Part 12 (1/2)

There Was a knock on the door. I had told my coeditor at The Bay State Progressive The Bay State Progressive where I could be found in case of emergency, ”Who is it?” I said. where I could be found in case of emergency, ”Who is it?” I said.

There was a sound like a little gasoline engine on the other side of the door. It was Alexander Hamilton McCone, my mentor, who had decided to come to Cambridge unannounced-to see what sort of life I was leading on his money. He sounded like a motor because of his stammer. He stammered because of the Cuyahoga Ma.s.sacre in Eighteen-hundred and Ninety-four. He was trying to say his own name.

18.

I HAD SOMEHOW NEGLECTED HAD SOMEHOW NEGLECTED to tell him that I had become a communist. to tell him that I had become a communist.

Now he had found out about that. He had come first to my room in Adams House, where he was told that I was most likely at The Progressive The Progressive. He had gone to The Progressive The Progressive and had ascertained what sort of publication it was and that I was its coeditor. Now he was outside the door with a copy folded under his arm. and had ascertained what sort of publication it was and that I was its coeditor. Now he was outside the door with a copy folded under his arm.

I remained calm. Such was the magic of having emptied my seminal vesicles so recently.

Mary Kathleen, obeying my silent arm signals, hid herself in the bathroom. I slipped on a robe belonging to von Strelitz. He had brought it home from the Solomon Islands. It appeared to be made of s.h.i.+ngles, with wreaths of feathers at its collar and cuffs.

Thus was I clad when I opened the door and said to old Mr. McCone, who was in his early sixties then, ”Come in, come in.”

He was so angry with me that he could only continue to make those motor sounds: ”bup-bup-bup-bup-bup ...” But he meanwhile did a grotesque pantomime of how repulsed he was by the paper, whose front-page cartoon showed a bloated capitalist who looked just like him; by my costume; by the unmade bed; by the picture of Karl Marx on von Strelitz's wall.

Out he went again, slamming the door behind him. He was through with me!

Thus did my childhood end at last. I had become a man.

And it was as a man that I went that night, with Mary Kathleen on my arm, to hear Kenneth Whistler speak at the rally for my comrades in the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers.

How could I be so serene, so confident? My tuition for the year had already been paid, so I would graduate. I was about to get a full scholars.h.i.+p to Oxford. I had a superb wardrobe in good repair. I had been saving most of my allowance, so that I had a small fortune in the bank.

If I had to, I could always borrow money from Mother, G.o.d rest her soul.

What a daring young man I was!

What a treacherous young man I was! I already knew that I would abandon Mary Kathleen at the end of the academic year. I would write her a few love letters and then fall silent after that. She was too low cla.s.s.

Whistler had a big bandage over one temple and his right arm was in a plaster cast that night. This was a Harvard graduate, mind you, and from a good family in Cincinnati. He was a Buckeye, like me. Mary Kathleen and I supposed that he had been beat up by the forces of evil yet again-by the police or the National Guard, or by goons of organizers of yellow-dog unions.

I held Mary Kathleen's hand.

n.o.body had ever told her he loved her before.

I was wearing a suit and a necktie, and so were most of the men there. We wanted to show that we were as decent and sober citizens as anyone. Kenneth Whistler might have been a businessman. He had even found time to s.h.i.+ne his shoes.

Those used to be important symbols of self-respect: s.h.i.+ned shoes.

Whistler began his speech by making fun of his bandages. ”The Spirit of Seventy-six,” he said.

Everybody laughed and laughed, although the occasion was surely not a happy one. All the members of the union had been fired about a month before-for joining a union. They were makers of grinding wheels, and there was only one company in the area that could use their skills. That was the Johannsen Grinder Company, and that was the company that had fired them. They were specialized potters, essentially, shaping soft materials and then firing them in kilns. The fathers or grandfathers of most of them had actually been potters in Scandinavia, who were brought to this country to learn this new specialty.

The rally took place in a vacant store in Cambridge. Appropriately enough, the folding chairs had been contributed by a funeral home. Mary Kathleen and I were in the first row.

Whistler, it turned out, had been injured in a routine mining accident. He said he had been working as ”a robber,” taking out supporting pillars of coal from a tunnel where the seam had otherwise been exhausted. Something had fallen on him.

And he went seamlessly from talk of such dangerous work in such a dark place to a recollection of a tea dance at the Ritz fifteen years before, where a Harvard cla.s.smate named Nils Johannsen had been caught using loaded dice in a c.r.a.p game in the men's room. This was the same person who was now the president of Johannsen Grinder, who had fired all these workers. Johannsen's grandfather had started the company. He said that Johannsen had had his head stuck in a toilet bowl at the Ritz, and that the hope was that he would never use loaded dice again.

”But here he is,” said Whistler, ”using loaded dice again.”

He said that Harvard could be held responsible for many atrocities, including the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, but that it was innocent of having produced Nils Johannsen. ”He never attended a lecture, never wrote a paper, never read a book while he was there,” he said. ”He was asked to leave at the end of his soph.o.m.ore year.

”Oh, I pity him,” he said. ”I even understand him. How else could he ever amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the basic rights of workers-those are loaded dice. The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights-those are loaded dice.”

Whistler asked the fired workers how much Johannsen actually knew or cared about grinding wheels. How shrewd this was! The way to befriend working people in those days, and to get them to criticize their society as brilliantly as any philosopher, was to get them to talk about the one subject on which they were almost arrogantly well-informed: their work.

It was something to hear. Worker after worker testified that Johannsen's father and grandfather had been mean b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, too, but that they at least knew how to run a factory. Raw materials of the highest quality arrived on time in their day-machinery was properly maintained, the heating plant and the toilets worked, bad workmans.h.i.+p was punished and good workmans.h.i.+p was rewarded, no defective grinding wheel ever reached a customer, and on and on.

Whistler asked them if one of their own number could run the factory better than Nils Johannsen did. One man spoke for them all on that subject: ”G.o.d, yes,” he said, ”anyone here.”

Whistler asked him if he thought it was right that a person could inherit a factory.

The man's considered answer was this: ”Not if he's afraid of the factory and everybody in it-no. No, siree.”

This piece of groping wisdom impresses me still. A sensible prayer people could offer up from time to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: ”Dear Lord-never put me in the charge of a frightened human being.”

Kenneth Whistler promised us that the time was at hand for workers to take over their factories and to run them for the benefit of mankind. Profits that now went to drones and corrupt politicians would go to those who worked, and to the old and the sick and the orphaned. All people who could work would work. There would be only one social cla.s.s-the working cla.s.s. Everyone would take turns doing the most unpleasant work, so that a doctor, for example, might be expected to spend a week out of each year as a garbage man. The production of luxury goods would stop until the basic needs of every citizen were met. Health care would be free. Food would be cheap and nouris.h.i.+ng and plentiful. Mansions and hotels and office buildings would be turned into small apartments, until everyone was decently housed. Dwellings would be a.s.signed by means of a lottery. There would be no more wars and eventually no more national boundaries, since everyone in the world would belong to the same cla.s.s with identical interests-the interests of the working cla.s.s.

And on and on.

What a spellbinder he was!

Mary Kathleen whispered in my ear. ”You're going to be just like him, Walter.”

”I'll try,” I said. I had no intention of trying.

The most embarra.s.sing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

People who had heard Kenneth Whistler speak before begged him to tell again about leading the pickets outside Charlestown Prison when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. And it seems, strange to me now that I have to explain who Sacco and Vanzetti were. I recently asked young Israel Edel at RAMJAC, the former night clerk at the Arapahoe, what he knew about Sacco and Vanzetti, and he told me confidently that they were rich, brilliant thrill-killers from Chicago. He had them confused with Leopold and Loeb.

Why should I find this unsettling? When I was a young man, I expected the story of Sacco and Vanzetti to be retold as often and as movingly, to be as irresistible, as the story of Jesus Christ some day. Weren't modern people, if they were to marvel creatively at their own lifetimes, I thought, ent.i.tled to a Pa.s.sion like Sacco and Vanzetti's, which ended in an electric chair?

As for the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti as a modern Pa.s.sion: As on Golgotha, three lower-cla.s.s men were executed at the same time by a state. This time, though, not just one of the three was innocent. This time two of the three were innocent.

The guilty man was a notorious thief and killer named Celestino Madeiros, convicted of a separate crime. As the end drew near, he confessed to the murders for which Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted, too.

Why?

”I seen Sacco's wife come here with the kids, and I felt sorry for the kids,” he said.

Imagine those lines spoken by a good actor in a modern Pa.s.sion Play.

Madeiros died first. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.

Sacco died next. Of the three, he was the only family man. The actor portraying him would have to project a highly intelligent man who, since English was his second language and since he was not clever with languages, would not trust himself to say anything complicated to the witnesses as he was strapped into the electric chair.