Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Hoover has hated the OSS since the day Roosevelt created it. He’ll do anything to destroy it so he can get his hands on intelligence operations outside the United States to go along with his counterintelligence operations inside.”

  “I repeat, what does that have to do with me?”

  “Come off it, Tom; you know Hoover has been playing up Red Scares since the 1920s. What was the first thing you told me when you got here?” I couldn’t remember, but he did. “That you’d been a communist as a kid. Well, OSS knew that—it was in your security check, but we didn’t care, so long as you weren’t a Nazi.”

  I smiled. “So now the OSS or whatever it’s called is worried I’m a commie?”

  “No, but they are worried that you are a handy stick Hoover can use to beat them up. First whispers, then leaks to congressional committees, finally headlines—‘Communists in Spy Agency.’ Get it?”

  “I get it.” There really was nothing I could do about it short of rewriting history.

  “Sorry, Tom. If it’s any consolation to you, I’m getting out too. Going back to my prewar job.”

  “What was that?”

  “I was a professor. Maybe you should try it.”

  New York in the late ’40s was different from the city I’d left in 1941. I was living off Broadway at 111th Street, not far south of where I’d rented in Harlem before the war. But it felt more like London. No, not London. There was no bomb damage anywhere. Riverside Drive along this part of Manhattan looked more like Paris or some other European city. When I had left six years before, Broadway had still been mainly boarded-up or vacant storefronts, nearly empty shops tended by listless owners. Now there were bookstores and bakeries, delis and florists, dressmakers and tailor shops, butchers and greengrocers with stands that spilled into the streets when the police would let them.

  The crowds on the pavement were different. On the Upper West Side of New York, you could suddenly hear a dozen European languages, along with Puerto Rican Spanish and Harlem jive talk. The immigrants all seemed to be pushing baby carriages, the men walking arm in arm the way they might in Vienna. There were plenty of Americans too, men so long in the service that they seemed almost consciously to suppress a salute when they met.

  Like me, most of these men were students at Columbia University. The surge of grown men in a hurry completely overwhelmed the Ivy League restraint I had sensed before the war the few times I dared to walk the mall that cut through the campus at 116th Street. Before the war there had been vast and pristine lawns, the likes of which I did not see again till Oxford. Now there were the same Quonset huts the 609th Service Battalion had known in England. Every open space from 114th Street to 123rd Street was covered with these temporary buildings—living spaces, lab spaces, classrooms.

  I came back knowing what I wanted to study—history, American history, the history of slavery and reconstruction after the Civil War. And I knew whom I wanted to study it with. Richard Hofstadter had been a member of the Young Communist League and a member of the party before the war. He was about four years older than me, and when I first met him before the war, he was working on a doctorate at Columbia himself. Hofstadter had quit the party the same week as I had and for the same reason—Stalin’s deal with Hitler. By the time I had returned, he was back at Columbia as a professor. The best thing about Hofstadter was that he knew nothing much about my subject. That made it easy to satisfy him, and I was able to finish a PhD in a little over four years. A record for Columbia in the ’40s.

  The other reason I was able to wrap things up that quickly was my marriage. I met Barbara the second week of September 1947, in Butler Library. She was a very tall, very thin woman, long black hair, dressed with the sort of chic maturity that sorority girls at Barnard couldn’t even recognize. I was standing behind her as she was checking out one of Hofstadter’s books.

  “You don’t want to read that, miss.” She was just turning around and about to respond to my cheekiness, but I went on, “I should know. He’s my thesis director.” For some reason she smiled. Emboldened, I went further. “I’d be glad to fill you in on the book if you’d have a drink with me at the West End.” It was one of the two student bars in the neighborhood.

  Barbara, it turned out, was a Barnard senior, from a place near San Francisco called Tiburon. She lived alone in a studio off West End Avenue toward the Hudson River.

