The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  There were five, including Eaglin. They’d overdressed, overcompensated with vests and jackets, now arraying themselves on her chairs like some Soviet oil painting, postured as if on some intellectual assignment. In pursuit of that chimera, the Dialectical Whosis, when really there was to be no dialectic here. Only dictatorship. And the taking of dictation. Still, Rose sought to be forgiving. These men were too young, apart from Eaglin, to have survived like she had the intellectual somersaults of the thirties, the onset of European Fascism and of the Popular Front; they’d been children during the war. They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who’d become slaves of party groupspeak. None mattered in this room except the sole independent or thoughtful among them, a true and famous organizer, after all, a man of the factory floors, Sol Eaglin. And Rose Zimmer’s former lover. Eaglin in his bow tie, hairline now gone behind his high cranium’s arc like the winter’s sun setting. Eaglin the only among them man enough not to meet her eye, the only to grasp anything of the shame of it.

  Here was Communist habit, Communist ritual: the living-room trial, the respectable lynch mob that availed themselves of your hospitality while dropping some grenade of party policy on your commitment, lifting a butter knife to slather a piece of toast and using it in passing to sever you from that to which you’d given your life. Yet that it was Communist habit and ritual didn’t mean these boys were good at it, or comfortable: Rose was the veteran. She’d suffered one such trial eight years ago. They sweated; she felt only exhaustion at their hemming and throat-clearing.

  The oil painting made small talk. One leaned over and noodled with Rose’s Abraham Lincoln shrine, the small three-legged table bearing her original six-volume Carl Sandburg, a photograph of herself and her daughter at the memorial’s statue in D.C., propped in a little frame, and a commemorative fake cent-piece the circumference of a slice of liverwurst. The young man was fair, like Rose’s first husband—her only husband, yet Rose’s brain persistently offered this slippage, as though some next life lay before her, waiting to be enumerated. The man hefted the medallion and tilted his head idiotically, as if being impressed with the weight of the thing constituted a promising avenue of discourse.

  “Honest Abe, then?” he said.

  “Put it down.”

  He produced an injured look. “We’re aware you’re a civil rights enthusiast, Mrs. Zimmer.”

  It was typical of such an evening that every remark found itself getting to the point, whether it wished to or not. Here was the crime the party had invented for Rose, then: excess zeal in the cause of Negro equality. In the thirties she’d been what would later be called, by Red-baiters, a premature anti-Fascist. Now? A too-sensuous egalitarian.

  “I had a few slaves,” said Rose, “but I freed them.” At best, a poke at Sol Eaglin. Certainly lost on the young man.

  Eaglin stepped in, as he’d been destined to all along, to “handle” her. “Where’s Miriam tonight?” he asked, acting as though his knowledge of her daughter’s name mitigated his incongruous presence in Rose’s life: neither friend nor foe, despite that they’d a hundred times groped at each other’s forms in the darkness. Eaglin was a mere bland operative, an automaton of party policy. Tonight was definite proof, like she’d needed proof. You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma.

  Or, for that matter, the concrete of police work.

  Nor, incidentally, had she dislodged either man from his wife.

  Rose shrugged in reply. “At the age she’s reached I shouldn’t ever know her location, apparently.” Miriam, the prodigy, was fifteen. Having skipped one grade already she was a high-school sophomore, and a virtual runaway. Miriam lived in other families’ homes and in the dining hall at Queens College, flirting with Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual phonies, boys who’d a year or two before been scratching their nuts and slapping one another with rolled-up comic books on spinning stools in soda fountains or on the elevated trains, the kind of boys who fell silent, who even quaked, when they shared sidewalks with Rose Zimmer.

  “Playing footsie with Cousin Lenny?”

  “Sol, the one thing I can say with assurance is she’s anywhere but with Cousin Lenny.” It was Rose’s second cousin Lenin Angrush who’d in fact gifted Rose with the bogus giant penny. A numismatist, he called himself. Lenny, getting the time of day from fifteen-year-old Miriam? He could dream.

  “Let’s not waste any more time,” suggested the young man who’d been at her Lincoln stuff. Rose shouldn’t underestimate the brutal authority of youth: He had some. Eaglin wasn’t the sole power in the room just for being the sole power Rose chose to acknowledge. This young fellow was eager to distinguish himself, likely in the context of some jousting with others present, for status as Eaglin’s protégé. That itself, only a prelude to stabbing Eaglin in the back. Surely that was it.

  Poor Sol, really. Still neck-deep in the paranoid muck.

  Rose poured them coffee, this brave cohort who’d come to declare she’d picked the wrong Negro. They were talking; she really ought to listen to the verdict. Short of severing the affiliation, Rose would no longer be welcome to the privilege of acting as recording secretary at meetings with union officials, including the union at her own workplace, Real’s Radish & Pickle. Her last duty in the party, stripped. There at Real’s, Rose enjoyed the honor of serving in horrified silence as her ham-fisted comrades bullied workers whose daily facts, whose solidarities, forged side-by-side plunging elbow-deep in barrels of chill salt brine, put to shame the abstractions of the posturing organizers, those arrayed in their dapper suspenders and unwrinkled plaid, not knowing enough to be unashamed of these Halloween-hayride proletarian costumes.

  These men in her apartment, they could needless to say go to hell.

  Yet Rose’s usual fury was inadequate to the occasion. This kitchen-ful of moral bandits, even Eaglin, appeared to her sealed in distance, voices dim. The room’s events unspooled before her as if scripted, something happening not to her but to another. A one-act play, worthy of Sunnyside’s Socialist theater troupe, set in Rose’s kitchen and starring her body—her body’s behaviors being the matter under disputation—but no further portion. Heart, if bosom contained one anymore, not in attendance. Rose no longer here. This excommunication something that had already long ago been concluded. She warmed and refilled coffee, gracing the lynch mob with use of her mother-in-law’s Meissen china, even while they alluded, in terms just oblique enough to salve their own shame but not hers, to Rose’s sex life. Presumed to tell her who to fuck. Who not to fuck, exactly. Or, not to fuck at all. Not to make her own bedroom solidarities with men who, unlike themselves, had the stature and self-possession to want her, to be undeferential to Rose.

  For these occupiers of her kitchen, even in their executioner’s errand, were pathetically deferential: to Rose’s force, to her history, to her chest twice the circumference of theirs. She who’d marched in protest of Hitler’s New York birthday party on Fifth Avenue, while American brownshirts pelted her with rotten vegetables. She who’d marched for blacks practically before they marched for themselves. Bringing revolution to Negroes, fine. To have one particular black cop in her sheets, not so fine. Oh hypocrites! Their incessant, mealy-mouthed usage, again and again droning out of the fog of their talk, was “associations.” They were troubled by her associations. They meant, of course, the association of her rapidly aging Jew Communist vagina with the black lieutenant’s sturdy and affectionate penis.

  Yet Rose took orders like a mad lobotomized waitress: A little milk, or cream? With sugar? Oh, you like it black, perhaps? So do I. Her tongue stayed stopped, wit unexpressed. A recording secretary, she recorded. Shorthanded her own tribunal as she would that of another, onto some distant mind’s tablet. Shorthand, even mental shorthand, an act of fingers scratching at some page barely registered by the mind itself. Here’s Rose Zimmer, née Angrush, the scourge
of Sunnyside, she who ought to be punching like a boxer against the elastic shadows that filled her kitchen, these ghastly shades of doctrine, and she couldn’t care. This second trial was, really, only a lousy parody of the first. That first one, that had been something. Then, Rose was important in American Communism. Then, she’d been importantly Communistically married, about to be importantly Communistically divorced. Then, she’d been young. She wasn’t anymore.

  Now mental pen quit scraping mental tablet. Rose receded even further from the events before her, a present life under assault of disarrangement. “Eaglin?” she said, interrupting some droning insinuation.

  “Yes, Rose?”

  “Come outside.”

  The nervous glances that ensued, Eaglin quelled, using his brow like an orchestra conductor would a wand, to cease his players’ tuning. And then he and Rose stepped outside, into the air of the Gardens.

  ————

  The ashtray was a pure fetish: obloid, smooth-polished black granite, weighing enough to use as a stop against a pressure-hinged door or indent a man’s skull. Finding it full yet again of Pall Mall stubs, you’d lug it to the kitchen with both hands to overturn it in Alma Zimmer’s trash. Then rinse it in the sink, for Alma, Rose’s unwilling mother-in-law, had made it plain she liked to see it come back gleaming again—never mind that three or four smokers, Albert’s comrades, might be waiting to stub by the time you returned. Imagine making room for that ashtray in your bags as you fled Lübeck! Alma had done so. Who knew who’d hoisted that baggage, whose wrists the ashtray and the load of paper-wrapped Meissen had strained? Surely not Alma’s. Porters, Rose supposed, and when no porter was available, Alma’s brother, Lukas, or Alma’s son, Albert. Albert Zimmer. Rose’s future husband, a rich Jew deluded he was German even as the Nazis marched.

  And who could say what other treasure had been left behind, in favor of these things? The ashtray, souvenir of Alma’s deceased husband’s bank desk, was a chunk of German reality, imported against absurd obstacles, to prove the unreality of Alma’s present circumstance. That being: Broadway and Ninety-Second, the Knickerbocker Apartments. A one-bedroom on this island of Manhattan, furnished conspicuously with what could be saved apart from the ashtray, the half set of china, a crucial framed photograph or two (showing Alma among cousins, on Alpine vacations, they might as easily have been Nazi memorabilia to Rose’s eye), Viennese-lace curtains. An apartment less a home than a memorial to the life abandoned. Two windows staring onto Broadway traffic to replace a house placed high enough in Lübeck’s posh district to give panoramas of both river and mountains, next door to none other than the family home of Lübeck’s great scion Thomas Mann, the Buddenbrooks house. Alma and her banker had more than once conversed with the visiting author, across the distance of two back porches. Another life. Before exile. Alma, formerly an opera singer on Lübeck’s greatest stages. Alma, flower of Lübeck. (Rose got her fill of this word, this holy name, Lübeck.) More German than German, barely Jew at all until the degraded sons of Bavaria had wrenched the nation to pieces. All this is what that ashtray knew, up to and likely including the exact sums Alma had used to buy herself and her brother, Lukas, and her son, Albert, escape to New York, at that last minute when, after the approaching nightmare had induced the banker’s heart attack, Alma’s and Albert’s denial had been torn from them: Jew, not German. Alma had had to sell it all, maybe was lucky even to keep the ashtray.

  Here at the Knickerbocker was the “parlor,” the sole public room, really, where, sitting over cups of tea, Rose abased herself to Alma’s contempt in order to win grudging approval to marry. Albert was that much a mother’s boy. Here, the same room, Rose had then learned to open her voice at serious Communist meetings, to smoke and argue with the men, while Alma, sealed in her aristocratic German, unwilling or unable to learn English, had, gratifyingly, been reduced to a hostess for their cell’s meetings. And here, spring of ‘47, was the site of Rose’s first living-room trial, the one that mattered, that changed everything. The meeting where, with classic party perversity, Albert, wrongly accused of spying when he was only an incompetent blabbermouth, was made a spy. The trial in which Albert was aided and abetted in flight from his family, his wife and seven-year-old daughter, by the party.

  Where was Miriam? Right there. The daughter Albert was abandoning was the whole while in Alma’s bedroom. She sat through the trial as she’d sat through previous meetings, gobbling the foil-wrapped Mozartkugeln Alma always provided the granddaughter with whom she couldn’t converse in English, only coo at, to the solitary child’s increasingly evident boredom. Miriam sat amid a litter of the unwrapped foil, playing quietly with her rag doll, likely smearing it with the German chocolate, and understanding, God help her, who knew how little or much of the things she overheard. The expulsion that would reverse-exile her father from New York, from America forever.

