I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  Across the street from Mr. Ringold's Lehigh Avenue house was the Beth Israel Hospital, where I knew Mrs. Ringold had worked as a lab assistant before their daughter was born, and around the corner was the Osborne Terrace branch library, where I used to bicycle for a weekly supply of books. The hospital, the library, and, as represented by my teacher, the school: the neighborhood's institutional nexus was all reassuringly present for me in virtually that one square block. Yes, the everyday workability of neighborhood life was in full swing on that afternoon in 1948 when I saw Mr. Ringold hanging out over the sill undoing a screen from the front window.

  As I braked to descend the steep Lehigh Avenue hill, I watched him thread a rope through one of the screen's corner hooks and then, after calling down "Here she comes," lower it along the face of the two-and-a-half-story building to a man in the garden, who undid the rope and set the screen onto a pile stacked against the brick stoop. I was struck by the way Mr. Ringold performed an act that was both athletic and practical. To perform that act as gracefully as he did, you had to be very strong.

  When I got to the house I saw that the man in the garden was a giant wearing glasses. It was Ira. It was the brother who had come to our high school, to "Auditorium," to portray Abe Lincoln. He'd appeared on the stage in costume and, standing all alone, delivered Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and then the Second Inaugural, concluding with what Mr. Ringold, the orator's brother, later told us was as noble and beautiful a sentence as any American president, as any American writer, had ever written (a long, chugging locomotive of a sentence, its tail end a string of weighty cabooses, that he then made us diagram and analyze and discuss for an entire class period): "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." For the rest of the program, Abraham Lincoln removed his stovepipe hat and debated the proslavery senator Stephen A. Douglas, whose lines (the most insidiously anti-Negro of which a group of students—we members of an extracurricular discussion group called the Contemporary Club—loudly booed) were read by Murray Ringold, who had arranged for Iron Rinn to visit the school.

  As if it weren't disorienting enough to see Mr. Ringold out in public without a shirt and tie—without even an undershirt—Iron Rinn wasn't wearing any more than a prizefighter. Shorts, sneakers, that was it—all but naked, not only the biggest man I'd ever seen up close but the most famous. Iron Rinn was heard on network radio every Thursday night on The Free and the Brave—a popular weekly dramatization of inspiring episodes out of American history—impersonating people like Nathan Hale and Orville Wright and Wild Bill Hickok and Jack London. In real life, he was married to Eve Frame, the leading lady of the weekly repertory playhouse for "serious" drama called The American Radio Theater. My mother knew everything about Iron Rinn and Eve Frame through the magazines she read at the beauty parlor. She would never have bought any of these magazines—she disapproved of them, as did my father, who wished his family to be exemplary—but she read them under the dryer, and then she saw all the fashion magazines when she went off on Saturday afternoons to help her friend Mrs. Svirsky, who, with her husband, had a dress shop on Bergen Street right next door to Mrs. Unterberg's millinery shop, where my mother also occasionally helped out on Saturdays and during the pre-Easter rush.

  One night after we had listened to The American Radio Theater, which we'd done since I could remember, my mother told us about Eve Frame's wedding to Iron Rinn and all the stage and radio personalities who were guests. Eve Frame had worn a two-piece wool suit of dusty pink, sleeves trimmed with double rings of matching fox fur, and, on her head, the sort of hat that no one in the world wore more charmingly than she did. My mother called it "a veiled come-hither hat," a style that Eve Frame had apparently made famous opposite the silent-film matinee idol Carlton Pennington in My Darling, Come Hither, where she played to perfection a spoiled young socialite. It was a veiled come-hither hat that she was well known for wearing when she stood before the microphone, script in hand, performing on The American Radio Theater, though she had also been photographed before a radio microphone in slouch-brimmed felts, in pillboxes, in Panama straw hats, and once, when she was a guest on The Bob Hope Show, my mother remembered, in a black straw saucer seductively veiled with gossamer silk thread. My mother told us that Eve Frame was six years older than Iron Rinn, that her hair grew an inch a month and she lightened its color for the Broadway stage, that her daughter, Sylphid, was a harpist, a Juilliard graduate, and the offspring of Eve Frame's marriage to Carlton Pennington.

