by Philip Roth
"What did she see in him, the big rube who hits New York and lands a job in a soap opera? Well, it's not a great riddle. After a short apprenticeship, he is not a simple rube, he is a star on The Free and the Brave, so there's that. Ira took on those heroes that he played. I never bought it, but the average listener believed in him as their embodiment. He had an aura of heroic purity. He believed in himself, and so he steps into the room, and bingo. He shows up at some party, and there she is. There is this lonely actress in her forties, three times divorced, and there's this new face, this new guy, this tree, and she's needy, and she's famous, and she surrenders to him. Isn't that what happens? Every woman has her temptations, and surrendering is Eve's. Outwardly, a pure, gangling giant with huge hands who'd been a factory worker, who'd been a stevedore, who was now an actor. Pretty appealing, those guys. It's hard to believe something that raw can be tender too. Tender rawness, the goodness of a big rough guy—all that stuff. Irresistible to her. How could a giant be anything else to her? There's something exotic to her about the amount of harsh life he's exposed himself to. She felt that he'd really lived and, after he heard her story, he felt that she'd really lived.
"When they meet, Sylphid's away in France for the summer with her father, and Ira doesn't get to see that stuff firsthand. And so these strong, if sui generis, maternal urges of hers Ira gets instead, and they have this idyll together all summer long. The guy never had a mother after the age of seven, and he's starved for the attentive, refined care that she lavishes on him, and they're living alone in the house, without the daughter, and ever since he came to New York he's been living, like a good member of the proletariat, in some dump on the Lower East Side. He hangs out in cheap places and eats in cheap restaurants, and suddenly these two are isolated together on West Eleventh Street, and it's summer in Manhattan and it's great, it's life as paradise. Sylphid's picture is all around the house, Sylphid as a little girl in her pinafore, and he finds it wonderful that Eve's so devoted. She tells the story of her horrible experiences with marriage and men, she tells him about Hollywood and the tyrannical directors and the philistine producers, the terrible, terrible tawdriness, and it's Othello in reverse: ''twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful'—he loved her for the dangers she had passed. Ira's mystified, enchanted, and he's needed. He's big and he's physical, and so he rushes in. A woman with pathos. A beautiful woman with pathos and a story to tell. A spiritual woman with decolletage. Who better to activate his protective mechanism?
"He even takes her to Newark to meet us. We have a drink at our house, and then we all go down to Elizabeth Avenue to the Tavern, and she behaves well. Nothing inexplicable. It seemed so surprisingly easy to know what to make of her. That evening he first brought Eve to our place and we went out for dinner, I didn't see anything wrong myself. It's only fair to say that it's not Ira alone who couldn't figure this out. He doesn't know who she is because, to be honest, nobody would have right off. Nobody could have. In society, Eve was invisible behind the disguise of all that civility. And so, though others might proceed slowly, because of his nature, Ira, as I said, rushes right in.
"What registered on me right off weren't her inadequacies but his. She struck me as too smart for him, too polished for him, certainly too cultivated. I thought, Here is a movie star with a mind. Turned out she'd been reading conscientiously since she was a kid. I don't think there was a novel on my shelves that she couldn't talk about with familiarity. It even sounded that night as though her inmost pleasure in life were reading books. She remembered the complicated plots of nineteenth-century novels—I would teach the books and I still couldn't remember them.
"Sure, she was showing her best side. Sure, like everyone else on first meeting, like all of us, she was keeping a prudent watch over her worst side. But a best side was there, she had one. It looked real and it was unostentatious, and in someone so renowned, that made it very winning. Sure, I saw—I couldn't help but see—that this was by no means a necessary union of souls. The two of them were more than likely without any affinity at all. But I was dazzled myself that first night by what I took to be her quiet substance on top of the looks.
