I Married a Communist (19 page)

Nobody laughed or even smiled. Arthur Sokolow was backed against the bookcases, quietly paging through a book he'd taken down from Ira's Lincoln collection, and the rest of the men stood smoking their cigars and sipping their whiskey and acting as though my view of America were what they'd gone out with their wives to hear that night. Only much later did I realize that the collective seriousness with which my introduction was received signified nothing more than how accustomed they were to the agitations of their overbearing host.

"Listen," said Ira, "just listen to this. Play about a Catholic family in a small town and the local bigots." Whereupon Iron Rinn launched into my lines: Iron Rinn inside the skin, inside the
voice
box,
of an ordinary, good-natured, Christian American of the kind I'd had in mind and knew absolutely nothing about.

"'I'm Bill Smith,'" Ira began, plunking down into his high-backed leather chair and throwing his legs up onto his desktop. "'I'm Bob Jones. I'm Harry Campbell. My name doesn't matter. It's not a name that bothers anyone. I'm white and Protestant, and so you don't have to worry about me. I get along with you, I don't bother you, I don't annoy you. I don't even hate you. I quietly earn my living in a nice little town. Centerville. Middletown. Okay Falls. Forget the name of the town. Could be anywhere. Let's
call
it Anywhere. Many people here in Anywhere give lip service to the fight against discrimination. They talk about the need to wreck the fences that keep minorities in social concentration camps. But too many carry on their fight in abstract terms. They think and speak of justice and decency and right, about Americanism, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. All this is fine, but it shows they are really unaware of the what and why of racial, religious, and national discrimination. Take this town, take Anywhere, take what happened here last year when a Catholic family right around the corner from me found that zealous Protestantism can be just as cruel as Torquemada was. You remember Torquemada. The hatchet man for Ferdinand and Isabella. Ran the Inquisition for the king and queen of Spain. Guy who expelled the Jews from Spain for Ferdinand and Isabella back in 1492. Yeah, you heard right, pal—1492. There was Columbus, sure, there was the
Niña,
the
Pinta,
and the
Santa Maria
—and then there was Torquemada. There's always Torquemada. Maybe there always will be ... Well, here's what happened right here in Anywhere, USA, under the Stars and Stripes, where all men are created equal, and not in 1492..."'

Ira flipped through the pages. "And it goes on like that ... and here, the ending. This is the end. The narrator again. A fifteen-year-old kid has the courage to write this, y'understand? Tell me the network that would have the courage to put it on. Tell me the sponsor who in the year 1949 would stand up to Commandant Wood and his committee, who would stand up to Commandant Hoover and his storm-trooper brutes, who would stand up to the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans and the VFW and the DAR and all our darling patriots, who wouldn't give a shit if they called him a goddamn Red bastard and threatened to boycott his precious product. Tell me who would have the courage to do that because it is the right thing to do. Nobody! Because they don't give any more of a shit about freedom of speech than the guys I was with in the army gave a shit about it. They didn't talk to me. Did I ever tell you that? I walked into the mess hall, y'understand, two hundred and some-odd men, nobody said hello, nobody said anything because of the stuff I was saying and the letters I was writing to
Stars and Stripes.
Those guys gave you the distinct impression that World War II was being fought to spite them. Contrary to what some people may think about our darling boys, they didn't have the slightest notion, didn't know what the hell they were there for, didn't give a shit about fascism, about Hitler—what did they care? Get them to understand the social problems of Negroes? Get them to understand the devious ways capitalism endeavors to weaken labor? Get them to understand why when we bomb Frankfurt the I. G. Farben plants are not touched? Maybe I am myself handicapped by my lack of education, but the picayune minds of 'our boys' make me violently sick! 'It all comes to this,'" he suddenly read from my script. '"If you want a moral, here it is: The man who swallows the guff about racial, religious, and national groups is a sap. He hurts himself, his family, his union, his community, his state, and his country. He's the stooge of Torquemada.' Written," Ira said, angrily tossing the script down on his desk, "by a fifteen-year-old kid!"

