The Pledge (33 page)

“Then I might as well get on with it and do the time, and get it out of my life.”

“I want you to think about it, at least overnight. Talk it over with Molly. I'll get us enough extra days to give you the time to wind up your affairs.”

“And then?”

“We go down to Washington, and you surrender yourself formally …” She hesitated. “Well — that's it. You're in jail.”

“Do I get the bail money back?” He was speaking slowly, carefully. “I know I get it back. But when?”

“After you surrender — a day or two. Don't worry about it, Bruce. I'll take care of it and deposit it wherever you say.”

“I want you to give it to Molly. She's waiting tables again, and I know how she hates it. The five thousand dollars will take her through the year. Isn't there any way, Sylvia, you can help her find a decent job?”

“I wish I could. Bruce, you don't go from the
Daily Worker
into a decent job.”

“And I want you to bill me today — for everything. I have enough money to take care of that.”

“Don't worry about the bill. I'll get to it.”

“When? When I'm in jail?”

“I'll get to it. There's no hurry. I'm not starving, and you can still sign a check in jail.”

“And one more thing I'm going to ask of you: Can you get me eight days?”

“I think so.”

Bruce looked at her, the small, regular features, the bright blue eyes, and dark brown hair. Birdlike, people might say, but when she spoke or smiled or wept, something happened that lit up her face and made it quite wonderful.

“I owe you so much,” Bruce said to her. “I don't know how to repay you, and I certainly can't afford to pay you what should be paid for what you've done. More than a lawyer — you've been a fine, dear friend. God bless you.”

“On the other hand,” she said, in control now, “I've been with you and Molly all these long months. That's payment in kind.”

Molly was in control of herself when they met for dinner that same evening. She worked breakfast and lunch, never the evening hours, which would have kept them apart too much. Through the meal, she talked little. She was turned inward. She listened as Bruce reported on his meeting with Sylvia. When he had finished, she was silent for a while. The dinner ended. The coffee came. It was a small, inexpensive Italian restaurant, and the hour was late. Only one other table was occupied. Bruce ordered brandy, and when it came he poured his into his coffee. Molly looked at him inquiringly.

“I did it that way in North Africa. It's not great. I just wanted to remember the taste.”

She did the same thing. “I'll remember too.”

“You are a damn strange woman.”

“I think you said that a couple of times. Maybe I'm not so strange. Maybe you're strange.” She tasted the coffee and made a face. “That's what you want to remember?”

“More or less.”

“However,” Molly said, bringing it out of nowhere, “I don't give up. I don't give up and I don't accept anything the way it is. You're going to jail in a few days, and you're going to be there for a year, and the way the Feds make the rules, only your wife or father or mother or your lawyer can visit you, and I'm none of them, and if you want to walk out of here and not see me for twelve months, that's one thing; and that's all right, and I can take it and go on living, but not as your girl. On the other hand, if you love me, I want to marry you, now, before you go into the slammer.”

“Molly — darling, we only have seven or eight days at the most.”

“We can set the world on fire in a week. We can get our Was-sermans in the morning, get married at City Hall, get the sleeper to Boston, and be married by a priest that day. The priest is for Mom. Otherwise, she'd die, and I can't take away from her the one sustaining thing she has. If you love me?”

“I love you. Let's hang on to that and tell me what I do about Dr. Bacon and his wife.”

She was eager and alive now. “Don't bedevil them with it. Write to them after you're in jail. Tell them when you come out we'll have a great wonderful party, and I'll marry you again. I'll marry you as many times as you want, but one thing I will not do is weep in my pillow for twelve endless months.”

“And what priest will marry us in Boston, with you a Catholic and me a Protestant?”

“That is no problem — absolutely no problem. Bernadette has a Jesuit, Paul O'Hara, who's madly in love with her and pleads with her to stop being a nun so he can stop being a Jesuit and marry her, and he'd marry a Hindu to a Muslim if Bernadette asked him to.”

