MOE & ALEXANDRA

Moe and Alexandra

Antoine J. Polgar

Moe Fierst was usually not talkative on long flights. Yet when he arrived at his aisle seat on the Swissair flight from JFK to Geneva in 1982 in his three piece suit looking like an undertaker, he could hardly believe his luck. A lady in the window seat next to his aisle seat. A greying middle-aged woman dressed in a suit. A good prospect for a captive audience. Someone Moe could while away the time with over the next six sleepless hours in the darkened cabin until they got sleepy as if they were in bed together with no commitment. He could confess some things he had on his mind - and not have to worry. No secrets. Nothing serious. And if he told any  secrets, they would be lost in the stratosphere.

Before getting seated, he placed his umbrella and homburg in the overhead bin, bowed obsequiously and introduced himself.

“Hello, Moe,” he said.  

The lady acknowledged him with a nod.

“Alexandra,” she replied with a look of resignation. Some stranger was going to spend the night seated beside her and she would have to talk.

“Pleased,” he mumbled pondering her weariness. “Don’t be too forward,” he reminded himself. “Be careful not to brush her arm on the armrest.” Whose armrest IS it anyway? Just in case of what? Just in case you say something wrong, and she asks to change seats. That’s what!” Moses said to himself.

“On vacation?” he asked her.

“meeting my daughter in Switzerland. She’s in college. Semester abroad,.” Alexandra replied.

“Where does she go to college?”

“Down South,” Alexandra said. She had heard the unbelievable story of a female student’s father who had served time for she what she didn’t know moving into her residence hall on a college campus with the knowledge of the administration and wreaking havoc on the private lives of other girls and their parents. She wasn’t going to disclose her daughter’s first name, the name of the college, the dorm, or her room number.  

“What year is she in?”

“Second year. It was an ordeal at first. She was arrested for underage drinking during her first semester and went through a bout of clinical depression. I had to fly down to be with her, get her a lawyer and a therapist.” she said. “she’s fine now.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t know each other,” Moe said. “I could have fixed the matter. It’s a racket in college towns between the police, the bars, and the lawyers unless the student union has a lawyer on retainer. They trap a lot of freshmen students.”

Alexandra feigned interest. The conversation was suspended during dinner but afterward, Moe had to show off his cosmopolitanism and asked the flight attendant if they had any Poire William, a pear brandy. He brought them two little bottles known as mignonettes. The intoxicating wine with dinner, the liqueur and the altitude made Moe more talkative.

“I never went to college. I never even graduated from high school.”

“I’m sorry,” Alexandra replied. Then she impulsively decided to entertain her neighbor with her own performance.  

“I nearly didn’t either - go to college that is. My father grew up during the depression. He had his eccentricities. Like not sending us to the dentist when we needed to go. He was on Wall Street. I nearly didn’t go to college because my father didn’t believe his daughters had to go to college.”

Moe raised his eyebrows.

“You would be surprised what happens in respectable families,” Alexandra declared. “My father wouldn’t send us to college, but he didn’t hesitate to pay for his girlfriend’s college tuition or other unforeseen expenses he couldn’t take care of himself.”

“Unforeseen …?” Moe’s head jerked.

“She needed an abortion. He wasn’t a medical doctor. When my parents divorced, my mother insisted he pay my tuition. I’m determined to see that our daughter gets a college education so she can be independent.”

“What’s she studying?”

“She’s an undecided.”  

“I was a child of the depression too. I grew up on the lower East Side. My parents and two brothers lived in a railroad apartment. Total lack of privacy. As a teenager, I was a truant and runaway. Eventually, my family stopped filing missing person reports. They just waited for me to show up from time to time. I never graduated from high school either. One summer when I was around sixteen I hitchhiked up to the Catskills to console myself – it was like taking a vacation from failure.”

“Wasn’t that an artist’s colony in those days?”

“You mean Woodstock. It was also vacation place for Jews and leftist working-class people from New York City. They stayed in bungalows and luxury hotels. We went up there when I was a child. We would drive up on weekends from Brooklyn to rent a bungalow and spend time discussing Socialism. I fit right in.”

“They had cars?” 

“Many had cars. There were regular buses. Some husbands were cabdrivers. They piled the family into their cabs. I would run into my parents’ neighbors and word would get back to them in Brooklyn that the country air was doing me good. I stayed at a Boarding House owned by an anarchist debating society and worked in the kitchen for my board. It was a communal society. Nobody went hungry if you were willing to work.”

“Weren’t your parents worried?”

