Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  Linda wrote to friends in New Jersey for a box turtle. We also had a large desert turtle named Little Dickens, not after Charles but because Linda saw a roguish look in the turtle’s eye, and every time I opened a drawer in Linda’s room, I found a horned toad. When we had to move from Redondo we had sixty pets to find homes for, besides the dog and the parakeet who remained with us. The dog, Kinch, was given to Linda by Andy, our niece, when Linda was seven years old; Kinch was the noblest, most wonderful dog I have ever known.

  George and I discussed whether we wanted to live the kind of life that his house-building was leading us into. We decided that we did not want it, and George set up a carpenter shop in our garage and began making cabinets for hi-fi sets instead. A combination of components had been recommended by Consumer’s Union, and people who bought them needed a cabinet. Each week a new customer would appear in answer to a small ad in the newspaper. George did the designing and building of the furniture, and I helped with the finishing.

  In April 1950 a little procession of neighbors came up our driveway with a lit birthday cake for George. The feeling in the neighborhood was friendly, neighborly—but this little party was the last of this neighborliness. The F.B.I. began its visits:

  “Whose car is that at your neighbor’s house?”

  “Do you visit those people often?”

  Nagging and persistent, it was clear from their questions that they had a dossier with information about us far back into our lives. They visited not only us, but every friend, every neighbor, every person who had signed a petition, every trade unionist, every supporter of Henry Wallace; Henry Wallace himself was suspect because he was a liberal. Visits from a neat, unobtrusive car with two gray flannel-suited young men with F.B.I. credentials and notebooks became routine. We decided to give no answers to their expert questioning, although their insinuation was: give information, tell all, expose your neighbors, friends, comrades—that is the only way for you to be safe. One young man did the questioning, the other took out his notebook. When I walked around in back of the one who was writing, he looked up and asked, “Are you going to watch to see what I write?”

  “I am going to do just that.”

  We were part of the movement which had begun with the mutiny at Manila. Now with war declared in Korea it was clear to us that Joseph McCarthy and General MacArthur, representing the policy of the Pentagon, sought to silence opposition to this war.

  Our friend Raf came to talk to us of his predicament. He was in more immediate danger than we were. He was free on a bail bond. A questionnaire had arrived in the jungle where Raf was working on a United States project to eradicate Hoof and Mouth disease in cattle. Each worker was to sign—“Yes or No! Do you believe in the forcible overthrow of the U.S. govern-ment?” Raf had answered honestly “No.” Later another questionnaire had arrived; the question this time was, “Have you ever been a Communist?” To which Raf answered, “Yes,” because years before, when he had been a student, he had been a Party member. The charge was perjury. It had seemed unlikely that a trial would ever be held, but now with this wave of repression, Raf decided that his trial would probably be called. He decided to leave at once for Mexico, and he asked us to take care of his family and to follow ourselves as soon as we could.

  The next day a friend from Hollywood called on us. “What would you think of me if I should leave the country?” he asked.

  We replied, “We are going to Mexico next week.”

  In preparation for going to Mexico, Linda, now ten years old, was reading a child’s account of the life of Benito Juarez, president of Mexico at the same time that Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States; he occupies the same position in the hearts of Mexicans as Lincoln does in the United States. Linda was talking in her sleep one night, and George went into her room; Linda sat up in bed, and patting the bed beside her said to George, “Sit down Juarez, you’re tired.”

  As Linda, George, and I drove to Mexico with the parakeet and our dog Kinch, we discussed our attitudes toward living in Mexico. We were quite sure we would be there for a period of years. We had our child, whose culturation and education had to be provided. What kind of life would we find for ourselves and for her? We said, “We will enter into the life of Mexico as it is offered. We do not want to live only within an expatriate group of foreigners in Mexico.”

  Linda had had to leave behind her mare, of whom she sometimes said, “I think she would take care of me like my mother.”

