by Lois Ruby
Amy Lynn’s voice drops to a whisper. “My pop’s in big, big trouble, Marty. The College suspended him, without pay, for not signing the loyalty oath. Don’t they realize that he was Teacher of the Year in 1951 and 1952? What’s worse, they’ve given his classes to Dr. Muldaur, who was never once nominated. But Muldaur will sign anything. He’d probably confess to murder if they asked him to.”
“What happens now?”
Amy Lynn sighs deeply. “No one knows. They’ve been poring through Pop’s personal papers for a week now. They won’t find anything besides a lot of math formulas, unless they plant something incriminating.”
“I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“Maybe Pop could get a job teaching at the high school, but he’s ridiculously over-qualified. It would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible. Or I suppose we could just starve. Go on welfare and end up buried in paupers’ graves.”
“One of my parents’ friends got fired from KU ’cause he wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath,” I offer. “He moved his family to Mississippi to teach at a Negro college, and he’s not even a Negro. He’s Japanese.”
“No! I’d just die if Pop did that. I’d be so lonesome for everything here.”
For me?
“Oh, Marty, can’t you just imagine how Julius and Ethel Rosenberg must be lonesome for each other, locked up in opposite ends of Sing Sing?”
I was thinking more about how scared they must be. The Chair, the electric chair waiting for them.
But Amy Lynn’s the romantic one. “I saw a picture of them in Look Magazine. They’re on their way from court back to prison. Ethel’s hooded eyes are gazing into Julius’s with such longing that you could cry. You can see how she adores him and yearns for him, even though there’s chicken wire separating them in the patrol wagon. It’s utterly heartbreaking.”
She sharpens the focus in the binocs. “What’s that drooping out the window? Oh, it’s Dimple Chin’s tie. He’s going to wake up with a stiff neck. Serves him right!”
“Maybe his head’ll snap right off and roll under the car like my basketball.”
Amy Lynn’s giggle is like ripply water. She sighs and cranks back into gear. “I’ve heard that Julius and Ethel pass their time in their cells writing passionate letters. They’ve convinced guards to carry the letters back and forth.”
“Bribed?”
“Bribed! Where is your romantic spirit, Marty? They do it out of sympathy for those poor lovers. I’ve read a few of the letters leaked to the papers. Steamy prose! If I were Ethel I’d be so embarrassed.” She lets the binocs hang from the leather strap around her neck.
“Don’tcha think Ethel has bigger stuff to worry about, like staying alive?”
“Yes, but love conquers all,” Amy Lynn says, in this faraway dreamy voice. “So, I wonder, just how deep does love go? Deep enough for them to hold hands walking down the corridor to the electric chair? How do they decide who goes first?”
I jump up and take a sweeping bow. “ ‘Ladies first,’ Mr. Rosenberg will say, and Missus will say, ‘No-no-no, after you. Age before beauty.’ ”
“She’s older.”
So much for my attempt at humor.
“I’ve heard that all Ethel has to do to save herself is admit that Julius is guilty. But she won’t. They’d rather die together than live without one another. That’s my dream.”
“To get electrocuted?” What’s she talking about?
“No, to love somebody that much, some day, and be loved back. They’re like Romeo and Juliet, like Abelard and Heloise.”
“I get the Romeo thing, but who are those other guys?”
Amy Lynn slaps her hand to her heart, making the binoculars bounce like a ping pong ball. “You never heard of Abelard and Heloise? Where have you been, Martin Rafner? They’re just the most classic lovers in the whole history of the world, or at least in the drafty stone castles of the twelfth century.”
“Even more famous than Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe?”
She gives me this disgusted look. How come Amy Lynn’s always lecturing me on the stuff I don’t know? How come I don’t know so much stuff?
She tilts her head northward, toward the campus. “Of course, Romeo and Juliet both turned up dead, and I won’t even tell you the horrible fate of Abelard and Heloise. Love is so, so tragic, Marty.”
“Kinda like losing the World Series,” I say.
Told you I don’t know how to talk to girls.
Chapter 4
Saturday, April 18
Even before the FBI guys showed up, our family wasn’t like other people’s families. My professor parents are called doctor, but they couldn’t set a busted leg or gouge out your appendix.
