by Philip Roth
***
"That library was to the rear of the living room and up a step," Murray was remembering. "There were sliding oak doors that closed the one room off from the other, but when Sylphid practiced Eve liked to listen, and so the doors were left open and the sound of that instrument carried through the house. Eve, who'd started Sylphid on the harp out in Beverly Hills when she was seven, couldn't get enough of it, but Ira could make no sense of classical music—never listened to anything, as far as I know, except the popular stuff on the radio and the Soviet Army Chorus—and so at night, when he preferred to be sitting around downstairs in the living room with Eve, talking, reading the paper, a husband at home and so forth, he kept retreating to his study. Sylphid would be plucking away and Eve would be doing her needlepoint in front of the fire, and when she'd look up, he'd be gone, upstairs writing letters to O'Day.
"But after what she'd been through in that third marriage, the fourth, when it got going, was still pretty wonderful. When she met Ira, she was coming out of a bad divorce and recovering from a nervous breakdown. The third husband, Jumbo Freedman, was a sex clown from the sound of it, expert at entertaining them in the bedroom. Had a high old time of it altogether till she came home early from a rehearsal one day and found him in his upstairs office with a couple of tootsies. But he was everything Pennington wasn't. She has an affair with him out in California, obviously very passionate, certainly for a woman twelve years with Carlton Pennington, and in the end Freedman leaves his wife and she leaves Pennington, and she, Freedman, and Sylphid decamp for the East. She buys that house on West Eleventh Street and Freedman moves in, sets up his office in what became Ira's study, and starts trading property in New York as well as in L.A. and Chicago. For a while he is buying and selling Times Square property, and so he meets the big theatrical producers, and they all start to socialize together, and soon enough Eve Frame is on Broadway. Drawing room comedies, thrillers, all starring the one-time silent-screen beauty. One after another is a hit. Eve is making money hand over fist, and Jumbo sees that it's well spent.
"Being Eve, she goes along with this guy's extravagance, acquiescing to his wild ways, is even caught up in the wild ways. Sometimes when Eve would start to cry out of nowhere and Ira would ask her why, she would tell him, 'The things he made me do—what I had to do...' After she wrote that book and her marriage to Ira was all over the papers, Ira got a letter from some woman in Cincinnati. Said that if he was interested in a little book of his own, he might want to come out to Ohio for a talk. She'd been a nightclub entertainer back in the thirties, a singer, a girlfriend of Jumbo's. She said Ira might like to see some photographs Jumbo had taken. Maybe she and Ira could collaborate on a memoir of their own—he'd supply the words, she, for a price, would fork over the pictures. At the time Ira was so hell-bent on getting his revenge that he wrote the woman back, sent her a check for a hundred dollars. She claimed to have two dozen, and so he sent her the hundred bucks she was asking for just in order to see one."
"Did he get it?"
"She was true to her word. She sent him one, all right, by return mail. But because I wasn't going to allow my brother to further distort people's idea of what his life had meant, I took it from him and destroyed it. Stupid. Sentimental, priggish, stupid, and not very farsighted of me, either. Circulating the picture would have been benevolent compared to what happened."
"He wanted to disgrace Eve with the picture."
"Look, once upon a time all Ira thought about was how to alleviate the effects of human cruelty. Everything was funneled through that. But after that book of hers came out, all he thought about was how to inflict it. They stripped him of his job, his domestic life, his name, his reputation, and when he realized he'd lost all of that, lost the status and no longer had to live up to it, he shed Iron Rinn, he shed The Free and the Brave, he shed the Communist Party. He even stopped talking so much. All that endless outraged rhetoric. Going on and on when what this huge man really wanted to do was to lash out. The talk was the way to blunt those desires.
"What do you think the Abe Lincoln act was about? Putting on that stovepipe hat. Mouthing Lincoln's words. But everything that ever tamed him, all the civilizing accommodations, he shed, and he was stripped right back to the Ira who'd dug ditches in Newark. Back to the Ira who'd mined zinc up in the Jersey hills. He re-claimed his earliest experience, when his tutor was the shovel. He made contact with the Ira before all the moral correction took place, before he'd been to Miss Frame's Finishing School and taken all those etiquette lessons. Before he went to finishing school with you, Nathan, acting out the drive to father and showing you what a good, nonviolent man he could be. Before he went to finishing school with me. Before he went to finishing school with O'Day, the finishing school of Marx and Engels. The finishing school of political action. Because O'Day was the first Eve, really, and Eve just another version of O'Day, dragging him up out of the Newark ditch and into the world of light.
