by Howard Fast
“I don’t know,” Ruth said.
“And where in hell is Max?”
He waddled in then by the side door, grinning and asking gently, “Were you disturbed, Doc? If I move slowly, I prolong my own life, and the revolution will still come on schedule, won’t it? This is a business for the young. I’m a museum piece. I got no business being a red.”
“What stopped you—a checker game?”
“Different motivations in different folk,” Goldstein mused, as Ruth got into her coat. “Wear boots—there’s an inch of snow. You, Elliott, are a professional revolutionary; I am a stout slug; let us face the truth, all of it. When you were in Spain, I sat in the sunshine and kept my feet by the fire, and whatever comes, I will die in bed with uremia and high blood pressure. As to what kept me, I informed myself on the facts, an old-fashioned but necessary detail.” He followed them outside and climbed into the coupe, grunting as he squeezed Ruth into the few inches the two great bulks left. “I would prefer a quiet movement,” he sighed. “Ethical and correct and patient in the smooth flow of events. A movement that sees both sides of a thorny matter,” he added after a moment, “but takes definite action on neither. Instead, I ally myself with a group of pariahs. Ye are the cursed of the earth, even as the early Christians were. But I am neither meek nor sinful, and martyrdom holds no gentle attractions, neither have I a nervous system, or what you fancy young fellows call a neurotic compulsion. I am George Babbitt, with a smattering of learning—and the only compulsion I have is in the shape of a mesalliance with a whore called .truth. I find no one else interested—in truth, I mean—”
“For Christ’s sake,” Abbott snapped, “stop trying to be a latter-day Socrates! What’s going on?”
“Nothing that I can make sense of. Their childish fancy—which, I am given to understand, sprang full blown from the mind of a gentleman of ancient repute, Gelb by name, as Athene sprang from the brow of Zeus—is that since Lowell owns all of the property between the gates of the plant and Birch Street and has posted it to that effect, he can prevent picketing through the ordinary function of the trespass ordinance. They faked up a handful of warrants, waited for Ryan and Joey Raye to turn up, and then ran them in. Also, they pushed the picket lines back to Birch Street. I couldn’t locate Noska, and nobody else seems to know what to do.”
“That sounds like a cheap, stupid stunt,” Abbott said, at the courthouse now, easing into the line of obliquely parked cars.
“It is—indeed, it is. But it’s part of the pattern of Hamilton Gelb. A whole generation of strikebreakers learned under him, and don’t underestimate him. Your Seventy-ninth Congress is learning his technique. The trick is to find some law, rule, ordinance, tort, or regulation that the strikers are violating, slap it onto them, force them into an impossible decision, and then crack down with enough force to break the strike wide open. Meanwhile, split the body of the union. That’s classic. That’s why they picked up Ryan and Raye.”
“How did they know?” Abbott wondered.
“You can find out,” Goldstein murmured sadly. “There is no such thing as a secret Communist, my friend. Only the Federal Bureau of Investigation is foolish enough to believe so and spend time and money trying to dig them out. Open your mouth, talk sense, like liberty, know where you’re going—these are the Victorian virtues which endear your childish movement to me, but they make a man as transparent as a GOP platform.”
14.The county courthouse was the center, geographically as well as in a business sense, of Glarkton. An old and not too ungainly granite building, erected in 1857, it had an appropriate air of dignity and temperance. A broad flight of stone stairs led up to the big double doors, above which was cut into the stone JUSTITIA OMNIBUS, a slogan Abbott had always admired for its brevity and wealth of inclusion. In front of the courthouse was a tiny park, about a hundred feet square, and in the center was the Civil War monument, with all the names around it of the 108th Massachusetts Regiment, which had borne the weight of the first attack at Gettysburg and had suffered so terribly, taking three hundred and twenty-two casualties out of its three-hundred-and-fifty-odd men. Underneath the names and around the base of the pedestal was engraved, UNION IS DEAR—GLORY HATH A SWEET TASTE—BUT WHEN A MAN LAY DOWN HIS LIFE IT IS FOR HIS BROTHER—AND BY WHAT ELSE SHALL HIS BROTHER SET STORE BUT FREEDOM? There were benches in the park, which in milder weather supported the town Ioafers and those few citizens who achieved more than the threescore years and ten allotted by the Book, but now they were deserted and encrusted with snow, as was the wooden billboard which named those new dead in the ancient struggle. The public library faced the courthouse from across the square, and on either side were two-story loft buildings, housing stores and offices.