I always knew my dad was different from other fathers. For one thing, he doesn’t go nutso over sports like Connor’s dad.
It’s not that Dad has no sports sense. He’s an anthropologist, so he knows more than anybody on this planet about sports in a dozen countries you never heard of. Amazing what you can do with coconut shells and wooly mammoth spine bones.
Also, my mom’s not like other mothers. “Housewife?” She always huffs, “I am not married to a house. I’m married to a profound man, and I’m a superb English professor and poet in my own right. Housewife, indeed!”
Explains why you’d think our house has been ransacked by thieves.
Connor’s always here at lunch time, and he’s always hungry. Maybe he has a tapeworm swimming around in his gut, like some of the people in countries Dad studies. He drops into his usual seat at the kitchen table.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I warn him. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Campbell’s Tomato Soup, but no such luck. Mom’s clunking a pan of something. Truth is, Mom dishes up her best stuff in moronic pentameter. I think that’s what her students call it when they come to our house for poetry readings and leave their teeth marks in half-eaten crackers with cream cheese and chopped olive smeared on them—stuff you’d use to grout bathroom tile.
She splats barefoot across the floor to the window sill, where her avocado pit is sitting in a mayo jar with its round bottom submerged in water. “I dare you to grow roots, you imbecile pit.” After she’s turned it to face the sun, she ladles thick white sauce with mysterious beige flecks onto soggy toast.
“This chipped beef?” Connor asks, his hungry eyes gleaming.
“Tuna. Chipped beef in cream sauce isn’t kosher,” Mom says. Not that we keep all those dietary laws, or that we’re super-religious, but Mom was brought up not mixing meat and dairy, and whatever meat we have comes from the kosher butcher in Kansas City so when Bubbie Sylvia comes to visit, she’s okay eating our stuff. Creamed tuna is second on my Hit Parade of worst meals. Pickled tongue tops the charts. The sight of a package of oatmeal-raisin cookies on the counter cheers me a little, even though I don’t like raisins or oatmeal.
Connor goes to work on the creamed tuna like a stevedore who’s been hauling at the docks all morning. Me, I stab at the wreck on my plate. “Don’t they put food in your cage?”
“I’m a growing boy.”
“Shows.”
Mom’s more distracted than usual. Probably composing some epic poem in her head with lots of words nobody gets. “Your father had a meeting at the College.”
I dig out a green foreign substance, while Connor flicks his tongue across his lips like a gecko. “One of Dad’s committees?” They meet at weird hours, like no one at the College gets hungry at normal times.
Mom shakes her head, and that simple tilt of her brownish-gray braid makes me feel itchy. Something’s up.
She scritches the bottom of the pan, emptying the gluey blob onto Connor’s plate. “Listen, when your father comes home, don’t ask him too many questions.”
“How many’s too many?”
Eyes closed, Mom sucks white sauce off the ladle. “Wash up the dishes when you’re done, will you, Marty? And Connor, you’d better be gone before Dr. Irwin comes home.”
Conn
or freezes with his fork half way to his mouth. A wedge of toast and white sauce defies gravity. “This about the Rosenbergs?”
“Indirectly.” Mom tosses the white-coated ladle into the sink.
I haven’t said a word to her about Connor’s hard line on the Rosenbergs, so it must be something else, something big and hairy, if it’s got my mother flinging spoons.
Connor spins his plate on the counter and sends the screen door banging behind him, just as Amy Lynn comes in, glaring at his back. She and Connor are sworn enemies.
Mom’s at the fridge with her back to us. Her thick braid ends in a little paint brush at her waist. “How’s your father doing, Amy Lynn?”
“Oh, he’s just peachy-keen,” she says dryly. “And my mother’s even worse.”
Water splashes in the gluey pot. “What’s going on?” Mom asks.
“Things are a little tense at my house.” Amy Lynn’s voice is wobbly. “My mother drifts around the house in an old herringbone sweater she found in the back of the closet, even though our house is steamy and dark as a cave, with every window shut and the blinds down so those men in the car across the street can’t see in.”
