by Irwin Shaw
“‘Dummkopf,’ my mother said, ‘don’t you ever read the newspapers?’
“‘Yes, Mama, I read the newspapers,’ I said. It wasn’t true. I thought that a man who was studying Kant and Hegel and Plato insulted his intelligence by reading newspapers, but I couldn’t explain this to my mother. You couldn’t explain anything to my mother. ‘But why does Tante Elsa need me tomorrow?’ I asked her.”
Sternberger had the lawyer’s gift, which Federov had always admired, of being able to talk in coherent, unhesitating, grammatical sentences. Even in the minute or two that Sternberger had been telling the story, the image of the austere mother in the kitchen and her imperious domination of the young, unformed philosophy student who had just put off the white apron in Coney Island was clear and real.
“‘The Italians,’ my mother said, ‘the two anarchists—they are executing them tomorrow. You know your Tante Elsa, you know how she feels about this. And she is dying, besides. It is one day she cannot be alone.’”
“His aunt was famous,” George said. He told Federov the name. It was the name of a woman who hadn’t been forgotten even after all these years, a professed anarchist, a woman who had gone to Russia during the Revolution, who had sat with Lenin on platforms, who had broken with the Bolsheviks, who had been implicated but never convicted in the attempted assassination of a great industrialist in the Middle West. She hadn’t been convicted, but she had been deported, at the time of the Palmer raids, in the 1920s, first to Mexico and from Mexico to Canada.
“My mother hadn’t spoken to her sister Elsa for years,” Sternberger went on, comfortably chewing on his steak. “When my aunt came back from Russia my mother told her she’d disgraced the family name and that she was ashamed to show her face on the street and in the synagogue and that she never wanted to see her again. She never did, either. But it was a big family, my mother had four brothers, and they kept in touch with Tante Elsa and my mother got all the news. And I myself went to visit her every Christmas.
“‘She has tuberculosis,’ my mother said. ‘The doctors only give her days to live, she can’t be alone tomorrow. And you’re the only one in the family she likes. You’re the only one in the family she says isn’t German. I suppose she means that as a compliment,’ my mother said. ‘Maybe she’s right. Who knows what goes through that poor woman’s head? Anyway, you’re the only one she ever asks about in her letters to the rest of the Mespucheh.’”
“‘Mespucheh’ means ‘family,’ Benny,” George said.
“That much Yiddish I know,” Federov said.
“Just in case. You never can tell with you young fellers.”
Sternberger went on. “‘She says you’re wasting your time studying those old dead Greeks, Elsa,’ my mother said. ‘She has an opinion on everything, that woman. But no matter. You go to Montreal. You stay by her side. You represent the family. You give her comfort. Here’—my mother gave me the sandwiches. ‘Put these in your pocket. Eat. The tickets cost enough as it is, there’s no sense in making the thieves in those dining cars rich. And God knows what they feed you, with all those fancy prices.’”
Sternberger smiled faintly, enjoying the memory of that powerful, obstinate woman, his mother, that strong voice silenced these many years, that rigid code of honor, that pride of family, that queenlike insistence on traditional deportment, now only a subject for amusing anecdotes at weddings and funerals.
“So I went to Montreal,” Sternberger continued. “I sat up all night. Aside from being thrifty, my mother thought Pullman cars were immoral. All those people, men and women all mixed up, sleeping together with only wavy little curtains between them. Men sleeping on top of women, women sleeping on top of strange men.
