today to take off jacket and tie. He slung the jacket
over his shoulder and they went along through the
little stretch of woods and out on the open lawns'
with the grass beginning to grow tall, and down to-
ward the Sound, like a blue pond ahead. They ran a
little, they walked, and when he ran behind her, his
eyes fell irresistibly toward her hips forming under
the thin cloth: he caught up with her and got his
arm around her waist. When he was ahead of her,
he heard her feet on the gravel as she came up to
him and held on to him for a moment.
He had felt like getting here today after the hard
winter's work at the Section. Spring day along the
shore. So he'd called Helen.
They reached the shore, roughing each other in
the Spring way of roughing, and sat on the bench
on the concrete walk at the Bay and talked. He said
to her, "Do you know what that is on the other
side? That's China ....
"China," he said again, and was still for seconds,
with his hands on his chin, elbows on knees and
staring out over the Sound, over the low blue water
with the sailboats heeling over and the planes test-
ing up above, and he stared at Helen, the massed
golden-brown hair, her eyes laughing and laughing.
Gray. High cloudless sky. Dimitroff free on May
Day in Moscow, free now in Soviet Russia under a
;sky like this, free and fighting and forever free.
The South Bronx, organizing down there, the
wreaths for the dead in the doorways of the Irish
brownstone houses on 140th Street framed in snow,
and snow on the power-house walls. Dimitroff in the
dock at Leipzig. They couldn't hold him. He look-
ed at Helen quizzically as if about to say some-
thing ...•
"Well," she said.
"Ever since that National Training School," he
said, "I've begun to think that maybe I have a job
right here at the Section. Last year I looked for
work and came down to the Section evenings, but
I'd like to forget about a job and just work down
there, though I need a little money .... What would
you say if it happened that I became a full-time
functionary in the Party?"
"I think it would be grand," she said. "Si thinks
it's just the thing for you, you're cut out for it."
"I was down to the District three weeks ago,"
he said, and she could see that he was holding in a
lot of joy.
"There's plenty to do everywhere, and there's a
chance for some of us here to go out and rake the
surface, y'see, start the ball rolling for a united front
party, and while I just talked it over with Si down-
town, well, I think I could go ....
But, you see, I
don't want to leave New York particularly, I think
there's plenty to do here ....
Anyway, after the
Seventh World Congress."
Water rolling up on the shore, and he could re-
10
member coming here as a boy, summer after sum·
mer. He told her about the time he had scrambled
in over the side of the cabin cruiser in his cotton
bathing suit, and the parties on the lawns and under
the trees, Charley Abramson's and Irving's and
Benny's families going up and spreading lunches,
and Helen remembered coming up once or twice,
too. That had been after the War, and thinking
about it now it seemed even farther back. Mid·
afternoon over the Sound, today he felt bound to
remember this, to do exactly this, sit on the bench
across from the green tongue he had called China
when first he walked along here, holding his father's
hand-sit
here and remember that childhood during
and after the War. Overhead were the trees and
the hot sky shining down over the families spreading
lunches on the grass, fragrance of face powder, the
pungent smell of hard-boiled eggs out of wrappers.
The fathers after the lunch sleeping or talking, their
voices deep and wise as they talked politics and the
War and work. He and other boys ran away from
all the old, wise voices, to go down and live their
childhood fiercely with hands and feet and eyes.
The voices, the laughter of young mothers, 1919,
1920, 1921, enormously distant. Rice Stadium, the
stone steps silent. He ran up those steps one hot
day to the very top, and up at the top his heart
pounded, sweat streamed into his eyes....
"Would you go with me if I were to leave New
York?" he asked suddenly.
The color came into her full, round face with its
skin toned to the color of her hair, the faintest tinge
of brown, showing darker now. "Why, Harry"-
laughing-"Harry
I"
and letting his arm slide up
to her breast. They looked at each other. "Blue,"
he said softly. "Blue, that's your color ....
'God,
think of that, I'm beginning to feel that I'm in, in
for life, nothing else, no running after anything
anymore-"
"I know that, I know what that means, Harry
I
I
remember an evening almost two years ago, decid·
ing something and it does something to you-"
"And Sam," he said, "Sam told me about going
down to Washington in 1932 just a scared kid."
The marvelous thing, of decisions made, some of
those fellows at the National Training School had
told him stories. It was wonderful but not singular,
a law underneath all that deciding, everywhere over
the country, men sitting down and saying and put-
ting together and subtracting in all kinds of houses
and places. That Cuban kid from the University of
Havana Sam had introduced him to, the same thing
down there in Cuba ....
Running one afternoon. How old was he? He
was 'something small and running, that was all, and
the street was Fox approaching \Vestchester, it must
have been April, icicles dripping down, and running
and running up Fox toward Westchester to beat the
MAY,
1936
