I Married a Communist (43 page)

"See, someone commits a crime like murder, I figure the Dostoyevskian reality is going to kick in. A book man, an English teacher, I expect him to manifest the psychological damage that Dostoyevsky writes about. How can you commit an act of murder and not be anguished by it? That makes you a monster, doesn't it? Raskolnikov doesn't kill the old lady and then feel okay about it for the next twenty years. A cold-blooded killer with a mind like Raskolnikov's reflects all his life on his cold-bloodedness. But Ira was not very self-reflective, ever. Ira is an action machine. However that crime contorted Raskolnikov's behavior ... well, Ira paid the toll in a different way. The penance he paid—how he tried to resurrect his life, his bending backward to stand up straight—was not at all the same.

"Look, I didn't believe he could live with it, and I never believed
I
could live with it. Live with a brother who had gone and committed a murder like that? You would have thought I would either have disowned him or forced him to confess. The idea that I could live with a brother who had murdered somebody and just sit on it, that I could think that I had discharged my obligation to humanity ... Murder is too big for that. But that is what I did, Nathan. I sat on it.

"But despite my silence, twenty-odd years later, the root at the root of everything was about to be exposed anyway. America was going to see the cold-blooded killer that Ira really was underneath Abraham Lincoln's hat. America was going to find out that he was no fucking good.

"And Boiardo was going to get
his
revenge. Boiardo, by about then, had left Newark for a palazzo stronghold in the lersey suburbs, but that didn't mean that the Strollos' grievance against Ira Ringold had been forgotten by the Boot's lieutenants holding down the First Ward fort. I was always afraid a goon from the pool hall was going to catch up with Ira, that the Mob would send somebody to do him in, especially after he became Iron Rinn. You know that night he took us all to the Tavern for dinner, and he introduced us to Eve, and Sam Teiger took our picture and hung it up in the foyer there? Did I not like that! What could be worse? How drunk on metamorphosis could he get, the heroic reinvention of himself he called Iron Rinn? Back virtually at the scene of the crime, and he allows his mug to go up on the wall? Maybe
he's
forgotten who he was and what he's done, but Boiardo's going to remember and gun him down.

"But a book did the job instead. In a country where a book hadn't changed a goddamn thing since the publication of
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
A banal show-biz tell-all book, written in hackese by two opportunists exploiting an easy mark named Eve Frame. Ira shakes off Ritchie Boiardo but he couldn't elude the Van Tassel Grants. It's not a goon dispatched by the Boot who does the job on Ira—it's a gossip columnist.

"In all my years with Doris I had never told her about Ira. But the morning I came back from Zinc Town with his gun and his knives I was tempted to. It was about five in the morning when he turned everything over to me. I drove directly to school that morning with that stuff under the front seat of my car. I couldn't teach that day—I couldn't think. I couldn't sleep that night. That was when I nearly told Doris. I'd taken away his gun and his knives, but I knew that wasn't the end of it. Somehow or other, he was going to kill her.

"'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.' Line of prose. Recognize it? From the last act of
Twelfth Night.
Feste the clown, to Malvolio, just before Feste sings that lovely song, before he sings, 'A great while ago the world begun, / With hey ho, the wind and the rain,' and the play is over. I couldn't get that line out of my head. 'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.' Those cryptogrammic g's, the subtlety of their deintensification—those hard
g's
in 'whirligig' followed by the nasalized
g
of 'brings' followed by the soft
g
of 'revenges.' Those terminal
S
's...'thus brings his revenges.' The hissing surprise of the plural noun 'revenges.' Guhh. Juhh. Zuhh. Consonants sticking into me like needles. And the pulsating vowels, the rising tide of their pitch—engulfed by that. The low-pitched vowels giving way to the high-pitched vowels. The bass and tenor vowels giving way to the alto vowels. The assertive lengthening of the vowel
i
just before the rhythm shifts from iambic to trochaic and the prose pounds round the turn for the stretch. Short
i,
short
i,
long
i.
Short
i,
short
i,
short
i,
boom! Revenges. Brings in his revenges.
His
revenges. Sibilated. Hizzzzzuh! Driving back to Newark with Ira's weapons in my car, those ten words, the phonetic webbing, the blanket omniscience ... I felt I was being asphyxiated inside Shakespeare.

"I went out again that next afternoon, drove up again after school. 'Ira,' I said, 'I couldn't sleep last night, and I couldn't teach the kids all day, because I know that you will not quit until you have brought down on yourself a horror that goes far beyond being blacklisted. Someday the blacklisting is going to end. This country may even make amends to people who were handled like you, but if you go to jail for murder ... Ira, what are you thinking now?'

"Again it took me half the night to find out, and when finally he told me I said, 'I'm calling the doctors at the hospital, Ira. I'm getting a court order. This time I'm getting you committed for good. I'm going to see that you are confined in a hospital for the mentally ill for the rest of your life.'

"He was going to garotte her.
And
the daughter. He was going to garotte the two of them with the strings off the harp. He had the wire cutter. He meant it. He was going to cut the strings and tie them around their necks and strangle the two of them to death.

"That next morning I came back to Newark with the
wire cutter.
But it was hopeless, I knew that. I went home after school and I told Doris what had happened, and that's when I told her about the murder. I told her, 'I should have let them put him away. I should have turned him over to the police and let the law do what the law does.' I told her that when I left him in the morning, I said, 'Ira, she's got that daughter to live with. There's her punishment, terrible punishment, and it's punishment she brought upon herself.' And Ira laughed. 'Sure, it's terrible punishment,' he said, 'but not terrible enough.'

"In all the years that I had been dealing with my brother, that was the first time I collapsed. Told Doris everything and collapsed. I meant what I said to her. Out of a twisted sense of loyalty, I'd done the wrong thing. I saw my kid brother covered with blood, and I got him in the car and I was twenty-two years old and I did the wrong thing. And now, because the whirligig of time brings in his revenges, Ira was going to kill Eve Frame. The only thing left to do was to go to Eve and tell her to get out of town and take Sylphid with her. But I couldn't. I couldn't go to her and that daughter of hers and say, 'My brother's on the warpath, you better go into hiding.'

"I was defeated. I'd spent a lifetime teaching myself to be reasonable in the face of the unreasonable, teaching what I liked to call vigilant matter-of-factness, teaching myself and teaching my students and teaching my daughter and trying to teach my brother. And I'd failed. Un-Iraing Ira was impossible. Being reasonable in the face of the unreasonable was impossible. I'd already proved this in 1929. Here it was 1952, and I was forty-five years old and it was as though the intervening years had been for nothing. There was my kid brother with all of his power and all of his rage bent once again on murder, and once again I was going to be accessory to the crime. After everything—everything he'd done, everything we'd
all
done—he was going to cross the line again."

"When I told this to Doris, she got in the car and drove up to Zinc Town. Doris took over. She had that kind of authority. When she got back, she said, 'He's not going to murder anybody. Don't think,' she said, 'that I didn't
want
him to murder her. But he's not going to do it.' 'What is he going to do instead?' 'We negotiated a settlement. He's going to call in his chits.' 'What does that mean?' 'He's going to call on some friends.' 'What are you talking about? You don't mean gangsters.' 'I mean journalists. His journalist friends.
They're
going to destroy her. You let Ira alone. I'm in charge of Ira.'

"Why did he listen to Doris and not to me? How did she convince him? Who the hell knows why? Doris had a way with him. Doris had her own kind of savvy, and I turned him over to her."

"Who were the journalists?" I asked.

"Fellow-traveling journalists," Murray said. "There were plenty. Guys who admired him, the culturally authentic man of the people. Ira carried great weight with these people because of his working-class credentials. Because of his battles in the union. They'd been at the house often, for those soirées."

"And they did it?"

"They tore Eve to pieces. They did it, all right. They showed how her whole book was made up. That Ira was never a Communist. That he had nothing to do with Communists. That the Communist plot to infiltrate broadcasting was a bizarre concoction of lies. Which did not shake the confidence of Joe McCarthy or Richard Nixon or Bryden Grant, but it could and would destroy Eve in the New York entertainment world. That was an ultraliberal world. Think of the situation. Every journalist is coming to her, taking down every word she says in their notebooks and writing it up in all the papers. Big spy ring in New York radio. The ringleader her husband. The American Legion takes her up, asks her to address them. An organization called Christian Crusade takes her up, an anti-Communist religious group. They reprint chapters from the book in their monthly magazine. There's a story celebrating her in the
Saturday Evening Post.
The
Reader's Digest
abridges a section of the book, it's the stuff they love, and this, along with the
Post,
puts Ira in every doctor's and dentist's waiting room in America. Everybody wants her to talk to them. Everybody wants to talk to her, but then time passes and there are no more journalists and nobody any longer is buying the book and little by little nobody wants to talk to her.

