Michael was certain that Lee’s opinions, and his way of clinging to them, were founded in his emotions, but he had no success in probing those emotional roots. In fact, something in Michael resisted understanding Lee emotionally, and he finally gave up exploring this side of his nature. For Michael sensed that, except for June, “people were like cardboard” to Lee, and this repelled him.[5]
The two men could not have been more unlike: they were as different as earth is from air. Michael was a brilliant man, with a quality of sunlight about him. He was tall, slender, sensitive, with gray, sad eyes that seemed to light up only when the talk turned to aerodynamics. Even Michael’s mind appeared to be airborne; he had been curious about everything all his life. It was Michael’s gift to think originally, to look at things in a way no one had thought of before. He was an inventor, and he especially loved to invent things that expressed the beauty, the harmony, the wholeness of life. As a boy of ten, hearing that there might one day be an energy crisis, he tried to invent a car that would run on a minimum of oil. Next, it was gliders, and by the time he was a teenager, he was building a hydrofoil boat.
At the time he and Lee met, Michael was working on new concepts in helicopter design. But it was his dream to quit his job, live in an old barn, and design an airplane so cheap, so functional, so exquisitely economical that people could own it the way they own cars. A visionary as well as a scientist, Michael hoped that with so many people flying over national frontiers, borders might be wiped out entirely.[6]
Michael came from a family of visionaries and eccentrics with roots reaching deep into the New England past. The families that produced him, the Paines and Forbeses, had fortunes derived from the China trade, railroads, and the telephone company—and consciences hammered out of guilt. Some of them, the best, perhaps, shuddered at the word “aristocrat,” but they were aristocrats and they knew it, and most arrived at an acceptance of it by embracing the thought of their common ancestor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that one’s place in life, one’s privileges even, can be redeemed by good works. Michael’s grandfather, George Lyman Paine, was a renowned clergyman, a low church Episcopalian, who had run for state office in Massachusetts as a socialist. Michael calls him “a fierce stone.” Michael’s father, Lyman Paine, was an architect who was also a political activist. During the thirties, he had been a member of the Trotskyite wing of the American Communist Party, and it is said—Michael himself is uncertain as to the truth of it—that he was one of a group of American leftists who went to see Trotsky in Norway.
Michael, like his wife Ruth, was a child of divorce. He had seen his father only half a dozen times before he reached the age of twenty, and yet he loved him devotedly. Indeed, he felt as if the two were “like one person trying to live in two bodies.” All three men, the grandfather who was a socialist and a clergyman, the father who was a Trotskyite and an artist, and now Michael, who was a scientist and a liberal, had come to an identical belief: that man’s material needs must be met, but that his deepest hunger is a hunger of the spirit. Each in these three generations of Paine men had in his own way come back to the Emersonian conviction that it is a necessity for every individual to do as his conscience requires.
It is one of many ironies of the situation that Lee, a steady visitor at the Paine household and a beneficiary of its generosity, never even inquired who Michael might be or knew that his father had been a member of the very same Trotskyite wing of the American Communist Party that Lee had tried to join in its later form, the Socialist Workers Party. And it is characteristic of Michael that he never told him. Nor did Lee stop to consider that Michael, a physicist at Bell Helicopter, might have a security clearance—he did, and he was continually being turned down for higher clearances because his father had been a Trotskyite—and that Lee, by receiving the Militant, the Worker, and all his Russian newspapers at Michael’s house, might be jeopardizing Michael’s job. Again, it was characteristic of Michael that he, too, did not consider it and, indeed, would have scorned to do so.
As an intellectual, Michael was accustomed to thinking in abstractions, but as an inventor he was also at home with facts. His mind was open and questioning. And he never lumped things into categories, for no sooner had he thought of a category than his mind blazed with exceptions and defiances. Lee, he discovered, was the opposite. His mind was closed and dogmatic. He was at home with nothing but categories, and into them he stuffed every fact or observation that came his way. The category he clung to hardest, and insisted on throughout their discussions, was the “exploitation of the worker” under capitalism. Lee admitted that exploitation existed everywhere, but he insisted that in the Soviet Union at least the state reaps a profit, whereas in a capitalist society only the employer gains. Under capitalism, he said, all institutions, churches, schools, everything exists to exploit the working class. Each is a part of an interlocking structure that is interested only in maintaining itself in power.[7]
Michael tried to argue with Lee by pointing out that there are other values beside material ones. There is science, there is art, and there are spiritual values. These, too, and not just politics and economics, affect the way men look at things and the way they organize their lives. Lee would not listen. None of it made any difference. Capitalism must be destroyed. In one of their more animated discussions, Michael got the impression that Lee was dreaming of “revolution in the United States—crowds storming the Winter Palace.”[8]
On Friday night, October 25, the conversation turned from politics to religion, with the Paines, who belonged to a Unitarian congregation, describing how their church worked and trying to explain to Lee that it, at least, had no interest in keeping any one political group in power. But Lee again refused to listen. He insisted that the church, all churches, are merely an arm of the state, and their function is to keep people blind.[9] Marina did not understand what they were saying, but she detected a nastiness and anger in Lee’s tone that she had not heard from him in months. She did not see how the Paines could be so nice to him. They were so polite that she thought, with some surprise, that they must really like Lee.
The Paines were polite; but that night, and other nights, too, they got angry at Lee’s dogmatic was of arguing. Ruth was the more offended. Talking to Lee, she thought, was like talking to a stone wall. He refused to listen to logic, refused to listen to facts, and when he was up against a fact that appeared to refute what he believed, he repeated the same old arguments as if that was all there was to it. Michael tried to check himself and felt, with some shame, that he showed his anger more openly than Lee did. He could tell, of course, that Lee was very angry, too, saw that his hands were even trembling, but it looked to him as if Lee was a fellow who had had a good deal of practice at keeping his feelings under control.[10]
After that evening in late October, Ruth gave up trying to talk to Lee about religion or politics, but Michael did not. When Lee mentioned over supper that two nights ago he had been to hear a speech by General Walker, Michael remarked that that was odd: he had attended a meeting of the John Birch Society that same evening. Michael, a liberal, wanted to understand the workings of the right-wing mind. He was interested in better communication between “right” and “left,” what little “left” he could find in Dallas. He told Lee that he went to meetings, too, first one group and then the other.