The Unwitting (9 page)

I checked her diaper, but I knew before I felt the cloth that it was dry and clean.

I carried her to the rocking chair and sat. My feet started us in motion; my hand patting her back kept rhythm with the movement. I began to sing about the cotton being high, her daddy rich, and her mama good-looking. The cries subsided to whimpers, then went quiet, but I kept rocking and singing. I was having too good a time to stop. I moved from
Porgy and Bess
to “Of Thee I Sing.” It was a Gershwin night. Down the hall, the argument continued to rage. The words
snitch
and
betrayal
and
blacklist
hammered on the closed door. I heard Charlie’s voice, though I couldn’t make out the words—he wasn’t shouting; he never shouted—then Sonia’s laugh, rising and falling like an electric fountain. I kept rocking and patting and singing.

“Who cares if the sky cares to fall in the sea? So long as I care for you and you care for me,” I sang softly into Abby’s velvet ear. I knew I had the lyrics out of order, but that was okay. The sentiment was on the mark.

The sentiment, it occurs to me now, was my anthem at the time. Each morning, when I padded to the front door to take in the newspapers, I found myself staring into the fleshy smirking face of Senator Joe McCarthy. Every time I turned on the radio, he was warning of communists in the State Department, the Army, government offices, schools, libraries, and every woodpile in the nation, though he could never decide on the actual number. One day it was 205, then 57, then 81, then 10. He would have been ludicrous had he not been so dangerous. But he could not have done what he did without help. Reporters blared his every accusation, no matter how far-fetched or loony; editors plastered his leering photograph across front pages. The junior senator from Wisconsin sold newspapers and made careers, and newspapers and reporters made the junior senator in return.
It was a sweetheart deal if ever there was one. But it had nothing to do with Abby and me.

HOW LONG DID
I live in that cocoon, six months, eight? Abby was born in August 1953, and the Army-McCarthy hearings began in April 1954. Years later, I would watch the Watergate hearings with Abby and, after that, the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings while babysitting her daughter Elizabeth, but the Army-McCarthy hearings were the first nationally televised congressional inquiry, and for thirty-six days, 188 hours—I didn’t keep track, I wasn’t that bad, but the statistics were all over the papers—I was chained to the ABC or DuMont network. CBS and NBC preferred the revenue from their soap operas. I moved Abby’s playpen into the bedroom to keep an eye on her or held her on my lap and turned the pages of
Goodnight Moon
or
The Velveteen Rabbit
while I watched Senator McCarthy drone and bully. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, lurked at his side, looking, with his smudged heavy-lidded eyes and pouty mouth, like a sullen mean-spirited boy, the kind who ends up on the front page of a tabloid for murdering his parents and setting fire to the house to destroy the evidence.

The longer the hearings went on, the more convoluted the drama grew. The Army accused McCarthy and Cohn of trying to get special treatment for a staff member named Schine, who had been inducted into the service. McCarthy countered that the Army was holding Schine hostage to prevent McCarthy’s committee from exposing a veritable coven of communists in the military. The proceedings featured monitored phone conversations, doctored photographs, fabricated memoranda, and other assorted skulduggery.

McCarthy and Cohn were repellent, but, though the hearings made me sick, I could not turn them off. I shouted at the television. Once I made Abby cry. I also fought with Charlie about them.

My first idea was that Charlie should write an editorial. He said it would be premature. The hearings were barely under way.

“But if we wait, it may be too late,” I argued.

“McCarthy isn’t going anywhere. More’s the pity.”

“Exactly my point. That’s why we have to speak out against him.”

But Charlie was adamant. I stopped arguing and started writing my own article. I even paid Orchid, who came down from Harlem to care for Abby, to take her to the park for a few extra afternoons so I could work without interruption. I spent my days watching the hearings, reading about them, and outlining the article. The bulletin board over my desk was covered with notes, clippings, and charts of names and dates. I kept waiting for Charlie to wander into my study and ask what I was working on. He didn’t.

The article went more quickly than I expected. That was because I spent every moment I wasn’t actually writing the piece thinking about it. One night, a week or so before the end of the hearings, I handed Charlie the article as he walked in the door. I didn’t even let him put down his briefcase or loosen his tie.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“A piece I’ve been working on.”

He put the papers on the hall table. “Do you mind if I have a drink first?”

He started for the living room, loosening his tie and taking off his jacket as he went.

I picked up the pages and followed him.

He made two drinks and gave me one. I took it and handed the article back to him.

He looked down at the title. “Senator McCarthy’s Points of Disorder,” he read.

“I’ll take out the pun. It was a bad idea.”

He looked up at me. “I thought we agreed to wait on this.”

“We didn’t agree. You said you wanted to wait for an editorial.”

“In politics, like just about everything else in life, timing is everything.”

“Exactly. That’s why we have to strike while the iron is hot.”

“I hope the piece isn’t written in clichés like that.”

I was stung. He could be a tough editor, but he had never ridiculed me.

“Why don’t you read it and find out?” I said and went back to the kitchen.

He followed me a few moments later, his drink in one hand, the article in the other.

“It’s good,” he said.

“Not too many clichés?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I’ve had it up to here with McCarthy. I spend half my life in the office debating what to say, when to say it, whether to say it, and around and around.”

“I don’t see what there is to debate. The man is dangerous, and it’s up to people like us to speak out.”

“And the consequences be damned?”

“Isn’t that the point of
Compass
?”

“Did it ever occur to you that this could mean the end of
Compass
?”

“You mean the end of the foundation’s backing?”

“No, I mean the end of the magazine and of me. McCarthy, in case you haven’t noticed, doesn’t play nice or even fair.”

