The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (2 page)

“But he didn’t go far enough.”

“What was it like growing up in Mexico?” Edna asked, trying to steer her away from controversy.

Very
traditional,” Millie replied tiredly. “

Bella stared out the window tolerating Paul’s precious coquette. As coffee and dessert were served, Edna asked a casual question about the suffrage movement and whether Millie thought a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote could actually get passed. It compelled Paul’s date to launch into one of her signature arguments for women’s rights.

“Tell me, dear,” Bella finally said, “what exactly is it your parents do?”

“My father is the head of a mining company down in Mexico.”

“And do you think he exploits any workers there?”

“My own guilt doesn’t excuse anyone else’s,” Millie replied.

“Young lady, I don’t know who taught you the fine art of hypocrisy, but—”

“It’s my life mission to give restitution. What’s your excuse?”

“You can’t talk to my mother like that!” Mr. Robert interjected, rising to his feet.

Paul had to bite his lip to keep himself from laughing. After an awkward silence, his father Emanuel made a comment about the weather.

When Millie left early the next day for the train back to Philly, Paul’s mother called him into her study and explained that she didn’t want him seeing “Señorita Obnox-chez” ever again.

“I love her,” he said simply.

“How can any man love such a sanctimonious and vain person?”

“I can ask the same of Dad,” he snorted back.

“Paul, I made an effort to be nice to her and only got scorn in return.”

As Paul stormed out of the room, he bumped right into the maid, Maria, nearly knocking her down.

“Pardon me,” he said, but the words sounded strange, like they were muffled behind some invisible wall. Hard as he tried to reach out, he couldn’t.

“Paul, are you okay?” Her face seemed to ripple as she spoke.

“I’ll be fine,” he muttered, and left.

4

T
hough his younger sister Edna liked Millicent, neither his mother nor brother had anything nice to say about her. On a visit home toward the end of the year, Mr. Robert inquired whether Paul was still seeing “that opinionated young lady.”

“Sure I am, and I plan to see her as much as I can.”

“You’re certain you’re not just using her to anger Mom?”

“Mom is such a stick in the mud. Everything angers her.”

“I know she can be pretty bullheaded, but she is our mother.”

“We’re her children, not her whipping boys.”

Mr. Robert nodded silently.

That fall, to his mother’s great joy, Mr. Robert began attending Yale. Soon the two brothers fell out of touch.

One day the next spring, Paul, as president of the Democratic Reform Club, was invited to a tea hosted by the dean of Student Affairs. There he was introduced to the tall, dapper Woodrow Wilson, who was now serving as governor of New Jersey. He had come earlier that day to meet the constituents of Princeton, where he had formerly presided. Paul and a few lucky others had the opportunity to chat with the bespectacled politician for nearly twenty uninterrupted minutes.

“Regarding workers,” Paul asked, “what exactly would you do to alleviate their hardships if you occupied the Oval Office?”

“Well, I’m not running for president, but if I was, I’d probably draw up a bill of rights for the working man.”

When Paul called to tell his sister that he had met his hero Wilson—who incidentally supported the idea of a Jewish nation—she interrupted to say that Robert, who had been captain of the Yale swimming team, was in the middle of a huge imbroglio with the head of the university’s sports funding.

“What happened?”

“He tried to get more money for the swimming team and ended up resigning.”

“Good for him,” Paul said, happy to hear that his brother was finally standing up for himself. He wanted to congratulate Robert for confronting the administration, but still felt uncomfortable about how they had left things regarding Millie and Mom.

On the morning of the summer solstice, Millie called him in tears. She’d just heard that President Díaz had formally declared that he was running for a seventh term—he had lied!

“Well, I’m sure he’ll be defeated,” Paul said, not knowing how else to respond.

“No, he won’t,” she retorted. “People are afraid to run against him.” Millie told him that a prominent member of a respected Mexican family, Francisco Madero, had announced that he was going to oppose Díaz in the election, but Díaz had Madero thrown in jail, effectively destroying the hopes for a democratic nation that so many had spent years patiently waiting for.

