After the interview we went to bed. Max had a one-room flat on the rue Père Corentin in the 14th, a quarter I was not at all familiar with. The interview had been in the 6th, a stone’s throw away from my own apartment off the rue des Saint Pères, but at the time I thought it more discreet not to sleep at my place because of my two children. However, when they eventually found out I was sleeping with Max, it did not interest them particularly. The youngest was thirteen, the oldest seventeen, but both had consuming social lives of their own, plus their social organization into the school system.
The apartment at the rue Père Corentin was up a dinky flight of stairs, opening into a small entrance hall lined with dynamite cases. One of Max’s geophysical expeditions had had something to do with dynamite. A former girl friend, the mother of his only child, had painted them dark red the summer she had lived there while he was in Cuba. They made very solid bookcases, but there were not enough of them to accommodate all his files. These consisted of folders and stacks of newspapers, tied together in neat piles on the floor.
--It is very important to have files, said Max. And we will have to start one for the Baby Business. But first we will make love.
At that time in parts of the Latin Quarter, it was the fashion to tie up the woman half of the couple. Max had said I could tie him up if I wanted but I never got anything out of it. One of my younger friends in PACS told me that a girl from the Tournon, the cafe many of them had gone to several years earlier. had asked him to leave her tied to the bedposts and send her up someone sympa' from the cafe. He could choose. I felt she was taking quite a chance, but, of course, she knew he would send someone dependable.
Anyway, this evening he tied my hands and we went at it quite traditionally in the missionary position. Max was not circumsized, quite strange to me, used to Jews and Americans. He had a particular habit of covering his entire penis with the foreskin before penetrating into you, so it would go as far as possible. If I left on my panties, he pulled them down to my thighs, so that my legs were trussed up under him. While I could hardly move, he could rub himself back and forth between my thighs, until finally he pushed them far enough apart to get inside me, still protecting his penis with its foreskin until it too slid back as he moved, and then we both moved back and forward until orgasm. The first time, in his car, I regained consciousness to discover I was lying on my back on the tin floor of the Citroen with his ninety kilos on top of me, the air out of the rubber mattress, and a crumpled sail cloth bag caught in the small of my back.
The bed in the rue Père Corentin was more comfortable, and my own bed in the rue Ste. Guillaume, all with names redolent of French Catholicism, the most comfortable. As I said, in a few months we ended up there, although the files had to remain here, not an ideal solution.
--I don’t see why we have to have a file at all, I said that night, after we had shook ourselves out.
Max gave a triumphant smile.
--You’re too old to be New Left, he said, like the provos. But you seem to have many of their possible reactions. To the New Left, filing cabinets and carbon copies are unknown animals. They were part of the organization methods of my generation, thus making it easy for the FBI to round us all up. All they had to do was bribe a left winger and/or raid the organization headquarters and take our files.
--Then why have them?
--Otherwise we’ll never keep track of the people willing to help with the deserters.
--Then let’s have them. I’m not paranoid about people raiding my house.
--You didn’t live through the late forties and early fifties in America.
--Yes, I did.
--But you weren’t on the Left then. Did I ever tell you about Agnes Caligari and Ruth Frankenstein?
--Were they raided?
--It was more complicated than that. It happened in New York City, in the late forties, when I was section organizer for the 6th AD.
Pause.
--Does that mean anything to you?
--It was a political division in New York.
--Do you know--or are you just guessing?
--It’s not a hard guess.
--Not bad. The 6th AD was the 6th Assembly district, and I was organizing for Marcantonio.
Another pause.
--Don’t tell me you don’t know who Marcantonio was?
--I do now. You told me about him in Holland.
--I’m glad you remember what I tell you.
--What about the two girls?
--What two girls?
--You began with two girls and a filing cabinet.
--Agnes Caligari and Rose Frankenstein. No, that’s another story.
Although it took place about the same time in Max’s life. When I was Section Organizer for the 6th AD, I had a hard time getting girls. Have I ever told you my theory of the paradoxical situation--less true now than it was then--which makes it easier for fat, middle-aged men like me to get girls than young men of twenty?
--Yes. At twenty a girl can pick and choose whereas at forty you can pick and choose. Go on about Agnes Caligari.
--Well, I met her at AYD headquarters, and she seemed not unwilling to let me make her. She lived with another girl, but I didn’t think much about that, particularly when she let me take her home, and I succeeded in getting her undressed and into bed. But then she told me she was sorry, she just couldn’t. Because she was a lesbian, and she was sleeping with her roommate, Rose Frankenstein. So I let her go. Results: no girl, and a political dilemma. Because Rose Frankenstein was Party Secretary. That mean, among other things, that she had access to the files.
