I Married a Communist (38 page)

"Why?"

"I'm the only person still living who knows Ira's story, you're the only person still living who cares about it. That's why: because everyone else is dead." Laughing, he said, "My last task. To file Ira's story with Nathan Zuckerman."

"I don't know what I can do with it," I said.

"That's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to tell it to you. You and Ira meant a lot to each other."

"Then go ahead. How did it end?"

"Pamela," he said. "Pamela Solomon. Pamela panicked. When she learned from Sylphid that Eve had broken into Ira's desk. She thought what people seem generally to think when they first get wind of someone else's catastrophe: how does this affect me? So-and-So in my office has a brain tumor? That means I have to take inventory alone. So-and-So from next door went down on that plane? He died in that crash? No. It can't be. He was coming over on Saturday to fix our garbage disposal.

"There was a photograph that Ira had taken of Pamela at the shack. A photograph of her in her bathing suit, by the pond. Pamela was afraid (mistakenly) that the picture was in the desk, along with all the Communist stuff, and that Eve had seen it, or that, if it wasn't there, Ira was going to go to Eve and show it to her, stick it in her face and say, 'Look!' Then what would happen? Eve would be furious and call her a hussy and throw her out of the house. And what would
Sylphid
think of Pamela? What would Sylphid
do?
And what if Pamela was deported? That was the worst possibility of all. Pamela was a foreigner in America—what if her name got dragged into Ira's Communist mess, and it wound up in the papers and she was deported? What if Eve made
sure
she was deported, for trying to steal her husband? Goodbye, bohemia. Back to all that suffocating English propriety.

"Pamela wasn't necessarily wrong in her appraisal of the danger to her of Ira's Communist mess and of the mood of the country. The atmosphere of accusation, threat, and punishment was everywhere. To a foreigner particularly, it looked like a democratic pogrom full of terror. There was enough danger around to justify Pamela's fear. In that political climate, those were reasonable fears. And so, in response to her fears, Pamela brought to bear upon the predicament all her considerable intelligence and commonsense realism. Ira was right to have spotted her for a quick-witted and lucid young woman who knew her mind and did what she wanted.

"Pamela went to Eve and told her that one summer day two years back she'd run into Ira in the Village. He was in the station wagon, on his way to the country, and he told her Eve was already there and asked why she didn't hop in and come out to spend the day. It was so hot and awful that she didn't bother to think things through. 'Okay,' she said, 'I'll go get my bathing suit,' and he waited for her and they drove out to Zinc Town, and when they arrived she discovered that Eve
wasn't
there. She tried to be agreeable and to believe whatever excuse he made and even got into her suit and went for a swim with him. That's when he took the photograph and tried to seduce her. She burst into tears, fought him off, told him what she thought of him and what he was doing to Eve, and then she got the next train back to New York. Because she didn't want to make trouble for herself, she had kept his sexual advances secret. Her fear was that if she didn't, everybody would blame her and think she was a slut just for having got into the car with him. People would call her all kinds of names for letting him take that picture. Nobody would even listen to her side of the story. He would have crushed her with every conceivable lie had she dared expose his treachery by telling the truth. But now that she understood the
scope
of his treachery, she couldn't, in good conscience, remain silent.

"What happens next is that one afternoon, after my last class, I get to my office and there's my brother waiting for me. He's in the corridor, he's signing his autograph for a couple of teachers who've spotted him, and I unlock my door and he comes into the office, and he throws on my desk an envelope with 'Ira' written on it. The return address is the
Daily Worker.
Inside is a second envelope, this one's addressed to 'Iron Rinn.' In Eve's handwriting. It's her blue vellum stationery. The office manager at the
Worker
was a friend of Ira's, and he'd driven all the way out to Zinc Town to deliver it to him.

"It seems that the day after Pamela went to Eve with her story, Eve does the strongest thing she can think of, for the time being the strongest punch she can throw. She gets all dressed up in her lynx jacket and a million-dollar black velvet dream of a dress with white lace trim and her best open-toed black shoes, and she puts on one of her stylish black veiled felt hats, and marches over, not to '21' for lunch with Katrina, but to the
Daily Worker
office. The
Worker
was down on University Place, only a few blocks from West Eleventh Street. Eve takes the elevator to the fifth floor and demands to see the editor. She's led into his office, where she removes the letter from her lynx muff and places it on his desk. 'For the martyred hero of the Bolshevik revolution,' she says, 'for the people's artist and mankind's last best hope,' and turns and walks out. Racked and timorous as she was in the face of any opposition, she could also be impressively imperious when she was tanked up with righteous resentment and having one of her delusionary grande-dame days. She was capable of these transformations—and she didn't go in for half measures, either. At whichever end of the emotional rainbow, the excesses could be persuasive.

"The office manager was given the letter, and he got in his car and he carried it out to Ira. Ira had been living alone in Zinc Town since he'd been fired. Every week he'd drive to New York to confer with lawyers—he was going to sue the network, sue the sponsor, sue
Red Channels.
In the city he'd stop by and visit Artie Sokolow, who'd had his first heart attack and was confined to bed at home on the Upper West Side. Then he'd come to Newark to see us. But by and large Ira was out at the shack, infuriated, brooding, devastated, obsessed, making dinner for his neighbor who'd been in the mining accident, Ray Svecz, eating with him and sounding off about his case to this guy who was fifty-one percent not there.

"It was later on the day that Eve's letter was delivered to him that Ira shows up at my office, and I read it. It's in my file with the rest of Ira's papers; I can't do it justice by paraphrasing it. Three pages long. Scorchingly written. Obviously zipped off in one draft and perfect. Real bite to it, a ferocious document, and yet very competently done. Under the pressure of her rage, and on monogrammed blue note paper, Eve was quite the neo-classicist. I wouldn't have been surprised had that lambasting of him concluded in a fanfare of heroic couplets.

"Remember Hamlet cursing out Claudius? The passage in the second act, just after the player-king gives his speech about Priam's slaughter? It's in the middle of the monologue that begins 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!' 'Bloody, bawdy villain!' Hamlet says. 'Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! / O! Vengeance!' Well, the gist of Eve's letter is more or less along those lines: You know what Pamela means to me, I confided one night to you, and to you alone, all that Pamela means to me. 'An inferiority complex.' That's what Eve described as Pamela's problem. A girl with an inferiority complex, far from home and country and family, Eve's ward, Eve's responsibility to look after and protect, and yet, just as he uglified everything he had ever laid his hands on, he cunningly undertook to turn a girl of Pamela Solomon's background into a striptease artist like Miss Donna jones. To lure Pamela out to that isolated hellhole under false pretenses, to salivate like a pervert over her picture in her bathing suit, to fasten those gorilla paws of his on her defenseless body—for the sheer pleasure of it, to turn Pamela into a common whore, and to humiliate Sylphid and herself in the most sadistic way he could contrive.

"But this time, she told him, you went too far. I remember your telling me, she said, how, at the feet of the great O'Day, you had marveled at Machiavelli's
The Prince.
Now I understand what you learned from
The Prince.
I understand why my friends have been trying for years to convince me that in every last thing you say or do, you are, to the letter, a ruthless, depraved Machiavellian who cares not at all for right or wrong but worships only success. You try to force to have sex with you this lovely, talented young woman struggling with an inferiority complex. Why didn't you try having sex with me as a means, perhaps, of expressing love? When we met, you were living alone on the Lower East Side in the squalid arms of your beloved lumpenproletariat. I gave you a beautiful house full of books and music and art. I provided you with a handsome study of your own and helped you to build up your library. I introduced you to the most interesting, intelligent, talented people in Manhattan, offered you entrée into a social world such as you'd never dreamed of for yourself. As best I could, I tried to give you a family. Yes, I have a demanding daughter. I have a troubled daughter. I know that. Well, life is full of demands. For a responsible adult, life
is
demands ... On and on in that vein, uphill all the way, philosophical, mature, sensible, wholeheartedly rational—until she ended with the threat:

"Since you may recall that your paragon brother wouldn't allow me to talk to you or to write to you when you were hiding in his house, I went through your comrades to reach you. The Communist Party would appear to have more access to you—-and your heart, such as it is—than anyone. You
are
Machiavelli, the quintessential artist of control. Well, my dear Machiavelli, since you don't seem to have understood yet the consequences of anything you have ever done to another human being in order to have your way, it may be time you were taught.