  We tumbled into bed that first night, began living together the next week, and married in December. I won’t say any more about it beyond the fact that we were well matched, sexually and otherwise. She was looking for an academic, one who would be successful, and more than that, visible—at least in cultured circles. Whoever she picked would have to want to stay in New York. She loved New York and didn’t want to go back to California. She never said so, but I suspected that the lucky man couldn’t be a Jew, of which there were many in New York who otherwise fit her bill. There was one more thing she was looking for: a man who didn’t want children.

  I didn’t know that immediately. Like most of my fellow veterans, I guess I came home from the war expecting to have kids. Barbara’s time in New York led her in the opposite direction. No kids. Thanks, but no thanks. Too much trouble. I guess I should have objected a little more strongly. But we were a good match. I was too busy trying to become at least a little bit famous, famous for doing something interesting, controversial, worth arguing about. It had to be about the black-white racial question. That issue hadn’t left me.

  I didn’t mind that Barbara had a private income. I liked the fact that she didn’t want to marry a lawyer or a doctor, still less a banker or broker, even if Barbara intended to live like the wife of one. She didn’t mind my politics either.

  Being on the left was fashionable back then. We were still fighting the good fight, recalling Roosevelt and the New Deal, condemning Truman as a traitor to unions, workers, poor farmers. We blamed him, Churchill, and the Republicans in Congress for the beginnings of the Cold War, rallying to Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign in 1948. Barbara’s political contributions were large enough to get us invitations to cocktail parties, to the reserved seats at rallies, and even to a dinner at which Katharine Hepburn was the guest of honor.

  Meanwhile, I was being drawn into another part of the campaign, where my old friends from the Communist Party were playing active roles. The whole apparatus of the party, at least in New York City, was put at Henry Wallace’s “disposal.” What really happened was that the party took over his campaign. Once I began to turn up at Wallace functions, people I recognized from before the war made it clear that bygones were bygones. I was welcomed back into their crowd. The parties were fun, and Barbara liked the frisson of people with dangerous ideas.

  One Friday evening in the fall of 1948, I found myself alone at a party on the Lower East Side. Was it a rent party, or one to raise money to fight Truman’s Taft-Hartley antiunion law? I can’t remember. But there in the middle of the room I saw my old “friend” Julie Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel. The last time I’d seen him was the afternoon in September 1939 when he vaguely threatened me with a beating if I didn’t rejoin the party. He was heavier now, wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit and a tie that even from across the room looked like it had food stains on it. Julie Rosenberg looked decidedly unprosperous.

  I worked my way over to him and clinked beer bottles. “Long time, Julie.”

  He recognized me, thought for a moment, recovered my name, and then gave me a hug. “Tom, do you remember Ethel?” He turned to a diminutive woman with an oval face framed in dark hair. Her very red lips were pursed, and a worried look seemed permanently set on her face. Like Julie’s suit, her dress was strictly “S. Klein—on the Square.” “Tom and I were friends at City College before the war, Ethel.”

  His wife replied, “Yes, Julie, I recall your introducing us.” Her smile was forced.

  Julie turned back to me. “What are you doing these days, Tom?”

  “I’m at Columbia, stu
dying history. You?”

  “Little of this, little of that. I was working for the army as an engineer till they fired me for having been in the party. I’d quit when the war started, but it didn’t matter to them.”

  “Yes, I’ve had the problem too,” I commiserated. “You quit?” I was slightly surprised.

  “Ethel and I got tired of it all. We’re out of politics altogether.” He looked round the room and then called out, “Hey, Morty, here’s Tom Wrought.” He looked back at me. “Remember Morty . . . Morty Sobell?” I watched the man come across the room. After ten years he was hard to identify—glasses, longer hair, a good deal more weight. He looked altogether neater and more prosperous than Julie Rosenberg. I smiled, recognizing a really old friend, one I had ridden the subway with to high school every day for four years, the boy who introduced me to the party and, more important, to girls.

  Turning to Julie I replied, “Sure, I remember Morty.” By this time he had arrived, and concurring, he gripped my hand.

  “So, Tom, good war?” It was the first thing Sobell said after ten years.

