by Leslie Brody
ONE NIGHT, DECCA arrived early for a CRC meeting at Codornices Village. She planned to do a little leafleting in advance, as she often did. It was dusk. At first, she would run into workers returning home. Most people were friendly and polite and accepted leaflets. The older folks looked weary. They wanted their dinner. The younger ones had other things on their mind—lovers, friends. Some said they’d think about the meeting; some said they’d come. As the lights in the apartments switched on, Decca could see that she had wandered farther afield. Everyone had gone inside. There was no one else in sight, and it had become very quiet, just the night birds singing. A pleasant interlude between the frantic activity of her day and the meeting that night, which like so many others would start as routine and become something exciting as their discussion grew more heated. You never knew who might show up and how they might change the chemistry. She meandered back toward the lights. The benches in the distance were empty of their usual occupants, kids who sucked endless cigarettes and whistled at the pretty girls.
She didn’t see the man who pulled her down to the dry creek bed. It happened so quickly, she didn’t scream, and then he had covered her mouth. He was a black man in his midtwenties, unkempt, dressed in a motley arrangement that included a dirty army jacket. He had a crazy, wild look, and he muttered that if she screamed, he’d kill her. She nodded and whispered yes, but asked him, was he a veteran? He had begun to pull at her clothes and told her to shut up. She kept talking, calmly. Had he heard of the case of Willie McGee? She had been to Mississippi. Korea must have been horrible for him. She had opposed the war. He mustn’t think she was his enemy. He told her she was crazy. She sympathized with his anger and frustration, she said. Why not come along to the CRC meeting? There would be other women there far younger and prettier. He pushed and clawed and she kept talking. All this took just a minute or two, and her luck held. Above them on the creek side, they heard Bob’s voice and others calling out to her. Her attacker pushed her and ran in the other direction. She shouted for Bob.
Soon after, she told her friends what had happened. Her friend Marge Frantz said Decca had “escaped by her wits,” and Decca was justifiably proud of herself. Dobby remembered the incident, but Decca hadn’t made a big deal about it.
Over the years, the story of her attack mutated according to Decca’s audience and the degree of vodka involved. Catherine “Katie” Edwards, Decca’s assistant, heard of her “narrow escape” and of Bob’s arrival in the nick of time (and her irritation that he hadn’t come earlier). Decca told her friend, the young writer and political philosopher Bettina Aptheker, a different version. She said she offered her attacker the name of her friend Billie Wachter (with whom she’d traveled to Mississippi). In the heat of the moment, the reference made sense—Wachter was an activist in the peace movement. Decca thought, if her attacker were a veteran, he too would be sick of war. The point of it all was to keep talking, distract him, and negotiate if possible. In the version Decca told Bettina, she was raped. She heard no comforting voices searching the creek side, she made no narrow escape, and “it was bloody uncomfortable.” Afterward, Bettina said, Decca made her way from the creek to the home of her doctor, Ephraim Kahn, who examined her and gave her some kind of shot.
The violence surrounding such an experience must have been terrifying, but there are no letters from the time reflecting any trauma. Kathy Kahn, Ephraim’s daughter, knew nothing of that visit, but she too had heard a version of the story, which ended, “‘So I told him to hurry up and get it over with, and he did,’ or words to that effect in Decc-ese.” Decca had always been adept at suppressing horrors or turning them into tall tales.
Peter Sussman, the editor of her letters, “puzzled over the rape story too.” The only reference Sussman found was in an exchange of letters years later between Decca and her cousin Ann Farrer Horne. Decca contrasted Ann’s indifference to newspapers with her own passion for them:I could hardly pry my eyes open in the a.m. were it not for the S. F. Chronicle clattering on the porch; although I admit most of it is not only v. boring but v. forgettable. Once years ago, when I was about 30 & thought I might be dead soon (near-raped in a rather dismal creek . . . ) I’m sorry to say that my Last Thoughts (as I thought they might be) were not so much for Bob & children as “I’ll never see tomorrow’s paper.”
