World's End (14 page)

“Your mother's father—he was a president of the Colony Association and a party member—he gave Truman some literature and talked to him about the dignity of the worker, surplus value and the fetishism of commodities—we all did, we all talked to him—and
before long, he'd joined us. Of course, it was your mother who really won him over, but that's another story. That fall they were married, and they rented a little two-room bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place—you remember it, don't you?”

Lola paused to snub out her cigarette. “In the summer, Walter, summer of forty-six, you were born.”

Walter knew when he was born. He'd learned the date when he was three or four, and if it should ever happen to slip his mind, he could always consult his driver's license. He knew that bungalow too, his home through the first dim years of his life, just as he knew what was coming next. He leaned forward all the same.

So Truman joined the party. Truman got married. Truman spent two nights a week at City College, studying the American Revolution, and five nights a week at the card table in Hesh and Lola's front room. One night Christina would make up a pan of stuffed cabbage or a
hutspot
stew she'd learned from her mother, or her crisp potato pancakes; the next night, Lola would bake a cheese-and-noodle kugel. That was the way it was. Lola couldn't have children of her own. But when Walter was born, Truman came to her and asked if she and Hesh would consent to be the boy's godparents, and the evenings went on as before, only now little Walter's crib stood in the corner.

And then it was 1949. August. And the party wanted Paul Robeson to give a concert in Peterskill, and Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and to Truman. For security. There wouldn't be any violence. No, they didn't think so. It was going to be a peaceful affair, Negroes and whites together, working people, women and children and old folks, enjoying a concert and maybe a couple of political speeches, exercising their right to assemble and to express unpopular ideas. But Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and Truman. Just in case.

Hesh swung off a dirt lane onto Van Wart Road, not a mile from the concert grounds, and the first thing he noticed was the number of people gathered along the road. Some were headed in the direction of the Crane property, in groups of four and five, ambling and desultory, beer bottles in hand; others just stood at the side of the road, waiting, as if for a parade. A moment later he encountered the cars. Scores of them, parked alongside the road, drawn up on the shoulders on both
sides, so that only a narrow one-way lane remained between them. It was only half past six.

Hesh was mystified. Peletiah had set aside a pasture the size of three football fields expressly for parking, and here they were lined up along the road like cabbies at the airport, practically choking off access to the place. Buses had to get through here, buses from the City, and camp trucks and more buses from the summer colonies in Rockland County and the Catskills. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of private cars. What was going on here? Why hadn't they parked on the concert grounds?

He got his answer soon enough.

No one had even glanced at them until they reached the gauntlet of parked cars, but now, once they'd entered the single lane heading for the entrance to the concert grounds, heads began to turn. A man in an overseas cap shouted an obscenity and then something glanced off the side of the car. These people hadn't come to see the concert—they'd come to prevent it.

Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum didn't think there would be any violence—though the Peterskill paper had seethed with anti-Communist, anti-Jew and anti-Negro invective for the past month, though the local chapter of the VFW had threatened to hold a “loyalty rally” to protest against the concert, though flags had been waving aggressively from every porch in town and placards reviling Robeson had begun to appear in shop windows—but here it was. At the entrance, Hesh was confronted with a larger and denser crowd—two hundred or more—that erupted in jeers and insults when it became clear that he and his passengers were concertgoers rather than kindred spirits. They rolled up the windows, though it was eighty-five degrees outside, and Hesh shifted down as he approached the mouth of the narrow dirt road that gave onto Peletiah's property.

“Nigger lovers!” someone shouted.

“Kikes!”

“Commie Jew bastards!”

A teenager with slicked-back hair and a face red with hate loomed out of the crowd to spit across the windshield, and suddenly Hesh had had enough and put his foot to the floor. The Plymouth leapt forward and the crowd parted with a shout, there was the thump-thump-thump
of angry fists and feet against fenders and doors, and then they were in and the crowd was receding in the rearview mirror.

Shaken, Hesh pulled into the lot beside a rented bus. Three other buses, a truck bearing the legend “Camp Wahwahtaysee” and perhaps twelve or fifteen cars were already there. Christina's face was white. Truman and Piet were silent. “Trouble,” Hesh muttered, “son of a bitch. We're in for it now.”

