“Maury was raised in a family of Party people,” she said. “His aunts were in positions of leadership: on the National Committee, chairmen of the Disciplinary Committee. From childhood on, as soon as he walked, as soon as he remembered, he was surrounded by the Party. He still resents to this day the domination of his mother. When he got his first job in Chicago, she brought the dishes and the linen to his new apartment.
“She had a great contempt for her husband. Her family was important in the Party. Her husband didn’t have time, although he was a member, to be active. He ran the pharmacy, and he was there practically twenty hours a day. She played a strong activist role, and felt he wasn’t active enough—that he was a yeshiva bocher type, that he allowed himself to be pushed around. She thought Maury was from her side of the family, and that he identified with her.
“She was wrong. He loved his father, he treasured the memories of his father. When his father became ill, his mother put him in a home. Maury never forgave her for letting his father die there while he was in prison.”
Maury was too busy to see the reporter again. He phoned Maury every week. Maury had six, ten projects: to help improve the medical equipment in Vietnam, to attend the farewell dinner for the Vietnamese ambassador, rallies, demonstrations. “I met Abbie Hoffman for the first time at an affair for Nicaragua!” Peals of laughter. Why was this man laughing?
The months passed. On a spring day, a spy was arrested. When the reporter called him that night, he could barely recognize Maury’s voice. It was minute, strangled, terrified. He did not understand why. Had the arrest brought back memories? Was Maury afraid of him?
Yet that was the night Maury finally agreed to see him again. They agreed on “next Wednesday night.” Maury called back. He was suddenly effervescent again. Was it to be that Wednesday or the following? Maury was delighted with “the ambiguity in the language.” He rocked with laughter, and hung up howling.
On Wednesday night, the reporter walked through Harlem to Maury’s apartment.
He removed his shoes and put on Maury’s slippers.
Maury said he felt upset that night. He looked much older, his hair frazzled. He sat scrunched up, his hands between his legs, peering downward. The reporter suddenly saw him in prison.
Maury talked again about his Social Security; he was afraid he would be getting less than he had expected.
“You said you became a much more social person in prison.”
“There’s a real camaraderie,” Maury said. “There was an escape attempt. Half the joint knew what was going on for months. That’s how tight the thing is … But even if I felt close to someone, for their own sake I kept aloof. It hurt me, especially with black people. One guy wanted to get even with a guy who fired me. But I said no… .
“I had the outside to keep me going. That was a stress inducer and a stress reducer. You go insane digging a ditch in your mind deeper and deeper into events that happened, going over and over them, with no way of breaking out. If it were analysis, okay; but it wasn’t.”
“You seem to be a happy person,” the reporter said.
“I have to make up for those years. That’s why I’m happy. In prison, you develop humanity. You see all these unfortunate people.
“You feel for them. My confreres opened up to me. We walked the yard and talked. I developed a radar. There’s either an open loop when you speak with somebody or there’s a servo loop—engineering terms—and you really listen to what they’re saying. In college I was an open-loop person. I didn’t listen. In prison I listened.”
“But you call yourself primarily a political person.”
“Yes. People unfortunately react with their hearts rather than their heads. The heart betrays. I strictly avoid self-sacrifice. In Argentina the bastards are getting the people’s support. In England they support the bitch. We wouldn’t have wars if people didn’t respond that way.”
Maury stretched his legs out before him. “Before prison I never really had a world view, a long view. It was through the heart, not the head. Linda was very political, even when I met her in 1940. So was Solly.
“In prison the government was testing me, trying to make me a witness. Why did I resist? I didn’t feel pressure. It isn’t in yourself to turn somebody in to save yourself.”
He suddenly said, “You know, I can’t get deeply involved with a ‘personal’ person.”
“I guess that’s me,” the reporter said.