DECCA’S SISTER PAM had been living in Ireland, but she traveled a good deal and lived much of the year in Switzerland. Nancy and Diana lived in France. Debo had vast country estates and a grand home in London and had joined the ranks of frequent flyers for which the expression jet-setters would be coined in the decade to come. Decca thought it would be nice to get out of the house. She wasn’t envious of her sisters’ affluence, but she did think it “frightfully unfair” when she heard Nancy had plans to visit Russia.
In February 1954, Decca told her mother the “outlook is gloomy” for any trip to England. She and Bob had applied, but there was little hope of being issued passports. Decca rarely felt she was entirely without options. She asked her Muv to please “ring up Cousin Winston & tell him we just want to come for a visit, no politics, and see if he can’t arrange it?” When Bob was in Washington, D.C., on business, he also made a stab at invoking special privilege through Esmond’s mother, Nellie. “Winston Churchill’s sister-in-law was most anxious to see her grandchild,” he told the immigration official, who was unimpressed. An FBI special agent assigned to gather information on Decca was following this story closely. He entered the following into her file:Note from clerk to Mrs. Shipley, head of passports. Mrs. Shipley, Robert E. Treuhaft (orange card case now pending) wants to see personally re his proposed trip to England. Says his wife is related to British Churchills (Winstons) . . . told him I didn’t know when you would be back or whether you would have time to see him.
The CRC was on its last legs. There was always someone watching or listening. From the trenches, England, where a Communist was just another person with a political tic, must have looked like a fantastic holiday to Decca. Muv wrote back that she couldn’t ask that kind of favor of Cousin Winston. She also told Decca that Esmond’s mother was dying. In her reply, Decca asked her Muv for some advice on protocol and enclosed a note for Nellie Romilly:Thinking to give her a little news of Dinky; but then I thought, perhaps she will construe it as hinting about the will, (if any). Also, perhaps she is dead by now. Anyway, will you use your judgment as to if it should be forwarded, you might even tell her definitely it is NOT hinting about the Will. Oh dear, life is so complicated.
The Treuhafts’ life was circumscribed, but they made the best of things. Decca sometimes missed the city lights and throngs. Although San Francisco had its own sophistication, it wasn’t London. Hiking was an inexpensive consolation for friends Pele and Dobby, but the beauties of the vast wilderness didn’t hold the same delight for Decca, who had grown up on the more domesticated beauty of the English Cotswolds. When Dobby did manage to get Decca out on an excursion once in the High Sierras, it wasn’t a success. Their plan was to camp and hike for seventy miles over two weeks. The nights would be cold and the days often very hot, but it would at least be a relief to leave the struggle twelve thousand feet below.
To save money when preparing for the trip, Decca bought her hiking boots out of two different bins in the Army Navy store and very soon developed blisters on the trail. When she wasn’t able to walk anymore, she rode atop a supply horse alongside a mountain cliff’s steep drop-off. Decca didn’t care for horseback riding, and she didn’t like heights. The whole thing was more an ordeal than a holiday. When they returned to the Berkeley flatlands, she and Bob held a party to celebrate her survival. Their guests, invited to attend in hiking clothes, were treated to a commemorative ode that included the line “Nature, nature [pronounced “nate-cha”], how I hate ya.”
That spring, McCarthy was in the last stages of self-destruction. The senator accused the secretary of the army and assorted generals and admirals of the U.S. armed forces of “coddling commun
ists” in their ranks. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised, and marketing geniuses everywhere learned quickly that a sweating, red-faced drunk in a wool suit spewing poison did not project heroic values, even when hunting red devils.
“The tide here seems to be turning somewhat politically,” Decca wrote to Muv. The Army-McCarthy hearings had concluded with McCarthy’s chastisement. Decca and her friends didn’t think the persecution of Communists would end overnight, but, she told her mother, “perhaps in the next few years we’ll be able to come to England after all. At least jail & concentration camps look a bit further off now than a few months ago.”
In the time leading up to Bob’s testimony before the “Beastly Un-American Committee” (as Decca called it), the Treuhafts had taken for granted that they, like others, would suffer more financial hardship. They thought Bob might lose his law practice as others had. Instead, he had become something of a local hero, partly for his testimony before HUAC, but mainly as a stalwart opponent of the Oakland Police Department.
