Children of Liberty Page 28

  “I have absolutely adhered to the prepared curriculum.”

  “Really? You’ve taught your students about prices and markets? The role of profits and losses, big business and government, productivity and pay, controlled labor markets? You’ve taught them time and risk, investment and speculation, national output, money and the banking system, government finance, international transfers of wealth? I think the only thing you may have taught them is myths about markets, and non-economic values.”

  Harry took a step away. “I’m not a performing monkey,” he said. It was 4:30.

  Carver stood up. “You’re supposed to be a teacher of economics. I’ve heard you recently praising Emma Goldman’s speeches at the faculty lounge. Personally, I wonder if that outrageous anarchist with the silver tongue has seduced you, made you daft in the head.”

  That’s when Harry walked out. Carver was right. But it wasn’t Emma Goldman.

  3

  To plumb the Marianic depths of just how far he had fallen, in May he allowed himself to go with her to one of those round-table discussions he’d been hearing so much about, at which a group of derelicts she called her friends, mostly male, sat in a small community common room, indeed around a circular table, smoking, drinking, and trying to sound like Eugene Debs, a gifted orator, which these louts weren’t. Gina wore her hair loose, barely up, and a red silk blouse with a beautifully fitted camel-colored skirt. She perched on the edge of her chair, which happened to be next to his, long legs crossed, smoked, and though she was turned halfway to him, listened embracingly to her friends’ anarchic inanities. When she laughed, her large hoop gold earrings shimmered and shook and more strands of her hair curled down around her neck. Harry hadn’t wanted to go. But what did his desire have to do with it? He eats not, drinks not, sleeps not, has no use of anything. Take all, he thought, the world’s not worth my care.

  Her friends—Sophie, Miranda, Julia—they were just pencil etchings. She was oil on canvas. She was Michelangelo’s sculpture, they mere drawings in an anonymous notebook.

  “All this fine talk about doing what you want,” Harry said to Dyson, the shortest and most insufferable of her friends after they’d had too many beers. They had no wine for Harry, or whiskey, so he remained stone sober and humorless. He would not drink beer with the hoi polloi. “But what happens if we’re all anarchists?”

  “The world is a free and fantastic place.” Dyson slapped his best friend Archer on the back, as if he had just scored one. Archer, in his pristine and starched suit and tie was sitting on the other side of Gina, insinuating himself into her line of sight. Harry was wrong. Archer was the most insufferable of Gina’s friends.

  “Everyone doing what they want? Taking what they want?”

  “People will police themselves. But they’ll be free to do it.”

  “And if they don’t police themselves?”

  “Then they’ll be shunned.”

  “Shunned?”

  “Ostracized.”

  “Yes, thank you. I know what ‘shunned’ means. So each little community of anarchists will police themselves?”

  “Exactly right, my good friend.”

  Harry wanted to tell the intolerable fool not to call him “friend”. Only one person was allowed to call him “good friend” and he was still in Panama, much to Esther’s dismay. “So, pretty much like local government now?”

  “Not government. Local.”

  “Right. Local government. And what happens when your local anarchist goes twenty miles south and robs the fruit-stand in Danbury? Who’s going to police him?”

  “It’ll all work out,” cut in Archer, the whistling pursuer. “No one will be robbing anyone.”

  “In dreams it works out,” Harry said. “On the pages of Rousseau and Hobbes, it works out. In smoky beer halls it works out. We’ve got seventy-five million people in this country. That’s a boatload of people to be beating their own drum, doing what they want.”

  “Everyone will be free and happy,” said Archer, getting another beer and pouring off a little into Gina’s glass, which further aggravated Harry.

  “You’re talking about a political movement!” said Harry. “Not a day at the park.” Like the Sundays at Cambridge Common he spent with her, Thomas Hardy and his repressions be damned.

  “Bakunin is right,” said Archer. “And you’re wrong.”

  “I haven’t told you what I think,” Harry said. “How can I already be wrong?”

  Dyson drunkenly picked up the thread. “Bakunin told Marx plain and simple that Marx’s plan would make serfs of the very men Marx purports to free.”

  It pained Harry to ignore him, so familiar was he with the unresolved bitter conflict between Marx and Bakunin, unresolved because neither man’s plan had yet to be applied to a place or location or country. “Anarchy means you live without rules,” Harry said, desperately regretting having long ago chosen this particular topic for his doctoral thesis. It was beneath him to prepare to argue his sophisticated complex case in the storied halls of Harvard and simultaneously be dragged into a brawl with such boors.

  “That’s right. You live free.”

  “Can a hundred million people live without rules?” asked Harry.

  “Can the state make infants out of men and then expect them to contribute to the social order?”

  “Answer me.”

  “You answer me.” Dyson banged his glass of beer on the table for emphasis.

  “You can’t make a civil society …”

  “Who said anything about society? We don’t want you trespassing on our unfettered development as human beings.”

  “Someone is bound to trespass on somebody’s unfettered development, surely?”

  “Yes, but your way lies tyranny,” Archer piped in. “You’ve got built into your social order the force of one group of men upon another.”