There must have been another fifty people who showed up after dinner. Despite the extraordinary stature Ira had imposed on me up in his study, I would never have had the courage to stay and mingle with everybody pressed into the living room had it not been for Sylphid's again coming to my rescue. There were actors and actresses, directors, writers, poets, there were lawyers and literary agents and theatrical producers, there was Arthur Sokolow, and there was Sylphid, who not only called all the guests by their given names but knew in caricatured detail their every flaw. She was a reckless, entertaining talker, a great hater with the talent of a chef for filleting, rolling, and roasting a hunk of meat, and I, whose aim was to be radio's bold, uncompromising teller of the truth, was in awe of how she did nothing to rationalize, let alone to hide, her amused contempt. That one is the vainest man in New York ... that one's need to be superior ... that one's insincerity ... that one hasn't the faintest idea ... that one got so drunk ... that one's talent is so minute, so infinitesimal ... that one is so embittered ... that one is so depraved ... what's most laughable about that lunatic is her grandiosity...

How delicious to belittle people—and to watch them being belittled. Especially for a boy whose every impulse at that party was to revere. Worried as I was about getting home late, I couldn't deprive myself of this first-class education in the pleasures of spite. I'd never met anyone like Sylphid: so young and yet so richly antagonistic, so worldly-wise and yet, costumed in something long and gaudy as if she were a fortuneteller, so patently oddballish. So happy-go-lucky about being repelled by
everything.
I'd had no idea how very tame and inhibited I was, how eager to please, until I saw how eager Sylphid was to antagonize, no idea how much freedom there was to enjoy once egoism unleashed itself from the restraint of social fear. There was the fascination: her formidability. I saw that Sylphid was fearless, unafraid to cultivate within herself the threat that she could be to others.

The two people she announced herself least able to endure were a couple whose Saturday morning radio show happened to be a favorite of my mother's. The program, called
Van Tassel and Grant,
emanated from the Hudson River farmhouse, up in Dutchess County, New York, of the popular novelist Katrina Van Tassel Grant and her husband, the
Journal-American
columnist and entertainment critic Bryden Grant. Katrina was an alarmingly thin sixfooter with long dark ringlets that once must have been thought alluring and a bearing that suggested that she did not lack for a sense of the influence she brought to bear on America through her novels. The little I knew about her up until that night—that dinnertime in the Grant house was reserved for discussion with her four handsome children of their obligations to society, that her friends in traditional old Staatsburg (where her ancestors, the Van Tassels, first settled, reportedly as local aristocracy, in the seventeenth century, long before the arrival of the English) had impeccable ethical and educational credentials—I had happened to overhear when my mother was tuned in to
Van Tassel and Grant.

"Impeccable" was a word much favored in Katrina's weekly monologue on her rich and varied record-breaking existence in the bustling city and the bucolic countryside. Not only were
her
sentences infested with "impeccable," but so were my mother's after an hour of listening to Katrina Van Tassel Grant—whom my mother thought "cultivated"—lauding the superiority of whoever was so fortunate as to be brought within the Grants' social purview, whether it was the man who fixed her teeth or the man who fixed her toilet. "An impeccable plumber, Bryden, impeccable," she said, while my mother, like millions of others, listened enraptured to a discussion of the drainage difficulties that afflict the households of even the most wellborn of Americans, and my father, who was solidly in Sylphid's camp, said, "Oh, turn that woman off, will you, please?"

It was Katrina Grant about whom Sylphid had muttered to me, "What's most laughable about that lunatic is her grandiosity"; it was about the husband, Bryden Grant, that she had said, "That one is the vainest man in New York."

"My mother goes to lunch with Katrina and she comes home white with rage. 'That woman is impossible. She tells me about the theater and she tells me about the latest novels and she thinks she knows everything and she knows
nothing.
' And it's true: when they go to lunch, Katrina invariably lectures Mother on the one thing Mother happens to know all about. Mother can't stand Katrina's books. She can't even read them. She bursts out laughing when she tries, and then she tells Katrina how wonderful they are. Mother has a nickname for everyone who frightens her—Katrina's is 'Loony.' 'You should have heard Loony on the O'Neill play,' she tells me. 'She outdid herself.' Then Loony calls at nine the next morning and Mother spends an hour with her on the phone. My mother goes through vehement indignation the way a spendthrift goes through a bankroll, then she turns right around and sucks up to her because of the 'Van' in her name. And because when Bryden drops Mother's name in his column, he calls her 'the Sarah Bernhardt of the Airwaves.' Poor Mother and her social ambitions. Katrina is
the
most pretentious of all the rich, pretentious river folk up in Staatsburg, and
he's
supposed to be a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. Here," she said, and in the midst of the party, with guests everywhere so closely huddled together that they looked as though they had all they could do to keep their muzzles out of one another's drinks, Sylphid turned to search the wall of bookcases behind us for a novel by Katrina Van Tassel Grant. To either side of the living room fireplace, bookcases extended from floor to ceiling, rising so high that a library ladder had to be mounted to get to the topmost shelves.

