I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "The FBI had a field day with him. And with Ira's reputation up there. To stake you out, to ruin you in your community, to go to your neighbors and have them do you in ... I have to tell you, Ira always suspected that it was the taxidermist who fingered you. You were with Ira, weren't you, at the taxidermy shop?"

  "I was. Horace Bixton," I said. "Little tiny, humorous fellow. Gave me a deer toe for a present. I sat one morning watching a fox being skinned."

  "Well, you paid for that deer toe. Watching 'em skin that fox cost you your Fulbright."

  I started to laugh. "Did you say turning his son against the war too? The son was stone deaf. The son was deaf and he was dumb. He couldn't hear a goddamn thing."

  "This is the McCarthy era—didn't matter. Ira had a neighbor down the road, a zinc miner who'd been in a bad mining accident and who used to work for him. Ira spent a lot of time listening to these guys complain about New Jersey Zinc and trying to turn them around about the system, and this particular guy who was his neighbor, who he used to feed all the time, was the one the taxidermist got to take down the license plate numbers of whoever stopped at Ira's shack."

  "I met the guy who'd been in the accident. He ate with us," I said. "Ray. A rock fell on him and crushed his skull. Raymond Svecz. He'd been a POW. Ray used to do odd jobs for Ira."

  "I guess Ray did odd jobs for everyone," Murray said. "He'd take down the license plate numbers of Ira's visitors and the taxidermist gave them to the FBI. The plates that turned up most often were mine, and that evidence they also used against me—that I visited my Communist-spy brother so much, sometimes even overnight. Only one guy up there stayed loyal to Ira. Tommy Minarek."

  "I met Tommy."

  "Charming old guy. Uneducated but an intelligent man. Had backbone. Ira took Lorraine out to the rock dump one day and Tommy gave her some stuff for free and he was all she talked about when she got home. After Tommy saw the news in the papers, he drove over to the shack and he marched straight in. 'If I had the guts,' he said to Ira, 'I woulda been a Communist myself.'

  "Tommy was the one who rehabilitated Ira. It was Tommy who brought him out of his brooding and got him back into the world. Tommy had him sit right beside him out at the rock dump where he ran things so that people could see Ira there. Tommy was somebody the town respected, and so over time, people up there forgave Ira for being a Communist. Not all of them, but most. The two of them sat at the rock dump talking for three, four years together, Tommy teaching Ira all he knew about minerals. Then Tommy had a stroke and died and left his cellar full of rocks to Ira, and Ira took over Tommy's job. And the town let him. Ira sat out there, hyper-inflammatory Ira rubbing his aching joints and muscles, and ran the Zinc Town rock dump till the day he died. In the sunshine, a summer day, selling minerals, keeled over dead."

  I wondered if Ira ever bled himself of the resolve to be argumentative, contrary, defiant, to be illegitimate when necessary, or if that all still burned on in him while he sold Tommy's specimens out front of the rock dump, across the highway from the machine shop where they had the toilet. Burned on, more than likely; in Ira everything burned on. No one in this world had less talent for frustration than Ira or was worse at controlling his moods. The rage to take action—and selling kids fifty-cent bags of rocks instead. Sitting there till he died, wanting to be something entirely different, believing that by virtue of personal attributes (his size, his animus, the father he'd suffered) he had been destined to be something different. Furious to have no outlet for changing the world. The embitterment of that bondage. How he must have choked on it, employing now to destroy himself his inexhaustible capacity never to desist.

  "Ira would come back from Bergen Street," Murray said, "from walking past Schachtman's newsstand, a worse wreck than when he'd left the house, and Lorraine couldn't take it. Seeing her great big uncle, with whom she'd sung the song of the common worker, 'Heave-ho, heave-ho'—seeing him humbled like that was too much for her, and so we had to put him into the hospital over in New York.

  "He imagined he'd ruined O'Day. He was sure he had ruined everybody whose name and address were in those two little diaries Eve had turned over to Katrina, and he was right. But O'Day was still his idol, and those letters from O'Day that were quoted piecemeal in the papers after they showed up in her book—well, Ira was sure this was the end of O'Day, and the shame of it was awful.

