Suspect Red

by L. M. Elliott

  How cool was that? Braving all sorts of stuff, all alone, to keep the country safe. Richard could hardly wait for the TV show to start in October.

  For the thousandth time, Richard mulled over the meaning of that wad of money Hoover had shoved at his dad on the Fourth of July. It had to be money to buy some info from Reds, or for Don to throw around at their gatherings to look like some big-time operator in DC that the commies would love to turn. Philbrick said he’d done that.

  No wonder his dad was so tense and preoccupied and impatient sometimes—Philbrick said he’d been that way plenty, given the stress he was under. If he used Philbrick’s experiences as the litmus test, Don wasn’t a “psycho”—he had to be an undercover agent, a secret hero! That’s what Richard loved about books—they provided insights that could be such a relief.

  Maybe someday Richard would be watching his dad destroy a couple of Reds in court! And boy oh boy, wouldn’t he rub that into Jimmy’s face then!

  “Richie?” Ginny knocked on his door with her foot.

  Irritated at having his epiphany interrupted, Richard shouted, “Stop calling me Richie!”

  “Okay, Dickie. Open the door.”

  “I’m reading!”

  Ginny kicked again. “Mom sent me. It’s very, very, very urgent.”

  Richard rolled off his bed. “You know, Ginny, it’s dumb to use very with a word like urgent.” He jerked his door open to find his little sister holding a laundry basket full of flashlights. “What gives?”

  “Take one and put it on your bedside table. It’s urgent.” She made a face on the word.

  “What for?”

  “You know how Russia—I mean the Soviets—just exploded their own superbomb?”

  “Yeah?” The news had sent the whole country’s nerves ajangle.

  “Well, if the commies drop the H-bomb on us, our electricity will go out. The blast might shake our house enough that it breaks our gas pipes and our house will fill up with gas. Then if we strike a match to light a candle to see, we could blow up!”

  Richard snorted. “Sis, we live in Washington, DC. We’re ground zero. If the Soviets drop their new bomb on our capital, we’re toast before the flash.”

  Ginny shook her head. “And where will this negative thinking get us, mister?”

  Richard laughed in spite of himself. How did she imitate their mom that well?

  Ginny grinned back at him. “That’s what our bomb shelter will be for.”

  “What bomb shelter, Gin?” Richard asked.

  “The basement! Mom and I are filling the cellar with canned foods and first aid and soap and towels and water for a month, plus bedding and potassium tablets and batteries and a crank-up radio and books to read. Oh, and cards. Mom says if we have to stay down there for long it’ll be the perfect time for her to teach us to play bridge.”

  For some reason, it was the idea of happily learning a card game during a nuclear holocaust that got him. “What the heck are you talking about?”

  “Civil preparedness, silly! I just copied out a checklist from the Saturday Evening Post about what we are supposed to do when the sirens go off. Mom taped it to the refrigerator. You better look at it.” Ginny raised her eyebrow before turning to head for their parents’ bedroom with her flashlights.

  Richard bounded down the stairs to the kitchen. Sure enough, in Ginny’s perfect printing, on lined homework assignment paper, was a list of things to do during an air-raid threat.

  BEFORE.

  Turn off the pilot lights in the stove and water heater and furnace.

  Close all doors and windows and curtains.

  Shut the fireplace flue.

  Put car in the garage and roll up windows.

  If caught outside, lie in a ditch or behind a sign. Cover yourself with a raincoat or an awning or newspapers. Do not hurry to get up after the blast. Crawl out from under your covering so that no dust falls on you.

  Cover your mouth.

  Do not step in puddles.

  Walk in streets with tall buildings and against the wind.

  AFTER.

  Do not touch anything that looks like ash. It could be bits of unexploded uranium.

  Do not use silverware. It holds radiation.

  Shower. Scrub skin and hair.

  Drink only the water in the basement containers. Boiling water concentrates radioactive pollution.

  Underneath the list was a crayon drawing Ginny had done of the White House with a set of circles radiating out from the famous building in blast zones. Each zone showed the time and magnitude of impact with each passing mile away from the president’s mansion. She’d copied it from a real estate ad that promoted houses for sale just beyond the blast radius.

