The call, p.96
The Call, page 96
At this point, Treadup writes, he became convinced that the decent, kindly young Communists who had so impressed him and so honored him in the first months after their arrival had for some reason all gone stark raving mad. “Or was I still in my box, was I mad? Was all this a chimera?” He was, at any rate, furious. In a very loud voice he called out to the speaker: “Those are all lies.”
The crowd let out a sigh of what seemed to Treadup a gaseous kind of applause: “Aaaah!”
The speaker, however, was pleased. This was apparently just what he had wanted. He appeared to believe that his victim had by his outburst hopelessly lost face. He said, “You tell the truth, then. Were you a mu-shih in the following places: Paoting, also the villages of Ma Ch’iao, Ch’en Ts’un, Shao T’an, Li Chia, Ho Chao, Ku Chuan, T’u Ti?”
Treadup could not deny that he had been.
At this the speaker took off with a long harangue on Christianity—supernatural riddles to confuse simple minds, a device of the upper classes to make the oppressed think that their miseries would be eased in another world, and so to be able to keep on exploiting them—and it came clearly, if belatedly, to David Treadup that his crime was that of being an abstraction.
At once I was faced with this: Why not tell them I had lost the best part of my faith? They were barking up the wrong tree. They could not object to the freethinker I thought I had become. But no. I instantly decided I could not do that—any more than I could have told Emily of my change of heart and mind. The man who was on trial here was that other man who was me in the past. I could not turn my back on him. I must defend myself in him. And anyhow, I had to face it that whatever I might say would be useless. A defense against such magnificently fraudulent charges would itself take on the taint of fraud. But of course I couldn’t help myself. I had to try to fight.
TREADUP (again loudly, this time not to his accuser but to the crowd) “Some of you know me. Tell this man. I taught you to read and write.”
ACCUSER (as if in answer to what had just been said) “Jesus did not understand the laws of dialectics. Love can only function in a classless society. Where there are classes, a tiger can only love a tiger—it eats all others. Jesus tried to build a bridge directly from a slave society to the Kingdom of God. His revolution failed. It had to. He did not take into account the necessary steps of social development. What do you say to that?”
It was extremely difficult to deal with this kind of talk. I couldn’t parry his gospel with the one I had abandoned. Whatever I might say, it would be delivering a punch to a pillow full of feathers.
TREADUP “I say that you find me guilty first, and then put me on trial afterward.”
ACCUSER “You think it is enough that Lin Fu-chen recently called you ‘a good man.’ ” (“I was shocked at how much these people knew. How could he have known this? Mr. Lin and I had had a private conversation.”) “You think it was enough to ‘do good’ in the villages I have named. But what you did weakened the people’s resistance to the landlords. You confused class distinctions. You did not work according to the dialectics of Ma K’e Sze.”
TREADUP “I have studied Marx. Your own people have been telling me until recently that my work in the villages was in accordance with his and your principles. Why this turnaround? I have been trying for weeks to find out why you arrested me.”
I could see by a flicker in the eyes of my un-friend that I had scored at least a minor point. He must have sat in on discussions of my work with the local team. But my little success, if it was one, passed unnoticed where it counted, with The People. For my accuser now began to call on men and women from “my” villages to testify against me. This was the cruelest mockery of all. As I saw it, the poor villagers had been fed bushels of lies to vomit out on me.
The first to testify was one-armed Mi Tu-ch’uan, the splendid young man who, being left behind in the village because of his infirmity, had become the local wise man and, in his early twenties, the village elder, and who had worked so closely and affectionately with Treadup. He could not bring himself to look at the accused as he told of having dug out the mu-shih’s k’ang after he had been taken away by the Japanese, and having found hidden, in a hole alongside its oven, an American-manufactured military rifle—an M1. (“Their falsehoods were made of cement—convincing details. My old fowling piece, with which I used to hunt snipe, and which I kept wrapped in rags in a cavity in the k’ang to keep it clean!”) A man whom Treadup had never seen before said that the accused had extorted grain from the farmers and had delivered it to an American corporation based in Paoting—“a landlord to landlords.”
Fighting for my sanity, I worked it out that this last charge must have arisen from some kind of misunderstanding of my transactions, buying grain for my starving villagers with the relief money I’d raised in Peking, back before the war. But then at once I realized I had let myself be drawn into a zone of plausibility which was very dangerous to my reason. I bit my lip to keep myself from saying anything.
As if to reinforce this plausibility, one witness after another acknowledged that the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives were above blame, and granted that Treadup had done “some good things.” But the word “exploit” was the catchword in refrain.
It was a long entertainment, lasting most of the day, in the tradition of Peking opera. My knees were in great pain.
When at last the show appeared to be boring even the Accuser, he called on the crowd once more to acclaim, viva voce, the guilt of the prisoner.
Was he an enemy of the people?
In the roar I now heard, I thought I could distinguish different tones—of the gullible, of those who hated the abstraction I represented, of those who knew some history and would never forgive the foreign powers for their part in it, but also of some who were too shrewd and wise to have been taken in by the charade of the day, and—oh, yes, I could hear them—of those who loved me. They all pronounced the same word: Yes!
The Party Secretary of the district delivered the sentence, which had obviously been written out before the trial began: Despite the guilt proven before the People’s Court, despite the crimes against the Chinese people of the prisoner, despite his conspiracy with the American government to oppress the Chinese people, and because of his mixed record, which included certain mitigating evidence of attempts to “do good,” this man would not be returned to prison, where some might think he belonged for the rest of his life, but instead would be expelled forever from the People’s Republic of China.
* * *
—
HE WAS given thirty days in which to arrange transportation. The team leaders in the area of the villages were now just as cordial to him as they had been when they first arrived. They returned his diaries, which they had “borrowed”—and of course, this was where they had found some of the material they had used against him in the trial, such as Mr. Lin’s praise of him. Many villagers came to call, and perfectly openly said that Mi Tu-ch’uan and the other village witnesses had of course not meant what they had testified that day. Of course he would understand that all those things had all been “necessary.”
Their attitude toward the fiasco of the trial fascinated me. Many of those people truly liked me, perhaps even loved me; I really believe so. They seemed to accept that in a time of change—change that was giving them hopes far more opulent than those I had been able to offer them—certain celebratory rituals would be necessary. In a way, my trial was like one of the political planting songs they dance to. The pleasing emotion they feel while dancing has no relationship to “facts” or “reality” or “truth.” It never occurred to them that they were committing a crime of violence against me, because, as they saw it, the ritual itself simply asked an abstract figure to atone for real crimes committed against them for a long time by much larger outside forces, as vague but also as threatening to them as fox spirits, of which the abstract man is asked to be a miniature representation. After the trial, I was no longer abstract. I was the man they knew and liked, and they resumed their former relationship with me, not knowing that my heart was broken.
A SOLEMN CHARGE
JUNE 4, 1950, Thornhill, N.Y.
On one of the many buzzer buttons he had himself rigged within reach of the various places in the apartment where he might come to rest, he tapped, in Morse code, the three dots, three dashes, and three dots by which mariners radio to nearby vessels their cry for help in extremity: SOS, Save Our Ship.
Unknown waves before me roll,
Hiding treacherous rock and shoal…
Downstairs, in the Hurds’ rooms, the rasping sounds of the buzzer, which Treadup had installed in the kitchen, made Gertrude Hurd, who was ironing clothes and listening to the radio, jump so that she dropped the iron with a clatter to the floor. She pulled its plug and raced upstairs. Mr. Treadup was slumped over in a chair in the sun window, with a notebook in his lap.
* * *
—
THE NOTEBOOK has scrawled on its cover: ADDENDUM TO SEARCH. Philip Treadup would later come on these recent entries, among many others—all presumably written here in the Hurds’ house, at this very window, in the months since his father’s return from China:
• Coming home from China, I went aloft in an airplane for the first time in my life. The Chinese took me to Canton by train and slipped me out to the lip of the New Territories of Hong Kong, where, at the very border, they simply dumped this enemy of the people to fend for himself. I still had some money saved up from UNRRA, and casting it to the winds, I rose into the air on the back of Pegasus. My lecture on aviation was written longhand on the folds of my brain—the dynamics of the parallelogram of forces on the curved upper edge of the wing—the ratio of thrust to mass—the torque of the propeller—all theoretical. But this, this was real, this rising spiral up out of the bowl of Hong Kong into a blue blue of elation—my heart was amazingly strong in its response to such magic. Pegasus leapt to Hanoi, Rangoon, Calcutta, Karachi, Cairo, Paris, Shannon, Gander, Presque Isle, and New York. The sights I saw! The driest and the wettest parts of the earth; snowy peaks and desert sand; jungles and barrens; and castles of clouds worth a century of dreams. I was out of touch with the mystery I used to call God, but I trembled more than once in awe at the inventiveness of whatever forces, blind or intelligent, had shaped all that I saw. Of course it would be son Philip to meet me on the ground at New York. I was on ‘terra firma,’ but I was not home. I collapsed in Customs.
• In my imagination, my sons stand around me. Philip is pallid. He does the right thing, every time. Gentle with his children. I can imagine his pupils dropping off to sleep in the classroom. Abbo, how I love that impassioned boy! Who, I guess, hates me. Unable to hear, he sees everything—too clearly. And Paul? What, in his upbringing, made him such a materialist?
• My lost love. I sit in this sunny window, in this little room, looking out on a horse chestnut tree, its shamelessly erotic blossoms giving their lust to the bright light of a June day, and I remember. O Emily, I remember everything. I remember the evening at Syracuse, long before I could be sure of you, when I took you to vespers at Park Church, down in the city, and afterward I “tried to say some kind words.” I don’t remember what they were. They must have been awkward, and, to be sure, they fell far short of the feeling behind them. What I remember now is that as you responded—kindly, too, but of course without the steady knowledge that I already had—you tilted your head. We were near a street lamp. Your eyes glistened, almost as though you were crying. What I saw, as clearly as if the summer light of this sensuous moment of this day of my old age had been showering down all around us then, was your mysterious calm. Sometimes over the years your serenity frightened me, because it was so deep, I could not sound it to its bottom. But I, an old man, am a young man looking now into your eyes under the streetlight on the sidewalk outside Park Church, and I see that you have the calm of someone to whom it has been given to know how to love. What I saw then is what I have worshiped all my life. Christ was my metaphor. You were my reality. You had the secret of peace on earth, and goodwill.
