I Married a Communist (40 page)

"Who? Gerald Ford? Gerald Ford. I don't ever remember seeing Gerald Ford looking so focused before, so charged with intelligence as he clearly was on that hallowed ground. Ronald Reagan snapping the uniformed honor guard his famous salute, that salute of his that was
always
half meshugeh. Bob Hope seated next to James Baker. The Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi seated next to Donald Nixon. The burglar G. Gordon Liddy there with his arrogant shaved head. The most disgraced of vice presidents, Spiro Agnew, there with his conscienceless Mob face. The most winning of vice presidents, sparkly Dan Quayle, looking as lucid as a button. The heroic effort made by that poor fellow: always staging intelligence and always failing. All of them mourning platitudinously together in the California sunshine and the lovely breeze: the indicted and the unindicted, the convicted and the unconvicted, and, his towering intellect at last at rest in a star-spangled coffin, no longer grappling and questing for no-holds-barred power, the man who turned a whole country's morale inside out, the generator of an enormous national disaster, the first and only president of the United States of America to have gained from a handpicked successor a full and unconditional pardon for all the breaking and entering he committed while in office.

"And Van Tassel Grant, adored widow of Bryden,
that
selfless public servant, reveling in her importance and jabbering away. All through the service, the mouth of reckless malice jabbering on and on in her televised grief over our great national loss. Too bad she wasn't born in China instead of the USA. Here she had to settle for being a best-selling novelist and a famous radio personality and a top-drawer Washington hostess. There she could have run Mao's Cultural Revolution.

"In my ninety years I've witnessed two sensationally hilarious funerals, Nathan. Present at the first as a thirteen-year-old, and the second I saw on TV just three years ago, at the age of eighty-seven. Two funerals that have more or less bracketed my conscious life. They aren't mysterious events. They don't require a genius to ferret out their meaning. They are just natural human events that reveal as plainly as Daumier did the unique markings of the species, the thousand and one dualities that twist its nature into the human knot. The first was Mr. Russomanno's funeral for the canary, when the cobbler got hold of a casket and pallbearers and a horse-drawn hearse and majestically buried his beloved jimmy—and my kid brother broke my nose. The second was when they buried Richard Milhous Nixon with a twenty-one-gun salute. I only wish the Italians from the old First Ward could have been out there at Yorba Linda with Dr. Kissinger and Billy Graham.
They
would have known how to enjoy the spectacle. They would have hurled themselves on the ground with laughter when they heard what those two guys were up to, the indignities to which they descended to dignify-that glaringly impure soul.

"And had Ira been alive to hear them, he would have gone nuts all over again at the world getting everything wrong."

"A
LL HIS RANTING
Ira now directed at himself. How could this farce have wrecked his life? Everything to the side of the main thing, all the peripheral stuff of existence that Comrade O'Day had warned him against. Home. Marriage. Family. Mistresses. Adultery. All the bourgeois shit! Why hadn't he lived like O'Day? Why hadn't he gone to prostitutes like O'Day?
Real
prostitutes, trustworthy professionals who understand the rules, and not blabbermouth amateurs like his Estonian masseuse.

"The recriminations started to hound him. He should never have left O'Day, have left the UE shop at the record factory, have come to New York, married Eve Frame, grandiosely conceived of himself as this Mr. Iron Rinn. In Ira's own estimation he should never have done
any
of the living he did once he left the Midwest. He shouldn't have had a human being's appetite for experience or a human being's inability to read the future or a human being's propensity for making mistakes. He shouldn't have allowed himself to pursue a single one of a virile and ambitious man's worldly goals. Being a Communist laborer dwelling alone in a room in East Chicago under a sixty-watt bulb—that was now the ascetic height from which he had fallen into hell.

