The Pledge (25 page)

“Why don't you shout it?”

“Ah, dear Bruce, I have such guilts over you. You found yourself a redheaded Irish girl and you walked into a bear trap, and all I can give you is some love.”

“I want to marry you.”

“Oh, yes, yes, bless your sweet heart. For the moment, let's go to bed and find each other again, and then tomorrow, if you want to, I'll get the day off and we'll go up to Boston and you can meet my mother and my sisters, which is something you want to do before you plant yourself in any family.”

“Not tomorrow,” Bruce said. “Tomorrow is the day before I get to hear the fate of my book, and it makes no sense to try to come and go in one day.”

“And what about the book?”

“Ah, well may you ask. Bronson has put me off for weeks, and it's damn near taken him and his editors as long to read the book as it took me to write it.”

“Bruce, it's not a novel. It's a large, important work, and it says something about the war that no one else has had the guts to say.”

“I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'm not happy about it.”

Neither was Bronson as he sat behind his desk facing Bruce, the manuscript of Bruce's book resting in a large box in full view. He tugged on his lower lip, his eyes going from the manuscript to Bruce and then back to the manuscript. “I should have called you earlier,” he said to Bruce. “I hate to put writers off, but I had to think this one out. You've written an extraordinary book, Bruce, but I can't publish it. It's not for our house.”

“And you waited all these weeks to tell me that? That was not your opinion when you read the first piece of it. You were ready to put your money on the line.”

“The first piece was not the whole book,” Bronson said unhappily.

“You're talking rubbish,” Bruce said, his anger increasing. “You damn well know that. The book is of a piece. The first hundred pages defined it and specified it, and now you tell me you couldn't publish because the theme changed. You sit with the book for weeks. First you tell me editors are reading it, and then you don't return my phone calls.” Bruce picked up the manuscript, started for the door, and then turned to Bronson and spat out, “Do you know what I think, sir? I think you're a damn liar and a damn coward!”

Bronson leaped to his feet, a big, fleshy man, his face reddening, came around his desk to face Bruce and tell him that no one had ever spoken to him like that before. “Damn you,” he said to Bruce, “by what right?” His voice turned into a shout, and his secretary opened the door to his office.

“Are you all right?”

“Get out of here!” Bronson snapped.

She fled, closing the door behind her, and now the two men stood facing each other.

“You had no right,” Bronson said. “You damn well owe me an apology.”

“Then you damn well owe me the truth,” Bruce retorted. “I'm no novice. I know what I've written.”

Bronson took a deep breath, and then he seemed to deflate, to collapse in upon himself. He took a few paces across his office and back, and then he said to Bruce, “Sit down, please.” When Bruce remained standing, Bronson went around his desk and dropped into his chair. “Please, Bruce, sit down,” he said again. “We'll talk.”

Bruce dropped into a chair, facing him.

“You called me a coward,” Bronson said. “Do you know anyone who isn't?”

“A few.”

“Introduce me to them. It hurts worse to call me a liar. If you had told me a year ago that I would sit here and say what I am going to say, I would have replied that you are out of your mind and dreaming nightmares. About three weeks ago, an FBI man came here to my office and informed me that the Director — J. Edgar Hoover, they call him the Director — anyway, the Director did not wish the book that Bruce Bacon had written to appear in print.”

“Come on — you're kidding.”

“No, no. Now you're getting the truth, naked, unvarnished. As naked as I feel right at this minute.”

“And you agreed to that? You let yourself be threatened by some horse's ass in the FBI? You dismantled the Bill of Rights and concurred in a filthy suppression that has no precedent in American history? You're telling me that you succumbed to this kind of pressure?”

“Take it easy, Bacon. Don't be so goddamned holy! And for your information, I did not toss your book out of the window at that point. I'm not defending myself, but for God's sake, don't brush me off like some damned right-wing bastard!”

No, Bruce thought to himself, like some liberal son of a bitch.

