The Fifth Column Read online

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  For Martin and Louis

  1939–1941. While there was already a war raging in Europe, at home there was intense, widespread opposition to President Roosevelt getting America involved. Isolationists still controlled Congress and the State Department, pushing the president to remain neutral. The America First Committee enjoyed widespread support. Charles Lindbergh, after Roosevelt the second-most-admired man in America, was an outspoken Nazi sympathizer, often butting heads with the administration. The National Socialist Bund, a powerful pro-German organization headquartered in Yorkville on New York’s Upper East Side, a uniquely German neighborhood, defended Hitler and his transformation of the German Republic in fiery, public rallies. German families even spent summer weekends at pro-Nazi camps in New Jersey and on Long Island, where children wore swastikas on their arms, sang patriotic German songs, and gave Nazi salutes just like the Hitler Youth back in Germany.

  As Roosevelt supplied arms and equipment to the Brits and Russians, fears grew that Germans long buried in the fabric of our society were actually Nazi agents who would carry out acts of sabotage should America enter the war. On one day alone, in 1939, some 2,850 reports of suspected German espionage were reported to the FBI. Those fears flamed the highest in February of that year, when over 22,000 Nazi supporters in khaki uniforms, waving swastikas and singing German songs, packed New York’s Madison Square Garden for a raucous, hate-filled rally. This story begins on that night.

  1

  FEBRUARY 1939

  “Eli, just one more,” I said to the man behind the bar, sliding my glass across to him. “The same.”

  “How about we think about calling it a night, Mr. Mossman?” the barman replied, likely detecting that rise in my voice that immediately gave me away when I’d had one too many. “What is that now, two, three?”

  He was being kind. It was four, actually. Four Rob Roys. And he knew just how I liked them. A jigger of Cutty with only a wave of vermouth skirted around the edge. Pretty much scotch on the rocks for anyone else. Along with an ashtray full of Chesterfield butts. That’s how I passed every Tuesday and Thursday eve.

  But he was right—I ought to get myself home. I had a wife and a daughter there, the remains of a once-happy family, even if it was now more of a memory than a fact. For weeks now, after work—if you even called it work, what I did these days, teaching evening classes in U.S. history to immigrants applying for citizenship—I’d been stopping by this dark, smoky bar with its red neon sign flickering on and off—Eli’s, Eli’s … It was in a part of the city most people steered away from after dark, south of Madison Square Garden and north of Forty-second, where the Greyhound Line buses came in. I always instructed the Irish owner who manned the bar as I took a stool, “Just the one, Eli.…” Only to make the bus ride across town and the rickety Lexington IRT back to Yorkville more bearable (though I usually threw my wobbly ass into a cab) and to go over the stories of the day: the deteriorating situation in Europe; that madman Hitler threatening to take over the Sudetenland; the wave of America Firsters and our own isolationist Congress seemingly closing their eyes to the looming danger there. What every thinking person in this increasingly blind world could clearly see.

  But invariably, the “one” had a way of always turning into two, and two, three—as the discussion heated. “Let those Europeans work it out for themselves,” Eli would say. “Me, I don’t want a single one of our boys dying over there for them. Not after the last war…”

  And then the three might become four, or even more, until it was clear as the torment on my face why I was really there, drinking myself into a dulled state, and that it wasn’t all over the gloomy condition in Europe.

  That clearly, undeniably, I simply didn’t want to go home. That home merely reminded me of the promise and hope rapidly fading from my life. That once I had been in the doctoral program at Columbia, instructing graduate candidates in nineteenth-century European history while I finished my dissertation. That once I had a smart and beautiful wife who thought of me as the center of her universe, but now looked at me with scorn and disappointment—if she even looked at me at all. And a daughter, Emma, the apple of my eye no matter what I had done to ruin things, who had seen me stagger home more sideways than straight far more times than she could even count to at the age of four. “Mommy, what’s wrong with Daddy?” she would ask. “Is he sick?”

  “Yes, honey, Daddy’s just not feeling well,” Liz would say, doing her best to cover for me.

  Hearing my daughter’s words and seeing her questioning look was the most painful part of it for me. Still, as bad as things had become with Liz, and whenever it was that our troubles had truly begun, tonight, it seemed, the whole city was in the same state of unrest. Maybe the world.

  Tonight, over twenty thousand supporters of that maniac Hitler had gathered at Madison Square Garden to listen to finger-pointing fascists spew their hate and vitriol on the Jews and the international interests who were threatening our society. Thousands, dressed in khaki shirts and armbands or even in their business suits draped in Nazi flags, listening to anti-Semites like Fritz Kuhn, Father Coughlin, and Joseph McWilliams (known as “Joe McNazi)” rile them up into a hate-filled state; shouting their vile calumnies against the Jews and Bolsheviks who they claimed had infiltrated our government and were now running our country. Bernard Baruch. Henry Morganthau. Felix Frankfurter. And our president, Franklin Delano “Jewsavelt,” and his Commie New Deal.