“My parents thought of me as a troublemaker with no future. The area was a hotbed of rival ideologies among the socialists, communists, and anarchists. That was where I got my education. Reading the works of Russian, French and German utopian socialists in translation. The anarchists told me to stay away from the Trotskyites and the Hasidim encamped down the road, but I made myself useful. Since I didn’t fit whatever people thought was a stereotype of a Jew, on a lark they sent me down the road to infiltrate the pro-Nazi Bund camp. I found out they had shortwave radio equipment that linked them directly to Berlin.. We reported them to the FBI.”

“What would have happened if they knew you were an informer?”

“I could have ended up in a pool of blood. But the FBI was more concerned about Communists than Nazis then. The FBI probably had their own informer in the group and knew all about it and shut the Bund operation down when the United States finally entered World War II after Pearl Harbor. They arrested them all for being enemy aliens and sent them to a prisoner of war camp in Arkansas.”

“So you lived through World War II?”

“I have lived dangerously in a state of emergency ever since. I was just deported from Mexico by the way. I’m on a mission. A Human Rights Conference to deliver information on a case in Mexico.”

“That sounds way over my head,” Alexandra.

“I’m just a courier.”

“What’s going on in Mexico?”

“What’s going on in Mexico? Indigenous uprising. Military repression. Torture. Genocide. Ethnocide. Diplomats watch what is going on wherever they are stationed and then write papers that go back to their governments.”

“I know such things are happening in the world, but I can’t do a thing about it. What did you do to get deported?”

“I just picked up a dossier from a foreign embassy in Mexico City, and as I was leaving the building, they arrested me, interrogated me, and confiscated the dossier. Now I’m persona non grata in Mexico.”

“You made them very angry.”

“I’m nobody important. I told them I was a tourist visiting the Mayan ruins. They don’t like foreigners criticizing their Human Rights record in international forums. They put a paper in front of me saying I lied about the purpose of my trip. I refused to sign,” he went on to say. ‘You can put a gun to my head, and I still won’t sign,’ I told them.”

“You changed your mind,”

“We all come to a crossroads in life. I chose life. Die in a Mexican jail or be deported. I signed the paper. Then they took me downstairs. I saw FBI men milling about in dark suits outside. They handcuffed me to the seat of a van, and we headed for the airport. When we reached the airport, they asked me if I had any money. I had to pay for my own ticket to be deported. They escorted me to the Air Mexicana plane. When I boarded, they gave mypassport to the captain. The flight attendant looked at me with disapproval. It’s not pleasant not being a paying passenger as if you’re being repatriated by an airline or a government because you’re impecunious. I bought my own ticket, I indignantly told the flight attendant when she was serving a meal so she would not feed me begrudgingly. Don’t worry. I’m not being deported now. I have a ticket and my American passport. My papers are in order and there is nothing incriminating in my briefcase.”

 “Is this something you do for a living?” inquired Alexandra.

Putting on a good face, Moe said. “I’m just a hapless rogue who gets in and out of trouble without knowing how I got there. I’ve never been able to earn a living myself. If I were Catholic, I would be like a priest who had taken a vow of poverty, but I never willingly took a vow of poverty and I’m not Catholic. I’m Jewish. Did you know priests get Social Security?” he said.

“I had no idea.” Alexandra said with a smile. “But it’s no sin not to have any money.”

“No one ever told me that. I’ve never found a remedy for it,” Moe replied. “It’s too late to change. That reminds me of the time…I apologize. It’s the liqueur talking…That’s enough about me. I’ve bared my soul. It’s your turn,” Moe said.

“I just told you, I’m on my way to meet my daughter. She’s in college. Spending the semester abroad in Europe,” Alexandra said.

“Your husband couldn’t join you?

She shook her head. “He wasn’t able to travel. He told me to go and have a good time.”

“I’m sorry.” Moe said.

“We had a terrible storm. It flooded our garage. A gasoline can for the lawnmower was leaking and you could smell the fumes. He decided to leave the gasoline cans the night before not thinking there would be flooding. Then in the middle of the night he went down to the garage in his pajamas with a bucket and started emptying out the water and gasoline amidst the dangerous fumes.  He knew he had heart trouble, but he was trying to empty the garage with a bucket all by himself. He told me to go back to bed. He was a proud man.” She shook her head from side to side. “So have you been flirting with human tragedy your whole life?” Alexandra asked.

“I was no hero. I was only seventeen when the war ended. I could have lied about my age and enlisted at sixteen. I just went to recruitment meetings trying to indoctrinate people into becoming anarchists while thinking about romancing young ladies in the high meadow grass. Then when I was eighteen. I joined the Merchant Marine so I could take a political stand without killing or getting killed. My anarchist friends encouraged me to serve on the Booker T. Washington, a Liberty ship that had just come off the assembly line, the first  Merchant Marine ship commanded by a Black captain. Hugh Mulzac.  Originally from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Of course, after the war, he couldn’t get a ship because of McCarthy, and his seaman’s papers were cancelled. He was blacklisted because he was active in the National Maritime Union and the American Labor Party. In 1960, when he was 74, a Federal Judge restored his license, and he found work as a night mate standing watch on a ship while the crew slept.”

