When We Argued All Night (3 page)

The woman said, How old are you? At the time it seemed like a natural question.

—Nineteen, said Harold. How old are you?

—Twenty-seven, said the woman. Are you from the Bronx?

—Brooklyn. Now they were turning aside to part, but Harold didn't want to. He was sick with fear for Artie but curious about this woman who had touched him so intimately. Wait, he said. My name is Harold Abramovitz.

—Belle Kantor. Do you have paper? I'll give you the address where we meet. He had a squashed notebook in his pocket, a pen.

C
offee, in the morning, made Virginia talk. Harold had found an iron frying pan and was frying eggs they'd bought in Albany. Virginia was from Schenectady and so was Myra, but Myra had gone to college—Vassar, that fancy girls' school—and Virginia had not. You boys been to college? she asked. Sometimes Artie couldn't stop himself with the rhymes and songs. This time he chanted something he'd heard around the campus at City.

Jacob, Yitzhak, Abraham and Sam!

We're the boys that eat no ham!

Where we come from . . . don't remember.

New York City College. Yay!

—Oh, stop it, said Harold. He was dressed, but his curly hair was tousled, making him look like a big baby. He was grumpy.

Virginia considered. You mean you don't remember the words or you don't remember where you come from?

—I don't remember the words, Artie said. He couldn't help laughing.

—And you eat wieners, which is the same as ham. She had twisted her hair up.

—Not necessarily, Harold said.

Myra was walking behind Artie toward the old couch, where he sat back, his legs stuck out into the room. He had his shoes on but hadn't tied the laces because he planned to change his socks as soon as he had some privacy. Artie rarely drank coffee, but he'd taken some just to warm up, and he was trying to look as if he liked it. Myra said sarcastically, Not necessarily! She touched Artie's shoulder and gave him the sort of half smile people give when they've already agreed together to make fun of a third person. She was smoking a cigarette. Since he and Myra had not had an agreement to make fun of Harold, tacit or otherwise, Artie was surprised. Flattered, maybe. Myra was pretty, with her dark red hair. Her smile scared him, but her breasts were perky. It would be too much to touch her ass, though that came to mind—it was small but well shaped. He lifted his coffee mug in her direction, with what he hoped was a slightly conspiratorial smile.

—So that means you're Jewish? Virginia said, hunched at the table over her coffee. You're both Jewish?

—You don't like Jews? said Artie.

—Leave her alone, Myra said.

—I was just curious, Virginia said.

—Can't be too careful, Artie said. That's how they feel in Germany. Nothing against Jews, just keep an eye on them.

—It's not funny, Artie, Harold said.

—I'm not against Jews, said Virginia.

Harold said, Did you know Jewish doctors in Germany had to turn in their licenses?

Virginia said, I don't pay much attention to the news.

—Oh, my God, Artie said. For Christ's sake.

—Would you stop it? Myra said. Leave her alone. Something seemed to travel through her, starting with the hair or the nose, which was prominent though not Jewish-looking, and out her long fingers. I think I'll take a walk, she said. And in moments, she was gone.

Artie was curious. What did she mean? he asked Virginia. Leave you alone? There's something wrong with you?

—Maybe she thinks there is, Virginia said. She went into the bedroom and emerged in a white bathing suit, then added her heavy brown sweater. She had on shoes but no socks. She went outside, and Artie saw her go down to the lake, where there was a patch of sun.

—So how would the wise Communist Party direct us to spend our morning? he said to Harold, who was busying himself with the tin mugs and unmatched plates. Shall we organize the local bears?

—Very funny.

—What's Myra mad about? Artie said. He was looking around for trouble to make—he knew it. He felt a certain malaise. He was cold; he didn't want to flirt with the girls, though he wouldn't have minded if they flirted with him; he didn't want to go into the water; and at the moment he couldn't remember why this week in the woods had seemed like a good idea. When Artie felt that way, he started up with somebody; he always had, stirring up quarrels among his brothers—he had four—as a child. Trouble was a good way of staying interested and awake. But this time, before he could get seriously interested in annoying Harold, he remembered something: the dilapidated, oarless rowboat he'd seen the day before. He went for his camera. The sound of a tree branch scraping the roof had interrupted his thoughts and changed his mood. Hell, they were in the woods! He should take pictures.

