For instance. In she came, smiling, kissed my inky cheek, looked at the FBI men, and said, “Oh! Company! How nice!” Angela — and only Angela — had failed to see that these were Feds.
B came lumbering forward, notebook at the ready. “What’s your name?”
“Angela,” she said, beaming. “What’s yours?”
“Honey,” I said. “These are—”
“You close your mouth,” A told me.
B said to Angela, “What do you know about a” — he consulted his notebook — “a Mortimer Eustaly?”
Angela looked as alert as a bird on a branch. She said, “Who?”
“Mortimer,” B said slowly, enunciating, “Eustaly.”
Angela continued to look alert. “Eustaly,” she said. She turned her bright smile toward me, saying, “Honey, do I know anybody named Eustaly?”
“Playing dumb,” commented A.
“We’ll see about that,” said B. Poising his notebook threateningly, he said to Angela, “What’s your full name?”
“Angela,” she said, “Eulalia Lydia Ten Eyck.”
“All right, you, don’t be— Did you say Ten Eyck?”
“Well, of course,” said Angela prettily. “That’s my name.”
A and B looked at one another again, and this time I knew why. The FBI had specific instructions about Miss Angela Ten Eyck, though I’m sure they’d never have admitted it. But it’s one thing to practice your counterspy techniques on a bunch of uninfluential pacifists, and it’s quite another thing to get tough with the daughter of Marcellus Ten Eyck.
Angela’s timely arrival, therefore, had considerably shortened what had looked to be a long and tedious interview. (Having told A and B the truth at the outset, I would have had increasingly less to say to them as time went on.) As it was, they looked at one another, apparently decided their best bet was to check with Headquarters before doing anything else, and made preparations to leave. That is, B warned me to stick around in case I should be wanted for further questioning, A gave me the unnecessary information that I would be watched, and, with a rather stiff attempt at a polite nod to Angela, they trooped out.
Angela turned her bright smile on me and said, “They’re cute. Who are they, honey? New members?”
3
Over coffee, I told her the whole story. She listened, saying ooohh and wow and golly at the ends of all the sentences, and despite her, I struggled on until my tale was done. (I have shared my bed and board, such as they are, with bright girls and with rich girls over the years, but never simultaneously, and if there is a God I’d like to ask Him why that should be so. Why can’t I have a bright rich girl — or even a rich bright girl — for a change? If she were both rich and bright, I’d even give up good looks, despite my aesthetic nature.)
Well. When I was finished, Angela said one more golly, and then added, “What are you going to do, Gene?”
“Do? Why should I do anything?”
“Well, this Mr. Eustaly’s going to do something terrible, isn’t he? Maybe blow up the UN Building or something like that.”
“Maybe so,” I said.
“Well, that’s terrible!”
“Granted.”
“Then you ought to do something!”
I said, “What?”
She looked around the kitchen helplessly. “I don’t know, tell somebody, do something, stop him.”
“I told the FBI.” I said.
“You did?”
“I already told you that,” I said. “Remember?”
She looked a little glassy. “You did?”
“Those two guys. The cute ones. We were just talking about that.”
“Oh, them!”
“Them. I told them.”
She said, “Then, what are they going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing.”
“Nothing! Good heavens, why?”
“Because I don’t think they believed me.”
At that, she got more excited than ever. “Well...well... well—” she sputtered, “—well... well... you’ve got to make them believe you!”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I have trouble enough with the FBI as it is. I’m not going to make them believe I have traffic with a lot of terrorist organizations. If they come around and ask me questions I’ll tell them the absolute truth, just the same as always. If they don’t believe me, that’s their tough luck, not mine.”
“Gene,” she said, “do you know what that is? Do you know what you’re saying, Gene? That’s non-involvement, Gene, do you realize that?”
(You must understand, being accused of non-involvement in my circle is just a little worse than an accusation of non-conformity uptown, or Uncle-Toming in Harlem, or child-molesting in the suburbs. Non-involvement is not necessarily the only sin we know, but it’s the only mortal sin. If a man had accused me of it, only my determined pacifism would have saved him from a punch on the nose.)
As it was, I blanched, I spilled coffee, I said loudly, “Now, just a damn minute here!”
But loud words wouldn’t stop her. “That’s exactly what it is, Gene,” she said, “and you know it. Don’t you?”
“I told the FBI,” I said sulkily.
“Well, that isn’t enough,” she said. “Gene? You know better, Gene.”
I did, damn it, I knew better. But doggone it, I had troubles enough as it was. The mimeograph, for instance. And the fact that Angela and I were the only members of the CIU who weren’t a minimum of two years behind in their dues, for a second instance. And the fact I’d made a clerical error and promised I’d have the group march in two totally different picket lines this coming Sunday, one at the UN Building and the other at an aircraft factory out on Long Island. And the fact—
Oh, the hell with it. The fact that Angela, of all people, should be the one to wake me up to my responsibilities, that’s what really galled, and I might as well admit it.
But I made one last attempt to save face. I said, “Sweetheart, what more can I do? I can’t convince the FBI, me of all people. The more I tell them about Eustaly, the less they’ll believe me.”
“You don’t know until you try,” she said.
Exasperated, I slammed down my coffee cup, got to my feet, waved my arms around, and said, “All right! So what do you want me to do, for God’s sake, run over to Foley Square and picket?”
“You don’t have to be a smart aleck,” she said, miffed.
I opened my mouth to tell her a thing or two, and the doorbell rang. “Now what,” I snarled, grateful for something besides Angela to take out my irritation on, and stormed into the living room to see who it was.
Murray Kesselberg, that’s who it was, standing there in his dark suit and tie, attaché case at his side, pipe in the corner of his mouth, eyes aglint behind his horn-rim spectacles, cheeks round and soft and clean-shaven. No one on earth looks more like a young Jewish New York attorney than Murray Kesselberg, so you know what he is? A young Jewish New York attorney.