He paused again.
--Very important, the person who is responsible for the files. I may be paranoiac but--
--What happened to Agnes?
--Nothing. At least, she didn’t sleep with me. That was her misfortune. I stopped seeing her. My big problem was with Rose. At that time, no one in the Party was supposed to be homosexual. Obviously Rose had not told the Party Responsible that she was a lesbian, or she would have been excluded. So, as a good Party member, should I tell on her or not? I didn’t because I didn’t want to be a stool pigeon.
--So you did belong to the Communist Party?
--I belonged to the CPA.
--What was that?
--The Communist Party Association.
--How did that differ from the Party?
--There was no Communist Party.
--Because of McCarthyism?
--No, no, said Max in an annoyed tone.
Whether he was annoyed with me, the C, or McCarthyism, I did not know, yet.
--Like most ignorant people, he began. you have a tendency to telescope events that you are little informed about. The period we are talking about is towards the end of the war, 1944-45, and McCarthyism didn’t start till six years later. Besides, McCarthyism is a very inadequate name for what happened. McCarthy was a hook to hang a whole reactionary, to put it mildly, trend of American politics on that began with Harry Truman.
--So why was there no Communist Party?
--In 1944-45, Communist Party policy was complete, wholehearted cooperation with the allies, Britain and the United States. The Soviet Union had entered the war on June 22, 1941, and from then on, it was a United Front against Fascism.
--I should think the allies would have been more Communist Party oriented, once Stalin entered the war.
--The policy was, said Max a little stiffly, not to do anything that might disturb the democracies. So the Communist Party as such dissolved itself. I was not in agreement with this decision, and went around saying so. Making myself popular, as usual.
----It seems wild to me. I can see them dissolving themselves in 1941 when Stalin entered the war, but why three years later?
--It didn’t last long, said Max. Duclos sent a letter of severe criticism from France, saying that they were really overdoing the swerve to the right; so the Party was re-established in 1945, summer or fall, I forget which, and when Max was told to start pulping Earl Browder’s books, he obeyed Party discipline, but with a heavy heart.
--Why did they pulp Earl Browder’s books?
Max sighed again. Again, whether it was at my ignorance or at the bad treatment meted out to Earl Browder, I did not know.
--Because he had been the one who originated this line in the right wing period of the Left.
--But you were against that line?
--That’s right.
--Then why did you mind that they pulped his books?
--That, said Max, is an essential question. Why was Max reluctant to pulp Earl Browder’s books? A good question. I think there were two reasons. Would you like to take notes?
---No, I have a very good memory.
--Well, let’s see if I can put more in it than Harvard seems to have done. Firstly, I don’t think books should be pulped. Just because Trotsky wrote a book in 1924 that was published and meant something at the time, there is no good reason to burn it in 1937 because you no longer agree with Trotsky. Put in an afterward, or a preface or something saying why you disagree, but let people read the book.
I thought of saying that since Stalin made a pact with Hitler, it was hardly surprising his methods were similar, but I did not want to deviate Max into defending the Stalin-Hitler pact, and I did want to hear the second reason for not pulping books.
--Also, he continued, in the old days, one of the principal features of a Party meeting was fund-raising. They always got a professional to do this, who would stand up at the end of the meeting and tell about some little girl on the East Side who broke open her piggy bank and gave two dollars and ninety-eight cents and who would raise it to three dollars? People contributed. I did too, and I urged other people to contribute. You know, someone would not buy a bicycle or something and give the money to the Party instead. A lot of this money went to print Earl Browder’s books, so, even if the line changed, it seemed like tricking people to destroy books they had made sacrifices to get printed in the first place.
--If you didn’t agree, why didn’t you bring it up at a meeting or something?
--Don’t forget, said Max. I agreed with the new line. It was in the right direction. The CPUs should never have dissolved itself in the first place. But I was sorry to pulp the books, and I said so.
--So actually, you observed Party discipline in The Case of Earl Browder’s Books, and not in The Case of the Communist Lesbian?
--Very funny. Particularly as she wasn’t a communist at all. You haven’t heard the end of that story. She turned out to be from the FBI.
--How did you find that out?
--She was instrumental in giving evidence that convicted the Foley Square 10.
