Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  “What is human nature?” Yancey answered. “Is it human nature to have kings and peons, masters and slaves? That’s what the power brokers always say. That’s what the plantation owners said where I come from in Alabama. No. There is no human nature that is unchangeable as the capitalists claim.”

  “Good,” said Greta Kimple. Apparently Yancey had passed. “Technology and reason,” Kimple went on, “will produce the idea, the ideology, that we can be scientifically liberated and transformed. There is only science and progress, and Communism can direct both of them for the greater good of mankind. Human nature will be the result of evolving human effort.”

  Now someone else objected. It was Poor Jim Bicker, possibly because he’d been cast off by our hostess, the widow Flower, in favor of the professor. “The Communist goals are an improvement on what we have,” he said, “but you can’t reduce all human color and hope and endeavor to a monochromatic machine-made man.”

  “Did I say that?” Greta Kimple replied. “Did anyone hear me say I want the gray individual? No, Comrades, I want to see human potential expanded because that’s the only way to redden the planet. Already one sixth of the world’s landmass is Red. That leaves five sixths. Can we do it, Comrades? I think we can.”

  “Which,” Mort Leech carried on, “will permit life to be organized into a single model, subject to central planning. Man himself will be remade.” Leech now seemed to expand his girth as he drew deeply on his cigarette and pulled himself up to his full bulldozing altitude. “On to the other five sixths!” he shouted, having now reverted to his position of Party stalwart. He and Kimple picked up some applause in the room as if accepting bouquets. “Onward to the new man,” Leech finished his catechism.

  “And woman,” Kimple said.

  “Yes,” Sylvia agreed, “on to the other five sixths. But I don’t want to be dictated to. I want the Party to be democratic, the vanguard of the working class, sure, but within a system that embraces other parties as well.”

  “Nope,” Mort Leech said, his neck bulging out of his shirt collar. “What you call the democratic system is nothing but a shell game the capitalists play to keep everyone in line. Democracy has had its day, too bad it doesn’t work. Class oppressors get a stranglehold on it, finance a smokescreen of lies, and only hide behind them. When you’ve found the truth, what’s the point of permitting error? Would you let astronomers teach that the moon is made of green cheese?”

  “The Dionne quintuplets,” Sylvia said, “have as much chance of convincing Americans to give up the ballot as Moscow does.”

  “No, Moscow won’t do it,” Greta Kimple said as if she’d been appointed to quell any disturbances from the one other woman in the conversation. “This will happen by our own strength as a Party within the United States. Stalin himself has said nothing important is decided by the soviets and other mass organizations, but by the Party alone.”

  “But not by the Party in Moscow?” I asked, tentative as ever, my only contribution to the dialogue. Taking in this heady scene of my superiors, I was nervous, smothered, elated, a teenager at a dance with an erection he can’t subdue.

  “Moscow has almost twenty years’ experience,” Mort Leech said, reclaiming the floor to put down a potentially unruly conscript, if that’s what I was becoming. “Once they have laid down general guidelines, we Americans will take it from there.”

  Sylvia pulled me toward the canapé spread. “Where coal miners and garment workers are concerned I’m redder than they are,” she said, “but I’m becoming afraid we may have to save Communism from the Communists. Another drink, Sweetie?”

  Sweetie? I thought as I headed for the bar. I passed a tall man with brilliantined hair wearing a double-breasted suit, looking gloomy and out of place. It was Hurd Dawn, the head scene designer at Jubilee. I was surprised to see him at a Party gathering; he’d always looked like the essence of acquisitive capitalism to me, cocky and well satisfied with himself. Dawn was asking a woman if he could see her the following evening. This revealed a truth about the Party to me; it was also a singles market where you could go to a meeting one night and find a date for the next. “I thought we could have some fun,” Dawn said to the woman. “Well then, I suppose we don’t always have to be so serious,” she said, “so why not?” “Good,” he said, “I need something to look forward to. Just lost my job as head scene designer at Jubilee.”

  I was amazed, remembering Hurd Dawn strutting so proudly around the Jubilee lot that I had thought he was Mossy Zangwill himself when I first came to work there.