"Nathan, remember the chair in my office, beside my desk—the hot seat? Where you kids sat and sweated while I used to go over your compositions? That's where Ira sat while I went over that letter. I asked, 'Is it true you made a pass at this girl?' 'For six months I had an affair with this girl.' 'You fucked her.' 'Many times, Murray. I thought she was in love with me. I'm astonished that she could do this.' 'Are you now?' 'I was in love with her. I wanted to marry her and have a family with her.' 'Oh, it gets better. You don't think, do you, Ira? You act. You act, and that's it. You shout, you fuck, you act. For six months you fucked her daughter's best friend. Her surrogate daughter. Her
ward.
And now something happened and you're "astonished."' 'I loved her.' 'Speak English. You loved fucking her.' 'You don't understand. She'd come to the shack. I was
mad
for her. I
am
astonished. I am absolutely astonished by what she has done!' 'By what
she
has done.' 'She betrays me to my wife—and then she lies in the process!' 'Yes? So? Where's the astonishing part? You've got a problem here. You've got a big problem with that wife.' 'Do I? What's she going to do? She did it already, with her pals the Grants. I'm fired already. I'm out on my ass. She's making it into a sexual thing, you see, and it wasn't that. Pamela knows that isn't what it was.' 'Well, that's what it is now. You're caught, and your wife is promising
new
consequences. What will those be, do you think?' 'Nothing. There's nothing left. This stupidity,' he said, waving the letter at me, 'a letter hand-delivered by her to the
Worker. This
is the consequence. Listen to me. I never did a thing Pamela didn't want. And when she didn't want me anymore, it killed me. I dreamed of a girl like this all my life. It
killed
me. But I did it. I walked down those stairs and out into the street and I left her alone. I never bothered her again.' 'Well,' I said, 'be that as it may, honorable as you were in gentlemanly taking your leave of six months of fancy fucking with your wife's surrogate daughter, you're in a bit of hot water now, my friend.' 'No, it's
Pamela
who's in hot water!' 'Yes? You going to
act
again? You going to act once
again
without thinking? No. I'm not going to let you.'

"And I didn't let him, and he didn't do anything. Now, how much impetus writing this letter gave Eve to rush into the book is hard to say. But if Eve was in search of a motive to really go all out and do the big irrational thing that she'd been born to do, the stuff she got from Pamela couldn't have hurt. You would think that having married a cipher like Mueller, followed by a homosexual like Pennington, followed by a sharpie like Freedman, followed by a Communist like Ira, she'd have fulfilled whatever obligation she had to the forces of unreason. You would think she might have worked off the worst of 'How-could-you-do-this-to-me?' just by going over to the
Worker
in her lynx jacket with the matching muff. But no, it was Eve's destiny always to take her irrationality to greater and greater heights—and this is where the Grants come in again.

"It was the Grants who wrote that book. It was
double
ghostwritten. It was Bryden's name they used on the jacket—'as told to Bryden Grant'—because that was almost as good as having Winchell's name on the jacket, but it's the talent of the pair of them that shines through. What did Eve Frame know about Communism? There were Communists at the Wallace rallies she'd gone to with Ira. There were Communists on
The Free and the Brave,
people who came to their house and had dinner and were at all the soirées. This little unit of people involved with the show was very interested in controlling as much of it as possible. There was the secrecy, the conspiratorial edge—hiring like-minded people, influencing the ideological bias of the script however they could. Ira would sit in his study with Artie Sokolow and try to force into the script every corny party cliché, every so-called progressive sentiment they could get away with, manipulating the script to stick whatever ideological junk they thought of as Communist content into any historical context whatsoever. They imagined they were going to influence public thinking.
The writer must not only observe and describe but participate in the struggle. The non-Marxist writer betrays the objective reality; the Marxist one contributes to its transformation. The party's gift to the writer is the only right and true worldview.
They believed all that. Crapola. Propaganda. But crapola is not forbidden by the Constitution. And the radio in those days was full of it.
Gangbusters. Your FBI.
Kate Smith singing 'God Bless America.' Even your hero Corwin—propagandist for an idealized American democracy. In the end it wasn't so different. They weren't espionage agents, Ira Ringold and Arthur Sokolow. They were publicity agents. There is a distinction. These guys were cheap propagandists, against which the only laws are aesthetic, laws of literary taste.