Little Red Schoolhouse
BY ELIZABETH GRAVER
SHE WAS NOT A COMMUNIST. The coat she wore in the photograph on the front page of the March 12, 1957 New York Herald was not a rank and file Mao coat, despite its gray color and straight, marching orders silhouette. It was pigeon, not military gray, of worsted wool, from the previous year’s February’s clearance sale at Macy’s. It had a flipped high collar, and if, in a just world⎯in a world of academic freedom, of freedom of all kinds⎯you could wear a flipped high collar, be a communist and go about your business, it didn’t matter because Sue wasn’t one. She wasn’t even a socialist. She was merely a student, twenty-one, still living with her parents and trying, during the precious hours she spent at college away from her weekday job at the shark loan outfit and weekend job at her father’s store, to puncture the taut balloon of her own ignorance and meet boys.
It began as an act born out of two burning desires: #1 to educate herself, and #2 to find a husband (underlying both was a crabbed and unacknowledged #3: to prove that #1 and #2 could coexist). The Queens College Student Senate had, until that year, been staffed by students from the party crowd, whose idea of programming was to organize a pledge smoker or All-College-Crowd trip to Miami Beach. When, in the fall of their junior year, Sue’s friend Claire Deutsch suggested that they stage a takeover of the Student Senate, Sue was all for it. And when somehow they won, with Claire elected President, Sue elected Chair of the Cultural Affairs Committee and their pal Joannie Miller elected Chair of the Publicity Subcommittee, they gave a thorough scrubbing to the Senate’s dingy, windowless basement office, strategized about how to recruit attractive, brainy boys to the Cabinet, drafted a proposal for a Classics lounge with books and a victrola and set the meeting schedule, heady with their newfound power.
In January, in preparation for Academic Freedom Week in March, they sent speaking invitations to prominent people from across the political spectrum: Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley. Senators Irving Ives, Jacob Javits, and Joseph McCarthy himself. Seeger said yes. Buckley and Ives declined straight away, and eventually so did Javits and McCarthy so that by late February, when Joshua Goldstein—a fast-talking, handsome, if bordering on cocky sophomore on the Cultural Affairs Committee—suggested inviting John Gates, the communist editor of The Daily Worker, the girls thought sure, why not?
They’d already started a Marxist Discussion Club, to learn what Marx had to say and as a small gesture of rebellion, for his ideas had been excluded from the curriculum as if wiped from the face of the earth. Sue found herself stirred by his words—Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs—even as she knew enough to understand that Stalinism has twisted the ideals of Communism into some brutal shapes. The Discussion Club was a nice tie-in to Gates, and while they figured the invitation might raise a few eyebrows, they had no inkling that things would blow up the way they did. Because why give the green light to Academic Freedom Week if you didn’t believe in academic freedom, and the university was a place of learning, where the professors wore berets, smoked thin cigarettes and talked of Paris and Berlin.
Sue got to work. She’d been raised to apply herself, whether the task consisted of scooping ice cream at the store, getting top grades or showing up punctually to the Long Island Discount Corporation in Jamaica, where she filed contracts for loans and car repossessions behind a metal grille that separated the staff from angry customers who had been conned into taking out high interest loans for cars they couldn’t afford. She got approval from the Faculty Committee for the list of speakers and wrote to Mr. Gates, who wrote back that he’d be pleased to come speak. She oversaw the outreach and refreshments subcommittees, confirmed the dates, reserved the rooms.
All this between her coursework: American History 1492-1865, The Early American Novel, Great Western Thinkers, Economics and Intermediate Spanish, which she’d signed up for as a gut, though the professor, a Cervantes scholar from Madrid, noticed her unwittingly archaic locutions and took her aside after class one day to say, “Hablas como Cervantes, Señorita Levy! ¿Eres una Judía Sefardí, es verdad?” So then she had to admit it: her first language was Ladino, her parents were from Turkey (“gobble gobble!” her childhood classmates had cried). The professor said the Sefarads were the aristocrats of Jews, but she was weak on diacritics and modern Castillian had different rules. La mijor palavra es la ke no se avla—“the best word is the word unspoken”—she was tempted to spit out in Ladino, but she wanted a good grade. Sometimes she was so tired on her fourth bus of the day, from Long Island Discount to home in Cambria Heights, that she nodded off on her satchel, an unforgiving pillow, hard with books.