  As for Rose, her voice wasn’t for once available to be overheard. Knowing, that day, that if she spoke she’d scream, Rose never said a word that would have given Miriam, as she listened from the next room, the least alarm. Nothing to alert her that this meeting was out of the ordinary, that the party men were handing down anything other than Albert and Rose’s next irritating errand, the next recalcitrant shop steward or union chief to pester with their pamphlets and talk, the next cultural gathering to uselessly infiltrate. If anything alarmed the seven-year-old girl, it would have been the absence of her mother’s voice.

  The voice that crosscut through every room and situation, the voice never stilled, for once stilled.

  If anything alarmed Miriam, it certainly would have been this: the absence of her mother’s voice even when her mother paused in the doorway, on a trip bearing the unbearable ashtray from kitchen to parlor, and hovered there, stared at the girl with tight lips, possibly moist eyes though she’d have disclaimed this, then leaned to fondle her daughter’s head, to mold her hand along the darling skull to the small hairs at the neck. Spoke not a word, most uncharacteristically, about the minefield of foil. Instead, still clutching the ashtray like a bludgeon, impulsively grabbed at one of the few remaining Mozartkugeln, bared it of wrapper, and grimacing, gobbled it whole, then stepped from the doorway still unspeaking, to return the ashtray to its place before any smoker’s ash grew unsupportably long.

  If the girl recalled it—unlikely—it would have been the sole instance in a lifetime that she’d seen a piece of German chocolate cross her mother’s lips.

  From that day it would be just the two of them, mother and daughter, in the Gardens apartment.

  In Rose’s constellation of memory, this was Ursa Major, the real trial. Something of which to be mordantly proud: that the top men in New York Communism had taken notice of Albert and decided he needed correction, needed to be adjusted, from the status of dissolute husband and father, a Commie lush conducting “meetings” at McSorley’s tavern—where he’d been overheard by visiting undercover Soviets!—and pressed into service overseas. Returned to Germany, where his courtly manners made him an asset instead of a sore thumb. A dandy Jew with a trace of German accent tainting his English? Not of such terrific value to an American Communist Party looking to get folksy with the workers. A native German with impeccable English and total dedication, willing to repatriate? Of maximal attractiveness to the new society forming in the ragged shadows and rubble.

  So Albert was sent to become an East German citizen and spy.

  Rose could really savor the pomp and menace of the committee who’d come to Alma’s little parlor to drink tea and put the seal on the destruction of her marriage. She could shroud herself properly in this memory, of the trial that had cost her everything, sent her slinking back to her candy-store peasant family to admit that no, you couldn’t hold a man, couldn’t, at last, keep that posh refugee. See? Rose’s marriage, minus God, had flopped. And so she’d been cast into her life’s purgatory: Real’s Radish & Pickle, single-motherhood, and Queens without Manhattan, exile to that suburb of the enraged
. And Albert Zimmer escaped back to Europe. What was Rose’s failed marriage except evidence, against the whole fable of American history, that European chains could never be shrugged off?

  ————

  And what, after all, were Albert Zimmer and Rose Angrush but an implausibility briefly entertained? Tolerated for an instant before being demolished, dismantled from at least three directions at once: her family, his family, and the party. The high assimilated German joining up with Rose the Polack, Rose the Russian, Rose the immigrant, second-generation Brooklyn Jew? Unlike every comedy ever devised by Jewish writers mocking class difference from the sanctuary of Hollywood, these were divisions that exactly couldn’t be closed by the bonds of love. This wasn’t screwball, it was you’re screwed. Not It Happened One Night but It Happened Never.

  How came it even to attempt happening?

  Simple. At a packed meeting hall near Gramercy Park, under a high ornate ceiling echoing with voices, a mole met a mole. Rose seated there, on one side, in one creaky wooden folding chair; Albert seated here, across the room, in the same sort of chair. Both seeking to take the meeting’s floor, to steer its innocence and idealism in a given direction, both eager to run back to their contacts and brag of enlisting the group, and both obstructed, largely, by the other. Oh, it was ripe: Albert and Rose discovered each other because they’d been assigned, by their separate and poorly coordinated cells, to insinuate themselves into the same organization, the Gramercy Park Young People’s League. To introduce the possibility of solidarity with the coming workers’ revolution into this vague, well-intentioned gathering.