Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Construction of this no was under way before they’d reboarded the Packard’s long front seat and waved farewell to their hosts. It was under way even before the conclusion of Albert’s speech. Rose had lifted herself in full view of her orator husband and all else and gone and seated herself in the cool leaf-shade of the car’s running board, to commune with a chapter of Lincoln. Let them come and tell her she’d in some way failed Communism or Americanism by refusing mud and straw and sunburn: No. In Rose’s private researches, which converted the glad-hander’s shuck of the Popular Front into something true and real, she abided with both Communism and Americanism at a depth no farmer’s plow could touch, not of topsoil but of mysterious intellectual root. Sandburg had isolated a passage from Lincoln’s message to Congress in December 1861: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration …” This, six years before Das Kapital.

  The other point, you dummies, was that The Prairie Years came first. Lincoln had put log cabins behind him, in favor of cities, of civilization—not the reverse!

  So Rose’s walkout on Albert’s Fourth of July address was mere overture. They rode in silence from the Homesteads to New York, apart from a refreshed attack on his driving.

  “You’re like a painter, daubing at the thing.”

  “Which?”

  “The automobile’s pedal. You approach it with feathery little brushstrokes—add a bit more blue to this corner, Señor Picasso.”

  “I rather doubt Picasso has a critic standing beside him as he works.”

  “A more steady application of pressure might be more to the liking of Yetta’s chopped liver where it presently resides high in my throat.”

  “You’ve got nothing to say about my speech? I thought it went well.”

  She only looked out the window. Let Albert interpret the force of a no chiseled in the stone of Rose’s glare, a no in smoke signals emitting from her ears. A no inscribed, that night and weeks after, in semaphore postures of unavailability in their marriage bed. Let him pass that one along. Comrades, in the contest between the allure of chickens and the prospect of my wife’s legs ever again parting, I have reluctantly but with swelling resolve concluded against chickens.

  Then, living in the battleground of her no, Rose gave Albert a glimpse of a possible accord. An armistice, that was to say, between herself and the unseen presences searching for Albert’s usefulness to the party. Look, Rose told him, more or less flatly, if they intend to implant us, make us a party worm in the bud of Utopia, why not Utopia with a skyline? Why not with a place you could buy a pack of cigarettes within walking distance, from those who’d happily sell the cigarettes to Jews? Idealists had already forged a suburb, the city equivalent of Brown’s Homesteads, so why be stranded in Jersey? Don’t you see that Sunnyside Gardens is where the city Reds go?

  As with the Homesteads, the Gardens was populated by history-stunned Jews whose immigrant journey needed a stop. Rose had already gotten familiar with the place. A few distaff Angrushes lived there, including Rose’s older cousin Zalman and his wife and their moon-eyed boy named for Lenin. How would that go over in the Monroe Township school district, I ask you?

  The Gardens were sanctified as a leftist social laboratory by Lewis Mumford and Eleanor Roosevelt. If Mumford and Roosevelt were merely Pink, not Red, wasn’t the usurpation of Pink by Red precisely what the Popular Front was meant to accomplish? To ally and align with such progressive sentiments as already floated in American life, in a community such as the Homesteads or the Gardens. Like a man on the make who says he just wants to be friends, then gets on the couch and next thing you know your clothes are off. Nine months later, out pops a proletariat! So why not stay in the city? Sunnyside Gardens could form the simultaneous rejection, inversion, and satisfaction of Albert Zimmer’s Jersey Homesteads trial balloon.

  The Gardens and the Homestead might really be the exact same place, only tugged inside out like a sock.

  In New Jersey the concrete-bunker homes huddled surrounded by road and field and forest, expanse of land dwarfing the blot of attempted civilization, making it puny and precarious.

  In Queens the family homes surrounded a communal garden wherein muddy vegetable beds could be given lip service within a theater of urbanity. They also offered a nice whiff of exclusivity, of social arrival. The Gardens were half Kropotkin commune and half Gramercy Park. Like her marriage, even if foolish Albert had mistaken himself for something other than aristocracy!