“I once wrote to the Metropolitan Opera radio host asking him to compare Tosca with Leonora: two women trying to help free their men from prison. Tosca uses womanly wiles to try to help her man. Leonora turns into a boy, Fidelio, and succeeds in freeing hers.
“Apropos culture,” Maury said. “I can’t believe you hated Reds.”
“Did I say that?”
“You said it. On the phone. You’re an effete aesthete,” he snapped. “I’m the radical, you’re the liberal.”
“But you couldn’t tell what John Reed was motivated by.”
“All right!” Maury shouted. “So you couldn’t tell. Maybe Reed didn’t know himself why he was doing what he was doing! So what?”
Maury sprang up and ran water into a glass. He paced around the room. He picked up a book. “Ever see this?” He showed the reporter Linda’s book of poetry: To My Beloved Prisoner.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Two of the poems were to me. The others were to other people. This wasn’t generally known at the time.”
“It must have hurt you, about Linda,” the reporter said softly. Maury stiffened.
“That was our relationship. I was powerless. Under the circumstances any other way would have seemed more painful.”
“When did she tell you?”
“About a year into it. Haven’t you had extramarital affairs?”
“No.
Maury was striking his hand against the chair. “Look, I don’t believe in self-sacrifice. I was caught in a situation. I did not choose. They came to me with all these deals. They were not viable alternatives. She had alternatives, which would in no way take away from me. If I had faith in her, it would not take anything from me. If it hurt me, it was my own fault. It’s because I’m too damn bourgeois.”
“Did it hurt you?”
“Of course it hurt me.” Maury stood up and moved to a table. He took a framed picture from it and silently handed it to the reporter. It was Maury as a boy in Brooklyn, sitting on his father’s lap. His father was smiling. Maury took the picture back and placed it on the table.
“You don’t know where I’m coming from,” he said after a silence. “You’re too full of feeling—that’s what I get from you. Feeling just works off guilt,” he said with contempt.
“No one’s more full of feeling than you.”
“But I control it.” Maury stood up. “I think that’s it for today.”
The reporter put on his shoes and coat.
Maury ripped the reporter’s name off his bulletin board.
“Farfallen” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“The opportunity is lost.”
Put Down Your Forks, Comrades
I’ll have a bite.
—G. L.
Solly was squashed into his seat at the Paramount Cafeteria on a Saturday night at eight-thirty beside the other comrades from his unit.
Leon Pepstein, who always wore a tweed scarf draped over his shoulder, was talking about the coming abolition of the army in the USSR: “Why waste time on military drills when you have close ties with the workers?” he shouted. No one disputed him. “None of this blind obedience to bullshit orders! No class distinction! As the masses become social beings, as the economic basis for crime and other antisocial acts is removed, police won’t even be necessary.”
Leon suddenly pounded on the table and they all sang out the City College song against President Robinson. Robinson had welcomed the fascist students from Italy and suspended student protesters who had objected, ca
lling them “guttersnipes,” pointing his umbrella at them.
“We’re all fed up with Robinson’s rule
We’re sick of high-priced knowledge
To get the nineteen back in the school
Strike City College!”
Solly, in a mischievous mood, took his knife and fork and the silverware of the other comrades and stuck them in his jacket. “This place is already rich from the workers it exploits,” he declared.
“No, Comrade Solly,” a little voice piped up. It was the pretty new comrade who had recently joined the unit. The only girl at the table, she had been eating her food very carefully, her eyes glued to her plate. Solly couldn’t bring himself to look much at girls anyway She had looked at her plate, and he had looked at his.
Now he gazed directly at her.
“Remember,” she said, “what Lenin wrote: to steal less than the state is petty thievery. When the Bolsheviks took the Soviet Union, comrade, they took a state. If you fight, you fight for a country, for important things. For principles.” She took a deep breath. Everyone was silent.
Solly grinned. He dropped the silverware back on the table with a little crash and leaned toward her.
“My name, in case you’re wondering, comrade, is Dolly, Dolly Stern.”