  I’d heard there were over two thousand of New York’s policemen trying to keep order over on Eighth Avenue, and thousands of protestors, the last line of sanity in this world, shouting back and pointing fingers at them for their treatment of Jews in Europe, shouting, “Fascists! Make Europe safe for everyone.”

  Now, three hours later, the bastards were still roaming the streets around town in raucous bands of six or ten, singing Nazi songs, busting into fistfights with hecklers who flung curses and garbage back at them. Railing against the “interventionists” who were trying to draw America into Europe’s unrest. America is for Americans, they would say. Yes, it was all crazy. Not just in my soul, in my conscience tonight, but everywhere.

  Eli, just one more.

  Eli, in his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a matching apron around his waist, looked at me with a philosophical shake of his head, the wisdom that came from serving a thousand people like me with similarly empty souls: Don’t you have something better to do with your life, son, than sit here? His look said, You’re smart. Educated. You’re not like the usual riffraff who crawl their way in here this time of night. Go on home. You’ve got a beautiful gal waiting for you there, an adorable daughter. Didn’t you show me their picture once?

  But then he just shrugged—that complacent, unjudging bartender’s shrug that says, I just give ’em what they want. And he reached to the shelf for the open bottle of Cutty and filled my glass one more time. “Your poison, young man.”


  Yes, my poison.

  This time I waved off the vermouth and took a gulp, no longer even feeling the bite of the alcohol, just the warmth of it going down and doing its job. Forgetting.

  “You know what tonight is, Eli?” I asked him. I lit another cigarette.

  “All I know is it’s one woeful night to make a living,” he said, turning his blue Irish eyes at the sparse crowd and at the bedlam going on outside.

  You could still hear bands of them parading down West Forty-third Street, roaming the deserted, trash-lined streets, drunkenly singing their “patriotic” songs, kicking over trash cans, scrawling swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs on store windows. The cops all seemed to look the other way. All they wanted was for it all to go away. Hell, half of them probably felt the same way as the mob if you asked them over a beer. Last October, only five months ago, almost a hundred Jews—old men, women, rabbis, even babies—had been murdered throughout Germany, with hundreds more beaten senseless in the streets or protecting their homes and synagogues. Jewish businesses and religious sites trashed and destroyed; Torahs and Talmuds defaced. Kristallnacht, they called it—The Night of Broken Glass. All egged on and even sanctioned by the Reich. The very people these drunken idiots here were celebrating tonight. The world was horrified. It had been the deadliest state-sanctioned attack on Jews since the violent pogroms in Russia in the early part of the century. It made people—even the ones who had supported them initially—think, what had these Nazis unleashed? What dark demons of the soul had they let loose? How could we avoid war?

  But as bad as it was outside, it only mirrored the turmoil playing out in my own soul. My once-promising career and marriage were now corkscrewing into a fiery crash like one of those downed Messerschmitts on the newsreels.

  It had all begun about a year ago, when the head of the history department was changed at Columbia, my old friend Otto Brickman sacked—two-thirds of the way through my thesis on the punishing effects of the Versailles Treaty on Germany today, the damage fell on me. “All this talk about punishing Germany, it’s just a bit too radical for now,” said the new head, Townsend Rusk, a pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed bigot who’d spent ten years in the State Department before taking a cozy position back in the classroom. “Too inflammatory with all that’s happening in the world.”

  But what he was really saying was that there might no longer be a career path for me there. And it was clear it was partly related to my last name. That the full-time professorship I’d had the inside track on with Brickman would now be handed on a platter to someone else. Someone with a different name and background. And that it might be in my best interest to begin looking for a teaching career elsewhere.

  There was still a quota around the Ivy League for Jews on the graduate level, and suddenly it was hitting me square in the face. Three years I’d put into that work, into my job there. And it was gone in a day. So, yes, maybe a drink or two as I looked around for a new position did kind of ease the sting and disappointment.

  And then there was Ben.

  Six months ago, word that my twin brother—six minutes younger, the one with the true brains of the family, we always said (and the guts to put them to use)—had been killed while fighting the fascists in Spain. He’d joined up after a spat we had at our family Seder the year before. “You hate the fascists so much, go sign up and fight them,” I kind of dared him, after he took issue with my thesis argument, that Europe and the United States had forced Germany toward the Nazis by handcuffing them economically with the Versailles Treaty.

  Ben, who was in his second year of residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital up in Boston, looked back at me with that gleam in his eye that said he rarely backed down from a dare. “Maybe I just will” was all he said, going back to the noodle pudding, and not six months later he boarded a freighter across the Atlantic and joined the fight as a medic. My father begged him not to be a fool, not to be such an idealist, but he went nonetheless. In August, we heard he’d been tending to a wounded soldier in a hotel lobby in Valencia when a bomb planted by a Nationalist saboteur blew up most of the lobby. For almost thirty years there hadn’t been a day when my brother wasn’t a part of my life. He was the person I looked up to most. Judged myself against. Competed against. For me, it was hard not to shoulder some of the blame. Certainly, my father, who still hadn’t come back from it, made me feel that way. I was the one who had never put much on the line for anything, but always found a way to get by. He was the one who put himself on the line for everything, and now he was gone.

