I Married a Communist (37 page)

"When the police come, Helgi's still at it, still going strong—out on West Eleventh Street, telling the world. 'Does the wife give him the blow jobs? No. The Peasant gives him the blow jobs.'

"They take her down to the precinct station, book her—drunk and disorderly conduct, trespassing—and Eve is back in the smoke-filled living room and she's hysterical and she doesn't know what to do next, and then she sees that two of her enamel boxes are missing. She has a beautiful collection of tiny enamel boxes on a side table. Two of them are gone and she calls the police station. 'Check her,' she says, 'there are things missing.' They look in Helgi's handbag. Sure enough, there they are, the two boxes and also Eve Frame's monogrammed silver lighter. It turned out that she'd stolen one from our house too. We never knew where it had gone and I went around saying, 'Where the hell is that lighter?' and then when Helgi wound up at the precinct station, I figured it out.

"I was the one who bailed her out. The phone call she made from the station after they booked her was to our house, to Ira, but I was the one who went there and got her. I drove her up to the Bronx, and on the drive I got the drunken tirade about the rich bitch not pushing her around anymore. Back home, I told Ira the whole story. I told him he'd been waiting all his life for the class war to break out, and guess where it happened? In his living room. He'd explained to Helgi how Marx had urged the proletariat to wrest the wealth from the bourgeoisie, and that was exactly what she'd set out to do.

"The first thing Eve does, after calling the cops about the theft, is to call Katrina. Katrina speeds over from their townhouse, and before the day is out, everything inside Ira's desk finds its way into Katrina's hands and from her hands into Bryden's hands and from there into his column and from there onto the front page of every New York newspaper. In her book Eve would claim that she was the one who broke into the mahogany desk up in Ira's study and found his letters from O'Day and his diary books where he'd recorded the names and serial numbers, the names and home addresses of every Marxist whom he had met in the service. She was much celebrated for this in the patriotic press. But that break-in, I believe, was Eve boasting, performing again, pretending to be the patriots' heroine—Eve boasting and maybe simultaneously protecting the integrity of Katrina Van Tassel Grant, who would not have hesitated to break into anything in order to preserve American democracy but whose husband was then planning his first campaign for the House of Representatives.

"There in 'Grant's Grapevine,' in Ira's writing, are Ira's subversive thoughts, recorded in a secret diary while he was purportedly serving overseas as a loyal sergeant in the U.S. Army. 'The papers and censor and such have distorted the news of Poland, thus creating a wedge between us and Russia. Russia was and is willing to compromise but it has not been presented so by our papers. Churchill directly advocates a total reactionary Poland.' 'Russia requests independence for all colonial peoples. The rest just emphasize self-government plus trusteeships.' 'British cabinet dissolves. Good. Now Churchill's policy of anti-Russia and of status quo may never materialize.'

"That's it. There it is. Dynamite that so terrifies the sponsor and the network that by the end of the week 'Redhot Iron' is finished and so is
The Free and the Brave.
So are some thirty others whose names are down in Ira's diaries. In time, so am I.

"Now, since long before Ira's troubles began my union activities had made me public enemy number one to our superintendent of schools, maybe the school board would have found a way to get me labeled a Communist and fired without the help of Eve's heroism. It was only a matter of time, with or without her assistance, until Ira and his radio program would have gone under, and so maybe nothing that happened to any of us required that she first give that stuff to Katrina. Still, it's instructive to think about what exactly Eve did in falling prey to the Grants and delivering Ira whole to his worst enemies."

Once more, we were together in eighth-period English, with Mr. Ringold perched at the edge of his desk, wearing the tan glen-plaid suit that he'd bought on Broad Street with his army separation pay—at the American Shop's sale for returning GIs—and that, throughout my high school years, he alternated with his other American Shop suit, a gray double-breasted sharkskin. In one hand he would be hefting the blackboard eraser that he wouldn't hesitate to hurl at the head of a student whose answer to a question did not meet his minimum daily requirement for mental alertness, while with the other hand he would regularly cut the air, enumerating dramatically each of the points to be remembered for the test.