  “Mom?” Richard turned to Abigail, who was pulling a meat loaf from the oven. She didn’t hear him over the radio, blaring the daily broadcast of Arthur Godfrey Time. He snapped off the folksy commentator. “Do we have to keep this list on the refrigerator?”

  Abigail looked up, her face red from the stove’s heat. “It gives me the willies, too, honey. But it’s very important to Ginny.”

  Willies seemed a mild term for how he felt about being cooked alive in a thermonuclear blast. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Mr. Hoover called him in.”

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  “I know, but it seemed urgent to Mr. Hoover.”

  Urgent to Mr. Hoover? His dad must be working undercover!

  But then he noticed Abigail was frowning. Distracted, she managed to burn her wrist on the scalding pan as she slid it onto a trivet. “Doggone it!” she yelped, and then muttered something else under her breath. She stuck her arm under running water to soothe it.

  “Geez, Mom, be careful!” Richard pulled some baking soda from the cabinet for her to make a paste that would pull out the sting. “You okay? Why are you cooking meat loaf in the middle of the day, anyway? It’s too hot to eat it.”

  “Oh, gosh. I hadn’t thought of that.” Abigail looked deflated. “Well, they can refrigerate it and use it for sandwiches.”

  “They?” Richard asked.

  She stopped running the water to sprinkle some baking soda on the burn. “We have new neighbors! Mrs. Emerson told me all about them. They just came from New York City. She thinks the husband was doing something connected with the United Nations. Before that, he was posted to our embassy in Czechoslovakia. So they must be State Department people. Hopefully they aren’t closet Reds or pinkos, like Senator McCarthy claims most Foreign Service Officers are,” she said with a laugh.

  “The best part is—Mrs. Emerson says they have a son about your age! So…” She gave Richard a hug with her good arm and then tugged on his sleeve. “A new friend! Let’s go meet them.”

  She picked up the meat loaf dish with oven mitts and headed for the door. “Come on!” She smiled at him over her shoulder.

  “Aw, Mom.” She made him sound so desperate. Was it that obvious?

  As Abigail walked a block down and over, her meat loaf still steaming and the wide skirt of her pink-and-green plaid dress swinging back and forth like a willow in a gentle breeze, Richard followed, daring to hope.

  A moving van was rammed up under the low-hanging cherry trees in front of the brick house. Its yard was littered with boxes, bicycles, a grill, shovels, hoses, and rakes the movers had unloaded and dropped there. At the front entrance was a woman nailing something into the doorway. Her black hair was cropped short in little waves around her head, and she wore a sleeveless red top over straight, narrow, to-the-ankle Capri pants.

  “Oh, my goodness,” murmured Abigail. “She’s so glamorous. She looks like Audrey Hepburn.” She cleared her throat and called, “Hello! Welcome to Forest Hills! Mrs. White?”

  The lady turned abruptly, hammer in hand, and the object she had been trying to hang fell to the ground, bouncing under a thick azalea.

  “Oh dear! I’m so sorry to have startled you. Let my son help you with that.” Abigail elbowed Richard. “I always as
k my husband, Don, to hang things for me. I’m all thumbs.”

  While Richard crawled under the bush, Abigail introduced them. “I’m Abigail Bradley. But please call me Abby. We live on the next street over. This is my son, Richard. I’ve brought you dinner. Unpacking is such a nuisance. No time to cook!”

  “How very kind! Please, come in.” The lady’s voice was husky with a slight accent. She held the door open and added, “And please, no need for the Mrs. Call me Teresa.” The two women stepped inside.

  Under the azalea, Richard found a thin gold box, about the size of a pen. On it was painted a tiny candelabra and a six-pointed star. He brought it to the kitchen. His mother was already at work, putting teacups in the whitewashed cabinets.

  “Ah, thank you so much, Richard.” Teresa held out her hand. “That is very dear to me. My grandmother’s mezuzah.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, it’s a very special thing. Jews believe God protects homes with a mezuzah at the door. I was raised Catholic. But my bobeshi really wanted me to have it when Mr. White and I had to flee Prague.”

