A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

Alice pulled harder on her mother’s hand and started whining.

  “Please stop pulling Mommy, Alice,” said Carrie gently. “Mommy is finishing her conversation.”

  Alice did not stop pulling. Carrie started walking toward the front door, letting her toddler win as we all did.

  “Do call on me, Rina. I miss you. I’m lonely lately. Maybe I should have more children to keep me company.” She smiled, and not as brightly as usual.

  “I’ll stop by soon, Carrie,” I said as she went inside.

  I turned away from the building, and though it was away from the subway stop, I crossed the street and stood exactly where Turner Wells had been very early Wednesday morning. I shifted my weight from my right foot to my left, and as I did, a gust of wind wafted warm air past me. I could still sense him there. He was the kind of man whose presence lingered.

  CHAPTER 19

  I started walking north, to catch the Lexington Avenue line at Sixty-eighth. Inside the station, I sat down on the worn wooden bench in the middle of the platform and opened a copy of the Times that had been left there. The entire paper seemed to be painted redder than usual. The Geneva Accords and the extraction of the French empire from Vietnam. A Korean War prisoner convicted of collaborating with communists. The Army-McCarthy dispute had entered week three. A Red teacher had resigned. I studied a beautiful drawing of a mink coat, but even that was misleading. “President of the Fur and Leather Workers Union convicted today of having falsely denied he was a Communist Party member; penalty up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine,” according to the article below. The head of the fur union was a communist? Who was next, Grace Kelly? I turned the page to an ad for exclusive twinkle coats at Bergdorf Goodman. Who was twinkling anymore? The threat of communism, and how scared we were all supposed to be of it, was quickly taking the twinkle out of our postwar joy. Maybe that’s why what I was doing was important. Not just to get my own joy back, but to help get the collective joy back.

  I closed the paper and opened a copy of Harper’s Bazaar. The thick May issue, devoted to clothes for an air-conditioned climate, disguised what I was really reading, a pamphlet titled The Communist Party, a Manual on Organization. At dawn, the morning after I’d received all the books, I’d made a list with the most important ideological points from my reading. I’d stayed up nearly all night to do so, studying the letter from Coldwell on what to expect at the meeting and making a chart of the party hierarchy.

  It had felt strange to use a ruler and draw straight lines, to organize my thoughts, to memorize. I was working, and on something that did not entail the upkeep of my apartment or survival of my boys. The last chart I’d made had been over two years ago when Tom insisted that I write down—and describe—all of newborn baby Gerrit’s bowel movements. The first time I’d just written “disgusting” in the details column, but he hadn’t found that very entertaining.

  The train came, and I took a seat in the far corner by the window and opened the pamphlet again. It was tucked between a two-page advertisement—four svelte women showing off Catalina bathing suits. Poster girls for capitalism.

  “The Communist Party is the organized vanguard of the working class, composed of the most class-conscious, the most courageous, the most self-sacrificing section of the proletariat.” Since the pamphlet had appeared in my home, I’d been repeating that line quietly as I tended to the boys and my housework.

  “The Communist Party of the USA leads the working class in the fight of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the establishment of a Socialist Soviet Republic in the United States, for the complete abolishment of classes, for the establishment of socialism, the first stage of the classless Communist society.”

  The next section, circled by Coldwell, was about Negroes.

  “The Party must mobilize the masses for the struggle for equal rights of the Negroes and for the right of self-determination for the Negroes in the Black Belt. It must ruthlessly combat any form of white chauvinism and Jim Crow practices. It must not only in words, but in deeds, overcome all obstacles to the drawing in of the best elements of the Negro proletariat, who in the recent years have shown themselves to be self-sacrificing fighters in the struggle against capital. In view of this, special attention must be given to the promotion of Negro proletarians to leading work in the Party organizations.”

