The Pledge (15 page)

They finished the food before he told Molly what had brought him to call her and insist on their being together tonight. “Of course,” he began, with the intent to say something about going on this way without living together; but then he choked the rest of it. “Of course, it's damned selfish of me,” he said instead. “I demand and you do it.”

“If I want to.” She was clearing the table. “Good food. You bring food, the door's open. Tell me about the crisis.”

“I suppose it is a crisis.”

She sat opposite him now, grinned, and poured tea. She had large, strong hands. He was constantly engaged by her competence; she did things well.

“You see,” he said, “I'm trying to place myself. Am I insane or do I live in an insane world? Then why me? Why should I be any more sane than the next guy? I never faced up to any of this. All the months I lived in a butcher shop, I accepted the butchery. Hitler had brought it on himself and his people. I saw a little girl of perhaps nine or ten years who had been cut in half. The whole lower part of her body had been blown away, and yet the head and neck and arms had survived without damage. She had blue eyes and flaxen hair, and that touched the part of me that is still racist, and I dream about her at night and she speaks to me. When a child is dying of starvation, the flesh disappears, and the oversized, hollow-eyed head sits on a skeleton. That's India. The blue-eyed child was German. I saw a nineteen-year-old infantryman go crazy, and he put the muzzle of his rifle under his chin and he pulled the trigger, and his head exploded in a burst of brains and bone. An officer watching it remarked that he had never seen a hard-nosed bullet act that way. His only comment. Six million Jews die, and no one gives a damn. Six million Indians die, and no one gives a damn. Mr. Truman blows two Japanese cities off the map, and no one gives a damn.”

She didn't interrupt him. When he finished, Molly said, “That's true — more or less. Some hyperbole, but that's only to be expected. But you knew this.”

“I suppose. But I never faced it.”

“Some of us faced it. It doesn't change much.”

“What happened with me,” Bruce explained, “is that I face a wall, a dead end. I sit in front of that damn typewriter, and I have no place to go. Molly, I'm no amateur. I've written my stories under the worst conditions, and I got them through. I told what I saw. It's not enough.”

“If you see clearly, why not?”

Taking a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket, unfolding it on the table, and pushing it toward Molly, Bruce said, “I've written over two hundred pages, and then the wall. For two weeks, I've been tearing up everything I put down. I fill a wastebasket and my brain is empty.”

He paused, and Molly read, “There is no good war, there is no just war, there is no righteous war. We, the human race, have been flimflammed —” She looked up from the paper. “What else is new?”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I don't know what else to say,” she confessed, almost sadly. “Please don't be angry, Bruce. We are both of us very simple people. I think that's why we get along with each other. But there are things I've known since I was a little kid, and when you discover some of these things, it blows your mind.”

“Which is another way of saying I'm both innocent and stupid.”

“No!” she exclaimed. “God damn it, no! You are not stupid. I never said you were stupid. But innocent — oh, yes. What is innocence? To be upright and artless, which you are, thank God. If you were sitting here with one of those half-ass intellectuals who are now leading the new crusade against the left, they'd spend the rest of the night convincing you that there is good war and bad war and good murder and bad murder, because that's the function of society. Well, yes, it's my hyperbole — I exaggerate. You made a discovery — it's not the last. The only advantage I have over you is that I never went to college. I cribbed my education as a packing clerk in Filene's basement, so I made the choices. By the time I was fourteen, I had read Shaw's
Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
, Bellamy's
Looking Backward
, Veblin's
Leisure Class
, Jack London's
Iron Heel
, John Reed's
Ten Days That Shook the World
— to mention only a few. We sang a song where the refrain was ‘No Irish need apply,' and we had a teacher called poverty that cut to the core of things, and when I was eighteen, I met a wonderful Irish lady, name of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who talked me into joining this subversive organization — oh, damn it, I run off at the mouth like some silly schoolteacher, but I have to make the point, Bruce, and I'm the stone in the pudding. You made the most important discovery of your life, and I say, So what? But that's it — so what? Nothing changes except your mind.”

“And that's not important?” Bruce asked softly.

“Damned important.”

“So why are you putting me down?”

“Because if I know you, you're ready to tear up your book and go into a passionate denunciation of war. Don't. Please. Write what you saw, and believe me, it will come out right. I don't want you to be a preacher. I don't want you to join the Communist Party. The Party would shrink your soul and destroy you. I want you to be what you are — a decent, upright man who knows the difference between right and wrong — and when you write what you see, the reader will know it too.”

“Let's not have tea,” Bruce said. “Let's have some gin or whatever's handy. You get points for confusion, and I might as well be drunk. You're a first-rate news lady, and yet you work for forty bucks a week on a communist paper, and you tell me that the same Party would shrink my soul and destroy me, and I'm supposed to make sense of all this?”

“No more than anyone else does, and if we start to drink, you won't go home. Well, why not? And about the Party, it's like everything else. There are people in it who are damned near saints and there are others I don't want to know or talk about, and God only knows how many have sold out to the FBI and how many were FBI from the beginning, and if there were something better around, I'd join it in a minute. But there isn't anything else that isn't totally corrupt, and as for the Democrats and the Republicans, well, you name them and that's enough said. As for the C.P., it's being attacked from every side, the government is determined to destroy it, its leaders are narrow and not bright, we lose membership, we're afraid to stand up and attack what's wrong in the Soviet Union, and a hell of a lot is wrong” — she spread her arms — “so it crumbles.”

“And yet you stay with it.”