The fact that she was a bit of a rebel was not news to her family. During her first year of college, she had taken over the upstairs boys’ bedroom—her older brothers had moved out by then, Frank had moved downstairs—and covered the walls with black burlap and travel posters of Casablanca, Buenos Aires and Madrid. This past summer, after her sophomore year, she’d gone on her own dime with Joannie to Mexico City by way of Cuba, and while the two girls did, as promised to their parents, attend summer school at the university, they also flirted liberally with danger, sneaking into pools at fancy hotels, accepting free drinks from all manner of men, befriending (somehow) El Jefe, the Chief of Police—the most powerful man in Mexico City, they were later told—who took them to nightclubs in his armored limo and pursued Sue with tequila and invitations to Acapulco until she finally shook him off with a tale of being engaged to the son of a judge in the States.
Havana, where they spent three days on the way to Mexico, was a startling mix of elegant buildings and American businessmen living high on the hog and the worst poverty she’d ever seen. After the first day, she and Joannie added a small allotment of coins for beggars to their budget, despite traveling on the cheap and keeping a strict log of expenditures: Mangoes for 5¢ from street vendor; loaf of Cuban bread for 8¢; 2 Coca Colas for 16¢; 2 Cuban pastries at 10¢, Kraft pimento cheese = 60¢. At El Capitolio, Sue asked a street vendor who looked like a younger, more dapper version of her father to pose with her on the steps, mirroring the framed photograph of her parents, who had married and honeymooned in Cuba—how romantic (that it was an arranged marriage, both of them widowed with children, her mother desperate to get into America, wasn’t part of the story she shared with Joannie)—and been photographed on these very steps.
ON MARCH 10, A SUNDAY, THE PUBLICITY SUB-COMMITTEE, led by Joannie, made a trip to campus to put up last minute posters for the week’s events. On the morning of March 11, Sue checked in with the Chair of the Campus Affairs Committee, an eager beaver sophomore girl who enlisted cookie bakers and arranged for extra folding chairs, within fire code rules, in case of overflow crowds. An hour later, Sue was bent over an American History quiz when a silver-haired woman knocked on the classroom door, summoned her and led her across the quad to the Provost’s office. “Can you tell me why?” Sue asked as they entered the building, and the woman said, “No idea, but don’t worry—he doesn’t bite. Leave me your coat, dear. I’ll hang it up.”
In his office, Provost (Professor? Sir? what to call him?) Shannon offered her a seat, then thumped the leather blotter and said he wasn’t going to beat around the bush: he’d spent the past twenty years trying to protect this place from its undeserved nickname of Little Red Schoolhouse. Did she realize she was undoing that work in one day?
“I’m sorry, Sir?”
“Why the hell, Miss Levy—why the heck did you need to invite somebody like John Gates to campus? Of all people? Gates? I’m aware there’s been a takeover of the Student Senate this year. Do you people have a beef with Queens College? Are you trying to damage our reputation? Is that why?”
“Definitely not! We’ve organized a balanced roster of speakers and a program of substance. And no. No, Sir. I love it here.”
He snorted. “You have a funny way of showing it.”
Perched on the edge of a too-tall chair, she swallowed hard. She did love Queens College, with its arched, Spanish style buildings, picturesquely out of place, built originally as a school for troubled boys. Sometimes she returned to campus after work just to study and smoke cigarettes with friends, though her parents fretted if she wasn’t back by dark. She’d never felt at home in Cambria Heights, where the streets were too straight—a grid, a cage—and her childhood full of brothers quick to torment her about the size of her nose or her bookishness. Her parents liked to have fun—they’d go out dancing or play cards with friends—but their fun was not hers, and the Cambria Heights Jewish Center, her mother’s cause célèbre, poked into everyone’s business, publicly announcing each family’s High Holiday donation and tracking attendance, even as the sermons were a snooze and Hebrew lessons not offered to the girls. Queens College, though—like Trailblazers, the free sleepaway camp she’d attended for years and that gave her the gift of generous green days and starry nights spent not pinching, scraping, scrambling, measuring, forbidding—had her heart.
“If you love it here so much, Miss Levy, why are you trying to deceive us?” asked the Provost now.
“Deceive you? How?”
