She switched hands, put the other one on top. “But then it got Mom so excited. And Tom really didn’t seem to care. And I felt so guilty about it afterwards. I got it into my head that Madame Nadeau would come and punish me for it. I never go up to the falls alone now.”
“It wasn’t your idea in the first place,” Irini suggested.
Sissy nodded eagerly. “I would never have thought of it. I got it from Wheat Theater. Remember when Anna Peal faked a ghost?”
“To scare the headhunters? That ghost?”
“To punish the pirates. Tom was so interested in Maggie. He used to come over and ask about her. What was she like? What did I think she stood for? Do you know, for the longest time he thought she was real. No one told him she wasn’t. But even when he knew, I could tell he didn’t like Maggie much. He was very suspicious of her. I thought if I actually saw her he would come over even more to hear about it.
“Oh, Irini, I’m sure you didn’t see Maggie up there. I’m sure it was just Opal May again. Don’t you think?”
Irini supposed it could have been. She hadn’t really seen a face. It wasn’t like Maggie to appear topless, but it wasn’t really Opal May’s style either. Irini had been influenced, perhaps overly, by the apron.
“Do you think he ever really liked me?” Sissy asked.
“I’m sure he did,” said Irini, thinking, of course, he didn’t. She remembered Holcrow putting his arms around Sissy to calm her down, kissing her forehead.
“He always wanted to go into Jimmy’s room. He said he had a good view from there.”
“A good view of what?”
“Of your house,” Sissy said.
“Why would he want to see that?” Irini asked, startled, but Sissy didn’t know.
Nothing was left in Irini’s cocoa cup but a dark, cold, and bitter residue. It could probably have been salvaged for something—put into a devil’s food cake, or used as a starter on the next cup of cocoa or soaked into a rag for shining shoes. Maggie Collins had always opposed waste. In honor of Maggie’s ghost, Irini forced herself to gulp it down.
40
On January 30, 1948, soon after achieving, against all odds, the communal truce in Delhi, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. It was hard on Ada. It was hard on Irini’s father. It was hard on me and I wasn’t even born yet. Like Lincoln’s death. It still hurts.
Meanwhile, back in America, a former marine, Joseph McCarthy, had been elected to the U.S. Senate from the same state that once gave us the La Follettes. J. Edgar Hoover had already gone before HUAC, attempting to have the Communist party outlawed. “They have developed one of the greatest propaganda machines the world has ever known,” Hoover warned America. “They have been able to penetrate and infiltrate many respectable and reputable public opinion mediums.”
In February of 1948, in congressional committee, Thomas Holcrow, an agent for the FBI, denounced Ada Collins as a Communist spy and her husband, prominent capitalist and civic leader, as a dope. And Irini’s father, in what was very much a sidebar, as a fellow traveler.
Holcrow had been collecting evidence all summer and the file was too thick for anyone to read all the way through. No need; its mere size was overwhelmingly persuasive. It contained affidavits and recipes and doubtful housecleaning tips. There was an inclination toward bananas that Holcrow found suspicious enough to mention. They were not an American fruit. The entire minutes of the Magrit Society of Satyagraha were also included. Holcrow noted that, although he had been present, whenever decisions were made he had abstained.
Ada had unabashedly declared herself a Communist during the war. She had never denied or apologized for it. She had access to ham radio equipment. She had taken trips abroad. Her ideals and heroes were dark-skinned and foreign.
Her artwork was examined by members of the House of Representatives. They looked at those blue period teacups with their ashy flowers, their dusty colors, especially the set with the withered stems, and said no American could have painted them. They were, in short, the kind of art that was bad for people.
It might not have mattered so much, but the Collinses were rich. Why would a rich person be a Communist? It was the most un-American thing the members of the House could imagine.