  I didn’t agree with a lot that the party literature preached pithily—when they’d come up with the abolition of private property, they’d surely never seen New York City—but the equality of the Negro, I did agree on. So if that was the primary reason I was supposed to be a member, I could play the part believably. Or so I hoped.

  When I was very young, my mother had spoken candidly with me about her views on race. “Racism in America is a horrible thing. You must ensure that both your thoughts and your actions never contribute to that horror. Just treat everyone as if they were your brother. Because,” she’d said, pointing to the Bible on the bookshelf, “they are.”

  When I’d punched Timo in the gut later that day, she’d changed her tune. “Maybe treat them as a first cousin, instead,” she’d advised.

  Words mattered, of course they did. I understood that my foreign-born parents preaching equality had helped shape me. My father said, “America is a country with open arms, but that’s only true as long as the color of your arms is white. If they’re not, then simply staying employed and alive in this country is a battle. Even in Manhattan. Don’t ever forget it. Remember that every person is a work of art and should be treated as such.” His ability to see beauty in everyone had impacted me, but New York’s innate diversity had shaped me, too, from the public schools I attended to the freedom my parents gave me to fill my pockets with subway tokens and just explore the hell out of our city.

  When I’d had the affair with the Haitian delegate that the entire FBI now seemed to be aware of, he’d spoken quite frankly. “In the United Nations buildings, we’re fine. In bed, we’re more than fine. Out there, we are not fine.” I nodded, knowing he was right. The 1940s in New York were not the 1940s in Mississippi, but it was still America, and Manhattanites were not color-blind. “And neither are you,” he’d said. “The only people who are color-blind are children.”

  The train came and I sat down and flipped to the end of the magazine where I’d slipped my diagram on the hierarchy of party units. There were two kinds, shop units—formed at a place of work—or street units. I would be going to a street unit meeting, since I didn’t work. And because that’s where Turner Wells went.

  Each unit had members who were elected by their peers to lead. They were called the unit bureau. At the top of that group was the unit organizer, its political leader; then the agitprop director, the person in charge of its agitational and propaganda work; and the financial secretary. In the meeting I was attending, the unit organizer was also a member of the CRC.

  I had done some things in my life that surprised me—fell in love with a millionaire, gave up my career for said millionaire; called Gerrit a “possessed demon put on this earth to snuff out my soul” when he peed in a heating vent—but never in my life did I think I would one day be attending a Communist Party meeting. I flipped the magazine open again. Behind the front cover was my forged application to join the party. It was backdated and had been signed for me by two undercover members, one of them a woman. “No one will ask for it,” Coldwell had said, “but bring it anyway.”

  I would go by my aunt Hanna’s name, Hanna Graf. The translator. My occupation was listed as housewife and my party dues were ten cents a week.

  Jacob already knew my real name, but Coldwell had said it didn’t pose a problem. That real communists, like Ava, often used aliases for party meetings, for if they were ever found out they could lose their jobs, their housing, go to prison, be fined thousands. If they were foreign, they could be swiftly deported. Just last month a bill outlawing the Communist Party in Texas had passed, allowing
for twenty-year prison terms for anyone found to be a member. The governor had told the Times that he thought juries should be given the right to assess the death penalty for Reds.

  After the doors closed at Seventy-seventh, I went to open the magazine again, but stopped when I felt eyes on me. As I looked up, a woman standing among the crowd slipped behind another passenger. I stood and offered my seat to an elderly, tired-looking Indian man who smiled gratefully. But I could not shake the feeling that a woman had been watching me. At Eighty-sixth Street I got off the train and waited for the next one.

  The platform was full of people that had just missed my train. At the last possible moment, I leapt onto the next train, the doors nearly pinching my jeans as I did. Three cars down, I thought I saw a slim woman in a cloche hat do the same thing.

  I clutched the silver railing and held my bag to my chest as the train sped to 103rd without stopping.

