Red Love Read online

  “One of the first musicians I ever heard was Percy Grainger from Australia,” she said. “Then I saw Yehudi Menuhin make his debut playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto. He came out in short pants with one of those big collars. I got acquainted with symphonies and soloists. I heard Caruso twice. I would go from the shop to the Met and stand on line. I heard Rostropovich many times. Now if he hanged himself I wouldn’t go to hear him anymore. Not since he had the nerve to shelter Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet authorities!”

  “Have you ever read Solzhenitsyn?” he asked her.

  “I wouldn’t think of it. I’ve heard about him plenty. There was a program at Carnegie Hall the other night made up of refugees from the Soviet Union. I might have gone because it was a holiday and there were some very special singers and musicians. But I can’t stand them. Most of them are Jewish, otherwise they wouldn’t have come here. To hell with them. In the last generation they wouldn’t have had a goddamn thing in all their lives. And now they get to the point of being great artists. I’m very much in favor of what the Soviet Union is doing. The fact that people don’t have to sleep on the sidewalks is enough for me.

  “Michael was born in June 1937. I had met Earl at Camp Nitgedaiget (‘Don’t Worry’) in 1936. Maury Ballinzweig was a lifeguard there, you know. Earl and I married the next year. He was a salesman for a paste-and-glue factory. Very bright, an advanced thinker. But he ran around a lot. There was a great deal of fighting. For a while I took Michael to California and we lived in a bungalow. Pepper trees, eucalyptus, lemon trees. In the middle of the summer you could see the snow on the mountain. I had an orange tree right in my kitchen window. But we came home, and Earl got a divorce. Michael felt terrible. He missed his father.

  “We had a lot of trouble together because Michael was not well. He was disturbed, and I feel very guilty about it. I think it was my fault. From the time he was eight or nine years old, they said he was schizophrenic. I took him to Rockland State Hospital, to Bellevue. He didn’t want to go. He was screaming blue murder and the nurse said, ‘Look, I’m in the hospital. I stay here too.’ Angry as he was, Michael turned around to her and said, ‘Yeah, but you’re getting paid for it.’ You see, he was so brilliant. He knew the derivation of words. I don’t know how he learned it. The thing was, I trusted the doctors and I didn’t know how to handle him myself. He did something bad once in the apartment. I said, ‘What should I do with you?’ He said, ‘Love me. Just love me.’

  “He had a wonderful sense of humor. When he was twelve, I took him to a TV preview studio. They showed an ad for a life insurance company which advertised insurance for the husband so the family would have something when he died. They lived in a slum, but when the husband died, they fixed up the house, they got new furniture. So Michael stood up, raised his hand, and said, ‘It seems to me from your commercial that the wife is better off with her husband dead.’ Everyone roared.”

  Sylvia paused, and said, “The thing is, he often said: ‘I love you, but I don’t like you.’ As he got older, he seemed to take it out on me that I was progressive. Just to spite me, he bought a copy of 1984 when it first came out. He said that’s what’s gonna happen, rotten things like that. Just to spite me, see. One day 1 was in his room and found the damn thing. I was so angry I threw it down the incinerator. He bought a copy of William Z. Foster’s old book for five dollars, Toward A Soviet America. He showed it to me, and he tore it up page by page right in front of me.”

  The reporter held her and asked how her son had died.

  “They pulled him out of the East River,” Sylvia whispered. “Half naked. He used to go to Bellevue Hospital for medication. They treat these things with drugs. One Sunday evening in 1982, he was very disturbed. He understood himself so well. When he felt he shouldn’t take something, he didn’t. When he felt he needed it, he took it. He was bad that night. At ten he said he was going to go to Bellevue for the medication. As he was walking out the door, I said, ‘Michael, don’t take too much money with you.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ and he walked out. Monday morning he wasn’t home. Tuesday he didn’t come home. Friday about four o’clock, two cops came to my house and told me.

  “At the morgue, they brought up his body in a glass case all covered with a sheet. And he looked sleepy and he had such a contented look on his face. They brought him up on an elevator. I couldn’t even touch him. He was in a case.

