Free The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman Page A

telephone to ask if she could stop by. She liked to sit with a martini or highball at the kitchen table while I fed Abby, or on the closed toilet in the bathroom while I bathed her, recounting tales of her complicated love life and asking my advice, which, to my knowledge, she never took. I didn’t blame her for that either. You could fit what I knew about balancing numerous love affairs on the head of a pin and still have plenty of room for angels. Mostly, I remained silent and hid my discomfort when I felt her studying me as if I were ablueprint and looking at Charlie as if he were breakfast. On second thought, maybe my wariness of her boiled down to nothing more than that. Charlie.
    Halfway through the marinated London broil that January night at the dinner party, the conversation turned to two Harvard professors whom Senator McCarthy had hauled before an investigative committee a few days earlier. I was surprised that the group had taken so long to get around to the subject. One of the editors suggested the two professors should have taken the Fifth rather than answer the noxious and by now familiar question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
    “They obviously didn’t want to end up blacklisted,” the other editor’s wife pointed out.
    “But now that they’ve answered one question, they either have to answer the rest by naming names or face contempt of Congress charges,” the writer said.
    “Anyone who names names is a traitor and a stoolie.” That was Frank Tucker. “It must be wonderful,” I’d said to him once, “to see the world so clearly in black and white.”
    “You ought to know, babe,” he’d answered.
    “You never know what you’ll do until you’re sitting in the hot glare of the press lights or, even worse, in the shadows of some obscure government office,” Charlie reasoned.
    “I know what I’d do,” Tucker insisted.
    I sat listening to the familiar arguments, noticing the wine stains I’d have to put in the sink to soak before I went to bed, trying to ignore Frank Tucker blowing his nose in my linen dinner napkin. Mouths moved, food went in, opinions came out. Sonia put a hand on Charlie’s arm to make a point, then left it there for a moment or two. The conversation grew more heated. It was a miracle I even heard Abby’s whimpers through all the noise.
    I didn’t bother to excuse myself. No one would notice I was gone. I made my way quietly down the hall to Abby’s room, closed thedoor behind me, and lifted her out of the crib. Her arms closed around my neck in a baby-powder-and-spit-up-scented choke hold.
    I checked her diaper, but I knew before I felt the cloth that it was dry and clean.
    I carried her to the rocking chair and sat. My feet started us in motion; my hand patting her back kept rhythm with the movement. I began to sing about the cotton being high, her daddy rich, and her mama good-looking. The cries subsided to whimpers, then went quiet, but I kept rocking and singing. I was having too good a time to stop. I moved from Porgy and Bess to “Of Thee I Sing.” It was a Gershwin night. Down the hall, the argument continued to rage. The words snitch and betrayal and blacklist hammered on the closed door. I heard Charlie’s voice, though I couldn’t make out the words—he wasn’t shouting; he never shouted—then Sonia’s laugh, rising and falling like an electric fountain. I kept rocking and patting and singing.
    “Who cares if the sky cares to fall in the sea? So long as I care for you and you care for me,” I sang softly into Abby’s velvet ear. I knew I had the lyrics out of order, but that was okay. The sentiment was on the mark.
    The sentiment, it occurs to me now, was my anthem at the time. Each morning, when I padded to the front door to take in the newspapers, I found myself staring into the fleshy smirking face of Senator Joe McCarthy. Every time I turned on the radio, he was warning of communists in the State