Mom sighs. “Privacy is dead in America.”
“I know!”
So do I. Last night I woke up and saw one of the night guys with binoculars hanging around his neck, trying to climb a tree outside my window. Not that Mom and Amy Lynn bother to include me in this conversation; I’m The Invisible Man.
“Would you believe it, Dr. Rosalie? Those FBI agents rummage through our trash. And they leap out of the car when poor Mr. Oberon arrives. They make him show every piece of mail before he can slide it through our slot.”
I clunk the giraffe salt and pepper shakers together to get their attention. “Dumb question. All this is happening because your father refuses to sign a loyalty oath at the College?”
“Outrageous, isn’t it?” Amy Lynn answers.
“He’s got to resist.” Mom pounds the table so hard that the salt shaker giraffe jumps and snorts salt out his nostrils.
“Oh, my father’s like a boulder. He can’t be moved an inch. He won’t sign, and he won’t tell why he won’t sign, except he says it’s a matter of conscience.”
“Absolutely!” Mom affirms. “It’s the only thing left after they strip all our rights away.”
“Except it’s making Mother furious. She yells, ‘Conscience! You’re a math teacher, not political science or philosophy. Sign the ridiculous oath and stop this right now!’ ” Amy Lynn turns to me, with her eyes blazing. “Just wait, Marty. It’ll happen at your house, too.”
No chance. We’ve got enough going on with the Rosenbergs. My parents know better than to go looking for even more trouble. Don’t they?
Chapter 5
Saturday, April 18
Amy Lynn is washing, I’m drying. She flicks soapy water at my face, so I have to snap the soggy dish towel at her or look like a dwonk. Outside, gravel’s crunching in our driveway. My dad. Uh-oh.
He opens the door just enough to poke his head in. “Anybody here?”
“Marty and me, Dr. Irwin. The Human Trash Can’s gone home.”
“So sorry to miss Connor.” Sweat tracks down Dad’s cheeks, gray as oatmeal, and dribbles through his reddish-black beard until it pools at his neck. He’s tugging at the tie and starchy collar, his stuffy College uniform. His pinkie sports a Harvard class ring, his only jewelry, not even a wedding ring matching Mom’s thin gold band from their poor days.
So, these are the rich days? You couldn’t tell by looking at our peeling wall paper and the nicks in the countertops.
The kitchen’s half-doors swing open, like in a western saloon, and Mom comes barreling in. No six-shooter; she’s got a finger tucked in the middle of a book and a pen woven into her hair.
“Irwin? Tell me.”
Amy Lynn and I go into slow motion with the dishes so we can spy on their conversation. She lazily scrapes a pink Brillo pad over the scummy sauce pan, and I wipe each dish until it’s dry enough to spontaneously combust.
Mom stares at my father, who shakes his head, and Mom slams the book down on the table. “They fired him? Unbelievable. Theo’s given his life for the College.”
Amy Lynn pivots, flinging pink soap. “My father’s fired, not just suspended? Mother’s going to have a complete cow.”
All I can think is, they’ll be out of here by fall, off to Mississippi or Timbuktu. There goes my future. See, if by some ugly twist of fate I don’t make the Majors, I’m planning to live here in Palmetto, coach baseball at the College, and raise a whole dugout full of little Rafner basemen and basewomen. I kinda thought it would be with Amy Lynn Sonfelter, who wrote in my middle school yearbook, Yours till the ocean wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry. If that’s not a promise, I don’t know what is.
“They had no choice,” Dad says. “Theo’s being called up before the HUAC.”
Amy Lynn sinks into a chair, dripping soapy water on the speckled linoleum. “What exactly is that, Dr. Irwin?”
Dad lets out a sigh. “It’s the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee—the twentieth-century Inquisition.”
Mom adds bitterly, “Railroaded by the Lie-Mongering, Red-Baiting Carnivore and his fascist buddy. They’ve twisted innocent lives into the so-called red menace by labeling people as communists. Deplorable, unconstitutional, and just plain revolting.”
“But my father’s not a communist!” Amy Lynn hesitates. “Is he?”
Dad’s response is icy and tight: “Not everyone called up to testify is a communist.”