—
I hate to see . . .
He hustled to the shore—avoiding Virginia, who sat on the ground, her knees drawn up—and photographed the rowboat, the shadow of the boat on the shore, the shadow of the seat on the bottom of the boat, the weeds beyond the boat. He was trying out a lens he'd bought just before losing his job. When he had money, he spent it on his camera. Better a camera than a woman. After he took pictures, he circled the outside of the cabin and saw no oars. He put his camera into its case and slung the case across his chest. Then he took the thickest, largest stick he could find and (again avoiding Virginia) climbed into the boat, whistling, untied it, and pushed off. He saw Myra return from the driveway and go into the cabin. Whistling and poking at the bottom of the lake with his stick, soon he was afloat.

H
arold had been born in summer, only a few months after his parents arrived in New York, and as an infant he slept in a wooden box his mother had used to bring clothing and blankets on the long journey across the ocean. Every morning she put the box near the window so the baby could strengthen in sunshine. Harold remembered, with nostalgia so keen the memory came to him as a taste, cool and milky—vanilla—the pleasure of lying on his back, his limbs at rest, comfortable in every part of his body, watching something flash and flash again in the sunlight outside the window. When he'd told his mother this memory, at ten, she said it was not possible. Harold had grown quickly, and at six months he'd outgrown the box. Besides, by then it was winter, and the window was drafty. A baby could not remember what happened before he was six months old, Harold's mother said. She could not read or write, but she remembered everything anyone had ever told her, and spoke, her blue eyes bulging like her son's, with the certainty and clarity people would later notice in Harold. They would assume he'd picked up the tone at City College, but he had begun talking that way when he spoke only Yiddish, having conversations with his mother. He was content not to argue with her on the topic of early memory. Harold—called Hesh until he started school and the teacher chose
Harold
—knew what he knew. The memory—it made his salivary glands tingle—and the loss of that exquisite comfort as he grew older, informed whatever Harold would eventually do. It didn't make sense for Harold to join the Communist Party: he was elegiac, not radical, but Harold loved fairness as others loved risk or drama, and it was only fair to join with those who stood with the oppressed, whether their reasoning was crude or not. Harold Abramovitz had sought the risk of becoming a Communist, though he looked down slightly on his comrades and they knew it. Brenda Saltzman, many years later, would comment that Harold Abrams—by then he'd have changed his name—had joined the Communist Party as an actor might try out for the role of the tragic hero. That morning at the house in the Adirondacks, long before Brenda's birth, Harold wanted Myra and Virginia to leave so he could talk Artie into understanding why he'd done it. Artie was hard to convince, and Harold—since third grade—had never been able to give up the challenge of convincing Artie. He wanted nothing but to renew the argument.

N
either Harold nor Artie got over the effects of the riot in Union Square. Harold had intermittent pain in his right hand all his life, and occasionally he was unable to control the movement of his thumb. It spoiled his already weak tennis game. The Communists had shown him why the workers must revolt on the same day they'd made it impossible for Harold to sew, no matter how much respect he had for his father. In addition to English literature, and with the same conviction though not the same pleasure, Harold began reading Marx and Engels and attending meetings at the address Belle had given him, even when they bored him.

The afternoon in Union Square changed Arthur Saltzman as well, though unlike Harold he didn't often mention it years later; Harold always did, remembering the one time in his life when he screamed. Artie was not injured, but his camera was smashed and then lost. As shocked as Harold was at the cruelty of the police, Artie remained angry mostly at particular policemen, whom he remembered and described. The one who brought his club down on Artie's camera was fair-haired, with a narrow face not unlike his own. The sight of police attacking unarmed citizens, some of them women, some just people trying to run away, astonished him, and it aroused in Artie an anger that could at times be attached to anything at all.

—But what did the Communists expect? he'd ask, even years later, telling his children the story. What did they
think
would happen? He would glare at Brenda and Carol as if they were the heedless Communists. He conceded without discussion that the protesters were mostly right and the government mostly wrong, but surely everyone knew that, and figuring out in just what way they were right or wrong didn't interest Artie. He'd always been instinctively for the powerless, the losers.

