The Pledge (12 page)

Bruce took the check. He hadn't expected pay of any kind, but he knew he could use the money. Greenberg had left. As Bruce came into the lobby, the redheaded woman who had asked him the provocative question was there, waiting for him, and she smiled at him and said, “Can I lure you into the bar for a drink? I'd like to talk to you.” It was not a pickup. It was absolutely straightforward and on the line. She was a tall woman, at least five foot nine or ten, well shaped, strong long-fingered hands, good-looking if not beautiful, eyes blue, and her flame-colored red hair tied in a knot behind her neck.

“You won't have to do much luring,” Bruce said. “What's your name?”

“Molly Maguire, Mr. Bacon, and you can ask for a gin and bitters for me.” They were at the bar. Bruce asked for two of the same, and then they took their drinks to a table in the corner.

“If we're going to talk,” Bruce said, “I'm Bruce and you're Molly, if that's OK with you.” He was trying to assess her age, and he decided that she was probably the same age as himself.

“Good enough, Bruce. I'm Molly, I'm thirty years old, because the first thing a man tries to guess seated next to a woman is how old she is, and I'm divorced to answer the second thing, and that's now out of the way. I know all about you because I've been reading your dispatches for many moons, and I read a piece Skeets Andrews wrote about you when you met him in Paris. Myself, I was born in Boston and grew up there, and right now I'm a reporter for the
New York Daily Worker.”

“You're kidding.”

“Why should I kid about something like that? Did you ever read the
Daily Worker?”

“Yes, once,” Bruce recalled. “Your friend Skeets Andrews gave me a copy to read. Yeah — that was the one time I met him. I forgot about that completely. Did he actually write a piece about me?”

“You never saw it?”

“No. Never knew about it. I met Andrews in Paris a few days after Liberation. Met him in a hotel bar, and we had a few drinks and talked — nice guy. I thought he was working for
The Nation?
Or was it
The New Republic?”

“Actually, it was neither. But he did some stuff for the
Daily Worker
and
The Nation.
He started it in North Africa, and he would sign those pieces Africanus, a pen name he kept. His assignment was from the
Sun.
You know, he spoke highly of you. He thought you were an honorable man.”

“That sounds old-fashioned,” Bruce said.

“Do you remember what you thought of the
Worker
then?”

“The commie paper?”

“That doesn't sound too honorable,” Molly Maguire said. “Call it red or communist, not commie.”

“Fair enough.”

“You said you read the issue Skeets gave you?”

She was hard to decipher. Was she goading him, teasing him, or seriously trying to get something from him? She was not beautiful. She had one of those strong Irish faces, a high, narrow nose, full lips, and a wide mouth. Or was she beautiful? The freckled face and the freckled arms gave her a strange girlish appearance. He kept seeing the image of a kid running barefoot in the field.

“You're staring at me, and you don't even know what I asked.”

“My opinion of the
Worker.
That was years ago. Let me think.”

She picked up their two empty glasses. “I'll refurbish while you think.”

“Oh, no. Let me.”

“You think,” she said. She came back with two more gins. “I didn't pay for them,” she said. “I make forty dollars a week. You got a wife, kids, girl friend?”

“No wife, no kids, and maybe no girl friend.”

“What's she like?”

“That's the trouble. I don't really know,” Bruce admitted.

“All right. We drink to two lonely strangers. Tell me your opinion of my paper.”

“It's too long ago. All I really remember is that it smelled of poverty and that it was self-serving.”

“And the
Trib
and the
Times
are not?”

“Of course they are. But they're not a whisper in the cheering squad. They're the cheerleaders.”

“You make a point.” She opened the big purse she carried and took out a thin newspaper. “Here's today's issue.”

Bruce took it and scanned the front page. The headline read:
TWELVE NAZI WAR LEADERS SENTENCED TO BE HANGED.
“Same headline as the
Times,”
Bruce said.