“What are you telling me? That these shenanigans go on in the Catholic Church, a priest marrying a nun?”

“Hold on, hold on, and keep it soft, because this is an Irish kind of thing and we're in an Italian restaurant and the Italians might take a dim view of our talk and toss us out on our respective ears. Who said a priest marries a nun? If she left her calling, she would not be a nun, and if he left his calling he would no longer be a priest. It happens, and sooner or later it will happen with Bernadette, but it has to wait because my poor mother would agonize too much. And furthermore, if we were not married in the church, I couldn't sleep with you without agonizing myself.”

“But you've been sleeping with me for a couple of years. You are crazy — absolutely crazy.”

“My love, we weren't married.”

“God help me.”

“Oh, He will, He will,” Molly pleaded. “And now marry me — please.”

“Sure,” Bruce said. “No sweat. First thing tomorrow. And now let's pay the check and get out of here, and have one more night in bed without guilt.”

“Ah, you're a wonderful, fine, Christian broth of a lad.”

“Absolutely. And you're the strangest damn communist I ever heard of. I'm going to Boston tomorrow night to be married a second time to a Catholic lady by a priest who is in love with a nun, and I'm doing all this of my own free will a few days before I am going to be put away in the slammer for twelve long months. What did I miss? Yes, married to a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. God help me.”

“All right,” Molly said, “I'll explain once more, and listen carefully. First thing, we never mention your first marriage. Mom doesn't know about it, none of my family do. We don't lie, we just leave it off-stage, so to speak. About my first marriage, my husband was Jewish, and as I told you, the church doesn't recognize it. So in a Catholic sense, I never was married. This is not something I like. It belongs in the Middle Ages, but it is a fact, and the marriage was performed by a justice of the peace. Now there are different ways we can go. For one thing, the priest can simply witness an exchange of vows for the State of Massachusetts, but I don't think Paul will go that way. He might insist that no mass is offered or he might want it outside the rail, but I don't see any reason why. I think he'll make it very ordinary.”

“And you're not worried about —”

Molly smiled. “What? Sin?”

“All right. You're a Catholic. Sin.”

“Oh, Bruce — can't you understand? In my book, there's only one sin, to cause pain to another. I don't believe in any heaven or hell except what men make right here on earth, and now let's finish with this kind of talk and go home to bed.”

The wedding in Boston was very simple, in the small chapel of a big church, with only Molly's mother and her two sisters and brother-in-law present, and Father O'Hara diplomatically avoiding questions and pitfalls. Bruce was amazed at how easily and undisturbedly the Maguires accepted the situation, as if life was a street where the turnings could not be anticipated and should not be cursed. On his part, Bruce alternated between moments of love and pleasure and moments of sheer panic. He had lived until now a life that was filled with futures; and now he had stepped into a world without any real or predictable future. He had been inaugurated into membership in the world of the poor and powerless, where a couple of stiff whiskies eased both pain and promise. He was very conscious of Molly watching him constantly, aware of every reaction on his part — so as to speak like a mental angel trying to anticipate and ease his hurt.

Father O'Hara, a lean, ascetic-looking man, shook Bruce's hand warmly and told him that he had been following the case. “A bitter, awful injustice,” he said, and Bruce, on the other hand, replied that he hoped no harm would come to O'Hara.

“What harm?” O'Hara answered. “I'm revising some priorities, but doing no wrong. You married a fine, strong woman, and you're a proper man for her. Just let things work their way out.”

One way with the bus was enough. They returned to Joe Car-lino's house, where Mary had set out a huge repast, and Molly put her foot down and said, “The hell with saving. We'll take the sleeper back and have at least that much of a wedding night.”

