Irrepressible (27 page)

Decca trekked back to her children’s school to explain their situation. She and Bob would be testifying before HUAC again. They had no idea what consequences there might be. The teachers she met were sympathetic and assured her that they would “give the kids extra care & attention while the hearings were on.”

In their parents’ absence, Dinky would cope with the assistance of various neighbors and friends. She was a star student in junior high. “The most strongminded and determined child I ever saw once she makes her mind up, she’s just exactly like Esmond,” Decca wrote to Muv. Nicholas was also coming into his own. He was the kind of youngster who went into raptures over gadgets, an experimenter. He was quick and quieter than little Benjy, who when his parents were otherwise occupied, feasted on mustard and jam sandwiches.

Decca wasn’t called to testify this time, but her subpoena required that she attend all five days of the hearings: a disgraceful spectacle, during which the friendly witnesses “served up more than 300 names.”

The committee counsel’s first question to Bob was, “Are you accompanied by counsel?” Bob replied that he would answer (as opposed to taking the Fifth) and began to read a three-page statement. Statements were
typically gaveled down, and a committee member interrupted with, “You’ll have to submit that.”

“I am answering the question,” Bob pointed out. “I was asked whether I had counsel?” The committee conferred and, to everyone’s surprise, allowed Bob to explain what prevented him from securing the counsel of his choice. “What a shameful thing it was that I, a lawyer, was unable to get counsel, and how much worse,” he went on, for the unfortunate with even fewer connections and expertise. Bob was, Decca wrote, “determined to reveal through his testimony the full extent to which the Committee had succeeded in terrorizing the bar.”

“Everyone was breathless,” as Bob read his indictment of the committee and its methods. Afterward, “there was terrific cheering & applause,” Decca told Aranka. Her son’s testimony had been heroic, and also historic—a rare triumph for any witness to make it all the way through a prepared statement. There would be only a few times, over the course of a great many hearings nationwide, when an unfriendly witness would get the chance to speak honestly, in effect to disprove the perception that he or she was a hostile demon. Outside the courtroom, Bob’s friends congratulated him. They hoped this day’s work opened a crack in the power of the inquisition. Then they waited like the actors in an opening show to see how the mainstream press would review the performance. Headlines pronounced Bob’s testimony “The Day’s Stormiest.”

ONE NIGHT, DECCA arrived early for a CRC meeting at Codornices Village. She planned to do a little leafleting in advance, as she often did. It was dusk. At first, she would run into workers returning home. Most people were friendly and polite and accepted leaflets. The older folks looked weary. They wanted their dinner. The younger ones had other things on their mind—lovers, friends. Some said they’d think about the meeting; some said they’d come. As the lights in the apartments switched on, Decca could see that she
had wandered farther afield. Everyone had gone inside. There was no one else in sight, and it had become very quiet, just the night birds singing. A pleasant interlude between the frantic activity of her day and the meeting that night, which like so many others would start as routine and become something exciting as their discussion grew more heated. You never knew who might show up and how they might change the chemistry. She meandered back toward the lights. The benches in the distance were empty of their usual occupants, kids who sucked endless cigarettes and whistled at the pretty girls.

She didn’t see the man who pulled her down to the dry creek bed. It happened so quickly, she didn’t scream, and then he had covered her mouth. He was a black man in his midtwenties, unkempt, dressed in a motley arrangement that included a dirty army jacket. He had a crazy, wild look, and he muttered that if she screamed, he’d kill her. She nodded and whispered yes, but asked him, was he a veteran? He had begun to pull at her clothes and told her to shut up. She kept talking, calmly. Had he heard of the case of Willie McGee? She had been to Mississippi. Korea must have been horrible for him. She had opposed the war. He mustn’t think she was his enemy. He told her she was crazy. She sympathized with his anger and frustration, she said. Why not come along to the CRC meeting? There would be other women there far younger and prettier. He pushed and clawed and she kept talking. All this took just a minute or two, and her luck held. Above them on the creek side, they heard Bob’s voice and others calling out to her. Her attacker pushed her and ran in the other direction. She shouted for Bob.

Soon after, she told her friends what had happened. Her friend Marge Frantz said Decca had “escaped by her wits,” and Decca was justifiably proud of herself. Dobby remembered the incident, but Decca hadn’t made a big deal about it.

Over the years, the story of her attack mutated according to Decca’s audience and the degree of vodka involved. Catherine “Katie” Edwards, Decca’s assistant, heard of her “narrow escape” and of Bob’s arrival in the nick of time (and her irritation that he hadn’t come earlier). Decca told her friend, the young writer and political philosopher Bettina Aptheker, a
different version. She said she offered her attacker the name of her friend Billie Wachter (with whom she’d traveled to Mississippi). In the heat of the moment, the reference made sense—Wachter was an activist in the peace movement. Decca thought, if her attacker were a veteran, he too would be sick of war. The point of it all was to keep talking, distract him, and negotiate if possible. In the version Decca told Bettina, she was raped. She heard no comforting voices searching the creek side, she made no narrow escape, and “it was bloody uncomfortable.” Afterward, Bettina said, Decca made her way from the creek to the home of her doctor, Ephraim Kahn, who examined her and gave her some kind of shot.

