Timebends (78 page)

A much decorated marine who had fought in the Korean War, Cain was one of a very few Red-hunters to have turned against the whole business, in his case with a vengeance. He had ridden the anti-Communist tide out of his native state of Washington when, with no trace of any political background, he was picked up by the Republicans and run for the Senate. His sole campaign theme was the Communist menace, about which he had such powerful feelings that he would demand Chaplin's deportation for having asked “the self-admitted Communist Picasso” to help organize French protests against American repression.

Joe McCarthy came out to help him, and even then, in the full flood of his fervor, Cain noticed something disconcerting about Joe's paranoid vindictiveness. One night they were both on the platform in an American Legion hall when “some guy got up in the back and began heckling McCarthy. The boys threw him out in the street, but you couldn't help noticing how really mad McCarthy was at the guy—I mean he was mad
personally,
he was damn near shaken. It was weird.

“Anyway, some years passed, and we were playing poker with the wives one evening, and suddenly Joe looks at me and says, ‘What'd you do about that guy?'

“I didn't know who he was talking about. That guy in the Legion hall that night who was bugging me.'

“It took me a minute to recall, it had been so long ago. I couldn't believe he'd even remember it, but it still really bothered him that somebody way, way back there in Tacoma hadn't gone along with him. And I said something like, ‘I don't know, I guess they just tossed him out of the hall. Why?'

” ‘ Why!
For Chrissake, the son of a bitch was heckling me!'—and he was mad as hell all over again. I couldn't believe it, because Joe was not all that bad a guy, you know. He could be awfully sweet and good to a person if he wanted to be. He just got onto the
Communism thing and ran with it, and I think he was always scared it was going to collapse under him, so he kept looking for enemies. … Tell you the truth though, Arthur, the really vindictive ones were the wives. We'd be playing cards with some of these senatorial wives and their husbands, and more likely than not the wives'd be the ones who'd say, ‘When are you going to get this one or that one? Why do you let him get away with saying this or that? Go get the son of a bitch!' They were the
real
haters.”

In court Cain testified that he had read my plays and found that politically they were so contradictory that they could not have been written under Party control. It was pleasant testimony, but obviously the tracks were laid and the train was going to its appointed station no matter what.

Cain's transformation had grown out of his former job as head of the Subversive Activities Control Board, to which he was appointed by President Eisenhower after his defeat for a second term as senator. The board's mandate was to see that no Reds were hired by government or held government positions. In an ordinary day he received a bushel of letters of denunciation of one citizen by another for real or imagined subversive views, plus a small but steady number of complaints by accused people claiming innocence of Communist associations or sympathies, which went into the files with little ado.

A persistent man in Baltimore, however, caught Cain's bored attention with a semiliterate protesting letter about every third day claiming that he had been unjustly fired as a subversive from his job at the post office. A real Red, Cain imagined, had to know how to spell better than this, and he wrote agreeing to see the man to discuss the matter, figuring he would probably not dare to show up and face his interrogation.

But he did appear one morning and convinced Cain of his innocence. He had the same name as a man known to have contributed to some Party front. Cain got him his job back, but he now found himself staring at his massive files containing the hundreds of denials, partial denials, remorseful confessions, denunciations—the whole mixed detritus of thousands of Americans who had lived through the New Deal years and had been tainted with what was simplistically branded subversion. Beginning by attempting to sort out the obvious from the less obvious Reds, the far leftists from the more conservative leftists and the mere left liberals, he arrived in some worried weeks at the point where he no longer believed that the government should be in the ideological policing business at
all. He got an appointment with Eisenhower, to whom he confided his deep misgivings that they were assembling a governmental structure of a totalitarian, mind-controlling bent. Eisenhower listened and Cain was promptly fired.

At the time of my trial he was doing regular political commentary on some Florida TV station. Sitting and talking with him in the Rauh living room, I saw a man with the special kind of tired, thin laugh that comes to those who have been spewed out by power and know they are not ever coming back.