  On June 11, 1950, the Great American Desert was hot. We planned to drive only at night, but we couldn’t get across the desert in one night’s drive. Daytime temperature reached 120°; the tires heated to danger point, and the bird collapsed—he couldn’t hang on to his perch, and I rode along with my finger under his beak, holding it up. We all wilted. Linda had barely recovered from a viral pneumonia; she seemed a fragile child, but she traveled better than the rest of us. Water was for sale at service stations, and at one station the man said to George, “I’ll make you an iced coffee in my own glass.” It was a quart glass beer mug, and George and I shared it. In the station, which was air conditioned, was a fancy cage of parakeets; when she saw our bird, the woman said, “The last people through here before you gave me these birds, which were not surviving the heat.” At another stop a woman gave us cold watermelon—watermelon has never tasted so exquisite since.

  We crossed the border uneventfully and entered Mexico with a three-month tourist visa. At Chihuahua, we stopped at a hotel that was patronized mostly by Texans, a sort of spa with a swimming pool, gardens, and a restaurant. We rested and recovered—it seemed a delightful oasis after the desert. But we had not received any advice about hygiene or diet in Mexico, and in our resolve to enter into life in Mexico fully as it presented itself, we ate freely, and within three days Linda and I had la turista. In Linda’s condition it seemed too dangerous for her to continue on a hard trip of several more days’ driving. Linda and I took a plane to Mexico City, established ourselves in a hotel, called a doctor and collapsed into bed. George arrived three days later, came upstairs and fainted into the bathtub. We had arrived.

  In a few days we were able to emerge, holding each other up. We drove about the city to discover a pensione in which to convalesce. In the dining room the first day, we noticed an elderly gentleman, who eyed George with apparent recognition and stopped just short of speaking to us. George crossed the room, and said, “I noticed you looking at me; do you by any chance know my father?” He was old man Gerstle, from San Francisco, who knew George’s father and recognized a family resemblance. He sighed for bygone days in San Francisco, which were in his memory a golden age.

  “In what way have things changed?” asked George.

  “Why, just the other day one of our girls married a Polish Jew,” said old man Gerstle.

  “Who was that?” asked George.

  “David Sarnoff.”

  George understood—a German-Jewish girl of merchant class family had married into the family of a second-generation Polish immigrant (chairman of the National Broadcasting Corporation), and it was a lowering of class for the German-Jewish girl in the eyes of old man Gerstle.

  In Mexico City we got in touch with a family whose name had been given to us by our movie writer friend. We were received cordially, and with all the information and attention we needed, we began to find our way into Mexico City’s United States émigré and refugee circle, in which we lived for nine years. Through friends of these new acquaintances we found an apartment into which we moved within a few days, which had been built from an old wine storage room in the Monastery of Carmen in San Ángel. The plumbing was faulty, so we bathed in the garden in the fountain where water flowed more freely. The garden was the chief reason for living in this place; it was lovely and intimate, with a high wall and a stable for a burro in one corner. Linda immediately wanted a burro, and on our walks and drives to the outlying areas of the city
we always asked to see any donkey which might be for sale. We looked at many donkeys and finally bought one that seemed better trained and more willing than any other. He was very small and babyish, and Linda named him Pinocchiore. He became part of our household, greeting each entry through our gate with hilarious loud braying, indicating how lonely he had been for us in our absence. Linda arranged saddlebags across the donkey’s back and undertook the daily marketing.

  Linda was a small ten-year-old with long brown braids and brown skin from long hours spent on her horse. She was to all appearances a Mexican child. On her first trip home from market, with the donkey laden with our food, she met at the entrance to our alleyway beside the convent a bus-load of Canadian tourists, visiting the Carmen convent. By hand-signs they indicated they would pay her ten centavos if she allowed them to take her picture. She gravely collected the coins and silently stood beside her donkey before racing home to tell us the joke.