"It demonstrates," he told me, "that when you decide to contribute your personal problem to an ideology's agenda, everything that is personal is squeezed out and discarded and all that remains is what is useful to the ideology. In this case, a woman contributes her husband and their marital difficulties to the cause of zealous anti-Communism. Essentially what Eve contributes is an incompatibility that she herself couldn't resolve from day one between Sylphid and Ira. A standard difficulty between stepchild and stepparent, even if somewhat intensified in the Eve Frame household. Everything that Ira was with Eve otherwise—good husband, bad husband, kind man, harsh man, understanding man, stupid man, faithful man, unfaithful man—everything that constitutes marital effort and marital error, everything that is a consequence of marriage's having nothing in common with a dream—is squeezed out, and what is left is what the ideology can make use of.

"Afterward the wife, if she is so inclined (and maybe Eve was and maybe she wasn't), can protest, 'No, no, it wasn't like that. You don't understand. He wasn't only what you are saying he was. He wasn't, with me, at all what you are saying he was. With me he could also be this, he could also be that.' Afterward an informer like Eve may realize that it's not only what she said that's responsible for the bizarre distortion of him that she reads in the press; it's also all that she left out—that she deliberately left out. But by then it's too late. By then the ideology has no time for her because it no longer has a
use
for her. 'This? That?' replies the ideology. 'What do we care about This and That? What do we care about the daughter? She is just more of that flabby mass that is life. Get her out of our way. All we need from you is what advances the righteous cause. Another Communist dragon to be slain! Another example of their treachery!'

"As for Pamela's panicking—"

But it was after eleven, and I reminded Murray, whose course at the college had finished earlier that day—and whose evening's narration seemed to me to have reached its pedagogical crescendo—that he was due to take the bus down to New York the following morning and that perhaps it was time for me to drive him back to the Athena dormitory.

"I could listen and listen," I told him, "but maybe you should get some sleep. In the history of storytelling stamina, you've already taken the title from Scheherazade. We've been sitting out here for six nights."

"I'm fine," he said.

"You're not getting tired? Cold?"

"It's beautiful out here. No, I'm not cold. It's warm, it's lovely. The crickets are counting, the frogs are grunting, the fireflies are inspired, and I haven't had occasion to go on like this since I was running the teachers' union. Look. The moon. It's orange. The perfect setting for peeling back the skin of the years."

"That it is," I said. "You have a choice up on this mountain: either you can lose contact with history, as I sometimes choose to, or mentally you can do what you're doing—by the light of the moon, for hours on end, work to regain possession of it."

"All those antagonisms," Murray said, "and then the torrent of betrayal. Every soul its own betrayal factory. For whatever reason: survival, excitement, advancement, idealism. For the sake of the damage that can be done, the pain that can be inflicted. For the cruelty in it. For the
pleasure
in it. The pleasure of manifesting one's latent power. The pleasure of dominating others, of destroying people who are your enemies. You're surprising them. Isn't that the pleasure of betrayal? The pleasure of tricking somebody. It's a way to pay people back for a feeling of inferiority they arouse in you, of being put down by them, a feeling of frustration in your relationship with them. Their very existence may be humiliating to you, either because you aren't what they are or because they aren't what you are. And so you give them their comeuppance.

"Of course there are those who betray because they have no choice. I read a book by a Russian scientist who, in the Stalin years, betrayed his best friend to the secret police. He was under heavy interrogation, terrible physical torture for six months—at which point he said, 'Look, I cannot resist any longer, so please tell me what you want. Whatever you give me I will sign.'

"He signed whatever they wanted him to sign. He was himself sentenced to life in prison. Without parole. After fourteen years, in the sixties, when things changed, he was released and he wrote this book. He says that he betrayed his best friend for two reasons: because he was not able to resist the torture and because he knew that it didn't matter, that the result of the trial was already established. What he said or didn't say would make no difference. If he didn't say it, another tortured person would. He knew his friend, whom he loved to the end, would despise him, but under brutal torture a normal human being cannot resist. Heroism is a human exception. A person who lives a normal life, which is made up of twenty thousand little compromises every day, is untrained to suddenly not compromise at all, let alone to withstand torture.

