I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "You shit! You whore! Go! Get out of here! You two-faced little cocktease whore!" he said, and shoved me from the room and slammed the door.

  I didn't understand. I didn't really understand Beethoven, I was continuing to have trouble with Kierkegaard, and what Leo was shouting and why he was shouting it was also incomprehensible to me. All I'd done was to tell him I was contemplating living alongside a forty-eight-year-old Communist steelworker who, as I described him, looked a little like an aging Montgomery Clift—and Leo, in turn, throws me out.

  Not just the Indian student across the hall but nearly all the Indian students and Oriental students and African students on the corridor came out of their rooms to see what the commotion was. Most of them, at this hour, were in their underwear, and what they were looking at was a boy who had only just discovered that heroism was not as easy to come by at seventeen as was a seventeen-year-old's talent for being drawn to heroism and to the moral aspect of just about everything. What they thought they saw was something else altogether. What they thought they saw I myself still couldn't figure out until, at my next humanities class, I realized that Leo Glucksman would henceforth mark me down not merely as nobody superior, let alone nobody destined to be a great man, but as the most callow, culturally backward, comical philistine ever, scandalously, to have been admitted to the University of Chicago. And nothing I said in class or wrote for class during the remainder of the year, none of my lengthy letters explaining myself and apologizing and pointing out that I hadn't left the college to join up with O'Day would ever disabuse him.

  ***

  I sold magazines door to door in Jersey that next summer—not quite the same as distributing handbills at an Indiana steel mill at dawn, dusk, and in the dark of night. Though I was on the phone with Ira a couple of times and we made a plan for me to come out to see him at the shack in August, to my relief he had to cancel at the last minute and then I was back at school. Some weeks later, in the final days of October 1951, I heard that he and Artie Sokolow, as well as the director, the composer, the program's two other leading actors, and the famous announcer Michael J. Michaels, had been fired from The Free and the Brave. My father gave me the news on the phone. I didn't regularly see a newspaper, and the news, he told me, had appeared the day before in both Newark papers, as well as in every one of the New York dailies. "Redhot Iron" they had called him in the headline of the New York Journal-American, where Bryden Grant was a columnist. The story had broken in "Grant's Grapevine."

  I could tell from my father's voice that what he was most worried about was me—about the implications of my having been befriended by Ira—and so indignantly I said to him, "Because they call him a Communist, because they lie and call everybody a Communist—" "They can lie and call you one too," he said, "yes." "Let them! Just let them!" But no matter how much I shouted at my liberal chiropodist father as though he were the radio executive who had fired Ira and his cohorts, no matter how loudly I claimed that the accusations were as inapplicable to Ira as they would be to me, I knew from having spent just that one afternoon with Johnny O'Day how mistaken I could be. Ira had served over two years with O'Day in Iran. O'Day had been his best friend. When I knew him, he was still getting long letters from O'Day and writing back to him. Then there was Goldstine and all he'd said in his kitchen. Don't let him fill you full of Communist ideas, kid. The Communists get a dummy like Ira and they use him. Get out of my house, you dumb Communist prick...

  I had willfully refused to put all this together. This and the record album and more.

  "Remember that afternoon in my office, Nathan, when he came over from New York? I asked him and you asked him, and what did he tell us?"

  "The truth! He told the truth!"

  "'Are you a Communist, Mr. Ringold?' I asked him. 'Are you a Communist, Mr. Ringold?' you asked him." With something shocking in his voice I had never heard before, my father cried, "If he lied, if that man lied to my son ...!"

  What I'd heard in his voice was a willingness to kill.

  "How can you be in business with somebody who lies to you about something that fundamental? How? It wasn't a child's lie," my father said. "It was an adult lie. It was a motivated lie. It was an unmitigated lie."

