I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "What was the accident?" Ira asked Tommy. "What happened to your dad? Tell Nathan what happened to him."

  "The station broke. See, we put a timber in the back of this four-by-four hole at a certain degree—we put one back there, have to dig it out with a pick to make it slantlike, so I wedge this in and I cut it at an angle. One in the front and one over here. And then we put a two-inch plank on there."

  Ira interrupted to try to push him ahead, to the good stuff. "So what happened? Tell him how your dad died."

  "It collapsed. The vibration collapsed it. The machine and everything went down. Over a hundred feet. He never recovered. His bones were all broke. He died about a year after. We had this old-fashioned stove, and he had his feet right in there, trying to stay warm. Couldn't keep warm."

  "Did they have any workmen's compensation? You ask, Nathan, ask the questions. That's what you do if you want to be a writer. Don't be shy. Ask Tommy if he had workmen's compensation."

  But I was shy. Here, eating hot dogs with me, was a real miner, thirty years in the zinc mines. I couldn't have been any more shy if Tommy Minarek had been Albert Einstein. "Did they?" I asked.

  "Give you anything? The company? He didn't get a penny," Tommy said bitterly. "The company was the trouble and the bosses was the trouble. The bosses down there didn't seem to care for their house. You know what I mean? For their territory that they worked in every day. Like me, if I was a boss down there, I would check these planks goin' over where the people walk over the holes. I don't know how deep them holes are, but certain people got killed down there, walkin' on these planks, and the plank broke. Rotten. They never took care of them to check them darn planks. They never did it."

  "Didn't you have a union then?" I asked.

  "We had no union. My father didn't even get a penny."

  I tried to think of what else I ought to know as a writer. "Didn't you have the United Mine Workers down here?" I asked.

  "We had it later. In the forties already. It was too late by then," he said, outrage again in his voice. "He was dead, I was retired—and the union didn't help that much anyway. How could they? We had one leader, our local president—he was good, but what could he do? You couldn't do nothin' with a power like that. Look, years before we had a guy tried to organize us. This person went to get water for his house from a spring down the road. Never come back. Nobody ever heard of him anymore. Tryin' to organize the union."

  "Ask about the company, Nathan."

  "The company store," Tommy said. "I seen people get a white slip."

  "Tell him, Tom, what a white slip is."

  "You didn't get no pay. The company store got all his money. A white slip. I seen that."

  "Owners make a lot of money?" Ira asked.

  "The president of the zinc company, the main guy, he's got a big mansion over here, up on the hill alone. Big house up there. I heard one of his friends say, when he died, that he had nine and a half million dollars. That's what he owned."

  "And what'd you get to start?" Ira asked him.

  "Thirty-two cents an hour. First job I worked in the boiler house. I was twenty-some years old. Then I went down in the mines. Highest I could get was ninety cents because I was like a boss. A headman like. Next to the boss. I did everything."

  "Pensions?"

  "Nothin. My father-in-law got a pension. He got eight dollars. Thirty-some years he worked. Eight dollars a month, that's what he got. I didn't see no pension."

  "Tell Nathan how you eat down there."

  "We have to eat underground."

  "Everybody?" Ira asked.

  "The bosses are the only ones who come up twelve o'clock and eat in their washroom. The rest of us, underground."

  The next morning, Ira drove me out to the rock dump to sit there with Tommy and learn from him on my own all I could about the evil consequences of the profit motive as it functioned in Zinc Town. "Here's my boy, Tom. Tom's a good man and a good teacher, Nathan."

  "I try to be the best," Tommy said.

  "He was my teacher down in the mines. Weren't you, Tom?"

  "That I was, Gil."

  Tommy called Ira Gil. When I had asked, at breakfast that morning, why Tommy called him Gil, Ira laughed and said, "That's what they called me down there. Gil. Never really knew why. Somebody called me that one day, and it just stuck. Mexicans, Russians, Slovaks, all called me Gil."

  In 1997, I learned from Murray that Ira had not been telling me the truth. They had called him Gil because up in Zinc Town he had called himself Gil. Gil Stephens.

  "I taught Gil how to set the explosives when he was a kid. By then I was a runner, I was the one that drills and sets up everything, the explosives, the timbers and everything. Taught Gil here to drill, and in every one of them you put a stick of dynamite in there, and put a circuit wire through."

  "I'm going, Tom. I'll pick him up later. Tell him about the explosives. Educate this city slicker, Mr. Minarek. Tell Nathan about the smell from the explosives and what that does to a man's insides."

  Ira drove off, and Tommy said, "The smell? You have to get used to that. I had it once, bad. I was mucking out a pillar, not a pillar, an entrance, a four-by-four entrance. And we drilled and fired it, and we put water on it all night, on that muck, we call it muck, and the next day it smelled like hell. I got a whiff of that good. It bothered me for a while. I was sick. Not as sick as some of the guys, but sick enough."

  It was summertime, already hot at nine A.M., but even out at the ugly rock dump, with the big machine shop across the highway where they had the not-so-hygienic toilet Tommy used, it was blue overhead and beautiful, and pretty soon families started driving up in cars to visit. One guy stuck his head out the car window and asked me, "Is this the one where the kids can go in and pick rocks and stuff?"

  "Yep," I said, instead of "Yes."

  "You got kids here?" Tommy asked him.

  He pointed to two in the back seat.

  "Right here, sir," Tommy said. "Go in and look around. And when you go out, right here, half a buck a bag here for a miner who mined 'em for thirty years, special rocks for the kids."

  An elderly woman drove up in a car full of kids, her grandchildren probably, and when she got out, Tommy politely saluted her. "Lady, when you're going out, and you want a nice bag of rocks for the little ones from a miner who mined 'em for thirty years, stop here. Fifty cents a bag. Special rocks for the kids. They fluoresce beautifully."

  Getting in the swing of things—getting in the swing of the joys of the profit motive as it functioned in Zinc Town—I told her, "He's got the good stuff, lady."

  "I'm the only one," he told her, "who makes these bags. These bags are from the good mine. The other is completely different. I don't put no junk in there. There's real stuff in there. If you see 'em under light, you'll enjoy what's in there. There's pieces in there only comes from this mine, nowhere else in the world."

  "You're in the sun without a hat," she told Tommy. "You don't get hot sitting there like that?"

  "Been doing this many years," he told her. "See these ones on my car? These fluoresce different colors. They look ugly but they're nice under light, they got different things in 'em. It's got a lot of different mixtures in."

  "This is a fella"—"fella," not "fellow," said I—"who really knows rocks. Thirty years in the mines," I said.

  Then a couple pulled up who looked more like city people than any of the other tourists. As soon as they got out of their car, they began to examine Tommy's higher-priced specimens on the hood of the car and to consult together quietly. Tommy whispered to me, "They want my rocks in the worst way. I got a collection, nobody can touch it. This here's the most extraordinary mineral deposit on this planet—and I got the best of 'em."

  Here I piped up. "This guy's got the best stuff. Thirty years in the mines. He's got beautiful rocks here. Beautiful rocks." And they bought four pieces, for a sale totaling fifty-five dollars, and I thought, I'm helpin'. I'm helpin' a real miner.

  "I
f you want any minerals again," I said as they got back with their purchase into their car, "you come here. This here's the most extraordinary mineral deposit on this planet."

  I was having a fine time of it until, close to noon, Brownie arrived and the silly gratuitousness of the role I was so enthusiastically playing was revealed even to me.

  Brownie—Lloyd Brown—was a couple of years older than me, a skinny, crewcutted, sharp-nosed boy, pale and harmless-looking in the extreme, particularly in the white shopkeeper's apron that he wore over a clean white shirt and a clip-on black bow tie and a pair of fresh dungarees. Because his relation to himself was so transparently simple, his chagrin when he saw me with Tommy was plastered all over him and pitiable. Compared with Brownie, I felt like a kid with the most abundant and frenzied existence, even just sitting quietly beside Tommy Minarek; compared with Brownie, that's what I was.

