I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "A couple of years later, the daughter abandons her. When her mother is sinking and needs her most, Sylphid discovers her independence. At thirty, Sylphid determines that it's not good for a daughter's emotional well-being to live at home intertwined with a middle-aged mother who tucks her in bed every night. Whereas most children leave their parents at eighteen or twenty, live independently of them for fifteen or twenty years and then, in time, reconcile with their aging parents and try to give them a hand, Sylphid prefers to pull it off the other way round. For the best of modern psychological reasons, Sylphid goes to France to live off the father.

  "Pennington was already sick by then. A couple of years later he died. Cirrhosis of the liver. Sylphid inherited the villa, the cars, the cats, and the Pennington family fortune. Sylphid gets it all, including Pennington's handsome Italian chauffeur, whom she marries. Yes, Sylphid married. Even begat a son. There's the logic of reality for you. Sylphid Pennington became a mother. Big news in the tabloids here because of an interminable legal wrangle initiated by some well-known French set designer—I forget his name, a one-time long-term lover of Pennington's. He claimed that the chauffeur was a hustler, a fortune hunter, who'd only recently come on the scene, who'd himself been an on-and-off lover of Pennington's, and who'd somehow rigged or doctored the will.

  "By the time Sylphid left New York to take up life in France, Eve Frame was a hopeless drunk. Had to sell the house. Died in a drunken stupor in a Manhattan hotel room in 1962, ten years after the book. Forgotten. Fifty-five years old. Two years later, Ira died. Fifty-one. But he lived to see her suffer. And don't think he didn't enjoy it. Don't think he didn't enjoy Sylphid's walking out. 'Where is the lovely daughter we all heard so much about? Where is the daughter to say, "Momma, I'll help you"? Gone!'

  "Eve's dying put Ira back in touch with the primary satisfactions, unchained the ditchdigger's pleasure principle. When all the rigging of respectability, when all the social construction that civilizes, is removed from someone who has thrived most of his life on impulse, you have a geyser, don't you? It just starts gushing. Your enemy destroyed—what could be better? Sure, it took a little longer than he hoped and, sure, this time he didn't get to do it himself, to feel the blood spurt up hot in his face, but still and all, I never saw Ira enjoy anything more than her death.

  "You know what he said when she died? The same thing he'd said the night he'd murdered the Italian guy and we organized his getaway. He told me, 'Strollo just took his last strollo.' First time he'd uttered that name to me in over thirty years. 'Strollo just took his last strollo,' and then he lets loose the cackling crazy-kid laugh. The just-let-'em-try-to-do-me-in laugh. That defiant laugh I still remembered from 1929."

  I helped Murray down the deck's three steps and guided him in the dark along the path to where my car was parked. We were silent as we swung along the curves of the mountain road and past Lake Madamaska and into Athena. When I looked over I saw that his head was back and his eyes were shut. First I thought he was asleep, and then I wondered if he was dead, if, after his having remembered the whole of Ira's story—after his having heard himself tell the whole of Ira's story—the will to go on had lost its grip even on this most enduring of men. And then I was recalling him again reading to our high school English class, sitting on the corner of his desk, but without the minatory blackboard eraser, reading scenes to us from Macbeth, doing all the voices, not afraid to be dramatic and perform, and myself being impressed by how manly literature seemed in his enactment of it. I remembered hearing Mr. Ringold read the scene at the end of act 4 of Macbeth when Macduff learns from Ross that Macbeth has slain Macduff's family, my first encounter with a spiritual state that is aesthetic and overrides everything else.

