by Philip Roth
"Doris always excused him and made allowances for him, came to Ira's defense every time I started in. 'Yes,' Doris said, 'here is a Communist, a big revolutionary, a party member with his kind of zeal, and he suddenly falls in love with an unthinking actress in this year's ladylike waspy-waist jackets and long skirts, who is famous and beautiful, who is steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions, and it contradicts his entire moral standard—but this is love.' 'Is it?' I would ask her. 'Looks like credulity and confusion to me. Ira has no intuition about emotional questions. The lack of emotional intuition goes along with his being the kind of flat-footed radical he is. Those people are not very psychologically attuned.' But Doris's rebuttal is to justify him by nothing less than the annihilating power of love. 'Love,' says Doris, 'love is not something that is logical. Vanity is not something that is logical. Ira is not something that is logical. Each of us in this world has his own vanity, and therefore his own tailor-made blindness. Eve Frame is Ira's.'
"Even at his funeral, where there weren't twenty people, Doris stood up and made a speech on this very subject, a woman who dreaded speaking in public. She said he was a Communist with a weakness for life; he was an impassioned Communist who was not, however, made to live in the closed enclave of the party, and that was what subverted and destroyed him. He was not perfect from the Communist point of view—thank God. The personal he could not renounce. The personal kept bursting out of Ira, militant and single-minded though he would try to be. It's one thing to have your party allegiance and it's also one thing to be who you are and not able to restrain yourself. There was no side of himself that he could suppress. Ira lived everything personally, Doris said, to the hilt, including his contradictions.
"Well, maybe yes, maybe no. The contradictions were indisputable. The personal openness and the Communist secrecy. The home life and the party. The need for a child, the desire for a family—should a party member with his aspirations care about having a child like that? Even to one's contradictions one might impose a limit. A guy from the streets marries an artiste? A guy in his thirties marries a woman in her forties with a big adult baby who is still living at home? The incompatibilities were endless. But then, that was the challenge. With Ira, the more that's wrong, the more to correct.
"I told him, 'Ira, the situation with Pennington is uncorrectable. The only way to correct it is by not being there.' I told him more or less what O'Day had been telling him back with Donna. 'This is not politics—this is private life. You can't bring to private life the ideology that you bring to the great world. You cannot change her. What you've got, you've got; if it is insufferable, then leave. This is a woman who married a homosexual, lived twelve years untouched by a homosexual husband, and who continues her involvement with him even though he behaves in front of their daughter in a way that she considers detrimental to her daughter's well-being. She must consider it even more detrimental for Sylphid not to see her father at all. She's caught in a dilemma, probably there is no right thing for her to do—so let it be, don't bother her about it, let it go.'
"Then I asked, 'Tell me, are other things insufferable? Other things you want to go in and change? Because if there are, forget it. You cannot change anything.'
"But change was what Ira lived for. Why he lived. Why he lived strenuously. It is the essence of the man that he treats everything as a challenge to his will. He must always make the effort. He must change everything. For him that was the purpose of being in the world. Everything he wanted to change was here.
"But as soon as you want passionately what is beyond your control, you are primed to be thwarted—-you are preparing to be brought to your knees.
'"Tell me,' I said to Ira, 'if you were to put all the insufferable things in a column and draw a line under them and add them up, do they add up to "Totally Insufferable"? Because if they do, then even if you only got there the day before yesterday, even if this marriage is still brand-new, you must go. Because your tendency, when you make a mistake, is not to go. Your tendency is to correct things in that vehement way that the people in this family like to correct things. That's a worry to me right now.'
"He had already told me about Eve's third marriage, the marriage after Pennington, to Freedman, and so I said to him, 'Sounds like one disaster after another. And you are going to do what, exactly—undo the disasters? The Great Emancipator off the stage as well as on? Is that why you seek her out in the first place? You're going to show her that you're a bigger and better man than the great Hollywood star? You're going to show her that a lew isn't a rapacious capitalist like Freedman but a justice-making machine like you?'
"Doris and I had been to dinner there already. I had seen the Pennington-Frame family in action, and so I unloaded about that too. I unloaded everything. 'That daughter is a time bomb, Ira. Resentful, sullen, baleful—a person narrowly focused on exhibiting herself who otherwise is not there. She is a strong-willed person used to getting what she wants, and you, Ira Ringold, are in her way. Sure, you are strong-willed too, and bigger and older and a man. But you will not be able to make your will known. Where the daughter is concerned, you can have no moral authority because you are bigger and older and a man. That is going to be a source of frustration to a tycoon in the moral-authority racket like you. In you, the daughter is going to discover the meaning of a word that she could never have begun to learn from her mother: resistance. You are a six-foot six-inch hindrance, a hazard to her tyranny over the star who is mom.'
"I used strong language. I was an intense fellow myself in those days. I would get unsettled by the irrational, particularly when it emanated from my brother. I was more vehement than I should have been, but I didn't really overstate the case. I saw it right off, out of the gate, the night we went there for dinner. I would have thought you couldn't miss it, but Ira gets indignant. 'How do you know all this? How do you know all these things? Because you're so smart,' he says, 'or because I'm so dumb?' 'Ira,' I told him, 'there is a family of two living in that house, not a family of three, a family of two that has no concrete human relationships except each with the other. There is a family living in that house that can't find the right scale for anything. The mother in that house is being emotionally blackmailed by the daughter. You will not live happily as the protector of someone who is being emotionally blackmailed. Nothing is clearer in that household than the reversal of authority. Sylphid is the one wielding the whip. Nothing is clearer than that the daughter bears a rankling grudge against the mother. Nothing is clearer than that the daughter has got it in for the mother for some unpardonable crime. Nothing is clearer than how uncurbed the two of them are with their overwrought emotions. There is certainly no pleasure between those two. There will never be anything resembling a decent, modest state of accord between so frightened a mother and this overweening, unweaned child.
'"Ira, the relationship between a mother and a daughter or a mother and a son isn't all that complicated. I have a daughter,' I told him, 'I know about daughters. It's one thing to be with your daughter because you're infatuated with her, because you're in love; it's another to be with her because you're terrified of her. Ira, the daughter's rage at her mother's remarrying will doom your household from the start. "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I am simply describing to you the way that family is unhappy.'
"That's when he lit into me. 'Look, I don't live on Lehigh Avenue,' he told me. 'I love your Doris, she's a wonderful wife and a wonderful mother, but I'm not myself interested in the bourgeois Jewish marriage with the two sets of dishes. I never lived inside the bourgeois conventions and I have no intention of starting now. You actually propose that I give up a woman I love, a talented, wonderful human being—whose life, by the way, hasn't been a bed of roses either—give her up and run away because of this kid who plays the harp? That to you is the great problem in my life? The problem in my life is that union I belong to, Murray, moving that goddamn actors' union from where it is stuck to where it belongs. The problem in my life i
s the writer for my show. My problem isn't being a hindrance to Eve's kid—I'm a hindrance to Artie Sokolow, that's the problem. I sit down with this guy before he turns in the script, and I go over it with him, and if I don't like my lines, Murray, I tell him so. I won't do the goddamn lines if I don't like 'em. I sit down and I fight with him till he gives me something to say that gets across a message that is socially useful—'
"Leave it to Ira to aggressively miss the point. His mind moved, all right, but not with clarity. It moved only with force. 'I don't care,' I told him, 'if you're strutting the stage and telling people how to write their scripts. I'm talking about something else. I'm not talking about conventional or unconventional or bourgeois or bohemian. I'm talking about a household where the mother is a pathetic carpet for the daughter to stomp on. It's crazy that you, the son of our father, who grew up in our house, won't recognize how explosive domestic arrangements can be, how ruinous to people. The enervating bickering. The daily desperation. The hour-by-hour negotiation. This is a household that is completely out of whack—'
"Well, it wasn't hard for Ira to say 'Fuck off' and never see you again. He didn't modulate. There's first gear and then suddenly there's fifth gear, and he's gone. I couldn't stop, I wouldn't stop, and so he tells me to go fuck myself and he leaves. Six weeks later I wrote him a letter he didn't answer. Then I made phone calls he wouldn't answer. In the end I went to New York and I corralled the guy and I apologized. 'You were right, I was wrong. It's none of my business. We miss you. We want you to come over. You want to bring Eve, bring her—you don't want to, don't. Lorraine misses you. She loves you and she doesn't know what happened. Doris misses you...' Et cetera. I wanted to say, 'You've got your eye on the wrong menace. The menace to you is not imperialist capitalism. The menace to you isn't your public actions, the menace to you is your private life. It always was and it always will be.'