"The pile-on of humiliation, that was the key to it. It wasn't as though a book had been thrown at him—the book was a bomb that had been thrown at him. McCarthy, you see, would have the two hundred or three hundred or four hundred Communists on his nonexistent lists, but allegorically one person would have to stand for them all. Alger Hiss is the biggest example. Three years after Hiss, Ira became another. What's more, Hiss to the average person was still the State Department and Yalta, stuff far, far away from the ordinary Joe, while Ira's was popular-culture Communism. To the confused popular imagination, this was the democratic Communist. This was Abe Lincoln. It was very easy to grasp: Abe Lincoln as the villainous representative of a foreign power, Abe Lincoln as America's greatest twentieth-century traitor. Ira became the personification of Communism, the personalized Communist for the nation: Iron Rinn was Everyman's Communist traitor in ways that Alger Hiss could never be.

"Here's this giant who was pretty damn strong, in many ways pretty damn insensitive, but the calumny heaped upon him he finally couldn't take. Giants get felled too. He knew he couldn't hide from it and he thought, as time passed, he could never wait it out. He began to think that now that the lid was off there would always be something coming at him from somewhere. The giant couldn't find anything effectual to deal with it, and that's when he caved in.

"I went up and got him, and he lived with us until we couldn't handle the situation anymore, and I put him in the hospital in New York. He sat in that chair for the first month, rubbing his knees and rubbing his elbows and holding his ribs where they ached, but otherwise lifeless, staring into his lap and wishing he were dead. I'd go to see him and he would barely speak. Every once in a while he'd say, 'All I wanted to do...' That was it. Never went any further, not out loud. That was all he said to me for weeks. A couple of times he muttered, 'To be like this ..."I never intended...' But mostly it was 'All I wanted to do ...'

"They didn't have much to help mental patients in those days. No pills other than a sedative. Ira wouldn't eat. He sat in that first unit—the Disturbed Unit, they called it—eight beds there and Ira in his robe and pajamas and slippers, looking more like Lincoln with each passing day. Gaunt, exhausted, wearing Abraham Lincoln's mask of sorrow. I would be visiting, sitting beside him holding his hand and thinking, If it weren't for that resemblance, none of this would have happened to him. If only he hadn't been responsible to his looks.

"It was four weeks before they moved him up to the Semi-Disturbed Unit, where the patients got dressed in their clothes, and they had recreational therapy. Some of them went off to play volleyball or to play basketball, though Ira couldn't because of his joint pain. He had been living for over a year with pain that was intractable, and maybe that undid him more than the calumny. Maybe the antagonist who destroyed Ira was physical pain, and the book would not have come close to defeating him if he hadn't been undermined by his health.

"The collapse was total. The hospital was awful. But we couldn't have kept him at the house. He would lie in Lorraine's room cursing himself and crying his heart out: O'Day told him, O'Day warned him, O'Day had known back on the docks in Iran ... Doris sat beside Lorraine's bed and she held him in her arms and he wailed away. All of the force that was behind those tears. Awful. You don't realize how much plain old misery can be backed up inside a titanically defiant person who's been taking on the world and battling his own nature his whole life. That's what came pouring out of him: the whole damn struggle.

"Sometimes
I
felt terrified. I felt the way I felt in the war when we were under bombardment at the Bulge. Just
because
he was so big and arrogant you had the feeling that there was nothing to be done for him by anyone. I saw that long, gaunt face of his, distorted with desperation, with all that hopelessness, with
failure,
and I was myself in a panic.

"When I would get home from school I'd help him dress; every afternoon I'd force him to shave and I'd insist on his going for a walk with me down Bergen Street. Could any city street in America have been friendlier in those days? But Ira was surrounded by enemies. The marquee on the Park Theater frightened him, the salamis in Kartzman's window frightened him—Schachtman's candy store frightened him, with the newsstand out front. He was sure every paper had his story in it, weeks after the papers had finished having their fun with him. The
Journal-American
ran excerpts from Eve's book. The
Daily Mirror
had his kisser all over the front page. Even the stately
Times
couldn't resist. Ran a human-interest story about the suffering of the Sarah Bernhardt of the Airwaves, took all that crap about Russian espionage completely seriously.