“Pulling this last minute stunt, inviting Gates. I understand you wrote the letter?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t trying to deceive anyone. I booked Mr. Gates’ event several weeks ago, as soon as I heard back from him. I followed the proper steps. The Faculty Committee approved the invitation. I can show you—”
“I never approved it, nor did the Acting President, but let’s not get caught up in red tape, if you’ll pardon the pun. Why Gates? Why a communist?”
“He’s…he’s just a speaker for Academic Freedom Week because—” she shrugged “—a few other people dropped out, and he—I mean, it seems to me, to us, he has the right to speak. He’s actually been breaking with the party lately, criticizing Stalin and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He might leave the party altogether.” She was abruptly grateful for the crash course that Josh Goldstein, who proved useless when it came to logistics (though she could stare at him all day) had offered the Marxist Discussion Club. “We have a range of speakers. We believe he has an interesting perspective.”
“So invite him to dinner, on your own time. Off campus, if you please. Just get a chaperone.” The Provost laughed, a donkey’s bray, and fiddled with his wedding ring, and Sue had a flash of pity for his wife. “Try to see my perspective for a moment, Miss Levy. I’m trying to steer a reasonable course for a serious, if fledgling, public university operating on limited resources in challenging times. How old are you?”
“Me, Sir? Twenty-one.”
“A baby. Just a year older than Queens College. Do your parents know about your activities? What are their political views, if I might ask?”
She sat taller. Was it legal for him to ask such questions? “My parents are Democrats, and proud Americans.”
“What’s your father’s line of work?”
“He has an ice cream shop.”
“Very nice, good man. Miss Levy, what’s driving you here?”
It was an enormous question, and one she didn’t fully have the answer to, even for herself. “I just . . . I believe that freedom of speech is a central value, tenant, of democracy. It’s the idea of dialogue, having a chance to ask hard questions, of public . . . public dis—”
“All right, all right.” The Provost pushed back his chair and stood. “I appreciate the civics lesson, but I’m pressed for time. I’m afraid there’s a problem with the room.”
“Excuse me?”
“The room was double-booked. We have someone from the Ed. Department coming to speak. We need a room of that size. An honest mistake, maybe even on our end.” The Provost shrugged his wide shoulders. “You’ll have to cancel Mr. Gates’ appearance. Maybe he can come some other time. Do you have a phone number for him on you?”
“With all due respect, Sir, you can’t just—”
“Miss Levy, I am counseling you to cancel.” He pointed to the phone, snug in its cradle.
“I can’t do that on my own. I’d need to consult with the other members of the Cabinet, and the wider Senate too. If you like, I can call a meeting.”
He looks astonished, then weary. “You really want to derail your education, throw everything away to make a point? Bring on the Socialists, Miss Levy, bring on anyone you want—there are already plenty of rabble rousers in your line-up—but spare us the Communists, who know little of freedom except that they’re against it. I’m counseling you as I would my own daughter. For your hardworking father, your future prospects and the reputation of Queens College, it’s just not worth it, dear. There’s already been a reaction from some of our Korean War veterans and alumni. Good people, who want this place to thrive. Your posters are—” he shrugged “—everywhere. Word is getting out. My God. Do yourself a favor, make that call.”
Sue climbed off the chair, then wished she hadn’t, for her legs were unsteady and she felt like she might vomit or, worse, cry. The Provost had frightened her, but she would not be frightened. A saying came to her: Boz del puevlo, boz del sielo, voice of the people, voice of heaven. She knew almost nothing of her father’s childhood in Turkey except that it was impoverished, but her mother, who’d been rich for a time, loved to tell stories so she knew that the maternal side of her family had left Turkey for Spain partly in the name of freedom, and that they’d operated, at some risk, a secret temple in Barcelona where her half-brothers David and Al were born, and where they’d sheltered war refugees. Closer to home, she knew her parents came to America because it was the land of the free and could offer their children a quality public education, the same one that had taught her the very principles the Provost was now asking her to forsake.
“I’ll consult with the Senate,” she said softly, focusing on her penny loafers.
“Respectfully, Miss Levy, you’re making a big mistake to not nip this in the bud.”
Her head shot up; she met his gaze. “Respectfully, Provost Shannon, I’ll consult.”
She stood and turned toward the door, aware of his eyes on her back and grateful that she had on a tweed pencil line skirt and a poplin blouse and looked professional, or at least scholastic, although maybe that wasn’t what he was noticing, maybe he was devouring her with his eyes. She felt obscenely small and female, a doll flung through space, even as she was propelled forward by a fizzy sense of her own bravery and couldn’t wait to find Claire and Jeannie to recount the story and plan next steps.
