“Sing it with me: Shall We Gather at the River and Drown the Radiant Future in Its Infancy?”
“I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
“No, you don’t, not personally. Because you’re folk music’s walking advertisement for eternal innocence with a hayseed in its teeth. You don’t know, but Mim understands me completely.”
“Too completely,” said Miriam.
“You prefer Paul Robeson?” asked Gogan, infuriatingly benign.
“Paul Robeson’s an intellectual, and I prefer him, yes. As I do Fletcher Henderson and King Oliver, not for their politics, which are unknown to me, but for their innate dignity, speaking as it does of a better world to come. Your preference I suppose is for the barefoot indigent from the Delta, a moaning teddy bear you can cuddle. You know, I heard the Yankees still keep a Negro boy in the dugout to touch for good luck on their way to the plate.”
“Shut up now, Lenny.”
Saying it, Miriam had raised her head from the folksinger’s shoulder. Tommy Gogan stared across the table, his fingers still around the guitar’s neck. Lenny would have liked to have hurt him, but Gogan might be unhurtable. Lenny reached below the table and produced the reel from his briefcase, shoved it across between the sweating steins. “Here, it was useless, less than useless. Write me a new folk song, when you think of it, called ‘Ignorance Is Bliss.’ ”
“Beat it, Lenny. Go home to Queens.”
She could command him to shut up, to beat it, only because no one was listening. In one of Lenny Angrush’s regular milieus—the chess shop, the coin shop, the City College cafeteria, amid some accidental confluence of former party regulars in adjacent Sunnyside backyards, which though newly fenced were helplessly communal, Kropotkin’s Gardens by deep design and which no boundary, no white picket or cyclone fence or high border of roses could corrupt, possibly even in a car of the 7 train as it pulled a horde from Grand Central toward the teetering sun-blazed platform of Queensboro Plaza—in any of these, Lenny’s rant, his tone rising to indignation, would have gathered over-hearers. Kibitzers, leaning in to contribute their own grudges, their own angle of attack. Those enmeshed in history and not without a yawp of their own. Giving air to indignities new and eternal, they’d have taken exception to no small portion of Lenny’s argument, sure. They’d have also pounded home his point for him, wagged a finger or several at the folksinger for his lack of historical grasp. The point being, Lenny would have kindled a spark. Here, nothing. The White Horse, home instead to drunken painters and poets and teenagers with Trotsky beards who might not know Trotsky’s name if they heard it, here Lenny’s cascade was just another beatnik word-painting, a splash in the general muddle. If nearby listeners made out any specifics they’d have likely taken it as mere patter. A Lord Buckley or Brother Theodore stand-up routine, something in quote marks. Only Miriam heard him and knew what it meant and that it mattered, and so she was liberated by the lack of dialectical context to command him to put a sock in it.
“It’s simply that the naïveté perturbs me,” Lenny said, and knew he was sulking. He’d come to be among fellow travelers, seeking consolation for the travesty in Shea’s office, yet was the cause of a workers’ revolution any less dead here in the White Horse than in that office? Likely not.
“I hear and obey,” he said, rising, clutching briefcase to chest, a Roman’s shield for brazening through the pub’s rising throngs to the door. “I return to the homeland, to the solace of my pauper’s bed, and to the orange juices and buttered rolls of morning. Remember me when I’m gone. We who are about to die blow you a raspberry, preferably out of the ass.” The tape reel in its box Lenny left floating, a vacated life raft amid the shipwreck of beer steins.
“So long, Cousin Lenny. Sorry the tune didn’t cut it with the bigwigs.” (dum, dum, dum)
Lenin Angrush was eight years old when the swaddled girl was lowered into his arms. To him still yesterday. Lenny’s ma and Cousin Rose sentineled in the general vicinity, rattling teacups, railing. Probably, if considered from a grown perspective, they’d never stepped farther away than from where in a swift gesture they could reclaim the infant from the boy who’d been made to wash his hands and swear gentleness. Yet at that moment when the bundle was placed on Lenny’s lap, cradled in his crossed legs, it was as though those teacups rattled from distant shores—Lenny and Miriam were on their own island together, that was how it felt to him. Lenny’s attentiveness shrunken to pinpoint in the gaze between his and the girl’s. The brown of her eyes. Tiny bubble at the corner of her lip. The beaming of her presence, into his. Miriam soothed the calamity Lenin Angrush at eight years old could only understand as the root of himself always, now identified by her effect on him as something soothable, a storming sea of unrest he lived inside but which was not him. At least not when he clung to this girl and they arrived together at this island. The voices distant were nonetheless distinct.
“She’s quiet with him.”
“And him with her. Oy, this kid. He’ll talk your ear off.”
“A good influence both ways, then.”
“You’ve got a babysitter, in a couple of years.”
“A wet nurse is what I need. I think she wants to take my nipples off. I don’t see teeth, but I’d swear they’ve come already.”
A cousin might be your cousin, something that belonged to you at last, even as she described your sense of apartness. Your family comprised a field of night against which you could discern your outlined form. Cousin Rose was already your parents’ idol and conundrum, for marrying the impossible German, for embodying the standard of the classless future—Lenny’s ma and pa might believe in Communism, but Rose was the party-made New Woman, unforgiving in her nature and intoxicating in her demands, her abrupt swerves and violent exclusions. Cousin Rose chipping the mezuzah from her doorway with a screwdriver, gouging wood and scarring paint. Lenny had later quested in the bushes and rescued it, weird token of Rose’s disaffiliation, her ferocious will to reinvent with the tools at hand. He stashed it with some treasures, shooter marbles and a dud firecracker he’d retrieved from under the el, Aladdin stuff to polish until it produced a genie.
Now Cousin Rose and her German had made this baby. And this baby had been placed in his arms. His new cousin was a girl child, a fact Lenny’d confirm with his eyes soon enough. They couldn’t hover forever, not women like his ma and Rose, squabbling at the Daily Worker while fucking up a recipe, despairing of some burned ruin and opening a tin of sardines instead. In their distraction they’d left him with the infant alone, even if they’d not yet declared him the babysitter. Lenny’s thumbs were not too blunt to insert in the waist of Miriam’s diaper and pull. It slid past her dimply ankles easily enough. Lenny pretended stupidity afterward, claimed she’d done it herself. The diaper, left heavy with her piss on his ma’s Persian rug, was ripe with stink, but the girl was clean and scentless. Perfect.
Short thumbs were no great curse, not compared to that of learning too soon that only one person existed for you on this earth. The curse of having that thing for which anyone might seek a lifetime, for which anyone awaits, made too utterly apparent, placed too near at hand, too calamitously soon. Placed in your very grasp yet still denied you, as a bullfrog is denied the moon. The years before Miriam Zimmer could organize her teenage personality, the years before she learned she had the right to tell Lenny to bug off, tell him to make like a tree and leave or to twenty-three skidoo, before she could demand he unmolest her with his attentiveness, demand he make secret his faith, those years might be the best he’d known. A time or three his cousin had occupied his lap again. Once to read a comic he’d brought to her when she was six and he was fourteen. A year later to watch the first television that had come to Sunnyside Gardens, when every kid for blocks around had crowded inside the same parlor to marvel. Those years before he was disallowed from that island he’d begun to know this day when she was first cradled in his arms. Left afterward to drown in his boiling sea. Som
etimes she acknowledged him there, sometimes not. But she’d never rescue him. Lenny had loved his cousin her whole life.
Lenin Angrush had been born three times. In 1932 he’d arrived on the earth. In 1940 Miriam had been placed in his eight-year-old arms. In 1956 Khrushchev wrecked the Soviet illusion and it was at that moment that true Communism had floated free of history, like smoke. The weaker ones, that describing nearly everyone Lenny had ever met or heard of, were demolished with the dream. Some flew the coop. The coop, such as it was—the American CP was in tatters.
Lenny’s ma and pa, specifically, flew. Zalman and Ida, but to Lenny just ma and pa. They became Jews again and ran to Israel, to farm olives with even more distant Angrush cousins, those putting the Semite back in Semitic, building a new Jew world founded on a desert scrap, a few sandy phrases from the Old Testament. A refuge from twentieth-century politics, hiding inside the politics of the sixth century BC—why risk the war of the present when the war of the past was still eligible to be revived? They asked if he wanted to join them. Lenny said no and they departed before he graduated Queens College. Their seats at commencement empty.
