Fools Read online

  FOOLS

  JOAN SILBER

  Dedication

  For Chuck Wachtel

  Epigraph

  If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  I am painfully aware of the fact that conduct everywhere falls far short of belief.

  —MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

  Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

  —MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

  Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

  —DOROTHY DAY

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Fools

  The Hanging Fruit

  Two Opinions

  Better

  Going Too Far

  Buying and Selling

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Fools

  Also by Joan Silber

  Reading Group Guide

  Copyright

  Fools

  A lot of people thought anarchists were fools. I finished high school in 1924, and even during my girlhood, when the fiercest wing of anarchists still believed in “propaganda by deed” and threw bombs and shot at world leaders, people thought they did it out of a bloody kind of sappiness, a laughable naïveté. All this laughing, I came to think, ignored the number of things a person could be a fool for in this life—a fool for love, a fool for Christ, a fool for admiration. I had friends who were all of these, as it turned out. But I took my own route.

  I wasn’t born into anarchism. I read myself into it. Someone handed me a pamphlet in the street, and that was the beginning. And my cousin Joe was an influence. Joe was a third cousin, hardly related at all, but in our teen years we were both enlisted in my mother’s brief attempt to distribute used clothes to the poor in our church. Musty woolen topcoats, faded school pinafores, piles and piles of men’s hats. The problem was, my mother was afraid of the people who showed up for the clothes. We stood behind a table in the dank church basement while she pled for an orderly line and whispered at me not to touch the children. On the other side, Joe was muttering to me about why we had these extra goods and they didn’t.

  I was born in India, in the city of Madras in the state of Tamil Nadu, when my father was a missionary for the Congregationalist Church. We went home to Philadelphia when I was six, but I had memories. My father left the mission in a state of great disillusion, embittered by ecclesiastical infighting in a country so filled with suffering. In America, I was mocked for the way my speech sounded Indian and was hounded in school by a group of bullying girls.

  In my adult life, when my friends heard I came from a missionary family, they teased me about how I naturally came from a long line of zealots, didn’t I, which was how I liked to view it. Actually, the zealotry had drained by the time I was growing up. My father was just another bald, tired minister who mumbled through the services and didn’t really want to look anyone in the eye. My mother was more ardent, more desperate.

  I hated the unbearable Ladies’ Aid meetings in our living room and the tedious Sunday school with my poor mother teaching improbable platitudes. In high school I was infamous for cynical jokes about the Virgin Mary. Only Joe was worse. In the school auditorium, he passed me notes parodying the psalm read in assembly. (He that hath clean hands and a pure heart and always washes with Boraxo.)

  When I was reading the books Joe lent me, I felt a kind of joyous relief, once I got past the hard parts. What I loved in anarchism, from the first, was the obvious truth in it: people had gotten it all wrong to expect justice from any state. Power never protected the weak, it only protected itself. Tyranny was built into the system. The clarity of this argument was pretty stunning, I thought, and so was its insistence that this didn’t have to continue, despite its long human history.

  I was a girl Joe had always known. It hadn’t occurred to him to be attracted in a noncousinly way until he saw me in the park one chilly autumn day, listening to speakers for Sacco and Vanzetti. I was leaning against an elm tree when he came striding toward me, with his slicked-back hair and his long-legged walk.

  “They think I’m off studying in the library,” I said.

  “Well, you are, Vera.”

  “I’ve been here awhile,” I said. “Aren’t you cold? I’m freezing.” I shivered for effect, put my hand on his cheek so he could feel its coolness. I knew what I was doing.

  I’d had a crush on him for a while. He took off his muffler and wrapped it around my shoulders, coming closer to knot it for me. “Is that better?” he said. How easy this part was.

  All our excited feelings for each other were mixed up with ideas, with anger and vision, but what was wrong with that? Our meandering conversations, full of half-remembered reading and sudden bits of clarity, felt majestic. Together we picketed a textile mill with the workers—on a Saturday afternoon when my parents thought we were at the pictures, we took a streetcar and then we lined up with a big group. Joe was a fast walker and we were up in the front with the yelling schoolboys. I kept close to Joe, I heard myself yell and chant. It was my first time in public as this form of myself.

  Joe was older than I was, by a year. Once he was done with high school, he got a managing job in a printing office. He liked being out in the world, and all the mechanical processes of rotary presses and dry offset were interesting enough to him, but he had to put in very long hours. And I had a baby brother I took care of. On Saturdays I’d take my fat little Robert to the park in his carriage, and Joe would walk the paths with us, wheeling the carriage for me, so I could take his arm.

  My mother spoke of us as courting, but this was a misunderstanding on her part. We didn’t mean to marry at all. We both assumed we would be together for life, no papers needed. I really loved that idea—the purity of our bond, without the government having anything to say about it or any religious body presuming it could sanctify us. The whole notion of a legal wedding seemed profoundly disrespectful to us, us of all people. I was so insulted when my sister said, “What’s to keep Joe from taking off? He could go anytime. You want that?” No one believed how unfair that was to Joe or how belittling to me.

  We were still at home with our families, and we didn’t hide our plans, we were nothing if not straightforward. My parents were not backward or strict, as clerical families went. They didn’t send me away to a distant relative, they didn’t lock me in my bedroom. But they wouldn’t let Joe in our house again. No matter how many times he came to the door. My mother told me, “You think we could ever get over it if you did this? We never would.” My father said, “There’s a reason for the commandments. Don’t you feel God all around you? You think you’re above God?”

  Outrage might just have hardened us, if there hadn’t also been tears. I heard my father weeping! My tired, desiccated father. It was a choked, unnatural, gasping sound through the wall. What were we doing, Joe and I? I began to think we were sticking too blindly to a technical point. Like my friend Mary Elizabeth from grade school, who thought eating a raisin before going to Communion was wrong. One raisin. Who cared, what did it matter, if we said a few words in a public ceremony? Was cruelty better? Even Joe agreed, though his face had a terrible half-smile of embarrassment. It hurt us to have me see him. So, in the end, we were hypocrites for kindness. Both of us. Standing with my bouquet of orange blossoms, I thought: I’m happy but I’m in disguise. But probably many people feel that at their weddings.

  We lived for two months in an apartment overlooking a box factory, and then, as soon as we could, we moved from the Philadelphia of our families to the freer, more unknown spaces of New York. First we were in a very cramped and desolate room in a boardinghouse, and then, after we starte
d going to meetings and had more of a social life, we shared a place in the Village with a couple named Betsy and Norman and a single man named Richard and his dog, Bakunin. Sometimes other people too. I liked this arrangement very well.

  We didn’t drink as much as the others, but we didn’t seem to need to—we got into the arguing and the clowning and the repudiating of theories at just as high a volume without it. We were testing how to be right. Richard was the most dogged in posing questions.

  “Joe,” he would say, “what would you do if you caught a man stealing your wallet? Would you have him arrested?”

  Joe was against prisons, we all were. Kropotkin had called them “universities of crime.” “I’d grab my wallet and really talk to him,” Joe said.

  “Oh, that talk,” Betsy said. “Maybe he’d rather be in jail.”

  But I thought it was a good answer.

  I brought up Tolstoy’s hero in Resurrection, who decided prisons had never, ever done any good. “Listen to her,” Joe said. “Are you listening?” Everyone knew I’d read more than Betsy.

  “Tolstoy said money was a new form of slavery,” I said. “People don’t read his essays.”

  “Only you have set eyes on them, I guess,” Richard said. “Don’t brag, it’s never effective.” This embarrassed me and I really did stop bragging after that.

  Dorothy, a friend of Richard’s who liked to drink with us, said, “I’ve been in jail. It didn’t reform me.” She was in her late twenties, older than we were, and she’d once been arrested in a march for women’s suffrage. And now she never voted, because she’d come to believe that voting was colluding. I admired these scruples.

  I liked watching Joe when he waited to speak, his solid chin, his dark, soft eyes. My mother had told me that the first years of her marriage were the hardest ones, but the shock of cohabitation went fine for us, mostly. We had the fire and puzzle of ideas, a goad to keep our better selves showing. And we had all those other people around.

  None of us slept enough. The others went out after midnight to drink at a speakeasy a few blocks away. They had less regular jobs, looser hours—they wrote articles for magazines, they sketched ladies’ fashions for department store ads, and I thought Betsy had money from her family. Joe had found work in a print shop uptown, and I had a job painting letters for a sign and banner place in the neighborhood. I had always liked to draw and sketch and used to do all the decorating in the church.

  This was a very good time for us. Joe loved the long debates, but at the end of any evening, once we were in our room, he would say, “I am so tired,” and make a big joke of collapsing against me, where lust took over whatever fatigue either of us had. How luxuriant those nights were, our secret lives of excess.

  We’d come to the city in the thick heat of late summer, but within a month we were in an autumn of clear days, of morning air with light in every molecule. I made a vow to walk to my job, to get more time in the sudden freshness outside, but this excellent habit lasted two days. I envied our friend Dorothy, who owned a tiny, unheated bungalow by the beach in Staten Island. A very nice man named Forster stayed with her there on weekends, when he wasn’t working in the city. They claimed to live on bootleg wine and the fish he caught. Once they brought us a basket of lovely shells that smelled like drying seaweed and I put the shells all around our room, big white whelks and nacreous jingle shells, thin as paper, and blue cockles striped with yellow, on the mantel and the bed table. “Think of this as your island hideaway,” I said to Joe, as I flipped down the covers. “Where the roaring surf echoes the passion of mortals.”

  “I hear it, I hear it,” Joe said.

  Joe had never been to the ocean, but I had. My mother walked with me along the Jersey shore when she was trying to talk me into giving up Joe. I was busy thinking at that moment how the rhythm of the surf sounded like a great animal breathing, sounded like the pulse of sex. I knew what sex was, or thought I did—my mind was entirely colored by the few chances Joe and I had taken. I sat with my mother on a bench along the sands, watching the curling froth and trough of the waves, and I had remembrances that made me feel smug in her company.

