Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  Three days later Alice Silverstone still had no answers to the questions that troubled her. All that week she’d watched for some notice in the papers of the death in the tube station at Paddington, some report of Tom’s arrest. There was nothing more beyond the squib in one of the tabloids. The papers were all concerned about the worst patch of pea soup fog London had ever dealt with.

  The CID now knew Alice was Tom Wrought’s solicitor, yet she had not been called to be present at a single interview. Liz had promised to alert Alice as soon as the police wanted to interview her. But they hadn’t shown any interest in doing that either. Why not? The love triangle was obvious. But most of all, there was the coincidence that really couldn’t be a coincidence. Tom was there on that platform because someone wanted him to be there when they killed Trevor Spencer. Of that Alice was certain.

  Thursday, 29 January 1959, had been the worst smog and fog day in London for a decade. Visibility was nil. Everything had been brought to a standstill, as though a blizzard had dropped thirty inches of snow on the capital. Breathability was no better. Even the next afternoon, after it had lifted, making her way to Brixton Prison, Alice could feel the burn in her chest. It was, she thought, almost a relief to bear some discomfort elsewhere in her body.

  Alice had spent the morning at her desk in the office. She was, in the expression she now really understood, “putting her affairs in order.” She was closing cases, noting some for the office’s clerk to transfer to other solicitors, toting up her accounts, leaving instructions about how much to pay clerks, notice servers, and revenue stamp agents. It would take time. Did she have enough? In just a week her demands on the morphine had detectably increased. Would she be able to deal with Tom Wrought’s case? She needed a way to speed things up.

  It was Tom’s second meeting with his solicitor. When he arrived in the interview room, Alice Silverstone was already seated at the table with two composition books before her, dressed as fashionably as before. Tom couldn’t resist remarking on it. “Miss Silverstone, so nice to see you again. But you didn’t have to dress up for me.” Just seeing her lifted the despond.

  “Didn’t do it for you. Did it for me.” She said it lightly. Cheeky. “Tom?” Her tone turned interrogatory. “Liz told me I had to call you that. Alright?” Tom nodded, smiling, and Alice continued, “I can’t let her visit. She’ll probably be a witness in any trial, and the Crown will suggest connivance if there’s a record of her being here.”

  “Could she be compelled to testify?”

  “’Fraid so. Look, we don’t have much time today. They won’t let me stay more than thirty minutes at a time. Now, here is my theory of this case. Someone wants you in prison or perhaps hung, and they killed Trevor Spencer to accomplish that end.” Silverstone laid out her reasoning and did not have to go over anything more than once. Tom saw it immediately.

  “So, what are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t think a barrister will be able to do much with the witnesses, though I’ll have them throw sand at the trainman’s identification. If my theory is right, you were framed. And if so, there is one thread hanging loose: Why kill Trevor Spencer when whoever did it could have simply killed you and been done with it? If we can answer that question, we stand a chance.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “By getting you to tell me who might have had an interest in framing you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that most of the last three days . . . I can give you a list, but it would be pretty far-fetched.”

  “A list of names is no good to me, Mr. Wro—Tom.” They both smiled at her correcting herself.

  “That’s all I can give you from in here.”

  “No, you can give me more, and you’ll have to, if we are to stand a chance.” She caught her breath and continued, “If you just make a list, you’ll forget someone for sure. Besides, lacking context, I won’t be able to figure out who the people on your list are or why they’re on it. Look, Tom, we don’t have time for endless interviews, piecing together your past so we can figure out who did this to you. But you’re a historian, a writer. I need you to sit down and write out the history for me, your history—at least as far back as you think might be relevant.”

  “Write my autobiography, you mean? At my age, and behind bars?” Tom was momentarily amused by the thought. “Sounds pretty pretentious, counsellor.”

  “Maybe. But the more you write, the more people and events will come to you that you’d never recall just drawing up a list. You know how memory works. Start concentrating, and one recollection leads to another. Better to get down too much rather than too little. Let me be the judge of what’s important.”

  “Well, I suppose it’ll be something to do.” But then Tom began warming to the task. Perhaps having an assignment, work to do, would displace the funk that was too often punctuated by moments of dread.

  Alice slid the two composition books across the table. They were thick, quarto-size volumes, larger than American notebooks, ruled with narrower lines, Tom noticed as he opened one. Then she placed a fountain pen and ink bottle before him. “Don’t just tell me who might want to frame Tom Wrought for murder. Tell me everything about what got you here, to Britain, to Oxford, to that underground platform, but from the beginning, as far back as you think matters.”

  Liz was waiting in the gusty wind across the street from the main gate of Brixton Prison when Alice Silverstone emerged.

  “How is he?” was her first question.

  “A bit demoralized. It must be frightfully boring for him when he’s not just scared. I gave him the assignment. I’m not certain he took it seriously. But I can’t think of another way to speed things along.” She looked at Liz and thought to herself, “Speed things along”? Wrong thing to say, Alice.

  Liz didn’t notice. “He’s a man, an academic, a writer. He won’t find composing his autobiography boring.” Their laughter lifted the gloom briefly.

