When We Argued All Night

by Alice Mattison

  —What are you talking about? Artie said.

  —I’m doing what I should be doing, Harold said.

  —And you think I’m not? Artie said. I told you to get a job with the Board of Ed for years. Now you’re giving me a song and dance?

  —No, no, Harold said. I was thinking aloud.

  This was the work he was supposed to do, this was the work that joined his love of literature with his miserable greed for social justice. He got off the phone doubting himself. Maybe he’d be just as afraid on Monday.

  He was not. He began to like the people he taught, these creatures between children and adults. He began to type stories and essays he found for them onto mimeograph stencils, then run them off. He learned how to get the mimeograph machine to work without tearing the stencils. By his second year he was famous for it: they’d call him when the machine jammed. He joked and cajoled his students until they cared about what he’d found.

  Harold joined the Teachers Union, though everyone knew it was full of Communists, and he talked Artie into joining as well. The TU worked in the Brooklyn streets with poor kids, worked on integration, worked on civil liberties. The Teachers Guild, he said to Artie—the tamer union—was more interested in pensions.

  The first time Artie went to the cabin without Harold—Harold and Myra now had part ownership and encouraged him and Evelyn to go—he made up his mind to learn to swim. Evelyn could swim a little, but though she loved the sounds and smells of the woods, she didn’t like having to cook in the makeshift kitchen, and she seemed to hold the lake responsible. She took a brief, hasty swim each warm afternoon, as if it were required, then didn’t get wet again. Artie, one eye on the girls, watched her while she splashed a few feet, out where the water came up to her neck. She made more noise than Harold did when he swam and produced more foam. She thrust her head in its white rubber bathing cap back and forth.

  In anticipation of this week in the country, Artie had taken a book about swimming from the library, and he tried to persuade Evelyn to read it. Her sense of humor had become more acid with motherhood, and the way in which she found Artie’s suggestion funny hurt his feelings.

  —Okay, he said, you’re the expert. I merely note that you can’t swim ten yards without getting tired.

  —I merely note that you can’t swim at all, she said. So Artie decided he could teach himself to swim without getting the book wet, not an easy proposition. He forced himself to walk quickly into the cold lake because Evelyn was watching—or maybe he could even be seen by one of the people in the few quiet houses that now were spread around the lake—and leaned forward, gingerly putting his face in the water while holding his breath. Eventually he learned to turn his head to one side to take a breath and let it out under water. He dared to open his eyes. He practiced the flutter kick while holding onto the dock, to which a canoe was now tied. By the end of the week he could propel himself a few yards through the water.

  The following year Artie and Evelyn paid Harold and Gus to rent the cabin for two weeks in July, and that became their habit. Brenda especially loved it—well, they all loved it, but Brenda would disappear, walking as far as she dared, returning late, or she’d go into the woods with a book and not be seen for hours. Evelyn had learned to drive and announced that she’d never liked swimming in the lake, with its rocks and weeds. Schroon Lake village, a few miles away, had a sandy beach with lifeguards. Artie insisted there was nothing like swimming in front of the cabin (I can dive from bed into the water! he said, though he couldn’t dive), but on warm afternoons Evelyn slowly drove the girls down the long driveway and onto the paved road to Schroon Lake. She unfolded a canvas chair and watched Brenda and Carol, who ran in and out of the water and splashed around under the lifeguard’s eye. Later, they walked up the hill, back to Route 9, and bought ice cream.

  Harold, who could go to the cabin whenever he liked—he and Artie both had cars now—found that he disliked being there with Myra and Nelson. They seemed to pick the hottest days of the summer for their vacation, and though it was cool at night, the days were slow and lazy, the hum of insects reproachful. Myra loved sleeping in the sun, getting browner, and Nelson, as he grew, carried rocks into the water and brought them out again, but Harold wanted to walk long distances, wearing out his restlessness so he could write. A few times he went alone, in fall or spring, for a weekend, and then the cabin was all he had dreamed of, except that he felt guilty for leaving Myra alone in the city with Nelson. Sometimes the shouts of children from houses across the lake made him look up from his book and think wistfully of his own child, who was more baffling and troublesome than children ought to be. Sometimes a fisherman’s motorboat interrupted the dense, layered quiet, but then the quiet returned.

