The Pledge (26 page)

“Oh, no!” Molly cried. “I don't believe you.”

“I tell you only what Majumdar told me. Well, this police spy, and I can't remember his name — well, he asked Majumdar to talk to some friends of his who were also police spies, and the upshot of it was that Majumdar organized them into the police spy trade union.”

“You invented the whole thing.”

“No. And I don't think Majumdar did.”

“And what happened to the police spy? Did Majumdar tell you that? Are you going to tell me that he became a powerful trade union leader in India?”

“Hardly. The British arrested him, according to Majumdar. They broke his legs and his arms. He can't walk or crawl. He pulls himself along on his belly.”

“What a horrible end, poor devil. It doesn't sound like something that happened, Bruce. It sounds like a folk story of long, long ago.”

“It is long, long ago, and India is free now, and who remembers, Molly? That's what I can't comprehend about this whole radical thing. Who knows, who remembers? You shout into the darkness. You die to make a labor union, to free a black man in the South. Who knows? Who cares? Who remembers? You walk on a picket line because some poor bastards are out on strike, and a cop fractures your skull with his club and kills you. Who cares? Would the
Times
offer you a free inch on the obit page? Who would remember that Molly Maguire gave her life to raise the wages of some worker ten cents an hour? Who would shed a tear?”

“You would, dear Bruce.”

“Come on, Molly. Try to answer me. I love you. I want to know why you are what you are.”

“And you think I know?” She put her fingers to her lips and then touched Bruce's hand. “Father Cogan — he's a Paulist priest in Brookline — he says that some of us are God's laughter and some of us are God's tears.”

“That's a smart apple, your Father Cogan, but the fact remains that if there is a God, He's bequeathed this beautiful earth of His to a pack of unmitigated scoundrels and murderous bastards, and that goes for every government on the planet, including ours and including your Soviet Union —”

“Not mine, Bruce!”

“— and if one of His commandments is
Thou shall not kill
, it has to be the most abused instruction in history. And damn it, what kind of a Catholic are you?”

“You're beating up on me,” Molly said primly, “and I'm not going to get angry. I'm a very good Catholic — that is, the part of me that believes in God. That's Molly Maguire at four o'clock in the morning. In daylight, I'm a much more independent thinker. You see, I had God with me when I was a little girl, and then one day, He went out to lunch or Mexico or some such place and never came back. Jesus is much more reliable, because you can hang Him up over your bed, and I can understand Him because I like Jews. The first thing Mom said when I told her I was bringing you home was, Is he Jewish? I asked her when she ever knew a Jew whose name was Bacon, and she said that she knew a rabbi in Ireland whose name was Moriarity, but she probably made that up. She's very sharp and she makes up things like that.”

It was late afternoon when they drove up to the small white house in Brookline. The four Carlino children, Joe Jr., nine, Peter, seven, Lucy, five, and Agnes, a very small three, were lined up in front of the house, a sort of greeting committee, but silent, a presence without a voice. They all had more or less the same red hair. “The perseverance of a stout gene,” Molly said. Then Molly's mother, sisters, and brother-in-law came out of the house, and there was a lot of hugging and kissing, and the silent children dissolved in laughter. Molly's mother, also Mary by name, six inches shorter than her daughters, a round, white-haired cheerful woman, did not wait for introductions but threw her arms around Bruce and went up on her toes to kiss him. “He's a fine man,” she decided in immediate judgment. The others were introduced more formally: Mary, the middle sister, very much like Molly but older and work-tired and thinner; her husband, Joe Carlino, slender, good-looking, too good-looking, Bruce thought, for an aging, tired wife and four kids; and last, retiring, waiting, her smile gentle and tentative, Bernadette, in her gray nun's habit.