“My aunt was living in one room in a boardinghouse. A dying neighborhood. Big old mansions in what used to be a rich quarter of the city, now cut up into small apartments, boardinghouses. Spinsters, widows, old bachelors, people with small pensions, people with night jobs, a hot plate for cooking behind a screen in the corner of the room, everything on the decline and no hope of its ever getting better. My aunt’s room was tiny, filled with books and papers. Cigarette butts overflowing from saucers and a coffee pot always going. Somehow, wherever my aunt lived, even though she was German and had lived in North America most of her life, her rooms looked as though they were in a poor quarter of Moscow under the Czar. No windows open, even in summer, because she was dying. ‘I have the winter of the grave in my bones, Sam,’ she told me that morning, all wrapped up in sweaters. Everything she wore was brown or black or dusty green. Everything about her, her clothes, her complexion, her hair, was the color of dust. She was nearly a skeleton already. Her face was sharp, translucent, like the edge of a seashell. She kept walking up and down that little room all morning, smoking one cigarette after another, holding the cigarettes the Russian way, with the hand cupped under them, so weak she had to hold onto the back of a chair, onto the bedpost, the edge of the washbasin, my shoulder, to keep from falling. But she wouldn’t sit down. ‘I am like an old horse,’ she said. ‘If I sit down, I will never get up again.’
“‘Your mother is a narrow, ignorant woman,’ my aunt said. ‘If she were a man she would be a tax collector in Prussia. Her horizon is the kitchen stove. She has only slept with one man in her whole life. Your father. Imagine the outlook on life of a woman who has only made love to one man. Made love! Hah! Taken off her corset for ten minutes on a Saturday night twice a month. She thinks I’m crazy. A woman rules the house, she thinks, men change the world. But she sent you here to me today. For that I forgive her everything, tell her. For today. Somewhere inside the corset there is the remnant of a heart, she remembers that we slept in the same bed together when we were children, that we gathered raspberries in the fields along the Rhine in the summer in white dresses and blue aprons, that we stood beside the grave of our grandfather in the cemetery in Cologne when we were both under ten years old. I thank her for it, tell her, she sent me her son when I needed him.’
“She kept tottering from chair to bed to basin,” Sternberger said, “and I was afraid she was going to fall and die right then and there. She couldn’t stop talking and she couldn’t stop smoking and she couldn’t stop walking up and down. And it wasn’t because she was dying. She had a contempt of death. She wouldn’t cry for anybody else’s and she wouldn’t cry for her own. She wouldn’t cry for Sacco and Vanzetti, either. ‘What a farce,’ she said. ‘Those hypocritical holy Puritans from Boston pretending they are saving the world, pretending they are upholding justice, proud of themselves because they are killing two poor little Italian workmen. Beware people in power, Sam, beware the rich. They’re frightened somehow their money is going to be taken away from them, they strike out blindly—in all directions, at people passing by in the streets, at children, at poets, at shadows, at two little Italians. Beware systems. Beware rulers. They are all the same. Everything to keep them where they are—on the workingman’s back. And don’t think the Russians are better. They’re worse. The hypocrisy is deeper. They tell the world they are workingmen, they are for the workingman. Liars. Rockefellers in caps. Bismarcks without a tie. All for effect. How many Vanzettis they’ve killed already, how many poor dumb Saccos. They could sit down at lunch with the Governor of Massachusetts, they could shake hands with Judge Webster Thayer, and if you changed their clothes nobody could tell the difference.’”
Sternberger finished his beer, put the glass down on the tablecloth. He had long, fine hands and he used them with precision. He paused. He was remote. He was not in a crowded and noisy restaurant in New York any more. His hair was not white. He was a young philosophy student again in a dingy room in Montreal, awed by the elemental cry of outrage of a dying woman, a woman through whose veins ran the same blood as his but who, as if with a contemptuous actor’s aside on a stage, had cut her ties with family, with security, with everything small and safe, to plunge into bitter depths where only courage counted, where only the purest and most dangerou
s honesty could be tolerated, where love was nothing, sympathy nothing, hope nothing, conviction everything…
It’s amazing, Federov thought, how everybody remembers every detail of that one day in 1927. Like the survivors of Pompeii who watched from afar as Vesuvius stained the sky and who must have described with grieving accuracy the flaming rock, the day-long cloud, each moment of the death of the city, to their great-grandchildren; like the four or five inhabitants the Germans had neglected to kill when they wiped out Ourador and who would always know what the church looked like as it burned, what the cries sounded like from within.
A waiter came over and put three glasses of beer on the table. The movement, so close to Sternberger, brought him back to today, to the restaurant, to the men at the table with him. He took a long draught of the beer, then played with the glass, tapping lightly at its stem.
“She kept coughing and coughing into handkerchiefs,” Sternberger went on. “She had a dozen handkerchiefs on her, in pockets, tucked into her sleeves, into the sash around her bathrobe, everywhere, and she would cough so hard I thought the final hemorrhage had to start any minute.
“‘And me, me, your beloved Aunt Elsa,’ she said after the worst fit of coughing. ‘Here it is noon, August twenty-third, 1927, the two men are walking to the electric chair, the whole world is holding its breath in horror, and your aunt, who has been tortured by the police of four countries, who fought in revolutions, who has addressed meetings of fifty thousand people, whose name is hated by every hypocrite in the world, where is your aunt? In Boston, screaming in agony, denouncing this crime? Waiting with a gun to kill the real criminals? No. In a little room in Canada, a hopeless country with no history, no future, a continent of bigots, coughing my lungs out, dying for no purpose. And where should I be? In Charlestown Prison. Myself. Walking to the electric chair. Being the martyr to wake up a billion people from their sleep. The whole world is looking at this one execution. It is our crucifixion. At this moment they are making two saints for the next two thousand years. And who are these saints? Two poor, obscure, illiterate men, who don’t even know what’s happening to them. They are victims, not martyrs. THEY DO NOT KNOW THEIR GLORY and so they do not deserve it, they are robbing me of it, me, me, me…’”
Sternberger had stopped eating, as had Federov and George, as the smooth, easy lawyer’s voice dominated the hum of the busy restaurant, the voice low, but burning with the passion that had not diminished in thirty years, the voice that remembered the last terrible phrase of his aunt’s life: THEY DO NOT KNOW THEIR GLORY.
Sternberger shook his head, returning from the past. “She died four days later,” he said. “All alone. I was back at Coney Island selling frozen custard on the boardwalk. When I got home from Montreal my mother didn’t ask me a single question about what had happened there. All she said was, ‘One of your hoodlum friends is here, he came last night, he said he had no place to sleep.’ It was a classmate of mine from Columbia. They’d kicked him out of the YMCA on Twenty-third Street because he’d thrown a chair out the window and broken a skylight at noon, the only way he could think of at the time to protest the execution.” Sternberger was quiet for a moment.
“After my mother died in 1940, we finally got my aunt’s coffin down from the cemetery in Montreal and buried her next to her sister in Queens. I didn’t tell anybody about my aunt for years. I was ashamed of her.” He smiled a little sadly. “I don’t really know what to think about her even now,” he said. “I go out to Queens once a year and put some flowers on the two graves.” He looked at his watch. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting up. “I’m late. I have to go home.”
The next night Federov went to a party at the Staffords’. It was a big party in their house on East Seventy-eighth Street and there was the usual haphazard mixture of generations and professions that John Stafford gathered around him—actors, politicians, boys from Yale, young married couples who worked for magazines and publishing houses, people who were there because they were handsome or poor or seldom invited anywhere else.
Sternberger’s story about his aunt had haunted Federov all day long and, even though Stafford was surrounded by a group of young people who were standing with him at the bar, Federov began to tell Stafford about the old lady in Boston and her saints for the next two thousand years. When he mentioned the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, he saw blank looks on the faces of the youngsters.
Stafford laughed as Federov stopped in midsentence. “They never heard of them, Ben,” he said. “They don’t give that course in good schools.”
“I don’t believe it,” Federov said.
“They came in late,” Stafford said. “They were born after 1920.”
“Even so…,” Federov said.
“Ask them.”
“My dear young lady,” Federov said to a blond girl in a red dress, “can you tell me who Sacco and Vanzetti were?”
“Well…” The girl was embarrassed.
“How about you?” Federov turned to her escort, who seemed about twenty-three. “Do you know about them?”
“Vaguely,” the boy said. “To be honest—no.”