"Ira knew his own nature. He knew that he was physically way out of scale and that this made him a dangerous man. He had the rage in him, and the violence, and standing six and a half feet tall, he had the means. He knew he needed his Ira-tamers—knew he needed all his teachers, knew he needed a kid like you, knew that he hungered for a kid like you, who'd got all he'd never got and was the admiring son. But after I Married a Communist appeared, he shed the finishing school education, and he reclaimed the Ira you never saw, who beat the shit out of guys in the army, the Ira who, as a boy starting out on his own, used the shovel he dug with to protect himself against those Italian guys. Wielded his work tool as a weapon. His whole life was a struggle not to pick up that shovel. But after her book, Ira set out to become his own uncorrected first self."
"And did he?"
"Ira never shirked a man-sized job, however onerous. The ditchdigger made his impact on her. He put her in touch with what she had done. 'Okay, I'll educate her,' he told me, 'without the dirty picture.'"
"And he did it."
"He did it, all right. Enlightenment through the shovel."
Early in 1949, some ten weeks after Henry Wallace was so badly defeated—and, I now know, after her abortion—Eve Frame threw a big party (preceded by a smaller dinner party) to try to cheer Ira up, and he called our house to invite me to come. I had seen him only once again in Newark after the Wallace rally at the Mosque, and until I got the astonishing phone call ("Ira Ringold, buddy. How's my boy?") I'd begun to believe that I'd never see him again. After the second time that we'd met—and gone off for our first walk ever in Weequahic Park, where I learned about "Eye-ran"—I'd mailed to him in New York a carbon copy of my radio play The Stooge of Torquemada. As the weeks went by and there was no response from him, I realized the mistake I'd made in giving to a professional radio actor a play of mine, even one that I considered my best. I was sure that now that he'd seen how little talent I had, I'd killed any interest he might have had in me. Then, while I was doing my homework one night, the phone rang and my mother came running into my room. "Nathan—dear, it's Mr. Iron Rinn!"
He and Eve Frame were having people to dinner, and among them would be Arthur Sokolow, whom he'd given my script to read. Ira thought I might like to meet him. My mother made me go to Bergen Street the next afternoon to buy a pair of black dress shoes, and I took my one suit to the tailor shop on Chancellor Avenue to have Schapiro lengthen the sleeves and the trousers. And then early one Saturday evening, I popped a Sen-Sen in my mouth and, my heart beating as though I were intent on crossing the state line to commit murder, I went out to Chancellor Avenue and boarded a bus to New York.
My companion at the dinner table was Sylphid. All the traps laid for me—the eight pieces of cutlery, the four differently shaped drinking glasses, the large appetizer called an artichoke, the serving dishes presented from behind my back and over my shoulder by a solemn black woman in a maid's uniform, the finger bowl, the enigma of the finger bowl—everything that made me feel like a very small boy instead of a
large one, Sylphid all but nullified with a sardonic wisecrack, a cynical explanation, even just with a smirk or with a roll of her eyes, helping me gradually to understand that there wasn't as much at stake as all the pomp suggested. I thought she was splendid, in her satire particularly.
"My mother," Sylphid said, "likes to make everything a strain the way it was when she grew up in Buckingham Palace. She makes the most of every opportunity to turn everyday life into a joke." Sylphid kept it up throughout the meal, dropped into my ear remarks rife with the worldliness of someone who'd grown up in Beverly Hills—next door to Jimmy Durante—and then in Greenwich Village, America's Paris. Even when she teased me I felt relieved, as if my mishap might not lie but one course away. "Don't worry too much about doing the right thing, Nathan. You'll look a lot less comical doing the wrong thing."
I also took heart from watching Ira. He ate the same way here as he did at the hot dog stand across from Weequahic Park; he talked the same way too. He alone among the men at the table was without a tie and a dress shirt and a jacket, and though he didn't lack for ordinary table manners, it was clear from watching him spear and swallow his food that the subtleties of Eve's kitchen were not overscrupulously assessed by his palate. He did not seem to draw any line between conduct permissible at a hot dog stand and in a splendid Manhattan dining room, neither conduct nor conversation. Even here, where the silver candelabra were lit with ten tall candles and bowls of white flowers illuminated the sideboard, everything made him hot under the collar—on this night, only a couple of months after the crushing Wallace defeat (the Progressive Party had received little more than a million votes nationwide, about a sixth of what it had anticipated), even something seemingly as uncontroversial as Election Day.
"I'll tell you one thing," he announced to the table, and everyone else's voice faded while his, strong and natural, charged with protest and barbed with contempt for the stupidity of his fellow Americans, promptly commanded, You just listen to me. "I think this darling country of ours doesn't understand politics. Where else in the world, in a democratic nation, do people go to work on Election Day? Where else are the schools still open? If you're young and you're growing up and you say, 'Hey, it's Election Day, don't we have a day off?' your father and mother say, 'No, it's Election Day, that's all,' and what are you left to think? How important can Election Day be if I have to go to school? How can it be important if the stores and everything else are open? Where the hell are your values, you son of a bitch?"
By "son of a bitch" he was alluding to nobody present at the table. He was addressing everyone in his life he had ever had to fight.
Here Eve Frame put her finger to her lips to get him to rein himself in. "Darling," she said in a voice so soft it was barely audible. "Well, what's more important," he loudly replied, "to stay home on Columbus Day? You close the schools up because of a shitty holiday, but you don't close them up because of Election Day?" "But nobody's arguing the point," Eve said with a smile, "so why be angry?" "Look, I get angry," he said to her, "I always got angry, I hope to my dying day I stay angry. I get in trouble because I get angry. I get in trouble because I won't shut up. I get very angry with my darling country when Mr. Truman tells people, and they believe him, that Communism is the big problem in this country. Not the racism. Not the inequities. That's not the problem. The Communists are the problem. The forty thousand or sixty thousand or a hundred thousand Communists. They're going to overthrow the government of a country of a hundred and fifty million people. Don't insult my intelligence. I'll tell you what's going to overthrow the whole goddamn place—the way we treat the colored people. The way we treat the working people. It's not going to be the Communists who overthrow this country. This country is going to overthrow itself by treating people like animals!"
Seated across from me was Arthur Sokolow, the radio writer, another of those assertive, self-educated Jewish boys whose old neighborhood allegiances (and illiterate immigrant fathers) strongly determined their brusque, emotional style as men, young guys only recently back from a war in which they'd discovered Europe and politics, in which they'd first really discovered America through the soldiers they had to live alongside, in which they'd begun, without formal assistance but with a gigantic naive faith in the transforming power of art, to read the fifty or sixty opening pages of the novels of Dostoyevsky. Until the blacklist destroyed his career, Arthur Sokolow, though not as eminent a writer as Corwin, was certainly in the ranks of the other radio writers I most admired: Arch Oboler, who wrote Lights Out, Himan Brown, who wrote Inner Sanctum, Paul Rhymer, who wrote Vic and Sade, Carlton E. Morse, who wrote I Love a Mystery, and William N. Robson, who'd done a lot of war radio from which I also drew for my own plays. Arthur Sokolow's prizewinning radio dramas (as well as two Broadway plays) were marked by their intense hatred of corrupt authority as represented by a grossly hypocritical father. I kept fearing throughout dinner that Sokolow, a short, wide tank of a man, a defiant pile driver who'd once been a Detroit high school fullback, was going to point at me and denounce me to everyone at the table as a plagiarist because of all I had stolen from Norman Corwin.
Following dinner, the men were invited up to Ira's second-floor study for cigars while the women went to Eve's room to freshen up before the after-dinner guests began to arrive. Ira's study overlooked the floodlit statuary in the rear garden, and on the three walls of bookshelves he kept all his Lincoln books, the political library he'd carried home in three duffel bags from the war, and the library he'd since accumulated browsing in the secondhand bookshops on Fourth Avenue. After passing around the cigars and advising his guests to take whatever they liked from the whiskey cart, Ira got his copy of my radio play out of the top drawer of the massive mahogany desk—the one where I imagined he kept up his correspondence with O'Day—and began to read aloud the play's opening speech. And to read it not to denounce me for plagiarism. Rather, he began by telling his friends, including Arthur Sokolow, "You know what gives me hope for this country?" and he pointed at me, all aglow and tremulously waiting to be seen through. "I got more faith in a kid like this than in all those so-called mature people in our darling country who went into the voting booth prepared to vote for Henry Wallace, and all of a sudden they saw a big picture of Dewey in front of their eyes—and I'm talking about people in my own family—so they pulled down Harry Truman's lever. Harry Truman, who is going to lead this country into World War III, and that's their enlightened choice! The Marshall Plan, that is their choice. All they can think is to bypass the United Nations and to hem in the Soviet Union and to destroy the Soviet Union while siphoning off into their Marshall Plan hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to raising the standard of living for the poor in this country. But tell me, who is going to hem in Mr. Truman when he drops his atomic bombs on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad? You think they won't drop atomic bombs on innocent Russian children? To preserve our wonderful democracy they won't do that? Tell me another one. Listen to this kid here. Still in high school and he knows more about what's wrong with this country than every one of our darling countrymen in the voting booth."
Nobody laughed or even smiled. Arthur Sokolow was backed against the bookcases, quietly paging through a book he'd taken down from Ira's Lincoln collection, and the rest of the men stood smoking their cigars and sipping their whiskey and acting as though my view of America were what they'd gone out with their wives to hear that night. Only much later did I realize that the collective seriousness with which my introduction was received signified nothing more than how accustomed they were to the agitations of their overbearing host.
"Listen," said Ira, "just listen to this. Play about a Catholic family in a small town and the local bigots." Whereupon Iron Rinn launched into my lines: Iron Rinn inside the skin, inside the voicebox, of an ordinary, good-natured, Christian American of the kind I'd had in mind and knew absolutely nothing about.