When Judge McLaughlin looked down at me and asked if I had anything to say before sentencing, I thought I saw a look of embarrassment on his kindly Midwestern small-town face. I could think of nothing to add, and he sentenced me to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine and serve a month in jail, with the prison term suspended. The case was reversed by the court of appeals a few months later, with only the briefest technical comment. Spyros Skouras was quick to send a superlatively congratulatory telegram.

With the sentence delivered, McLaughlin quickly left, explaining to Rauh that he had a funeral to attend. And so Joe and I gathered up my doodles and his few documents and ambled out onto the broad steps of the courthouse into the bright Washington sunshine, where he suddenly grabbed my arm. “Wait! You can't leave this building, you're a convicted criminal! We've got to get you bailed out!”

With which we rushed down one empty marble corridor after another looking for a bail bondsman and a clerk to set me free. We were now in Kafka country, it being a few minutes after five, when no proper clerk would be found dead in a federal court. What to do? To depart might be to invite a whole new charge of flight from justice. Luckily, we happened on a wandering clerk on his way home who agreed to reopen his office and fix me up with the necessary stamps and documents.

In the early eighties, some twenty-five years later, I received a letter from a literature professor at a Midwestern university identifying himself as the nephew of Judge McLaughlin, now deceased, whom he rather feelingly described as having had an important and good influence on his development, as a man of warm human sympathies and a certain quality of intellect. Would I mind telling him how I felt about his uncle, who had confided to him that my trial had troubled him greatly and left him with some regrets about his part in it? Particularly, what had my impressions of him been during the actual trial?

I wrote the professor that I honestly felt no rancor toward the judge, regarding him now as simply one more deanimated cog in the gears. After all, no civil liberties organization had offered me its help then, any more than two years earlier when I had been barred from writing the screenplay on delinquency despite the
World-Telegram's
suggestion that I be “allowed” to finish it but that my name not appear on the screen. To this benign outrage there was also no public reaction whatever, neither from the literary world and the civil libertarians nor from the reborn leftists and libertarian Trotskyites, who were now giving their all to fight Soviet totalitarianism and its contemptuous treatment of writers. It was simply that having once been pro-Soviet, I had failed later on to make the right exculpatory noises, the passionate anti-Soviet protestations, fearing as I still did a blind anti-Communism that could easily overflow into a primitive fascist spirit at home and fling us into war abroad; had failed, in short, to close my eyes to what was happening in my own country, something that would cost me over the years in certain influential literary quarters where such things mattered quite as much as literature—indeed, a lot more.

The hearing and trial seemed an artistically barren experience for me—I had already written
The Crucible
five years before, and the dynamics of the phenomenon were too repetitious to teach me much more. Yet in the long run it too served my education; a decade later, well before such concerns became the common property of Western intellectuals—if for some merely a chic exercise—I would accept the international presidency of PEN, an organization of poets, essayists, and novelists, and at the time a virtually expiring institution. Its London leadership, under David Carver, came to me in Paris while I was there on a long visit, in a last desperate hope that having a known working writer as president might help PEN to survive. No writer whose typewriter was still warm could want such a job, I thought, but after weeks of trying I finally found it impossible to turn down; my American experience had given me too clear an idea of what writers were going through in Eastern Europe and the benighted, ignorant, brutalized parts of the globe where there were few to hear and fewer to offer a helping hand once government had decided that they must be silenced. I thought by the mid-sixties that perhaps I could help hasten the time when a human principle unclouded by the Cold War, then temporarily in abeyance, might be seriously asserted. The Un-American Activities Committee had provided me with the desire to make its like impossible here anymore, and maybe on some far-off day, everywhere else in the world.