The violence surrounding such an experience must have been terrifying, but there are no letters from the time reflecting any trauma. Kathy Kahn, Ephraim’s daughter, knew nothing of that visit, but she too had heard a version of the story, which ended, “‘So I told him to hurry up and get it over with, and he did,’ or words to that effect in Decc-ese.” Decca had always been adept at suppressing horrors or turning them into tall tales.

Peter Sussman, the editor of her letters, “puzzled over the rape story too.” The only reference Sussman found was in an exchange of letters years later between Decca and her cousin Ann Farrer Horne. Decca contrasted Ann’s indifference to newspapers with her own passion for them:

DECCA’S SISTER PAM had been living in Ireland, but she traveled a good deal and lived much of the year in Switzerland. Nancy and Diana lived in France.
Debo had vast country estates and a grand home in London and had joined the ranks of frequent flyers for which the expression
jet-setters
would be coined in the decade to come. Decca thought it would be nice to get out of the house. She wasn’t envious of her sisters’ affluence, but she did think it “
frightfully
unfair” when she heard Nancy had plans to visit Russia.

In February 1954, Decca told her mother the “outlook is gloomy” for any trip to England. She and Bob had applied, but there was little hope of being issued passports. Decca rarely felt she was entirely without options. She asked her Muv to please “ring up Cousin Winston & tell him we just want to come for a visit, no politics, and see if he can’t arrange it?” When Bob was in Washington, D.C., on business, he also made a stab at invoking special privilege through Esmond’s mother, Nellie. “Winston Churchill’s sister-in-law was most anxious to see her grandchild,” he told the immigration official, who was unimpressed. An FBI special agent assigned to gather information on Decca was following this story closely. He entered the following into her file:

The CRC was on its last legs. There was always someone watching or listening. From the trenches, England, where a Communist was just another person with a political tic, must have looked like a fantastic holiday to Decca. Muv wrote back that she couldn’t ask that kind of favor of Cousin Winston. She also told Decca that Esmond’s mother was dying. In her reply, Decca asked her Muv for some advice on protocol and enclosed a note for Nellie Romilly:

The Treuhafts’ life was circumscribed, but they made the best of things. Decca sometimes missed the city lights and throngs. Although San Francisco had its own sophistication, it wasn’t London. Hiking was an inexpensive consolation for friends Pele and Dobby, but the beauties of the vast wilderness didn’t hold the same delight for Decca, who had grown up on the more domesticated beauty of the English Cotswolds. When Dobby did manage to get Decca out on an excursion once in the High Sierras, it wasn’t a success. Their plan was to camp and hike for seventy miles over two weeks. The nights would be cold and the days often very hot, but it would at least be a relief to leave the struggle twelve thousand feet below.

To save money when preparing for the trip, Decca bought her hiking boots out of two different bins in the Army Navy store and very soon developed blisters on the trail. When she wasn’t able to walk anymore, she rode atop a supply horse alongside a mountain cliff’s steep drop-off. Decca didn’t care for horseback riding, and she didn’t like heights. The whole thing was more an ordeal than a holiday. When they returned to the Berkeley flatlands, she and Bob held a party to celebrate her survival. Their guests, invited to attend in hiking clothes, were treated to a commemorative ode that included the line “Nature, nature [pronounced “nate-cha”], how I hate ya.”

That spring, McCarthy was in the last stages of self-destruction. The senator accused the secretary of the army and assorted generals and admirals of the U.S. armed forces of “coddling communists” in their ranks. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised, and marketing geniuses everywhere learned quickly that a sweating, red-faced drunk in a wool suit spewing poison did not project heroic values, even when hunting red devils.

“The tide here seems to be turning somewhat politically,” Decca wrote to Muv. The Army-McCarthy hearings had concluded with McCarthy’s chastisement. Decca and her friends didn’t think the persecution of Communists
would end overnight, but, she told her mother, “perhaps in the next few years we’ll be able to come to England after all. At least jail & concentration camps look a bit further off now than a few months ago.”

In the time leading up to Bob’s testimony before the “Beastly Un-American Committee” (as Decca called it), the Treuhafts had taken for granted that they, like others, would suffer more financial hardship. They thought Bob might lose his law practice as others had. Instead, he had become something of a local hero, partly for his testimony before HUAC, but mainly as a stalwart opponent of the Oakland Police Department.