Immediately after lunch he took off in the cold rain for the bridge. It was teetering wildly from the heavy wind. He crossed it and walked briskly up to the tavern.
She wasn’t there. Laszlo said he had delivered Woodroe’s message.
Should he walk over to her barn? He asked Laszlo, Would Anton, tending his farm, be easy to find? No. Anton had left for Budapest. “He will reclaim his land.”
Teresa must have been held over on duty at the military camp. He asked, struggling to come up with words Laszlo could understand, if the military was still—like—like normal military? Continuing to do routine work?
Laszlo shrugged. He didn’t know.
Was there any way to telephone Teresa at work?
Laszlo did not know whether this could be done. He added that he had never telephoned her at work.
What would happen, Woodroe wondered, if he were simply to arrive at the military camp and ask for her?
It took only seconds to acknowledge that this was truly crazy-thought—he was embarrassed that the idea had so much as crossed his mind. Walk into an army camp in a country governed by a hard Communist regime only three days ago? Whose national military might still be under Communist control?
He asked Laszlo for paper, and wrote out a three-page letter. He told Teresa that he loved her with all his heart, that he could not sleep for longing for her. He said that she must on all accounts inform Laszlo when next he might come to her, never mind the hour of day or night. If she wanted him in the afternoon—or in the morning, or at midnight—he would simply leave the mission and explain later.
He walked over the field to her barn and slipped the letter under the door.
From Andau, he telephoned every day. Laszlo had heard nothing from her. “Perhaps she is in Budapest.”
On Wednesday, Andrew Goodhart had a call from Vienna.
Putting down the phone, he informed Woodroe that the two of them would go to Vienna. They had been summoned to meet with the head of the Mormon mission for Austria, presumably to discuss the explosive news from Budapest. “Just imagine! The first occupied East European country to shake free of the Soviet Union!”
In Vienna the temperature was cold but the sun bright. A taxi took them to the Mormon mission on Radetskystrasse. The Mormon officials met for four hours. Woodroe was seated with two other young missionaries behind the principals, who were at a long wooden table. It was not too soon, the mission head said, to think ahead. At Salt Lake, the elders would want recommendations from Vienna on how to extend help to the new democratic state.
The seminar over, Andrew and Woodroe got a ride to the station. On the train, the passengers seemed unmoved by the historic events just across the border. They had had so much, these middle-aged Austrians. The takeover by Hitler, the war, the roundup of the Jews, the Gestapo terror followed by the Red Army terror, the awful scarcities, the ever-so-gradual return of life in the American zone, and then the peace treaty. Let Hungary fend for itself.
They were back at five. Woodroe said, simply, that he would not be there for supper.
Again, at Kapuvar, there was no word about Teresa.
Why had there been no letter? Had she received his own letter? He walked again to the barn and slid a penknife probingly under the door. He could tell that the letter left on Saturday had been removed. He wanted to leave a note but was without paper to write on.
He took from his wallet a one-dollar bill and wrote on the border : “Teresa. I must hear from you. I call Laszlo at noon every day. Love from me—and from the free world!”
It was on Thursday that Imre Nagy gave the electric speech announcing that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, the iron pact which bound the Communist satellites to a common defense.
That did it.
The next day the Russian tanks came. And then the terror: the shootings, imprisonments, hangings.
That same night the refugee flight began.
Late Saturday afternoon Woodroe was bound again for Kapuvar. But there were Hungarians flooding north on the bridge, making their wobbly way across with what they could bring with them on their backs. The men who brought suitcases needed to carry them over the handrail—the bridge was too narrow for bulk. There was barely room for Woodroe, struggling to make his way athwart the traffic. Reaching the Hungarian end, finally, he could make out in the last minutes of twilight what seemed thousands of men, women, and children pressing to get down to the crossing.
He bounded past them up to the Grodka. It was closed. He made his way by flashlight to Teresa’s barn.
