I Married a Communist (20 page)

"Do you really?" I said, laughing away, in part because she was being funny and in part because, imitating the conductor, she'd been laughing too.

"They're impossibly difficult to play. They break down all the time. You
breathe
on a harp," she said, "and it's out of tune. Trying to have a harp in perfect condition makes me
crazy.
Moving it around—it's like moving an aircraft carrier."

"Then why do you play the harp?"

"Because the conductor's right—I
am
stupid. Oboists are smart. Fiddle players are smart. But not harpists. Harpists are dummies, moronic dummies. How smart can you be to pick an instrument that's going to ruin and run your life the way the harp does? There's no way, had I not been seven years old and too stupid to know better, that I would have begun playing the harp, let alone be playing it still. I don't even have conscious memories of life before harp."

"Why did you start so young?"

"Most little girls who start the harp start the harp because Mommy thinks it's such a
lovely
thing for them to do. It looks so pretty and all the music is so damned sweet, and it's played politely in small rooms for polite people who aren't the least bit interested. The column painted in gold leaf—you need sunglasses to look at it. Really refined. It sits there and reminds you of itself all the time. And it's so monstrously big, you can never put it away.
Where
are you going to put it? It's always there, sitting there and mocking you. You can never get away from it. Like my mother."

A young woman still in her coat and carrying a small black case in her hand appeared suddenly beside Sylphid, apologizing in an English accent for arriving late. With her were a stout, dark-haired young man—elegantly turned out and, as though corseted in all his privilege, holding his youthful chubbiness militarily erect—and a virginally sensuous young woman, ripish-looking, just verging on fullness, with a cascade of curling reddish gold hair to offset her fair complexion. Eve Frame rushed up to meet all the newcomers. She embraced the girl carrying the small black case, whose name was Pamela, and was then introduced by Pamela to the glamorous couple, affianced and soon to be married, who were Rosalind Halladay and Ramón Noguera.

Within only minutes Sylphid was in the library, the harp against her knees and cradled on her shoulder while she tuned it, Pamela was out of her coat and was alongside Sylphid fingering the keys of her flute, and, seated beside the two of them, Rosalind tuned a stringed instrument that I assumed was a violin but that I shortly discovered was something slightly larger called a viola. Gradually everybody in the living room turned toward the library, where Eve Frame stood waiting for silence, Eve Frame wearing an outfit I later described to my mother as well as I could and that my mother then told me was a white pleated chiffon gown and capelet with an emerald green chiffon sash. When I described her hairdo as I remembered it, my mother told me it was called a feather cut, with long curls all around and a smooth crown. Even while Eve Frame patiently waited, a faint smile intensifying her loveliness (and her fascination to me), a joyful excitement was evidently mounting within her. When she spoke, when she said, "Something beautiful is about to happen," all her elegant reserve seemed on the brink of being swept away.

It was quite a performance, particularly to an adolescent who in half an hour was going to have to get back on the number 107 Newark bus and return to a household whose intensities no longer left him anything other than frustrated. Eve Frame came and went in less than a minute, but in just the grand way she strode down the step and back into the living room in her white pleated chiffon gown and capelet, she gave the whole evening a new meaning: the adventure for which life is lived was about to unfold.

I don't want to make it seem as though Eve Frame appeared to be playing a role. Far from it: this was her
freedom
being revealed, Eve Frame unimpeded, rapturously unintimidated, in a state of serene exaltation. If anything, it was as if
we
had been assigned by
her
nothing less than the role of our lives—the role of privileged souls whose fondest dream had been made to come true. Reality had fallen victim to artistic wizardry; some store of hidden magic had purified the evening of its mundane social function, purged that glittering half-drunk assemblage of all vile instincts and low-down schemes. And this illusion had been created out of practically nothing: a few perfectly enunciated syllables from the edge of the library step, and all the nonsensical self-seeking of a Manhattan soirée dissolved into a romantic endeavor to flee into aesthetic bliss.

"Sylphid Pennington and the young London flutist Pamela Solomon will play two duets for flute and harp. The first is by Fauré and is called 'Berceuse.' The second is by Franz Doppler, his 'Casilda Fantasie.' The third and final selection will be the lively second movement, the Interlude, from the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp by Debussy. The violist is Rosalind Halladay, who is visiting New York from London. Rosalind is a native of Cornwall, England, and a graduate of London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In London, Rosalind Halladay now plays with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House."

The flutist was a mournful-looking girl, long-faced, dark-eyed, and slender, and the more I looked at her and the more enamored I became of her—and the more I looked at Rosalind and the more enamored I became of
her
—the more trenchantly I saw how deficient my friend Sylphid was in anything designed to promote a man's desire. With her square trunk and stout legs and that odd excess of flesh that thickened her a bit like a bison across the upper back, Sylphid looked to me, while playing the harp—and even despite the classical elegance of her hands moving along the strings—like a wrestler wrestling the harp, one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers. Because this was a thought that I was ashamed to be having, it only gathered substance the longer the performance continued.

I couldn't make head or tail of the music. Like Ira, I was deaf to the sound of anything other than the familiar (in my case, to what I heard Saturday mornings on
Make-Believe Ballroom
and Saturday nights on
Your Hit Parade),
but the sight of Sylphid gravely under the spell of the music she was disentangling from those strings and, too, the
passion
of her playing, a concentrated passion that you could see in her eyes—a passion liberated from everything in her that was sardonic and negative—made me wonder what powers might have been hers if, in addition to her musicianship, her face were as alluringly angular as her delicate mother's.

Not until decades later, after Murray Ringold's visit, did I understand that the only way Sylphid could begin to feel at ease in her skin was by hating her mother and playing the harp. Hating her mother's infuriating weakness and producing ethereally enchanting sounds, making with Faure and Doppler and Debussy all the amorous contact the world would allow.

When I looked at Eve Frame, in the front rank of the spectators, I saw that she was looking at Sylphid with a gaze so needy that you would think that in Sylphid was the genesis of Eve Frame rather than the other way around.

Then everything that had stopped was starting up again. There was the applause, the bravos, the bows, and Sylphid, Pamela, and Rosalind came down from the stage that the library had become and Eve Frame was there to embrace each of them in turn. I was close enough to hear her say to Pamela, "You know what you looked like, my darling? A Hebrew princess!" And to Rosalind, "And you were lovely, absolutely lovely!" And finally to her daughter, "Sylphid, Sylphid," she said, "Sylphid Juliet, never, never have you played more beautifully! Never, darling! The Doppler was especially lovely."

"The Doppler, Mother, is salon garbage," Sylphid said.

"Oh, I love you!" cried Eve. "Your mother loves you so!"

Others started coming up to congratulate the trio of musicians, and the next I knew, Sylphid slipped an arm around my waist and was good-naturedly introducing me to Pamela, to Rosalind, and to Rosalind's fiancé. "This is Nathan of Newark," Sylphid said. "Nathan is a political protégé of the Beast's." Since she said it with a smile, I smiled too, trying to believe that the epithet was harmlessly meant, no more than a family joke about Ira's height.

I looked all around the room for Ira and saw that he wasn't there, but rather than asking to be excused to go and find him, I allowed myself to remain appropriated within Sylphid's grip—and engulfed by the sophistication of her friends. I had never seen anyone as young as Ramón Noguera so well dressed or so smoothly decorous and urbane. As for the dark Pamela and the fair Rosalind, each seemed so pretty to me that I couldn't look openly at either of them for more than a split second at a time, though simultaneously I was unable to forgo the opportunity to stand casually within only inches of their flesh.

Rosalind and Ramón were to be married in three weeks at the Nogueras' estate just outside Havana. The Nogueras were tobacco growers, Ramón's father having inherited from Ramón's grandfather thousands of farm acres in a region called the Partido, land that would be inherited by Ramón, and in time by the children of Ramón and Rosalind. Ramón was formidably silent—grave with his sense of self-destiny, diligently resolved to act out the position of authority bestowed upon him by the cigar smokers of the world, while Rosalind—who only a few years back had been a poor London music student from a remote corner of rural England but who was now as close to the end of all her fears as she was to the beginning of all that spending—grew more and more vivacious. And loquacious. She told us about Ramón's grandfather, the most renowned and revered of the Nogueras, for some thirty years a provincial governor as well as a vast landowner until he entered the cabinet of President Mendiata (whose chief of staff, I happened to know, was the infamous Fulgencio Batista); she told us about the beauty of the tobacco plantations where, under cloth, they grew the wrapper leaf for the Cuban cigars; and then she told us about the grand Spanish-style wedding that the Nogueras had planned for them. Pamela, a childhood friend, was being flown from New York to Havana, at the expense of the Noguera family, and would be put up at a guesthouse on the estate; and if Sylphid could find the time, said the overbrimming Rosalind, she was welcome to come along with Pamela.

Rosalind spoke with eager innocence, with a joyful blend of pride and accomplishment, about the enormous wealth of the Nogueras while I kept thinking, But what about the Cuban peasants who are the tobacco workers—who flies
them
back and forth from New York to Havana for a family wedding? In what sort of "guesthouses" do
they
live on the beautiful tobacco plantations? What about disease and malnutrition and ignorance among your tobacco workers, Miss Halladay? Instead of obscenely squandering all that money on your Spanish-style wedding, why not begin to compensate the Cuban masses whose land your fiancé's family illegitimately holds?

But I was as close-mouthed as Ramón Noguera, though, internally, nowhere near as emotionally composed as he looked to be, unflinchingly staring straight ahead as if reviewing the troops. Everything Rosalind said appalled me, and yet I could not be socially incorrect enough to tell her so. Nor could I summon up the strength to confront Ramón Noguera with the Progressive Party's assessment of his riches and their source. Nor could I move voluntarily away from Rosalind's English radiance, a young woman both physically lovely and musically gifted who seemed not to understand that by abandoning her ideals for Ramón's allurements—or, if not her ideals, by abandoning mine—by marrying into Cuba's oligarchical, landholding upper class, she was not only fatally compromising the values of an artist but, in my political estimation, trivializing herself with someone far less worthy of her talent—and her reddish gold hair and eminently caressable skin—than, for instance, me.

As it turned out, Ramón had reserved a table at the Stork Club for Pamela, Rosalind, and himself, and when he asked Sylphid to join them, he also, with a certain vacant aplomb, a kind of upper-class analogue to courtesy, turned to extend an invitation to me. "Please, sir," he said, "come as my guest."

"I can't, no—" I said, but then, without explaining—as I knew that I should, that I had to, that I must ... as I knew
Ira
would—"I don't approve of you or your kind!" but adding instead, "Thanks. Thanks just the same," I turned and, as though I were escaping the plague rather than a marvelous opportunity for a budding writer to see Sherman Billingsley's famous Stork Club and the table where Walter Winchell sat, I rushed away from the temptations being dangled by the first plutocrat I had ever laid eyes on.

Alone I went up to a second-floor guest bedroom, where I was able to find my coat at the bottom of the dozens piled on the twin beds, and there I ran into Arthur Sokolow, who was said by Ira to have read my play. I'd been too shy to say anything to him up in Ira's study after Ira's brief reading, and, occupying himself with browsing through that Lincoln book, he hadn't appeared to have anything to say to me. Several times during the party, however, I'd overheard something he was aggressively telling someone in the living room. "That got me so goddamn mad," I heard him say. "I sat down in a white heat and wrote the piece overnight"; I heard him say, "The possibilities were unlimited. There was an atmosphere of freedom, of willingness to establish new frontiers"; then I heard him laugh and say, "Well, they fed me against the ranking number-one program in radio...," and the impact on me was as though I had encountered the indispensable truth.

I got my strongest picture ever of what I wanted my life to be like when, by deliberately roaming within earshot of him, I listened to Sokolow describing to a couple of women a play he was planning to write for Ira, a one-man show based not on the speeches but on the entire life of Abraham Lincoln, from his birth to his death. "The First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural—that's not the story. That's the rhetoric. I want Ira up there telling the
story.
Telling how goddamn
difficult
it was: no schooling, the stupid father, the terrific stepmother, the law partners, running against Douglas, losing, that hysterical shopper his wife, the brutal loss of the son-—the death of Willie—the condemnation from every side, the daily political assault from the moment the man took office. The savagery of the war, the incompetence of the generals, the Emancipation Proclamation, the victory, the Union preserved and the Negro freed—
then
the assassination that changed this country forever. Wonderful stuff there for an actor. Three hours. No intermission. Leave them speechless in their seats. Leave them grieving for what America might be like today, for the Negro
and
the white man, if he'd served his second term and overseen Reconstruction. I've thought a lot about that man. Killed by an actor. Who else?" He laughed. "Who else would be so vain and so stupid as to kill Abraham Lincoln? Can Ira do three hours up there alone? The oratorical stuff—that we know he can do. Otherwise, together we'll work on it, and he'll get it: a mightily harassed leader full of wit and cunning and intellectual power, a huge creature alternately high-spirited and savagely depressed, and," said Sokolow, laughing again, "not yet apprised of the fact that he is 'Lincoln' of the Memorial."