I Married a Communist (16 page)

Whereupon I had to make a superhuman effort not to start to bawl. I had to pretend to myself that my whole aim in life was not to cry, never to cry, at the sight of two men affectionately shaking hands—and I barely managed to succeed. They'd done it! Without shouting! Without bloodshed! Without the motivating, distorting rage! Magnificently they had pulled it off—though largely because Ira was not telling us the truth.

I'll insert this here and not return to the subject of the wound inflicted on my father's face. I count on the reader to remember it when that seems appropriate.

Ira and I left my father's office together, and to celebrate—purportedly to celebrate my upcoming summer visit to Zinc Town but also, complicitously, to celebrate our victory over my dad—we went to Stosh's, a few blocks away, to have one of Stosh's overstuffed ham sandwiches. I ate so much with Ira at four-fifteen that when I got home, at five of six, I had no appetite and sat at my place at the table while everybody else ate my mother's dinner—and it was then that I observed in my father's face the wound. I had planted it there earlier by going out the door of his office with Ira and not staying behind to talk a little to him until the next patient showed up.

At first I tried to think that maybe I was guiltily imagining that wound because of having felt, not necessarily contemptuous of him, but certainly superior leaving, virtually arm in arm, with Iron Rinn of
The Free and the Brave.
My father didn't want his son stolen from him, and though, strictly speaking, nobody had stolen anybody, the man was no fool and knew that he had lost and, Communist or no Communist, the six-foot six-inch intruder had won. I saw in my father's face a look of resigned disappointment, his kind gray eyes softened by—distressfully subdued by—something midway between melancholy and futility. It was a look that would never be entirely forgotten by me when I was alone with Ira, or, later, with Leo Glucksman, Johnny O'Day, or whomever. lust by taking instruction from these men, I seemed to myself somehow to be selling my father short. His face with that look on it was always looming up, superimposed on the face of the man who was then educating me in life's possibilities. His face bearing the wound of betrayal.

The moment when you first recognize that your father is vulnerable to others is bad enough, but when you understand that he's vulnerable to
you,
still needs you more than you any longer think you need him, when you realize that you might actually be able to frighten him, even to
quash
him if you wanted to—well, the idea is at such cross-purposes with routine filial inclinations that it does not even begin to make sense. All the laboring he had gone through to get to be a chiropodist, a provider, a protector, and I was now running off with another man. It is, morally as well as emotionally, a more dangerous game than one knows at the time, getting all those extra fathers like a pretty girl gets beaux. But that was what I was doing. Always making myself eminently adoptable, I discovered the sense of betrayal that comes of trying to find a surrogate father even though you love your own. It isn't that I ever denounced my father to Ira or anyone else for a cheap advantage—it was enough just, by exercising my freedom, to dump the man I loved for somebody else. If only I had hated him, it would have been easy.

In my third year at Chicago, I brought a girl home with me at Thanksgiving break. She was a gentle girl, mannerly and clever, and I remember the pleasure my parents took in talking to her. One evening, while my mother stayed in the living room entertaining my aunt, who had eaten dinner with us, my father came out to the corner drugstore with the girl and me, and sitting in a booth together we all three ate ice cream sundaes. At one point I went over to buy something like a tube of shaving cream at the pharmacy counter, and when I got back to the table, I saw my father leaning toward the girl. He was holding her hand, and I overheard him telling her, "We lost Nathan when he was sixteen. Sixteen and he left us." By which he meant that I had left
him.
Years later he would use the same words with my wives. "Sixteen and he left us." By which he meant that all my mistakes in life had flowed from that precipitate departure of mine.

He was right, too. If it weren't for my mistakes I'd still be at home sitting on the front stoop.

It was about two weeks later that Ira went as far as he could toward telling the truth. He was in Newark one Saturday to see his brother, and he and I met downtown for lunch, at a bar and grill near City Hall where, for seventy-five cents—"six bits" to Ira—they served charcoal-broiled steak sandwiches with grilled onions, pickles, home fries, cole slaw, and ketchup. For dessert we each ordered apple pie with a rubbery slice of American cheese, a combination that Ira had introduced me to and that I assumed to be the manly way you ate a piece of pie in a "bar and grill."

Then Ira opened a package he was carrying and presented me with a record album called
The Soviet Army Chorus and Band in a Program of Favorites.
Conducted by Boris Alexandrov. Featuring Artur Eisen and Alexei Sergeyev, basses, and Nikolai Abramov, tenor. On the cover of the album was a picture ("Photograph courtesy
SOVFOTO
") of the conductor, the band, and the chorus, some two hundred men, all wearing Russian military dress uniforms and performing in the great marble Hall of the People. The hall of the Russian working people.

"Ever hear them?"

"Never," I said.

"Take it home and listen. It's yours."

"Thanks, Ira. This is great."

But it was awful. How could I take this album home, and, at home, how could I
listen?

Instead of driving back to the neighborhood with Ira after lunch, I told him I had to go over to the public library, the main branch on Washington Street, to work on a history paper. Outside the bar and grill I thanked him again for lunch and the present, and he got into his station wagon and drove back to Murray's on Lehigh Avenue while I proceeded down Broad Street in the direction of Military Park and the big main library. I walked past Market Street and all the way to the park, as if my destination were indeed the library, but then, instead of turning left at Rector Street, I ducked off to the right and took a back way along the river to reach Pennsylvania Station.

I asked a newsdealer in the station to change a dollar for me. I took the four quarters over to the storage area and I put one of them into the coin slot of the smallest of the lockers, and into the locker I shoved the record album. After slamming the door shut, I nonchalantly deposited the locker key in my trouser pocket, and proceeded
then
to the library, where I had nothing to do except to sit for several hours in the reference room worrying about where I was going to hide the key.

My father was around the house all weekend, but on Monday he went back to his office, and on Monday afternoons my mother went up to Irvington to visit her sister, and so after my last class I jumped on a 14 bus across the street from school, took it to the end of the line, to Penn Station, removed the record album from the locker, put it in the Bamberger's shopping bag I had folded up inside my notebook that morning and taken with me to school. At home I hid the record album in a small windowless bin in the basement where my mother stored our set of glass Passover dishes in grocery cartons. Come the spring and Passover, when she removed the dishes for us to use that week, I'd have to find another hiding place, but for the time being the album's explosive potential was defused.

Not until I got to college was I able to play the records on a phonograph, and by then Ira and I were already drifting apart. Which didn't mean that when I heard the Soviet Army Chorus singing "Wait for Your Soldier" and "To an Army Man" and "A Soldier's Farewell"—and, yes, "Dubinushka"—the vision of equality and justice for working people all over the world wasn't reawakened in me. In my dormitory room, I felt proud for having had the guts not to ditch that album—even if I still hadn't guts enough to understand that, with the album, Ira had been trying to tell me: "Yes, I'm a Communist. Of course I'm a Communist. But not a bad Communist, not a Communist who would kill Masaryk or anyone else. I am a beautiful, heartfelt Communist who loves the people and who loves these songs!"

"What happened that next morning?" I asked Murray. "Why did Ira come to Newark that day?"

"Well, Ira slept late that morning. He'd been up with Eve about the abortion till four, and around ten
A.M
. he was still asleep when he was awakened by someone shouting downstairs. He was in the master bedroom on the second floor on West Eleventh Street, and the voice was coming from the foot of the staircase. It was Sylphid...

"Did I mention that the first thing to drive Ira wild was Sylphid telling Eve that she wasn't coming to their wedding? Eve told Ira that Sylphid was doing some kind of program with a flutist and that the Sunday of the wedding was the only day the other girl could rehearse. He himself doesn't particularly care if Sylphid's coming to the wedding but Eve does, and she's crying about it and she's very distraught, and this upsets him. Constantly she gives the daughter the instruments and the power to hurt her—and then she's hurt, but this is the first time he sees it, and he's infuriated. 'Her mother's
wedding,
' Ira said. 'How can she not come to her mother's wedding if that's what her mother wants?
Tell
her she's coming. Don't ask her—tell her!' 'I can't tell her,' Eve says, 'this is her professional life, this is her music—' 'Okay,
I'll
tell her,' Ira says.

"The upshot was that Eve talked to the girl, and God knows what she said, or promised, or how she begged, but Sylphid showed up at the wedding, in those clothes of hers. A scarf in her hair. She had kinky hair, so she wears these Greek scarves, rakishly as she thought, and they drive her mother crazy. Wears peasant blouses that make her look enormous. Sheer blouses with Greek embroidery on them. Hoop earrings. Lots of bracelets. When she walks, she clinks. You hear her coming. Embroidered schmattas and lots of jewelry. Wore the Greek sandals that you could buy in Greenwich Village. The thongs that tie up to her knees and that dig in and leave marks, and this also makes Eve miserable. But at least the daughter was there, however she looked, and Eve was happy, and so Ira was happy.

"At the end of August, when both their shows were off the air, they married and went up to Cape Cod for a long weekend, and then they got back to Eve's place and Sylphid has disappeared. No note, nothing. They call her friends, they call her father in France, thinking maybe she decided to go back to him. They call the police. On the fourth day Sylphid finally checks in. She's on the Upper West Side with some old teacher she'd had at Juilliard. She'd been staying with her; Sylphid acts as though she didn't know when they were getting back, and that explains why she didn't bother to call from Ninety-sixth Street.

"That evening they all eat dinner together and the silence is awful. It doesn't help the mother any to watch the daughter eat. Sylphid's weight makes Eve frantic on a good night—and this night is not good.

"When she finished each course, Sylphid always cleaned her plate the same way. Ira'd been around army mess halls, crummy diners—lapses of etiquette didn't bother him all that much. But Eve was refinement itself, and watching Sylphid cleaning up was, as Sylphid well knew, a torment for her mother.

"Sylphid would take the side of her index finger, you see, and she'd run it around the edge of the empty plate so as to get all the gravy and the leavings. She'd lick everything off the finger and then she'd do it again and again until her finger squeaked against the plate. Well, on the night that Sylphid decided to come home after her disappearance, she started cleaning her plate that way of hers at dinner, and Eve, who was screwed pretty tight on an ordinary evening, came undone. Could not keep that smile of the ideal mother plastered serenely across her face one second more. 'Stop it!' she screams. 'Stop it! You are twenty-three years old! Stop it, please!'

"Suddenly Sylphid is up on her feet and clubbing at her mother's head—going after her with her fists. Ira leaps up, and that's when Sylphid screams at Eve, 'You kike bitch!' and Ira sinks back into his chair. 'No,' he says. 'No. That won't do. I live here now. I am your mother's husband, and you cannot strike her in my presence. You cannot strike her, period. I forbid it. And you cannot use that word, not in my hearing. Never.
Never in my hearing.
Never use that filthy word
again!
'

"Ira gets up and he leaves the house and he takes one of his calming-down hikes—from the Village walks all the way up to Harlem and back. Tries everything so as not to outright explode. Tells himself all the reasons why the daughter is upset. Our stepmother and our father. Remembers how they treated him. Remembers everything he hated about them. Everything awful that he swore he would never be in life. But what's he to do? The kid takes a swing at her mother, calls her a kike, a kike bitch—what is Ira going to do?

"He gets home around midnight and he does
nothing.
He goes to bed, gets in bed with the brand-new wife, and, amazingly, that's it. In the morning he sits down at breakfast with the brand-new wife and with the brand-new stepdaughter and he explains that they are all going to live together in peace and harmony, and that to do this they must have respect for one another. He tries to explain everything reasonably, the way nothing was ever explained to him when he was a kid. He's still appalled by what he saw and heard, furious about it, yet he is trying his damnedest to believe that Sylphid isn't really an anti-Semite in the true Anti-Defamation League sense of the word. Which more than likely was the case: Sylphid's insistence upon ego-justice for Sylphid was so extensive, so exclusive, so
automatic,
that a grand historical hostility of even the simplest, most undemanding sort, like hating Jews, could never have taken root in her—there was no room in her. Anti-Semitism was too theoretical for her anyway. The people Sylphid could not endure she could not endure for a good, tangible reason. There was nothing impersonal about it: they stood in her way and blocked her view; they affronted the regal sense of dominance, her
droit defille.
The whole incident, Ira rightly surmises, hasn't to do with hating Jews. About Jews, about Negroes, about any group that presents a knotty social problem—as opposed to somebody posing an immediate private problem—she does not care one way or the other. She is concerned at that moment only with him. Consequently, she allows to break out into the open a malicious epithet that she instinctively gauges to be so repugnant, so foul and disgusting and out of bounds, as to cause him to walk out the door and never again set foot in her house. 'Kike bitch' is her protest not against the existence of Jews—or even against the existence of her Jewish mother—but against the existence of
him.