The Pledge (14 page)

In effect, that was the way it was, and there wasn't one damn thing he could do about it. Or was there? He could begin to avoid anyone he suspected of being very left wing — or a communist, or a liberal? he asked himself. Where did it stop? He experienced a wave of self-disgust that the idea had even shaped itself in his mind.

Forget it, he told himself. It's over. It's done. You're on the goddamn list, and you'll just have to earn your daily bread without the networks, since if one of them has that list, you can be damn sure that they all have it.

Bruce put the incident away as something he had to live with, telling himself that at least he was not a communist and therefore had less to worry about than the more obvious victims of the witch hunt. But as the witch hunt became more apparent on the American landscape, his certainty was shaken. He had refrained from mentioning the incident with Sally to Molly — indeed, refrained now from mentioning Sally at all when he was with Molly; but having dinner with Molly, one evening a few weeks after the Sally debacle, he raised the question of her own security. “Aren't you afraid, or at least worried, the way this lunacy is spreading?”

Her answer seemed inappropriate: “Have you never wondered about my name, Bruce?”

“Your name? Why, and what has that got to do with it?”

“You're as poorly educated as the rest of your lot, Harvard and Yale and Williams notwithstanding. If you had a bit of knowledge of your own land, you'd know that after the Civil War there was a big movement of Irish immigrant lads into the hard-coal fields around Scranton, and the mine operators were squeezing the blood and life out of them, the men dying of the black lung and kids in the mines at age ten and twelve, never with a chance to be a kid or eat a decent bowl of food. So the Irish miners got together and organized a secret union, which they called the Molly Maguires, and they went on strike for a living wage. Well, the strike was broken, and twenty of the lads were hanged, which was the price of putting together a trade union in those days, but my father remembered them and took great pride in them, and he said to my mother, If the third should be a girl, call her Molly after the heroic miners. Well, Bruce, with that in my mother's milk, I'll be damned if I let the likes of John Rankin or Dickie Nixon scare me. What can they do to me? Ask me if I'm a communist?”

It was then that Bruce told her about the blacklist and about his final parting with Sally.

“Ah, Bruce,” she said, “you make such lousy choices. I love you. I hope I'm not a lousy choice.”

“You love me? I mean — in what way?”

She burst out laughing and stretched across the table and took his hand in hers. “How many ways are there? We'll talk about that later. I want to know about this list. You know, we all took it for granted that the networks and film companies had blacklists, but hard evidence — did she say there actually was a printed or a typewritten list that she saw with her own eyes?”

“She indicated as much. Oh, yes, I would have to conclude that. I mean not that she actually saw the list. Someone else could have seen and said to her, You know, Sally, that guy with the glasses who was with you the other day, you said he was Bacon, the correspondent, well his name is on a blacklist — or something of the sort.”

“Or something of the sort. But I'm inclined,” Molly said, “to believe that she actually saw the list, probably in her boss's office.”

“Probably. So what do I do? I'm new at the whipping boy act. I plead for life to be rational.”

“After what you saw in Europe?”

“Still I plead for life to be rational. Tell me why this is happening. What are they after? What are they thinking? What do they suspect me of? If this whole damn Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't have enough common sense to know that Dr. William Bacon's boy never even pulled a traffic ticket, then a lot of taxpayers' money is going right down the drain.”

“Eat your spaghetti,” Molly said. “Why do you always order spaghetti?”

“Because my mother never served it, or something of the sort. Don't try to evade my question. I rely on you. You're my only link to that foul conspiracy you call communism. Why don't you ever talk about it? Why don't you try to charm me into it? I read the
Communist Manifesto
by Mr. Marx. It's as pertinent to what is happening in America today as that idiot Tennyson's ‘Charge of the Light Brigade,' and don't think they don't have something in common.”

“I'd hardly compare Karl Marx to Alfred Tennyson.”

“They're both Victorian antiques. I tried
Das Kapital
and got fifty pages into it — bored to tears. Did you ever read it?”

“No.”

“Then why the hell are you a communist?”

“I tried to explain, but you're too dumb to get it. Let's stop worrying about me being a communist and get on to your case. Go ahead, eat.”

