Justin asked sympathetically, “Been asked to move again?”
“For once the landlord’s on our side,” Mitch said. “No. I’m driving back to Detroit.”
“Not again.”
Mitch had already made three attempts to organize a local in the automotive capital: on his last tour of duty he had tackled Woodland. Dickson Keeley, now head of Security, had personally kicked him out of Gate One, breaking several of his ribs.
“I’m wasting time here, Justin. What’s the point of attacking the tentacles? You have to go for the heart.”
The unsettling bleakness in Justin’s eyes was not connected to Mitch’s persistent failures. When reminded of Detroit, province of the Bridgers, the humiliation of being the family bastard drenched him while at the same time he was stricken with pangs of loneliness for his blood kin. With difficulty he extracted the last Camel from a crumpled pack: years ago he had given up frivolities like imported cigarettes.
Mitch was saying, “… in Wayne County fifty-three percent of the auto workers are unemployed. It’s murder there. Workers are worse off than slaves—slaves are guaranteed food. You bring in mass production and men become interchangeable, more dispensable than the cheapest tool.”
“Conditions are always worse—”
“Children are scavenging through the garbage cans,” Mitch interrupted. “Come with me, Justin.”
“What?”
“Drive back to Detroit with me.”
“Impossible.” Justin’s lips were tensed. “I have cases on the docket all month.”
“A vacation isn’t what I had in mind. You were trained in every department at Onyx. You’ll have no trouble getting a job in the industry.”
The implication of these words sank gradually into Justin’s brain. “You want me to become an organizing director for AAW?”
Mitch stared across the cluttered desk. “Get wise to yourself, Justin. It’s where you belong.”
“And what about my family? What about them?”
“Elisse can bring the kids later, on the train,” Mitch said. “I know you’re not political, so there’s no point arguing on ideological grounds.” Mitch’s own ideology had never particularly meshed with the party line, and he had nearly quit when Central Committee ordered him to head an unemployment council. He belonged, short, muscular body and tough, blinkered soul, to the labor movement. “It’s a moral issue, Justin. You’re no moral coward; you don’t evade the issues. You’re a natural for this. It’s getting worse back there, not better. You can’t shut your eyes to that. Detroit’s one big, festering sore.”
“I can’t change that.”
“It’s time we had a top man on our side—don’t look so indignant. You know you’re a natural leader. You could convince those bitter, frightened men that their one hope is collective bargaining.” Mitch paused, adding in a less resonant, more personal tone, “You’re close to the Bridgers.”
“Onyx? Is that where you’re going? You want me to try to unionize Onyx?”
“Outside of Ford it’s the most repressive company there is. Woodland’s turned into a prison with Keeley’s brigades of plug-uglies.” Mitch clasped his bicep to his newly mended ribs. “Take it from me.”
Justin sat very still. Any movement and he would be on his feet screaming at this infuriating zealot, his best friend. “If it’s some jolly tie-in with the Bridgers you’re looking for, that lets me out.”
“I know you don’t have your hand in the pocket of your brother-in-law’s family, but you certainly know them. And every bit of inside information about Tom and Hugh Bridger is an advantage.”
Justin’s hands were shaking. Putting out his cigarette, he clasped them to his knees. His weakest bastion was unwittingly being stormed. How he missed Tom, Hugh, Caryll! How he longed to see Zoe! She had never replied to his letters. When headlines informed him of the birth of Lynn, the oldest of his three nieces, he had sent a sterling porringer: Caryll had written a thank-you note, signing both names, and now the two men corresponded with occasional, faintly elegiac letters that spoke of the past and seldom mentioned their divergent present lives.
Mitch was watching him.
“I’m not going with you,” Justin said decisively.
“Oppressed and oppressor, there’s only two sides.”
“One more, I’m afraid, Mitch. The lawyer’s side.” Justin managed a smile at the old saw, and got to his feet. “Los Angeles is our home.”
Mitch opened a drawer of the nearest filing cabinet where letters were mounded. He shoved a random handful into a folder. “Take these along and read them,” he said. “Then make up your mind.”
