I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "What most people mistake for Negro sullenness and stupidity—you know what that is, Nathan? It's a protective shell. But when they meet somebody who is free of race prejudice—you see what happens, they don't need that shell. They got their share of psychos, sure, but you tell me who doesn't."

  When Ira one day discovered outside the barbershop a very old, bitter black man who liked nothing better than to vent his spleen in vehement discussion about the beastliness of humanity—"Everything we know of has developed not out of the tyranny of tyrants but out of the tyranny of mankind's greed, ignorance, brutality, and hatred. The tyrant of evil is Everyman!"—we went back several times more, and people gathered round to hear Ira going at it with this impressive malcontent who was always neatly dressed in a dark suit and a tie and who all the other men respectfully called "Mr. Prescott": Ira proselytizing one on one, one Negro at a time, the Lincoln-Douglas debates in a strange new form.

  "Are you still convinced," Ira asked him, graciously, "that the working class will go along for the crumbs from the imperialist's table?" "I am, sir! The mass of men of whatever color is and always will be mindless, torpid, wicked, and stupid. If ever they should become less impoverished, they will be even more mindless, torpid, wicked, and stupid!" "Well, I've been thinking about that, Mr. Prescott, and I'm convinced that you are in error. The simple fact that there aren't enough crumbs to keep the working class fed and docile refutes that theory. All you gentlemen here are underestimating the proximity of industrial collapse. It's true that most of our working people would stick with Truman and the Marshall Plan if they were sure it would keep them employed. But the contradiction is this: the channeling of the bulk of production to war materiel, both for the American forces and for those of the puppet governments, is impoverishing American workers."

  Even in the face of Mr. Prescott's seemingly hard-won misanthropy, Ira tried to insert some reason and hope into the discussion, plant if not in Mr. Prescott then in the sidewalk audience an awareness of the transformations that could be effected in men's lives through concerted political action. For me it was, as Wordsworth describes the days of the French Revolution, "very Heaven": "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!" The two of us, white and surrounded by some ten or twelve black men, and there was nothing for us to worry about and nothing for any of them to fear: it was not we who were their oppressors or they who were our enemies—the oppressor-enemy by which we were all appalled was the way the society was organized and run.

  It was after the first visit to Spruce Street that he treated me to cheesecake at the Weequahic Diner and, while we ate, told me about the Negroes he'd worked with in Chicago.

  "This plant was in the heart of Chicago's black belt," he said. "About ninety-five percent of the employees were colored, and there is where the esprit I was telling you about enters in. It's the only place I've ever been where a Negro is on an absolutely equal footing with everybody else. So the whites don't feel guilty and the Negroes don't feel mad all the time. Y'understand? Promotions based solely on seniority—no finagling about it."

  "What are Negroes like when you work with them?"

  "As far as I can determine, there was no suspicion of us whites. First off, the colored people knew that any white the UE sent to this plant was either a Communist or a pretty faithful fellow traveler. So they weren't inhibited. They knew that we were as free from race prejudice as an adult in this time and society can be. When you saw a paper being read, about two to one it was the Daily Worker. The Chicago Defender and the Racing Form were about neck and neck for second place. Hearst and McCormick strictly ruled off the track."

  "But what are Negroes actually like? Personally."

  "Well, buddy, there are some ugly types, if that's what you're asking me. That has a basis in actuality. But that's a small minority, and an El ride through the Negro ghettos is enough to indicate to anyone with an open mind what warps people into these shapes. The characteristic I was most aware of among the Negro people is their warm friendliness. And, at our record factory, the love of music. At our factory, there were speakers all over the place, amplifiers, and anybody who wanted a special tune played—and this is all on working time—just had to request it. The guys would sing, jive—not uncommon for a guy to grab a girl and dance. About a third of the employees were Negro girls. Nice girls. We'd smoke, read, brew coffee, argue at the top of our voices, and the work went right along without a hitch or a break."

  "Did you have Negro friends?"