  By the fall of 1951 Harold had long since learned to relax in the classroom, looking from one student to another, watching them think, watching them for the fun of it while they wrote or thought up answers to his questions. He caught himself making unconscious, habitual gestures, the kind students notice and laugh at, but he didn’t care. He tapped his chalk excitedly on the blackboard, making little dots, and the students joked about how many little dots they’d earned. This year another kid had big ears: Kenneth Duggs, tall and difficult, bright, with small, tight features. Sometimes their noses grew even before their ears, but Kenneth’s nose hadn’t grown yet, and maybe it would stay as it was, made tiny by his ears. He had a dark-skinned, tense face that sometimes forgot itself and looked curious. Harold couldn’t resist the curious ones.

  One Saturday, early that fall, a police car moved on a group of boys loitering late in the evening, some on the sidewalk and some in the East New York street, and Kenneth Duggs was struck by the car—knocked over so his head hit a fire hydrant. He died later that night in the hospital. Harold would never find out if his nose would have grown, if he would have suppressed or indulged his curiosity. A student phoned him late that night. Awakened, astonished both by the news and the child’s willingness to phone him, he began to cry. He put on his clothes, his hands shaking, and drove through the dark streets to the corner where a crowd was gathered, almost outnumbered by police cars. Harold stood at the edge of the crowd, in tears, for a long time. He saw no one he knew.

  The papers carried the story the next day. The officer said he hadn’t seen Kenneth with his dark skin and dark clothing, but witnesses said the street was bright with streetlights and headlights, and there was no reason for the car to move forward, certainly not so fast. On Monday, older teachers put their arms on Harold’s shoulders and told him not to let the kids talk for too long about Kenneth’s death. There was a ceremony in the auditorium, and Harold also went to the funeral, in a Negro church. The other teachers were almost as upset as Harold, but when neighborhood protests and marches kept happening—people wanted the officer brought up on charges—most of the teachers avoided the subject. Harold and his students talked of little else. They marched, they spoke out in impromptu meetings at churches. He found himself talking to their parents, drinking coffee in their kitchens. Harold was horrified and thrilled. The chairman of his department heard what he was doing and urged him to stop. I respect you for this, he said, but it’s not a good idea.

  Harold thanked him and went on to the meeting at the church, where he’d already agreed to speak, but he knew what the chairman meant. When Artie heard about it, he was exasperated.

  —I’m taking a chance, yes, Harold said. But the boy—the boy is dead.

  —Oh, stop sounding superior, Artie said. With your nefarious past . . .

  —They don’t even care if you’ve got a nefarious past, Harold admitted, once they get interested.

  —So you need to be a hero?

  Since the passage of the Feinberg Act by the New York State legislature two years earlier—subversive persons were to be eliminated from the teaching profession—the Board of Education had been investigating and firing teachers suspected of Communist ties.

  Artie kept talking, moving on to the q
uestion of what Harold should say if he did get called in. Look, you quit the party years ago. Tell the truth, if anybody asks. You joined and you quit.

  —It’s not that simple, Harold said.

  —Of course it’s that simple. You wouldn’t be a fool and take the Fifth, would you? Let some kind of crazy idealism ruin your life? People who do that have a death wish.

  —Stop it, you don’t mean that, Harold said.

  —Of course I mean it.

  Harold sighed. Why did they have to discuss this? You mean I’d name the people I knew? If it happened to you, you wouldn’t do that.

  —Of course I would, Artie said.

  Harold knew he should get off the phone. Myra, heavily pregnant with their second child—and always testy because she didn’t want to gain too much weight and ate as little as she could—was demanding tearfully that Nelson get out of the bathtub. If she got upset enough, she’d frighten him. He said, Nobody’s asking me anything at the moment.