II
That afternoon Miss Gunther telephoned Elisse to explain that Ben was being kept late and it was necessary for her to pick him up. Having received other high-pitched summonses from Ben’s teachers, Elisse, unnerved, left the gingerbread ingredients on the kitchen table to run in and waken Tonia from her nap.
The school was six residential blocks to the east. Elisse pushed the lacquered English pram by stucco bungalows with neat front yards sporting recently transplanted red poinsettias and jolly red Santas. Here and there a dark fir tree was festooned with colored lights, attesting that the householder could afford to waste electricity. This Depression’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Elisse thought.
Outside the second-grade classroom waited Miss Gunther: the teacher’s gray hair crinkled in the same shade and rough texture as her eternal gray tweed suit. Elisse rocked the well-sprung perambulator so that Tonia would not cry while the district attorney voice rapped out a report of Ben’s latest fight over his theft of another boy’s lunch.
Elisse glanced through the glass inset of the door. Alone in the empty schoolroom, Ben surely realized that this muted tirade was about him, yet he sat in a rear desk gazing toward the blackboard with his chin lifted in disdainful calm. He had Elisse’s delicate frame and her curly light brown hair, which at the moment was tangled over his wide forehead, further shadowing the deep-set blue eyes. Elisse caught her breath at the miracles of heredity. His peachy skin, dusted with golden freckles, clung to the facial bones, giving an odd, adult intensity to his expression.
He leaned back, regarding a thumb before chewing on the nail: no nail-biter, he must have felt a roughness. His hands were sensitive, and though he seldom cried, a grazed knuckle could cause tears of pain—the hands of a musician said his grandfather, who was teaching him the violin. Ben, sharply, nervously intelligent, had skipped a semester. A loner, he never exchanged visits with his classmates. Elisse loved him fiercely, and did not understand him at all.
“He’s never had this kind of problem, stealing,” she said.
The gold chain of Miss Gunther’s pince-nez shook. “I found the lunch pail in his desk.”
“I didn’t mean I doubted you,” Elisse said, torn between defending her son and not alienating the gray witch who had him in her fell clutch six hours a day. “Did you ask him to explain?”
“That,” sniffed Miss Gunther, “is up to the parents.”
Witch, Elisse thought again.
As they started home Elisse asked Ben, “Didn’t your own sandwich and cupcake please you?”
“There wasn’t anything in Jerrold’s pail, just a couple of hard heels of bread.”
“Oh, my God,” Elisse muttered. “He is hungry.”
“Maybe he deserves to be.”
“Taking food from people is wrong, Ben.”
The boy’s freckles darkened. “I didn’t start it.”
“But you did swipe his lunch! As soon as we get home you’ll go to your room!” Tears standing in her eyes, she gripped the perambulator handle. She decided she was an inadequate mother, she was furious at herself for losing her temper, she felt sorry for the child, Jerrold; she was perceiving through the blur that the houses with their cheery seasonal adornments were not places of comfort and joy but caves in which deprivation lurked.
She was setting the table and Tonia was
gumming a cracker in the high chair when Justin let himself in the back door. After he had kissed her, Elisse rolled her eyes in the direction of the loud, remarkably assured violin attack on Mozart. “Trouble, trouble.”
Justin tickled the baby’s stomach, touching his lips to satiny, near white hair. “How’s my Tonia?” A chortle and beautiful baby smile exhibiting two bottom teeth and clumps of melted Zweiback was his response. “What sort of trouble?”
“Interrogate the defendant.”
“I’m sure he’ll be less evasive.”
“You males,” she said in the mock dismay she used when the two drove off on Saturday mornings to the beach or Griffith Park: she and the baby could have gone along, but she knew exactly how much Justin and Ben cherished their dusty, boisterous hours alone. “It’s six twenty-five. Mother and Daddy’ll be here at quarter to.”
III
As Justin opened the door, Ben put down the violin. While the pressure mark faded from his jaw, he paid rigorous attention to refolding the silk handkerchief.