  As Ross he read, "Your castle is surpris'd; your wife and babes / Savagely slaughtered...." Then, after a long silence in which Macduff both comprehends and fails to comprehend, he read as Macduff—quietly, hollowly, almost in his reply like a child himself—"My children too?" "Wife, children, servants," says Mr. Ringold/ Ross, "all / That could be found." Mr. Ringold/Macduff is again speechless. So is the class: as a class, the class is by now missing from the room. Everything has vanished except whatever words of disbelief are coming next. Mr. Ringold/Macduff: "My wife kill'd too?" Mr. Ringold/Ross: "I have said." The large clock is ticking toward two-thirty up on the classroom wall. Outside, a 14 bus is grinding up the Chancellor Avenue hill. It is only minutes before the end of eighth period and the long school day. But all that matters—matters more than what happens after school or even in the future—is when Mr. Ringold/Macduff will grasp the incomprehensible. "He has no children," Mr. Ringold says. Whom is he speaking of? Who has no children? Some years later I was taught the standard interpretation, that it is Macbeth to whom Macduff is referring, that Macbeth is the "he" who has no children. But as read by Mr. Ringold, the "he" to whom Macduff is referring is, horribly, Macduff himself. "All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?...All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?" And now Malcolm speaks, Mr. Ringold/Malcolm, harshly, as though to shake Macduff: "Dispute it like a man." "I shall do so," says Mr. Ringold/Macduff.

  Then the simple line that would assert itself, in Murray Ringold's voice, a hundred times, a thousand times, during the remainder of my life: "But I must also feel it as a man." "Ten syllables," Mr. Ringold tells us the next day, "that's all. Ten syllables, five beats, pentameter ... nine words, the third iambic stress falling perfectly and naturally on the fifth and most important word ... eight monosyllables and the one word of two syllables a word as common and ordinary and serviceable as any there is in everyday English ... and yet, all together, and coming where it does, what power! Simple, simple—and like a hammer!

  "But I must also feel it as a man," and Mr. Ringold closes the big book of Shakespeare's plays, says to us, as he does at the end of each class, "Be seein' ya," and leaves the room.

  By the time we got into Athena, Murray's eyes were open and he was saying, "Here I am with an eminent ex-student and I never let the guy speak. Never asked him about himself."

  "Next time."

  "Why do you live up there, alone like that? Why don't you have the heart for the world?"

  "I prefer it this way," I said.

  "No, I watched you listening. I don't think you do. I don't think for a moment the exuberance is gone. You were like that as a kid. That's why I got such a kick out of you—you paid attention. You still do. But what is up here to pay attention to? You should get out from under whatever's the problem. To give in to the temptation to yield isn't smart. At a certain age, that can polish you off like any other disease. Do you really want to whittle it all away before your time has come? Beware the Utopia of isolation. Beware the Utopia of the shack in the woods, the oasis defense against rage and grief. An impregnable solitude. That's how life ended for Ira, and long before the day he dropped dead."

  I parked on one of the college streets and walked with him up the path to the dormitory. It was close to three A.M. and all the rooms were dark. Murray was probably the last of the elderly students to be leaving and the only one who'd be sleeping there that night. I wished I had invited him to stay with me. But I didn't have the heart for that either. To have anyone sleeping anywhere within sound or sight or smell of me would have broken a chain of conditioning that hasn't been that easy to forge.

  "I'm going to come down to Jersey and pay you a visit," I said.

  "You're going to have to come to Arizona. I don't live in Jersey anymore. Been in Arizona a long time now. I belong to a church book club that the Unitarians run; otherwise it's slim pickins. Not the ideal location if you have a mind, but I also have other problems. Staying tomorrow in New York and the next day I fly to Phoenix. You're going to have to come to Arizona if you want to see me. Only don't dawdle," he said with a smile. "The earth spins very fast, Nathan. Time is not on my side."

  As the years pass there is nothing I have less talent for than saying goodbye to somebody I feel
a strong attachment to. I don't always realize how strong the attachment is until the moment comes to say goodbye.

  "I somehow assumed you were still in Jersey." That was the least dangerous sentiment I could think to express.