“That wasn't the end of it,” Bronson went on, pleading now. “I went down to Washington to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I saw Mr. Hoover — yes, J. Edgar himself, the esteemed head of the Federal Bureau. You know, during the worst of the Depression, I joined one of those left-wing organizations for a short time. Maybe two, three hundred members. Hoover had it all there in a folder on his desk. He told me I had been given an anti-American book, and if I published it, I should be ready for the consequences. They knew what women I had been to bed with. Once, during the war, we paid off a printer to get paper a little better than our quota provided for. He had that. He knew how many times I pissed. He had a précis of your manuscript, obviously given to him by some little shit in our company. He told me that the précis had been shown to the British and they had taken the matter to the White House. I don't know how much I believed of his threats, but he convinced me that if we published your book we would be out of business in very short order.” He paused, took a deep breath, and said, “All right. That's it. I don't function alone in this company. I have stockholders, I have a board of directors.”

“I'm sure,” Bruce said, rising and taking his manuscript. “I suppose I can be grateful that he didn't order you to burn the book. I'm sure you would have.” And then he turned and walked out of the room.

It was still early in the day, and with the manuscript under his arm, Bruce found a telephone booth in a drugstore, found the number he wanted in the phone book, and then called another publisher with a reputation as good as Scandia. He gave the young woman who answered his name and asked to speak to one of the editors.

“Will you hold on, please?”

The minutes ticked by while he searched his pockets for another nickel, found one, and dropped it into the slot. The woman was back on the line, informing him that Mr. Williams would speak to him.

“Is this the same Bruce Bacon who covered the war for the
Tribune?”

“The same Bruce Bacon.”

“Oh, how very nice — how very nice indeed. I was a great fan of yours. What can we do for you?”

“I have a manuscript I would like you to read.”

“Book length?”

“Over six hundred manuscript pages.”

“And do you want to submit it to us? I mean, it's rather strange. Most of our submissions come from literary agents. Do you have an agent?”

“I'm afraid not,” Bruce admitted.

“Well, no reason why you should if you feel you don't need one.”

“I would like to come by your office right now, if you don't mind, and leave the manuscript at your reception desk. There is no need for me to speak to anyone. My name, address, and telephone number are all on the manuscript box. Would that be all right?”

“Well, very unusual, Mr. Bacon, but quite all right. With your name, well, it won't go through our readers. One of our editors will read it himself.”

It was within walking distance, and that way, Bruce left his manuscript at the reception desk at the publishing house of Harley-Cummings. Telling the story of his experience that day, Bruce experienced a curious feeling of unreality, as if the day's happenings had unrolled slowly and turgidly in a surrealist painting.

When he finished, Molly was silent.

“What do you think?”

“I have cold shivers running up and down my spine, and you want me to think.”

“It seems to me,” Bruce said, “that somewhere down there in Washington, they have made the decision to wipe out the Communist Party, root and branch, and anyone associated with it. God knows why. There was a time when you people organized the trade unions and you sang with the voice of the people. I admit it. You made our songs and you gave this country a sense of itself it never had before. I've read all that and heard all that. You fought for the Negroes and for women's rights, and maybe it was a fight worth dying for, regardless of what went on in Russia. But what have you done since the war?”

“Fought for our existence, and that way we become more and more rigid and more and more impotent. We don't think anymore, and I'm not the only one who feels the life is being choked out of him. Our leadership, if you can call it that, has been arrested and will go on trial, and some of us estimate that there are maybe a thousand, twelve hundred FBI agents in the Party, which has a total membership today of about thirty thousand.”

“Then why are they so desperate to destroy you?”

“I can make a good guess. They're planning war with the Soviet Union, and we don't fit into their plans. They have already built three enormous concentration camps. For the
day
, when it arrives.”

“No — I go a long way with you, Molly, but not down that street. I simply don't believe it.”

“And if I told you yesterday that the FBI would blackmail a publisher out of publishing your book, you wouldn't have believed that either.”

“Not concentration camps. Who's in them?”

“No one at this point. They're built and ready, that's all.”

“Then why hasn't it broken as a story in any paper?”

