Irrepressible (28 page)

One day, a middle-aged woman came to Bob’s law office asking for counsel for her eighteen-year-old son. He’d been arrested on gang rape charges and was being held at City Hall. Bob took the case, but when he arrived to meet his client, the officer on duty told him, “He’s not in jail now.” After some wrangling, the officer admitted that the young man was in District Attorney Frank Coakley’s office.

Bob argued that his client was being interrogated illegally and demanded to be brought to him. The police delayed him with excuses, and as Bob and his client’s mother kept vigil outside the district attorney’s office, they were joined by other lawyers and civil servants and court reporters. Bob repeatedly knocked on Coakley’s door and, through the keyhole, saw the legs of several people, all of whom froze at the sound of his voice (like children playing statues). Eventually, an officer cracked open the door and snarled,
Go away
, as he shoved Bob across the floor to the far railing. Rushing back, Bob crashed his foot through the bottom pane of the frosted glass door and then stuck his head inside in time to see Frank Coakley and other officers of the court vanish out another exit. Bob’s client was soon back in his jail cell with a harrowing tale of illegal detention and intimidation. Decca thought her husband a hero for having exposed Coakley in his lair.

I
N A LETTER sent on Valentine’s Day 1955, thirteen-year-old Dinky informed her grandmother Aranka that she would thereafter be signing her name with two
i
’s, and also that “Nicky has a paper route with The Oakland Tribune now. He gets 19$ a month.”

The following afternoon, ten-year-old Nicky was riding his bike delivering papers when a speeding bus hit and killed him instantly. Dinky had been walking home from school when some children who had seen the accident shouted that her brother had been run over. She ran to Nicky and stayed until the ambulance came. Some neighbors had also gathered, and Dinky overheard one woman say, “If Mrs. Treuhaft was home more, this wouldn’t have happened.” Dinky jumped at the woman, scratching and screaming, until the others pulled them apart.

This was the hour when Decca was driving home from work. Their friends had begun to gather in front of the house, and she knew at once from their sober faces that something was horribly wrong. She rolled down the car window. “What happened, what happened to the children?!” People kept coming over all evening, and the police came to make their report. “Bob was in one room and Decca in another,” Dinky remembered. “They couldn’t talk to one another.” The following day, Decca sent this telegram:

About two hundred people attended Nicky’s funeral. There was a big white coffin and flowered wreaths. Pele thought the formality and remote ritual of the event was contrary to the Treuhafts’ taste, but neither Bob nor Decca was in any condition to object. Dobby was at the service, too, and afterward accompanied the family to the gravesite in Guerneville, not far from where Decca and Bob had married. Afterward, they held a memorial dinner at the home of some friends near the Russian River.

“Darling Muv,” Decca wrote from Sonoma County,

Nicky had enjoyed a sweet nature and inquiring turn of mind that intimated the man he might have become. The December before, he had spent endless hours helping “Low Price Al” sell Christmas trees in a nearby lot. He “never got a cent for all that arduous child labor,” Pele said, which led her to fondly call him “No Price Nick.” Aranka had felt a special connection to this grandchild, which he had reciprocated. Once, hearing that Aranka would be coming to visit in a few weeks, Nicky made up Benjy’s bed with fresh sheets and sent his little brother to sleep in the closet with orders to stay there until their grandmother arrived. Nicky had stayed with her in New York over the previous summer, when they had explored the various science and history museums. He’d been such good company she had planned to bring him along on her next junket to Paris.

Decca’s friends marveled at how she coped. They would have understood if she had demonstrated a more public, lavish grief. If at any time she blamed Bob, blamed herself, or raged at her fate, she did so out of sight of friends, who saw her only as “stoic.” She drank a lot, but then again, she often did. “Brave Little D,” Muv had called her after Esmond died. Decca confided in Pele once and only briefly about Julia, the baby she and Esmond
had lost to illness. This tragedy, like that and all the others, had to be borne. She stayed in the house for a month after Nicky’s funeral. She had caught a bad flu and then passed it to the children, so there was nursing to keep her busy. Benjy’s illness persisted for so long that Bob and Decca began to consider it “unexpressed unhappiness.”

Decca buried what she could and railed instead at dramatic sorrow. Her mother-in-law’s nature was to be more extravagant in her grief, and back in New York, Aranka wrote a series of letters to Decca and Bob detailing her loneliness and pain. Bob wrote frequently to commiserate with his mother, but Aranka’s lamentations tried Decca’s patience. The younger woman didn’t have the words to console her mother-in-law and felt that her first duty was to Dinky and Benjy. A month after Nicky’s death, she wrote to Aranka:

Aranka’s other grandchildren might offer some consolation and keep her occupied, Decca wrote, “if you’d let them.”

Bob went back to work, but Decca’s job had all but vanished in her absence. As much as she wished it could still dig itself out, the Civil Rights Congress had been decimated: attacked as a Communist front, its funding dried up, its national leaders imprisoned, and its members’ list lately composed of more agents than Communists. Any one of those spying agents (without hearts of stone) might have recorded in her file,
Subject presents little threat now
. Decca simply hadn’t the energy or the optimism to rouse the troops. For both Treuhafts, this was a moment of dormancy, with all happiness deferred. And yet there had to be food for the children, clean clothes, homework. Longing and loneliness were the themes of daily life.

