I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "What did Ira do?" I asked.

  "What do you think Ira did? Out of the house, roaming the streets, up to Harlem, back down to the Village, walking for miles, and then, in the middle of the night, he headed for Pamela's on Carmine Street. He tried never to see her there if he could help it, but he rang her doorbell and zoomed up the five flights and told her it was over with Eve. He wanted her to come with him to Zinc Town. He wanted to marry her. He had wanted to marry her all along, he told her, and to have a child with her. You can imagine the impact that made.

  "She lived in her one bohemian room—closets without doors, the mattress on the floor, the Modigliani prints, the chianti bottle with the candle, and sheet music all over the place. A tiny walk-up forty feet square and there is that giraffe of a man storming around her, overturning the music stand, knocking over all her 78s, kicking at the bathtub, which is in the kitchen, and telling this well-brought-up English kid with her new Greenwich Village ideology who thought that what they were doing was going to be consequence-free—a big, passionate consequence-free adventure with a famous older man—that she was the mother-to-be of his unborn heirs and the woman of his life.

  "Overpowering Ira, the outsized, knocking over, crazy, giraffelike Ira, the driven man, with his all or nothing, says to her, 'Pack your clothes, you're coming with me,' and so he learns, sooner than he might have otherwise, that Pamela had been wanting to end things for months. 'End? Why? She couldn't stand the strain anymore. 'Strain? What strain?' And so she told him: every time she was with him in Jersey, he wouldn't stop holding her and fondling her and making her sick with anxiety by telling her a thousand times how much he loved her; then he'd sleep with her and she'd come back to New York and go over to see Sylphid, and all Sylphid could talk about was the man she had nicknamed the Beast; Ira and her mother she linked together as Beauty and the Beast. And Pamela had to agree with her, had to laugh about him; she too had to make jokes about the Beast. How could he be so blind to the toll this was taking on her? She couldn't run away with him and she couldn't marry him. She had a job, she had a career, she was a musician who loved her music—and she could never see him again. If he didn't leave her alone ... And so Ira left her. He got in the car and he drove to the shack, and that's where I went to see him the next day after school.

  "He talked, I listened. He didn't let on to me about Pamela; he didn't because he damn well knew my thoughts on adultery. I'd already told him more times than he liked to hear, 'The excitement in marriage is the fidelity. If that idea doesn't excite you, you have no business being married.' No, he didn't tell me about Pamela—he told me about Sylphid sitting on Eve. All night, Nathan. At dawn I drove back to school, shaved in the faculty bathroom, met my homeroom class; in the afternoon, after my last class, I got in the car and drove back up again. I didn't want him out there alone at night because I didn't know what he might do next. It wasn't only his home life that he was confronting head-on. That was just a part of it. The political stuff was encroaching—the accusations, the firings, the permanent blacklisting. That's what was undermining him. The domestic crisis wasn't yet the crisis. Sure, he was at risk on both sides and eventually they'd merge, but for the time being he was able to keep them separate.

  "The American Legion already had Ira in their sights for 'pro-Communist sympathies.' His name had been in some Catholic magazine, on some list, as somebody with 'Communistic associations.' His whole show was under suspicion. And there was friction with the party. That was heating up. Stalin and the Jews. The Soviet anti-Semitism was beginning to penetrate the consciousness of even the party blockheads. The rumors were starting to circulate among the Jewish party members, and Ira didn't like what he was hearing. He wanted to know more. About the claims to purity of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, even Ira Ringold wanted to know more. The sense of betrayal by the party was faintly setting in, though the full moral shock wouldn't come until Khrushchev's revelations. Then everything collapsed for Ira and his pals, the justification for all their effort and all their suffering. Six years later, the heart of their adult biographies went right down the drain. Still, as early as 1950, Ira was causing problems for himself by wanting to know more. Though that stuff he'd never talk about with me. He didn't want me implicated, and he didn't want to hear me sounding off. He knew that if we tangled on the Communist issue, we'd wind up like a lot of other families, not talking again for the rest of our lives.

