Blacklist

by Jerry Ludwig

  I asked the usherette at the door if she’d seen my mother, and I showed her the snapshot in my wallet. Long odds, I know, but the usherette nodded, yes, she was here before, but then she went away. Where? The usherette pointed out the door—and I saw a bus wheeze by.

  Going strictly by instinct, I ran for the bus. Got on. Then didn’t know what to do next. I looked out the windows as we traveled, scanned the passing streets for a sighting of her. But there were few pedestrians, the whitewashed stucco walls with gaily colored doors flashing by. I began to doubt my coming aboard. But feelings of dread and urgency were almost gagging me. I had to find her. The bus rolled on. Where do I get off? Then I thought, where does she know? The Zócolo. The center of Oaxaca, the vast three-block shady square surrounded by sidewalk cafés and souvenir shops. Fountains in the center, people constantly milling about.

  So I got off there and began to wander, looking for her, searching the faces at the cafés, getting more and more frightened that I wouldn’t find her, sure that something terrible had happened to her—it was getting hot, I was sweating, almost ready to give up, maybe she was back at the hacienda—and then as I shouldered through a line of placard-waving marchers shouting protests about the latest guerilla activities of the Zapatistas, I saw her—sitting on the grass, under a tree, her head buried in her hands, like a child counting to ten at the start of a game of hide-and-seek.

  I stood over her and waited for her to look up. When she didn’t, I said softly, “Mom, it’s Davey. Are you okay?”

  She looked up at me, then brought her finger to her lips and said, “Sh-h-h!” Her eyes were wild. She gestured for me to sit down next to her. When I did, I noticed her shoes. They were the same height but my fashion-conscious mother was wearing mismatched shoes. She whispered in my ear, “You’ve got to be very careful, Davey. He’s here, watching us. Stay very close to me, I’ll protect you from him.”

  “From who, Mom?” I looked around and saw only the usual array of locals and tourists.

  “From Joe McCarthy,” she whispered. “Don’t turn your head—he’s right over there.”

  I knew what Joe McCarthy looked like from the TV news and photos in the newspapers—the balding head, beefy face, beady eyes, sneering mouth—but a covert scoping of the area didn’t reveal anyone who even vaguely resembled him. “I don’t see him,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, but a pounding panic was filling my chest.

  “He’s been following me. Since I first saw him. In the church with the singing. He was hiding in back.”

  “In back of what?”

  “In back of the guitar player. He was playing the mandolin, pretending to be one of the band. Then he got on the bus after me. And followed me here.”

  It was as if she had struck me—she took my breath away. My mother isn’t making sense. She isn’t. She isn’t making sense. I gasped. Then I put my arm around her. Hoping that I would smell tequila on her breath, but she was cold sober. Just absolutely terrified.

  “It’s okay, Mom, I think he’s gone now. Let’s go home.”

  I meant the hacienda, of course, but tears filled her eyes. “We can’t go home, Davey, maybe not ever again—they’ll put us in prison. You, too!”

  It took a while, I had to coax her, she was like a little girl frightened of the monsters, but I got her back to the hacienda, and when Teddy came home from the airport that evening, Mom was still very upset, and he gave her a sleeping pill so she could get some rest.

  * * *

  On Friday afternoon, August 12, 1951, I came home late after having a fistfight in the yard after school with a big kid whose father was an oil-company executive from Tulsa. He towered over me. But when he called me a Commie-loving Jew bastard I went for him. It was the first time the black rage swept over me. Literally blackness on my peripheral vision, targeting in on an enemy. The big kid kicked the crap out of me, but not before I got in some good licks.

  I came home and washed off the blood under my nose, put a couple of Band-Aids on my knuckles and a knee, changed into unmuddied clothes so the sight of me wouldn’t upset my mother. But when I went looking for her, the bedroom door was closed and it was quiet inside. Figured she was still napping. Wish, how I wish, I’d gone in then anyway. But instead I went downstairs, and Adela made me a snack. My father was due back from another quick business trip. I ate my snack and watched TV for a long time, then realized Mom still wasn’t up. She wasn’t supposed to be drinking anymore, she’d promised. But maybe. So. Something made me go upstairs. Listen at her door to hear if she was stirring. Still all quiet. I rapped lightly, not wanting to frighten her, she had become a light sleeper. There was no answer. A flash of foreboding. I rapped louder … and louder. Then I cracked the door and looked in.

  The curtains were drawn, but in the gloom I could see her in bed. Not exactly lying there. More like sprawled. One arm flung out toward the nightstand. “Mom,” I called softly. Advanced into the room. She hadn’t moved. I went closer. Looked down. Again said, “Mom.” But I think I knew then. Even before I saw the empty bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand.

  I don’t know what I thought then. In that exact moment. It seems like my brain just stopped. I kept looking at her. She was so pretty, my mom. I wasn’t scared, that came later, after I yelled for help and Adela came upstairs, and after she called for the ambulance and they couldn’t revive her. I remember too clearly what I thought at that point and so many times since: Why didn’t I go into the bedroom when I first came home? Why didn’t I do what my father had told me to do: “Take care of your mother.”

  We only knew a few people in Oaxaca, so my father and I mourned pretty much in private. I kept waiting for him to rebuke me, but he never did. He was as strong as the combat soldier he had been. I tried to copy his strength and failed again. Together we went to the airport when the arrangements had been made to ship her body back to the family plot in L.A. for burial. Neither my father nor I were going along with her. He was concerned he’d be arrested if he set foot in America, and he felt I was too young to face all that alone.

  When I saw the cargo hatch of the plane close on Mom’s coffin, I began to cry, choking paroxysms of tears, nearing hysteria before my father could calm me enough to get me back into the car.

  “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,” he kept repeating when I tried to assume the blame. Then whose fault was it?

  * * *

  There’s a thing that happens with my left cheek every now and then. It’s a small quick twitch, halfway to a wink, but it’s involuntary. Just happens. Hugo Kositchek, my shrink in Rome, a transplanted Swiss Jungian, he called it a psychic wince. He was interested in the phenomenon, said it was a bulletin from my subconscious. I never paid much attention. I mean, usually it’s just one little tic. Sometimes days or even weeks go by that I don’t do it. But here’s the first one today. What the hell, if it doesn’t happen here at your father’s funeral, when would it?

  Because it’s my turn to speak. The rabbi moves aside and I step up to Teddy’s casket. I’m about to take out the pages I struggled over last night. But instead, when I look out over the small crowd, I realize that they already know everything I’ve written. It’s seared into their psyches. So I leave the pages in my pocket and just begin to talk.

  “I can’t sleep on planes, but coming here from Rome with Teddy, I got drunk enough over the Atlantic to conk out for a few hours. And I had a dream. Wouldn’t you know, it was a scene from a movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. All the POWs are lined up in formation and Sessue Hayakawa, who played the Japanese commandant, is going down the line, asking everyone who they are. When he reaches me, I give him only the basics. Name, rank, and serial number. Sessue Hayakawa squints at me and says, ‘Ah, you Teddy’s boy.’”

  A chuckle starts through the small assemblage. I encourage it with what I hope is a smile. There’s a tickle in the back of my throat.

  “That’s who most of you know me as—been called that my whole life, I’m proud t
o say. I’m Teddy’s boy.”

  I clear my throat, but the tickle is still there. I look over at the adjoining plot. It’s been well kept; we’ve been paying the maintenance fee for years but didn’t know if they were caring for it properly. Now I know. She won’t be alone anymore. Teddy and Ellie. Together again.

  “And I’m Ellie’s boy, too,” I croak. My gaze finds Jana in the small crowd; her eyes are waiting for mine. Contact. Maybe there’s a chance.

  I discover that’s all I can say, so I sit down again. Trying to swallow, but the tickle is a lump that won’t go down.

  CHAPTER

  6

  DAVID

  Peter Zacharias is standing beside the casket now, telling us all how he met Teddy.

  “It was in London during the Blitz. I have never seen nights so pitch black—illuminated only by the Nazi high-explosives plunging down from the skies. A dazzling fireworks display, but you didn’t want a front seat for that show.”

