Red Love Page 7

  A lonely guy becomes a spy.

  —G. L.

  Sid Smorg of South Philadelphia kept squares of Swiss chocolate in his mother’s refrigerator. They were his luxury, late at night, in his room. He didn’t deserve them. Jews were burning.

  A bald, virginal, fatting man, at forty-two the chemist remembered what others had long packed away: the girl he shared a seat with in the ninth grade, how she felt at his side, her smell of licorice; eating a sizzling kosher hot dog at twelve on a winter day; his rabbi’s words at his bar mitzvah. Once, at eight, he was swimming; a girl appeared beside him in the pool, said “You’re handsome,” and dove away.

  Sid remembered his two years at YMCA summer camp. Frail and sickly, he gained seven pounds each summer. He learned to love spinach (a passion he kept the rest of his life), played soccer, and shivered with delight on the boulders around the campfire while the counselors (strapping college athletes) told ghost stories. Sid developed a sound appetite. Years later, his Soviet friend Alexei would say fondly, “Sid will eat anything that will stand still long enough and that won’t eat him first.”

  Sid read manuals on how to appeal to the opposite sex. He kept a bowl of apples on his kitchen table, because he had read that apples kept the breath sweet.

  You could win Sid’s gratitude by asking him how things were going. He thanked the bus driver for saying good morning. He waited each week for Fibber McGee to open his closet, and he listened to Jack Benny for eighteen years.

  When Sid was in his senior year of high school, his English teacher gave an exam in his class and then asked Sid to remain afterward. He asked Sid to take the exams home and grade them that night.

  Some of the other kids saw Sid take the exams. They surrounded him in the hallway pleading with him to pass them. Many of them had not even bothered to speak to him before. Sid saw many new attractive attributes in them.

  Sid took the exams home and sat up until 5 A.M., erasing wrong answers and filling in the right ones, even faking the kids’ handwriting. When he was through, they had all passed. Sid downgraded his own paper to make things look less suspicious.

  Sid handed the exams in to the teacher. In the afternoon Sid met the teacher in the hallway. The teacher said, “The class did very well, did they not, Sid?” turned his back and walked away. This comment burned into Sid. For twenty-four years he thought of it and considered looking up the teacher in the phone book, apologizing, and explaining why he had acted as he did.

  Each year when the new phone book arrived, Sid looked at the women’s names and wondered what they were like. Stephanie Schnall: a tremulous librarian with suppressed emotions and chestnut hair; Bridget Hart: a vixen who kept a little braided whip in her glove compartment.

  Russ Columbo broke Sid’s heart, and he had a special shot of Grable’s legs in his dresser drawer under his shirts and mismatched socks.

  The seasons came and went; Sid sat quietly on the bus on the way to work watching the young lovers, the cycles. People’s grief gave him strength—he cheered up.

  Later, in Jersey City, when his friend Pete Boston introduced him to the Soviets, Sid was uncertain. He had considered himself a Norman Thomas Socialist. But he saw these were interesting men. The Philadelphia Communists he knew, were weird and shabby losers—libertines, gap-toothed wonders—no way he would join those furry nuts. The Party was their glory. It made them shoot up a few inches, gave them a set of balls. Pete had taken him to their meetings, hoping Sid would join.

  The local Party office had walls papered with drawings of brawny, upright workingmen in overalls with upraised, gigantic muscled arms and capitalists with fat cigars and big bellies sitting on piles of coins.

  The leaders, with their pipes, tweedy vests, and blank faces, had this “You go out and get your heads cracked, it’s only the cops” attitude. He saw a small black woman make a suggestion about a demonstration and the leader coldly respond: “We will decide who we will learn from.” She steadied herself by putting her hand on the chair.

  One angry Greek exploded at the Marxist dialectics (Does the Party shake the workers or do the workers shake the Party?) and shouted, “The hell with this bullshit—give me five good men and I’ll take Rittenhouse Square by storm.” The meetings broke up at 4 A.M. They were dominated by what the Swiss called the ploder sacken, the endlessly boring talkers.

  Sid couldn’t take those pig festivals on the Jewish holidays—the Jewish Communists’ celebration of the pig. Not just spareribs in Chinese restaurants, mind you—okay, that was odd on Yom Kippur, but they thought they were proving they weren’t narrow Zionists. But pictures of pigs on the mantelpiece! Pig recipes! Pig poems! Sex tips! This was excess, Sid thought.