  But if something about my complexity mocked him, something about his simplicity also mocked me. I turned everything into an adventure, looking always to be altered, while Brownie lived with a sense of nothing other than hard necessity, had been so shaped and tamed by constraint as to be able to play only the role of himself. He was without any craving that wasn't brewed in Zinc Town. The only thoughts he ever wanted to think were the thoughts that everybody else in Zinc Town thought. He wanted life to repeat and repeat itself, and I wanted to break out. I felt like a freak wanting to be other than Brownie—perhaps for the very first time but not for the last. What would it be like to have that passion to break out vanish from my life? What must it be like to be Brownie? Wasn't that what the fascination with "the people" was really all about? What is it like to be them?

  "You busy, Tom? I can come back tomorrow."

  "Stay here," Tommy said to the boy. "Sit down, Brownie."

  Deferentially, Brownie said to me, "I just come here every day on my lunch hour and I talk to him about rocks."

  "Sit down, Brownie, my boy. So what do you got?"

  Brownie laid a worn old satchel at Tommy's feet, and from it he began to extract rock specimens about the size of the ones Tommy was displaying on the hood of his car.

  "Black willemite, huh?" Brownie asked.

  "No, that's hematite."

  "I thought it was a funny-looking willemite. And this?" he asked. "Hendricksite?"

  "Yep. Little willemite. There's calcite, too, in there."

  "Five bucks for that? Too much?" Brownie asked.

  "Somebody may want it," Tommy said.

  "You in this business too?" I asked Brownie.

  "This was my dad's collection. He was in the mill. Got killed. I'm selling it to get married."

  "Nice girl," Tommy told me. "And she's a sweet girl. She's a doll. A Slovak girl. The Musco girl. Nice girl, honest girl, clean girl who uses her head. There's no girls like her anymore. He's gonna live with Mary Musco all his life. I tell Brownie, 'You be good to her, she'll be good to you.' I had a wife like that. Slovak girl. Best in the world. Nobody in the world can take her place."

  Brownie held up another specimen. "Bustamite there with that?"

  "That's bustamite."

  "Got a little willemite crystal on it."

  "Yep. There's a little willemite crystal right there."

  This went on for close to an hour, until Brownie started packing his specimens back in the satchel to return to the grocery store where he worked.

  "He's gonna take my place in Zinc Town," Tommy told me.

  "Oh, I don't know," Brownie said. "I won't know as much as you do."

  "But you still have to do it." All at once Tommy's voice was fervent, almost anguished, when he spoke. "I want a Zinc Town guy to take over my place here. I want a Zinc Town guy! That's why I'm teaching you here as much as I can. So you can get somewhere. You're the one who's entitled to it. A Zinc Town person. I don't want to teach somebody else, from out of town."

  "Three years ago I started coming here lunchtime, I didn't know anything. And he taught me so much. Right, Tommy? I did pretty good today. Tommy can tell you the mine," Brownie said to me. "He can tell you where in the mine it came from. What level, how deep. He says, 'You gotta hold the rocks in your hand.' Right?"

  "Right. You gotta hold the rocks in your hand. You gotta handle that mineral. You gotta see the different matrixes that they come in. If you don't learn that, you're not going to learn Zinc Town minerals. He even knows now, he knows if this is from the other mine or if it's from this mine."

  "He taught me that," Brownie said. "I couldn't tell what mine it came from in the beginning. I can tell now."

  "So," I said, "you're going to be sitting out here someday."

  "I hope so. Like this right here, this is from this mine, right, Tom? And this is from this mine too?"

  Because in another year I hoped to go off on a scholarship to the University of Chicago and, after Chicago, become the Norman Corwin of my generation, because I was going everywhere and Brownie was going nowhere—but mostly because Brownie's father had been killed in the mill and my own was alive and well and worrying about me in Newark—I spoke even more fervently than Tommy had to this aproned grocer's assistant whose aspiration in life was to marry Mary Musco and fill Tommy's seat. "Hey, you're good! That's good!"

  "And why?" said Tom. "Because he learned right here."

  "I learned from this man," Brownie told me proudly.

  "I want him to be the next one to take my place."

  "Here comes some business, Tom. I gotta run," Brownie said. "Nice to meet you," he said to me.

