I Married a Communist (33 page)

I remembered Ira's telling me that O'Day carried a light punching bag in his gear and that in the army he was so quick and strong that, "if forced to," he could lick two or three guys together. I'd been wondering all the way down on the train if there'd be a punching bag in his room. And there was. It wasn't in a corner hanging at head height, as I'd been imagining it and as it would have been if we'd been in a gym. It was on the floor, lying on its side against a closet door, a stout tear-shaped leather bag so old and battered it looked less like leather than like the bleached-out body part of some slaughtered animal—as though to keep in fighting trim O'Day worked with the testicle off a dead hippopotamus. A notion not rational but impossible—because of my initial fear of him—to make go away.

I remembered the words that O'Day had spoken the night that he'd poured out his frustration to Ira about not being able to spend his days "building the party here in the harbor": "I ain't that good at organizing, that is true. You have to be something of a hand holder with timid Bolsheviks, and I lean more to bopping their heads." I remembered because I had gone home and entered those words into my radio play then in progress, a play about a strike in a steel plant, wherein every last drop of the argot of Johnny O'Day emerged inviolate from one Jimmy O'Shea. Once O'Day had written to Ira, "I'm getting to be the official son of a bitch of East Chicago and environs, and that means winding up in Fist City."
Fist City
became the title of my next play. I couldn't help it. I wanted to write about things that seemed important, and the things that seemed important were things I didn't know. And what with the words at my disposal then, I instantly transformed everything into agitprop anyway, thus losing within seconds whatever was important about the important and immediate about the immediate.

O'Day was broke, and the party too broke to hire him as an organizer or to help him financially in any way, and so he was filling his days writing leaflets for mill-gate distribution, using the few dollars secretly contributed by some of his old steelworker buddies to pay for the paper and to rent a mimeograph machine and a staple machine, and then, at the end of each day, himself handing out the leaflets over in Gary. The change he had left he spent on food.

"My case against Inland Steel isn't finished," he told me, going right to the point, leveling with me as though I were an equal, an ally, if not already a comrade, talking to me as though Ira had somehow caused him to think that I was twice my age, a hundred times more independent, a thousand times more courageous. "But it looks as if management and the Red-baiters in the USA-CIO have got me fired and blacklisted for good. In every walk of life, all over this country, the move is on to crush the party. They don't know that it isn't Phil Murray's CIO that decides the great historic issues. Witness China. It's the American worker who will decide the great historic issues. In my occupation there are already more than a hundred unemployed ironworkers in this local union. This is the first time since 1939 that there haven't been more jobs than men, and even the ironworkers, the most obtuse section of the whole wage-earning class, are at last beginning to question the setup. It's coming, it's coming—I assure you it's coming. Still, I got hauled before the executive board of the ironworkers' local and expelled by reason of my membership in the party. These bastards didn't want to expel me, they wanted me to repudiate my membership. The rat press, which is zeroed in on me hereabouts—here," he said, handing me a clipping from beside the typewriter, "yesterday's
Gary Post-Tribune.
The rat press would have made a big thing out of that, and although I'd have retained my working card in the ironmongers', the word would have gone out to the contractors and the gang bosses to blacklist me. It's a closed industry, so expulsion from the union means that I'm deprived of work in my trade. Well, to hell with 'em. I can fight better from the outside anyway. The rat press, the labor fakers, the phony city administrations of Gary and East Chicago regard me as dangerous? Good. They're attempting to keep me from making a living? Fine. I've got nobody dependent on me but me. And I don't depend on friends or women or jobs or any other conventional prop to existence. I get along anyway. If the
Gary Post,
" he said, taking back from me and neatly folding in two the clipping that I hadn't dared to look at while he spoke, "and the
Hammond Times
and the rest of them think that they're going to run us Reds out of Lake County with these kind of tactics, they're playing the wrong number. If they'd left me alone, I would probably have one day soon left under my own power. But now I've got no money to go anywhere and so they are going to have to continue to deal with me. At the mill gates the attitude of the workers when I hand them my leaflets is, on the whole, friendly and interested. They flash me the V, and it's moments like that when the books balance for a while. We got our share of fascist workers, of course. Monday night, the other night, while I was handing out my leaflets at the Gary Big Mill, a fat lug started calling me a traitor and a prick, and I don't know what all else he had in mind. I didn't wait to find out. I hope he likes soup and soft biscuits. Tell that to the Iron Man," he said, smiling for the first time, though in a distressing way, as if forcing a smile were among the more difficult things he had to do. "Tell him I'm still in pretty good shape. Come on, Nathan," he said, and it chagrined me to hear this unemployed steelworker utter my given name (that is, my new college obsessions, my budding superiority, my lapse from political commitment chagrined me) when I had just heard him describe, in the same quiet, even voice, with the same careful enunciation—and with an intimate familiarity that did not seem culled from books—
the great historic issues, China, 1939,
above all describe the harsh, sacrificial selflessness imposed by his mission to
the hourly paid workingman.
"Nathan" spoken in the very voice that had raised gooseflesh on my arms by saying
It's coming, it's coming—I assure you it's coming.
"Let's get something for you to eat," said O'Day.

