A bucket of rocks has landed in my stomach, and they’re working their way up my gullet into my throat. By seven o’clock, I feel like I might explode if I don’t get some sympathy.
I pick up the phone, hold my breath, swallow gobs of pride, and dial Connor’s number. His father answers.
“Connor home?”
“D’jou see the American flag waving outside our house? Tells you something about us that’s different from you folks. I can’t have my boy hanging around with communists, which’ll get my own rear twisting in the wind at the College. So, best you don’t call here again. It’s nothing personal.”
Sure feels personal. You’d think Mr. Dugan would realize that I’m me, and my mother is somebody outside my skin, and just because she refuses to sign that stupid loyalty oath that’s gotten us in hot split-pea soup up to our pits, doesn’t mean my whole family is plotting to put the White House on a gigantic tractor trailer and move it to Red Square in Moscow.
These thoughts are dragging me down into a black hole. Mom and Dad are both working at the dining room table.
“Hey, can we talk?”
Mom whips around like she’s just been kicked. Can we talk is usually her phrase. “Sure, Marty, what’s on your mind?”
Dad puts down the manuscript he’s editing and caps his pen. They both wait for me to speak.
“Maybe it’s not the worst thing that’s happening to our family with all this—do I dare say the word?—pinko stuff that’s going on.”
Mom curls her lip.
“Coach kicked me off the team.” Saying it out loud makes it feel even worse and final.
“Because of your performance?” Dad asks.
I shake my head.
“Because of me?” Mom clunks the table with a thick Chinese dictionary. “That ignorant, tyrannical Neanderthal has no concept of—” She stops and leans over to put her arms around me. “Oh, Marty, I’m so sorry my stubbornness has hurt you this way.”
Is that what the Rosenbergs told Michael and Robby?
Dad reaches for my arm across the table. “You want me to talk to the coach?”
“No! I want all this to stop! It’s not just Coach—everyone looks at me differently now, including Connor.” I swallow back the details. “It’s not fair.”
Dad sighs deeply. “Rosalie?”
Mom clenches her fists. “I’m sorry about how this is affecting our family. Sorrier than you can ever guess. But I can’t back down now. Someday Marty, you’ll thank me for being true to my convictions.”
Yeah, sure.
Dad doesn’t waste a lot of time on sappy sympathy. Just turns on the radio to muffle the sound of our voices. “Martin, I think you should know what’s going on with the Sonfelters, in case Amy Lynn hasn’t given you the full story. Theo’s appearance before the HUAC in D.C. is next week.”
“I heard.”
“He has some options,” Mom says, and Dad looks annoyed that she’s butted in. “He can plead the First Amendment, meaning his right to free speech and free association with anybody he pleases.”
Dad pushes his glasses up into his hair. “The problem with that is, he could be held in contempt of court.”
“Meaning?”
“Maybe a year in prison.”
“Sheesh!”
“There’s a better option,” Mom chimes in. “He can invoke the Fifth Amendment, which is his right not to testify against himself. Husbands and wives can invoke the Fifth so they don’t have to testify against each other.” She glares daggers at Dad.
He dodges the sharp points. “That might have worked a few years ago, but nowadays everyone assumes you’re guilty—that is, you’re a communist—if you plead the Fifth. He’d be blacklisted, and no other college or industry would hire him.”
Mom mutters, “He’ll be lucky to get a job bagging groceries.”
Pretty grim. “Third option?”
“Well, when they throw him the central question—are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?—”
Like Milgrim did to Mom.
“—he can state clearly that he isn’t and wasn’t ever.” They exchange looks I can’t read. “You might as well know this, Martin. He could be lying.”
“He really is a communist?” What’s that make Amy Lynn? Is it something you inherit, like brown eyes, or do you catch it like the measles? Does she know?
Mom reaches for my hand and roughly rubs my fingers. “Then the HUAC will produce a witness, someone who swears he’s been at a meeting with Theo, or someone who fought with him in Spain, or almost anyone who’s willing to come forward to save his own hide, and he’ll testify that Theo is, in fact, a party member.”
“In which case Theo would be convicted of perjury and would go to prison,” Dad adds.
“You’re telling me he has a fifty-fifty chance of ending up behind bars?”
Mom says, “He’d get one year for contempt with the Fifth, or five years for lying under oath. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out which is the better choice.”
“Amy Lynn’s father could rot in the slammer for five years?” I keep thinking of Connor saying, I’d rather be dead than red. Five years in prison would be like being dead, like living in an iron lung.
“Well, there’s still another option,” Dad says, “a way for him to get his job back at the College. He’d have to feed the committee names.”
Mom jumps to her feet and rips a dead leaf off her avocado plant. “That’s like throwing raw meat to sharks. And it would ruin so many other lives.”
I ask, “Yeah, but couldn’t he give them names of people the committee already knows are communists?”
Dad shakes his head. “The fact is, it doesn’t matter who he names. These hearings aren’t designed to get at truth. They’re designed to intimidate, to strike fear in the hearts—”
“—of patriotic American citizens like us!” Mom shouts.
“Sit down, Rosalie, you’re making me nervous.”
I’m sinking in my chair, practically at nose level with the table, as if the less of me that’s showing means less that can feel crummy about this whole sorry mess.
Sooner or later I’m going to have to come right out and ask: If Dr. Sonfelter’s a communist, and so are the Rosenbergs, Mom and Dad, are you communists?
Can you be a patriotic American and a communist at the same time?
Dad lowers his voice to a whisper: “There is one more option. Not a good one, but a possibility.” There’s a long, dicey pause. “Theo can go underground. Just . . . disappear.”