I Married a Communist (22 page)

He was instantly up out of the stairwell, and shouting, "This is a democracy, Mrs. Grant! My beliefs are my beliefs. If you want to know Ira Ringold's beliefs, all you have to do is ask him. I don't give a damn if you don't like them
or
me. These are my beliefs, and I don't give a damn if
nobody
likes them! But no, your husband draws his salary from a fascist, so anyone comes along daring to say what the fascists don't like to hear, it's 'Communist, Communist, there's a Communist in our civilized home.' But if you had enough flexibility in your thinking to know that in a democracy the Communist philosophy,
any
philosophy—"

This time when Eve Frame screamed it was a scream with neither a bottom to it nor a top, a scream that signaled a life-threatening state of emergency and that ended effectively all political discourse and, with it, my first big evening out on the town.

"T
HE JEW HATRED
, this contempt for Jews," I said to Murray. "Yet she married Ira, married Freedman before him ..."

It was our second session. Before dinner, we had sat out on the deck overlooking the pond, and while we drank our martinis, Murray had told me about the day's lectures down at the college. I shouldn't have been surprised by his mental energy, even by his enthusiasm for the three-hundred-word writing assignment—discuss, from the perspective of a lifetime, any one line in Hamlet's most famous soliloquy—that the professor had given his elderly students. Yet that a man so close to oblivion should be preparing homework for the next day, educating himself for a life that had all but run out—that the puzzle continued to puzzle him, that clarification remained a vital need—more than surprised me: a sense of error settled over me, bordering on shame, for living to myself and keeping everything at such a distance. But then the sense of error vanished. There were no more difficulties I wished to create.

I grilled chicken on the barbecue and we ate dinner outside on the deck. It was well after eight when we finished our meal, but we were only into the second week of July and, though that morning when I went for my mail the postmistress had informed me that we were going to lose forty-nine minutes of sun that month—and that if we didn't have rain soon, we would all have to go to the store for blackberry and raspberry preserves; and that the local roadkill was running four times greater than this time last year; and that there had been another sighting, near somebody's bird feeder at the edge of the woods, of our resident six-foot-tall black bear—there was as yet no end in sight for this day. Night was tucked away behind a straightforward sky proclaiming nothing but permanence. Life without end and without upheaval.

"Was she a Jew? She was," said Murray, "a pathologically embarrassed Jew. Nothing superficial about that embarrassment. Embarrassed that she looked like a Jew—and the cast of Eve Frame's face was subtly quite Jewish, all the physiognomic nuances Rebecca-like, right out of Scott's
Ivanhoe
—embarrassed that her daughter looked like a Jew. When she learned that I spoke Spanish, she told me, 'Everybody thinks Sylphid is Spanish. When we went to Spain, everybody took her for a native.' It was too pathetic even to dispute. Who cared anyway? Ira didn't. Ira had no use for it. Politically opposed. Couldn't stand religion of any kind. At Passover, Doris used to prepare a family seder and Ira wouldn't come near it. Tribal superstition.

"I think when he first met Eve Frame he was so bowled over by her, by everything—fresh to New York, fresh to
The Free and the Brave,
squiring around on his arm
The American Radio Theater—
I think that her being or not being a Jew never came up. What difference did it make to him? But anti-Semitism? That made
all
the difference. Years later he told me how whenever he said the word 'Jew' in public she would try to quiet him down. They'd take the elevator in an apartment building after visiting somebody somewhere and there'd be a woman with a baby in her arms or a baby in a carriage, and Ira wouldn't even notice them, but when they got into the street, Eve would say, 'What a perfectly hideous child.' Ira couldn't figure what was eating her until he realized that the hideous child was always the child of a woman who looked to her grossly Jewish.

"How could he stand five minutes of that crap? Well, he couldn't. But it wasn't the army, Eve Frame was no southern hillbilly, and he wasn't about to take a swing at her. Pummeled her instead with adult education. Ira tried to be an O'Day to Eve, but she was no Ira. The Social and Economic Origins of Anti-Semitism. That was the course. Sat her down in his study and read aloud to her from his books. Read aloud to her from the notepads he'd carried around with him during the war, where he'd put down his observations and thoughts. 'There is nothing superior in being Jewish—and there is nothing inferior or degrading. You are Jewish, and that's it. That's the story.'

"He bought her what was one of his favorite novels back then, a book by Arthur Miller. Ira must have given away dozens of copies of it. Called
Focus.
He gave Eve a copy, then marked it all up for her, so she wouldn't miss the important passages. He explained it to her the way O'Day used to explain books at the base library in Iran. Remember
Focus,
Miller's novel?"

I remembered it well. Ira had given me a copy too, for my sixteenth birthday, and, like O'Day, explained it to
me.
During my last years of high school,
Focus
took its place, alongside
On a Note of Triumph
and the novels of Howard Fast (and two war novels that he gave me,
The Naked and the Dead
and
The Young Lions),
as a book that affirmed my own political sympathies as well as furnishing a venerated source from which I could take lines for my radio plays.

Focus
was published in 1945, the year Ira returned from overseas with his duffel bags full of books and the thousand bucks he'd won on the troopship shooting craps, and three years before the Broadway production of
Death of a Salesman
made Arthur Miller a famous playwright. The book tells of the harshly ironic fate of a Mr. Newman, a personnel officer for a big New York corporation, a cautious, anxiety-ridden conformist in his forties—too cautious to become actively the racial and religious bigot he is secretly in his heart. After Mr. Newman is fitted for his first pair of glasses, he discovers that they set off "the Semitic prominence of his nose" and make him dangerously resemble a Jew. And not just to himself. When his crippled old mother sees her son in his new glasses, she laughs and says, "Why, you almost look like a Jew." When he turns up at work in the glasses, the response to his transformation is not so benign: he is abruptly demoted from his visible position in personnel to a lowly job as a clerk, a job from which Mr. Newman resigns in humiliation. From that moment on, he who himself despises Jews for their looks, their odors, their meanness, their avarice, their bad manners, even for "their sensuous lust for women," is marked as a Jew everywhere he goes. So socially wide-ranging is the animosity he incites that it feels to the reader—or did to me as an adolescent—that it cannot be Newman's face alone that is responsible but that the source of his persecution is a mammoth, spectral incarnation of the extensive anti-Semitism that he was himself too meek to enact. "He had gone all his life bearing this revulsion toward Jews" and now that revulsion, materialized on his Queens street and throughout New York as in a terror-filled nightmare, ostracizes him brutally—in the end, violently—from the neighbors whose acceptance he had courted with his obedient conformism to their ugliest hatreds.

I went into the house and came back with the copy of
Focus
I probably hadn't opened since I got it from Ira and read it through in one night, then through again twice more, before setting it between the bookends on the bedroom desk where I kept my stash of sacred texts. On the title page Ira had inscribed a message to me. When I gave the book to Murray, he handled it a moment (a relic of his brother) before turning to the inscription to read it aloud:

Nathan—There are so few times I find anybody to hold an intelligent conversation with. I read lots and believe that what good I get from that must be stimulated and take form in discussion with other people. You are one of those few people. I feel slightly less pessimistic as regards the future because of knowing a young person like you.

Ira, April 1949

My former teacher flipped through
Focus
to see what I had underlined in 1949. He stopped a quarter of the way in and again read aloud to me, this time from one of the printed pages. "'His face,'" Murray read. '"
He
was not this face. Nobody had a right to dismiss him like that because of his face. Nobody! He was
him,
a human being with a certain definite history and he was not this face which looked like it had grown out of another alien and dirty history.'

"She reads this book at Ira's request. She reads what he underlines for her. She listens to his lecture. And what is the subject of the lecture? The subject is the subject of the book—the
subject
is the Jewish face. Well, as Ira used to say: It's hard to know how much she hears. This was a prejudice that, no matter what she heard, no matter how much she heard, she could not let go of."

"
Focus
didn't help," I said when Murray handed back the book to me.

"Look, they met Arthur Miller at a friend's house. Maybe it was at a party for Wallace, I don't remember. After Eve was introduced to him, she volunteered to Arthur Miller how
gripping
she had found his book. Probably wasn't lying, either. Eve read many books, and with a far wider understanding and appreciation than Ira, who if he didn't find political and social implications in the book, the whole thing was no good. But whatever she learned from reading or from music or art or acting—or from personal experience, from all the tremulous living she'd done—remained apart from where the hatred did its work. She couldn't escape it. Not that she was a person who couldn't make a change. She changed her name, changed husbands, changed from movies to the stage to radio when her professional fortunes altered and a change had to be made, but this was fixed in her.

"I don't mean that things didn't get better the longer Ira hammered away—or didn't look as though they'd gotten better. To avoid those lectures of his, she probably censored herself at least a little. But a change of heart? When she
had
to—to hide the way she felt from her social set, from the prominent
Jews
in her social set, to hide the way she felt from Ira himself—-she did it. Indulged him, patiently listened when he was off and running about anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church and the Polish peasantry and in France during the Dreyfus affair. But when she found a face inexcusably Jewish (like the one on my wife, like Doris's), her thoughts weren't Ira's or Arthur Miller's.

"Eve hated Doris. Why? A woman who'd worked in a hospital lab? A former lab technician? A Newark mother and housewife? What threat could she possibly pose to a famous star? How much effort would it have taken to tolerate her? Doris had scoliosis, there was pain as she aged, she had to have an operation to insert a rod and that didn't go very well, and so on and so forth. The fact is that Doris, who to me was pretty as a picture from the day I met her till the day she died, had a deformation of the spine and you noticed it. Her nose was not so straight as Lana Turner's. You noticed
that.
She grew up speaking English the way it was spoken in the Bronx when she was a kid—and Eve could not bear to be in her presence. Couldn't look at her. My wife was too upsetting for her to look at.

"During those three years they were married, we were invited for dinner exactly once. You could see it in Eve's eyes. What Doris wore, what Doris said, what Doris looked like—all repellent to her. Me, Eve was apprehensive of; she didn't care for me for other reasons. I was a schoolteacher from Jersey, a nobody in her world, but she must have seen in me a potential foe and so she was always polite. And charming. The way she was with you, I'm sure. I had to admire the pluck in her: a fragile, high-strung person, easily addled, who'd come as far as she had, a woman of the world—that requires tenacity. To keep trying, to keep surfacing after all she'd been through, after all her career setbacks, to make a success in radio, to create that house, to establish that salon, to entertain all those people ... Sure, she was wrong for Ira. And he for her. They had no business together. Nonetheless, to take him on, to take on yet another husband, to get a big new life going again, that took
something.

"If I separated out her marriage to my brother, if I separated out her attitude to my wife, if I tried looking at her separate from that stuff—well, she was a bright, peppy little thing. Separate out all that and she was probably the same bright, peppy little thing who'd gone out to California and taken on being a silent-movie actress at the age of seventeen. She had spirit. You saw it in those silent films. Under all that civility, she masked a lot of spirit—I venture to say,
Jewish
spirit. There was a generous side to her when she could relax, which was not often. When she was relaxed, you felt that there was something in her wanting to do the right thing. She tried to pay attention. But the woman was hog-tied—it wouldn't work. You couldn't establish any sort of independent relationship with her, and she couldn't take any independent interest in you. You couldn't count on her judgment for very long, either, not with Sylphid at her other side.

"Well, after we left that night, she said to Ira, a propos of Doris, 'I hate those wonderful wives, those doormats.' But it wasn't a doormat Eve saw in Doris. She saw a Jewish woman of the sort she could not abide.

"I knew this; it didn't take Ira to clue me in. He felt too compromised to anyway. My kid brother could tell me anything, tell
anybody
anything—had since the day he could talk—but
that
he couldn't tell me until everything was kaput. But he didn't have to for me to know that the woman had got caught in her own impersonation. The anti-Semitism was just a part of the role she was playing, a careless part of what went into playing the role. In the beginning, I would think, it was almost inadvertent. It was unthinking more than malicious. In that way went along with everything else she did. The thing that's happening to her is unobserved by her.