Activity

The afternoon is fading, the brilliant north light vanishing from the studio. Grace and I replace our coffees with scotch. We remain silent for a bit in the gathering darkness. Then Grace lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and says:

“I guess I’m an old-fashioned ideologue. For me, discipline is…

“Marxism stirred me deeply,” Grace says, leaning back in one of her two chairs, crossing her long, blue-jeaned legs on her low table. “It struck chords in me as deep as the remembrance of New England. It transformed the memory of those isolated human efforts, made my parents’ lives a thing of beaut…

Rindzer falls silent. Glances out his window. Plays with the venetian blind behind him. Looks around his book-lined office. Then he says:

“So for me there’s no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the…

“But there is one thing about those days I am sure of, one memory I have that sticks like glue. I began haunting the movies on Forty-Second Street like every other miserable unemployed bum in New York in those days. I never even looked at the marquee to see what was playing. I simply bought a ticke…

“And, of course, you mustn’t forget, the life was exciting, very exciting. We felt—he did, and I did, too—like we had our hands on ‘the throttle of history,’ as we used to say. That’s an extraordinary feeling. When Hitler rose to power and all those lost, floundering liberals were wandering around …