  "I tried to contact Johnny O'Day. I'd met the guy. I knew how close they'd been in the army. I remembered when Ira was his sidekick in Calumet City. I didn't like the man, I didn't like his ideas, I didn't like his blend of superiority and cunning, that moral pass he thought he'd been given as a Communist, but I couldn't believe that he was holding Ira responsible for what had happened. I believed that O'Day could take good care of himself, that he was strong and ruthless in his principled Communistic uncaringness, as Ira had turned out not to be. I wasn't wrong, either. Out of desperation, I figured that if anybody could bring Ira around, it would be O'Day.

  "But I couldn't get a phone number. He wasn't listed any longer in Gary or Hammond or East Chicago or Calumet City or up in Chicago. When I wrote to the last address Ira had for him, the envelope came back marked 'No such person at this address.' I telephoned every union office in Chicago, I phoned left-wing bookstores, phoned every outfit I could think of, trying to hunt him down. Just when I'd given up, the phone at home rang one night, and it was him.

  "What did I want? I told him where Ira was. I told him what Ira was like. I said that if he would be willing to come east on the weekend and go to the hospital and sit with Ira, just sit there with him, I would wire the money for the train and he could stay overnight in Newark with us. I didn't like doing it, but I was trying to entice him, and so I said, 'You mean a lot to Ira. He always wanted to be worthy of O'Day's admiration. I think you might be able to help him.'

  "And then, in that quiet, explicit way of his, in the voice of one tough, unreachable son of a bitch with a single overriding relationship to life, he answered me. 'Look, Professor,' he told me, 'your brother tricked me damn good and proper. I always prided myself that I knew who is phony and who ain't. But this time I was fooled. The party, the meetings—all a cover for his personal ambition. Your brother used the party to climb to his professional position, then he betrayed it. If he was a Red with guts, he would have stayed where the fight is, which is not in New York in Greenwich Village. But all Ira ever cared about was everybody thinking what a hero he was. Always impersonating and never the real thing. Because he was tall, that made him Lincoln? Because he spouted "the masses, the masses, the masses," that made him a revolutionary? He wasn't a revolutionary, he wasn't a Lincoln, he wasn't anything. He wasn't a man—he impersonates being a man along with everything else. Impersonates being a great man. The guy impersonates everything. He throws off one disguise and becomes something else. No, your brother isn't as straight as he'd like people to think. Your brother is not a very committed guy, except when it comes to the commitment to himself. He's a fake and he's a dope and he's a traitor. Betrayed his revolutionary comrades and betrayed the working class. Sold out. Bought off. Totally the creature of the bourgeoisie. Seduced by fame and money and wealth and power. And pussy, fancy Hollywood pussy. Doesn't retain a vestige of his revolutionary ideology—nothing. An opportunistic stooge. Probably an opportunistic stoolie. You're going to tell me he left that stuff in his desk by accident? A guy in the party leaves that by accident? Or was something worked out, Professor, with the FBI? Too bad he's not in the Soviet Union—they know how to handle traitors. I don't want to hear from him and I don't want to see him. Because if I ever do see him, tell him to watch out. Tell him that no matter how thick he butters it with rationalizations, there's going to be blood on the bricks.'

  "That was it. Blood on the bricks. I didn't even try to answer. Who would dare to explain the failure of purity to a militant who was only and always pure? Never in his life had O'Day been this with this one, and that with that one, and a third person with s
omebody else. He does not share in the fickleness of all creatures. The ideologue is purer than the rest of us because he is the ideologue with everyone. I hung up.

  "God knows how long Ira might have languished in the Semi-Disturbed Unit if it hadn't been for Eve. Visitors weren't encouraged and he didn't want to see anybody anyway, aside from me and Doris, but one evening Eve showed up. The doctor wasn't around, the nurse wasn't thinking, and when Eve announced herself as Ira's wife, the nurse pointed her down the corridor, and there she was. He was looking emaciated, still pretty lifeless, hardly talking at all, and so at the sight of him she started to cry. She said she'd come to say she was sorry but that just looking at him brought her to tears. She was sorry, he mustn't hate her, she couldn't live her life knowing he hated her. Terrible pressures had been exerted on her, he couldn't understand how terrible. She didn't want to do it. She did everything not to do it...

  "With her face in her hands, she wept and she wept, until at last she told him what we all knew from reading one sentence of that book. She told Ira that the Grants had written it, every word.