  "Sure. Sure I did. There was a big guy named Earl Something-or-Other who I took a liking to right away because he looked like Paul Robeson. It didn't take me long to discover that he was about the same kind of tramp working stiff as me. Earl would ride the streetcar and El as far as I did, and we made a point to take the same ones, the way guys do, to have somebody to chew the fat with. Right up to the plant gates, Earl and me would talk and laugh the same as we did on the job. But once inside, where there were whites he doesn't know, Earl clams right up and just says 'So long' when I get off the El. That's it. Y'understand?"

  In the pages of the small brown notebooks that Ira had brought back from the war, interspersed among his observations and the statements of belief, were the names and stateside addresses of about every politically like-minded soldier he had met in the service. He had begun to track these men down, sending letters all over the country and visiting the guys who lived in New York and Jersey. One day we took a ride up to suburban Maplewood, just west of Newark, to visit former sergeant Erwin Goldstine, who in Iran had been as far to the left as Johnny O'Day—"a very well developed Marxist," Ira called him—but who, back home, we discovered, had married into a family that owned a Newark mattress factory and now, a father of three, had become an adherent of everything he had once opposed. About Taft-Hartley, about race relations, about price controls, he did not even argue with Ira. He just laughed.

  Goldstine's wife and his kids were away with the in-laws for the afternoon, and we sat together in his kitchen drinking soda while Goldstine, a wiry little guy with the haughty, knowing air of a street-corner sharpie, laughed and sneered at everything Ira said. His explanation for his turnabout? "Didn't know shit from shinola. Didn't know what I was talking about." To me Goldstine said, "Kid, don't listen to him. You live in America. It's the greatest country in the world and it's the greatest system in the world. Sure, people get shit on. You think they don't get shit on in the Soviet Union? He tells you capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system. What is life if not a dog-eat-dog system? This is a system that is in tune with life. And because it is, it works. Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it. In order to get them to believe in their brotherhood, they've got to control people's every thought or shoot 'em. And meanwhile in America, in Europe, the Communists go on with this fairy tale even when they know what is really there. Sure, for a while you don't know. But what don't you know? You know human beings. So you know everything. You know that this fairy tale cannot be possible. If you are a very young man I suppose it's okay. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, okay. But after that? No reason that a person with an average intelligence can take this story, this fairy tale of Communism, and swallow it. 'We will do something that will be wonderful...' But we know what our brother is, don't we? He's a shit. And we know what our friend is, don't we? He's a semi-shit. And we are semi-shits. So how can it be wonderful? Not even cynicism, not even skepticism, just ordinary powers of human observation tell us that is not possible.

  "You want to come down to my capitalist factory and watch a mattress being made the way a capitalist makes a mattress? You come down and you'll talk to real working guys. This guy's
a radio star. You're not talking to a workingman, you're talking to a radio star. Come on, Ira, you're a star like lack Benny—what the hell do you know about work? The kid comes to my factory and he'll see how we manufacture a mattress, he'll see the care we take, he'll see how I have to stand over the whole operation every step of the way to see they don't fuck up my mattress. He'll see what it is to be the evil owner of the means of production. It's to work your ass off twenty-four hours a day. The workers go home at five o'clock—I don't. I'm there till midnight every night. I come home and I don't sleep 'cause I'm doing the books in my head and then I'm there again at six in the morning to open the place up. Don't let him fill you full of Communist ideas, kid. They're all lies. Make money. Money's not a lie. Money's the democratic way to keep score. Make your money—then, if you still have to, then make your points about the brotherhood of man."

