Red Love (29 page)

The Catholic Boy

A different vigil.

—G. L.

He was nine years old. He lived between the Croton Falls Reservoir and Mahopac, New York, on Union Valley Road. There were all kinds of memories there connected with the Union Army. The imaginations of the farmers in that area were still linked to the Republican party, back to the Civil War. Even though two world wars had intervened, to them America was the Republican party. The Republican party had saved the Union.

They knew there were Democrats in places like New York City, but they were people who weren’t like them. During the 1952 election he remembers standing at the bus stop with the farmers’ kids and telling them his father supported Adlai Stevenson. They were all a little bit amazed and pissed off, calling him a Democrap. They had never even heard of one in the flesh before. Nor an Irish Catholic either.

The afternoon that the Rubells were executed, he was with the family of his friends. They were on the front lawn of the old farmhouse. The farmer had knocked off somewhat early after his day’s work. He was out on the front porch with his wife. The boy was with the farmer’s two sons, Chet and Mercer Hough. His father used to call him “Farmer Hough,” so he doesn’t recall his first name. It was a beautiful, spacious farmhouse with a big front lawn and huge oak and maple trees. The kids were playing catch and fooling around.

He remembers the Houghs’ concern that the president might weaken, that he might give in and grant clemency to these people. Now he finds it hard to remember if he knew they were the Rubells, if he knew they were Jewish, if he knew what they had been convicted of. He suspects he didn’t. He thinks he knew they were spies, probably that they were Communists—primarily that they were traitors.

The Houghs thought there was a big danger right then: that very powerful influences might get to the president. The Rubells were people who deserved to be punished. The kids picked this up from the parents. The feeling was there had been a lot of weakness in the country, and that for the president to give clemency to these people would just be more weakness. They didn’t think he would, because this was a tough guy. But the feeling was that there were enormous forces that made even the president somewhat weak in comparison.

Now he understands what they thought those “forces” were—the Jews, who somehow controlled the world—but he was just a kid then.

Real Americans wanted these people executed but real Americans were weak and beleaguered. They’d been pushed around and they were probably going to get pushed around again—but maybe the president had enough guts to hold out.

So it was a vigil. They were waiting, on this countryside. This house and farm were the only ones in sight. They had this little valley to themselves. There were no other human beings around. Farmer Hough’s farm and cows and a few kids.

And a radio.

It was well known that there were people who lived up Lake Mahopac who would buy carp when you caught them. It was regarded as bad luck when you caught a carp. Because you didn’t eat them. And they didn’t fight, so you’d think you were just hauling out a log or a tire. But you could get a dollar for it.

They didn’t know what the Jews did with them, but they’d heard that they ate the eyes. No one the boy knew was going to eat fish that lived down in the mud and ate all the garbage off the bottom of the pond.

Suddenly there was a hush and they drew around the crackling radio.

“The Rubells are dead at last,” the announcer said.

There was a sense of relief, not exaltation: “Well, that’s over,” and it turned out all right. The radio was snapped off. They went back to playing catch.

Things hadn’t gone wrong.

There were vigils going on at Union Square, at Sing Sing, in left-wing neighborhoods. They were participating in another kind of a vigil.

He remembers a very pleasant summer day and a very pleasant summer evening. A beautiful end to a beautiful day.

The House on the Hill

Close the door on your way out.

—G. L.

In 1949 the house on the hill was a jewel. Looking out over everything. You couldn’t survey it; it surveyed you. Ziggy and Sarah Weissberger had immense wealth and standing in the world. Libraries and capsules were named after them. Their names connoted substantial values, commitment, and integrity.

The lighting of this house high on the hill was fantastic; if you looked up at it at night, the lights blinded you.

To this house came hunted figures. They drank out of goblets, slept in silk sheets and silk pajamas; little nips of caviar were offered to them on gold trays.

A personal tragedy occurred in this house: the death of a child; a tragedy that would send the family fleeing at night forever from this reminder of their mortality.

But in 1949 the house was still lit.

Sarah Weissberger, noted lawyer, skipping up and down, holding her butterfly dress and train so they wouldn’t trail on the floor. A woman of principles could dress like a flibbertigibbet. Ziggy—tuxedo, bow tie, sneakers, that delicious touch. The servants wore tuxedos and shiny black shoes. They had official badges with the title, “Friend.” The paintings were Picassos, Van Goghs, Matisses; in addition, Charles White, Hugo Gellert, Rockwell Kent, and William Gropper were in discreet alcoves. Supreme Court justices on arrival saw Picasso, Utrillo, portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The pig imagery was muted, in darkened areas where the servants hunted for food and the dogs killed. Portraits of Robeson, Ben Davis, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn resided in locked studies.

The famous senator stayed with the Weissbergers upon his return from his trip to Kolyma. He arrived aglow with stories of the “great experiment” and bearing the souvenir bones of counterrevolutionaries. He gave a small bone to the Weissbergers as a gift.

