by John Sanford
Dan reached across the table and put his hand on the woman’s arm, saying, “I love you, Flo. You’re so very wonderful.”
A voice said, “She isn’t so wonderful to me.”
Dan looked up. A man was standing in the aisle, and behind him, from a nearby table, a woman was angrily watching.
“Who the hell’re you, mister?” Dan said.
“I couldn’t help overhearing what was said, and I want you to know I resent it.”
“Resent all you like, but get away from this table.”
“I let no one run down my religion.”
“What do you generally do about it?”
“What I’m doing now. I defend it.”
“Do you ever do anything to make it better?”
“It’s perfect as it is. All that you’ve been told is a lie.”
Dan rose. “The poor never lie, and the rich never tell the truth,” he said. “I think we ought to go outside, mister.”
LAST HIRED, FIRST FIRED
“Last name?”
“Pollardius.”
“First name?”
“Julianum.”
“You remind me of somebody,” Dan said. “Haven’t we met?”
“It’s a small white world,” Julie said.
“What’re you doing in this part of it, black-face?”
“Black all over, Mr. Underdone.”
“I thought you were a word-man. You don’t really want a sweating-job, do you?”
“Don’t want it, but I’m after it.”
“You’re not for Chrisake giving up writing, I hope.”
“Who said? I’m going to do me a book about working-stiffs, so I got to be one.”
“You had me worried,” Dan said, and picking up the telephone, he said, “Put Pete on, will you, Liz?” and beyond the partition a bell rang. “Dan talking, Pete. You busy? I’ve got a special in here.” He hung up, and after a moment, Peterson entered. “Pete, I want you to meet Julie Pollard, a particular friend of mine. Julie, the Boss.”
“Glad to know you, Pollard,” Peterson said.
“Same,” Julie said.
Peterson sat down and studied Julie through the lighting of a cigarette. “What’s his specialty?” he said to Dan.
“It used to be hating us buckras. Tell him what it is now, Julie.”
“Same,” Julie said, “plus looking for a job.”
“Unique,” Peterson said.
“He’s a writer,” Dan said. “He has a novel that’s making the rounds. Eight-ball, it’s called.”
“We get a lot of calls for novelists,” Peterson said. “Only they got to be able to dish-wash.”
“Julie wants to get material for a new book,” Dan said. “A book about the proletariat.”
“Why don’t he go back to Russia?” Peterson said.
“If all the people you’re against went back to Russia,” Dan said, “there wouldn’t be anybody left to turn a wheel. It might be a good thing. We’d find out what runs Capitalism: money or man-hours.”
“Even the capitalists know that,” Peterson said. “Only they ain’t letting on.”
“I aim to write a letting-on book,” Julie said.
“Everybody’s a communist,” Peterson said. “What’s Capitalism coming to, anyway?”
“Ain’t coming,” Julie said. “It’s going.”
Peterson spilled ash and slapped his chest. “Do you devote much time to thoughts like that?” he said.
“All day,” Julie said, “and I got some over for breakfast.”
Peterson stood up, saying to Dan, “Find him a spot at hard labor. Maybe if he eats, he’ll salute the flag.”
Dan gave the salute of the Boy Pioneer. “One nation indivisible,” he said, “with liberty and justice for all.”
“Liberty and just us,” Julie said.
At the door, Peterson said, “Sorry to met you, Pollard.”
“Same,” Julie said. “In spades.”
Over his shoulder, Peterson said, “Try the New York Central freight-yards, and the hell with Roosevelt.”
“Run along and pay your taxes like a good boy,” Dan said.
“The hell with Roosevelt,” Peterson said, and he left the room.
Dan took a folded card from a rack and began to fill in the blanks after the words DATE, TO, and INTRODUCING. He raised his head once to smile.
ON THE WAY HOME
Leaving the hack-driver’s flat, Dan and Mary walked across town toward the West Side. They went for some way in the cold and quiet dark before Dan said, “May I talk to you about something, Mary?”
“Always,” she said, “and about anything.”
“Even why I don’t quit the job?”
“Yes, but I’d like the real reason for once.”
“You don’t think I’ve given you a reason?”
“Never the real one, Dan.”
“How do you know that?”
“You still want to talk about it.”
He put his arm through hers, saying, “I can’t even deceive myself any more. I keep the job for one reason only: I’m afraid to give it up. I’m yellow, Mary, and knowing it is like having a bum heart—there’s no walking away from it, no place to hide.”
“I don’t think you want to hide.”
“I’ve hidden all my life.”
“At any rate, long enough to make it seem that long.”
He tried for half a block to evade her meaning, but there was no escape, nor did Mary intercede for him, and in the end he said, “Part of my life, then.”
“Good,” she said, “Now, do you want to tell me where the hiding began?”
