by Howard Fast
“What nonsense!” Birdie snorted. “You’ve never been normal and you’ve never been content. Happy, I don’t know about.”
“It may surprise you, but I happen to be quite content. Who do you want to bring around?”
“Just a few people — Father Gibbons, he’d be representing the Peace Fellowship; Terry Distan —”
“Gay rights?” Barbara interrupted.
“Yes.”
“That’s already an odd combination. Who else?”
“Your ex-daughter-in-law, Carla; she’s become president of the Bay Area Chicano Union. And Abner Berman; he’s the local NEA guy. Just the four of them for the moment.”
“I shouldn’t listen to you,” Barbara said.
“Please, Barbara. You’ve never said no to anything like this.”
There was an interval of silence, and then Barbara sighed. “All right.”
“Two o’clock?”
“Make it three. I have a column to finish.”
At three o’clock, she let them into her house and seated them in her living room, Carla, as vibrant as ever, Father Gibbons, a Jesuit priest, a slight man with a ferret face and a pair of black, accusing eyes, Terry Distan, a Montgomery Street type, tailored meticulously from head to foot, three-piece suit and properly clipped beard, and Abner Berman, jovial in tweeds and pipe and knit tie, and of course Birdie MacGelsie, swallowing her smile of triumph, deferring to Father Gibbons, who opened by asking, “Would you like me to make a short, convincing preachment to the effect that unless we rid ourselves of that cursed bomb, the good God will gaze upon a planet devoid of life?”
“No,” Barbara said emphatically. “I am not friendly and I don’t like sermons. I know what you’re here for. There are other people in San Francisco. Why must you upset my life?”
“Ah, yes,” Berman said gently. “But the plain ugly truth is that no one can do it the way you can. You have a track record that won’t go away. You created Mothers for Peace, which was the smartest and most effective peace movement during Vietnam. We watched that. We watched your campaign for Congress —”
“You know our intentions,” Father Gibbon broke in. “We intend to put a million people on Market Street. They’ll be doing the same thing in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston — yes, in L.A.”
“And you feel that will move Mr. Reagan?”
“Maybe not,” Disten said. “But if we pull it off, the whole world will see it, and that means the Russians too.”
“I agree with you,” Barbara said. “If we pull it off, the whole world will look at it, and maybe Mr. Reagan too. But let me say this, Terry: if I let myself be talked into this, I don’t want to have you telling me that you will deliver a hundred thousand gays if you can carry your own slogans for gay rights. If we march and assemble for the freeze, it is for the freeze, period. And that goes for you, Father — you don’t push antiabortion here, and you too, Carla. For once the Chicanos are going to stop shouting about civil rights and talk peace. Either this is a single effort in one direction, or you go elsewhere for somebody to tie it up.”
“I’ll buy that,” Distan said.
“And what makes you so sure I’m a right-to-life gent?” Father Gibbon asked. “Things change, Barbara. It’s a fluid world we live in.”
“The point is,” Birdie said, “that this is the very beginning. We want to start the organizing pressure from here.”
“What you mean,” Barbara said, “is that you want to turn my home into a madhouse, and have a place rent-free, where you will install twenty telephone lines and stick me with the unpaid bills and store enough leaflets and pamphlets to make the halls impassable, and have every nut in the Bay Area aware that all this commie peace business comes from Barbara Lavette’s house on Green Street.”
“Sort of,” Birdie admitted.
“We are not just talk,” Berman insisted. “We will be with you every inch of the way. We understand your position and accept that you’re not a young woman.”
“You understand that?” Barbara said acidly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, indeed! Now listen to me, all of you. If there were anyone around who loved me, he’d talk me out of it. Here, I’m alone against the lot of you. I’ll base my response on two questions. First, has a date been chosen?”
“Three weeks from now. So the agony is at least terminal.”
“And second, this: three weeks leaves small time for fund-raising. How much money do we begin with?”
Birdie handed her a slip of paper. “Here’s my check for five thousand. MacGelsie howled, but I won.”
Terry Distan handed her a check for two thousand dollars. “It’s a beginning,” he said.
“We should have five thousand by Friday,” Berman said.
“I don’t know what,” Carla said. “We’ll do our best.”
“What I can squeeze out of my lot, I don’t know,” Father Gibbon told them. “I have an appointment with the bishop for lunch tomorrow. I’ll do my best.”
“I will not touch the money thing,” Barbara said. “We need a treasurer right now.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Distan told them. “I’ll be glad to open the bank account and draw up the papers. We’ll want two signatures on the checks. Suppose I say myself and Birdie?”
“So I guess I’ve done it again.” Barbara sighed. “Ah, well, at least it’s only three weeks. So let’s get down to work.”
That night, Barbara had dinner with Sam and Mary Lou, and she told them about the freeze demonstration plans. Sam said nothing. Mary Lou told Barbara that she had given up her job at the hospital. “But still and all, I don’t see myself reading novels and watching the booby box for the next five months. Can I have a job, Barbara?”
“The pay is small — nonexistent, as a matter of fact.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Mary Lou agreed.
“Sam,” Barbara said to her son, “don’t be intimidated. Just say whatever you want to say.”
“I don’t know what I want to say.”
“Ah, well, dear one, just don’t see it as anything extraordinary. Some of us have to shout now and then, even if no one hears us.”
“People hear you,” Mary Lou said.
“I like to think so. Otherwise, I’d feel too absurd.”
“You’re never absurd.”
“Oh, I have been, rest assured. One spits into the wind, you know. I like to think of such a label or requiem for my kind of person. Nothing pretentious, nothing like all the bad prose the other side lays on their cherished ones. I would leave it right there and call us the wind-spitters. It defines all the absurd qualities that we possess. It mocks at our impotence, yet it admits that we do stand up to the wind, that we face it and that we spit directly into it. I am not apologizing for anything tonight, Sammy; I am simply trying to explain your mother.”
But having said that, Barbara was embarrassed. Regardless of chronology, she felt too young for requiems and thought that even to define herself as a wind-spitter was somehow pretentious.
The man and the woman sitting at the table with her were smiling affectionately.
“The hell with labels and explanations,” she said. “I am just what I am, Barbara Lavette, and I intend to go on living with it and doing what I’ve always done. And that goes for the three of us, doesn’t it? It’s not easy to become the friend of someone you cherish, but we’ll try.”
“I’ll buy that,” Sam said.
“You wanted to say something before?”
“I think I said it, Mom.”
“Then let’s eat,” Mary Lou decided. “I skipped lunch.”
“You’re eating for two, dear, and skipping lunch makes no sense. You see, whatever else changes, I’m still your mother, so call the waiter, Sam, and we’ll order. That’s the crux of it. Even the Best of philosophy never filled an empty stomach.”
“And I’ll buy that too,” Sam agreed.
A Biography of Howard Fast
Howard Fast (
1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.
Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.
Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.
Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast’s appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin’s purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.
Fast’s career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast’s books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).
Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.
Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother’s death in 1923 and their father’s absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”
A copy of Fast’s military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.
Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. “Everyone worked at the prison,” said Fast during a 1998 interview, “and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America.” Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: “I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison.”
Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette’s father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)
Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. “I got a disease, which is called ‘candidateitis,’” he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. “And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you’re ready to kill to win that election.” He concluded: “I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience.”
In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson’s work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. “Paul,” he said, “was an extraordinary man.” Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.)
Howard and Bette Fast in California in 1976. The couple relocated to the West Coast after Fast grew disgruntled over the poor reception of his novel The Hessian. While in California, Fast temporarily gave
up writing novels to work as a screenwriter, but, like many novelists before him, found the business disheartening. “In L.A. you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you are cheating on your wife,” he told People after he had moved back East in the 1980s. Of course, Fast, an ardent nature-lover, did enjoy California’s scenic beauty and eventually set many of his novels—including The Immigrant’s Daughter and the bestselling Masao Masuto detective series—in the state.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1985 by Howard Fast
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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