  "Who cares?" my father said. "Nathan does," my mother replied defensively. "Iron Rinn is Mr. Ringold's brother. Mr. Ringold is his idol."

  My parents had seen Eve Frame in silent movies when she was a beautiful girl. And she was still beautiful; I knew because, four years earlier, for my eleventh birthday, I had been taken to see my first Broadway play—The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand—and Eve Frame was in it, and afterward my father, whose memories of Eve Frame as a young silent-film actress were still apparently amorously tinged, had said, "That woman speaks the King's English like nobody's business," and my mother, who may or may not have grasped what was fueling his praise, had said, "Yes, but she's let herself go. She speaks beautifully, and she did the part beautifully, and she looked adorable in that short pageboy, but the extra pounds are not becoming on a little thing like Eve Frame, certainly not in a fitted white piqué summer dress, full skirt or no full skirt."

  A discussion as to whether or not Eve Frame was Jewish invariably occurred among the women in my mother's mahjong club when it was my mother's turn to have them for their weekly game, and particularly after the evening a few months later when I had been a guest of Ira's at Eve Frame's dinner table. The starstruck world round the starstruck boy couldn't stop talking about the fact that people said her real name was Fromkin. Chava Fromkin. There were Fromkins in Brooklyn who were supposed to be the family she had disowned when she went to Hollywood and changed her name.

  "Who cares?" my serious-minded father would say whenever the subject came up and he happened to be passing through the living room, where the mahjong game was in progress. "They all change their names in Hollywood. That woman opens her mouth and it's an elocution lesson. She gets up on that stage and portrays a lady, you know it's a lady."

  "They say she's from Flatbush," Mrs. Unterberg, who owned the millinery shop, would routinely put in. "They say that her father is a kosher butcher."

  "They say Cary Grant is Jewish," my father reminded the ladies. "The fascists used to say that Roosevelt was Jewish. People say everything. That's not what I'm concerned with. I'm concerned with her acting, which in my book is superlative."

  "Well," said Mrs. Svirsky, who with her husband owned the dress shop, "Ruth Tunick's brother-in-law is married to a Fromkin, a Newark Fromkin. And she has relatives in Brooklyn, and they swear their cousin is Eve Frame."

  "What does Nathan say?" asked Mrs. Kaufman, a housewife and a girlhood friend of my mother's.

  "He doesn't," my mother replied. I had trained her to say that I didn't. How? Easy. When she had asked, on behalf of the ladies, if I knew whether Eve Frame of The American Radio Theater was, in actuality, Chava Fromkin of Brooklyn, I had told her, "Religion is the opiate of the people! Those things don't matter—I don't care. I don't know and I don't care!"

  "What is it like there? What did she wear?" Mrs. Unterberg asked my mother.

  "What did she serve?" Mrs. Kaufman asked.

  "How was her hair done?" Mrs. Unterberg asked.

  "Is he really six six? What does Nathan say? Does he wear a size sixteen shoe? Some people say that's just publicity."

  "And his skin is as pockmarked as it looks in the pictures?"

  "What does Nathan say
about the daughter? What kind of name is Sylphid?" asked Mrs. Schessel, whose husband was a chiropodist, like my father.

  "That's her real name?" asked Mrs. Svirsky.

  "It's not Jewish," said Mrs. Kaufman. "'Sylvia' is Jewish. I think it's French."

  "But the father wasn't French," said Mrs. Schessel. "The father is Carlton Pennington. She acted with him in all those films. She eloped with him in that movie. Where he was the older baron."

  "Is that the one where she wore the hat?"

  "Nobody in the world," said Mrs. Unterberg, "looks like that woman in a hat. Put Eve Frame in a snug little beret, in a small floral dinner hat, in a crocheted straw baby doll, in a veiled big black cartwheel—put her in anything, put her in a Tyrolean brown felt with a feather, put her in a white jersey turban, put her in a fur-lined parka hood, and the woman is gorgeous, regardless."

