I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "Look," Murray said, "I haven't told you everything about Ira. Ira had already killed somebody. That's why he left Newark and headed for the sticks and worked in the mines when he was a kid. He was on the lam. I got him up to Sussex County, beyond the beyond in those days, but not so far that I couldn't check on him and help him and get him through that thing. I drove him myself and I gave him his new name and I hid him away. Gil Stephens. The first of Ira's new names.

  "He worked in the mines till he thought they were after him. Not the cops, the Mob. I told you about Ritchie Boiardo, who ran the rackets in the First Ward. The gangster who owned the restaurant, the Vittorio Castle. Ira got wind that Boiardo's thugs were out looking for him. That's when he started riding the rails."

  "What had he done?"

  "Ira killed a guy with a shovel. Ira killed a guy when he was sixteen."

  Ira killed a guy with a shovel. "Where?" I said. "How? What happened?"

  "Ira was working at the Tavern as a busboy. It was a job he'd had for about six weeks when, one night, he finished up swabbing the floors at two, and he came out alone into the street and set off for the room he rented. He lived on a dinky little street way down by Dreamland Park, where they built the project after the war. He made the turn onto Meeker at Elizabeth Avenue and was headed down the dark street across from Weequahic Park, in the direction of Frelinghuysen Avenue, when a guy emerged from the shadows where Millman's hot dog stand used to be. Out of the shadows there, and he swung at him, aiming at his head, and he caught Ira on the shoulders with a shovel.

  "It was one of the Italians from the ditchdigging gang where Ira had worked after he left school. Ira had quit digging ditches to bus tables at the Tavern because of all the trouble he kept having with this guy. It was 1929, the year the Tavern opened. He was going to try to get in on the ground floor and advance from busboy to waiter. That was the goal. I'd helped get him the job. The Italian was drunk and walloped him one, and Ira wrestled the shovel away from him and knocked his teeth out with it. Then he dragged him back of Millman's, back into that pitch-black parking lot. In your day, kids on dates used to park and neck back of Millman's, and that's where Ira beat this guy up.

  "Guy's name was Strollo. Strollo was the big Jew hater on the ditchdigging gang. 'Mazzu' crist, giude' maledett." Christ killer, no-good Jew ... that stuff. Strollo specialized in it. Strollo was about ten years older than Ira and not small, a big guy almost Ira's size. Ira beat him on the head until he was unconscious and left him there. He threw down Strollo's shovel and walked back out into the street and started home again, but something in him wasn't finished. Something in Ira was never finished. He's sixteen and forceful and full of rage, he's hot and sweaty and worked up and excited—he's aroused—and so he turns around and goes back of Millman's and he beats Strollo over the head until the guy is dead."

  Millman's was where Ira used to take me for a hot dog after our walks in Weequahic Park. The Tavern was where Ira had taken Eve to have dinner with Murray and Doris the night they all met. That was in 1948. Twenty years earlier he'd killed someone there. The shack up in Zinc Town—that shack meant something else to him that I'd never understood. That was his reformatory. His solitary confinement.

  "Where does Boiardo come in?"

  "Strollo's brother worked at the Castle, Boiardo's place. Worked in the kitchen. He went to Boiardo and told him what happened. At first nobody connected Ira with the murder because he had already left the ward. But a couple of years later, it's Ira they're looking for. I suspected it was the cops who put Boiardo on to Ira, but I never knew for sure. All I knew was that somebody came to our door asking for my brother. Little Pussy pays me a visit. I grew up with Little Pussy. Little Pussy used to run the dice game in Aqueduct Alley. He ran the ziconette game in the back of Grande's till the cops broke it up. I used to play pool with Little Pussy at Grande's. He got his name because he started out professionally as a cat burglar, sneaking across the rooftops and going in through the windows with his older brother, Big Pussy. In grade school they were already up all night stealing. When they even bothered to come to school, they sat sleeping at their desks and nobody dared to wake them up. Big Pussy died of natural causes, but Little Pussy was bumped off in 1979 in real gangland style: found in his oceanfront apartment in Long Branch, wearing a bathrobe, three bullets from a .32 in his head. The next day Ritchie Boiardo tells one of his cronies, 'Perhaps it was for the best—because he talked too much.'