  So what if Rose had wrecked Albert’s party career at one stroke? Wrecked inasmuch as he’d bent not to the cell but to Rose, hence was proven weak or untrustworthy (as though bending to them would have proven otherwise!). Better they learn what she knew. Anyhow, Rose knew she’d rescued his career as much as she’d wrecked it, by ending his drift through the Manhattan ranks where his contacts might go on forever imagining that given his loquacity and cuff links, given Alma’s apartment—her granite ashtray and Meissen salvage—he possessed either money or deep influence to donate to the cause. He possessed neither. Rose was the stronger of the two, no matter what fantasies about Albert their cell entertained. In Sunnyside she could perhaps accomplish something.

  Sunnyside then. It was decided, by the end of that July. With help from Sol Eaglin, a party man with a foothold, they had a lease on Forty-Sixth Street by mid-August. Albert’s new vehicle operator’s license burrowed into his billfold’s depths, for safety’s sake, before he ever got his leather soles anywhere near the cast-iron accelerator of a John Deere.

  Utopia was better when equipped with a subway stop so you could go screaming back to reality for five cents.

  The timing? Sublime catastrophe of irony. Rose and Albert and their imaginary baby moved into the apartment the same day the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced, the Popular Front wrecked in one stroke of the pen.

  Rose and Albert in the mouth of history, shaken like a mouse in a cat’s.

  The war overturned the life of a recruiting Communist in Sunnyside as anywhere else, the Popular Front’s precarious rhetorical line dismantled overnight in the face of the pact. Go ahead, sell Hitler to your typical fellow traveler—he who, emboldened by anti-Fascism, had tiptoed into the party. He who was tearing up his pamphlets the next day, hearing of Stalin’s reversal, his expedient embrace of Nazis. Europe, melting in a rain of nightmares, dictated that young men become soldiers on real fronts. And that Reds become Jews again.

  Albert, isolated in this way, never took to the life of the Gardens.

  Began decamping, by means of the elevated subway, to his old life almost immediately.

  There to commit his various unnameable offenses, the offenses of an aristocratic lush with a German accent, running from an unhappy marriage to the barrooms of Manhattan.

  “Loose lips sink ships” was the phrase. Well, they could also get you sunk in American Communism.

  Meanwhile, Rose stuck. Who’d guess four decades, more, could descend from the strength of saying no to New Jersey? Rose Angrush Zimmer, having propelled herself from the rank of the sisters squabbling in a Brooklyn candy shop’s back room, had, in marrying Albert, hardly bargained for this outer-borough destiny. Yet entrenched in the vast no of Queens, one made a life.

  In exile, Albert’s letters—not many—came from Rostock, from Leipzig, locations, thanks to Life magazine, impossible to envision except as wholly deserving ruins, palaces of rubble. The letters might come from a machine for reproducing German stamps and postmarks, one installed on Saturn or the moon, zones far less improbable than postwar Rostock. The envelopes had obviously been opened and resealed before reaching Rose’s mailbox. Albert had seemingly qualified himself for Hoover’s watch list at last—he should be proud. The mother crumpled the scant pages into the trash while the girl took the envelopes and steamed off the stamps.

  It was a year or so after he fled
that Rose erected the shrine, the small, half-circle table in the kitchen, on which the six volumes of Sandburg’s Lincoln were aligned, and propped in front a small cameo portrait of Abraham Lincoln given Rose by her sisters jointly on her thirtieth birthday. Albert moved out and Lincoln moved in.

  Rose’s Communism, the core quotient of knowledge and belief, was durable in Albert’s absence, durable in the absence of all encouragement. It hadn’t required, as had Albert’s, a cultivation of vanities, pleasure in pasteboard rhetoric. The crumbling both of her marriage and of the Popular Front left Rose etched in the hard outline of her private certainties. At the next reversal, Hitler invading Russia, Rose was not among those who let down their guard and became intoxicated with public certainties again.