  Teachers were accused of perjury if they denied membership in the Communist Party. If they admitted it, they were asked to name other Communists they’d known, and they were fired if they didn’t. Harold knew quite a few teachers whom he’d known years ago in the party. He finally hung up. I’m going out for a paper, he called to Myra, and put on his coat, though he could hear Nelson crying now. Outside, feeling in his pocket for change, he found himself walking not toward the newsstand but toward the station. No, that made no sense. He went home without a paper, let himself in, and offered to read to Myra. She lay flopped on their bed, almost on her face, her dark red hair scattered, her belly to one side—it aroused him, the look of her big belly—and her nightgown hiked up around it. He read Edna Ferber aloud, starting at the top of the page where she’d left a bookmark. Harold had a girlfriend, but he had managed not to go and visit her.

  Harold had been faithful to Myra for two years. One of the two women he was seeing at the time of his marriage worked at a magazine where he sometimes wrote and delivered book reviews. He was relieved when she changed jobs and he no longer knew her. The other was Naomi, the French teacher. She had found out soon enough about Myra and didn’t mind seeing him anyway. But a few weeks before his wedding, she put a stop to it. I draw the line, she said.

  Two years later he called her. She’d met a man, but when he proposed marriage, she had stopped seeing him, and whenever Harold turned up at Naomi’s apartment in the Village and asked for tea or a drink, she let him in. She looked older, still with a tense line between her eyes, and it was hard not to rub it away with his thumb. Sometimes he did. Naomi was unshocked by sex but surprised, each time, at how pleasurable it was. I don’t see why people think they should do this with only one person, she said, in bed one afternoon, a rainy afternoon when Harold had come from the library. We don’t talk with just one person. We don’t eat with just one person.

  —So you no longer draw a line, Harold said.

  —Yes, I have become depraved. You must lead your life as seems best to you.

  On the way home he’d pick her hairs off his clothes. Naomi shed.

  Myra accused him of sleeping with other women, becoming hysterical, but she’d always done that. Artie, who knew some facts, was disgusted. Harold had always suspected that Myra continued to see Gus Maloney, and he minded less than he thought he should. He liked knowing the cabin was his—almost his—so much that he didn’t care what it took to have it. Myra didn’t go there with Gus, he was sure of that; now and then she was mysteriously elsewhere, but only for a couple of hours. People need to live, Harold said to himself. He didn’t have daydreams of being with women—women were a responsibility—but of being alone at the cabin, writing and reading and taking walks, looking up to watch a bird or a boat, looking down again at a book.

  Alger Hiss, Harold wrote on the blackboard in his large loopy handwriting. This was a class of juniors—Kenneth’s class—and all he was sure about concerning the day’s lesson was that he would not talk about Kenneth. Underneath Alger Hiss he wrote Whittaker Chambers. Which name sounds like the bad guy? he asked. The class had been discussing A Tale of Two Cities. Harold wanted them to think about words themselves; he talked about the taste of words, and the kids laughed tolerantly. He made each of ten students read the famous first sentence of Dickens’s novel aloud: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . . Meanwhile, Harold pounded out the rhythm on the desk and shouted the repeated words. When he began listing the characters, the students were quick to see that Jerry Cruncher and Mr. Stryver resembled their names, but it was harder for them to hear anything in the names Charles Darnay, Sydney Carton, and Madame Defarge, even though Harold stretched it out ominously—Madahhhhme Defahhhhge . . .

  So he wrote Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, not sure how much the students would know about them, and asked his question.

  —But that’s not fair! shouted Harvey Edelstein, the shortest boy in the class and often the hardest to teach because he knew so much and couldn’t keep quiet. Harvey had no sense of nuance. He waved his hand back and forth, supporting his raised arm with his other hand, leaning forward at his desk.

  Harold didn’t want to talk about the innocence or guilt of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, he wanted to talk about their names, about the emotional effect of sound. But he couldn’t control the boy. His hand still raised, Harvey said, It’s unfair because you mean Hiss sounds like the name of the bad guy, just because when you hiss, that means something is bad—but Hiss isn’t guilty. Chambers is the bad guy, Hiss shouldn’t be in prison right now!

