The glaring difference between my family and Kitty’s was that the Steels were rich and the Muldoons were not. My father was happily married; he never laid a hand on John or me. He traveled the world and went to an Ivy League college. His kids were also college graduates, one a lawyer and the other on his way. Of Jack’s four children, Kitty was the best educated; she had two college credits and two years of drama school.
That Jack Muldoon wasn’t the best husband goes well beyond universal relativism. As for his fathering, three out of his four children found him hard to take. But none of that mattered to Kitty. She loved him as only a favorite child can.
Jack was raised in an orphanage by an order of monks in Pittsburgh, and the story was that he was abused by the brothers there. It seemed to me that he became a cop so no one could hurt him again. The blackjack he carried around in the back pocket of his uniform was an insurance policy. He also recited poetry, read history, sang old Irish songs in a beautiful tenor voice, and could tell stories with a wry sense of humor.
Almost the first thing out of Jack’s mouth when we met was, “I hear they have a lot of pinkos at Harvard.” God knows how I replied to that.
Only Kitty knew how to handle Jack’s moods, always staying on his good side. It didn’t hurt that she was the apple of his eye. She could glide over the pitfalls of daily life with Jack when everyone else had to walk on eggshells. Having heard the family stories for more than five decades, I believe the takeaway is that Kitty symbolized everything Jack wanted to be. It was almost as if she were a reflection of his better self.
Jack and I got along all right. He adored Kitty and wanted the best for her. I benefited from that. She loved him. I adored her. But that didn’t stop Jack from reciting his version of the Cohen and McCarthy story in two distinct dialects, Irish brogue, and Yiddish that to this day Kitty can do perfectly: McCarthy had a brickyard, and Cohen had nothing. So Cohen baited McCarthy—calling him names and taunting—till McCarthy threw his bricks at him. Cohen kept up the harangue till McCarthy had no more bricks. Then Cohen took all those bricks and built a grand hotel. He called it “Ireland.”
However, I was never sure whether that was a “crafty Jew” story. If Jack held any real prejudices against Jews, he hid them from me. There was no way he’d let something like my religious background get in the way of his special child marrying into the Warner family.
When we visited California we always stayed with Kitty’s sister Mary. She had married Jim Duffy, a died-in-the-wool American Irishman who drank beer and loved the “ould sod.” In the beginning I was always on my guard in their home.
As far as I was concerned, the Muldoon-Duffy clan belonged to a different tribe. I downed a Scotch or two from time to time and I liked to have a few beers now and then, but drinking was not my thing. Because I saw myself as being so different, I thought they would consider me an intruder who had married their prize girl. And that made me feel like the odd man out. And the sense of being a Jew was always there, someone who did not believe in their Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, or for that matter the God of both the Jews and the Catholics.
Over the years, however, I drew close to Mary, Jim, and their children, Jimmy and Erin. Jim and I became good friends. He retired as the general manager of his local pipefitter’s union, after integrating it with blacks, Latinos, and women, all the time retaining the respect of his white members. Jim marched with Cesar Chavez during the farmworker strikes and became a progressive voice in Southern California. His son became a public defender handling death-penalty cases, and Erin is one of my daughter’s closest friends.
* * *
Ten years after we were married Kitty overheard me telling the story of how the church covered all the crosses for our wedding.
“That had nothing to do with you being Jewish!” she exclaimed. “It was the Thursday before Good Friday. The crosses are always covered.”
Afterward she marveled that I had kept that to myself for all those years.
“What was I to think?” I replied.
* * *
When we moved into our first apartment, Kitty put up a cross in the hallway to our bedroom. I looked at it a lot. Sometimes I ignored it. But sometimes it made me feel anxious. Looking at it sideways, out of the corners of my eyes, I started to fear that it was going to come between us. It was Kitty’s cross, I told myself, and her religion, and she should be able to be herself in her own home. If I wanted to put up a mezuzah by our door, Kitty would have had no objection.
That Kitty had a right to hang her cross in her own home, however, was not a feeling shared by my mother. When my parents visited, I saw my mother eye the cross, but she said nothing. She waited till she had a way to use that sighting to her advantage. The opportunity arose the next time we were on the phone.
“Grandma Bessie will never come to your apartment if you keep that cross up,” she said in her archest tone.
I disputed that, but she was insistent.
“You must tell her in advance, so that she can tell you without having to see it,” she scolded me. “Or I will do it.”
When I told Kitty about the call, she felt trapped. She was alone in New York City without the support of her own family, which had always been a big part of her life. It wasn’t easy trying to integrate herself into a different culture, with a mother-in-law who saw her as a shanty Irish showgirl who had seduced her gullible son. It was hard for Kitty to understand and accept that she would never be able to win over my mother the way she had everyone else. Ruth was all pretense and show. Her status within our family, and the way she was perceived by the tiny society of well-heeled Jews she cared about, was her overriding concern. Kitty was pretty, and people liked her. She had an easy way about her and no guile—and that was anathema to my mother.