  “And women,” Gina said.

  Archer and Dyson waved her off condescendingly. She wasn’t Emma Goldman, or Mother Jones. They could do that. But Harry didn’t wave her off and he also would not argue with her. If she declared tonight she wanted everybody’s right to beautiful and radiant things, he would have agreed with her with his whole heart.

  “Do you know the difference between real and pretend rights?” Harry asked Archer and, receiving no answer, continued. “Do you accept that there might be a conflict between claims of freedom and claims of order?”

  “No, I don’t accept it,” retorted Archer.

  Gina smiled like a cat. “Ah, Harry,” she said. “Haven’t we become quite the Burkian?”

  He almost couldn’t continue. Gina not only knew who Edmund Burke was but was teasing him about it! “Hardly. I’m merely presenting a dialogue to arrive at the truth. Free men accept the natural limitation on some of their rights to organize a government for the good of the people,” Harry said. “To represent the will of the people. Men and women.” He almost smiled at her, but didn’t want vile Archer to see an intimate interaction between them.

  “Not me,” said Archer. “I don’t accept it.”

  “Not me,” said Dyson with a burp. “I don’t accept it either.”

  “See, here’s the difference between you and us,” said Archer, chugging down his beer like a farmer. “This is where you and I are dialectically opposed. You keep talking about society, and we are talking about individuals.”

  “Yes, your plan is to abolish all government.”

  “And your plan is coercion! Benevolent, malevolent, who cares, coercion is what you preach!”

  “Look,” said Harry, “I believe we should have a different kind of government than what we have now. God knows there’s room for improvement. What’s your grand plan?”

  “Any imposed rule weakens man because it takes choice away from him.”

  “And woman,” added Gina.

  “I know what you’re doing,” said Archer to Harry. “You mock everything that’s fatal to your philosophy.”

  “You flatter yourself
, Archer. Yours is not a philosophy but a dim song in the field flung far.”

  “Janie! Do you see how he mocks you?” Archer exclaimed. “Our philosophy, and I include my friend Jane here, is that any attempt for man to rule another man is wrong.”

  “Yes.” Harry nodded. “In a nutshell that is your absurd philosophy.”

  “My way, we are free and happy. Your way makes slaves out of men. Your Marxist creed will make chain gangs out of free men, and I’m absurd?”

  “Not just absurd but dead wrong! Have you not been paying attention? Men are desperate to reorganize themselves into a new order!”

  “Not me. Not Jane.”

  Harry took a breath. “Why can’t you understand that liberation of the individual is not possible until the masses are freed first? But how can you be free when you have to mark your time at the factory you work in? You work the hours they state, you collect the wage they give you. What rights do you have? Where is this freedom you keep bleating about?”

  Archer shrugged. “OK, so in your land of unicorns the factory will be owned by the state. Everything else will remain exactly the same.”

  “By the same you mean better.”

  “Christ, you are naïve! It’ll be a thousand times worse. At least right now the jerk that pays my wage at the sugar plant is not pretending he is paying me peanuts for my own good.”

  “The socialists will not pay you peanuts. They will pay you a good and decent wage.”

  “Keep dreaming.”

  “What is it about work that’s so distasteful to the anarchists?”

  “We happen to believe,” Archer said with grandiose pomposity, “that four to five hours of work a day is plenty. More than enough. We’re not interested in the left-wing proletarians telling us otherwise. Right, Janie?”

  Diplomatically Gina said nothing.

  “You want everyone to be free from oppression,” Harry asked, “or just you?”

  “We’ll start with me. After that I don’t care.”

  “I didn’t think so. But for change, there must be action. That’s the loudest support of your own heady principles.”

  “Inaction is also action!”

  Harry laughed incredulously. “Forget about the socialists. You’re not going to make it five minutes in the capitalist world.”

  “Exactly. Because you want to force me to do what you want to do. Under you and your ilk, dictatorship of the proletariat will swiftly become dictatorship over the proletariat, won’t it?” Archer now laughed at Harry.

  “You’re a fool,” Harry said, standing up, and putting on his fine tailored wool coat. “Do you even know what the word ‘proletariat’ means? It means ‘worker.’ Your anarchist hero Bakunin writes about the working man. Not a dolt like you. You don’t believe in revolution. You believe in evolution.”

  “That’s quite a trick,” Gina said, after they had parked and he was walking her very slowly back to her dorm. “In five minutes to alienate all of my friends by pronouncing them idiots.”

  “It was more like thirty minutes.”

  “They’re not fools, Harry. They’re my friends.”

  He struggled not to snort. “What happened to Verity? She was nice.”

  “She is married and lives in Boston. She doesn’t go to these meetings anymore.”

  “Sensible girl.”

  “For marriage or for her political apathy?”

  Sideways he glanced at her. “Both,” he said. “I thought she was going to become a nun?”

  “She joined the Sacred Heart Sodality, but then fell in love in a boat on the Merrimack.”

  He wanted to ask her to go in a boat with him on the Charles. On Sundays in the summertime they rented boats at the Harvard dock and a flotilla of them meandered through the wide harbors. He bit his lip not to ask. “Oh, too bad about her,” Harry said. “She was so righteously political.”

