I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "Helgi might have been a handsome woman, but the shallowness shone right through. Her English wasn't so hot, and, as I said, there was always a thin stream of vodka gurgling through her veins, and all of this together gave her the aura of somebody pretty thick. Eve nicknamed her. The Peasant. That's what they called her around West Eleventh Street. But Helgi Pärn was no peasant. Shallow maybe, but not thick. Helgi knew that Eve considered her the equivalent of a beast of burden. Eve didn't bother to hide it, didn't think she had to with a lowly masseuse, and the lowly masseuse despised her for it. When Helgi was blowing Ira, and Eve was downstairs in the living room listening to the harp, Helgi used to have fun imitating the dainty, ladylike way that she imagined Eve deigning to suck him off. Behind the blanked-out Baltic mask, there was somebody reckless who knew when to strike out and how to strike out against her dismissive betters. And when she struck out at Eve, she brought the whole thing down. When the vodka was in there, Helgi wasn't about to impose restrictions on herself.

  "Revenge," announced Murray. "Nothing so big in people and nothing so small, nothing so audaciously creative in even the most ordinary as the workings of revenge. And nothing so ruthlessly creative in even the most refined of the refined as the workings of betrayal."

  I was taken back to Murray Ringold's English class by the sound of that: the teacher summing up for the class, Mr. Ringold recapitulating, intent, before the hour ended, on concisely synthesizing his theme, Mr. Ringold hinting, by his emphatic tone and his careful phrasing, that "revenge and betrayal" might well be the answer to one of his weekly "Twenty Questions."

  "In the army I remember getting hold of a copy of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and reading it every night, reading it for the first time in my life when we were training in England to invade France. I loved that book, Nathan, but it left me puzzled. Do you remember what Burton says about melancholy? Every one of us, he says, has the predisposition for melancholy, but only some of us get the habit of melancholy. How do you get the habit? That's a question that Burton doesn't answer. That book of his doesn't say, and so I had to wonder about it right through the invasion, wonder until from personal experience I found out.

  "You get the habit by being betrayed. What does it is betrayal. Think of the tragedies. What brings on the melancholy, the raving, the bloodshed? Othello—betrayed. Hamlet—betrayed. Lear—betrayed. You might even claim that Macbeth is betrayed—by himself—though that's not the same thing. Professionals who've spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature's scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It's a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What's that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal. Adam—betrayed. Esau—betrayed. The Shechemites—betrayed. Judah—betrayed. Joseph—betrayed. Moses—betrayed. Samson—betrayed. Samuel—betrayed. David—betrayed. Uriah—betrayed. Job—betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don't forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn."

  6

  IN MID-AUGUST of 1950, only a few days before I left home for the University of Chicago (left forever, as it developed) to enroll for my first year of college, I went up on the train to spend a week in the Sussex County countryside with Ira, as I had the previous year when Eve and Sylphid were in France visiting Sylphid's father—and when my own father had first to interview Ira before granting his permission for me to go. That second summer, I arrived late in the day at the rural station a curvy five-mile drive from Ira's shack through narrow back lanes and past the dairy herds. Ira was waiting there in the Chevy coupe.

  Beside him in the front seat was a woman in a white uniform whom he introduced as Mrs. Pärn. She had come out from New York that day to help him with his neck and his shoulders and was about to return on the next eastbound train. She had a folding table with her, and I remember her going to lift it out of the trunk by herself. That's what I remember—her strength in lifting the table, and that she wore a white uniform and white stockings and that she called him "Mr. Rinn" and he called her "Mrs. Pärn." I didn't notice anything special about her except her strength. I noticed her hardly at all. And after she got out of the car and, lugging her table with her, crossed over to the track where the local would take her as far as Newark, I never saw the woman again. I was seventeen. She seemed to me old and hygienic and of no importance.