I jump in. “Okay, some are, but not Amy Lynn’s dad.” But all of a sudden it dawns on me. “Wait, even if they just say he’s a communist, it’s bad for the College, right?”
Hawthorne College is the sun in our universe. Without it, we’d freeze up and turn into a whole neighborhood of flavorless Popsicles. So it’s a jolt to hear my father say, “The point isn’t what’s good for the College—or even whether Theo Sonfelter is a communist or a Soviet stoolie or whatever McCarthy calls Americans with a conscience. The point is a man’s political associations are his own business. The First Amendment guarantees it.”
“First Amendment, hah!” Mom mutters, taking a swig of milk right out of the Borden’s bottle. I’d be grounded if I did that. “And what’s next, Irwin? Are we all going to have to sign loyalty oaths? That’s blatantly un-American!”
Dad says, “We live in dangerous times. Look at how many of our compatriots are in prison.”
“That is not going to happen to my father.” Amy Lynn slumps in the chair. Her toes reach my leg, and she doesn’t even pull them back.
Mom pats Amy Lynn’s arm. “Certainly not.”
Dad’s not so optimistic. “Extremely dangerous times. Think of the Rosenbergs. Who would ever have thought it would go so far?”
“Yes, and look at the protest marches all over the country,” Mom reminds us. “All over the world. Einstein—the president of France—the pope, for God’s sake. They’re all protesting. And so will we. It’s Jewish to protest. We’ve got to fight this loyalty oath thing, Irwin.”
My stomach lurches, like when a line drive comes slamming right to me and I’m scared I’ll miss it. Last summer we drove out to New Jersey to visit Bubbie. My parents went to a “Clemency for the Rosenbergs” protest in Newark.
Bubbie Sylvia had a conniption fit. “Listen, sweetheart, your mother and father are very smart people, college professors, no less. But they’re crazy-mishooga to get involved in such a thing. Believe me, they could wind up in jail. Alcatraz, yet, like that Morton Sobell friend of the Rosenbergs. I should visit my daughter in Alcatraz? I’d drop dead on the ferry across.”
She usually cracks me up, but this was no laughing matter. That night I stared up at the ceiling wondering how you could crash-land in jail for trying to get two people out of jail who didn’t belong there in the first place. I was still awake at three-thirty in the morning when
Mom and Dad finally came home. Phew, no handcuffs.
Now, in our kitchen in Palmetto, Dad nods. “It’s a witch hunt, that’s what it is. Amy Lynn, I don’t know how much this has been discussed in your house.”
“Nothing’s discussed. They just yell at each other.”
So Dad and Mom explain it all to her, which goes something like this: The Lie-Mongering, Red-Baiting Carnivore is the Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy, and his fascist buddy is J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. What a winning team. They’re convinced that we’re all victims of a red menace, except for the human reptiles like Amy Lynn’s father, who ARE the red menace in person. Those traitors are under direct orders from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, to take over the U.S. and turn us all into godless robots who can’t keep a dollar we earn because all the money has to be shared with the rest of the godless robots.
Man, that’s a pretty grim picture. How do the Carnivore and the Fascist ever get to sleep worrying about stuff like this?
I go back to drying dishes. It’s safer—until a plate slips out of my hands and breaks into three even pie slices. No one even looks up while I crawl around on the floor dabbing at crumbs of glass with a wet napkin.
Chapter 6
Saturday, April 18
Dad asks, “Do you children understand what democracy is?”
Amy Lynn pretends to be totally excited by the topic. Maybe she really is; it’s her family’s doom.
I need baseball stats to get me through Dad’s lecture. Let’s see, ’52 Series, Yankees and the bums from Brooklyn meeting for the eighteenth time . . . “Yeah, Dad, yeah. Democracy means people vote, and the majority rules.” Straight out of my social studies book. I must have been awake for a few minutes in Mr. Mundy’s class.
“Majority rules and protects the minority,” Mom reminds us.
“We’re Jewish, we’re a minority, but nobody’s protecting my father,” says Amy Lynn.
“Precisely,” Dad agrees. “And how would you define capitalism?” Pop quiz time, which Dad’s famous for.