He said nothing, he did not begin. Instead, the marriage began to die in that second year while Amy grew inside her belly and Jonah fell into Christie's own trap: it was all trivial and inconsequential, the normal difficult adjustment newlyweds have to make, it would pass, it would pass. It did not pass, and eight years later he would wonder whether he could have said or done anything to change the situation, whether there was still time then before the treason trial began, before everything else became terribly more urgent and important than the woman who was his wife.
The treason case broke in July of 1954, two months after Amy was born. His daughter weighed nine pounds two ounces, huge for a girl, causing Christie to go into shock shortly after the delivery, throwing up all over the floor of her room while the night nurse ran to fetch a mop instead of a doctor. He cornered the nurse in the hospital corridor, a big red-faced mean bitch with gray hair and a nose like a cleaver, and he told her she had better get the doctor immediately before he strangled her. Her red face went very white, two glacial spots showing one on each cheek and then spreading to the rest of her features as she struggled with indignation and anger, and then swallowed both and went trotting off down the corridor, white skirts flying, crepe soles padding, you're goddamn right, Jonah thought. His daughter had the Dunseath look, passed directly from Lady Fitz to Christie, each lineal reproduction slightly less perfect, as though the mold were losing its firmness: Mrs. Dunseath had been breathtakingly lovely; Christie was merely beautiful; and Amy, his daughter, was only pretty. But oh what a true loveliness about her, something Mrs. Dunseath could not have acquired in a thousand years of breeding, the black hair and the light eyes, yes, the finely turned profile and the generous mouth, yes, all these though less classically stated, but her manner as well. Ahh, her gentle, shy, and inquiring manner, the delicate grace of her, this was the Willow legacy. This was his mother gently walking toward the seawall, her head tilted in anticipation, his Amy, his darling girl.
In July of 1954, a young man named Kaneji Yoro, accompanied by another young man named Peter Koenig, set a series of homemade bombs against the walls of Gracie Mansion, detonated them, and began running downtown in the direction of Wall Street, hoping to lose themselves in the lunch hour crowds. They were picked up before they had traveled three blocks, and were immediately charged with attempted murder, the mayor and the governor having been in executive conference within when the bombs went off. The charges were later expanded in the indictment to include arson (because the building caught fire), anarchy (because they found in a Jersey City basement several documents in the defendants' handwriting which outlined an escalating scheme of methodical destruction that would eventually lead to chaos and insurrection), conspiracy (because the two men had been out of state when they conspired to commit their act against the peace of New York), and, finally, treason. Treason, of course, was the most serious of all the charges and was a crime punishable by death. Since Article 212 of the New York State Penal Law defined treason as consisting of "a combination of two or more persons by force to usurp the government of the state, or to overturn the same, shown by a forcible attempt made within the state, to accomplish that purpose," Jonah could not see how the district attorney hoped to prove there had been an attempt at overthrowing the government, notwithstanding the timely presence in Grade Mansion of the state's highest executive. The documents in the Jersey City basement indeed supported a charge of anarchy, bolstered as they were by copies of books by Engels and Marx, issues of the Daily Worker, and even one or two party directives. Attempted murder was also well within the bounds of realistic possibility, and a conviction on that charge alone would have netted the perpetrators twenty-five years each in prison, a long enough span for any young bomber. The enormity of the crime, however, this attempt on the lives of two important officials (by Communist anarchists, no less) undoubtedly called for more severe punishment than the law allowed, so the district attorney had gratuitously tacked to his indictment the charges of arson, conspiracy, and treason. The arson charge amused Jonah. The conspiracy and treason charges incensed him. He could not believe that Yoro's and Koenig's respective Japanese and German ancestry had anything whatever to do with the indictment ("Of course not," Christie said. "The war's already forgotten. It's all craparoo") but he nonetheless detected in the public reaction an attitude of outraged piety and righteousness. Hadn't we been reconstructing and regenerating those dirty Nazi bastards and sneaky Jap finks ever since the war ended, a war we had won, mind you? So now two snotnosed red Communist Fascist punks try to blow up Gracie Mansion with our beloved mayor and governor inside, dirty red subversive Jap rat bastard Nazis — notwithstanding the fact that Yoro was born and raised in San Francisco or that Koenig's father was a respected employee of the Reader's Digest in Chappaqua, where he had been born and where he had sired his anarchist son.
Jonah wanted to take the case because he felt the treason charge was unjustified and unjustifiable. Raymond wanted to take the case because he was shrewd enough in his ancestral French way to realize that whoever defended these two young Communists would become famous overnight. Their initial separate motives were later ironically reversed: it was Raymond who wrote a paper explaining the principles involved in the case, which he read at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association; it was Jonah who conducted the court trial, Jonah whose name and picture appeared in all the newspapers, Jonah who came out of the proceedings a well-known legal figure and a champion of the rights of the individual in a free-society.
The district attorney eventually dropped the absurd arson charge, but Jonah permitted his clients to plead guilty only to attempted murder and anarchy, fighting the treason charge as well as the linked charge of conspiracy (if there had been no treason, how could anyone have conspired to commit an act against the peace?) on the grounds that whatever eventual overthrow may have been contemplated by the pair, its execution had certainly not begun with the bombing of the mayor's residence. Youthful ego and exuberance aside, even these misguided twenty-year-old boys could not possibly have intended their deed (he almost said "childish prank") as the beginning of a bona fide uprising. The jury was out for six hours. It convicted Yoro and Koenig of the first two crimes, and the judge sentenced them to consecutive prison terms of twenty-five years for attempted murder and ten years for anarchy. The case was won, and a style was set. The style was not immediately manifest, though. Like the dissolution of Jonah's marriage, it resisted definition until it was fully recognizable. By the time the tone of the partnership was realized, the tone of the marriage was also realized, and it was curious that both marriage and partnership dissolved in the same year, only several months apart, though neither had anything to do with the other. Or was that true?