The Education Files
Frances decided on the correct outfit for a June interrogation — a shirtwaist with pale gray collar and cuffs, matching gloves with raised stitching and a white cardigan. A visual representation for compliance and respectability in front of the Trial Examiners. Harry told her the look was just right, and gave her a twirl before he left for work.
By 1960, time and the blacklist had suppressed any glimpse of the named and shamed, imprisoned, exiled or other subversives excised from the public view. Permanent status as a teacher still required a loyalty oath though, and she had been summoned to 110 Livingston Street, the seat of the little empire that was New York City public schools. Frances stepped into the building with a counterfeit saunter, mimicking Dietrich in a film she couldn’t remember the title to.
The room was spare, illumined by streaks of dust brightened in the afternoon sun. To the right a door remained open to a room lined with file cabinets. Behind a broad table sat three men in suits. There were name plates, a large blue binder and a narrow foot-long box. Her deeds (and she imagined many others) crammed into 3 x 5 index cards stored in the dimensions of a library catalog drawer. No seating charts checkered with students’ names. One man thumbed a stapled sheaf of papers. A middle-aged woman sat at a separate desk off to the side. Her fingers rested below the keys of a steno machine.
The table where Frances was directed to sit was not much bigger than a student desk, sized to make her feel small. After placing her gloves in her handbag and the handbag on the floor, she looked up, determined to ignore the vibrations of fear and be open-eyed, responsive and use bluff and deception to best effect.
Three white men, not a 5-o’clock-shadowed Joseph McCarthy type among them. Levy’s jaw looked welded at a right angle. Donofrio had the air of a mildly worn Italian movie star. Worthington, chairman, kept his potato chip of a face expressionless. She was as guilty as anyone else for surmising a biography from two or three observable features. Donofrio might play the violin, Levy might holler at Yankees games. The court reporter was nameless.
The men consulted their papers and cards. A large round wall clock ticked. Her lips felt dry, even though she’d reapplied lipstick before she’d entered.
She was expected to take the witness oath – just as in Congress or on Perry Mason. She took the oath. As a permanent substitute (not quite an oxymoron) she had been a live body in a classroom and with no one caring about her biography. But full status required detailed scrutiny.
First evidence: an insurance policy with her sister as beneficiary, a plan she’d signed onto 25 years earlier. A front organization. A revolution through insurance? She looked at her hands, which she kept in her lap. What was there to say about life insurance or the sister she barely spoke with now?
Other lists in life: books she had read, books to be read by English classes, the phantom communists who roamed the corridors of power? What else was in her record?
McCarthy dead four years, ignored after his use-by date had expired. Poor old Joe with his cirrhosis.
This bureaucracy appeared to have the properties of an Egyptian mummy. Not the least bit decomposed, though last month university students had demanded entrance to a HUAC hearing on teachers and professors. When police had used hoses to flush them down the steps of San Francisco’s city hall, the students, wet, angry, and chanting, went right back up.
Someone cleared his throat. The court reporter, whose brown eyes and face revealed only diligence, was waiting with back straight, hands ready. Was there a question to answer? “When in doubt, stall, repeat the question. Or flatter the accusers to put them off their stride,” Harry had told her.
What details were written in the files? Her brand of shampoo or the songs she had sung her children to sleep by? The phone numbers she had dialed? The meetings attended? There were rumors that a quarter of the Communist Party were informers. Being an informant might not have been lucrative, but it could help pay the rent.
“You registered as a communist for the 1936 election primary.”
“So did Lucille Ball, same year,” she said without hesitation. That story had been big news. But Frances didn’t make the nation laugh and Lucy’s attempts to get into Ricky’s nightclub act could not brainwash children out of faith in America.
The night before, Harry rehearsed her.
“Let’s start with ‘are you now or have you ever been’?”
“They won’t ask that. It’s not Congress.”
“Well, are you now or have you ever been a pinochle player?” he asked.
“What are you talking about? You know gin rummy’s my game.
“All right. Are you now or have you ever been a nightclub singer? A soldier of fortune?”
Hypothetical subversive curriculum: Analysis of Shakespeare’s communist tendencies. Montagues and Capulets as feuding aristocratic parasites. Before falling for Romeo, Juliet working with Nurse in a doublet sewing collective. And then there was Friar Lawrence, opium dealer to the masses. Gullible Americans, she thought, unable to tell fact from fiction.
Before they ended up working in beauty salons or the typing pool, her girls wanted to read love stories, like Falling in Love, Romantic Confessions, and endless permutations of these magazines, with the inevitable plot of rebellion, ruin and romance.
In the classroom next door, the math teacher kept a bottle hidden but handy in a desk drawer. Tipsy by 12. In his afternoon classes girls snapped gum to transistor radio tunes and tried out hairstyles on each other. He’d collect his pension, though, because he’d kept his political nose clean.
Worthington asked her if she knew of anyone in the school system that had been, or was currently a member of the Communist Party.
