The Golden Gate by Amy Chua

Author:Amy Chua
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

PART

THREE

Chapter Eighteen

MRS. BAINBRIDGE’S TESTIMONIAL

PREPARED FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY DOOGAN

IN CONNECTION WITH HER DEPOSITION

TAKEN ON THE FIFTEENTH OF MARCH, 1944

One April day in 1941, my granddaughter Nicole announced she was now a Communist.

I instantly suspected a boy was involved. This required no genius on my part. It was a straightforward deduction from the fact that at the very same time she began to denounce all her previous beaus.

“What’s wrong with me, Nana?” she asked. “How could I have had such mortifying taste? What could I possibly have seen in that ridiculous George Thatcher? Or Chip Abbott—ugh!”

I had to agree with her there. George was Nicole’s first boyfriend, and never was there a wider gap between self-perception and reality. He thought of himself as brooding and stoic when in fact he was thin-skinned and giddy with an extremely low pain tolerance. Charles Abbott IV was Nicole’s date to the deb ball, and as pretentious as they come. He was an artist at heart—but only at heart.

“I want to make a difference, Nana. I want my life to have meaning. But what have I done? Nothing—nothing except come out and dance with inane boys at cotillions. I haven’t contributed a whit to humanity.”

For the rest of that year Nicole was seized with class fervor, and in those prewar days, labor strikes were still omnipresent. Nicole joined women warehouse workers striking at the Southern Pacific terminal. She marched outside the Heinz pickle factory in Emeryville. She even picketed the Mark Hopkins; I doubt very much that anyone else in that line was a descendant of the great man.

You will suppose, Mr. Doogan, that I abhor Communism. Far from it. Although I am certainly not a Communist myself, no one with a heart can fail to object to our society’s gross inequities, our mistreatment of the workingman, and our scandalous indifference to hunger. I admired Nicole’s idealism, and I thought it important for her to learn through her own experiences, including her own mistakes.

But to be candid, I fully expected her new fervor to burn itself out within a few quick months. Nicole’s dalliances with causes had always been like Sadie’s, or Isabella’s for that matter, with men—passionate but fleeting. In this I was mistaken. Nicole’s devotion to her new cause intensified, and soon we were all in her crosshairs—our whole family, our entire social strata.

Later that year, I dropped by John’s house in Pacific Heights to say hello to the twins and found Nicole in a state. She was so angry she was shaking, and at first she refused to speak with me. When I pressed her, she finally burst out, “Do you know what happened today, Nana? The police beat up some longshoremen. They punctured the lung of one of the men and left him to die. The men hadn’t done a thing—only exercised their right to strike.”

I was horrified. “That’s terrible,” I said. “Reprehensible. Did you know any of them?”

“What difference does that make? You don’t understand, Nana. The police are disgusting, and they’ll pay for what they did, but they’re just pawns.

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