"For some people it takes six months of torture to make them weak. And some start off with an advantage: they are already weak. They are people who know only how to give in. With a person like that, you just say, 'Do it,' and they do it. It happens so rapidly they do not even know it is a betrayal. Because they do what they are asked to do, it seems okay. And by the time it sinks in, it's too late: they have betrayed.

"There was an article in the paper not long ago about a man in East Germany who informed on his wife for twenty years. They found documents about him in the files of the East German secret police after the Berlin Wall came down. The wife had a professional position and the police wanted to follow her and the husband was the informer. She didn't know anything about it. She's found out only since they've opened the files. For twenty years it went on. They had kids, they had in-laws, they threw parties, they paid bills, they had operations, they made love, they didn't make love, they went to the seashore in the summertime and bathed in the sea, and all this time he was informing. He was a lawyer. Smart, very well read, even wrote poetry. They gave him a code name, he signed an agreement, and he had weekly meetings with an officer, not at police headquarters but at a special apartment, a private apartment. They told him, 'You are a lawyer, and we need your help,' and he was weak and he signed. He had a father he supported. His father had a terrible enfeebling disease. They told him that if he helped them out they would take good care of his father, whom he loved. It often works that way. Your father is sick, or your mother, or your sister, and they ask you to help and so, keeping uppermost in mind your ill father, you justify the betrayal and sign the agreement.

"To me it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war—say, between '46 and '56—than in any other period in our history. This nasty thing that Eve Frame did was typical of lots of nasty things people did in those years, either because they had to or because they felt they had to. Eve's behavior fell well within the routine informer practices of the era. When before had betrayal ever been so destigmatized and rewarded in this country? It was everywhere during those years, the accessible transgression, the
permissible
transgression that any American could commit. Not only does the pleasure of betrayal replace the prohibition, but you transgress without giving up your moral authority. You retain your purity at the same time as you are patriotically betraying—at the same time as you are realizing a satisfaction that verges on the sexual with its ambiguous components of pleasure and weakness, of aggression and shame: the satisfaction of undermining. Undermining sweethearts. Undermining rivals. Undermining friends. Betrayal is in this same zone of perverse and illicit and fragmented pleasure. An interesting, manipulative, underground type of pleasure in which there is much that a human being finds appealing.

"There are even those who have the brilliance of mind to practice the game of betrayal for itself alone. Without any self-interest. Purely to entertain themselves. It's what Coleridge was probably getting at by describing Iago's betrayal of Othello as 'a motiveless malignity.' Generally, however, I would say there is a motive that provokes the vicious energies and brings
out
the malignity.

"The only hitch is that in the halcyon days of the Cold War, turning somebody in to the authorities as a Soviet spy could lead right to the chair. Eve, after all, wasn't turning Ira in to the FBI as a bad husband who fucked his masseuse. Betrayal is an inescapable component of living—who doesn't betray?—but to confuse the most heinous public act of betrayal, treason, with every other form of betrayal was not a good idea in 1951. Treason, unlike adultery, is a capital offense, so reckless exaggeration and thoughtless imprecision and false accusation, even just the seemingly genteel game of naming names—well, the results could be dire in those dark days when our Soviet allies had betrayed us by staying in Eastern Europe and exploding an atomic bomb and our Chinese allies had betrayed us by making a Communist revolution and throwing out Chiang Kai-shek. Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung: there was the moral excuse for it all.

"The lying. A river of lies. Translating the truth into a lie. Translating one lie into another lie. The
competence
people display in their lying. The
skill.
Carefully sizing up the situation and then, with a calm voice and a straight face, delivering the most productive lie. Should they speak even the
partial
truth, nine times out of ten it's in
behalf
of a lie. Nathan, I've never had a chance to tell this story to anyone this way, at such length. I've never told it before and I won't again. I'd like to tell it right. To the end."