The Pledge (13 page)

“Oh, shit, no! It is not intimate. It is you, and you are what interests me. You want to know about Molly Maguire? Here's line and word. She's the daughter of Sean Maguire, whom I know only from his picture, but I could see a sweet lad who never had enough to eat in all his blessed life, and came here at the turn of the century as a kid from county Mayo in the old country. He was exalted. He worked his way up from being a construction laborer to being a fireman on a locomotive and breathed enough coal dust to give him tuberculosis. He died two months before I was born, and there was my mother, left with three daughters to raise and not one damned Prudence or Patience or Sally to stretch out a hand to help her, but sweet Jesus be praised, there was Frank O'Malley, the crooked ward heeler whom they hustled off to jail eventually, but he kept us in potatoes and cabbage until he got my blessed mother a job scrubbing floors in the old Hancock Building.” She paused, her wide blue eyes half closed, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Ah, poor decent Bacon, I am jumping on you with both feet, am I not?”

Bruce shook his head. He didn't want her to stop, he didn't want her to tell him that it was very late, that he should go along home. He was filled with desire for this long-limbed Irish woman with her pale skin and her flaming hair, but he also sensed very deeply that this was not the time and that she was not someone who opens her arms and says, Come jump into them.

“And still I haven't answered your question, dear Bruce, me who would be a little lost Mick, a guttersnipe, were it not for the blessings of the Boston Public Library, and what is it that made me a communist? There was my mother, working on the floors with her scrub brush and pail, and along comes Mr. Lowell Wordsworth, a very big banker who was working late, and he sees, sticking out of the basket in which my mother carries her lunch and whatever, a copy of the
Daily Worker
— I've had a subscription for her as long as I've been on the paper — and he sees it sticking out, and he says to her, ‘Mrs. Maguire, I am shocked. You, a good Catholic, reading that communist rag.' A good Catholic! Imagine! Catherine O'Brian Maguire, my mother, has her name written on the golden gates as the number one Catholic in the Boston diocese. There was no room in our apartment without at least two crucifixes, and my mother has sore knees more from prayer than from scrubbing floors, and this godless white Protestant banker dares to scold her with taunts like, You, a good Catholic. Well, Mom just looked at him and said, ‘Mr. Wordsworth, I have three beautiful daughters. One I have given to God for his blessed goodness to me, and she's a nun; and one I have given to the poor abused women in this life, that they might take some comfort, and she is a hairdresser; and my youngest daughter I have given to the working people, to God's poor children, and she writes for a communist paper. So I'll not have you looking down on me.' There's my history and if you can't figure out from that why I am a communist, then you have beans for brains, which is also not uncommon.”

“I don't know what to say,” Bruce complained. “My mother and father put me in the way of being a white Protestant. One of my mother's tragedies is that she was not born in Boston. I'd say that's one for you, except that you're from the wrong side of the tracks. But I like your mother.”

“There's points for you.” She rose to refill his coffee cup, but it didn't help. She was shaking him gently and the room was full of the morning light. “Wake up, Bruce. It's half past seven.”

“Here in this chair all night?”

“I'm afraid so,” she said.

She made eggs and sausage, and they had breakfast together, and then he walked with her to the
Worker
building on Twelfth Street, kissed her on the cheek, and then left her.

THE SUBPOENA

   

I
T WOULD HAVE BEEN
less of a dilemma for someone else, but for Bruce the fact that he had twice asked Sally Pringle to marry him prevented him from calling Molly Maguire and telling her that he must see her again, that he could not just wipe her out of his consciousness and pretend that she did not exist, and that he could not go on staring at his typewriter and thinking of her, of that flaming red hair and snow-white skin, and asking himself silly questions, like did she ever sit in the sunshine, or did she wear a wide, wide hat, or did she have some current lover whom she had simply failed to mention? Nevertheless, he could not escape that he had been to bed with Sally Pringle dozens of times and had made passionate love to her, which she returned. Molly Maguire might hoot and laugh, being Boston-born and Irish, but Sally was a most passionate and loving woman — or was she? The two times Bruce had asked her to marry him, she laughed and assured him that such flattery would get him anything and everything; but she never said yes — the same laugh that replied to his declaration that he loved her.

And if he loved her, why had six weeks gone by since he had last spoken to her? And why had she not called him? And, damn it all, why should he, a grown man who had seen something of life and death, be influenced by his mother, who felt and stated that Sally Pringle was an absolute dear and precisely the sort of wife that Bruce wanted? In any case, it was six weeks, and he went to the telephone and called her at the television network where she now worked.

When Sally answered, and Bruce said, “Sally, this is Bruce,” her reply was hushed. “I can't hear you,” Bruce said.

She said, “Hold on, please. I must transfer this call.” And then, after perhaps a minute, she was on the phone again and said to him, “I'll call you back, Bruce. In ten or fifteen minutes. Are you at home?”

“Nowhere else.” He put down the telephone and walked to the window and stared out at the street below. Why? Someone, obviously, was in her office. Whoever it was, she couldn't talk in front of him or her. It meant nothing, absolutely nothing — unless, of course, she had a new lover. He had not called her for six weeks; why had it never entered his head that she had not called him during that time? It was not as if she had never called him. At the beginning of their relationship, she had called him at least a dozen times. What then? Was it over? He brooded until the telephone rang.

“Bruce,” Sally said, “it's all right now. I'm in a booth in the entry downstairs.”

“Sally, what's all right?”

“I didn't dare to talk from my office. My secretary could overhear me. Who knows who else? Bruce — Bruce, dear, you must not call me here ever again.”