“We agree on some things. That was a hell of a story, over there in Nuremberg. Are you sorry you missed it?”

“No. I've had my share of the Old World. Tell me, why are we sitting here?”

“You do come right to the point. I wanted to talk to you,” she said.

“Why? You don't have to come to a lecture to pick up men.”

“I don't pick up men.”

“You picked me up,” Bruce said. “Thank God. I never would have had the nerve to stop you and talk to you.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. That's the truth.”

“All right, Bacon — here's my truth. I was divorced six years ago, I hate living alone, and I haven't met anyone who wasn't married who grabbed me enough to interest me. Tonight, I said to myself, He could finish, walk right out of this place, and I'd never see him again. What do I do then? Do I get your phone number and call you and say, I was at the Murray Hill when you spoke and I want to see you? We don't do things that way, do we?”

“Good heavens, Maguire, we don't know the first thing about each other.”

“We're not Bruce and Molly anymore. That's too formal, so we've made the first step. Well, I was married to a man for three years, and I never knew the first thing about him, so that's the way it goes.”

“You're going to call me Bacon,” he said hopelessly. “For the rest of my life, you're going to call me Bacon. I never liked the name. Bacon. God be praised.”

“You know,” she said, “no one talks like you anymore. ‘Good heavens,' ‘God be praised.' You're out of another time, Bacon. As the Bacon fried, she sighed and dreamed of far Cathay. Maguire, not Tennyson or some such. Do you think we're both a little drunk?”

“This is the strangest courtship I been — I have ever been, that's better — involved in. Your glass is empty. I will go to the bar.”

At the bar, he was told that the room would close in fifteen minutes. “We make a proper drink here,” the bartender said. “I hope you're not driving.”

“I'm not even walking,” Bruce replied sagely. He paid the bill and went to their table and said, “We have to vacate this place in fifteen minutes, so drink up. Where do you live?”

“I think — Twenty-ninth Street. Just east of Fourth Avenue. We could make it on our hands and knees if we have to. I live in a brownstone. I have one studio room. You said this is a strange courtship. Why the hell don't you court me?”

“We'll talk about it,” Bruce said. “Do you have anything to drink at home?”

“Three gins are enough. And how do you know you're coming home with me? It's twelve o'clock.”

“Whatever you say, Maguire.”

“Sure. Whatever I say.”

He wasn't drunk, not even when they finished the third gin, but high and pleased with the world, and feeling unwound and more at ease with himself than he had been in years. Who was this wild, redheaded, vulgar woman who wrote for a communist paper? As he walked home with her, she sang softly a little ballad about a man called Kevin Barry, who fought the British Army all around a little bakery, and Bruce wondered how the devil the word
vulgar
had leaped into his mind. Vulgar? This was the most unusual, straight-on woman he had ever met.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” he asked her.

“How do you mean that? I don't know you well enough to even guess what's wrong with you. You use a word like
courtship.
Nobody's used that word in twenty-five, thirty years.”

“You used it.”

“A gift from you.”

“Am I prissy?”

“You're innocent,” Molly said. “You're as innocent as the first light of dawn, when the birds begin to sing.”

“That's very poetic,” Bruce said, “but how can I be innocent? You know where I've been, what I've seen.”

“But you've never killed anyone, not even in your heart. The ‘Dear John' letter either enrages men, or saddens them, or liberates them. And you —”

Molly Maguire's room, or apartment, was one half of the third floor in a fine old brownstone on East Twenty-ninth Street. It made for a room twenty by twenty-two feet, simply furnished with one double bed, two overstuffed chairs, a kitchen table painted and decorated, four chairs to the table, two cheap Indian carpets on the floor, some bright prints on the walls, and a long bookcase, the length of one wall, six feet high and stuffed with books. A bathroom and a tiny kitchen completed the apartment.