It was dark, but the adjacent farmhouse was lit. He banged on the door. Anton opened it, clutching a rifle.
“Where is Teresa?” Woodroe asked in German.
Anton spat on the ground. “Teresa is with the enemy. She is giving guidance to the Russians. I am going to the bridge. I am going to take my rifle. You can help?”
Dazed, Woodroe nodded. Anton pointed to a large sack. “You can take that.”
Woodroe strapped it over his back. Anton took a second sack and, rifle slung over his right shoulder, said simply, “Let us go.”
It was near dawn before they got to the head of the line and after seven when they reached the other end, walking inch by inch to freedom in Austria. There were thousands of refugees milling about the Austrian bank, many setting out on the nine-kilometer trek to Andau, the closest village center. Woodroe pointed to the bicycle chained to a nearby tree. “That is mine.”
When they reached it, Woodroe said, “I know the road to Andau that goes around the hill.”
“Good. You go if you want. I will stay here and watch.”
Woodroe sat down with him. They would pause for a while and survey the bridge. Anton pulled a stick of bread from one of the sacks and broke off a piece for Woodroe.
It was near nine that they heard the shouts. Two armored cars could be seen descending the hill at the far end of the bridge, followed by a column of soldiers. Across the divide they could hear voices coming through megaphones, but not the words that were spoken. An armored car positioned itself at the head of the bridge, cutting off access to it. Two men in uniform wearing thick winter coats carried a supply of what seemed like logs in olive-green cases. They disappeared under the bridge’s end span.
“They are going to dynamite it!” Woodroe said.
Anton raised his rifle. His shot felled a soldier standing by the armored car.
A shot fired back, hitting the tree trunk above their heads. A second fatal shot hit Anton between his eyes. A third entered Woodroe’s hip. He dragged himself to the sheltered side of the tree. Moments later he heard the explosion. He edged his head around to see the bridge of Andau wrenched from Hungarian soil, swung down over the Einserkanal, hanging from the edge, fifty meters from where he lay wounded.
Somebody, one of those thousands on the Austrian bank, dressed Woodroe’s wound. Sometime later, he didn’t know how many hours later, he was transported through the throng to Andau. And later—on the same day, he had the impression—he was in the hospital. Several weeks after that he was learning to walk with a crutch when Vice President Richard Nixon, fresh from victory at the polls in the Eisenhower-Nixon landslide of 1956, was suddenly there with his entourage and the press, on a whirlwind visit in the bitter days after the Soviet army had done its work in Hungary.
Nixon made many stops in the refugee centers of Austria, where 200,000 Hungarians were being cared for. When he came by the hospital bed in Vienna, he clasped Woodroe’s hand. A photographer recorded the moment and the embassy got a print. The next day Woodroe was given a copy.
Yes, Woodroe now knew what treachery was about. He had known since he was a mere nineteen-year-old. That wasn’t, by Big Ben time, all that long ago; he was only twenty-five in 1962, but the bridge of Andau seemed forever ago.
After Andau had come Princeton; then, without even a pause, the John Birch Society of Robert Welch (Woodroe now addressed him, at his invitation, as “Bob,” after a year of “
Mr. Welch”). One small part of what happened to him in his lifetime had become, in a modest way, public knowledge: he could force himself to smile on that, that moment when Woodroe Raynor and Vice President Richard Nixon had shared a camera screen. The Birch Society had reproduced the picture, sending it to chapter presidents, when Woodroe joined the staff.
Nixon! Nixon was now, six years after the Hungarian revolution, reduced to running not for president—he had done that, losing to Senator Kennedy—but for governor. Governor of his home state of California. The French called that, Woodroe remembered from his exposure to French maxims at Princeton, “reculer pour mieux sauter”—one step back, two steps forward. Get elected governor of California in 1962 in order to maximize your chances of running for president again in 1964. This, Woodroe thought reproachfully, was the Nixon who had thrown cold water on Senator Joe McCarthy. Yes, and the Nixon who, at a press conference in 1960, had thrown cold water on what everybody knew was the John Birch Society, though he hadn’t mentioned the Society’s name, just “Radical Right.” Woodroe doubted Nixon had ever read Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. If he had, he might have learned something about the need to remain true to one’s principles.
