I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "He was going to garotte her. And the daughter. He was going to garotte the two of them with the strings off the harp. He had the wire cutter. He meant it. He was going to cut the strings and tie them around their necks and strangle the two of them to death.

  "That next morning I came back to Newark with the wire cutter. But it was hopeless, I knew that. I went home after school and I told Doris what had happened, and that's when I told her about the murder. I told her, 'I should have let them put him away. I should have turned him over to the police and let the law do what the law does.' I told her that when I left him in the morning, I said, 'Ira, she's got that daughter to live with. There's her punishment, terrible punishment, and it's punishment she brought upon herself.' And Ira laughed. 'Sure, it's terrible punishment,' he said, 'but not terrible enough.'

  "In all the years that I had been dealing with my brother, that was the first time I collapsed. Told Doris everything and collapsed. I meant what I said to her. Out of a twisted sense of loyalty, I'd done the wrong thing. I saw my kid brother covered with blood, and I got him in the car and I was twenty-two years old and I did the wrong thing. And now, because the whirligig of time brings in his revenges, Ira was going to kill Eve Frame. The only thing left to do was to go to Eve and tell her to get out of town and take Sylphid with her. But I couldn't. I couldn't go to her and that daughter of hers and say, 'My brother's on the warpath, you better go into hiding.'

  "I was defeated. I'd spent a lifetime teaching myself to be reasonable in the face of the unreasonable, teaching what I liked to call vigilant matter-of-factness, teaching myself and teaching my students and teaching my daughter and trying to teach my brother. And I'd failed. Un-Iraing Ira was impossible. Being reasonable in the face of the unreasonable was impossible. I'd already proved this in 1929. Here it was 1952, and I was forty-five years old and it was as though the intervening years had been for nothing. There was my kid brother with all of his power and all of his rage bent once again on murder, and once again I was going to be accessory to the crime. After everything—everything he'd done, everything we'd all done—he was going to cross the line again."

  "When I told this to Doris, she got in the car and drove up to Zinc Town. Doris took over. She had that kind of authority. When she got back, she said, 'He's not going to murder anybody. Don't think,' she said, 'that I didn't want him to murder her. But he's not going to do it.' 'What is he going to do instead?' 'We negotiated a settlement. He's going to call in his chits.' 'What does that mean?' 'He's going to call on some friends.' 'What are you talking about? You don't mean gangsters.' 'I mean journalists. His journalist friends. They're going to destroy her. You let Ira alone. I'm in charge of Ira.'

  "Why did he listen to Doris and not to me? How did she convince him? Who the hell knows why? Doris had a way with him. Doris had her own kind of savvy, and I turned him over to her."

  "Who were the journalists?" I asked.

  "Fellow-traveling journalists," Murray said. "There were plenty. Guys who admired him, the culturally authentic man of the people. Ira carried great weight with these people because of his working-class credentials. Because of his battles in the union. They'd been at the house often, for those soirées."

  "And they did it?"

  "They tore Eve to pieces. They did it, all right. They showed how her whole book was made up. That Ira was never a Communist. That he had nothing to do with Communists. That the Communist plot to infiltrate broadcasting was a bizarre concoction of lies. Which did not shake the confidence of Joe McCarthy or Richard Nixon or Bryden Grant, but it could and would destroy Eve in the New York entertainment world. That was an ultraliberal world. Think of the situation. Every journalist is coming to her, taking down every word she says in their notebooks and writing it up in all the papers. Big spy ring in New York radio. The ringleader her husband. The American Legion takes her up, asks her to address them. An organization called Christian Crusade takes her up, an anti-Communist religious group. They reprint chapters from the book in their monthly magazine. There's a story celebrating her in the Saturday Evening Post. The Reader's Digest abridges a section of the book, it's the stuff they love, and this, along with the Post, puts Ira in every doctor's and dentist's waiting room in America. Everybody wants her to talk to them. Everybody wants to talk to her, but then time passes and there are no more journalists and nobody any longer is buying the book and little by little nobody wants to talk to her.

  "In the beginning nobody questions her. They don't question the stature of a well-known actress who looks so delicate and who comes on the scene with this shit in order to sell it. L'affaire Frame did not bring out the best thinking in people. The party ordered him to marry her? That was his Communist sacrifice? They took even that without questioning it. Anything to empty life of its incongruities, of its meaningless, messy contingencies, and to impose on it instead the simplification that coheres—and misapprehends everything. The party ordered him to do it. Everything is a plot of the party. As if Ira lacked the talent to make that mistake all on his own. As if Ira needed the Comintern to help plan a bad marriage.

  "Communist, Communist, Communist, and nobody in America had the least idea of what the hell a Communist was. What do they do, what do they say, what do they look like? When they're together, do they talk Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Esperanto? Do they build bombs? Nobody knew, which is why it was so easy to exploit the menace the way Eve's book did. But then Ira's journalists went to work and the pieces begin to appear, in the Nation, the Reporter, the New Republic, tearing her to bits. The public machine she set in motion doesn't always go in the direction one wants. It takes its own direction. The public machine she wanted to destroy Ira begins to turn against her. It has to. This is America. The moment you start this public machine, no other end is possible except a catastrophe for everybody.

  "Probably what unhinged her, what weakened her most, occurred at the outset of Ira's counteroffensive, before she even had a chance to figure out what was happening or for somebody else to take her in hand and tell her what not to do in a battle like this one. Bryden Grant got hold of the Nation attack, the first attack, when it was still in proof. Why should Grant care what they wrote in the Nation any more than he cared what they wrote in Pravda? What else would you expect them to write in the Nation? But his secretary sent the proof over to Eve, and Eve evidently phoned her lawyer and told him she wanted a judge to serve an injunction on the Nation to prevent them from printing the piece: everything in it was malicious and false, lies designed to destroy her name and her career and her reputation. But an injunction was prior restraint, and legally a judge couldn't do that. After the thing appeared she could sue for libel, but that wasn't good enough, that would be too late, she would already be ruined, so she went straight to the office of the Nation and demanded to see the writer. That was L. J. Podell. The Nation's muckraking hatchet man, Jake Podell. People were frightened of him, and they had reason to be. Podell was still to be preferred to Ira with a shovel in his hands, though not by much.

  "She went into Podell's office and there followed the Big Scene, the Academy Award-winning scene. Eve said to Podell the piece was full of lies, it was all vicious lies, and you know what the most vicious lie turned out to be? In that entire piece? Podell identified her as a closet Jew. He wrote that he'd been out to Brooklyn and uncovered the true story. He said that she was Chava Fromkin, born in Brownsville, in Brooklyn, in 1907, grew up on the corner of Hopkinson and Sutter, and that her father was a poor immigrant housepainter, an uneducated Polish Jew who painted houses. He said that nobody in her family had spoken English, not her father, not her mother, not even an older brother and sister. Both of them had been born years before Eve, in the old country. Except for Chava, they all spoke Yiddish.

  "Podell even dug up the first husband, Mueller, the bartender's kid from Jersey, the ex-sailor she'd run off with at sixteen. He's still out in California, living on disability, a retired cop with a bad heart, a wife, and two kids, a good old boy wi
th nothing but good things to say about Chava. The beautiful girl she was. The gutsy girl she was. A little hellion, believe it or not. How she eloped with him, Mueller said, not because she could possibly love the big idiot that he was back then, but because, as he'd known all along, he was her ticket out of Brooklyn. Knowing this and feeling for her, Mueller never stood in her way, he told Podell, never came back to haunt her for money, even after she made it big. Podell's even got some old snapshots, snapshots that Mueller (for an undisclosed sum) kindly turned over to him. He shows them to her: Chava and Mueller on a wild beach at Malibu, the Pacific big and booming behind them—two handsome, healthy, exhilarated youngsters, robust in their twenties swimsuits, ready and eager to take the big plunge. Snapshots that wound up reprinted in Confidential magazine.

  "Now, Podell was never really in the business of exposing Jews. He was an indifferent Jew himself, and God knows he was no supporter of Israel's, ever. But here was someone who'd been lying about her background all her life and now she was lying about Ira. Podell had verifying quotations from all sorts of elderly people in Brooklyn, alleged neighbors, alleged relatives, and Eve said that it was all stupid gossip and that if he reported as the truth the things that stupid people make up about someone who is famous, she would sue the magazine right out of existence and sue him personally for every penny he had.

  "Somebody there had a camera and came into Podell's office and snapped a picture of the onetime movie star just as she was reminding Podell what she could do to him. Well, any drop of self-mastery still left in her vanishes, the rational outlook, such as it was, evaporates, and she runs down the hall sobbing, and there is the managing editor and he takes her into his office and he sits her down and he says, 'Aren't you Eve Frame? I am a great admirer. What's the trouble? What can I do for you?' And she tells him. 'Oh, my, my,' he says, 'that won't do,' and he calms her down and he asks her what she wants changed in the piece, and she tells him about how she was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to an old seafaring family, her great-grandfather and her grandfather captains of a Yankee clipper, and though her own parents had by no means been wealthy, after the death of her father, a patent lawyer, when she was still a little girl, her mother had run a very nice tearoom. The managing editor tells her how glad he is to get the truth. He assures Eve as he sees her into a cab that he will take care that it is printed in the magazine. And Podell, who has been outside the managing editor's office taking down every word Eve says, does just that: puts it in the magazine.

  "After she left, Podell went back to the piece and inserted the incident whole—the visit to the office, the Big Scene, the works. Ruthless old battering ram, inordinately fond of that sort of sport, on top of which he especially liked Ira and disliked her. Scrupulously recorded every detail of the New Bedford story and put that in as the conclusion of the piece. The others who did their stories after Podell's picked up on it, and that became another motif in the anti-Eve stories, another reason she turned on Ira, who is not only not a Communist now but himself a proud, observant Jew, et cetera. What they called Ira had almost as little relation to Ira as what she had called Ira. By the time all these savage intellects, with their fidelity to the facts, were finished with the woman, to find anything anywhere of the ugly truth that was the story of Ira and Eve, you would have needed a microscope.

  "In Manhattan, the ostracism begins. She starts losing friends. People don't come to her parties. Nobody calls her. Nobody wants to talk to her. Nobody believes her any longer. She destroys her husband with lies? What does this say about her human quality? Gradually there's no more work for her. Radio drama is on its last legs, crushed first by the blacklist and then by TV, and Eve's been putting on the weight and television isn't interested.

  "I saw her perform just twice on TV. I believe those were the only two times she ever appeared on TV. The first time we watched her, Doris was astounded. Pleasantly so. Doris said, 'You know whom she looks like now that she's built like that? Mrs. Goldberg, from Tremont Avenue in the Bronx.' Remember Molly Goldberg, on The Goldbergs? With her husband, Jake, and her children, Rosalie and Samily? Philip Loeb. Remember Philip Loeb? You ever meet him through Ira? Ira brought him to our house. Phil played Papa Jake on The Goldbergs for years and years, from the thirties, when the program first started out on radio. In 1950 they fired him from the TV program because his name was on the blacklist. Couldn't get work, couldn't pay his bills, couldn't pay his debts, so in '55 Phil Loeb checked into the Taft Hotel and killed himself with sleeping pills.

  "Both parts Eve played were mothers. Awful stuff. On Broadway she'd always been a quiet, tactful, intelligent actress, and now she was sobbing and throwing herself all over the place—acting, unfortunately, much like herself. But by then she must have been mostly on her own, with nobody giving her any guidance. The Grants are down in Washington and haven't the time, and so all she's got is Sylphid.

  "And that didn't last either. One Friday night, she and Sylphid appeared together on a TV program that was very popular back then. Called The Apple and the Tree. Remember it? Half-hour weekly program about children who had inherited some sort of talent, trait, or profession from a parent. Scientists, people in the arts, in show business, athletes. Lorraine liked to watch it, and sometimes we watched with her. It was an enjoyable program, funny, warm, even interesting sometimes, but pretty light fare, pretty light entertainment. Though not when Sylphid and Eve were the guests. They had to give the public their bowdlerized take on King Lear, with Sylphid as Goneril and Regan.