Less than a month later an Irish couple took occupation of the Angrush home on Packard Street. Lenny could have evaporated from Sunnyside Gardens then, fled at the sight of his childhood home inhabited, another mezuzah stripped off, the door frame this time sanded and repainted a fresh green so you’d never know. His parents unremembered entirely. Into the memory hole with the whole business, the silence that fell with relief over all that silence could cover, everything but the faces, faces like stoical sinkholes for hiding remorse. The fresh ex-Communists who, unlike Lenny’s ma and pa, still lurched around this place, daring you to mention what you knew about their recent affiliations, affiliations held two decades and dropped overnight. Lenny could have dissolved in smoke like so many. At twenty-four young enough to pretend it was all his parents’ idea. He was already getting some work in coins. He could have gone to live at the Y, charted some orbit eliding Sunnyside Gardens completely.
In 1956, thanks to Khrushchev, Lenny would have been born a third time in either case. If he’d fled or stayed. One summer night he stood in the gardens, not, for once, his parlor, or Rose’s, or some other where a meeting formal or informal occurred, but in the actual gardens of the Gardens, the unboundaried communal patchwork of flower and vegetable beds, some overgrown with ground cover or delegated to the nurture of some young tree, some future shade. He’d gone out to gaze at the stars and enjoy a cigarette—in his unthrift Lenny had become a smoker of cigarettes that summer, a habit he’d soon enough shed, a sacrifice to austerity like so many other vanities, like matched socks, mouthwash, or umbrellas, all manner of bourgeois fancies. He stood among the plots, here carrots and turnips, as if wartime rationing still applied, and over there a bed of dwarf roses, beneath a tire swing lashed to the sturdiest branch of the oldest tree. Stood venting his smoke to the blinking and unblinking stars, the cruciform jets tilting for LaGuardia or Idlewild. From this place, at the center of a city block designed for accord, Lenny heard the voices. The quarreling, the keening despair, the unvowing of vows. From the opened windows of kitchens everywhere, that summer, issued these voices if you let yourself be attuned, took off the mental ear-muffs. Despairing arguments with history, with fate, and with the self. American Communism, born in parlors, had gone to the kitchen to die.
One kitchen window was quiet, though a bare bulb shone to show it was not unoccupied. Cousin Rose had no one to argue with. She’d been booted from the party scant months before. Her purebred Communist husband, whether because he was too Communist and too German to stay, or because he couldn’t stand her, was long gone. Her black cop boyfriend, home with his family. And Miriam? At fourteen, Miriam had already practiced vagrancy. By sixteen—gone. She’d exported herself from the Gardens, to wherever else the new high-school kid could think to be, Morgenlander’s soda shop on Queens Boulevard, or the Himmelfarbs’ recarpeted basement, their “rumpus room.” Solly Himmelfarb the good Jew who got to lord it over the Commies now—they’d gotten what was coming to them. The same effort of will they’d wasted at meetings, squandered waiting for a new world to come, Sol sank over decades into his furniture showroom on Greenpoint Avenue, selling to Jew and Irish alike. During the war privations, with nothing new to sell, he sold used. He bought back and sold at prices shamelessly doubled. Cannily, not Himmelfarb’s but Modern Luxury. Under that name, Himmelfarb earned a bit of luxury for his daughters, the basement room with a phone extension of its own so Miriam could call Rose in her kitchen and say she’d stay at the Himmelfarbs’ for dinner again. Lenny at twenty-four probably ate at his own parents’ table, before they evacuated for the promised land, more often than the runaway-in-training ate at Rose’s. So in this hour of recriminations and torment, any smaller children put into their beds, exhausted souls uncorked at kitchen tables, Rose was alone. Lenny saw her shadow cross the wall. Rose opening the refrigerator to pour a tall glass of tomato juice. Something in the oven for dinner, something previously frozen. Or not. Possibly sardines and saltines, for convenience and despair an equally fine selection.
This scene, Lenny could have fled, that night and forever.
At that moment Lenny became aware he was not alone. He heard a scraping in the dirt, at first thought it could be an animal, God help him, some rat or squirrel about to bolt up a pants leg. No, a kid—incredibly enough, a teenager, on his knees in the dirt of the flower garden, currying over some ground with a little hand rake. Lenny heeled the butt into the dirt and stepped closer for a look. It was that kid Carl Heuman. He was nearly Miriam Zimmer’s age, her schoolmate, though at fifteen the girls were women but the boys were boys. Heuman was one of those who was always lingering around invisible, a witness, a sponge. An earnest boy—Lenny had even seem him doing his fly-on-the-wall act at party meetings, helping the kitchen ladies keep the tray of almonds full or pour the tea while he recorded the adult universe with his mind. Now Heuman tended his parents’ marigolds in the moonlight while mother and father tore each other’s throats out over Khrushchev’s undeniable and shattering truths. A slug in the grass, leaving a trail of teenage woe glistening where he’d been. Lenny had been the same, not so long ago.