“You're the only woman I ever took to dinner who worried about how much I ate.”

“I went to bed with you,” Molly said. “Do you think I'd go to bed with you if I didn't love you? That's why I worry about how much you eat. It's the shanty Irish way of demonstrating love. Food and whiskey. You know, there's one thing you'll never really understand, Mr. Bacon, and that's how it is to be poor.”

“I've seen that in India.”

“That doesn't mean you understand it. Now let's get down to what's happening to you. If you want to understand lunacy, you have to think like a lunatic. There are three connections you have: first with Harold Legerman, second with Ashoka Majumdar — that was his name?”

“Yes.”

“And third with the famine in Bengal. Or maybe that should go together with Majumdar. Now let's examine it carefully. What happened to Majumdar?”

“I don't know. When I was leaving, Legerman indicated that the British had tortured him and had then beaten him to death, a not uncommon practice among our British cousins in India. They certainly don't like the Congress people, and they have a maniacal hatred for the communists.”

“OK. Let's go from there.”

“Do you want dessert and coffee?” he asked her.

“You don't take it seriously, do you?” Molly said. “You just can't believe that this could happen to the all-American boy? In Jack Armstrong's world, there is apple pie, mother, and absolute justice.”

“Why the hell are you always sticking a knife into me and twisting it? One moment you tell me you love me —”

“Good! Get angry! And listen to me, damn you. You're in the middle of something, and you can't believe it's happening to you. If they tortured Majumdar and killed him — why? It's not illegal to be a communist in Calcutta, is it?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Jesus be praised, you sure as hell don't know very much. You never walked the dark side of the street. Well, that's the way you are, and someday you'll grow up.”

“If we're going to talk, talk,” Bruce said angrily. “Don't lecture me on what a horse's ass I am, and I'm damned tired of being told I don't have minimal street smarts. I don't! Period.”

She lifted his hand to her lips and whispered, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

“You're forgiven.”

“It's too easy. I love you, Bacon. Now please listen to me. They knew that you were after the famine story. They knew that you associated with Majumdar. Put it together. They knew that Majumdar had something on the famine and who made it.”

“Majumdar had nothing. If he had anything, he would have given it to me. I think he trusted me. He knew I was after the story, and he knew how big the story was.”

“It doesn't matter,” Molly insisted. “Try to think the way they think. They pick up Majumdar. They tell him, very nicely, You have something we want. Oh, no, says Majumdar. I have nothing. Then they beat him. Then they beat him some more. But from what you say, this Majumdar is a stubborn critter and they keep beating him and finally he turns up dead. Tell me something, did you try writing to Majumdar?”

A chill went through Bruce's body, a chill of cold, primitive fear. Until now, he could explain away everything unusual that had happened to him. He was living in a strange, new world, a place that the United States of America had never been before. It was a place of fear and suspicion and cheap betrayal, and the key word, the word that was bringing people to their knees, was
communism.
But he had been apart from all this; he had no record of being involved with the Communist Party. When others were accused and he read about it in the newspapers, he half agreed with the accusations. He had no way of knowing. He had even whispered to himself at times, This is not Russia and this is not India. This is the U.S.A., and if they're not tools of the Russians, why are they what they are? Why not Democrats, if they were liberals? It was still the party of Roosevelt — or was it? And here was himself, Bruce Bacon, sitting opposite a red as red as red could be, a tall, strapping, handsome Irishwoman, who was exactly that thing and made no effort to conceal it.

“Bruce, did you hear me?” she asked. “Did you write to Majumdar?”

“Yes,” very weakly.

“Bruce, it's not the end of the world. Let's talk about it.”

“I wrote to him twice,” Bruce admitted. “Both times at the offices of his paper,
Prasarah.
That means truth or freedom or such, in Sanskrit. Molly, what the devil has happened to me? When I was there in India, I felt that communists were good and even noble people, and now I'm back here —”

“And you're wondering why you ever got mixed up with me. But you're going too quickly, Bruce. It's not the end of the world. The Limeys may be playing footsie with our new set of nuts, who call themselves the Central Intelligence Agency, or it may be that it's your connection with Hal Legerman or maybe with me.”