By the time they reached her apartment, their moods had changed and the gaiety had gone. Molly made coffee, and they sat in the overstuffed chairs and talked. They talked about themselves and they talked about each other, and he spelled out the difficulties he had understanding why anyone in this postwar world should be a communist.

“I could see it in the thirties. Not that I ever felt the Depression. My father was and still is a successful surgeon, and we had enough money. I went to private school and then to Williams up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Have you ever been there?”

Molly shook her head. She was untying her hair, and it fell out in a mass around her shoulders.

“Well, you have middle class and upper middle class at Harvard and Yale, but Williams is something else. It's a beautiful, elegant school, perched up in the Berkshires in the shadow of Mount Greylock. The world doesn't touch it. Oh, I knew there was a depression and I knew that the country was in a crisis, but it wasn't very real. Do you know that when you untie your hair with a lamp behind you like that, you're framed in a kind of golden —”

“Back to Williams, Bacon,” she said. “I want to know who I picked up. Not something I do every day of the week.”

“We had a tiny left-wing group on the campus. I remember the fuss they made about the slaughter at Republic Steel — but that's about the only thing of its kind that stayed with me.”

“The slaughter at Republic Steel,” Molly said slowly. “I was there. I was just a kid. It was my first big assignment. Go on.”

“No — you were there. What was it like?”

“You know, Bruce, you're very strange. For three years, you watched the greatest slaughter in the history of man, and now you want to know what Republic Steel was like. It was very small. Republic was on strike. Tom Girdler, who ran the place, hired an army of armed guards. The strikers organized a march across the flat prairie where the plant was, and the guards stopped them and began clubbing — especially on the women — and I was watching it and then the shooting began. I remember that, because it didn't sound the way I thought shooting should sound.”

“No, it doesn't.”

“Just
pop, pop, pop
, like toy fireworks, and seven strikers were dead and more than a hundred wounded, and then the Communist Party workers laid out the dead bodies and people talked and more than two hundred of the strikers signed Communist Party cards right then and there — because we were with them and we were willing to die for them, and you say you can't understand why anyone should be a communist now, because a couple of years have gone by and nobody remembers that the Red Army destroyed the Wermacht.”

“I remember,” Bruce said, “but for heaven's sake, it is a different world, isn't it?”

“It's always a different world. I'm not pushing you or trying to convince you of anything, Bruce. Something is finished. It is different, damn different.”

“The truth is,” Bruce confessed, “that I've only known two communists in my life, I mean aside from those I met in India, and you are one and the other is a fellow by the name of Legerman.”

“Hal Legerman? So that's who you were talking about in your lecture. Why didn't you name his name?”

“I don't know. In this current lunacy and anticommunist hysteria — I don't know. I suppose I wanted to protect him. Then you know him?”

“A little. Before the war, he was a flack around Broadway. Now he's out on the Coast. I hear he got a job as a screenwriter. Something like that. He used to feed me bits and pieces. I suppose he felt it was something to have your name in print — even in the
Daily Worker.
Funny thing about the
Worker
, we never run much more than fifty thousand copies, and for a metropolitan daily, that's nothing, but it gets around. I got to interview Leland Harringwell — you know, he has more money than God and a bit of power to go with it — and he said to me that there are only two papers in the United States that he trusts, the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Daily Worker
, and he reads both.”

“He has the advantage of me. The only copy I ever saw is the one Skeets Andrews gave me.”

“And the one I gave you? Do you know, Bruce, for a smart guy, you're a dumbbell.”

“Thank you. I haven't read your copy yet.”

“I have a byline, so read it. You know, if I were your mother, I would have called you Candide.”

“Thank God you're not my mother. What about your mother? Father?”

“You want to put me up there with Sally Pringle? My God, you're a man, flesh and blood, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds of you — you have a heart, compassion, understanding, and you witness three years of hell, and you marry a girl whose name is Prudence — Prudence, God help me — and now you're shacked up with a Sally Pringle?”

“Well — that's sort of intimate, isn't it? I mean, this is —”