  Zacharias—everyone calls him that, as if he’s an Old Testament figure—talks like a poet but in a thick Bronx accent. He’s still gaunt, big nose, big voice, but his hair has gone snow white since I saw him last.

  “I was scrambling like a blind man down a darkened street in Soho in search of the air-raid shelter. When I found it, and plunged through the blackout curtain, it was even darker inside. Not a flicker of light. The thundering of the bombs became louder and louder, as if Goliath was hopscotching toward us. But I wasn’t sure there was an ‘us’ in here. Maybe I was alone. ‘Hey, anyone in here?’

  “‘Just us chickens,’ an American guy’s voice said from the darkness.

  “‘Well, whaddayasay?’ I called out in relief. Just as a blockbuster rocked the shelter. I was scared. But this other guy started to sing:

  ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats,

  And little lamzy divey,

  A kiddle-dee-divey-two…’

  “And I started to laugh. It was that silly song that had been such a hit a few years before. So with the bombs still crashing, I joined in for the final chorus, decoding the gibberish jingle:

  ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats.

  And little lambs eat ivy,

  A kid’ll eat ivy, too…’

  “Then the bombers went away and that’s when I met Teddy. Turns out we had a lot in common: I was a writer from New York who hated the movies, he was an ex-New Yorker who only hated bad movies. We were both in George Stevens’s combat photography unit. Teddy and I were together every day after that. From the D-day invasion to the liberation of Dachau. We shot film of sights that, please God, will never occur again.”

  Zacharias takes a deep breath, then shrugs.

  “What else can I tell you about Teddy? He was a preemie, did you know that? Born prematurely, in Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, weighed only three pounds, twelve ounces. He came through that fine, but he was still premature. In Hollywood, he was a premature union man, a premature anti-Fascist, but old-fashioned enough that when push came to shove, he refused to betray his friends—”

  Zacharias looks over at the knoll where Agent McKenna is taking notes.

  “—Am I going too fast for you, sonny?”

  Then he turns to me. “Duveed,” that’s what he always called me, “you’re entitled to be proud. Your father was a mensch.” A real person.

  Zacharias gazes down at the casket. “Now he’s been taken from us at the age of forty-eight—so very premature of you, Teddy.” He touches the casket gently. “The war is over, pal. Rest in peace.”

  I look over at Jana. She’s staring straight ahead with that steel-jawed expression she always had when trying to hold back tears. Beside her, Markie looks bored. But on Jana’s other side, Wendy Travers is dabbing at her Ray-Ban–concealed eyes with a hanky. Crocodile tears! The bitch is trying to impress anyone who may be looking. I look away.

  Zacharias goes back to his seat as the two-man honor guard marches up in stiff precision. The staff sergeant snaps and holds a tight salute as the corporal brings a bugle to his lips and plays “Taps.” After the bugler finishes his dirge, the soldiers step up to the casket and, with practiced exactness, fold the flag covering my father’s coffin. When it has been reduced to a compact bundle with the stars showing, the sergeant paces to my chair and I take it from him. He salutes me and I snap a return salute automatically. Ranger reflex. My father’s funeral service has concluded.

  * * *

  My duties are not quite over. I’m a one-man reception line. The mourners all throw spades of earth on the coffin and then troop past me for embraces and handshakes. Some of them reintroduce themselves. “Do you remember me? I knew you as a little boy.” I see Harry Rains being glad-handed by various people, some of them hugging Valerie Nolan, sharing old fond memories. Wendy Travers stands near them, shunned, isolated by unforgiven history. Nobody pays any attention to Jana or Markie, guess they don’t recognize them as adults.

  When I look up, Zacharias, with watering eyes, clasps me to his skinny bosom. I squeeze back and he feels almost frail.

  “All grown up since the last time I saw ya,” he says.

  “You still writing?”

  “Nah, I’m in the transportation game now.” I’m puzzled. He clears it up. “I’m driving a bus.” Spoken with a twinkle. “Come see me sometime, I’ll let you ride for free. It’s an education.”

  He hands me a business card, and I pocket it without looking at it because Jana and Markie Gunderson are standing in front of me. Actually, Markie has stopped a few paces away. That’s it, man, give us a little room.