  Ira leaned back in his chair, raised his arms so that his huge hands were interlaced behind his neck, and, his contempt undisguised, said—though not to our host but, so as to gall him to the utmost, pointedly to me—"You know one of life's best feelings? Maybe the best? Not being afraid. The mercenary schmuck whose house we are in—you know what his story is? He is afraid. That's the simple fact of it. In World War II Erwin Goldstine was not afraid. But now the war is over, and Erwin Goldstine is afraid of his wife, afraid of his father-in-law, afraid of the bill collector—he is afraid of everything. You look with your big eyes into the capitalist shop window, you want and you want, you grab and you grab, you take and you take, you acquire and you own and you accumulate, and there is the end of your convictions and the beginning of your fear. There is nothing that I have that I can't give up. Y'understand? Nothing has come my way that I'm tied and bound to like a mercenary is. How I ever got from my father's miserable house on Factory Street to being this character Iron Rinn, how Ira Ringold, with one and a half years of high school behind him, got to meeting the people I meet and knowing the people I know and having the comforts I have now as a card-carrying member of the privileged class—that is all so unbelievable that losing everything overnight would not seem so strange to me. Y'understand? Y'understand me? I can go back to the Midwest. I can work in the mills. And if I have to, I will. Anything but to become a rabbit like this guy. That's what you now are politically," he said, looking at last at Goldstine—"not a man, a rabbit, a rabbit of no consequence."

  "Full of shit in Iran and full of shit still, Iron Man." Then, again to me—I was the sounding board, the straight man, the fuse on the bomb—Goldstine said, "Nobody could ever listen to anything he says. Nobody could ever take him seriously. The guy's a joke. He can't think. Never could. Doesn't know anything, doesn't see anything, doesn't learn anything. The Communists get a dummy like Ira and they use him. Mankind at its stupidest doesn't come any stupider." Then, turning to Ira, he said, "Get out of my house, you dumb Communist prick."

  My heart was already wildly thumping before I even saw the pistol that Goldstine had drawn out of a kitchen cabinet drawer, out of the drawer right behind him where the silverware was stored. Up close, I'd never seen a pistol before, except tucked safely away in the hip holster of a Newark cop. It wasn't because Goldstine was small that the pistol looked big. It was big, improbably big, black, and well made, molded, machined—eloquent with possibility.

  Though Goldstine was standing and pointing the pistol at Ira's forehead, even up on his feet he wasn't much taller than Ira was seated.

  "I'm scared of you, Ira," Goldstine said to him. "I've always been scared of you. You're a wild man, Ira. I'm not going to wait for you to do to me what you did to Butts. Remember Butts? Remember little Butts? Get up and get out, Iron Man. Take Kid Asslick with you. Asslick, didn't the Iron Man ever tell you about Butts?" Goldstine said to me. "He tried to kill Butts. He tried to drown Butts. He dragged Butts out of the mess hall—didn't you tell the kid, Ira, about you in Iran, about the rages and the tantrums in Iran? Guy weighing a hundred and twenty pounds comes at the Iron Man here with a mess kit knife, a very dangerous weapon, you see, and the Iron Man picks him up and carries him out of the mess hall and drags him down to the docks, and he holds him upside down over the water, holds him by his feet, and he says, 'Swim, hillbilly.' Butts is crying, 'No, no, I can't,' and the Iron Man says, 'Can't you?' and drops him in. Headfirst over the side of the dock into the Shatt-al-Arab. River's thirty feet deep. Butts goes straight down. Then Ira turns and he is screaming at us. 'Leave the redneck bastard alone! Get out of here! Nobody go near that water!' 'He's drowning, Iron Man.' 'Let him,' Ira says, 'stay back! I know what I'm doing! Let him go down!' Somebody jumps in the water to try and get at Butts, and so Ira jumps in after him, lands on him, starts pummeling this guy's head and gouging his eyes and holding him under. You didn't tell the kid about Butts? How come? Didn't you tell him about Garwych, either? About Solak? About Becker? Get up. Get up and get out, you crazy fucking homicidal nut."

  But Ira didn't move. Except for his eyes. His eyes were like birds that wanted to fly out of his face. They were twitching and blinking in a way I'd never before seen, while along the entire length of him he looked as though he'd ossified, assumed a tautness as terrifying as the flapping of his eyes.

  "No, Erwin," he said, "not with a sidearm in my face. Only ways to get me out are pull the trigger or call the cops."