  "In one picture she wore—I'll never forget it," said Mrs. Svirsky, "—a gold-embroidered white evening suit with a white ermine muff. I never saw such elegance in my life. There was a play—which was it? We went to see it together, girls. She wore a burgundy wool dress, full at the bodice and the skirt, and the most enchanting scrollwork embroidery—"

  "Yes! And that matching veiled hat. Tall burgundy felt," said Mrs. Unterberg, "with a crushed veil."

  "Remember her in ruffles in whatever that other play was?" said Mrs. Svirsky. "No one wears ruffles the way she does. White double ruffles on a black cocktail dress!"

  "But the name Sylphid," asked Mrs. Schessel yet again. "Sylphid comes from what?"

  "Nathan knows. Ask Nathan," Mrs. Svirsky said. "Is Nathan here?"

  "He's doing his homework," my mother said.

  "Ask him. What kind of name is Sylphid?"

  "I'll ask him later," said my mother.

  But she knew enough not to—even though secretly, ever since I had entered the enchanted circle, I was bursting to talk about all of it to everyone. What do they wear? What do they eat? What do they say while they eat? What is it like there? It is spectacular.

  The Tuesday that I first met Ira, out in front of Mr. Ringold's house, was Tuesday, October 12, 1948. Had the World Series not just ended on Monday, I might, timorously, out of deference to my teacher's privacy, have speeded on by the house where he was taking down the screens with his brother and, without even waving or shouting hello, turned left at the corner onto Osborne Terrace. As it happened, however, the day before I had listened to the Indians beat the old Boston Braves in the final game of the Series from the floor of Mr. Ringold's office. He had brought a radio with him that morning, and after school those whose families didn't yet own a television set—the vast majority of us—were invited to spill directly out of his eighth-period English class and down the hall to crowd into the English department chairman's little office to hear the game, which was already under way at Braves Field.

  Courtesy, then, necessitated that I slow way, way down and call out to him, "Mr. Ringold—thanks for yesterday." Courtesy necessitated that I nod and smile at the giant in his yard. And—with a dry mouth, stiffly—stop and introduce myself. And respond a little daffily when he startled me by saying, "How ya' doin', buddy," by replying that on the afternoon he'd appeared at Auditorium, I'd been one of the boys who had booed Stephen A. Douglas when he announced into Lincoln's face, "I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. [Boo.] I believe this government was made on a white basis. [Boo.] I believe it was made for white men [Boo], for the benefit of white men [Boo], and their posterity for ever. [Boo.] I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men ... instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. [Boo. Boo. Boo.]"

  Something rooted deeper than mere courtesy (ambition, the ambition to be admired for my moral conviction) prompted me to break through the shyness and tell him, tell the trinity of Iras, all three of him—the patriot martyr of the podium Abraham Lincoln, the natural, hardy American of the airwaves Iron Rinn, and the redeemed roughneck from Newark's First Ward Ira Ringold—that it was I who had instigated the booing.

  Mr. Ringold came down the stairs from the second-floor flat, sweating heavily, wearing just khaki trousers and a pair of moccasins. Right behind him came Mrs. Ringold, who, before retreating back upstairs, set out a tray with a pitcher of ice water and three glasses. And so it was—four-thirty P.M., October 12, 1948, a blazing hot autumn day and the most astonishing afternoon of my young life—that I tipped my bike onto its side and sat on the steps of my English teacher's stoop with Eve Frame's husband, Iron Rinn of The Free and the Brave, discussing a World Series in which Bob Feller had lost two games—unbelievable—and Larry Doby, the pioneering black player in the American League, whom we all admired, but not the way we admired Jackie Robinson, had gone seven for twenty-two.