“Much as I may hate a lot of what goes on in the Party, I have even more contempt and hatred for those who leave the Party and go over to the other side and make a cheap bundle out of becoming anti-Party hacks. No matter how wrong we are, no matter how much we choke creative people and isolate ourselves from the rest of the country — which is one reason I don't want you in it — we still have never betrayed the workers or peace or the Negro people or the women's movement. Show me another party in this country that will face death for its beliefs —”

“Come off it,” Bruce said. “I ask you questions, and you don't really try to answer them, and as for facing death, millions of us faced death, and I don't find virtue in it, not on your side, not on the other side —”

“Stop,” she said. “We're building up to an awful fight. Let's go to bed and make love. It's better.”

“It's better,” Bruce agreed.

Yet during the ensuing days, Bruce followed Molly's advice. He went on writing plainly and straightforwardly about what he had seen, nor did he destroy what he had already written. Yet as his inner self matured and changed, so did his reflection on his own experience. During this time, he often thought of breaking his connection with Molly Maguire. He sometimes asked himself whether his view of communism was so different from the general public's view, as reflected in the media. It was something mysterious and unreal and menacing. And Molly, if not menacing, was so different from any other person he had ever known, including Legerman and Majumdar, that she might have dropped out of another planet. All of her premises were different, at least from what his had been. She shattered every icon he had lived by. When he asked her how she, a member of an atheist organization, could consider herself a good Catholic, she replied that one had nothing to do with the other, and when he objected that atheism and Catholicism were not compatible, she replied that no one was really an atheist, and when he asked when she had last been in a church, she replied that a church was the last place in the world where one should look for God. She loved America and considered its economy and its government to be a disaster for the world, and at the same time inscribed it as the best place on earth. She had taken a job in a shipyard to support the war, taking a leave from the paper, yet she condemned the war as a stupid and bloody result of twenty years of British and American stupidity. She displayed a mind that was a cross between a steel trap and the dreams and fancies of a poor Irish kid in the streets of Boston. She had apparently read every book he had ever heard of, and one evening in her apartment, after dinner with Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger, she sang along with them in an endless flow of song that went on for hours. She canvassed for the Party in the Puerto Rican section of East Harlem, and he went with her one day, amazed by her Spanish and by the ease and compassion with which she dealt with the people.

“Where did you learn Spanish?”

“A year in high school. I picked up the rest.”

He was troubled by his affair with her; he was also in awe of her, enchanted by her, and madly in love with her. His fantasy terror was that one day she would decide, This Bacon character is hopeless, and why am I wasting time with him?

But his writing went better and easier, and the end of his book was in sight.

Each time he had a chapter finished, he brought it to her to read. She was a good critic, clever enough to get him to see for himself where he had gone off the track. “You must understand,” she said to him, “that there are things here that I wouldn't write the way you write them. That's OK. You're not me and you're not a communist, and I don't ever want you to become one. You have a clear, pure vision, and no one must ever tell you how to write or what to write.” She often spoke of “parlor pinks,” well-to-do, comfortable liberals who echoed the Party line and never walked a picket line. “You have to be in this neck deep,” she said to him, “to realize how isolated we are, the mistakes we've made, the writers we've squeezed dry until they fled from us. It's lovely to talk about the things we believe in and sit safe and comfortable. Don't do it, Bruce.”

One evening, Bruce went with her to the home of Professor Ernest Goland, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and who was subsequently thrown off it and out of his job at Cornell University because it was discovered that as a young man in Germany of the thirties, he had been a member of the Communist Party. His wife, Nell Goland, was an important and gifted gynecologist and, like her husband, a one-time fugitive from the Nazis. They lived in a big old apartment on West End Avenue, and when they opened the door for Bruce and Molly, they embraced and welcomed Molly with the enthusiasm of a father and mother greeting a long-away daughter.

“This is Bruce Bacon,” Molly said. “He's the best thing that has happened to me in a long time.”

“Bruce Bacon,” Professor Goland said thoughtfully. “The same one? Africa? Europe and then India?”

Bruce nodded.

“Then indeed I'm honored. You're an honest writer — and also very good.”

The apartment reminded Bruce of his father's place, the high beamed ceilings, the dining room and living room separated by big sliding doors, the massive dining room table, the overstuffed pieces in the living room, the maps and steel engravings and etchings on the walls, the clutter by people interested in practically everything; but different from his youthful home in its feeling of another culture and a rather forlorn attempt to reproduce it.

Alone with Molly for a moment as another guest arrived, Bruce whispered, “The parlor pinks you spoke of?”

“Not the professor. He puts his life on the line. Others? There'll be some. Find them yourself.”

Most of the guests were familiar to Molly. A handsome woman in her forties was introduced to Bruce as Betty Anderson. He would keep asking himself, Is she a communist? Is he? This was a new kind of place for him. Abe Kinholt, a fat, imposing man in his fifties — next to be met and greeted. Bruce was still focused on Betty Anderson. He had seen her in at least a dozen films when he was a kid. Of course, she had been blacklisted. “The
Liberal Day,”
Kinholt said. “One should be properly identified in this den of reds. I'm the editor of the best of what Westbrook Pegler called the ‘butcher paper' magazines.” Frank Collins was in his late twenties, slight and blond. His wife, slighter, blonder, looked like a small twin sister. Kinholt overwhelmed them. They stood in the background, modestly, almost sheepishly, while Kinholt's voice filled the room. Bruce realized he was staring at Collins, and Molly nudged him.

“What is it?” she whispered.

He pushed past Kinholt to where Collins stood with his look-alike wife, and said to him softly, “Frank Collins? Captain Collins?”

Collins said, “Do I know you, sir?” Apologetically, as if he, Collins, had no right to ask the question. His wife smiled, also diffidently. Professor Goland joined them and said, “This is Josie and Frank Collins. Good teachers. Good honest teachers.”

Kinholt stopped talking to Molly. They all turned toward the Collinses.

“We teach at Stuyvesant High School. We met there. It's such an honor — I mean to be back there and teaching there. It's such a very good school.”