Once a week, Annie went to a party meeting. She had completed six weeks in what the party called State School and had read only excerpts from books that she was supposed to have read in their entirety. The school was on the second floor of an old office building in Los Angeles. The windows were covered with steel mesh. There was one classroom and an office. It was there she met Ethel Schaeffer. The older woman occasionally took her to a dairy restaurant where, beneath a slowly turning fan which moved flies languidly across the tin ceiling, she tested kasha and matzoth-ball soup. Ethel’s voice was like a bubbling stream; she spoke gently, continually, and her conversation had neither beginning nor end, flowing along effortlessly. Annie had trouble understanding the old woman’s heavily accented English, but she was content to be bathed in the exceptional, if somewhat impersonal tenderness that emanated from her. She knew Ethel was regarded as a kind of saint, so she seemed to be, yet Annie’s judgment did not remain in total abeyance. Ethel was—she could not banish the treacherous thought—too simple. The whole weight of Ethel’s nature burdened her comrades with the demand, made ruthless by her single-mindedness, that they release the good in themselves, the virtues they were hiding only out of timidity and ignorance. Only society was complex, not its members. Exclusiveness was patrician; one must love everyone. It was a killing tolerance. It embraced even the stiff-faced party doctrinaires about whom Ethel made mild fun. “When you really know,” she said, “you are not so uneasy. Like the state, those poor chaps may wither away.”

Once she asked Annie, “And how do you like our Karl Marx?”

“Oh—”

“No, no,” Ethel had protested, laughing. “You will say something silly. Don’t do that. Leave close reading to the ones for whom such activity is meant. For you, only the vision is necessary. No more.”

By then, Annie had met Calvin Schmitter. He had given her a curt nod, addressed her as “Comrade,” and congratulated her on working in a shipbuilding plant where she would come into contact with real workers. Annie’s glance had come to rest on a Soviet poster which Schmitter had hanging on the wall of his small office. In it, four enormously muscled figures strode forward, one grasping the staff of a banner bearing the hammer and sickle. Behind the leading workers, identical replicas repeated themselves, diminishing in size until they disappeared behind the curve of the earth itself.