Irrepressible (18 page)

She and Bob began attending weekly meetings. So, what was that secret coven like? There was no initiation fee, no blood-letting ceremony, no funny masks or headgear. “We didn’t do anything terribly subversive,” Bob said. It was just a meeting. What about those notorious cards that Commies were suppose to carry, the ones that gave them their evil power, in the imaginations of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, certain congressional inquisitors, and the FBI? Bob did have a card, which was issued to a fictitious name. The name (which he didn’t remember after a while) was a joke, the card was a joke, and all the Moscow gold they were supposed to be bathing in was a terrific joke. The local chapters were always short of money, and the greater part of every agenda included how to raise more.
Each week, whoever was able to do so gave what he or she could to aid the defense of comrades caught up in the courts, in loyalty commissions, or suffering from civil rights abuses. There were discussions of benefits, drives, rummage sales, and potluck parties to plan; small committee reports on labor, education, literature, and family issues like the cost of milk and hamburger meat; and sign-ups to carpool to the all-day child-care center at San Francisco State College. There was always a cry for more petty cash to keep the chapter (or club, as they called it) in coffee and pencils and toilet paper. No gathering was complete without some discussion about how to keep the
People’s Daily World
afloat.

At some point in the meeting, sometimes even first thing before people got too drowsy, there would be an “educational” period. One week’s assignment might be a thudding bore and another’s an inspiration; more often, the lesson fell somewhere in between. It wasn’t easy to slog through dense theory from Marxist journals while holding down a job or caring for young children, but members prepared as best they could. Bob was used to rigorous study, but for Decca, cramming was a new and thrilling experience. Assigned to read Marx’s
Capital
, Decca remembers that “dead tired from the round of work, housework, and meetings,” Bob and she would sometimes “read aloud to each other until three in the morning.” Even slackers could amuse themselves at meetings by checking out what their comrades wore and who was giving whom special looks. The clubs were anything but salacious, but even in the Puritan churches of Massachusetts, everybody looked. And in these meetings, the members were often young and handsome, of rude health and passionate energy.

Like many of their comrades, Bob and Decca were still government workers, and any hint of membership could bring dangerous scrutiny by the FBI. The Congressional Dies Committee (named after its first chair, Martin Dies Jr.), otherwise known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA or, more commonly, HUAC), had as its mandate to uncover just those people who were determined to stay covered. There was something Shakespearean in the doubling that membership compelled: Like
men playing women playing men, your true nature only appeared ordinary. Perhaps you thought your membership was nobody’s business but your own, perhaps you were proud to proclaim it, but if you wanted to keep your job and your effectiveness, then you had to lie.

In November, Decca learned that her sister Diana and Diana’s husband, Oswald Mosley, had been released from prison after three and a half years. By then, Decca had pretty much come to terms with her sister Unity’s permanent mental disability and had forgiven Unity to the best of her ability. Diana was another story, and Decca felt a powerful inclination to immediately denounce the Mosleys’ release, but there was a glitch. The pleasure she felt in the New World was due in no small way to her relative anonymity. The Mitford sisters were news however you sliced it, and if she wished to renounce Diana and her hateful trappings, she would lose her precious privacy. The dilemma resolved itself when a reporter from the
San Francisco Examiner
tracked her to her desk in the OPA. When the “cameraman,” as she described him, ignored her pleas to go away, and proceeded to snap her picture, she tackled him and kicked his camera.

Back in their apartment, while reporters milled outside, Bob and Decca “locked the doors, pulled down the blinds and prepared to wait it out.” When she and Esmond had eloped, they had waited out the whole British government, and later in London, there had been that unfortunate electric-company employee who had tried to shadow them. This time, Decca had the redoubtable Mrs. Betts to bring food and bulletins and the next day’s
Examiner
, with its story full of outright mistakes. Starting at the top, the headline was just ridiculous—“Sister of Hitler’s Nordic Goddess in OPA Job Here”—when, after all, had Unity ascended to Valhalla? Last that Decca had heard, her brain-damaged sister had been helping out in the church kitchen, following the parson around like a kitten. The subhead was cause for further hilarity, but again only down the line. It read “Beauty Hates Nazis,” which led Muv to exclaim, “Fancy Little D being a beauty!” According to some unnamed source, Unity had attempted suicide “when Hitler’s friendship for her cooled.” How could any reporter possibly know
that? Far worse, the story contended that Decca had married Bob Treuhaft several months previously in Washington “shortly after Romilly had been killed.” Decca had waited deliberately, she had even run away to San Francisco to put some space between them, and now here was this horrible rag, broadcasting lies.

She had already lost her privacy; now she would get to work. Not only was she Oswald Mosley’s sister-in-law, but she was also Winston Churchill’s cousin and niece by marriage. That cameraman had no idea whom he was tangling with. Esmond might have known instinctively how to use the press, but Bob was no slouch. Together, with the editor of their union newspaper, they mapped out a campaign. First of all, there would be a public letter to Winston Churchill, decrying the Mosleys’ release from jail. This document would be an exclusive to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the
Examiner
’s competition.

Dear Cousin Winston:

Churchill did not reply to the published letter.

Decca was not alone in her rejection of the Mosleys. On November 23, there was a huge demonstration to demand that the government put Mosley back in prison. The protest brought much of central London to a standstill. Diana, who under the conditions of her release was not allowed to visit London, give political speeches, or meet with fascists, wrote to Nancy that she was disappointed that she couldn’t attend.

Dissension has begun to spread in the ranks of the living.