He couldn't afford another camera for a long time, and he was left with a grudge he'd never live past, never see around, and soon couldn't explain. He began to feel as if he'd always been angry: angry was what he was, angry at humanity's capacity for rage, at his own capacity. And angry at humanity's stupidity, which made him begin, at nineteen, to laugh bitterly in a way that would eventually infuriate his wife and frighten his children. Unlike Harold, he didn't tell stories about the protest, except for one that he'd learned not firsthand but from the newspaper. A policeman had stopped Mayor Jimmy Walker on his way into his office that day, not recognizing him, and asked where he thought he was going. The mayor replied that six million people expected him to get to work. What Artie liked—or hated—was that even though he was mayor, Jimmy Walker couldn't count on being recognized and respected. Nobody was dignified. Everyone was a fool. The mayor was stopped from going into his own office by a stupid cop; another stupid cop smashed skulls; a third broke Artie's camera. The afternoon didn't make Artie hate cops forever, but it made him think that cops were stupid, and since cops were just people, people were stupid.

Despite the Depression, Harold got his degree, and eventually the night courses added up, and Artie did too. He worked in another camera store. It closed. He wrote freelance stories about sports and continued selling photographs. At a paper, Artie met an editor who needed a book reviewer, and he thought of Harold. Harold began reviewing, then briefly had a reporter's job. That ended, but when the Federal Writers' Project began, he was hired.

Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration was offering white collar jobs to people on home relief, so Artie, who lived with his parents as Harold did, took an apartment for one month and applied. He couldn't be on relief if he lived at home, and he couldn't get a WPA job unless he was on relief. The investigator's nosy questions enraged him even though he was lying, saying his parents had thrown him out. He got one check, was hired as a clerk in the WPA offices, and celebrated by buying a suit for work and a new lens for his camera. Then he gave up the apartment and moved back to his room at home. He hated the job, but he was glad to have a job. For several months he was bored and obstreperous. Then he was laid off.

Meanwhile, Harold wandered the city to contribute to a guidebook about New York and in spare moments wrote gritty poems in his reporter's notebook about scraps of garbage on city streets and ill-fed cats and children. He'd been going to C.P. meetings off and on since he'd met Belle Kantor at Union Square. After the meetings, he and Belle lingered over nearly empty cups in the Automat, talking about whether the Soviet Union could carry off socialism or about their own lives. Belle's thick brown hair wouldn't stay where she put it, and in her loosening bun and old-fashioned clothes, she looked like Harold's idea of an idealistic European revolutionary. Her husband was so busy with party business she rarely saw him, but because she was married, Harold and Belle assured each other that they were not in love. They allowed themselves to clasp hands across a table on which drops of cold coffee hardened.

Sometimes Harold talked about his friendships with other women. He knew Belle disliked this, but she didn't admit it, and he couldn't stay away from the subject. Harold didn't join the party until six years after he met Belle. He wasn't certain enough or pure enough. He loved literature too much and believed what it implied: all life is interesting, even life made possible by capitalism.

What made Harold join was a conversation with his father, who admitted that as a young man he'd wanted to be a rabbi or a Hebrew school teacher. But I couldn't go to school, he said. Money was everything.

At last Harold understood. Money was everything; the leisure to read books was stolen leisure. The New Deal gave people hope, but only a revolution would make a big enough difference. He approached the group's leaders.

—Finally? they said. They laughed at him, but they accepted his dues.

N
ow Harold was alone in the cabin with Myra, who had returned from her walk as he was trying to clean the iron skillet, and had gone into the bedroom. Virginia sat on the lakeshore waiting to be loved. Artie, the last time Harold had checked, was fooling around with the busted rowboat. Harold thought he heard thunder. He tidied restlessly, though that was pointless. The place was appealing but not clean. The walls were wooden planks, and the floor was also wood, with years of ground-in dirt. The skillet was greasy and rusty and would stay that way. The windows were dirty. But Harold liked the cabin. He was impatient for Myra and Virginia to leave so he could get a book and sit on the dilapidated sofa. He was reading Henry James's
The Portrait of a Lady
. His suitcase was still in the bedroom, with all his books in it.