  "We'd already had a lulu of an argument, back in '46, when he was first out in Calumet City rooming with O'Day. I went to visit him and it was not pleasant. Because Ira, when he argued about the things that mattered to him most, would never be finished with you. Especially in those early days after the war, Ira, in a political argument, was extremely disinclined to lose. Not least with me. Uneducated little brother educating the educated big one. He'd be staring straight at me, his finger jabbing straight at me, obstreperous, forcing the issue, overriding everything I said with 'Don't insult my intelligence,' 'That is a goddamn contradiction in terms,' 'I'm not going to stand here and take that shit.' The energy for the fight was astonishing. 'I don't give a damn if nobody knows it except me!' 'If you had any knowledge of what this world is all about...!' He could be particularly incendiary putting me in my place as an English teacher. 'What I hate with a passion is please define what the hell you are saying!' There was nothing that was small for Ira in those days. Everything he thought about, because he thought about it, was big.

  "My first night visiting him out where he lived with O'Day, he told me that the teachers' union should push for the development of 'the people's culture.' That should be its official policy. Why? I knew why. Because it was the official policy of the party. You've got to elevate the cultural understanding of the poor foe on the street, and instead of classical, old-time, traditional education, you've got to emphasize those things that contribute to a people's culture. The party line, and I thought it was unrealistic in every way. But the willfulness in that guy. I was no pushover, I knew how to convince people that I meant business too. But Ira's antagonism was inexhaustible. Ira wouldn't quit. When I got back from Chicago, I didn't hear from him for nearly a year.

  "I'll tell you what else was closing in on him. Those muscle pains. That disease he had. They told him it was one thing and then another thing and they never figured out what the hell it was. Polymyositis. Polymyalgia rheumatica. Every doctor gave it another name. That's about all they gave him, aside from Sloan's Liniment and Ben-Gay. His clothes started stinking of every kind of goo they sold for aches and pains. One doctor that I took him to myself, across the street at the Beth Israel, a physician friend of Doris's, listened to his case history, drew blood, examined him thoroughly, and described him to us as hyperinflammatory. The guy had an elaborate theory and he drew us pictures—a failure of inhibition in the cascade that leads to inflammation. He described Ira's joints as quick to develop inflammatory reactions that rapidly escalate. Quick to inflame, slow to extinguish.

  "After Ira died, some doctor suggested to me—made a persuasive case to me—that Ira suffered from the disease that they believe Lincoln had. Dressed up in the clothes and got the disease. Marfan's. Marfan's syndrome. Excessive tallness. Big hands and feet. Long, thin extremities. And lots of joint and muscle pain. Marfan's patients frequently kick off the way Ira did. The aorta explodes and they're gone. Anyway, whatever Ira had went undiagnosed, at least in terms of finding a treatment, and by '49, '50, those pains were beginning to be more or less intractable, and he was feeling under political pressure from both ends of the spectrum—from the network and from the party—and the guy had me worried.

  "In the First Ward, Nathan, we were not just the only Jewish family on Factory Street. More than likely we were the only family that wasn't Italian between the Lackawanna tracks and the Belleville line. These First Warders came from the mountains, little guys mostly, with big shoulders and huge heads, from the mountains east of Naples, and when they got to Newark somebody put a shovel in t
heir hands and they began to dig and they dug for the rest of their lives. They dug ditches. When Ira quit school, he dug ditches with them. One of those Italians tried to kill him with a shovel. My brother had a big mouth and he had to fight to live in that neighborhood. He had to fight to survive on his own from the time that he was seven years old.

  "But all at once he was battling on every front, and I didn't want him to do something stupid or irreparable. I didn't drive out to tell him anything in particular. This wasn't a man you told what to do. I wasn't even there to tell him what I thought. What I thought was that to go on living with Eve and her daughter was insane. The night Doris and I went there for dinner, you couldn't miss the strangeness of the link between those two. I remember driving back to Newark that night with Doris and saying over and over, 'There is no room for Ira in that combination.'

