The Pledge (19 page)

“Not a great deal. I've known some. I think they're good people in pursuit of an impossible and unworkable dream. I'm not a red baiter, I couldn't be.”

“All right. Now let me explain something about contempt of Congress in the legal sense. You must forget about the judgmental sense; if that were part of it, I would be in jail tomorrow, since I have the utmost contempt for this committee of Congress. In the legal sense, contempt is basically the refusal of cooperation. Refusal to answer a question most often, and of course perjury. Now, there is a legal shield against the coercion by a committee, and that is to rest upon the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that no person can be forced to give evidence against himself. But it carries an implication of guilt, and as far as I can see, it's a tactic you don't need. You have no guilt in any measure, and it would seem to me that in your straightforward position, you are well armed. Answer fully and straightforwardly and you will not be in harm's way. I would guess that this subpoena stems from your public association with Miss Maguire and with your job at the
Tribune.
They dislike both the
Times
and the
Tribune
, and they'd be as pleased as punch to uncover a communist plot at the
Tribune.
But the whole notion is ridiculous. I am a loyal reader of the
Tribune
, and I read every column you wrote during the war years, avidly, since I had two sons in the service, and to my mind, it was fine reporting, perhaps the best of its kind.

“Now, this subpoena of yours calls for an appearance before the committee in executive session, which means closed session. In other words, I cannot be in the room with you. I could be outside in the waiting room, and you could come out to consult me after each question, but I don't regard that as very profitable. It won't surprise you if I tell you that we are a very expensive firm, and if I were to accompany you to Washington, I would have to charge you what would sound like a most unreasonable figure. As far as this present consultation is concerned, there will be no charge at all. You're the son of an old friend.”

“I'm not asking for favors,” Bruce said. “I'm ready to pay.”

“I'm sure you are. But we'll stand on our right not to charge. I won't go with you to Washington because it will not help you. As senior partners, we do accompany corporate clients to Washington, but you are not in a comparable situation. I don't feel that you are being abandoned. I think you will handle it very nicely. We have a little pamphlet which we give to any client facing a congressional committee, and I'll let you have a copy to study. However, if you have apprehension —”

Bruce cut him off. “I don't.”

“You feel you can handle it? I want you to be absolutely forthright with me.”

“I can handle it. Yes, sir.”

“Fine. Your hearing is on the twenty-second of the month. Suppose you stop by here at the same time on the twenty-fourth.”

“Yes, sir. Certainly.”

“And remember — you have nothing to hide.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I'll see you on the twenty-fourth.”

He left Britain's office in a totally ambivalent state, unable to decide whether to go along as Britain had suggested or to find another lawyer. But he had no stomach to go shopping for lawyers, and it might very well be that Britain had given him the best advice he could expect. In the street, walking down to Battery Park, breathing the pungent sea air, it was hard to be depressed. After all, his book was just about finished, a bit of rewriting here and there, a little more editing, and there it was. He was going to marry a most beautiful and remarkable woman, he was only a couple of years past thirty, and he was in good health. After the House committee business had been put to bed, he would go back to the
Tribune
, provided they gave him a stateside assignment. Mel Bronson had spoken of an advance of fifty thousand dollars, and together with his wartime nest egg, it would solve his and Molly's problems for another year, even if neither of them could find jobs.

A headline in a newspaper caught his eyes:
A YEAR OF FREEDOM.
He bought the paper and sat down in Battery Park to read it. It had come at long last, and now it was a year since freedom came to hundreds of millions of people in India who had been a virtual possession of a tiny ruling class of a tiny island thousands of miles away. True, India had been split, and there was a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India, but it was freedom, and if there was still hunger, there were no more contrived famines to break the bodies and the souls of the people.

His mind filled with thoughts of Professor Chatterjee and Ashoka Majumdar, Bruce walked uptown in the fading afternoon light. He had a sense of his Bengal experience being an eternity ago. The war had finished. The Nuremberg trials had finished, and a dozen Nazis had been sentenced to death, among them Ribbentrop and Goering, and India was free. He felt a sense of sadness. People live and die for a cause — fifty million had died in this recent war, and for what? For peace? To destroy Hitler? We make vile gods and kill millions to destroy the gods we make. Was Majumdar alive? Had
Prasarah
, that strange single-sheet newspaper, survived? And what would
Prasarah
be in the future?

He stopped at a telephone booth and called Molly. “I want to celebrate,” he told her. “I want to celebrate life.”

“I can understand that,” she agreed. “Where?”

“I'll meet you at the King Cole Bar of the Saint Regis at seven. We'll go on from there.”

They went on and on from there, and at midnight or so, they ended up in bed at her apartment, where he whispered to her, “That was true about marrying me?”

“Body and soul. Drop your arms so that I can cross myself.”

“You still cross yourself?”

“Only at very important moments of truth — like this.”

“Amen, my dear love.”

After that day with Britain, Bruce's life quickened its pace. He felt that he had been in a sort of torpor. He was more alive now than he had ever been, as if the subpoena had acted as adrenaline, at least when matched with the fact that Molly would marry him. By the end of the first of the three weeks between receiving the subpoena and his impending date in Washington, he sat up into the small hours of the morning and finished his book, six hundred and twenty manuscript pages, with two maps, which he drew himself and which he hoped would tell the truth about two battles that were being mythologized. He packed it into a cardboard box and bore it in triumph to Mel Bronson at Scandia Press.

“Here it is,” Bruce said, putting the heavy package down on Bronson's desk. “Almost three years out of my life.”

Bronson touched it tenderly. “In my life, this is sacred. It sounds as pretentious as hell, Bruce, but we are not only money-grubbing businessmen, we are the keepers of a flame that since the beginning of history has sanctified civilization. Nothing else has. How wise those old words ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and God was the Word.'”

“That's too much for me to deal with right now, but very nice.” He felt much too pleased with himself to tell Bronson that his bit of fantasy was rubbish. They were family now. This man was his publisher, and soon would be sending him a check for fifty thousand dollars.

“Of course, it's not something you read overnight,” Bronson said. “Give me a few weeks on this, Bruce.”

“Sure. I'm flattered. If you told me you intended to read it overnight, I'd be worried.”

“Not only myself,” Bronson said. “Anything that our readers report on positively gets three readings, myself and two of the editors. Not that the readers will ever touch this, but still three readings take time.”

“Of course.”

He told Molly of the delivery and then added, “I use
delivery
advisedly. A whole new experience for me. You know, they say that a woman, after the delivery of a baby, feels empty, depressed. Well, I don't feel depressed, but empty, yes.”

“Advice?” Molly asked him.

“Well, yes, absolutely.”

“Then hike down and see your old boss tomorrow. Tell him you want your job back. Tell him the book is finished and you'll soon be famous, but you'll do him the honor of coming back on the paper before you get too famous.”

“That'll be the day.” Bruce laughed.

“All right, tell it your way. Tell him you want your job or you'll break his back. It is waiting for you, isn't it?” she asked, a new note of concern in her voice.

“Maybe. I hope so. But you remember, I was overseas. When I first came back, they offered me everything but the moon, so long as I got out of the country. Maybe they figured that a foreign correspondent can't handle City Hall. Who knows? Maybe now they'll decide I'm a red. The old where-there's-smoke-there's-fire routine. I'm beginning to feel damn smoky.”

Nevertheless, he realized that it was good advice, and the next day he went down to the paper and made himself known, as he thought of it. “The book is done,” he said.

“Cheers!” The editor took a bottle of Old Overholt out of his desk drawer and poured two shot glasses full. “Cheers,” he said again.

“Well,” Bruce said, “here I am — for better or worse.”

“Leave out the worse. You're a damn sight better than most.”

“I need a job,” Bruce said.

“If you just finished the book, could be you need a breather.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing very serious, Bruce. Just a little time to loosen up.”

“Loosening up won't do a damn thing for me. I have to eat and I have to pay my rent and I've been known to need a new pair of shoes. I need a job.”

“Bruce, I'm not conning you. It's just not that easy. We're running with a full staff and we're losing money. I can't just say, Here's your job. It doesn't depend on me. I have to take it upstairs.”

“In other words,” Bruce said, “you're thinking about the subpoena.”

“Come on, that's a hell of a note. Don't accuse us of playing ball with that lousy committee. I'm hurt that it should even come up in our conversation. You read the paper. You know what we think of the dirty little men who run it.”

“Tell me about it!” Bruce said angrily. “I gave you three years of damn good stuff, and I didn't get it by taking a streetcar down to City Hall. Then I asked for a leave, and you said fine. Now I'm told that the paper's losing money.”

“Just take it easy, Bruce. Take it easy.”

But he was in no mood to take it easy, and he went from the paper to the Newspaper Guild offices, where he sat down with Mike Levenson, who took care of such things; and Mike said to him: “Just how did you part company, Bruce? Did you get some kind of a letter of agreement that your leave would be so many weeks or months, and that at the end of that period your job would be waiting for you?”

“Who'd think of it? You come back from three years of writing blood and horror, and you've survived — well, you tell yourself that you've paid your dues.”

“Bruce, what in hell do we have a union for? You never pay your dues. It's their club, not ours. Do you have anything in writing?”

“No, nothing.”

“Oh, beautiful. Just beautiful. Do you know what you did, Bruce? You walked out. You quit your job. Sure they said, Take a leave Bruce. Don't worry about a thing, Bruce. Whenever you want it, the job will be waiting. But what they said doesn't mean a thing. You remember Samuel Goldwyn's line, ‘A verbal agreement is not worth the paper it's written on.' That's what it amounts to.”

“So you think I'm through at the
Trib?”

“Maybe, maybe not. All I'm saying is that they have no obligation to give you back the job. Maybe they will. You have a damned good name. The war's not so long ago that it's forgotten. There's the
Times
, the
News
, the
World-Telegram
, the
Sun.”

“And there's my subpoena.”

“The hell with those creeps. You're no communist, and anyone who says so is out of his mind.”

Grateful for encouragement if not aid, Bruce sat at his desk in his apartment making a list of newspapers and periodicals where he might find work when he learned that the gates at the
Tribune
were finally closed. He was unwilling to believe what he had thrown at his former boss, that the subpoena was enough for them to bar him. Other places, possibly, but not at the
New York Tribune.
His brooding was interrupted by a call from his father, who said that after he had told Bruce's mother — under severe pressure — that a wife was in the picture, she would have nothing but that Bruce should bring her to dinner.

The silence that followed that announcement provoked him to ask “Did you hear me, Bruce?”

“I heard you. I love my mother, so don't hold anything I say against me.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Does she know about the subpoena?” Bruce asked.

“No. She doesn't read the papers, and I see no reason to tell her. Frank Britain assures me that you have nothing to worry about.”

“Come on, Dad. Some dear friend will call her and inform her, and she'll want to destroy Molly before she ever lays eyes on her.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she'll blame Molly. Does she know that Molly works for the
Daily Worker?”

“Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Molly, on the other hand, was equally doubtful. “You know, Bruce, a few years ago I would have said, The hell with your mother and father. They'll take me the way I am, or shove it. I suppose I've changed. I love you, and I don't want it to be all crapped up. Did you hear what I just said? That's the way I talk.”

“You're a big girl. You'll talk the way you want to talk.”