"Don't forget the effect of fame. Doris and I had grown up on those silent films of hers. She was always cast with older men, tall men, often white-haired men, and she was a girlish, daughterly-looking thing—granddaughterly-looking thing—and the men were always wanting to kiss her and she was always saying no. Took no more than that in those days to heat things up in a movie house. A movie of hers, maybe her first, was called Cigarette Girl. Eve's the cigarette girl, working in a nightclub, and at the end of the movie, as I remember, there's a charity event to which she's taken by the nightclub's owner. It's held at the Fifth Avenue mansion of a rich, stuffy dowager, and the cigarette girl is dressed up in a nurse's uniform and the men are asked to bid to kiss her—money that will go to the Red Cross. Each time one man tops another's bid, Eve covers her mouth and giggles behind her hand like a geisha. The bidding goes higher and higher, and the stout society ladies looking on are aghast. But when a distinguished banker with a black mustache—Carlton Pennington—bids the astronomical sum of one thousand dollars and steps up to plant the kiss we've all been waiting to see, the ladies surge madly forward to watch. At the finale, instead of the kiss at the heart of the screen, there are their big corseted society behinds obscuring everything.
"Quite something that was in 1924. Quite something Eve was. The radiant smile, the hopeless shrug, the acting they did in those days with their eyes—she'd mastered it all as just a kid. She could do defeated, she could display temper, she could do crying with her hand to her forehead; she could do the funny pratfalls too. When Eve Frame was happy, she would do a run with a little skip in it. Skipping with happiness. Very charming. She played either the poor cigarette girl or the poor laundress who meets the swell, or she played the spoiled rich girl who is swept off her feet by the trolley conductor. Movies about crossing class barriers. Street scenes of the immigrant poor with all their crude energy and then dinner scenes of the privileged American rich with all their strictures and taboos. Baby Dreiser. You couldn't watch those things today. You could barely watch them then, if not for her.
"Doris and Eve and I were the same age. She'd started out in Hollywood when she was seventeen, and then, still back before the war, she was on Broadway. Doris and I had seen her from up in the balcony in some of those plays, and she was good, you know. The plays weren't so wonderful, but as a stage actress she had a direct way about her, unlike what had made her popular as the girlish silent-film star. On the stage she had a talent for making things that weren't very intelligent seem intelligent, and things that weren't serious seem somewhat serious. Strange, her perfect equilibrium on the stage. As a human being she wound up exaggerating everything, and yet as a stage actress she was all moderation and tact, nothing exaggerated. And then, after the war, we'd hear her on the radio because Lorraine liked to listen, and even on those American Radio Theater shows, she brought an air of tastefulness to some pretty awful stuff. To have her in our living room looking through my bookshelves, to talk to her about Meredith and Dickens and Thackeray—well, what is a woman with her experience and her interests doing with my brother?
"That night I never figured on their getting married. Though his vanity was clearly flattered and he was excited and proud as hell of her over lobster thermidor at the Tavern. The toniest restaurant Jews ate at in Newark, and there, escorting Eve Frame, the epitome of theatrical class, is the onetime roughneck from Newark's Factory Street, and not an ounce of uncertainty in him. Did you know that Ira was once a busboy at the Tavern? One of his menial jobs after he quit school. Lasted about a month. Too big to be rushing with those loaded trays through the kitchen door. They fired him after he broke his thousandth dish, and that's when he headed up to Sussex County to the zinc mines. So—nearly twenty years pass and he's back at the Tavern, a radio star himself and showing off that night for his
brother and sister-in-law. The master of life exulting in his own existence.
"The owner of the Tavern, Teiger, Sam Teiger, spots Eve and comes over to the table with a bottle of champagne, and Ira invites him to have a drink with us and regales him with the story of his thirty days as a Tavern busboy in 1929, and, now that his life hasn't come to nothing, everybody enjoys the comedy of his mishaps and the irony that Ira should ever have got back here. We all enjoy his sporting spirit about his old wounds. Teiger goes to his office and returns with a camera and he takes a picture of the four of us eating our dinner, and afterward it hangs in the Tavern foyer, along with the photographs of all the other notables who've ever dined there. No reason that picture wouldn't have hung there till the Tavern closed for business after the '67 riots had Ira not been blacklisted sixteen years earlier. I understand they took it down then overnight, as though his life had come to nothing.