"Here," she said. "
Eloise and Abelard.
" "My mother read that," I said. "Your mother's a shameless hussy," Sylphid replied, rendering me weak in the knees until I realized she was joking. Not just my mother, but nearly half a million Americans had bought it and read it. "Here—open to a page, any page, put a finger down anywhere, and then prepare to be ravished, Nathan of Newark."

I did as she told me, and when Sylphid saw where my finger was pointing she smiled and said, "Oh, you don't have to look very far to find V.T.G. at the top of her talent." Aloud to me Sylphid read, '"His hands clasped about her waist, drawing her to him, and she felt the powerful muscles of his legs. Her head fell back. Her mouth parted to receive his kiss. One day he would suffer castration as a brutal and vengeful punishment for this passion for Eloise, but for now he was far from mutilated. The harder he grasped, the harder was the pressure on her sensitive areas. How aroused he was, this man whose genius would revamp and revitalize the traditional teaching of Christian theology. Her nipples were drawn hard and sharp, and her gut tightened as she thought, "I am kissing the greatest writer and thinker of the twelfth century!" "Your figure is magnificent," he whispered in her ear, "swelling breasts, small waist! And not even the full satin skirts of your gown can conceal from view your loveliness of hip and thigh." Best known for his solution of the problem of universals and for his original use of dialectics, he knew no less well, even now, at the height of his intellectual fame, how to melt a woman's heart.... By morning they were sated. At last it was her chance to say to the canon and master of Notre Dame, "Now teach me, please. Teach me, Pierre! Explain to me your dialectical analysis of the mystery of God and the Trinity." This he did, patiently going into the ins and outs of his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma, and then he took her as a woman for the eleventh time.'

"Eleven times," said Sylphid, hugging herself from the sheer delight of what she'd heard. "That husband of hers doesn't know what
two
is. That little fairy doesn't know what
one
is." And it was a while before she was able to stop laughing—before either of us could. "'Oh, teach me,
please,
Pierre,'" cried Sylphid, and for no reason in the world—other than her happiness—she kissed me loudly on the tip of my nose.

After Sylphid had returned
Eloise and Abelard
to the shelves and we were both more or less sober again, I felt emboldened enough to ask her a question I'd been wanting to ask all evening. One of the questions I'd been wanting to ask. Not "What was it like to grow up in Beverly Hills?"; not "What was it like to live next door to limmy Durante?"; not "What was it like having movie star parents?" Because I was afraid of her ridiculing me, I asked only what I considered to be my most serious question.

"What's it like," I said, "to play at Radio City Music Hall?"

"It's a horror. The
conductor's
a horror. 'My dear lady, I know it's
so
difficult to count to four in that bar, but if you
wouldn't
mind, that would be
so
nice.' The more polite he is, the nastier you know he's feeling. If he's really angry, he says, 'My dear
dear
lady.' The 'dear' dripping with venom. 'That's not quite right, dear, that should be done arpeggiated.' And you have your part printed
non-
arpeggiated. You can't go back, without seeming argumentative and wasting time, and say, 'Excuse me, maestro, actually it's printed the other way.' So everybody looks at you, thinking, Don't you know how it's supposed to be done, idiot—he has to tell you? He's the world's worst conductor. All he's conducting is music from the standard repertoire, and still you have to think, Has he never
heard
this piece before? Then there's the band car. At the Music Hall. You know, this platform that moves the band into view. It moves up and backward and forward and down, and every time it moves, it jerks—it's on a hydraulic lift—and you sit and hold on to your harp for dear life even as it's going out of tune. Harpists spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune. I hate all harps."