—JESSICA MITFORD, “ST. PETER, DON’T YOU CALL ME”

I
N JANUARY 1944,the Red Army defeated the Nazis to end the twenty-nine-month siege of Stalingrad. The next month, the Allies began their offensive, dropping seventeen thousand tons of bombs on Germany in one week. In Decca and Bob’s household, these staggering events paled temporarily beside the springtime invasion of Bob’s mother.

Aranka Treuhaft arrived from Manhattan with feathered hats, furs, high heels, creams, and perfumes, to find her son’s new wife—when at home—clothed efficiently in workman’s overalls and their house in a permanent state of disorder. Dishes went unwashed, floors unswept, meals haphazard, and her adorable new stepgranddaughter left to the care of an eccentric landlady.

Decca’s previous experience as a daughter-in-law offered little to recommend it. She held Nellie Romilly in contempt as an unregenerate class enemy. Aranka would work harder to find common ground. Her character was in general more accommodating, but she was no pushover.

The writer Judith Viorst, who would marry Bob’s closest friend, Abe Glasser, remembered being told that Aranka had mixed feelings about the marriage. “Upside,” said Viorst, “Bob had married an aristocrat. Downside she wasn’t Jewish.” Bob agreed that Aranka “was rather put out when I married Decca without consulting her, and it took some time for her to accept the idea.”

Bob’s younger sister, Edith, said that during this period, their mother “demanded a lot from the people around her.” Their father, Albin, Edith called a
luftmensch
, someone with his head in the air, in contrast to the energetic Aranka. When Albin’s restaurant business had failed in the 1930s,
he’d wanted to start all over again in California, but Aranka was “so New York-ish, she wouldn’t think of leaving.”

Aranka found Bob’s radical politics and California home life equally disappointing. After the education he had received, she hoped he would have established a more comfortable, affluent life. It was convenient early on to imagine that Decca’s influence was responsible for this dissatisfying turn of events. To Aranka, Bob and Decca’s home seemed too wide open, and maybe that was the California way, but there were always too many people of all shapes, sizes, and colors wandering through singing, playing games, eating, and always talking about what must be done. (On one visit, Aranka arrived to find Decca also playing host to the blues musician Huddie William Ledbetter—aka Leadbelly—who was in town to play a benefit. Leadbelly chivalrously camped on the living room floor, while Aranka took the couch.) She may have thought it odd, too, that Bob took on most of the household responsibilities (but she was glad to share her recipes), but since there was nothing to be done, she adapted. Her daughter-in-law, she discovered, was a whirlwind, very persuasive, a natural saleswoman, a quality they had in common, though Aranka preferred the soft sell. When Decca wrote requests for donations to causes, she was virtually impossible to resist. A few years later on a visit to Paris, Aranka found that she was more like her daughter-in-law’s sister Nancy, with whom she shared among other things impeccable fashion sense, mutual bad luck in men, and bafflement over the things Decca did.

It was around this time that Decca began to hit her stride as a fund-raiser. This was the adult fulfillment of an incipient talent. Given the opportunity to raise money for the causes she believed in, Decca quickly rose to her club’s director of fund-raising. In the future, her organizational zeal would find its zone in activities investigative and journalistic, but for the time being, it was sufficient to be recognized for accomplishing her assignments quickly and well. One of Decca’s earliest challenges was to plan a benefit for the
People’s Daily World
fund drive. The “coveted prize of a lifetime subscription to the
People’s Daily World
” was promised to the comrade who could raise more
than one hundred dollars in donations. Decca fully intended to surpass that mark and do so with brio and originality. The party she and Bob would give at Mrs. Betts’s would serve notice to the Communist community of the Bay Area that a new
compañera
was on the scene, and she was one of a kind. Invitations were passed along the grapevine to party members and fellow travelers—and a party of this sort always included a few undercover agents in the mix.

Among the guests whom Decca especially looked forward to seeing was Pele deLappe, editor of the
People’s Daily World
Women’s Pages and creator of “Vicky Says,” a daily illustrated column. Pele described Vicky (“Vicky,” for
victory
) as “a leggy female who with limericks, exhorted readers to speed the war effort.” This featherweight diversion was then under attack by the Communist Party’s local Women’s Commission, which denounced it to party leadership. Vicky (the curvaceous cartoon sexpot who liked to philosophize from atop her office desk) was “cheesecake,” they complained, and ought to be replaced with articles treating women’s issues “with more seriousness and concern.” Decca considered the Women’s Commission a bunch of pious persecutors and vociferously defended “Vicky Says” and its author against their censorious campaign.

Pele deLappe was married to the lawyer Bert Edises, whose firm Bob would soon join. Both women had small children and shared an abiding interest in becoming serious journalists. Pele’s first impression of Decca was of a pretty, jolly woman in a one-piece corduroy coverall, which young Londoners called siren suits (since they were easy to slip into on your way to the underground shelters). They discovered a mutual delight in rowdy wordplay and bawdy songs. Guessing that Decca’s debut fund-raiser would get raucous, Pele was looking forward to it, too.

Pele was a talented artist in the social realist grain. The daughter of socialists and a native San Franciscan, Pele had been arrested for the first time when she was fifteen, during the San Francisco general strike. Her father, a locally celebrated intellectual and newspaper cartoonist, had turned Marxist before World War I.

Pele’s mother was a “New Woman” from the Midwest whose travels in the South Seas gave her daughter that Polynesian first name. As dedicated modernists, the whole family had trooped off to Paris to meet James Joyce. Pele went to study at the Art Students League of New York with Raphael Soyer, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera and, while in New York, fell hard for jazz and the blues. She spent one summer in a Woodstock retreat among artists, mystics, and politicos. These composite adventures led Decca to say that Pele “had the luckiest childhood that I could dream of.”