I Married a Communist (44 page)

"Now, Podell was never really in the business of exposing Jews. He was an indifferent Jew himself, and God knows he was no supporter of Israel's, ever. But here was someone who'd been lying about her background all her life and now she was lying about Ira. Podell had verifying quotations from all sorts of elderly people in Brooklyn, alleged neighbors, alleged relatives, and Eve said that it was all stupid gossip and that if he reported as the truth the things that stupid people make up about someone who is famous, she would sue the magazine right out of existence and sue him personally for every penny he had.

"Somebody there had a camera and came into Podell's office and snapped a picture of the onetime movie star just as she was reminding Podell what she could do to him. Well, any drop of self-mastery still left in her vanishes, the rational outlook, such as it was, evaporates, and she runs down the hall sobbing, and there is the managing editor and he takes her into his office and he sits her down and he says, 'Aren't you Eve Frame? I am a great admirer. What's the trouble? What can I do for you?' And she tells him. 'Oh, my, my,' he says, 'that won't do,' and he calms her down and he asks her what she wants changed in the piece, and she tells him about how she was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to an old seafaring family, her great-grandfather and her grandfather captains of a Yankee clipper, and though her own parents had by no means been wealthy, after the death of her father, a patent lawyer, when she was still a little girl, her mother had run a very nice tearoom. The managing editor tells her how glad he is to get the truth. He assures Eve as he sees her into a cab that he will take care that it is printed in the magazine. And Podell, who has been outside the managing editor's office taking down every word Eve says, does just that: puts it in the magazine.

"After she left, Podell went back to the piece and inserted the incident whole—the visit to the office, the Big Scene, the works. Ruthless old battering ram, inordinately fond of that sort of sport, on top of which he especially liked Ira and disliked her. Scrupulously recorded every detail of the New Bedford story and put that in as the conclusion of the piece. The others who did their stories after Podell's picked up on it, and that became another motif in the anti-Eve stories, another reason she turned on Ira, who is not only not a Communist now but himself a proud, observant Jew, et cetera. What they called Ira had almost as little relation to Ira as what she had called Ira. By the time all these savage intellects, with their fidelity to the facts, were finished with the woman, to find anything anywhere of the ugly truth that
was
the story of Ira and Eve, you would have needed a microscope.

"In Manhattan, the ostracism begins. She starts losing friends. People don't come to her parties. Nobody calls her. Nobody wants to talk to her. Nobody believes her any longer. She destroys her husband with lies? What does this say about her human quality? Gradually there's no more work for her. Radio drama is on its last legs, crushed first by the blacklist and then by TV, and Eve's been putting on the weight and television isn't interested.

"I saw her perform just twice on TV. I believe those were the only two times she ever appeared on TV. The first time we watched her, Doris was astounded. Pleasantly so. Doris said, 'You know whom she looks like now that she's built like that? Mrs. Goldberg, from Tremont Avenue in the Bronx.' Remember Molly Goldberg, on
The Goldbergs
? With her husband, Jake, and her children, Rosalie and Samily? Philip Loeb. Remember Philip Loeb? You ever meet him through Ira? Ira brought him to our house. Phil played Papa Jake on
The Goldbergs
for years and years, from the thirties, when the program first started out on radio. In 1950 they fired him from the TV program because his name was on the blacklist. Couldn't get work, couldn't pay his bills, couldn't pay his debts, so in '55 Phil Loeb checked into the Taft Hotel and killed himself with sleeping pills.

"Both parts Eve played were mothers. Awful stuff. On Broadway she'd always been a quiet, tactful, intelligent actress, and now she was sobbing and throwing herself all over the place—acting, unfortunately, much like herself. But by then she must have been mostly on her own, with nobody giving her any guidance. The Grants are down in Washington and haven't the time, and so all she's got is Sylphid.

"And that didn't last either. One Friday night, she and Sylphid appeared together on a TV program that was very popular back then. Called
The Apple and the Tree.
Remember it? Half-hour weekly program about children who had inherited some sort of talent, trait, or profession from a parent. Scientists, people in the arts, in show business, athletes. Lorraine liked to watch it, and sometimes we watched with her. It was an enjoyable program, funny, warm, even interesting sometimes, but pretty light fare, pretty light entertainment. Though not when Sylphid and Eve were the guests. They had to give the public their bowdlerized take on
King Lear,
with Sylphid as Goneril and Regan.