  We were prepared to receive political refugees, sure that many of them would be coming. A Hollywood family arrived and moved in with us in our convent apartment, and I began looking for a larger place. I found an old colonial house with thirteen rooms; the street floor also housed the San Ángel Post Office and a branch of a bank. Upper floors contained a patio, a ballroom, and a chapel. When we moved in, a young Indian girl was sitting on the doorstep—she made it clear that she had to be hired, that she belonged to the house. Francisca was an intelligent girl, whose grandfather came from back in the hills toward the mountains at which we looked from our windows. Her mother lived in a hovel on the outskirts of San Ángel, where the servants and the landless people huddled as in medieval times; she came to do our washing and ironing. I undertook the cooking because the severity of amoebic dysentery had made it clear to us that we could not eat carelessly.

  Our discussion of taking Mexico as it presented itself and entering its culture came to very little if one could not accept food when offered. The commonest cause of death at this time was enteric infection, and with all our care I think I had every variation of intestinal upset at least once. We were stopped short, for instance, of inviting and being invited in turn by Mexicans with whom we might wish to be friends. Mexico in 1950 did not yet have adequate supplies of pure water available; if pure water were available, and no other precautions were taken, U.N. research had shown that enteric infections would become a minor source of death.

  The Post Office and the bank beside our doorway brought everyone in the vicinity to our door. In our first days in the house we ourselves got lost in the thirteen rooms—we met Francisca’s relatives abruptly face to face, and we didn’t yet know them. We even met a few people wandering on our patio, looking for the Post Office. We had to be firm with Francisca about locking the downstairs door and about having so many of her relatives sleeping in the house. In the old colonial days, if one person from a family were hired, her whole family became dependent on the patron. We decided after a short trial that we would have no sleep-in help. The strength of custom was too strong if we let even Francisca sleep in, so she stayed overnight only to babysit.

  Our red-paneled truck was noticeable, and as we wanted to be able to visit our friends and acquaintances a little less conspicuously, we had the truck painted a dark blue. When Linda came home from school and looked at it, she said, “You might as well have Georgie Florist painted on it.”

  Our friends had recommended the Luis Vives school for Linda. We had no knowledge of schools here, and as our new acquaintances sent their children to that school, we enrolled Linda, and I accompanied her to school. The teachers were recent refugees from Spain; they had been educators, and Luis Vives himself had been a noted educator in Spain, but no person in the school spoke English. I spoke Spanish from two years of high school Spanish, which came back to me in this emergency, but for a little child it seemed too hard to be placed in the situation of having to learn the language all at once. The children came and invited Linda, and when she was reluctant to join them they politely stood near her and tried to talk to her. A man and a woman teacher taught in the double classrooms for each group. The methods seemed admirable to me, but we took Linda out of the school when we found that an American school existed which was qualified in the United States for grade school, high school, and college preparation. The appearance and size of this school made it seem very similar to a big United States consolidated school system. Spanish was taught half the day and English the other half; in the student body were included many Mexicans who wanted to enter American colleges or who wanted to be qualified with the English language and American business training. Before we enrolled Linda we talked with other refugee parents with children to be placed in the school. One parent who had several children talked to the principal for all of us and discussed the problems of children of leftist political refugees. He asked, “Will our children suffer from prejudice of the teachers or the administration of the American School?” He was assured that no prejudice would be allowed to continue if any became noted. We did not, in all the years of our child’s education there, hear of any such incident in the school. On the San Ángel schoolbus, however, before the parents put a stop to it, the children carried on a fascist-communist vendetta. We made it clear to our children that their parents’ politics was not to be carried over as an adventure on the schoolbus.

  More refugees arrived every week. We usually had an extra family staying with us until a house could be found for them. In a short time Carlin and her two children joined us, and Raf was reunited with his family.