  “I had his body cremated. The man said to me, ‘Do you want the ashes?’ What am I going to do with the ashes? I said, ‘What do you do with them?’ He said, ‘They collect them. And then they bury them.’ And you know, I get thoughts: How do I know what they did with his ashes? How do I know they cremated him altogether? How do I know?”

  The reporter tried to see her again for two months, but she was busy with a Communist Party convention, peace demonstrations, union picket lines. They spoke on the phone. “I hate to say it, but I miss you,” she said. “I hate to give you the satisfaction. I know you’re not that progressive. But we have respect for each other. Just as long as you don’t go any further backward.” She laughed.

  “I was at a mental illness hearing last week,” Sylvia said. “I began by talking about the military budget. I said do you realize what they can do with seven billion dollars that they want to spend on military missiles, that they want to destroy the world? While all these thousands of young people have no place to go? And I told them about Michael. I said I was away one weekend in Cleveland. I said my son was very depressed, and that he tried to hang himself in the bathroom. When I came home, Michael told me. He said he put a rope on the beam in the bathroom and the rope broke, and it cut into his neck. He got very frightened. He put on his coat, he put his collar up, and he ran to Bellevue in the middle of the night. When he got there, the guard asked him what he wanted. Michael told the guard that he’d tried to commit suicide but that the rope broke and he fell on the bathroom floor and the rope hurt his neck. And I said to them, ‘Do you know what the guard said to him? The guard wouldn’t let him into the hospital. He said, ‘Go home and get a stronger rope.’ And I said to them, ‘That’s the kind of society we have.’”

  When the reporter saw Sylvia again at Nutburger, her mouth had moved back to the center, and she looked well. “I never did meet the right man,” she said. “I was always the one who got the blind date. When I went out with a group of friends, if they had somebody they didn’t know who to pair off with, I was it. I didn’t like the idea but I accepted it. But inside I resented it. The young men who wrote poetry in those days all had ‘dens.’ There was a guy named Ezzi, a shriveled-up little thing. I loved that guy. I didn’t love him physically, but he was so brilliant. You didn’t know how old he was; he was really nothing to look at. My crowd went on hikes to Palisades Park; we’d go hitchhiking and come home at four o’clock in the morning. We’d stop a milk wagon and buy a bottle of milk. We knew what to live for. Whatever we did we did with our whole being.

  “This was 1915. I was working at the Arrow shirt factory in Williamsburg. I worked on artificial flowers. They taught me how to work on a button sewing machine. Every time I broke a needle they would mark it down and take two cents out of my pay.

  “Oh, I wanted to show you a letter my son sent me once.” She handed him a typed page with two quotations on it:

  Oh, the comfort, the inexplicable comfort of feeling safe with a person. Having neither to weigh thoughts or measure words, but to pour them all out just as they are, chaff and grain together. Knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with a breath of kindness throw the rest away.

  —George Eliot

  The second quotation was from an article by Liz Smith in Reader’s Digest.

  The son-to-mother communication transmitted over the longest distance is the birthday greeting sent on November 22, 1968, by astronaut James A. Lovell, Jr. to his mother. At the time of its transmission he was 140,000 miles out in space on his way to the moon. />
  At the bottom of the page was written, “Love, Michael.”

  “I wake up and hear him say, ‘Ma?’ I don’t wish it on anyone. See, the thing is, I went to work when he was a baby; a year and a half or two years. I had to get out of the house because I was so unhappy with my husband. He was jealous of me—very. I wasn’t an attractive-looking woman, and he knew beautiful ones. But he was insecure. And I didn’t like humiliation.

  “I didn’t realize Michael wanted somebody close to him. His father was always running around. He would take Michael to the park, spread a blanket, and fall asleep.

  “I got a letter the other day from Reagan. For Michael. They sent a self-addressed envelope with a stamp and they want a reply. I felt like writing, ‘You should be where he is.’ But I knew Michael voted for Reagan to spite me. He was envious because he knew that I had friends. He didn’t have a life. He learned Morse code by himself, and talked a lot to these people, the C.B.’s. The thing is,” she said, her voice breaking, “he really loved me very dearly.

  “He would have been forty-eight years old now,” Sylvia said.

  “Then he was—”

  “That’s right, young man. He was your age.”

  “Did you ever read Khrushchev’s speech in 1956?” he asked her.

  “I didn’t bother,” Sylvia said. “Ben Davis said not to, and his vision was deeper than all mankind. Look, I was in the Soviet Union in 1937 when Stalin was president. The big shots used to walk around with their canes and their ladies, and the old women used to go about with a stick and clean up the papers and do the sweeping. These bureaucrats had finally reached the day when they had servants and felt like millionaires. I spoke to a lot of people about them. `Their day will come too,’ they said. And it was true. Shortly after I came back here, the Soviet Union had the Moscow trials.”

  “How did you feel about the trials?” he asked.

  “What could you feel?” Sylvia replied. “I felt there had to be a clean sweep, and there was.”

  “But then what did you think when Khrushchev said all those people were innocent, and the trials were rigged?”

  “Listen,” Sylvia said, “I don’t think about the individual.”

  F.B.I. Agent Goldberg and the Car Thief

  Solly’s best friend.

  —G. L.

  I arrested Davey Lapidus. We got him on car theft. Caught him in the act. Took me where he stole the cars. A real skunk, low class. A thug. Greasy-looking, tough, surly, cheap crook. Head down, slinking around. He said: “I hate cops. I’ll kill any cops in my way.” But he really was a profitable car thief. He made a lot of money.

  He asked to see me. Says: “I’m in the same place with Rubell. Maybe you’d like me to ask him some questions.”

  I said goodbye. You don’t let a punk like that set you up.

  He started telling me about it anyway.

  We learned about Rubell through Lapidus.

  Solly was weak. Look how he talked to Lapidus, opened his heart to him. Solly opened his heart to a car thief.

  Every day I’d write a three-page memo from what Solly told Lapidus.

  Solly was that vulnerable. He needed someone to talk to.

  The House of Detention was tough in those days. A top Communist, Joe Horton, had his skull bashed in there. Horton had been standing in line for lunch, talking about how he hated the United States. Some little guy called him a son of a bitch, picked up a pipe and hit him. The warden called me up when it happened. There was blood all over the floor. It was a crime on government property.

  After the Horton case, the warden and I became friends. He gave me carte blanche.

  Ballinzweig was in there too. I asked the warden to bring Ballinzweig up. He was to be brought through the prison door leading to security quarters where prisoners were interviewed.

  I was waiting in the interview room. Ballinzweig came through the door. The minute he saw me, he turned and went back to the door, stood there, waiting to be readmitted. Wouldn’t speak to me. He was holding all these engineering papers he worked on while in prison.

  Ballinzweig was at least on the same level as Solly. But he didn’t recruit like the Rubells did.

  I had dozens of cases like the Rubells.

  Dolly was a vibrant recruiter. She worked at it. She was smart. Always talking with people she might be able to use. The squad room talk was that Dolly was the driving force.

  We did chalk talks. On a chalkboard. Points. We’d tear up each point that was proposed; try to develop leads. Dolly was always mentioned. She covered her tracks very well. Solly was a wimp. She led his whole life.

  Everyone in the office knew she was the driver.

  One reason she wasn’t nailed: this was the 1950s—”this is a woman; you’re picking on a woman.”

  Women prisoners who go bad are vicious. Men can still be nice guys. Dolly was vicious.

  Squad room agents felt if we had gotten them apart, we could have broken him. Dolly seemed to feel that too. She insisted that Solly be executed first. She raised a hell of a row.

  They wouldn’t let me talk to Solomon. I think I could have broken him. I’m low key, forthright. I have luck in that regard. Ballinzweig was surly and hostile. With his notebook, his engineering, working on complicated formulas. I didn’t like Ballinzweig

  Solly was vulnerable. He knew about Joe Horton. I would have had an edge because he was in jail. I knew that jail. Prisoners had access to each other. Today that jail wouldn’t exist.