I had another choice, whether to abandon the issue of what Max should have done as a disciplined Party Member, or abandon the Foley Square 10. Although I wanted to know why he had stayed with a Party that made a pact with Stalin, banned homosexuals, and pulped books, I was also curious about the Foley Square 10 and thought that some information on one might explain the other.
--What were they convicted of? Being Communist?
--No, no. The CP was never outlawed in America.
--I always thought it was. What about the McCarthy witch hunts and all?
--Everyone has always thought what the government wanted them to think--namely, that it is against the law to belong to the Communist Party. This is not true. It is not and never was against the law to belong to the Communist Party. Conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States is against the law.
--So the Foley Square 10 were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government?
--There may have been eleven. No, not even that. The evidence would have been very hard to make stick. They were convicted--and here Rose Frankenstein’s evidence was eminently useable--they were convicted of “intent to conspire” to overthrow the government. Thereby she could, and did, bring in as evidence private conversations, or remarks about friends, where someone said that the government should be changed, or the System, or there should be a revolution, or something like that.
--It didn’t matter that they were Communists?
--Of course it mattered. That was the whole purpose--to convict someone for being Communist using the laws of the United States--which are supposed to allow for free political opinions--to convict him. If a banker says that the government is going to the dogs and must be changed, a jury supposes he means to vote for Eisenhower or Goldwater the next time. If a Communist says the same thing, the same jury assumes he is planning a violent coup d’état
and convicts him.
--What about Agnes? Did Rose fink on her too?
--I don’t know. I don’t think she was even a Communist.
--Did she know you were?
--It wasn’t for political reasons that I was going with her, said Max with a smirk.
Although it was seemingly by chance that night that we got into the stagnation of the Communist Party in the late forties and early fifties, it probably had a lot to do with Max’s and by now my feeling that if the deserter movement was not stagnating, it had not yet really got going. It was now April, and only one new deserter had come in since Manfred and Buster had appeared in January. And it was getting hard and harder to feed even them and find places for them to stay. There was still no question of work, and no signs of any breakthrough that would permit us or the phoneless friends to ask for political asylum for them. Even the film interview, made on shaky credit by two young Frenchmen, turned out to be unsellable. Maybe the files made us feel that we would someday be important enough to be flummoxed by the FBI or CIA or French Troisième Bureau. I did not help much with the files, however; one of my retarded New Left tendencies being, as Max said, an instinctive aversion to filing cabinets and post offices.
A Trip to the Country
April 22, 1967
Picked up Pen Johnson in the car as per our agreement to let him interview the deserters before we take them to the country. Pen is part of the left-wing of PACS. Since I know more about the Communist Party now, the word peace is associated with the CP for me. This association would flip out the Paris Americans, on the whole, except for left wing renegades like Max and Pen. In the beginning, PACS was supposed to apply to be a chapter of SANE in Paris. But then SANE, a conservative anti-nuke group, wrote a letter saying we had to screen out all the Communists, and the consensus at PACS was to forget about SANE. Most members of PACS are in their fifties and sixties, and while they are certainly not pro-Communist, they remember the McCarthy time and don’t want that to start up again.
Pen was expelled from the US during the McCarthy period. Not for very long. He had had to surrender his passport at the American Embassy here but got it back a year later. Maybe even less. He has established himself as a free lance journalist and sends articles to the left-wing press in the States and in England. New Left papers mostly. Most Communist publications only take articles from staffers. I don’t know what Pen’s earlier relation to the Party was, probably something like Max. Party discipline bearing its own seeds of rupture. His wife, Ginetta, is Turkish but has lived in France for years and translates his articles for the French press. She never was able to get US citizenship, probably because of Pen’s political activities in the 40’s. Because they were both active during the Algerian War here, they have never gotten French citizenship either. They probably could not have gotten it anyway, no matter how long they lived here.
Pen was in a bad mood, complaining about the right-wing direction of PACS preventing the organization from progressing. His mood was not improved when we picked up Max along the way, and Max began talking about secrecy, protecting the deserters, disguising their names, and so on. He sounded like the phoneless friends. Finally Pen blew up when Max said he would have to approve the article before it was sent out. Pen said he knew how to write, and if Max didn’t know him well enough to trust him, then he didn’t want to write the article anyway. Max said it was not a question of trust, but minimum security measures, and that all journalists, friends or not, had to agree to observe them. If Pen couldn’t agree to that, then he couldn’t see the deserters. Pen said he would show me the article, and Max said it was him or nothing, and so Pen said, “Nothing,” and got out of the car. Pen is having a hard time with PACS; they mistrust him because of his political past, and so he resents it when Max too comes down on him. Max is also unpopular with PACS and is profiting to the full from his hegemony with the deserters. I think Max is more politically effective than any of them, but I find the whole lot hard to take at times, including Max. Manfred is the only one that is at all relaxing to be with.