"To go back to when their idyll first began—he heads home at night to this room he rented, but gradually enough he doesn't, and then he's at her place, and they're not kids, and the woman hasn't been up to much lately, and it's passionate and wonderful, locked up alone in that West Eleventh Street house like a pair of sex criminals tethered to the bed. All the spontaneous intrigue of that at the onset of middle age. Letting go and falling into the affair. It's Eve's release, her liberation, her emancipation. Her salvation. Ira's given her a new script, if she wants it. At forty-one, she thought it was all over and instead she's been saved. Well,' she says to him, 'so much for the patiently nurtured desire to keep things in perspective.'
"She says things to him nobody's ever said to him before. She calls their affair 'our exceedingly, achingly sweet and strange thing.' She tells him, 'It keeps dissolving me.' She tells him, 'In the middle of a conversation with someone, I'm suddenly not there.' She calls him 'mon prince.' She quotes Emily Dickinson. For Ira Ringold, Emily Dickinson. With thee, in the Desert / With thee in the thirst / With thee in the Tamarind wood / Leopard breathes—at last!'
"Well, it feels to Ira like the love of his life. And with the love of your life you don't think about the particulars. If you find such a thing, you don't throw it away. They decide to get married, and that's what Eve tells Sylphid when she gets back from France. Mommy's getting married again but this time to a wonderful man. Sylphid's supposed to buy that. Sylphid, from the old script.
"Eve Frame was the big world to Ira. And why shouldn't she have been? He was no baby, he'd been in a lot of rough places and knew how to be rough himself. But Broadway? Hollywood? Greenwich Village? All brand-new to him. Ira wasn't the brightest guy around when it came to personal affairs. He'd taught himself a lot. He and O'Day had brought him a long, long way from Factory Street. But that was all political stuff. And that was not sharp thinking either. It wasn't 'thinking' at all. The pseudoscientific Marxist lexicon, the Utopian cant that went with it—dish that stuff out to someone as unschooled and ill educated as Ira, indoctrinate an adult who is not too skilled in brainwork with the intellectual glamour of Big Sweeping Ideas, inculcate a man of limited intelligence, an excitable type who is as angry as Ira ... But that's a subject all its own, the connection between embitterment and not thinking.
"You're asking me about how he wound up in Newark that day you two met. Ira wasn't prone to going at life in ways that were conducive to solving the problems of a marriage. And it was early days, it was only a matter of months since the wedding to the star of stage, screen, and radio and his moving into that townhouse of hers. How could I tell him it was a mistake? The guy wasn't without vanity, after all. He was not without conceit, my brother. Wasn't without scale either. There was a theatrical instinct in Ira, an immodest attitude toward himself. Don't think he minded becoming someone of enhanced importance. That's an adaptation people seem able to implement in about seventy-two hours, and generally the effect is invigorating. Everything all at once filled with possibility, everything in motion, everything imminent—Ira in the drama in every sense of the word. He has pulled off a great big act of control over the story that was his life. He is all at once awash in the narcissistic illusion that he has been sprung from the realities of pain and loss, that his life is not futility—that it's anything but. No longer walking in the valley of the shadow of his limitations. No longer the excluded giant consigned to be the strange one forever. Barges in with that brash courage—and there he is. Out of the grips of obscurity. And proud of his transformation. The exhilaration of it. The naive dream—he's in it! The new Ira, the worldly Ira. A big guy with a big life. Watch out.
"Besides, I already had told him it was a mistake—and after that we didn't talk for six weeks, and then only because I went to New York and explained to him I was wrong and begged him not to hold it against me did I get the guy back. He would have shot me down for good if I'd tried it a second time. And a complete falling-out—that would have been awful for both of us. I'd been taking care of Ira since he was born. I was seven years old, I used to push him down Factory Street in his baby carriage. After our mother died, when my father remarried and a stepmother came into the house, if I hadn't been around, Ira would have wound up in reform school. We had a wonderful mother. And she didn't have such a good time of it, either. She was married to our father. That was no picnic."
"What was your father like?" I asked.
"We don't want to go into that."
"That's what Ira used to say."