  "No. I left Newark after Doris got killed. Doris was murdered, Nathan. Across the street from us, back of the hospital. I wouldn't leave the city, you see. I wasn't going to move out of the city where I had lived and taught all my life just because it was now a poor black city full of problems. Even after the riots, when Newark emptied out, we stayed on Lehigh Avenue, the only white family that did stay. Doris, bad spine and all, returned to work at the hospital. I was teaching at South Side. After I was reinstated I went back to Weequahic, where already, by then, teaching was no picnic, and after a couple of years they asked me if I'd take over the English department at South Side, where it was even worse. Nobody could teach these black kids, and so they asked me to. I spent the last ten years there, until I retired. Couldn't teach anybody anything. Barely able to hold down the mayhem, let alone teach. Discipline—that was the whole job. Discipline, patrolling the corridors, bickering until some kid took a swing at you, expulsions. Worst ten years of my life. Worse than when I was fired. I wouldn't say the disenchantment was devastating. I had a feel for the reality of the situation. But the experience was devastating. Brutal. We should have moved, we didn't, and that's the story.

  "But all my life, I was one of the firebrands in the Newark system, wasn't I? My old cronies told me I was nuts. They were all in the suburbs by then. But how could I run away? I was interested in respect being shown for these kids. If there's any chance for the improvement of life, where's it going to begin if not in the school? Besides, any time as a teacher I was ever asked to do something that I thought was interesting and worthwhile, I said, 'Yeah, I'd like to do that,' and I threw myself into it. We stayed on Lehigh Avenue and I went down to South Side and I told the teachers in the department, 'We've got to find ways to induce our students to commit themselves,' and so forth.

  "I got mugged twice. We should have moved after the first time and we should certainly have moved after that second time. The second time I was just around the corner from the house, four in the afternoon, when three kids surrounded me and pulled a gun. But we didn't move. And one evening, Doris is leaving the hospital, and to get to our house, all she had to do, you remember, was cross the street. Well, she never made it. Somebody hit her over the head. Just about half a mile up from where Ira killed Strollo, somebody cracked her skull open with a brick. For a handbag with nothing in it. You know what I realized? I realized I'd been had. It's not an idea I like, but I've lived with it inside me ever since.

  "Had by myself, in case you're wondering. Myself with all my principles. I can't betray my brother, I can't betray my teaching, I can't betray the disadvantaged of Newark. 'Not me—I'm not leaving this place. I'm not fleeing. My colleagues can do as they see fit—I'm not leaving these black kids.' And so who I betray is my wife. I put the responsibility for my choices onto somebody else. Doris paid the price for my civic virtue. She is the victim of my refusal to—Look, there is no way out of this thing. When you loosen yourself, as I tried to, from all the obvious delusions—religion, ideology, Communism—you're still left with the myth of your own goodness. Which is the final delusion. And the one to which I sacrificed Doris.

  "That's enough. Every action produces loss," he said. "It's the entropy of the system."

  "What system?" I said.

  "The moral system."

  Why hadn't he told me about Doris earlier? Was the reticence a kind of heroism or a kind of suffering? This too happened to him. What else is there? We could have sat on my deck for six hundred nights before I heard the entire story of how Murray Ringold, who'd chosen to be nothing more extraordinary than a high school teacher, had failed to elude the turmoil of his time and place and ended up no less a historical casualty than his brother. This was the existence that America had worked out for him—and that he'd worked out for himself by thinking, by taking his revenge on his father by cri-ti-cal think-ing, by being reasonable in the face of no reason. This was what thinking in America had got him. This was what adhering to his convictions had got him, resisting the tyranny of compromise. If there's any chance for the improvement of life, where's it going to begin if not in the school? Hopelessly entangled in the best of intentions, tangibly, over a lifetime, committed to a constructive course that is now an illusion, to formulations and solutions that will no longer wash.

  You control betrayal on one side and you wind up betraying somewhere else. Because it's not a static system. Because it's alive. Because everything that lives is in movement. Because purity is petrifaction. Because purity is a lie. Because unless you're an ascetic paragon like Johnny O'Day and Jesus Christ, you're urged on by five hundred things. Because without the iron pole of righteousness with which the Grants clubbed their way to success, without the big lie of righteousness to tell you why you do what you do, you have to ask yourself, all along the way, "Why do I do what I do?" And you have to endure yourself without knowing.