  We noticed two men hanging around our house day after day, checking on us. On one visit from these surveillants, George and I were sitting on the patio with the man who was interrogating us. We were curious as to what questions he would ask. He had the same dossier, with all the same background that the F.B.I. men had had in California and all the same errors, but these were Mexican men, supplied with dossiers that the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had compiled. Little Miguel, an infant fourteen months old, wandered onto the patio with bottle in hand and diaper sagging; while the preoccupied man absently stroked the baby’s head, Miguel was saying, “Funnyman, funnyman,” which usually got a response from any adult. The policeman did not think, “Whose baby?”—babies are so usual in every Mexican household that it didn’t occur to him to wonder. Meanwhile, Raf was on our roof, and at the first sign that the questioning concerned his presence in the house Raf would have been away over the roofs.

  At our first meeting with our lady lawyer, we sat in the anteroom waiting until the door opened and her secretary said to George in Spanish, “Perhaps you could help us?” Our lawyer was standing on her desk, from which she was vainly trying to reach the light which hung on a central cord from the ceiling. We introduced ourselves, and George changed places with her and fixed the light. Then we said to her, “Two men, obviously from the C.I.A., are watching us. Can you do something about it?”

  She replied, “That’s not done in Mexico, we don’t have an F.B.I. or a C.I.A.; you must be mistaken.”

  We insisted, and she said, “Meet me early tomorrow morning at Gobernación [the Department of the Interior] and we will see who it is that you say is bothering you.”

  Next morning we entered office after office, where Carmen, our lawyer, would say to the secretary, “Oh Angela,” (or Maria, or Josefa) “may I please look in your files?”

  “Certainly Carmencita,” was the reply. Whereupon Carmen would call us over to look at picture after picture in the files. We did not recognize our men. “Oh,” said Carmen, “this is serious; they must be from the presidential secret police. We will go outside and look for them on the steps of the palace, where they congregate in the mornings.”

  As we walked toward the steps we saw our men and pointed them out to Carmen, who walked directly up to one of them. “My clients tell me that you are bothering them,” she said. “That is very ugly [Es muy feo]. I want you to stop at once. I want you to promise that you
will not do it anymore. I am instructing them to tell me at once if you do it again. If there is something you want to know, please come to me. I will confer with my clients. I will speak for them.” We never saw the men again.

  It is remarkable and strange that in the years when we were being questioned by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., our families were never disturbed, nor questioned. In Mexico we were friendly with many of the Hollywood exiles; George was in a way “their” proletarian, because George and his partner Carlos had a furniture factory, and our acquaintances turned any job they had over to George.

  I began to paint, and George and I both attended an art school in Mexico City; George attended because this was one of the ways to collect G.I. job-training money. He sketched and carved in wood while I sketched the model and worked in clay and in paint, but we did not talk to our friends about poetry, our publishing venture in France, or our connection to the poets. One day our friend Alice came knocking at our door. She was indignant. “I have been reading William Carlos Williams’ autobiography, and in it he mentions meeting at your house in Brooklyn, and that you were part of a group that published and wrote poetry! You never told me you were intellectuals!” I agreed with her that it was a failure in friendship not to have been frank with her.

  On our return to the United States, George and I determined to present ourselves as who we were, with all our past included. The first taxi man George encountered in Brooklyn said, “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”

  George in a previous stage of our “proletarianization” might have replied in kind, but he answered, “The weather is extremely cold.”

  “Yes,” the taxi man replied, “it’s seasonable.”

  We have always felt that our writing required distance from the politics of experience. Even the ideology of day-to-day politics is not a far-reaching truth. Our minds were occupied with these expedients in very material ways, and our stay in Mexico had been forced upon us. We were in exile in a country we had chosen only because we could enter Mexico without a passport when a passport was refused us. Our lives then were occupied with earning extra money in order to live a bourgeois life in Mexico, because to live as the lower classes live in Mexico is a life fraught with danger due to the lack of hygiene in such a poverty-stricken, undeveloped country. We were not expatriates by choice, and we were unrelenting in withholding ourselves from becoming exiles forever. We wanted more than anything to return home to the United States. To be artists in these conditions was impossible to us. We needed to be freely in our own country, to have time to assimilate the violent years before turning them into thought and poetry.