On the same night, a frightened Solly and Dolly Rubell appeared unexpectedly at the doorstep, stinking with terror. Solly had already been visited by the F.B.I. The smell was so strong that the Weissbergers were afraid it would reach the senator, three rooms and four vaults away. They were deeply conflicted; on the one hand, they looked at the couple in front of them as saints; on the other, as wretched runts. Their feelings were the dialectical contradictions of living under capitalism. They showed their proletarian solidarity by taking the stinking couple into their arms and embracing them, then spirited them away into the tower until the senator departed. They ordered the servants to delouse the couple and give them new togs.

The tower was reserved for political prisoners in flight, for progressives from around the world. Here everything was in the open: the pig imagery was forthright, the pictures of Stalin and Dmitrov and Lenin large and lustful. Soviet medals and rugs and medallions hung on every wall. Stalin’s
Collected Works
were assembled on bookshelves in luscious red leather volumes.

The Weissbergers, with their Germanic culture, were not the ghetto Jews of Rivington Street, of Perry Street, the Jimmy Higginses. They revered the Rubells, but how common they seemed, the crumbs on their clothes, their accents. That whole little gang of engineers. They had heard Solly say: “They had no use for us as Jews. But others did. Good use, and we utilized our skills to the max.”

Not being paranoid or poor themselves, they could not share the sentiments. A new university in Chicago had just been named after Ziggy; a nutrition drive was launched across America with Sarah’s picture and name; the Weissbergers’ weekly radio program was almost as popular as Howard Mayfield’s.

They knew that many Americans bowed their heads when their names were spoken. Their money had softened people’s brains and their hostility toward Jews. They gave away a thousand and got millions back in reputation. They were known for their philanthropy, their enlightened attitudes, and especially they were known for their money. The country knew of their special concern for children whose legs were of different sizes. Movietone News frequently ran shots of the bejeweled, befurred Sarah in her butterfly dress putting her arms around a little limping child, the two of them walking together (one walking, one hopping) into a sunlit forest, Sarah murmuring, “Come along, my child,” or “Dear heart, you can do it. You can do anything you want to do.” These movie vignettes often came at the end of segments about war, famine, bigotry, and anti-Semitism, and were a heartening windup to the news.

The servants were under the supervision of the lacquered, debonair, fur-and-feathered Howard Martin. A faint, wild, animal glint there. Martin, once Herb Winkelman, the cutthroat from the Bowery, Wink the Fink, Wink the Butcher, Wink the Harbor Pirate. If anyone recognized Wink, Ziggy said, “Yeah, he was a militant trade unionist. Ah, that’s ancient history.” The rat-faced woman by Wink’s side was Sonya Stein. Stalin sent her to New York in 1937 to help Wink mop up some class enemies. She was a well-trained student of mesmerism from the Motnia College in Leningrad. Ziggy knew Wink since 1934, when he’d met him on a Party-run ship in Hamburg. Wink supplied him with cameras and instructions for photographing American harbors.

Sarah Weissberger was busy entertaining her guests, skipping up and down the steps. In the second basement, the red-hot light, the machines churned away day and night. People flew up and down the stairs with telegraphic instructions. The noise of the radio transmitters, the photography and microfilming was deafening; the machinery clanking against other machinery; slabs of concrete falling to the floor from overuse. Counterfeit money and passports were an extra drain; it was too much to do at one time. It was a life of exhilaration; men with hot messages screaming,
“Go for it.”
The power made them horny; they plunged their faces into Sarah’s breasts.

On the central floor the guests, the judges, the justices, the diplomats, the journalists, the whole slew—the senator was standing there in his gray suit and shiny shoes requesting, if possible, if she pleased, an autographed picture of Sarah with one of those short-legged creatures for his den, for his wife, for his daughter, for Congress, for the president, if only, if she could, if she would.

Beneath piles of rubble were covers of wood. Beneath the wood were cavities twenty inches long, eighteen inches wide, six inches deep. Packages were inside. In the middle was a gray metal box, covered by polyethylene bags. The box, the size of a small attache case, was a radio transmitter that reached to Moscow. In another bag was a false torch battery with lenses to make microdots and a keying device for sending long messages quickly.

The transmitter had a single earpiece and no loudspeaker. It worked on a high-frequency band with a 150-watt output. It was used with the automatic keying device.

The photography equipment was superb: 35-millimeter cameras, a lens system, and the 35-millimeter negatives reduced to microdots. The microdots were inserted in letters, sealed behind the stamp on an envelope or sent out of the country in a book.

The Weissbergers visited the Rubells in the tower on the third day after the departure of the senator. “Be brave, be strong, it is too late to escape,” they told Solly and Dolly.

You will be legends, you will be history, they told them. You must go back now to your little East Side hovel and you must remain true to your convictions. We are invincible. History is on our side. We love you. Your contribution has been enormous. We will never abandon you. Stalin loves you. You are steel rods. You will not break.

Solly said, his voice a trembling green reed, “I love my babies.”

“Babies are born every minute, my dear Solly,” said Sarah. “And now they will be free.”

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Yaddo Corporation and the MacDowell Colony.

With special thanks to Erika Goldman, Michael Congdon, Richard Gid Powers, Judith Liss, and Alan Schwartz.