  "Little Pussy wants to know where my brother is. I told him I hadn't seen my brother in years. He tells me, 'The Boot is looking for him.' They called Boiardo 'the Boot' because he made his phone calls from what the First Ward Italians called a telephone boot'. 'Why?' I asked. 'Because the Boot protects the neighborhood. Because the Boot helps people in time of need.' This was true. Boiardo used to go around wearing a diamond-studded belt buckle and was held in higher esteem even than the saintly guy who was their parish priest. I got word to Ira about Little Pussy and it was seven years, it was 1938, before we saw him again."

  "So it was not because of the Depression that he rode the rails. It was because he was a hunted man."

  "Startled to learn this?" Murray asked me. "About somebody you admired the way you admired him?"

  "No," I said. "No, I'm not startled. It makes sense."

  "That's one reason why he cracked up. That's what he wound up crying in Lorraine's bed. 'The whole thing failed.' The life shaped to overcome it had all fallen apart. The effort had been futile. He'd been returned to the chaos where it had all begun."

  "What's the 'it'?"

  "After he came out of the army, Ira wanted people around him whom he couldn't explode in front of. He went looking for them. The violence in him had scared Ira. He lived in fear of it breaking back into existence. So did I. Somebody who showed that propensity for violence so early—what was going to stop him?

  "That's why Ira wanted the marriage. That's why Ira wanted that child. That's why that abortion crushed him. That's why he came to stay with us the day he found out what was behind the abortion. And that very next day, he meets you. He meets this boy who was all that he had never been and who had all that he had never had. Ira wasn't recruiting you. Maybe your father thought so, but no, you were recruiting him. When he came over to Newark that day, the abortion still so raw in him, you were irresistible to Ira. He was the Newark boy with the bad eyes and the cruel household and no education. You were the nurtured Newark boy given everything. You were the guy's Prince Hal. You were Johnny O'Day Ringold—that's what you were all about. That was your job, whether you knew it or not. To help him shield himself against his nature, against all the force in that big body, all the murderous rage. That was my job all my life. It's the job of lots of people. Ira was no rarity. Men trying not to be violent? That's the 'it.' They're all around. They're everywhere."

  "Ira killed the guy with a shovel. What happened after that?" I asked him. "What happened that night?"

  "I wasn't teaching in Newark. It was 1929. Weequahic High hadn't been built yet. I was teaching at Irvington High. My first job. I rented a room up by Solondz's lumberyard, near the railroad tracks. It was about four in the morning when Ira turned up. I was on the first floor and he rapped on my window. I went out, took one look at his bloody shoes and his bloody pants and his bloody hands and his bloody face, and I got him into that old Ford I had and we started driving. I didn't know where the hell I was going. Somewhere far from the Newark police. I was thinking about the cops then and not Boiardo."

  "He told you what he'd done."

  "Yes. You know whom else he told? Eve Frame. Years later. During their courtship. During that summer they were alone together in New York. He was crazy about her and he wanted to marry her but he had to tell her the truth about who he'd been and the worst he'd done. If it frightened her off, then it frightened her off, but he wanted her to know what she would be getting—that he had been a wild man but that the wild man had been obliterated. He said it for the reason th
at self-reformed people make those confessions: so she could hold him to it. He didn't understand then, he never understood, that a wild man was what Eve needed most.

