The Lacuna (39 page)

“You keep saying that. I am thrilled.”

“Well, ye barely look it,” she said. She had on the blue Kerrybrooke beret (
wear it many ways!
), identifying this as a Social Adventure of the highest order.

“You don’t,” Romulus agreed.

“You pipe down. We men have to stick together. We don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves the way women do.”

He glanced at his shoulder, then took a whitecap of cream off his cheek with the back of a hand.

“It’s not really settled yet, for one thing. Where am I going to find an agent?”

“Did Mr. Lincoln say you
have
to get one? Or just that it would be helpful? What did he say about that exactly?”

“Find someone to negotiate the contract, for the motion-picture option. He can’t do it, this is between Hollywood and me. An agent is customary. Or a lawyer.”

“Well, lawyers, I have known a few. Working for the city. Not that they could reckon out a motion-picture contract.”

“Mr. Lincoln said brace ourselves for the press. They’ll step up the pursuit.”

A pea-green Cadillac hunched past like some kind of water animal, the small, split windshield like close-set eyes. They will never make another car to touch the Roadster. Mrs. Brown put us in a corner near the window so I wouldn’t be spotted in the shop. But even so, I could hear a couple of girls at the counter saying “
him. It is. Isn’t
.”

Mrs. Brown snapped her fingers. “I have a man! I think I have the business card in my jewelry case.” For a moment she sounded so modern, a regular Gal Friday.

And she saves the day, once again. Or might have, we will see. It’s a gentleman she met last year when he came to inquire about renting a vacant room. They had quite a chat in the parlor while waiting for Mrs. Bittle to return from the hairdresser’s. He’s from New York City, a lawyer, mostly retired. Moving to Asheville because his wife had died, and the daughter Margaret lived here. Grandchildren. He was not sure how he’d get along in Dixieland, but you can’t argue with a daughter named Margaret. Even Harry Truman knows that, ha-ha. They’d had the radio on in the parlor, and Mrs. Brown happened to wonder aloud what the stars looked like. The voices give a certain impression, but the actors might be less attractive than they sound. It was
Duffy’s Tavern
. The gentleman told her as a matter of fact the actress playing Duffy’s daughter might sound like a girl but she is a mature woman, forty if she’s a day.
Shirley Booth. And the other one, Cass Daley, has an overbite like a lizard.

How did he know? He’s met them, that’s how. It’s his line. A radio and television lawyer.

I asked Mrs. Brown why he hadn’t taken the room.

“Mrs. Bittle wouldn’t let to him. She was sorry. He seemed very nice.”

“I see. Only good people here. Was he a Negro?”

“No.”

“Just too much of a Yankee?”

She glanced at Romulus, then back at me. “You told me in Mexico you use to work for some…that didn’t have Christmas.”

Even the word
Christmas
didn’t jog a glimmer of attention from Romulus. He sat glaze-eyed as a mystic, stirring his bowl of ice-cream soup streaked with a bleeding cherry. I tried to work out the puzzle.

“Oh. This man was a Jew?”

Arthur Gold. The New York Jew in Dixie.

July 22

Poor Mrs. Brown, in trouble with the Woman’s Club. She was so distracted today, she had to call Mr. Gold back twice to get instructions about mailing the motion-picture contract. She seems to think these women mean to throw her in a cauldron of bouillon. As one of three members of the Cultural Committee, she was not the lone perpetrator. But it was her idea to involve the children.

Their speaker was a girl named Surya, spending the summer with Asheville relatives, on leave from some school-term cultural exchange in Washington, D.C. It was Genevieve Kohler (neighbor to the relatives) who hatched the plot to have this girl from Russia as their Cultural Evening speaker. The ladies were in a jam; Decorating with the New Plastic Fabrics had canceled on short notice. Mrs. Brown thought of inviting local high-school girls, pointing it up as an inspi
rational talk. The girl had lived through war. She had overcome long odds to arrive in Carolina in time for a Rhododendron Festival.

Mrs. Brown said she looked as hale as a milkmaid, with brown eyes and dimples, and that the talk was both informative and audible. Little Surya spoke of her school in Russia, the free health program, and the Russian plan for old-age care. She contrasted the governing bodies in her country with the newly elected Communist government of Poland. She made favorable mention of the position of women in modern-day Russia, and equally favorable mention of North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. Mrs. Brown said the girl was so unsophisticated and gracious, she doubted the child would have disparaged a spider, had it walked across her face. Yet she created a sensation. The Woman’s Club president, vice president, and sergeant-at-arms stood up as a block, interrupted the speaker to announce their devotion to America, and walked out. Some others followed. Mothers who had brought their girls, responding to the handbill distributed at school, left with daughters in tow, indignant at having been duped.

“We did not mislead,” Mrs. Brown insists. “We put on the handbill she was here in the youth foreign exchange from the former St. Petersburg.”

“Maybe they thought you meant St. Petersburg, the Republic of Florida. Just across the waters from the Mexican continent, as I recall.”

“Mr. Shepherd, this is not a joking matter.”

“I’m trying to lighten your mood. It’s not the disaster you think.”