  PART IV

  1937–1957

  The Confessions of Thomas Wrought

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tom sat himself as comfortably as he could, leaning against the wall behind his bunk. Carefully he put the fountain pen point in the small bottle, pulled the lever on the pen barrel, drawing ink into the pen, and then opened the first of his black-and-white marbled composition books. There was now nothing more he could do to postpone the writing. How to begin? Historians are storytellers. They have to be to make their readers care. So tell Alice your story.

  My parents came to New York a few years before I was born, at the end of a large migration from Finland. At the time it was still a province of Tsarist Russia. My name was Toomas, and Wrought is a rough translation of the Finnish name Koristeltu. Probably my ancestors were blacksmiths.

  Growing up, my mother spoke only Finnish at home. So I learned. But the only time I ever felt Finnish was on Sunday afternoons, when we listened to Toscanini and the NBC symphony on the radio playing Finlandia by Sibelius. The music made me stand and cry. That got me mad at myself for being moved by music.

  I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a mainly Irish neighborhood in Manhattan between Broadway and the Hudson River docks. My father died in 1930, when I was ten; I had the run of the streets most days while my mother worked.

  Hell’s Kitchen was as rough as it sounds. Any other street but your own was a foreign territory. The east/west blocks between the avenues were narrow and long, four times the length of the north/south avenue blocks. These long cross streets were lined with six-story walk-up brownstone tenements—cold-water railroad flats. All winter the winds whistling up the Hudson would cut right through them. Summer nights were worse, each an agony of damp sleeplessness in stagnant heat. When we had one, my mother and I would both sleep on the fire escape, in spite of the smell of sewage.

  I was Finnish, not Irish, so I didn’t go to mass, have a first communion, or attend the local parochial school. I didn’t wear its blue serge uniform and experience
the daily afternoon’s release from the nuns’ terror. Coming out into the street uncorked a seething anger that the Irish Catholic boys took out on whomever wasn’t Irish Catholic, was smaller, and was alone. All too often that was me. I couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t let me be Irish.

  The smart thing was to hide the little money you carried in a sock and tie your latchkey to a string under your shirt. Otherwise a tough kid with a switchblade would turn out your pockets and make you take him up the stairs to rob you in your own home.

  In the winter the only place to stay warm was the public library. My mother taught me how to read before I ever got to school. That, plus the steam heating in the library, is what saved me.

  I was pretty much like most kids, really, except for one matter. The only serious thing I really cared about from the time I was very young was equality for Negroes. I don’t really know why, but I can’t ever remember not being angry about racialism. Maybe it started when I had pneumonia as a five-year-old; the doctor who treated me was a Negro, and later, the librarian who didn’t turn me out into the winter snow was a black lady. I couldn’t understand why Negroes weren’t welcome by the toughs on our street. More than once when I was a kid, I’d see gangs of white kids jump a colored boy—“colored” was the polite term back then. They would take his money and leave him with enough bruises to remember not to come that way again. Cheap as the housing was, no Negro families were tolerated. I remember thinking it was a lot worse being colored than being Finnish.

  The first time I got in trouble with authority was sixth grade. The teacher, my first male teacher, told us that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. Somewhere in an old library book, I’d seen the famous photograph, a daguerreotype maybe, of the old man freed from the New Orleans slave market, stripped to the waist showing the wretched cross-hatching of scars on his back. I raised my hand and said, “No. It was a war about slavery.” Well, I had to come forward, put out my hand, and receive three strokes of a ruler. That was his response to my argument. After class the other kids started calling me “nigger lover.” Maybe I became a Communist that morning. I certainly became interested in history and rebellion.

  I went to an all-boys high school, where the kids were smart alecks. It was a long subway ride, and there was nothing much to do on the trains but talk about baseball and politics. By then the Depression was in full force. One of the older boys, Morty Sobell, was always going on about capitalist exploitation and Roosevelt’s pointless attempt to save Wall Street from the coming Socialist revolution. Back then in New York, there were Communists wherever you went. They called themselves “Democrats in a hurry.” Their slogan was “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”

  I lost contact with Sobell till after the war. In 1951 he was accused of being a Russian spy and convicted for passing atomic-bomb designs to the Russians along with the Rosenbergs. I knew Julius Rosenberg in university, but that’s a little later in my story.

  As I’ve said, there were no females in my high school. And that was a more serious matter than either sports or politics. But Morty Sobell mentioned that if you went to Communist Party meetings, you could meet girls, and these girls were not bourgeois. That was code. It meant they were “fast.” So I went along to a meeting. He was right. There was something else different at these meetings. There were educated, sophisticated Negroes. Back then in New York, the color bar was different but still strong. People would say, “In the South they don’t care how close you get, so long as you don’t get too high. In the North they don’t care how high you get, so long as you don’t get too close.” Not many Negroes got very high. But the party was the only organization that practiced complete integration and demanded outright racial equality.

  The summer I graduated high school, 1937, there were still no jobs, but the Communist Party sent me south to help organize sharecropper and farm labor unions. That way at least my mother didn’t have to support me.