“Not you. No, I won't accept that. Anyway, no one knows. It's always just the two of us.”

“I know,” Molly said, “but that's no good either. I can assure you that the FBI knows. The Party is lousy with them. Sometimes I feel that the whole damned Bureau has joined the Party. We have nothing to hide, and I have to step into your world and you have to step into mine. Or else — we end this.”

“No, we don't end it,” Bruce said. “Not now, not ever.”

That night, he clutched her in his arms as if she were the only reality in a world of senseless flux.

Then he had a spell of frustration and destruction, which he told himself had nothing to do with his name on that ridiculous network list. For three weeks, he was satisfied with nothing he wrote. He filled his wastepaper basket with torn, crumpled manuscript paper. When he opened the weekly book sections of the
New York Times
and the
New York Tribune
, he burned with envy of and resentment against this world of people who wrote books so easily and who understood war and peace and despair and hope and murder and innocence as if it was all simply an extended
abc
of an adult-extended childhood. For himself, he understood less and less. Williams College had given him no leads into the world that was and is. Molly had not pushed beyond the single question: Had he written to Majumdar? She didn't have to call his attention to the fact that he lived in a demented world where the act of writing to the gentle and compassionate Majumdar might cause his own death; his learning on that score was instantaneous.

It was not that communism lured him; it exhibited a kind of total immersion that was no more pleasant or enticing to him than the total immersion of the born-again Southern Baptist, yet recalling the four communists he had met in his lifetime — Chatterjee, Majumdar, Legerman, and Molly Maguire — he had to admit that if one looked upon the world as a place of good and bad people — as most human beings did look upon it — he would have to place those four among the good. He could not accept their ideology. He could not believe in a communist brotherhood of man any more than he could accept the notion of a Christian brotherhood of man. Someone who looks into an open burial pit in a Nazi death camp and sees a thousand bodies of men, women, and children piled like cord wood, stiff in death, is not too likely to preach brotherhood or believe in it — or is he? Or is Bruce Bacon? And what in God's name does Bruce Bacon believe in? And why did he have to know? Why couldn't he go ahead and write the damn book as any writer writes a book?

He put a page in his typewriter and typed, slowly, a totally new beginning for his book: “There is no good war, there is no just war, there is no righteous war. We, the human race, have been flimflammed, and what follows is the story of one man's witness to the flimflam.”

He called Molly at her office at the paper. She had warned him that, in all probability, the telephones at the
Daily Worker
were tapped, but Bruce's position was that if he gave in to this mindless fear of FBI-tapped telephones, a fear that was beginning to permeate New York, he would give up and move to Tasmania or some such place. Anyway, he didn't give a damn, convinced that nothing he might say had much value to anyone anywhere. “I must see you tonight,” he told her. “Have dinner with me, please.”

“I'm working too late for dinner. How about my apartment, say nine o'clock?”

“Will you have eaten?”

“I'll grab a sandwich.”

“I'll bring Chinese,” Bruce said. He loved Chinese food, the assortment of wonderful dishes that were the forbidden fruit of his childhood. They were still wonderful. Molly laughed at his delight in such things. “You're like a kid,” she told him. “Everything new is wonderful.”

“Or terrible.”

Tonight, he arrived at her place about fifteen minutes before she did. They had exchanged keys as an alternative to living together. They never spoke of marriage, and when in his fantasy he asked her to move in and live with him, he always thought better of it. Simply on the basis of not deliberately putting his foot in a bear trap. You couldn't be free and aloof from the Communist Party if you lived with someone who was blatantly a member of the Party. He added to this the fact that his relationship with Molly Maguire was totally different from any of his previous affairs or encounters. There was no flirtation, no maybe or perhaps, no playing of mating games; they simply accepted each other. “You're what I want,” she had explained once. “A little askew here and there, but basically right.” He felt the same way, and tonight as he emptied the containers into dishes, putting them in the oven set at Warm, he thought of how different it had been with Sally and Prudence.