And then the door was opening from the other side—the Provost must have pressed his intercom—and the secretary was offering up her coat.
BY THE END OF MONDAY, John Gates (born Solomon Regenstreif to ethnic Jews from Poland) was barred by the Acting President and Provost from speaking at Queens College on the grounds that as a guest speaker, he was effectively a teacher, and Communists could be banned from teaching on city campuses. On Tuesday, the Student Senate held a public emergency session and voted 23 to 6 with 1 abstention in favor of a resolution drafted by the Cabinet to protest the ban on Gates. CBS Television News came to film the proceedings, setting up cameras in the aisle that bisected a packed audience of nearly five hundred students and faculty.
From where Sue sat on stage, she couldn’t see much—the lights were too bright—but she could feel sweat trickling down her back and hear the cameras click. Less than a minute after the vote, as her eyes watered from the camera flashes, they learned from a newly arrived reporter that the four other city colleges had swiftly banned Gates by creating a hasty restriction against people convicted under the Smith Act, which made it a criminal offense to advocate for the subversive overthrow of government—a conviction for which Mr. Gates (though Josh had failed to mention this in his crash course so Sue only found out later) had already served a three-year prison term.
What followed was a blur of emergency meetings, public forums, and tête-à-têtes with lawyers and sympathetic professors who swooped in to advise them, even as the programming for Academic Freedom Week continued on. The ACLU showed up. The Students for Democratic Action staged protests at all five colleges, while a group of students in support of the ban (thankfully, a clear minority, mostly veterans) circulated a petition condemning the actions of the Student Senate. On Monday and Tuesday nights, Sue arrived home after dark and slipped past her family, pleading a late meeting and impending exam on the first night, and a headache on the next. On Wednesday, she called in sick to work and made a plan to sleep at Claire’s in Forest Hills for a few nights because it was closer to the college, telling her parents she had to study for exams.
The thing was, she was enjoying herself. The cause was important, but it was also impossible not to be seduced by the cameras and reporters, though she would later realize that if she hadn’t spent so much time rehearsing comebacks and mulling over what to wear (she borrowed clothes from Claire and sprang for a new lipstick), she might have considered the potential fallout from her name and face appearing on newsstands throughout (as her mother would put it, her speech in English often weirdly formal) the land. In her family, it had always been her mother who was the performer, ever ready with a song and dance, so it came as a surprise for Sue to discover that she enjoyed being visible on campus, strangers and acquaintances tipping their hats and giving her the thumbs-up.
On Tuesday night, Pete Seeger came to campus, sponsored by the Folk Song Club, and while Sue was stuck in yet another emergency session, she caught the finale, “If I had a Hammer,” from the doorway, though she couldn’t join in when Pete invited the audience to sing, for the hot tears trickling down her face. GONE TOO FAR, chanted the students at the next day’s rally, where Josh nearly knocked Claire over in his effort to grab the megaphone. FREE SPEECH NOW! And then Columbia University, which could do whatever the hell it wanted because it was loaded and private, invited Gates to speak the following week, and he accepted, so that was that.
WHO KNEW THAT TIME COULD PASS at once so slowly and in such a rush? For the next few days, she barely paused to eat and drink. Everything seemed brighter: colors, sounds and smells. On Wednesday, the socialist leader Norman Thomas—Gates’ acceptable substitute—arrived to a packed audience in Remsen Hall. Sue led him to the stage, offered a brief introduction, poured him a glass of water and found her seat between Claire and Joannie in the front row. An elderly man with keen blue eyes and a voice befitting the Presbyterian minister he was, Mr. Thomas told the crowd that banning John Gates from campus was a violation of American freedoms, and that ironically, the Communist Party would gain more from the ban than it would have from any speech by Gates. In a velvety, deep voice, he commended the students for their bravery in valuing freedom of expression and encouraged them to stay the course but never lose sight of the bigger picture: “I don’t advise that you cut yourself off from knowledge, just because you can’t hear Mr. Gates.”
As Sue listened from the front row, she had an urge to rush back up and hug the man, who was over six feet tall and had the most beautiful air of calm and reason, but reason fueled by humanist ideals (she’d touched his arm, he’d thanked her for her efforts; I’m in love, she’d whispered to Joannie when she sat back down). So maybe she was a socialist in the making. She might be. Who could say? It was up to her.
