She went to a meeting where she discovered Max several rows behind her, sitting by himself on a wooden bench. The occasion was in honor of a visiting union leader from Detroit, a comrade who’d come to report on some factional dispute among the United Automobile Workers. She looked around her at faces that were mostly unfamiliar. There were certainly workers here, but not like those in the plant. After, she started over to speak to Max, but he waved quickly and left. Later, she asked him why he’d avoided talking to her. He said he didn’t know. It had been an impulse. He had found the idea of speaking to her at the meeting intolerable. Inside the plant, Max was special; inside the party, Max treated her as special. She didn’t understand it but was vaguely stirred.

One day, Max quoted something to her. “Karl Radek said, ‘Apart from sleeping, I have never in my life committed any undeliberate action.’”

He looked at her expectantly. She was uneasy. What did he hope she would say?

“I could hardly make that statement,” she said dryly, at last.

“It is the most hateful thing I ever read,” Max said. “It never occurred to me until last night how hateful it really was, and I’ve read the transcripts of the Moscow trials often enough.”

“How’s Eva?”

“Fine.”

Annie never visited their apartment any more. Her life had become a series of compartments; the plant, and Max on the bench; the party meetings, where she listened to reports on money-raising for the party paper, discussions on dialectical materialism, Menshevism, the Mexican community of Los Angeles, the writing of a pamphlet for the ship-scalers’ union, the discrimination practiced against women in the International Machinists Union, the recruiting drive for Negro comrades, the possibility, always present, of a wave of repression, the cells which would have to be organized, the imperialist war, the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome Axis, and scrap iron, scrap iron, scrap iron!

Christmas, Annie spent with the Ives who had no tree, although Mrs. Ives made a cake in the shape of a Yule log. “This is the way they do it in France, much more sensible, not the orgy of meretricious gift-giving that goes on in this country,” Mrs. Ives boasted, and each of the children received a book. Mrs. Gannon gave Annie a metal lunch box containing a Thermos bottle. She had painted Annie’s name on it in yellow letters. After the holidays, Max turned up on the bench with a package in hand for her, a collection of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. She put it on her bookshelf next to Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

She saw a good deal of Cletus Moore, and through him met other people, some of whom became her friends.