Nixon of all people had to know something about the depths of the Communist conspiracy. He had had a full taste of it when, going hard after Alger Hiss, he ran into that great stone wall of resistance—the people who would not tolerate the surrealistic idea that one of their own was a traitor. Alger Hiss. Pure-blooded product of the Establishment, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, clerk to the august Oliver Wendell Holmes, rising figure in the service of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The same man who wielded the very first gavel at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. Nixon had fought his way through the Hiss case; why didn’t he continue to fight? Take on the next, hidden (and not all that hidden) layer of men and women whose torpor and treachery for fifteen years had been responsible for event after event that led to defeat after defeat—in China, in Korea, in Berlin, in weaponry, in space. Way back at age nineteen, Woodroe had learned about such things firsthand. A lifetime’s education.
He kept the Nixon picture taken in the hospital. He didn’t exhibit it, though at Princeton he had pulled it out one time to show to his roommate; and he had shown it to Robert Welch when he was being interviewed for a job with the John Birch Society, where he would try to advance the movement of the Hungarian freedom fighters, and continue to learn from his experience with Teresa.
4
WHEN LEONORA GOLDSTEIN was sixteen, she participated in a lottery ($1) sponsored by the Atlantic Longshoremen’s Union, to which her father had belonged, and lo! she won it. Her surprise and her excitement overwhelmed her mother when she heard the news at the end of the afternoon, in the kitchen of the small Brooklyn apartment. Rachel Goldstein was seized by her daughter without being told immediately the reason for it all and couldn’t maintain her balance, let alone open her mouth to speak orderly words. Leonora was at once kissing her, attempting to dance with her, pulling her on the ears, alternately pounding on her mother’s shoulders. Finally Rachel Goldstein managed to pinion her daughter over the back of the sofa, grabbing her fists together and saying, in her accented English, “Lee, Lee, now Yossel, genug shoyn—You stop that now, you hear me! What have they done to you? Made you a Rhodes scholar?”
Leonora stopped. “Momma, before I tell you, can I have a—glass of champagne?”
She laughed joyously at her mother’s astonishment.
“No champagne in the refrigerator? How come?” More laughter. “Have you ever had champagne, Momma? I know, I know. But can I have a Coca-Cola? Or—” What else did the widow Goldstein routinely keep in the refrigerator? Tomato juice? Club soda? Leonora was too excited to explore the question. “Anything.” She was hogging the suspense. Rachel, a wink in her eye, would carry the game one step further: she would feign indifference.
“Well, Leonora. Let me see. Could I brew you some nice tea? That would take a few minutes. But who is in a hurry? Not Rachel Goldstein.”
She had outwitted her daughter.
“Wait a few minutes? To tell you about the biggest thing that’s happened in my whole life?”
“The biggest thing that’s happened in your life, young lady, is that you were”—Rachel turned her head aside—“born in America.”
“All right, Momma. And the second-biggest thing that’s happened to me is that I won the lottery.”
Rachel Goldstein looked up. Lottery?
“The union lottery. You probably forgot. They came in February. You gave them one dollar for one ticket. And wrote down my name.”
Now Rachel joined in the celebration with her broad smile, cocking back her oval face with the gray hair tied trimly behind her neck, always convenient for a scrubwoman who spent time on her knees. She loosened her apron and threw it over the counter. “You won! My darling girl, you won! Your father would be smiling and laughing in his grave! Beat the longshoremen’s union finally!”
They spent most of the evening poring over the travel folder. Leonora’s first prize put her on the tour the Atlantic Longshoremen’s Union, in company with the longshoremen’s union in San Francisco, was sponsoring. The itinerary: London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Naples. Twenty-eight days, including passage eastbound on the SS Continental —a dazzling seagoing adventure—and back on Pan American Airways.
