I Married a Communist (11 page)

"O'Day gave Ira what he called 'a refresher course in matrimony as it pertains to the world revolution,' based on his own encounter with marriage before the war. 'Is this what you came out with me to the Calumet for? To prepare to run a candy factory or to run a revolution? This is no time for ridiculous aberrations! This is it, boy! This is life or death for working conditions as we've known them for the past ten years! All the factions and groups are coming together right here in Lake County.
You
see that. If we can hold this pitch, if nobody jumps ship, then damn it, Iron Man, in a year, two at most, the mills will be ours!'

"So, some eight months on, Ira told Donna it was all off, and she swallowed some pills and tried to kill herself a little. About a month later—Donna's by then back at the Kit Kat and got herself a new guy—her long-lost drunken father turns up with one of Donna's brothers at Ira's door saying he's going to teach Ira a lesson for what he did to his daughter. Ira's in the doorway fighting the two of them off, and the father pulls a knife and O'Day takes one swing and breaks the bastard's jaw and grabs the knife ... That was the
first
family Ira was going to marry into.

"From such a farce it's not always a short way back, but by '48 the putative savior of little Donna has become Iron Rinn of
The Free and the Brave
and is up and ready for his next big mistake. You should have heard him when he learned Eve was pregnant. A child. A family of his own. And not with an ex-stripper whom his brother had disapproved of but with a renowned actress whom American radioland adored. It was the greatest thing ever to come his way. That solid foothold he'd never had before. He could hardly believe it. Two years—and this! The man wasn't impermanent anymore."

"She was pregnant? When was that?"

"After they were married. It didn't last but ten weeks. That's why he'd stayed with me and how you two met. She'd decided to abort."

We were sitting out back, on the deck, looking toward the pond and, in the distance, to the mountain range in the west. I live here by myself and the house is small, a room where I write and eat my meals—a workroom with a bathroom and a kitchen alcove off at one end, a stone fireplace at right angles to a wall of books, and a row of five twelve-over-twelve sash windows looking onto the broad hay field and a protective squadron of old maples that separates me from the dirt road. The other room is where I sleep, a nice-sized rustic-looking room with a single bed, a dresser, a wood-burning stove, exposed old beams upright in the four corners, more bookshelves, an easy chair where I do my reading, a small writing desk, and, in the west wall, a sliding glass door that opens onto the deck where Murray and I were each drinking a martini before dinner. I'd bought the house, winterized it—it had been somebody's summer cottage—and come here when I was sixty to live alone, by and large apart from people. That was four years ago. Though it isn't always desirable living as austerely as this, without the varied activities that ordinarily go to make up a human existence, I believe I made the least harmful choice. But my seclusion is not the story here. It is not a story in any way. I came here because I don't want a story any longer. I've had my story.

I wondered if Murray had as yet recognized my house as an upgraded replica of the two-room shack on the lersey side of the Delaware Water Gap that was Ira's beloved retreat and the spot where I happened to have got my first taste of rural America when I went up, in the summers of '49 and '50, to spend a week with him. I'd loved my first time living alone with Ira in that shack, and I thought of his place immediately when I was shown this house. Though I had been looking for something larger and more conventionally a house, I bought it right off. The rooms were about the same size as Ira's and similarly situated. The long oval pond was about the same dimensions as his and about the same distance from the back door. And though my place was much brighter—over time, his stained pine-board walls had gone almost black, the beamed ceilings were low (ridiculously low for him), and the windows were small and not that plentiful—mine was tucked away on a dirt road as his was, and, if from the outside it didn't have that dark, drooping ramshackle look that proclaimed, "Hermit here—back off," the owner's state of mind was discernible in the absence of anything like a path across the hay field that led to the bolted front door. There was a narrow dirt drive that swung up and around to the workroom side of the house, to an open shed where, in the winter, I parked my car; a tumbledown wooden structure that predated the cottage, the shed could have been lifted right off Ira's overgrown eight acres.