  On he went, while I was thinking, Why did Ira bother, why didn't he tell me the truth? I would have gone up to Zinc Town anyway, or tried to. But then, he didn't just he to me. That wasn't the point. He lied to everyone. If you lie about it to everyone, automatically and all the time, you're doing it deliberately to change your relationship to the truth. Because nobody can improvise it. You tell the truth to this person, you tell the lie to the other person—it won't work. So the lying is part of what happens when he put on that uniform. It was in the nature of his commitment to lie. Telling the truth, particularly to me, never occurred to him; it would have not only put our friendship at risk but put me at risk. There were lots of reasons why he lied, but none that I could explain to my father, even if I had understood them all at the time.

  After speaking with my father (and my mother, who said, "I begged Dad not to call you, not to upset you"), I tried to telephone Ira at West Eleventh Street. The phone was busy all evening, and when I dialed again the next morning and got through, Wondrous—the black woman whom Eve used to summon to the dinner table with the little bell that Ira loathed—said to me, "He don't live here no more," and hung up. Because Ira's brother was still very much "my teacher," I restrained myself from phoning Murray Ringold, but I did write to Ira, to Newark, to Lehigh Avenue, in care of Mr. Ringold, and again to the box address up in Zinc Town. I got no answer. I read the clippings my father sent me about him from the papers, crying aloud, "Lies! Lies! Filthy lies!" but then I remembered Johnny O'Day and Erwin Goldstine and I didn't know what to think.

  Less than six months later there appeared in America's bookstores—rushed into publication—I Married a Communist by Eve Frame, as told to Bryden Grant. The jacket, front and back, was a replica of the American flag. On the front of the jacket the flag was ripped raggedly open, and within the oval tear was a recent black-and-white photograph of Ira and Eve: Eve looking softly lovely in one of her little hats, with the dotted veil she'd made famous, wearing a fur jacket, and carrying a circular purse—Eve smiling brightly at the camera as she walked arm in arm down West Eleventh Street with her husband. But Ira didn't look at all happy; from beneath his fedora, he stared through his heavy glasses into the camera with a grave and troubled expression. Very nearly at the bull's-eye center of that book jacket proclaiming "I Married a Communist, by Eve Frame, as told to Bryden Grant," Ira's head was circled boldly in red.

  In the book, Eve claimed that Iron Rinn, "alias Ira Ringold," was "a Communist madman" who had "assaulted and browbeaten" her with his Communist ideas, lecturing her and Sylphid every night at dinner, shouting at them and doing his best to "brainwash" both of them and make them work for the Communist cause. "I don't believe I've ever seen anything so heroic in my life as my young daughter, who loved nothing so much as to sit quietly all day playing her harp, arguing strenuously in defense of American democracy against this Communist madman and his Stalinist, totalitarian lies. I don't believe I've ever seen anything so cruel in my life as this Communist madman using every tactic out of the Soviet concentration camp to bring this brave child to her knees."

  On the facing page was a photograph of Sylphid, but not the Sylphid I knew, not the large, sardonic twenty-three-year-old in the gypsy clothes who had hilariously helped me through my dinner that night at the party and who afterward had delighted me by filleting one after another of her mother's friends, but a tiny, round-faced Sylphid with big black eyes, in pigtails and a party dress, smiling at her beautiful mommy over a Beverly Hills birthday cake. Sylphid in a white cotton dress embroidered with little strawberries, its full skirt puffed out with petticoats and cinched by a full sash tied at the back in a bow. Sylphid at forty-two pounds and six years of age, in white anklets and black Mary Janes. Sylphid not as Pennington's child or
even Eve's but as God's. The picture achieving what Eve intended at the outset with the misty daydream of a name: the deprofanation of Sylphid, the etherealization from solid to air. Sylphid as saint, perfectly innocent of all the vices and taking up no room in this world whatsoever. Sylphid as everything that antagonism is not.

  "Momma, Momma," the brave child cries helplessly to her mother in one climactic scene, "those men up in his study are speaking Russian!"

  Russian agents. Russian spies. Russian documents. Secret letters, phone calls, hand-delivered messages pouring into the house day and night from Communists all over the country. Cell meetings in the house and in "the secret Communist hideaway in the remotest wilds of New Jersey." And "in a parlor-floor apartment briefly leased by him in Greenwich Village, on Washington Square North, across from the famous statue of General George Washington—an apartment acquired by Iron Rinn chiefly for the purpose of providing a safe haven for Communists on the run from the FBI."