  In his parents’ house he’d lived in the same room since childhood. Sid had sat in the back row in the living room beside his bachelor uncles in the darkening dusk. Uncle Simon was known for his Republican rage. You never mentioned F.D.R. in his presence. If you did, he turned livid red and screamed, then didn’t talk to anyone for days. Whenever Simon sat quietly in his chair, everyone assumed he was thinking about how much he hated F.D.R.

  When Sid was introduced to Alexei by Pete, he was touched by Alexei’s concern. Also Alexei was dark and handsome, which Sid couldn’t help admiring, and had a lock of hair that kept falling over his forehead. “Sid Sid Sid Sid!” (Imagine, hearing his name said over and over again.) “Sid-Sid-Sidney,” said Alexei, gazing at Sid fondly, licking a vodka martini, “I don’t expect our boys to be social butterflies, but this is ridiculous. What can we do with you? You’re so pale. You don’t play cards, you have no girl. You think we don’t care about these things?”

  Sid sat, his head down, eating it up. Come on, Alexei, you guys don’t care that much. Blood came to Sid’s face. To have such friends—and to help the USSR at the same time, the only country where anti-Semitism was a crime against the state. Anything that strengthened the USSR would help to save the Jews.

  Tears came to Sid’s eyes when Alexei told him that Stalin had struggled to learn Yiddish, that he davenned when he prayed. This was no normal leader.

  The Jew thing, who could ignore it? Sid had gone to the library every day as a boy, walking the two miles. The Neckers festered near the city dump amid mosquitoes, raising hogs. They were kids who lived in the marshy wasteland of Stonehouse Lane and did lightning forays on Sid’s neighborhood, throwing bricks and smashing windows. When he was fifteen, they beat him. Blood dripping down his face, he watched the legs of his friends skitter away into the bushes.

  Sid’s father, one of the only Jews at the factory, was baited by the other workers. They stole his chisels; they put glue on his good clothes. Yus Smorg struck a man who grinned and ran together the words “Hi Jew?” and almost lost his job because the man had a weak heart and fainted.

  Yus Smorg’s foreman told him, “I’m going to make you quit.” He moved him to a quicksilver production line where Yus was the only worker hand-sanding cabinets. He came home at night with the skin rubbed off his fingertips. Sid’s mother would bathe Yus’s fingers and put ointment on them. Sid’s father went back to work the next morning without a word of complaint.

  Sid graduated from the university in 1932 and went to work as a laboratory worker at the Richmond Sugar Company. He was now a main support of his family.

  One week before Christmas, he was laid off. He searched frantically for a job, walking in a perspiring heat in snow and slush against tides of smiling, happy employed workers with tinsel on their faces, bearing green, gold, and red Christmas boxes with silver bells to their families as carols tinkled from storefronts. This was capitalism. As he approached a factory gate, a bundled laborer walked toward him and asked what he wanted. When Sid told him, the man snarled, “Better go back, boy. Enough people out of work here.”

  One night a old co-worker of his, Fred Stone, came with the news that a former classmate of Fred’s, Pete Boston, was leaving his job at the Terrill Manufacturing Company in Jersey City and might be able
to put Sid in his place. A week later a telegram arrived: Sid was told to come to Jersey City that night to see Pete Boston. He anxiously packed a brown cardboard suitcase, borrowed six dollars and a jacket that closely matched his pants, and took a Greyhound to Jersey City. Boston was waiting for Sid in front of his house. Pete Boston’s biceps could make a man blush. Plus a huge, friendly, freckled face, pug nose, the grin, the feel of the bearlike grip of his hand.

  They sat up until morning talking. Boston briefed Sid on soap chemistry. Then there were “complicating circumstances.” The boss, Roger Whitman, would never hire a Jew. Sid would have to say that, despite his name, he was really not Jewish. His grandfather had converted and married a Christian girl.

  Then Boston got down to brass tacks. He told Sid he was a Communist Party member, and that he had purposely selected Sid because Fred had told him that Sid was a Socialist. Pete said, “We figure that when you really know the score you’ll want to struggle for real change.” Boston talked for three more hours about how mankind had advanced to a new level in the Soviet Union.

