Red Love

by David Evanier

  The other grandmother said that if the kids were sent to her, she would throw them out the window.

  Sarah Rubell said to the kids: “Look what your mother did to my son.”

  The Springers would bring food and clothes for the kids. Sarah would hide them. No American culture, no Eastern European culture either. Prost, common.

  But this doesn’t get the mood. She would speak against blacks. She would rail against this woman who took her son away. Doing this in front of five- and eight-year-old kids.

  Joseph read the Daily Worker. After Amy went to sleep, he wanted to engage in political discussion: never a cultural or recreational matter. He announced his desire to become a lawyer. Vindication was the key word.

  The adoption process was still under consideration. Dean Smyth allowed the kids to live with the Springers more and more. To me the amazing thing was their continued sanity. Joseph was a consummate actor. When Dean Smyth visited the Springer house, Joseph wanted to demonstrate what excellent adoptive parents they would be. He would eat an apple and say, “You know, Dean, Mrs. Springer says an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” He’d sit down and play the piano and say, “You know, Dean, Mrs. Springer says culture is very important.”

  Joseph had a bar mitzvah. The dean needed it to satisfy the Jewish community. But he treated it very seriously. Not really a put-on.

  Joseph sang and he recited. Dean Smyth cried like a baby. At the end he told Joseph he was magnificent. He said, “I wish I had taped it.” Joseph said, “I’ll do it all over again.”

  The dean arranged for the adoption by the Springers. In the wee hours of the morning they all descended from different parts of the city, pretending they didn’t know each other as they walked up the steps of the court. The dean had pneumonia and came out of a sickbed to get it done. He died the next day.

  The community wanted the kids to be punished for what their parents did.

  I didn’t have a kid of my own. What do you do with children, you play. I became the uncle. I’d do multiple accents. I’d wear my glasses on my head.

  I see Solly’s face before me.

  A young guy with a moustache, which struck me as strange. My concept of a yeshiva bocher, somebody who had not come of a more cultured background. He wore a suit. Most likely he had one suit.

  Now Joseph was growing a little stubble of a moustache. He turned his profile and said, “Who do I look like?” I said, “You look like Joseph.” He said, “No no no.” And I said, “You look like Joseph.” And he said, “Come on now.” I said, “You want me to say you look like Solly? You look like Solly. Does that make you happy?” He said, “Yeah, it does make me happy.”

  Surveillance

  May I come in?

  —G. L.

  “For years,” the woman said to the reporter, “I kept a nun’s costume with a magnetic chessboard in a locker in the old Penn Station. I was sure I was going to get swept up when the arrests began. They had concentration camps ready.”

  A man watches a cabin in Goldens Bridge, New York, in 1949. He watches the movements of a young couple and their two kids. He watches the father, recognizes the type: a candy-store boy. Both of them, schleppers. He observes their comings and goings.

  In time, he will knock at their door. He will drop a Daily Worker he is holding and, after they react, pick it up sheepishly, as if he is not sure of their response. They will glance at each other, and welcome him instantly. He will drink the couple’s coffee and eat their food, and bounce their children on his lap. He will play the harmonica for them.

  The kids flap after the ducks on the lake, calling and laughing. The father carries the little one on his back, playing horsie, and tossing her into the air, sings:

  “Fly higher and higher and higher

  Our emblem’s the Soviet Star

  Let every good comrade shout Red Front!

  We’re building the USSR.”

  The little one cannot get enough of her father. The boy wants to grow up to be like Ben Davis.

  The mother, away from her therapist, the rasping New York streets, is ready to scream. But how she loves her babies. The cold lake water cleanses the smell of fear that she carries with her. Even in the water, sometimes Solly and Dolly look anxiously to the shore to see who is there. There is their neighbor, the advanced thinker, the man with the harmonica.

  In the jail bullpen the guard averted his eyes and said in an unnaturally soft voice, “Nick, your mother is here to see you. …”

  This was hell! This was worse than frying!