  “Two years stateside; after that, two weeks of combat.” Then I said something that must have been significant, though I couldn’t know it at the time. “Spent the last two years in Helsinki.” Neither man said a word. They didn’t ask me what I’d done. Did they exchange glances? I couldn’t be sure. But suddenly they stopped asking questions. Julie drifted away, and I asked Mort about some of the other guys we’d known in high school.

  Then Julie returned, and we were joined by a rather good-looking woman. “Tom, this is Lona Cohen, friend of ours.” Lona towered over Ethel Rosenberg and looked even taller with her rich brown hair pinned up over her warm, smiling face. She grasped my hand and held my gaze intensely. Was she inviting me to make a pass, I wondered. Then she noticed my wedding ring and assumed a more restrained affect.

  “Hello.” I smiled. “Lona is an unusual name,” I remarked.

  “Actually it’s Leontine. Even more unusual. Julie tells me you’re studying history. My husband and I have a used bookstore in the village. Lots of history on our shelves. Maybe you can lighten them.” I felt a twinge when she mentioned her husband. Her warmth had been arousing.

  “Love to come and browse,” I replied. Lona handed me a card and drifted off.

  A week later I was in Washington Square for a lecture at NYU. Afterward I headed into Greenwich Village, looking for a cup of espresso. Suddenly I found myself in front of Good Price Books and Prints, Lona’s shop. I certainly had no objection to seeing her again. In fact, it might have been that thought that sent me in. At the counter was a stocky man with a thick mop of hair going gray, parted close to the middle. He was wearing heavy corduroys and a blue shirt underneath suspenders and manhandling a stack of books piled high on the counter. There was a cloud of dust behind and above him. Coughing, he pulled out a kerchief and smiled. “Can I help you?” Another spasm of coughing took him.

  “Is Lona here? We met a few days ago at a party.”

  “Sorry, no. She’s traveling. Won’t be back till day after tomorrow. Are you”—he paused—“Tom? Tom Wrought? She mentioned meeting you. I’m Morris, Lona’s husband.” My conversation with Lona at the party had seemed to me far too brief for her to bother mentioning me to someone else, especially a husband she might have been contemplating cuckolding. I was surprised.

  “Actually I came in looking for something,” I lied. “George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.” I began to explain. “It’s not published in the US. I’m looking for a British edition, Secker and Warburg, I think. She said you might have it.”

  He laughed. I didn’t ask why, though years later I realized how transparent the lie was. Then he said, “Ah yes. Great book. I was in Spain during the civil war.” He began coughing again. “Got this cough I can’t shake after ten years. Didn’t run into Orwell, though.” He came out from behind the counter and headed to a shelf behind me, pretending to look for a book he must have known was not there. “No, sorry. If you leave me a number, I can call you if it comes in.” He added portentously, “Or Lona can.”

  A few days later, Lona called. “Hello, Tom. I’ve got that book you came looking for, Homage to Catalonia. A copy just came in. If you can’t get down here, I can bring it over.”

  What, I wondered, was going on? She wanted to bring me a book she knew I hadn’t really asked her about at the party. What did this woman really want from me? The only way to find out was to agree to a meeting. But not at home, I decided. “I have some research to do at the Forty-Second Street Library tomorrow. Can we meet in front of the lions, say, two o’clock?”

  “Great. See you then.” The voice betrayed no disappointment.

  Lona was waiting when I arrived. I looked for a book in her hand, but there was none. I had half thought she’d go through the motions of the pretext for the meeting. She smiled as I approached, and before I could offer my hand, she hugged me and offered her lips, mouth open, to mine. This was not quite what I was expecting, and my response—an averted face—left her looking disappointed. She cleared her throat and began, “I thought when we spoke that we . . .” She did not finish the sentence. “I guess I sized you up wrong, Tom.” Still I didn’t speak. “Buy me a drink, will you?” We walked down toward Grand Central Station and found a quiet bar.

  When we were seated at the bar she said, “Too early for a dry martini?”

