The Lacuna (50 page)

June 1949—January 1950
(
VB
)

When the FBI called on Mrs. Brown, that was the alarm bell gone off. That was the waking up. How stupid I have been. I’d failed to expect it, the FBI going to see her at Mrs. Bittle’s. So I knew then, burn everything. It was May 10 or 11, the burning. They’d come on the evening of May 4, she said, not a forgettable date, and she went a week without telling me. I didn’t expect that either. It wasn’t Myers but two other men, looking for anything she could think of. Not only during our acquaintance, they told her, but anything she might know about my past. Tax avoidance, girlfriend troubles.

Well, I hope you told them. I have the worst trouble finding any girlfriends
.

She would not let me make it into a joke. They offered to give her money if she thought of something. They mentioned five thousand dollars. She asked if I had any idea what kind of money that is. I said, “Do you think I don’t?” We were sitting at the green table in the kitchen, it was after we’d taken to eating lunch there together because she doesn’t like going to the luncheonettes now. I fixed her a pork sandwich that day. It was raining. No, not raining, because later she would be out in the back, that fire roaring.

What I remember plainly is how she bit the sandwich, set it down, chewed, bit again. Nearly choking, the whole time. I was sorry I’d made the sandwich, she was obviously not hungry but now would feel obligated to eat. In Mexico she looked at every piece of embroidery that any barefoot mother held up to her. Not just pretending, really examining the stitches with full appreciation. She can’t dissemble to save her life.

That is why, when I asked why she wasn’t hungry, she told me the reason. She really had not wanted to bother me about the FBI men who came to see her at Mrs. Bittle’s. Not to worry me.
Five thousand dollars
. For the first time I began to understand what a danger I pose to her. I have been so thick, so naive.

She said she felt covered with dirt with those two men there. Mrs. Bittle dusting every sill in the parlor, trying to hear. I could picture that, and Mrs. Brown telling them I was a fine citizen, standing up for me, which I told her she should not do anymore. The less said to those men, the better.

“Maybe you’re wrong,” she said. “Maybe we need to give them what for.”

“Why? What does it matter if I go on their list as a Communist?”

“For one thing, it proves their so-called informing man was reliable. Whoever is making things up about you. Now these agents will look on their Communist list and see you’re on it. Then they’ll look to see who accused you, and they’ll say, ‘Well, good, that fellow was reliable. We’ll use him again.’”

That is true. She was right. Her acuity humbled me.

She had more to say, about using gossip as its own evidence. The Woman’s Club now has a committee to check the schoolbooks for Americanism. In Mrs. Brown’s opinion things have gone too far, it’s time somebody showed some intestinal fortitude. Her words. She was holding back tears. What I held back, that would be harder to name. Chispa strolled in with her tail high, indifferent to the crisis. Checked the half-filled food dish next to the Philco, snubbed it, left the kitchen. Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

I told Mrs. Brown she should consider looking for a different job. Her eyes flew wide, the sandwich in both hands. She looked like an advertisement.

“You firing me, Mr. Shepherd? For what I just said?”

I told her that wasn’t it. That I was very worried about causing her more trouble than I already had. She drank half a glass of water and went to look for a handkerchief in the other room. I heard her rummaging in the big leather mail pouch. I cleared the plates, put that sandwich out of sight so it wouldn’t be the end of her. Some waterworks in the dining room, I think. All dried up when she returned, but the eyes were puffy.

“Mr. Shepherd, don’t you read the papers? They’ve already had me as your secret wife, the whore of Babylon, crime partner, and I don’t know what. Your bee keeper, for all I know. Who else would have me now? My stars, I might yet learn to keep bees.”

That is what she said, bee keeper. I wanted to give her a bear hug. It would have involved lifting her off her feet, she’s so small, I really could see the whole thing. Probably we both did, facing one another in a white-tiled kitchen, hands open at our sides, the embrace playing out between us like a motion-picture scene that makes you whistle and throw popcorn. We elected just to stand and watch it.

We made the agreement then. I would keep her hired, on certain conditions. A lot of things had to be taken care of: all the rest of the old notebooks. All those names and dates. I have done nothing wrong, she knows this and I know it, and still we both understand the position she is in. They could get a warrant, use something in those notebooks as evidence and make her a party to it.