Abbott and his wife followed Max Goldstein as he laboriously climbed the steps, sweating and puffing for all of the cold; and then they waited in the lobby for him to catch his breath, squeeze out of his coat, and stow away his scarf and gloves. This was not a busy season for the court; they only had to wait a few minutes before the bailiff informed Goldstein that Judge Curtis would see him. Then Goldstein led the way into the dim gothic vault of the court, where half a dozen people loafed on the benches, a lawyer prowled impatiently, and a bespectacled, neat little man, with a toothbrush mustache, maintained a bored watch behind the bench. He grinned at Goldstein and waved a hand.
“Hello, Max.”
Elliott and. Ruth stopped at the rail, but Goldstein pushed through with the untroubled tenacity of an elephant and rumbled, “With all honor to the Bench, when I see that grin on your face, I see an obsequious servant of the rotten oligarchy that runs this town.”
“Why don’t you retire?” the judge said dryly. “You’re just a fat old goat, and you get worse each day.”
“I don’t have enough money to retire. I keep my hands clean.”
“Suppose I declare you in contempt of court and it costs you five hundred?”
“Go ahead, go ahead,” Goldstein muttered.
“Do you have business here, or did you just come to insult the Court? It’s Saturday, and in the run of things, without your pleading over the phone and my being fool enough to listen, I’d fine you and adjourn.”
“Go ahead and adjourn,” Goldstein said. “In the run of things, I’d be in my office with a checker game instead of out in a blinding snowstorm. Your Honor …” he added.
“What is it?” the judge asked. “Ryan and Raye?”
“I expect you to give me custody out of hand.”
“I can’t do it,” the judge said shortly.
“What? My God Almighty, have I thirty years as a member of the Massachusetts bar and fifty years as a citizen of this Commonwealth, to hear you ask me for bail on a cheap little trespass frame?”
“That’s right.” The neat little man’s voice hardened; the sparkle went out of his eyes. “That’s right, Max. Don’t make too much of it. I know you a long time. I don’t want to get angry.”
“I know you a long time too, Your Honor,” Goldstein answered slowly, and to Abbott, listening, there was something he had never heard in the lawyer’s voice before. “How much bail?”
“Two hundred dollars each,” the judge said succinctly.
“Two hundred dollars for trespass?”
“And resisting arrest. It’s cheap at the price.”
“Resisting arrest?”
“That’s right.”
Goldstein turned to Elliott and nodded. Suddenly, he had become a fat, tired old man.
15.Ryan was able to grin, but there was no place for a smile on Joey Raye’s battered, shapeless face. Also, something was wrong with the big Negro’s feet, and he had to lean heavily on Elliott to get down the icy courthouse steps. With each step, he winced, and little cries of pain came from between his broken lips. His face had been pounded, mashed, pulped, and swollen, until he resembled an old and tired pug, come out of a long and hopeless preliminary bout. Max Goldstein looked at him, sighed, and lent his support to the ot
her arm.
“Resisting arrest,” Goldstein said. “I was born and raised here, and now I’m a stranger.”
A little crowd gathered as they helped the two men across the square. Goldstein and Abbott crawled into the small seat in the back of the coupe, while Danny Ryan and Joey Raye pushed in alongside Ruth. “I’m too old for this kind of trouble,” Goldstein said despondently. Abbott asked: “Who was it, Danny?” “Curzon and Gelb.” And Joey Raye muttered, “I told you about that man.” “Don’t try to talk,” Ruth told him. “You, too, Danny. You have a bad cut on that lip, so don’t try to talk.” “It’s not my lip, it’s inside me,” Ryan said. “I’m broken inside. I wanted to die before, it hurt so much.”
They drove back to Abbott’s house and brought the two men into his operating room. Mike Sawyer was waiting there and when Goldstein tried to help, Elliott pushed him out, telling him, “Go and sit with Mike. I can handle this with Ruth.”
“You’re sore at me, Elliott,” Goldstein said pitifully. “How did I know? How could I know?”
“I’m not sore at you, Max.”