  “You had to flee your home?” Abigail’s face puckered with concern. “How terrible.”

  “I was lucky to be married to a member of the American diplomatic corps. I could get out, with my children, before the Nazis came.”

  “What’s a bobeshi?” The question just kind of burst out of Richard. “Sorry,” he added, seeing Abigail frowning at him.

  Teresa smiled at Abigail. “I do not mind. I encourage our children to ask about such things. That is how they learn, yes? My husband says we forward peace by coming to understand one another’s backgrounds. I personally believe talking to teenagers as if they are children keeps them children and doesn’t prepare them for the real world.”

  Wow. Richard was liking this woman.

  Teresa turned back to him. “Bobeshi is Yiddish for grandmother. Mine died in Hitler’s concentration camps, so I put up the mezuzah in her memory. You’ve never seen one?”

  Richard shook his head.

  Teresa looked at Abigail with surprise. “Really? We purchased this home because the realtor told us this neighborhood did not have any restrictive covenants. I was quite horrified to learn many still did against Blacks and Jews. There was a lovely house we liked, but the deed actually said the owners could not sell to Semitics or Armenians, Persians, or Syrians. I just couldn’t live in a neighborhood with such attitudes.

  “Do you think it will be a problem if I hang my mezuzah? There has been such a horrendous spike of anti-Semitic rhetoric after the Rosenbergs’ conviction, since they were Jewish.”

  “Oh, no. Richard just hasn’t noticed them before.” Abigail waved her hand at Richard and laughed lightly. “You know boys.”

  But he could tell his mother was taken aback by so much honesty. That wasn’t her style at all. Her company conversation usually revolved around articles in Ladies’ Home Journal, recipes, and garden-club tips for arranging flowers.

  Abigail opened another box and began stacking plates onto the kitchen counter. She changed the subject. “I heard your husband was posted to Prague before the war. Did you two meet there?”

  Teresa brightened. “Yes, I was a first-year student at the university. He was this young, handsome cultural attaché. We met at an art show and fell in love instantly. Natalia and Vladimir were both born in Prague. Of course, when Hitler invaded, the embassy closed and relocated to London for the duration. Is your husband at State as well? Is that how you know of us?”

  “Oh, no. We just have a neighbor who makes it her business to be well informed. I’m sure she will be by soon. A Mrs. Emerson. She’s very sweet, but take my advice and don’t eat the Rice Krispies Treats she’s sure to bring you. Hard as cement.” Abigail shook her head. “Also, don’t tell her anything you don’t want the whole neighborhood to know.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Teresa said with a smile.

  “No, my husband was a gunner on a bomber during the war. Then he rejoined the FBI afterward,” Abigail continued. “By the way, you might see the director’s car pass by here. Mr. Hoover lives right around the corner. On the same block as Senator Johnson and his family, as a matter of fact.”

  “The FBI’s Hoover? Really?” Teresa paused. “I hadn’t realized.” She closed one of the kitchen’s white cabinets with an oddly loud snap.

  Abigail seemed disappointed that Teresa didn’t ask for more gossip about the neighborhood’s famous residents. To Richard, at least, Teresa seemed a bit frosty suddenly. Or annoyed, maybe. Or…? Hmmmm. He just couldn’t really read her expression.

  “Speaking of Vladi.” Teresa was the one to change the subject this time. “He will be so pleased to meet you, Richard. Go ahead upstairs.”

  She was sending him up there without warning her son first? Richard looked to his mother, who would have called him down to the living room to meet someone new and overseen handshakes and proper cotillion-style introductions. Abigail shrugged slightly and nodded at him in permission to go on up, before saying to Teresa, “Now, what else can I do? Where do you want these pots?”

  The house was laid out exactly as Richard’s: a center-hallway brick colonial, a dining room and kitchen to the right, a long living room on the left, and a side porch off that. This porch was finished, though, to make it into a year-round room. He could see the sunroom was jammed with ripped-open boxes and piles of paints, brushes, palettes, canvases, and easels, all awash in bright sunshine.

