Establishment

by Howard Fast

  She broke off in deference to the two old ladies who had seated themselves on the bench facing her and who were regarding her uncertainly. “He’s very young,” Barbara explained, “but he has an amazing vocabulary. I mean, he’s older than he looks.”

  She wheeled Sam off, and when safely out of sight, she burst into laughter. She couldn’t understand why her talk with Mr. Denaman had made her feel so lightheaded, but it had, and after she took Sam home and bathed him and fed him and put him in his crib for the night, she scrambled two eggs for herself, toasted two slices of bread, and read the first chapter of Sinclair Lewis’ new book, Kingsblood Royal. One chapter was enough. She could not share her father’s enthusiasm for Lewis.

  She then went into her study and sat down to attempt her evening stint at her own book; she had not yet begun to write when the doorbell rang. She had not been expecting anyone, and she was pleasantly surprised to see Alex Denaman. She welcomed him enthusiastically as he stepped into the house until she saw his face.

  Then she knew. She would always remember the look on his face. Denaman was not capable of concealing emotion.

  “Please come in,” she said. It doesn’t matter what you know. One part of the mind turns off the other part, and death is not a part of anyone’s experience. Only life is a part of experience. Death is what exists without being imagined, which cannot be imagined. For all her familiarity with it in the past, it was still the malignant stranger who comes unbidden. All doors are closed to him; he walks through doors.

  Denaman stood facing her in the little parlor, his hat in his pudgy hands, an old gray felt hat that he kept sliding through his fingers. His topcoat was worn, and his shoes were cracked under their polish. Evidently there was not much money in being the executive officer of the United Jewish Appeal in San Francisco in 1948.

  “Please tell me what you found out,” Barbara said. He would remember afterward how gentle and kind her voice was, as if she pitied him.

  “I found out about your husband, Mrs. Cohen.” Each word was edged with pain. “I felt I must come here myself.”

  “Is he dead?” she asked slowly. “Is that what you have to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  For a long, long moment the two of them stood there, looking at each other in silence. Barbara was aware that as yet nothing had happened to her; inside her, from head to foot, there was emptiness, as if she had been turned into a fragile, hollow shell of being. She took a step back and sank into a chair.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked. “A glass of water?”

  “No,” she said softly. “No, thank you, Mr. Denaman.” She formed each word carefully and slowly, as a child might. “Please sit down and tell me what you learned. You might be mistaken.” She thought how odd it was of her to say that, to decide that he might be mistaken.

  He sat on the edge of the chair facing her, fingering his hat nervously. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got through to Tel Aviv. I found out that your husband and another man whose name was Irving Brodsky and two Haganah men had set out to drive from Tel Aviv to Haifa. That was on the day or the day after he sent you the cable. Maybe,” he interrupted himself, “I should call someone, your mother? You’re all alone here?”

  “Please go on, please.”

  “They drove in a jeep. And they were attacked by Arabs, and all of them were killed. The bodies were found the next day by the Haganah, but they could not be identified. Then, only yesterday, they took some Arabs prisoner and found the things they had taken from the bodies. Your husband’s wallet and some cards. Today, just a few hours before I got through, a man called Goodman made a positive identification. He was one of the men who traveled with your husband to Czechoslovakia, so he could not be mistaken.”

  The thickness in her chest came again. She struggled for breath. “I think,” she said, “that if you go into my kitchen, Mr. Denaman, you will find a brown paper bag—”

  “I know, I know,” he said, relieved to be able to act in some way. Barbara pointed. He ran to the kitchen and then returned with the paper bag. She put it over her mouth and breathed into it for a minute or so.

  “I’m all right now,” she said. “I have heard—” She swallowed and began again. “I have heard that the Arabs torture their prisoners. Do you know how my husband died?”

  “I asked. He was shot through the head. He died instantly.”

  “Yes.”

  “They will be in touch with you. They will send you all his things.”

  “Yes.” Her face crinkled now. The tears were running down her cheeks.

