Defending the Truth, page 4
Joshua rolled his eyes. “You think they’ll attach your checking accounts?”
Livinsky said nothing. Moraga chuckled.
“So why did your article stir up such a furor?”
“Because the Soviet Union has denounced the U.N. entry into the Korean War, as has our group, and because section three of the McCarran Act defines subversive activity as including publications which ‘advocate the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism.’ Since our article expressed the same view as the official Communist policy, we have been branded as Communists.”
“That’s all they have?” Joshua asked.
“That’s all.”
Joshua flipped through the pages and skimmed section three for a moment. He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Pretty scary stuff.”
Livinsky nodded. “I’ll tell you what is even scarier, Mr. Rabb. When the Subversive Activities Control Board designated our group as a Communist front, all of us simply sent written letters of resignation from the organization to the university president. Nothing has happened to the other seven. Only to Julio and me. We were notified just this morning by the provost that our contracts will not be honored for employment at the University of Arizona next year, even though both of us are tenured.”
“How can they do that?”
“Because the McCarran Act says that a Communist front member may not hold employment with an agency of the United States government without disclosing such membership.”
“I don’t get it,” Joshua said. “The U of A is a state institution, not federal. It’s run by the State Board of Regents and supported by state funds.”
“Except that the University of Arizona does accept federal funds for various of its research enterprises, and the university president considers that to fit within the definition of ‘agency of the United States.’”
“That’s plain nonsense,” Joshua said. “He must be getting pressure from someone.”
“Senator William Maitland,” Livinsky said.
Joshua had read several times that Big Bill Maitland, the freshman Republican senator from Phoenix, had eagerly jumped aboard McCarthy’s witch-hunting wagon. He had run for the seat that had been held for four terms by Jacob Lukis, whom Joshua had come to know quite well. Lukis was a native Tucsonan, very rich, powerful, and in his mid-seventies. A stroke had kept him from running for reelection in the midterm election of 1950. Maitland, in a vicious anti-Communist McCarthyite campaign, had soundly defeated the Democratic candidate.
“Okay, assuming it’s Maitland, why would he single you two out?” Joshua looked from Livinsky to Moraga.
Julio answered first. “I’m a subversive because I assaulted the Pima County registrar when he refused to register me to vote back in 1948. And also because I helped Mischa write the article.”
“I thought that punching the registrar made you a man of honor,” Joshua said, “but that may not be the universally accepted opinion.” He looked at Livinsky. “And you, sir?”
“I am from the Soviet Union, Mr. Rabb, and I am a Jew. The only way I could teach at the University of Moscow in the 1930s was by being a member of the Communist party. It was one of Stalin’s rules, although for nonpolitical gentiles it was often overlooked. I fled Moscow in June 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia. I had read Mein Kampf and heard enough of Hitler’s speeches on the short wave radio to have a strong sense of what was coming. I fled to Sweden and finally to New York City. My undergraduate degree was from the University of Heidelberg in political economy and my doctorate from the Sorbonne, so I had sufficient credentials to get a teaching job at New York University. And in 1947 I accepted a tenured professorship at the University of Arizona.”
“Did you ever renounce your membership in the Communist party?”
Livinsky shrugged. “I don’t really know how I would do that. Would I write to party headquarters in Moscow and tell them that I’m not?”
Joshua pursed his lips and said nothing.
“At NYU I signed a loyalty oath. I avowed that I held no views inimical to the United States. And you must remember, Mr. Rabb, that communism wasn’t illegal in the U.S. during the Second World War, and the Soviet Union was a vitally important ally. When I became a naturalized citizen here in Tucson two years ago, I again swore my loyalty. It was true, and it is true today.”
Joshua looked pensive. Livinsky’s case was not as clear-cut as Moraga’s.