"There were nights I couldn't sleep. I'd say to Doris, 'Why doesn't he leave? Why can't he leave?' And do you know what Doris would answer? 'Because he's like everybody—you only realize things when they're over. Why don't you leave me? All the human stuff that makes it hard for anybody to be with anybody else—don't we have it? We have arguments. We have disagreements. We have what everybody has—the little this and the little that, the little insults that pile up, the little temptations that pile up. Don't you think I know that there are women who are attracted to you? Teachers at school, women in the union, powerfully attracted to my husband? Don't you think I know you had a year, after you got back from the war, when you didn't know why you were still with me, when you asked yourself every day, "Why don't I leave her?" But you didn't. Because by and large people don't. Everyone's dissatisfied, but by and large not leaving is what people do. Especially people who've been left themselves, like you and your brother. Come through what you two came through and you value stability very highly. Probably overvalue it. The hardest thing in the world is to cut the knot of your life and leave. People make ten thousand adjustments to even the most pathological behavior. Why, emotionally, is a man of his type reciprocally connected to a woman of her type? The usual reason: their flaws fit. Ira cannot leave that marriage any more than he can leave the Communist Party.'
"Anyway, the baby. Johnny O'Day Ringold. Eve told Ira that when she had Sylphid out in Hollywood, it was different for her than it was for Pennington. When Pennington went off every day to work in a movie, everybody accepted it; when she went off every day to work in a movie, the baby was left with a governess, and so Eve was a bad mother, a neglectful mother, a selfish mother, and everybody was unhappy, including her. She told him she couldn't go through that again. It had been too hard on her and too hard on Sylphid. She told Ira that in many ways that strain was what had ruined her Hollywood career.
"But Ira said she wasn't in movies anymore, she was in radio. She was at the top of radio. She didn't go off every day to a studio—she went off two days a week. It wasn't the same at all. And Ira Ringold wasn't Carlton Pennington. He wouldn't leave her in the lurch with the kid. They wouldn't need any governess. The hell with that. He'd raise their Johnny O'Day himself if he had to. Once Ira got something between his teeth, he wasn't about to let go. And Eve wasn't somebody who could take the barrage. People went after her and she collapsed. And so he believed he'd convinced her on this score, too. Finally she said to him he was right, it wasn't at all the same, and she said okay, they'd have the baby, and he was euphoric, in seventh heaven—you should have heard him.
"But then that night before he came over to Newark, the night before you two met, she broke down and said she couldn't go through with it. She told him how wretched she felt denying him something he wanted so much, but she couldn't live through it all again. This went on for hours, and what could he do? What good was it going to do anybody—her, or him, or little Johnny—for this to be the backdrop to their family life? He was miserable, and they were up till three or four that night, but it was over as far as he was concerned. He was a persistent guy, but he couldn't tie her to her bed and keep her there for seven more months in order to have a child. If she didn't want it, she didn't want it. And so he told her he'd go with her down to Camden to the abortion doctor. She wouldn't be alone."
Listening to Murray, I couldn't help but be overtaken by memories of being with Ira, memories I didn't even know I continued to have, memories of how I used to gorge myself on his words and on his adult convictions, solid memories of the two of us walking in Weequahic Park and his telling me about the impoverished kids he'd seen in Iran—pronounced by Ira "Eye-ran."