  In June, a list of 151 people in radio and television with purported connections to "Communist causes" had appeared in a publication called Red Channels, and it had set in motion a round of firings that spread panic throughout the broadcasting industry. Ira's name had not been on the list, however, nor had that of anyone else involved with The Free and the Brave. I had no idea that Ira had more than likely been spared because of the insulation afforded him by being Eve Frame's husband, and because Eve Frame was herself being protected (by Bryden Grant, an informer for the people running Red Channels) from the suspicion that might automatically have fallen on her as the wife of somebody with Ira's reputation. Eve, after all, had attended with Ira more than one political function that, in those days, could have put in question her loyalty to the United States. It didn't require much incriminating evidence—in cases of mistaken identity, it didn't require any—even for someone as unengaged by politics as Eve Frame was, to be labeled a "fronter" and to wind up out of work.

  But I wasn't to know Eve's role in shaping Ira's predicament until some fifty years later, when Murray told me about it at my house. My theory at the time for why they didn't go after Ira was that they were afraid of him, afraid of the fight he'd put up, of what looked to me back then to be his indestructibility. I thought the editors of Red Channels were afraid that, if provoked, Ira might singlehandedly bring them down. I even had a romantic moment, while Ira was telling me about Red Channels over our first meal together, of thinking of the shack on Pickax Hill Road as one of those austere training camps in the Jersey sticks where heavyweights used to go for months before the big fight, the heavyweight here being Ira.

  "The standards of patriotism for my profession are about to be set by three policemen from the FBI. Three ex-FBI men, Nathan, that's who's running this Red Channels operation. Who should be employed on radio and who shouldn't be employed will be determined by three guys whose favored source of information is the House Un-American Activities Committee. You'll see how courageous the bosses are in the face of this shit. Watch how the profit system holds out against the pressure. Freedom of thought, of speech, due process—screw all that. People are going to be destroyed, buddy. It's not livelihoods that are going to be lost, it's lives. People are going to die. They're going to get sick and die, they're going to jump off buildings and die. By the time this is over, the people with names on that list are going to wind up in concentration camps, courtesy of Mr. McCarran's darling Internal Security Act. If we go to war with the Soviet Union—and nothing the right wing in this country wants more than a war—McCarran will take a personal hand in putting us all behind barbed wire."

  The list neither shut Ira up nor sent him, like any number of colleagues, running for cover. Only a week after the list was published, the Korean War suddenly broke out, and in a letter to the old Herald Tribune, Ira (signing himself defiantly as The Free and the Brave's Iron Rinn) had publicly stated his opposition to what he described as Truman's determination to turn that remote conflict into the long-awaited postwar showdown between the capitalists and the Communists and, by doing so, "maniacally to set the stage for the atomic horror of World War III and the destruction of mankind." It was Ira's first letter to an editor since he'd written from Iran to Stars and Stripes about the injustice of troop segregation, and it was more than an inflamed declaration against going to war with Communist North Korea. By implication it was a blatant, calculated act of resistance against Red Channels and its goal not simply of purging Communi
sts but of menacing into silent submission the airwaves' liberals and non-Communist left wingers.

  Korea was virtually all Ira could talk about during that week up at the shack in August 1950. Almost every evening during my previous visit, Ira and I had stretched out back on rickety beach chairs, surrounded by citronella candles to repel the gnats and mosquitoes—the lemony fragrance of citronella oil would forever after recall Zinc Town to me—and, while I looked up at the stars, Ira had told me all sorts of stories, some new, some old, about his teenage mining days, his Depression days as a homeless hobo, his wartime adventures as a stevedore at the U.S. Army base at Abadan on the Shatt-al-Arab, the river that, down near the Persian Gulf, more or less separates Iran from Iraq. I had never before known anyone whose life was so intimately circumscribed by so much American history, who was personally familiar with so much American geography, who had confronted, face to face, so much American lowlife. I'd never known anyone so immersed in his moment or so defined by it. Or tyrannized by it, so much its avenger and its victim and its tool. To imagine Ira outside of his moment was impossible.

