“Your mother’s father — he was a president of the Colony Association and a party member — he gave Truman some literature and talked to him about the dignity of the worker, surplus value and the fetishism of commodities — we all did, we all talked to him — and before long, he’d joined us. Of course, it was your mother who really won him over, but that’s another story. That fall they were married, and they rented a little two-room bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place — you remember it, don’t you?”
Lola paused to snub out her cigarette. “In the summer, Walter, summer of forty-six, you were born.”
Walter knew when he was born. He’d learned the date when he was three or four, and if it should ever happen to slip his mind, he could always consult his driver’s license. He knew that bungalow too, his home through the first dim years of his life, just as he knew what was coming next. He leaned forward all the same.
So Truman joined the party. Truman got married. Truman spent two nights a week at City College, studying the American Revolution, and five nights a week at the card table in Hesh and Lola’s front room. One night Christina would make up a pan of stuffed cabbage or a hutspot stew she’d learned from her mother, or her crisp potato pancakes; the next night, Lola would bake a cheese-and-noodle kugel. That was the way it was. Lola couldn’t have children of her own. But when Walter was born, Truman came to her and asked if she and Hesh would consent to be the boy’s godparents, and the evenings went on as before, only now little Walter’s crib stood in the corner.
And then it was 1949. August. And the party wanted Paul Robeson to give a concert in Peterskill, and Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and to Truman. For security. There wouldn’t be any violence. No, they didn’t think so. It was going to be a peaceful affair, Negroes and whites together, working people, women and children and old folks, enjoying a concert and maybe a couple of political speeches, exercising their right to assemble and to express unpopular ideas. But Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and Truman. Just in case.
Hesh swung off a dirt lane onto Van Wart Road, not a mile from the concert grounds, and the first thing he noticed was the number of people gathered along the road. Some were headed in the direction of the Crane property, in groups of four and five, ambling and desultory, beer bottles in hand; others just stood at the side of the road, waiting, as if for a parade. A moment later he encountered the cars. Scores of them, parked alongside the road, drawn up on the shoulders on both sides, so that only a narrow one-way lane remained between them. It was only half past six.
Hesh was mystified. Peletiah had set aside a pasture the size of three football fields expressly for parking, and here they were lined up along the road like cabbies at the airport, practically choking off access to the place. Buses had to get through here, buses from the City, and camp trucks and more buses from the summer colonies in Rockland County and the Catskills. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of private cars. What was going on here? Why hadn’t they parked on the concert grounds?
He got his answer soon enough.
No one had even glanced at them until they reached the gauntlet of parked cars, but now, once they’d entered the single lane heading for the entrance to the concert grounds, heads began to turn. A man in an overseas cap shouted an obscenity and then something glanced off the side of the car. These people hadn’t come to see the concert — they’d come to prevent it.
Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum didn’t think there would be any violence — though the Peterskill paper had seethed with anti-Communist, anti-Jew and anti-Negro invective for the past month, though the local chapter of the VFW had threatened to hold a “loyalty rally” to protest against the concert, though flags had been waving aggressively from every porch in town and placards reviling Robeson had begun to appear in shop windows — but here it was. At the entrance, Hesh was confronted with a larger and denser crowd — two hundred or more — that erupted in jeers and insults when it became clear that he and his passengers were concertgoers rather than kindred spirits. They rolled up the windows, though it was eighty-five degrees outside, and Hesh shifted down as he approached the mouth of the narrow dirt road that gave onto Peletiah’s property.
“Nigger lovers!” someone shouted.
“Kikes!”
“Commie Jew bastards!”
A teenager with slicked-back hair and a face red with hate loomed out of the crowd to spit across the windshield, and suddenly Hesh had had enough and put his foot to the floor. The Plymouth leapt forward and the crowd parted with a shout, there was the thump-thump-thump of angry fists and feet against fenders and doors, and then they were in and the crowd was receding in the rearview mirror.
Shaken, Hesh pulled into the lot beside a rented bus. Three other buses, a truck bearing the legend “Camp Wahwahtaysee” and perhaps twelve or fifteen cars were already there. Christina’s face was white. Truman and Piet were silent. “Trouble,” Hesh muttered, “son of a bitch. We’re in for it now.”
Seven o’clock came and went. There was no Robeson, no Freeman, no Blum. Out on the road, nothing moved. The access routes were either blocked or jammed with the cars and buses of frustrated concertgoers, and no one could get in or out. Except for the patriots, that is, who fingered brass knuckles and tire irons or tore up fence posts and tried the heft of them, ambling along the blacktop road as if they owned it. Which they did, for some four hours that night. The unlucky few who did actually make it to Van Wart Road, thinking to sit on a blanket, sip a Coke or beer and enjoy a concert, were routed past the blockaded concert grounds, pulled from their cars and beaten. No one, from Peterskill to Kitchawank Colony and back again, saw a single policeman.
There were maybe a hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the stage when Hesh and the others arrived. Most were women and children who’d turned out early to enjoy an evening in the sylvan glades of northern Westchester. Besides Hesh, Truman and Piet, there were about forty men among them; up above, beyond the line of trees that marked the boundary of Peletiah’s property, five hundred patriots stormed up and down the road, looking for Communists.
Hesh took charge. He sent five teenagers — three boys and two girls who’d come up from Staten Island to serve as ushers — to keep an eye on the crowd at the entrance. “If they set foot on the property, you let me know,” he said. “Right away. Understand?” He asked Truman and Piet to take six of the men, arm themselves with anything they could find and fan out across the field to make sure none of the zealots came at them from the rear. Then he organized the rest of the men in ranks, eight across, their arms linked, and marched them up the road. The women and children — Walter’s mother amongst them — gathered around the empty stage. In the distance, they could hear the sound of shattering glass, truncated cries, the roar of the mob.
Walter knew the old road into the Crane place, didn’t he? It was no more than a footpath now, walled off since the riots, but in those days it was a pretty well-worn dirt road with a hummock of grass in the middle. Narrow though, and with steep shoulders and impenetrable brush — sticker bushes and poison ivy and whatnot — on either side. The road wound down into the meadow and then turned into a path when it crossed the stream on the far side and climbed up the ridge. People would drive down there for a little privacy — to play their car radios, neck and drink beer. Some nights there’d be ten cars parked in the meadow. Anyway, there was but one other way in and that was by foot only — at the far end of the meadow, where Van Wart Road swung back on it half a mile up. Hesh figured if he could hold the road, they’d be all right. If real trouble started, that is. He hoped the police would show up before then.