As to be expected, he and Buster were not downstairs at the cafe where we had arranged to meet, and we had to go wake them up. Manfred was in bed with a girl, a French girl speaking no English--I guess he’s learning French--who is coming along for the ride. She said she lived with her mother in Montparnasse and had to be back by six. Very white and unhealthy-looking. The other addition to our group was what Joubain had called “tribal reflexes.” His name is Chico, a black friend of Manfred that we have seen on occasion and who seems to be half-heartedly trying to convince us he is a Puerto Rican draft dodger. He doesn’t speak English, and when I asked my Spanish maid to speak to him in Spanish, he did not seem to understand that either. He answered si to everything, and she said he doesn’t know Spanish. In the end, therefore, he admitted to being a Martiniquan who is trying to draft-dodge from the French Army. Max did not want to take him with us, probably why Chico waited until we were halfway there before breaking the news he was French. Helping French draft dodgers is ingerance dans les affaires francaises, something the French authorities take a very negative view of, said Max. Sticking your nose into French affairs. But one of the reasons the three boys agreed to go to the country is to help Manfred kick his heroin habit. Manfred says Chico has experience in this sort of thing. It seems that it is very important to be surrounded by friends. I doubt that either Buster or the girlfriend are very equipped for this sort of work, but they all say that Chico is. Who knows if any of this is true, but at least they run less chance of getting in trouble in the country than in the Latin Quarter. Anyway, it’s a big farm, and so Chico comes along.
The farm is near Nemours, a small melancholy town on a slow-moving river. I remember, in a former life, making up a party to visit two old ladies there, and eating the best soufflé au Grand Marnier I have ever had in my life. The hotel where this memorable dessert was produced must still be there--but we skipped the town this time and went straight to the farm. It is owned by several young middle-class Frenchmen who only used it weekends and are willing to let the deserters stay there. Who made the contact I don’t know.
Outside of Nemours the ground starts to undulate, and we could see the farm from a distance on a slight rise of the plowed fields. Manfred began singing, “Buy you a house on a hill.” Simon Regnier, of the Million Francs for Vietnam committee, asked me if I thought it would be an idea to send Manfred to Hanoi to sing over the radio to the GI’s stationed in south Vietnam. This was after Joubain had knocked Simon down for the 1800 francs rent on the apartment he lent us. If we had waited for the phoneless friends to call, they would have taken Manfred and Buster and there wouldn’t have been any rent to pay. I saw no point in bringing this up, so I told Simon I thought enough money had been spent on Manfred as it was without sending him to Hanoi. Besides, there were enough black GI’s in Vietnam already. If this was the start of a world-wide movement, sooner or later one of them in Hanoi would desert and start singing.
Max was pleased with the house on the hill because it was possible to survey all approaching roads. I wonder if he expects them to withstand a siege. The farm itself is almost fortified, architecturally, so that three sides are built around a middle square all enclosed by a stone wall. The car could be driven into the courtyard and the gates closed after it, hiding it from the outside. There was no heat, but a mazout burner could be reactivated if necessary. Buster said he knew how to do this. The bathroom works, and so does the stove. No fridge. The boys found this primitive. That is, Buster and Manfred found it primitive. Life in American is inconceivable without a Frigidaire. Chico, from one of the ex-colonial countries, found everything to his liking. I don’t know what the girl from Montparnasse thought. We treated them like rather hard-to-satisfy paying guests, which is, of course, how they acted. I shudder to think how Arthur of the phoneless friends would have gone at it.
Once they got settled, Buster made us lunch and argued with Manfred who refused to do the dishes. Chico and the girl finally did them. Manfred seems to think since he is here to take the cure; he has the right to act like a grande invalide. Well, that’s Buster’s problem. The girl has decided to stay the night. We told her she would have to get home by herself unless she stayed until the weekend when we would come out to see how things were when the owners were there.