  City College of New York was free. All I needed was the IRT subway fare from Fiftieth Street and Broadway. At about 120th Street, the train would break out on the viaduct and race above the deep ravine that divided Harlem from downtown. Back into the ground the subway would tunnel, coming into the 135th Street station. On my first day I bounded up the stairs and came out to a different world from the one I’d grown up in.

  There was a steep hill up from Broadway to the college, on St. Nicholas Terrace. All the way up, there were Puerto Rican bodegas, where you could get comidas crejoles, and cafés where they’d make you a cappuccino if you knew how to ask for it; shops that sold only jazz records and sheet music; even boxing gyms taking inspiration from the black heavyweight champ Joe Lewis. Along the streets you’d see Latin girls in tight, low-cut rumba dresses, and high-yellow (light-skinned) Negro men in zoot suits and two-tone shoes, even at midday. And there were the down-and-out beggars, drunks, even bemedaled veterans of the Bonus Army. Here they were all brown and no threat to a white boy.

  At the crest of the hill over the tenements rose the massive “Perp” English Gothic of City College, built of the granite schist excavated from subway tunnels all over the city. Its four gates staked out an island of mainly white faces in the middle of Harlem.

  As I passed into the vast basement cafeteria of Shepard Hall that first morning, I had to dig into my pocket to be sure I had the ten cents for coffee and a donut, plus the five cents I’d need for the subway back home. Balancing a tray and my books, I found a long table occupied by two Negro girls and asked if they minded the company. Polite pleasantries were immediately swamped by noise. A definite disturbance had emerged in the alcoves at the arched basement windows. I turned to the girls at my table. “Can you tell me what that’s about?”

  One of the girls responded, “Oh, it’s another case of no-enemies-on-the-left. Just a couple of the splinter groups in the Popular Front going after one another again.”

  The second girl looked over her shoulder. “Let’s see, there’s the Young People’s Socialist League, not to be confused with the Young Socialist Alliance; the Socialist Workers’ Party; the American Labor Party; the Communist Party; the Fourth International—that’s the Trotskyites; and there’s Eugene Debs’s old Socialist Party too.” Pleased with herself, she looked back at her friend. “Have I missed any?”

  “’Fraid so. The plain old Workers’ Party, for one. But the others don’t have enough members to squat in an alcove from early morning to late at night.” She looked at me, and in dead earnest said, “They’d camp out if they could.” Then they both rose. “Excuse us; calculus class . . .”

  Since I was already a member of the Young Communist League, I made my way to the alcove sheltering the CP. Two young men were arguing about the Popular Front—Stalin’s strategy of protecting Russian communism by combining with noncommunist parties to fight fascism. One of them was adhering closely to the party line; the other was plainly a Trotskyite. I listened for a while in silence. Suddenly the Stalinist turned to me. “I’m Irving Howe. Who’s right here, me or Kristol?”

  It was obvious to my Stalinist orthodoxy. “Socialism in one country, of course. World revolution is fatuous. Kristol there is guilty of what Lenin called ‘an infantile disorder.’” Kristol took a small notebook from his pocket and began writing. I turned to him. “Taking my name down?”

  “No. I’m writing down the word fatuous. It’s good, and I want to check the meaning.” That was the beginning of my education as an intellectual.

  I could follow the party line pretty well, at least when I got to college in 1937. At first I was doctrinaire as hell. I would look Kristol in the face and defend Stalin’s show trials in Moscow. He had lined up all his old comrades from the revolution, men in their sixties, who had been loyal for forty years. Torture had made them denounce themselves as “wreckers” and “Trotskyite” enemies of the people. Anyone but a true believer could see what was really happening, especially when you noticed the bruises and fractures in the Life magazine photos.
But the party could whistle up fifty of us students to swear the trials were “on the up and up.”

  Why did we care so much? Well, we took ideas seriously, but we also thought the times were really dangerous and that you had to take sides. From 1936 on, we knew war was coming, and we knew that only the Russians were prepared to take on the Nazis.

  But the main reason I stayed in the party was its “line” on Jim Crow. That was always the most important thing for me. Only the Communist Party demanded Negro equality unequivocally, or at least it did till 1941, when Stalin’s need for American trucks made its members into strike-breakers!

  To me, Negroes were not just the equals of everyone else. The ones I knew were finer human beings. Maybe the best of them was a handsome young man named Bayard Rustin. He came to City College the same year I did, joined the party too. Rustin was a talented singer, professional in fact, and once introduced me to Paul Robeson. When I had any money and a date to impress, he could get me a late table at Café Society in Greenwich Village. There he performed for one of the few completely integrated audiences in the country. He left the party before I did, but we remained friends.

  It was from Bayard I first learned the lyrics Billie Holiday made famous at Café Society:

  Southern trees bear strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

  Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  I found a job as a messenger boy for the New Masses, a weekly magazine that delivered the party’s line on culture, literature, the movies, music, and theater all over New York. New Masses published Hemingway and Dreiser and Dorothy Parker, but it also published Negro writers like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. These men I met. They took me to their jazz clubs, concerts at the Apollo, even their party meetings once I turned eighteen and could join the grown-ups.