  I hurried toward the nearest exit, and as soon as I reached the sidewalk, Turner Wells approached me. He smiled pleasantly as I breathed heavily. As he grew closer, my breathing remained labored, but I was matching his smile.

  “Rina, it’s nice to see you,” he said. He was wearing light gray slacks with a short-sleeved, white, collared shirt tucked in. He looked neat and put together, as he had the day we met, but on his feet were a pair of the oldest-looking brown loafers I’d ever seen. They looked as if they’d be far more comfortable in a garbage can.

  “Mr. Wells.”

  “Turner,” he said.

  I stopped walking a moment and let the sound of his voice fill the air.

  “Turner,” I said finally, “it’s nice to see you again. I’m glad you’re here. With me.”

  “In this instance,” he said, gesturing for us to walk, “it’s you here with me. This is my regular meeting, and you’ll be my regular friend. Okay?”

  “Okay. Are those your regular party shoes?”

  “Party has taken on a whole new meaning,” he said, laughing. “And yes. I actually ran them over with my car to get them to look like this.”

  “Effective.”

  We walked a minute, and I wondered if he would say anything about being outside my window. He didn’t, but I could feel the moment in his silence. We had shared the best kind of silence from seven floors and one famous avenue apart.

  “I don’t know if this is relevant,” I said finally.

  “Everything that might be relevant is relevant,” he said quietly.

  “I felt like I was being followed on the subway. I felt watched.”

  Turner’s smile dropped. “Could be Gornev having you followed. Could be nothing.”

  “Let’s act like it’s not nothing.”

  “We’ll look into it,” he said calmly as he gestured for us to walk away from the subway station. “And quickly,” he added, his brown eyes shining under the street lamp. In that soft light, Turner could have been leading me anywhere, and I would have followed.

  “We should talk about…” he said, his voice trailing off.

  “The meeting?”

  “That’s right,” he said, a faint smile on his face.

  He nodded at me as we approached an alley. I took a few steps and looked back at him. He was glancing over his shoulder, too. There was no one behind us.

  “Try not to be nervous, Rina,” he said softly as we got to the halfway point. “I know that’s stupid advice, but try anyway. Since I’m bringing you, no one will question your presence. Still, say as little as possible. If anyone asks, your story is the brilliant one you already gave Gornev. That you used to work at the United Nations, and while there, we were introduced and became friendly. I can vouch for your involvement with the CRC and eventually with the party. But you’ve only been a member for a year and you haven’t been very active. You’ve been busy with your children. You owe dues. But you’d like to pay them and commit more time to the party now that your sons are older. Make sense?”

  “It does.”

  “Good. Don’t offer any of it up unless asked.”

  We left the alley and took a right on 103rd.

  “This meeting is mostly white people, some involved with the CRC, some not. There are Negroes too, but many have stopped attending meetings lately. If they do, it’s always this one.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ve stopped because they’re rightly starting to get scared of getting caught. But some will risk it for this one because the man who runs it raised $250,000 for the CRC last year. And they think he deserves a little loyalty.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said, thinking about Tom’s four-million Lenox Hill fund-raising goal for the coming year.

  “Gornev really never spoke of the party to you? Not a word?” Turner asked as we walked under another streetlight.

  “No,” I said, watching his face glow again. “I’ve thought about it quite a bit, tried to recall an instance, but I’m sure he didn’t. Perhaps I was just too patriotic.”

  I had been careful about speaking German during the war. Even though I was Swiss, not German, it was a distinction many Americans were too agitated to make. After the United States entered the war, I switched to speaking French out with my mother and German only at home or at Columbia. I volunteered with the Red Cross, and donated enough blood in those three and a half years to keep a battalion alive.

  “Jacob and I spoke about the war, of course, but it was often about how much Russia was helping the United States, not the opposite. Are you all quite sure he was such an active member in college?”

  “Active is an understatement. He was agitprop director of the Columbia unit. The most effective they’ve ever had.”

  “I truly feel like an idiot,” I said, picturing Jacob reading Chekhov while drinking a bottle of wine in his underwear. He wasn’t exactly trading bonds, but he seemed like a very typical Columbia grad student. Smart, quick-witted, entertaining, sparsely clothed. “How could I have missed all that?”

  “Simple. Because he made sure you did. Also, speaking of covering your cover, for people who know me as a member of the CRC, I was in the military, a soldier in Korea—that much is true—now I’m working as a bookkeeper in Harlem for a construction company, hoping to make my way up to management.”

  “I’ll cross my fingers for you,” I said, smiling.

  Turner took a few more steps then nodded at a gray building that took up half the block. “That’s where we’re going.”

  We both looked up at it.

  “Your windows are nicer,” he whispered. This time our eyes met.

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Am I nervous…”

  “To go to the meeting?” he added, grinning.

  “You know, I’m not that nervous. In part, because I’m excited, but mostly, because you’re here.”

  He nodded and gestured for me to follow him.

  We trudged up five flights of stairs in silence before pausing on a landing. As I tried to catch my breath, I thought about Coldwell’s suggestion that I bring the boys with me, present as their mother attended a Communist Party meeting under false pretenses. As she assumed the role of … what? What was I? A patriot, helping her country? But this felt very different from volunteering with the Red Cross or giving blood. Maybe I was nothing but a snitch. A stool pigeon. A rat. A mole. I knew that’s the calculation that Turner had had to carefully consider, but here he was. And here I was.

  “Do you need a bit more time?” Turner asked as I caught my breath.

  The hallway was dark and dingy, with dust bunnies in every corner.

  “No,” I said, pushing myself off the wall. My heartbeat had not slowed, but it was being propelled by nerves, not exertion.

  Turner knocked on the door. It was swiftly opened by a man, short in stature, with red hair and freckles dotting his pale skin. He was frowning, but as he opened the door wider and saw Turner, his expression turned sunny.

  “Comrade Wells. I’m glad to see you.”

  “And I’m glad to be here
,” he said, stepping inside and gesturing to me. “This is Comrade Graf. Hanna Graf. She’s been newly assigned to this unit.”

  The red-haired man nodded at me. “I’m Levine.”

  Jonathan Levine. He was the unit organizer. I could see his name on the chart still hidden in my magazine.

  “Come, sit. You’re the first ones here.”

  “As it should be,” said Turner. “Thank you for hosting. This is a great space. It should seat all twenty-five of us comfortably. Oh, twenty-six with Hanna.”

  Twenty-three more people were going to come into this room? This studio apartment with one couch, two chairs, and a bed? It was impossible.

  But I was wrong. As I sat silently in a chair in the corner by Levine’s bed, twenty-three more people, seven of them Negro, piled into the room, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor, leaning against windowsills and sharing chairs. Everyone chatted happily as we waited for the twenty-sixth person to arrive. I thought Turner might act differently as he morphed into Turner Wells, CRC member, instead of Turner Wells, FBI Special Agent, but he didn’t. He greeted everyone with kindness and a quiet enthusiasm that seemed present in any situation. When the last person arrived, Levine quieted the room and Turner introduced me, explaining that I had been at home with my newborn baby, but that I was ready to recommit myself to the party. That was greeted warmly, with a few of the other women congratulating me. The Negro woman next to me held my arm and said, “Toughest job there is. I’m so glad you’re here with us now.” Enemies, I reminded myself as I thanked her, and others, even shook people’s hands. Brainwashed America haters.

  After I’d been greeted like family, Levine launched into the meeting agenda. Then another member went over recommended reading for the week. Next, people took turns speaking about their individual work for the party, and their recruitment efforts. Finally, talk turned to the CRC, and cases they were working on. Turner stood and called for money and legal support for the group’s executive secretary, William Patterson. He’d been sentenced to ninety days in jail for contempt of court after he refused to give CRC financial records to the IRS for inspection.