The Business

I don't usually write here about how fantastic my children are, because, while it's a topic of endless fascination to me, I'm sure it interests no one else. Nonetheless, I'm going to put in a quick Jude update here to mention that the way he is being woven into the fabric of our family can only be described as amazing. He is a great little kid, and it seems as if he's always been here. He's also adjusting really well. I took him for an evaluation to see if he'd qualify for speech therapy under Early Intervention, and he didn't; in spite of the fact that the supervising speech-language pathologist has other adopted Chinese children his age in her practice, it turned out that Jude's acquired language, despite the fact that he was nonverbal in Mandarin and English three months ago, was too good. It is pretty adorable to see him point to various things and, when I hand them to him, to hear him cheerily reply "Ta-tee [thank you], Mama!" before toddling off, or when he puts on his little backpack which he's crammed full of doo-dads, calling "'Mon, Ree-ree," to his brother (whose name sounds nothing like Ree-ree) and beckoning with extravagant arm gestures before setting off on some adventure. As a friend of mine put it, "Jude is the business."

"Easter at Al Qaeda Bodega"

My tough, beautiful sister-in-law, a committed non-believer, gave me last year for Christmas a poetry anthology by Catholic convert Mary Karr, one of whose poems, "Recuperation from the Dead Love through Christ and Isaac Babel," I wrote about in the early days of this blog.  While trying to avoid folding the laundry today, I pulled the book, Sinners Welcome, off the shelf, and opened to a beautiful poem about New York.

If you've ever lived in New York, you will know exactly what Karr is hinting at.  In his slim book Here is New York, published in 1948, E.B. White wrote:

The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. . . . In New York smoulders every race problem there is, but the noticeable thing is not the problem but the inviolate truce.

I daresay that White's pre-Civil-Rights-era truce has been largely transformed (in many New York neighborhoods, anyway) to a real spirit of neighborliness, if not brotherliness, among different groups.  And what New Yorker has not at times felt as if he is really in love with all his fellow citizens, and as if each of them shows forth the true face of Christ?

Here is Mary Karr's poem.

At the gold speckled counter, my pal in white apron --
index finger tapping his Arabic paper,
where the body count dwarfs the one in my Times -- announces,
You're killing my people. 

But in Hell's Kitchen, even the Antichrist
ought to have coffee -- one cream
and two sugars.  Blessings
upon you, he says, and means it.

I Married a Communist

Readers of this blog will know that I don’t usually address politics, preferring to focus on topics that are more interesting to me, like music and faith. Insofar, however (as the feminists used to say) as the personal is the political, I will be writing occasionally about a political issue that has had a direct impact on my life. The reason that I knew how to pronounce “HUAC” correctly, even as a young soprano, is that my grandmother had been subpoenaed before that body (she went underground rather than testify); she was a member of the American Communist Party. According to family history, she had joined because of her distress over the plight of blacks in the 1930s (it’s true that she later left the CP and devoted her energies to the civil rights movement).

Shortly before my son was born two years ago, at the recommendation of a priest who was giving me spiritual direction, I started reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Not more than a few pages into the book, my heart sank when I recognized the name of a man whom I knew to have been a close friend of my grandmother’s and a frequent guest at her home in a large Midwestern city; Chambers named him as the Comintern’s representative to the United States. I decided to request my grandmother’s FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act to try to find out who she really had been.

The first 500 pages (roughly a third of the file) arrived yesterday. The packet starts off with a 1941 letter from J. Edgar Hoover advising that, in case of a national emergency, Grandma be detained. A very cursory glance at a few of the documents shows that she was spied upon by informants, neighbors, and probably also agents provocateurs. I read things about Grandma, her activities, and her beliefs that I never knew, and that run counter to family lore. But it is almost impossible for me to determine at this point what in all of it -- family legend and FBI dossier both -- is true. It will take me a while to go through the documents. In the meantime, I have the uncanny sense of someone walking over my own grave.