By Friday, the speakers had run their course and Sue’s body was exhausted, though her mind was still revved up by the events of the past week. The Student Senate had a plan to meet for pizza and beer to debrief and strategize next steps around protesting the Gates ban, but when Claire flagged down Sue on the quad and said she’d see her there, Sue told her she couldn’t make it.
“Why not? We need you!”
“I promised I’d go home. I’ve been away all week. I have to work at the store.”
“Tonight?”
Sue nodded. “It’s Friday. We stay open late, and my mother won’t work on Shabbat.”
“You can’t get out of it, just this once? We have so much to figure out.” Claire put her hand on Sue’s sleeve. “If you don’t go, I’m not sure I will either. The boys talk over us. I’m tired.”
“So go home. I have a job.” Sue’s irritation showed. “My father depends on me, and he’s sick.”
“Oh no! Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Just a cough, but he’s home in bed. My brother is at the store, but one person isn’t enough on Friday nights. Sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’ll miss the bus.”
“Go, go!” Claire planted a kiss on Sue’s cheek, then muttered, under her breath, “I have a job too.”
What, two hours a week? Sue was tempted to say. Claire helped out her cousin by watching her baby while the cousin got her hair done or shopped for groceries. Sue started down the path, then turned and called out to Claire, more loudly than she should have (a few heads turned), “Workers of the World Unite!”
That night, the 5 p.m. bus from Flushing to Jamaica had already left, so she caught the 5:30, then the 6:15 bus to Cambria Heights, heading straight from the bus stop to the store. There it was, as always: the eight red leatherette booths, the candy bins and ice cream case, her younger brother Frank behind the marble counter. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he said. Her brothers resisted working in the store, but Sue liked to decorate sundaes, chat with customers and—especially—catch up with her father, who was always interested and interesting and paid all his children the standard wage, plus a sundae at the end of the shift.
“How’s Dad?” she asked.
Frank flicked a rag at the countertop. “Barking like a seal but okay.”
The evening crowd was just starting to arrive, Friday nights the busiest time, everyone out and about except for the most religious Jews. First, it was young families coming in for sandwiches or ice cream at the end of a long week. Elderly couples came for ice cream, too—it was homemade here, flavored with seasonal fruits, the best around.
People came on dates, or a boy would stop in to buy his sweetheart a box of chocolates. Her mother made the chocolates from molds in the basement, where she also decorated ice cream cakes, assisted by Irma, a zaftig German spinster who’d become a family friend. If Cambria Heights was a yawn of a town where Sue would rather die than spend her life, the store brought out the best in people and was where some of her fondest memories took place.
A little before nine—they stayed open until 11 on Fridays—the Catholic teens showed up. The store was right near Sacred Heart, where they had confraternity class and came for ice cream and malteds afterward, good clean fun. Her father was friendly with the priest, who always stopped in for morning coffee and the paper, and Sue knew some of the kids from the neighborhood or because they were the younger siblings of girls she used to play with on the Catholic Basketball League, or because they came here, like clockwork, each Friday night.
Frank worked the register. She made the sundaes and soda creams. Frank talked sports with some boys, and Sue, even more than usual, blabbed. There was just so much to say. A few of the teens had already seen her in the newspaper, which was how it got started, so maybe it wasn’t her fault, and they asked lots of questions—one boy especially, red-haired and freckled, brainy, headed for City College—about what the students planned to do next and who Gates was and even what she thought of Karl Marx.
So she talked a little (so she talked a lot), and soon a gang of them was listening, they were egging her on—it sounds so unfair! What a jerk! Did you really?—and if at one point Frank tried to get her to put a lid on it, she wouldn’t be ordered around by her kid brother, and she was starving—not for ice cream but for an audience: to feel them on her side, buoying her up, urging her on, as she put words to the most momentous week of her young life. She told them about the college stopping Gates from speaking, and then, pulling the Herald Tribune from her satchel, she showed them the article with her picture in the Macy’s coat, which some of them had already seen.
“So are you a Commie?” asked someone at one point—a girl with dark pigtails and rosy cheeks, still in her school uniform and looking like a child but for the large bosom straining the buttons on her blouse.
“Me? Of course not. Don’t be silly,” Sue said. “I’m a proud American. This isn’t about politics, it’s about freedom of speech.”
She felt a flicker of unease but far away, unreachable, like an itch on the sole of her foot between sock and shoe. For a weird, backward-spooling moment, she caught a glimpse of herself bragging about her exploits, brandishing the newspaper. Just who did she think she was? She’d been seventeen when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed. Mostly what she remembered was feeling horror that anyone would kill a young mother even if she was a spy, leaving two little boys, and that the execution had been pushed up a few hours to happen just before—not on—Shabbat, which seemed a grotesque concession. Her father had forbidden the children from discussing the Rosenbergs in school because, he said, it wasn’t a great time for the Jews, and her mother had said kayedes, keep your head down, and Sue (who was still Suzanne back then, pronounced Suzon by her parents) had said but why, we’re not communists or spies—are you saying they were executed because they’re Jewish, and her father said I never said that but it’s complicated.
“What’s your name?” Sue asked the girl now, and though she tried to sound casual, her voice betrayed her. “Are you new to town? I don’t remember seeing you here before.”
“I’m a proud American,” said the girl, and then she crossed her eyes as uneasy laughter rippled through the store.
THE NEXT MORNING—her father was still sick, her mother at services and Frank asleep so Sue opened the store—nobody showed up to get the paper. Or not no one, but almost no one, and she saw regulars going into another shop, a smaller one, run-down, owned by an Irishman, that sold papers and candy across the street. Around noon, her father showed up, sniffling and glassy-eyed, and told her to go home.
“People are talking,” he said. “Mother heard at services. The Catholics, mostly, but others, too. Even some of our friends. Your behavior makes them nervous, your picture all over the paper.” He slammed his hand down on the countertop. “I shouldn’t have let you work last night! What did you say?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t . . . I just— ” She had nothing to say, having said too much. “Oh Daddy, I’m sorry. You look like you still have a fever. Can I make you tea?”
“I told you to go home. I’m fine. You are the one with a fever.” Now he sounded more sad than angry. “On your brain.”
IT WAS NOT UNTIL MONDAY that she learned that on Friday night, some of their fellow Senate members, after getting plastered in the basement office, had had the brilliant idea of painting Deutschland Über Alles in drippy red letters on the wall—obviously a play on Claire Deutsch’s name, but also, of course, the banned national anthem of Germany and a rallying cry for the Nazi party, leading a Long Island Daily Press reporter, who got wind of the graffiti, to write an article speculating about the Student Senate being communists and Nazi sympathizers/anti-Semites (the article would fail to mention the fact that Claire, like over half the Student Senate, was Jewish and wasn’t even present for the painting spree; when Sue had bailed on the meeting, she had too).
All through the following week, the store stayed largely empty, newspapers piling up, food going bad, so much waste. Suzanne went to classes, where she sat silently and tore her fingernails to shreds, then to work at the loan outfit, then into her room, where she crawled into bed, doing her homework with a precision bordering on fanatical but avoiding family and friends. It was her mother’s birthday in the middle of the week. Her father closed the store early, and they all went out to dinner, and the older children, who came in from Brooklyn and the Bronx, split the bill at their parents’ favorite Italian restaurant, and no one mentioned what had happened, which made it worse. The store could go a week or so without much business, but Easter was coming, its busiest time, and they paid a high rent, having recently expanded to a bigger space and taken out loans.
The article about Deutschland Über Alles led to an investigation by the college that got nowhere except for the students having to pay a defacement fine but served to distract from the ban. By then, the newspapers had gone a little crazy with the Gates affair, some running editorials in support of the students, others against, but all of them ramping up the inflammatory rhetoric and cheesy headlines. Red Scare . . . Gate Closed to Gates . . . Cozy With the Commies . . . Red Diaper Coeds Make a Stink . . . Seeing Red.
The next Friday came, and Sue lit Shabbat candles with her mother, feeling some solace in the repetition of the ancient words, and then her mother told her, without inviting her to come, that she was going to services and to the store—to help Daddy, she said, and decorate a cake. It was not until later that Sue learned that her mother had invited friends to the store that night, Lillian and Rosie from the Sisterhood, along with their husbands and a few other couples. Her parents put up the Closed sign and dished out free ice cream and cake because why let it go to waste, and because it was brave and loyal for these friends to gather when the store was being boycotted and people had a thing about Jews being communists or communists being Jews, her mother’s own brother Marko having been accused of being a Freemason Bolshevik in Barcelona, where he’d had his head bashed in by one of Franco’s henchman and was living out his days in a Spanish loony bin.
Her parents got home around ten. Sue was lying on the living room floor curled up with their dalmatian, Reina, trying to sync her breath to the rhythmic breathing of the dog. Her father took out his wallet. A dollar an hour was her wage at the store; he gave her three. She sat up, said what are you doing, and he said paying you, and she said for what, and he said for working in the store.
“No.” She threw the money down. “Why would you pay me? I’ve ruined everything, and I didn’t even work tonight. I’m an idiot. I’m so sorry.” She was crying now, wet, sloppy, childish tears. “I’m . . . I had no idea, but I’m an idiot. I did such a stupid thing.”
He said, “remember the stink you made with the bus pass last year?”
She’d gone on the warpath because her student bus pass was only good until 6pm, but she had the job at the loan place in Jamaica after school, and one day the bus from Jamaica to Cambria Heights was late—there was a sleet storm—and it was after six by the time the bus came but she didn’t want to pay for a ticket so she used her pass, and oops, they caught her, took it away, confiscated it. Because that was the rule. She’d come home yelling and screaming like she’d been mugged, robbed blind, and her father had said just drop it, it’s not worth the fight. Her brother Jack had called her a cheapskate, which made her even madder. She’d said I will not drop it; they’re putting a mark on my record for breaking the rule, and they’re charging me a fine!
Her father had said it’s one little mark, just don’t do it again. He even offered to pay the fine. But it’s not fair, Sue had said. She paid for her own college, $300 tuition every year, and had this job to pay for it. It’s not, she said, my fault a storm came down! Her mother had said shhh, you’re giving me an earache, I need help with dinner. Over the next week, Sue had marched here and there, to this office, that. She’d gone all the way to the Board of Education, and after she’d finished explaining what happened, the man said, “did you ever think about becoming a lady lawyer?” and erased the mark. So she won, she sort of won, but not really because they didn’t change the rule.
Now her father told her that it was stupid for her to have wasted so much time and energy on a trivial thing, but what she was doing now wasn’t stupid because it was about freedom of speech, which mattered to democracy, which was why they lived here, why they’d come.
“This is not a waste of your time, if you believe in what you’re doing,” said her father, who had dropped out of school in Turkey at age ten to support his family after his father ran off and who used to borrow copies of her schoolbooks from the library so he could read along with her until he got too busy or her studies became too advanced (he never said; she never asked). “In my opinion.”
“I wish you could have heard Norman Thomas,” said Sue. “He was wise, Daddy, and he has a beautiful voice. And Pete Seeger, who’s a singer. You’d have loved that, Mama. Someday I’ll bring you to hear him sing.”
Her mother said, “In the newspaper you look pretty, and like my mother, of blessed memory, but next time, take your glasses off.”
Sue rolled her eyes. “There won’t be a next time. My days of fame are over. I need to concentrate on school.”
“Smartypants,” her mother said. “Did you know we stayed here so you could go to school?”
“What do you mean?”
“A few years ago, when our friends the Scherers moved Bakopa Gloves to Florida, they offered Daddy a job, to be in charge of international shipping, and for me, glove design, and truth to tell, we were tempted, to go where it’s warm again and have no more store. But you were starting college, and Daddy said Queens College is the best for her of the free or almost free ones, better than Florida. So bueno, okay, that’s it—for you we stay.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have come with you or stayed here on my own.”
Her father said it wasn’t a question, it was just the right decision, and then he told her to give the store time to get back to business. People, he said, would forgive and forget.
“Of course. Easter is coming,” said her mother. “Even Mary, mother of Jesus, didn’t make Easter chocolates like I do.”
Sue laughed, a quick peal, and stood up from the floor. When had she gotten so much taller than her mother? For an odd moment, her parents seemed not quite hers, a couple from a story, resolutely optimistic, if burdened by pasts she couldn’t quite see.
Before long, she would leave them, going as far away as she could without fleeing the country. She was already secretly looking into PhD programs in English literature in California and squirreling away a portion of her earnings for the move. “I walk where I choose to walk,” Norman Thomas had said, a beautiful sentiment, and an oblivious one, but she was young, still, an American (not a communist, maybe a socialist?). She could choose to see the beauty. She could go.