April 27, 1967
Visit to the farm. The deserters seem quite accepted by the owners and their friends, especially Buster who washes the dishes and is a great help. Manfred’s girl has left, and Manfred is playing the enigmatic black deserter. Successfully. Frenchmen love black Americans syndrome, as Max calls it. The owners seem to be what are called jeune cadres, young executives, I guess, and use the place to have fun with their wives or girl friends. I don’t know people like that as a rule, and it is hard for me to place them. Sort of upper middle-class hip. Yuppies. Wife-swapping and mild marijuana. Having a few deserters around seems to be considered part of the bizarre bohemian atmosphere. Nebbish. I should not be so critical. One of the film makers had a wife who was lying in bed at four in the afternoon with a chain twisted around one hand. “We live like gypsies,” she said in her sixteenth arrondissement apartment. That sort of people. But that is what we are working with now. I prefer the Sco’s and the Maxes. And these people are also being very helpful. Because of them, I think, Chico has gone back to being Puerto Rican and speaks no French. None of them seem to speak Spanish, so he gets away with it. He probably feels, rightly enough, that a Martiniquan is no bizarre novelty for this group.
There was a small crisis, we are told, when one of the girls lost Pacsy, Manfred’s hamster. She let him out of his cage, and he disappeared forever. Manfred laid into her and this was badly taken. They don’t mind being hospitable, but the girl was a friend of theirs and not to be scolded by a deserter, even a black one. At least he didn’t hit her, said Max, so what are they complaining about? Manfred says he wants to come back to Paris with us, but he promises to return after a day or so. What about his cure? Chico, our therapist, says to let Manfred go to Paris, and he will stay at the farm with Buster. The trip is to be funded out of our pockets. Fortunately my older daughter went to see her grandfather in Israel for Passover, and he gave her 500 dollars not to talk to the American ambassador about Vietnam during the Seder. Thank god for the Zionist movement, said Max.
April 28
I dropped Max at the Porte d’Orleans so he could get his car and go out to Ville Juif to spend what was left of the weekend with his wife, Manfred on the corner of Saint Michel to do whatever he had planned for Sunday night, and I got back to the rue Ste. Guillaume just in time to pick up a phone call from Pasteur Rangoon. To my surprise, I was invited to another phoneless friends meeting. Maybe they had heard about our taking the deserters to the house on the hill. I knew they were clandestine, but if they had heard about our taking the guys out of town, I did not think it totally improbable that the French DST had. Until some governmental decision had been taken, Max did not think there was much danger of the French police arriving with honking horns and blue lights on their cars from Paris. And the local gendarmerie in Nemours would not pay much attention to the guests of one of the rich Parisian weekenders.
The phoneless friends meeting was at the same address, rue Marcadet, and for a moment I even thought of taking the subway, to be less obvious. However, if the deserters are not underground, I don’t see why I should be. I can be found by anyone in the telephone book.
When I got there, I noticed DeChatou, the Protestant lawyer who is lined up to defend the babies if they get in trouble. He was speaking when I got there, late as usual. The other changes were the absence of Arthur and the absence of the girl I had spoken to as we were leaving. Her boyfriend was there, however. Maybe she was studying for his exams for him. And Simon Regnier, my friend from the Million campaign, along with Kurilla and the Silent Figure, whom I had ticketed as Arthur’s father. I loosened up towards him when I heard him say after the meeting: “Arthur is a rotten apple. When he was only so high, he was already a rotten apple.”
DeChatou spoke in the usual ordered French way: Roman numeral I, capital A, small arabic 1, and so on. I don’t think that way at all. Grosso modo, the gist of his speech was that a stalemate had been reached. The deserters could not stay indefinitely underground. Ideally, the next step would be to have a test case. But there was no deserter around who could be a test case.
--What about Buster? I asked. He talks a lot.
I figured I had been asked to the meeting to make suggestions, but all I got was a pitying glance from all the phoneless friends who knew Buster.
--We need someone political, said Kurilla.
--But Buster is very typical l of many GI’s.
--We need someone who can ask for asylum for his political objections to the Vietnam War. Buster was never in Vietnam.
--Manfred was.
--Max told us Manfred takes heroin.
--He’s out at a farm now, taking a cure.
He was probably on the Boul’ Mich´ making a hit, but I wanted to speak up for Manfred; I did not change anyone’s mind. Basically I agreed with them. I know very little about drugs, but I suppose Manfred would go mad after two days without heroin and give everyone’s name to the police. At least that’s the way it looked in the movies.
--An alternate plan, DeChatou continued, if nothing positive happens in the next week or ten days, would be to have a press conference, followed by a grande marche to the Prefecture with the deserters and their lawyers.
Mental image of Manfred, Buster, DeChatou, and Dreyfus marching to the Prefecture, all flags flying.
--This could be timed to coincide with the Vietnam Assises.
