Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

will use them to carry on. They are effective. They are more like Wesley’s army than we Methodists would like to admit.”

Part Four

Chapter 41

“Didn’t they teach you to at least try to see the other person’s point of view?”

Robby frowned. “That from you, Dad, the former communist? I am amazed.”

“Things were different before the war. Everyone but the plutocrats was on the left.” He was on a glass of cabernet after two Jim Beams. “You’d have been there, too. There were no jobs. Today, jobs for everyone!”

Robinson Adams Morton—Ram, to his friends (only the immediate family was allowed to call him Robby)—was home. Four years at Phillips Exeter, followed by six years at Stanford, where he’d earned an undergraduate engineering degree and graduate law degree, had opened all the doors. There was the little problem of Vietnam, but he was working on it. Exeter was a prep school for the Ivy League, but after four years he’d had enough of the New England ladder: Exeter-Choate=Harvard-Yale=Wall Street. He’d visited enough of his Eastern classmates’ homes to know he didn’t want to end up like their fathers.

From his grandmother, he knew all about Grandpa Eddie. He knew about the murder, of course, but what mainly interested him was how Eddie had ruled Los Angeles for a while, which one man couldn’t do in New York or Boston, which is why he had come back. On grad day at Stanford Law, Robby had interviewed with every law firm and corporation headquartered in Los Angeles. An Exeter-Stanford connection didn’t mean much in the East, but in Los Angeles it was gold. It was only a matter of which firm to choose, and Robby was taking his time.

He glanced at his mother sitting back after dinner sipping her coffee and listening as she always did. As much as he enjoyed going toe-to-toe with his father, his mother vexed him. He blamed her, not his father, for sending him away. If she’d wanted him, she would have kept him, but she was too busy. A decade later, the pain was still there, abated only slightly by knowing how few of his Exeter classmates were close to their mothers. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? The weaning that would make them men.

“Me a communist?” he said with a little smirk. “I don’t think so.”

“I wouldn’t be one today either,” Joe said. “Don’t you see, that’s my point: things were different in the thirties. It helps to remember that.”

Nothing his father did shocked the boy, not even his ridiculous nom de plume. Letters arrived at their house addressed to Memory Laine. Some secret! It had, however, been a shock to find out what his mother was doing, she and Aunt Maggie: a shock to learn of the $50 million Mull Foundation. With money like that, why did his mother still work and his father scrounge out a living writing scripts for B movies and translating the works of communists like Bertolt Brecht? At Exeter, the headmaster called him in one day to talk about that. They weren’t going to expel him, he joked; punish the son for the sins of the father was not the Exeter way, ha-ha, au contraire. But for heaven’s sake, Robinson, hasn’t your father heard of the Cold War?

And that was before Vietnam.

“No, Dad,” he said, careful not to raise his voice. Emotion defeats reason, defeats judgment, they taught at Exeter. The greater man the greater courtesy, said Tennyson. “To say that something bad is good because of the circumstances is relativism. There are objective criteria for judging things. The communist system was as flawed then as it is today.”

Joe didn’t mind anyone getting onto dialectical ground. “Actions grow out of context,” he said. “Take revolutions, for example. The communist system may be flawed, but the capitalist system didn’t look so hot either in the thirties with half the country out of work. Then the war came along, and the communists were our allies. The enemy of your enemy, you know. What did Roosevelt say? ‘In times of trouble sometimes you must walk with the devil to get to the other side of the bridge.’”

“The only trouble with the capitalist system is government interference,” said Robby, avoiding the point. “That was true in the thirties as well.”

“I hope you didn’t learn that at Stanford.”

Robby smiled. “Actually I learned it at Exeter in Professor Farnsworth’s class. Our textbook was Atlas Shrugged.”

“Good God!” laughed Joe. “Ayn Rand at Exeter? I hope it was a science-fiction course.”

Lizzie always learned something in these sessions, little odds and ends, like the Roosevelt thing. Of course, Joe could have made it up, he was good at that, but it had the ring of truth. And of course Robby would check. The conversations between them were intense, but managed to stay civil. With her, things always got down to the personal level, which she hated. Robby knew his father wasn’t a Mull, but Lizzie had more to answer for—like the family, like boarding school, the Times, the Mull Foundation. Robby hated the foundation as much as he hated the Times, both unfairly, she thought. The Times was vastly improved under Otis Chandler. Even Joe conceded the point. It had taken her some time to understand her son’s resentments, which she resented herself. What right did he have to be resentful?

She’d had to endure his mockery over the outcome of the Chicago transportation trial. “I read about that,” he’d said at breakfast one morning. Joe was gone early leaving her alone at the table with her son, something that rarely went well. “So you work on this story for how long, six months? And the trial lasts for two months or something? And then, mirabile dictu, you get a guilty verdict and the jury fines the guilty corporations what—the stupendous sum of five thousand dollars each. As if they cared! And you call that a victory? When will you people learn? Don’t mess with the market system.”

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