  "Blindly, which was her way, Eve had an insight into herself. She needs the brute. She demanded the brute. Who better to protect her? With a brute she was safe. It explains why she can be with Pennington during all those years he was out picking up boys and spending the night with them and coming home through a special side entrance he had built onto his study. Built it at Eve's request, so she wouldn't have to hear him returning from his trysts at four A.M. It explains why she married Freedman. It explains the men she was drawn to. Her romantic life consisted of changing brutes. If a brute came along, she was first in line. She needs the brute to protect her, and she needs the brute to be blameless. Her brutes are the guarantor of her treasured innocence. To drop to her knees before them and beg is of the greatest importance to her. Beauty and submission—that was what she lived by, her key to catastrophe.

  "She needs the brute to redeem her purity, while what the brute needs is to be tamed. Who better to domesticate him than the most genteel woman in the world? What better to housebreak him than the dinner parties for his friends and the paneled library for his books and a delicate actress with beautiful diction for his wife? So Ira told Eve about the Italian and the shovel, and she wept for what he had done at sixteen and how he had suffered it and how he had survived it and how he had so bravely transformed himself into a perfect and wonderful man, and they were married.

  "Who knows—maybe she thought that an ex-murderer was perfect for still another reason: on a self-confessed wild man and murderer you can safely impose this unimposable presence, Sylphid. An ordinary man would run screaming from that kid. But a brute? He could take it.

  "When I first read in the papers that she was writing a book, I thought the worst. You see, Ira had even told her the guy's name. What was to stop this woman who had it in her, when she believed she was cornered, to say anything to anyone—what was to stop her from shouting 'Strollo' from the rooftops? 'Strollo, Strollo—I know who murdered the ditchdigger Strollo!' But when I read the book, nothing about the murder was in there. Either she never told Katrina and Bryden about Ira and Strollo, either there was some restraint in her after all, some sense of what people like the Grants (another couple of Eve's brutes) would do to him with it, or she had forgotten it the way she could conveniently forget any unpleasant fact. I never knew which. Maybe both.

  "But Ira was sure it was going to come out. The whole world was going to see him as I saw him that night when I drove him up to Sussex County. Covered with a dead man's blood. With the blood on his face of a man he'd killed. And telling me with a laugh—the cackling laugh of a crazy kid—'Strollo just took his last strollo.'

  "What had begun as an act of self-defense, he had turned into an opportunity to kill someone. He'd lucked into it. Self-defense the instigating event that provides the opportunity to murder. 'Strollo just took his last strollo,' my kid brother tells me. He'd enjoyed it, Nathan.

  '"And what did you just take, Ira?' I asked him. 'Do you know? You just took the wrong fork in the road. You just made the biggest mistake you've ever made. You just changed everything into something else. And for what? Because the guy attacked you? Well, you beat him up! You beat him silly. You got your victory. You spent your rage on beating him to a pulp. But to make the victory total, to go back and then murder him—for what? Because he said something anti-Semitic? That necessitates killing him? The whole weight of Jewish history falls on Ira Ringold's shoulders? Bullshit! You just did something ineradicable, Ira—evil and maniacal and forever rooted in your life. You've done something tonight that can never be made right. You cannot publicly apologize for murder and make everything all right, Ira. Nothing can make murder all right. Ever! Murder doesn't just end one life—it ends two. Murder ends the human life of the murderer as well! You will never get rid of this secret. You will go to the cemetery with this secret. You will have it with you forever!'

  "See, someone commits a crime like murder, I figure the Dostoyevskian reality is going to kick in. A book man, an English teacher, I expect him to manifest the psychological damage that Dostoyevsky writes about. How can you commit an act of murder and not be anguished by it? That makes you a monster, doesn't it? Raskolnikov doesn't kill the old lady and then feel okay about it for the next twenty years. A cold-blooded killer with a mind like Raskolnikov's reflects all his life on his cold-bloodedness. But Ira was not very self-reflective, ever. Ira is an action machine. However that crime contorted Raskolnikov's behavior ... well, Ira paid the toll in a different way. The penance he paid—how he tried to resurrect his life, his bending backward to stand up straight—was not at all the same.

