Red Love (2 page)

I was afraid for much of my life.

When I was called down to my draft board, I feared they would find out about my connections to the Party. On my way there I carried three red leather volumes of Stalin’s collected works which I Wanted to destroy. I had tried to set them on fire at home, but they wouldn’t catch. In my anxiety I forgot I was still carrying them until I got within a block of Whitehall Street. Looking around to see if any nuts were watching me, I tried to casually drop them through the grates of sewers, but they were too thick. I picked them up again, garbage and litter falling off them, and hurled them into a stairwell.

That was 1958.

To this day I am the kind of fellow who, if he really
detests
other guests at a dinner party, may love them to death. I recently sat next to a poet over dinner who loved to write poems in honor of dictators she admired, like Castro, Assad, Qaddafi, and Ortega. She referred to Israel each time she had to mention it as, “that client state of the United States.”

She asked me what the book I was writing was about. I felt that if I said one honest word to her, all my real feelings would come tumbling out or that even the one honest word would give me away. Even a word like “really?” or “wow.” And that she would get me. So I told her only that this book was about “political radicals in the 1930s,” plied her with admiring questions, gave her a fairly expensive set of pearls, and grinned when she toasted the Palestinians.

On my way out I heard her ask the host, “Why does that little guy hate me so much?”

It’s difficult to get up in front of the world. Christ, it’s even difficult to get up in a saloon and sing “Heart of My Heart” and do a little dance. I wanted to be a song-and-dance man in a high hat. Until life encroached.

Yet I wrote this book. I got the story of the true believers. I walked up to their front doors, rang their bells, and walked in when invited. Life became emotionally charged and rich.

Maury Ballinzweig’s sister (Maury was codefendant with the Rubells) read a chapter from this book before she would see me. She criticized me for writing that the sister of the executed Solly Rubell said it was a tragedy that Solly “didn’t live to experience the joys of television.” I asked her about all the “nice” things I quoted Solly’s sister as saying about him. She replied, “Yeah, but you pricked the balloon with that one.” At another point, I told her that Maury had felt I was too “anti-Communist.” She said, “What does this have to do with Communism?”

I stared at her, and smiled. “I don’t know.”

“I read your other books,” she said. “You nitpicked your characters to death. You just spat them out. You know, you can get at the truth and be sympathetic, or you can get at the truth the way the F.B.I. tries to get at it. I can’t give you any information.”

“Your criticism of my books is marvelous, by the way,” I said. “But I’m not looking for information. I’m looking for family background.”

“That’s information,” she said. “From that information you draw your own conclusions.”

“Maury talked to me,” I said.

“Yeah. And he told me he was sorry.” She laughed and kissed me.

I went to those who were most directly involved. They talked out of the need to talk, out of loneliness, because they wanted to be understood. Sometimes they jarred my understanding. When I heard that a grandson of the Rubells wrote in a creative writing class of his father’s guilt about their death—that he had been unable to prevent it—I was stopped in my tracks and left alone with the human story.

IV

How I ever got Maury Ballinzweig, “the prince of progressive humanity” himself, to talk to me—that was exhilarating and impressive. Maury was convicted along with the Rubells. He had once been called one of the most dangerous espionage agents in America.

What happened was this: he was sensitive. I was sensitive. And we liked each other tremendously.

It was a case of sensitivity rewarded.

Maury had been photographed, taped, wired, spat upon, condescended to, despised, and generally screwed in every orifice. He should have awaited my visits with machine guns and barbed wire and baby tape recorders in corners. Instead he sat in his bare room waiting for me in his slippers, fortified by apricots, his radical publications, his picture of his father, his ideology. Maury was the pied piper of ragamuffin espionage. Lee Harvey Oswald wrote him a fan letter. The Weather people looked up to him as a mentor. In the 1980s he visited them in prison. When he entered the prison corridor, a hush descended as if the pope had arrived.

I worked up to calling Maury on the phone and then meeting him over the course of two years. I cultivated his former wife Linda and his other friends, learning all I could about him.

First I called Linda Ballinzweig. “Turtles get a great deal of satisfaction sitting and getting sunned on a rock,” Linda told me, explaining how she had always been “attracted to a profound respect for things in and of themselves.” She was sitting in my living room talking and darning socks. She went on to point out that this society did not have that “profound respect,” and she traced it back to Columbus, who “came to this continent, looked at these people who welcomed him, and the first thought he had was how to use them.” That was why, she said, she now conducted anti-Columbus celebrations in her classroom.

And Linda used Maury but good, while he was in prison, to make herself the toast of progressive society, a celebrity from coast to coast and continent to continent.

I wanted to understand more, I told Linda in my living room. The idealism, the hope, Spain, antifascism in the thirties and forties.

“You want to build a bridge over the Holocaust,” she said.

Sure, why not? “Yes,” I said simply.

“I was in Washington,” Linda said, “in the park, picketing, when we heard that the Rubells were murdered. Shit on a stick! We lined up to put away our signs on the truck. As each sign was lowered on the truck, into a huge growing pile, it was as if a part of the world’s virtue were being destroyed and savagery were winning sway.

“Maury was meant to testify against Dolly and Solly,” she said. “Dolly and Solly were meant to testify against others. Concentration camps were ready, you know. The F.B.I. came to Maury and told him he was a patsy for not testifying. After the Rubells’ death, they wanted someone to wash their hands for them.”

I asked her: “How would you describe Maury?”

“He’s a hedgehog: a prickly outer shell which he uses to protect his soft inner self.”

“I would like to meet him,” I said, as if it were a new thought.

“You can try,” she said. “Here is his number and address.”

She was leaving New York to teach the art of software in Cleveland.

When we said goodbye, she said, “I want to help you.” Then she kissed me on the mouth. She raised one orthopedic shoe behind her as we clinched.

I wrote a heartfelt letter to Maury Ballinzweig and made out my will in case he decided to have me bumped off. Weeks passed. Heartbroken, I wrote him again and told him how depressed I was about not hearing from him.

And then a letter came:

Dear Gerald,

Mea culpa! Yes, I was touched by your letter.

You mustn’t get so depressed. Keeping busy and active helps.

But so many years have passed. I’m not sure my memories of Dolly and Solly will have the clarity you need. But I’ll try. The question is when. My daughter is coming to see me next week so I’ll be busy. Soon after that. Call me?

Again, I’m sorry. But you were very much on my mind. Your name, “Desperate Gerald,” is on my bulletin board in big letters.

Maury

358-9704

What a sweet letter! I decided Maury was innocent after all. But those moods don’t last.

I called Maury after a martini, a tranquilizer, and black coffee. The first phone conversation took place in December 1982. Maury’s voice on the phone was Brooklyn Jewish with little curls of refinement. There was whining in it, weeping, and a bubbling joy. And such sophistication—Maury knew psychology! Art exhibits! Hemingway’s male chauvinism! There was also an alacrity in his response to me, openness, suspicion, curiosity, and friendliness. But he was not willing to schedule a date for our meeting yet.

Three weeks and ten phone calls later, we set a date, and I met Maury at his apartment for four hours. After I left, I stood in a freezing doorway and wrote in my notebook:

When we said goodbye, we shook hands, and when I began to pull away, Maury held my hand for a moment longer.

This is a very lonely person. A sweet person.

The inner man is very close to the surface. Maury wants to make himself known to someone who can understand.

Wasn’t he lucky he found me?

And so my novel began.

When I called Maury for a second appointment, he seemed upset. He said he had spent the weekend visiting two “friends”: one of the Weather people and a Roumanian convicted on espionage and conspiracy charges for supplying classified information to Cuba.

The Weather lady had killed several innocent passersby during a holdup. Maury told me that the impact of visiting her had been so traumatic that afterward he’d had to stop his car on the side of the road and close his eyes. He told me the Weather lady had been moved by his example, and she kept his picture on the wall of her cell.

Maury said he hadn’t been sleeping well and that his work was going badly. He seemed to relate these problems to our meeting. He said he’d been reading some of my stories in my earlier books,
Hot Pastrami Sandwich
and
Kosher and Topless,
and that he “envied” my ability. But while he admired the writing, he said, he did not always care for what my writing was
saying
politically.