“You seem to know,” he said.
“I do: it began in jail.”
“You’re smart about me, Mary.”
She tightened her arm, pressing his against her side. “Did you ever wonder how I spend the time we’re not together?” she said. “I ride the subways and the Tubes for two hours a day, but I don’t actually read the ads any more, and for another seven hours, I wait on women who want gloves, or imagine they want gloves, or want and imagine nothing because they have everything, but all I see of them is five fingers stuck up in the air. What do you think I do most of that time, Dan? I think about you. I make myself smart thinking about you, and I know so much that I know there must be more that you’ve never told me.”
He slid his hand into her pocket, but not until he said, “There is more, Mary,” was the hand embraced.
THERE WAS SMOKE IN THE ROOM
Skeins and blue veins of it waved slowly, like submarine weed, and it hung over the furniture, books, and people in the Powell parlor: over Julie and Mary on the leather couch, over Dan sitting cross-legged on the floor, over Tootsie at a window, over his father and mother, and over worn volumes racked and stacked everywhere. It rose and fell too over a newspaper propped in the lamplight, a first page featuring a heavy headline and a profile of Il Duce superimposed on a map of the Somaliland frontier.
Tootsie moved to the table and stared down at the cock-feathered face. “Well, it begins,” he said.
There was smoke in the room.
HOW to START A REVOLUTION
“Thirteen dollars isn’t so much,” Mary said.
On the table between her and Dan lay a brochure listing the courses to be given during the coming semester at the World Labor School, an organization occupying a few rooms in a Greenwich Village loft. Around the subject Political Economy, a ring had been drawn with a pencil.
“When you have to figure close, it is,” Dan said. “Maybe I’d get just as much out of a textbook.”
“I doubt it. There’s nothing like being in a class.”
“That’s true, I suppose. The others kind of keep you primed.”
“Why don’t you go down to the school after work tomorrow and sign up? For months now, Tootsie’s been at you to join his Party, and you’ve been saying you didn’t know enough to decide. Well, here’s your chance to find out.”
“Tell you
what: I’ll sign up if you do.”
“And spend twenty-six when we’re worried about thirteen?” Mary said. “You go by yourself, and when you come home from each lecture, you can tell me what you learned. For thirteen weeks, every Monday’ll be Political Economy night.”
* * *
Mary was still awake when Dan returned from the first session of the course. She patted a place for him alongside her on the bed, and he sat down and kissed her. “Well, teach me something,” she said. “Something political, I mean.”
“If I tell you all I know, what’ll I have left?”
“Knowledge is the one thing you can give away and still have—or did your mother say that first? But no matter: it’s true.”
“I wish it was true about money,” Dan said. “If money stretched like that, there’d be no class-struggle and no Diaterical Malectialism.”
“And we’d still have our thirteen dollars,” Mary said. “What’s the teacher like?”
“He has a face,” Dan said. “He goes by the name of Austin, Jeff Austin, but I’ll gamble he doesn’t answer to it in the daytime. About thirty, I’d judge, and kind of thinnish. A thinnish man with a face.”
“What did he say with it?”
“First of all, he outlined the course: it’ll be about Scientific Socialism, and that’s Marxism, and Marxism is I only wish I knew.”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“He said lots of people called themselves Marxists because they once read a book called Capital. But reading a book only proves you know how to spell, he said; it doesn’t necessarily mean you know what you’re spelling. So far, so good?”
“So far, so good,” Mary said.
“I’m glad,” Dan said, “because the rest is Greek, and literally. For instance, do you know what Dialectics is? Well, neither do I, so I’ll explain it to you. The word comes from the Greek dialektike, which, if I misunderstand it correctly, translates into something like this. A couple of guys in togas would square off some place, only instead of trying for a fall with a hammer-lock, they’d clamp ideas on each other, the aim being to get at the truth by arguing till one of them showed himself up as a chump. I don’t know what the winner won, but I know how he won it: by the dialectical method.”
“What’s Greek about that?”
“Every damn word of it,” Dan said. “For a long time, those debating-matches were abstract, but the day came when people began to wonder what would happen if you used Dialectics to get at the truth about Nature. Up to then, Nature had been thought of as an act of God, a thing that nobody would ever be able to give a reason for or change, but the minute they got to work on it with Dialectics, they found that Nature was all change, whether you were dealing with a grain of sand or the sun—and right there, a slew of Dialectical Materialists got themselves a job with a future.”
“When do you come to the Greek stuff?”
“You mean, you understand all that?”
“Of course,” Mary said. “Don’t you?”
“I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“When you’re finished, I’ll explain.”
“Austin said Dialectics is the opposite of Metaphysics.”
“You know what Metaphysics is, of course.”