  She tells me how glad she is she spotted the ad in Variety or she would have missed this, and I ask where Leo is, and she says her father is on his way back from shooting preproduction footage, otherwise he’d be here. How’s his health? She says they removed a lung and hit him with intense doses of radiation and he’s in complete remission, doing fine. Then she cuts right through, the way she always did:

  “Were you going to call me before you left?”

  “Of course I was, sure, I just was—working my way up to it.” Nervous laugh escapes me.

  But she accepts it, keeps searching my eyes. “Well, let’s get together while you’re here.”

  “I’m not leaving for a while.” Jeez, sounds like I’m putting her off. “But yeah, let’s—I’d like that. Really.” Not too much, you’ll scare her off.

  There’s a pause, not awkward though, Jana wants to say something important, I can sense it. And in a shaky voice, “Can’t tell you what a shock it was to hear about Teddy.” Markie is gazing away, still looking bored. Jana takes a deep breath, then leans closer. “I’ve been here before to—visit Ellie. Flowers on Mother’s Day, that kind of stuff.”

  Jana looks at the neighboring plot where my mother is buried. At the time, in our absence, Zacharias had handled the minimal arrangements for Teddy and me. I was unaware Jana even knew about this place. Mother’s Day. The tic in my cheek fires again.

  “Calamity Jane,” I whisper. So only Jana can hear, not Markie. Her eyes rivet me again as if seeking to verify my identity. Those remarkable hazel eyes with the gold flecks. I used to think she could peer into my soul. I’m about to say, Jana, it’s still me! But Markie breaks the moment.

  “Hey, Weaver,” stepping forward with an outstretched hand to give me a limp-dick handshake. He’s my height now, still with a bland round face and a terminally jaded expression. “Sorry about your dad, he was a good writer, my father always said so.”

  Not before the Committee, when his father pointed an accusing finger at Teddy, but I don’t say that. Trying not to confuse what Rex Gunderson did and who Markie is.

  “Thanks for coming,” I say.

  “Had to drive Jana so she wouldn’t get lost way out here in the Valley.” He grins. Shucks. Jest a-takin’ care of the li’l gal.

  Jana is holding out a business card to me with the Panorama logo on it. The word “Research” under her name.

  “So you’re both working
for the studio now,” I say.

  “How’d you know that?” Markie is pleased I’m aware he’s an exec in the script development department.

  “They sell Variety in Rome,” I say. Why mention he turned down one of Teddy’s black-market scripts six months ago? Nothing personal, there was a phony name on it. And what difference does it make now?

  Jana ignores the chitchat. Taps the business card I’m still holding. “You can reach me at the studio—or at home,” she says. “Still the same number.” Her look says: you remember that number.

  They move off and I continue receiving condolences from other mourners, but the corner of my eye is still on Jana and Markie, as he drapes an arm over her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to mind, but I sure as hell do. Particularly when Markie’s words to her float back to me:

  “Some creepy crew turned up here, huh? Looks like the road company of Mission to Moscow.”

  McCarthy is dead, but McCarthyism lives on. My reflex is to go for Markie. But before I can, I hear Jana.

  “Shut the fuck up, Markie!” she snaps, shrugging off his arm. “You didn’t have to come if you didn’t want to.” And she stalks away. I’m delighted by her reaction.

  Then I look at the next person standing before me. It’s Wendy Travers. How can she bring herself to face me? She makes the first move. Taking off her sunglasses, out of some kind of courtesy, I guess, but I see her eyes are red-rimmed. Not crocodile tears after all. For Teddy? Or for herself?

  “So very very sorry for your loss,” she croaks in a choked voice.

  What do I say to her? What would Teddy say? I hear my voice: “Thanks for being here.” By rote. Flat. She almost flinches, then nods and walks off. Grudgingly, I concede that it took guts—or incredible chutzpah—to come today and brave the hate-filled stares.

  Now here are Harry and Valerie. I offer my hand, but Harry ignores it and wraps me in a big abrazo. “Sonuvagun, you’re not a little boy anymore. Look at Davey,” he says to Valerie, “all grown up.” Why is everyone so surprised I got taller in ten years?