I Married a Communist (12 page)

As my teacher some fifty years earlier, Murray Ringold used to play things up, make a show out of the lesson, dozens of tricks to get us to stay alert. Teaching was a passionate occupation for him, and he was an exciting guy. But now, though by no means an old man who'd run out of juice, he no longer found it necessary to tear himself apart to make clear his meaning, but had brought himself close to being totally dispassionate. His tone was more or less unvaried, mild—no attempt to lead you (or mislead you) by being overtly expressive with his voice or his face or his hands, not even when singing "Heave-ho. Heave-ho."

His skull looked so fragile and small now. Yet within it were cradled ninety years of the past. There was a great deal in there. All the dead were there, for one thing, their deeds and their misdeeds converging with all the unanswerable questions, those things about which you can never be sure ... to produce for him an exacting task: to reckon fairly, to tell this story without too much error.

Time, we know, goes very fast near the end, but Murray had been near the end so long that, when he spoke as he did, patiently, to the point, with a certain blandness—only intermittently pausing to wholeheartedly sip that martini—I had the feeling that time had dissolved for him, that it ran neither quickly nor slowly, that he was no longer living in time but exclusively within his own skin. As though that active, effortful, outgoing life as a conscientious teacher and citizen and family man had been a long battle to reach a state of ardorlessness. Aging into decrepitude was not unendurable and neither was the unfathomability of oblivion; neither was everything's coming down to nothing. It had
all
been endurable, even despising, without remission, the despicable.

In Murray Ringold, I thought, human dissatisfaction has met its match. He has outlived dissatisfaction. This is what remains after the passing of everything, the disciplined sadness of stoicism. This is the cooling. For so long it's so hot, everything in life is so intense, and then little by little it goes away, and then comes the cooling, and then come the ashes. The man who first taught me how you box with a book is back now to demonstrate how you box with old age.

And an amazing, noble skill it is, for nothing teaches you less about old age than having lived a robust life.

"T
HE REASON
Ira came to see me," Murray continued, "and to stay overnight with us the day before you two met was because of what he'd heard that morning."

"She'd told him about wanting the abortion."

"No, she'd already told him that the night before, told him that she was going to Camden for an abortion. There was a doctor in Camden whom a lot of rich people went to back when abortion was a dodgy business. Her decision didn't come as a total surprise. For weeks she'd been back and forth, uncertain what to do. She was forty-one years old—she was older than Ira. Her face didn't show it, but Eve Frame wasn't a kid. She was concerned to be having a baby at her age. Ira understood that, but he couldn't accept it and refused to believe that her being forty-one was something to stand in their way. He wasn't that cautious, you know. He had that all-out steamrolling side, and so he tried and tried to convince her that they had nothing to worry about.

"He thought he
had
convinced her. But a new issue emerged—work. It had been hard enough to tend a career and a child the first time around, with Sylphid, the daughter. Eve was only eighteen when Sylphid was born—she was a starlet then out in Hollywood. She was married to that actor, Pennington. Big name when I was young. Carlton Pennington, the silent-film hero with a profile molded precisely to classical specifications. Tall, slender, graceful man with hair as dark and sleek as a raven and a dark mustache. Elegant to the marrow of his bones. Member in good standing of both the social aristocracy and the aristocracy of eros—his acting capitalizes on the interplay of both. A fairy-tale prince—and a carnal powerhouse—in one, guaranteed to drive you to ecstasy in a silver-plated Pierce-Arrow.

"Studio arranged the wedding. She and Pennington had made such a hit together, and she was so enamored of him, that the studio decided they ought to get married. And once they were married, that they ought to have a child. All this was to squelch the rumors that Pennington was gay. Which, of course, he was.