The Komsomol Badge
Dreaming of Soviet justice.
—G. L.
Antonio Carelli’s father stood out in the Italian community in Buffalo. The other men were immigrants who spoke little English and dressed up only on Sundays when they went to church. Arturo Carelli had an accent, but he spoke English better than anyone in the neighborhood. He always carried books with him.
On Saturdays, father and son would put on their Sunday clothes and go to the movies—usually westerns starring William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, or Hoot Gibson. Antonio was a small boy. When his father held his hand and they walked down the street, he was in heaven. He would cuddle up to his father while they watched the movie. Afterwards, they would go to the five-and-dime store, and his father would treat Antonio to a glass of milk and pie.
His father forbade him to salute the American flag in school or to pray with the other kids in the morning. They already knew that he didn’t go to church on Sunday. But they didn’t know his family was Communist.
At the beginning he didn’t know the words to the prayer, but he clasped his hands and bowed his head. He didn’t want to be different. And he saluted the flag with everyone else.
He was afraid that his father might find out.
At first Antonio Carelli had been ashamed of his father’s politics. When he was three, his father, who was active in the hod-carriers union, was arrested in the Palmer raids. He called it his “revolutionary baptism.” When he was four, his father took Antonio to a silent movie about the Bolshevik revolution. There were scenes of trenches filled with dead Russian soldiers and the Women’s Death Battalion marching with rifles slung over their shoulders. His father and the whole audience cheered and shouted when Lenin and Trotsky stood beside a flag with the hammer and sickle.
His family celebrated May Day and attended meetings each year in November celebrating the revolution and marking the assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. His father once won a portrait of Lenin at a raffle and hung it in the parlor.
Arturo Carelli worked during the day as a laborer. But after work, he came home, washed, ate dinner, and left to carry on his Party assignments. Many comrades visited the house on the weekends. Antonio understood little of the conversation, but he was aware that his home was very different from his friends’ homes.
Antonio joined the Buffalo branch of the Young Pioneers. Wearing a white blouse and red kerchief tied under his chin, he sang with the other boys and girls, “Give a yell! Give a yell! Give a good substantial yell! And when we yell, we yell like hell and this is what we yell: Pioneers! Pioneers! Rah! Rah! Rah!” And “Two, four, six, eight: Who do we hate? Capitalists! Capitalists! Rah! Rah! Rah!” He read the Young Comrade page of the Daily Worker:
Y is for Youth who leaders shall be
0 is for Oil which capitalists own
U is for Union with which we agree
N is for Nonsense which into our minds is thrown
G is for Groups which we organize
R is for Russia, that country of ours
E is for Ended which capitalism will be
B is for Bunk which teachers tell for hours
E is for Endeavor a workers’ world to create
L is for Lenin whose ideas we follow
S is for bosses’ Stuff which we will not swallow
Antonio attended a meeting at which Mush Snitkin, district organizer of the Young Communist League, spoke about the “treacherous role organized religion plays in the lives of the workers from the cradle to the grave.” At this meeting, held to replace bourgeois christenings, five newborn babies of Party members received their names and were enrolled in the Young Pioneers. There was a lot of howling and crying, but afterward there was a dance and what the Party called “general jollifications.”
Antonio Carelli’s father wanted him to learn how to speak to crowds the way he did. When Antonio was eleven, his father picked him up and put him on a soapbox at the park where the workers gathered on weekends. Antonio began his memorized speech, but in the middle he became confused and forgot his lines. To save the situation, he shouted, “In conclusion, comrades and fellow workers, don’t forget Patrick Henry’s words: ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’”
He noticed the smiles on the faces of the workers, and then he jumped off the soapbox into his father’s outstretched arms.
At the Young Pioneer school Antonio observed Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthday by learning what frauds they really were. The teacher was Mush Snitkin. The Y.C.L.’s district organizer, Mush, was from New York City. Antonio worshiped Mush, who was handsome and wore bell-bottoms like the sailors wore. Mush’s sister Clara was a legendary leader of the Gastonia textile workers’ strike in North Carolina.