“If we don’t stand up to him, who will?”

“I’m not saying we won’t stand up to him. I’m just suggesting we should wait for the outcome of the hearings.”

“When it will be too late.”

We went on like that for a while. I accused him of being too cautious, but I never used the word
craven
. I didn’t have to. He knew what I thought of his behavior.

I REMAINED GLUED
to the hearings. Then on an overcast Wednesday in June, I discovered why. I was waiting for good to triumph over evil. Charlie was right. I was a political naïf.

It started with Joseph Welch, the lawyer who had been hired by the Army as its special counsel. He was a wiry man with a kind face and a wardrobe of bow ties that were always a little askew. Occasionally, he let his wit show.

On that June afternoon while the city went about its business twelve floors below, I sat spellbound before a television screen as McCarthy began to accuse a young lawyer in Welch’s firm of working for the Communist Party. The charge was not unusual. McCarthy was good at the fancy footwork of character assassination. If one line of attack seemed to be going nowhere or if the spotlight drifted off him for a moment, he danced on to another. In this case, he was circling a junior attorney called Fisher.

Welch tried to stop him, but McCarthy kept going. He was smirking and joking and making hash of another life. That was when Welch blew up. I say blew up, but his explosion was all the more powerful for being so controlled. Overnight, his words became a national slogan.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

On television, the hearing room went silent. At my feet, Abby sang good night to the stars and the air and noises everywhere. The silence went on for another few seconds. Even Abby looked up from her book. Then the crowded smoky hearing room erupted in applause. It was hard to tell, because McCarthy was looking down at his desk, but he seemed stunned. The next day, I read in the paper that he had turned to Cohn and asked what had happened.

What had happened was that the restrained eloquence of one man with a conscience had brought down a demagogue who had none. Six months later the Senate would vote to censure McCarthy. Within three years, he would be dead of drink. And Charlie ran my piece on McCarthy as the lead article in the next issue.

Six

N
O ONE WAS
sure where the term
Cold War
came from. Some ascribed it to George Orwell, others to the columnist Walter Lippmann. But one fact was undisputed. It was heating up. Every issue of the magazine carried at least one article about an intellectual or academic confrontation between the Soviets and the West in some out-of-the-way country that many couldn’t locate on a map. Though most of us could locate Guatemala on a map, few of us knew much about the country. But a reporter named Sydney Gruson did. That was why it was so odd that
The New York Times
pulled him off the story.

Sydney Gruson was a flamboyant newsman who had started off as a bellboy in a Toronto hotel at twelve and worked his way up to covering cataclysmic, often dangerous events around the world. Charlie knew him better than I did, because when Charlie had been at a meeting in Mexico City a year or two earlier, Sydney had put him up at his sprawling house—dripping with bougainvillea, Charlie said—and taken him to the racetrack to see Sydney’s three Thoroughbreds run. But despite the high life, Gruson was a serious reporter with an uncanny ability to get to the bottom of murky, complicated stories. That was why he was so incensed when the
Times
told him to stay in Mexico rather than return to Guatemala to cover the coup brewing there. The coup was supposed to be indigenous,
but anyone who could read between the lines in a newspaper knew it was CIA inspired and backed.

“Obviously someone at the CIA got to someone at the
Times
,” I told Charlie when we heard that Sydney had been pulled off the story.

“That’s what Sydney thinks.” Charlie had spoken to him that day.

The next morning I called Sydney in Mexico City. By the time Charlie got home that evening, I had made up my mind. I was going to write a piece on the simmering coup and the American press coverage of it.

A few days later, Charlie called to ask if he could bring Elliot home for dinner. He always called, I always said yes, and then each of us felt we had done the right thing. Twenty minutes later, he called again and said that since Elliot was coming to dinner, he might as well bring Sonia as well. She was at loose ends.

“Sonia alone of an evening. Now there’s an unlikely scenario.”

“I thought you two were friends.”

“That’s what friendship is, Ace, accepting each other’s weaknesses, or in this case strengths.”

The friendship had begun with her evening visits and blossomed since I’d gone back to working at the magazine three afternoons a week. We were two women navigating a man’s world, not as equals, never that, but not as mere appendages either. We were in cahoots as well as competition, bound by having voices that were, in meetings, somehow out of the range of male hearing, and by the ability to make coffee, and the dubious honor of being the objects of innuendo-laced compliments. She got more of those than I did. That was because I was married, she insisted, and had nothing to do with her appearance. You see, she really was a friend.

The night Charlie brought her and Elliot home for dinner, they turned up at the apartment a little after seven. Sonia was wearing a
knit dress that showed a lot of cleavage. I was in trousers and a shirt. It wasn’t her fault. I could have changed, if I’d thought of it, but I hadn’t until I saw her.

We went into the living room. Across the park, the windows of the Fifth Avenue buildings flamed crimson in the setting sun. Charlie headed for the bar to mix gin and tonics. Elliot sat beside Sonia on the sofa. She took a cigarette from the silver box on the coffee table. As he leaned toward her to light it, she put her hand on the back of his. She had once told me that Elliot was too buttoned-up to interest her romantically, but now I wondered if she had suddenly picked up the hum he gave off, the one audible only to females of the species. Or perhaps the gesture was simply a reflex on her part. She was homotropic.

When the flaming windows across the park began to darken, I excused myself and went into the kitchen to check on dinner. A moment later, Elliot followed. He stood leaning against the counter with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, watching me as I took the pork roast out of the oven. I found myself standing up a little straighter. A man in the kitchen tends to do that to a woman, even if he’s not the man she wants in the kitchen.