Justin asked, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?”
“Yeah,” Ben mumbled, not looking up. “Grandpa gave it to me yesterday and I’m surprising him tonight.” He was resentful, not of Justin but of his fear of Justin, in much the same way that a fox cub resents it paw rather than the cruel-toothed trap holding it.
Justin sat on the bed watching his son fit the half-size instrument and bow in the worn red plush of the case. “I was in the Georgia Street police station this afternoon.”
“How come?”
“Six men were picketing the Chevrolet factory. Last week they were fired and then the company hired six other men to take their jobs at half the money. Their placards told their side. They had a permit, but some toughs came along and pushed them around.”
Ben sat next to Justin, whose weight sagged the mattress springs so that their bodies touched. “Did they fight back?”
“It was more of a shoving match. None of the others was arrested, only the pickets.”
“So you went down and got them out of jail?”
“Not me, Ben. The law. The law gives us—”
“The right of havas corpus—”
“Habeas corpus, Ben. Very good.”
“You told me. They give money, it’s called posting bail, to show they’ll come back for the trial,” Ben said. “It’s not fair, only the pickets being punished. That’s how it is in school. Miss Gunther, she stinks. Even when it’s the other guy’s fault, she blames me. And you should see her. She writes one word on the blackboard then spells it over and over. It’s so boring!”
Ben’s retentive and restless intelligence was no delight to his teachers: he finished every assignment first and then ostentatiously, disruptively, whistled complex classical tunes: Bach or Mozart.
“She has to help the others, Ben.”
“Dummies!”
“They aren’t,” Justin said. “They need more time than you, that’s all. You learn very quickly. That’s a big responsibility, Ben. If a person is cleverer or stronger or richer, that gives him an obligation to help others.”
“Hah!”
“That’s something I believe.”
“And what about me?” Ben cried. And because he still remained innocently unguarded with his father, he exposed his burns. “Should I let them hit me, take my things? Call me swear words?”
Ben had been skipped this semester. An insolent newcomer to A2, younger and kitten-boned, he was picked on mercilessly. For his part, he was incapable of letting any insult pass.
Justin sighed. “When I first came to America, I had a bad time.”
“No joke?”
“No joke certainly. I was in a fight, and after that everyone sided with the others. Have you ever heard the word coventry?”
Ben shook his head.
“It means, nobody speaks to you. That’s what happened to me. I was very lonely. I hated that school.”
“Yeah,” Ben sighed. That his father, all-knowing, all-wise, stronger than God, had suffered his own torments spread wan prickles of comfort through him, and he pressed closer to the large, warm body.
Justin hugged his son. “This morning I was talking to Uncle Mitch. He wants me to go to Detroit with him and work for the AAW. I said it was impossible to move us all there. But remember what we were talking about a minute ago? People having an obligation to help others who aren’t as well-off? That’s made me think. You know something, Ben? To me the most wonderful world would be one where nobody needs help.”
“Umm.” The conversation, having drifted away from the personal, no longer interested Ben, and he kicked the metal taps of his heels against the bed frame.
“In Detroit so many people are out of work that they’ll do anything to get a job. What beats me is how the big automobile companies take advantage of their weakness.”
Ben burst out, “What are you going to do to me?”
Justin looked down at his son. “Tell me what happened.”
“Yesterday Jerrold beat me up, took my lunch pail, he ate everything and broke the Thermos. Mom was really mad when she saw it was broken. I didn’t tell her Jerrold did it. Now today, he called me a curse word, so I took his pail. Miss Gunther, she found it and blamed everything on me. And all he had was cruddy stale bread.”
“What did you do with it?” Justin’s question, deep and rough, reverberated through Ben’s body.
“Dumped it in the trash,” Ben whispered, frightened.
“I’m sorry you were bullied by Jerrold. That was wrong of him. But regardless, you’re never to take food from anybody. Ever. As long as you live.”
“I won’t.”
“You promise that?”
“On my best honor, Dad.”