Mush spoke under a banner that said SMASH THE BOY SCOUTS. “Washington was not the popular idol bourgeois historians now paint him to be,” Mush declared. “Not at all. Let’s look at the record, comrades. He commanded the revolutionary armies, spilling the blood of artisans and poor farmers so that his own class in the colonies could rule. Before, the British landowners and capitalists in America could exploit the workers, farmers, toilers, and Negroes. Now the rich merchants and planters could do it on their own. This bastard Washington was the richest land-and slave-owner in America. Can you compare such a bourgeois lackey with such working-class leaders as Stalin, Lenin, and Marx? Come on now!”
The kids laughed and applauded. They all wore the same flaming red mufflers. Antonio fingered his proudly.
“As president,” Mush said, “his policies were consistently for the benefit of the ruling class. The heavy taxes for the profits of the rich produced revolt among the masses, including the Whiskey Rebellion by the farmers in Pennsylvania against the whiskey tax. Washington sent troops against the farmers, just like Roosevelt is doing today.
“And Lincoln,” Mush continued, “he wasn’t even opposed to slavery, comrades. His aim was to save the capitalist union, not to free Negroes. The bastard used the slaves as a pawn to weaken the Southern landowners and strengthen the Northern capitalists.”
Mush then talked about how Stalin and Lenin led the fight for workers’ democratic rights, including the fight for land and the full equality of Negroes.
“The very fact,” Mush said, “that the children have to struggle in school for food and against discrimination proves that the American Revolution did not benefit the workers and that Lincoln didn’t free the Negroes.”
When he was twelve, Antonio traveled by train with his father to New York City to celebrate Revolutionary Christmas Day at Madison Square Garden. The Young Pioneers, Young Communist League, and the Communist Party were sponsoring the event.
Before the f
estivities began, the secretary of the Young Pioneers, George Winfield, walked out to a standing ovation. “Before the constructive fun begins, comrades, we must take note of that organization for capitalist war, the Boy Scouts. The Scouts glorify the wars of the bosses! Their real aim is to prepare the workers’ children to be good soldiers in the armies of the capitalists.
“Just what are the differences between the Boy Scouts and the Young Pioneers? Study them and you will clearly see your duty as workers’ children. We must smash the Boy Scouts, the organization of our class enemies, the capitalists.”
The audience chanted “Smash the Boy Scouts! Defend the Soviet Union!”
“And the Boy Scouts attack Workers’ Russia,” Winfield said. “The Soviet government is a government of and for the workers and toilers. The Soviet Union is the worst enemy of all the bosses the world over. So the bosses hate it and are plotting war against it. The workers and their children all over the world have only one fatherland—the Soviet Fatherland, Workers’ Russia! We know that in the Soviet Union there is no child labor. Workers’ children go to the best schools there are and have free vacations.”
Winfield concluded, “Comrades, we want a workers’ and farmers’ government where the workers will rule like they do in the Soviet Union!”
Winfield held his fist clenched while the chants continued:
“BURY THE BOY SCOUTS!”
“SIX FEET UNDER!”
“SOVIET JUSTICE FOR THE BOY SCOUTS!”
The chants were interrupted by a shouting voice. “Ooh, don’t you just hate the little fuckers?” a lone, screechy male voice called. “Smash the little cocksuckers,” it called again.
Heads turned. Winfield screened his eyes to get a better look. Adults in the crowd muttered, “Who approved those slogans? They seem a trifle much.”
“Shut up, fuckface,” the same voice called. A disheveled man in sneakers and an apron was laughing and pedaling his legs in the aisle. Two bodyguards reached him and rapidly carried him upside down to the back as he called, “Bury the little cunt-sniffers.”
Red Love Page 14
