Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  In The Dean’s December, the Gromer case becomes the Rickie Lester case. As Albert Corde sits shivering in Bucharest, failing to comfort his distraught wife, Minna, ineffectually wrestling with the petty tyrannies of party functionaries, chief among the problems he ponders is the fallout from his decision as dean of students to offer a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the perpetrators of Rickie Lester’s defenestration. It is Corde’s only nephew, Mason Zaehner, Jr., a character very loosely based on Philip Grew, who gives him the most grief. Mason’s deceased father was “a high-powered Loop lawyer…tough, arrogant, a bulldozing type” (p. 32) (an American equivalent of the hospital director in Bucharest). Mason, Jr., shares both his father’s “bullying lusterless put-down stare” (p. 37) and his contempt for “the dud dean” (p. 42). He orchestrates campus protests against the university’s role in prosecuting the two suspects in Rickie Lester’s death. These suspects are Riggie Hines, a boyish-looking prostitute, and Lucas Ebry, a black dishwasher at the restaurant where Mason works part-time. In Corde’s summary, “The radical student line was that the college waged a secret war against blacks and that the Dean was scheming with the prosecution, using the college’s clout to nail the black man….Mason argued that there had been no murder. Rickie Lester hadn’t been pushed from the window, he had stumbled, he fell. Anyway, it was all his [Lester’s] fault, he went out that night looking for trouble, had been asking for it” (p. 30). The university’s behavior in the case was of a piece with its attempt to restrict black housing in the neighborhood, its refusal to divest itself of South African investments, its slowness on affirmative action. Mason identifies with blacks like Embry and Hines: “Those are my people and you made them all seem subhuman…wild-ass savages from the Third World. And now I see that you are writing something about County Jail” (p. 47).

  Corde admits that Mason “had a cause,” but sees his animus as personal. “Mostly he was eager to needle his uncle and he hoped—craved, longed—to drive his needle deep” (p. 35). An Oedipal element is at work in the nephew’s hostility. Mason resents Corde’s closeness to his mother and her idealizing of him. “I’m the one who makes her unhappy,” Mason, Jr., tells Corde. “You’re the one that protects her” (p. 49). Brother and sister “have something palpable between us. Mason, somewhere, is aware of this and he doesn’t like it” (p. 90). “I was always having you rubbed into me,” Mason says. “Uncle Albert this and Uncle Albert that. A big man, and smart, and a notable” (p. 49). By the end of the novel, Mason flees to Mexico, having been indicted by the assistant state’s attorney for threatening witnesses. His mother asks Corde if he believes Mason capable of shooting at anyone. “Not necessarily,” Corde answers. “But I don’t necessarily disbelieve it. He’s in real earnest about his pal Ebry. By working in the restaurant kitchen he got to be an honorary black. He cornered those witnesses.” The prosecutor indicted Mason “because he raised hell with the witnesses. You can’t expect a prosecutor to let the kid ruin his case….He threatened those street characters. He said he’d get ’em.” “Without them,” Corde adds, the prosecutor “had no case” (p. 86).

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  PHILIP GREW DESCRIBES his politics in 1977 as to the left of those of his parents, ardent Stevenson supporters, but as neither extremist nor radical, a position not dissimilar, he claimed in an interview, to that of the young Saul Bellow, a Trotskyist unwilling to toe the party line (though Bellow joined the Trotskyists, whereas Grew belonged to no political parties or formal groupings).41 Mason, Jr., was also a nonjoiner, perhaps calculatedly. “A definite ideology would have made him easier to deal with,” Corde thinks, “and Mason didn’t intend to make anything easy. No, Corde couldn’t identify the young man’s position, if he had a position. Maybe there wasn’t really any” (p. 31). In 1977, Grew certainly looked like a radical, with curly hair down to his shoulders, so long that, when it was washed and slicked down, he could, if he leaned back, sit on it. He also talked like a radical, with “black” or hipster inflections and in a manner not unlike Mason, Jr.’s, judging by his reconstructions during our interview. Corde describes Mason, Jr., as affecting a “bright bitterness barrels-of-fun line” (p. 34); “His ultra-bright hey-presto look was insolent” (p. 35). Although Grew was deeply serious in the interview, at one moment moved to tears, there were also times when he recounted the ironies and injustices of the Gromer case with just such a “bright bitterness.”