I told her it’s time, I kept saying that. It is time. I’d been piddling at it, trying for more than a year since we pitched Billy Boorzai into the flames. Better dead than read, I told her. Expecting a fight, but strangely, no fight came. Not even from Violet the defiant, who always insists,
Those are your words so claim them, leave your bairns not to be orphaned, you wrote those
. She too is defeated. She wanted to do the job herself. Stood at the door watching while I cleared the whole shelf, all the way back to the beginning. She seemed as eager as I was to get it over with, taking our medicine.

She went downstairs with the first armload, and I ransacked my
desk drawers. Sometimes I’ll type up a day and forget to file it with the others. And letters. I’d long since done away with Frida’s—they were hardly mine to begin with—but the carbons of my own were harder to part with. I scooped up all that now, and odd little clippings I’d kept, oh, I was on a tear. By the time she had the fire going in the tar bucket outdoors, I was making a mad sack of the house to see if there were any notebooks I’d missed, hidden from myself like a drunk’s gin bottle tucked in the chandelier. It feels that way sometimes, that desperate.

I went a day. Spent that evening standing at the window lighting one cigarette off the last, after she’d gone, to keep myself from sitting and writing out the scene as freshly recalled. One week, thirty packs of cigarettes. Weeks. Without spooling out more of a tale, creating more to burn, knitting away at the front of the long knotted scarf that will have to be unraveled at the back. How helpless I feel before this flood of words, how ridiculous. A hundred times trying to shut off the flow. Under orders from Mother. From Frida and Diego, arms crossed, feet tapping, stop it. In the name of the law. Stop writing down everything, it makes me nervous. And something inside the boy cries out,
Those are the only two choices: read, or dead
.

This only feels like madness; really now it’s just the usual thing, summer and polio. Going mad inside a house. The wisteria vines have blocked up the windows. No matter where I try to look out, it’s those palmate leaves, green hands shoved against my eyes. The neighbor used to bring over his pruners and do the job as a favor, but Myers likely advised him against pruning Communist vines. He hasn’t done his own either, I notice. The house looks like it’s cowering behind its own shrubbery. Every bungalow on the block is the same, curtained, folded shut. Quarantine. The siege of Berlin ended May 12, the barricades finally came down. But here they seem high as ever.

Tommy can’t risk the plague—Keep cool, he says. Nor can Mrs. Brown, but she would if she could, I’m sure of that.

Lincoln Barnes says, Don’t get excited. Arthur Gold has informed
him that breach of contract can be costly, and they would be wise to release this book on the schedule previously agreed upon by all parties. He must have been persuasive. Barnes said if we don’t make any waves they’ll put the book out quietly, buried in their list of summer reading.

America has had a change of management. It’s as plain as anything in the magazine advertisements. All the July issues came this week, and where are the square-shouldered gals pouring Ovaltine for their children, the mother who knows what’s best? Who smiles ruefully and shakes her finger at that husband who used the wrong hair tonic? She’s fired. They’ve got scientists in now, white laboratory coats and reports showing that the ordinary doesn’t measure up to our brand. Goodness, they can prove anything: skin softness, quicker relief. I miss the mothers. If you didn’t like the taste of Ovaltine, you might have wheedled. With these new authorities, you’ve got no chance.

“Summer Reading” is upon us, but so far not one review of
The Unforetold
. Sales nil, reports Barnes; the bookstores have not really picked it up so much as others on the list. A whisper campaign, he was afraid of that.
I just hope we won’t be sorry about this
.

He needs to hire some of those scientists. Our studies show Harrison Shepherd provides a happier reader, 14 percent faster to achieve the racing pulse. This morning I found an advertisement for a condensed-book series: regular books with all the unnecessary parts cut out, to get it over faster. “Dr. George Gallup recently revealed in his polls, an astonishingly high percentage of the nation’s university graduates
no longer read books
. The reason is obvious: because of their educational advantages, they occupy positions where they are busy, busy, busy always!”