Molly stayed sober, with the instinct that someone had to stay sober and get Bruce onto the train when the time came, and Bruce and Father O'Hara got slowly and warmly drunk, opening their hearts to each other. Each lived with the guilts of an insane world and listened to mankind's pain. “Each of us are cursed with it,” O'Hara said after an hour or so of talking and drinking. “You're a blood brother, Bacon, and you'd make a good priest and so would I if we could find us a church without sin. But as it is, we'll do the best we can and carry some poor, bleeding little church with us, which is a drunken, Irish way of blessing our uneasy burden. Perhaps the Irish drink because they have such a profound love for the music of words, and with liquor the words come easily. There's a profound truth in the fact that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and God was the Word, but I'm too besotted to see more than a tiny sparkle of light behind it. When you get out of jail, hale and healthy, God willing, we'll see something of each other.”

There were some friends of Joe and Mary, and an old lady who had come over to America in the same steerage as Mrs. Maguire, and the four Carlino kids, and it all made for a packed room and a great deal of kissing and hugging and tears before Molly got a barely ambulatory Bruce into a cab and down to the station and into a bedroom on the New York sleeper.

“A sleeper,” he said. “Oh, but you've gone stylish, Molly Maguire.”

“I'm Molly Bacon now. Please to remember.”

He was not the kind of drunk who loses the sense of things, and when Molly showed him a cash gift of five hundred dollars that her mother had given her, he shook his head unhappily and insisted that the money be returned. “How can you accept it? She's so poor.”

“She's not poorer for this five hundred dollars. Oh, Jesus, my love, you don't understand things.”

“I try.”

“I know you try, I know that. Let's go to bed.”

The last evening with his parents was more difficult. To be married and to keep it from them was, in the end, absolutely inconceivable; but before going to have dinner with them, the night before he left for Washington and prison, he went to his father's office in the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center up on Washington Heights for a private talk. He felt it was best to be alone here, and Molly felt it best that she avoid the dinner as well. He argued against her decision, but she would not be moved.

“You simply don't understand them. They're the most decent, open-minded people you can imagine.”

“I'm filled with guilts,” Molly protested. “I can't be easy with them. They make me feel that I've robbed them.”

“But that's your impression. You're making it out of the whole cloth and it has no validity.”

“Oh, but it has.”

“I want you to come.”

Still she would not come, and he had to accept that. His father found it harder to accept. Bruce was waiting in his father's office in the hospital when Dr. Bacon walked in, still wearing his green gown. He took it off, trying hard to smile, telling Bruce that he had been three hours in the operating room, tossing the gown aside, and going to his desk for a cigar. “I'm getting too old for it,” he told Bruce, “sixty-seven next spring, the legs go, the knees hurt — too old,” trying to avoid a four-letter word called
jail
, trying to pretend that a year out of his son's life was not also a year out of his life. He lit the cigar, his hand shaking just a trifle but not so little that Bruce didn't notice it. “I should give up these damned things. That's what I tell my patients.” In disgust, he threw the lit cigar into the ashtray on his desk. “How are you, kid?” he asked gently, blinking and trying to control tears. He used to call him kid before the war.

“I think I'm pretty good, Dad — all things considered.”

“Yeah. Scared?”

“A little. What was it Tolstoy said — that a writer, above all else, should experience war and prison.”

“That helps?” the doctor asked, smiling.

“A little.”

The doctor took a bottle out of a drawer in his desk. “Golden Wedding, sweet as sugar. I never got a taste for Scotch.” He poured two shot glasses, and passed one to his son. “Here's to you, Bruce Nathaniel!”

Sweet or not, the whiskey burned like fire. “Water?” his father asked.

“No — no, I'm all right. You know, Dad, if I could say I did something to earn this jail sentence, I mean if I were one of the communists they're putting away, I could say I'm giving a year of my life for my beliefs, for principles that are as important as freedom. What makes me empty is that I am not one of them. I am being sent away because somewhere along the line I was taught that you don't inform on others.”

“That's a pretty big principle.”

“Maybe, maybe. That's what Molly said. Tell me truthfully, Dad, what do you think of her?”

“I like her. You know that. She's a beautiful woman, decent, open. Hell, how much do any of us know about another?”