  Here, simultaneously, we succumbed to the urge to embrace the other. Holding Murray in my arms I sensed—more than merely sensed—the extent of his decrepitude. It was hard to understand where he had found the strength, for six nights, to revisit so intensely the worst events of his life.

  I didn't say anything, thinking that, whatever I said, I would drive home wishing I had been silent. As though I were still his innocent student eager to do good, I was dying to say to him, "You weren't had, Murray. That isn't the proper judgment to be made of your life. You must know that it isn't." But, as I am myself an aging man who knows what unexalted conclusions can be reached when one examines one's history probingly, I didn't.

  Having let me hold on to him for close to a minute, Murray suddenly slapped my back. He was laughing at me. "The emotional demands," he said, "of leaving a ninety-year-old."

  "Yes. That. And everything else. What happened to Doris. Lorraine's death," I said. "Ira. Everything that happened to Ira."

  "Ira and the shovel. All that he imposed on himself," Murray said, "exacted from himself, demanded from himself because of that shovel. The bad ideas and the naive dreams. All his romances. His passion was to be someone he didn't know how to be. He never discovered his life, Nathan. He looked for it everywhere—in the zinc mine, in the record factory, in the fudge factory, in the labor union, in radical politics, in radio acting, in rabble-rousing, in proletarian living, in bourgeois living, in marriage, in adultery, in savagery, in civilized society. He couldn't find it anywhere. Eve didn't marry a Communist; she married a man perpetually hungering after his life. That's what enraged him and confused him and that's what ruined him: he could never construct one that fit. The enormous wrongness of this guy's effort. But one's errors always rise to the surface, don't they?"

  "It's all error," I said. "Isn't that what you've been telling me? There's only error. There's the heart of the world. Nobody finds his life. That is life."

  "Listen. I don't want to overstep the boundary. I'm not telling you I'm for or against it. I'm asking that when you come down to Phoenix, you'll tell me what it is."

  "What what is?"

  "Your aloneness," he said. "I remember the beginning, this very intense boy so much looking forward to participating in life. Now he's in his middle sixties, a man by himself in the woods. I'm surprised to see you out of the world like this. It's pretty damn monastic, the way you live. All that's missing from your monkhood are the bells to call you to meditation. Sorry, but I do have to tell you: you're still a young man by my count, much too young to be up there. What are you warding off? What the hell happened?"

  Now I laughed at him, a laugh that allowed me to feel substantial again, charged up with my independence of everything, a recluse to be conjured with. "I listened carefully to your story, that's what happened. Goodbye, Mr. Ringold!"

  "Be seein' ya."

  On the deck,
the citronella candle was still burning in its aluminum bucket when I got back, that little pot of fire the only light by which my house was discernible, except for a dim radiance off the orange moon silhouetting the low roof. As I left the car and started toward the house, the elongated wavering of the flame reminded me of the radio dial—no bigger than a watch face and, beneath the tiny black numerals, the color of a ripening banana skin—that was all that could be seen in our dark bedroom when my kid brother and I, contrary to parental directive, stayed up past ten to listen to a favorite program. The two of us in our twin beds and, magisterial on the night table between us, the Philco Ir., the cathedral-shaped table radio we'd inherited when my father bought the Emerson console for the living room. The radio turned as low as it could go, though still with volume enough to act on our ears as the most powerful magnet.

  I blew out the candle's scented flame and stretched myself across the chaise on the deck and realized that listening in the black of a summer's night to a barely visible Murray had been something like listening to the bedroom radio when I was a kid ambitious to change the world by having all my untested convictions, masquerading as stories, broadcast nationwide. Murray, the radio: voices from the void controlling everything within, the convolutions of a story floating on air and into the ear so that the drama is perceived well behind the eyes, the cup that is the cranium a cup transformed into a limitless globe of a stage, containing fellow creatures whole. How deep our hearing goes! Think of all it means to understand from something that you simply hear. The godlikeness of having an ear! Is it not at least a semidivine phenomenon to be hurled into the innermost wrongness of a human existence by virtue of nothing more than sitting in the dark, listening to what is said?