Burning Questions: A Novel

Preface

With joy and envy I read the lives of those great revolutionary women of the past—the Moscow Amazons of the eighteen sixties, seventies, and eighties who helped assassinate the Tsar, the Pétroleuses who mounted the barricades of Paris to defend the Commune, and all the other brave, single-minded women who devoted their lives to the revolution: Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, La Pasionaria.

Their lives are so direct, their stories high drama. They begin with the stations of their birth, skip quickly to the crucial incident of childhood—the one riveting moment when the sight of some unspeakable cruelty or the touching kindness of a concerned elder (an aunt, a teacher) awakens them from their slumbering innocence to pose their destiny. They brood, then plunge directly into reading the book that will change their lives by its stunning revelations or wrestling with the idea that will launch them on lives of implacable commitment. Nothing will keep them now from leaving the provinces for St. Petersburg, from Zurich, Geneva, or Paris, where the new ideas fill the air. Studying medicine at a university or philosophy in a workers’ study group, they stay awake every night, sometimes till dawn, passionately debating the new ideas with their little circle or reading the forbidden books that pass secretly from hand to hand, until at last they take the irrevocable step by which they merge their lives with those of their comrades in the Great Cause of our generation. (Sometimes they speak of love, but men are by no means the important element in their lives.) Long before they die. which they are prepared to do at any time, each one knows the very words she wishes to pass on to the future:

Sofia Bardina: Persecute us—you have material strength for a while, gentlemen, but we have moral strength, the strength of ideas; and ideas, alas, you cannot pierce with bayonets.

La Pasionaria: It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Marie Schmitt, Communarde: I am only sorry that I did not do everything I am accused of.

Louise Michel: Why should I defend myself? … You are men who are going to judge me. You are before me; your faces are revealed. You are men, and I am only a woman; yet I look you in the eye…. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance; … I have finished. If you are not cowards, kill me.

It was not like that for us: For my generation nothing was ever so clear. Perhaps I shouldn’t even speak of us and my generation; nowadays, generations succeed each other so quickly. In Babylon, Indiana, where I grew up, my generation seemed to consist of jocks, grinds, and the contented, whom I rejected by leaving at the first opportunity; then, in New York City, where I rushed to find myself, there were the people who rejected me. We were called the Silent Generation because some of us felt we had nothing to say and the rest had no one to say it to. But I was fortunate enough and young enough to pass from one generation to another at the appropriate moment by a timely change of style. From Silent to Beat to Revolutionary.

But I am also uneasy with words like revolutionary. It is true that I am privileged to teach the course in Revolutionary Women at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and here I am setting down My Life as a Rebel. But it is with grave reservation that I invoke those revolutionary greats. Even at the height of the sixties, when the word revolutionary was as debased as it was fashionable, applying to scanty clothing, flowing hair, manufacturers of certain plastics, and busy fornicators, as well as to a handful of civilian bombers and thousands of compassionate partisans of a new world order, to me there was something pretentious in the word. I would never have called myself an artist, either, among the beats of MacDougal Street, though I too kept a journal and took life classes at the Art Students League. It always seemed to me that an artist, a revolutionary, had to earn the names by performing significant and heroic acts. Tokens, good intentions, were not enough. Even as a child I thought it shamefully dishonest to boast of exploits one had yet to perform; when Adlai Stevenson let us down by losing the election to Eisenhower after boasting all over the country that he could win, I wondered how he would ever be able to stand up in public again. I felt sorry for him (he was my father’s candidate); but mostly I felt contempt. Decades later I had similar reservations about movement people who said they were going to change the world but had no idea how, and without winning their titles by acts of courage or suffering went around arrogantly declaring themselves avatars of a New Society. If they didn’t know how to bring it off, then at least, I thought, instead of bluffing and boasting they ought to have proven their sincerity: actively, like Rosa or Che or the Lincoln Brigade who fought in Spain, or the visionary souls who were with Mao on the Long March, or those Buddhist monks who burned themselves before heads of state; or else passively by being persecuted like Sacco and Vanzetti and the poor Rosenbergs who gave their lives or those New Haven lesbians who went to jail rather than rat on one of their sisters.

(Though as a child I kept a picture of Joan of Arc, most defiant of all, above my bed, and years later, caught up in our own movement, I too spent a night in jail, I never imagined that such fancied or impure acts as mine could make me a revolutionary.)