  “We can take the ferry to Coney Island sometime,” Joe said, taking off his shoes.

  “This is our island,” I said to Joe, setting my palm on the bed.

  Joe liked this sort of beckoning frankness. (He was reaching for me now, while he turned down the lamp with his other hand.) As long as it wasn’t too frank. If my praise of his body ran to candid exactness, if I was moved to use blunt and stumbling language to exalt something we’d done, he would laugh and say, “Yes, yes,” but not happily. So I stopped doing that. Everyone thought Joe was the bolder of us, but no one knows how a couple fits together. The twists in that knot. For his part, Joe had learned not to talk so much when we were already lying in bed at night, not to squander this time reflecting on his day until we were too sleepy for love. The quarrels we had turned each of us huffy but caused useful corrections.

  Dorothy had said that their beach was glorious at night, with tall, skinny pines against the sky and lights in the houses along the shore and the rolling surf invisible and tremendous in the dark, and I was thinking of that now, while Joe and I entered our own night, our own sea. We stayed awake so long we could hear the clop of the horse’s hooves outside when the milk truck went by in the very early morning.

  In the morning, when Joe and I got up, only the dog—a big mongrel with some police dog in him—was awake and pacing the kitchen. The others always slept late. But I sort of liked being someone who went to work, and I didn’t mind my job. Nothing fascinating, but I could lose myself in it.

  I spent a perfectly pleasant afternoon painting—in dark brown and ivy-green—a sign that suggested to all passersby

  ADAMS CHICLETS

  “Genuinely and Truly Delightful to All”

  with a spearmint leaf below. The leaf was easy and I took pride in adding serrated edges, tiny veins, a jaunty stem.

  It was true that chewing gum was a worthless product, a clever vendor’s dream of packaged nothing. Betsy refused to buy it. My father had banned chewing gum for all his daughters, who were not to be seen masticating like cows. My poor father. In India the people used to chew beeda after a meal, to freshen the mouth and aid digestion—a leaf with sweet spices rolled into it. My mother was in anguish, close to tears, when men spit its red juice in the street.

  My unhappy mother. What an effort she always strove to make. Sometimes now she wrote me letters. Regards to my dearest son-in-law. I hope that he is enjoying your cooking! She would never really like Joe, never forgive him for wanting to dishonor me. I made fun of her letters to my friends, as if I were the sort of person who wanted a bluffer, franker mother.

  When I finished the sign, my boss, Mr. Frances, said, “The leaf looks like a caterpillar somebody stepped on.”

  “It’s mint,” I said. “We used to grow it in our yard.”

  “Do I pay you to be an imbecile?” Mr. Frances said. “I’m the imbecile then, aren’t I?” He talked to all of us like that.

  Sometimes he docked our pay when he didn’t like the way the signs turned out. Ten cents, or even twenty cents, enough for a meal. He called it fining us for artistic offenses. Or he’d have us stay late into the night to paint a sign over again. “Right is right,” he’d say. A few times I’d passed out union literature to try to organize our little group of workers, but that was as far as my bravery went.

  “You’re one of the sloppiest, least talented sign-painters I’ve had the misfortune to be around,” Mr. Frances said, “and anyone can see it. Isn’t that true?”

  That was the worst, his wanting you to agree. He always wanted that.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” Mr. Frances said.

  I took my brushes to the sink to soak them in a jar of turpentine. “You do know,” he said.

  I had the water running, and I kept my back to him. I didn’t want to look for
another job. We had no savings.

  “You do know,” Mr. Frances said.

  The others had stopped talking. I wiped my hands on the towel. I should have turned around but I didn’t. The room was waiting.

  “I know,” I said.

  What if he fired me anyway? They were looking at me, the others, but they all would have done the same thing.

  “Go home to your husband who has to put up with you,” Mr. Frances said.

  I put on my jacket and got out of there. I thought about Joe the whole walk home. In my head I was explaining, trying to make myself sound better. Most of my days were not as bad as this one, but the sweetness and the one true thing at the end of all of them was Joe.

  I didn’t stop to say anything to the others when I came in the door. I went down the hall at once to change out of the clothes that smelled of turpentine. I waited, sitting on the bed, and when Joe came in, tired and inky himself, he had to hear about my day.

  “It’s not for profit that the man acts that way,” I said. “It’s to push someone around. He can’t resist. Do you think that’s a human instinct?”

  “Of course,” Joe said. “But we overcome other instincts. We’re housebroken, we don’t go around mounting each other’s wives.”

  I had to go in to work the next day too. Joe had his hand on my knee as we spoke. I leaned against him, against the hard span of his chest. “I’ve compromised too much, haven’t I?” I said. “It’s ugly.”

  But I was as blithe as anyone when Betsy decided later that night that we should all go out to a speakeasy she liked. There I was, only hours after my unspeakable day, singing “Beautiful Dreamer” with her at the bar. She had a better voice than I did but I could keep on key after drinking. “Out on the sea,” I sang, “mermaids are chanting the wild lorelie.”