The Pledge (28 page)

“I can live with anything except the man who tells me what I must write or what I cannot write, because if I can't write what I have to write, my brain stops being mine. There's no damned sense living if you give your mind away,” Molly told Bruce.

“Was it the story about me? Molly, I don't give a damn what they or the
Times
or the
Daily News
says about me. The press was once sacrosanct. There was a time when I would have defined it as a priesthood of freedom, which is merely my penchant for bullshit. Since this started, not one damned paper in this city has given me at least the poor crutch of an editorial. Nothing. Yes — except your paper. So score one for the
Daily Worker.”

“I'm not putting them down,” Molly agreed. “They're good guys and they're dedicated, but that's not enough.”

“But what does it mean?” Bruce asked her. “Does it mean you're out of it, through with the Party?” How many times he had said to himself, Please God or whatever there is, please get her out of it before someone jails her or kills her. He was saying it now, and in spite of his determination never to demand this of her, he could not keep the note of excitement and anticipation out of his voice.

Molly heard it. “Poor Bruce, you want so desperately for me to be out of it.”

“But this means you're out of it.”

“No, darling — not unless they expel me. Maybe they will. I doubt it. The movement's going down, and in a way that breaks my heart. We meant something to this country. We go back half a century to the Wobblies, the lumber workers in Washington state and Oregon state, and we never turned our backs on wrong and we never put our tail between our legs and ran. We taught this country something about truth and courage and we left our dead wherever the battle was, and then it went wrong. Somehow, it went wrong as hell, not those slimy little bastards like Rankin and Nixon and the rest of them, but inside us, and instead of opening our arms, we're nitpicking us into hell. Oh, Jesus, I don't know. When I sang with the Southie chorus, and we sang ‘The Minstrel Boy,' I knew who I was and what my life had to be; you know, ‘His father's sword he has girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him.' That was me; it had to be me and my wild harp, and now it's gone — ah, Mother of God, where do we go from here?”

He took her in his arms, and she clung to him, sobbing. He tried to tell her that if she wanted her job back, they would give it to her; she had years behind her; but she knew better and through her tears tried to explain that none of it could be reversed. She was right, of course, and he knew it well and deeply. That at least he had seen better than she, that beginning as something unique and wonderful, coming out of all the different and remote American movements toward peace and brotherhood, a socialist movement began and flowered and then, through a freakish turn of history, hooked itself onto the tail of a man called Stalin and the little circle around him. He didn't see it clearly or scientifically or as a historian, which he was not; but he felt it and he absorbed it through all that Molly had told him; and he knew as well as she did that she couldn't go back.

“What in hell am I crying about?” she demanded, pulling out of his arms. “We have work to do. We have to get you through this stupid trial, and I have to find myself a job — no sweat,” she added as she saw the look on Bruce's face. “I can sling hash, I can type, I can use a sewing machine — no problem at all.” The next day she was waiting tables at the Downtown Café at Eighth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, and on the same day, Bruce was informed that his trial date had been set for late November.

“We can postpone the trial,” Sylvia Kline told him.

“To what end? Do we need more time than that?”

“No, we don't. Perhaps you do.”

“No — unless it runs into Christmas. I'd look forward to Christmas at home with my family. Can it stretch out more than three weeks?”

“Bless your heart, Bruce, not a chance. Three, four days — five at the most. You have been, by their lights, contemptacious. You haven't robbed a bank. They'll give us a day to pick the jury, and then they'll be on with it. We'll want your father down there as a character witness, and the editor of the
Tribune
, if you can talk him into it. Now, as I told you, I don't expect to win this shot, but I think I can do a good appeal. Contempts are rarely appealed, but this is something different.”

Everything was different, and he, Bruce Bacon, was being remade. When Molly first informed him that she had taken a job as a waitress, he was ready to explode with objections — to the tune of: No, absolutely not. You don't have to do that kind of work, I have enough money for both of us. Yet he controlled himself and managed to nod calmly, convinced that she'd never know what that took.