"In order to marry Pennington there was a first husband to be gotten rid of. Pennington was the second husband. The first was a fellow named Mueller, whom she'd run away with when she was sixteen. An uneducated roughneck just back from five years in the navy, a big, burly German-American boy who'd grown up the son of a bartender in Kearny, near Newark. Crude background. Crude guy. A sort of Ira without the idealism. She met him at a neighborhood theater group. He wanted to be an actor and she wanted to be an actress. He was living in a boarding house and she was in high school and still living at home, and they ran off together to Hollywood. That's how Eve wound up in California, eloped as a kid with the bartender's boy. Within the year she was a star, and, so as to get rid of Mueller, who was nothing, her studio paid him off. Mueller did appear in a few silent films—as part of the payoff—and he even had a couple of roles as a tough in the first talkies, but his connection to Eve was all but erased from the record books. Until much later on, that is. We'll get back to Mueller. The point is that she marries Pennington, a coup for everyone: there's the studio wedding, there's the little baby, and then the twelve years with Pennington living the life of a nun.

"She used to take Sylphid to see Pennington in Europe even after she married Ira. Pennington's dead now, but he lived on the French Riviera after the war. He had a villa up in the hills back of St. Tropez. Drunk every night, on the prowl, a bitter ex-somebody ranting and raving about the Jews who run Hollywood who ruined his career. She'd take Sylphid over to France to see Pennington, and they'd all go out for dinner in St. Tropez and he'd drink a couple bottles of wine and be staring all through dinner at some waiter, and then he'd send Sylphid and Eve back to their hotel. The next morning they'd go to Pennington's for breakfast and the waiter would be at the table in a bathrobe and they'd all have fresh figs together. Eve would return to Ira in tears, saying the man was fat and drunk and there was always some eighteen-year-old sleeping there, a waiter, or a beach bum, or a street cleaner, and she could never go to France again. But back she went-—for good or bad, she took Sylphid to St. Tropez two or three times a year to see her father. It couldn't have been easy on the kid.

"After Pennington, Eve marries a real estate speculator, this guy Freedman, who she claimed spent everything she had and all but got her to sign over the house. So when Ira shows up on the radio scene in New York, naturally she falls for him. The noble rail-splitter, outgoing, unpolluted, a great big walking conscience yapping away about justice and equality for all. Ira and his ideals had attracted all sorts, from Donna Jones to Eve Frame, and everything problematic in between. Women in distress were crazy about him. The vitality. The energy. The Samson-like revolutionary giant. The luggish sort of chivalry he had. And Ira smelled good. Do you remember that? A natural smell of his. Lorraine used to say, 'Uncle Ira smells like maple syrup.' He did. He smelled like sap.

"In the beginning, the fact that Eve would deliver up her daughter to Pennington used to drive Ira nuts. I think he felt that it wasn't only to give Sylphid a chance to see Pennington—that there was still something about Pennington that Eve found attractive. And maybe she did. Maybe it was Pennington's queerness. Maybe it was that wellborn background. Pennington was old California money. That's the money he lived on in France. Some of the jewelry that Sylphid wore was Spanish jewelry collected by her father's family. Ira would say to me, 'His daughter is in the house with him, in one room, and he's in another room with a sailor. She should
protect
her daughter from this stuff. She shouldn't drag her over to France to have her witness stuff like that. Why doesn't she protect her daughter?'

"I know my brother—I know what he wants to say. He wants to say, I forbid you to go ever again. I told him, 'You're not the girl's father. You can't forbid her kid to do anything.' I said, 'If you want to leave the marriage because of this, leave it because of this. Otherwise, stay and live with it.'

"It was the first shot I'd had at even hinting at what I'd been wanting to say all along. Having a fling with her was one thing. A movie star—why not? But marriage? Glaringly wrong in every way. This woman has no contact with politics and especially not with Communism. Knows her way around the complicated plots of the Victorian novelists, can rattle off the names of the people in Trollope, but completely unknowing about society and the workaday doings of anything. The woman is dressed by Dior. Fabulous clothes. Owns a thousand little hats with little veils. Shoes and handbags made out of reptiles. Spends lots of money on clothes. While Ira is a guy who spends four ninety-nine for a pair of shoes. He finds one of her bills for an eight-hundred-dollar dress. Doesn't even know what this means. He goes to her closet and looks at the dress and tries to figure out how it can cost so much. As a Communist, he should be irritated by her from the first second. So what explains this marriage with her and not with a comrade? In the party, couldn't he have found somebody who supported him, who was together with him in the fight?

"Doris always excused him and made allowances for him, came to Ira's defense every time I started in. 'Yes,' Doris said, 'here is a Communist, a big revolutionary, a party member with his kind of zeal, and he suddenly falls in love with an unthinking actress in this year's ladylike waspy-waist jackets and long skirts, who is famous and beautiful, who is steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions, and it contradicts his entire moral standard—but this is love.' 'Is it?' I would ask her. 'Looks like credulity and confusion to me. Ira has no intuition about emotional questions. The lack of emotional intuition goes along with his being the kind of flat-footed radical he is. Those people are not very psychologically attuned.' But Doris's rebuttal is to justify him by nothing less than the annihilating power of love. 'Love,' says Doris, 'love is not something that is logical. Vanity is not something that is logical.
Ira
is not something that is logical. Each of us in this world has his own vanity, and therefore his own tailor-made blindness. Eve Frame is Ira's.'

"Even at his funeral, where there weren't twenty people, Doris stood up and made a speech on this very subject, a woman who dreaded speaking in public. She said he was a Communist with a weakness for life; he was an impassioned Communist who was not, however, made to live in the closed enclave of the party, and that was what subverted and destroyed him. He was not perfect from the Communist point of view—thank God. The personal he could not renounce. The personal kept bursting out of Ira, militant and single-minded though he would try to be. It's one thing to have your party allegiance and it's also one thing to be who you are and not able to restrain yourself. There was no side of himself that he could suppress. Ira lived everything personally, Doris said, to the hilt, including his contradictions.

"Well, maybe yes, maybe no. The contradictions were indisputable. The personal openness and the Communist secrecy. The home life and the party. The need for a child, the desire for a family—should a party member with his aspirations care about having a child like that? Even to one's contradictions one might impose a limit. A guy from the streets marries an
artiste?
A guy in his thirties marries a woman in her forties with a big adult baby who is still living at home? The incompatibilities were endless. But then, that was the challenge. With Ira, the more that's wrong, the more to correct.

"I told him, 'Ira, the situation with Pennington is uncorrectable. The only way to correct it is by not being there.' I told him more or less what O'Day had been telling him back with Donna. 'This is not politics—this is private life. You can't bring to private life the ideology that you bring to the great world. You cannot change her. What you've got, you've got; if it is insufferable, then leave. This is a woman who married a homosexual, lived twelve years untouched by a homosexual husband, and who continues her involvement with him even though he behaves in front of their daughter in a way that she considers detrimental to her daughter's well-being. She must consider it even more detrimental for Sylphid not to see her father at all. She's caught in a dilemma, probably there
is
no right thing for her to do—so let it be, don't bother her about it, let it go.'

"Then I asked, 'Tell me, are other things insufferable? Other things you want to go in and change? Because if there are, forget it. You cannot change
anything.
'

"But change was what Ira lived for.
Why
he lived. Why he lived
strenuously.
It is the essence of the man that he treats everything as a challenge to his will. He must always make the effort. He must change everything. For him that was the purpose of being in the world. Everything he wanted to change was here.

"But as soon as you want passionately what is beyond your control, you are primed to be thwarted—-you are preparing to be brought to your knees.

'"Tell me,' I said to Ira, 'if you were to put all the insufferable things in a column and draw a line under them and add them up, do they add up to "Totally Insufferable"? Because if they do, then even if you only got there the day before yesterday, even if this marriage is still brand-new, you must go. Because your tendency, when you make a mistake, is not to go. Your tendency is to correct things in that vehement way that the people in this family like to correct things. That's a worry to me right now.'

"He had already told me about Eve's third marriage, the marriage after Pennington, to Freedman, and so I said to him, 'Sounds like one disaster after another. And you are going to do what, exactly—undo the disasters? The Great Emancipator off the stage as well as on? Is that why you seek her out in the first place? You're going to show her that you're a bigger and better man than the great Hollywood star? You're going to show her that a lew isn't a rapacious capitalist like Freedman but a justice-making machine like you?'