They kept him for three days without anything to eat or drink in a disused office in the Federal building on Park Row. Every few hours a new bunch of detectives would stamp into the room and question him. His head throbbing, and ready to faint with thirst, he’d face the ring of long yellow faces, jowly red faces, pimply faces, boozers’ and hopheads’ faces, feel the eyes boring into him; sometimes they kidded and cajoled him, and sometimes they bullied and threatened; one bunch brought in pieces of rubber hose to beat him up with. He jumped up and faced them. For some reason they didn’t beat him up, but instead brought him some water and a couple of stale ham sandwiches. After that he was able to sleep a little.
An agent yanked him off his bench and led him out into a well-appointed office where he was questioned almost kindly by an elderly man at a mahogany desk with a bunch of roses on the corner of it. The smell of the roses made him feel sick. The elderly man said he could see his lawyer and Morris Stein came into the room.
“Benny,” he said, “leave everything to me… Mr. Watkins has consented to quash all charges if you’ll promise to report for military training. It seems your number’s been called.”
“If you let me out,” Ben said in a low trembling voice, “I’ll do my best to oppose capitalist war until you arrest me again.” Morris Stein and Mr. Watkins looked at each other and shook their heads indulgently. “Well,” said Mr. Watkins, “I can’t help but admire your spirit and wish it was in a better cause.” It ended by his being let out on fifteen thousand dollars bail on Morris Stein’s assurance that he would do no agitating until the date of his trial. The Steins wouldn’t tell him who put up the bail.
Morris and Edna Stein gave him a room in their apartment; Fanya was there all the time. They fed him good food and tried to make him drink wine with his meals and a glass of milk before going to bed. He didn’t have any interest in anything, slept as much as he could, read all the books he found on the place. When Morris would try to talk to him about his case he’d shut him up, “You’re doing this, Morris… do anything… why should I care. I might as well be in jail as like this.” “Well, I must say that’s a compliment,” Fanya said laughing.
Helen Mauer called up several times to tell him how things were going. She’d always say she had no news to tell that she could say over the telephone, but he never asked her to come up to see him. About as far as he went from the Steins’ apartment was to go out every day to sit for a while on a bench on the Drive and look out over the grey Hudson at the rows of frame houses on the Jersey side and the grey palisades.
The day his case came up for trial the press was full of hints of German victories. It was spring and sunny outside the broad grimy windows of the courtroom. Ben sat sleepily in the stuffy gloom. Everything seemed very simple. Stein and the Judge had their little jokes together and the Assistant District Attorney was positively genial. The jury reported “guilty” and the judge sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment. Morris Stein filed an appeal and the judge let him stay out on bail. The only moment Ben came to life was when he was allowed to address the court before being sentenced. He made a speech about the revolutionary movement he’d been preparing all these weeks. Even as he said it it seemed silly and weak. He almost stopped in the middle. His voice strengthened and filled the courtroom as he got to the end. Even the judge and the old snuffling attendants sat up when he recited for his peroration, the last words of the communist manifesto:
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
The appeal dragged and dragged. Ben started studying law again. He wanted to work in Stein’s office to pay for his keep, but Stein said it would be risky, he said the war would be over soon and the red scare would die down, so that he could get him off with a light sentence. He brought lawbooks up for him to study and promised to take him into partnership if he passed his bar exam, once he could get his citizenship restored. Edna Stein was a fat spiteful woman and rarely spoke to him; Fanya fussed over him with nervous doting attentions that made him feel sick. He slept badly and his kidneys bothered him. One night he got up and dressed and was tiptoeing down the carpeted hall towards the door with his shoes in his hand, when Fanya with her black hair down her back came out of the door of her room. She was in a nightdress that showed her skinny figure and flat breasts. “Benny, where are you going?”
“I’m going crazy here… I’ve got to get out.” His teeth were chattering. “I’ve got to get back into the movement…. They’ll catch me and send me to jail right away… it will be better like that.”
“You poor boy, you’re in no condition.” She threw her arms round his neck and pulled him into her room.
“Fanya, you gotto let me go…. I might make it across the Mexican border… other guys have.”
“You’re crazy… and what about your bail?”
“What do I care… don’t you see we gotto do something.”
She’d pulled him down on her bed and was stroking his forehead. “Poor boy… I love you so, Benny, couldn’t you think of me a little bit… just a little teeny bit… I could help you so much in the movement…. Tomorrow we’ll talk about it… I want to help you, Benny.” He let her untie his necktie.
The armistice came, and news of the peace conference, revolutionary movements all over Europe, Trotsky’s armies driving the whites out of Russia. Fanya Stein told everybody she and Ben were married and took him to live with her at her studio apartment on 8th Street, where she nursed him through the flu and double pneumonia. The first day the doctor said he could go out she drove up the Hudson in her Buick sedan. They came back in the early summer gloaming to find a special delivery letter from Morris. The circuit court had denied the appeal, but reduced the sentence to ten years. The next day at noon he’d have to report to be delivered by his bondsmen to the custody of the U.S. District Court. He’d probably go to Atlanta. Soon after the letter Morris himself turned up. Fanya had broken down and was crying hysterically. Morris looked pale. “Ben,” he said, “we’re beaten… You’ll have to go to Atlanta for a while… you’ll have good company down there… but don’t worry. We’ll take your case to the President. Now that the war’s over they can’t keep the liberal press muzzled any more.”
“That’s all right,” said Ben, “it’s better to know the worst.”
Fanya jumped up from the couch where she’d been sobbing and started screaming at her brother. When Ben went out to walk around the block he left them quarreling bitterly. He found himself looking carefully at the houses, the taxicabs, the streetlights, people’s faces, a funny hydrant that had a torso like a woman’s, some bottles of mineral oil stacked in a drugstore window, Nujol. He decided he’d better go over to Brooklyn to say goodby to the old people. At the subway station he stopped. He hadn’t the strength; he’d write them.
Next morning at nine he went down to Morris Stein’s office with his suitcase in his hand. He’d made Fanya promise not to come. He had to tell himself several times he was going to jail, he felt as if he was going on a business trip of some kind. He had on a new suit of English tweed Fanya had bought him.