  Tutor Beedleman, smiling and familiar, suddenly popped up like a tin face in a shooting gallery. Dapper, short, scrappy, eager. Always faintly amused. “Owen, my dear man,” said Tutor, “so invigorating to find you at the circus. Can anyone tell me what we’re all doing here? What is the goddam balance between liberty and compulsion anyway? If everything is provided by the state, what’s the incentive to work? Yet if everything is privately owned there’s no incentive to better yourself because the rich have it all locked up and bettering yourself is impossible. Reds or Republicans, what’ll it be?”

  “You’re leaving out a big category,” I said.

  “Oh, I hate the Democrats,” he said. “I want to wipe that jut-jawed smile off FDR’s smug sunny face. I’ll go for an extreme solution, Big Business and Wall Street, or Workers of the World Unite. Nothing in between.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

  “Now that you mention it, wouldn’t that be fun? We should try it sometime.”

  “Was Hurd Dawn fired?” I asked. “Is that possible?”

  “Too big for his britches is what Dunster Clapp said. Mossy went along with it because he wants to show New York he can trim staff. The younger boys in set design make about a quarter of Hurd’s salary, and they can do the job. Go find your girlfriend.”

  Tutor’s wild, mild eye began to rove like the glance of a wallflower desperately searching, imploring faces to ask her for the next dance.

  Wandering among the faithful with a drink in each hand, I had a flash of what had really brought me to Gloriana Onslow Flower’s house. It wasn’t Sylvia’s invitation alone, nor even her rescuing me from Mossy’s vengefulness. No, what had truly propelled me to the party was the affair between Amos Zangwill and Palmyra Millevoix. I said their full names to myself as a distancing tactic. It didn’t work. They hovered more closely than ever. Pammy would be an even bigger star here than on the Jubilee lot, Mossy an even bigger threat. Thank God they weren’t at the party. I worked, slaved when ordered, for one, and was in love, infatuated certainly, obsessed I suppose, with the other. But in my mind they were to stay separate. I hated picturing them even in the same room.

  Instead, they had united. I couldn’t help feeling the union—parental? I quivered—was against me. I knew how irrational this was, but that was the nature of obsession. My sense was of being helpless before conquering powers. I was here looking for help among those who represented the helpless. The hostile forces of the nation personalized themselves into Mossy, with Pammy as his moll. I despised him, scorned her. Not daring to confront my boss, I could enlist in the fight against bossism, capitalism itself. I was suddenly furious at Mossy, a delayed reaction to his brutal treatment that afternoon, with an anger so strong it surfaced as a kind of dilating righteousness.

  I reverse zoomed my anger, went wide with it, and saw the whole world as vassal to self-anointed, capricious power. I was famished for a philosophy, a faith. And my hunger zoomed in now on the Party, the Party that would rid the world of itself. Reader, I became a Red that night.

  I almost tripped over Sylvia. She was talking to Bruno Leonard, who looked like he was trying to become an ex-professor, a new Hollywood native. I felt a stab when I saw them together, almost nose to nose. As Mossy had taken my love, this CCNY refugee would now steal my date. Sylvia noticed and with two deft motions took her gimlet with one hand and slipped the other under my elbow.

  “You thought I was
horning in on your girl,” Bruno said. “Oh no, don’t object, I saw. We are territorial souls all of us. I’m a senior figure, Sylvia herself may have a month or so on you. We transfer everything, Owen, can’t help ourselves. Just because I’ve gone over to Marx doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what I learned from Freud. I believe the widow de-Flowered will presently want me to sing for my supper—and much more.”

  “I wasn’t jealous,” I lied as soon as Bruno left us.

  “I’m flattered,” Sylvia said. “To Bruno, all his friends are intimates. But they change. Purposes, decisions, ambitions, sweethearts all exist to be changed. Life is a party Bruno gives, and if you don’t keep showing up he feels betrayed. Since he’s become an appendage of our hostess, I see him less now than when he first came west and was snapped up as an exotic creature who could actually talk ideas and tell us about the radicals on the East Coast.”

