Jailbird

18

I had somehow neglected 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. He had gone to 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.

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 shingles, 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 Strelit'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 Ke

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 scholarship 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, God 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 class.

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 Cinci

I held Mary Kathleen's hand.

Nobody 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. Ke

Those used to be important symbols of self-respect: shined 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 Joha

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 tu

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 classmate named Nils Joha

"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 i

"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 Joha

It was something to hear. Worker after worker testified that Joha

Whistler asked them if one of their own number could run the factory better than Nils Joha

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 lime to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: "Dear Lord — never put me in the charge of a frightened human being."

Ke