I tried to assure Kitty that I would stand by her if she wanted to keep the cross up. I told her that my mother was blowing things out of proportion, that my grandmother wouldn’t be upset in the least.
Kitty had a good relationship with Bessie. It seemed absurd even to think about whether she would accept Kitty’s cross as the natural symbol of her religious belief. It was a given. But my mother managed to cast that into doubt, which was infuriating because being Jewish meant nothing to her. She even gave a fleeting thought to becoming Unitarian, but apparently that lasted through only one Sunday service. Years later she read a few books on Zen Buddhism. It was just a passing thing, although after my father died and she was in her late eighties, Ruth claimed she was a Buddhist. I joked and said she was a “Jew-Boo.” She tried that out on a few friends and soon began calling herself that.
While my mother didn’t have a religious bone in her body, religion was important to Bessie. So Kitty’s religion was a plus. Bessie had heard that Pope Plus XII saved many Jews during the war, even hiding some of them in the Vatican. He was a good pope, she always said, and after Kitty became part of her family, Bessie always served fish at her Friday dinners.
But Kitty was deeply insecure about her status in the family, I was a weakling, and that business about the crucifix gnawed at her. Bessie was supporting us at the time, and Ruth had her ear.
“You’re wrong.” That’s what I should have said to Ruth about the cross. “It’s not coming down no matter what.”
Instead I told Kitty, “If you tell me you want the cross to stay up, it will stay up.” Looking for guidance and the comfort of home, Kitty cried to her mother, Irene, the peacemaker. She soothed Kitty and told her to accept the situation for what it was, and the crucifix came down.
Kitty was deeply hurt. She let me to know I had not been a pillar of fortitude. I told her to put it back up if she wanted, but that wasn’t the same thing as putting a nail in the wall and hanging it back up myself.
It wasn’t long after that we purchased a painting of Jesus by an artist named Joachim Probst, who painted luminous pictures of saints and other religious figures. It hangs outside our bedroom today, not as a religious symbol but in homage to
a man who sought a better way of life for the poor, and a more peaceful world.
While we were on vacation in Rome a few years later, my father arranged for us to attend a papal audience in the Vatican. Among the guests milling around the chapel, we waited for the Lord’s vicar to appear. Pope Paul VI glided in, all in white. To me he looked like how I imagined a medieval artist would paint Satan. I stared at those bushy black eyebrows perched above his deep-set dark eyes and looked for a sign of warmth in his long, severe face. Not a trace of a smile or a twinkle in his eyes softened his features.
“He looks like the devil,” I whispered.
Kitty shushed me.
The pope was doing his duty, allowing himself to be seen. He blessed all the trinkets and saints’ medals people brought and disappeared whence he came. Kitty was delighted. She had seen the pope and had treasures for all of her family. I don’t think my little comment about the satanic-looking pope—which I have happily repeated many times since then—diminished the experience, though I suspect Kitty would say that I was just being my ornery self.
Over the years Kitty drifted away from Sunday churchgoing, saving her attendance for Christmas, Easter, and sometimes Ash Wednesday. She also goes with her sisters, Mary and Dolores, when they are together. The falling-off began with an incident at confession that was sparked by her mother. She had told the priest she was going to use birth control, and that her mother had told her it was all right—that it was her own personal sin. The priest said her mother would burn in hell. Kitty left the confessional with tears running down her face. She considered her mother a saintly woman. Despite her mother’s advice that she just go to another priest, Kitty’s questioning of the dogmas of her faith grew. Certain mainstays fell away, but her sense of belonging remained.
Many years later, when we were in our seventies, we went to San Juan Capistrano, the California town famous for its migratory swallows, to spend the day and see its old Catholic mission.
“I’m going to buy a cross there,” Kitty said on the drive down from Mary’s house, “to replace the one Ruth made me take down.”
In the gift shop, with me looking over her shoulder, Kitty purchased a small crucifix.
“She can’t tell me to take it down anymore,” Kitty said. Later, on the drive back, she told me something I had never known before.
“The cross Ruth made me take down,” she said, “was in my little brother’s coffin before we buried him.”
Prior to hearing that, I had always done a little mental dance about the cross. Kitty, of course, could put the cross wherever she wanted. But now I saw the cross in a wholly different light—as a remembrance of Johnny and the darkest part of her life. I was glad she purchased that cross and that it now hangs in our home, closing that chapter in our life.
6
Starting at the NAACP
Contrary to Ruth’s admonishments, Grandma Bessie never retaliated because of Kitty’s religious background or any other reason. She kept us afloat after I graduated while I was in law school and Kitty had her swan song in show business—with Jimmy Durante at the Copacabana—shortly before we married. There were also the occasional television commercials, but Kitty had decided to get an education, keep up her acting and singing on the side, and start a family. A regular at family dinners, she developed a caring relationship with Grandma Bessie and got along well with Major, who sometimes would roll up to Kitty in his Cadillac, chauffeured by Bill, to whisk her away from NYU to the Aqueduct racetrack, where they would spend the day playing the ponies.