  It was open and dangerous.

  Solly, 1953

  He didn’t flutter with the breeze.

  —G. L.

  Mornings in deep autumn, with the ebbing of his hopes, he noticed the leaves and maple-tree seeds blown by the wind descending slowly like helicopters over the death-house wall. The icy Hudson River wind. He began another letter to his children—”my precious children”—he talked about playing horsie with them and what it was like gathering them in his arms at bedtime, and again, again about his and Dolly’s innocence: “All the government had as evidence, children, were those Freiheit thimbles. Thimbles your mommy and I gave to our progressive friends for donating to a peaceful world by reading the Freiheit. For this, these cunning madmen plan to kill us.” He tore the letter up, and began another, telling them he hoped they were taking their piano lessons seriously. He told them their mother (alone in the women’s section of the death house) was a diamond, that no amount of government filth could scratch her honor.

  The guards led him out into the yard again in the afternoon. The wind stung his ears. He watched a seagull sail upward in wide circles, lifted by the wind, and fly into the wide-open sky until he could no longer see it. And he saw Delancey Street and Columbia Street, the crowd surging by the pushcarts, the chickens in their wooden boxes cackling, the merchants shouting and fighting, and Solly saw himself hurrying home to Dolly and the kids. Rocking them all in his arms, crying out, “It’s over. Everything’s hunky-dory.” His legs almost buckled. He looked at the white streaks of calcium carbonate running in broken lines from brick to brick along the wall. He thought of coal and iron ore dug from the earth, trucks carrying it to the mills, iron and steel pouring from furnaces, parts sent to the prison. Mechanics molding them into an edifice, a death house…. What could he tell his children to make them understand? One parable, one picture. Peekskill, the Scottsboro boys, Gastonia, Kritstallnacht, Fuchik’s letters, Spain, Dmitroff’s speech to the Nazi court… . And he remembered something that said it all. The American captain who had told Solly of being on the outskirts of Dusseldorf in early 1945. The captain was preparing with his men a siege to liberate the city from the Nazis. A German worker, a printer wearing an apron, approached the captain. The German had asked the American captain for permission to hold a meeting of his Communist club, the first that would be held since Hitler took power. He handed the captain the written announcement of the meeting for his approval. It contained the date, time, and place, and the words, “Those who flutter
ed with the breeze are not invited.”

  Only a Communist—no, Solly would have to write “progressive”--could have the perspective to call twelve years of Nazism a “breeze.” He sat down to write the letter. My precious children, do you now understand why your parents are dying?

  And again Solly could breathe.

  The Uncle

  Shadow of a moustache.

  —G. L.

  I met Solly in the fall of 1938 at City College. I knew him for two semesters, in the alcoves mainly. He was there early and late.

  He was not too bright.

  I could see Solly getting involved with the Russians, trying to help: this aspect of looking for a parent.

  A very strange, unhappy young man. Lonely, always there in the alcoves, always away from home.

  He didn’t have depth.

  When the Springers adopted the kids, they looked for people who had knowledge of the Rubells. They wanted to provide continuity, not treat the parents as outcasts.

  I saw the kids quite often after the execution. I played chess with Joseph. He used to play chess with his father. So I was Uncle Henry.

  The Springers had a family conference every week where anyone could bring up any subject. They operated by majority vote.

  The Jewish community was concerned that Communists were raising the kids. The Jewish Child Care Association came with the police and took them away. Joseph and Amy held hands all the way to Pleasantville, New York, where they were put in a shelter.

  Acting purer than the goyim, protecting the good name of the Jews: this is what I call a Jewish judge sentencing the Rubells on the eve of Yom Kippur. I think it was part of a primitive purification rite for him that was very vulgar.

  In order to wrest control from the Communists, a WASP, Dean Smyth of the New York School of Social Work, was appointed co-guardian. The kids’ grandmother, Sarah Rubell, was the other co-guardian, but Smyth was main man.