  Gloriana herself, treasuring every second and all insults to her class, at last cruised to the center of her gathering. Gently tinkling her Champagne glass with a silver spoon to command attention, Gloriana crooned to the room at large. “Comes the revolution,” she said in a voice whose bluster would have offended her Bostonian relatives even more than her words, “the man we’re about to listen to will be honored as our homegrown American prophet. We’re all red, white and blue patriots here, are we not?” A couple of hisses and an amiable boo interrupted the hostess. “No, really we are—red for our politics, white for the motion picture screens, blue for our country in the Depression. The Depression that progressive thought and policies can lift us out of. Our guest this evening is a man whose visions can forge a new reality, and if you don’t mind being herded into the lanai I think you’ll agree that Professor Bruno Leonard makes both common and uncommon sense.”

  Bertrand the butler had set up a humidor for use as a podium, and the professor began with modesty, however posed, as he drew us into his orbit. If you had photographed him that night you’d have said, yes, this exile from the East has miraculously managed it, he looks like both of them, this is the perfect marriage of Lenin and Trotsky. “I’m Professor Bruno Leonard from the City College of New York,” he began, “and I count for nothing in our mutual struggle. At CCNY I teach history and government, hoping my humble efforts can help change the first and overthrow the second.”

  A fat character actor of no note, Gates Billings, applauded and was immediately stared down. If Edward G. Robinson had done the same thing the whole room would have joined him. But Robinson was far too courteous and too good a listener.

  “Revolution is an art,” Leonard continued, “and I am not an artist. Many of you are, however, which is why the revolution comes looking for you. In your motion picture art, timing is everything. So is it with revolution. Like a captain when a turbulent wind howls, the revolutionist trims his sail when he must. Other times, when the day is fair and the breeze blows in the right direction, the sails are billowed for full speed ahead. This is where we are today as we face a worldwide depression whose causes and cures are social, economic and political. Our sails catch the wind in 1934.”

  “‘Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State.’” Too many cocktails had regressed Yeatsman to a schoolboy Longfellow quoter. Bruno Leonard drew his mouth into the unsteady grin of someone who isn’t sure whether he’s receiving ridicule or approval.

  “Roosevelt and his crowd look at the world through a straw,” the professor continued. “From their high perches they peer down and see only tiny pieces of the picture. We Reds see the picture whole. Why? because we look from the bottom up, without straws, we see the expanse of class injury, the enhanced eyesight centuries of pain have conferred on the workers, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised.”

  Coming down a notable notch and several octaves, Bruno wooed the fearful among us. “Boys and girls, here’s what I say. Most of what you read and hear about Russia are Hearst’s lies and in Los Angeles it is especially the Chandlers’ rot. Remember how they helped frame Tom Mooney. But some of what they say is true. The Soviet Union is not summer camp. It can’t afford to play softball with the rest of the world hating it, plotting against it, led by the industrialists and the fascists.”

  “Is there a difference?” Hurd Dawn piped up, wanting to participate from his new and unfamiliar posture of outcast.

  “There are plenty of differences,” Bruno said, “but in this fight there are no distinctions. Big business and big fascism are in bed together, and we know what happens when people who like each other get into bed.”

  Appreciative titters from women and guffaws from the men who hoped to sleep with them later.

  “No, they can’t play softball with the hostility of the fascist and capitalist systems surrounding them, with fifth columnists swarming among their own population. Uncle Joe Stalin gives a choice to the peasants—we’re trying something new here. If you join our collectives, stop fighting each other, great, welcome to the new Russia, but if you won’t we can’t help you, sorry. Progressives understand most countries and their institutions are against us. Read the Chandlers’ Los Angeles Times dispatches making the Soviet Union look like a giant slave colony. The whole world will someday soon be divided between the U.S. and the S.U., and we have to be ready, folks, we have to be ready to make our stand, we have to arm ourselves first with revolutionary ideas and ideals, and then with a plan to undermine the capitalist bosses and their sycophants.”

  “But it’s not only idiots,” Tutor Beedleman interrupted, “who say labor in the USSR is the equivalent of slave labor, not just the Hearst and Chandler newspapers. Are their any real choices of leaders there or even of the kind of work you go into?” Tutor was silenced by catcalls. I couldn’t tell if his question was a plant or genuine skepticism.

