A Long Island Story. Rick Gekoski

about it any more. Might as well enjoy it while he still could . . .

      They had arrived back East in 1948, when Jake was five and Becca one, when Ben got his job working on the Rural Electrification Projects for the Department of Justice. The young couple looked at apartments in DC, but nothing other than tiny one-bedroom units were affordable, and reluctantly found a halfway decent two-bedroom apartment in Alexandria, from which Ben could commute and in which Addie could fester.

      She negotiated an agreement with her anxious-to-placate husband in which they spent Saturdays, when they weren’t all too exhausted or cranky, exploring the new city. Unlike Addie, Ben was unimpressed by the many monuments to America’s glorious slave-owning past and imperial present: the grandeur of American power revolted him. The Pentagon! The White House! The Senate! Lovely architecture, but so what? The glorious playground of hypocrites and bloated capitalists. Addie was happy, on a sunny afternoon, to walk round the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial with Jake, perhaps go to the Smithsonian, and would allow Ben to go off for an hour or two (with the baby carriage) to his favourite haunt, the Washington Cooperative Bookshop on 17th St NW.

      He’d never encountered anything like it before: a shop, an inventory, a programme of events so Left-ward leaning that it was amazing it hadn’t fallen over (two years later it did), with a stock of socialist and Communist books and tracts, plus well-chosen new books on various subjects – all offered at discount prices to members of the Cooperative. Ben was soon on first name terms not merely with the staff but with many of the friendly browsers, believers and fanatics, not one of whom even glanced at his gorgeous baby companion.

      On the noticeboard was a copy of the in-house publication, The Bookshopper, advertising the annual picnic in Rock Creek Park. In July, as always. It was supposed to be great fun. The Cooperative cultivated a family feel, had events and special areas for children, concerts, lectures. The members and their families were more congenial, more his types than anyone in Justice. He could go to a lecture or two, perhaps a concert. He’d smiled at the very thought and resolved to say nothing.

      He’d heard the rumours, of course. Since 1941, when the membership list of the bookshop had been seized by Federal agents, there had been constant surveillance. At last year’s picnic an inappropriately chic woman, claiming to be a journalist, was taking pictures of many of the revellers, then asking their names and jobs. None had been willing to divulge much, but it had rather spoiled the atmosphere. A number of families left early.

      As he’d leafed through the magazines, Ben was being watched, quite openly stared at, by a casually well-dressed man in his thirties, clean-shaven, slim and bright eyed – not one of the regulars! – who met his eye and gave the briefest of nods, as if to say ‘We know who you are. If I were you I’d put that down.’ Ben had, frightened not so much by the cool hostility of the glance as by its apparent knowingness. It was directed at him. At Ben Grossman. He’d tried not to let his shiver of apprehension show. He had nothing to fear from the Senator himself, who didn’t squash vermin personally, but the nice-looking young man could make Ben’s life more than miserable.

      There was regular surveillance of the bookshop’s premises, after all it was a hotbed of Reds, a meeting place for Commies anxious to subvert democracy, Christianity and the American way. Nobody could read that much propaganda and come out unsullied; in fact, they went in sullied and came out filthy.

      The spies in disguise were easy enough to spot. No G-Men shiny suits, no hats, no ties. They’d been told to wear slacks and sweaters to blend in, look round the inventory in an interested fashion, make a note of who was there and what was said. So they donned their pressed and pleated trousers, button-down white cotton shirts with V-neck wool sweaters, put on their shiny black shoes and lurked. The rest of the clientele, dressed in baggy flannels, loose fitting casual shirts, with long hair, often bearded, unselfconsciously scruffy, looked with amused disdain on their preppy interlopers, teased them, made speeches in favour of revolution: made themselves and their fellow travellers as easy to pick off, and to dispatch, as apples on a tree.

      In the midst of this dangerous hothouse, Ben would avoid political discourse – after all he was a member of both devils’ parties – and devote himself to choosing his reading matter for the weeks to come. He made it a point to come most weekends; if Eleanor Roosevelt could lecture there, surely he could buy some books?

      It was at the Cooperative Bookshop that Ben first encountered George Orwell’s unprepossessing little book of fiction – hardly a novel, more an extended fairy tale or allegory – entitled Animal Farm. There was a small pile of them on the table. The book had aroused more – and more heated – debate and discussion than any novel since the war. The hardliners deplored its anti-Stalinism, its all too easy rejection of a mis-described autocracy, branded its author a bourgeois, worse than a bourgeois, an aristocrat who went to Eton, encore les barricades, they intoned gleefully. But for leftists like Ben, who knew Stalinism to be as brutal, arbitrary and cruel as Nazism, Orwell’s finger was pointed in the correct direction.

      From this time, Ben re-described himself as a socialist and in the 1948 election had refused to choose between one meretricious candidate (Dewey) and a slightly less unappealing one (Truman). Instead he voted for Norman Thomas of the American Socialist Party and felt himself richer, fuller, more upright for having done so. It was a romantic gesture, and a futile one according to Addie, who was scornful and dismissive. Why waste a vote on a loser?

      Hadn’t they both supported FDR? And if FDR was a fancy pants, spoiled and privileged, no one was going to offer America a better palliative than the New Deal, and they (Communists though they may have been) were sensible enough to support it. The New Deal was the only deal for the poor, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, though that category, in the early 1930s, included a great many people who, if they could be called workers, were workers in the banks and markets, in big (or mostly small) businesses.