“The problem,” Maury said, “is that, really, Gerald, I am a political person, and the humanist side of things does not really turn me on.”

My voice trembled as I said, “I wish you wouldn’t close me out, Maury.”

“You’re not closed out!
Believe me,
Gerald, believe me, you’re not closed out. Let me solve my problems of the moment. I’ll try to—look, look—I’m putting you up on my bulletin board again—up you go—so I won’t forget.”

When I called Maury next, he said, “Ah, bad hews, bad news. I mean I still got all this other stuff to do.” Maury said he was working as a technical adviser for Nicaragua, Cuba, and Vietnam. “Look,” he said, “maybe we’ll get together in the springtime when it’s nice and sunny.”

I didn’t speak.

“Gerry? Gerry? Are you there? Listen to me. I promise. When the sun comes out in Riverside Park, when it’s nice and sunny, we’ll find a pleasant bench and we’ll talk.”

V

I had discussed everything with my psychiatrist in Chicago, who analyzed Maury for me and told me how to approach him. Now I was desperate, yet it had become difficult to fly to Chicago from New York more than once a week to see him. My debt is staggering. I called Dr. Goldberg again and said I had to see him to talk about my problems with Maury.

Dr. Goldberg sighed. “You promised me.”

“What?”

“You promised you wouldn’t talk about your problems anymore.”

It was true. After seeing Dr. Goldberg for thirty-three years, years during which we had both aged, had our ups and downs, and gone through many changes, Dr. Goldberg had told me he wanted to only talk about himself from now on.

For years Dr. Goldberg invited me to visit him in Maine in the summer. He had a summer house there. Even when we walked in the woods, in his gray shirt, shorts, and little argyle socks, Goldberg was alert to human grief. He would turn our walks into brief therapy sessions, which he interspersed with bird-watching.

“I have needs too,” he said now. “My patients become my healers. It’s your turn, Gerald.

“I was always shy as a young man,” he said. “My father would say that suffering is the law of life …” he began, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise from then on. I think he felt I owed him since I never paid him for my therapy. Dr. Goldberg talked to me for eight months on how Ronald Reagan was ruining his life. “All therapy is pointless until we get rid of him,” he said.

“A blind girl knocked at my door,” Dr. Goldberg continued. “She was looking for a room. She wore dark glasses. She came by at the suggestion of a patient, Bob Starr, who said she was a witch. Before I could decide whether to let her stay, the doorbell rang again, and a bunch of people came in and trudged upstairs with boxes of her stuff. I said ‘wait a minute,’ and she said, ‘You wouldn’t want to be known as a doctor who put a blind girl out on the street.’

“Now I can’t get rid of her. She’s taken over the house. She has a malign presence, an aura, and a vast network of people who are devoted to her. I told her she had to leave, and a lawyer’s letter arrived several days later. It had the same refrain: ‘You wouldn’t want a news story that says a noted doctor put a blind girl out on the street.’ Even Bob Starr, who used to hate her, comes to see her now. I see him disappearing into her room. He says, ‘She has a way of moving her body.’”

“But what about Maury—” I shouted at him.

He sighed. “From what you tell me,” he said, “Maury is a very warm, affectionate person. Especially for a former spy. He wants to carry on this relationship with you, but he doesn’t really know quite how to do it.

“There’s an essential conflict,” Dr. Goldberg said. “He has to deny that he’s important on a personal level, since he’s only important in his own view if he furthers his political ideology. He feels his heroism is in his martyrdom. By letting him know you think his own story is important, you’re telling him that
he’s
important. Maybe he’s beginning to sense there’s something important about him that no one else realized. In a way you are re-creating him, establishing him as a person of significance in a world that rejected him. You may be the only one who’s communicated this to him. He isn’t going to let you go, Gerald, but he isn’t going to make it easy for you to get to him either. Now can I talk about myself?”

The next time we talked, Dr. Goldberg said, “You’ve got to realize he’ll only be willing to talk on a superficial level at first. He’s glad to find somebody who doesn’t see him just as a political entity, but he’ll never admit that. That’s his armor.