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eleven Gladys The penitentiary years have a different quality. Of course, it was painful, but there was nothing as painful as that initial hearing, knowing that it was all over and that there was no more hope. When he was in the penitentiary I knew I would see him once a month, and I looked forward to those visits, and wrote as often as I was permitted. And he wrote to me. It was a time of walking around in your sleep, thinking , Is this ever going to end? Visiting him was very difficult, but he was just wonderful. He knew how painful it was for Barbara and me, and so he was always very cheerful and strong and loving. You know, you’re not allowed to touch. You sit across from one another—although they don’t enforce that with children, so Barbara was always around her daddy in some way. We just talked about everything. But that was a dreadful time for me personally. I tended to withdraw. I was bitterandunhappy.Iwasedgyandtouchyanddidn’twantanybodytofeelsorry for me. I didn’t want anybody to do me any special favors—all of my neuroses were just exacerbated, and I was paranoid as hell. I wanted to stay away from people, and then if I stayed away, I got sad if they didn’t pursue me. I was working in a Yeshiva school, and most of the people there, particularly in the English department, were people who had themselves suffered through the McCarthy period. They had been victims of the Rapp-Coudert subversive witch hunt: the time when anybody who supposedly was a member of or connected with the Party was thrown out of the New York City public school system. And they were very wonderful. A RED FAMILY 107 I went to work every day and enjoyed my work with the children. My close friends were constantly calling, and my family was very good to me. I just did my work and took care of my child and wrote to my husband. That was the time he started that Sunday-night forum, and I was able to get records and books for him. Just meeting the needs of somebody in prison, having a young child, and working kept me quite busy during that time. And, of course, my greatest activity was trying to get him out of jail. We had a group of key people like Jimmy Wechsler, the editor of the New York Post, and Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader. And I would meet with them periodically to see what we could do, who we could see next, or what kind of story Wechsler wanted to do for the Post. I went around to see all kinds of people, begging for help for my husband. I went to see John Oakes at the New York Times and Gardner Cowles, who used to be the editor of Look magazine. That was really going into the inner sanctums of the high mucky-muck of the Establishment. Cowles could not have been more polite. There was a very fancy inner office , all richly carpeted, with works of art on the walls. And the question that all these influential people asked me was, “How do we really know he left the Party?” So I told them, “You’ll just have to take my word for it. I mean, what else can I do to explain it to you?” They wanted some kind of guarantee. I didn’t likethat.TheyshouldhavebeenfightingforthismansimplybecausetheSmith Actitselfwassuchahorriblething.Buttheywouldnevercommitthemselvesin any way. . . . Oh, they listened. They listened very politely. The Times did come out with three editorials. Cowles, I don’t know—I don’t know what he might have done behind the scenes. Or whether he did anything at all. I got to see Emmanuel Celler, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn. My mother had been a friend of his sister’s, so we went up to see him. His office was in the old Paramount building on Broadway, right around the corner from the New York Times. That was a most unpleasant meeting. He as much as said, “Well, your husband did something that was against the law, and he deserves to be punished.” He was just obnoxious. Now, politicians have many faces, and I was told by other people that maybe the visit did mean something to him. But who knows? I went to see William F. Ryan, a congressman from the West Side of Manhattan , and he also behaved like...

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