I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  Toward the end of the school year, when Ira invited me to spend a week up at the shack with him that summer, my father said I wasn't going unless Ira had a talk with him first.

  "Why?" I demanded to know.

  "I want to ask him some questions."

  "What are you, the House Un-American Activities Committee? Why are you making such a big thing out of this?"

  "Because in my eyes you are a big thing. What's his telephone number in New York?"

  "You can't ask him questions. About what?"

  "You have your right as an American to buy and read the Daily Worker? I have a right as an American to ask anybody anything I want. If he doesn't want to answer me, that's his right."

  "And if he doesn't want to answer, what's he supposed to do, take the Fifth Amendment?"

  "No. He can tell me to go jump in the lake. I just explained it to you: that's how we do it in the USA. I don't say that's going to work for you in the Soviet Union with the secret police, but here that's all it ordinarily takes for a fellow citizen to leave you alone about your political ideas."

  "Do they leave you alone?" I asked bitterly. "Does Congressman Dies leave you alone? Does Congressman Rankin leave you alone? Maybe you better explain it to them."

  I had to sit there—he told me I had to—and listen to him while he asked Ira, on the phone, to come over to his office for a talk. Iron Rinn and Eve Frame were the biggest things ever to enter the Zuckerman household from the outside world, yet it was clear from my father's tone that this didn't throw him at all.

  "He said yes?" I asked when my father hung up.

  "He said he'd be there if Nathan would be there. You're going to be there."

  "Oh, no I'm not."

  "Yep," my father said, "you are. You are if you want me even to begin to consider your going up there to visit. What are you afraid of, an open discussion of ideas? It's going to be democracy in action, next Wednesday, after school, at three-thirty in my office. You be on time, son."

  What was I afraid of? My father's anger. Ira's temper. What if because of how my father attacked him Ira picked him up bodily the way he picked up Butts and carried him down to the lake at Weequahic Park and threw him in? If a fight broke out, if Ira threw a lethal punch...

  My father's chiropody office was on the ground floor of a three-family house at the bottom of Hawthorne Avenue, a modest dwelling in need of a face-lift near the rundown edge of our otherwise plainly pedestrian neighborhood. I was there early, feeling sick to my stomach. Ira, looking serious and not at all enraged (as yet), arrived promptly at three-thirty. My father asked him to be seated.

  "Mr. Ringold, my son Nathan is not a run-of-the-mill boy. He is an older son who is an excellent student and who, I believe, is advanced and mature beyond his years. We are very proud of him. I want to give him all the latitude I can. I try not to stand in his way in life, as some fathers do. But because I honestly happen to think that for him the sky is the limit, I don't want anything to happen to him. If anything should happen to this boy ..."

  My father's voice grew husky and he abruptly stopped talking. I was terrified that Ira was going to laugh at him, to mock him the way he'd mocked Goldstine. I knew that my father was choked up not merely because of me and my promise but because his two youngest brothers, the first members of that large, poor family of his who were targeted to go to a real college and become real doctors, had both died of illnesses in their late teens. Studio portrait photos of them rested next to each other in twin frames on our dining room sideboard. I should have explained to Ira about Sam and Sidney, I thought.

  "I have to ask you a question, Mr. Ringold, that I don't want to ask you. I don't consider another person's beliefs—religious, political, or otherwise—my business. I respect your privacy. I can assure you that whatever you say here will not go beyond this room. But I want to know whether you are a Communist, and I want my son to know whether you are a Communist. I'm not asking if you ever have been a Communist. I don't care about the past. I care about right now. I have to tell you that back before Roosevelt I was so disgusted with the way things were going in this country, and with the anti-Semitism and anti-Negro prejudice in this country, and with how the Republicans scorned the unfortunate in this country, and with how the greed of big business was milking the people of this country to death, that one day, right here in Newark—and this will come as a shock to my son, who thinks his father, a lifelong Democrat, is to the right of Franco—but one day ... Well, Nathan," he said, looking now at me, "they had their headquarters—you know where the Robert Treat Hotel is? Right down the street. Upstairs. Thirty-eight Park Lane. They had offices up there. One was the office of the Communist Party. I never even told this to your mother. She would have killed me. She was my girlfriend then—this must be 1930. Well, one time, one day, I was angry. Something had happened, I don't even remember what it was any longer, but I read something in the papers and I remember that I went up there, and nobody was there. The door was locked. They had gone to lunch. I rattled the door handle. That's as close as I got to the Communist Party. I rattled the door and said, 'Let me in.' You didn't know that, did you, son?"