Justin’s clasp tightened. “Good, Ben. Good.” He kissed the brown tangle as he had kissed Tonia’s hair a few minutes earlier.
Ben scowled against the flooding joy of his relief.
“There. That’s settled,” Justin said. “We better get washed up. Grandma and Grandpa’ll be here any minute.”
IV
After Tonia bewitchingly acquiesced to the cuddling and belly prodding of her grandparents and was tucked in her maple crib, Elisse announced dinner. A salad of sliced avocado, which even after eight years in California, Justin still fell on as a delicacy, was followed by stuffed veal breast surrounded by richly glowing vegetables. The adults talked and ate with gusto: Ben dug a trough in his mashed potatoes to bury his string beans and carrots. The gingerbread, swathed in whipped cream and drenched in turn by ladles of thick butterscotch sauce, silenced everyone.
“A gourmet meal,” pronounced Mr. Kaplan, wiping his mouth. With a maroon paisley scarf knotted at his plump throat and his shirt collar spread outside the lapels of his navy sport jacket in the prevailing Hollywood style, he looked smartly prosperous. And prosperous he was. With the advent of sound, films relied on music to set mood. Harris Kaplan now bowed his viola in the highly talented, highly paid, studio orchestra. The financial tables had turned. He was far richer than his son-in-law. Justin’s annual trust income, $3, 110, was the equal of what USC paid its tenured full professors, but in these depressed years Mr. Kaplan’s $10,000 glittered like a vein of gold.
Ben mumbled “MayIbeexcused” and bolted from the table, snatching a handful of mint wafers.
Mrs. Kaplan’s pretty, crumpled face was wistful. “You really have your hands full, dear. Looking after Ben and Tonia, shopping for food, cooking.” Both Kaplans chipped away at Elisse’s socialist madness of coping without a live-in maid, which she and Justin could well afford.
Mr. Kaplan was swaying back and forth across the table like a sun-satisfied pigeon as he explained a nuance of a concert to Justin.
Elisse’s cheeks were pink. Who would ever believe, she thought contentedly, that these middle-aged children once rejected my husband?
“Be quiet, everybody. I’m ready!” Ben shouted from the connecting living room. A fine gloss covering his intent,
peach-hued face, Buster Brown shoes planted firmly, his thin body skirmishing in all directions, he fingered and bowed brightly luminous chords through the food-scented room. His false notes were remarkably few considering that he had left his music stand in his room.
Promptly at nine Mrs. Kaplan put on her new broadtail coat and Mr. Kaplan got his fedora. The studio orchestra had an early call.
It was an evening—placid, gemütlich, cherished—like a hundred others.
V
Elisse emerged from the kitchen rubbing lotion on her hands, smiling at Justin, who sat at the cleared dining table, his briefcase open in front of him. She stretched on the green sofa, head in the glow of the lamp, opening A Farewell to Arms. After a minute she rested the buckram-bound library book open on her breasts, surrendering to a delicately spun sense of happiness and well-being. Sated with her own cooking, contentedly weary, she had no work to get back to, no projects to complete, no compulsion even to finish the novel; she simply let herself drift without thought or inhibition, giving no more consideration to time than the crickets did outside. She felt herself part of their sweet, mournful chittering, part of the cool, damp California night, part of the two children sleeping in their wallpapered bedrooms, part of this large, thoughtful man. Stretching languorously, she said, “Nice Justin,” and went over to kiss pewter hair that smelled faintly of tobacco smoke. “What’re those?”
“Mitch’s letters. From men he knows at Woodland.”
As she heard the plant name, the joy drained from Elisse’s face. One delìcate eyebrow shot up. “He shares his mail?”
“You might as well hear the worst. He’s going back to Detroit in a week or so. He wants me to drive with him.”
“The very season for a pleasure jaunt through the frozen Middle West,” she said, sitting at the table, the better to watch him.
“He wants us to move there. He’s asked me to work for the AAW as an organizer.”
“That’s Mitch all over! Oh, damn. Justin, the idea’s too ridiculous to discuss.”
“Just what I told him.”
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