  —Do the rest of you know what he’s talking about? said Harold with a sigh. He put it as briefly and objectively as he could, explaining that Whittaker Chambers was someone who admitted that he used to be a Communist and claimed first that he knew Alger Hiss, and then that Alger Hiss was not only a Communist but a Soviet spy. He mentioned Hiss’s position in the Roosevelt administration. He decided to leave out the Pumpkin Papers (though Chambers’s concealment of papers that allegedly incriminated Hiss in a hollowed-out pumpkin was a delicious piece of the story), and just said that Hiss had insisted he wasn’t a Communist or a spy, that he was tried twice for perjury, and that the second time he’d been convicted and sent to prison.

  —Now, the learned Mr. Edelstein, Harold continued, gesturing grandly toward Harvey, has anticipated my admittedly lame point, which is that the name Hiss sounds bad. Maybe that’s too simple an example. Hisssss, he said. He wrote onomatopoetic on the board. And doesn’t Chambers sound good? Chaaaaymbers, he said, Darnaaaay. Doesn’t the sound give you a confident, happy feeling? Some students looked interested, others confused. Whittaker! Harold said then. Could a bad guy be named Whittaker? Whittaker, whittaker, whittaker—it sings!

  —So you think Whittaker Chambers is right because he has a nice name? Harvey said.

  —No, Harvey, Harold said, his chalk pointing straight at Harvey’s bright brown eyes. I think if they each had the other’s name, Harold said, Alger Hiss would be a free man today.

  One of the front-row girls giggled. But then he wouldn’t be him, he’d—

  He could not make himself clear today! I mean, he said, the man we call Alger Hiss would be free if his name was Whittaker Chambers. The jury had to decide who to believe, and they couldn’t believe a man with a name like Hiss. It’s deep in our consciousness—the lying serpent in the Bible.

  In fact, this was Artie’s argument. Artie was the one in love with the names. Both Artie and Harold assumed Hiss was innocent—everyone they knew thought Hiss was innocent—but Harold was more likely to blame the guilty verdict on the benightedness of the American public and the craziness of the congressman who’d made it his cause, Richard Nixon.

  —But, Mr. Abramovitz, do you think Hiss is guilty? Harvey Edelstein asked now.

  —That’s not for me to say, Harold said, and the bell rang. The clas
s filed out. He was free this period—the fourth—and would sit at his desk and eat the lunch he’d brought from home. He started to erase the board as the woman who taught next door stuck her head in.

  —What did you think of that memo? she said.

  Harold shook his head. The assistant principal was an old reactionary, and this woman—a union member like himself—was infuriated by his insinuations and demands, and she liked to relieve her rage by analyzing his awkward sentence structure. Harold had only glanced at this latest note to the faculty.

  —Alger Hiss! she interrupted herself. What the hell are you teaching?

  Harold looked over his shoulder at the blackboard. Dickens, he said. It all made sense—one of the kids even thinks I’m a Commie hunter.

  —Erase it anyway, she said.

  —That’s what I was doing. As he turned to erase the board while she glanced again at the offending memo, she said, Been meaning to tell you something. Speaking of Whittaker Chambers. I heard you’ve been making friends with his female counterpart.

  —Heard from who? said Harold. He was alarmed at the word female. Could she somehow have heard about Naomi? This teacher was a nice married woman. She would hate him.

  —London? she said. What did I hear—you’re in cafeteria patrol with her? Be careful.

  He relaxed. The home ec teacher? She’s one of those sweet women who’s going to turn herself into a little despot because she’s scared to be nice. I’m just trying to give her a little advice.

  —I wouldn’t be so sure she’s a sweet woman, his friend said. There are some bad rumors around.

  Was Beatrice London a famous loose woman? Did Harold’s friend think he’d seduce the likes of Beatrice London? It was absurd and annoying. He sat down and took out his tuna sandwich, and she said, Got to talk to the office about a kid, and hurried away.