Harold shrugged.
Finally Evelyn came out in her bathrobe. Do you guys know it’s one in the morning? she said.
—Yeah, Artie said. What’s so special tomorrow that I’ll miss if I sleep late?
—You still have to go to work.
—To hell with it.
—At least come in. I’ll make tea. Harold. Her voice, when she was upset, had the rhythms of her immigrant parents. Harold followed her inside, and at last Artie came too. Go to sleep, he said to Evelyn. I’ll come soon.
Artie boiled water for tea. They didn’t take off their coats until they’d drunk it, they were so cold. I’ve always been a wise guy, Artie said. How was I supposed to know I was making jokes with the devil?
—Because she had no sense of humor? Harold said. Like McCarthy.
When the tea was gone, Harold stood and made more. Have you got anything to eat? They ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Artie cried. He wasn’t angry anymore, only scared. It’s all I know how to do, he said. I’m a good teacher. I’m such a good teacher.
—I know you are, Harold said. It was getting light when he stood and placed his teacup firmly in the sink. I’m going to take a piss, he said, and get rid of some of that terrible tea. And I’m going home. We’ll solve this, my friend.
—I don’t think so, Artie said. Harold had moved to put an arm around his shoulders, but Artie shrugged it away.
Artie and six other teachers were suspended from their jobs at a meeting of the Board of Education two weeks later. Harold had gone to some of these meetings because he was a union member, and he’d read stories of others. The board knew there would be protests, and it would schedule suspensions or dismissals last, after many routine agenda items. The union members, in turn, would sit through all of them, but when the question of suspensions was raised—the board always agreed on them unanimously—the union members jumped to their feet and began shouting protests. This board is trampling on the Bill of Rights! someone would shout.
Policemen ejected the shouting teachers, and they screamed, Don’t you touch him! We’re taxpayers! We own this building!
The cops would herd them toward the doors, and they’d rally and speak outside. Artie had never been to one of these meetings, but everything happened just as Harold had described it. It was announced that there would be trials of the suspended teachers. They’d be entitled to lawyers and to cross-examine witnesses.
The trials didn’t happen for many months, until after summer vacation. When Artie’s trial finally took place, his lawyer subpoenaed Beatrice London, who described in detail Communist Party meetings they’d supposedly gone to together, cups of coffee afterward, walks to the subway. She made you sound like her boyfriend, Harold said later.
The first week of school, that fall—the sacred week when the first bright leaves appeared and any achievement, whether teaching or learning, seemed possible—Harold, as when he was a boy—organized his notebooks and roll books, putting everything into the briefcase he’d eventually repossessed from Nelson. In his mailbox at school was a letter summoning him to the superintendent’s office. There had been spies at the protest meetings, or someone else had named him. He wasn’t surprised, but shocked, as if he’d heard of the death of someone he loved whom he expected to die. On the appointed day, Harold went to 110 Livingston Street and pleaded the Fifth Amendment. He was formally suspended the day Artie was dismissed, and dismissed a couple of months later, when McCarthy, in Washington, was at the height of his powers. A year later, Harold and Myra would be the last on their block to buy a television set, so as to watch the Army–McCarthy hearings, the end of the senator’s short career.
Chapter 5
Green Books
1953–1963
1
Singing I hate to see that evening sun go down, Artie looked into the window of a music store, like the dilapidated places where he’d once worked, letting kids try out trumpets and cornets they’d never buy until the owner lost everything or fired him. I love to see that morning sun come up. This shop was more dilapidated, maybe owned by someone so good-hearted he’d give money for any instrument, starving in there, worse off than Artie. The window was piled with scarred instrument cases, their leather stained and rubbed away: cases for clarinets, flutes, bassoons, no doubt with dull, creaky instruments still inside, sold by some musician or would-be musician who finally gave up—took the office job, married the girl. On top were instruments with no cases at all: blotchy trumpets, greenish and dented, parts of clarinets, dull gray flutes. He was on his way home from work. He’d begun walking down Broadway instead of getting into the subway. He’d walked miles.
Artie had taken a job unwillingly, but he wasn’t young. He couldn’t pretend his luck would change any day. He worked in Evelyn’s uncle’s shoe store. His brothers had been too embarrassed to look at him when the Board of Ed fired him, too embarrassed to hear Artie’s angry explanations, or just unwilling to let their crazy brother work in their various businesses, in which room might have been found for somebody who could read and count.
Or they waited to be asked, but Artie didn’t ask, and nobody came forward except Evelyn’s uncle, so now Artie Saltzman, seventh-grade teacher, fitted shoes to the feet of irrational people. Even now, he couldn’t resist teaching: he told his customers that women shouldn’t wear tight shoes or high heels. Everyone should wear shoes in which they could run, if necessary. Evelyn’s patient uncle patted Artie’s shoulder and said, She wants size six? Sell her size six.
Artie had played the clarinet as a young man, and he too had sold the instrument eventually. He didn’t remember where. It was not like selling the photography equipment. He turned to go away—St. Louie woman . . . Then he turned back and walked into the store. It was dark, dusty, and he was alone. He thought he would sneeze but instead, as he stood listening to something, he cried, shedding new tears for the pupils he didn’t have, the lost privilege of walking into the teachers’ lounge and finding someone to joke with (What do you eat that candy for, do you know what it does to your teeth?), arguing with the school secretary about where paper should be stored. The main entrance to the school had a simple decorative pattern of slanted bricks, with no mistakes he’d ever found, and he’d marveled, many a morning, at the care given to add a little style to something that might have had no style at all.
It was some kind of whistle tootling along, playing the complicated ups and down of the baroque music he’d been hearing on the radio. Ah, it was a recorder. The music came from the back of the store. Wet-faced, Artie pushed through a curtain.
The instrument Artie bought that day from Frederick, the man in the dark store, was a soprano recorder. But the soprano was squeaky, and he moved on to an alto, even though he had to learn a whole new fingering. The second time he came to the store, he signed up to take a few lessons. He had found what he wanted.
—Not the same key, Frederick repeated. He was a distinguished-looking man, unlike the battered creature—a match for the instruments—whom Artie had expected. Looking at a C on a page of music, Artie arranged his fingers on the holes of the alto where they’d go for a C on the soprano.
—No, no. The C is now an F.
—Be quiet a minute, Artie said. When he finally caught on—the C was now an F!—he was so pleased he had to teach someone to play.
The recorder was a wooden cylinder with a line of holes on top and one hole—for the thumb—underneath. The soprano was shorter and thinner than the alto. They came apart, and the top of the lower part had waxed thread spooled tightly around its neck, so it wouldn’t shift when it was fitted inside the upper part. It was important to wax the threads at stated intervals. A long thin brush, cotton thread looped around stiff wire, cleaned spittle out of the instrument when you were done playing. Artie practiced scales and exercises. There were trills and mordents—ornamental flourishes for which the musician played extra notes above and below the notes on the page: lore nobody else knew. When he began lecturing abo
ut the recorder at family dinners, his relatives thought that he meant a record player, but the recorder was an ancient instrument. Ancient or not, it drove Evelyn crazy, and he liked to practice in the kitchen. On her way from the stove to the refrigerator, she tripped on the spindly metal feet of the music stand. She sent him into the bedroom, but the music stand seemed to walk back when she wasn’t looking. And sometimes she listened, saying, That’s pretty.
When their father brought home a second music stand, Brenda and Carol removed the music books, notebooks, and pencils that had rested on the first stand’s lip, then dressed the metal contraptions in hats and skirts, and marched them three-leggedly around the house. Evelyn got home late these days, and the girls were alone after school. She’d taken a job keeping records in a home for the aged, and she was also taking a course on how to do it.
Brenda preferred being at home without her parents in the afternoons. It was restful. She and Carol watched anything they liked on television or they listened to the radio. What interested Brenda was the Rosenberg case, which her parents refused to discuss as too upsetting for children, though Brenda was twelve and considered herself an adult. She followed every detail of the trial and discussed it with nobody but Carol, who had nightmares but loyally wouldn’t say what they were about. These people who seemed as if they might have been Brenda’s aunt and uncle were going to be electrocuted.
Artie yelled when he found his music on the floor, then told them he’d brought home the second music stand so he could teach Brenda or Carol to play the soprano recorder he had stopped playing in favor of the alto. Carol offered to learn. Brenda disliked the squeaky sound but didn’t want her father and Carol to know something that she didn’t know, so she hung around while Artie showed Carol how to read the notes and where to put her fingers. Later, Brenda practiced until she played better than Carol did. Carol quit, and now the challenge was to learn more quickly than her father. Soon Brenda—who couldn’t always explain or alter an intensity that took shape inside her—could play all the songs in the beginners’ book. She couldn’t overtake Artie because he delayed teaching her some things. He believed that the best way to learn was to practice the basics, not to add new skills until the old ones were mastered. Brenda learned trills but not mordents, and she never learned the alto, so it remained mysterious to her how F could be C or the other way around. Her father was soon playing music he borrowed from the public library, flute and clarinet pieces he somehow figured out, playing in the kitchen after supper, while the rest of them cleaned up and tripped over him.
Everyone connected with the Rosenberg case—lawyer, judge—had a Jewish name, Harold noted. The Rosenbergs’ lawyer tried to delay their execution, which was scheduled for a Friday night—after the start of the Jewish Sabbath—so the judge had them killed before sundown. Ethel Rosenberg had resided in Harold’s mind for months, and as he walked through the dusty city in June 1953 on his way to hand in a book review or get an assignment, he seemed to experience her terrified obstinacy. Her brother had betrayed her—her brother.
When Harold lost his job, he had changed his name to Harold Abrams. Someone else—someone wider, bulkier, harder to spell, and closer to immigrant awkwardness—had lost that job. For months after he was fired, Myra wept and slept, neglecting the children, while they lived on savings and money from her family, plus the few dollars he made from writing. He roamed the city, dropping in on Naomi, or sat restlessly in the library, trying to write and looking at job ads. But one day Myra had a mysterious errand in the city, and came home to announce that she’d been hired for a lucrative commercial art job. Harold began staying home with Nelson and Paul. On the Friday on which the Rosenbergs would die, Harold stayed outside, pushing Paul in his carriage, keeping away from the radio. At three, he picked up Nelson at school, and they went to the playground. By the time he reached his apartment and snapped on the radio, the Rosenbergs were dead. They’d had to shock Ethel three times to kill her. Myra was home and in the bathtub. It was late.
Nelson, hot and overtired, began running back and forth through the house saying, Is she dead? She’s dead. Is she dead? She’s dead, and Harold realized he’d forgotten him and had walked straight from the door to the radio, picking up Paul as he did so, not remembering he had another son.
—Are you tired? he called to Myra, pausing in the bathroom door.
—It’s hot, she said.
Harold changed the baby and Myra came into the kitchen as he started supper. Paul was in his bassinet in the doorway. As she eased herself, in a summer robe, into a chair, Nelson leaned silently against her and she shrugged him off, then touched his arms and shoulders and forehead. Go wash your face, Nelson, she said. You’re overheated. Then she said, I’ll make supper.
Harold agreed, though sometimes he regretted agreeing. Supper would taste better, but she was tricky when tired. Retying the belt of her robe, Myra took his place at the stove. Nelson, who had not washed his face, followed. Did you make money today? he asked her.
—Don’t stand near me, Myra said. She was getting ready to cook lamb chops. You’ll get burned.
—Why did they kill those people?
—What people? Myra studied the cans on the shelf.
—On the radio.
—Nobody got killed, Myra said.
Nelson resumed leaning against her. He said, They did get killed. He had a way of leaning against her right arm that made her shake him off like a fly.
—What did they do? Nelson said. Did they burn up? The radio said they got killed.
—I didn’t realize he was listening, Harold said.
—What’s he talking about?
—The Rosenbergs.
—Oh, my God, Myra said.
—What, Mommy? Nelson said. What did they do? Did they take people’s money?
—He thinks people get electrocuted for bank robbery, Myra said. Honey, nobody died, they just put them in jail.
—But the radio said.
—These are bad people, Myra said. They did a lot of bad things, Nelse, but they didn’t get killed. Nobody got killed.
—But bad guys get killed, Nelson said. He sat down on the floor, his back to Myra, and leaned forward, his hands clasped behind the back of his head, his head down. It was something like the posture Harold had been taught to enforce during Take Cover drills, when the children were supposed to get under their desks—as opposed to ordinary air-raid drills, when they sat on the corridor floors.
—And . . . these . . . people . . . got . . . killed, Nelson said, bobbing his head rhythmically.
—Nope, Myra said, now at the sink. Didn’t happen.
—Myra, Harold said.
—When he’s older, she said. You should hear my father on this topic. Couldn’t happen soon enough. Sing Sing?
—What? Harold said.
—They did it at Sing Sing, didn’t they?
—Come on, Nelson, Harold said. Let’s give you a bath.
When he thought later about evenings like that, he didn’t remember Nelson eating in his pajamas. He often carried or walked him off or, when he was old enough, urged him to take a bath on his own. Nelson liked baths, and sometimes they’d forget and find him in a cold tub, his skin wrinkled, an hour later or more, playing with the assortment of toys and household objects he took with him. Did he never return and eat? Did Harold not notice? He’d discover gaps like this when he described the children to Naomi.
—You want kids, he said to her one night, when she’d asked him whether Paul had begun to talk.
—I have kids. She meant her pupils. She had a childish body for all her passion, straight and firm, and season after season she wore the same navy blue skirt. Now she leaned toward him, her hair pulled up in a ponytail, as if she was a high school girl, her shoulders square. They were eating spaghetti and meatballs at a little place in the Village that Naomi liked, drinking red wine. Harold couldn’t feel guilty for sleeping with Naomi—he simply couldn’t, though he did feel guilty for not feeling
guilty—but he felt guilty for eating in restaurants when Myra was home with the children, scarcely eating at all. A year after losing his job, Harold was studying for his doctorate in English literature at Columbia, and now it was easy to meet Naomi after classes.
She twirled spaghetti on her fork, forgetting Harold in the task, that little frown line steady between her eyes. Naomi often startled him by looking older than she did in his imagination. She had to be thirty-five or more by now; he didn’t know how old she’d been when she sat in his apartment weeping over the occupation of Paris.
When she twirled her fork, she thought only of the fork—or of the fork and Paris—but not of him, not of any man. She didn’t play the game other women he knew played, that sad game they always lost: waiting for a man to do what they wanted him to do. Naomi risked her youth, her time, her body—and that was what you had to do if you didn’t play that game and if you were a woman: you risked being single, childless, and middle-aged.
—You don’t mind that I treat you this way, he said. The candle on their table, in its chianti bottle, lit her face. I think you don’t mind—is that right? He meant to sound admiring, not rude, and he gentled his voice to make that clear, but she wouldn’t play that game either.
She cut her meatball with her fork and ate before looking up. Mind your buying me dinner? No.
—That’s not what I mean.
—Mind that you married Myra instead of me? You deserve each other.
—But your life? What kind of a life—
—I’m going to France in the summer, she said. I’m going to stay in a chateau and speak French all day.
—I didn’t know, Harold said.
—I’m sure the effects of the war are everywhere, but at least now they can have people come and stay. She spoke as she always did of France and the French, with respect and restraint, and maybe as if she had to think twice to speak English when talking about France.
—You didn’t tell me.
When We Argued All Night Page 14