Red Love Page 10

  QUESTION: Now when Sophie Rich came to see you in Pittsburgh in 1950, she was no stranger to you, was she?

  METZGER: No, she was not.

  QUESTION: And when she mentioned Solomon Rubell to you, you knew that that was the Solomon Rubell from City College whom you had seen during those years since, didn’t you?

  METZGER: Well, with all this characterization, I would say no to that question.

  QUESTION: Did she mention the name Solomon Rubell?

  METZGER: I don’t think she did.

  QUESTION: Do you recall whether she did or didn’t?

  METZGER: No. What I recall is that she wrote it down. I don’t think she mentioned it at all.

  QUESTION: When she wrote the name down, did it awaken memories or recollections in your mind as to a certain individual by that name?

  METZGER: Well, in a sense, yes. I had just been reading about his arrest in the papers.

  QUESTION: Did you realize whom she was referring to with relation to your own past experience or contacts?

  METZGER: No, I didn’t recall Rubell from school. She didn’t refresh my recollection in that respect at all.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, hadn’t the F.B.I. questioned you about Rubell in the week preceding Sophie Rich’s visit to your apartment in Pittsburgh?

  METZGER: I am not sure.

  QUESTION: Do you deny that they did?

  METZGER: No, I can’t deny it.

  QUESTION: When Sophie Rich offered you money to flee the country and identified herself by using Solomon Rubell’s name, didn’t you stop to ask yourself where you had met Solomon Rubell?

  METZGER: Perhaps I did have some such reaction. I mean that is a peculiar question, but I believe I may have had some such reaction, yes.

  QUESTION: When Sophie Rich mentioned Solomon Rubell’s name, what did you say to her?

  METZGER: I don’t recall.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, isn’t it a fact that you knew exactly what she was talking about, and that is why you did not ask her anything about Solomon Rubell?

  METZGER: No, on the contrary, I didn’t know at all what she was talking about.

  QUESTION: Did you want to cooperate with the government at that time?

  METZGER: That is right.

  QUESTION: And you say that Sophie Rich wrote down all these instructions and information on a piece of paper which she left in your apartment. Is that correct?

  METZGER: Yes.

  QUESTION: You didn’t call the F.B.I. that day, did you, Mr. Metzger, and tell them about this visit?

  METZGER: No, I didn’t.

  QUESTION: Did you call them the next day?

  METZGER: I don’t think I did.

  QUESTION: Isn’t it a fact that you didn’t tell the FBI about Sophie Rich’s visit until they called you into the office three days later?

  METZGER: They called me?

  QUESTION: Yes.

  METZGER: Oh. I was just about to.

  QUESTION: You realized the importance of this piece of paper, didn’t you, Mr. Metzger?

  METZGER: Well, to what extent?

  QUESTION: In connection with this F.B.I. investigation of Rubell, about which you had been interviewed just before.

  METZGER: I can’t answer that. I don’t understand your concept of “important” there.

  QUESTION: Isn’t it a fact that at the time Sophie Rich visited you, you knew the F.B.I. had you under surveillance?

  METZGER: Yes, I knew that.

  QUESTION: Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Metzger, that the only reason you told the F.B.I. anything at all about Sophie Rich’s visit was that you believed they knew about it?

  METZGER: Not at all.

  QUESTION: What did you do with the paper that Sophie Rich wrote those notes on?

  METZGER: I destroyed it.

  QUESTION: Is that your idea of cooperation with the government?

  METZGER: I was under emotional strain at the time. Sorry.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, what connection of yours with Rubell were you hiding when you destroyed that paper?

  METZGER: None whatsoever.

  QUESTION: Now, Mr. Metzger, isn’t it a fact that you paid rent over a two-year period and gave your address as 29 Perry Street in the years 1947 and 1948 for the purpose of voting?

  METZGER: Yes.

  QUESTION: Didn’t you give Columbia University 29 Perry Street as your permanent home address?

  METZGER: I may have.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, were you living at 29 Perry Street?

  METZGER: No, I don’t think I was.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, why did you deliberately conceal that address in filling out government forms and the questionnaire that you filled out for the Atomic Energy Commission?