  “Not at all.” I spoke to the barman.

  She took a long sip at the drink and then began, “Tom, you may not be interested in me, not the way I thought. Are you interested in peace?”

  “Sure. Aren’t we all?”

  “You were in Helsinki after the war, weren’t you?”

  I had never said anything about Helsinki to her at the party. Had Julie Rosenberg or Mort Sobell passed every word I had spoken to Lona Cohen? If so, why? “I was there for a while in ’45 and ’46. You know I’m Finnish.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “Can’t afford it, Lona.”

  “If you’d like to go back for a visit, that wouldn’t be a problem.”

  I couldn’t let the conversation go on much further. “What’s the catch, Lona?”

  “No catch. If you want to help the cause of peace, if you want to resist the people trying to start a new war, this time against the Soviet Union, there are things you can do.” I made no response. She went on, “You’ve been listening to Henry Wallace, haven’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, his words are not going to be enough to stop the warmongers, the men who always wanted to fight the Soviets instead of the Germans. If you want to stop them, there are things to do.”

  “Sorry, I can’t help you.” I rose and left the bar.

  After my conversation with Lona, I wasn’t particularly shocked when the government arrested Julie Rosenberg for espionage in August 1950. But I was surprised they took Ethel too. After all, she had two little kids and wasn’t a threat to anyone.

  By the time they were put on trial the next year, along with Mort Sobell and Ethel’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass, I was in Helsinki again. Every time I picked up a paper to read about the Rosenberg trial, I expected the Cohens to be mentioned, or at least Lona. But nothing appeared. When I got back to New York, I went round to the bookstore. It was gone, replaced by a nice little Puerto Rican bodega selling Café Bostello espresso coffee by the bag. It had been there for a couple of years. The bookstore had folded early in 1950.

  Now, here’s the weird thing. Last fall I could swear I saw Lona Cohen and Morris Cohen each at Marks and Co., the booksellers on Charing Cross at Cambridge Circle. I asked the manager about them. All he could tell me was they were named Mr. and Mrs. Peter and Helen Kroger, and they owned an antiquarian bookshop in town.

  In the early spring of 1951, I was still at Columbia, wrapping up my thesis on the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow in the South. One day I got a call from the chairman of the history departm
ent at Howard University, John Hope Franklin. Howard was a Negro college, the most prestigious of them. I’d never met Franklin but knew about him and his work. He was the first Negro to finish a PhD in history at Harvard. More than that, Franklin was the most important historian writing on my subject. The fact that he called, long distance, person-to-person—a trunk call, to you Brits—instead of writing was out of the ordinary, but I didn’t pick up on it at the time.

  “Mr. Wrought, could you come to Washington to give a lecture on your research? We’d also like to discuss offering you a position on our faculty.”

  “Name your time and place, sir,” I responded with enthusiasm. He seemed in a remarkable hurry. We fixed a date for two days hence.

  I arrived at Howard on a Thursday and gave my talk on the “corrupt bargain” of the 1876 presidential election, which the House of Representatives had to decide, owing to the failure of the electoral college to agree on a winner. The resulting compromise gave the Republicans the presidency in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the former Confederate States. It was the beginning of the reenslavement, as I called it, of the black agricultural proletariat. Franklin didn’t approve of the heavy dose of Marxism in my analysis, but he appreciated the archival research and the census data that went into it. I returned to my hotel after a pleasant dinner, fairly certain I would not be offered the job.

  As I entered the lobby, a man rose and approached. “Hello, Tom.” It was Taylor Cole, my Stockholm OSS control.

  “Taylor, what are you doing here?”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “Nothing ever is with you fellas.” I was beginning to remember the terms on which we had last seen each other. “Am I back in your good graces?”

  “You were always in mine. But I don’t work for the government anymore. Can we talk?”

  “The bar? My room?” I looked toward the elevator.

  He pointed at the walls. “Let’s take the air.” We walked out into the warmth of a Washington spring evening.