  “Maybe there is someone I should call for you?”

  “No,” Barbara whispered.

  “Do you want me to stay with you, Mrs. Cohen?”

  “No.” The sound of crying came from upstairs. “I have to go to my baby,” Barbara said. “You’d better go now. I’m grateful to you, Mr. Denaman, but I want to be alone.”

  “I understand,” he said. At the door he paused and turned.

  “Goodnight,” Barbara said.

  He closed the door behind him.

  Barbara went up the stairs. Sam was wet, so she diapered him, her hands moving, her mind clouded with shapeless pain. Then she went to her bedroom, stumbling in the darkness, unable to bring herself to turn on the lights. She dropped down on the bed and lay there on her back, staring at the darkness, watching it dissolve as her eyes became used to the absence of light. Now she could see her hand. She held it in front of her eyes, flexing the fingers. That was life. Bernie was dead. He would never come back here. The bed would be cold, night after night after night. And empty. All the world was empty.

  PART FOUR

  Trial

  On the fourteenth of May, 1948, the same day that the British officially ended their mandate over Palestine and a Jewish state came into being for the first time in two thousand years, the Congress of the United States paused in its awesome task of legislating for the most powerful country on earth and sandwiched in, among other earth-shaking duties, a vote of contempt against one Barbara Lavette Cohen for failing to answer a proper question put to her by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  Harvey Baxter phoned Barbara with the news. “It’s not easy to tell you this on top of everything else, Barbara, but I thought you should know immediately. I had hoped Congress might reject it, but the vote went through.”

  “What exactly does it mean, Harvey?”

  “It puts the contempt citation in the hands of the Justice Department. The crime is a federal misdemeanor, which means that if you should be found guilty, the sentence cannot exceed a year’s imprisonment. Now don’t jump to any conclusions. I am not saying that you face a year in prison or even that this will go to trial. All that remains to be determined. I think you might drop by one day very soon, and we’ll talk about it.”

  Barbara was tired of talking about it. Still, she agreed. “Tomorrow or the next day, Harvey.”

  She was unable to come to any sort of terms with the notion of trial and imprisonment. These were words, and words, which had once been so important, had now lost all their meaning. Dr. Kellman had spoken sympathetically of the effect of depression. “It will pass,” he had assured her.

  What would pass? The hurt will go away and I’ll be as gay as a lark, she said to herself. But there was no more hurt, only emptiness. Everything was empty.

  It was not the first time. I have buried two men, she told herself. I have buried everything good that has happened to me. Only one was a grave she might never see. Bernie was buried somewhere in what was now, this day, the State of Israel. Denaman had made inquiries, and he told her that there was a way to bring the body back to the United States. It would be very difficult and might take a long time, but it could be done. Barbara said no, let him lie there. It would have been his wish. It was
the place he had given his life to. She was not the type who worshipped graves or brooded over them. She had never returned to Toulouse to look at Marcel’s grave. Whatever was left of him and of Bernie was inside her.

  Life went on. She knew this out of past experience. Life doesn’t pause for death. Sam peed in his diaper, gave in reluctantly to toilet training, gobbled his food, ate and slept and played in the wonderful world of his infancy and shed tears only over wet diapers and an empty belly. He existed in a totality of life, in a world where there was no death. Of his father he would know nothing except the pictures Barbara showed him and the stories she told him. What kind of an image would he have of the big, easygoing gentle person who had fathered him? He would carry a Jewish name, but Barbara knew that according to Jewish law he would not be considered Jewish. The burden or stigma or pleasure of being Jewish comes through the mother’s line.

  After the first awful night, she cried very little. Jean, never very good at coping with death, suggested a memorial service, but Barbara refused. She was the only person on earth who had known the man who had been her husband, and she would not suffer others to speak maudlin, empty phrases of adulation. She herself had no feelings of adulation; she had known Bernie for what he was. It was only that of all the men she had known, there were only two that she had wanted to live and be with.

  She had been raised as an Episcopalian within sight of Grace Cathedral, but to her, formal religion was as meaningless a memory as the fairy tales of her childhood. The chapel at Sarah Lawrence College was the last church she had attended. She had no bias against religion and no bias toward it, and she had no real belief in or desire for an afterlife or an existence without a body. Her own body had always pleased her; it was strong, healthy, and good to look at. It was a body men loved and admired, and she had reacted to that love and admiration. When Barbara’s first book had been published, the account of her experiences in France and Nazi Germany, a critic had written: “One should not expect profundity from Barbara Lavette. She is not a deeply profound person. Essentially, she is a very ordinary, amiable, and cheerful person confronting a nightmarish world gone mad, which is precisely what gives her writing its excitement and meaning.” The critic, seeking profundity, found an absence of gloom and pessimism. The two are often confused. Barbara wallowed neither in gloom nor in profundity. There were weeks of total, devastating misery, but throughout she functioned, took care of her child, and presented a calm front to the family and friends who came to see her. Even that first night she had been able to say to herself, Bernie is dead, but I am alive and Sam is alive.

  It was only after weeks had passed that she became aware that a part of her was unable to accept the fact of Bernie’s death. Not that she doubted the report. In due time, a package had arrived, containing his wallet, some cards, and, curiously enough, keys to a car, possibly the keys to the jeep they had been driving. There was also a letter from Herb Goodman, in which he said, in part, “I hate to write about this because it seems cold and callous, but I feel that I must tell you about the identification. There is no question that it is Bernie. His face was not disfigured. It was very peaceful, so I don’t think he suffered. I had come to know your husband and to love him. He was a brave, decent man. We could never have done what we did without him…” So the fact of his death was not to be doubted—and still a part of her waited for him to return.

  She spoke to Clair Levy about this, and Clair said, “I know, Bobby. I still feel that way about Josh. I find myself wondering when he will come back and calculating how old he will be now. Maybe it happens to us because there is no grave—no grave that you can look at. You have the advantage of me there. Someday you will go there and see the grave.”

  “And then I’ll know that he’ll never come back?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And until then, each time the doorbell rings—”

  “I’m a strong woman,” Clair said to her. “I think you know how I was raised. I’ve had whores as baby-sitters—for myself—and by the time I was twelve I could swear as well as any sailor on the Redwood Coast, and if pop disappeared for a week, as he often did, I survived very nicely. But when Josh was killed in the Pacific, I died too. I don’t know what is worse than for a mother to lose a son. I remember thinking then, as much as I love Jake, why couldn’t it have been Jake—or me? So I died. I was empty. I had no will to live or laugh or speak or to wake up in the morning.”

  “I know the feeling,” Barbara said.

  “And I didn’t think it would ever change or that it could ever change. The thought of joy, any joy, had become obscene. But do you know, it changed. I changed. Not that the grief isn’t there, but I live with the grief, the way Eloise lives with those monstrous headaches of hers. And I’m happy, very happy. And that will happen to you, believe me.”

  “It has happened to me,” Barbara said. “I’ve been through this twice. I know because when Marcel died, a part of me died. I’ll be all right, Clair.”

  Bit by bit, Barbara picked up the threads of her life. To begin writing again was a slow, painful process, a form of self-torture, for the very sight of her typewriter forced her into introspection and memory. No writer, she realized, truly invents. He takes from here and there, shapes, changes, contrives, but always with something that had touched his life. So much had touched her life! She remembered a day in 1946, soon after she had returned from her two years of overseas reporting in North Africa and in the China-Burma-India theater and had purchased Sam Goldberg’s house on Green Street. Her mother had come to see her and had found her engaged in an article on Spode china for the Woman’s Home Companion. “Spode china!” Jean had exclaimed in amazement. But that kind of flight from reality was exactly what she had needed then, and now she needed it no less. But none of the women’s magazines, which until the committee hearing had plied her with endless requests, wanted anything now.

