You are making a mockery of American justice! And it was more than strategy, it was more than Lenin’s advice to use the reactionary apparatus to defend yourself, it was passion.
My father never really believed it would happen. My mother wasn’t to be surprised from the day they were indicted. But he never believed it was possible. He believed in the beneficence of his ideas, and could not appreciate that anyone would find them offensive enough, threatening enough to do—that. His ideas were an extension of himself, and he meant only well. Because the other side of finding confirmation over and over again, of dwelling in evidence, was that he would never believe any of it. He would never believe that America was not the cafeteria at City College; and as often as it was proved to him he forgot it.
Pauly. Sometimes he used to cut my mother’s hair. I don’t remember her ever cutting his. She would put a towel around her shoulders and spread newspaper on the floor in the kitchen and sit on a kitchen chair in the middle of the floor, and he would go to work; holding a scissors and a comb in his long hands, he would comb through her hair, get a short bunch ofit off the comb and between his fingers, and with the comb like a harmonica in his mouth, pick up the scissors and slice off the hair. He was very deft. She had thick hair that tended to curl and she liked to keep it short. I wouldn’t say she enjoyed saving money, I would say it gave her satisfaction. I would say it was a righteous pleasure. She wore plain clothes that were bought to last. All our clothes were bought to last. She always bought things that were too big. “She wanted us to get use out of them,” I once explained to Susan when we were talking about this. “She wanted us to grow into them.” But Susan said: “She bought Daddy’s things too big, and her own things too. She dressed us all like bags. Why must you always think she was perfect? Why can’t you admit she just didn’t know how to buy clothes?”
I think she was a sexy woman, despite her austerity, her home-cut hair, her baggy clothes, her no make-up except for very red lipstick on her small, prim mouth in the full cheeks. Her grim appreciation of life. She was full-breasted and heavy-hocked and wore corsets, which I would see her pull on or off while she said something like “Danny, go turn the light out under the coffee.” She was exacting about cleanliness and kept us all cleaner than we thought was necessary. When she was working, before Susan was born, she would clean the house late at night and on weekends. That miserable little house. In my bed, when she came to fix the covers, I smelled her after her bath—she smelled of the steam of cleanliness, of powdered redness. She made curtains and tacked down linoleum and found bargains at the Salvation Army, and hammered and tacked and waxed and polished and scrubbed. She washed our clothes on a washboard in the deep half of the kitchen sink. She had enormous energy. The whole thing with Rochelle was defending herself against the vicious double-crossing trick that life was. Income was defense. A clean house. A developed political mind. Children. Her weaknesses were not as obvious to me as Paul’s. If someone claims to deal with life so as to survive, you grant him soundness of character. But she was as unstable as he was. In her grim expectations. In her refusal to have illusions. In her cold, dogmatic rage. As if there was some profound missed thing in her life which she could never forget.Some betrayal of promise. It wasn’t sex. It couldn’t have been sex. They used to make the whole house rock. They really went at it, they balled all the time.
In prison, she began to write.
Her politics was not theoretical or abstract. She had no difficulty making connections. Her politics was like Grandma’s religion—some purchase on the future against the terrible life of the present. Grandma lit candles on Friday night, with a shawl over
My father never really believed it would happen. My mother wasn’t to be surprised from the day they were indicted. But he never believed it was possible. He believed in the beneficence of his ideas, and could not appreciate that anyone would find them offensive enough, threatening enough to do—that. His ideas were an extension of himself, and he meant only well. Because the other side of finding confirmation over and over again, of dwelling in evidence, was that he would never believe any of it. He would never believe that America was not the cafeteria at City College; and as often as it was proved to him he forgot it.
Pauly. Sometimes he used to cut my mother’s hair. I don’t remember her ever cutting his. She would put a towel around her shoulders and spread newspaper on the floor in the kitchen and sit on a kitchen chair in the middle of the floor, and he would go to work; holding a scissors and a comb in his long hands, he would comb through her hair, get a short bunch ofit off the comb and between his fingers, and with the comb like a harmonica in his mouth, pick up the scissors and slice off the hair. He was very deft. She had thick hair that tended to curl and she liked to keep it short. I wouldn’t say she enjoyed saving money, I would say it gave her satisfaction. I would say it was a righteous pleasure. She wore plain clothes that were bought to last. All our clothes were bought to last. She always bought things that were too big. “She wanted us to get use out of them,” I once explained to Susan when we were talking about this. “She wanted us to grow into them.” But Susan said: “She bought Daddy’s things too big, and her own things too. She dressed us all like bags. Why must you always think she was perfect? Why can’t you admit she just didn’t know how to buy clothes?”
I think she was a sexy woman, despite her austerity, her home-cut hair, her baggy clothes, her no make-up except for very red lipstick on her small, prim mouth in the full cheeks. Her grim appreciation of life. She was full-breasted and heavy-hocked and wore corsets, which I would see her pull on or off while she said something like “Danny, go turn the light out under the coffee.” She was exacting about cleanliness and kept us all cleaner than we thought was necessary. When she was working, before Susan was born, she would clean the house late at night and on weekends. That miserable little house. In my bed, when she came to fix the covers, I smelled her after her bath—she smelled of the steam of cleanliness, of powdered redness. She made curtains and tacked down linoleum and found bargains at the Salvation Army, and hammered and tacked and waxed and polished and scrubbed. She washed our clothes on a washboard in the deep half of the kitchen sink. She had enormous energy. The whole thing with Rochelle was defending herself against the vicious double-crossing trick that life was. Income was defense. A clean house. A developed political mind. Children. Her weaknesses were not as obvious to me as Paul’s. If someone claims to deal with life so as to survive, you grant him soundness of character. But she was as unstable as he was. In her grim expectations. In her refusal to have illusions. In her cold, dogmatic rage. As if there was some profound missed thing in her life which she could never forget.Some betrayal of promise. It wasn’t sex. It couldn’t have been sex. They used to make the whole house rock. They really went at it, they balled all the time.
In prison, she began to write.
Her politics was not theoretical or abstract. She had no difficulty making connections. Her politics was like Grandma’s religion—some purchase on the future against the terrible life of the present. Grandma lit candles on Friday night, with a shawl over
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