“I was afraid of that,” Dan said. “I think it has to do with the supernatural, because whenever a metaphysical guy met a dialectical guy, they got into a terrible fracas about Nature. The metaphysical guy would say, ‘You want to know something, bum? Nature is a trunkful of unrelated junk.’ The dialectical guy would say, ‘You’re describing the contents of your head, feller. The only accident in Nature is the way you look at it.’ The metaphyscial guy would say, ‘And not only is Nature accidental, but it’s a permanent accident. That’s how it was, bum, and that’s how it’ll always stay.’ The dialectical guy would say, ‘It didn’t stay that way even while you were talking about it. Somebody just died, and somebody was just born. Millions of people grew older, and an island sprang up from the sea. A star fell, a mortgage was foreclosed, and a cop shot a picket. Nothing stands still. Everything moves.’ The metaphysical guy would say, ‘Hush mah mouf, for not only is Nature accidental and unchangeable, but it repeats itself. It’s like a child practicing penmanship. Over and over, he makes the same circles, the same curls of ink. Birth, death, decay, and then birth again—the same uniform pattern.’ The dialectical guy would say. ‘What you argue is that no matter how long we practice penmanship, we’ll never be able to write, but I say that if we keep on making those curlicues, some day they’ll be words—and it’s the same with Nature. Pile up enough quantity, and you’ll wake up to find that the quantity has changed its quality.’ The metaphysical guy would say, ‘And not only is Nature accidental, unchangeable, and repetitious, but it’s harmonious. Whatever is, is right.’ And the dialectical guy would say, ‘Whatever is, is fight! All things in Nature have their positive and negative sides, their past and their future, their start and their end. They have their own life and death within themselves, and any harmony you see is the unity of those opposites in a constant struggle, as if Nature were fighting itself and being both winner and loser at the same time.’”
“It was worth the money,” Mary said.
“One thing more, and you’ll have all of Lecture I,” Dan said. “Austin claims that Marxism is merely an extending of the dialectical method to the history of society. I don’t know whether that can be done; I don’t know whether you can treat people the same as you treat things. Austin says you can, and he says he’s going to prove it. If he doesn’t, thirteen of our material bucks are down the dialectical drain.” He rose now. “To be continued next week in an exciting instalment.”
[On your way home from the school, crossing one of the streets above Washington Square, you had passed an apartment-building, stopped suddenly, and gone back to stand before the entrance, and there, with a remembrance of Emma James, you had summoned Julia as well, and then, glancing upward through the iron skeleton of the canopy, you had found only darkness in the windows of the fourth floor—and now in your own room you needed darkness too; you were still dressed, but you felt exposed.]
* * *
“Tonight I took some notes,” Dan said, and he reached for a pad lying on the table next to the bed. “In Lecture II, we learned how to start a revolution.”
“All that in only two hours?” Mary said.
“Yes, but it’ll take a little longer to learn how to finish one. Now, pay attention, because I’m going to say this once, and once only: Marxism deals with the relations between human bodies in the class-struggle. That’s it, and no questions are allowed.”
“Is that what we got for our dollar?”
“By God, it’s worth a dollar of anybody’s money! Think it over. Smell it. Feel it. Try it on.”
“Move back a little. You don’t have to give me a lecture right up against my face.”
“Mary, sweetheart,” he said. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. I never had the proper words for it, though, and that’s why I never spoke.”
“Do you have them now, Danny?”
“Yes,” he said. “Under Capitalism, there are two main classes.”
“You dog, you!”
“The ruling-class and the working-class. The ruling-class, or bourgeoisie, or bushwa, as us kids used to say, owns all the factories, mines, land, banks, railroads, and utilities. The working-class or proletary-rat, owns an old fish-rod, a phonograph with a dented horn, a dinner-pail, and itself. In between these two classes are the farmers, knife-grinders, tap-dancers, candy-butchers, and employment-agents, but it’s the top and bottom that make the class-sandwich: the filling is only something to bite through. Do you follow?”
“Wherever my little dog leads.”
“The ruling-class rules, and the working-class works, but it’s reasonable to ask why one gets all the meat and fur and the other only the entrails and bones. Under Capitalism, this fair and square division is arrived at a
ccording to their relation to the means of production: the machine. If you own that, no matter how you came by it, you rule; if you don’t own it, no matter what you did to create it, you work. The capitalists want that state of affairs to go on forever; the socialists want to change it tomorrow. For the answer to the burning question, ‘Will the Marxists arrive in time to save Emanuel Labor?’ don’t miss Instalment III next Monday night. Man, am I tired!”
[You had walked the same street, this time by design, and this time there had been a lighted window where you sought it, and you had stared up at it for a long while before slowly moving on—and you had known even then, even as you went away, that not forever would you pause and pass by.]
* * *