"I remember Doris saying to me, 'She's read and understood all those books. She's read and understood all those roles she's played. Is it so hard for her to come to her senses? What makes someone so experienced so hopelessly foolish? To be in your mid-forties, to be so much in the world, and to be so unknowing.'

"What interested me was that after publishing and promoting
I Married a Communist,
she didn't, even for a second, in passing, own up to the spite. Maybe by then she'd conveniently forgotten the book and all it had done. Maybe this was the pre-Grant, pre-monster version coming out, Eve's story of Ira before it had been properly Van Tasseled. But the about-face she achieved in revisiting her story was still something to see.

"All Eve could talk about on TV was how in love she'd been with Ira, and how happy she'd been with Ira, and how the marriage was destroyed only by his treacherous Communism. She even cried for a moment over all the happiness treacherous Communism had ruined. I remember Doris getting up and walking away from the TV set, then coming back and sitting there stewing. Afterward she said to me, 'Seeing her burst into tears like that on television—it shocked me nearly as much as if she'd been incontinent. Can't she stop crying for two minutes? She's an actress, for God's sake. Can't she try acting her age?'

"So the camera watched the Communist's innocent wife weep, all of TV-land watched the Communist's innocent wife weep, and then the Communist's innocent wife wiped her eyes and, looking nervously to the daughter every two seconds for corroboration—no, for
authorization
—made it clear that everything was wonderful between Sylphid and her once again, peace established, bygones bygones, all their old trust and love restored. Now that the Communist had been rooted out, there was no closer family, no family on better terms, this side of
The Swiss Family Robinson.

"And every time Eve tried smiling at Sylphid with that poorly pasted-on smile, tried looking at her with the most painfully tentative look in her eyes, a look all but pleading with Sylphid to say, 'Yes, Momma, I love you, that's true'—all but blatantly begging her, 'Say it, darling, if only for television'—Sylphid gave the game away by either glowering back at her or condescending to her or irritatedly subverting every word Eve had said. There came a point at which even Lorraine couldn't take any more. Suddenly this kid shouted at the TV screen, 'Show some love, the two of you!'

"Sylphid doesn't display a split second's worth of affection for this pathetic woman struggling to hang on. Not a speck of generosity, let alone understanding. Not one conciliatory line. I'm not a kid—I don't speak of love. I don't even speak of happiness, harmony, or friendship, fust of conciliation. What I realized watching that program was that this girl could
never
have loved her mother. Because if you did, even a little, you are able to think about her sometimes as something
other
than your mother. You think of her happiness and her unhappiness. You think of her health. You think of her loneliness. You think of her
craziness.
But this girl has no imagination for any of this. The daughter has no understanding whatsoever of the life of a woman. All she has is her
J'accuse.
All she wants is to put the mother on trial before the whole nation, to make her look terrible in every way. The public grinding of Momma's bones.

"I'll never forget that picture: Eve continually looking to Sylphid as though her whole idea of herself and her worth derived from this daughter who was the most ruthless judge imaginable of her mother's every failing. You should have seen the mockery in Sylphid, deriding her mother with every scornful grimace, spurning her with every smirk, getting her licks in publicly. She's finally got the forum for her anger. Giving her famous mother a ride on TV. Her power is to say, just with her sneer, 'You who were so admired are a stupid woman.' Not very generous stuff. The stuff most kids sort out by the time they're eighteen. Ferociously self-revealing stuff. You feel there's a sexual pleasure in it when it hangs on that late in a person's life. That program made you squirm: the histrionics of the mother's defenselessness no less remarkable than the relentless blackjack of the daughter's malice. But the mask of Eve's face was what was most frightening. The unhappiest mask you could imagine. I knew then that there was nothing left of her. She looked annihilated.

"Finally, the program host mentioned Sylphid's upcoming recital at Town Hall, and Sylphid sat down and played the harp.
There,
that's why Eve agreed to degrade herself like this on TV. Of course—for Sylphid's career. Could there be any better metaphor for their relationship, I thought, than this, than Eve crying in public for all that she's lost while the daughter who doesn't care plays the harp and plugs the recital?

"A couple of years later, the daughter abandons her. When her mother is sinking and needs her most, Sylphid discovers her independence. At thirty, Sylphid determines that it's not good for a daughter's emotional well-being to live at home intertwined with a middle-aged mother who tucks her in bed every night. Whereas most children leave their parents at eighteen or twenty, live independently of them for fifteen or twenty years and then, in time, reconcile with their aging parents and try to give them a hand, Sylphid prefers to pull it off the other way round. For the best of modern psychological reasons, Sylphid goes to France to live off the father.

