Departure by Howard Fast Page A

often afraid, and there was much and subtle variation in the types of fear; he feared death and being beaten up and going hungry and not passing exams, but one fear and another was woven into the fabric of his life and accepted, just as he accepted the fact of work from the age of eleven, first as a delivery boy, then with a newspaper route, then as a canvasser for the local Tammany Club, then as a hack political street-corner speaker at the age of sixteen. His father went around with a bright hope burning in his heart that Sidney would study law, but in the first year at City College, Sidney’s jaw was fractured in a student demonstration, and amid reacting to the pain of his son’s bruised body, his father realized that the boy was a radical and came to accept the fact that he would not be a lawyer, not an alderman, nor even an assemblyman, not even a schoolteacher.
    But fear did not make Sidney a radical. Such cloth is woven of other stuff, and for Sidney there was a world lost that should not have been lost. Some are made or shaped or fashioned to see all the parts of the whole, not one direction or one street or one narrow alley, but all the roads that lead on; and it was for a part of that horizon that Sidney stayed with the class that made him. If he had accepted, his epitaph could have been more easily written, but he didn’t accept—he had to understand. In one way, there was a tremendous health and vitality in his small, skinny body, an identification with life that was more than matched chromosomes or cell clinging to cell. Death gives the lie to life, refutes it, and all the misshapen things that Sidney saw were part of that death. And he walked into life with his head up; vitality is a manner of saying other things. The vitality of Sidney made him a prow rather than a rudder.
    â€œI told him,” Mr. Greenspan said long afterwards to one of us who knew Sidney, “that it was no good. He would get in trouble, he should try to be a good, hard worker and keep out of trouble.”
    But Sidney didn’t look for trouble. As a boy, he hardly ever won a fight; he wasn’t a tough kid, and he stayed away from fights whenever he could. He always had a job after school, and even to go to a free college like C.C.N.Y. he had to work during the summers. Two summers he worked at Lang’s Wholesale Grocery Warehouse downtown on Hudson Street, until he became involved with attempts to organize it and was fired. And then he had a job one summer at Coney Island, handling props for a magician’s show. But the point is that he never looked for trouble, and you could see that just by looking at him.
    He didn’t look any different at eighteen than he did at twenty-five, about five feet seven inches in height, a hundred and thirty-two or -three pounds, with sloping shoulders, a prominent nose, and thin brown hair. His brown eyes were reflective and gentle, giving an impression of sympathetic softness; you were surprised to find something hard and absolutely unyielding underneath; no matter how long you knew Sidney you were always surprised at that.
    When he was eighteen years old, a freshman at City College, he met Jane Albertson and fell in love with her, in spite of such obvious obstacles as both her parents having a little money and being descended from what they call “old American stock,” and her being an inch taller than he was. And the strange part of it was that after the usual initial fumbling and antagonism she fell in love with him, something nobody understood except those of us who knew Sidney. The first time he brought her home with him, to the same, tiny apartment where the Greenspans had always lived, the old man was still grieving over his wife, with a kind of awful, dumb-animal suffering. The apartment was dirty and messy; Fannie tried to keep house, but it was not the kind of thing she was good at, and Adrian was already married. Janie walked in with the air of a person