"There's Leo Gold," they would have said, "come to gloat over Brickman."
So I tell Sophie maybe, depending on my hip. Rainy days it's torture, there isn't a position it doesn't throb. Rainy days and Election Nights.
But Sophie won't hear no, she's still got the iron, Sophie. Knows I won't be caught dead on the Senior Shuttle so she arranges a cab and says, "But Leo, don't you want to see me?"
Been using that one for over fifty years.
Worked again.
We used to have it at the New Yorker Hotel before the Korean and his Jesus children moved in. You see them on the streets peddling flowers, big smiles, cheeks glowing like Hitler Youth. High on the Opiate of the People. Used to be the New Yorker had its dopers, its musicians, its sad sacks and marginal types. We felt at home there.
So this year the Committee books us with the chain that our religious friends from Utah own, their showpiece there on Central Park South. Which kicks off the annual difficulties.
"That's the bunch killed Joe Hill," comes the cry.
"Corporate holdings to rival the Pope," they say, and we're off to the races.
Personally, I think we should have it where we did the year the doormen were on strike, should rent the Union Hall in Brooklyn. But who listens to me?
So right off the bat there's Pinkstaff working up a petition and Weiss organizing a counter-Committee. Always with the factions and splinter groups those two, whatever drove man to split the atom is the engine that rules their lives. Not divide and conquer but divide and subdivide.
First thing in the lobby we've got Weiss passing a handout on Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadow Massacre.
"Leo Gold! I thought you were dead!"
"It's a matter of days. You never learned to spell, Weiss."
"What, spelling?"
I point to the handout. "Who's this Norman? 'Norman Hierarchy,' 'Norman Elders.' And all this capitalization, it's cheap theatrics."
Weiss has to put on his glasses. "That's not spelling," he says, "that's typing. Spelling I'm fine, but these new machines — my granddaughter bought an electric."
"It's nice she lets you use it."
"She doesn't know. I sneak when she's at school."
Next there's the placard in the lobby — WELCOME ANARCHISTS and the caricature of Bakunin, complete with sizzling bomb in hand. That Gross can still hold a pen is such a miracle we have to indulge his alleged sense of humor every year. A malicious man, Gross, like all cartoonists. Grinning, watching the hotel lackeys stew in their little brown uni forms, wondering is it a joke or not. Personally, I think it's in bad taste, the bomb-throwing bit. It's the enemy's job to ridicule, not ours. But who asks me?
They've set us loose in something called the Elizabethan Room and it's a sorry sight. A half-hundred old crackpots tiptoeing across the carpet, wondering how they got past the velvet ropes and into the exhibit. That old fascination with the enemy's lair, they fit like fresh kishke on a silk sheet. Some woman I don't know is pinning everyone with name tags. Immediately the ashtrays are full of them, pins bent by palsied fingers. Name tags at the Anarchists' Convention.
Pearl is here, and Bill Kinney in a fog and Lou Randolph and Pinkstaff and Fine, and Diamond tottering around flashing his new store-boughts at everyone. Personally, wearing dentures I would try to keep my mouth shut. But then I always did.
"Leo, we thought we'd lost you," they say.
"Not a word, it's two years."
"Thought you went just after Brickman, rest his soul."
"So you haven't quit yet, Leo."
I tell them it's a matter of hours and look for Sophie. She's by Baker, the Committee Chairman this year. Always the Committee Chairman, he's the only one with such a streak of masochism. Sophie's by Baker and there's no sign of her Mr. Gillis.
There's another one makes the hip act up. Two or three times I've seen the man since he set up housekeeping with Sophie, and every time I'm in pain. Like an allergy, only bone-deep. It's not just he's CP from the word go — we all had our fling with the Party, and they have their point of view. But Gillis is the sort that didn't hop off of Joe Stalin's bandwagon till after it nose-dived into the sewer. The deal with Berlin wasn't enough for Gillis, or the Purges, no, nor any of the other tidbits that started coming out from reliable sources. Not till the Party announced officially that Joe was off the Sainted list did Gillis catch a whiff. And him with Sophie now.
Maybe he's a good cook.
She lights up when she sees me. That smile, after all these years, that smile and my knees are water. She hasn't gone the Mother Jones route, Sophie, no shawls and spectacles, she's nobody's granny on a candy box. She's thin, a strong thin, not like Diamond, and her eyes, they still stop your breath from across the room. Always there was such a crowd, such a crowd around Sophie. And always she made each one think he was at the head of the line.
"Leo, you came! I was afraid you'd be shy again." She hugs me, tells Baker I'm like a brother.
Sophie who always rallied us after a beating, who bound our wounds, who built our pride back up from shambles and never faltered a step. The iron she hadl In Portland they're shaving her head, but no wig for Sophie, she wore it like a badge. And the fire! Toe-to-toe with a fat Biloxi deputy, headto-head with a Hoboken wharf boss, starting a near-riot from her soapbox in Columbus Circle, but shaping it, turning it, stampeding all that anger and energy in the right direction.
Still the iron, still the fire, and still it's Leo you're like a brother.
Baker is smiling his little pained smile, looking for someone to apologize to, Blum is telling jokes, Vic Lewis has an aluminum walker after his stroke and old Mrs. Axelrod, who knew Emma Goldman from the Garment Workers, is dozing in her chair. Somebody must be in charge of bringing the old woman, with her mind the way it is, because she never misses. She's our museum piece, our link to the past.
Not that the rest of us qualify for the New Left.
Bud Odum is in one corner trying to work up a singalong. Fifteen years younger than most here, a celebrity, still with the denim open at the chest and the Greek sailor cap. The voice is shot though. With Harriet Foote and old Lieber join ing they sound like the look-for-the-Union-label folks on television. Determined but slightly off-key. The younger kids aren't so big on Bud anymore, and the Hootenanny Generation is grown, with other fish to fry.
Kids. The room is crawling with little Barnard girls and their tape recorders, pestering people for "oral history." A pair camp by Mrs. Axelrod, clicking on whenever she starts awake and mutters some Yiddish. Sophie, who speaks, says she's raving about the harness-eyes breaking and shackles bouncing on the floor, some shirt-factory tangle in her mind. Gems, they think they're getting, oral-history gems.
There are starting to be Rebeccas again, the little Barnard girls, and Sarahs and Esthers, after decades of Carol, Sally and Debbie. The one who tapes me is a Raisele, which was my mother's name.
"We're trying to preserve it," she says with a sweet smile for an old man.
"What, Yiddish? Idon't speak."
"No," she says. "Anarchism. The memories of anarchism. Now that it's served its dialectical purpose."
"You're a determinist."
She gives me a look. They think we never opened a book. I don't tell her I've written a few, it wouldn't make an impression. If it isn't on tape or film it doesn't register. Put my name in the computer, you'll draw a blank.
"Raisele," I say. "That's a pretty name."