* * *

Our rented house in eastern Long Island faced broad green fields that made it hard to believe we were so near the ocean. Next door lived a painter and her husband who cherished their own privacy and thus defended ours. Now we could take easy breaths in a more normal rhythm of life. Marilyn had decided to learn how to cook and started with homemade noodles, hanging them over a chair-back and drying them with a hair dryer, and she gave me hair trims out in the sunshine, and we walked the empty Amagansett beach in peace, chatting with the occasional commercial fishermen who worked their nets from winches on their rusting trucks. These local men, Bonackers, so-called, greeted her with warmth and respect, even though she perplexed them by running along the shore to throw back the gasping “junk” fish they had no use for and had flung from their nets. There was a touching but slightly unnerving intensity in her then, an identification that was unhealthily close to her own death fear. One day, after throwing a couple of dozen fish one by one back into the water, she was losing her breath, and I finally had to distract her and draw her away to keep her from working the shoreline until she dropped.

The doctor, having administered a series of treatments over a period of weeks, had confirmed that she was pregnant, but could still not rule out the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy. I thought in talking to him that he really feared this danger at least as much as he hoped for a term pregnancy. But she was deaf to his cautionary tone. A child of her own was a crown with a thousand diamonds. I did all I could to throw myself into her anticipatory mood, at the same time trying to keep reality within sight should a crash be awaiting us. But the very idea of her as a mother ultimately swept me along with her, for already there were moments of a new kind of confidence, a quietness of spirit that I had never seen in her. For the first time she was being the hostess in her own home rather than defensively shying away from inconsequential visits by people whose good intentions she might normally not have trusted. She was beginning to feel a safe space around herself, or so it seemed. Becoming a father again in my forties would take some getting used to, but the almost visible process of learning about herself that the pregnancy had triggered was enough to convince me that if a child might intensify her anxieties, it would also give her, and hence myself, new hope for our future.

But her reprieve was short; the pregnancy was soon diagnosed as tubal and required an operation to end it, and as she lay recovering
in her hospital bed, her vulnerability was almost impossible to bear: I would surely turn away from her, wounded as she was—a fear that was incredible to me. Returning to the apartment after a visit one night, I realized that this might be a chance to demonstrate what she meant to me, for her defenselessness moved me deeply. But I could think of nothing, and words of reassurance were clearly not enough.

The photographer Sam Shaw came to visit in the hospital one afternoon, and we took a walk along the East River afterward and sat on a bench talking about her. I knew Sam only slightly; he was an unaffected man who had never exploited his friendship with her, admiring her for her valor in taking life on so unarmed, with no allies and no reservations. I said that I thought there was a greatness of spirit in her, even a crazy kind of nobility that the right role might release, and if that happened she might step out of herself and see her own worth. Psychoanalysis was too much like talking
about
something rather than doing it, which was the only thing she had ever believed in anyway—her life had all been put up or shut up.

Sam began talking about my story
The Misfits,
which he had read in
Esquire
magazine. “It would make a great movie,” he said, “and that's a woman's part she could kick into the stands.”

The ambulance ride back to Amagansett took a seemingly endless three hours or more, and it was nearly impossible to speak. There could be no assurance that another pregnancy would succeed. Somehow, the past once again seemed to be reaching out its dead hand to drag her down. There were no words anymore that could change anything for her. She lay there sad beyond sadness, watching the traffic pass the cautiously driven ambulance. I felt an urgency about making something for her.

After a few days I began sketching out a screenplay, for the first time since our marriage working from breakfast to dinner. There was a studio detached from the house where I could be alone. My mother came out to visit, but a strange distrust soon arose between them, and she cut her stay short and returned to the city on the train, troubled and, I thought, frightened. Marilyn, it turned out, had sensed something like disapproval in her—maybe only disappointment, which came to the same thing—and was as upset with her as if she had been menaced. While I attempted to reassure her otherwise, I saw that she was not altogether wrong. My mother could be superstitiously put off by ill people; she wanted Marilyn whole and beautiful. This had gone past me, but Marilyn had dug at it until it dominated their time together. She had an uncanny
instinct for threat and wanted it out in the open, having no reserves to withstand it. And of course with an older woman she had no means of sexually disarming it.