“They were anarchists back in the early twenties,” Federov said, fighting back what he knew as an irrational anger, “a shoemaker and a fish peddler in Massachusetts, and they were convicted of murdering a man in a holdup. But the general feeling was that they were innocent and they were convicted not because they had had anything to do with the crime, but because of their political opinions. Though Oliver Wendell Holmes—” Again he saw the look of puzzlement on the young faces. He laughed, his anger gone. “He was a Justice of the Supreme Court,” Federov explained. “Anyway, what I wanted to say was that despite all the outcry, Holmes thought the men were guilty and he wrote somewhere that the case was being turned into a text by the Reds. But whether he was right or wrong, at the time many people who were not Reds thought the case would never be forgotten and I guess I thought the same thing and that’s why I’m surprised when anybody doesn’t know all about them.”
“I heard of them,” said a young girl at the far end of the bar. She was pretty, not American. Federov had met her and her husband several times. She was Belgian, but had married an American after the war. She was more than thirty years old, but she looked younger.
“How did you hear of them?” Federov asked.
“From my father and mother,” the girl said. “In Belgium.”
“What were they—your father and mother? Socialists?”
The girl laughed. “Nobility,” she said. There was a trace of mockery in her voice. “They used to play croquet on the lawn after dinner when I was a little girl. You know how you put your foot on your own ball and tap it to send your opponent’s ball off the course?”
“Yes,” Federov said, curious now.
“They called that the Sacco-Vanzetti shot,” the girl said. “You hit Sacco—I guess the noise the mallet made against the ball sounded something like ‘sacco’ or ‘socko’—and you knocked Vanzetti off the course. It was a family joke…” There was silence in the room.
The girl looked around, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said, although what she was sorry about would have been difficult for her to explain and for the others to understand. “I suppose…in Belgium, at the time, it must have seemed—well—remote…”
1964
FEDEROV HAD REACHED THE beach in front of the Club by now. Two old ladies under the parasol stared coldly at him. A hundred times a summer they complained about the law, demagogically inspired, which permitted outsiders to spoil their view of the ocean merely by keeping below the high-tide line on the beach. Lonely sentries, old bones wrapped in scarves, windswept and discarded, unpleasant at a distance, unpleasant close up, menopaused, everlastingly dissatisfied, under a striped parasol on a bare white beach, they guarded the gates of the past.
The sea was still running strong, but now Federov, who had been walking with his head down watching his toes squash into the damp sand, saw that there
were four boys, aged about seventeen, out in the rough water, being tossed about on rubber mattresses on which they were trying to ride the waves. They were not in any immediate trouble, but Federov knew the coast well and how treacherous rip tides could build up in this kind of swell and pull the strongest swimmer out to sea. He tried to shout to the boys to come in, feeling the disapproval of the old ladies behind his back at this unseemly noise. But the crash of waves drowned his voice and the boys either did not see him gesturing or purposely ignored him.
There was a catamaran on blocks high on the beach, but without oars. It was late in the afternoon, the red flag had been up all day and the two lifeguards who were usually on duty were not to be seen.
One of the boys was overturned by a wave and it was only by luck that another boy grabbed his mattress as it went by and held onto it.
“Fools,” Federov said aloud.
1932
DEATH BY WATER.
The lake was down the hill, eight hundred yards away, out of sight of the camp. The camp was in the Adirondacks. It was a coed camp, the girls’ bunks separated by a thick grove of pines from the boys’ side. Benjamin was to get seventy-five dollars for working as a counselor for nine boys between the ages of eight and ten for the summer. The camp was owned by a Mr. Kahn, a small, roostery nuisance of a man with ulcers and a bad temper, who could be heard screaming at the cooks in the kitchen that they were wasting food. He also complained constantly to the counselors that they were losing too many baseballs and not being careful enough in checking the campers’ laundry each week and that he alone, poor, sorely beset, pitiful Morris Kahn, out of his own pocket, would have to pay the parents for all the missing shirts and sweaters at the end of the season.