She’d been a pretty little girl in a sharp, brunette way, dark and fast-moving, her narrow feet shod in saddle shoes, the tips always carefully whitened, the brown saddle gleaming with polish. She wore no ornaments, only plain blouses or her sweater “set.” She wasn’t as trim these days as she had once been. Her worn-down heels, the stains on her clothes, the uneven hems of her dresses bespoke neglect. But she still wore gloves. Those gloves!

Eva had not been as pretty, except for a striking small-waisted figure and beautiful narrow ankles. In the darkened rooms where she and Max made love any time they could, he would forget her sharp voice, its complacency fed and fattened by meals of Engels and R. Palme Dutt, by party meetings in dusty boardinghouse rooms in Berkeley, by faction and dissension and discussion. In those days, only a few years ago, that eager, fresh-skinned, heavyfleshed girl, every feature of her round face imprinted on his neck and shoulder and belly, seemed to have no connection with the young functionary tough, la commandante, as he called her. But she was loving with their son—a kind of sexual romanticism excluded the infant from the daylight world of politics and tied him to those darkened rooms of love and its motions.

But, he thought, most of the party women, especially the younger ones like Eva and Fern, suffered a touch of disjunction in their beings. He didn’t understand it. Last night, out of his boredom perhaps, out of a deliberate misreading of “Comrade,” he had looked at her with a certain tentative sexual inquiry. He hadn’t been fully aware of it himself. But she must have sensed something. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, she’d arisen and said, “I need my rest.” Her voice had been high, thin; she’d avoided his eyes. At first, he wondered if the chile had given her indigestion. He’d observed before that she was one to pick at food and push it away. There was a lot of distaste in Fern.

But later, when the planes had waked them both, and they had gone to the window to look up at the play of searchlights, her excitement at this event—it was unprecedented, those tiny planes pinned between earth and the night sky—had illuminated a momentarily unguarded side of her nature. Yet afterward, listening to the radio news bulletins which insistently proclaimed the planes to have been Japanese, she had assumed her usual postures, scolding imperialism, “pointing out” the inherent contradictions of capitalism, the contradictions of her own nature left abandoned by the window where the curtains had fallen back into place.

“Max! Are you deaf? I asked you if it’s true that Ethel is sick? I heard she wasn’t coming.”

“Ethel?” he asked wonderingly. He had forgotten where he was, where he was going. She poked him with that hand so quick to poke. He looked resentfully at her hand, then at her. She nodded briefly toward the back seat. No names, Max realized, that was what she meant. He was a little amused, mostly irritated. Who did she think that poor stray was? An FBI plant? A Trotskyite infiltrator?