Evan Hunter - Sons

It seemed to me, I had been saying, that we could not blame everything that was happening in this country on the Communists. The Boston police had had every right to strike last month, they were only earning eleven hundred dollars a year...

“That’s more than what you and I make, isn’t it?” Allen said.

“We’re new on the job,” I said, “and we don’t have to buy our own uniforms and guns. There’s nothing wrong with a man striking for a decent living wage.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a strike that isn’t instigated by the Bolsheviks,” Allen said.

“Are you telling me the Boston cops are Bolsheviks?”

“I’m telling you there’s no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime! That’s what the governor of Massachusetts said, and that’s what I’m saying.”

“Then how about the steel workers? Do they have a right to strike?”

“Bert, don’t you know that whole crowd there is infested with Reds? Who’s the man who did the most to organize the steel workers, can you tell me that? Well, I’ll tell you, Bert. It was William Z. Foster, a left-wing syndicalist. The whole damn strike there is a conspiracy. If I owned a steel mill, I’d do just what they’re doing over in Gary, I’d bring in strikebreakers by the thousands and protect them with the National Guard, that’s what I’d do. You wait and see how quick this strike’ll be settled now that they’re wise to those Reds.”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t bring in strikebreakers every time there’s a strike. John L. Lewis has called one for November first, now are you going to...?”

“The UMW voted for public control of the mining industry,” Allen said. “What’s public control if not Communism?”

“They want more money,” I said. “How would you like to work underground twelve, fourteen hours a day, breathing all that stuff into your lungs?”

“The hell with them,” Allen said. “Palmer’s got the right idea. He told them if they go ahead with this strike, they’re violating the Lever Act. Do you know what the Lever Act is?”

“What’s the Lever Act got to do...”

“It gives the President the power...”

“... with here and now?”

“... to step in whenever anything inter—”

“It was a wartime measure!”

“... feres with the production of...”

“The war’s over, Allen!”

“Coal is fuel!” Allen said. “And the President can tell those Red bastards to cut the crap and start producing it! That’s the power the Lever Act gives him!”

“Gives the Attorney General, you mean. Wilson’s a sick old man, he doesn’t know what’s going on in this country any more. If you want my opinion, I think Palmer’s a lot more dangerous than either the Boston police or the steel workers or ...”

That was when Allen jumped out of his chair and said, “Bert, you’re a goddamn Red!”

“No, Allen, I’m not,” I answered, surprised, and hurt, and angry.

“What’s going on out there?” Allen’s wife called from the kitchen.

“Its nothing,” Allen said.

“It sure sounds like something,” she answered.

“It is something,” I whispered to Allen. “It’s very definitely something when a friend of mine can call me a Bolshevik simply because...”

“I didn’t say a Bolshevik!”

“You said a Red!”

“I said you sounded like a Red.”

“No, you said I way a Red.”

“Is that you, Bert?” Nancy called from the kitchen.

“The girls are getting upset,” Allen said.

“No more upset than I am,” I said.

“I see you’ve managed to smell up the entire parlor,” Nancy said, coming into the room. Rosie Garrett followed immediately behind her, a tall slender girl with long black hair and dark eyes, wearing lip rouge (“The devil’s own paint,” Nancy called it, though she herself had begun putting powder on her face) and a tan suit, skirt tight above the ankles, tan spats to protect her from Chicago’s winds. Congress had passed the Nineteenth Amendment in June, making it illegal to deny the right to vote on account of sex, and the thought of Rosie Garrett casting a ballot next year, when the law would go into effect, was somewhat frightening. Both she and Allen were older than either of us, each in their early twenties and terribly sophisticated. (They had spent Allen’s week-long vacation in New York City this past summer, and had seen Up in Mabel’s Room, which Rosie claimed had not shocked her the slightest tiny bit.) Rosie smoked cigarettes. Together, she and Allen made a very striking couple, and I was always conscious of my own, well, not exactly handsome looks when I was with them; my nose especially, though Nancy insisted it was a quite regal nose. Nancy, of course, looked fresh and lovely anywhere, in anybody’s company. She had put on a little weight since we got married, but those few extra pounds only brought her up to where she’d been before her illness. Slightly flushed as she came into the parlor, she flapped her hands at the cloud of cigar smoke. Behind her, slender dark Rosie put a cigarette between her rouged lips and struck a match.

“What was all the shouting about?” she asked.

“Allen thinks I’m a Red,” I answered.

“Allen thinks Douglas Fairbanks is a Red,” Rosie said, and Nancy burst into laughter. Rosie blew out a puff of smoke and then went to sit on the arm of her husband’s chair, putting her hand on his shoulder. He was still frowning, though God knew why. He was the one who’d called me a Red.

“A goddamn Red, in fact,” I said.

“Please, there are ladies present,” Rosie said in mock affront, and wiggled her black eyebrows at Nancy, who again laughed.

“We were talking about the strike,” Allen said.

“Grrrrrrr,” Rosie said. “He reminds me of a grizzly when he’s this way. Look at him. Grrrrrrrr,” she said again, and tousled his short blond hair, and said, “Doesn’t he look just like a bear, Bert?”

(He lay silent and motionless with one hand still clasped over the base of his skull, just below the protective line of his helmet. There was no blood on him, no scorched and smoking fabric to indicate he’d been hit.)

“Bert?”

(And then I saw the steel sliver that had pierced the top of his helmet, sticking out of the metal and the skull beneath it like a rusty railroad spike. “Timothy?” I said again, but I knew that he was dead.)

“Bert’s out gathering wood violets,” Nancy said.

“No, Bert is sulking,” Rosie said.

I did not answer. I was wondering all at once about having made the world safe for democracy. As Allen sat opposite me and glowered in suspicion, I found myself thinking something seditious, thinking something traitorous, thinking (God forgive me) that perhaps Timothy Bear had been duped into giving his life for a slogan that was meaningless, that maybe there was no such thing as freedom, not in America, not anywhere in the world, that perhaps the boundaries of freedom would always be as rigidly defined as the boundaries of the Twenty-ninth Street Beach had been this past July, where trespassing had led to stoning and to death. I found myself overwhelmed by a wave of patriotic feeling such as I had never experienced before (not even when the German guns were sounding all around me), and I suddenly realized that America was only now, only right this minute beginning to test the strength of a political idea that was more revolutionary than anything that had ever come out of Russia, testing it in a hundred subtle and unsubtle ways, not the least of which was the unexpected appearance of a lone Negro on a forbidden beach. And I wondered, exultantly, hopefully, fearfully, what would happen when America decided to find out exactly what freedom meant, exactly to what limits freedom extended.