Plus, through Maggie, Ada was in a position of considerable influence and power. In a poll conducted by the editorial staff of Women at Home Maggie had once been voted the most admired woman in America. And if you lined the recipes in How to Cook a Goose up vertically on the page, as Holcrow had done, if you put the middle one first, the last one second, the first one third and so on, and then eliminated every fourth letter the first letters of the first word of each recipe spelled out “Stallgn” and that was just far enough removed from “Stalin” to be cunning. It maintained deniability, that was the cunning part.
Holcrow testified that he believed Maggie’s recipes to be full of such coded information. It had been a convenient way for Ada to send information abroad. Two teaspoons could easily refer to two missiles. A tablespoon might well decode into an armed submarine. The Bureau had their top men working on it in secret kitchens in Washington.
Women at Home had an international market and the whole New York staff could well have been implicated if they had not cooperated fully with Holcrow. They had received Maggie’s final columns direct from Holcrow himself and had run them unhesitatingly, disregarding any possible legal ramifications or First Amendment issues. This was, Holcrow implied, the mark of the true patriot. As a result the magazine’s reputation had suffered along with Maggie’s. Holcrow was glad of this opportunity to set the record straight.
It was a shame, Holcrow told the committee, that a dangerous woman like Ada Collins should have used and abused the reputation of a fine woman like Maggie. Because he loved this country, he’d been left with no choice but to destroy them both.
It was the headline story in the Chicago paper: SPY RING EXPOSED. RED MAGGIE COOKS FOR COMMIES. Norma Baldish folded the issue inside out so nothing but the personals showed when she left the paper on the porches of Magrit. It was 1948, and the personals were pretty sedate.
Down at college, Irini read the headline and phoned home. “Hey, Cindy,” she said. “How’s my dad doing? Do you think I should come back?”
“Whatever for?” said Cindy. Irini tried to pretend that Cindy’s tone was not just a little bit cool.
Her father, in contrast, was cheery. “I’m ignoring the whole thing,” he told her. “It’s not as if Mr. Henry’s going to fire me over it. I’m okay as long as the mill survives.”
No one in Magrit was surprised to learn that he was a dangerous revolutionary. They had always pretty much assumed it. Those people who had already disliked him now liked him less. But Magrit, along with the rest of the country, was not as casual about communism as they had been. The suspicions and whisperings that had once been confined to the Kitchen now spilled out. Magrit was seeing Communists the way they had always seen ghosts.
They wondered about Claire, who’d told a number of people she never would marry. This didn’t seem American. They wondered about the Leggetts with their unnatural Quaker doctrines. They wondered about the Törngrens with their sauna and their foreign cooking. They snubbed Ada completely. It was not a pleasant place for Irini to come home to. In fact, it was not home at all.
The Baldishes were the most tangibly hurt by the accusations, because of their association with Irini’s father. Business at Bumps fell off and never recovered, although Irini’s father did his best to personally make up the difference.
Suspicions were trained particularly on the Magrit Society of Satyagraha. None of the satyagrahis turned out to have the moral courage to keep coming to meetings. The movement for nonviolence in Magrit was obliterated, wiped out as if it had never been. But Irini’s father refused to allow a petty bureaucrat like Thomas Holcrow to bully him out of his admiration for Gandhi. Or for Mrs. Ada.
Who was ecstatic. There was no one in Magrit more ready to serve jail tim
e than Ada. She went to Washington at her own expense to let them know before they even asked that she would name no names. She began an immediate fast. She wrote letters, she circulated petitions. She did serve some jail time, about two months. She emerged more committed than ever. She urged the FBI to join with her in the search for truth and they did so, whether they realized it or not; that was the beauty of satyagraha. If they’d only been paying a little attention, Martin Luther King Jr. might not have had to do it all over again.
She was, according to Irini’s father, the bravest old woman he had ever known. It irritated Irini that he said this, not the brave part, but the old. In point of fact, Ada was not so much older than he was. At nineteen herself, Irini really couldn’t see the difference. Ever since he had married Norma, he had completely lost track of his age.