Seven o'clock came and went. There was no Robeson, no Freeman, no Blum. Out on the road, nothing moved. The access routes were either blocked or jammed with the cars and buses of frustrated concertgoers, and no one could get in or out. Except for the patriots, that is, who fingered brass knuckles and tire irons or tore up fence posts and tried the heft of them, ambling along the blacktop road as if they owned it. Which they did, for some four hours that night. The unlucky few who did actually make it to Van Wart Road, thinking to sit on a blanket, sip a Coke or beer and enjoy a concert, were routed past the blockaded concert grounds, pulled from their cars and beaten. No one, from Peterskill to Kitchawank Colony and back again, saw a single policeman.

There were maybe a hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the stage when Hesh and the others arrived. Most were women and children who'd turned out early to enjoy an evening in the sylvan glades of northern Westchester. Besides Hesh, Truman and Piet, there were about forty men among them; up above, beyond the line of trees that marked the boundary of Peletiah's property, five hundred patriots stormed up and down the road, looking for Communists.

Hesh took charge. He sent five teenagers—three boys and two girls who'd come up from Staten Island to serve as ushers—to keep an eye on the crowd at the entrance. “If they set foot on the property, you let me know,” he said. “Right away. Understand?” He asked Truman and Piet to take six of the men, arm themselves with anything they could find and fan out across the field to make sure none of the zealots came at them from the rear. Then he organized the rest of the men in ranks, eight across, their arms linked, and marched them up the road. The women and children—Walter's mother amongst them—gathered around the empty stage. In the distance, they could hear the sound of shattering glass, truncated cries, the roar of the mob.

Walter knew the old road into the Crane place, didn't he? It was no more than a footpath now, walled off since the riots, but in those days it was a pretty well-worn dirt road with a hummock of grass in the middle. Narrow though, and with steep shoulders and impenetrable brush—sticker bushes and poison ivy and whatnot—on either side. The road wound down into the meadow and then turned into a path when it crossed the stream on the far side and climbed up the ridge. People would drive down there for a little privacy—to play their car radios, neck and drink beer. Some nights there'd be ten cars parked in the meadow. Anyway, there was but one other way in and that was by foot only—at the far end of the meadow, where Van Wart Road swung back on it half a mile up. Hesh figured if he could hold the road, they'd be all right. If real trouble started, that is. He hoped the police would show up before then.

They didn't.

The first fracas broke out about seven-thirty. Hesh and his men had stationed themselves just out of sight of the mob, at the road's narrowest point, and they'd backed the camp truck up against their flank to further obstruct the way. If the patriots got worked up enough to attack—with odds something like fifteen to one—they had to be held here; if they reached the stage, and the women and children, anything could happen. And so they stood there, arms linked, waiting. Thirty-two strangers. A black stevedore in sweatshirt and jeans, a handful of men in merchant marine uniform, pot-bellied car dealers and liquor store owners and shipping clerks, an encyclopedia salesman from Yonkers and three scared black seminary students, who, like the kids at the gate, had come early to serve as ushers. They stood there and listened to the howls and curses of the mob and waited for the police to come and break it up. No one wanted a concert any more, no one wanted speeches or even the inalienable rights guaranteed under the Constitution: all they wanted, to a man, was to be out of there.

And then it started. There was a roar from the crowd, succeeded by a prolonged hiss and clatter that might have been the blast of a tropical storm thrashing the trees, and then the five ushers suddenly appeared around the bend—the three boys and two girls—running for their lives in a hail of rocks and bottles. The look in their eyes was
something Hesh had seen before—at Omaha Beach, at Isigny, St. Lo and Nantes. Both girls were sobbing and one of the boys—he couldn't have been more than fifteen—was bleeding from a gash over his right eye. They passed through the lines and then Hesh and his recruits locked arms once again.

