Melanie had been telling Elwood she’d gotten a letter from Washington laying out for her what the government’s expectations were if she wanted to prove her innocence.
“I’m not un-American!” Melanie had been shouting up to the window. “I was a Girl Scout, for heaven’s sake. I sang the National Anthem at my high school football games! I have done nothing wrong, Elwood. Ask anyone at the studio! Anyone.”
“But this isn’t about what you have done or not done, Melanie,” Elwood had said, his voice gliding down unhurriedly to Melanie’s side of the fence. Eva got the impression he didn’t often raise his voice. “It’s about who they think you are. And who you associate with.”
“You mean who I sleep with,” Melanie had shot back, and only slightly less loudly.
“Especially who you sleep with.” His voice had still been gentle.
“Even if Carsonisa communist—” Melanie had begun, but Elwood cut her off.
“You should probably just assume for the moment that they know something about him that you don’t. I would.”
“Why? Why should I do that?”
“Because word gets around in Hollywood, especially in the writers’ circles, where there once were quite a number of Party members. And because you’re only on the list because he is.”
“But even if Carsonisa communist, that doesn’t mean that I am one!”
“I think perhaps those men in Washington suspect that you’re not.”
“Then why is all of this happening to me?”
“They suppose, if you are guilty, that you must know a great many people whoarecommunists. Because you are in an intimate relationship with one. And that must mean you sympathize with a communist and what he believes in. Communist sympathizers are as great a threat to national security as communists. Maybe worse. That’s how they see it.”
“That’s not what I am!”
“But this is what they see.”
“They are wrong!”
“I am inclined to agree with you. The problem is not that they are wrong but that they are in a position to make your life difficult because they think they’re right. They have power that you do not.”
Eva had stopped shaking the rug but was glued to the spot as she listened.
“So I should do nothing?” Melanie had sounded on the verge of tears. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“You can only do what is in your power to do, of course. That’sall any of us can do about anything. But you can begin to do something by adjusting what they see.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“Well, for one thing, you can stop sleeping with a man they say is a communist.”
“But I don’t think—”
“Theythink he is. That’s what you need to remember.”
“He’s paying my rent.”
“And you don’t see that as an additional problem here?”
“I can’t afford this place without his help.”
Elwood had sighed. He’d sounded tired to Eva, very tired, and it had been only a little past ten in the morning.
“And he’s not even here right now,” Melanie added.
“But he’ll be back at some point, right? Don’t you have family in Nebraska?” Elwood had asked wearily but still kindly.