  "Nice to meet you," I replied, as though I were the older man and he the child. "When I come back in ten years," I said, "I'll see you out here."

  "Oh," said Tom, "he'll be here, all right."

  "No, no," Brownie shouted back, for the first time laughing lightheartedly as he headed on foot down the highway. "Tommy'll still be here. Won't you, Tom?"

  "We'll see."

  In fact, it was Ira who would be out there ten years later. Tommy had educated Ira, too, once Ira was blacklisted from radio and living alone up in the shack and needing a source of income. That was where Ira dropped dead. That's when Ira's aorta gave out, while he was sitting on Tommy's flat rock selling mineral specimens to the tourists and their kids, telling them, "Lady, half a buck a bag here for them when your boys come out, special rocks right from the mine that I mined there for thirty years."

  This was how Ira had ended his days—as the overseer at the rock dump whom the local old-timers all called Gil, out there even in the wintertime, making fires for certain people for a few bucks. But I didn't learn this until the night that Murray told me Ira's story there on my deck.

  The day before I left that second year, Artie Sokolow and his family drove out to Zinc Town from New York to spend the afternoon with Ira. Ella Sokolow, Artie's wife, was about seven months pregnant, a jolly, dark-haired, freckled-faced woman whose Irish immigrant father, Ira told me, had been a steamfitter up in Albany, one of those big, idealistic union men who are patriotic through and through. "The 'Marseillaise,' 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' the Russian national anthem," Ella laughingly explained that afternoon, "the old man would stand up for all of them."

  The Sokolows had twin boys of six, and though the afternoon began happily enough with a game of touch football—refereed in a manner by Ira's neighbor, Ray Svecz—and was followed by a picnic lunch that Ella had brought along from the city and that all of us, including Ray, ate up the slope from the pond, it ended with Artie Sokolow and Ira down by the pond, toe to toe and barking at each other in a way that horrified me.

  I had been sitting on the picnic blanket talking to Ella about My Glorious Brothers, a book by Howard Fast that she had just finished reading. It was a historical novel set in ancient Judea, about the Maccabees' struggle against Antiochus IV in the second century B.C., and I, too, had read it and even reported on it in school for Ira's brother the second time he was my English teacher.

  Ella had been listening to me the way she listened to e
veryone: taking it all in as if she were being warmed by your words. I must have gone on for close to fifteen minutes, repeating word for word the internationalist-progressive critique I'd written for Mr. Ringold, and all the time Ella gave every indication that what I was saying couldn't have been more interesting. I knew how much Ira admired her as a lifelong radical, and I wanted her to admire me as a radical too. Her background, the physical grandeur of her pregnancy, and certain gestures she made—sweeping gestures with her hands that made her seem to me strikingly uninhibited—all bestowed on Ella Sokolow a heroic authority that I wanted to impress.

  "I read Fast and I respect Fast," I'd been telling her, "but I think he lays too much emphasis on the Judeans' fight to return to their past condition, to their worship of tradition and the days of post-Egyptian slavery. There's entirely too much that's merely nationalistic in the book—"

  And that was when I heard Ira shout, "You're caving in! Running scared and caving in!"

  "If it's not there," Sokolow shot back, "no one knows it's not there!"

  "I know it's not there!"

  The rage in Ira's voice made it impossible for me to go on. All I could think about, suddenly, was the story—which I had refused to believe—that ex-Sergeant Erwin Goldstine had told me in his Maplewood kitchen, about Butts, about the guy in Iran Ira had tried to drown in the Shatt-al-Arab.

  I said to Ella, "What's the matter?"

  "Just give them room," she said, "and hope they calm down. You calm down."

  "I just want to know what they're arguing about."

  "They're blaming each other for things that have gone wrong. They're arguing over things having to do with the show. Calm down, Nathan. You haven't been around enough angry people. They'll cool off."

  But they didn't look it. Ira particularly. He was storming back and forth at the edge of the pond, his long arms lashing out every which way, and each time he turned back to Artie Sokolow, I thought he was going to pounce on him with his fists. "Why do you make these goddamn changes!" Ira shouted.