  Grew’s father was a professor at the University of Michigan, a fact, he believes, that contributed to the passion he brought to the Gromer case. The issue that galvanized him was racial injustice. He had gone to school with black children and “really believed from a very early age in Martin Luther King.” “I grew up believing literally in King’s dream. I was living it.” “In junior high school and high school I had loved Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Eldridge Cleaver. This kind of African American awareness had been very much around me, was part of my upbringing.” Arriving in Hyde Park, “I was just shocked by race relations….I had completely failed to realize what the black-white situation was going to be like in Chicago.” What also shocked Grew was the discovery that white liberals, university people, often “held feelings about race which were in some sense the most pernicious.”42 In his first year in Chicago, he lived in a dormitory on the north side of the Midway, below which lay Woodlawn. Bellow referred to the Midway as the “Maginot Line” or “Passchendaele”; Grew referred to it as “the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone.”

  Unique, where Grew, McInnis, and Levar Lewis worked, was on Fifty-third Street, on the northern edge of Hyde Park. Although a predominantly white neighborhood, it was one in which blacks were a presence, particularly at night in bars and restaurants. Tiki was one of those bars, an “unsavory” place to some (T. J. McCarthy, for instance). It stayed open after 2:00 a.m., and drugs could be found there as well as drink. Grew remembers that drugs were also passed in the alley behind Unique, where the dishwashers played craps. Mason accuses the Dean of despising such types: “Those people of the underclass, dopers or muggers or whores: what were they, mice? To the ‘thinking population,’ to establishment intellectuals, they were nothing but mice! Thus Corde spelled out, parsed his nephew’s message. He even agreed, in part” (p. 36). Like Mason, Grew is proud that he knew something of the black underclass, a term he hates (as does Mason, who tells Corde, “That’s what your sociologists around here call them. They’re hoping that drugs and killings and prison will eliminate that lousy, trouble-making underclass” [p. 35]).43 In knowing and working with the African American kitchen staff and dishwashers at Unique, Grew felt he was keeping faith with Martin Luther King’s dream. At the same time, he was clearheaded about his fellow workers. Ellis McInnis he describes as an alcoholic, a pathetic figure who looked in his thirties, not his twenties, “one of those black kids gone wrong but from a good mom, a good family.” Although he was pretty much “unhirable,” the owner of Unique, a woman named Pat Bradley, “scooped [McInnis] up out of the gutter….He was her pet project, at least at the beginning.”

  Because Grew found it hard to believe that McInnis “could have been involved in this,” also because McInnis “seemed to be heading in the right direction,” Grew “couldn’t stand by and do nothing.” He began investigating the charges, partly for the university newspaper, partly to aid McInnis’s attorney. He was soon convinced, is still convinced, that McInnis and Johnson were “railroaded”: “there was absolutely no pretense that this was a fair trial.” To begin with, there was “too much circumstantial evidence that things were being fabricated, things were being made up, there was all this interference.” The testimony of the witnesses kept changing. There were questions about the testimony of Gromer’s wife, who seemed to Grew and others to be holding something back. The word on the street (and later witness testimony in court) was that Gromer was high that night on drugs as well as drink, and in search of sex. In addition to the reward money, Lev
ar Lewis and Joseph Booth, key prosecution witnesses, hoped for leniency in their own cases. In pleading guilty and accepting the prosecution’s account of what happened in the apartment, Deola Johnson was seeking a reduced sentence. Despite these complications, Grew recalls, “in the white environment I lived in there was a unanimous leap to say this was a murder. We were brought up, we were trained, by the university to expect to be the victims of black-on-white crime. In actual reality, this black-on-white crime didn’t take place so much.”