  I couldn't have said which of them was more frightening. Why didn't Ira do what Goldstine wanted—why didn't the two of us get up and go? Who was crazier, the mattress manufacturer with the loaded pistol or the giant daring him to fire it? What was happening here? We were in a sunny kitchen in Maplewood, New Jersey, drinking Royal Crown from the bottle. We were all three of us Jews. Ira had come by to say hello to an old army buddy. What was wrong with these guys?

  It was when I began to tremble that Ira ceased to look deformed by whatever antirational thought he was thinking. Across the table from him he saw my teeth chattering all on their own, my hands uncontrollably shaking all on their own, and he came to his senses and slowly rose from his chair. He raised his arms over his head the way they do when the bank robbers in the movies shout "It's a stickup!"

  "All over, Nathan. Quarrel called on account of darkness." But despite the easygoing way he managed to say that, despite the surrender that was implicit in his mockingly raised arms, as we left the house through the kitchen door and made our way down the driveway to Murray's car, Goldstine continued after us, his pistol only inches from Ira's skull.

  In a sort of trance state Ira drove us through the quiet Maplewood streets, past all the pleasant one-family houses where there lived the ex-Newark Jews who'd lately acquired their first homes and their first lawns and their first country club affiliations. Not the sort of people or the sort of neighborhood where you would expect to find a pistol in with the dinnerware.

  Only when we crossed the Irvington line and were heading into Newark did Ira come around and ask, "You okay?"

  I was miserable, though less frightened now than humiliated and ashamed. Clearing my throat so as to be sure to speak in an unbroken voice, I said, "I pissed in my pants."

  "Did you?"

  "I thought he was going to kill you."

  "You were brave. You were very brave. You were fine."

  "Walking down the driveway, I pissed in my pants!" I said angrily. "Goddamit! Shit!"

  "It's my fault. The whole thing. Exposing you to that putz. Pulling a gun! A gun!"

  "Why did he do that?"

  "Butts didn't drown," Ira suddenly said. "Nobody drowned. Nobody was going to drown."

  "Did you throw him in?"

  "Sure. Sure I threw him in. This was the hillbilly who called me a kike. I told you that story."

  "I remember." But what he'd told me was only a part of that story. "That's the night they waylaid you. They beat you up."

  "Yeah. They beat me, all right. After they fished the son of a bitch out."

  He let me off at my house, where no one was at home and I was able to drop my damp clot
hing into the hamper and take a shower and calm down. I had the shakes again in the shower, not so much because I was remembering sitting at the kitchen table with Goldstine pointing his pistol at Ira's forehead or remembering Ira's eyes looking like they wanted to fly out of his head, but because I was thinking, A loaded pistol in with the forks and the knives? In Maplewood, New Jersey? Why? Because of Garwych, that's why! Because of Solak! Because of Becker!

  All the questions I hadn't dared to ask him in the car, I started asking aloud alone in the shower. "What did you do to them, Ira?"

  My father, unlike my mother, didn't see Ira as a means of social advancement for me and was always perplexed and bothered by his calling me: what is this grown man's interest in this kid? He thought something complicated, if not downright sinister, was going on. "Where do you go with him?" my father asked me.

  His suspiciousness erupted vehemently one night when he found me at my desk reading a copy of the Daily Worker. "I don't want the Hearst papers in my house," my father told me, "and I don't want that paper in my house. One is the mirror image of the other. If this man is giving you the Daily Worker—" "What 'man'?" "Your actor friend. Rinn, as he calls himself." "He doesn't give me the Daily Worker. I bought it downtown. I bought it myself. Is there a law against that?" "Who told you to buy it? Did he tell you go out and buy it?" "He doesn't tell me to do anything." "I hope that's true." "I don't lie! It is!"

  It was. I'd remembered Ira saying that there was a column in the Worker by Howard Fast, but it was on my own that I had bought the paper, across from Proctor's movie theater at a Market Street newsstand, ostensibly to read Howard Fast but also out of simple, dogged curiosity. "Are you going to confiscate it?" I asked my father. "No—you're out of luck. I'm not going to make you a martyr to the First Amendment. I only hope that after you've read it and studied and thought about it, you have the good sense to know that it's a sheet of lies and to confiscate it yourself."