"That's the only thing there is to say. We had a father who ... well, much later in life I learned what made him tick. But by then it was too late. Anyway, I was luckier than my brother. When our mother died, after those awful months in the hospital, I was already in high school. Then I got a scholarship to the University of Newark. I was on my way. But Ira was still a kid. A tough kid. A crude kid. Full of mistrust.
"Do you know about the canary funeral in the old First Ward, when one of the local shoemakers buried his pet canary? This'll show you how tough Ira was—and how tough he wasn't. It was in 1920. I was thirteen and Ira was seven, and on Boyden Street, a couple streets away from our tenement, there was a cobbler, Russomanno, Emidio Russomanno, a poor-looking old guy, small, with big ears and a gaunt face and a white chin beard and, on his back, a threadbare suit a hundred years old. For company in his shop Russomanno kept a pet canary. The canary was named Jimmy and Jimmy lived a long time and then Jimmy ate something he shouldn't have and died.
"Russomanno was devastated, so he hired a parade band, rented a hearse and two coaches drawn by horses, and after the canary was laid out for viewing on a bench in the cobbler shop—beautifully exhibited with flowers, candles, and a crucifix—there was a funeral procession through the streets of the whole district, past Del Guercio's grocery store, where they had clams outside in bushel baskets and an American flag in the window, past Melillo's fruit and vegetable stand, past Giordano's bakery, past Mascellino's bakery, past Arre's Italian Tasty Crust Bakery. It went past Biondi's butcher shop and De Lucca's harness shop and De Carlo's garage and D'lnnocen-zio's coffee store and Parisi's shoe store and Nole's bicycle shop and Celentano's latteria and Grande's pool hall and Basso's barbershop and Esposito's barbershop and the bootblack stand with the two scarred old dining chairs that the customers had to step up high, onto a platform, to get to.
"Gone now for forty years. City knocked down that whole Italian neighborhood in '53 to make way for low-rent high-rise housing. In '94, they blew the high-rises up on national TV. By then nobody'd been living in them for about twenty years. Uninhabitable. Now there's nothing there at all. St. Lucy's and that's it. That's all that's standing. The parish church, but no parish and no parishioners.
"Nicodemi's Café on Seventh Avenue and Café Roma on Seventh Avenue and D'Auria's bank on Seventh Avenue. That was the bank where, before the second war broke out, they extended credit to Mussolini. When Mussolini took Ethiopia, the priest rang the church bells for half an hour. Here in America, in Newark's First Ward.
"The macaroni factory and the deco
ration factory and the monument shop and the marionette playhouse and the movie theater and the bocce alleys and the icehouse and the print shop and the clubhouses and the restaurants. Past the mobster Ritchie Boiardo's hangout, the Victory Café. In the thirties, when Boiardo got out of jail, he built the Vittorio Castle on the corner of Eighth and Summer. Show-business people used to travel from New York to dine at the Castle. The Castle is where Joe DiMaggio ate when he came to Newark. The Castle is where DiMaggio and his girlfriend held their engagement party. It's from the Castle that Boiardo lorded it over the First Ward. Ritchie Boiardo ruled the Italians in the First Ward and Longy Zwillman ruled the Jews in the Third Ward, and these two gangsters were always at war.
"Past the dozens of neighborhood saloons the procession wound from east to west, north up one street and south down the next, all the way to the Clifton Avenue Municipal Bathhouse—the First Ward's most extravagant lump of architecture after the church and the cathedral, the massive old public bathhouse where my mother used to take us for our baths as babies. My father went there too. Shower free and a penny for the towel.
"The canary was placed in a small white coffin with four pallbearers to carry it. A huge crowd assembled, maybe as many as ten thousand people stretched out along the procession route. People were squeezed together on the fire escapes and up on the roofs. Whole families were hanging out of their tenement windows to watch.
"Russomanno rode in the carriage behind the coffin, Emidio Russomanno weeping while everybody else in the First Ward was laughing. Some people were laughing so hard they wound up hurling themselves to the ground. They couldn't stand up from laughing so hard. Even the pallbearers were laughing. It was infectious. The guy driving the hearse was laughing. Out of respect for the mourner, people on the sidewalk tried to hold it in until Russomanno's carriage had passed by, but it was just too hilarious for most of them, particularly for the kids.