Over the next month, her like-minded compatriots at different universities joined together and formed an emergency organization, Latin American Students and Teachers Still Concerned about Mexico—LAST SCaM.

Now, every time Paul visited Millie in Philadelphia, she talked obsessively about how Díaz was taking some new and diabolical action to destroy Mexican civil liberties: abolishing freedom of the press, then undoing all the land reforms that had been put in place before him. American slaves and Russian serfs had been set free, yet Mexican peasants were still captive.

Paul spent much of the summer helping Millie, who along with her committee launched a letter-writing campaign to raise money for the cause of those oppressed in Mexico. When she heard that Francisco Madero had escaped his captors, she called Paul and declared, “You know what this means? Porfirio’s days are numbered!”

“Well, there’s still the small matter of getting him out of office.”

“Díaz has everything but the people. And the people
are
everything!” she countered. Even Paul found this a little hokey, but he didn’t want to discourage her optimism.

One morning in early September, a week after he had started a new semester at Princeton, Paul got called to the pay phone in the noisy hallway. Pressing the earpiece against his temple, he heard Millie shouting, “It’s about to commence! People are racing down to Mexico. The revolution’s starting!”

“That’s great!”

“I’m heading down there too. I’m going with four other women and six men from the committee.”

“Sweetheart, you don’t want to get killed. Why don’t you think this over some more?”

“They can’t kill all of us. Mexico is about to go into the fight of its life!” she shouted. “These blackguards are trying to steal the country from my people. There’s no way I’m just going to sit here quietly while this is happening. I’m leaving tonight!”

He told her that she couldn’t go without seeing him one last time.

“We’re all boarding a train at 9:35 this evening,” she said. “If you want to come, you better head over here now.”

The commuter train from Princeton to Philly left six minutes past every hour and took roughly ninety minutes. He barely made the next train.

He arrived in Philadelphia at 8 p.m., dashed several blocks to the University of Pennsylvania, and headed across the sprawling campus. Men were not allowed up inside the women’s dorm, so, trying to catch his breath, he called from the reception desk downstairs. When Millie came down, she led him into a dark alcove; once alone, she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate kiss.

“Please don’t do this,” he pleaded.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she whispered. “But this is my own … escape.” It was as though she were drunk with the possibility of a new life awaiting her.

“Whatever does that mean?”

“It means when I’m visiting you at Princeton or even when I’m here at the campus, everyone looks at me as this proud, smart, annoying girl, but that’s only because I’ve done such a great job hiding my true self behind this pale face.”

“But what does that have to do with you now?”

“I was raised in Mexico City. I didn’t know a word of English until I was six. Heck, my mother’s father fought against the gringos when this country stole the northern half of our land more than fifty years ago.”

“Look, fifty years ago my family were Jews living in Prussia,” Paul replied.

“All I’m saying is that I’m stuck outside my country, trapped in a petticoat and a social strata. Your mother was right when she said I was living on my father’s blood money. And this is my chance to make amends.”

She’s going to get herself killed,
Paul thought, and kissed her hard on the lips.

“Unacceptable! Unacceptable!” one of the university matrons shouted over to them, clapping her hands loudly.

“I still have to pack my bags,” Millie said. She kissed him again and dashed back upstairs.

Paul paced tensely in the reception area. Some from Millie’s committee had already come down with their steamer trunks and suitcases. A taxi sedan had arrived and was waiting out front. Once they all squeezed in with their luggage, there was no room left, so Paul stood on the running board, hanging on the side. Despite the wind as they drove, he kept shouting to Millie through the window, “Please reconsider! This is a dangerous idea!!”

They finally arrived at the huge marble-columned station where redcaps with large wooden hand trucks grabbed their trunks and heavy leather bags. They met up with others who had come from various points nearby. After exchanging greetings they all headed to the gated ticket windows. Paul waited until he was alone with Millie, then dropped to one knee and said, “Marry me!”

“What?!”

“Be my wife!”