One day, a middle-aged woman came to Bob’s law office asking for counsel for her eighteen-year-old son. He’d been arrested on gang rape charges and was being held at City Hall. Bob took the case, but when he arrived to meet his client, the officer on duty told him, “He’s not in jail now.” After some wrangling, the officer admitted that the young man was in District Attorney Frank Coakley’s office.
Bob argued that his client was being interrogated illegally and demanded to be brought to him. The police delayed him with excuses, and as Bob and his client’s mother kept vigil outside the district attorney’s office, they were joined by other lawyers and civil servants and court reporters. Bob repeatedly knocked on Coakley’s door and, through the keyhole, saw the legs of several people, all of whom froze at the sound of his voice (like children playing statues). Eventually, an officer cracked open the door and snarled, Go away, as he shoved Bob across the floor to the far railing. Rushing back, Bob crashed his foot through the bottom pane of the frosted glass door and then stuck his head inside in time to see Frank Coakley and other officers of the court vanish out another exit. Bob’s client was soon back in his jail cell with a harrowing tale of illegal detention and intimidation. Decca thought her husband a hero for having exposed Coakley in his lair.
CHAPTER 19
IN A LETTER sent on Valentine’s Day 1955, thirteen-year-old Dinky informed her grandmother Aranka that she would thereafter be signing her name with two i’s, and also that “Nicky has a paper route with The Oakland Tribune now. He gets 19$ a month.”
The following afternoon, ten-year-old Nicky was riding his bike delivering papers when a speeding bus hit and killed him instantly. Dinky had been walking home from school when some children who had seen the accident shouted that her brother had been run over. She ran to Nicky and stayed until the ambulance came. Some neighbors had also gathered, and Dinky overheard one woman say, “If Mrs. Treuhaft was home more, this wouldn’t have happened.” Dinky jumped at the woman, scratching and screaming, until the others pulled them apart.
This was the hour when Decca was driving home from work. Their friends had begun to gather in front of the house, and she knew at once from their sober faces that something was horribly wrong. She rolled down the car window. “What happened, what happened to the children?!” People kept coming over all evening, and the police came to make their report. “Bob was in one room and Decca in another,” Dinky remembered. “They couldn’t talk to one another.” The following day, Decca sent this telegram:darling mother nicholas was killed yesterday by a bus while riding his bicycle funeral is friday afternoon dinky and benjamin taking it wonderfully will write soon going to country for a few days bob mother coming please don’t worry we are alright our friends are with us best love decca
About two hundred people attended Nicky’s funeral. There was a big white coffin and flowered wreaths. Pele thought the formality and remote ritual of the event was contrary to the Treuhafts’ taste, but neither Bob nor Decca was in any condition to object. Dobby was at the service, too, and afterward accompanied the family to the gravesite in Guerneville, not far from where Decca and Bob had married. Afterward, they held a memorial dinner at the home of some friends near the Russian River.
“Darling Muv,” Decca wrote from Sonoma County,He didn’t suffer, was killed almost instantly. He was one of the sweetest children I ever knew, kind & generous, everyone loved him. His teacher couldn’t go to school the next day, she was so upset. Dinky, Benjy & all our friends are making things bearable. Don’t worry about us, we are all right . . .
Nicky had enjoyed a sweet nature and inquiring turn of mind that intimated the man he might have become. The December before, he had spent endless hours helping “Low Price Al” sell Christmas trees in a nearby lot. He “never got a cent for all that arduous child labor,” Pele said, which led her to fondly call him “No Price Nick.” Aranka had felt a special connection to this grandchild, which he had reciprocated. Once, hearing that Aranka would be coming to visit in a few weeks, Nicky made up Benjy’s bed with fresh sheets and sent his little brother to sleep in the closet with orders to stay there until their grandmother arrived. Nicky had stayed with her in New York over the previous summer, when they had explored the various science and history museums. He’d been such good company she had planned to bring him along on her next junket to Paris.