“Didn’t see you down there.”
Heuman said nothing.
“You like flowers?”
The boy shrugged miserably.
“You ever contemplate the world of numismatics?”
“What?”
“Coins.”
“If I weed the flowers my pop’ll take me to a ball game.”
“You like Cal Abrams?” The Dodgers had once featured a Jew outfielder, even if not much of a patch on Duke Snider.
“Erskine. I wanna pitch.”
Lenny didn’t have the heart to tell the kid what he knew: Smart money had the Dodgers absconding. There was a reason Walter O’Malley had sold Ebbets Field: His gaze went West. The mighty correctors of segregated baseball, secret official team of the American Communist Party, now flirted with year-round sunshine. Tanned fat-cat movie-Jews to fill seats, in place of pasty Mitteleuropeans not half Americanized.
The grown men knew and didn’t know how to break it to the kids. Not so different from Khrushchev, the grown-up from Moscow, at last forced to break the childish heart of the American CP.
All affiliations slumped into abjectitude.
This whole popcorn stand, Lenny could have blown.
“You throw lefty?” asked Lenny, based on how Heuman held the rake. The kid was not tall.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Lefties stick around. Look how many chances they’re giving that overthrowing mutt Koufax. Got a curve?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll teach you.” Lenny hadn’t stood on a diamond in ten years—the other kids had learned to throw near his head, he’d reliably go whining down into the dust, and that was that. But he could play catch with the poor bastard. He could coach a curveball
out of him, if Heuman had any arm whatsoever. Make a little salvage from the ruins here, where a gabble of voices rained on through the pretty night in June 1956, evening of the day in which Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, delivered in February, had been printed in its entirety in The New York Times.
From this disaster area Lenny could have tiptoed, with no one saying a word.
Either way, go or stay, a new life. Lenny stayed. This night, encouraging the fifteen-year-old pitcher in the mud of his parents’ flower beds, Lenny felt the old Communism, the obedience to Moscow, peeling from his spirit like a thin skin, a covering inconsequential, which dried and crusted and blew away, to reveal the pink new self beneath. A week later Lenny took a job at Real’s Radish & Pickle, humping barrels. Cousin Rose, finding him seated in the office there, in collar and tie for his interview, glared at him like he was mad, making Lenny positive it was the right choice.
It was Rose and Miriam who were his compass—if a compass could have two needles, one abiding, the other flying off to parts unknown. Rose, entrenched in the Gardens and her neighborhood, entrenched in her sidewalk Citizens’ Patrol, hunkered in local grievances. Behind it all, entrenched, englued by rage, in her beliefs. Too much a way of life to quit now, even if she’d never speak of it. She’d been kicked out, Lenny knew. They took away her membership before immolating themselves in corrupt Moscow directives. Lenny took Rose as his model: the Last Communist. He’d never say to her what he knew, that he recognized her, except to signify recognition with his presence. They were two, a cell abiding. Rose was Lenny’s compass needle that never wavered.
Miriam, the bird that flew. Lenny spotted her from time to time, exploding through her high-school years, seemingly grown a new inch of bust each time he glanced. His lap ached for the baby he’d held, for the kid who’d had the time of day for her cousin just a few scant years before cutting him off. Miriam wasn’t even sixteen the Saturday she first shocked him with a how-do-you-do where he sat at an open-air concrete chessboard at the corner of Washington Square Park, trudging through an endless endgame with one of those non-resigners. You had to prove to these schmendriks that you’d beaten them, they’d never take your word for it, the point being that every once in a while you hadn’t. They’d eke out a draw by stalemate, though that was a term they seemingly refused to learn, perhaps for fear of its general applicability to their whole existences. Miriam and a friend, a Negro girl, came upon him, the distance between Sunnyside and Greenwich Village collapsed, and Lenny, rising out of his question-mark posture there, nearly straightened up completely free of his clothes. She might as well have ridden a horse up and greeted him from its saddle, he was so discombobulated.
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