I’ll tell Barnes that must be it. Not a whisper campaign, no Communist longhairs or fairies about, everyone’s just too busy.

The library has opened two days a week now. Evidently the polio germ takes a rest on Mondays and Fridays. Well, three cheers for the brave ladies who volunteered to preside over the crypt. Not a soul in the place, the perfect opportunity to walk about openly carrying
Look Homeward, Angel
and
Tropic of Cancer
without raising an eyebrow. All of Henry Miller in fact, I’ll take the whole pile, and Kinsey too.

How extraordinary he is, the good Dr. Kinsey. Another man in a white coat, with proof. Everything we ever dared think about men and sex turns out to be true. One hundred percent of men are homosexual for 4 percent of their lives (the Billy Boorzais), and 4 percent are homosexual for 100 percent of their lives (the Tommy Cuddys). Strangest of all, Dr. Kinsey’s book has not been checked out of the library before. Not even once: the slip in the jacket hasn’t a single name on it. Yet the spine was well cracked, every page of the book dog-eared and bent.

The news all looks the same now. The National Educators Association routs communism at its national convention in Boston. “The Communist is not suitable as a teacher.” Nor as butcher, baker, candlestick maker, beggar man, or thief, as far as that goes. The Negro singer Paul Robeson they have taken to calling the Black Stalin.

Has the world stopped on its axis? It doesn’t seem to be so, as the wheels of Mexico creak forward on their slow revolution. Europe raises herself from the ash and holds out a hand to her poor and damaged. But if Truman calls for any change, education improvements, or Social Security, a chorus shouts him down: welfare state, collectivism, conspiracy. What an extraordinary state of things, we are the finished product. A rock thrown in the canyon rolls neither uphill or down, it’s frozen in place.

August 5

Nationalist China falls to Mao’s armies. Or fell already. Acheson disclosed the collapse. The chorus is now at full howl, Truman presides
over the Party of Treason, he and his Democrat cronies have thrown China into the mouth of the Communist dogs, didn’t everyone say he should send more gunpowder to help Chiang Kai-shek?
I just hope we won’t be sorry about this, and now we are, now you pay
.

September 23

Russia has the bomb. Every evening radio program was stopped for this: the crooners in front of microphones quietly folded their sheet music, the wise guys laughing it up at Duffy’s Tavern set their steins slowly on the counter, their jaws dropped, they gaped. The fine fabric of our nation, ripped open to reveal a naked vulnerability. An atomic explosion has occurred in the USSR. Truman said the thing in as few words as possible. Two nations now have the bomb.

A man is shot dead this morning in Oteen. A panic on this land, the crowds toting pitchforks. Someone gave the Russians that bomb, they didn’t make it on their own, they don’t have the brains the drive the science, it had to be Alger Hiss but it could have been any of them, Paul Robeson, Harrison Shepherd, they all stick together it’s what they do.

It feels out of the question to go outdoors, to walk about in the open. With anger running this high, it finds targets. The man in Oteen was killed by someone living right on the same street, a warehouse security guard. At the end of a brooding night shift, instead of going home he walked through an unlatched screen door, screaming, “Dirty Russians!” and shot a neighbor in his undershirt. The wife and children watching.

They are Slavs, judging from the name, probably emigrated to escape Stalin. The gunman knew of the family through his son. The children go to school together.

The terrible concert in Peekskill, that was Robeson. Workingman’s songs and Negro spirituals and concertgoers beaten bloody afterward. Just one road leading out of the place—how trapped those
families must have felt, with throngs of armed police and citizens waiting at the roadsides to hurl rocks at their buses. Hands pressed flat against the windows, automobiles overturned, families dragged out and beaten, no matter their color. It’s here in
Life Magazine
, photo and caption:
“In scheduling the concert the party-liners had hoped for just such a chance to become propaganda martyrs, so there was a tendency to conclude that ‘they asked for it.’ The Communists got more help from the hoodlums who stoned the buses than they did from their own fellow travelers.”

It’s the same as the Mexican press after we were attacked at Lev’s. We asked for those blazing guns and fire bombs and screaming panic and Seva shot, Trotsky organized it all himself. We are doing this to ourselves.