Ada considered going back to jail, but Irini’s father talked her out of it. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to force Thomas Holcrow to comprehend himself this way, as a man who put old women, in whose houses he had been a welcome guest, into jail.
And her hard time was hard on Henry. His first wife had been in prison often enough, but he’d been a younger man. Now he’d lost Claire. And his radio show. And his baseball team. And Maggie. Most of all, Maggie.
There was more to the story, but it didn’t come out for several years. Then, sometime when I was about five, my mother had a visit from Margo who told her that Sissy Tarken had told Arlys, who told Margo, who told my mother that Cindy had told Sissy that she had written Maggie’s final columns.
In fact, with the exception of the letters Claire wrote, the columns were all authored by various Mays. The alcohol column was written by Tracy. She’d become concerned at the way suspicion was directed toward Fanny. She’d been angry at Irini for voicing this suspicion. So she chose alcohol as her topic, because no one would think this was Fanny and Tracy didn’t care if they thought it was Irini.
I almost remember the conversation. I’m going to pretend I remember it better than I do. My mother and Margo sat at our dining-room table, playing big casino and drinking coffee. I sat under the table, between the two pairs of shoes, legs in nylons, the tablecloth around me like a cave. The cards fell onto the tabletop like rain. Slap, slap, slap.
Margo said, “At first he just wanted her to listen in on Mrs. Ada’s phone calls.”
“I always knew she listened to us,” my mother said. At the time, I assumed this was a reference to me. I didn’t think Margo knew I was there, crouched by her feet, eavesdropping silently, but I knew my mother did. “She was such a precocious little thing.” My mother’s tone was affectionate. The sound of the cards was cozy.
“When that didn’t give him what he wanted, he escalated.” Maggie had her initial outbursts. Holcrow found out that Cindy had written fake letters to servicemen during the war. It all fell together so neatly. He told Cindy she had the experience and the brains her country needed. He appealed to her patriotism, both for America and for Upper Magrit. He told her she would be a secret operative of the FBI. She was seventeen years old. It was more exciting than being a telephone operator.
“Tracy was always so sure he was coming over to see her,” Cindy said to Sissy, who passed it on. “No one ever thought he could be interested in me.” She began to attend the Committee on Satyagraha meetings, strictly in an undercover capacity.
My mother refused to blame her. This is so like my mother.
It made Margo just as nuts as it used to make me. The cards were falling faster and harder. “Cindy May knew she would end up hurting Mrs. Ada and Mr. Henry. They were always kind to her. She spied on your own father. She wrote those demented columns.”
(Well, actually those columns contained some pretty good advice. Those final columns, in my final grown-up opinion, had the real Maggie whipped like an egg.) But didn’t Cindy May completely destroy the movement for nonviolence in Magrit? Set the Sweethearts to suspecting each other? Kill innocent little Anna Peal?
“That period where she had no hands was so hard on her,” my mother said.
“I think she faked the injury,” said Margo. The bus turned over and she had hurt her arm, all right, but just badly enough to give her an idea. She could slip into the mill, type the columns on the mill typewriter, and with no hands, no one could possibly suspect her. It was one of those lies you show rather than tell.
My mother was still not persuaded of malice. Cindy had a love of drama, perhaps. A yearning for importance. Perfectly understandable from the youngest of three girls. “You’ve forgotten how it was. We were all patriots then,” my mother said. “We’d just won the war. You and me, we might have done the same if he’d asked us.”
“Never,” said Margo. “Never me, never you.” She reached under the table with one hand. She opened it somewhere by my ear. There was a Toll House cookie in it. I remember that part for sure.
Cindy May went on to become a mystery writer. Quite successful. Her specialty is kitchen cozies, that line of books with murders and really great dinners and sometimes a recipe or two. My mother always maintained, if you read Cindy’s books carefully, you find a subtext of regret and contrition. Those books are practically an apology.
My mother always hated mysteries in which the murderer turns out to be a child.
