I Married a Communist (3 page)

"I enjoyed selling vacuum cleaners. There were people who crossed the street when they saw me coming, even people who may have felt ashamed doing it but who didn't want to be contaminated, but that didn't bother me. I had a lot of support within the teachers' union and a lot of support outside. Contributions came in, we had Doris's salary, and I sold my vacuum cleaners. I met people in all lines of work and I made contact with the real world beyond teaching. You know, I was a professional, a schoolteacher, reading books, teaching Shakespeare, making you kids diagram sentences and memorize poetry and appreciate literature, and I thought no other kind of life was worth living. But I went out selling vacuum cleaners and I acquired a great deal of admiration for a lot of people I met, and I am still grateful for it. I think I have a better outlook on life because of it."

"Suppose you hadn't been reinstated by the court. Would you still have a better outlook?"

"If I had lost? I think I would have made a fair living. I think I would have survived intact. I might have had some regrets. But I don't think I would have been affected temperamentally. In an open society, as bad as it can get, there's an escape. To lose your job and have the newspapers calling you a traitor—these are very unpleasant things. But it's still not the situation that is total, which is totalitarianism. I wasn't put in jail and I wasn't tortured. My child wasn't denied anything. My livelihood was taken away from me and some people stopped talking to me, but other people admired me. My wife admired me. My daughter admired me. Many of my ex-students admired me. Openly said so. And I could put up a legal fight. I had free movement, I could give interviews, raise money, hire a lawyer, make courtroom challenges. Which I did. Of course you can become so depressed and miserable that you give yourself a heart attack. But you can find alternatives, which I also did.

"Now, if the
union
had failed, that would have affected me. But we didn't. We fought and eventually we won. We equalized the pay of men and women. We equalized the pay of secondary and elementary school teachers. We made sure that all after-school activities were, first, voluntary and, then, paid for. We fought to get more sick leave. We argued for five days off for any purpose whatsoever that the individual chose. We achieved promotion by examination—as opposed to favoritism—which meant that all minorities had a fair chance. We attracted blacks to the union, and as they increased in numbers, they moved into leadership positions. But that was years ago. Now the union is a big disappointment to me. Just become a money-grubbing organization. Pay, that's all. What to do to educate the kids is the last thing on anybody's mind. Big disappointment."

"How awful was it for those six years?" I asked him. "What did it take out of you?"

"I don't think it took anything out of me. I really don't think so. You do a helluva lot of not sleeping at night, of course. Many nights I had a hard time sleeping. You're thinking of all kinds of things—how do you do this, and what are you going to do next, whom do you call on, and so forth. I was always redoing what had happened and projecting what would happen. But then the morning comes, and you get up and you do what you have to do."

"And how did Ira take this happening to you?"

"Oh, it distressed him. I'd go as far as to say it ruined him had he not already been ruined by everything else. I was confident all along that I was going to win, and I told this to him. They had no legal reasons for firing me. He kept saying, 'You're kiddin' yourself. They don't need legal reasons.' He knew of too many guys who had been fired, period. Eventually I won, but he felt responsible for what I went through. He carried it around with him for the rest of his life. About you, too, you know. About what happened to you."

"Me?" I said. "Nothing happened to me. I was a kid."

"Oh, something happened to you."

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about—your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.

"If you remember," Murray said, "when you graduated from college you didn't get a Fulbright. That was because of my brother."

In 1953–54, my last year at Chicago, I'd applied for a Fulbright to do graduate work in literature at Oxford and been turned down. I had been near the top of my class, had enthusiastic recommendations, and, as I now remembered it—for the first time, probably, since it happened—was shocked not only at being turned down but because a Fulbright to study literature in England went to a fellow student who was well below me in class standing.

"This true, Murray? I just thought it was screwy, unfair. The fickleness of fate. I didn't know what to think. I wuz robbed, I thought—and then I got drafted. How do you know this is so?"

"The agent told Ira. The FBI. He was on Ira for years. Stopping around to visit him. Coming around to try to get him to name names. Told him that's how he could clear himself. They had you down for Ira's nephew."

"His nephew? How come his nephew?"

"Don't ask me. The FBI didn't always get everything right. Maybe they didn't always want to get everything right. The guy told Ira, 'You know your nephew who applied for a Fulbright? The kid in Chicago? He didn't get it because of your being a Communist.'"

"You think that was true."

"No doubt about it."

All the while I was listening to Murray—and looking at the needle of a man he'd become and thinking of this physique as the materialization of all that coherence of his, as the consequence of a lifelong indifference to everything other than liberty in its most austere sense ... thinking that Murray was an essentialist, that his character wasn't contingent, that wherever he'd found himself, even selling vacuum cleaners, he'd managed to find his dignity ... think-ing that Murray (whom I didn't love or have to; with whom there was just the contract, teacher and student) was Ira (whom I did love) in a more mental, sensible, matter-of-fact version, Ira with a practical, clear, well-defined social goal, Ira without the heroically exaggerated ambitions, without that passionate, overheated relationship to everything, Ira unblurred by impulse and the argument with everything—I had a picture in my mind of Murray's unclothed upper torso, still blessed (when he was already forty-one) with all the signs of youth and strength. The picture I had was of Murray Ringold as I had seen him late one Tuesday afternoon in the fall of 1948, leaning out the window and removing the screens from the second-floor apartment where he lived with his wife and daughter on Lehigh Avenue.

Taking down the screens, putting up the screens, clearing the snow, salting the ice, sweeping the sidewalk, clipping the hedge, washing the car, collecting and burning the leaves, twice daily from October through March descending to the cellar and tending the furnace that heated your flat—stoking the fire, banking the fire, shoveling the ashes, lugging ashes up the stairs in buckets and out to the garbage: a tenant, a renter, had to be fit to get all his chores done before and after going to work, vigilant and diligent and fit, just as the wives had to be fit to lean from their open back windows while rooted to the floor of the apartment and, whatever the temperature—up there like seamen at work in the rigging—to hang the wet clothes out on the clothesline, to peg them with the clothespins an item at a time, feeding the line out until all the waterlogged family wash was hung and the line was full and flapping in the air of industrial Newark, and then to haul the line in again to remove the laundry item by item, remove it all and fold it into the laundry basket to carry into the kitchen when the clothes were dry and ready to be ironed. To keep a family going, there was primarily money to be made and food to be prepared and discipline to be imposed, but there were also these heavy, awkward, sailorlike activities, the climbing, the hoisting, the hauling, the dragging, the cranking in, the reeling out—all the stuff that would tick by me as, on my bicycle, I traversed the two miles from my house to the library: tick, tock, tick, the metronome of daily neighborhood life, the old American-city chain of being.

Across the street from Mr. Ringold's Lehigh Avenue house was the Beth Israel Hospital, where I knew Mrs. Ringold had worked as a lab assistant before their daughter was born, and around the corner was the Osborne Terrace branch library, where I used to bicycle for a weekly supply of books. The hospital, the library, and, as represented by my teacher, the school: the neighborhood's institutional nexus was all reassuringly present for me in virtually that one square block. Yes, the everyday workability of neighborhood life was in full swing on that afternoon in 1948 when I saw Mr. Ringold hanging out over the sill undoing a screen from the front window.

As I braked to descend the steep Lehigh Avenue hill, I watched him thread a rope through one of the screen's corner hooks and then, after calling down "Here she comes," lower it along the face of the two-and-a-half-story building to a man in the garden, who undid the rope and set the screen onto a pile stacked against the brick stoop. I was struck by the way Mr. Ringold performed an act that was both athletic and practical. To perform that act as gracefully as he did, you had to be very strong.

When I got to the house I saw that the man in the garden was a giant wearing glasses. It was Ira. It was the brother who had come to our high school, to "Auditorium," to portray Abe Lincoln. He'd appeared on the stage in costume and, standing all alone, delivered Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and then the Second Inaugural, concluding with what Mr. Ringold, the orator's brother, later told us was as noble and beautiful a sentence as any American president, as any American
writer,
had ever written (a long, chugging locomotive of a sentence, its tail end a string of weighty cabooses, that he then made us diagram and analyze and discuss for an entire class period): "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." For the rest of the program, Abraham Lincoln removed his stovepipe hat and debated the proslavery senator Stephen A. Douglas, whose lines (the most insidiously anti-Negro of which a group of students—we members of an extracurricular discussion group called the Contemporary Club—loudly booed) were read by Murray Ringold, who had arranged for Iron Rinn to visit the school.

As if it weren't disorienting enough to see Mr. Ringold out in public without a shirt and tie—without even an undershirt—Iron Rinn wasn't wearing any more than a prizefighter. Shorts, sneakers, that was it—all but naked, not only the biggest man I'd ever seen up close but the most famous. Iron Rinn was heard on network radio every Thursday night on
The Free and the Brave
—a popular weekly dramatization of inspiring episodes out of American history—impersonating people like Nathan Hale and Orville Wright and Wild Bill Hickok and Jack London. In real life, he was married to Eve Frame, the leading lady of the weekly repertory playhouse for "serious" drama called
The American Radio Theater.
My mother knew everything about Iron Rinn and Eve Frame through the magazines she read at the beauty parlor. She would never have bought any of these magazines—she disapproved of them, as did my father, who wished his family to be exemplary—but she read them under the dryer, and then she saw all the fashion magazines when she went off on Saturday afternoons to help her friend Mrs. Svirsky, who, with her husband, had a dress shop on Bergen Street right next door to Mrs. Unterberg's millinery shop, where my mother also occasionally helped out on Saturdays and during the pre-Easter rush.

One night after we had listened to
The American Radio Theater,
which we'd done since I could remember, my mother told us about Eve Frame's wedding to Iron Rinn and all the stage and radio personalities who were guests. Eve Frame had worn a two-piece wool suit of dusty pink, sleeves trimmed with double rings of matching fox fur, and, on her head, the sort of hat that no one in the world wore more charmingly than she did. My mother called it "a veiled come-hither hat," a style that Eve Frame had apparently made famous opposite the silent-film matinee idol Carlton Pennington in
My Darling, Come Hither,
where she played to perfection a spoiled young socialite. It was a veiled come-hither hat that she was well known for wearing when she stood before the microphone, script in hand, performing on
The American Radio Theater,
though she had also been photographed before a radio microphone in slouch-brimmed felts, in pillboxes, in Panama straw hats, and once, when she was a guest on
The Bob Hope Show,
my mother remembered, in a black straw saucer seductively veiled with gossamer silk thread. My mother told us that Eve Frame was six years older than Iron Rinn, that her hair grew an inch a month and she lightened its color for the Broadway stage, that her daughter, Sylphid, was a harpist, a Juilliard graduate, and the offspring of Eve Frame's marriage to Carlton Pennington.

"Who cares?" my father said. "Nathan does," my mother replied defensively. "Iron Rinn is Mr. Ringold's brother. Mr. Ringold is his
idol.
"

My parents had seen Eve Frame in silent movies when she was a beautiful girl. And she was still beautiful; I knew because, four years earlier, for my eleventh birthday, I had been taken to see my first Broadway play—
The Late George Apley
by John P. Marquand—and Eve Frame was in it, and afterward my father, whose memories of Eve Frame as a young silent-film actress were still apparently amorously tinged, had said, "That woman speaks the King's English like nobody's business," and my mother, who may or may not have grasped what was fueling his praise, had said, "Yes, but she's let herself go. She speaks beautifully, and she did the part beautifully, and she looked adorable in that short pageboy, but the extra pounds are not becoming on a little thing like Eve Frame, certainly not in a fitted white piqué summer dress, full skirt or no full skirt."