  Curious, he tiptoed into the living room. It was a jumble of dark antiques, carved cabinets and tables juxtaposed with bright-colored modular chairs and weird artwork that looked like splotches of color. Except one. That piece was actually a poster for a 1947 exhibit in Prague with a painting by someone named Robert Gwathmey. Three Black people looked horribly sad while one of them played guitar. The melancholy of their expressions was emphasized by the fact that their bodies were built with geometric shapes and thick black outlines. The effect was powerful.

  But it was the books that made him really want to snoop. Open crates of them were everywhere. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Animal Farm by George Orwell—those titles he recognized. But there were also things by people he didn’t know at all: Truman Capote, Ezra Pound, Albert Camus, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot.

  “Whoa, wait a minute.” He picked up Invisible Man. It was a recently published novel that he’d heard about plenty. Its author, Ralph Ellison, was Black, and the novel was merciless in depicting white people as racists and fools. Richard’s English teacher had been really worked up about it, and not in a good way. Richard dropped the book and headed for the stairway.

  A kind of battle of the bands danced down its steps to him. First a piano and a delicate, lilting voice in slow song: Good morning, heartache, here we go again….You’re the one who knew me when.…Bursting out against that was totally different music: raucous, fast piano riffs, constant drumbeats, and alternating saxophone and trumpets tearing up and down the octaves.

  The dueling records were playing so loud, the girl inside the room he passed first didn’t even notice him. A replica of Teresa in looks but wearing an embroidered peasant-like blouse and jeans, she was packing rather then emptying a suitcase. Her room was the source of the blues singer. On her door was taped a pennant for UCLA.

  Shy, Richard hurried past.

  Across the hall came the rowdy tunes. Richard slowly approached, wondering how in the world to begin a conversation. He recognized the music as jazz. But he had no idea who the artist was. As he neared, he could hear banging and slaps as Vladimir kept his own drumbeat on his walls. Richard peeped around the open door. A tall, thin boy was waggling drumsticks and tapping in rhythm on the windowsill while wiggling his bottom to the music. LPs were strewn all over the floor. Richard couldn’t even see the bed under a heap of clothes and books and magazines and sheet music. But balanced on top of all that was a saxophone.


  He knocked, gingerly. Boy, he’d hate it if someone caught him dancing to music. Vladimir didn’t respond. Richard knocked again. But all that did was prompt Vladimir to look at his record player as if it were malfunctioning. Richard tried a third time, louder. Vladimir stopped, cocked his head, and then threw down his sticks, shouting as he headed for the door, “Need something, Natalia?”

  He crashed right into Richard. “Geez Louise! Who are you?”

  “A…a…Your neighbor. Your mom sent me up here.”

  Vladimir made a face. “She’s like that.”

  “Yeah. Moms.” Richard shrugged. “Whatcha gonna do?”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” Richard knew he sounded totally lame. He could feel his freckles heating up.

  “Got a name, man?”

  “Oh, right. Richard.”

  “I’m Vlad.” They shook hands.

  “Know Charlie Parker?” Vladimir asked.

  “No, I don’t. Is he a friend of yours?”

  Vladimir laughed. “My buddies warned me Washington was square. Well, it’ll be my job to change that.” He pointed to his room. “That.” He grinned. “That bebop. That’s Charlie Parker. Do you dig jazz?”

  This was a test, clearly. Richard knew he had already flunked the first question. He took a chance on stuff his dad listened to. “Don’t know this. But I like Louis Armstrong.” Seeing Vladimir’s approval, he added, “Yeah, old Satchmo. Boy, can he can blow that horn. I like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, too.”

  “All right! The pioneers. There’s hope for you.” Vladimir punched Richard’s shoulder before running his hands through his own thick, wavy black hair to get it out of his eyes. No way Don would ever let Richard grow his hair that long.

  The record ended, and Vladimir rushed into his room to lift the needle and stop the scratch-scratch-scratch. He snapped off the record player.

  “Soooooo…” Richard stayed awkwardly in the hallway. Now what?

  “Soooo…” Vladimir countered. There was a long pause.

  Richard looked around the room, trying to find something to spark conversation. His eyes fell on the pile of things on Vladimir’s bed. “Hey, you’ve got a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.” Out in the open!