"Pennington was already sick by then. A couple of years later he died. Cirrhosis of the liver. Sylphid inherited the villa, the cars, the cats, and the Pennington family fortune. Sylphid gets it all, including Pennington's handsome Italian chauffeur, whom she marries. Yes, Sylphid married. Even begat a son. There's the logic of reality for you. Sylphid Pennington became a mother. Big news in the tabloids here because of an interminable legal wrangle initiated by some well-known French set designer—I forget his name, a one-time long-term lover of Pennington's. He claimed that the chauffeur was a hustler, a fortune hunter, who'd only recently come on the scene, who'd himself been an on-and-off lover of Pennington's, and who'd somehow rigged or doctored the will.

"By the time Sylphid left New York to take up life in France, Eve Frame was a hopeless drunk. Had to sell the house. Died in a drunken stupor in a Manhattan hotel room in 1962, ten years after the book. Forgotten. Fifty-five years old. Two years later, Ira died. Fifty-one. But he lived to see her suffer. And don't think he didn't enjoy it. Don't think he didn't enjoy Sylphid's walking out. 'Where is the lovely daughter we all heard so much about? Where is the daughter to say, "Momma, I'll help you"? Gone!'

"Eve's dying put Ira back in touch with the primary satisfactions, unchained the ditchdigger's pleasure principle. When all the rigging of respectability, when all the social construction that civilizes, is removed from someone who has thrived most of his life on impulse, you have a geyser, don't you? It just starts gushing. Your enemy destroyed—what could be better? Sure, it took a little longer than he hoped and, sure, this time he didn't get to do it himself, to feel the blood spurt up hot in his face, but still and all, I never saw Ira enjoy anything more than her death.

"You know what he said when she died? The same thing he'd said the night he'd murdered the Italian guy and we organized his getaway. He told me, 'Strollo just took his last strollo.' First time he'd uttered that name to me in over thirty years. 'Strollo just took his last strollo,' and then he lets loose the cackling crazy-kid laugh. The just-let-'em-try-to-do-me-in laugh. That defiant laugh I still remembered from 1929."

I helped Murray down the deck's three steps and guided him in the dark along the path to where my car was parked. We were silent as we swung along the curves of the mountain road and past Lake Madamaska and into Athena. When I looked over I saw that his head was back and his eyes were shut. First I thought he was asleep, and then I wondered if he was dead, if, after his having remembered the whole of Ira's story—after his having heard himself
tell
the whole of Ira's story—the will to go on had lost its grip even on this most enduring of men. And then I was recalling him again reading to our high school English class, sitting on the corner of his desk, but without the minatory blackboard eraser, reading scenes to us from
Macbeth,
doing all the voices, not afraid to be dramatic and perform, and myself being impressed by how manly literature seemed in his enactment of it. I remembered hearing Mr. Ringold read the scene at the end of act 4 of
Macbeth
when Macduff learns from Ross that Macbeth has slain Macduff's family, my first encounter with a spiritual state that is aesthetic and overrides everything else.

As Ross he read, "Your castle is surpris'd; your wife and babes / Savagely slaughtered...." Then, after a long silence in which Macduff both comprehends and fails to comprehend, he read as Macduff—quietly, hollowly, almost in his reply like a child himself—"My children too?" "Wife, children, servants," says Mr. Ringold/ Ross, "all / That could be found." Mr. Ringold/Macduff is again speechless. So is the class: as a class, the class is by now missing from the room. Everything has vanished except whatever words of disbelief are coming next. Mr. Ringold/Macduff: "My wife kill'd too?" Mr. Ringold/Ross: "I have said." The large clock is ticking toward two-thirty up on the classroom wall. Outside, a 14 bus is grinding up the Chancellor Avenue hill. It is only minutes before the end of eighth period and the long school day. But all that matters—matters more than what happens after school or even in the future—is when Mr. Ringold/Macduff will grasp the incomprehensible. "He has no children," Mr. Ringold says. Whom is he speaking of? Who has no children? Some years later I was taught the standard interpretation, that it is Macbeth to whom Macduff is referring, that Macbeth is the "he" who has no children. But as read by Mr. Ringold, the "he" to whom Macduff is referring is, horribly, Macduff himself. "All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?...All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?" And now Malcolm speaks, Mr. Ringold/Malcolm, harshly, as though to shake Macduff: "Dispute it like a man." "I shall do so," says Mr. Ringold/Macduff.