Story of Lola Gregg

by Howard Fast

  She stood there with her face in her father’s jacket, and she began to cry. She cried like a little girl, easily and fully, and asked herself, while she wept, What is the use of crying now, Lola? You decided before that tears were no good. But I have to cry, she argued with herself. Gregg is cold and dead. I have to cry. I’ll be all right, but I have to cry.

  She heard her father ask Feldberger why? Why? The old man’s quavering voice was like a prayer that had to be answered. Why does one man kill another man whom he doesn’t even know? Cain and Abel were brothers, but this—this had no meaning, no sense. Was the whole world insane? Now did men kill for the sake of killing? And Lola whimpered to herself, Answer him, Sam. Tell him. Tell him why men kill? Tell him I She realized that Feldberger was trying. She knew that if she looked at Feldberger, she would see the tears running down his face, but she would not look at him. Her mind placed Feldberger on a far island where she saw him only dimly, and from there his voice issued. Her heart was breaking, but she had to listen and let each word sink in like a dagger thrust. And what, she wondered, had died for Feldberger, to put such pain in his voice? This man, the murderer, Feldberger said, would be sent home to die, but he didn’t want to die. There was only one virtuous act with which he could plead for his life to the Government of the United States—to kill a communist. Was his mind twisted, or the minds of hundreds? All other murder is a crime, but his act pleaded that this was no crime but an accolade. When he saw a communist, he took his iron pipe and struck, and Gregg died. No, it had not been planned by anyone else but himself. Feldberger didn’t think so, but didn’t Feldberger know that hundreds of crazed, ambitious and power-hungry men had planned this, laid the groundwork for it and used the insane Croatian as their weapon? Didn’t Sam know that? Didn’t her father know?

  Lola pulled away from her father and stood looking at him and the lawyer. She had stopped crying. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and then stood there looking at them.

  “I came to tell you,” Sam pleaded, “I didn’t want anyone else to tell you.”

  “Did you see Gregg?”

  “Yes, Lola, I saw him.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Yes, he’s dead.”

  “They said he was dead once before today.”

  “I saw him, Lola.” Feldberger could barely speak. “I know that he’s dead.”

  Still, Lola did not move, and the three of them stood silently in a room so still Lola could hear the clock in the kitchen ticking loudly. Her father started to speak, “Lola——” but she stopped him with a quick motion of her head. Still she stood there, and then, at last, she turned around and walked slowly to the children’s room, went in, and closed the door behind her.

  There she stood and looked down at her two children. It took a few moments for her eyes to begin to adjust, and that made her think of the theatre and how she had disciplined herself while her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Now the forms of her two sleeping children came into focus. Peacefully they slept, with all the beautiful, impetuous abandon of sleep, their arms flung out, their little bodies sprawled, their young life resting and renewing itself. Tomorrow, they would know that their father was dead, gone away with no returning, but tonight they slept. They would see a sunrise in the morning that Gregg would never see, and then many more sunsets and sunrises. They would grow and swell in the strength and beauty of their youth and they would live through their manhood and womanhood and they would see their children and their grandchildren, and even the memory of their father would hardly exist for them. The world continued; they would continue and Lola Gregg would continue.

  Lola did not know how long she stood there. Once she was conscious of the door opening a crack and a shaft of light biting in, but then they closed the door and left her alone. She stood there thinking many thoughts, the pain in her heart bitter and intense and not lessening. She stood there aware of the awful emptiness that the death of a beloved person leaves, and she wondered what would ever come to fill it. She tried to imagine the future that Gregg would never see or know, but all she could truly imagine was the long night that she faced before the first morning came. Only after a while did the first hints of anger and hatred appear within her, and then she knew it and recognized it and considered it.

  Not too much, she told herself, just & little, just enough to make me strong enough to live without a man I loved so much. I loved him very much, but I am still able to love as well as hate, and I need only a little hate now. As long as I know there is a reservoir, I need not have too much. I will do as he would do, because I know how he lived and thought, and what his mind was and what his soul was. And my son will be like him, wise and strong and not afraid. I was afraid all day, but I am not afraid now.

  “Sleep well,” she whispered to her children, and then she went out into the living-room where the two men waited for her.

  “I have something for you to take, Lola,” her father said earnestly. “Something to quiet your nerves. You need to sleep.”

  She shook her head. “My nerves are all right, and there’s plenty of time to sleep. I want to go with Sam to see Gregg, and you stay here with the children, Daddy. Then, when I come back, we’ll talk about other things.”

  “Do you think you ought to go, Lola?”

  “Yes, I think so. Don’t you, Sam?”

  Feldberger nodded, and Lola said slowly, “There are a good many things I never did before that I will have to do now. I want to learn to do them well.” She kissed her father gently. Then she and the lawyer went out, so that she could look at the face of the man she loved.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CERTAIN people who read this book in the American edition—before it was published in Great Britain—felt that the last chapter evidenced a degree of melodramatic implausibility, and wondered whether the book might not end with the previous scene.

  Apart from my reluctance to alter what has already been printed, though in another country, I felt that I could not abandon what was at least in part the premise for this tale. This strange and tragic story took birth in my mind through the actual incident of Robert Thompson.

  Thompson, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, commander in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, emerged from the Second World War as one of our great heroes. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, which is second only to the Congressional Medal of Honour, as the highest distinction in American military service, for his courage beyond the call of duty during service in the South Pacific. After the war, he became active in the Communist Party, U.S.A., and he was one of the many American communists sentenced to prison under the Smith Act.

  While still on bail, Thompson disappeared into hiding. More than a year later, he was trapped by the F.B.I., and taken to a New York City prison from his hiding-place in California. There, he was brutally assaulted by a Croatian immigration prisoner—who felt that through this assault he would demonstrate his loyalty to certain “American” values and thereby prevent his being returned to Yugoslavia, where criminal charges awaited him.

  For days Thompson, whose skull had been badly fractured, lingered between life and death. For years his body had been ravaged by tuberculosis and malaria, and his time of hiding had further weakened his resistance. His survival was due only to his tremendous will to live—but he lives now with a silver plate in his head, and he will carry the mental effects of the assault and continue to pay a price for it.

  This was not the first attempt at murder here to be based upon the plea that the victim was a communist, and it was the particular horror of such morality that began the making of the story in my mind. As always, the story came out very differently, and Gregg is not Thompson, nor are any of the other characters single persons. The circumstances are specific; the characters are many people or no people, as you would.

  I know perhaps as well as anyone how this little tale suffers from the author’s personal experience. The making of literature is, in my opinion, a matter of reflection, contemplation,
and objectivity—but for more years than I care to recall, all of these have been denied to me. The literature of agony, written at the moment of agony, has validity but not greatness. It can be pointed and vital, but never completely whole—and perhaps that is why in the whole world today there is so little literature that can be measured by the yard-stick of greatness; for we are none of us completely free from this singular agony of our time. Personally, I look forward to and dream of a time of peace when I can write so much that I have wanted to write; but I do not know whether I shall have it. The story you have read suffers because I know it so well and so currently; but perhaps the telling of it will help to end this long time of insanity we have endured.

  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 befor
e 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.