“It sort of did in the
Times.
Slantwise with innuendo that makes it acey-deucy. Oh, Mother of God, I don't know. I've had enough, and I can't walk away from it. Not now. Not when the whole ship is sinking.”

A week passed, and Bruce heard nothing from Harley-Cummings. He began another book, planned as a much shorter work, a story of the Normandy landing and his own personal experience during that time. Molly, meanwhile, had arranged for both of them to visit Boston and meet her family. The party would be at her sister Mary's house, since her mother's tiny one-room apartment would scarcely be suitable for a family dinner. Mary had a pleasant house in Brookline. She and her husband, Joe Carlino, had their own hairdressing shop and they did very well with it. “But they're nice, decent, simple people,” Molly explained. “They have four kids, which makes me jealous, and they don't know a hell of a lot about anything except being honest and raising their kids as nice kids, and that's a lot, believe me.”

Bruce rented a two-door Ford, and they drove up to Boston on a cool August day. The sky was blue and full of cotton-ball clouds, and it was a rare and important outing for them. They talked and sang songs and talked again and enjoyed what modest scenery presented itself along the Merritt Parkway and Route 15. Bruce explained about the book, “It's pretty crazy, isn't it? I mean, here's my first book, two years of damned hard work, and it seems not to have the chance of a snowball in hell to be published, and I'm beginning a second one. I suppose it's a condition by now. If I don't write, I begin to wonder what I'm doing in this foolish world. I suppose some of the material will duplicate what I've written, but with another point of view. I went ashore there. I want to try to put down what I felt — the quality of my own terror.”

“It's a wonderful notion. You read so much of war and so little of the terror that goes with it.”

It was an odd feeling to drive again, after not having driven for years. At the end of the summer before, he had spent a weekend with his folks in their summer place at Indian Lake. They kept an ancient Buick at the lake, which was jacked up on blocks each fall, greased, and wrapped away for the winter. It was a wonderful antique, but something had gone wrong with it, and he lost his opportunity of driving it that summer.

“Like riding a bicycle,” he told Molly, “you don't forget.”

He had lured her onto a bicycle in Central Park. She protested that she had not sat on a bicycle since her thirteenth birthday. “I never owned one,” she confessed. “We were hand to mouth, and you don't buy bikes instead of food. But Nancy O'Hare had a bike, and she let me use it now and then, just up the block and down. She would have killed me had I gotten out of her sight.” But on a rented bike in Central Park, she rode very decently, and it became a favorite thing for Sunday mornings. He loved the way people stared at her, her long, straight red hair flying in the wind, her head high, her legs strong and lovely.

“Do you drive a car?” he asked her now.

“I do indeed.”

“Then we'll take turns.”

“If you wish. I'll drive and you can tell me one of your wonderful stories.”

When she took her turn at the wheel, Bruce said, “Did I ever tell you about Majumdar and the police spy?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“He was working out of Old Delhi then. You know, there's an Old Delhi and a New Delhi, and they stand a few miles apart. New Delhi is a mass of great grand government buildings that the British put up as a place to run India. Old Delhi is an Indian city, crowded, full of twisting lanes, crumbling houses, and assorted dirt and disease. I was only there for a few days, so I can't be too specific about it.”

“But this happened to Majumdar, not to you?”

“Oh, yes — yes, indeed. Years before I met him. In those days, every radical had a police spy attached to him — oh, not everyone, of course, but the important ones — and labor was very cheap, so why not? Well, Majumdar was doing much the same thing as in Calcutta, going from village to village with his newspapers, sometimes on foot, sometimes on a bike, and when he was on his bike, slow as he might ride, his police spy had to move at a run to keep up with him. Finally, the police spy pleaded with Majumdar that if he kept this up, he, the police spy, would surely die. He was forty years old, and he had a wife and four children, and if he dropped dead, the way the rickshaw runners dropped dead, who would feed his family? At first Majumdar was in no mood to help a police spy, but then he reasoned that the police spies were exploited by the British as much as anyone else, and thus he agreed to give the police spy a résumé each day of where he had been and what he had said.”