  —Knock On Any Door

  Willard Motley

  The boy read the novel after his parents were executed. To learn how it went.

  In 1975, in a very small room of the famous Barr Building on Olive Street in St. Louis, a woman was on her lunch break. She was a newcomer to the city. She noticed a man her age who came into the room from time to time: a thin, stern-looking person with white hair.

  One day he told the newcomer that he was one of those who spied on the Rubells. He described the cabin on the beach, the children playing.

  The woman told the reporter in 1988: “I left home at twenty-one. When the Communists came around, I was ready to join them.

  “I married one of the comrades. He was, like most of the others in the Party, a misfit and a loser. My life was even worse than before. I divorced him and dropped all my old friends.

  “Three years later rumors reached me that the F.B.I. were looking for me. They visited me. They did not say I was going to jail but let my own fears work on me.

  “They suggested I go back into the Party and spy. I would receive twenty-five dollars a month for expenses. I refused. That was the end of it.

  “Later, I was on a picket line for Women Strike for Peace. The Red Squad’s photographer was there. He called me a schoene maydel— that meant ‘nice girl.’ This was his way of telling me he knew I was Jewish.

  “As time went on I was generally burned out as far as any other activity was concerned. When I met this man and he told me about the Rubells, you can see why I reacted the way I did. It was partly what he did and partly what I had lived through. I don’t know why he even trusted me enough to tell me what he did. I never found out his name. There was nothing about him that made me think he was not telling the truth or that suggested that he was delusional. I have, in my lifetime, met truly delusional persons and he was nothing like them.

  “If someone is suspected of spying, I think the government has a right to keep them under surveillance. But to go out of your way to be friends with people, to eat at their table, to maybe hold their children on your lap—and then coldly turn around and hand them over. …

  “Well, anyway. Just telling you all this gives me a strange feeling. It makes me tired, if you want to know the truth.”

  The older child remembers the apple his mother kept on the windowsill of her cell, and many details about both of them. His father’s arms around him, and his mother’s.

  The younger child does not remember them.

  Davey “Car Wreck” Lapidus

  Don’t flush, Solly.

  —G. L.

  I know my jails. This wasn’t so bad. But Solly was a milk shake.

  We met; we talked; we walked. I reminded him, he said, of a comrade with a harmonica at Goldens Bridge.

  I had credentials. Former member of the Young Communist League. Friend of Harry Brimmer, also known as Jay West, who was in another cell. The Party was ignoring Dolly and Solly completely, so Big Jay never acknowledged Solly in the yard or spoke to him. You should have heard Solly speak Big Jay’s name. The earth shook. A top Party leader, Jay had been an organizer in China and Berlin and Harlan, Kentucky. Big build, high forehead with a shock of black hair graying at the temples. Squeaky Donald Duck voice.

  Solly desperately wanted the Party to know just how significant his contribution was (as if they didn’t). He told me and let me know just how much it would mean to him for Big Jay to know everything. I promise
d the milk shake.

  I told him about my car episodes. He cursed the system.

  Not that I didn’t like Solly. I liked him. I was still rather progressive, but not the whole hog.

  I had been at Peekskill; I knew the score. I had the Little Lenin series in my bunk; I remembered Maury Ballinzweig from Camp Nitgedaiget. I’d known Mendy—Zitzi Mendelbaum—before he’d gone to Spain. Solly and I both knew Mendy’s historic words on the rooftop of 617 Livonia Avenue with the other boys before he left for Spain: “I’m just getting into the struggle a little sooner.” Brooklyn, 1936. Mendy was killed in his first action in Spain. When I quoted those words to Solly, his eyes filled.

  Solly got manic and talked for hours; he was morose and stood by himself in the corner. “When I get out of here, I’m putting you on the right track,” he promised me.

  He was confused; he’d forget what he’d said. The next week he’d say he would set up drops for me in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Caracas when I got out. “These are revolutionary strongholds,” he said. “I’ve worked out an escape route to Mexico by a small boat. It’s all arranged.”

  Then, the next time, he said he’d be out soon whatever sentence he got: “In five years, I promise you, sweet guy, we’ll have a Soviet America,” he said.

  One night Solly drew a diagram of the operational setup of the ring. He said there were two units operating in Manhattan. Solly headed one unit; the other was headed by two others, both of whom had fled. Joe Klein was already in Europe at the time of Solly’s arrest; the other man had fled to the Soviet Union a week after Solly was jailed. Solly said that for years he’d been in direct contact with a Soviet he met several times a month. “Oh, I’ve shared many a whiskey sour with my friends,” Solly said, worldly Solly. “They’ve already given five thousand dollars to Henky for my defense.”

  When he finished, Solly tore the diagram into little pieces and threw them in the toilet. He didn’t flush it. When he left, I took the scraps of paper out of the water and dried them. I put them in an envelope, and gave them to Goldberg.

  Solly told me his life story. Someday bridges and boulevards would be named after him and Dolly in a Soviet America; he wanted the facts to be straight. He’d been a hot yeshiva student. Went to a Y.C.L. meeting at fourteen. They told him rabbis were politicians with beards, and gave him William Z. Foster’s Toward A Soviet America. He got a hard-on. The Party, the shock brigade of the proletariat, would overthrow that insatiable bloodsucker, the capitalist class. Solly would carry a long needle with him to demonstrations, and stick police horses in the flank to make them bolt.

  Solly wanted above all to implement his beliefs with action, he said. Something that would tip the balance of forces in favor of the future.

  “And it happened, sweet guy,” he’d say. “It happened. It wasn’t easy going either. Not everyone is capable. It takes training. You don’t just get something of value to the Soviet Union and pass it on. No way. There can be many months of waiting. You have to control yourself. Davey, do you realize that when the Canadian ring was destroyed, I lost contact for almost two years?”

  He told me of his signals: a circle with a cross in the center of a store window on 14th Street. A hole in the cement floor of a movie theater that was used as a depository for transmitting information. Gum on a subway window—red for danger and white for all clear. “The simplest things are the best,” Solly said.

  “Solly,” I asked, “why didn’t you escape when you could have?”

  “I had to take care of friends. I knew what was happening for two months, but others had to be warned. One more week and I would have been on my way to the Soviet Union.”

  “And if it’s the death sentence?”

  “Look, I played the game and I lost. I’ll take the results.”

  Solly wept at night about his kids. A letter came from his sister that the kids wanted him to come home, that they did not understand what was happening, or that they understood too well. I put my arms around the milk shake.

  “What is Dolly like?” I asked him one night.

  “Dolly … is the most beautiful person I have ever met. She is truly beautiful in her soul. A keen analytical mind. She does not give an inch, never compromises her principles. She is in pain so much of the time from her back, her headaches, and the suffering of the workers. She has such revolutionary anger; she never deviates from it. She referred to Eisenhower the other day as a ‘guttersnipe in striped pants.’ And ‘a privileged fascist dog.’ And ‘a homophobic faggot who will fuck anything in skirts.’ I mean, she talks that way to me. I have learned so much from her integrity.”

  He told me Dolly was furious when the newspapers criticized returning prisoners of war from Korea for praising Communism. “ ‘They’ve seen a real system that works for the people for the first time,’ she said, ‘and their hearts rise up within.’”

  Solly got sentimental, and began humming concentration camp songs and Red Army troop marches. He said that when he met Dolly, life began. She helped him with his studies and typed his homework; although, he said with a twinkle, they did their share of smooching.

  Trolleys were still running then. There was a ferry at the end of Christopher Street, and they rode down to it. They read the Daily Worker and lists of lynchings from the Civil Rights Congress as the sweet salt spray kissed their faces. They learned about Sartre’s cockroach philosophy and other Freudian worms of reaction, the dangers of sectarianism and opportunist tendencies, and how to talk to the workers.