Joan of Arc, fly into this room, swing your sword and slash these bureaucrats. Let them fall to the knees. But Joan had undergone her own interrogation and ended burned on the pyre. Condemned not because she heard voices, but because they were not transmitted through the correct channels. Frances was not Joan and she wouldn’t lead anyone into battle.
The past could be put away in a box, labeled, taped shut. But she would not give anyone up. That would rip a tear in her being that could never be mended. Of course, there were people who’d named names and walked away with ease.
Thankfully she didn’t know any teachers to name.
They were working hard to confine her in a box. If Gregor Samsa could awake one day as a cockroach, Frances could eat holes in the bureaucracy with mandibles strong enough to gnaw wood and spit out great piles of sawdust. Juiced with prodigious saliva and vengeful insect teeth.
She heard a voice asking if she was all right. She wasn’t sure if she’d missed a question. Did they want to know about her classroom, her lessons? They didn’t.
Her students were conformist. If she walked down an aisle, she could see black Hushpuppy shoes on every girl. By mid-winter half of them wore the black and green striped sweater that her daughter kept asking for. Frances calculated they were less likely to rise up against the gray flannel corporate culture than to fly forward or back in time, although perhaps she should not underestimate the young.
Her students appreciated her corny jokes. The inferiority complex of the dependent clause or how subject and verb had to get along in marriage. Then there was Silas Marner and his adoration of silver. That was her problem – dwelling on the old man’s miserly ways.
Worthington said, “let’s take a break.” The reporter leaned back in her chair and flexed her fingers.
The Ladies restroom was empty. She lit a cigarette, finished that, listened to the sizzle as she flicked it into the toilet. Then she folded a stick of gum as a substitute. Glass block windows shed a diffuse light into the refuge. She closed the door and sat on the toilet, though her only need was for unobserved peace. On the walls there were no names, hearts with arrows or swears scratched into the paint. No imaginative vandals worked here. She needed to collect herself. She hadn’t felt so exposed since giving birth with her legs up in stirrups.
Fog crawled through her brain. The stall disappeared. A loud drone beat in her ears and she flew through dull, cottony material with a bright sun overlapping clouds, though even as she did, she was aware that didn’t make sense. There was an airplane engine inside her and a roar took over.
Then she returned and found herself wedged between toilet and door, one leg beneath her. She wanted the court reporter to come and ask if she was okay. She wanted a rescue. One eyelid stung where her face touched the floor, but the rest of her seemed all right. The tile floor was pleasantly cool. She unhooked her leg and, using one hand on the seat, hoisted herself from the cramped position. To recover from a faint — freshen temples and wrists with cool water, straighten the dress, powder the face and add lipstick. There was now a run in one stocking, but what did that matter?
At 4 o’clock the trial concluded. When she got to her feet, the examiners half stood. Half gallant.
The heat on the platform, the spotted black remains of gum flattened by a million heels, the grinding whoosh of the trains deflated any sense of relief. But nobody questioned who she was, what she had done, or asked for justification for her life. No scarlet letter appeared across her bosom. Everyone traveled in their own tunnel.
The meter of the wheels tracked along with rhyme. In 14 hundred 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Under the rule of Isabella and her fella, she added. Those were the days when Jews in Spain got a chance to convert or get out. Inquisitor-General Torquemada, in charge of the act of faith, not the subsequent burning. His name might have a heroic ring to it or sound like a method of torture. Or it might be a new Chevy model. You could find poetry in anything. Every age has its own inquisition. Who is true, who is not? She couldn’t declare innocence, but she was not guilty.
At 4 that day Harry left the print shop and walked down 39th. Between Third and Lex, he heard his name called. He should have kept going, pretended not to hear, weave in and out like the ball carrier to the goal.
The men approached and gestured toward the vestibule of the nearest building. One had a clothes-line peg of a nose and the other wore his hat low. They inched themselves forward, and Harry was forced to retreat from the comforting racket of traffic and the safety of the crowds.
They just wanted a minute. One could read the afternoon paper in an FBI minute. He was pinned. He might be slower, but he hadn’t lost the bounce he’d gained at the sports clubs of his youth. A move like a shoulder wheel or lift-pull sweep would get him out, but the fit was tight and since they knew where he worked and probably everything else, it would be a false escape.
There was a three-point mutual look-over. What was fascists’ obsession with trench coats? Harry wondered. Unbuckled in the June weather, but still.
“A few questions.”
They asked if they had the right name. Then small talk. To gain his trust? Getting warm, wasn’t it? He noted the absurdity quotient.
“You just got out of work, right?” low hat asked
He looked out to see if anybody from work spotted the encounter.
The agent loosened his tie, while the other mopped the back of his neck with a handkerchief. “At Apex Printing,” he added.
“The A gets my boss a top spot in the yellow pages,” Harry remarked.