Decca’s friends marveled at how she coped. They would have understood if she had demonstrated a more public, lavish grief. If at any time she blamed Bob, blamed herself, or raged at her fate, she did so out of sight of friends, who saw her only as “stoic.” She drank a lot, but then again, she often did. “Brave Little D,” Muv had called her after Esmond died. Decca confided in Pele once and only briefly about Julia, the baby she and Esmond had lost to illness. This tragedy, like that and all the others, had to be borne. She stayed in the house for a month after Nicky’s funeral. She had caught a bad flu and then passed it to the children, so there was nursing to keep her busy. Benjy’s illness persisted for so long that Bob and Decca began to consider it “unexpressed unhappiness.”
Decca buried what she could and railed instead at dramatic sorrow. Her mother-in-law’s nature was to be more extravagant in her grief, and back in New York, Aranka wrote a series of letters to Decca and Bob detailing her loneliness and pain. Bob wrote frequently to commiserate with his mother, but Aranka’s lamentations tried Decca’s patience. The younger woman didn’t have the words to console her mother-in-law and felt that her first duty was to Dinky and Benjy. A month after Nicky’s death, she wrote to Aranka:The only way we can possibly repay all the people who were so wonderfully kind and did so much, is to prove to them that they did help, & one can only do this by living a normal life which includes laughter and happiness—(Anyhow, one can’t live any other way—for long)—We have bad problems too, but we are trying to overcome them, as I’m sure you are.
Aranka’s other grandchildren might offer some consolation and keep her occupied, Decca wrote, “if you’d let them.”
Bob went back to work, but Decca’s job had all but vanished in her absence. As much as she wished it could still dig itself out, the Civil Rights Congress had been decimated: attacked as a Communist front, its funding dried up, its national leaders imprisoned, and its members’ list lately composed of more agents than Communists. Any one of those spying agents (without hearts of stone) might have recorded in her file, Subject presents little threat now. Decca simply hadn’t the energy or the optimism to rouse the troops. For both Treuhafts, this was a moment of dormancy, with all happiness deferred. And yet there had to be food for the children, clean clothes, homework. Longing and loneliness were the themes of daily life.
IN MAY, BOB reapplied for their passports, fully expecting them to be denied as usual. Twelve weeks later, the Treuhaft family received these “magic document[s]” in the mail. The occasion was as “unbelievable and stunning as winning the Irish Sweepstakes.” After sixteen years, Decca desperately wan
ted to go home. She wanted to see her family and “was longing to stay as long as possible.”
Fearful that the passports had been issued by some mistake, a newly adrenalized Decca planned the family’s getaway like a secret military campaign. They immediately booked passage on a French ocean liner, the Flandre, from New York. Dinky was sent ahead to stay with Aranka in New York until Decca and Benjy arrived by a later cross-country train. Bob would take a plane, and they’d all rendezvous just before boarding the boat.
This signaled a new turn, something so surprising, unexpected, and good that Decca and Bob’s friends, who had shared their grief, now shared their exultation through a series of dinners and parties with cakes in the shape of ships. Bob and Decca would be missed, of course, but who couldn’t help but think that if there were a synonym for miracle in the Marxist lexicon, it would have to be fortuitous mistake or beautiful escape. At one of their bon voyage parties, which had been given by the Crawfords (a family of intellectuals and labor activists with ties to the Harlem Renaissance), Decca fell into conversation with their host’s daughter. Nebby Lou Crawford “at the discontented age of seventeen was madly jealous of Dinky’s good fortune.” Decca, feeling sympathetic and enthusiastic now and as always tending to the philosophy of the more the merrier, spontaneously invited Nebby Lou to join her family on their European travels.
It must have seemed a dreamlike excursion, crossing the country again. While eight-year-old Benjy and Nebby Lou amused themselves with endless games of cards, Decca sat alone to contemplate the prospect of her return. The constant battle to make things work had stretched the little money they had. They hadn’t much to travel on, but there was still a bit in England in her running-away account. Over the years, she had tried to withdraw the balance, but had always been stymied. Ironic now that it would be there to welcome her home, all the time accumulating interest at Drummonds Bank.