  You didn’t talk, you read. You worked. Attended meetings but didn’t boast of it, took small assignments to visit a tenants’ rights meeting, a youth club. Were staunchly for the unionization of the workplace and the nationalization of industry and the education of the masses yet expressed this not in Popular Front braggadocio but in dogged community-mindedness—championing the Queensboro Public Library and the Police Benevolent Association, walking an Irish kid across a street he’d never usually cross and introducing him to a slice of pizza. Rose’s Communism in the war years was like the book of ration stamps she’d been issued, with another like it for the infant Miriam, each of which Rose preserved in its own wallet of the softest calfskin, an irony when you couldn’t get beef. Like the ration stamps, so with your political self: You tore off a square of your essence and laid it down only when necessary, hoarding the remainder in hopes the supply would extend until the siege was over.

  The White Castle on Queens Boulevard couldn’t serve burgers during the shortages, and yet the office staff at Real’s Radish & Pickle were so accustomed to lunchtime at the counter there, they went anyway and were served hard-boiled eggs. Yet when the war was over and the eggs were replaced with burgers again it was not the world it had been before. Rose’s war was different from anyone else’s, but in one regard it was the same: It made her more American.

  Rose’s second cousin Lenin Angrush had caught the Socialist flame but also the sickness, whose symptom was blabbering what you felt to any listener. Lenny was too wide-open, a mind like a gasping pore. Among other things, Zalman’s wife, Ida, failed to prevent the pore of Lenny’s mind from absorbing the local accent—Rose walked her to the door of the private elocution tutor on Greenpoint Avenue, but Ida wouldn’t grasp the necessity. Lenny, despite his advanced and esoteric interests—global revolution, chess, numismatics—grew to talk like a chestnut vendor, an iceman, a head emerging from a manhole. No child of Rose’s would ever come of age to speak in the fershlugginer tongue of Queens, distinguished from the stigma of the Brooklyn accent primarily by its nagging and lethargic undertones.

  Speaking of icemen, or workers in sewers, Rose had a couple of each.

  Yes, men got through her door after Albert. Handsome, heavy of chest, Rose was seen by men and didn’t always flinch from being seen. It was her prerogative to feel a man’s penis in her vagina if she chose, at this juncture in history, given the catastrophes that had befallen anyone’s assumptions, given the stalking horrors of the newsreels. As an occupant of a ruined century you could shrink the world to the size of one woman with one man in the clearing of a lunch hour. Yet were any of these men anything more to Rose than that? Well, apart from Lincoln, barely any. An hour in her bed but not so much as a cup of coffee afterward. Let alone to be there long enough to get a glimpse of the girl returning from school.

  In the apartment with the two of them, mother and daughter, no man but Lincoln. Rose was a reverse war widow, divorced but still married to the Jew who’d run back to Europe because he wanted to dissolve his urbanity, his Jewishness, and his Americanness in the solvent of the Eastern bloc. Maybe there he could have his wish—maybe the party would eventually award their spy retirement to a farm with chickens!

  Rose was divorced but still married to a century turned on its head.

  Were there men that mattered? After Albert, after the war? Just three. One undeserving, but for a time truly possessed by Rose; another deserving, but never hers to possess. And one not of her choosing but Miriam’s.

  The undeserving, Sol Eaglin. Rose’s party fling, perhaps an inevitable tumble. Sol was Albert’s own contact, likely the specific assigner of Albert’s tasks of acquiring a driver’s license and dragging his young wife to New Jersey. Kept for years by party protocol secret even to his operative’s wife, Sol had been unembarrassed to crawl out of the woodwork the moment Albert was gone. Sol’s was to Rose a familiar face, hitherto anonymous in meetings where others spoke up—his glaring at her over the course of years had suggested no special meanings apart from sexual curiosity. Now, along with admitting his special role in their lives, Sol explained that he had a wife at home but avowed free love, happily declaring the facts that his wife was unloved by him, lately unfucked by him, and completely uninterested in his doings. With that, the eyebrows raised lasciviously on the blank canvas of Sol Eaglin’s pate. He had the exaggerated appetite typical of the man who balded in his youth, this according to rumor among her sisters and Rose’s own observations. The first time she saw a photograph of Henry Miller she mistook it for one of Sol, though on second glimpse there was no deep resemblance in their features, not apart from the bald dome and the twinkle of an inexhaustible selfishness, disguised as something sublime or idealistic.

