CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman
left no sense of decency?”4 Alice Wirth felt particularly vindicated as Senator McCarthy’s power evaporated. Her father, Professor Louis Wirth, had been accused in 1951 of being a Communist and died at age 55 of a sudden heart attack shortly before his anticipated grilling by HUAC.
Fay dared not share with Marvin or any of her law school classmates her own former lover’s recent devastating experience with HUAC. Stanley Moore had been named a full professor at Reed in 1953, two years after Fay’s parents forced her to transfer. Divorced from Marguerite Higgins, he remarried one of his students in December 1953. The following spring, Moore was called before HUAC where he refused to answer whether he was a Communist. That prompted the local Portland papers to stir up a furor in the conservative community, using Moore as a lightning rod for growing discontent with the liberal professors and student body at the college. The Reed faculty, in a show of solidarity, circled their wagons around Professor Moore, strongly urging that the board of trustees take no action against the tenured professor. Reed had not instituted a loyalty oath. Professor Moore had not tried to recruit anyone to become a Communist. He simply held Marxist philosophical views. Fay followed the saga from afar, with no one to share her growing anxiety.
Source: Oregon Historical Society
Philosophy Prof. Stanley Moore with his second wife, Annie Laurie Malarkey, Reed Class of 1953, at their wedding in December 1953. In the spring of 1954, Prof. Moore became the center of controversy for his Marxist teachings. He was fired from Reed for refusing to answer if he was a Communist – the only tenured professor Reed ever dismissed. In 1981, Robert Richter co-led the successful effort to have the Reed Board of Trustees formally apologize to Prof. Moore.
Meanwhile, Fay still played piano to entertain friends, but now found contentment in her career choice. At Fay’s instigation, she and Marvin planned to move to San Francisco after he graduated. Fay had survived her first brutal Chicago winter and had had enough of the windy city. She wanted to rejoin her close friends and finish law school at Boalt Hall. With Marvin as her anchor, Fay looked forward to finishing her legal education and proving she could make good on her pledge to become an agent for change.
∎ 5 ∎
Renewed Ardor
“Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man [and woman].” 1
— ARISTOTLE
The newlyweds celebrated their marriage a second time with a large wedding reception for family and friends at the Abrahams’ home in Berkeley. Fay was excited to be reunited with her old companions, oblivious that her younger sister had delayed her finals in hopes of spending more time with Fay. It must have raised eyebrows in the Abrahams’ social circle when Fay and Marvin then decided to start out married life by sharing a house with Betty Lee. For a surprisingly affordable price, the trio rented a large home in the Berkeley Hills that resembled a drafty, Italian villa. Betty thought Fay had found a real gem of a husband. She was surprised and delighted that Marvin took his turn washing or drying dishes without a murmur, unlike all the other men Betty had met.
Betty remained one of Fay’s few confidantes about Stanley Moore’s ongoing troubles. In the summer of 1954, a group of influential Oregon businessmen pressured the trustees to ignore the faculty and fire Moore or see Reed closed. Moore kept silent on his party affiliation throughout the political storm, but challenged the trustees to consider that they might stand condemned by history for their action should they reject the faculty’s ringing endorsement of his fitness to teach. The trustees yielded to the outside pressure and fired Moore, outraging faculty and students and prompting the college president to resign. In spite of her distress at this alarming turn of events, Fay likely felt enormous relief at not having been caught up in Moore’s public shaming and ostracism.
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Though Marvin had to hunt for a job, Fay already had hers secured. Dag Hamilton’s in-laws had just rented a house in Berkeley. Walton Hamilton, then in his early seventies, had been an economist in the Roosevelt administration. The retired law professor remained still as sharp as a whip, but almost totally blind and in need of a reader and researcher. Fay and “Hammy” quickly proved even more simpatico than Dag had anticipated. Fay read him music and art books and shared his satisfaction as the Indian rights case he was working on progressed toward the United States Supreme Court.
When Professor Sharp came out to the Bay Area that summer to visit his son, he stopped by to ask Fay and Marvin for help. He was fund-raising for the Rosenbergs’ two orphaned children then being reared by another family. Marvin immediately began passing out leaflets at a factory gate in Emeryville. This time Marvin’s decisiveness alarmed Fay. She confided her panicked reaction to Betty. It was too dangerous. Fay pictured a steel worker punching Marvin or the FBI adding him to their list of undesirables. Yet, despite agonizing over the issue, Fay soon swallowed her fears and joined Marvin. In the years to come, Fay would take far greater risks, once she concluded that there was no safe middle ground on which she could live with herself.
After a heady summer of intellectual dialogue with Hammy, Fay came down to earth with a crash when she arrived for classes at Boalt Hall. Fay had grown up with only a dim awareness of the nearby law school as a more prestigious alternative to Hastings in San Francisco. In deciding to transfer from the University of Chicago, Fay had simply assumed that it would provide a parallel experience. She did not realize that no Malcolm Sharps could be found on its conservative faculty, whose members had all signed a loyalty oath and remained totally silent on the issue of forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Even among Boalt students in the early ’50s, being a Democrat was unusual and passed for flaming radicalism.
Within days after starting classes, Fay begged Marvin to return to Chicago. Marvin had by then obtained a temporary job as a law clerk for the office of famed torts attorney, Melvin Belli. Unlike her parents’ reaction when Fay had demanded to switch schools in the past, Fay found Marvin completely supportive of her wishes. He suggested to his distraught bride that she call Dean Levi. Marvin later recalled that when Fay reached Dean Levi to ask if she could undo her horrible mistake and get her scholarship back, he laughed and said, “Sure.” The earliest that the University of Chicago would accept her return was for the spring term. In the meantime, Fay told Marvin “I can’t stand it here” and immediately withdrew from Boalt. She had lasted only a week.
So far Fay’s iron will and headstrong, passionate nature set the path for her and Marvin. She decided to use the unexpected window of time before they moved back to Chicago to tackle a reading project her friend Pip likely encouraged — reading the English translation of the entire seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu). The ambitious work with 2,000 literary characters had received acclaim as the greatest novel of the century, perhaps, the best ever written. As usual, Fay immersed herself completely in her latest project. She was fascinated by the author’s reflections on time and memory, the role of the subconscious and of art and music in life among the French aristocracy and the emerging French middle class. Taking full advantage of Marvin’s indulgence, Fay spent hours on end reading chapters and trading insights with her friend Pip over coffee at outdoor cafes. This interlude had a lasting impact. Fay would name her only daughter for Proust’s heroine, the Duchesse Oriane de Guermantes, and, in her late forties, immerse herself in her own self-reflective, lengthy sojourn in Europe.
Meanwhile, Marvin left the chaotic Belli law office and worked as an editor for the legal publishing company Bancroft Whitney. When Fay tore herself from the adventures of the Duchesse Oriane de Guermantes, she sometimes joined Marvin for lunch in San Francisco. His new work address was right across the street from Hastings School of the Law. One day in the early fall, Fay suddenly recognized a young woman on the steps of the publishing company as Alice Wirth. Fay surprised her former law school classmate by greeting her as if she were one of Fay’s oldest and dearest friends. The two acquaintances