  "That's when Ira spoke. 'Why did you let them?' he said. 'They forced me to,' Eve told him. 'She threatened me, Ira. Loony. She's a vulgar, terrible woman. A terrible, terrible woman. I still love you. That's what I came to say. Let me say it, please. She couldn't make me stop loving you, ever. You must know that.' 'How did she threaten you?' It was the first time in weeks he was speaking consecutively in sentences. 'It isn't that she threatened only me,' Eve said. 'She did that too. She told me that I'd be finished if I didn't cooperate. She told me that Bryden would see to it that I never worked again. I'd wind up impoverished. When I still said no, told her, No, Katrina, no, I can't do it, I can't, no matter what he's done to me, I love him ... that's when she said that if I didn't do it, Sylphid's career would be ruined at the start.'

  "Well, all at once Ira became himself again. He hit the Semi-Disturbed Unit roof. It was pandemonium. Semi-disturbed is still semi-disturbed, and those guys in that room may have been playing basketball and playing volleyball but they were still a pretty fragile lot and a couple of them went haywire. Ira was shouting at the top of that voice of his, 'You did it for Sylphid? You did it for your daughter's career?' and Eve began to howl, 'Only you matter! Only you! What about my child! My child's talent!' One of the inmates is shouting, 'Beat the shit out of her! Beat the shit out of her!' and another one bursts into tears, and by the time the attendants get down the hall, Eve is facedown on the floor, hammering her fists and screaming, 'What about my daughter!'

  "They put her in a straitjacket—that's what they used in those days. They didn't gag her, however, and so Eve just let it out, all of it. 'I said to Katrina, "No, you cannot squash that kind of talent." She would destroy Sylphid. I couldn't destroy Sylphid. I knew you couldn't destroy Sylphid. I was powerless. I was simply powerless! I gave her the least little bit I could. To placate her. Because Sylphid—that talent! It wouldn't be right! What mother in the world would let her child suffer? What mother would have done any differently, Ira? Answer me! To make my child suffer for the silliness of adults and their ideas and their attitudes? How can you put the blame on me? What choice did I have? You have no idea what I go through. You have no idea what any mother would go through if someone says, "I am going to destroy your child's career." You never had children. You don't understand anything about parents and children. You had no parents and you have no children, and you don't know what the sacrifice is all about!'

  '"I don't have children?' Ira screamed. They'd gotten her onto a stretcher and were already carrying her away by then, and so Ira ran after them, ran shouting down the hall,' Why don't I have children? Because of you! Because of you and your greedy, selfish fucking daughter!'

  "They carted her away, something they'd apparently never had to do before with somebody who'd just come by for a visit. They sedated her and they put her in a bed in the Disturbed Unit, locked her up and wouldn't let her out of the hospital until the next morning, when they were able to locate Sylphid, and she turned up to take her mother home. What impulse had brought Eve to the hospital, whether there was any truth at all to what she'd come to say—that she was forced by the Grants to do this ugly thing—whether that was just the new lie, whether even her shame was real, we never knew for sure.

  "Maybe it was. It certainly could have been. In those times, anything could have been. People were fighting for their lives. If it was true that's what happened, then Katrina was a genius, really, a genius of manipulation. Katrina knew exactly where to get her. Katrina gave Eve her choice of people to betray, and Eve, with her pretense of powerlessness, chose what she had no choice but to choose. One is consigned to be oneself, and no one more so than Eve Frame. She became the instrument of the Grants' will. She was run by those two just like an agent."

  "Well, within a matter of days Ira was into the Quiet Unit, and the next week he was out, and then he really became...

  "Well, maybe," Murray said after a moment's reflection, "he just achieved the old survival clarity he had digging ditches, before all the scaffolding of politics and home and success and fame got erected around him, before he buried the ditchdigger alive and donned Abe Lincoln's hat. Maybe he became himself again, the actor of his own way. Ira wasn't a superior artist brought down. Ira was just brought back to where he began.

  "'Revenge.' He said it to me," Murray said, "as plain and calm as that. A thousand convicts, lifers, beating their bars with their spoons couldn't have put it better. 'Revenge.' Between the pleading pathos of defense and the compelling symmetry of revenge, there was no choice. I remember him slowly kneading those joints of his and telling me that he was going to ruin her. I remember him saying, 'Throwing her life into that daughterly toilet. Then throwing mine in with it. That doesn't go down with me. It's not just, Murray. It's degrading to me, Murray. I am her mortal enemy? Okay then, she is mine.'"