  “She was never serious,” Gina said.

  “Funny. Ben’s mother Ellen thought she was more political than you.”

  “Goes to show you must never judge a woman by appearances,” said Gina. “Verity is having her second baby. How bourgeois is that?”

  “Terribly.” Harry smiled. “What, Emma Goldman doesn’t believe in children?”

  “Of course she doesn’t,” said Gina. “She says children are the antithesis of liberty.”

  “Well,” said Harry, “I happen to agree with her there, I think it’s best she doesn’t reproduce.”

  “Harry!” They walked in silence for a few moments.

  He wanted to offer her his arm, but it wasn’t raining, or snowing, or slippery out. Treacherous, yes.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to come visit with my friends anymore,” she said.

  “Is Archer really your friend?” He couldn’t hide his animosity toward the hulking brute.

  “He’s not so bad,” she said, gently knocking into him.

  “No?” Harry shrugged. “Well, none of my business.”

  “What, you think he likes me …?” Gina smiled. “No young woman is going to hate a man for being a little bit in love with her.”

  “Not even when he is so blatant about it?”

  And she, breaking all rules of acceptable behavior, without being asked took Harry’s arm. “Especially not then.”

  It was dark as he walked with her. He couldn’t have walked any slower.

  “Do you have a little story to tell me?” she asked.

  “What kind of story? Something clever? Or something funny?”

  “Why not both?” She squeezed his arm.

  “A visiting instructor was interviewed by the president for a position in the economics department. He had been an esteemed professor in Wisconsin, I think, I can’t remember. And the president says to him, Professor so and so, we are very impressed with your work. However there are stories concerning your relations with women, and I must assure you that such relations would not be tolerated at this university. And the professor replies, Mr. President, after having been introduced to the wives of the members of the economic faculty, I can assure you, you need have no misgivings.”

  She laughed throatily, echoing her delight into the elms. “Are you making that up?”

  “Why would I make something like this up?”

  “I don’t know—how attractive are the wives of the economics professors?”

  “I’ve never noticed, so how attractive can they be?”

  He always found it wrenching to leave her at the door. The light was on over the small porch of her residence hall. They routinely bucked up against the curfew. Today, they stood together maybe three minutes before Gladys, the residence manager, poked her nosy head out the front door and in her patronizing voice said, “Miss Attaviano. Curfew.”

  Harry wanted to touch her, oh the desperation of his ostentatious desire.

  And as always, the more intensely he felt their imminent separation, the further he stepped away. “Goodnight,” he said, with his hat in his hand.

  “Goodnight. Thank you for taking me home.”

  “Of course.” He chewed his lip in agony. “Gia?” She was outrageously beautiful standing under the streetlamps. Harry couldn’t be far enough away.

  “Yes, Harry?”

  “Your Emma Goldman is giving a speech in Portsmouth in two weeks.” He stepped a little closer. At that moment the front door of the hall opened again.

  “Miss Attaviano,” the sonorous voice streamed.

  “Yes, Gladys, one minute, please.” They stopped speaking until the RA reluctantly closed the door. “Where is that?”

  “New Hampshire. Right on the border.”

  “That’s far.”

  “We can take my little clipper. Spend the day. It’s on a Saturday.”

  She too chewed her lip, not answering him. Behind her the door opened. “Miss Attaviano …”

  “One minute, Gladys!”

  The door slammed disapprovingly.

  “Well?” he said. “What do you say?”
/>
  “Hmm,” she said. “What is her topic?”

  “What is her topic?” That one Harry did not expect. “Puritanism and free love.”

  Gina laughed. “OK, I’ll go to that one. She is quite lively on the subject.”

  “It’s good that I didn’t say industrial trade relations.”

  “Oh Harry.”

  He carried her “Oh Harry” with him all the way home into the deep night. He was no longer steering his own ship. What did he want? He didn’t know. He wouldn’t allow himself to think past a brief, blissful, luminescent moment, flying with her like Icarus too close to the sun.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ON THEIR KNEES BY THE SEA

  “MARRIAGE and love have nothing in common. They are as far apart as the poles. They are antagonistic to each other. Now it may be that some marriages are based on love. There may be cases where there is love in marriage but I say love continues in spite of marriage, not because of it. Marriage is a failure that only the very stupid will deny.”

  It was standing room only. Harry leaned to a rapt Gina and whispered, “Just think, we almost missed this.”

  “Shh.”

  “From infancy the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal. Like a mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.”

  “Gina, I think she just called you a mute beast.”

  “Shh!”

  “This creature enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure! There is a criminal ignorance in matters of sex that is somehow extolled as a great virtue! It’s deplorable!”

  Harry watched Gina’s face, which she tried to make inscrutable. “Harry,” she whispered, “Emma is front and center, not to your right, where I am.”

  “I can’t watch that homely woman talk about love.”

  “But you can watch me listen to her?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  Gina turned her gaze to the stage. “I don’t think it’s love she’s talking about. Now shh.”

  “You were talking and I’m supposed to shh?”