• All America is suffering from the “lost love” pain. China. There is much talk about why we “lost” China—as if we ever “had” China. The loss I feel, coming back this time, is in the stable values of our society. We no longer seem to hold to the simple Emersonian law that good deeds will be rewarded and mean deeds will reap retribution. In fact, the doers of mean deeds appear to have frightened the country so much that they have been, virtually speaking, put in charge. Senator McCarthy: Look!—he’s driving out “the China hands,” so many of whom are sons of missionaries. Why? Ironically, because they loved, and understood, the China we have “lost.” So here’s a paradox: The Communists hound me, a neo-missionary, out of China, and the American tiger-hunters hound the “mishkids” out of the State Department—me because I am un-Chinese, and them because they are un-American. It is not the object of love America has lost, so much as the capacity for it.
* * *
—
GERTRUDE HURD used Mr. Treadup’s telephone to call an ambulance. She then called Dr. McCandless; her husband, at his job in Ossining; Philip’s wife at the school; and Paul’s secretary at his office in New York. Then she looked at the clock: nine fifty-five.
It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to arrive. Mr. Treadup was breathing as if he were snoring; all she could get by way of pulse was a fluttering like that of a moth trying to get out a window.
The ambulance came. The two attendants were calm as checkout clerks at a supermarket. One of them put an oxygen breather, attached to a small portable tank, to Treadup’s nose and mouth, while the other unfolded a stretcher. It was all the two men could do to lift the huge ruin and carry the bulk of it aslant down the narrow stairs.
Gertrude Hurd rode with Mr. Treadup to the hospital in the ambulance. She told Philip the next day, “Everything was done that could be done. I was a wreck. I wanted to climb right into a hospital bed myself. I love your father. He surprises you every moment with the sweetness that’s hidden under that power he has. Do I have to say ‘had’?”
* * *
—
PHILIP, who had farther to come than Paul, arrived first, at about five in the afternoon. Dr. McCandless told him that the outlook was unclear; Philip’s father’s history of previous minor cardiac disturbances was not encouraging. Dr. McCandless spent the entire night in the room with his patient; when Philip considerately asked, during the evening, if the doctor shouldn’t go home and get some rest, McCandless said, “With most patients, I certainly would.” Philip sat the night out in the visitors’ room at the end of the hall. Big Paul arrived at about ten o’clock, demanded to see his father, found some things at once to complain about, in the sick man’s presence, to Dr. McCandless, and then began blustering at the nurse’s desk about putting the old man in a better room. One nurse finally asked him if he wanted her to call four orderlies to remove him from the hospital. He told Phil he liked it that she knew she would have needed four.
At about ten thirty, while all this was going on, David Treadup had a second heart attack.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING, Dr. McCandless, himself ashen, stubbled, and drawn, said to the sons that the second attack probably would have been fatal had their father not been in the hospital, where immediate emergency measures could be taken. Paul said he had two important appointments in the city, and left. Philip spent the day in the room. His father was weak and exhausted. In the afternoon, he seemed to regain strength. When Gertrude Hurd came in the room, he took her hand and said he was sorry to have “put her through the wringer.” She kissed his hand and cried. Later he joked with Philip about Paul. “The Treadups have one mule in every generation,” he said, allying himself with Paul.
Things seemed to be going well, and Philip and Dr. McCandless both went home for a night’s sleep.
When they returned the next morning, the sixth, they found him weaker, though no further attack had been observed. Paul showed up. The two sons decided to send a telegram to Absolom—he had no phone. Late in the afternoon, an answer was delivered:
HEY POP HANG IN THERE COMING TOMORROW.
Paul took the telegram in to their father. He understood it and spoke pleasure with his eyes.
* * *
—
DAVID TREADUP’S big heart had nothing left but a whisper on the morning of the seventh. Dr. McCandless said there was such serious damage from the second attack that there was little hope for the heart to function normally again. Paul met Absolom at Grand Central and took him out to the hospital; they arrived in midafternoon. Their father was drowsy from his medication, but he opened his eyes, recognized Absolom, and said puzzling words, which, as Philip later wrote in a long letter to his Aunt Grace, the three boys finally figured out to have been an effort to get out an exultant shout from a childhood game: “Ally-ally in, home free!”
Soon after, he lost consciousness. He roused a few times after that, murmured, and floated back into the dark.
At a few minutes before six that evening—no one remembered later exactly what time it happened—the torn muscle of life stopped the faithful work it had done for almost seventy-two years.