  When Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, they shouted Starve the War and Feed America! Food for the Unemployed—Not Fodder for Cannon! Keep America out of the Imperialist War! Not One Cent, Not One Man, Not One Plane for the Imperialist War! The Yanks Are Not Coming! Solly told me of the merry days Dolly painted his hair gray, put him in a wheelchair all bundled up in blankets and wheeled him down Bleecker Street. She carried a placard: “My husband is legless because of fighting in the imperialist war! He can’t even get it up! Remember 1917! Don’t let Wall Street trick us again!—Sex-starved housewife.”

  Dolly handed out A Letter to Mother. Solly gave me a copy of it. The cover of the pamphlet had a drawing of a bent-over little old lady, a picture of her boy on her table, letting a piece of paper fall to the floor: “Telegram: Killed in Action.”

  Dear Mother,

  Happy Mother’s Day.

  I wish I could send you something that you need like a new chair or a nice dress, but every penny I get goes for room rent and eats. It sure makes me sore that my dear mother can’t have some nice things when the swells spend whole fortunes on a single swanky party or a country home, enough to keep a couple of dozen families like ours going for a whole year.

  Did you have Tommy’s tonsils out yet? Better take care of it before all this economy stuff goes through and they begin to shut down all the free clinics and hospitals. Things are getting plenty tough but Roosevelt ain’t talking no more about the unemployed. Looks like he has gone over to the fat boys on Wall Street bag and baggage. No difference now between him and the Republicans.

  You’ve guessed it, Mother. I’m sore. And I’m worried too. I’m worried about a lot of things that are happening but most about this country getting into the war. All the fellows I know feel the same way. None of us want to be smashed up in a Wall Street war.

  I heard a fellow talking just the other day: he said we have a big fight on our hands right here—for jobs and security and a federal health-and-housing program. Said he was a Communist. Said that we got into the last war for the benefit of big business and the munitions makers and we don’t want any more of it. Mother, he said, Give peace a chance. Sounds good to me.

  Now I see why the newspapers and the millionaires don’t like the Communists. But the Communists are for people like us. I’m going to read some of their stuff to find out what it’s all about.

  I am going to send you a little booklet that my friend Jim gave me. It’s called I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier for Wal
l Street. It only cost a cent but it’s sure got a lot of common sense in it. Mrs. O’Connor, Mrs. Goldstein, and Mrs. Fabrizio ought to read it too. Jim’s mother is getting the neighbors together for a Mother’s Committee to Keep America out of War. You ought to do that, Mother. Get off your fanny. All the neighbors would go along with you.

  Tell Tommy and Mary that if I get a job I am going to send you all something nice for Christmas. But there are no jobs. I am pressing my suit the way you told me to so it still looks pretty good. I want it to last till I get work. I wish I had a shirt to go along with it.

  Well, this is a long letter but I just had to tell you all this. Remember me to all the neighbors and any of the old gang on the corner. Love to you, Dad, Tommy, and Mary.

  Your son,

  Bill

  Then Hitler attacked Russia. Stalin was heartbroken. Browder made his famous statement: “What nerve! That’s really brazen, don’t you think?” The character of the war changed. Fascism lost its progressive character. Solly and Dolly carried the new placards: Starve the Shiftless and Feed the War! Not One Cent, Not One Man, Not One Plane for Peace! Down with the Appeasers of Hitlerism! Defend America by Giving Full Aid to the Soviet Union! The Yanks Are Coming! Defeat Anti-Semitism! Forward to a Worldwide People’s Front Against Hitler Fascism for the Defense of the Soviet Union!

  Solly and Dolly threw out their books and pamphlets with titles like New Germany—Where the Trains Run on Time, and America for Americans First: Refugees Crimp Our Style.

  Solly stopped reminiscing. “The thing is, Dolly is a tank.”

  I thought of the reason I could never testify against Solly at his trial. I’d never want Mother to know. She’s not only my mother; she is the famous Mother Lapidus.

  Mother came to this country from czarist Russia.

  She lived in a town that was friendly to the Jewish enclave within it. Things had not been bad.