  "No," I said.

  "Well, now you do. Luckily, that door was locked. And in the next election Franklin Roosevelt became the president, and the kind of capitalism that sent me down to the Communist Party office began to get an overhaul the likes of which this country had never seen. A great man saved this country's capitalism from the capitalists and saved patriotic people like me from Communism. Saved all of us from the dictatorial regime that results from Communism. Let me tell you something that shook me—the death of Masaryk. Did that bother you, Mr. Ringold, as much as it bothered me? I always admired Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, ever since I first heard his name and what he was doing for his people. I always thought of him as the Czech Roosevelt. I don't know how to account for his murder. Do you, Mr. Ringold? I was troubled by it. I couldn't believe the Communists could kill a man like that. But they did ... Sir, I don't want to get started having a political argument. I'm going to ask you one single question, and I'd like you to answer so that my son and I know where we stand. Are you a member of the Communist Party?"

  "No, Doctor, I'm not."

  "Now I want my son to ask you. Nathan, I want you to ask Mr. Ringold if he is now a member of the Communist Party."

  To put such a question to somebody went against my every political principle. But because my father wanted me to and because my father had asked Ira already to no ill effect and because of Sam and Sidney, my father's dead younger brothers, I did it.

  "Are you, Ira?" I asked him.

  "Nope. No, sir."

  "You don't go to meetings of the Communist Party?" my father asked.

  "I do not."

  "You don't plan, up where you want Nathan to visit you—what's the name of the place?"

  "Zinc Town. Zinc Town, New Jersey."

  "You don't plan up there to take him to any such meetings?"

  "No, Doctor, I don't. I plan on taking him swimming and hiking and fishing."

  "I'm glad to hear that," said my father. "I believe you, sir."

  "May I now ask you a question, Dr. Zuckerman?" Ira asked, smiling at my father in that droll sidewise way he smiled when he was playing Abraham Lincoln. "Why do you have me down for a Red in the first place?"

  "The Progressive Party, Mr. Ringold."

  "Do you have Henry Wallace down for a Red? The former vice president to Mr. Roosevelt? Do you think Mr. Roosevelt would choose a Red for vice president of the United States of America?"

  "It's not as simple as that," my father replied. "I wish it were. But what's going on in the world is not simple at all."

  "Dr. Zuckerman," said Ira, changing tactics, "you wonder what I'm doing with Nathan? I envy him—that's what I'm doing with him. I envy that he has a father like you. I envy that he has a teacher like my brother. I envy that he has good eyes and can read without glasses a foot thick and isn't an idiot who's goi
ng to quit school so as to go out and dig ditches. I've got nothing hidden and nothing to hide, Doctor. Except that I wouldn't mind a son like him myself someday. Maybe the world today isn't simple, but this sure is: I get a kick out of talking to your boy. Not every kid in Newark takes as his hero Tom Paine."

  Here my father stood up and extended his hand to Ira. "I am a father, Mr. Ringold—to two boys, to Nathan and to Henry, his younger brother, who is also somebody to crow about. And my responsibilities as a father ... well, that's all that this has been about."

  Ira took my father's ordinary-sized hand in his huge one and pumped it once very hard, so hard—with such sincerity and warmth—that oil, or at least water, a pure geyser of something, might as a result have come gushing from my father's mouth. "Dr. Zuckerman," Ira said, "you don't want your son stolen from you, and nobody here is going to steal him."

  Whereupon I had to make a superhuman effort not to start to bawl. I had to pretend to myself that my whole aim in life was not to cry, never to cry, at the sight of two men affectionately shaking hands—and I barely managed to succeed. They'd done it! Without shouting! Without bloodshed! Without the motivating, distorting rage! Magnificently they had pulled it off—though largely because Ira was not telling us the truth.

  I'll insert this here and not return to the subject of the wound inflicted on my father's face. I count on the reader to remember it when that seems appropriate.

  Ira and I left my father's office together, and to celebrate—purportedly to celebrate my upcoming summer visit to Zinc Town but also, complicitously, to celebrate our victory over my dad—we went to Stosh's, a few blocks away, to have one of Stosh's overstuffed ham sandwiches. I ate so much with Ira at four-fifteen that when I got home, at five of six, I had no appetite and sat at my place at the table while everybody else ate my mother's dinner—and it was then that I observed in my father's face the wound. I had planted it there earlier by going out the door of his office with Ira and not staying behind to talk a little to him until the next patient showed up.

  At first I tried to think that maybe I was guiltily imagining that wound because of having felt, not necessarily contemptuous of him, but certainly superior leaving, virtually arm in arm, with Iron Rinn of The Free and the Brave. My father didn't want his son stolen from him, and though, strictly speaking, nobody had stolen anybody, the man was no fool and knew that he had lost and, Communist or no Communist, the six-foot six-inch intruder had won. I saw in my father's face a look of resigned disappointment, his kind gray eyes softened by—distressfully subdued by—something midway between melancholy and futility. It was a look that would never be entirely forgotten by me when I was alone with Ira, or, later, with Leo Glucksman, Johnny O'Day, or whomever. lust by taking instruction from these men, I seemed to myself somehow to be selling my father short. His face with that look on it was always looming up, superimposed on the face of the man who was then educating me in life's possibilities. His face bearing the wound of betrayal.

  The moment when you first recognize that your father is vulnerable to others is bad enough, but when you understand that he's vulnerable to you, still needs you more than you any longer think you need him, when you realize that you might actually be able to frighten him, even to quash him if you wanted to—well, the idea is at such cross-purposes with routine filial inclinations that it does not even begin to make sense. All the laboring he had gone through to get to be a chiropodist, a provider, a protector, and I was now running off with another man. It is, morally as well as emotionally, a more dangerous game than one knows at the time, getting all those extra fathers like a pretty girl gets beaux. But that was what I was doing. Always making myself eminently adoptable, I discovered the sense of betrayal that comes of trying to find a surrogate father even though you love your own. It isn't that I ever denounced my father to Ira or anyone else for a cheap advantage—it was enough just, by exercising my freedom, to dump the man I loved for somebody else. If only I had hated him, it would have been easy.

  In my third year at Chicago, I brought a girl home with me at Thanksgiving break. She was a gentle girl, mannerly and clever, and I remember the pleasure my parents took in talking to her. One evening, while my mother stayed in the living room entertaining my aunt, who had eaten dinner with us, my father came out to the corner drugstore with the girl and me, and sitting in a booth together we all three ate ice cream sundaes. At one point I went over to buy something like a tube of shaving cream at the pharmacy counter, and when I got back to the table, I saw my father leaning toward the girl. He was holding her hand, and I overheard him telling her, "We lost Nathan when he was sixteen. Sixteen and he left us." By which he meant that I had left him. Years later he would use the same words with my wives. "Sixteen and he left us." By which he meant that all my mistakes in life had flowed from that precipitate departure of mine.

  He was right, too. If it weren't for my mistakes I'd still be at home sitting on the front stoop.

  It was about two weeks later that Ira went as far as he could toward telling the truth. He was in Newark one Saturday to see his brother, and he and I met downtown for lunch, at a bar and grill near City Hall where, for seventy-five cents—"six bits" to Ira—they served charcoal-broiled steak sandwiches with grilled onions, pickles, home fries, cole slaw, and ketchup. For dessert we each ordered apple pie with a rubbery slice of American cheese, a combination that Ira had introduced me to and that I assumed to be the manly way you ate a piece of pie in a "bar and grill."

  Then Ira opened a package he was carrying and presented me with a record album called The Soviet Army Chorus and Band in a Program of Favorites. Conducted by Boris Alexandrov. Featuring Artur Eisen and Alexei Sergeyev, basses, and Nikolai Abramov, tenor. On the cover of the album was a picture ("Photograph courtesy SOVFOTO") of the conductor, the band, and the chorus, some two hundred men, all wearing Russian military dress uniforms and performing in the great marble Hall of the People. The hall of the Russian working people.

  "Ever hear them?"

  "Never," I said.

  "Take it home and listen. It's yours."

  "Thanks, Ira. This is great."

  But it was awful. How could I take this album home, and, at home, how could I listen?

  Instead of driving back to the neighborhood with Ira after lunch, I told him I had to go over to the public library, the main branch on Washington Street, to work on a history paper. Outside the bar and grill I thanked him again for lunch and the present, and he got into his station wagon and drove back to Murray's on Lehigh Avenue while I proceeded down Broad Street in the direction of Military Park and the big main library. I walked past Market Street and all the way to the park, as if my destination were indeed the library, but then, instead of turning left at Rector Street, I ducked off to the right and took a back way along the river to reach Pennsylvania Station.

  I asked a newsdealer in the station to change a dollar for me. I took the four quarters over to the storage area and I put one of them into the coin slot of the smallest of the lockers, and into the locker I shoved the record album. After slamming the door shut, I nonchalantly deposited the locker key in my trouser pocket, and proceeded then to the library, where I had nothing to do except to sit for several hours in the reference room worrying about where I was going to hide the key.

  My father was around the house all weekend, but on Monday he went back to his office, and on Monday afternoons my mother went up to Irvington to visit her sister, and so after my last class I jumped on a 14 bus across the street from school, took it to the end of the line, to Penn Station, removed the record album from the locker, put it in the Bamberger's shopping bag I had folded up inside my notebook that morning and taken with me to school. At home I hid the record album in a small windowless bin in the basement where my mother stored our set of glass Passover dishes in grocery cartons. Come the spring and Passover, when she removed the dishes for us to use that week, I'd have to find another hiding place, but for the time being the album's explosive
potential was defused.

  Not until I got to college was I able to play the records on a phonograph, and by then Ira and I were already drifting apart. Which didn't mean that when I heard the Soviet Army Chorus singing "Wait for Your Soldier" and "To an Army Man" and "A Soldier's Farewell"—and, yes, "Dubinushka"—the vision of equality and justice for working people all over the world wasn't reawakened in me. In my dormitory room, I felt proud for having had the guts not to ditch that album—even if I still hadn't guts enough to understand that, with the album, Ira had been trying to tell me: "Yes, I'm a Communist. Of course I'm a Communist. But not a bad Communist, not a Communist who would kill Masaryk or anyone else. I am a beautiful, heartfelt Communist who loves the people and who loves these songs!"

  "What happened that next morning?" I asked Murray. "Why did Ira come to Newark that day?"

  "Well, Ira slept late that morning. He'd been up with Eve about the abortion till four, and around ten A.M. he was still asleep when he was awakened by someone shouting downstairs. He was in the master bedroom on the second floor on West Eleventh Street, and the voice was coming from the foot of the staircase. It was Sylphid...

  "Did I mention that the first thing to drive Ira wild was Sylphid telling Eve that she wasn't coming to their wedding? Eve told Ira that Sylphid was doing some kind of program with a flutist and that the Sunday of the wedding was the only day the other girl could rehearse. He himself doesn't particularly care if Sylphid's coming to the wedding but Eve does, and she's crying about it and she's very distraught, and this upsets him. Constantly she gives the daughter the instruments and the power to hurt her—and then she's hurt, but this is the first time he sees it, and he's infuriated. 'Her mother's wedding,' Ira said. 'How can she not come to her mother's wedding if that's what her mother wants? Tell her she's coming. Don't ask her—tell her!' 'I can't tell her,' Eve says, 'this is her professional life, this is her music—' 'Okay, I'll tell her,' Ira says.