"When I got to Iran," Ira told me, "the natives there suffered from every type of illness you can think of. Being Moslem, they used to wash their hands before and after defecating—but they did it in the river, the river that was in front of us, so to speak. They washed their hands in the same water they urinated in. Their living conditions were terrible, Nathan. The place was run by sheiks. And not romantic sheiks. These guys were like the dictator of the tribe. Y'understand? The army gave them money so the natives would work for us, and we gave the natives rations of rice and tea. That was it. Rice and tea. Those living conditions—I had never seen anything like it. I'd grubbed for work in the Depression, I hadn't been brought up at the Ritz—but this was something else. When we had to defecate, for instance, we defecated into GI pails—iron buckets, that's what they were. And somebody had to empty them out, and so we emptied them out in the garbage dump. And who do you think was there?"
All at once Ira couldn't go on, couldn't speak. He couldn't walk. It would always alarm me when this happened to him. And because he knew that, he'd tap the air with his hand, signaling me to be still, to wait him out, he'd be all right.
Things that were not to his liking he could not discuss with equilibrium. His whole manly bearing could be altered almost beyond recognition by anything that involved human degradation, and, perhaps because of his own shattered development as a boy, that involved particularly the suffering and degradation of children. When he said to me, "And who do you think was there?" I knew who was there because of the way he began to breathe: "Ahhh ... ahhh ... ahhh." Gasping like someone about to die. When he was emotionally intact enough to resume the walk, I asked as though I didn't know, "Who, Ira? Who was there?"
"The kids. They lived there. And they would pick through the garbage dump for food—"
This time when he stopped speaking my alarm got the better of me; fearful that he might get stuck, be so overwhelmed—not only by his emotions but by an immense loneliness that seemed suddenly to strip him of his strength—that he'd never find the way back to being the brave, angry hero I adored, I knew I had to do something, anything I could, and so I tried at least to complete his thought for him. I said, "And it was awful."
He patted my back and we started walking again.
"To me it was," he finally replied. "To my army buddies it mattered not. I never heard anybody comment on it. I never saw anybody—from my own America—deploring the situa
tion. I was really pissed. But there was nothing I could do about it. In the army there's no democracy. Y'understand? You don't go telling anybody higher up. And this had been going on for God knows how long. This is what world history is. That's how people live." Then he erupted, "This is how people make them live!"
We took trips around Newark together so that Ira could show me the non-Jewish neighborhoods I didn't really know—the First Ward, where he'd been brought up and where the poor Italians lived; Down Neck, where the poor Irish and the poor Poles lived—and Ira all the while explaining to me that, contrary to what I might have heard growing up, these were not simply goyim but "working people like working people all over this country, diligent, poor, powerless, struggling every goddamn day to live a decent and dignified life."
We went into Newark's Third Ward, where the Negroes had come to occupy the streets and houses of the old Jewish immigrant slum. Ira spoke to everyone he saw, men and women, boys and girls, asked what they did and how they lived and what they thought about maybe changing "the crappy system and the whole damn pattern of ignorant cruelty" that deprived them of their equality. He'd sit down on a bench outside a Negro barbershop on shabby Spruce Street, around the corner from where my father had been raised in a Belmont Avenue tenement, say to the men congregated on the sidewalk, "I'm ever a guy to butt into other people's conversations," and begin talking to them about their equality, and to me he never looked more like the elongated Abraham Lincoln who is cast in bronze at the foot of the broad stairway leading up to Newark's Essex County Courthouse, Gutzon Borglum's locally famous Lincoln, seated and waiting welcomingly on a marble bench before the courthouse, in his sociable posture and by his gaunt bearded face revealing that he is wise and grave and fatherly and judicious and good. Out in front of that Spruce Street barbershop—with Ira declaiming, when someone asked his opinion, that "a Negro has the right to eat any damn place he feels like paying the check!"—I realized that I'd never before imagined, let alone seen, a white person being so easygoing and at home with Negroes.