  "Look, I didn't believe he could live with it, and I never believed I could live with it. Live with a brother who had gone and committed a murder like that? You would have thought I would either have disowned him or forced him to confess. The idea that I could live with a brother who had murdered somebody and just sit on it, that I could think that I had discharged my obligation to humanity ... Murder is too big for that. But that is what I did, Nathan. I sat on it.

  "But despite my silence, twenty-odd years later, the root at the root of everything was about to be exposed anyway. America was going to see the cold-blooded killer that Ira really was underneath Abraham Lincoln's hat. America was going to find out that he was no fucking good.

  "And Boiardo was going to get his revenge. Boiardo, by about then, had left Newark for a palazzo stronghold in the lersey suburbs, but that didn't mean that the Strollos' grievance against Ira Ringold had been forgotten by the Boot's lieutenants holding down the First Ward fort. I was always afraid a goon from the pool hall was going to catch up with Ira, that the Mob would send somebody to do him in, especially after he became Iron Rinn. You know that night he took us all to the Tavern for dinner, and he introduced us to Eve, and Sam Teiger took our picture and hung it up in the foyer there? Did I not like that! What could be worse? How drunk on metamorphosis could he get, the heroic reinvention of himself he called Iron Rinn? Back virtually at the scene of the crime, and he allows his mug to go up on the wall? Maybe he's forgotten who he was and what he's done, but Boiardo's going to remember and gun him down.

  "But a book did the job instead. In a country where a book hadn't changed a goddamn thing since the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. A banal show-biz tell-all book, written in hackese by two opportunists exploiting an easy mark named Eve Frame. Ira shakes off Ritchie Boiardo but he couldn't elude the Van Tassel Grants. It's not a goon dispatched by the Boot who does the job on Ira—it's a gossip columnist.

  "In all my years with Doris I had never told her about Ira. But the morning I came back from Zinc Town with his gun and his knives I was tempted to. It was about five in the morning when he turned everything over to me. I drove directly to school that morning with that stuff under the front seat of my car. I couldn't teach that day—I couldn't think. I couldn't sleep that night. That was when I nearly told Doris. I'd taken away his gun and his knives, but I knew that wasn't the end of it. Somehow or other, he was going to kill her.

  "'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.' Line of prose. Recognize it? From the last act of Twelfth Night. Feste the clown, to Malvolio, just before Feste sings that lovely song, before he sings, 'A great while ago the world begun, / With hey ho, the wind and the rain,' and the play is over. I couldn't get that line out of my head. 'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.' Those cryptogrammic g's, the subtlety of their deintensification—those hard g's in 'whirligig' followed by the nasalized g of 'brings' followed by the soft g of 'revenges.' Those terminal S's...'thus brings his revenges.' The hissing surprise of the plural noun 'revenges.' Guhh. Juhh. Zuhh. Consonants sticking into me like needles. And the pulsating vowels, the rising tide of their pitch—engulfed by that. The low-pitched vowels giving way to the high-pitched vowels. The bass and tenor vowels giving
way to the alto vowels. The assertive lengthening of the vowel i just before the rhythm shifts from iambic to trochaic and the prose pounds round the turn for the stretch. Short i, short i, long i. Short i, short i, short i, boom! Revenges. Brings in his revenges. His revenges. Sibilated. Hizzzzzuh! Driving back to Newark with Ira's weapons in my car, those ten words, the phonetic webbing, the blanket omniscience ... I felt I was being asphyxiated inside Shakespeare.

  "I went out again that next afternoon, drove up again after school. 'Ira,' I said, 'I couldn't sleep last night, and I couldn't teach the kids all day, because I know that you will not quit until you have brought down on yourself a horror that goes far beyond being blacklisted. Someday the blacklisting is going to end. This country may even make amends to people who were handled like you, but if you go to jail for murder ... Ira, what are you thinking now?'

  "Again it took me half the night to find out, and when finally he told me I said, 'I'm calling the doctors at the hospital, Ira. I'm getting a court order. This time I'm getting you committed for good. I'm going to see that you are confined in a hospital for the mentally ill for the rest of your life.'