"In the beginning nobody questions her. They don't question the stature of a well-known actress who looks so delicate and who comes on the scene with this shit in order to sell it.
L'affaire
Frame did not bring out the best thinking in people. The party ordered him to marry her? That was his Communist sacrifice? They took even
that
without questioning it. Anything to empty life of its incongruities, of its meaningless, messy contingencies, and to impose on it instead the simplification that coheres—and misapprehends everything. The party ordered him to do it. Everything is a plot of the party. As if Ira lacked the talent to make that mistake all on his own. As if Ira needed the Comintern to help plan a bad marriage.

"Communist, Communist, Communist, and nobody in America had the least idea of what the hell a Communist was. What do they do, what do they say, what do they look like? When they're together, do they talk Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Esperanto? Do they build bombs? Nobody knew, which is why it was so easy to exploit the menace the way Eve's book did. But then Ira's journalists went to work and the pieces begin to appear, in the
Nation,
the
Reporter,
the
New Republic,
tearing her to bits. The public machine she set in motion doesn't always go in the direction one wants. It takes its own direction. The public machine she wanted to destroy Ira begins to turn against her. It has to. This is America. The moment you start this public machine, no other end is possible except a catastrophe for everybody.

"Probably what unhinged her, what weakened her most, occurred at the outset of Ira's counteroffensive, before she even had a chance to figure out what was happening or for somebody else to take her in hand and tell her what not to do in a battle like this one. Bryden Grant got hold of the
Nation
attack, the first attack, when it was still in proof. Why should Grant care what they wrote in the
Nation
any more than he cared what they wrote in
Pravda
? What else would you expect them to write in the
Nation
? But his secretary sent the proof over to Eve, and Eve evidently phoned her lawyer and told him she wanted a judge to serve an injunction on the
Nation
to prevent them from printing the piece: everything in it was malicious and false, lies designed to destroy her name and her career and her reputation. But an injunction was prior restraint, and legally a judge couldn't do that.
After
the thing appeared she could sue for libel, but that wasn't good enough, that would be too late, she would already be ruined, so she went straight to the office of the
Nation
and demanded to see the writer. That was L. J. Podell. The
Nation's
muckraking hatchet man, Jake Podell. People were frightened of him, and they had reason to be. Podell was still to be preferred to Ira with a shovel in his hands, though not by much.

"She went into Podell's office and there followed the Big Scene, the Academy Award-winning scene. Eve said to Podell the piece was full of lies, it was all vicious lies, and you know what the most vicious lie turned out to be? In that entire piece? Podell identified her as a closet Jew. He wrote that he'd been out to Brooklyn and uncovered the true story. He said that she was Chava Fromkin, born in Brownsville, in Brooklyn, in 1907, grew up on the corner of Hopkinson and Sutter, and that her father was a poor immigrant housepainter, an uneducated Polish Jew who painted houses. He said that nobody in her family had spoken English, not her father, not her mother, not even an older brother and sister. Both of them had been born years before Eve, in the old country. Except for Chava, they all spoke Yiddish.

"Podell even dug up the first husband, Mueller, the bartender's kid from Jersey, the ex-sailor she'd run off with at sixteen. He's still out in California, living on disability, a retired cop with a bad heart, a wife, and two kids, a good old boy with nothing but good things to say about Chava. The beautiful girl she was. The
gutsy
girl she was. A little hellion, believe it or not. How she eloped with him, Mueller said, not because she could possibly love the big idiot that he was back then, but because, as he'd known all along, he was her ticket out of Brooklyn. Knowing this and feeling for her, Mueller never stood in her way, he told Podell, never came back to haunt her for money, even after she made it big. Podell's even got some old snapshots, snapshots that Mueller (for an undisclosed sum) kindly turned over to him. He shows them to her: Chava and Mueller on a wild beach at Malibu, the Pacific big and booming behind them—two handsome, healthy, exhilarated youngsters, robust in their twenties swimsuits, ready and eager to take the big plunge. Snapshots that wound up reprinted in
Confidential
magazine.