In the consulting room, the lawyer told Mike Sawyer what had happened, as much as he knew. “It’s such a quiet little town,” he complained. “When I was a kid, I played in Battle Creek. I went to school here. I expect to die here. You get used to such a quiet little town.”
“The trouble is,” Sawyer said thoughtfully, “that we don’t believe ourselves. We tell ourselves that all hell is due to arrive, but we don’t believe in the schedule. And then, when it comes, we’re just as surprised as anyone else.”
“What do they hope to make out of it? They pick up two guys and beat the life out of them on a dirty little trespass charge. What do they hope to make out of that? I could understand it in steel, in mining, in packing, in auto—but here, in a little place like this, what do they hope to make out of it?”
“It’s part of the pattern,” Sawyer said. “They want to smash labor, which will leave the road open for everything else. But before they smash labor, they got to smash us. Gelb understands that. A man like Gelb, he’s got a scientific outlook. He understands that.”
“You got a cigarette?” Goldstein asked. “It doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I don’t want it to make sense.”
“We all get old,” Sawyer smiled, handing the lawyer a cigarette. “When I went to Spain, I thought socialism would come to America during the time I was away. That was a long time ago.”
“It creeps up. I look at this body where I can’t see my shoes any more, and I realize it’s all I got. I live with it for the time that’s left. No exchange. For each his own Jerusalem, his own fair dream of mankind’s hope. Keats or Shelley or something. We hold onto a vision of truth and brotherhood, and suddenly they’ve got the atom bomb. Now they’ll walk out of there, and I’ll look at Joey’s face.”
“His face’ll heal,” Sawyer said.
Goldstein nodded, but said nothing. He finished his cigarette and asked Sawyer for another. They waited. The snowfall had stopped. The phone rang, and Ruth came out to answer it.
“They’ll be all right,” Ruth said, after she had finished with the phone call.
“What do you mean, all right?”
“Danny was hurt most, and we thought he was ruptured. He’s all right, though. Joey’s feet—” She shook her head and went back inside. They all came out a while later, Joey Raye’s face patched and plastered, his shoes open. Danny Ryan grinned and sank into a chair. “Hello, Mike,” the Negro said. “I got an awful headache—otherwise, I’m good as new.” “He’s got a skull of granite,” Ryan laughed. Raye said, “Six of them in there whupping me around the head. I just figured, I’d whup them some and let it finish up, I felt so miserable.” “He felt more miserable when they got through with him,” Danny nodded. “I notice about big guys, they sometimes got guts but never any sense.”
“What for?” Goldstein wanted to know. “I know Jack Curzon—he’s bad medicine, but he hasn’t got enough guts to do this on his own.”
“Gelb.”
“Why? What does he stand to gain?”
Ryan said, “Hell, they want to do it whole hog and break the union. Go back to a company town. It’s provocation, that’s all.”
“You’ll have to put the line back at the gate, won’t you?” Abbott asked Ryan; his face sad, his voice sad.
“That’s right.”
“A big line, I suppose?”
“Two or three thousand,” Ryan said.
Goldstein, shaking his head ponderously, disagreed. “Let me slap a civil suit on this, Danny. We’ll give it to the papers, and move the whole CIO behind it. But if you go in there on their grounds, they got us. I tell you they got us.”
“I don’t want no civil suit. I want to win this strike. To hell with a civil suit.”
“You go against the law, Danny—”
“I got a bellyful of law this morning. So did Joey. Look at the law spread all over Joey’s puss.”
“But they can’t get away with this,” Goldstein insisted.
“They got away with it. They own this damn town. They own the state. They own the whole stinking works. Wake up, Max!”
Ruth Abbott said, “He’s right, Max. They force you to make a decision. If you don’t make it, it’s all over.”
“You say it easy,” Sawyer remarked. “How about the union? How about Noska?”
16.Lowell met Noska for the first time at Tom Wilson’s house, for lunch that day. By then, Lowell felt better. The nausea had left him, to be replaced by a sharp appetite, a more comfortable craving for food than he had had at any time during the past week. It surprised him, how quickly he could forget the incident at the police station, yet in retrospect the beating was a lamplit dream, utterly without reference or reality. He imagined that soldiers in combat made something of the same adjustment, and he was rather pleased by his own ability to meet circumstances like these without giving in to his initial impulse toward headlong retreat. Along with this, he had a sense of conclusion, of impending culmination. The fact that the thing would be over soon made it easier to justify.