  "Ira called his Utopian dream Communism, Eve called hers Sylphid. The parent's utopia of the perfect child, the actress's utopia of let's pretend, the Jew's utopia of not being Jewish, to name only the grandest of her projects to deodorize life and make it palatable.

  "That Ira had no business in that household Sylphid had let him know right off the bat. And Sylphid was right: he had no business there, he didn't belong there. Sylphid made perfectly clear to him that de-utopianizing her mom—giving Mom a dose of life's dung she'd never forget—was her deepest daughterly inclination. Frankly, I didn't think he had any business on the radio, either. Ira was no actor. He had the chutzpah to get up and shoot off his mouth—that he never lacked—but an actor? He did every part the same way. That easygoing crap, as though he were sitting across from you at pinochle. The simple human approach, only it wasn't an approach. It was nothing. The absence of an approach. What did Ira know about acting? He had resolved as a kid to strike out on his own, and everything that urged him on was an accident. There was no plan. He wanted a home with Eve Frame? He wanted a home with the English girl? I realize that's a primary urge in people; in Ira particularly, the urge to have a home was the residue of a very, very old disappointment. But he picked some real beauts to have a home with. Ira asserted himself into New York City with all his intensity, with all that craving for a life of weight and meaning. From the party he got the idea that he was an instrument of history, that history had called him to the capital of the world to set society's wrongs right—and to me the whole thing looked ludicrous. Ira wasn't so much a displaced person as he was a misplaced person, always the wrong size for where he was, in both spirit and physique. But that wasn't a perspective I was about to share with him. My brother's vocation is to be stupendous? Suits me. I just didn't want him to wind up unrecognizable as anything else.

  "I'd brought some sandwiches for us to eat that second night, and we ate and he talked and I listened, and it must have been about three in the morning when a New York Yellow Cab pulled up at the shack. It was Eve. Ira'd had the phone off the hook for two days, and when she couldn't stand any more phoning and getting a busy signal, she'd called a taxi and taken it sixty miles into the sticks in the middle of the night. She knocked, I got up and opened the door, and she rushed by me into the room, and there he was. What followed might have been planned by her all the way out in the taxi or might as easily have been improvised. It was right out of those silent pictures she used to act in. A completely screwy performance, pure exaggerated invention, yet so right for her that she would repeat it almost exactly only a few weeks later. A favorite role. The Suppliant.

  "She threw herself onto her knees in the middle of the floor and, oblivious to me—or maybe not all that oblivious—she cried, 'I beg you! I implore you! Don't leave me!' The two arms upthrust in the mink coat. The hands trembling in the air. And tears, as though it weren't a marriage at stake but the redemption of mankind. Confirming—if confirmation was necessary—that she absolutely repudiated being a rational human being. I remember thinking, Well, she's cooked her goose this time.

  "But I didn't know my brother, didn't know what he couldn't withstand. People down on their knees was what he'd been protesting all his life, but I would have thought that by then he had the wherewithal to distinguish between someone driven to her knees because of social conditions and someone just acting away. There was an emotion he could not quiet in himself when he saw her like that. Or so I thought. The sucker for suffering rushing to the fore—or so I thought—and so I stepped outside and got into the taxi and had a cigarette with the driver until harmony was restored.

  "Everything permeated with stupid politics. That's what I was thinking in the taxi. The ideologies that fill people's heads and undermine their observation of life. But it was only driving back to Newark that night that I began to understand how those words applied to the predicament my brother was in with his wife. Ira wasn't merely a sucker for her suffering. Sure, he could be swept away by those impulses that most everybody has when somebody they are intimate with starts to cave in; sure, he could arrive at a mistaken idea of what he should do about it. But that isn't what happened. Only driving home did I realize that wasn't at all what had happened.

