, Bob, and Dinky took a bus ninety miles north to Guerneville, the center of the Russian River honeymoon resort area in Sonoma County. The Russian River is particularly beautiful in June. Along the route, there are almond orchards and small vineyards, and horses and cattle graze on yellow hillsides. From the bus windows, the travelers saw California poppies in yellows and reds, wild roses, oleander, groves of eucalyptus and coastal redwoods; nearing the Sonoma town of Petaluma, they smelled the poultry farms operated by the Russian-Jewish émigrés who had settled there. Many of the farmers were comrades, and Petaluma chicken was often the main course at Communist Party affairs.

Before they had left the city, Decca had phoned a couple with a young son whom Kay Graham knew were living near Guerneville. Would they look after Dinky, just for the wedding night? A pleasure, they said, and arranged to meet en route, pulling their car alongside the stopped bus as Decca handed her daughter and little suitcase out the window. She and Bob continued down the road to Guerneville, where they were married on June 21, 1943, by a justice of the peace.

The town of Guerneville still looks much like it did in the 1940s. Many of its resort cottages are made of redwood. They have sun porches, wood-burning stoves, and beach access when the river is low. Resort owners favor cowboy hats and bolo ties and offer homemade meals served family style: fried chicken with gravy, barbequed lamb chops, or beef steak and fresh strawberry, peach, or apricot pie. The day of her wedding, Decca wrote to her mother:

Muv passed the news on to a family circle, which must have been at least intrigued by the pure normality of Decca’s situation. In England, Pam was efficiently running a farm. Her husband, the scientist Derek Jackson, was flying for the Royal Air Force. Diana was in prison, Unity recovering from her suicide attempt, Farve suffering from failing eyesight. Nancy was working in a London bookshop (hunting daily for firewood and fresh eggs—fresh produce sometimes arrived from Pam’s farm). Nancy’s husband, Peter Rodd, was an officer in the army posted to Africa, and her brother Tom was leading a regiment in Burma. Debo, meanwhile, was adjusting to her new position as the young married Lady Andrew Cavendish. Her husband, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, was on active duty in Europe.

 

HAVING SAFELY RETRIEVED Dinky, the newlyweds returned to San Francisco, Decca vastly pleased that she had managed to keep their marriage a secret from the press. Only a few people in San Francisco knew or cared about her history, and for the first time, she was truly enjoying an extended period of privacy. Had the news about her marriage leaked, she imagined the papers “would probably have made an awful stink, especially as Bob is Jewish & they would have brought out all the old stuff.” For his part, Bob intended to show that he didn’t care who knew—he didn’t fully understand the need for secrecy (he hadn’t yet seen the Mitford press frenzy), but went along because it seemed to matter so much to her. He would have been happy to
stand on the rooftops and shout about it. Failing that, he teased in a way he thought only she could appreciate. Returning to the house after “some errands,” Bob showed Decca the headline of a tabloid newspaper he said he had picked up. Its bold font trumpeted: “OPA Snoopstress Weds Slide-Rule Boy: Stuns SF.” Decca went white, stuttered, and almost fainted before he explained, with “profuse apologies,” that this was only a joke page printed for the occasion.

It wasn’t often that Decca would admit to being shaken by a tease. They still had so much to learn about each other. Bob had seen her angry before, but never speechless. Though capable in so many ways and quite discreet, Bob was a little tone-deaf early on when it came to applying new gadgetry to their lives. (That phonograph-proposal prank had cost him dearly back in Washington.) Within two weeks, Bob had wrangled moving expenses from OPA and a transfer to San Francisco. He also had a case of galloping poison oak, which Decca discounted with typical sangfroid as some “flea bites.”

IN THE WEEKS after her marriage, there were several competing reasons for Decca to accelerate her application for citizenship. The regional office of the OPA had instituted a loyalty ordinance, which excluded resident aliens from employment. Dobby launched an appeal to defend Decca’s job. The campaign cemented Decca’s friendship with Dobby, who succeeded in persuading national headquarters to revoke the ordinance.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party USA had also introduced a policy that only U.S. citizens could become members. This was part of a greater (and ultimately self-defeating) effort to identify and exclude anyone liable to inform under stress. Poor recruitment risks included anyone subject to the array of weaknesses a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe might discover: unorthodox sexual proclivities or orientation (as identified by the Feds), financial improprieties, mental instability, or lack of citizenship. Such
precautions explain in part the straight-arrow character of the war-era rank and file. The FBI had ways of discerning vulnerabilities that some people didn’t know they had. As time would tell, even the most stable person might break down.

