I Married a Communist (26 page)

"But all at once he was battling on every front, and I didn't want him to do something stupid or irreparable. I didn't drive out to tell him anything in particular. This wasn't a man you told what to do. I wasn't even there to tell him what I
thought.
What I thought was that to go on living with Eve and her daughter was insane. The night Doris and I went there for dinner, you couldn't miss the strangeness of the link between those two. I remember driving back to Newark that night with Doris and saying over and over, 'There is no room for Ira in that combination.'

"Ira called his Utopian dream Communism, Eve called hers Sylphid. The parent's utopia of the perfect child, the actress's utopia of let's pretend, the Jew's utopia of not being Jewish, to name only the grandest of her projects to deodorize life and make it palatable.

"That Ira had no business in that household Sylphid had let him know right off the bat. And Sylphid was right: he
had
no business there, he
didn't
belong there. Sylphid made perfectly clear to him that de-utopianizing her mom—giving Mom a dose of life's dung she'd never forget—was her deepest daughterly inclination. Frankly, I didn't think he had any business on the radio, either. Ira was no actor. He had the chutzpah to get up and shoot off his mouth—that he never lacked—but an actor? He did every part the same way. That easygoing crap, as though he were sitting across from you at pinochle. The simple human approach, only it wasn't an approach. It was nothing. The absence of an approach. What did Ira know about acting? He had resolved as a kid to strike out on his own, and everything that urged him on was an accident. There was no plan. He wanted a home with Eve Frame? He wanted a home with the English girl? I realize that's a primary urge in people; in Ira particularly, the urge to have a home was the residue of a very, very old disappointment. But he picked some real beauts to have a home with. Ira asserted himself into New York City with all his intensity, with all that craving for a life of weight and meaning. From the party he got the idea that he was an instrument of history, that history had called him to the capital of the world to set society's wrongs right—and to me the whole thing looked ludicrous. Ira wasn't so much a displaced person as he was a misplaced person, always the wrong size for where he was, in both spirit and physique. But that wasn't a perspective I was about to share with him. My brother's vocation is to be stupendous? Suits me. I just didn't want him to wind up unrecognizable as anything else.

"I'd brought some sandwiches for us to eat that second night, and we ate and he talked and I listened, and it must have been about three in the morning when a New York Yellow Cab pulled up at the shack. It was Eve. Ira'd had the phone off the hook for two days, and when she couldn't stand any more phoning and getting a busy signal, she'd called a taxi and taken it sixty miles into the sticks in the middle of the night. She knocked, I got up and opened the door, and she rushed by me into the room, and there he was. What followed might have been planned by her all the way out in the taxi or might as easily have been improvised. It was right out of those silent pictures she used to act in. A completely screwy performance, pure exaggerated invention, yet so right for her that she would repeat it almost exactly only a few weeks later. A favorite role. The Suppliant.

"She threw herself onto her knees in the middle of the floor and, oblivious to me—or maybe not all that oblivious—she cried, 'I beg you! I implore you! Don't leave me!' The two arms upthrust in the mink coat. The hands trembling in the air. And tears, as though it weren't a marriage at stake but the redemption of mankind. Confirming—if confirmation was necessary—that she absolutely repudiated being a rational human being. I remember thinking, Well, she's cooked her goose this time.

"But I didn't know my brother, didn't know what he couldn't withstand. People down on their knees was what he'd been protesting all his life, but I would have thought that by then he had the wherewithal to distinguish between someone driven to her knees because of social conditions and someone just acting away. There was an emotion he could not quiet in himself when he saw her like that. Or so I thought. The sucker for suffering rushing to the fore—or so I thought—and so I stepped outside and got into the taxi and had a cigarette with the driver until harmony was restored.

"Everything permeated with stupid politics. That's what I was thinking in the taxi. The ideologies that fill people's heads and undermine their observation of life. But it was only driving back to Newark that night that I began to understand how those words applied to the predicament my brother was in with his wife. Ira wasn't
merely
a sucker for her suffering. Sure, he could be swept away by those impulses that most everybody has when somebody they are intimate with starts to cave in; sure, he could arrive at a mistaken idea of what he should do about it. But that isn't what happened. Only driving home did I realize that wasn't
at all
what had happened.

"Remember, Ira belonged to the Communist Party heart and soul. Ira obeyed every one-hundred-eighty-degree shift of policy. Ira swallowed the dialectical justification for Stalin's every villainy. Ira backed Browder when Browder was their American messiah, and when Moscow pulled the plug and expelled Browder, and overnight Browder was a class collaborator and a social imperialist, Ira bought it all—backed Foster and the Foster line that America was on the road to fascism. He managed to squelch his doubts and convince himself that his obedience to every last one of the party's twists and turns was helping to build a just and equitable society in America. His self-conception was of being virtuous. By and large I believe he was—another innocent guy co-opted into a system he didn't understand. Hard to believe that a man who put so much stock in his freedom could let that dogmatizing control his think-ing. But my brother abased himself intellectually the same way they all did. Politically gullible. Morally gullible. Wouldn't face it. Shut their minds, the Iras, to the source of what they were selling and celebrating. Here was somebody whose greatest strength was his power to say no. Unafraid to say no and to say it into your face. Yet all he could ever say to the party was yes.

"He had reconciled himself to her because no sponsor or network or advertising agency was going to touch Ira as long as he was married to the Sarah Bernhardt of the Airwaves. That's what he was gambling on, that they couldn't expose him, wouldn't dispose of him, as long as at his side he had radio's royalty. She was going to protect her husband and by extension protect the clique of Communists who ran Ira's show. She threw herself on the floor, she implored him to come home, and what Ira realized was that he damn well better do what she asked, because without her he was sunk. Eve was his front. The bulwark's bulwark."

"That's when the deus ex machina appears with her gold tooth. Eve discovered her. Heard about her from some actor who'd heard about her from some dancer. A masseuse. Probably ten, twelve years older than Ira and pushing fifty by then. Had that worn, twilight look about her, the sensuous female rumbling downhill, but her work kept her in shape, kept that big, warm body firm enough. Helgi Pärn. Estonian woman married to an Estonian factory worker. A solid working-class woman who likes her vodka and is a little bit of a prostitute and a little bit of a thief. A large, healthy woman who, when she first shows up, is missing a tooth. And then she comes back and the tooth has been replaced—a gold tooth, a present from a dentist she's massaging. And then she comes back with a dress, a present from a dress manufacturer she's massaging. Over the course of the year she comes back with some costume jewelry, she has a fur coat, she has a watch, soon she's buying stocks, et cetera, et cetera. Helgi is constantly being improved. She jokes about all her improvements. It's just appreciation, she tells Ira. The first time Ira gives her money she says, 'I don't take money, I take presents.' He says, 'I can't go shopping. Here. Buy yourself what you want.'

"She and Ira have the obligatory class-consciousness discussion, he tells her how Marx urged working people like the Pärns to wrest the capital from the bourgeoisie and organize as the ruling class, in control of the means of production, and Helgi's having none of it. She's Estonian, the Russians had occupied Estonia and turned it into a Soviet republic, and so she's
instinctively
anti-Communist. There is only one country for her, the United States of America. Where else could an immigrant farm girl with no education, blah blah blah blah. The improvements are comic to Ira. Ordinarily he is a little short on humor, but not where Helgi is concerned. Maybe he should have married
her.
Maybe this big, good-natured slob who does not recoil from reality was his soulmate. His soulmate the way Donna Jones was his soulmate: because of what was untamed in her. Because of what was wayward.

"He sure did get a kick out of the acquisitive side of her. 'What is it this week, Helgi?' To her it's not whoring, it's not sinister—it's self-improvement. The fulfillment of Helgi's American dream. America is the land of opportunity, and her clients appreciate her, and a girl has to make a living, and so three times a week she came around after dinner, looking like a nurse—starched white dress, white stockings, white shoes—and carrying with her a table that folded in half, a massage table. She sets the table up in his study, in front of his desk, and though he was half a foot too tall for it, he stretched himself out on it, and for a solid hour she massaged him very professionally. Afforded him, with those massages, the only real relief Ira ever got from all that pain.

"Then, still in her white uniform, altogether professionally, she concluded with something that provided more relief. A wonderful outpouring gushed forth from his penis, and momentarily the prison dissolved. In that gush was all the freedom that Ira had left. The lifelong battle to exercise fully his political, civil, and human rights had evolved itself down to coming, for dough, onto this fifty-year-old Estonian woman's gold tooth while, below them in the living room, Eve listened to Sylphid play on her harp.

"Helgi might have been a handsome woman, but the shallowness shone right through. Her English wasn't so hot, and, as I said, there was always a thin stream of vodka gurgling through her veins, and all of this together gave her the aura of somebody pretty thick. Eve nicknamed her. The Peasant. That's what they called her around West Eleventh Street. But Helgi Pärn was no peasant. Shallow maybe, but not thick. Helgi knew that Eve considered her the equivalent of a beast of burden. Eve didn't bother to hide it, didn't think she had to with a lowly masseuse, and the lowly masseuse despised her for it. When Helgi was blowing Ira, and Eve was downstairs in the living room listening to the harp, Helgi used to have fun imitating the dainty, ladylike way that she imagined Eve deigning to suck him off. Behind the blanked-out Baltic mask, there was somebody reckless who knew when to strike out and how to strike out against her dismissive betters. And when she struck out at Eve, she brought the whole thing down. When the vodka was in there, Helgi wasn't about to impose restrictions on herself.

"Revenge," announced Murray. "Nothing so big in people and nothing so small, nothing so audaciously creative in even the most ordinary as the workings of revenge. And nothing so ruthlessly creative in even the most refined of the refined as the workings of betrayal."

I was taken back to Murray Ringold's English class by the sound of that: the teacher summing up for the class, Mr. Ringold recapitulating, intent, before the hour ended, on concisely synthesizing his theme, Mr. Ringold hinting, by his emphatic tone and his careful phrasing, that "revenge and betrayal" might well be the answer to one of his weekly "Twenty Questions."

"In the army I remember getting hold of a copy of Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
and reading it every night, reading it for the first time in my life when we were training in England to invade France. I loved that book, Nathan, but it left me puzzled. Do you remember what Burton says about melancholy? Every one of us, he says, has the predisposition for melancholy, but only some of us get the habit of melancholy. How do you get the habit? That's a question that Burton doesn't answer. That book of his doesn't say, and so I had to wonder about it right through the invasion, wonder until from personal experience I found out.

"You get the habit by being betrayed. What does it is betrayal. Think of the tragedies. What brings on the melancholy, the raving, the bloodshed? Othello—betrayed. Hamlet—betrayed. Lear—betrayed. You might even claim that Macbeth is betrayed—by himself—though that's not the same thing. Professionals who've spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature's scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It's a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What's that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal. Adam—betrayed. Esau—betrayed. The Shechemites—betrayed. Judah—betrayed. Joseph—betrayed. Moses—betrayed. Samson—betrayed. Samuel—betrayed. David—betrayed. Uriah—betrayed. Job—betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don't forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn."

I
N MID-AUGUST
of 1950, only a few days before I left home for the University of Chicago (left forever, as it developed) to enroll for my first year of college, I went up on the train to spend a week in the Sussex County countryside with Ira, as I had the previous year when Eve and Sylphid were in France visiting Sylphid's father—and when my own father had first to interview Ira before granting his permission for me to go. That second summer, I arrived late in the day at the rural station a curvy five-mile drive from Ira's shack through narrow back lanes and past the dairy herds. Ira was waiting there in the Chevy coupe.