From the beginning, the difference between O'Day's speech and Ira's was unmistakable to me. Perhaps because there was nothing contradictory in O'Day's aims, because O'Day was living the life he proselytized, because the speech was a pretext for nothing else, because it appeared to rise from the core of the brain that is
experience,
there was a tautened to-the-point quality to what he said, the thinking firmly established, the words themselves seemingly shot through with will, nothing inflated, no waste of energy, but instead, in every utterance, a wily shrewdness and, however Utopian the goal, a deep practicality, a sense that he had the mission as much in his hands as in his head; a sense, unlike that communicated by Ira, that it was intelligence and not a lack of intelligence that was availing itself of—and wielding—his ideas. The tang of what I thought of as "the real" permeated his talk. It wasn't difficult to see that the something Ira's speech was a weak imitation of was O'Day's. The tang of the real ... though also the speech of someone in whom nothing ever laughed. With the result that there was a kind of madness to his singleness of purpose, and that also distinguished him from Ira. In attracting, as Ira did, all the human contingencies that O'Day had banished from life, there was sanity, the sanity of an expansive, disorderly existence.

By the time I got back on the train that evening, the power of O'Day's unrelenting focus had so disoriented me that all I could think about was how I was to tell my parents that three and a half months was enough: I was quitting college to move down to the steel town of East Chicago, Indiana. I wasn't asking them to support me financially. I would find work to support myself, menial work, more than likely—but that was just as well, if not the whole idea. I could no longer justify continuing to accede to bourgeois expectations, theirs
or
mine, not after my visit with Johnny O'Day, who, despite all the soft-spokenness concealing the passion, came across as the most dynamic person I had ever met, more so even than Ira. The most dynamic, the most unshatterable, the most dangerous.

Dangerous because he didn't care about me the way Ira did and didn't know about me the way Ira did. Ira knew I was somebody else's kid, understood intuitively—and had been told by my father for good measure—and didn't try to take from me my freedom or take me away from where I came from. Ira never tried to indoctrinate me beyond a certain point, nor was he desperate to hold on to me, though all his life he was probably love-hungry enough and love-starved enough to be always yearning for close attachments. He just borrowed me for a while when he came to Newark, occasionally borrowed me to have somebody to talk to when he was lonely visiting Newark or by himself up at the shack, but never took me anywhere near a Communist meeting. That whole other life of his was almost entirely invisible to me. All I got was the rant and the raving and the rhetoric, the window dressing. He was not
just
unrestrained—with me there was tact in Ira. Fanatically obsessive as he was, toward me there was a great decency, a tenderness, and a consciousness of a kind of danger that he was willing to face himself but didn't wish to expose a kid to. With me there was a big-bodied good-naturedness that was the other side of the fury and the rage. Ira saw fit to educate me only to a point. I never saw the zealot whole.

But to Johnny O'Day I wasn't anybody's son he had to protect. To him I was a body to be recruited.

"Don't trifle with the Trotskyites at that university," O'Day had told me at lunch, as though Trotskyites were a problem I'd come to East Chicago to talk over with him. Huddled head to head, we ate hamburgers in the booth of a dark tavern where his credit was still good with the Polish proprietor and where a boy like me, a sucker for manly intimacy, found the situation much to his liking. The little street, not far from the mill, was all taverns except for a grocery on one corner and a church on the other and, right across the way, an open lot that was half scrap heap, half garbage dump. The wind was strong from the east and smelled of sulfur dioxide. Inside, the smell was of smoke and beer.

"I'm unorthodox enough to contend that it's all right to play with Trotskyites," O'Day said, "as long as you wash your hands afterward. There are people who handle venomous reptiles every day, going so far as to milk them of their poison in order to provide an antidote to it, and few of them are fatally bitten. Precisely because they know the reptiles
are
venomous."

"What's a Trotskyite?" I asked.

"You don't know about the fundamental divergence of Communists and Trotskyites?"

"No."

For the next few hours he told me. The story was replete with terms like "scientific socialism," "neo-fascism," "bourgeois democracy," with names unknown to me like (to begin with) Leon Trotsky, names like Eastman, Lovestone, Zinoviev, Bukharin, with events unknown to me like "the October Revolution" and "the 1937 trials," with formulations beginning "The Marxian precept that the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society..." and "Obedient to their fallacious reasoning, Trotskyites conspire to keep the aims from being achieved by..." But no matter how abstruse or complicated the story's ins and outs, coming from O'Day every word struck me as pointed and not at all remote, not a subject he was talking about to talk about it, not a subject he was talking about for me to write a term paper about it, but a struggle whose ferocity he had suffered through.

It was nearly three when he relaxed his hold on my attention. His way of having you listen was extraordinary and had much to do with a promise he silently made not to imperil you so long as you concentrated on his every word. I was exhausted, the tavern was all but empty, and yet I had the sense that everything possible was going on around me. I remembered back to that night, as a high school kid, when I'd defied my father and gone off to be Ira's guest at the Wallace rally in Newark, and once again I felt in communion with a quarrel about life that
mattered,
the glorious battle that I had been looking for since I'd turned fourteen.

"Come on," O'Day said, after glancing at his watch, "I'm going to show you the face of the future."

And there we were. There
I
was. There
it
was, the world where I had long secretly dreamed of being a man. The whistle blew, the gates opened wide, and here they came—the workers! Corwin's far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free. The little guy! The common man! The Poles! The Swedes! The Irish! The Croatians! The Italians! The Slovenes! The men who jeopardized their lives making steel, risked being burned or crushed or blown apart, and all for the profit of the ruling class.

I was so excited I couldn't see faces, I couldn't really see bodies. I saw only the crude mass of them heading through the gates for home. The mass of the American masses! Brushing by me, knocking into me—the face, the
force
of the future! The impulse to cry out—in sadness, anger, protest, triumph—was overwhelming, as was the urge to join that mob not quite a menace and not quite a mob, to join the chain, the rush of men in their thick-soled boots, and follow them all home. The noise of them was like the noise of a crowd in an arena before a fight. And the fight? The fight for American equality.

From a pouch slung over his hip, O'Day took a wad of leaflets and thrust them at me. And there, within sight of the mill, this smoking basilica that must have been a mile long, the two of us stood side by side giving a leaflet to any man coming off the seven-to-three shift who stuck out a hand to take one. Their fingers touched mine and my whole life was turned inside out. Everything in America that was against these men was against me too! I took the leafleteer's vow: I would be nothing but the instrument of their will. I would be nothing but rectitude.

Oh yes, you feel the pull with a man like O'Day. Johnny O'Day doesn't take you fifty percent of the way and leave you alone. He takes you all the way. The revolution is going to wipe out this and replace it with that—the un-ironic clarity of the political Casanova. When you're seventeen years old and you meet a guy who has an aggressive stance and who has it all figured out idealistically and all figured out ideologically and who has no family and no relatives and no house—who is without all that stuff that was pulling Ira in twenty different directions, without all those
emotions
pulling Ira in twenty directions, without all that upheaval a man like Ira takes on because of his nature, without the turbulence of wanting to make a revolution that will change the world while also mating with a beautiful actress and acquiring a young mistress and fiddling with an aging whore and longing for a family and struggling with a stepchild and inhabiting an imposing house in the show-business city and a proletarian shack in the backwoods, determined to assert unflaggingly one being in secret and another in public and a third in the interstices between the two, to be Abraham Lincoln and Iron Rinn and Ira Ringold all rolled up into a frenzied, overexcitable group self—who instead is claimed by nothing but his idea, who is responsible to nothing but the idea, who understands almost mathematically what he needs to live an honorable life, then you think as I did,
Here is where I belong!