  "I remember Doris saying to me, 'She's read and understood all those books. She's read and understood all those roles she's played. Is it so hard for her to come to her senses? What makes someone so experienced so hopelessly foolish? To be in your mid-forties, to be so much in the world, and to be so unknowing.'

  "What interested me was that after publishing and promoting I Married a Communist, she didn't, even for a second, in passing, own up to the spite. Maybe by then she'd conveniently forgotten the book and all it had done. Maybe this was the pre-Grant, pre-monster version coming out, Eve's story of Ira before it had been properly Van Tasseled. But the about-face she achieved in revisiting her story was still something to see.

  "All Eve could talk about on TV was how in love she'd been with Ira, and how happy she'd been with Ira, and how the marriage was destroyed only by his treacherous Communism. She even cried for a moment over all the happiness treacherous Communism had ruined. I remember Doris getting up and walking away from the TV set, then coming back and sitting there stewing. Afterward she said to me, 'Seeing her burst into tears like that on television—it shocked me nearly as much as if she'd been incontinent. Can't she stop crying for two minutes? She's an actress, for God's sake. Can't she try acting her age?'

  "So the camera watched the Communist's innocent wife weep, all of TV-land watched the Communist's innocent wife weep, and then the Communist's innocent wife wiped her eyes and, looking nervously to the daughter every two seconds for corroboration—no, for authorization—made it clear that everything was wonderful between Sylphid and her once again, peace established, bygones bygones, all their old trust and love restored. Now that the Communist had been rooted out, there was no closer family, no family on better terms, this side of The Swiss Family Robinson.

  "And every time Eve tried smiling at Sylphid with that poorly pasted-on smile, tried looking at her with the most painfully tentative look in her eyes, a look all but pleading with Sylphid to say, 'Yes, Momma, I love you, that's true'—all but blatantly begging her, 'Say it, darling, if only for television'—Sylphid gave the game away by either glowering back at her or condescending to her or irritatedly subverting every word Eve had said. There came a point at which even Lorraine couldn't take any more. Suddenly this kid shouted at the TV screen, 'Show some love, the two of you!'

  "Sylphid doesn't display a split second's worth of affection for this pathetic woman struggling to hang on. Not a speck of generosity, let alone understanding. Not one con
ciliatory line. I'm not a kid—I don't speak of love. I don't even speak of happiness, harmony, or friendship, fust of conciliation. What I realized watching that program was that this girl could never have loved her mother. Because if you did, even a little, you are able to think about her sometimes as something other than your mother. You think of her happiness and her unhappiness. You think of her health. You think of her loneliness. You think of her craziness. But this girl has no imagination for any of this. The daughter has no understanding whatsoever of the life of a woman. All she has is her J'accuse. All she wants is to put the mother on trial before the whole nation, to make her look terrible in every way. The public grinding of Momma's bones.

  "I'll never forget that picture: Eve continually looking to Sylphid as though her whole idea of herself and her worth derived from this daughter who was the most ruthless judge imaginable of her mother's every failing. You should have seen the mockery in Sylphid, deriding her mother with every scornful grimace, spurning her with every smirk, getting her licks in publicly. She's finally got the forum for her anger. Giving her famous mother a ride on TV. Her power is to say, just with her sneer, 'You who were so admired are a stupid woman.' Not very generous stuff. The stuff most kids sort out by the time they're eighteen. Ferociously self-revealing stuff. You feel there's a sexual pleasure in it when it hangs on that late in a person's life. That program made you squirm: the histrionics of the mother's defenselessness no less remarkable than the relentless blackjack of the daughter's malice. But the mask of Eve's face was what was most frightening. The unhappiest mask you could imagine. I knew then that there was nothing left of her. She looked annihilated.

  "Finally, the program host mentioned Sylphid's upcoming recital at Town Hall, and Sylphid sat down and played the harp. There, that's why Eve agreed to degrade herself like this on TV. Of course—for Sylphid's career. Could there be any better metaphor for their relationship, I thought, than this, than Eve crying in public for all that she's lost while the daughter who doesn't care plays the harp and plugs the recital?