  "Remember, Ira belonged to the Communist Party heart and soul. Ira obeyed every one-hundred-eighty-degree shift of policy. Ira swallowed the dialectical justification for Stalin's every villainy. Ira backed Browder when Browder was their American messiah, and when Moscow pulled the plug and expelled Browder, and overnight Browder was a class collaborator and a social imperialist, Ira bought it all—backed Foster and the Foster line that America was on the road to fascism. He managed to squelch his doubts and convince himself that his obedience to every last one of the party's twists and turns was helping to build a just and equitable society in America. His self-conception was of being virtuous. By and large I believe he was—another innocent guy co-opted into a system he didn't understand. Hard to believe that a man who put so much stock in his freedom could let that dogmatizing control his think-ing. But my brother abased himself intellectually the same way they all did. Politically gullible. Morally gullible. Wouldn't face it. Shut their minds, the Iras, to the source of what they were selling and celebrating. Here was somebody whose greatest strength was his power to say no. Unafraid to say no and to say it into your face. Yet all he could ever say to the party was yes.

  "He had reconciled himself to her because no sponsor or network or advertising agency was going to touch Ira as long as he was married to the Sarah Bernhardt of the Airwaves. That's what he was gambling on, that they couldn't expose him, wouldn't dispose of him, as long as at his side he had radio's royalty. She was going to protect her husband and by extension protect the clique of Communists who ran Ira's show. She threw herself on the floor, she implored him to come home, and what Ira realized was that he damn well better do what she asked, because without her he was sunk. Eve was his front. The bulwark's bulwark."

  "That's when the deus ex machina appears with her gold tooth. Eve discovered her. Heard about her from some actor who'd heard about her from some dancer. A masseuse. Probably ten, twelve years older than Ira and pushing fifty by then. Had that worn, twilight look about her, the sensuous female rumbling downhill, but her work kept her in shape, kept that big, warm body firm enough. Helgi Pärn. Estonian woman married to an Estonian factory worker. A solid working-class woman who likes her vodka and is a little bit of a prostitute and a little bit of a thief. A large, healthy woman who, when she first shows up, is missing a tooth. And then she comes back and the tooth has been replaced—a gold tooth, a present from a dentist she's massaging. And then she comes back with a dress, a present from a dress manufacturer she's massaging. Over the course of the year she comes back with some costume jewelry, she has a fur coat, she has a watch, soon she's buying stocks, et cetera, et cetera. Helgi is constantly being improved. She jokes about all her improvements. It's just appreciation, she tells Ira. The first time Ira gives her money she says, 'I don't take money, I take presents.' He says, 'I can't go shopping. Here. Buy yourself what you want.'

  "She and Ira have the obligatory class
-consciousness discussion, he tells her how Marx urged working people like the Pärns to wrest the capital from the bourgeoisie and organize as the ruling class, in control of the means of production, and Helgi's having none of it. She's Estonian, the Russians had occupied Estonia and turned it into a Soviet republic, and so she's instinctively anti-Communist. There is only one country for her, the United States of America. Where else could an immigrant farm girl with no education, blah blah blah blah. The improvements are comic to Ira. Ordinarily he is a little short on humor, but not where Helgi is concerned. Maybe he should have married her. Maybe this big, good-natured slob who does not recoil from reality was his soulmate. His soulmate the way Donna Jones was his soulmate: because of what was untamed in her. Because of what was wayward.

  "He sure did get a kick out of the acquisitive side of her. 'What is it this week, Helgi?' To her it's not whoring, it's not sinister—it's self-improvement. The fulfillment of Helgi's American dream. America is the land of opportunity, and her clients appreciate her, and a girl has to make a living, and so three times a week she came around after dinner, looking like a nurse—starched white dress, white stockings, white shoes—and carrying with her a table that folded in half, a massage table. She sets the table up in his study, in front of his desk, and though he was half a foot too tall for it, he stretched himself out on it, and for a solid hour she massaged him very professionally. Afforded him, with those massages, the only real relief Ira ever got from all that pain.

  "Then, still in her white uniform, altogether professionally, she concluded with something that provided more relief. A wonderful outpouring gushed forth from his penis, and momentarily the prison dissolved. In that gush was all the freedom that Ira had left. The lifelong battle to exercise fully his political, civil, and human rights had evolved itself down to coming, for dough, onto this fifty-year-old Estonian woman's gold tooth while, below them in the living room, Eve listened to Sylphid play on her harp.