  "Lies!" I cried. "Completely crazy lies!" But how was I to know for sure? How was anyone? What if the startling preface to her book was true? Could it possibly be? For years I wouldn't read Eve Frame's book, protecting as long as I could my original relationship to Ira even when I had been progressively abandoning him and his haranguing to a point where I had all but accomplished the rejection of him. But because I didn't want this book to be the awful end to our story, I skipped around and didn't read thoroughly beyond the preface. Nor was I avidly interested in what was written in the papers about the treacherous hypocrisy of the leading actor of The Free and the Brave, who'd been personifying all these great American characters despite having cast himself in a more sinister role entirely Who had, according to Eve's testimony, been personally responsible for submitting every one of Sokolow's scripts to a Russian agent for suggestions and approval. To see somebody I'd loved publicly vilified—why would I want to take part in that? There was no pleasure in it, and there was also nothing I could do about it.

  Even putting aside the charge of espionage, accepting that the man who had brought me into the world of men could have lied to our family about being a Communist was no less painful for me than accepting that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs could have lied to the nation by denying that they were Communists. I refused to read any of it, as I had earlier refused to believe any of it.

  This was how Eve's book began, the preface, the bombshell of an opening page:

  Is it right for me to do this? Is it easy for me to do this? Believe me, it is far from easy. It is the most awful and difficult task of my entire life. What is my motive? people will ask. How can I possibly consider it my moral and patriotic duty to inform on a man I loved as much as I loved Iron Rinn?

  Because as an American actress I have sworn myself to fight the Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry with every fiber of my being. Because as an American actress I have a solemn responsibility to an American audience that has given me so much love and recognition and happiness, a solemn and unshakable responsibility to reveal and expose the extent of the Communist grip on the broadcasting industry that I came to know through the man I was married to, a man I loved more than any man I have ever known, but a man who was determined to use the weapon of mass culture to tear down the American way of life.

  That man was the radio actor Iron Rinn, alias Ira Ringold, card-carrying member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and American ringleader of the underground Communist espionage unit committed to controlling American radio. Iron Rinn, alias Ira Ringold, an American taking his orders from Moscow.

  I know why I married this man: out of a woman's love. And why did he marry me? Because he was ordered to by the Communist Party! Iron Rinn never loved me. Iron Rinn exploited me. Iron Rinn married me the better to infiltrate his way into the world of American entertainment. Yes, I married a Machiavellian Communist, a vicious man of enormous cunning who nearly ruined my life, my career, and the life of my beloved child. And all of it to advance Stalin's plan for world domination.

  7

  "THE SHACK. Eve hated it. When they were first lovers, she'd tried fixing it up for him; she hung curtains, bought dishes, glasses, place settings, but there were mice, wasps, spiders got into the place, and she was terrified of them, and it was miles to the general store, and since she didn't drive, a local farmer who smelled of manure had to drive her there to shop. All in all, there was nothing much for her to do in Zinc Town except fend off all the discomforts, and so she started to campaign for them to buy a place in the south of France, where Sylphid's father had a villa, so that Sylphid could be near him in the summers. She said to Ira, 'How can you be so provincial? How will you ever learn anything that isn't screaming about Harry Truman if you won't travel, if you won't go to France to see the French countryside, if you won't go to Italy to see the great paintings, if you won't go anywhere except to New Jersey? You don't listen to music. You won't go to museums. If a book isn't about the working class, you don't read it. How can an actor—' And he would say, 'Look, I'm no actor. I'm a working stiff who earns his living in radio. You had a la-di-da husband. You want to go back and try him again? You want a husband like your friend Katrina has, a cultivated Harvard man like Mr. Loony, like Mr. Katrina Van Gossip Grant?'