After De Gaulle had refused permission for the Russell Tribunal to meet in Paris, the National Vietnam Committee had decided to hold its own trial in Paris to judge the Vietnam war criminals.
Kurilla said this decision could be reached later. Without the rest of us, I gathered.
Next the Silent Figure spoke. I suppose if I ever see him again, I should find him another soubriquet. He spoke about the German section. Same thing as the Canadian trip at the last meeting, except that the Germans were not doing so well. They had no contacts and needed money. No one looked at me this time.
Kurilla closed the meeting. He said that before the press conference was decided on, there were various important contacts to be made: the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Also a Gaullist de gauche called D’Artois. There was just the possibility that the idea of a scandal, like the grande marche to the Prefecture would frighten the French government to a point where it would be willing to give asylum.
--If this fails, he continued, there are several other possibilities. Our contacts in Algeria and Africa--and in the Transvaal.
He looked around significantly, I thought, his arms forming the usual barrier on either side of his notes. The Transvaal? Is this one of the sectors of guerilla warfare Manfred and Buster are to be trained for?
--Eventually Egypt.
Vision of Manfred and Buster on camels, visiting the pyramids.
--We also have put feelers out to Cuba, which is now serving as a letter box to Saigon.
Okay, so they’re impressing me that it is a big fat underground network. As if reading my thoughts, Kurilla looks at me and says that no more deserters should be accepted until some definite course of action has been decided on. The government would be frightened at the idea of American deserters arriving in quantity. I don’t know if I agree. Since we want to start a deserter movement, I would think the more deserters, the more pressure we could exercise on the government. However, I do not think they will listen to my opinion on this part of the question. Or on any part of the question, for that matter.
--The deserters just come in by themselves, I said. Even the people who transport them don’t ask our permission.
--Send them back, said Kurilla.
--To the army?
--Tell them that France is accepting no new deserters at present.
Simon Regnier of the Million asked if I could supply him with the list of all conscientious objectors, or insoumis in French, and deserters. He thought it might just be possible to get residence papers immediately for CO’s. I said I thought they had residence papers. I certainly seem to remember David showing us his carte de séjour on the night of the film interview. I imagine he needed one to work in the perfectly legal youth club wherever it was. Simon asked if I could check on all this. I nodded. Enigmatically. Remembering Rose Frankenstein, I had no intention of giving him a lot of names. It was bad enough that Max had started keeping files.
Arthur’s father, now disqualified as a Silent Figure, spoke to wind up the meeting. He said they were preparing a leaflet directed to the Third World to be presented at the Russell Tribunal sessions in Stockholm. It was to be a Soutien pour les Insoumis and to be signed by all the members of the Russell Tribunal to show their solidarity with the Vietnamese people. The Assises of the National Vietnam Committee in Paris would also sign the tract. If the pressure was great enough, said Arthur’s father, such an action might lead to the withdrawal of the French ambassador to Washington.
They certainly have a lot of self-confidence. It almost sounds like the popular idea of a powerful, ruthless communist conspiracy. I don’t see what good the withdrawal of the French ambassador from Washington would do. DeGaulle would just appoint another one. Unless they meant permanently? I can hardly see French-American diplomacy being carried on through the Swiss Embassy. Now the withdrawal of De Gaulle would be something else again. I guess all of these connections with important people is what Max meant when he said they were a very legalistic bunch.
April 29
Surprise, surprise. The boys are back from the country. All three of them. We tried to be stern and tell them they should not come in town, or at least not unless they discussed it first with us, but Buster and Chico said that Manfred had come to Paris last weekend whereas they had been out there two solid weeks, and it wasn’t fair. Besides, the only girls who looked decent were married or fourteen years old. Buster said he was ready to try a fourteen year old, but he thought Max mightn’t like it. Max said it would be statutory rape. There was never any consideration of the possibility of their coming in to Paris and Manfred staying out there alone; so all three are here. This fait accompli blackmailed us into giving them money. Apparently they all have places to stay the night but no bread. We gave each of them twenty-five francs. I shut out the vision of the phoneless friends disapproving faces. We told them the twenty-five francs would have to last to get them back to the country the next day. This last recommendation was probably a sheer waste of breath as they couldn’t care less whether they ever get back to the country. I suppose we should be pleased that they have so much regard or fondness for us that they keep us up to date on their every step. Of course, they do need us to bank them, but they are disarming nevertheless. I am sure relations would have deteriorated considerably if they had been delivered up to the phoneless friends.
To be continued...
To be continued...
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