They were all kind and warm. Evidently, through the months since she met Bruce, Molly had kept them up to date on the man as well as the progress of the love affair. It was a kind of family gathering that Bruce had not experienced before, outgoing, sometimes everyone talking at the same time, a bottle of champagne opened almost on their arrival, toasts made seriously yet lovingly beyond anything Bruce had encountered. They were all on best behavior, and Bruce in turn fought with himself not to be embarrassed. Much of his wartime stuff had been syndicated in Boston, in the
Boston Herald
, and whether they had read the
Herald
or not, they all gave voice to remembering and liking what he had written. Except Bernadette, who hardly spoke at all. He noticed her greeting Molly, a long, clutching embrace, and later Molly whispered to him, “She prays for me constantly, poor dear.” There was a large crucifix in the living room, a smaller one in the dining room, an apparent religiosity that at first struck him as morbid, and that he realized, as the evening went on, was so integral as to be a thing in passing. Coming from a family that relegated religion to Christmas dinner and Easter in church, he found it strange but hardly oppressive. Molly's mother knew about his appearance before the Un-American Committee, since she read the
Daily Worker
Molly sent her, and at the dinner table she argued the case against the uneasy opposition of Joe Carlino, who was a formal anti-communist, a matter-of-course thing; but also unwilling to offend their guest. His attitude was also modified by Mrs. Maguire, who was a staunch supporter of her daughter and a pillar of the church. Bernadette took no part in the discussion, sitting in silence, for the most part. When she spoke, it was to mention a project she was working on to establish a day care center for Negro children.

Carlino said to Bruce, “You see, to me that's communism.”

“Ah, so my Bernadette's a communist too,” Molly's mother said.

“I mean, that's what communism should be.”

“He'll write a book about it,” Mary said.

The table groaned with food, a twelve-pound turkey roasted to golden brown, a bowl of roast potatoes, salad, string beans, turnips, a Jell-O mold of fruit — “We didn't know if you'd like Italian food,” Mary said, “so we made it strictly American.”

Bruce forbore from informing her that he loved Italian food.

And at a point in the dinner, Bernadette said gently, “Some say Jesus was a communist, don't they?”

“Tim Murphy,” Mrs. Maguire said, “worked in the mines in Pennsylvania until his lungs gave out, and then he came back here to Boston to die where his people were, and he told me that one day in the mines, he saw Jesus standing in front of him, plain as day, and he called to the Protestant lads who were working with him, and not a thing could they see — meaning no offense to you, of course, Bruce, but it was his faith that took hold of him, and as he told me, Jesus wore the work clothes of a miner and was no different even to the lamp on His head, except that it gave out light like a halo.”

“And that I'll believe when pigs have wings,” Carlino said, to which his wife responded, “You got to have a brain to believe.”

Driving back to New York late that evening, Molly asked him what he thought of her family.

“I think your mother is a very remarkable woman,” he said. “I begin to see you more clearly.”

“Because of my mother?”

“How old is she?”

“Sixty.”

“She's very wise.”

“I think so,” Molly agreed. “Sometimes, when I compare women like my mother and my sisters to the run of your sex, I get very discouraged.”

“I can well imagine.”

“You are in a cheerful mood,” Molly said.

“I think I know you better than I knew you before, and that's important. I never knew a devil of a lot about the Irish. I read Farrell's Studs Lonigan books, and they put me off, making out the lot of you to be a race of barbarians —”

“Sure and we are,” Molly said, “but not Farrell's barbarians. The worm that crawls through Farrell's books comes out of him, not our people, or maybe he knows a race of Irish I never met with. You know what my mother once said to me? She was fifty-one years old and long a widow, and never in her life had she bought a book or had the money to spend for one. But a year past fifty, she said to herself, I will not live my life without buying a book, and she went into a bookstore and bought a copy of
Destiny Bay
by Byrne, and read every word of it, even though it disappointed her by being about the north of Ireland and not the south. She had never even set foot in my own church of God, the Boston Public Library, but after that, Mary and I would find her books. Did you like the kids?”

“The kids are great.”

“You like the way they look? You're not as dark as Joe, but our kids will probably look the same. I'm gonna have a lot of kids, you might as well know.”

“I think I can live with it.”