  “No, don’t boo,” Bruno Leonard went on from his humidor at the front of the lanai. “It’s a good question. There is no Jeffersonovich in Russian history, no Voltairovich. All they had were czars running a police state with savage pogroms and suppressions of any uprising where people tried for a more equitable arrangement between rulers and the ruled. We here have our traditional Bill of Rights liberties, the ideal of equality even if we’re far from living up to it. We have democracy at the ballot box, but it’s been taken over by parasites to the powerful. In the South colored people aren’t even allowed the dubious privilege of voting for parasites. But our revolution will bring no dictator to America, not even a benign representative of the proletariat. It will not be easy. We can never be dictated to here even by the proletariat. Marx himself said the revolution will be toughest here, the hardest to implement, because capitalism is so cemented into our way of living and thinking. It will take enormous effort to break up the reinforced concrete of American capitalism. That’s why the Party needs not only money but ideas and work, work, work!”

  “Yea Bruno!” shouted Poor Jim Bicker. Whether he was being mocked or admired, Bruno accepted the cheer as flattery. He was contradicting the doctrinaire Greta Kimple and Mort Leech, who said they’d suppress freedom in favor of revealed truth, but he was challenging his audience to take up the socialist project with fervor.

  “Wait!” Bruno said. “I can assure you socialism here will have a human face. Make no mistake, there will be a workers’ party worthy of the name. We intellectuals must form a durable and lasting alliance with labor unions. This is happening in Europe already and we must make it happen here. We must not fail anymore. Failure is guilt’s brother, and we have no time for either. We cannot feel guilty or apologetic about doing what must be done to establish a people’s socialism in America with the great Russian Revolution itself as our guide!”

  Interrupted by cheers, Bruno Leonard nodded his agreement with the audience. That is, he was agreeing he’d just said something wonderful and that the audience’s approval was precisely what he himself approved of. He was giving a B plus to a group of bright but not wholly informed undergraduates who were readying themselves to repeat on a midterm what he’d just said. Bru
no was overdoing his case, of course. That’s what we did; we overdid.

  “Joe Stalin asks us to prepare for a great undertaking,” Bruno said, leaning on his humidor. “Exploitation in this country is as American as apple pie and Mom. You have plenty of apple pie and Mom in your pictures, why not exploitation too?”

  Cheers for Bruno were blended with the no-count actor Gates Billings bawling, “Yeah, let’s show America to the Americans the way it really is!” Did he really think he could get a part this way?

  “What are we to make,” Bruno asked rhetorically, “of what I call the crisis of simultaneity? If Rockefeller rakes in millions while a hobo starves while FDR grins propping up the capitalists while they curse him while Hitler plots death while Stalin builds collectives—can we say all this simultaneity adds up to an alarm bell for action?”

  An assistant director, wishing he were on a set, yelled, “Camera, speed, action!”

  Gates Billings bleated, “Act now!” Others chimed in but Bruno quieted the room.

  I, however, was stuck, lost in the crisis of simultaneity. If everything Bruno Leonard had rattled off—Rockefeller, FDR, Hitler, Stalin—was happening at the same time, time itself being an artificial construct for measuring existence and experience, why couldn’t we bring the past forward and shrink the future backward, thereby having everything present in the present? No time like this time.

  “Are you taking all this in?” Sylvia, at my elbow, nudged me to her own present.

  “Sure am,” I said.

  Stout, impassioned, declamatory Bruno Leonard, doubts vanquished, shed all traces of academic restraint now and wound himself up to hortatory incitement.

  “What do you do with all the contending information that cascades upon you? I’ll tell you what: you let thought become words and words lead to deeds. For once in our lives we do not criticize, we do not complain, we ACT! We don’t let the top dogs treat us like trees to lift their legs on. We don’t let intellectuals spray perfume on the dung heap of capitalism, we intellectuals and artists for once in our lives ACT. Don’t just think, DO. Don’t make your peace with the fascists. OVERTHROW THEM!”