  Sid was hired the next day. Roger Whitman told him what a great man Hitler was, and how the Jews in the United States should be put on ships and the vessels sunk in mid-ocean.

  Sid’s thirty-dollar-a-week salary kept his family off relief. He repaid Pete by consenting to go to the Communist Party meetings in Jersey City, which he detested. He couldn’t hurt Pete’s feelings when Pete asked him to join the Party. He said that he felt he “must be adequately prepared” in the tomes of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and “steeped in the struggle” before he would be worthy to take such a step. Pete was moved, and tried to assure Sid that there “are years to go to drink from the fountain of wisdom of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism; the Party will guide you.”

  In the fall of 1933, Sid was rehired by the Richmond Sugar Company. Pete kept coming to see him in Philadelphia, where they would meet at the Automat and Sid would splurge on his favorites, hashed potatoes and creamed spinach. Pete talked for hours about Soviet justice. Pete was also welcomed by Sid’s family at his home, where he was considered their savior for having given Sid a job.

  One night Pete began their conversation by telling Sid about yet another incident of discrimination so typical of American society. He had attended the Christmas party of his Jewish girl friend’s company. The party was sedate and dignified, with good, rich food. Near the end, a partner in the firm, who did not know his secretary was Jewish, rose and proposed a toast: “A Merry Christmas to all us Christians here. I am so thankful there are no others in this firm.”

  After a long pause, Pete said, “Sid, the Soviet people eat off rough bare boards. You can help them live a little better, a little more as humans should, by getting this information.” He said that he had met a man who worked for Amtorg, the Soviet trading company, in New York City. The man wanted to obtain—”unofficially”—a quantity of specialized information and data on American chemical processes. The information on paper fillers, vitamin D concentrates, and sulphinated oils could greatly benefit the lives of the Soviet people. It could affect education (paper), food (fish-oil concentrates), and clothing (sulphinated oils). Pete said a great deal more information was also needed about products made by the Richmond Sugar Company. It would go a long way toward making the harsh life of Soviet citizens, who were still in the first stage of Socialist humanism, less difficult.

  “Will you do this for the Soviet people, Sid?” Pete asked, that wonderful brisk look of love in his eyes, a look no one had ever bestowed on Sid before.

  Sid said, “I’ll have to think this over.” Actually, he had already made up his mind. His pulse was pounding. This was great. Pete was his benefactor. Sid had been living in sin for so long by avoiding the Communist Party membership Pete wanted so badly for him. He felt he had been breaking Pete’s heart, and hated himself for it. He had torn clumps of hair out of his head at night in anger at himself. Now he could please Pete, get him off his neck about joining that bunch of furry nuts in the Communist Party, and strengthen the Soviet Union, his people’s best friend, as well.

  How sweet it was.

  During the next seven months, Sid and Pete fumbled about trying to figure out how they could go about copying the data kept in the office of Dr. Bachrach, the director of research at Richmond Sugar. There were voluminous plant operation reports, blueprints of equipment. The reproduction costs were prohibitive.

  Sid worried himself blue about it, wondering what he could hock that would cover it. Could he ever correct his faults? In the meantime he did manage to provide Pete with the process for the manufacture of phosphoric acid. This was a simple matter; Sid drew all the necessary sketches and copied the essential data himself over a period of forty-eight hours on a weekend during which he did not eat or drink.

  In the late fall of 1935 Pete came to Philadelphia with exciting news. Amtorg itself would provide excellent facilities for copying the information. Sid just had to bring the material to New York. Best of all, Pete told Sid that Dmitri, the Russian engineer from Amtorg, was very anxious to meet him, having heard so much about the canny Sid Smorg. Pete said the engineer had very warm words of praise for the information Sid had given the Soviet Union on the phosphoric acid process.

  Sid dove into the air and chased a fly.

  He had entered into history. He was making a difference.

  Sid and Pete did some of their secret work together. Like Sid, Pete was no libertine, and he avoided marriage because he had to conserve his energy for his activities on behalf of the Soviets. Pete kept a snake, a crow, and white mice as pets, but this was not, he told Sid, because he was a bohemian. It was calculated to give people the impression he was a bit “off” so that they would not notice his secret work.