  "Did he ruin her?" I asked.

  "You know what happened to Eve Frame."

  "I know she died. Of cancer. Didn't she? In the sixties?"

  "She died, but not of cancer. Remember that picture I told you about, the photograph Ira got in the mail from one of Freedman's old girlfriends, the picture he was going to use to compromise Eve with? The picture I tore up? I should have let him use it."

  "You said that before. Why?"

  "Because what Ira was doing with that picture was looking for a way not to kill her. His whole life had been looking for a way not to kill somebody. When he got home from Iran, his whole life was an attempt to defuse the violent impulse. That picture—I didn't realize what it was a disguise for, what it meant. When I tore it up, when I prevented him from using that as his weapon, he said, 'Okay, you win,' and I went back to Newark stupidly thinking I'd accomplished something, and up in Zinc Town, out in the woods, he starts target shooting. He had knives up there. I drove back to see him the next week and he makes no attempt to hide anything. Too wild with his imaginings to hide anything. He's full of murder talk. 'The smell of gunfire,' he tells me, 'it's an aphrodisiac!' He's absolutely gone. I hadn't even known that he owned a gun. I didn't know what to do. At last I perceived their true affinity, the hopeless interlinking of Ira and Eve as embattled souls: each of them disastrously inclined toward that thing that knows no limits once it gets under way. His recourse to violence was the masculine correlate of her predisposition to hysteria—distinctive gender manifestations of the same waterfall.

  "I told him to give me all the weapons he had. Either give them to me right away, or I'd get on the phone and call the police. 'I suffered as much as you did,' I told him. 'I suffered more than you did in that house because I had to face it first. For six years, by myself. You don't know anything. You think I don't know about wanting to pick up a gun and shoot somebody? Everything you want to do to her now I wanted to do when I was six years old. And then you came along. I took care of you, Ira. I stood between you and the worst of it for as long as I was at home.

 
'"You don't remember this. You were two, I was eight—and you know what happened? I never told you. You had enough humiliation to deal with. We had to move. We weren't living on Factory Street yet. You were a baby and we were living beneath the Lackawanna tracks. On Nassau. Eighteen Nassau Street, backing onto the tracks. Four rooms, no light, lots of noise. Sixteen-fifty a month, the landlord upped it to nineteen, we couldn't pay, and we were evicted.

  '"You know what our father did after we moved out our belongings? You and Momma and I started pushing the stuff over to the two rooms on Factory Street, and he stayed behind in the empty old flat, and he squatted down and he took a crap in the middle of the kitchen. Our kitchen. A pile of his shit right in the middle of where we used to sit at the table and eat. He painted the walls with it. No brush. Didn't need one. Painted the shit on with his hands. Big strokes. Up, down, sidewise. When he finished all the rooms, he washed in the sink, and he left without even closing the door behind him. You know what the kids called me for months after that? Shitwalls. In those days everybody got a nickname. You they called Boo-hoo, me they called Shitwalls. That was our father's legacy to me, his big boy, his oldest son.

  '"I protected you then, Ira, and I'm going to protect you now. I'm not going to let you do it. I found my civilizing path into life, and you found yours, and you are not going back on that now. Let me explain something that you don't appear to understand. Why you became a Communist in the first place. Has that never dawned on you? My civilizing path was books, college, teaching school, yours was O'Day and the party. I never bought your way. I opposed your way. But both ways were legitimate and both worked. But what's happened now, you don't understand either. They've told you that they've decided that Communism is not a way out of violence, that it is a program for violence. They've criminalized your politics and, in the bargain, criminalized you—and you are going to prove them right. They say you're a criminal, so you load up your gun and strap your knife to your thigh. You say, "Goddamn right I am! The smell of gunfire—it's an aphrodisiac!'" Nathan, I talked myself hoarse. But when you are with an enraged homicidal maniac, talking like this doesn't calm him down. It inflames him further. When you are with an enraged homicidal maniac, to start telling a story about childhood, complete with the floor plan of the apartment...