“All right,” Joshua said, “aside from the article you wrote and your backgrounds, what specific evidence does the government have that you committed the crime? I can’t imagine that Judge Buchanan, the federal judge here, is going to let the U.S. attorney go through with such a serious prosecution just on the basis of a pacifist article and your backgrounds. Certainly as to Julio, he knows the circumstances of his assault on the voting registrar, and he’s not going to be persuaded by that that he’s a Communist.”
“Mr. Rabb,” Livinsky said, “their entire additional evidence is that the McCarran Act lists as one of the elements of proof that an organization is subversive, that it keeps ‘membership lists in code.’ That’s section thirteen e seven.”
Joshua turned to it and read it. He nodded.
“When the FBI agents from Washington, D.C., came here—they have a special unit that witch-hunts Communists—they served a search warrant on my home. They found in my office a folder of papers in ‘code,’ which they sent to their expert code man back in Washington. They discovered that it was notes concerning the members of our group and several of our meetings, and that the notes were written in Yiddish. Not so odd, since my father was a Talmud teacher in a yeshiva in the Moldavanka ghetto in Odessa, and we spoke Yiddish at home, as did all the Jews in the Ukraine. But to the FBI, this clearly constituted a ‘code.’”
Joshua breathed deeply. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, sir. I am serious.”
“That’s it? Nothing else?”
Both Livinsky and Moraga shook their heads.
“Jesus,” Joshua muttered. “I never heard such bullshit in my life. Maybe I’d better stop writing letters to my parents in Yiddish. Except my mother doesn’t understand English so well.” He looked soberly at Livinsky and Moraga. “God save us from the patriots.”
The men were silent.
“Did you bring a copy of your article?”
“Yes. It’s the last six pages of those documents.”
“Give me a few minutes.” Joshua hunched over his desk and studied the article closely.
“Well,” he said, sitting back in his creaky wooden swivel chair, “I can’t see anything subversive about it. I don’t agree with you, but it’s still not subversive. But I can see what caused your problem.” He turned a couple of pages and read the quote. “‘Senator Joseph McCarthy’s tactics are those of a fascist demagogue, second in modern times only to Hitler. McCarthy’s infamous crusade is a sick salacious search for whomever he defines as deviant and deleterious to society.”
Livinsky nodded and shrugged. “It had a seductive poetic ring, Mr. Rabb. Wonderful alliteration. I simply couldn’t bear to edit out those lines.”
Joshua laughed. “Well, your poetry has landed you in the grand jury.”
The laughter from Livinsky and Moraga was thin and nervous.
“When is your grand jury appearance?”
“Monday after next at eight.”
“We’d better get started right now,” Joshua said. “It doesn’t give us much time to prepare.”
A smile slowly broke up the vertical wrinkles of Livinsky’s cheeks. “Thank you, sir,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”
The first thing that Joshua needed to do after Livinsky and Moraga left two hours later was to file a complaint in superior court to try to get their teaching positions reinstated. To do that he needed to have a copy of the personnel policy of the University of Arizona spelling out the rules of tenure.
He drove to the university administration building and went to the personnel department in the basement. A mousy woman in her sixties with a tight bun of white hair and an equally tight and colorless expression told him that employment policies could not be given out to members of the public.
Joshua cajoled her into letting him sit and read the policy manual at the small metal table next to her large mahogany desk. He copied the tenure provisions on a legal pad, thanked her profusely, and drove to the law library at the courthouse. It took him almost an hour to research the status of the Board of Regents and the right of a private citizen to maintain an action against it for breach of contract.
It would have to be an application for a writ of prohibition, which was simply a request for a hearing before a superior court judge in which Livinsky and Moraga would seek to prohibit state officials—the Board of Regents—from violating the professors’ tenure contracts. One of the basic guarantees of tenure was that a professor was protected from the termination of his contract for any reason other than “conviction of a felony or a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude.” Livinsky and Moraga hadn’t even been charged with a crime yet. The writ of prohibition would hopefully result in a superior court order that would reinstate the two professors until they were actually convicted of a crime, if ever.