Rachel wore her glasses now and examined the folder. “I’m surprised they let you in.”
“Momma, not everybody connected with the union lottery knows about Dad.”
“His killers may remember him.”
There was no point in going back into the fatal union brawl. Leonora revered the memory of her late father, and was faithful to his anti-Communist faith, about which she had been taught as soon as she could reason. Her father, the widow had taught the daughter, had been killed in the battle for control of the union fought by Communist “goons,” as Rachel insisted on calling them. “They may be socialists also, but mostly they are goons.”
But that was back in 1940, during the Nazi-Communist Pact, when the San Francisco longshoremen and selected union allies in New York and Philadelphia agitated against any munitions aid to the embattled Great Britain, Stalin having declared Hitler his ally. Leonora was a year old. She wanted, tonight, to talk only about her forthcoming adventure in Europe, and the evening was heady with excitement up until Leonora said in passing that she would need her birth certificate in order to get a passport.
Rachel was silent. There was the problem. The birth certificate was forged.
When Leo and Rachel, aged thirty-seven and thirty-five, applied for visas at the U.S. consulate in Gdansk, Rachel had gone to great pains to conceal her pregnancy. They had tickets on the Vistula, bound for New York. No woman bearing a child qualified for a visa: United States immigration laws were dodgy and restrictive. It was one thing to give out a ninety-day visa to the Goldsteins, permitting them to visit their cousins in New York, another thing entirely to have a visa holder give birth in the United States, entitling the progeny to full citizenship. Desperate to board the boat, Rachel filed by the visa clerk wearing a corset and a voluminous dress. She succeeded in making herself entirely amorphous—a pretty, chunky Jewish peasant woman, lucky enough to have a husband who could pay for a round-trip vacation.
The deception had gone well enough, except that three days before reaching New York, Rachel had given birth. The ship’s purser dutifully recorded the birth as having taken place at sea, depositing a copy of the ship’s paper with immigration officials at the Forty-second Street pier. In ordinary circumstances, the immigration authorities would have imposed strict surveillance on a foreign baby without any claim to U.S. citizenship, but these were not ordinary circumstances—Hitler had attacked Poland two days before the ship arrived. What exactly the SS Vistula would proceed to do had not been established, but there was no thought given to forcing the Goldsteins to return on it to Hitler-occupied Poland.
; That settled that problem, but Leo Goldstein didn’t want the little baby to go through life with ambiguous citizenship. His obliging rabbi in Fulton Street took the ship’s birth certificate and devised another, certifying that Leonora Goldstein had been born on September 3, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York.
Rachel worried that sixteen years later, when Leonora presented the birth certificate to get a passport, an alarm would sound. Somewhere, extant, was the Vistula’s logbook, recording the birth at sea. If the worst happened, maybe she would write to Senator McCarthy and tell him her late husband had fought against the communization of the Atlantic Longshoremen’s Union.
The mortal engagement between the band of New York longshoremen who had resisted the West Coast Communist-guided organizers had been papered over by the New York police. They set the fatal episode down to “an accident,” precipitated by a person or persons unknown. Rachel Goldstein was befriended by Joe Silverman, a young lawyer. He promised he would do what he could, and attempted to enlist the aid of anti-Communist labor union leaders in the city. Harry Bridges, who controlled the dominant San Francisco branch of the alliance of longshoremen, decided to step in—now that Hitler was the enemy, the flow of war materiel to Russia must not be interrupted by labor union strife. He instructed the union managers in New York to negotiate. Leonora was just two years old when the union, now eager to help Great Britain and other allies of the Soviet Union, issued its finding—that Leo Goldstein had died in the course of duty and was entitled to a (modest) pension. In return, Rachel signed the release written up by Silverman. She would continue her work as a cleaning woman at the courthouse, but she knew now that Leonora would one day go to college.
Getting It Right Page 3