How did the idea of Ira's shack maintain its hold so long? Well, it's the earliest images—of independence and freedom, particularly—that do live obstinately on, despite the blessing and the bludgeoning of life's fullness. And the idea of the shack, after all, isn't Ira's. It has a history. It was Rousseau's. It was Thoreau's. The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you've worn and the costumes you've gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods—Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The "forest dweller," the last stage on life's way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, the old Chinese man all alone under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.

The martinis were Murray's idea. A good though not a great idea, since a drink at the end of a summer's day with somebody I enjoyed, talk with a person like Murray, made me remember the pleasures of companionship. I'd enjoyed a lot of people, had not been an indifferent participant in life, had not backed away from it...

But the story is Ira's. Why it was impossible for
him.

"He'd wanted a boy," Murray said. "Was dying to name it after his friend. Johnny O'Day Ringold. Doris and I had Lorraine, our daughter, and whenever he stayed over on the couch, Lorraine could always lift his spirits. Lorraine used to like to watch Ira sleep. Liked standing in the doorway watching Lemuel Gulliver sleep. He got attached to that little girl with those black bangs of hers. And she to him. When he came to the house, she'd get him to play with her Russian nested dolls. He'd given them to her for a birthday. You know, a traditional Russian woman in a babushka, the one replica nestles inside the other, till you get down to the nut-sized doll at the core. They'd make up stories about each of the dolls and how hard these little people worked in Russia. Then he'd nestle the whole thing in one of those hands of his so that you couldn't even see it. lust disappear whole inside those spatulate fingers—such long, peculiar fingers, the fingers Paganini must have had. Lorraine loved it when he did that: the biggest nesting doll of them all was this enormous uncle.

"For Lorraine's next birthday he bought her the album of the Soviet Army Chorus and Band performing Russian songs. More than a hundred men in that chorus, another hundred in the band. The basses' portentous rumblings—terrific sound. She and Ira would have a great time with those records. The singing was in Russian, and they'd listen together, and Ira would pretend to be the bass soloist, mouthing the incomprehensible words and making dramatic 'Russian' gestures, and, when the refrain came, Lorraine would mouth the incomprehensible words of the chorus. My kid knew how to be a comedian.

"There was one song she especially loved. It was beautiful too, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong called 'Dubinushka,' a simple song sung with a balalaika in the background. The words to 'Dubinushka' were printed in English on the inside of the album cover, and she learned them by heart and went around the house singing them for months.

Many songs have I heard in my native land—

Songs of joy and sorrow.

But one of them was deeply engraved in my memory:

It's the song of the common worker.

That was the solo part. But what she liked best to sing was the choral refrain. Because it had 'heave-ho' in it.

Ekh, lift up the cudgel,
Heave-ho!
Pull harder together,
Heave-ho!

When Lorraine was by herself in her room, she'd line up all the hollow dolls and put on the 'Dubinushka' record, and she'd sing tragically 'Heave-ho! Heave-ho!' while pushing the dolls this way and that way all over the floor."

"Stop a minute. Murray, wait," I said, and I got up and went from the deck into the house, into my bedroom, where I had my CD player and my old phonograph. Most of my records were boxed and stored in a closet, but I knew in which box to find what I was looking for. I took out the album Ira had given to
me
back in 1948, and removed the record on which "Dubinushka" was performed by the Soviet Army Chorus and Band. I pushed the rpm switch to 78, dusted the record, and put it on the turntable. I placed the needle into the margin just before the record's last band, turned the volume up loud enough so that Murray could hear the music through the open doors separating my bedroom from the deck, and went out to rejoin him.