“Here’s a twenty, blondie,” Major would say, handing her the crisp bill on his way to place his bets.
“How’d you do?” Major would ask her at the end of the day.
“Not too good, I’m afraid,” she would usually say. “I lost the twenty.” That was Major’s cue to hand her another twenty.
“But don’t ever come back,” he’d joke.
Meanwhile, after law school, I applied to a few law firms and to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. My lack of enthusiasm and ambivalence were obvious, however, and my failure to get a single job offer came as no surprise. I just did not see myself at a desk, pushing papers, at a time when the country was in an uproar over civil rights activists trying to desegregate the South. Even though Kitty was about to have our first child, I was not ready to settle down. There had to be a better way to lead my life, and I could not get those media images of youthful blacks, joined by young whites from up North, being brutally attacked by Southern mobs, aided and abetted by the local police, out of my mind. That was a different America from the one I imagined. John F. Kennedy, a Harvard man like me, had urged all of us who had rallied to him: “Ask what you can do for your country.” I wanted to be able to say, “I hear you,” but I could not do that by remaining on the sidelines.
* * *
The woman who answered the phone told me I could talk to one of the general counsel’s assistants if I wanted to learn more about volunteering at the NAACP.
I met Maria Marcus in the cramped quarters allocated to the NAACP’s legal staff at Freedom House, which was at 20 West Fortieth Street across from the New York Public Library. The busy office of my imagination, bustling with lawyers, gave way to a nearly deserted office suite. Maria was there with Princene Hutcherson, secretary to the NAACP’s general counsel, Robert L. Carter. He and Barbara Morris, the only other attorney, were out, working on a case.
Maria was white and perhaps five years older than I. She was friendly and conveyed a sense of urgency. It was among her jobs to coordinate the work, and she needed help. I told her I had graduated first in my class and had been the editor in chief of the Law Review. She told me there was plenty to do, and I could start right away. Maria sent me—nervous but excited—to the New York City Bar Association’s library a few blocks away to look up the court procedures of a Southern state where the NAACP had been sued. I did that and rushed back with the information, ready for my next assignment. By the end of that first week, Maria started to treat me like a staff member.
The NAACP worked through a branch structure, with its national office there to develop policy and programs, push Congress and the president to pass civil rights laws, coordinate with like-minded organizations, and protect its members on the front lines of the civil rights movement when they came under attack. For example, in the South some NAACP branches were boycotting businesses that refused to serve or hire blacks. Some of the targeted establishments retaliated by suing the local NAACP branches, and occasionally the national office was named in those lawsuits. The cases were heard by hostile judges and all-white juries, calling into question the survival of the entire organization. A First Amendment expert, Carter and his attorneys invoked freedom of speech and the right of assembly, but those issues were often complicated by what proprietors claimed was the threatening behavior of the demonstrators. Only rarely did the national office have any control over those demonstrations. It set policies, but the branches did their own thing—then turning to the legal staff to defend them.
“The other organizations will come and go,” Maria told me, referring to the more militant groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “but it will be up to the NAACP to pick up the pieces and go on.”
To keep the branches functioning and to protect the national office, someone had to crank out the legal papers to oppose all the Southern lawsuits that were coming our way.
I learned quickly and started looking for ways to counterattack. Soon I was invited to staff meetings to discuss cases, where I began to focus on the work’s broader implications. Carter’s office was often empty because he was meeting with NAACP activists and organizers around the country. But it was his vision that guided our work.
Maria helped me get my bearings. She was married to a corporate lawyer and had two young children. Maria was in love with the law, and she spoke in quasi-mystical terms about her father, who had served as a judge in pre-Hitler Austria. Carter, she thought, was cut from the same c
loth: Both were great men committed to justice.
Everyone called Carter Bob, even though he was a larger-than-life character. When I arrived he had recently saved the NAACP from what might have been a crippling blow by winning a series of Supreme Court cases. At issue were the NAACP membership lists, which were kept secret so that individuals could join without fear of reprisal or retaliation. The first case was called NAACP v. Alabama. Bob won another Supreme Court decision, NAACP v. Button, repulsing Southern attacks on NAACP attorneys for allegedly concocting lawsuits on behalf of branch members instead of individuals who fitted the organization’s stated mission. Button overturned a state supreme court ruling that subjected local branch attorneys associated with the NAACP to severe sanctions on the grounds that group representation was illegal.
Maria also gave me a thumbnail sketch of the tangled history that resulted in Bob’s becoming NAACP general counsel rather than head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), which had a large staff of civil rights attorneys. The story went like this: Thurgood Marshall had headed the LDF. Bob had been his longtime chief assistant before Marshall became a U.S. circuit court judge, then the U.S. solicitor general, and finally the first black Supreme Court justice. As Marshall’s assistant, Carter had played a key role in developing the legal strategy that prevailed in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and had won a series of Supreme Court cases that were stepping-stones leading up to Brown. Bob was also behind the social-science testimony cited in Brown that segregation caused irreparable harm to a black child’s self-esteem.
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