Libra - Don Delillo [20]
“I don’t think you can but go ahead.”
“It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. Guaranteed. They’re the ones responsible.”
“Well that’s just you’re daydreaming.”
“Well no I’m not.”
“There was a trial unless I’m sadly mistaken,” she said.
“Ike is a well-known boob. He could have stopped the execution.”
“Like a movie, I suppose?”
“Do you know who the Rosenbergs are, even?”
“I just said there was a trial.”
“But the hidden factors, the things that don’t get out.”
She gave him a tight look. She was just the right height. Not too tall. He liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails. There was a mother or father moving around inside the house.
“I read all about the Rosenbergs when I was in New York,” he said. “They were railroaded to the chair. The idea was to make all communists look like traitors. Ike could have done something.”
“He did do something. He played golf,” Robert said.
“Now Senator Eastland’s coming to New Orleans. You know why, don’t you?”
“He’s looking for you,” Robert said. “He can’t figure out how a boy in the Civil Air Patrol.”
“He’s looking for reds under the beds,” Lee said.
“He’s wondering how a clean-cut boy.”
“The main thing is in communism that workers don’t produce profits for the system.”
“He’s looking at your cute smile and he’s just real upset. A teenage communist in the CAP.”
Lee half enjoyed the ribbing. He looked at Robert’s sister to get her reaction but her eyes were on the board. Well brought up. He saw her at the library. She was on the pep squad at school, the girl at the far end who went more or less unnoticed.
“What if they did spy? It’s only because they believed communism is the best system. It’s the system that doesn’t exploit, so then you’re strapped in the chair.”
Lee was aware that the parent, whichever one it was, had moved to the edge of the open doorway. The parent was standing there, on the other side of the wall, listening.
“If you look at the name Trotsky in Russian, it looks totally different,” he said to Robert Sproul’s sister. “Plus here’s something nobody knows. Stalin’s name was Dzhugashvili. Stalin means man of iron.”
“Man of steel,” Robert said.
“Same thing.”
“Dumb bunny.”
“The whole thing is they lie to us about Russia. Russia is not what they say. In New York the communists don’t hide. They’re out on the street.”
“Quick, Henry, the Flit,” Robert said.
“First you produce profits for the system that exploits you.”
“Kill it before it spreads.”
“Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.”
“Well that’s neither here nor there,” the sister said.
“Where is it?” he asked her.
It was the father who appeared in the doorway, a tall man with a plaid blanket folded over one arm. He seemed to be looking for a horse. He spoke of homework and errands, he mumbled obscurely about family matters. The sister’s relief was easy to see. It could be felt and measured. She slipped past her father arid melted serenely into the dim interior.
The father walked with Lee to the front door and opened it as wide as it would go. They did not speak to each other. Lee walked home through the Quarter past hundreds of tourists and conventioneers who thronged in the light rain like people in a newsreel.
He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. He let classmates read the titles if they were curious, just to see their silly faces crinkle up, but he didn’t show the books to his mother. The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed