I Married a Communist (15 page)

I couldn't have said which of them was more frightening. Why didn't Ira do what Goldstine wanted—why didn't the
two
of us get up and go? Who was crazier, the mattress manufacturer with the loaded pistol or the giant daring him to fire it? What was happening here? We were in a sunny kitchen in Maplewood, New Jersey, drinking Royal Crown from the bottle. We were all three of us Jews. Ira had come by to say hello to an old army buddy. What was
wrong
with these guys?

It was when I began to tremble that Ira ceased to look deformed by whatever antirational thought he was thinking. Across the table from him he saw my teeth chattering all on their own, my hands uncontrollably shaking all on their own, and he came to his senses and slowly rose from his chair. He raised his arms over his head the way they do when the bank robbers in the movies shout "It's a stickup!"

"All over, Nathan. Quarrel called on account of darkness." But despite the easygoing way he managed to say that, despite the surrender that was implicit in his mockingly raised arms, as we left the house through the kitchen door and made our way down the driveway to Murray's car, Goldstine continued after us, his pistol only inches from Ira's skull.

In a sort of trance state Ira drove us through the quiet Maplewood streets, past all the pleasant one-family houses where there lived the ex-Newark Jews who'd lately acquired their first homes and their first lawns and their first country club affiliations. Not the sort of people or the sort of neighborhood where you would expect to find a pistol in with the dinnerware.

Only when we crossed the Irvington line and were heading into Newark did Ira come around and ask, "You okay?"

I was miserable, though less frightened now than humiliated and ashamed. Clearing my throat so as to be sure to speak in an unbroken voice, I said, "I pissed in my pants."

"Did you?"

"I thought he was going to kill you."

"You were brave. You were very brave. You were fine."

"Walking down the driveway, I pissed in my pants!" I said angrily. "Goddamit! Shit!"

"It's
my
fault. The whole thing. Exposing you to that putz. Pulling a gun! A
gun!
"

"Why did he
do
that?"

"Butts didn't drown," Ira suddenly said. "
Nobody
drowned. Nobody was
going
to drown."

"Did you throw him in?"

"Sure. Sure I threw him in. This was the hillbilly who called me a kike. I told you that story."

"I remember." But what he'd told me was only a part of that story. "That's the night they waylaid you. They beat you up."

"Yeah. They beat me, all right. After they fished the son of a bitch out."

He let me off at my house, where no one was at home and I was able to drop my damp clothing into the hamper and take a shower and calm down. I had the shakes again in the shower, not so much because I was remembering sitting at the kitchen table with Goldstine pointing his pistol at Ira's forehead or remembering Ira's eyes looking like they wanted to fly out of his head, but because I was thinking, A loaded pistol in with the forks and the knives? In Maplewood, New Jersey? Why? Because of Garwych, that's why! Because of Solak! Because of Becker!

All the questions I hadn't dared to ask him in the car, I started asking aloud alone in the shower. "What did you do to them, Ira?"

My father, unlike my mother, didn't see Ira as a means of social advancement for me and was always perplexed and bothered by his calling me: what is this grown man's interest in this kid? He thought something complicated, if not downright sinister, was going on. "Where do you go with him?" my father asked me.

His suspiciousness erupted vehemently one night when he found me at my desk reading a copy of the
Daily Worker.
"I don't want the Hearst papers in my house," my father told me, "and I don't want
that
paper in my house. One is the mirror image of the other. If this man is giving you the
Daily Worker
—" "What 'man'?" "Your actor friend.
Rinn,
as he calls himself." "He doesn't give me the
Daily Worker.
I bought it downtown. I bought it myself. Is there a law against that?" "Who told you to buy it? Did he tell you go out and buy it?" "He doesn't tell me to do anything." "I hope that's true." "I don't lie! It is!"

It was. I'd remembered Ira saying that there was a column in the
Worker
by Howard Fast, but it was on my own that I had bought the paper, across from Proctor's movie theater at a Market Street newsstand, ostensibly to read Howard Fast but also out of simple, dogged curiosity. "Are you going to confiscate it?" I asked my father. "No—you're out of luck. I'm not going to make you a martyr to the First Amendment. I only hope that after you've read it and studied and thought about it, you have the good sense to know that it's a sheet of lies and to confiscate it yourself."

Toward the end of the school year, when Ira invited me to spend a week up at the shack with him that summer, my father said I wasn't going unless Ira had a talk with him first.

"Why?" I demanded to know.

"I want to ask him some questions."

"What are you, the House Un-American Activities Committee? Why are you making such a big thing out of this?"

"Because in my eyes
you
are a big thing. What's his telephone number in New York?"

"You
can't
ask him questions. About what?"

"You have your right as an American to buy and read the
Daily Worker
? I have a right as an American to ask anybody anything I want. If he doesn't want to answer me, that's
his
right."

"And if he doesn't want to answer, what's he supposed to do, take the Fifth Amendment?"

"No. He can tell me to go jump in the lake. I just explained it to you: that's how we do it in the USA. I don't say that's going to work for you in the Soviet Union with the secret police, but here that's all it ordinarily takes for a fellow citizen to leave you alone about your political ideas."

"Do they leave you alone?" I asked bitterly. "Does Congressman Dies leave you alone? Does Congressman Rankin leave you alone? Maybe you better explain it to
them.
"

I had to sit there—he told me I had to—and listen to him while he asked Ira, on the phone, to come over to his office for a talk. Iron Rinn and Eve Frame were the biggest things ever to enter the Zuckerman household from the outside world, yet it was clear from my father's tone that this didn't throw him at all.

"He said
yes?
" I asked when my father hung up.

"He said he'd be there if Nathan would be there. You're going to be there."

"Oh, no I'm not."

"Yep," my father said, "you are. You are if you want me even to begin to consider your going up there to visit. What are you afraid of, an open discussion of ideas? It's going to be democracy in action, next Wednesday, after school, at three-thirty in my office. You be on time, son."

What was I afraid of? My father's anger. Ira's temper. What if because of how my father attacked him Ira picked him up bodily the way he picked up Butts and carried him down to the lake at Weequahic Park and threw him in? If a fight broke out, if Ira threw a lethal punch...

My father's chiropody office was on the ground floor of a three-family house at the bottom of Hawthorne Avenue, a modest dwelling in need of a face-lift near the rundown edge of our otherwise plainly pedestrian neighborhood. I was there early, feeling sick to my stomach. Ira, looking serious and not at all enraged (as yet), arrived promptly at three-thirty. My father asked him to be seated.

"Mr. Ringold, my son Nathan is not a run-of-the-mill boy. He is an older son who is an excellent student and who, I believe, is advanced and mature beyond his years. We are very proud of him. I want to give him all the latitude I can. I try not to stand in his way in life, as some fathers do. But because I honestly happen to think that for him the sky is the limit, I don't want anything to happen to him. If anything should happen to this boy ..."

My father's voice grew husky and he abruptly stopped talking. I was terrified that Ira was going to laugh at him, to mock him the way he'd mocked Goldstine. I knew that my father was choked up not merely because of me and my promise but because his two youngest brothers, the first members of that large, poor family of his who were targeted to go to a real college and become real doctors, had both died of illnesses in their late teens. Studio portrait photos of them rested next to each other in twin frames on our dining room sideboard. I should have explained to Ira about Sam and Sidney, I thought.

"I have to ask you a question, Mr. Ringold, that I don't want to ask you. I don't consider another person's beliefs—religious, political, or otherwise—my business. I respect your privacy. I can assure you that whatever you say here will not go beyond this room. But I want to know whether you are a Communist, and I want my son to know whether you are a Communist. I'm not asking if you ever have been a Communist. I don't care about the past. I care about right now. I have to tell you that back before Roosevelt I was so disgusted with the way things were going in this country, and with the anti-Semitism and anti-Negro prejudice in this country, and with how the Republicans scorned the unfortunate in this country, and with how the greed of big business was milking the people of this country to death, that one day, right here in Newark—and this will come as a shock to my son, who thinks his father, a lifelong Democrat, is to the right of Franco—but one day ... Well, Nathan," he said, looking now at me, "they had their headquarters—you know where the Robert Treat Hotel is? Right down the street. Upstairs. Thirty-eight Park Lane. They had offices up there. One was the office of the Communist Party. I never even told this to your mother. She would have killed me. She was my girlfriend then—this must be 1930. Well, one time, one day, I was angry. Something had happened, I don't even remember what it was any longer, but I read something in the papers and I remember that I went up there, and nobody was there. The door was locked. They had gone to lunch. I rattled the door handle. That's as close as I got to the Communist Party. I rattled the door and said, 'Let me in.' You didn't know that, did you, son?"

"No," I said.

"Well, now you do. Luckily, that door was locked. And in the next election Franklin Roosevelt became the president, and the kind of capitalism that sent me down to the Communist Party office began to get an overhaul the likes of which this country had never seen. A great man saved this country's capitalism from the capitalists and saved patriotic people like me from Communism. Saved all of us from the dictatorial regime that
results
from Communism. Let me tell you something that shook me—the death of Masaryk. Did that bother you, Mr. Ringold, as much as it bothered me? I always admired Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, ever since I first heard his name and what he was doing for his people. I always thought of him as the Czech Roosevelt. I don't know how to account for his murder. Do you, Mr. Ringold? I was troubled by it. I couldn't believe the Communists could kill a man like that. But they did ... Sir, I don't want to get started having a political argument. I'm going to ask you one single question, and I'd like you to answer so that my son and I know where we stand. Are you a member of the Communist Party?"

"No, Doctor, I'm not."

"Now I want my son to ask you. Nathan, I want you to ask Mr. Ringold if he is now a member of the Communist Party."

To put such a question to somebody went against my every political principle. But because my father wanted me to and because my father had asked Ira already to no ill effect and because of Sam and Sidney, my father's dead younger brothers, I did it.

"Are you, Ira?" I asked him.

"Nope. No, sir."

"You don't go to meetings of the Communist Party?" my father asked.

"I do not."

"You don't plan, up where you want Nathan to visit you—what's the name of the place?"

"Zinc Town. Zinc Town, New Jersey."

"You don't plan up there to take him to any such meetings?"

"No, Doctor, I don't. I plan on taking him swimming and hiking and fishing."

"I'm glad to hear that," said my father. "I believe you, sir."

"May I now ask
you
a question, Dr. Zuckerman?" Ira asked, smiling at my father in that droll sidewise way he smiled when he was playing Abraham Lincoln. "Why do you have me down for a Red in the first place?"

"The Progressive Party, Mr. Ringold."

"Do you have Henry Wallace down for a Red? The former vice president to Mr. Roosevelt? Do you think Mr. Roosevelt would choose a Red for vice president of the United States of America?"

"It's not as simple as that," my father replied. "I wish it were. But what's going on in the world is not simple at all."

"Dr. Zuckerman," said Ira, changing tactics, "you wonder what I'm doing with Nathan? I envy him—that's what I'm doing with him. I envy that he has a father like you. I envy that he has a teacher like my brother. I envy that he has good eyes and can read without glasses a foot thick and isn't an idiot who's going to quit school so as to go out and dig ditches. I've got nothing hidden and nothing to hide, Doctor. Except that I wouldn't mind a son like him myself someday. Maybe the world today isn't simple, but this sure is: I get a kick out of talking to your boy. Not every kid in Newark takes as his hero Tom Paine."

Here my father stood up and extended his hand to Ira. "I
am
a father, Mr. Ringold—to
two
boys, to Nathan and to Henry, his younger brother, who is also somebody to crow about. And my responsibilities as a father ... well, that's all that this has been about."

Ira took my father's ordinary-sized hand in his huge one and pumped it once very hard, so hard—with such sincerity and warmth—that oil, or at least water, a pure geyser of something, might as a result have come gushing from my father's mouth. "Dr. Zuckerman," Ira said, "you don't want your son stolen from you, and nobody here is going to steal him."