“Your wife’s name is Frances, right? She has an appointment with trial examiners at the Board of Education today?” The tone was matter-of-fact.
Harry wrestled up ways he could take this. Frances who? Was until the divorce. Or Franny, we call her.
“Now, you served in the Pacific. Two and a half years,” one said. Very specific and respectful. “Now your wife….” He held his hands wide.
Alien? Saboteur? Typhoid Mary? These were the crime stoppers. Difficult to enjoy the show with two straight men and no funny guy.
“Do you know?” He paused. “That your wife is a communist?”
Again, Harry explored the possibilities. He decided on mild shock. “Hell’s bells!” They could interpret this is a number of ways. Funny how he himself was flying under the radar. But if they based their work on formula, and he didn’t fit, then he was out of the equation.
The agent cocked his head as if startled, but carried on. “These people sometimes hide their identities for a very long time.”
“Why would they do that?” Harry asked.
“To look normal for as long as it takes, fool everyone, and bore from within. Then later take over and betray us.”
Harry tried to imagine Frances leading a band of middle-aged marauders. He asked, “You married?” Then quickly, “you ever feel like marriage is a comedy show?” He put hand to chin to indicate deep thought. “Do we have secrets? You know any marriage that doesn’t?”
Why not act the good-hearted, duped idiot they took him for? These men were like Lieutenant Abbott. A rich father, a little college, and he couldn’t tell the difference between bootlicking and Shinola, not a clue to rebuilding a carbine or mortar. Once you know the basics, you can string moves together.
“So, you do know, or you don’t’?”
Harry hoped he was making their job difficult, although he was unsure of their goal here.
“You sure you have the right Frances? It’s a very common name. Just the other day my boss called me Howard.” His opponent in this game worked his lips trying to figure out the right comeback, but ended by nodding his head.
“Women! Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them,” Harry concluded. If the commies didn’t get you, Mata Hari would.
They had warned him. There were no other instructions.
Harry would have liked to read their field notes for the day.
When he got home, he put on a theatrical reenactment, jumping back and forth between all three parts.
“They asked did I know about your subversive side,” he said. “Oh honey, I didn’t marry you for your cooking.”
She laughed until she burst into tears.
The night before she returned for the judgment, she typed an updated resume. New job—back to secretarial work or off to a school outside of the bureaucracy.
For this day, Frances chose a flowered blouse, a plain skirt, and a pair of comfortable shoes. A streak of violet from her encounter with the restroom stall lay across one eyelid.
She arrived early. The court reporter, who was already at her desk, looked up and Frances nodded to her.
When the trial examiners walked in, before Worthington could put a hand on his chair, Frances spoke. “How do you get around the First Amendment?”
Worthington waited to speak until the men sat down and set up their name plates and materials.
“This proceeding is in accordance with the Supreme Court decision of 1952.”
“Freedom of association?”
He looked toward the court reporter. “Margaret,” he said, with a neutral tone, “Leave that out and begin now. June 16, 1960. The board of trial examiners is sitting today to inform the witness of our finding.”
“Of the 300 publications or organizations considered subversive, you have subscribed to two and attended or belonged to three others during a period of at least 10 years.” This was Levy.
Donofrio spoke. “It would be in contravention to the Feinberg law of New York State to allow you to continue teaching. You have willfully impeded a lawful investigation, and stand convicted of conduct unbecoming a teacher. Hereby dismissed.”
“What if I hired Joseph Welch?” she asked. There was no money for a lawyer.
The men stood.
“Anyone know the correct subjunctive — ‘Winston tastes good like or as a cigarette should’?”
The trial examiners left the room, a pernicious dignity in their movements, an aversion to her hysteria.
Levy popped back in the room. For a moment Frances thought that he would whisper an apology for only following orders, but instead he picked up the suit jacket he had left on the back of his chair and walked out again.
The court reporter packed her machine into its case.
“Good-bye, Miss Margaret,” Frances said. “Sorry. I didn’t learn your full name.”
The court reporter said, “you’ve got eye shadow missing from one eye,” a small shrug to her shoulders, before closing the door behind her.
To the empty room Frances hissed, “All of you — go down in flames!” She sighed. “But I know you’re just going to get the ferry to Staten Island or the train to White Plains.”
Before she went home, she stopped at her classroom. She wrote a good-bye note to the students on the blackboard, which she hoped wouldn’t be erased. She started to close the door, then turned back. Into a small bag she put a copy of the annotated text of Sheridan’s A School for Scandal, which she kept meaning to read, her supply of Black Jack gum from her desk, and the sturdy Swingline stapler with the words “Board of Education property” imprinted on its head. She chewed one piece of gum into a soft texture and stuck it under the desk drawer.
• • •
Clare D. Becker is the pen name of a former teacher who has collaborated on oral history projects – written and filmed. One of her stories appears in the anthology Best Original Climate Change Stories. She lives in the Boston area and is working on a set of linked stories.