“For a few weeks, darling,” she said. “I can step out of it any time I want to. Look, I'm a big girl, and the way men put it, I'm built like a brick shithouse. I walk into a lunch place, and the job is mine if there's a job there to be had. I've done it before and I can do it again.”

“At least come and live with me. We don't have to pay two rents.”

“Sylvia says no.”

“You mean you raised it with her?” He was astonished.

“Of course. But she said not until after the trial, and I have so much junk, enough papers and books to sink your place. All in good time, dear love.”

Bruce was shaken and confused. She had used a phrase that stuck in his mind, “built like a brick shithouse,” a phrase he had heard a thousand times during the war, just as he had heard every foul word in the language a thousand times, and not the phrase itself but her use of it, the ease with which she identified herself, the ease with which she had walked into a job at some cheap restaurant. If he, Bruce Bacon, was being remade, what in God's name was the direction and the result? He had just asked her to give up her apartment and live with him, and the understanding was that they'd be married; but who was he marrying, looking at this tall, self-confident woman, self-confident to the point of arrogance? Or was it arrogance that allowed her to burst into tears the other day? Who was she? How did she connect with him? She had led him into a world beyond his experience, and now he'd be going to prison without rhyme or reason. He was in love with her. The thought was without content, and at this moment in his life, he would not attest to being in love with anyone. If you have to try to find love within yourself, where is it and what is it?

Bruce left Molly with the feeling that he would like nothing better than to get in a car and drive day after day after day, without any destination, but away from everything happening here. A child dreams that way: fix it in your mind and it will happen, except that in this case it would not happen and he would do what had been planned. Tonight was dinner at his parents' place. They had not suggested that he come with Molly or without her; he said he would come alone, and that was quite conscious, an action he had taken and then removed from his own right of inquiry, telling himself, They'll be pleased to be with me, just the family. They do have problems with Molly.

But it was not just the family. His folks had invited two old friends of his father, Dr. Jules Steinmott and his wife, Ellen, and since Molly was not to be present, they had asked the Steinmotts to bring their daughter, Roberta, who was a resident at Dr. Bacon's hospital. It was a family thing, and Bruce had known Roberta since they were kids. She was four years younger than he, a bright, pretty young woman, round-cheeked, with large, wide-spaced brown eyes. Ellen Steinmott was a medical researcher, and where Steinmott was plump, pince-nez, and very bedside, his wife was thin and ebullient.

There had apparently been a prior decision by all but Bruce not to talk about his current trouble or the Un-American Committee, and to Bruce that was something of a relief. Roberta, who had not seen Bruce since before the war, was in awe of his romantic image, if not of him, and kept turning away his questions about the pros and cons of being a lady doctor in a world where there were so few; she would much rather hear his own stories. Was it true, for instance, that soldiers under fire never caught cold, regardless of the weather conditions? That they got trench foot, but not colds? She had read a paper on psychosomatic causes of the common cold. Bruce could offer no evidence either way. He was in a more difficult position with Mrs. Steinmott and India. Some years past, she had read a popular book entitled
Mother India
, which purported to be the truth about the great subcontinent. And was it? Bruce had never read the book, and he tried to convey the vastness of the place and the fact that he had seen only one small part of it. The papers had been full of India ever since its independence came about, full of the awful bloodletting between the Muslims and the Hindus, a recent history Bruce would just as well not discuss, knowing how causes and results were twisted and confused in the American media, and he was relieved when the talk turned to the astounding medical advances and discoveries that had come out of the war. They grasped at that, as if to squeeze some seeds of goodness out of the awful horror.

After dinner, he fell into conversation with Roberta. The two men had gone into Dr. Bacon's study to have their cigars and brandy, and Mrs. Bacon and Mrs. Steinmott were across the living room, immersed in their own conversation and recollections.

“You've had a real rotten deal, haven't you?” Roberta said softly. “I know we all have an agreement not to discuss it, but I'm damned if I could leave here and not know how hurt you are.”

“A little hurt. I'll survive.”

“Your dad talked to mine. I know the details in a rough kind of way. According to the few knowledgeable people I've spoken to, you've done nothing wrong.”

“Ah, bless your heart, and the devil with all that. Now tell me about you and the practice of medicine.”

They talked for hours. It was close to midnight when the Steinmotts rose to leave. Bruce had topped off the wine at dinner with three brandies; and now he felt warm, tired, and quite sleepy, and informed his folks that, if they didn't mind, he'd stay overnight. It was a very strange feeling to be in his bed in his old boyhood room. While the Bacons kept it as a guest room, they had changed very little in the room, and crawling under the sheets and the comforter, Bruce felt a wonderful sense of security. As when a child, when the sheets and comforter were neck high, he had felt beyond danger. Now, he was suffused with a warm glow. He had drunk just enough to mellow him and yet not enough to trouble him, and for the first time in months, he fell asleep almost instantly.

When he awakened in the morning, he was almost totally disoriented. Where was he? In the instant of not yet being fully awake, his life was like something he had dreamed. Then he was awake, and reality returned.

He had breakfast with his father and mother, the kind of breakfast he had eaten there long, long ago, bacon and eggs and bran muffins and two kinds of jam and coffee. He shared a taxi with his father, who went out of his way to drop him off at Seventy-sixth Street and Lexington. When he opened his door into his living room, he saw Molly curled up on his couch and sleeping.

As he stood staring at her, she opened her eyes, blinked, stretched, and then came to him and threw her arms around him. He returned the embrace, holding her tightly to him. This time,
his
eyes were clouded with tears.

“I was calling you,” she said. “I called until four o'clock in the morning, and then I knew that something awful had happened, and here I came, my darling, with what I could have of you, and your place and your books, and oh, Jesus, I was so scared, and I don't give a damn where you were, only that you're here and safe.”

“I was with my mother and dad, and it got late and I decided to spend the night there. Why didn't you call me there?”

“Ah, darling, I cannot call there, don't you understand?”

“Have you eaten? Have you had breakfast — or dinner, for that matter?”

“No, and I guess I don't have a job either. I should have been there for breakfast at seven, and it's past eleven now, and I don't give a damn, with you alive and well. Anyway, I hate waiting tables. I'll get something selling stuff.”

Bruce took her to a saloon on Third Avenue, where, confessing that she had not touched food since lunch the day before, she downed an enormous plate of hamburgers and fried potatoes. Finally, filled with food, relaxed, she smiled at him, touched his hand across the table, and said to him, “You ran, my dear one — ah, don't deny it. I understand it only too well. I think you want to love me, but I'm also frightening to you, and underneath, in your heart, you blame this whole rotten committee mess on me —”

“No!” he interrupted. “No! Absolutely not! You are wrong as hell.”

“Then why did you run, dear Bruce? Don't lie to me. I know you better than you know me. You can go to bed with a woman who talks of herself as being built like a brick shithouse, but no way can you commit to her. My dear, sweet Bruce — now please, please believe me, and I am going to tell you that you can get up from this table and walk out of here and never see me again, and I will not be on your conscience or ever trouble you again. I am free. But we have nothing unless you are free.”

“You could do that?”

“I damn well could.”

“And the love you speak of?”

“I love you and I'll love you all my life. What the hell is love? Handcuffs? Chains? If you had gone to bed with some dame last night, I might think that your brains were in your gonads, but I would not toss my love away.”

“And you did think that last night?”

“No, you damned fool. If I had thought that, I would have rested easy. I thought that you were hurt.”

“Where now?” he asked as they left the restaurant.

“I'm tired. Let's go to your apartment. We neither of us have a job.”