“I met someone in the Navy once,” Alexandra said.

“Really? Where??”

“New Orleans,” Alexandra replied.

“Your husband?”

“No. Somebody else. I was sitting at the bar alone. It was a dizzying experience sitting on the slow spinning Carousel Bar of the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street - Faulkner and Hemingway’s haunt. He was having a drink alone. I was waiting for him to strike up a conversation with me. His name was Ken. Finally, he came over and invited me to his table for a drink, a Goody. One ounce each dark rum, light rum, a syrup of orange flower water and almonds, pineapple juice and 2 ounces orange juice served in a tall glass over ice.”

“You in the Navy?” I asked stupidly. He said he was shipping out the next day and that he was celebrating a promotion to Operations Officer.”

“Do you get to steer the ship?” I asked him.

“No, I keep the watch, make sure we don’t collide with another ship, stay on course, and maintain distress signaling equipment,” Ken said.

“What kind of distress?”

“I don’t know. I just know I’m glad this is peacetime. No more escorting cargo ships on the death runs. I’m not going to make it a career. I’m going to resign soon and head for California,” Ken replied.

“Going to Hollywood to seek your fortune? I asked” 

“And he became a famous film director or actor?” Moe inquired.

“We stayed in touch for a while. After casting about in the industry and getting nowhere, he set up a company that managed payrolls for all the big studios. I think he became quite rich. He asked me if I was staying at the Monteleone Hotel. I said no, I’m a schoolteacher and I live in Nashville, I grew up in New Orleans and I’m back for a visit with my family.”

“It sounds like you both must have had a wonderful evening,”

“I was hoping. But he asked me to join him for dinner at Antoine’s on the Rue Saint Louis. Things went on from there. When we parted the next morning, we exchanged addresses. I wasn’t really a schoolteacher. I was something of a swinger or working girl in those days. The next morning I asked him if he thought I was a working girl.”

“What did he say?” Moe inquired.

“He said the thought never entered his mind. Then he asked me if I needed any money. I said yes. I never told anyone that story before.”

“A real gentleman,” Moe interjected.

“What did you do after being in the Merchant Marine?” Alexandra asked.

“When the American Communist Party found out they could be trust me with money, I became a remittance man. After World War II, they recruited me to deliver cash to distressed families of American intellectuals and Hollywood actors and actresses blacklisted by the Red Scare so they could pay their lawyers and pay their rent. If they didn’t end up in jail for contempt of Congress, and couldn’t survive, I helped arrange for their resettlement in London, Paris, and Rome. Then I funneled contributions to the families of slain black leaders in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. Once I was arrested for trying to smuggle a suitcase full of cash belonging to the American Communist Party from Canada into the United States at the Buffalo Peace Bridge. Nothing much came of that. But they kept the money.”

“Why didn’t they put you in jail?” Alexandra inquired.

“I don’t know for sure. The American Communist Party wasn’t illegal.” Moe replied. “I wasn’t a Soviet agent. Where would they have sent me? Into internal exile? We don’t have a Siberia here. Later, during the period of African independence, when a country became independent from France or Great Britain or Portugal, I found myself on the first planeload of Americans invited to take a place of honor at the Independence Celebrations. When they released Puerto Rican nationalist Alejandrina Torres from the maximum-security prison in Lexington, Kentucky, I was at the prison gates umbrella in hand waiting to take her back to Puerto Rico. Once upon my return from an illegal trip to Havana, two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked me to open my attaché case and to surrender my American passport. I refused to no avail. They said they would not allow me back in the country unless I allowed them to search my belongings. There was nothing else for me to do but to agree. Nothing came of it. A few years before the fall of the Berlin wall, I was in East Berlin when they named a high school after the great African American singer and actor Paul Robeson.”

“You’ve led an intriguing life,” Alexandra said.

Her head had fallen on Moe’s shoulder and her hand was on the armrest between them. He was afraid to move. When she awoke breakfast was being served and soon you could hear the sound of the landing gear lowering. He was holding her hand in the mystery of kinship between two strangers.

“I only wish I could bring your husband back.” Moe said. “How long were you married?”

“Twenty-two years. I miss him,” she said.

They smiled at each other. Their smiles revealed the heartache we feel in our dreams, the inexpressible pain at the edge of acceptance.

As they gathered their luggage, Alexandra said, “One last request. We part here. Would you mind. I don’t want you to meet my daughter. She will ask me too many questions about you. And I don’t want to lie about what we talked about spending the night with you on the plane.”

“Your wish is my command,” said Moe.