The Pledge (34 page)

“You know we intended to get married?”

The doctor nodded, waiting.

“The point is that under Federal law, only lawyer, wife, and family get visitation rights. Facing that, Molly and I felt that we had to take some action. Well, we did. We got married.”

Dr. Bacon waited, saying nothing, while Bruce spelled out the story, and then Bruce waited, sick over the mess that the whole business had become, wondering what his father would say, what he could say. What he finally said was “You should have trusted me, Bruce. You should have known me that well. But maybe no son can know his own father, any more than we can know our sons.”

“If I don't think of you as my father,” Bruce said, “but only as Dr. Bacon, I think I'm privileged to know you. You're a gentleman in this strange damned world where the word has lost all its meaning. That's why I came here and spelled it all out. I don't know whether we did the right or wrong thing. We're not thinking very straight. Molly has given many years of her life to a movement that lost its way somewhere along the line, and now its people are being hounded and persecuted and jailed as if they were the early Christian martyrs, and none of them quite understands how it came about. If anything, they are the most innocent and naïve people I ever met, and on the other hand, stubborn to death and ready to be jailed or die or anything else that's necessary to do what they think they must do to bring about the brotherhood of man. They've been isolated, beaten down, driven out of unions they organized, with the whole country turned against them, every newspaper in America calling them demons — and so help me God, Dad, the only thing I can compare them to is our Boy Scout troop when I was a kid, as crazy as that sounds. And as crazy as it sounds, the illusions are not so different, and this is what I've married, a wonderful, crazy woman who believes in Karl Marx and Jesus Christ and the church and the Communist Party and the working class and the brotherhood of man, and me, Bruce Bacon, whatever that is.”

“Whatever it is,” his father said, “it's a pretty good thing. Your mother and I haven't done too badly. I want you to bring her with you tonight.”

“She doesn't want to come.”

“Then see to it that she does, that she changes her mind. Come at seven-thirty, and by then I'll have had this out with Elizabeth, who is quite someone in her own right. We'll expect you.”

It took a half hour of argument, but in the end she gave in. “It probably means my job,” Molly told him. She was working the dinner hour in a small Italian restaurant on Fifty-second Street, and here it was already four o'clock and too late to find a replacement. “It's a hell of a thing to do.”

“Molly, God damn it, I'm going to jail tomorrow.”

“I would have seen you later, you know that. Don't make a Federal case out of this one, and for God's sake, let's not have a quarrel. I couldn't stand that.” She called the restaurant, and Bruce could hear the explosion at the other end of the wire. “I'm fired,” she said, putting down the telephone. “Oh, Jesus, I'm getting scared.”

“Look, darling — please, dear good wife —” He put his arms around her. “Sylvia will pick up my bail money after we surrender. That's five thousand dollars, and I already told her that the money goes to you. That'll take care of everything, and I still have a few thousand in my bank account, and you have power of attorney over that, so you'll be all right and you'll have a break to try to get a decent job.”

“Waiting tables is a decent job. Don't give me that kind of thing. Bruce, we're married ten minutes and we're tearing each other apart.”

“No, we're not tearing each other apart. We're high-strung and we're frightened.”

She clung to him. “All the things to do,” she said. “I have to get rid of some of this junk. I'll keep the wing chair and the books, but the rest goes. I bought the wing chair secondhand, but I love it. But I have to find room for your stuff.”

He led her to the bed. “Come on, baby. We'll lie here for a while and let the knots work themselves out — just lie here and be next to each other.” They stretched out on her bed, clinging to each other, and then they dozed off. It was almost seven o'clock when they awakened, and Molly rushed to change into her gray skirt and white blouse.

“I should wash my hair, but there's no time,” she said. “I'll tie it all in back and it won't look too awful. Should I wear makeup? I never know how people like your folks feel about makeup.”

“You look beautiful.”

She was subdued, like a very young girl, when they arrived at the Bacons' apartment, and then surprised and amazed when Elizabeth Bacon put her arms around her. At first Molly held back, but then she let go and accepted the small, thin body of the older woman against her own. Dr. Bacon made cocktails, and dinner revolved around a handsome rib roast. The conversation was as ordinary as they could make it. Dr. Bacon talked about the hospital and his work, and Mrs. Bacon finally intervened, explaining to Molly that it was one thing to have an internist bring home his work, and something quite different where a surgeon was concerned. Bruce turned the talk to the theater. He and Molly had seen Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
a few weeks earlier, and Bruce's mother complained that they rarely got to the theater anymore. “I miss it,” she said. “I really do miss it.” About Miller's play, Bruce and Molly had divergent opinions. Bruce liked it; Molly was untouched. Faulkner had received the Nobel Prize for Literature a few weeks before, and Dr. Bacon wondered whether Sigrid Undset had ever won the prize. No one could remember, but Molly, who had said little, told how she had discovered Sigrid Undset in high school and had fallen madly in love with
Kristin Lavransdatter.
Elizabeth Bacon was pleased. She and her husband were both great fans of the school of Scandinavian writers, and the talk turned to Hamsun and Bojer. Bruce, as always, observed Molly, amazed at how relaxed and easy she was. Elizabeth Bacon did not give in to any tears, an agreement reached with her husband, and when they finally got down to discussing the details of Bruce's incarceration and what their visiting privileges would be, it was done as a matter of course. Dr. Bacon had already spoken to Sylvia Kline, and now he assured Bruce that he would stay in touch with her and do whatever was necessary, and when the evening was over, they all embraced, and Elizabeth Bacon told Molly, “We won't have another wedding, but we will have a good party and celebration when Bruce comes home.”

When they arrived at Molly's apartment, she had fallen into a dark, brooding spell, and when Bruce argued that his parents had taken her to their bosoms, Molly shook her head hopelessly. “They covered every normal feeling. How can I ever know what they think — how can I know what you think?”

“Only by what I say and do. We're different — but that doesn't change anything that we have in common, and I mean a long love and friendship. I think being married to a man on his way to jail spooks you.”

“Maybe. God knows! Let's go to bed.”

The alarm clock exploded their sleep at five-thirty in the morning, and an hour later they had met Sylvia at Pennsylvania Station and were on their way to Washington. They had breakfast in the dining car, where Sylvia spelled out the process. “We go first to Judge Wilson's courtroom, where I've arranged to make one more plea — this time to suspend your sentence. There have been a few halfhearted columns of criticism and distaste in the
Times
, the
Tribune
, and the
Washington Post
, very milky stuff. After what happened in Hollywood, they're beginning to worry about so many writers being sent to jail. It smacks too much of a full-fledged police state, and with the Hollywood Ten, you and a dozen others from here and there, Europe is beginning to realize that something most peculiar is happening here. Some say that Mr. Truman is planning something against Russia and this is all buildup, but God only knows; and if the administration feels it is moving too fast, they may just advise Wilson to suspend sentence. Anyway, it's worth a try.”

“And if he says no?”

“Then it starts. We say goodby, and Molly kisses you, and I shed a few tears over being such a lousy lawyer —”

“And he kisses you, and we both tell you what a great lawyer you are,” Molly interrupted. “I feel so helpless.”

“And after everyone kisses everyone?”

“They take you downstairs to the holding cells, and there you're fingerprinted and photographed, and then, from what I could learn, they put you into one of those prison buses and shuttle you off to the District jail. But that's just a holding jail, although it's pretty big. Eventually, you'll be sent from there to one or another of the Federal prisons.”

“Where? Which one?” Molly asked her.

“I don't know yet. But when they decide, they'll let me know. I've already written to James Bennett — he's the chief of the Bureau of Prisons — and asked that as a world-renowned writer and a person of flawless character, you be given some kind of special treatment.”

Bruce stared at her over his plate of sausage and eggs. “You said all that about me?”

“I said it because I believe it. Anyway, Bennett has the reputation of being a thoroughly decent man, and if the letter does nothing else, it will open a dialogue with him — which I want. You know, a good part of this country may be brown-nosing McCarthy and his lunatics, but there are still good people around, and I want you to know that, Bruce.”

Bruce tried to remember her words, standing with Sylvia in front of Judge Harwood Wilson, who stared blankly ahead of him as Sylvia pleaded, “My client is not a criminal, not a communist, only a writer and a gentleman, and as a gentleman he could not bear witness against a woman he loved.”

“You've made quite a romance out of it, haven't you, Miss Kline?”

“I am not pleading for a criminal, Your Honor. He does not constitute a danger that must be removed from society.”

“Neither does he have some destructive disease. Or does he, Miss Kline?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“He appears to be in excellent health. Doesn't he, Miss Kline?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I don't think a year in prison will harm him. You will recall that he was offered an opportunity to purge himself of contempt by answering the questions he had originally refused to answer, and this opportunity to purge was rejected. He has only himself to blame.”

“I referred to that, Your Honor.”

“No, counselor. The law is specific. He has broken the law, and his sentence is what the law allows. Your motion is rejected, and the prisoner, Bruce Nathaniel Bacon, is remanded to the Federal marshal.”

As the marshal led him away, Bruce looked back at the two women who had become so very much a part of his life, one his lawyer and the other his wife, two women so unlike any women he had known before the war as to suggest a different species. They tried to compose their faces and pretend to no tears by not wiping away the tears that already filled their eyes. The marshal swung him around to lead him into the corridor. At this point, he was immensely relieved that the waiting was over. That took a weight off his shoulders, and now he was genuinely interested in what lay ahead, a new place to cover, to experience, and to write about. If he were a fiction writer, he might have been able to imagine and anticipate it; but he was not a fiction writer, and all through his life he had discovered that what he imagined and anticipated was never the real thing. To lie in a wet shellhole, pleading for the rain to stop and for the guns to stop, and pleading without any belief in the God he was pleading with, was as far from any of his reading as anything could be. So here was a reality, and he had twelve months to study it.

Routine at first. The Federal marshal had snapped handcuffs onto his wrist, and in the elevator kept a firm grasp on Bruce's arm. He was a big man, an inch more than Bruce's six feet, and fifty pounds heavier, mostly in a large paunch that pressed against his belt. He had no voice, opinion, or pleasantry, and therefore became simply an ambulatory object who led Bruce out of the elevator and into an area where there were other marshals, tables, desks, and a holding pen.

Here the handcuffs were removed, and Bruce was fingerprinted. Then he was given a cloth wet with cleaning fluid to wipe the black ink from his fingers, and then he was put in the holding tank, an iron cage about fifteen feet square. He was still wearing his suit, sleeveless sweater instead of a vest, tie and blue shirt, and topcoat. He had in his wallet fifty dollars and a driving license and identification, namely, an insurance card and his membership card in the Newspaper Guild. Also, his father's professional card and Molly's picture.

There were three other men in the holding tank, one black, two white. The black man was heavy, fat, and middle-aged. He grinned and said, “Welcome to the Ritz, sonny.”

The second man, dark, heavy mustache, sat on a stool, crouched over, staring at the floor. The third man, young, curly black hair, two or three days of blue beard on his cheeks, said, “That motherfucker don't talk.”

“Who did you kill, sonny?” the black man asked.

“He's a banker, done in the investors, the assholes.”

“You a banker, sonny?”

“I'm a writer,” Bruce said.

“Assholes put money in banks. I break my ass to get it out, but put it there? No way.”

“You never had enough money to put in a bank,” the black man said.

“Yeah? Yeah? How the hell would you know, shithead?”

“Say that word!” the black man shouted. “Just say it!”

“Shut up, both of you!” a guard yelled.

A few minutes later, sandwiches were brought, two slices of rye bread with a slice of salami between, each sandwich wrapped in paper. The man on the stool didn't budge. The guard tossed him the sandwich and he let it fall to the ground in front of him. Bruce stared at the sandwich with distaste. He had no appetite, no desire for food, and the black man, who was devouring his own sandwich with large bites, said, “If you don't want it, sonny, give it to me.” Bruce handed it to him. The young man with the curly hair said, “Share, you motherfucker, share.” The black man grinned and pointed to the fourth sandwich, lying on the floor. The young man yelled after the guard, “Coffee — where's the coffee?” The man on the stool kicked away his sandwich, and the young man picked it up and ate it. A guard came by with tin cups and a pitcher of a dark fluid that was hot but tasted of nothing in particular.