Yet, despite my qualms, I choose to begin my book by invoking those heroic women of the past. No matter how far short of their achievements mine may fall, our lives are intimately connected by history. Though the 1960s are not the 1860s, though our suburbs are hardly peasant villages or Greenwich Village Moscow, still, for one glorious moment some of us did manage to find each other and launch our rebellion.

Of course it didn’t last; a new generation with a different style replaced us soon enough. But then, the Paris Commune failed as well, wiped out in a matter of weeks; Rosa Luxemburg was murdered and her party smashed; La Pasionaria saw Franco conquer Spain; Emma Goldman was forced into permanent exile; and even the Moscow Amazons, whose revolution ostensibly triumphed, would probably rise from their graves if they knew what happened to their precious Russia under the tyrant Stalin. Still, as Angelica Balabanoff wrote half a century ago in her own account of My Life as a Rebel, … the experience of the individual in relation to historic events does not belong to oneself alone. It should be put at the disposal of those who can make use of it…. History has been falsified without shame…. The truth was never more necessary than it is today.

Despite our setbacks, then, I write my book. History isn’t over yet. When and where you are born are strictly matters of luck. The historical ebb and flow are governed by their own laws, wrote Trotsky, mere impatience will not expedite their change. If you choose to join up with history, you have to take what circumstances are dealt you.

If, now, before setting down my own modest Life as a Rebel, I begin by citing the greats, it is not to glorify myself. Rather, it is to show how important are circumstances, in hopes that history may conclude we did the best we could, given ours.

Zane IndiAnna   

New Space Cafe

New York City  

1977                  

PART 1

BABYLON

1 • DIGGING TO CHINA

What makes a rebel?

If you had seen the flags waving in front of each frame house set on its neat carpet of lawn on Endicott Road or any of the surrounding streets in Babylon, Indiana, on a Flag Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, V-J Day, or even a particularly fine Sunday after the War (World War II), you would never have guessed it possible that a fanatical radical was incubating there.

And yet, while the other kids were riding their tricycles and bicycles across the hills of Babylon, learning to spot the new models of every make of car that began appearing in 1946 and would come out once a year forever now that the War was over, I was out in our back yard sitting in a certain spot safe from the menacing bees in my mother’s hollyhocks but within the magical scented circle of her yellow tea roses, digging to China.

China!—an inconceivably distant place where people walked around upside down, wrote in pictographs, ate with chopsticks, sang their words, sailed on junks, rode in rickshaws, and hid their treasures in caves guarded by terrifying silent dogs with eyes as big as saucers—accessible through my back yard. I’d begun digging as soon as I learned it was there, dreaming, longing, hungering to see, though after a while people laughed at me. I knew that getting through was a staggering task, China being some eight thousand miles away; but unlike the skeptics I lived among, who doubted the existence of other states, much less other worlds, I didn’t think it impossible. Time, distance—my entire world was made up of unknown mysteries that gradually yielded to the accretions of steady effort and the slow erosion of experience. Learning when to take the long route to school around the treacherous snowdrifts on Silverbrook Boulevard; combining three completely different tunes into the glorious harmony of a single Christmas carol (walking slowly down the aisle in white dresses carrying lighted candles, every mouth a perfect O); mastering written language; knowing when to multiply and when to divide; diving through the surface of a pool into an entirely different medium and rising up again; the miraculous healing of a wound—digging to China. In Miss Peterson’s transportation unit the other kids made locomotives and cabooses, hansoms and kayaks; but I made cardboard and toothpick models of a sedan chair, a rickshaw, and a junk, bringing China to life. After that I thought about it each night and dug a bit every day. Five whole summers I dug, half believing I would get there, a born fanatic.

Maybe it was a little weird, like jumping off the garage roof with an umbrella hoping to fly, but so what? It was worth it to see the hole get deeper every day. If my parents fretted, they didn’t let on. Even after my Aunt Louise used psychology, trying to inject the Reality Principle with children’s books about the Chinese people and play-by-plays of the struggle of the courageous peasants against the terrible Chiang Kai-shek, I wouldn’t give up. My goal was audacious enough to sweep away the difficulties: imagine tunneling straight through the earth to the very opposite of everything you started from. China! Limitless difference: men in pigtails, hats like lampshades, mincing steps, emperors! Each day (which was naturally night in China) as I dug a little deeper into the earth with the hand cultivator that had replaced my sandbox shovel, I saw a bit more clearly where I was going. My dreams and desires fed each other. If it was possible for my friend Eleanor (with her mother) to sit on the opposite side of the front row of the vast Movie Palace from me (with my mother) and both of us somehow still manage to see the same amazing pictures flashing across a single centered screen, then if I dug diligently long enough I might emerge in China. No expert in the possible had ruled it out; indeed, no one even discouraged me: Else, would you please call Zane to wash up for dinner? She’s out in back, digging to China.

Maybe my grandiose ambitions were my parents’ fault, naming me Zane, marking me for life as different. They probably didn’t realize what they were starting. A combination of Zeke and Anna (Daddy and Mama), Zane meant God’s gracious gift. Plain and special at once, a version of John and Jane, it was a distinctive name (there were Zane Grey and me), promising, a name to live up to, announcing my specialness in a single syllable. Even as a small child I’d recognized its value as I chalked fancy Z’s up and down the sidewalks of Babylon. The last letter of the alphabet, my initial occupied the place of treasures, like dessert, like night-time, like the final wish that could reverse all others, like the tastiest morsel one saved up for the end, like China at the end of the tunnel. Zane: What an unusual name, teachers would say. Is it short for something? And I would swell with pride replying no. As certain parents bought their children growth stocks, my parents, smart but not rich, gave me a special name, probably unique in Indiana, knowing it would distinguish me before I raised a finger.

Distinction, however, was not the best thing to have in Babylon. God’s gracious gift: a blessing, but a mixed one. The Best was less acceptable than the Same. My parents had considered withholding their permission for the school to skip me over 3A and afterward often wondered if they hadn’t harmed me by granting it, making me younger than the rest. Even if you excelled, you’d better not be different. Daddy almost said as much, trying to prepare me for life, arming me with accomplishments and cunning but warning me not to use them, perhaps already uneasy about my name: My Uncle Herman learned the hard way that Different was wrong. The wrong attitude, the wrong amount of hair (like that contradiction in terms, Grace Gross, whose legs hung with hair and whose eyebrows met between her eyes as indelicately as a boy’s), the wrong color skin (God made the little niggers,/Made them in the night,/Made them in a hurry,/And forgot to paint them white, wrote Barbie Pratt in my autograph book), the wrong clothes from the wrong stores, made you unfit for Babylon—a place which, of all the places in the world, was right: by definition.

True, an outsider driving through our town might think Babylon indistinguishable from a thousand other postwar residential communities with houses sporting windows and gables like smiling faces, two-car garages, neatly tended flower borders, and uniform treelawns within a twenty-mile radius of a manufacturing center of approx 80,000 pop. The same winding roads, grandly named boulevards but as yet imperfectly drained; the same scattering of vacant lots; the same bowling alley, dry cleaner, gift shop, chop suey house, record store clustered at Tompkins Corners; the same lending library with its Thursday night Great Literature discussion group; the same two-story high school with its regular Friday night basketball game and Tuesday night samba lessons to paying couples in the gym. But anyone born there knew immediately that Babylon, though seemingly insignificant, was quite simply the standard by which the rest of the world was to be judged and by which different was to be defined. Not only did the poorer suburbs stand condemned by comparison, but even the reputedly richer ones, with their higher per capita income and teacher-to-pupil ratios, were despised (though less so) for their difference from us.

But generally such indelicacies as poverty or dark skin didn’t apply to us. To start with, you didn’t move to Babylon unless you were white and rich enough for a down payment on a house. Then once safely up there you could easily prove the rest of the world didn’t count. Rest of the world? We ignored even Middletown, that belching metropolis in the valley below of which we were supposedly only a small suburb, referring to it disparagingly as the city, tarnished by industry and grime. The #32 express bus that took Babylon fathers downtown to their offices whizzed past the streets that housed the poor so fast that nothing could be seen. (Later, in high school, we sometimes cut classes and went down to Middletown to shop or sit in Walgreen’s and flirt with soldiers—by then we had the Korean War; but we knew what would happen to us if our parents ever found out.) It was as impolite to notice the black or poor as it was to notice a harelip. Don’t stare. If you did happen to see, you were to hold in your observations like a belch until you were safely back in the privacy of Babylon, where you could once again breathe easily and then promptly forget.

But some people, the bane of their teachers, noticed the worst and couldn’t forget; I, it seemed, was one of them. Long before I ever ventured down to Middletown I had evidence of God’s grand scheme of injustice. Whenever I am asked, wrote Angelica Balabanoff, Lenin’s sometime collaborator, how I came to turn my back upon my family, upon the comfort and luxury of my home in southern Russia, and to become a revolutionist, I am at a loss for an answer. All the years of my childhood, as far back as I can remember, seem to have been years of rebellion…. Once when I saw some peasant on our estate kiss the border of my father’s coat when he returned from a long journey, I cringed with shame. My first realization of inequality and injustice grew out of these experiences in my early childhood. We saw no peasants flogged, knew no poor. The daily humiliation we witnessed at school of the queer, fat, slow, orphaned, and small by the big and loud was the worst cruelty we could imagine. Unlike the fabled Old Country schoolmasters whose abuses inspired rebellion, our teachers were not permitted to hit us, and in fact the best endeared themselves by permitting us to paint murals on the walls of the cafeteria. Still, somehow, I knew.

It wasn’t that I doubted that ours was the best place on earth; it was just that now and then the curtains parted for a minute to reveal a world beyond. China lay buried deep under our house, though most people weren’t interested. Just so, behind Mama’s lovely smile were the anxious questions I overheard her ask my Aunt Louise when I was supposedly asleep. Behind the starched shirts of the charity kids delivered to our school each morning in a panel station wagon were the sad hearts of orphans. And there on the third floor of our own white colonial on Endicott Road I sometimes heard our Polish maid Else cry her poor self to sleep.

As Sleeping Beauty, doomed to prick her finger on a spindle, found the fateful needle in the tower of her very own castle though her parents had banished all spindles from the land, I found all the injustice of the world lurking on our property.

2 • ELSE

There were maids before Else and at least one more after, for Mama worked in an office till sometime after the War. But Else is the one I remember with her sad blue eyes and silver cross and two limp blond braids she wore wrapped around her head like the maidens in distress pictured in my giant illustrated Grimm. She lived in the attic under our very roof, breathing the same air and eating the same food as the rest of us; but like the family of raccoons who nested in our chimney one winter, whining an unnerving song that kept us all awake until Daddy found them and smoked them out, she lived with us but not among us.

Once I stole up the steep stairs to the attic on my hands and knees to find her kneeling at the foot of her narrow bed, praying to Jesus. She held her silver cross in her hand and murmured words in a foreign tongue, with her sad eyes rolled toward the ceiling till all that showed were the whites. I was uneasy to be witness to such an intimate scene, but I was afraid to withdraw, knowing the stairs might creak. Mama had always insisted I be polite and considerate to Else. No, darling, she said sternly, don’t go up there now, that’s Else’s private room, she needs her privacy too. I remembered the interview in which Mama had promised Else two hours each afternoon to rest up before beginning dinner, besides Sundays and Thursday nights off, a cash retainer, and four white uniforms. But still, it disturbed me to think of her up there all alone; I always knew it was wicked to keep a maid in the attic. As I sat on the stairs listening to her pray in words I couldn’t understand, I had no doubt she was praying for release from some onerous burden—possibly me.

I often thought about her up there by herself. During the days, with Mama and Daddy away at work, everything seemed happy enough. After school I trailed her up and down the stairs through her daily chores—cleaning, ironing, mending, telephoning for the groceries, cooking, doing the laundry, and thorough cleaning once a week—and sometimes heard her sing strange songs in her high, thin voice. But when my parents were home, speaking to her in their special voice, she was morose and obedient. When I sat on the porch learning chess openings from Daddy on Saturdays, she slipped around the house pretending to be invisible. And at night I sometimes thought I heard her cry.

Living alone in an attic like serving girls in fairy tales—what was it like? Into Else’s room went furniture no one wanted. Her bathtub was rusty. The lightbulb in her ceiling had a chain instead of a neat switch like all of ours.

Not that anyone mistreated her. Daddy called her Miss Else and Mama, assuring me that Else was grateful to have a clean room and bath in a nice place like Babylon, took pains to see that she was comfortable. Now, Else, she would say, you be sure to order whatever brand of tea you like best. Yes, Mrs. Bentwood. But I still knew it was wrong. While we used any door we chose, she used only the back door; and while we ate together every night exchanging mind-stumping riddles and intimate stories, she ate alone in the kitchen. First she served us, emerging through the swinging door in her fresh uniform to refill our glasses with ice water or pass the serving dishes a second time (serve from the left, clear from the right) whenever my mother sat up tall, smiled, and rang the little silver dinner bell; then, after the dishes were cleared away and the dining table reduced to its minimum size, restoring the dining area to its original living room state, Else would assemble a meal from among the leftovers and serve herself in the kitchen.