The final leg of Decca’s application for citizenship was her interview. When the immigration official asked, “Why do you want to become a citizen?” she may have thought back to when she and Esmond had first applied for visas in England. America had seemed to them a distant and gigantic country, its denizens “endearingly childish.” The House Committee on Un-American Activities, for example (brand-new in 1938), they had thought “bizarre . . . a joke. Imagine a committee on un-English activities. What’s that? Not taking tea?” Almost five years later, she bit her tongue to avoid saying, “So I can join the Communist Party.” She officially became an American citizen in January of 1944.

Membership in the Communist Party was still a matter of some protocol. Both Bob and Decca, judged of high moral probity (notwithstanding some small concern about whether Decca showed “too much levity toward the Left”), still had to wait patiently to be invited. By late summer, the local Communist membership was thoroughly impressed with both prospective members. Once Decca’s immigration interview was over and her citizenship papers approved, Dobby presented the Treuhafts’ names to her Communist Party “club,” whose approval would allow her officially to recruit them. The motion carried unanimously.

That September, the Congress of Industrial Organizations held its national convention in Fresno, the market center of California’s greatest agricultural valley. Since the 1930s, this location had been a flashpoint of the kind of farmworker strikes Decca had read about in her labor history classes and in
The Grapes of Wrath
. Fresno is a hot, dry tinderbox in early fall, surrounded by well-hydrated fields of crops. Further east, yellow hills step to the Sierras. Dobby, attending as a leader of the United Federal Workers local, couldn’t wait to take Decca and Bob out on a hike at their first opportunity. She wanted them to see California from a great height, the
way she loved it best. Decca didn’t want to disappoint her friend, but hiking in the heat wasn’t high on her list of fun things to do in Fresno. Decca was at the convention as one of her union’s elected delegates. She had been to the 1940 Democratic Convention with Virginia Durr and marveled at those old Chicago pols in action. Now in Fresno, she looked forward to a gathering of “working class heroes,” organizers of the 1934 waterfront strike, and American veterans of the Spanish Civil War.

Decca might have wanted to keep a low profile on the Mitford front, but she must also have had a desire to talk about Spain, pride when she would run into someone who knew of Esmond or had read
Boadilla
, euphoria to hear of so many people doing so many of the things she believed in. After the first night of the conference, Dobby invited Decca and Bob (on hand in his new job capacity as a member of the War Labor Board) to meet her in a hotel bar away from the crowd. They’d been looking forward to this, and Decca was glad she hadn’t had to hike anywhere to hear her friend “pop the question.” “Would you be interested in joining the Communist Party?” Dobby asked. To which Decca and Bob replied singsong in unison, “We thought you’d never ask.” Dobby’s club had approved their recruitment some months previous, but since everything had to be done in elaborate secrecy, the Treuhafts hadn’t known they were approved until this ritual invitation was concluded.

This new commitment demanded a kind of investment that Decca was eager to make. She understood there would be a party line, which she would be required to endorse, and that the kind of defiance or escape she was used to indulging in might result in criticism or chastisement all the way up to expulsion (an unthinkable and terrible outcome). “It was indeed a matter of conform or get out,” she said, “but this did not particularly bother me. I had regarded joining the Party as one of the most important decisions of my adult life. I loved and admired the people in it, and was more than willing to accept the leadership of those far more experienced than I.”

Whatever the future held, her experience had proved that there was always wiggle room and that a little joke often helped to lubricate a difficult
situation. She had no fear, unless it was—as always—of being bored. There were, of course, “bores and misfits in our organization but even these seemed to be to some extent redeemed by their dedication to our cause,” she said. On the whole, she was “enchanted by the flesh and blood Communists” she met.

If at first Decca indulged in the romance of the movement, it was all of a piece with being in love again, being happy, watching as the war turned their way. But over the long run, she and Bob would need to exercise the distinctly unromantic dedication, stamina, and discipline. An all-in, modern-day American Communist needed to be physically able to take risks, to withstand the persecution. The discipline this required was not for the faint of heart. Decca was not an innocent, and she wasn’t sentimental. She knew of the deceptions and betrayals of the Communists in Spain, as well as their heroism and success in hopeless situations. She knew her Orwell and read Koestler, and she felt she could say her “conversion to Communism was not an instant process, nor did it ever have the profound religious overtones ascribed by ex-Communists to their experience. It developed . . . on looking back, out of the political exigencies of the times,” a rich brew including but not exclusive to memory, love, and shared conviction, new friendships, education, and the encouragement of those for whom she now cared most.