“Why not? What the devil's gotten into you?”

“I thought you knew, and that's why you'd stopped calling me.”

“Knew what? Talk some sense.”

“I'm talking very good sense. Bruce, they have put together a list of writers and actors whom the network will not employ because they are communists. Bruce, you're on that list. Bruce, I love my job, but if they find out that we have a relationship, I'm finished. I can't have that. I won't. I can't.”

Her voice rose. She was on the point of hysteria when Bruce told her to stop it. “Right now!” he insisted. “No more of that! Listen to me. I am not a communist. I have never been a communist. I don't give a damn about the Communist Party, and if my name's on that list, it's a setup and a damn lie!”

“Yes,” softly. She was at the point of tears.

“Do you believe me?”

“It makes no difference whether or not I believe you. If the network discovers that I see you, if they find out that we've been — oh, God, you know what I mean.”

“They won't find out that we slept together. No one knows that.”

“I can't see you again and you mustn't call me again.”

“Sally, do you know what you're saying?”

“Yes.”

“Don't you want to sit down with me and talk about this?”

“No, no, no, please!”

“All right. Don't get upset again. I promise never to call you again. And I won't see you. If that's what you want, all right. Whatever makes you happy.”

“It doesn't make me happy. It doesn't make me happy at all.” She was calm now. She had the situation in hand.

“I just hate to see it end this way,” Bruce said, and though he was shaken by her report on the blacklist, he was not at all certain, even while talking to her, that he hated to see it end this way or any other way.

“I mean, I don't want you to think me utterly heartless.”

“I wouldn't think that.”

“Of course you would,” she insisted. “But what am I to do, Bruce? That beastly list.”

It had gone on too long. “Sally,” he said firmly, “I understand. We had better not talk anymore.”

“Oh, Bruce” was the last thing she said.

He put down the phone and slumped into a chair and tried to sort out his thoughts, telling himself first that he was an utterly despicable and heartless cad not to shed a tear over Sally's departure and to be relieved in the bargain. Of course, Molly Maguire would pluck out the word
cad
and say something to the effect of nobody using that word since F. Scott Fitzgerald, and why the devil was he thinking of Molly Maguire when he should be brooding over his presence on a blacklist? And there was a ridiculous mystery. He had never written anything for television, and he had never written anything for radio. He was essentially, and above all, a newspaperman, so what was he doing on a network blacklist? Like everyone else, he had read about the blacklists, that strange new phenomenon that was being stitched into the fabric of what they had begun to call, in this postwar world, “the American way of life.” Somehow, before Pearl Harbor, no one referred to the American way of life. If you had a job, you were lucky; a lot of people did not have one, but no one talked up an American way of life.

But blacklists were for communists.

He asked himself, What in hell was he thinking? Sally wasn't lying to him. She was hardly so consummate an actress that she could manufacture that note of sheer terror. And as for Sally — well, she was as far from being a communist as one could get. And wasn't he? How did he land on the blacklist, and, more important, how did blacklists come into being? Where did a television network get either the impetus or the right to create a blacklist? The airwaves belonged to the people, and a television network operated by virtue of a franchise granted to it by the Federal government. Then either it was violating some very basic laws of the United States, or the names in the blacklist were fed to it, at least in part, by the very government that had granted its franchise. As for himself, what could he have said to the FBI agent, Carl Jorgenson, that would pin the communist label on him? Or were they so thorough in the United States Army Intelligence that the communist thing had been passed on to the FBI from Calcutta? That was not his experience of the army. Thorough — they could lose a division just from their slipshod and inefficient paperwork — but he couldn't imagine this as a lead to a blacklist. Or might it be his connection with Legerman? Or with Molly Maguire? But who knew about that? Or with Greenberg? Was Greenberg a communist? Or was he, Bruce Bacon, losing his mind? Why was he thinking of Greenberg? Because Greenberg was Jewish? Jews equal communists; was that it?

“This is crazy,” he said aloud, slowly. “This is totally insane, and it can't be happening to me.”

He was a reporter, wasn't he? A damn good reporter, and the thing to do now was to get himself down to the network and see the top man there, and say, “What the hell is this about a blacklist? About your network running a blacklist? Do you have a blacklist with the names of writers and actors —” Or was it actors as well as writers? Had Sally said actors, or was he thinking about Hollywood and the stories coming out of there about actors as well as writers being named as communists? All right, he'll put it to them as a writer: “I am a writer, and therefore I'm putting it to you flatly. My name is Bruce Bacon. If you were reading the
Tribune
two years ago, you saw my byline.”

“You are dreaming,” he said aloud.

He knew how it would go. Like this:

Blacklist?
Mr. Bacon,
we have no blacklist.

And what paper do you represent? The
Tribune?
Oh, you no longer work for the
Tribune.

And how did you come by this information, Mr. Bacon? You say from an employee of the network? And what is the name of this employee?

You do understand, Mr. Bacon, that if you should print this, we will not hesitate to take action, and this is very actionable.

It just wouldn't play, no matter how he innovated. In the first place, it would wash out Sally's job. He had picked her up at her office, spoken to people who worked with her, and they would make the connection. Whatever he felt about Sally, he could not destroy her career. That was impossible, particularly since he was pleased that she had ended their affair, relieving him of the guilts he would have lived with. And even if he were to write the story, why should he think that the
Tribune
would print it? They were an honest, decent newspaper, one of the best in the country, but he had seen no story in the
Tribune
about the blacklist.