  METZGER: There was no attempt at concealment.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, did you have good reason to lie about living at 29 Perry Street?

  METZGER: No.

  QUESTION: Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t know Solomon Rubell was the tenant of the apartment you lived in and that you were subletting the apartment from him?

  METZGER: Certainly not.

  QUESTION: Do you deny that Rubell, yourself, Ballinzweig, and many others engaged in the microfilming of stolen documents in the Perry Street apartment?

  METZGER: It never happened to the best of my memory.

  QUESTION: Didn’t you meet Solomon Rubell regularly there while you were living there?

  METZGER: No, sir, I did not.

  QUESTION: Once again, did you ever live at 29 Perry Street?

  METZGER: Oh, I stayed there a while, yes. I don’t believe I regarded myself as living there, but I stayed there off and on for a certain period.

  QUESTION: You didn’t regard that as your residence?

  METZGER: Well, in what sense?

  QUESTION: A place where you resided.

  METZGER: Yes, I resided there occasionally.

  QUESTION: And did you live in a continuous fashion at 29 Perry Street?

  METZGER: Well, no. This is a question of attitude.

  QUESTION: How long did you live there?

  METZGER: Well, I stayed there on various occasions between 1946 and 1948.

  QUESTION: For how long a period of time were you there?

  METZGER: Oh, days, weeks, months, years. That sort of thing.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, you have stated many times that you did not know Solomon Rubell.

  METZGER: That is certainly correct as I recall. I believe I said that.

  QUESTION: Mr. Metzger, I show you Government Exhibit 32-C for identification, and ask you if that is your signature?

  METZGER: Yes.

  QUESTION: What address do you give on that money order?

  METZGER: 29 Perry Street.

  QUESTION: What month is that?

  METZGER: March 24, 1948.

  QUESTION: And where do you send the money?

  METZGER: To S. Rubell at 110 Catherine Street, New York City.

  QUESTION: I show you Government Exhibit 32-D for identification, and ask you if that has your signature?

  METZGER: This is a similar money order with my signature from 29 Perry Street, dated April 26, 1948.

  QUESTION: To whom is it addressed?

  METZGER: S. Rubell, at the same address.

  QUESTION: I show you Government Exhibit 22-F for identification; is that your signature?

  METZGER: Yes, this is a similar money order dated May 22, 1948. The other facts are the same.

  QUESTION: Same address, 29 Perry Street?

  METZGER: Yes.

  QUESTION: Addressed to Solomon Rubell, New York City?

  METZGER: Yes.

  QUESTION: I show you Government Exhibit 22-G for identification, and ask you if that is your signature?

  METZGER: Yes, it is.

  QUESTION: What address do you give there, Mr. Metzger?

  METZGER: 29 Perry Street.

  QUESTION: Where do you send it?

  METZGER: To Solomon Rubell, 110 Cathe
rine Street, New York.

  QUESTION: And what is the date of that?

  METZGER: June 23, 1948.

  QUESTION: I show you Government Exhibit 22-H for identification; does that have your signature?

  METZGER: Yes, it does. The address is 29 Perry Street. I send this to S. Rubell at 110 Catherine Street, New York, and the date is October 26, 1947.

  QUESTION: I show you Government Exhibit 22-1, Mr. Metzger; is that your signature?

  METZGER: Yes, it is.

  QUESTION: What address do you give there?

  METZGER: 29 Perry Street.

  QUESTION: To whom did you send it?

  METZGER: To Solomon Rubell.

  QUESTION: To what address?

  METZGER: At the same address, 110 Catherine Street, New York City.

  QUESTION: What is the date of that?

  METZGER: November 28, 1947.

  THE COURT: I think at this time we will adjourn.

  Dolly, 1934

  Miss Smarty-Pants.

  —G. L.

  Dolly Stern would walk from Seward Park High School with her friend Sylvia Packman to the Jefferson Street Library, across from the Educational Alliance and near the Daily Forward building. The two girls often saw the old black woman seated on the bench by the library. She was in her forties, wrecked. Straining forward on the bench toward the sky, crying out, “Hurry, sundown … hurry, now … oh, hurry, sundown …” with different inflections and emphases, louder and softer, cutting through the afternoon dusk.