  For me, on those nights up in the shack, the America that was my inheritance manifested itself in the form of Ira Ringold. What Ira was saying, the not entirely limpid (or unrepetitious) flood of loathing and love, aroused exalted patriotic cravings to know firsthand an America beyond Newark, sparked those same native-son passions that had been kindled in me as a boy by the war, that had then been fostered in early adolescence by Howard Fast and Norman Corwin, and that would be sustained a year or two down the line by the novels of Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos. My second year visiting Ira, it began to get deliciously cold at night up in the Sussex hills at the tail end of summer, and I would be feeding the roaring flames in the fireplace with wood that I had split in the hot sun that morning, while Ira, sipping coffee out of his chipped old mug and wearing short pants, battered basketball sneakers, and a washed-out olive T-shirt from his army days—looking like nothing so much as the Great American Scoutmaster, the big natural guy who is adored by the boys, who can live off the land and scare off the bear and make sure your kid doesn't drown in the lake—would go on about Korea in a voice of protest and disgust you were unlikely to hear around the fire at any other campsite in the country.

  "I cannot believe that any American citizen who has half a brain can believe that the North Korean Communist troops will get into ships and travel six thousand miles and take over the United States. But this is what people are saying. 'You have to watch out for the Communist threat. They're going to take over this country.' Truman is showing the Republicans his muscle— that's what he's up to. That's what this is all about. Showing his muscle at the expense of innocent Korean people. We're going in and we're going to bomb those sons of bitches, y'understand? And all to prop up this fascist of ours Syngman Rhee. President Wonderful Truman. General Wonderful MacArthur. The Communists, the Communists. Not the racism in this country, not the inequities in this country. No, the Communists are the problem! Five thousand Negroes have been lynched in this country and not one lyncher has been convicted yet. Is that the fault of the Communists? Ninety Negroes have been lynched since Truman came to the White House full of talk about civil rights. Is that the fault of the Communists, or is it the fault of Truman's attorney general, Mr. Wonderful Clark, who resorts to the outrageous persecution in an American courtroom of twelve leaders of the Communist Party, ruthlessly destroys their lives because of their beliefs, but when it comes to the lynchers refuses to raise a finger! Let's make war on the Communists, let's send our soldiers to fight the Communists—and everywhere you go, around the world, the first ones to die in the struggle against fascism are the Communists! The first ones to struggle in behalf of the Negro, in behalf of the worker..."

  I'd heard it all before, these exact words many times, and by the end of my vacation week I couldn't wait to get out of earshot of him and go home. This time round, staying at the shack wasn't what it had been for me the first summer. With hardly an inkling of how embattled he saw himself on every front, of how compromised he felt his defiant independence to have become—still imagining that my hero was on his way to leading and winning radio's fight against the reactionaries at Red Channels—I couldn't understand the fear and desperation, the growing sense of failure and isolation that were feeding Ira's indignant righteousness. "Why do I do the things I do politically? I do things because I think it is right to do them. I have to do something, because something has to be done. And I don't give a damn if nobody knows it except me. I squirm, Nathan, at the cowardice of my erstwhile associates..."

  The summer before, even though I wasn't old enough to get a license, Ira had taught me how to drive his car. When I turned seventeen and my father got around to teaching me, I was sure that if I told him that Ira Ringold had beat him to it back in August, it would hurt his feelings, and so with my father I pretended that I didn't know what I was doing and that learning to drive was brand-new to me. Ira's '39 Chevy was black, a two-door coupe, and really good-looking. Ira was so big that he looked like something out of the circus sitting at the wheel of the car, and that second summer, when he sat beside me and let me drive, I felt as though I were driving a monument around, a monument in a mad rage about the Korean War, a battle monument commemorating the battle against battling.

  The car had been somebody's grandmother's and had only twelve thousand miles on it when Ira bought it in '48. Floor shift, three speeds forward and the reverse on the upper left of the H. Two separate seats in front, with a space behind them just large enough for a small kid to perch uncomfortably. No radio, no heater. To open the vents, you pushed down a little handle and the flaps would come up in front of the windshield, with a screen on them to keep out the bugs. Pretty efficient. No-draft windows with their own crank. Seats upholstered in that mousy gray fuzz that all cars came through with in those days. Running boards. Big trunk. The spare, with the jack, under the floor panel of the trunk. Sort of a pointed grill, and the hood ornament had a piece of glass in it. Real fenders, big and rounded, and the headlights separate, like two torpedoes, right behind that aerodynamic grill. The windshield wipers worked on a vacuum, so that when you stepped on the gas the wipers would slow down.

  I can remember the ashtray. Right in the center of the dash, between the two passengers: a nice elongated piece of plastic, hinged at the bottom, that rocked out toward you. To get at the engine, you twisted a handle on the outside. No lock—you could have vandalized that engine in two seconds. Each side of the hood opened independently. The texture of the steering wheel was not slick and shiny but fibrous, and the horn was in the center only. The starter was a little round rubber pedal with a corrugated piece of rubber around its neck. The choke that was needed for a start on a cold day was on the right, and something called the throttle on the left. The throttle had no conceivable use that I understood. On the glove compartment a recessed wind-up clock. The gas-tank cover, smack on the side, to the rear of the passenger-side door, screwed off like a lid. To lock the car, you pressed the button on the driver's window, and when you got out of the car, you pulled the rotating handle down and slammed the door. That way, if you were thinking about something else, you could manage to lock the key in the car.

  I could go on and on about that car because it was the first place I ever got laid. That second summer out with Ira I met the daughter of the Zinc Town chief of police, and one night I borrowed Ira's car and took her on a date to a drive-in. Her name was Sally Spreen. She was a redhead a couple of years older than me who worked at the general store and was known locally as "easy." I took Sally Spreen out of New Jersey to a drive-in across the Delaware in Pennsylvania. The drive-in speakers in those days hung inside the car window, and it was an Abbott and Costello movie. Loud. We started necking right away. She was easy. The funny part (if one can speak of just a part of it being funny) was that my underpants were around my left foot. And my left foot was on the accelerator, and so while I was humping her I was fl
ooding Ira's engine. By the time I came, my underwear had somehow wound itself around the brake pedal and my ankle. Costello is yelling, "Hey, Abbott! Hey, Abbott!," the windows are steaming, the engine is flooded, her father is the chief of the Zinc Town police, and I am tied to the floor of the car.

  Driving her home, I didn't know what to say or what to feel or what punishment to expect for having taken her across state lines to have sexual intercourse, and so I found myself explaining to her how American soldiers had no business fighting in Korea. I gave it to her about General MacArthur, as though he were her father.

  When I got back to the shack, Ira looked up from the book he was reading. "Was she good?"

  I didn't know what the answer was. The idea hadn't even occurred to me. "Anybody would have been good," I told him, and the two of us burst into laughter.

  In the morning, we discovered that in my exalted state of the previous night, I had locked the key inside the car before entering the shack no longer a virgin. Again Ira laughed out loud—but otherwise, during my week at the shack, he was impossible to amuse.

  Sometimes Ira invited his nearest neighbor, Raymond Svecz, over to have dinner with us. Ray was a bachelor who lived some two miles down the road, at the edge of an abandoned quarry, a most primeval-looking excavation, an enormous, terrifying manmade chasm whose broken, bottom-of-the-world nothingness gave me the willies even when it was sunlit. Ray lived there by himself in a one-room structure that decades earlier had been a storage shed for mining equipment, as forlorn a human habitat as any I'd ever seen. He had been a POW in Germany during the war and had returned home with what Ira called "mental problems." A year later, back at his job drilling in the zinc mine—in the zinc mine where Ira had himself worked with a shovel as a boy—he'd had his skull injured in an accident. Fourteen hundred feet below the surface of the earth, an overhead rock about the size of a coffin, weighing over a thousand pounds, broke off near a wall he was drilling and, though it didn't crush him, sent him hurtling to the floor, face first. Ray survived, but he never went underground again, and doctors had been rebuilding his skull ever since. Ray was handy, and Ira gave him odd jobs to do, had him weed the vegetable garden and keep it watered when he wasn't around, paid him to repair and paint things at the shack. Most weeks he paid him to do nothing, and when Ira was in residence and saw that Ray wasn't eating properly, he brought him in and fed him. Ray hardly ever spoke. An agreeable sort of dopey fellow, always nodding his head (which was said to look little like the head he'd had before the accident), very polite ... and even when he was eating with us, Ira's attack against our enemies never stopped.