Wrong. My Aunt Louise, who’d awakened my compassion when I was very young by weeping beside our radio while the war news blared, had taught me about injustice. And though I ignored it when I could, after a certain winter night I knew Else’s situation precisely fit the description.

The dinner dishes had been cleared away and my parents were settled before the fire in the living room. I was in my Daddy’s lap waiting to hear the next installment of one of his long, fanciful stories that eventually wound up to bed like a circular staircase, when he handed me his coffee cup and sent me off to the kitchen for a refill. I slid down from his lap and pushed through the swinging door, cup in hand—to find Else seated at the kitchen table eating by herself, her eyes red from crying.

Though I’d suspected often enough that she cried, I’d never before caught her at it.

What’s the matter, Else? I asked.

It’s nothing, darling, nothing.

Nevertheless, tears fell from her eyes.

Don’t cry, Else, I said. Please don’t. Then, applying Mama’s comforting remedy, I walked over to Else, patted her arm, and said in Mama’s voice, There, there.

Suddenly Else grabbed my waist with one arm, and pulling me to her, pressed me violently to her white starched breast. I heard her heart thumping amid muffled sobs, felt the silver cross pressing against my cheek. Quickly my own heart thumped back.

From the living room I distinctly heard my parents’ voices, knew they’d be sitting in the facing green wing chairs beside the fire, my father’s feet up on the hassock, my lovely mother, knees crossed, sipping her coffee, both waiting for me to return with Daddy’s cup in time to have my story before their evening radio programs began. My mother’s melodious voice drifted across the air sweet as a lullaby.

The silver cross, cold and sharp, began to gnaw my cheek as I waited inside the vise of Else’s bony embrace.

It’s because you have to eat alone in the kitchen, isn’t it? I ventured, naming our crime. The worst sentence my parents had ever passed on me was banishment to a corner for an agonizing number of solitary minutes.

Another violent squeeze, and then at last she spoke through her tears.

No, no, no. It’s your father. The way he plays with you and talks to you. He sets you on his lap and tells you such stories. She sniffled loudly without releasing me.

Her answer was as perplexing as her tears. I adored my father; he adored me. It was natural; I had never thought about it. Yet somehow, now, it was making Else cry. Won’t your daddy tell you stories? I asked. But she only clutched me tighter and continued to sob.

Perhaps she had no father. Perhaps she was an orphan, like the kids from the Welfare Center where Aunt Louise worked who came to our school in a station wagon and joined our classes. There had been two of them in my kindergarten class, a boy and a girl, whom everyone called brother and sister though we all knew they were unrelated. I had watched them, trying to put myself in their place. Then one day the station wagon stopped coming and we never saw them again.

Don’t you have a Daddy, Else? I whispered.

As abruptly as she had captured me, she now released me and dried her tears on her apron. I rubbed my cheek where I still felt the silver cross pressing and stared fixedly at the red-and-white checked oilcloth on the kitchen table. Else stirred her tea, which by then must have been quite cold, and stared out through her sad eyes and the kitchen window toward the lighted windows of the houses beyond and never answered me.

After a few moments I filled Daddy’s cup and slipped awkwardly out of the kitchen back to the cozy living room. Guiltily I rejoiced that I had a father, a mother, a piano, a dog, everything.

Daddy gave the fire a congenial poke and then, lifting me once again to his knee, resting his head on, one of the wings of his high-backed chair, closed his eyes (of which mine were said to be exact replicas) and resumed his impossibly beautiful story.

3 • UNCLE HERMAN

When Else left us the following spring, I wasn’t sorry. Her sadness seemed to increase every day, no matter what I did, and I somehow felt responsible. Once she was gone I moved up to the mysterious, forbidden attic until Mama, who had to take a few days of vacation time in order to conduct her interviews, had found Else’s replacement. In that strange room where strange women had lived so near yet so far, I pretended to lead another life—sleeping in a narrow cot, exploring the angles of the slanted eaves, delving into forbidden closets.

I don’t remember who replaced Else. Once the ground thawed out I started tunneling again toward China (in real China, whispered Aunt Louise, the People’s Army was gaining ground) until the end of the summer when Mama took the rest of her vacation and we all drove up to the Indiana Dunes—those high mountains of clear white sand that got us listed among the world’s lesser wonders. Indeed, from that summer I would probably have remembered only the Dunes if it hadn’t also been the summer Uncle Herman was called before the Board of Education and his name was in the papers, the summer he got sick.