  How differently such a woman would be treated in the Soviet Union, Dolly would say, and her friend would nod her head in agreement.

  They hurried up the library staircase to the third floor, where their club, Pindar’s Children, was located. There they read and wrote poetry.

  Afterward they slowly edged their way home. They walked along dark and cluttered Delancey Street, the elevated subway roaring by above them. Men sold apples at the corner. At the market, a schochet stood by as a truck unloaded crates of chickens. Feathers landed in the girls’ hair, and Dolly tried to pick the feathers out.

  At Rivington Street, peddlers passed them, returning from their day’s work, their pushcarts smelling of rotting fish and vegetables. The girls looked up and saw quilts, mattresses, and featherbeds made of goose feathers hanging out of windows.

  Dolly wore a steel brace because of a recurrent back problem. She stood erect. She would cock her head when she spoke and held it up high. Sylvia thought it made her look stiff and stuffy, but couldn’t tell her so. With her pale, small face, her black curly hair, her frailness, her silence, Dolly was almost like an invisible person.

  But she was really pretty, too, she loved poetry and singing, and was really a good Joe when you got to know her. She had a beautiful singing voice and was a member of the music club.

  The kids called her “Dictionary.”

  Sylvia and Dolly did not go to Hebrew school afternoons like the other kids. They studied together, at the East River Pier on Houston Street when it was hot, other times at the Jefferson Library or the Hamilton Fish Library on Houston Street.

  They sang together, walking across the Williamsburg Bridge. The girls in front of them giggled as the boys, waiting on the bridge, pounced on them. But no one bothered Sylvia and Dolly. And they pretended it was the last thing that mattered to them.

  They would go camping with other friends in the Palisades. Dolly’s pancake, that’s what they called it. They would lie under the blanket and try to sleep. If someone wanted to turn over, she would signal, and they all turned. The blanket just wasn’t long enough otherwise.

  Friendship for the two girls meant they could sit for hours, reading separately, not speaking. Staring through the windows of the dazzling Paramount Cafeteria on Delancey Street, where the vaudevillians and musicians from Loew’s Delancey gathered. Dolly confided to Sylvia that she was afraid to go inside, that she might not use her knife and fork the right way.

  It was something to be the star of the school assembly. After rehearsals, the girls would stroll down Rivington Street in the soft spring night. The tugboats’ whistles sounded from the river. Dolly was radiant. She recited a poem by the people’s poet, Sol Funaroff:

  “The poet, in his nightcap,

  descends the stairs of the dark,

  and holds a flickering candle.

  There are always bugaboos and drafts

  His magic cap makes him invisible.

  But the flame he carries reveals him.

  Here in the streets of life,

  His bright body walks.”

  They didn’t want the night to end. Sylvia would walk Dolly home. Then Dolly walked Sylvia. Back and forth.

  “I’m not getting married,” Dolly said. “Spending my life shopping, cooking, and cleaning.

  “I’m going to be different,” she said.

  She got the part in the school play, The Valiant: the sister of a man facing execution. She recited the lines from Julius Caesar, her fist clenched, sweat appearing on her brow: “Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant never taste of death but once.”

  Dolly refused to take a typing course. She dreamed of and waited for college.

  In winter Dolly’s parents sat in the cold kitchen with their feet in the oven. A tub on high legs with an enamel top stood beside them. The front of the unheated flat was a store and workshop for Dolly’s father, a dental technician. The flat was long and narrow. There was a toilet in the hall shared by three apartments.

  In a windowless bedroom slept Dolly, her brother Hershie, two single aunts, and a bachelor uncle, Moshe. Moshe was a survivor of a famous lost battalion of World War I.

  The backyard had a wooden fence around it. Dolly’s brother and his friends played handball against the fence, punchball and stick-ball, ring o’leaveo, kick-the-can, Johnny-on-a-pony, and running bases. They swam in the East River at Jackson Street, opposite the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On very hot days the boys opened the fire hydrant and placed a barrel over the pump to get a shower of spray.

  The boys hung out on the street in winter, building fires to keep warm. To earn money they collected scrap or stole large milk containers from Ratner’s restaurant. They built a fire around the container and lid, and melted off the lead used to solder the joints. A can and lid contained a pound of lead, which they sold for seven cents.

  When Hershie celebrated his bar mitzvah, Dolly’s mother, Ruth, treated his friends to the movies at the Cannon Theater. It cost three cents to enter, or two admissions for five cents. Kids would go in the mornings, bring their lunch, and stay until evening. Mothers were allowed to come in and search for their children.

  Ruth called her daughter Dolly “Miss Smarty-Pants.” She smiled when she told Dolly she could not go to college. “You want to do something? Make slipcovers, like I do.”

  Dolly slammed the door. In the backyard, she whispered to herself. Here in the streets of life, his bright body walks. Her pounding heart gradually quieted. A pigeon hopped along the pavement.

  Jerry Burns

  A sensitive dog.

  —G. L.

  I remember blazing klieg lights, armed guards escorting me down aisles of reporters and photographers to the waiting arms of red-faced, beaming senators and congressmen with shining shoes. I always saw “Jewboy” on their rich lips, but it never came out. I would be wearing a very nice suit. (Joe would often toss me a hundred bucks and tell me how important appearance was after I went out to get him some Jim Beam). The microphones would be adjusted.

  The Rubells had just been executed. I remember a truck going by on the street with streamers that said, “Two hot Rubellburgers coming up.”

  There I’d be on one side of the aisle with the oily and the powerful. Facing me would be some progressive, some fish wriggling on the hook. Someone who’d befriended me, most likely. My mouth would open, and I would speak.

  I knew what was expected of me. Ever since I’d announced that the Communists used sex to ensnare teen
agers; the next chance I got, I said the Reds were deep into the Boy Scouts.

  That’s how I became an expert.

  It was a long climb from the Labor Youth League sessions at the Brighton Beach Community Center. I guess I saw a golden opportunity and I plugged into it. I was always an impatient person. When I got out of the army, I missed the camaraderie of group life. I thought I found it in the Party. Probably the high point was when I sold 236 subscriptions to the Daily Worker and won myself a free trip to Pago Pago.

  That was the stage at which I really thought I was progressive. But when I got back from my trip, I found myself still treated as a political beginner. I was twenty-six. I had considerable acting skills, a poetic sensibility. This really meant nothing to the Party. I came to realize this. You were a number to them; they looked right through you. The thing they hated most was the F.B.I. I looked up the F.B.I. in the phone book. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. “I have information for you,” I said curtly, my voice deepening with authority.

  Basically it was like leaving a sinking ship. I see that now.

  They gave me some assignments at that point.

  Later they asked me: “At any point, did you hear anyone advocating the violent overthrow of the government?”

  I had read the newspapers: Winchell, Pegler, Jack Lait, Lee Mortimer. I explained how the Reds used sex with young people to exploit them, “to undermine everything we hold dear.”

  Glances were exchanged, phones lifted, reporters arrived swiftly.

  The title of the series in the Echo was: JERRY BURNS—I WAS A CHILD COMMUNIST. I received a hundred dollars for each article, which I dictated to an attractive secretary who admired my courage. That was the beginning.

  You fall into these things. I didn’t lie most of the time—I just added a key detail here and there.

  When I first faced the comrades across the aisle, it was very embarrassing. But the rewards outweighed the drawbacks.

  Many of the progressives had treated me like a son. Now this new rich world I had entered reacted in much the same way to me. We would all stand around with drinks in our hands discussing the next world war. They would ask my opinion. But they also regarded me as green, a boy to treat gently, to instruct.

  Joe McCarthy drank a lot; he was into a very good thing; he had a real affection for me. This is how I knew him. I did little errands for him. A very attractive supporter of his who had contributed money to his campaign had to be shipped out of the country for a while. Joe slipped his arm around me and explained that someone would have to take care of her for a few months. That’s how I got to go on a cruise to Tijuana, and how I met my beautiful and rich wife, Pippy Paris. The marriage was a sad, disjointed affair, but an experience I do not regret.