  That afternoon scotch soon turned into two or three.

  And then came Natalie. Natalie, with the bright, curious eyes and the high-breasted points in her cardigans. An intoxicating sophomore who I kept focusing on more and more in class and I couldn’t stop thinking about (or the bouncy bob in her sweater), until the flirty fixation became the elixir for all that was ailing me in life. This was at Marymount, where I’d finally landed a teaching job after Columbia—undergraduate women this time, a long way from Morningside Heights.

  She would visit me after class, at first with a question or two, and pretty soon, I was locking the office door and had her skirt up and her legs over my head. By then, it was the alcohol doing most of the talking, a lot more than reason or sense. Not so long ago, I had the prettiest, smartest girl I could imagine who thought the world of me. She’d cuddled up to me after a strings concerto at McMillin Theater and said, Charlie, let’s start a family. We met at Columbia—where she was in the doctoral program in musicology, finishing her thesis on Chopin. Now, she barely even talked to me. Could I really blame her? Once the thing with Natalie got out, I hurt her in a way that was beyond repair. Early on, she had begged me to stop. The booze. Blaming myself. For the sake of our marriage. If not, then for our daughter. You’ll get work elsewhere, Charlie. You know that. You will. And for a while, damn it, I did try. When I started at Marymount, I took a look in the mirror and saw the haggard face of someone I didn’t like at all. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I even stopped the booze.

  But then the news of Ben came, and the parts of my life that still hung together with tape couldn’t hold back the grief and guilt that came with it. After the business with Natalie got out and I lost that job too (also maybe thanks to a few classes I hadn’t shown up for and some end-of-semester exams that I had failed to correct in time), Liz threatened to take Emma and leave. “Daddy’s just not well.” Brickman, my old department head at Columbia, said I was pissing away my life. “I’ve seen that next rung down, Charlie, and let me tell you, it’s not a pretty sight.” Now I had a night job twice a week at John Jay College, teaching American history to immigrants aspiring to be citizens.

  I stared at myself in the glass across the bar. I’d found that next rung down.

  And Otto was right—it wasn’t pretty.

  “Here you go, Mr. Mossman.” Eli pushed across my glass. I noticed it was half-filled. He was doing his part.

  “Bottoms up,” I said, throwing a good part of it down in a single gulp. “I never told you what tonight is, did I, Eli…? I mean, why would you know?”

  “No, you didn’t.” The barkeep came up to me.

  It was February 10.

  February 10 was Ben’s birthday. And mine, of course. He would have been thirty today. As was I. I blinked my head clear. I’d let everything slide so deep that I could no longer even see the light above me to crawl out toward. But maybe this would be a good time to try. It was time to own up to a lot of things, I realized. I looked across from me in the mirror at the man sitting at the bar. I knew I had to start fighting sometime. Otherwise I was lost for good. Liz saw it. Brickman saw it. Hell, even Eli saw it. Go home to that pretty wife of yours, Mr. Mossman.

  Ben surely would have seen it too.

  For years, I’d had these two imaginary figures perched on my shoulders—my own personal angel and devil. Fighting in the existential tug-of-war for my soul.

  The voice of reason would always tell m
e: “Put that glass down, go on home. You’re drunk. Go be with Liz and Emma. Before you hit that bottom rung. Look at all that promise you let slip away. This is your last chance.” And on the other shoulder, the voice of temptation, my own little devil, in that ever-denying snicker of his: “Don’t listen to that fool, Charlie. Have one more. Who’ll know? You know how it makes you feel.” Promise … the word felt more like a dagger turned in my gut when it came from him. “That bottom rung, you still got a long, long way to go, Charlie-boy.”

  A long, long way.

  But this time I knew that Eli was right. For once the words penetrated like a beacon of light through the fog. I pushed the unfinished drink back across the bar and threw a few bills on the table. I swiveled off my stool. For once, at long last, maybe I would let Chuck win.

  “Eli—” I started to say.

  Suddenly I heard a loud crash from the front of the bar. I spun around. Someone had taken a metal trash can and hurled it through the front window, which caved in in a shower of glass. A woman screamed. Shattered shards rained in on a couple seated near the door; they leaped up and dodged out of the way. “What the…?”

  Four of those pro-Nazi revelers staggered in. By the looks of them, they’d had one too many. Two wore the typical uniform: khaki shirts with red-and-black armbands; another with red hair and a ruddy complexion was in a suit with a tie yanked down, a Nazi flag draped over his shoulders. He carried a half-drunk bottle of booze.

  “Eli’s…?” The one wearing the flag snorted. “What kind of place is this, some kind of Hymie bar?”

  “I’m as true-born Irish as any of you,” Eli called out from behind the bar. “But I’ll be serving the chief rabbi in Brooklyn before I will any of you, so get your drunken asses out of my place before I call the cops on you. You’re not welcome here.”