  "Whenever she'd bring up France and buying a vacation house there, Ira got going—it never took much. It wasn't in him casually to dislike somebody like Pennington or Grant. It wasn't in him casually to dislike anything. There was no disagreement that his outrage couldn't make use of. 'I traveled,' he'd tell her. 'I worked on the docks in Iran. Saw enough human degradation in Iran...' and so on and so forth.

  "The upshot was that Ira wouldn't give up the shack, and that was another source of contention between them. In the beginning the shack was a holdover from his old life and for her a part of his rube charm. After a while she saw the shack as a foothold apart from her, and that also filled her with terror.

  "Maybe she loved him and that's what spawned the fear of losing him. Her histrionics never registered on me as love. Eve cloaked herself in the mantle of love, the fantasy of love, but was too weak and vulnerable a person not to be filled with resentment. She was too intimidated by everything to provide love that was sensible and to the point—to provide anything but a caricature of love. That's what Sylphid got. Imagine what it must have meant to be Eve Frame's daughter—and Carlton Pennington's daughter—and you begin to understand how Sylphid evolved. A person like that you don't make overnight.

  "The whole despised part of Ira, everything disgustingly untamed in him, was also wrapped up for her in that shack, but Ira wouldn't get rid of it. If nothing else, as long as the shack remained a shack, it was Sylphid-proof. Nowhere for her to sleep other than on the daybed in the front room, and the few times each summer she visited for a weekend she was bored and miserable. The pond too muddy for her to swim in, the woods too buggy for her to walk in, and though Eve would endlessly try to keep her entertained, she sulked indoors for a day and a half and then headed back on the train to her harp.

  "But that last spring they were together, plans began to be laid to fix the place up. Big renovation to start after Labor Day. Modernizing the kitchen, modernizing the bathroom, large new windows, brand-new floors, new doors that fit, new lighting, blown insulation and a new oil-heating system to properly winterize the place. Paint job inside and out. And a large addition at the back, a whole new room with a huge stone fireplace and with a picture window overlooking the pond and the woods. Ira hired a carpenter, a painter, an electrician, a plumber, Eve made lists and drawings, and all of it was to be ready for Christmas. 'What the hell,' Ira said to me, 'she wants it, let her have it.'

  "His coming apart had begun by then, only I didn't realize it. He didn't either. He thought he was being shrewd, you see, thought he could finesse it. But his aches and pains were killing him, and his morale was shot, and the decision wasn't made by what was strong in him but by what was breaking. He thought by making things more to h
er liking he could minimize the friction and ensure her protecting him against the blacklist. He was afraid now of losing her by losing his temper, and so he began to try to save his political hide by letting all that unreality of hers flow freely over him.

  "The fear. The acute fear there was in those days, the disbelief, the anxiety over discovery, the suspense of having one's life and one's livelihood under threat. Was Ira convinced keeping Eve could protect him? Probably not. But what else was there for him to do?

  "What happened to his cunning strategy? He hears her calling the new addition 'Sylphid's room,' and that takes care of the cunning strategy. He hears her outside with the excavator saying, 'Sylphid's room this' and 'Sylphid's room that,' and when she comes inside the house, all glowing and happy, Ira's already undergone the transformation. 'Why do you say that?' he asks her. 'Why do you call that Sylphid's room?' 'I did no such thing,' she says. 'You did. I heard you. That's not Sylphid's room.' 'Well, she is going to stay there.' 'I thought it was just going to be the big backroom, the new living room.' 'But the daybed. She'll be sleeping there on the new daybed.' 'Will she? When?' 'Why, when she comes here.' 'But she doesn't like it here.' 'But she will when the house is as lovely as it's going to be.' 'Then screw it,' he says. 'The house won't be lovely. The house will be shitty. Fuck the whole project.' 'Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to my daughter? What is wrong with you, Ira?' 'It's over. The renovation is off.' 'But why? 'Because I can't stand your daughter and your daughter can't stand me—that is why.' 'How dare you say anything against my daughter! I'm getting out of here! I will not stay here! You are persecuting my daughter! I will not have it!' And she picked up the phone and called for the local taxi, and in five minutes she was gone.