  Like Mason, Jr., Grew cannot say for certain what went on in the apartment the night Gromer died.44 What he is certain of is that McInnis and Johnson were denied due process and that the guilty verdict was by no means beyond reasonable doubt. Especially upsetting to him was the role the university played in the case. From the start, the assistant state’s attorney was in close contact with university officials and the South East Chicago Commission (the university’s “Special Ops” division, Grew calls it).45 In Bucharest, Corde learns that he’s been subpoenaed by Mason, Jr.’s lawyer (another hostile relative, Corde’s cousin, Maxie Detillion), “to establish the heavy involvement of the college in this case” (p. 177). According to T. J. McCarthy, during the Gromer case Jonathan Kleinbard, a university vice-president and Bellow’s friend, was often in touch on the telephone, as was Michael J. Murphy, executive director of the South East Chicago Commission. Kleinbard first contacted McCarthy while he was “doing a work-up” on the case. He was “gracious but insistent. He wanted to be kept informed of what was going on.” Soon “Jonathan and I struck up a very good rapport.” When, however, McCarthy told Kleinbard that he planned to leave the State’s Attorney’s Office before the case went to trial, to go into private practice, Kleinbard was distressed. “He said, ‘Well, why? You know these two police officers, you’ve worked with them before, you’ve developed this rapport.’ ” Kleinbard then asked McCarthy, who was only three years out of law school, the name of the firm he was going to, which happened to be headed by two generous donors to the University of Chicago. After joining the firm, McCarthy learned that a deal had been struck between the State’s Attorney’s Office and his new employers, presumably suggested or orchestrated by figures from the university. McCarthy was to be seconded to the State’s Attorney’s Office and sworn in for the duration of the trial as a special prosecutor (“this was unheard of”). At the trial’s conclusion, he would return to his position in private practice. Kleinbard’s mission, in McCarthy’s words, was “to make sure that the people of the Hyde Park–University of Chicago community were aware that the State’s Attorney’s Office was doing everything possible to bring the case to a proper conclusion,” by which was meant not only a speedy and successful prosecution but a tightly focused one: “Jonathan had the parameters very clearly marked in his mind.” Sexual speculation, the sort that might upset the grieving Gromer family as well as reflect badly on the university community (depicting Hyde Park as a place where students mixed with drug dealers and prostitutes), was to be avoided. Such matters, in McCarthy’s words, “had no bearing on the actual underpinnings of the case”; they were “proprietary, confidential,” so “we didn’t really go into all of that, nor did we allow it.” According to Grew, the university also sought to shape coverage of the case in the Maroon. Soon after Gromer’s death, the editor of the paper was discouraged by unnamed university officials from interviewing potential witnesses or airing doubts about the police account of what had happened that night. McCarthy also felt pressure from the university to come down hard on Philip Grew, leader of what Kleinbard called “this scurrilous campaign by student groups,” and he had no problem accommodating Kleinbard, not only because he thought Grew a “smart-ass,” but because “I think he crossed the line with our witnesses. I still think that to this day.” Indicting Grew was the right thing to do, he believed, though it “kind of fanned the flames.”46

  What Grew saw as the university’s interference in the case outraged him, in part because of his background. “I was a faculty brat and thought universities should be held to a higher standard.” Grew also admits to an Oedipal element behind his outrage, like that of Mason, Jr. That Bellow gives Mason, Jr., such a motive is striking, part of what he means about art’s capacity to attend to “what’s happening humanly.” Also striking is Corde’s refusal to dismiss Mason, Jr.’s doubts about Rickie Lester’s death, about how the alleged perpetrators ended up in the apartment, about the reliability of “bought” witnesses, or the more lurid alternatives he offers about how Lester met his death. “Though it went against the grain,” Corde admits, “he suspected that his nephew might have been right, that on the night he was killed Rick Lester had been out for dirty sex, and it was this dirty sex momentum that carried him through the window” (p. 130). Mason is obnoxious, but none of his arguments, which were and remain Grew’s arguments, is refuted. In the novel, as opposed to the newspapers, justice is done not only to “what humanly matters,” but to the complications and uncertainties of the case.