  Pete was a superb lab man with an uncanny dexterity in those huge paws of his. The two friends worked in the lab together for hours without talking and it seemed to Sid as if each could anticipate the other’s thoughts and desires before they were expressed. Sid hoped that at some time in the future, when Nazism had been crushed, he could settle down to working with Pete in aiding the sick. Perhaps nutrition research. He could think of no more glorious project.

  With his new friends and engulfing work, Sid pondered the course of his life up to this point. He was embarrassed that he had spent so much time writing to Betty Grable in Hollywood, telling her of his hopes and dreams and what her legs meant to him. He had expressed this feeling to her in so many ways, in so many letters, it must have bored her to tears. He blushed. She must have thought, What a lonely man Sid Smorg must be. And this wasn’t really true, at least not any more. He thought up a letter telling her to forget those other letters, but he never sent it. The truth was, he just didn’t want to nibble at her toes any more.

  Sid’s two new Soviet friends, whom he knew only as Dmitri and Alexei, were among the most interesting men he had ever known. Dmitri had a swarthy complexion, black dancing eyes, and a warm smile. He had read widely in English literature, and discussed Browning’s “My Last Duchess” with Sid. He called Sandburg “a mediocrity and a bit of a faker,” but liked Dickens, Edgar Lee Masters, and Wordsworth. “My life is drudgery, Sid,” Dmitri confided. “It’s a succession of days of waiting apprehensively on street corners in all sorts of weather; sometimes the people don’t show up. Having to cajole and plead and threaten. Eating in cheap, out-of-the-way restaurants.” Sid wished he could do something to cheer his friend up. Dmitri often went to the ice hockey games at Madison Square Garden and joined in the free ice skating afterwards. Sid would watch Dmitri and his red-and-gold muffler fly around the rink, happy to see him freeing himself from his everyday cares. Dmitri would wave at Sid. Once, to Sid’s delight, he executed a somersault.

  One day Dmitri exploded with anger at Sid. Sid had traveled to New York four times in a single week in a fruitless effort to obtain a report that Dmitri wanted on synthetic rubber from a gull named Herman. Dmitri shouted at Sid, his face livid: “Just look at you, m
y boy. You not only look like a ghost, you are one. You’re dead on your feet. What will your mother think? You goddamn fool. You’re not coming to New York again for two weeks. Go home. Spend time with your family. That’s an order. I’ll bet you that asshole Herman hasn’t even begun that report. The hell with it for now. Even if Moscow were to fall tomorrow (and it won’t—ever) I forbid you to come to New York again for two weeks.” After that outburst, Dmitri calmed down. Gently, he said, “Come, Sidney. We’ll zip over to the Ferris Wheel Bar, have a few double Canadian Clubs and some sandwiches. Then I’ll put you in a cab and personally buy you some Corona Corona cigars and a parlor-car seat for the train.”

  So it was.

  Sid settled down in his parlor-car seat in a haze of holy contentment.

  Sid was busy day and night writing reports (grieving over his deficiencies in grammar), stealing blueprints, copying and returning them, seeing Dmitri and Alexei in New York, Cincinnati, or Buffalo, raising money for his trips (since he hated to take it from the Soviet people) by working weekends on his job for time and a half, telling lies at home.

  Sid’s mother was certain he was carrying on a series of cheap, clandestine love affairs. Sid worried about not living up to her code of ethics. She often said that a thief “could not look God in the eye nor at himself with respect.”

  Sid had fallen in love once, on Monday, August 30, 1937. A girl in the laboratory. Her unassuming manner, her snub nose captivated him. He courted her for a month and told her he loved her. One day as they walked by the river, she told him she did not believe his love, and cited his “lack of ardor” as the reason.

  He drank heavily. He thought of making a clean breast of it. Having seen a lot of Bing Crosby movies, he was tempted to confess to the Jesuit priests in the neighborhood, especially the dazzling Father Mahoo, or the erudite tall parish priest at St. Ambrose’s, Father Culligan.

  Whenever Sid was down, Dmitri’s concern picked him up. Dmitri said over drinks, “I realize it’s because of this work that you have no wife and family of your own. But this is not natural. You are a normal man with normal instincts and desires. We must find a solution, Sidney. As soon as possible you must get out of this lousy business. Forget it. Then you can run around with girls every night in the week.” Blushing at all this, Sid said he wasn’t that kind of guy.