The surprise in her eyes melted to a slightly amused sadness. “I’ll do it if you come with me.”

“That would defeat the whole point.”

“Which is to keep me here.”

“To keep you
safe,
” he clarified. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, but I do love you, Paul,” she said. “And one of the reasons I love you is because I know that if we were in Mexico City and you heard that America had been taken over by a tyrant, you’d come back up here to oppose him.”

Not if I were a woman,
he thought.

One of the fellows on the LAST SCaM committee, a skinny young man named Victor Gonzalez, handed her a train ticket and the group walked over to their track. The first leg of the trip was an express train which would take them as far as St. Louis. Paul walked alongside Millie and a redcap valet to the door of the train.

“I’ll write you at every opportunity,” she said.

Paul boarded the locomotive with her. The entire committee had bought sleeping berths in first class.

“Where can I write to you?” he asked nervously.

She proceeded to scribble down her family address in Mexico City, as well as the addresses of three friends living in the countryside. “I’ll write you as soon as I get down there, but if you don’t hear from me, one of these people should know where I am.”

“A person’s life is defined by the caution of their choices,” he said in an effort to sound authoritative. “This could be the worst decision you will
ever
make.”

“Despite what you might think, I’m not trying to be a hero and I have no desire to die, but I love my country and I have to do this.”

He remained with her on the train until the conductor called out, “All aboard!”

She walked with him to the Dutch door at the end of the car and watched as he stepped down onto the sunken platform. The conductor lifted the wooden step and jumped on board. As the train started pulling out of the station, Millicent waved.

Paul stood alone on the platform until the locomotive slowly vanished into the night.

5

P
aul took the next train back to Princeton and returned to his dorm room just past 3 that morning. Unable to sleep, he skipped his French and Spanish classes and remained listlessly in bed. As he eventually began his daily routines, he once again felt strangely captive. It was as if he were sealed in some kind of long, narrow tunnel, wanting to get through it quickly and out the other side. Without her, all alone, he felt as though he were drowning.

Roughly a week later, he got the first postcard from Millicent, sent from St. Louis. She explained that they were about to board a second train that would take them to Galveston, Texas. She had to be in Mexico by now, he thought. A second postcard came two days later from Texas saying they were about to cross the Rio Grande.

Two and a half weeks later, a letter arrived detailing how it was too dangerous to go to Mexico City, so they were instead heading west to Baja. Apparently, several revolutionary organizations had formed their own governments in the area and Millie’s group felt it could have the greatest impact there.

October went by without a single postcard. The Mexican postal service wasn’t very efficient, and Paul figured that the political turmoil must have further delayed the delivery of foreign correspondence. Hard as he tried to invest himself in schoolwork, Paul found himself suffering from repeated attacks of vertigo. He would usually just lay in bed trying not to imagine the worst: short, fat, oily soldiers with large, dirty sombreros taking turns violating Millie as she spat out blood and noble slogans.

The only ideas distracting him came from
The Physical Sciences,
the primary text for his Introduction to Physics class that he was taking to fulfill his science requirements. Reading the principles of physics from Galileo and Newton, he found himself mesmerized as if he was engrossed in a mystery novel.

Finally, on November 3, he received another post from Millicent. The letter had been given to a friend who was heading into Texas. It began:
My beloved Pablo, I’m assuming
you didn’t get any of my other letters as I haven’t received any from you
… It went on to explain that her committee had broken up. Two men had joined Pancho Villa’s contingent in the northeast; four others had joined Señor Zapata in Chiapas; but she and one other were still in Baja in a commune run by the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón. Despite these different factions, Madero was still generally regarded as the new hope for Mexico.

You’ll be happy to hear that Señor Flores is a pacifist. He
doesn’t even have a military attachment. He’s simply trying to lead by example. The other day a calvary of federal soldiers galloped through, almost daring us to provoke them. We’ve been wearing clothes we bought here, trying to blend in with the locals, but we spend our days heading down the peninsula trying to familiarize the peasants with the issues of the impending revolution …