In all, there was for Lowell a sense of life, of being. He recalled being introduced once—in Tucson, Arizona, he remembered it to be, when they were spending some winter months there—by a friend to some people as a very decent son of a rich man, a designation expressed as singular; and in all actuality he was able to recognize that he claimed no more distinction than that, being the son of a rich man and wanting to be what his father was not, soft of voice and pleasant of manner, despising a life orientated toward acquisition, traveling, summering, wintering, spending what money he had to spend without show or ostentation, feeling a strong antipathy toward people who only begrimed themselves with wealth, disguising his own wealth in numberless ways, knowing cultured people and being not too ill at ease with culture himself.
But nothing made him sense himself as he had during these past few days. He had not known a man like Gelb before. The forthright admiration of Frank Norman filled a place that had been empty since Clark’s death, and even Wilson could be understood not so much as a boor and a fool as a man who was doing a job earnestly and to the best of his ability. And the sweet taste at the edge of it was the girl, Rose Antonini. In all that happened, she was always present somewhere in his thoughts; even during the beating in the police station, he had made a connection with her—as if all passions were connected by some single string.
Now, at the table at Wilson’s house, Lowell watched Bill Noska with a live sense of curiosity. Mrs. Wilson, a plump, pretty woman, entertaining—even though under these strange circumstances—had outdone herself and set lunch in the dining room, a lace dinner cloth under gold-edged plates. In the center of the table, there was a flower piece, flanked by silver candlesticks. An insistent sense of lunch as being different from dinner, backed by many years’ reading of the Ladies’ Home Journal, moved her to lay out forks, knives, and spoons in fanlike patterns inst
ead of alongside the plates, but the service was dinner service and the napkins were rich brocade with the shine of long inactivity. The menu found itself in a similar contradiction, soup and a hot dish as well as sumptuous jellied molds that appeared to be waiting for the color photographer. Caught in a like position, Wilson served old-fashioneds that were veritable mounds of fruit.
Lowell wondered what Bill Noska thought of it. He himself was more kindly disposed than he would have been once. The single time before that he and Lois had been to the Wilsons’, stopping in for a drink and twenty minutes, Lois had not reacted well to the big new frame house that Wilson had built, the overstuffed furniture put there by a Worcester interior decorator, the velvets and tapestries standing out against Oriental rugs, the wallpaper with broad vertical stripes of silver and gray, or of two tones of blue. But he himself, even at the time, was affected by a certain sympathy for Wilson’s aspirations, and today at lunch he did not display any of his usual petulance with the manager. He was moved to consider the fact that the whole mighty industrial machine of America, this largest industrial machine in all the world, all history, all civilization, was almost entirely supervised by men more or less like Wilson. It was something he had not thought of in just these terms before, and he speculated upon whether that type of fancy would occur to Bill Noska.
He watched Bill Noska during lunch. The man, he surmised, was a Slav of some sort, a Pole or a Lithuanian or a Czech. More than six feet tall, broad, solid, handsome too in a way, he appeared to possess all the qualifications for a leader. Lowell could understand how people would trust him and follow him. Lowell’s curiosity had a tourist’s quality to it; these people had worked for him, but he had never known them, never spoken to any of them. Until lately, the word worker had been an abstraction to him, and like most people of his class, his relationship with the common people, in quotes, was via cab-drivers, barbers, hotel employees, ship’s help—and intermittently with all those others whose purpose in life was to satisfy this or that particular demand of his. Even his association with the plant during the past five years—in comparison with the present situation—was a most casual one. Florida and Arizona had been available during the war, as were the Berkshires. He could recall no instance during his time in Clarkton when he had actually spoken to a worker, other than a word or two with an office employee. Not that he would have reacted badly to the idea of sitting down to lunch with Bill Noska; it was simply one of those things so unlikely that in the normal course of events it did not happen. Now that it had happened, he found Noska most human, clear in his ideas, and with no suggestion of that servility which Lowell had seen displayed so consistently by workers who served him and his friends. When the meal was over and Wilson had passed around the cigars, Noska lit his with no trace of self-consciousness, saying to Lowell:
