The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  He and the girl were in sympathy on this. She rarely put in an appearance in summer. When the rest were gone, they would meet again, as if by agreement, barely acknowledging each other. But those imperious tones (of the gym teacher) that she used even with her friends didn’t interfere with autumn’s restored silence, and that hair of hers, how warmly it seemed to reflect the gold and brown of the beech trees around the house. He struggled to look critically at those specious capitalist appearances (which they undeniably were), and those beeches of changeable color, Blue Creek, the various glints of auburn that played in Nancy’s hair. But more, he had to resist their conniving charm, which was something else again. Pointless to pretend he hadn’t heard the mistress’s orders. “I could use some mistletoe for decoration.” “You’ll be here tonight to load the skis on the car.” When he saw her coming he would say to himself: Remember, this is surplus value’s daughter. But it was useless; as saints of another caliber know, you don’t exorcise the devil with common prayers.

  The fact was (mistletoe, hedges, pretty girls aside), it is easier to play the hero than to be coherent over the long haul, and that piece of wisdom, which now at age forty-five Ferranini was ready to accept, he still struggled to apply to others of his species and faith. Cases like that of Viscardi and Ancillotti would not have derailed him so much had he been sure that a man who’d risked being shot fighting the Nazi Fascists was not necessarily immune to the temptations of everyday life, or the good life.

  One winter morning (he was by then the permanent administrator of Old Laurel) he met Nancy Demarr coming out of the barn, the two of them looking like the cover of The Saturday Evening Post with the snow, the rustic backdrop, her elegant short pink coat, he in his checked flannel shirt. She was holding a pitcher of milk warm from the cow, and whether on a whim or out of sudden friendliness, she took it from her smiling lips and offered him some. He gave her a disdainful look. And she insisted: “Go ahead, be my guest.” Was he going to let that simperer boss him around? He turned to go. Luckily for him (or unluckily), the simperer did not take umbrage. She called him back. “Where do you take your meals? Why don’t you join us?” He said something brief, cool, and correct in thanks. He ate, and slept, in the room next to the storehouse, along with a Pole he’d hired as a farmhand and who, although he’d been in America for a number of years, still didn’t speak Americano and communicated in grunts. This was the proper company for him.

  Nancy didn’t insist, but the next Sunday there was an extra pair of skis on the roof of the car from Meadville. Ferranini accepted them willingly. He was lean and agile and it didn’t take much for him to learn to use them; he made his trial runs where the others couldn’t see him, though. It was Nancy who sought him out. Expert in many things (and even too much in one that we shall learn about), she was no less ingenuous than he in that field.

  Things went the way they would. In mid-December came a phone call from Saint Thérèse of Lisieux to say that the girl had the flu. She wanted some green China tea, imported exclusively by Demarr. It could not be found in Meadville. Of course her father, to be sure she got it quickly, sent Ferranini. Fifteen-year-old Salvatore, the eldest Demarr son, went along, and the two of them entered that little sickroom bursting with flowers, so many wildflowers and potted plants that it looked as if someone had died. (Salvatore told him it was one of his sister’s manias to sleep surrounded by flowers, even at home.) Ophelia among the flowers, the ex-militant in a convent. Not to be believed, thought Ferranini grasping for his sense of humor as she waved him closer. Then, when he was sitting down and she had smiled at him, and a bored Salvatore had gone out to take a walk around Meadville, he no longer entertained ironic thoughts. He no longer thought at all.

  They listened to the radio, she asked him to read her the paper for a bit, and then they fell silent. He didn’t permit himself to look at her but let his eyes roam around in the half-light of her little room: a place, a girl’s bedroom, that to Ferranini (he hadn’t had sisters or lovers) was strange and daunting, like a church. He was astonished to find the Stars and Stripes on the wall at the head of her brass bed. The Virgin, a crucifix? No, neither.

  He would have been even more astonished if he had known what this Ophelia’s vocation was. She was an activist, which was laudable, although he didn’t like her cause. A daughter of immigrants, the adolescent Nancy had embraced “Americanism”: a sort of inward-looking nationalism worshipping the customs, memory, and “heritage of the stock,” a creed espoused by people whose patriotism-cum-social conservatism verged on racist idiocy. Nancy had become a “distinguished member” of a couple of Americanist societies through her proselytizing in school and out. When that didn’t satisfy her, she had founded her own league called August Americans, with some hundred members, both boys and girls, who during the war began collecting magazines, records, and trinkets to send to the soldiers. Now Nancy, languorous under her Stars and Stripes, stretched out a hand on her bedcover to touch Ferranini’s. The hand of that alien who’d dropped in from God knows where, as foreign and probably as irreconcilable with Americanism as maccheroni or the fandango.

  They were engaged four months later, spring already budding. Nancy, in crinoline and a straw hat, appeared at Old Laurel in a two-horse landau. Pink and smiling, she was the picture of old Colonial charm, under some cherry trees that were opportunely heavy with blossoms. The wedding followed at the Camden town hall; Minelli was best man and there was no party, those being hard times. The day before she had told him, frankly but nicely, what other women may think but don’t say: “I’m marrying you because I like you, but I like my freedom too and I’m marrying you to have more of it, not to give it up.” Her mother, the pale, faraway, sensitive Clementine, did not pretend to be happy, but she did not oppose the marriage. Demarr was too fond of his own peace of mind to object, although his sights had been set higher. “You’re a lucky guy,” was all he said, in Americano as always, because beyond that he spoke only the dialect of Altamura, which was impenetrable to Ferranini. Besides, the young man seemed to be serious, he was a confidential clerk (not a salesman), and there was Salvatore, Demarr’s firstborn son, to inherit the company one day. Ultimately, Demarr looked upon his daughter’s choice with favor.

  To Ferranini, it was all somewhat unreal. Old Laurel’s meadows seemed to flower just for him; other people barely existed, they didn’t touch him. “I had no idea what real happiness was. That’s why I was self-centered.” His energy pierced the lazy clouds of that mild Pennsylvania spring day like an airplane shooting straight up. When he was alone in his office at the firm, he would beat his fists on the desk and sing to blow off steam. At first, right after the engagement, he was halting, timid. He seemed to persist in avoiding her. But every day brought new euphoria. Not just contentment but timorousness, triumphant anxiety, and amazement. “I can’t believe this. I don’t get it.” In short, it was happiness, not real if it didn’t overflow, if it wasn’t muddied by worries, if it didn’t question itself, incredulous.

  Even so, he couldn’t see himself in it. “I’ve died and come back to earth as someone else.” It was not just the would-be builder of socialism who had disappeared; it was his supposed Italian and Emilian convictions. Oxen and wives from your own tribe. Before you do marry, thrice fill the granary. Gone, too, was his own familiar diffidence and fierceness; that supremacy of ideas over sentiments he had so often boasted of. (At twenty-three, twenty-four years old!)

  After they married, naturally enough he calmed down, in part because the responsibility, in the most solemn sense, fell entirely on him. He had to be all that was needed for both of them. His makeshift experience was enhanced by his own tenderness, yet experience taught him that his wife was neither very tender nor anxious to conceal the fact. “Your interests for you, Walter,” she said, “and mine for me.” A rule that might even have been fine, if beyond their separate interests they had been eager to be intimate, but Nancy didn’t bother with that. Their wedding landau had but one hors
e, as it were. He was the one who must follow, must understand her and make himself understood, a double task. When she came back, and sometimes she came back a day late, from Meadville (from the school where she was still teaching three days a week), Nancy was pleased to find the house warm, clean, well-stocked.

  Honestly convinced that this happened miraculously and without any effort, she decided it was “absurd” to waste time on domestic duties (“like Mrs. Brown and Mrs. White do”) because things exist to serve us and not vice versa. And as she was in love’s intimate matters, so she was in her everyday affairs: it was he who took care of her when she had a cold, or reserved a seat on the plane for Boston where she had to go once a month. She was sincere as could be, and so helpless it made a man’s jaw drop.

  •

  A great expert, however, in areas that to Ferranini seemed less essential. For example, in Camden town politics, where she was keen to encourage certain of her father’s political aspirations. But when her husband complained that she left him alone on Sundays, or instead filled the house with people, Nancy would say quite seriously, “What do you expect? I don’t have a clue; you’re the first man I’ve had in my life.”

  A year went by in those three rooms they’d grown into, a bit dark and low-ceilinged on the top floor of the Demarr mansion; meanwhile out in the world, the war grew wider and more disastrous. Ferranini resigned himself to putting his feet back on the ground and tried to go less often to Old Laurel; it made him feel gloomy. He continued to be in love, with that pathetic certainty that stokes love, that Nancy would make him suffer. And yet he was sure that he knew her. He made lists of her merits and defects.

  “You are honest, not very demonstrative. You’re proud, you are sincere. Stubborn.”

  He wasn’t so very wrong, but he was far from knowing her. Surprises lay in wait.

  “I’m not stubborn. I simply married a man who is different from me. If you knew how to carry me off. . . .”

  She wasn’t entirely wrong, not that she herself knew how she wanted to be carried off, either. Her character, impervious and tough as it usually was, was also supremely contradictory, and she would suddenly, unpredictably turn tender. Whisper in her ear in one of those receptive intervals (brought on by some state of mind or body or who knows what other imponderables) and she would be docile and utterly available. An hour later, no one could budge her, not without hearing about it. Some casual suggestion made at just the right moment would become compulsory behavior for herself and others. A psychologist might have been curious about this dangerous, if deeply hidden, peculiarity of hers. Her family, not only poor Walter but also her parents, never saw it, although they sometimes bore the brunt.

  •

  A girl who wanted a life of her own, who dimly sensed she was physically frail and insisted from the beginning they would have no children. Something—certainly not her upbringing—also made her insist against her parents’ wishes on a civil rather than religious wedding. For poor Clementine this was scandalous; for Demarr, a heartache. Her stubbornness remained a mystery and they blamed it, quite wrongly, on the bourgeoisifying Ferranini. But they did give in.

  Rosaleen, a sister of Clementine Demarr, lived in Boston. Her husband had been a local reporter for a New York newspaper, but he had died years earlier. Nancy had gone to visit her aunt after she married Walter, and the visits became a habit. She didn’t say much but from what Ferranini was able to learn, she was drawn to Boston by friends, perhaps friends she’d recently met, intellectuals, people who wrote in the papers. She also went to conferences, or classes, what sort it wasn’t clear. In April 1945—it was their anniversary—she went to Boston and immediately came down with a cold. She phoned to say she would be late in returning, and in fact they waited all of fifteen days. And when she did return, she was no longer herself. Walter scarcely recognized her. She spoke a different language.

  It didn’t quite dawn on him that it was English. A King’s English that obeyed the diction of Harvard and the accent of Boston’s better sort. She would no longer be going to mass, she told the Demarrs. She had converted to Presbyterianism (a fashionable denomination, also of the better sort), producing a certificate signed by the minister of St. George Chapel in Boston. As for Walter, she expected him to enlist in the army as soon as possible, so as to earn American citizenship right away, and in the meantime she wanted him to apply to change his surname: it wasn’t respectable; it needed to be Anglo-Saxonized.

  While she was down with the cold, someone had seized the moment to expose her to another virus. One well-known and widespread in the States, raw material for sociologists and amusing to people of good sense. It took the form of abhorrence of anything that wasn’t highborn Yankee, that wasn’t descended from Anglo-Saxon Old America. Although in New America, those distinctions were as rarely to be found as Cato’s sturdy Roman spirit in the wealthy new quarters of Rome.

  Ferranini had already thought of enlisting, and now that the USA was fighting alongside the USSR, he could earn Nancy’s approval with a clean conscience. One morning he went down to the army enrollment office in Germantown, Philadelphia. The physical exam was rigorous. Though he was careful not to breathe a word of his old heart murmur to the army doctors, they flushed it out immediately. As a foreigner, he couldn’t be taken on in the civilian corps. So there was nothing to be done, and as for the new name, there wasn’t much point in that. Nancy was displeased, and angry at him about the physical, as if the murmur were his fault and he’d wasted time trying to hide it. Ferranini wasn’t offended; he was in love. And he always found a reason for his indulgence: Nancy had inherited an irritable nervous system from her mother; you had to be patient. (Hadn’t she also inherited those copper streaks in her hair, those bewitching green eyes?)

  Now patience is the key to marital happiness, if there are two to practice it. Nancy was as smug about being peevish as she was about her small round breasts. Even with her parents, with old Demarr, things weren’t going smoothly. One evening, in front of them and some of their friends she proudly announced she had joined the executive committee of American Heritage in Boston. This was another league (far more powerful than those she’d been part of at school) of political conservatives, or rather political extremists, with plans for a “restoration” of government institutions, of manners (and race relations) to what they’d been at the time of the Civil War if not before, and with a special veneration for Southerners and slavers. Old Demarr knew little about American Heritage, but he’d heard it was anti-Catholic. He protested that his daughter would end up in the Ku Klux Klan.

  “In any event,” replied Nancy, “I shall live and die an American.”

  “And me? I’ve been an American for thirty-two years!”

  And in all those years, he was told, he had never learned that on Thanksgiving Day you ate roast turkey and not boiled capon.

  Such was her infatuation—and things would get worse. In their bedroom she kept a recruiting poster for the Marine Corps, showing a tall, slim soldier with sandy hair and a close-fitting uniform, captioned “The Only Country That Never Lost a War.” Dark and not very tall, Ferranini nightly undressed in front of the poster while his wife watched, the unhappy comparison implicit. Meanwhile she read the National Review, a bellicose, chauvinist weekly for which, she told him, she hoped to write. For Nancy Demarr and her fellow Americans, even some who were older, better educated, and wiser, snobbism was becoming ideology. Right-wing opinion, or prejudice—it would culminate in McCarthyism—was gathering strength. Reaction against Roosevelt, the New Deal, the alliance with the Soviets, and the ideals of peace and international unity mingled with the East Coast and Southern bourgeoisie’s everlasting contempt for and dread of the blacks and the immigrants.

  Because of the war effort, the propaganda was subtle and contained, but it was unflagging. Nancy was one of the many conquests, and victims. A victim who, without meaning to, spread disorder among all those close to her. She couldn’t forgive her parents (always r
eferred to as “the old folks”) for their Irish and Italian origins. Her mother, Clementine, then decided that her husband, Demarr, was too old and too simple to “understand” her, and that her son-in-law, Walter, was a sly one who had gotten himself a rich wife. One sorry day she affirmed that she was gravely ill (in spirit, the others were so insensitive and small-minded), and she took herself off to an oceanside clinic and spa at Vanport that treated illnesses like hers and offered psychoanalytic care. And there she remained. Demarr, in a fit of vexation and misery, then grief, telephoned her and blurted out that he was glad she was gone. He quickly repented, begging her to come back. Perhaps offended but certainly hysterical, as introverts can be at menopause, she proclaimed he had crushed her soul: he would never see her again. Every evening at the table ready to eat, Demarr broke down in tears. Only Ferranini was there to console him. Nancy neither defended nor disapproved of her mother; she was neutral. And yet old Demarr, left with the children, and Carmelo the youngest not yet seven years old, really did deserve some sympathy. Nancy was the eldest and she loved her siblings, but she had no time or inclination to look after them. Instead, they had to take on Mrs. Esposito, an elderly employee of the firm who minded them in her spare time. She was the unwitting cause when matters took another turn for the worse for Ferranini and for all of them.