I Married a Communist (34 page)

Which was probably what Ira had thought on encountering O'Day in Iran. O'Day had viscerally influenced him the same way. Takes you and ties you to the world revolution. Only Ira had wound up with all that other inadvertent, undesigned, unpremeditated stuff, bouncing all those other balls with the same enormous effort to prevail—while all that O'Day had, was, and wanted was nothing other than
the real thing.
Because he wasn't a Jew? Because he was a goy? Because, as Ira had told me, O'Day had been raised in a Catholic orphanage? Was that why he could be so thoroughly, so ruthlessly, so visibly living nothing but the bare, bare bones?

There was none of the softness in him that I knew was inside me. Did he see my softness? I would not let him. My life with its softness squeezed out, here in East Chicago with Johnny O'Day! Down here at the mill gate at seven
A.M
. and three
P.M
. and eleven
P.M
. distributing leaflets after each shift. He will teach me how to write them, what to say and how best to say it so as to move the workingman to action and make of America an equitable society. He will teach me everything. I am someone moving out of the comfortable prison of his human irrelevance and, here at the side of Johnny O'Day, entering the hypercharged medium that is history. A menial job, an impoverished existence, yes, but here at the side of Johnny O'Day, not a meaningless
life.
To the contrary, everything of significance, everything profound and important!

From such emotions you would not imagine that I could ever find my way back. But by midnight I still hadn't phoned my family to tell them my decision. O'Day had given me two thin pamphlets to read on the train to Chicago. One was called
Theory and Practice of the Communist Party,
the first course in a "Marxist Study Series" prepared by the National Education Department of the Communist Party, in which the nature of capitalism, of capitalist exploitation, and of the class struggle were devastatingly exposed in just under fifty pages. O'Day promised that the next time we met, we would discuss what I'd read and he would give me the second course, which "developed on a higher theoretical level," he told me, "the subjects of the first course."

The other pamphlet I took back on the train that day,
Who Owns America?
by James S. Allen, argued—predicted—that "capitalism, even in its most powerful embodiment in America, threatens to reproduce disaster on an ever widening scale." The cover was a cartoon, in blue and white, of a porky-looking fat man in top hat and tails, seated arrogantly atop a swollen moneybag labeled "Profits," his own bloated belly adorned with a dollar sign. Smoking away in the background—and representing the property expropriated unjustly by the rich ruling class from the "principal victims of capitalism," the struggling workers—were the factories of America.

I had read both pamphlets on the train; in my dormitory room I read through them again, hoping to find in their pages the strength to phone home with my news. The final pages of
Who Owns America? were
entitled "Become a Communist!" These I read aloud, as though addressing me were Johnny O'Day himself: "Yes, together we will win our strikes. We will build our unions, we will gather together to fight at every step and stage the forces of reaction, of fascism, of war-making. Together we will seek to build up a great independent political movement that will contest the national election with the parties of the trusts. Not for one moment will we give rest to the usurpers, to the oligarchy which is bringing ruin to the nation. Let no one question your patriotism, your loyalty to the nation. Join the Communist Party. As a Communist, you will be able to fulfill, in the deepest sense of the word, your responsibility as an American."

I thought, Why isn't this reachable? Do it the way you got on that bus and went downtown and attended that Wallace rally. Is your life yours or is it theirs? Have you the courage of your convictions or haven't you? Is this America the kind of America you want to live in or do you intend to go out and revolutionize it? Or are you, like every other "idealistic" college student you know, another selfish, privileged, self-involved hypocrite? What are you afraid of—the hardship, the opprobrium, the danger, or O'Day himself? What are you afraid of if
not
your softness? Don't look to your parents to get you out of this. Don't call home and ask permission to join the Communist Party. Pack your clothes and your books and get back down there and do it! If you don't, is there really any distinction to be made between your capacity for daring to change and Lloyd Brown's, between your audacity and the audacity of Brownie, the grocer's assistant who wants to inherit Tommy Minarek's seat out at the rock dump in Zinc Town? How much does Nathan's failure to renounce his family's expectations and battle his way to genuine freedom differ from Brownie's failure to oppose
his
family's expectations and battle
his
way to freedom? He stays in Zinc Town selling minerals, I stay in college studying Aristotle—and I end up being Brownie with a degree.

At one in the morning I crossed the Midway from my dormitory through a snowstorm—my first Chicago blizzard blowing in—to International House. The Burmese student on desk duty recognized me, and when he unlocked the security door and I said, "Mr. Glucksman," he nodded and, despite the hour, let me through. I went up to Leo's floor and knocked on the door. You could smell curry in the hallway hours after one of the foreign students had cooked up dinner for himself on the hot plate in his room. I was thinking, Some Indian kid comes all the way from Bombay to study in Chicago, and you're afraid to live in Indiana. Stand up and fight against injustice! Turn around, go—the opportunity is yours! Remember the mill gate!

But because I had been pitched so high for so many hours—for so many adolescent
years,
been overcome with all these new ideals and visions of truth—when Leo, in his pajamas, opened his door, I burst into tears and, by doing so, misled him badly. Out of me poured all that I hadn't dared show to Johnny O'Day. The softness, the boyness, all the unworthy un-O'Dayness that was me. Everything nonessential that was me. Why isn't this reachable? I lacked what I suppose Ira also lacked: a heart without dichotomies, a heart like the enviably narrow O'Day's, unequivocal, ready to renounce everyone and everything except the revolution.

"Oh, Nathan," Leo said tenderly. "My dear friend." It was the first time he had called me anything other than "Mr. Zuckerman." He sat me down at his desk and, standing over me just inches away, watched while, still weeping, I undid the buttons of a mackinaw already wet and heavy with snow. Maybe he thought that I was preparing to undo everything. Instead, I began to tell him about the man I had met. I told him that I wanted to move down to East Chicago and to work with O'Day. I had to, for the sake of my conscience. But could I do it without telling my parents? I asked Leo if that was honorable.

"You shit! You whore! Go! Get out of here! You two-faced little cocktease whore!" he said, and shoved me from the room and slammed the door.

I didn't understand. I didn't really understand Beethoven, I was continuing to have trouble with Kierkegaard, and what Leo was shouting and why he was shouting it was also incomprehensible to me. All I'd done was to tell him I was contemplating living alongside a forty-eight-year-old Communist steelworker who, as I described him, looked a little like an aging Montgomery Clift—and Leo, in turn, throws me out.

Not just the Indian student across the hall but nearly all the Indian students and Oriental students and African students on the corridor came out of their rooms to see what the commotion was. Most of them, at this hour, were in their underwear, and what they were looking at was a boy who had only just discovered that heroism was not as easy to come by at seventeen as was a seventeen-year-old's talent for being drawn to heroism and to the moral aspect of just about everything. What they thought they saw was something else altogether. What they thought they saw I myself still couldn't figure out until, at my next humanities class, I realized that Leo Glucksman would henceforth mark me down not merely as nobody superior, let alone nobody destined to be a great man, but as the most callow, culturally backward, comical philistine ever, scandalously, to have been admitted to the University of Chicago. And nothing I said in class or wrote for class during the remainder of the year, none of my lengthy letters explaining myself and apologizing and pointing out that I
hadn't
left the college to join up with O'Day would ever disabuse him.

***

I sold magazines door to door in Jersey that next summer—not quite the same as distributing handbills at an Indiana steel mill at dawn, dusk, and in the dark of night. Though I was on the phone with Ira a couple of times and we made a plan for me to come out to see him at the shack in August, to my relief he had to cancel at the last minute and then I was back at school. Some weeks later, in the final days of October 1951, I heard that he and Artie Sokolow, as well as the director, the composer, the program's two other leading actors, and the famous announcer Michael J. Michaels, had been fired from
The Free and the Brave.
My father gave me the news on the phone. I didn't regularly see a newspaper, and the news, he told me, had appeared the day before in both Newark papers, as well as in every one of the New York dailies. "Redhot Iron" they had called him in the headline of the
New York Journal-American,
where Bryden Grant was a columnist. The story had broken in "Grant's Grapevine."

I could tell from my father's voice that what he was most worried about was me—about the implications of my having been befriended by Ira—and so indignantly I said to him, "Because they call him a Communist, because they lie and call
everybody
a Communist—" "They can lie and call you one too," he said, "yes." "Let them! Just let them!" But no matter how much I shouted at my liberal chiropodist father as though he were the radio executive who had fired Ira and his cohorts, no matter how loudly I claimed that the accusations were as inapplicable to Ira as they would be to me, I knew from having spent just that one afternoon with Johnny O'Day how mistaken I could be. Ira had served over two years with O'Day in Iran. O'Day had been his best friend. When I knew him, he was still getting long letters from O'Day and writing back to him. Then there was Goldstine and all he'd said in his kitchen. Don't let him fill you full of Communist ideas, kid. The Communists get a dummy like Ira and they use him. Get out of my house, you dumb Communist prick...

I had willfully refused to put all this together. This and the record album and more.

"Remember that afternoon in my office, Nathan, when he came over from New York? I asked him and you asked him, and what did he tell us?"

"The truth! He told the truth!"

"'Are you a Communist, Mr. Ringold?' I asked him. 'Are you a Communist, Mr. Ringold?' you asked him." With something shocking in his voice I had never heard before, my father cried, "If he lied, if that man lied to my son ...!"

What I'd heard in his voice was a willingness to kill.

"How can you be in business with somebody who lies to you about something that fundamental?
How?
It wasn't a child's lie," my father said. "It was an adult lie. It was a motivated lie. It was an
unmitigated
lie."

On he went, while I was thinking, Why did Ira bother, why didn't he tell me the truth? I would have gone up to Zinc Town anyway, or tried to. But then, he didn't just he to me. That wasn't the point. He lied to everyone. If you lie about it to everyone, automatically and all the time, you're doing it deliberately to change your relationship to the truth. Because nobody can improvise it. You tell the truth to this person, you tell the lie to the other person—it won't work. So the lying is part of what happens when he put on that uniform. It was in the nature of his commitment to lie. Telling the truth, particularly to me, never occurred to him; it would have not only put our friendship at risk but put me at risk. There were lots of reasons why he lied, but none that I could explain to my father, even if I had understood them all at the time.

After speaking with my father (and my mother, who said, "I begged Dad not to call you, not to upset you"), I tried to telephone Ira at West Eleventh Street. The phone was busy all evening, and when I dialed again the next morning and got through, Wondrous—the black woman whom Eve used to summon to the dinner table with the little bell that Ira loathed—said to me, "He don't live here no more," and hung up. Because Ira's brother was still very much "my teacher," I restrained myself from phoning Murray Ringold, but I did write to Ira, to Newark, to Lehigh Avenue, in care of Mr. Ringold, and again to the box address up in Zinc Town. I got no answer. I read the clippings my father sent me about him from the papers, crying aloud, "Lies! Lies! Filthy lies!" but then I remembered Johnny O'Day and Erwin Goldstine and I didn't know what to think.

Less than six months later there appeared in America's bookstores—rushed into publication—
I Married a Communist
by Eve Frame, as told to Bryden Grant. The jacket, front and back, was a replica of the American flag. On the front of the jacket the flag was ripped raggedly open, and within the oval tear was a recent black-and-white photograph of Ira and Eve: Eve looking softly lovely in one of her little hats, with the dotted veil she'd made famous, wearing a fur jacket, and carrying a circular purse—Eve smiling brightly at the camera as she walked arm in arm down West Eleventh Street with her husband. But Ira didn't look at all happy; from beneath his fedora, he stared through his heavy glasses into the camera with a grave and troubled expression. Very nearly at the bull's-eye center of that book jacket proclaiming "
I Married a Communist,
by Eve Frame, as told to Bryden Grant," Ira's head was circled boldly in red.

In the book, Eve claimed that Iron Rinn, "alias Ira Ringold," was "a Communist madman" who had "assaulted and browbeaten" her with his Communist ideas, lecturing her and Sylphid every night at dinner, shouting at them and doing his best to "brainwash" both of them and make them work for the Communist cause. "I don't believe I've ever seen anything so heroic in my life as my young daughter, who loved nothing so much as to sit quietly all day playing her harp, arguing strenuously in defense of American democracy against this Communist madman and his Stalinist, totalitarian lies. I don't believe I've ever seen anything so cruel in my life as this Communist madman using every tactic out of the Soviet concentration camp to bring this brave child to her knees."