The Asheville Trumpet,
July 23, 1947

Crowd Takes Stand Against Reds

by Edwina Boudreaux

September 2

Arthur Gold in person looks like a Dashiell Hammett private eye: white shirt, rolled-up sleeves, steel blue eyes, necktie five years out of date. He’s a regular white-haired Sam Spade, complete with the smoky little office up a narrow flight of stairs in the Woolworth’s building on Henry Street. The ever-burning cigarette, the epic slouch. If Violet Brown is the “do be” gal for posture, Mr. Gold is the “don’t be.” His narrow body describes the shape of an S in his chair, with a meridian running through the head, navel, and shins, with all else slumped to the fore or the aft. It was hard at first to reconcile the slumped posture with the astute voice on the telephone. But within minutes he established himself as the same Mr. Gold, planking out the long sentences that arrive unfailingly at their destination. He could be formidable in court. Except midway between his subject and object, you’d become distracted by the cigarette, wondering when that worm of ash will finally drop on his shirt.

“Congratulations on your distinguished career.” He unwound himself to stand, shake hands. “Please, call me Artie. Finally we meet, sit down, please. It’s a pleasure doing business with a man who has made so much of himself in a relatively short amount of time in this country, and if I may say so, on this earth. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

He squinted, evaluating. “Yeah, okay. You look it.”

He studied the letter for only a few seconds before tossing it on his
desk. “To make a long story short? You will have to answer this. If you don’t, they will send you another. It’s a form, they’ve got millions of them. Please, tell me, what is it about this particular request that worries you?”

“I’m not really worried. There’s nothing on that list that applies. Honestly, treason and sedition, violent overthrow. I’m all right until they add smoking in bed.”

Artie laughed, bobbing his head from the shoulders.

“I’m just wondering what’s behind it, before I answer. I make mistakes sometimes. I seem to be naive about certain things.”

“How so?”

“I grew up in Mexico, in the Revolution. Being a Communist was just an ordinary household thing. About like fish on Fridays.”

“I grew up in a country like that also. New York in the twenties. You ever hear of Eugene V. Debs?”

“I think so.”

“So. Grew up in Mexico, but you are a citizen of the United States, this much I know from working on your film contract. You were born here, moved to Mexico at the age of twelve as I recall, returning when exactly?”

“September of ’40. Before that, I was here two years to attend school.”

He was making notes. “Where and when?”

“Potomac Academy, Washington, D.C., ’32 and ’33.”

“District of Columbia in ’32. The summer of the Bonus Army riots.”

“I know. I was in them. I was sick a few weeks from the tear gas.”

He looked up. “You were in the Bonus Army riots?”

“By accident. I was trying to make a delivery from the A&P.”

“Holy smokes. I will not put this in your dossier.”

“I don’t think my dossier is going to be problematic.”

“Mr. Shepherd. Should I call you Harry?”

“No. Just Shepherd is fine. Without the Mr.”

“Shepherd. In seventy-five words or less, how would you describe your dossier?”

“Empty. That’s the whole truth. I spent almost all my life until now putting food on other people’s plates. Eating their leftovers, if any. So you could say my sentiments lodge in the proletarian quarter. The worker control of industry strikes me as a decent idea. But I’m not a member of anything. Is that seventy-five words?”

“Or less. You are concise.”

“I don’t even vote. My secretary needles me about that.”

“You believe in the class struggle, but you don’t vote?”

“This country is a puzzle. In Mexico even the conservatives grant the power of the syndicates. But here, during the strikes, the most liberal politicians called the Mine Workers president a coal-black son of Satan. The conservatives probably just thought he was Satan père. It’s a pretty watery broth. Republicans, Democrats.”

“This I will not deny.”

“In the war they were all friends with Stalin, but now he’s also joined the Satan family line. That one I agree with. This letter they’ve sent me, I only want to understand it. So I won’t step in something. I tend to do that, step in things.”

He sat staring, the ash end of his cigarette growing long and white. “I see. This letter worries you because you’re thinking you may get hit with somebody else’s gas on your way to the A&P.”

“This letter confounds me. I know what communism is. But a few weeks ago, my secretary was voted out of her Woman’s Club because she asked a girl from Russia to give a lecture. Just a schoolgirl.”

“Shepherd, my friend. This month, in certain quarters, people are burning the
Graphic Survey
magazine because it contains a picture story on life in Russia. Photographs of farms. Windmills, whatever they have on farms. Russian cows. This incites people to bonfires.”

“What do you think is frightening them?”

“Hearst news. If the paper says everyone this season will be wear
ing a Lilly Daché hat that resembles an armadillo, they will purchase the hat. If Hearst tells them to be afraid of Russia, they will buy that too.”

“If the hat is too ridiculous, not everyone buys it.”

Artie finally ashed his cigarette, then paused to light a new one from the old, which he left burning in the ashtray, presumably for ambiance. He reorganized his S-shaped body into a thoughtful pose against the desk. “Do you want to know my theory?”

“Of course.”

“I think it’s the bomb.”

“People are afraid of the bomb?”

“Yes, I believe that is the heart of the matter. When that bomb went off over Japan, when we saw that an entire city could be turned to fire and gas, it changed the psychology of this country. And when I say ‘psychology,’ I mean that very literally. It’s the radio, you see. The radio makes everyone feel the same thing at the same time. Instead of millions of various thoughts, one big psychological fixation. The radio commands our gut response. Are you following me?”

“Yes. I’ve seen that.”

“That bomb scared the holy Moses out of us. We became horrified in our hearts that we had used it. Okay, it ended the war, it saved American life and so on and so forth. But everyone feels guilty, deep inside. Little Japanese children turned into flaming gas, we know this. How could we not feel bad?”

“I’m sure we do.”

“Okay. We used the bomb. We convince ourselves we are very special people, to get to use this weapon. Ideal scenario, we would like to think it came to us from God, meant for our own use and no one else’s.” He leaned in, eyes and cigarette blazing. “You wrote a book about this topic, am I right?”

“You’ve read my books?”

“Of course I’ve read your books. You’re an important client, I’ve read your books. You of all people understand this. Suddenly we are
God’s chosen, we have this bomb, and we better be pretty damn certain no one else is going to get this bomb. We must clean our house thoroughly. Can you imagine what would happen if England also had the bomb, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union all had this bomb? How could a person go to sleep at night?”

“Those countries hardly have standing armies now, they’re sacked. All but the Soviet Union.”

“Okay. The Soviet Union. You get it.”

“I thought we had nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“You see, this is what I’m saying. The radio. It creates for us a psychology. Here’s what happened to fear itself. Winston Churchill said, ‘iron curtain.’ Did you see how they all went crazy over that?”

“Of course.”

“Then Truman said, ‘Every nation must decide.’ You are standing on one side of that curtain, my friend, or else you are on the other. And John Edgar Hoover, my God, this man. John Edgar Hoover says this curtain is what separates us from Satan and perhaps also the disease of leprosy. Did you happen to hear his testimony to Congress?”

“I read some of it.”

“‘The mad march of Red fascism in America. Teaching our youth a way of life that will destroy the sanctity of the home and respect for authority. Communism is not a political party but an evil and malignant way of life’—these are his words. A disease condition. A quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation.”

“I read that. But newspapers exaggerate. I couldn’t quite believe he said all that.”

“You have a point. Maybe he did not. And yet in this case it happens that he did. I acquired a transcript of this testimony because it pertains to certain of my clients.”

“Why did he say it? I mean, what are his rational motives?”

“Rational motives are not the scope of this discussion. He is an excitable man. He heads a powerful agency. The newspapers love this
kind of thing, as you say. It’s a moment of history, my friend. You wonder why you’ve received this letter. I am attempting to draw you a picture.”

“Is that really his signature?”

“No. They have a machine. I read Frank Sinatra has one also, for autographs. Maybe you need one. Okay, do you know anything at all about this Dies Committee?”

“I’ve heard of it. Years ago they contacted my boss to come and testify. This was in Mexico. The State Department arranged visas for us, but it never happened.”

“Your Mexican boss had something to say about un-American activities?”

“He wasn’t Mexican, he was in exile there, under threat of death from Stalin. So he had a lot to say about the man. This was before the war, when the U.S. was getting very friendly with Stalin. Trotsky felt the U.S. was being hoodwinked. They needed to know he was treacherous.”

“Trotsky.”

“Lev Trotsky. He was my boss.”

The cigarette ash fell to the floor. For a moment the lawyer himself seemed poised to follow it. He straightened, shook his head slowly, and reached for the letter on the desk. “I am going to give you a piece of advice. Don’t mention that you once were employed by the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution.”

“I was a cook. And this was Trotsky. He hated Stalin even more than J. Edgar Hoover does. He spent his whole life trying to overthrow the Soviet politburo. The American Communist Party vilified him.”

“Let me just say, these subtleties are lost on your secretary’s Woman’s Club, and they are lost on the Dies Committee. Most of them don’t know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what
anti
communism is. The two are practically unrelated.”

“You’re telling me anticommunism is unrelated to communism. That doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense to you. You’re a man of words, so you think we’re speaking here of tuna fish and disliking tuna fish, but we are not. We’re talking tuna fish and the Spanish influenza.” He reached into the papers on his desk and drew out a pair of spectacles. “All former places of residence and former employers,” he read. “Schools and colleges attended, organizations in which you have been a member.”

“What should I write?”

“Tell them exactly what they already know. Mexico, they probably know very little. Military service record they know. What was your tour?”

“Civilian service. That’s how this came up. I helped move federal property for the Department of State during the war.”

“Civilian service, so you were 4F?”

“Something like that.”

He waited. The intensity of the man’s gaze is extraordinary.

“Blue slip,” I said.

“Okay. Disqualified from service on account of sexual indifference to the female of the species. This one I could never figure.”

“They offered to put me in a psychiatric hospital, to get me sorted out. But then suddenly my particular talents were needed elsewhere, moving art treasures out of Washington. Both coasts were under attack, so it looked very urgent.”