A moment later the mob was on them. Five hundred or more strong now, but funneled into the narrow road like cattle in a chute, they burst against the defenders in a frenzied, stick-wielding rush. Hesh was struck across the face, slashed just behind the ear and battered on both forearms. “Kill the commies!” the mob chanted. “Lynch the niggers!”

It lasted no more than two or three minutes. Hesh's men were bruised and bleeding, but they'd repulsed the first wave. Rabid, shrieking insults and flinging sticks and stones and whatever else they could lay their hands on, the mob withdrew a hundred feet to regroup. The better part of them were drunk, whipped to a frenzy by irrational hates and prejudices that were like open wounds, but others—there was a knot of them, the ones in dress shirts and ties and Legionnaire's caps—were as cool as field marshals. Depeyster Van Wart was among this latter group, stiff and formal, his face composed, but with a pair of eyes that could have eaten holes in the camp truck. He was conferring with his brother—the one who was killed in Korea—and LeClerc Outhouse, who'd made all that money in the restaurant business. Did Walter remember him?

Walter nodded.

“Go back to Russia!” a man screamed, shaking his fist, and the whole crowd took it up. They were about to break ranks and charge again when the three policemen showed up. These were local cops, not state police, and the patriots knew them by name.

“Now boys,” Hesh could hear one of them saying, “we don't like this any better than you do, but let's keep it legal, huh?” And then, while his partners placated the mob with more of the same—“If it was up to me I'd shoot 'em down like dogs, right here and now, but you know we can't do that; not in America, anyways”—the one who'd spoken first hitched up his trousers, squared his crotch and sauntered down to where Hesh and his battered recruits stood with folded arms and lacerated flesh.

“Who's in charge here?” he demanded.

Hesh recognized him in that instant: Anthony Fagnoli. They'd gone to school together. Fagnoli had been two years younger, a criminal type with greased hair who was forever being suspended for smoking in the boys' room or coming to class drunk. He'd dropped out of school as a sophomore to drive one of his uncle's garbage trucks. Now he was a cop.

Hesh glanced around. Sasha Freeman hadn't made it. Nor Morton Blum either. “I guess I am,” he said.

“You are, huh?” Fagnoli gave no sign of recognition.

“Kike!” screamed a patriot. “Hitler didn't get you, but we will!”

“So just what in the fuck do you think you're trying to do here, Mister?” Fagnoli said.

“You know damn well what we're doing.” Hesh looked him hard in the eye. “We're exercising our right of peaceful assembly—on private property, I might add.”

“Peaceful?” Fagnoli practically howled the word. “Peaceful?” he repeated, and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the crowd. “You call that peaceful?”

Hesh gave it up. “Look,” he said, “we don't want any part of this. The concert is done. Off. It's over. All we want is out.”

Fagnoli was smirking now. “Out?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You made this mess, clean it up yourself.” And then he turned his back and started to walk off.

“Officer. Please. If you tell them to disperse, they'll listen.”

Fagnoli swung around as if he'd been hit from behind. His face was like a clenched fist. “Up yours,” he hissed.

Hesh watched him swagger back up the road and push his way into the mob, where he stopped a moment to confer with Van Wart and Outhouse and the other ringleaders. Then he turned to his two compatriots and said, in a voice that carried all the way back to Hesh and his men, “They want out, boys. What do you think of that?”

A man in an overseas cap suddenly bawled, “Out! You never get out! Every nigger bastard dies here tonight! Every Jew bastard dies here tonight!” And the crowd began to roar. Fagnoli and the two other cops had disappeared.

The second charge came a moment later. The patriots screamed
down the narrow roadway, swinging fence posts and tire irons, flinging rocks and bottles, slamming with all the weight and fury of those behind them into Hesh's lines. Hesh stood firm, grappled with a man swinging a fence post and ground his fist into the center of the man's face till he felt something give. Again, the melee lasted no more than three or four minutes, and the attackers fell back. But Hesh was hurt. And so were his men. Hurt and scared. They had to get word out to the world at large, had to phone the police, the governor,
The New York Times
—they had to have help. And quick. If it didn't come soon, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that some of them would die there on the road before the night was out.