  Then we were talking about boxing: Louis knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott when Walcott was way ahead on points; Tony Zale regaining the middleweight title from Rocky Graziano right in Newark, at Ruppert Stadium in June, crushing him with a left in the third round, and then losing it to a Frenchman, Marcel Cerdan, over in Jersey City a couple of weeks back, in September ... And then from talking to me about Tony Zale one minute, Iron Rinn was talking to me about Winston Churchill the next, about a speech that Churchill had made a few days earlier that had him boiling, a speech advising the United States not to destroy its atomic bomb reserve because the atomic bomb was all that prevented the Communists from dominating the world. He talked about Winston Churchill the way he talked about Leo Durocher and Marcel Cerdan. He called Churchill a reactionary bastard and a warmonger with no more hesitation than he called Durocher a loudmouth and Cerdan a bum. He talked about Churchill as though Churchill ran the gas station out on Lyons Avenue. It wasn't how we talked about Winston Churchill in my house. It was closer to how we talked about Hitler. In his conversation, as in his brother's, there was no invisible line of propriety observed and there were no conventional taboos. You could stir together anything and everything: sports, politics, history, literature, reckless opinionating, polemical quotation, idealistic sentiment, moral rectitude ... There was something marvelously bracing about it, a different and dangerous world, demanding, straightforward, aggressive, freed from the need to please. And freed from school. Iron Rinn wasn't just a radio star. He was somebody outside the classroom who was not afraid to say anything.

  I had just finished reading about somebody else who wasn't afraid to say anything—Thomas Paine—and the book I'd read, a historical novel by Howard Fast called Citizen Tom Paine, was one of the collection in my bicycle basket that I was returning to the library. While Ira was denouncing Churchill to me, Mr. Ringold had stepped over to where the books had tumbled from the basket onto the pavement at the foot of the stoop and was looking at their spines to see what I was reading. Half the books were about baseball and were by John R. Tunis, and the other half were about American history and were by Howard Fast. My idealism (and my idea of a man) was being constructed along parallel lines, one fed by novels about baseball champions who won their games the hard way, suffering adversity and humiliation and many defeats as they struggled toward victory, and the other by novels about heroic Americans who fought against tyranny and injustice, champions of liberty for America and for all mankind. Heroic suffering. That was my specialty.

  Citizen Tom Paine was not so much a novel plotted in the familiar manner as a sustained linking of highly charged rhetorical flourishes tracing the contradictions of an unsavory man with a smoldering intellect and the purest social ideals, a writer and a revolutionary. "He was the most hated—and perhaps by a few the most loved—man in all the world." "A mind that burned itself as few minds in all human history." "To feel on his own soul the whip laid on the back of millions." "His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's could ever be." That was Paine as Fast portrayed him, savagely single-minded and unsociable, an epic, folkloric belligerent—unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar's clothes, bearing a musket in the unru
ly streets of wartime Philadelphia, a bitter, caustic man, often drunk, frequenting brothels, hunted by assassins, and friendless. He did it all alone: "My only friend is the revolution." By the time I had finished the book, there seemed to me no way other than Paine's for a man to live and die if he was intent on demanding, in behalf of human freedom—demanding both from remote rulers and from the coarse mob—the transformation of society.

  He did it all alone. There was nothing about Paine that could have been more appealing, however unsentimentally Fast depicted an isolation born of defiant independence and personal misery. For Paine had ended his days alone as well, old, sick, wretched, and alone, ostracized, betrayed—despised beyond everything for having written in his last testament, The Age of Reason, "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Reading about him had made me feel bold and angry and, above all, free to fight for what I believed in.

  Citizen Tom Paine was the very book that Mr. Ringold had picked out of my bicycle basket to bring back to where we were sitting.

  "You know this one?" he asked his brother.

  Iron Rinn took my library book in Abe Lincoln's enormous hands and began flipping through the opening pages. "Nope. Never read Fast," he said. "I should. Wonderful man. Guts. He was with Wallace from day one. I catch his column whenever I see the Worker, but I don't have the time for novels anymore. In Iran I did, in the service read Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Caldwell..."

  "If you're going to read him, this is Fast at his best," Mr. Ringold said. "Am I right, Nathan?"

  "This book is great," I answered.