IN MAY, BOB reapplied for their passports, fully expecting them to be denied as usual. Twelve weeks later, the Treuhaft family received these “magic document[s]” in the mail. The occasion was as “unbelievable and stunning as winning the Irish Sweepstakes.” After sixteen years, Decca desperately wanted to go home. She wanted to see her family and “was longing to stay as long as possible.”

Fearful that the passports had been issued by some mistake, a newly adrenalized Decca planned the family’s getaway like a secret military campaign. They immediately booked passage on a French ocean liner, the
Flandre
, from New York. Dinky was sent ahead to stay with Aranka in New York until Decca and Benjy arrived by a later cross-country train. Bob would take a plane, and they’d all rendezvous just before boarding the boat.

This signaled a new turn, something so surprising, unexpected, and good that Decca and Bob’s friends, who had shared their grief, now shared their exultation through a series of dinners and parties with cakes in the shape of ships. Bob and Decca would be missed, of course, but who couldn’t help but think that if there were a synonym for
miracle
in the Marxist lexicon, it would have to be
fortuitous mistake
or
beautiful escape
. At one of their bon voyage parties, which had been given by the Crawfords (a family of intellectuals and labor activists with ties to the Harlem Renaissance), Decca fell into conversation with their host’s daughter. Nebby Lou Crawford “at the discontented age of seventeen was madly jealous of Dinky’s good fortune.” Decca, feeling sympathetic and enthusiastic now and as always tending to the philosophy of the more the merrier, spontaneously invited Nebby Lou to join her family on their European travels.

It must have seemed a dreamlike excursion, crossing the country again. While eight-year-old Benjy and Nebby Lou amused themselves with endless games of cards, Decca sat alone to contemplate the prospect of her return. The constant battle to make things work had stretched the little money they had. They hadn’t much to travel on, but there was still a bit in England in her running-away account. Over the years, she had tried to
withdraw the balance, but had always been stymied. Ironic now that it would be there to welcome her home, all the time accumulating interest at Drummonds Bank.

Aranka rushed to meet Decca and company at the New York train station. She had dramatic news. Their friends had telephoned to say a telegram had arrived at the Treuhaft house in Oakland. Dated August 16, 1955, it read

The government was demanding their passports back, and now there were agents on their trail to retrieve them. Even if they’d imagined that scenario a thousand times, it still must have felt like a cosmic joke when proved true. Bob had jumped on a red-eye from San Francisco and would be there any minute. Meanwhile, they would hide out at Bob’s sister Edith’s apartment.

Decca recounted their evasion of authorities as a kind of Marx Brothers comedy of mistaken identities and ships’ gangways pulled away at the last minute. Everyone must have been operating on a kind of jittery, caffeinated intensity that made them forget everything else but the action at that instant. Decca had a talent for organizing under duress, and she and Bob and Aranka combined their considerable resources to plot a clandestine escape. Aranka volunteered to keep Benjy with her. They couldn’t use their tickets on the
Flandre
, since it would be watched. No warrant had yet been served, so as long as they could avoid one and they held their passports, their travel remained ostensibly legal. They looked for any kind of immediate transport. The next day, Bob found the last cabin on the French ocean liner
Liberté
. They were out of money, but generously, Aranka bought them tickets and cabins.

As they pulled out of the harbor, leaving behind the Statue of Liberty, they celebrated their narrow escape with champagne. Out in international
waters, Decca and Bob shed their status of rebels and renegades and felt for the first time in years unscrutinized, out from under their fortress mentality.

On the crossing, Dinky and Nebby Lou had their own independent adventures while Decca and Bob consoled each other. “There were no tears on the trip,” at least when Dinky was around. “We all pushed it away. That was our family style.”

DECCA HAD BEEN away from England for sixteen years. As she reunited with family and friends, she remarked on how much her contemporaries had changed while the older people like Muv and Nanny seemed to have stayed the same. (Perhaps, she said, because they had always seemed so old to her.)

Debo met them in London accompanied by her young son and daughter. Thus assembled, the company took the monumental trip up to Inch Kenneth. The train ride showed Decca “the half remembered English countryside, so green, so rolling, so carefully cultivated, so unlike the bare brown hills of California.” (However much she liked California, she never thought much of those brown hills.) Muv called this reunion with her children and grandchildren “one of the happiest moments of my life,” and Decca felt the same. She had succeeded in putting thousands of miles between herself and the life she had made—which had in recent years become one of endurance and struggle and then, recently, anguish after Nicky’s death. Her mother knew what it was like to lose a son. On Inch Kenneth, Decca could slough off some of her burden long enough to simply accept her mother’s comfort and consolation. Later she would say, “There was something rather amazing about her unreserved loyalty to all the children, even me! And anyhow, Bob was fascinated by all this, he’d never seen anything like Inch Kenneth, or my mother’s way of life.” Muv would economize by eliminating napkins at meals, but she would send the
rest of her linens, round trip by train, to be laundered by Harrods department store in London. She also “sent dirty banknotes to Harrods’ bank to be exchanged for nice crisp new ones.”