“I'm glad that's over with.”

“Why?” Bruce wondered.

“I was a little afraid. You probably don't think of yourself and your folks as a part of the upper classes.”

“I certainly don't.”

“Well,” said Molly, “it depends on where you're coming from and where you're going.”

Then she fell asleep, curled up against him, while he drove the rest of the way into New York, well occupied in trying to work out where he was coming from and where he was going.

A week later, he received a call from Douglas Williams at the publishing house of Harley-Cummings. He had only spoken to Williams on the telephone; meeting him, Bruce found to his pleasure an open-faced young man of about his own age, a long, narrow head, sandy hair, and gold-rimmed glasses. Williams shook his hand eagerly. “What a hell of a wonderful book you've written! I couldn't put it down, and finally I stayed up half the night to finish it. The chapters about General Patton and General Clark are the most exciting and revealing stuff I've read in years — and I have such a deep sense of the truth. You are a brave and damned eloquent man, Mr. Bacon. You have put this war and all war in a new perspective, and if we have a volcano here, then heaven bless volcanoes. This is the kind of thing that happens to an editor once or twice in a lifetime, if he's lucky, and I'm enjoying it.”

Bruce stood transfixed.

“Sit down, please. Has no one else told you that? It seems so lucky and unlikely, you coming in off the street, no literary agent — and you are a well-known writer, if I may say so. Surely someone else said what I'm saying.”

“The woman I'm going to marry,” Bruce said. “You can't believe anyone who loves you when it comes to literary criticism. Let me get my breath.”

“Well, there it is. But mine is not the last word. The chapter about India is shocking, to put it mildly, and God only knows what will happen when your book sees the light. But it's going to sell like crazy, and that is the bottom line, isn't it?”

“What do you mean when you say yours is not the last word?”

“It has to go to the board. That means three more readings, and perhaps a World War Two expert in the bargain. But don't let that worry you. There isn't a book on our list that I'm as certain about as this one.”

He wondered, at that moment, whether he should reveal to Williams the history of the manuscript at Scandia Press; but since the question had not been asked of him directly, he decided not to bring up the matter.

When he told Molly of his interview with Williams”, she decided it was the occasion for a proper celebration, and that he would be her guest at Dinty Moore's. They both dressed for the night, Bruce in his single operative gray flannel suit and Molly in her kelly green skirt, and they ordered the famous Dinty Moore gefilte fish, followed by the famous Dinty Moore corned beef and cabbage. They started with martinis, drank two beers each through dinner, and then put it to rest with doubles of Irish Cream. They were filled with good food, comfortable, just a bit glazed, and in love with each other. After dinner, they went to Roseland and danced. It was Bruce's first time at Roseland.

“Let's get married tonight,” he said to Molly.

“You've asked me that before. You can't do it in one night. You got to have Wassermans and a license, and you got to have someone to marry you. Bless you, Bacon, which mother's heart do we break?”

“You're kidding,” Bruce said, stopping in the middle of the floor. “You mean she wants the real thing, a priest and all that?”

“That's what she wants.”

“She can't afford it.”

“The church is pretty cheap. It's not a Jewish or Italian wedding. We don't have to feed anyone.”

They were dancing again. “I know,” he said. “You reserve that for the wake.”

“Don't be Wasp-nasty.”

“All right. I ignore the insult, but let's be practical. You're divorced, I'm divorced. So how on earth can we be married in a Catholic church?”

“Poor dear Bruce. The church is no monster, and my faith is that God understands. About my first husband — well, he was Jewish, and the church, in a fine piece of arrogance, will not recognize a marriage to a Jew. As for your marriage, we will never mention it, and what no one knows hurts no one.”

“You'd do that?”

“Why not? My God understands such things. In fact, I turn to Mary, who is very wise in the devious things a woman must do to live in a world where men make the rules, and what have any of these rules got to do with the fact that we love each other? Now will you put the problem away? I will manage it, and I'll say no more in the way of needles under your skin.”