The Last Word
Williams, Mary
THE LAST WORD Mary Williams Portrait of a Lady After thirty-three years in the United States, Albertine still speaks English with the halting precision of a well-schooled foreigner. She still...
...And people in the middle wonder about us, and sometimes worry, too...
...Later, I was amazed by how that man McCarthy was mistreated...
...Politics aside, she was the stuff of feminist magazine profiles—a woman as sturdy and sensible as an army hiking boot...
...about fluoride in the water, sex in the schoolroom, LSD on the backs of stamps...
...The teacher, the boy scout leader...
...And I listened to her willingly...
...But seeing the reverence his ghost still brings out in someone as worldly wise as Albertine makes me want to turn the question around...
...They, too, are on the outside of things, hewing hard to longshot causes and dubious hopes...
...In Mississippi, I looked in the papers and all I found was McCarthy...
...She impressed me because, with a historical romance for a life story and a set of good, simple passions for a creed, she seemed wildly out of place in an assembly of right-wing crackpots and political misfits...
...I met Albertine at the McCarthy memorial this year, late in the evening after the Marine color guard had trooped the flag away, after the ice cubes had melted, when the busboys were setting tables for the next day's round of battered chicken and canned corn...
...What will the rest of America do...
...They salute the flag, ponder dark mysteries surrounding their hero's death ("Who killed McCarthy...
...I was a teacher...
...Unless you have good family, you can't have a good country"), about patriotism ("I am poor today, but I am ready to help my country get back on its feet"), and, leaning forward for emphasis, about hard work and faith ("Life means work...
...So why had she gone to such lengths to honor Tailgunner Joe...
...She could not be called a typical McCarthyite, but she was a good personification of the abstraction we call Middle America...
...She still sends letters and an occasional food package to her husband—a man now remarried, whom she has not seen since the last days of World War II...
...Her allegiance to McCarthy dates to her stint in the Mississippi fields...
...Then, in one night, 15,000 were gone...
...When Germany occupied Latvia, Alber-tine's husband was drafted to fight the Soviet army...
...Yet the seventy-three-year-old Latvian immigrant, now living in Michigan, traveled 800 miles in May to salute one of the most destructively xenophobic American public figures ever, the late Senator Joe McCarthy...
...and then repair to a nearby restaurant for food and drink and great swallows of gut-grabbing anti-communism...
...But it's also true that we're not as comfortable as we once were, and that if things get worse, we may see more disillusionment, and more people latching onto extremes of faith to ward it off...
...It would not be easy or fair to dissect and label Albertine's McCarthyite persuasion, but I think I understand it...
...In 1940, the Russians came into all three Baltic states," she recalled...
...And when Germany capitulated, he was bundled off, she said, to a fifteen-year term in a Soviet labor camp...
...What murderous gang committed this murder...
...What kind of country...
...Others at the McCarthy celebration had talked of crooked plots between financiers and Muscovites...
...She had lost everything that was important—family, home, country—and McCarthy stood ruthlessly against it happening to her ever again...
...Every spring, a little flock of believers gathers at the cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin, where McCarthy is buried...
...Horatio Alger could not have spun a better plot...
...As one who works for a left-leaning publication, I feel a certain kinship with people who tilt so sharply the other way...
...Only a year later, when they opened the mass graves, we found them...
...We were in Latvia...
...But Albertine talked about her family ("What kind of family do we want...
...McCarthy was the only one who spoke to her fears at a time when her life was a shambles...
...We don't win our wars any more...
...The Russian communists came at night, two, three in a bunch...
...I may, in fact, respect it...
...On the fourteenth of June, in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Russians started the mass deportations...
...we cannot be upbeat about the economy...
...Because I had lived one year under communist occupation in Russia, I wanted to find what Americans knew about communism," she said...
...He was the only man for whom I have—how to say— respect...
...It was a hot day, like today...
...She fled Latvia with a toddler daughter, wound up first picking cotton in Mississippi and later frying doughnuts in Michigan...
...McCarthy may have ruined a lot of people, but to some he gave a shot in the arm...
...two million people...
...about sinister Jewish industrialists who, plainly, staged World War II...
...We will live right only if we live by the Ten Commandments...
...I am often asked, "What will you do if there is ever another Joe McCarthy...
...One day we were Latvians, Mary Willliams is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...And many Americans are looking for another shot these days...
...My husband was a commissioned officer in the Latvian army...
...She convinced a secretarial school to enroll her on credit, mastered shorthand in a language she could barely speak, worked to put her daughter through college, and, though she had never divorced her first husband, remarried...
...That whole year, people disappeared from the streets, from businesses, from families—and nobody knew where they went...
...People ask me what I'll do if there is ever another McCarthy...
...Everything about her—the gray stockings and sober black suit, the white blouse bordered in lace, the restless, talkative hands, the frequent insistent references to God's law— suggests an earlier time, an alien culture...
...It was all secretly done, with secret vehicles...
...America of the early 1980s is not Latvia of the early 1940s, it's true...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