  What she and Sol did in bed was beyond imagination. For the first year at least this nearly compensated for the dull thump of his rhetoric, his persistent remarking on the subject of himself as if reciting lines from a biographical essay in a Soviet high-school textbook.

  1948–1950. Those were the years she’d have carved on the affair’s tombstone. In every serious sense, it ended in 1950. Yet in truth, Rose and Sol Eaglin fell into bed a scattering of times before she gave herself to Douglas Lookins, and before Sol personally spearheaded her expulsion from the party. This denied aftermath, the sporadic fucking after they’d broken it off, was analogous to the subterranean kindling of other renounced flames—specifically the Soviet dream.

  Navigating Albert’s delusions regarding the CCCP, then Sol’s equally absurd and stubborn faith, Rose discovered her previously unglimpsed talent for silence.

  Let disappointment burn brighter than love, and in doing so let it preempt judgment by those outside the arena.

  Let unspeakable go unspoken.

  Police lieutenant Douglas Lookins was the lover who deserved her. Maybe the lover Rose deserved, though she wouldn’t presume to claim as much. And anyway, she couldn’t possess him. What use to concern oneself with the unpossessable deserved? Her black cop, noble enduring grandson of slavery, starved husband and disgruntled father, Bulge veteran, Eisenhower Republican, six foot two and near three hundred pounds of moral lumber, of withheld rage and battened sorrow, embodied cipher of American fate stalking Greenpoint Avenue, rattling kids off doorsteps and out from where they ganged around parking meters, daring anyone to utter a cross-eyed word—the man should have from Rose whatever he required.

  What Rose required from him he’d given at first glance, quite completely: to be seen. The galvanic surge of mutual knowledge, occurring instantaneously at the Renters’ Alliance meeting, to which he’d been assigned in order to protect the two intrepid landlords who’d actually agreed to come and address the potential lynch mob. Rose had gone planning only to observe but found herself compelled to stand and offer some spontaneous words of global perspective, likening tenancy to Irish serfdom, if only to stick it to the idiot second- and third-generation micks making themselves the most reactionary faction in the neighborhood on this issue as on so many others. She’d barely sketched a few comparisons when met with Douglas’s skeptical, saturnine glance, containing more recognition than she could practically bear.

  Recognition—of what? What was Rose Zimmer by this time?

  Mi
ddle-aged, almost abruptly. Mother of a fourteen-year-old giver-of-as-good-as-she-got. Miriam, she of the razor alertness just about to commence wasting itself on boys and Elvis Presley—a hormonal onset that would come almost as a relief to Rose, a needed interruption in the laser beam of a preternatural child’s intelligence, Miriam attending to Rose’s skirmishes with her sisters and with Sol Eaglin, Miriam sticking herself to her cousin Lenny, making sport of flattering him with her uncanny parrotlike queries on baseball and coins, Miriam burrowing through books, anything on Rose’s shelves and anything Rose brought home from the library, anything at hand except she shunned the Lincoln shrine—since toppling it twice as an eight-year-old and being slapped away from the thing, she steered a berth. Miriam unmistakably never forgetting a rebuke or a cuff but silently tucking it into her mental catalogue, no matter whether Rose apologized or not.

  Too much a mother. But not here. Another reason to stand and speak at the renters’ meeting: to be visible as something other than the single mother in the apartment where every day one grew nearer to desirability and fecundity while the other grew further from the same, to be visible as something other than Real’s Radish & Pickle’s wizard bookkeeper—one who by now kept her own hours, managed the office nearly effortlessly in passing—to be visible both as a political animal and as a woman. Every day walking on Queens Boulevard she drew a stare less. For each man who earlier would have glanced in her direction Rose felt herself becoming less the woman and more the political animal, or perhaps more the moral scold. For she’d become radiant with disapproval, to trump anyone who’d dream of rebuking her from the right or the left of her unique position as a political exile, a political conundrum. The embattled party wanted nothing to do with her, and the anti-Communist throng didn’t know what to do with an unshameable Red. The more she involved herself with civic causes like the library and the Citizens’ Patrol, the more impossible and integral she became. Sunnyside’s own whatever. Look out, she’s coming. Prepare for a civic lecture. Don’t litter or make reference to Sputnik.