By the time that Joshua finished typing the writ application, it was after six o’clock and too late to file it with the clerk of the court.
The next morning at a few minutes after eight, he filed it and secured the appropriate subpoenas. The hearing was set for Tuesday, July 17, at nine o’clock, before Judge Bernardo Velasco, one of Tucson’s three superior court judges.
Chapter 4
They drove in Mark’s Cadillac convertible to the little town of Eloy, fifty-five miles north of Tucson. They couldn’t go to a motel in Tucson, lest they be seen by someone they knew, or someone recognize the car, or the room clerk get suspicious that they weren’t married and call the police.
It was dark, a little after nine—travelers didn’t check into a motel in daylight—and they carried two empty valises into the room. The door was held open by the fawning clerk, a sixty-year-old fat Mexican with a wad of tobacco in his cheek and juice trickling down the furrowed grooves of flaccid skin by his mouth. They yawned at him and smiled tiredly, and he flipped the key on the double bed and left, closing the door behind him. Mark slid the dead bolt.
He turned around and smiled at Hanna, sitting on the edge of the bed. All of a sudden she felt shy. They had been going together for three years, and he had touched her and she him, but never like this. Good girls didn’t go all the way. But this was different. Mark was going into the army tomorrow, and then almost certainly to Korea, and she might never see him again.
Her father and Mark’s parents had forbidden them to marry, but they couldn’t forbid her and Mark to love. Mark was gorgeous, big and tall, hazel eyes, brown hair. She had been in love with him since the first time he looked at her at Tucson High School five years ago.
He switched the light off. A sixty-watt bug bulb outside the door cast pallid illumination into the room, and the room brightened frequently with the lights of the trucks and cars whizzing by on Highway 87, just ten yards away.
He walked to her, leaned over, and they kissed. Her breath came hot and fast. He unbuttoned her cotton blouse and she held her arms up and he took it off. He fumbled with the hooks of her brassiere, and she helped him unhook it and slid it off her arms. Her nipples were puckered, and he took one softly in his mouth, and then the other. She lay back on the bed, and he unbuttoned and unzipped her shorts and pulled them off with her panties. He unbuttoned his Levi’s, pushed them down along with his underwear, and stepped out of them. He pulled off his polo shirt.
She touched him timidly with tremulous fingers.
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He lay beside her and held her. She had no idea what to do, but she knew that he did. He had been to the whorehouses several times in Nogales, Mexico, just sixty-five miles south of Tucson. It was a rite of passage for high school and college boys in Tucson.
He spread her legs and touched her gently, and she forgot everything and everyone but him.
Mark, Mark, Mark, I love you. Why can’t we be like this forever? Oh. God, I love you so.
She cried in the car all the way back to Tucson, and when Mark drove away from the house on Speedway Boulevard and Fourth Avenue, it took all the strength she had just to open the door and walk inside and up the stairs to her bedroom.
Joshua lay sleeping restlessly next to Barbara in the master bedroom. He and Hanna had had yet another argument earlier, late in the afternoon, and this time she had sworn that if Mark were killed in Korea, she would move away from Tucson and never see her family again. Her father had stolen from her the only happiness she would ever have.
He thought he had years ago conquered the nightmares about the war that used to recur regularly, ruining his sleep and wrenching him awake. But suddenly they were back, even cruelly invading his waking thoughts at the party a few days ago. And now, the dybbuks tore at his soul and choked him in his sleep as the familiar, frightful specters came alive again.
He jerked awake as he heard Hanna’s bedroom door slam shut. Tears spilled out of his eyes onto the mattress. His body and the sheet under him were drenched with sweat, but he was trembling with chills.
Barbara rolled to him, wrapped her arms tightly around him. and rocked him softly like a baby.
Joshua and Adam stood at the end of the railway platform. Joshua’s deep blue eyes were sunken and melancholy, his tanned, strong-boned face lined with pain. He combed his fingers through his thick brown hair, straight back from the widow’s peak. It was graying at the temples, betraying his forty-one years.
At six feet three inches, he was taller than David Goldberg by four or five inches, but their weight was the same, about two hundred pounds. Unlike Joshua, David wore twenty-five pounds of it bulging from his belly.
Barbara stood next to her husband. She was almost his height in her high heels, and very shapely, even though she was wearing a full rust-colored silk skirt and a loose beige silk sleeveless blouse. Her face had the chiseled features of the photographic model she had once been, broad high cheekbones and wide-set brown eyes. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a simple, loose ponytail, glinting with red highlights in the early morning sun. She had worn no eye makeup so that the tears would not stream in colored rivulets down her cheeks.
Magdalena had come, too. She had asked the principal of Dunbar School, Morgan Maxwell, if she could have just an hour off in the mid-afternoon, and he had insisted that she take the entire afternoon. A big sister could not abandon her little sister at a time like this, he had said. His own son had left for Korea just a month ago, and he well knew the deep anguish of such a parting. Magdalena stood next to Barbara, holding her hand.
Although Judy Goldberg was dressed in the best that money could buy from her husband’s department store, the biggest and finest in Tucson, she looked matronly next to Barbara, and even in her grief she edged slightly away from Barbara to avoid the comparison. Judy sniffled into a handkerchief and patted her eyes softly with it.
All of them were silent, absorbed in their own thoughts.
Hanna and Mark were sitting at a table by the window of the restaurant inside the terminal, fifteen feet from their families directly outside. The train had arrived a half hour ago, and a brakeman was walking down the track checking the air hoses. They could see his disembodied head and shoulders bob above the platform, and they watched him silently. Hanna had sworn to herself that she would not cry, that she would smile at Mark as he left so that her smile would be what he remembered last, and not her teary, swollen eyes.
There was nothing else she could say to Mark, nothing more she could do for him. Just watch him leave and pray every day and every night that he would come back to her the same man who had left.
“Let’s go to the Dixie,” Joshua said quietly to Barbara. “I don’t want her just going home and lying in bed in her room, crying.”
Barbara nodded.
The Dixie Diner was way out on Speedway Boulevard, almost to where the paving ended at Alvernon. It was about five miles from the Southern Pacific Railroad Station, but it was the only place in Tucson that served fried shrimp. Hanna and Adam loved the shrimp, and although Joshua didn’t eat it, because it was unkosher, he had been reluctant to deny his children an occasional treat.
Tucson wasn’t Brooklyn, where you could go to any of a hundred delicatessens and eat your fill of dozens of delicacies. Here there was only one delicatessen, and it only had lox and salami. Otherwise, when you went out to eat at the small cafes and diners, your choices were Mexican food everywhere, open-faced roast beef sandwiches at Suzette’s, fried chicken at the Lucky Wishbone, hamburgers at Johnnies, or pizza at La Cucina.
Not that Joshua kept kosher any longer. The army had cured that. And the only thing that kosher meant in Tucson was something strange that some people did a long way from here. But he still didn’t eat certain foods like pork and shellfish. Force of habit.
The Dixie was a small, white stuccoed box with ten chipped brown Formica tables surrounded by aluminum pipe dinette chairs with peeling plastic padded seats. Another big treat for Hanna and Adam was that on every table there was a little gizmo about the size of a toaster that you put a nickel into and pushed a selector, and the song you chose would come out of two wooden speakers hung high in the corners of the west wall.
Joshua put a nickel in the slot, and Adam said, “Rock Around the Clock.”
“I don’t care,” Hanna mumbled.
Joshua pressed the button, and the song began to play.
“This table is too small for all of us,” Joshua said.
He looked across the table at Barbara and asked her with his eyes to help Hanna.
“Come on,” Barbara said. “Let’s leave these guys and have some girl talk.”