"But that's what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it's because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper's half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world's oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious
everything
as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.

"McCarthy was never in the Communist business; if nobody else knew that, he did. The show-trial aspect of McCarthy's patriotic crusade was merely its theatrical form. Having cameras view it just gave it the false authenticity of real life. McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That's how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment. McCarthy was an impresario, and the wilder the views, the more outrageous the charges, the greater the disorientation and the better the all-around fun.
Joe McCarthy's The Free and the Brave—that
was the show in which my brother was to play the biggest role of his life.

"When not just the New York papers but the Jersey papers, too, joined in—well, for Ira that was the killer. They dug up whomever Ira knew out in Sussex County and got them to talk. Farmers, oldsters, local nobodies the radio star had befriended, and they all had a story about Ira coming around to tell them about the evils of capitalism. He had that great geezer pal out in Zinc Town, the taxidermist, and Ira liked to go around and listen to the guy, and the papers went to the taxidermist and the taxidermist gave them an earful. Ira couldn't believe it. But this taxidermist allows how Ira had pulled the wool over his eyes until one day when Ira came in with some young kid and the two of them tried to turn him and his son against the Korean War. Spewing real venom against General Douglas MacArthur. Calling the U.S.A. every bad name in the book.

"The FBI had a field day with him. And with Ira's reputation up there. To stake you out, to ruin you in your community, to go to your neighbors and have them do you in ... I have to tell you, Ira always suspected that it was the taxidermist who fingered
you.
You were with Ira, weren't you, at the taxidermy shop?"

"I was. Horace Bixton," I said. "Little tiny, humorous fellow. Gave me a deer toe for a present. I sat one morning watching a fox being skinned."

"Well, you paid for that deer toe. Watching 'em skin that fox cost you your Fulbright."

I started to laugh. "Did you say turning his
son
against the war too? The son was stone deaf. The son was deaf and he was dumb. He couldn't hear a goddamn thing."

"This is the McCarthy era—didn't matter. Ira had a neighbor down the road, a zinc miner who'd been in a bad mining accident and who used to work for him. Ira spent a lot of time listening to these guys complain about New Jersey Zinc and trying to turn them around about the system, and this particular guy who was his neighbor, who he used to feed all the time, was the one the taxidermist got to take down the license plate numbers of whoever stopped at Ira's shack."

"I met the guy who'd been in the accident. He ate with us," I said. "Ray. A rock fell on him and crushed his skull. Raymond Svecz. He'd been a POW. Ray used to do odd jobs for Ira."

"I guess Ray did odd jobs for everyone," Murray said. "He'd take down the license plate numbers of Ira's visitors and the taxidermist gave them to the FBI. The plates that turned up most often were mine, and that evidence they also used against me—that I visited my Communist-spy brother so much, sometimes even overnight. Only one guy up there stayed loyal to Ira. Tommy Minarek."

"I met Tommy."

"Charming old guy. Uneducated but an intelligent man. Had backbone. Ira took Lorraine out to the rock dump one day and Tommy gave her some stuff for free and he was all she talked about when she got home. After Tommy saw the news in the papers, he drove over to the shack and he marched straight in. 'If I had the guts,' he said to Ira, 'I woulda been a Communist myself.'

"Tommy was the one who rehabilitated Ira. It was Tommy who brought him out of his brooding and got him back into the world. Tommy had him sit right beside him out at the rock dump where he ran things so that people could see Ira there. Tommy was somebody the town respected, and so over time, people up there forgave Ira for being a Communist. Not all of them, but most. The two of them sat at the rock dump talking for three, four years together, Tommy teaching Ira all he knew about minerals. Then Tommy had a stroke and died and left his cellar full of rocks to Ira, and Ira took over Tommy's job. And the town let him. Ira sat out there, hyper-inflammatory Ira rubbing his aching joints and muscles, and ran the Zinc Town rock dump till the day
he
died. In the sunshine, a summer day, selling minerals, keeled over dead."