armchair, snoring lightly, her head tilted, surrounded by a surprising number of newspapers. He carefully lifted one from her lap and was astounded to see a photograph of the round-faced man with steel-rimmed glasses.
EISLER REPORTED STOWAWAY; SEIZURE IN BRITAIN ASKED
A man who has identified himself as Gerhardt Eisler, native of Germany, is fleeing from the United States aboard the Gdynia-American liner Batory, it became known yesterday. The fugitive is believed to be the former Comintern agent named by the House Un-American Activities Committee as America's No. 1 Communist, jumping $23,500 bail to escape serving a year in jail and other penalties.
The fugitive is bound for Gdynia, but the ship, which sailed last Saturday, will put into Southampton Saturday. To make sure that Polish Communists aboard the ship do not balk a return, the State Dept., at the request of the Dept. of Justice, notified Scotland Yard of the incident and asked that top investigators meet the ship on her arrival in the English port. Scotland Yard was asked to hold the suspect.
If Eisler, the convicted Communist agent, has fled the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court, his bail would be forfeited even though the English authorities returned him, it was said at the Federal Building.
The forfeiture of the $23,500 bail would be a blow to the Civil Rights Congress and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. For a good part of the funds to assure that Eisler would remain within the jurisdiction of the courts was put up by Communist workers and sympathizers, who made sacrifices to do so. The two agencies have fought one of his cases up to the Supreme Court.
Claude glanced up to find his mother watching him.
"He went first class," she said, reaching for the Pabst Blue Ribbon. "I don't feel bad about taking his money."
"What did he do? Was he a spy?"
She shrugged. "Who knows." She leaned forward and angrily pointed at the paper. "They say he filled out forms wrong. They say he didn't report eighteen hundred dollars on his income tax, so he owes them eleven hundred ninety-one dollars. What kind of bullshit is that?"
"A spy for the Nazis?"
"He's a Communist, for God's sake. The Communists fought the Nazis. They fought them harder than anyone else."
Claude sensed that he was not going to understand, and that if his mother understood, she wasn't going to tell him. He read the newspapers thoroughly, learning that Eisler was married and had left his wife behind, that he had a sister who had denounced him. But Claude could not find anything in clear language describing what the man had done. This was a disappointment, since it would have been thrilling were he a bank robber, or better yet a murdererâsomeone like the villains in radio programs. The Green Hornet or Jack Armstrong. But even if the evil in question remained tantalizingly vague, Claude followed the reports in a state of tremendous excitement. This was something real,
something that he was connected to, something that all those people who kept going back and forth outside the fan-shaped window knew nothing about. He could loiter by the newsstand on Lexington Avenue and feel, however temporarily, the importance of his own existence.
He was thrilled to see a photograph of the British authorities carrying Eisler from the
Batory,
holding him by his arms and legs. He followed the descriptions of the subsequent legal proceedings as well as he could, and felt a certain ambivalence at the front-page headlines that announced that the British were not going to send him back to the United States. Claude was happy for Eisler, who had, after all, treated him kindly and given him licorice, but sad too, because the story was over, and Claude could no longer enjoy his secret sense of superiority at the newsstand.
The maestro died in the late spring. One morning, according to Franz, he did not wake up. Claude had done well with scales, with Bach above all, and also with
Jessica Coulter Smith, Smith