It started innocently enough. Mama suggested that while we were away he and Aunt Louise should move into our house, which was cooler and more comfortable than their tiny apartment in Middletown and had a piano in need of Herman’s attention.

We got home to find that a protest had been entered by some of our neighbors the night before our return. Daddy stepped out of the car and gave such a cry that before I could get out myself I was trembling. Daddy never raised his voice; I knew something terrible must have happened.

I opened the door. Destruction surrounded me. Mama’s precious rose bushes, in perfect flower when we’d left, had been hacked to the ground, their delicate yellow blossoms and buds strewn carelessly across the yard. The young buckeye tree behind the porch which Daddy had planted for the future had been ringed with a knife and my tunnel heaped with trash. Two windows of the garage from which I had sometimes jumped, attempting to fly, were broken, and across a third like a signature was soaped, Go back to Russia.

All at once Uncle Herman and Aunt Louise were standing beside us, wringing their hands and carrying on. Uncle Herman, who always needed a haircut and something more, shook his rumpled head sadly while Mama held Louise, who cried as she had during the War. I watched them from a safe distance.

We don’t even live here, moaned Louise. Herman never set foot inside Russia. He despises Stalin. There’s no justice. What shall we do?

There, there, said Mama, bringing comfort to me if to no one else.

Normally, Mama would be the one in need of help, Louise the one to give it. Louise was a psychiatric social worker and, on important matters particularly, we all consulted her. Not only because of her vast store of arcane knowledge—even greater than Daddy’s, and he taught mathematics—but because she held an opinion on every question. She was, in Daddy’s words, a tough cookie, or, as Mama put it, a woman of views. From my private listening post at the top of the stairs I had heard her explain to Mama everything from the causes of poverty, suicide, stuttering, and juvenile delinquency, to matters of such crucial interest to me as the meaning of dreams, the reasons for nail-biting, and the strange significance, of digging tunnels. With Daddy, of course, she discussed union and world politics, speaking for herself and Herman, whose English was poor. To me she explained the nuances of injustice and how to make invisible ink from ordinary lemon juice and doll beds from matchboxes. Years later, when the great St. Lawrence Inland Waterway finally connected the dry towns of the Midwest with the fabulous sea (and Louise was a hefty widow of forty-five), she became the first woman in America to sign on to a freighter and ship out around the world from an inland port. But now, with destruction surrounding us, Louise was brought low. Drooping and silent as the ruined roses, she was bereft of explanations.

Daddy rose to the occasion. What shall we do? he shouted, sounding angrier than I’d ever heard him. His face was as red as his freckles. Do! I’m going to set in some more! And although like Herman he was one of those who taught rather than one of those who do, he backed the car straight out of the drive without unpacking and announced he was off to Tompkins Corners Garden Supply.

The next day I helped Daddy rake the yard and try to restore the roses, but when I finally looked down into my violated tunnel I decided to table my China project. Who was I to defy our neighbors? The truth was, I suspected that the whole ugly back yard business was somehow my fault. It happened that during the brief interlude between maids two men had come to our house asking questions, and though they were the sort of men I’d been warned not to speak to under any circumstances, by the time I’d opened the door and seen their mean faces it had been too late to keep them out. Now I had the uneasy feeling that their visit and the derangement of our yard were connected—both had something to do with Uncle Herman; and while not quite abandoning my dream of China (no dream is ever abandoned), I decided for the time being to stop digging.

The men had walked in without waiting, removed their hats, and taken seats on the rose sofa while I went for Mama.

We’d just like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Bentwood, they said, getting out little black notebooks.

I watched from the doorway. Mama lit a cigarette and sat down. I could tell she was not happy, though the men wouldn’t have known it from the way she smiled and sweetly asked, What exactly is it you’d like to know?

They asked several questions about my uncle and someone else. I knew it was trouble. Kids at school taunted me about my uncle who was reported to be a commie though he led the Glee Club. He was a small kindly man whom no one liked, I believed, because of his German name (though he was two parts Hungarian, one part Czech, and only one scant part German, Mama assured me) and because, with his masterly command of the universal language of music, he barely used English. As for his being a commie, a word I never heard until my classmates’ accusations, I adamantly denied it. Still, the strangers were asking questions; and I, having opened the door to them, felt responsible for the whole confusing predicament that made poor Mama have to use her hostess voice and keep on smoking cigarettes.

Then one of the men noticed me. His face pursed to a frown. With his hand pressed to the place he kept his badge, he caught Mama’s eye and tilted his head toward me.

I was afraid to move. But sweet Mama rescued me. Why don’t you go out back, Zane dear, and work on your tunnel? she said, enabling me to slip out the back door. (If they’d only known where I was digging to!)

That night, and for several nights afterward, there was frantic telephoning and late-night soul-searching.

Louise? Mama said grimly into the phone, unaware that I was listening. Two FBI men just visited me. They were asking about Herman. I stalled them off, but they’re coming back. Tell me, Louise, has Herman done anything I ought to know about? … Well, of course I didn’t. You know I wouldn’t. But they gave me a fright, I can tell you that. Now what do you think I ought to say when they come back?

I don’t know what Aunt Louise told Mama to say, but later, when it Was all over, I heard Mama tell Louise over coffee that she was really quite pleased with herself for the way she’d handled the affair.

You would have been proud of me, I think. I told them I didn’t really like Herman, even if he was my brother-in-law. Wasn’t that smart? I said Herman had always seemed to me a bit spineless, not bothering about English, and a trifle peculiar; but though I disliked him, I had no reason to believe he was a communist. He didn’t act like one. He never talked about Russia or tried to get me to join anything. And you know, I think it worked. I think I probably helped him. Because if I didn’t even like him, why would I have gone out of my way to defend him?

They came snooping around our building too, said Louise, asking all the neighbors. You know Ida Prichett—that retired woman from Georgia who’s lived on our floor for thirteen years? She told me that when they asked her if she had anything to say against our character, she turned on them and said in that thick accent of hers, Why, how day-ah you come into my home and ask me a question like that! How day-ah you! and pushed them right out the door. But of course, she doesn’t have a job to lose, she doesn’t teach in the public schools.

If only I’d thought of pushing the men out the door, I mused with sudden remorse.

Oh, I don’t know, Anna, Aunt Louise continued. Sometimes I wonder why they’re not after me instead, because of the union.

When winter came again, Mama and Herman were both out of jobs. Mama left hers to be a full-time mother now that the country was, as she put it, back to normal; but Herman’s left him, trailing ugly headlines behind. Not only was he stripped of the school Glee Club; now he couldn’t even teach as a substitute. Rapidly failing, without a job, he took to his bed. Why get up? he said to Mama when we went to visit. And except to cook small meals and practice his violin while Louise dressed to go to work, he didn’t. As Mama explained, Herman was a very sick man.

The last time I saw him was when we went to Middletown to visit him after the Rosenbergs died, burned as spies like Joan of Arc, leaving two more orphans in the world. Amid a clutter of books, newspapers, magazines, and ashtrays piled on the radiator tops and in the corners of the tiny living room, Louise railed against evil, sobbing, shaking her fists in the air, then wringing her hands, while once again Mama tried to calm her—For Herman’s sake, darling. He’s sleeping. Shh.

When he died Louise didn’t cry at all; she seemed angrier than sad. She read a short fiery sermon by Herman’s favorite writer, Trotsky (whom I would read myself years later). But I was too disturbed to listen. Instead I watched Louise standing before the open grave in her heavy space shoes, like a black candle in a black veiled hat, her eyes aflame, staring strangely down. As I told my diary, she looked noble, particularly when they lowered Herman’s coffin into a hole that seemed no deeper than my once active tunnel to China, which now existed, like Uncle Herman himself, on another plane.

My China—that single busy street bustling with rickshaws and rice merchants in one particular unnamed Chinese city where I would one day emerge—depended on nothing but my imagination. Whether China was our great suffering ally who’d fought the brutal Japanese, or the heroic champion of the people my Aunt Louise had described, or the dangerous communist horde moving down the winding wall to overrun the world I learned about in school, I didn’t care. To me China was an idea under my dreams, the mysterious shadow that lay on the other side of my burgeoning life, representing all that might be possible.

Like the small jar full of precious black sand given to my teacher Miss Peterson by a soldier friend who had carried it all the way back from the shores of the South Seas during the War and which Miss P. had distributed, teaspoon by teaspoon, to her class, my tunnel to China could challenge the limits of the thinkable. Through it I could connect myself to the farthest spot on earth from Babylon.

4 • THE RUMMAGE SALE

But the education of a rebel