  However, the Dean’s doubts about the case do not extend to the verdict. Lucas Ebry, he believes, was rightly convicted of murder. He believes this because he also believes that Rick Lester’s death occurred in the course of an armed robbery and therefore counted as “felony murder,” regardless of whether he was pushed or fell, was drunk and/or stoned, or lost his balance in a struggle. Corde has no sense of connection with people like Ebry and Hines; nonetheless, he thinks Mason’s attitude toward them is both naïve and typical. “In Mason you saw an attempted reversal, a connection to be made on black terms. What terms were those? Lucas Ebry’s terms? They didn’t exist. Unreal! Young Mason’s idea of boldness put him in the servile position” (p. 149). When pressed by Mason’s mother, Corde admits that his nephew was unlikely to have shot at anyone. “If shots were fired—a doubtful proposition—somebody else might have fired them” (p. 187). He is convinced, though, as McCarthy is of Grew, that “Mason did threaten the witnesses, gang style, that does seem to be a fact” (p. 87). There is also no question in the novel that Mason goes into hiding. “He must be thrilled to pieces to be a fugitive. It’s a terrific luxury for a kid like Mason. You corner two street people. You deliver a death threat. They take you seriously—that’s a real thrill. It means you’re pretty close to being black yourself. You don’t have to be ashamed of your white skin” (p. 87). At this point, Mason, Jr.’s story and Philip Grew’s story diverge dramatically. Grew went home to visit his family in Ann Arbor before he knew anything of the indictment. As soon as he received word of it, he returned to Chicago with his father and presented himself to the State’s Attorney’s Office. In the novel, Bellow sacrifices the reality of Grew’s response to the indictment, which he must have known, to “art,” to the serving of deeper truths. Corde accepts that Rick Lester, in one sense, brought his fate upon himself: “It was the evil that had overtaken the boy that did it” (p. 28). “Did it” means “got him killed,” and “the evil that had overtaken the boy” refers to an internal as well as an external evil. Rick Lester turned up at two in the morning at a bar like the Tiki. According to the bartender, “ ‘He made a pest of himself, acted up, just about the only white person in the place, making sex signals.’…Maybe this boy had hot pants, or drank more than he could hold, or was freaked out on Quaaludes” (p. 29), allegations that were made against Mark Gromer, in court as well as in the news.

  Philip Grew has an interesting story to tell about the claim that he intimidated witnesses. The only prosecution witness he talked to was Levar Lewis. “I talked to Levar a number of times. Levar and I worked together. Who is Levar? Levar is an opportunist….He was gonna make it, he was gonna get rich…the kind of upcoming black guy who could appeal to white people.” Grew had met Lewis many times at the Tiki and elsewhere, and Lewis had told him that he was going to be given witness protection and “live in the lap of luxury.” His story was that, the day after Gromer’s death, he and McInnis “were just shooting the breeze”
and McInnis, “his good friend,” told him the story of what had happened when he suddenly committed murder. At a later meeting, the crucial meeting, Grew now realizes, Grew was again in the Tiki, and “Levar was there and I went over to him and I knew that Levar was getting paid to testify against Ellis. This was a tense situation. Levar was with some girl…lighter skin than him. So I went over to Levar’s table and tried to have a frank conversation about this. ‘Levar, you got to do what’s right. I know you want the money. I know you want to cooperate with the South East Chicago Commission, but you can’t tell things you don’t know.’ ” The conversation got heated—they’d had several beers each—“it was certainly tense. I put it right before him, very frankly, that I thought what he was doing was morally wrong, and legally pretty risky, because you could get into a lot of trouble lying to the man. Also, there was a lack of solidarity to the black community. None of that shit fazed him.” So Grew took a different tack. “Levar had a proselytizing sister, so I made the Biblical argument. I said, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ ” This infuriated Lewis. “He got up and he stomped out of Tiki.”