Eventually all of the Sweethearts managed to marry, except for Sissy, who was, as we know, damaged goods and could hardly have expected to.
Tracy and Cindy both married into the Redd family, and even so the Redds had boys to spare.
Claire became modestly famous and had her own television show for a couple of years—Claire in the Kitchen. It ran in the Boston area, where she lived up until her death in 1982 with Fanny May. The exact nature of their relationship was never known. Not for lack of speculation, but you’ll get none of that from me. I come from a family celebrated for its discretion.
Fanny had jilted Mike Barr at the altar. I think it was because of the Atomic Pin. In the end she just couldn’t make herself wear it. He haunted Magrit, shattered and shaken, for several months, until Margo Törngren finally told him to stop his whining. Margo’s practical, sober, industrious ways stood in stark contrast to Fanny’s. They were married in the Lutheran Church and settled in Los Angeles. “I think they were very happy,” my mother used to say, though never without the “I think.”
Arlys, the prettiest and nicest of them all, had the last Sweetheart wedding. She went to visit Margo, where she met and married an ex-marine. He knew an athlete when he saw one. My mother had a wedding picture of them standing under two crossed bats. Her husband coached basketball at a high school in Ventura, California. She had more children than any of them, although in Magrit fashion, they were mostly girls. She still lives in Ventura, surrounded by her daughters and granddaughters and the occasional flukish grandson.
Irini married Walter. This is no surprise. Haven’t I been tipping it that way all along? It happened while Irini was in college. She Was working in a diner and Walter walked in. “Who’s the cutie at the counter?” one of the other waitresses asked and Irini turned around to see. And that’s what she saw, a really, really cute guy and only seconds later realized it was Walter. He looked exactly the same as always.
“Just a Coke, please, miss,” he said.
“Strictly coincidence, me walking into that diner,” Dad used to tell me. “Of all the gin joints in the world,” and Mom used to say to give her a break. And then my Dad would drop his voice. He would whisper to me so that Mom wouldn’t hear. “Your mother begged me to marry her,” he would say to me, smiling so that I could see that little bit of his gum line. I have, so people tell me, the same smile.
When I was about five, my parents took me to a minor league game and told me to watch the first baseman in particular. He was a thin, graceful, pretty man and he made a couple of good plays. “He’s batting .298 this season,” my dad told me. “He used to play for the Sweethearts.”
In Magrit Ruby had passed as a twenty-year-old. Now she was passing
as a man. Because the days of women’s baseball were over, and anyway, it had always been so complicated, being that good and being a girl. It just couldn’t be made to work.
“But what is she really?” I asked my mother, who told me that she was really a baseball player.
“I wish,” my mother said. She was watching the ball go into the catcher’s mitt. “Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” she said.
“What do you wish?” my dad said.
And she told us she couldn’t remember, but I always thought it must have had something to do with baseball.
That is where the story, if my mother were telling it, would end. You are welcome to stop reading here, if you like. In fact, I recommend it. It is 1948. The war is over. We won.
Afterword
In my own kitchen I now have many of my mother’s things. There is a hutch with Ada’s painted dishes in it. A toucan napkin ring that my mother used to use. An oak table that Norma built for her. A Chianti-bottle candle from some dinner I was never told about.
I have done my best with my mother’s story, although it was hard to get her to talk about Magrit. I think it had all been spoiled for her by the FBI and she was the kind of person who, lacking anything good to say, said nothing at all. I had to fill in a lot. I warned you about that part.
If I have made Magrit seem simple or naive, I apologize. Because of my own age, I was forced to set the story not in the real World War II years, but in those fictional World War II years I knew growing up. A story set in storyland.
My first introduction to World War II was to play it. The game was much like cowboys and Indians, only the names and the sound effects were different. When I had children of my own, the Star Wars movies came out and all the kids were on the streets fighting storm troopers again. It is apparently the mythology we are most comfortable with. It’s the game we were given to play, but not the story we ourselves were given to live.
The Sweetheart Season Page 34