  She tried to continue with her novel, but it was almost impossible. The words were empty. She could communicate nothing of herself to the paper. She found herself attending much more seriously to the work of the Lavette Foundation. The Treasury Department, not to be outdone by the House committee, sent a team of auditors to examine the books of the foundation, and for two weeks they pried, examined, added, subtracted, and checked. When Barbara asked Harvey Baxter what they were looking for, he replied that he had no idea and that in all probability neither did they. He told her not to worry. “We have been meticulous,” he said, “absolutely meticulous.”

  Bernie’s garage also made demands on her time, for which she was grateful. She had no desire to keep the business, and she made arrangements that permitted Francis Gomez, the chief mechanic, to assume ownership and to pay her out of the profits, assuming there should ever be any. She was touched by his gratitude, just as she was touched by the very deep and sincere feelings that he and the other mechanics expressed at Bernie’s death. “He was a good man,” Gomez said to her. “Believe me, Mrs. Cohen, he gave a man a fair shake.”

  Barbara felt that he could have had worse epitaphs.

  ***

  When Barbara went to Harvey Baxter’s office the day after the contempt vote, she took Sam with her. One of the side effects of Bernie’s death was a feeling that she must never leave Sam alone again. She knew that this feeling would pass, but just now it was very strong. He was agile enough to climb out of his stroller, and his desire for freedom and exploration was increasing by leaps and bounds. At Baxter’s office, she requisitioned the secretary to keep Sam occupied while she met with the lawyers.

  “I am now in contempt,” she said to Baxter. “Wasn’t I in contempt before? What difference does all this charade make?”

  “It makes a difference, Barbara. The Un-American Committee cited you for contempt. The House voted the actual contempt. Until that step was taken, there was no indictment, so to speak.”

  “And now?”

  “And now,
as I said, it’s in the hands of the Justice Department. In the ordinary course of things, they will serve a federal warrant for your arrest.”

  “Oh, no, you’re kidding,” Barbara said.

  “I wish I were. But please understand that this is merely a formality. You’ll appear at the federal courthouse here, and then you will either be released on your own recognizance or some nominal sum will be set for bail—for example, five hundred dollars. You are not to be alarmed by this. The moment the warrant is served, if it is served, you telephone us, and either Boyd or I will take care of matters. You will not go to jail for even an hour. Please understand that.”

  “I’m trying to. I am also trying not to go insane. Here I am, a housewife and mother and a widow living in these United States in this year of nineteen forty-eight, and I am being told that I shall be arrested by the government. Doesn’t it sound crazy to you, Harvey? What have I done?”

  “Mrs. Cohen,” Kimmelman said, “I would like to get a word in here, because this can be as confusing as hell. What you have done is very simple. You protected the eighteen people who gave you money to buy medicine for the hospital in Toulouse. That was a decent and courageous act, and in normal times you would be applauded widely, and nothing else would come of it. And what you did, both raising the money and protecting your people, is not a crime. There is nothing criminal about it. But these are not normal times. This country has gone crazy, and we’re embarked on some kind of lunatic witch hunt. You are caught in the middle of it. Why they chose you is obvious to me but perhaps less obvious to you. I read through the record of your hearing very carefully. This Manuel Lopez whose deposition Donald Jay read is either a stool pigeon of the committee or of the FBI, or else he’s a criminal who’s buying his way out by feeding the committee names. Those crumbs are insatiable. If Lopez ever was a communist, he would soon run out of names. Then he has to invent. He was a longshoreman, so he would know that you were mixed up in the thirty-four strike. What better name than Barbara Lavette, daughter of Dan Lavette, granddaughter of Thomas Seldon, the cream of West Coast class, right up there with the Crockers and the Hearsts and the Huntingtons and the Gianninis—and then with the neat little twist of her married name being Cohen. They couldn’t resist that. They haven’t had headlines like this since the Hollywood writers.”