In the dark we listened, though now neither I to him nor he to me but both of us to "Dubinushka." It was just as Murray had described it: beautiful, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong. Except for the crackle off the worn surface of the old record—a cyclical sound not unlike some familiar, natural night noise of the summer countryside—the song seemed to be traveling to us from a remote historical past. It wasn't at all like lying on my deck listening on the radio to the Saturday night concerts live from Tanglewood. "Heave-ho! Heave-ho!" was out of a distant place and time, a spectral residue of those rapturous revolutionary days when everyone craving for change programmatically, naively—madly, unforgivably—underestimates how mankind mangles its noblest ideas and turns them into tragic farce. Heave-ho! Heave-ho! As though human wiliness, weakness, stupidity, and corruption didn't stand a chance against the collective, against the might of the people pulling together to renew their lives and abolish injustice. Heave-ho.

When "Dubinushka" was over, Murray was silent and I began to hear once again everything I had filtered out while listening to him talk: the snores, twangs, and trills of the frogs, the rails in Blue Swamp, the reedy marsh just east of my house,
kuck-
ing and
kek-
ing and
ki-tic-ing
away, and the wrens there chattering their accompaniment. And the loons, the crying and the laughing of the manic-depressive loons. Every few minutes there was the whinny of a distant screech owl, and, continuously throughout, the western New England string ensemble of crickets sawed away at cricket Bartok. A raccoon twittered in the nearby woods, and, as time wore on, I even thought I was hearing the beavers gnawing on a tree back where the woodland tributaries feed my pond. Some deer, fooled by the silence, must have prowled too close to the house, for all at once—the deer having sensed our presence—their Morse code of flight is swiftly sounded: the snorting, the in-place thud, the stamping, hooves pounding, the bounding away. Their bodies barge gracefully into the thicket of scrub, and then, subaudibly, they race for their lives. Only Murray's murmurous breathing is heard, the eloquence of an old man evenly expirating.

Close to half an hour must have passed before he spoke. The arm of the phonograph hadn't returned to the starting position, and now I could hear the needle, too, whirring atop the label. I didn't go in to fix it and interrupt whatever it was that had quieted my storyteller and created the intensity of his silence. I wondered how long it would be before he said something, if perhaps he wouldn't speak at all but just get up and ask to be driven back to the dormitory—if whatever thoughts had been set loose in him would require a full night's sleep to subdue.

But, softly laughing, Murray said at last, "That hit me."

"Did it? Why?"

"I miss my girl."

"Where is she?"

"Lorraine is dead."

"When did that happen?"

"Lorraine died twenty-six years ago. Nineteen seventy-one. Died at thirty, leaving two kids and a husband. Meningitis, and overnight she was dead."

"And Doris is dead."

"Doris? Sure."

I went into the bedroom to lift the needle and return it to its rest. "Want to hear more?" I called to Murray.

He laughed heartily this time and said, "Trying to see how much I can take? Your idea of my strength, Nathan, is just a little too grand. I've met my match in 'Dubinushka.'"

"I doubt that," I said, going back outside and sitting in my chair. "You were telling me—?"

"I was telling you ... I was telling you ... Yes. That when Ira got booted off the air, Lorraine was desolate. She was only nine or ten, but she was up in arms. After Ira got fired for being a Communist, she wouldn't salute the flag."

"The American flag? Where?"

"At school," Murray said. "Where else do you salute the flag? The teacher tried to protect her, took her to one side and said you have to salute the flag. But this child wouldn't do it. A lot of anger. The real Ringold anger. She loved her uncle. She took after him."

"What happened?"

"I had a long talk with her and she got back to saluting the flag."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her I loved my brother, too. I didn't think it was right either. I told her I thought as she did, that it was dead wrong to fire a person for his political beliefs. I believed in freedom of thought.
Absolute
freedom of thought. But I told her you don't go looking for that kind of fight. It's not an important issue. What are you achieving? What are you winning? I told her, Don't pick a fight you know you can't win, one that isn't even worth winning. I told her what I used to try to tell my brother about the problem of impassioned speech—tried from the time he was a little kid, for all the good it did him. It's not being angry that's important, it's being angry about the right things. I told her, Look at it from the Darwinian perspective. Anger is to make you effective. That's its survival function. That's why it's given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato."