I Married a Communist (25 page)

"If ever Ira knew it was hopeless, it was that night. He couldn't have seen any more purely how impossible it was. Easier to make America go Communist, easier to bring about the proletarian revolution in New York, on Wall Street, than separate a woman and her daughter who didn't want to be separated. Yes, he should have just separated
himself.
But he didn't. Why? Finally, Nathan, I have no answer. Ask why anybody makes any tragic mistake. No answer."

"Throughout these months, Ira was becoming more and more isolated in the house. On the nights when he wasn't at a union executive meeting or wasn't at the meeting of his party unit, or they weren't out for the evening together, Eve would be in the living room doing her needlepoint and listening to Sylphid plucking away and Ira'd be upstairs writing to O'Day. And when the harp went silent and he went downstairs to find Eve, she wouldn't be there. She'd be up in Sylphid's room, listening to the record player. The two of them in bed, under the covers, listening to
Cost Fan Tutte.
When he'd go up to the top floor and hear the Mozart blaring and see them together in bed, Ira felt as though
he
were the child. An hour or so later Eve would return, still warm from Sylphid's bed, to get in bed with him, and that was more or less the end of conjugal bliss.

"When the explosion comes, Eve is astonished. Sylphid must get an apartment of her own. He says, 'Pamela lives three thousand miles from her family. Sylphid can live three blocks from hers.' But all Eve does is cry. This is unfair. This is horrible. He is trying to drive her daughter out of her life. No, around the corner, he says—she is twenty-four years old, and it's time she stopped going to bed with Mommy. 'She is my daughter! How dare you! I love my daughter! How dare you!' 'Okay,' he says, 'I'll live around the corner,' and the next morning he finds a floor-through apartment over on Washington Square North, just four blocks away. Puts down a deposit, signs a lease, pays the first month's rent, and comes home and tells her what he's done. 'You're leaving me! You're divorcing me!' No, he says, just going to live around the corner. Now you can lie in bed with her
all
night long. Though if, for variety, you should ever want to lie in bed with me all night long, he says, put on your coat and your hat and come around the corner and I will be delighted to see you. As for dinner, he tells her, who will even notice that I am not there? lust you wait. There is going to be a considerable improvement in Sylphid's outlook on life. 'Why are you
doing
this to me? To make me choose between my daughter and you, to make a mother choose—it's inhuman!' It takes hours more to explain that he is asking her to entertain a solution that would obviate the
need
for a choice, but it's doubtful that Eve ever understood what he was talking about. Comprehension was not the bedrock on which her decisions were based—desperation was. Capitulation was.

"The next night, Eve went up as usual to Sylphid's room, but this time to present her with the proposal she and Ira had agreed to, the proposal that was going to bring peace to their lives. Eve had gone with him that day to look at the apartment he'd leased on Washington Square North. There were French doors and high ceilings and ornamental moldings and parquet floors. There was a fireplace with a carved mantel. Below the rear bedroom was a walled-in garden much like the one on West Eleventh Street. It wasn't Lehigh Avenue, Nathan. Washington Square North, in those days, was as beautiful a street as there was in Manhattan. Eve said, 'It's lovely.' 'It's for Sylphid,' Ira said. He would keep the lease in his name, pay the rent, and Eve, who always made money but was always terrified about money, always losing it to some Freedman or other, Eve wouldn't have to worry about a thing. 'This is the solution,' he said, 'and is it so terrible?' She sat down in the sunlight in one of those front parlor window seats. There was a veil on her hat, one of those veils with the dots on it that she made popular in some film, and she lifted it away from her delectable little face and she began to sob. Their struggle was over.
Her
struggle was over. She jumped to her feet, she hugged him, she kissed him, she began to run from room to room, figuring out where to put the lovely old pieces of furniture that she was going to move from West Eleventh Street for Sylphid. She couldn't have been happier. She was seventeen again. Magical. Enchanting. She was the come-hither girl in the silent films.

"That night she gathered her courage and went upstairs bearing the drawing she'd made, the floor plan of the new apartment, and a list of the pieces from the house that would have gone to Sylphid anyway and so were hers to have forever right now. It took no time at all, of course, for Sylphid to register her objection and for Ira to be racing up the stairs to Sylphid's room. He found them in bed together. But no Mozart this time. Bedlam this time. What he saw was Eve on her back screaming and crying, and Sylphid in her pajamas sitting astride her, also screaming, also crying, her strong harpist's hands pinning Eve's shoulders to the bed. There were bits of paper all over the place—the floor plan for the new apartment—and there, on top of his wife, sat Sylphid, screaming, 'Can't you stand up to
anyone?
Won't you once stand up for your own daughter against him? Won't you be a mother,
ever? Ever?
'"

"What did Ira do?" I asked.

"What do you think Ira did? Out of the house, roaming the streets, up to Harlem, back down to the Village, walking for miles, and then, in the middle of the night, he headed for Pamela's on Carmine Street. He tried never to see her there if he could help it, but he rang her doorbell and zoomed up the five flights and told her it was over with Eve. He wanted her to come with him to Zinc Town. He wanted to marry her. He had wanted to marry her all along, he told her, and to have a child with her. You can imagine the impact that made.

"She lived in her one bohemian room—closets without doors, the mattress on the floor, the Modigliani prints, the chianti bottle with the candle, and sheet music all over the place. A tiny walk-up forty feet square and there is that giraffe of a man storming around her, overturning the music stand, knocking over all her 78s, kicking at the bathtub, which is in the kitchen, and telling this well-brought-up English kid with her new Greenwich Village ideology who thought that what they were doing was going to be consequence-free—a big, passionate consequence-free adventure with a famous older man—that she was the mother-to-be of his unborn heirs and the woman of his life.

"Overpowering Ira, the outsized, knocking over, crazy, giraffelike Ira, the driven man, with his all or nothing, says to her, 'Pack your clothes, you're coming with me,' and so he learns, sooner than he might have otherwise, that Pamela had been wanting to end things for months. 'End?
Why?
She couldn't stand the strain anymore. 'Strain?
What
strain?' And so she told him: every time she was with him in Jersey, he wouldn't stop holding her and fondling her and making her sick with anxiety by telling her a thousand times how much he loved her; then he'd sleep with her and she'd come back to New York and go over to see Sylphid, and all Sylphid could talk about was the man she had nicknamed the Beast; Ira and her mother she linked together as Beauty and the Beast. And Pamela had to agree with her, had to laugh about him; she too had to make jokes about the Beast. How could he be so blind to the toll this was taking on her? She couldn't run away with him and she couldn't marry him. She had a job, she had a career, she was a musician who loved her music—and she could never see him again. If he didn't leave her alone ... And so Ira left her. He got in the car and he drove to the shack, and that's where I went to see him the next day after school.

"He talked, I listened. He didn't let on to me about Pamela; he didn't because he damn well knew my thoughts on adultery. I'd already told him more times than he liked to hear, 'The excitement in marriage
is
the fidelity. If that idea doesn't excite you, you have no business being married.' No, he didn't tell me about Pamela—he told me about Sylphid sitting on Eve. All night, Nathan. At dawn I drove back to school, shaved in the faculty bathroom, met my homeroom class; in the afternoon, after my last class, I got in the car and drove back up again. I didn't want him out there alone at night because I didn't know what he might do next. It wasn't only his home life that he was confronting head-on. That was just a part of it. The political stuff was encroaching—the accusations, the firings, the permanent blacklisting.
That's
what was undermining him. The domestic crisis wasn't yet
the
crisis. Sure, he was at risk on both sides and eventually they'd merge, but for the time being he was able to keep them separate.

"The American Legion already had Ira in their sights for 'pro-Communist sympathies.' His name had been in some Catholic magazine, on some list, as somebody with 'Communistic associations.' His whole show was under suspicion. And there was friction with the party. That was heating up. Stalin and the Jews. The Soviet anti-Semitism was beginning to penetrate the consciousness of even the party blockheads. The rumors were starting to circulate among the Jewish party members, and Ira didn't like what he was hearing. He wanted to know more. About the claims to purity of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, even Ira Ringold wanted to know more. The sense of betrayal by the party was faintly setting in, though the full moral shock wouldn't come until Khrushchev's revelations. Then everything collapsed for Ira and his pals, the justification for all their effort and all their suffering. Six years later, the heart of their adult biographies went right down the drain. Still, as early as 1950, Ira was causing problems for himself by wanting to know more. Though that stuff he'd never talk about with me. He didn't want me implicated, and he didn't want to hear me sounding off. He knew that if we tangled on the Communist issue, we'd wind up like a lot of other families, not talking again for the rest of our lives.

"We'd already had a lulu of an argument, back in '46, when he was first out in Calumet City rooming with O'Day. I went to visit him and it was not pleasant. Because Ira, when he argued about the things that mattered to him most, would never be finished with you. Especially in those early days after the war, Ira, in a political argument, was extremely disinclined to lose. Not least with me. Uneducated little brother educating the educated big one. He'd be staring straight at me, his finger jabbing straight at me, obstreperous, forcing the issue, overriding everything I said with 'Don't insult my intelligence,' 'That is a goddamn contradiction in terms,' 'I'm not going to stand here and take that shit.' The energy for the fight was astonishing. 'I don't give a damn if nobody knows it except me!' 'If you had any knowledge of what this world is all about...!' He could be particularly incendiary putting me in my place as an English teacher. 'What I hate with a passion is please define what the hell you are saying!' There was nothing that was small for Ira in those days. Everything he thought about, because he thought about it, was
big.

"My first night visiting him out where he lived with O'Day, he told me that the teachers' union should push for the development of 'the people's culture.' That should be its official policy. Why? I knew why. Because it was the official policy of the party. You've got to elevate the cultural understanding of the poor foe on the street, and instead of classical, old-time, traditional education, you've got to emphasize those things that contribute to a people's culture. The party line, and I thought it was unrealistic in every way. But the
willfulness
in that guy. I was no pushover, I knew how to convince people that I meant business too. But Ira's antagonism was inexhaustible. Ira wouldn't quit. When I got back from Chicago, I didn't hear from him for nearly a year.

"I'll tell you what else was closing in on him. Those muscle pains. That disease he had. They told him it was one thing and then another thing and they never figured out what the hell it was. Polymyositis. Polymyalgia rheumatica. Every doctor gave it another name. That's about all they gave him, aside from Sloan's Liniment and Ben-Gay. His clothes started stinking of every kind of goo they sold for aches and pains. One doctor that I took him to myself, across the street at the Beth Israel, a physician friend of Doris's, listened to his case history, drew blood, examined him thoroughly, and described him to us as hyperinflammatory. The guy had an elaborate theory and he drew us pictures—a failure of inhibition in the cascade that leads to inflammation. He described Ira's joints as quick to develop inflammatory reactions that rapidly escalate. Quick to inflame, slow to extinguish.

"After Ira died, some doctor suggested to me—made a persuasive case to me—that Ira suffered from the disease that they believe Lincoln had. Dressed up in the clothes and got the disease. Marfan's. Marfan's syndrome. Excessive tallness. Big hands and feet. Long, thin extremities. And lots of joint and muscle pain. Marfan's patients frequently kick off the way Ira did. The aorta explodes and they're gone. Anyway, whatever Ira had went undiagnosed, at least in terms of finding a treatment, and by '49, '50, those pains were beginning to be more or less intractable, and he was feeling under political pressure from both ends of the spectrum—from the network and from the party—and the guy had me worried.

"In the First Ward, Nathan, we were not just the only Jewish family on Factory Street. More than likely we were the only family that wasn't Italian between the Lackawanna tracks and the Belleville line. These First Warders came from the mountains, little guys mostly, with big shoulders and huge heads, from the mountains east of Naples, and when they got to Newark somebody put a shovel in their hands and they began to dig and they dug for the rest of their lives. They dug ditches. When Ira quit school, he dug ditches with them. One of those Italians tried to kill him with a shovel. My brother had a big mouth and he had to fight to live in that neighborhood. He had to fight to survive on his own from the time that he was seven years old.