by Philip Roth
"Ours was a tiny neighborhood swarming with kids: kids in the alleys, kids crowding the stoops, kids pouring out of the tenements and stampeding from Clifton Avenue down to Broad Street. All day long and, during the summertime, through half the night you could hear these kids shouting to one another, 'Guahl-yo! Guahl-yo!' Everywhere you looked, bands of kids, battalions of kids—pitching pennies, playing cards, rolling dice, shooting pool, licking ices, playing ball, making bonfires, frightening girls. Only the nuns with rulers could control these kids. Thousands and thousands of boys there were, all under ten years old. Ira was one of them. Thousands and thousands of scrappy little Italian kids, the children of the Italians who laid the railroad tracks and paved the streets and dug the sewers, the children of peddlers and factory workers and rag pickers and saloon keepers. Kids called Giuseppe and Rodolfo and Raffaele and Gaetano, and the one Jewish kid called Ira.
"Well, the Italians were having the time of their lives. They'd never seen anything like that canary's funeral. They never saw anything like it again. Sure, there were funeral processions before that, and there were bands playing funeral dirges and mourners surging through the streets. There were the feast days all year round with processions for all those saints they brought over with them from Italy, hundreds and hundreds of people venerating their society's special saint by dressing up and bearing the saint's embroidered flag and carrying candles the size of tire irons. And there was St. Lucy's presepio for Christmas, a replica of a Neapolitan village depicting the birth of Jesus, a hundred Italian figurines planted in it along with Mary, Joseph, and the Bambino. There were the Italian bagpipes parading with a plaster Bambino and, behind the Bambino, the people in the procession singing Italian Christmas carols. And the vendors out along the streets selling eel for Christmas Eve dinner. People turned out in droves for the religious stuff, and they stuck dollar bills all over the robe of the plaster statue of whatever saint it was and threw flower petals out their windows like ticker tape. They even released birds from cages, doves that flew crazily above the crowd from one telephone pole to the next. On a saint's day the doves must have been wishing they'd never seen the outside of a birdcage.
"On the feast of Saint Michael, the Italians would dress up a couple of little girls as angels. From the fire escapes on either side of the street, they'd swing them over the crowd from ropes the girls were harnessed to. Little skinny girls in white gowns with haloes and wings attached, and the crowd would go silent with awe when they appeared in the air, chanting some prayer, and when the girls had finished being angels, the crowd went nuts. That's when they would set the doves free and that's when the fireworks would explode and somebody would wind up in the hospital with a couple of fingers blown off.
"So, lively spectacle was nothing new to the Italians in the First Ward. Funny characters, old-country carrying on, noise and fights, colorful stunts—nothing new. Funerals certainly weren't new. During the flu epidemic, so many people died that the coffins had to be lined up on the street. Nineteen eighteen. The funeral parlors couldn't handle the business. Behind the coffins, processions from St. Lucy's wended the couple miles to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery all day long. There were tiny coffins for the babies. You had to wait your turn to bury your baby—you had to wait for your neighbors to bury theirs first. Unforgettable terror for a kid. And yet two years after the flu epidemic, that funeral for Jimmy the canary ... well, that topped 'em all.
"Everybody there that day was in stitches. Except for one person. Ira was the only one in Newark who wasn't in on the joke. I couldn't explain it to him. I tried, but he couldn't understand. Why? Maybe because he was stupid, or maybe because he wasn't stupid. Maybe he simply was not born with the mentality of the carnival—maybe utopianists aren't. Or maybe it was because our mother had died a few months earlier and we'd had our own funeral that Ira had wanted no part of. He wanted to be out on the street instead, kicking a ball around. He begged me not to make him change out of his overalls and go to the cemetery. He tried hiding in a closet. But he came along with us anyway. My father saw to that. At the cemetery he stood there watching us bury her, but he refused to take my hand or let me put my arm around him. He just scowled at the rabbi. Glowered at him. Refused to be touched or comforted by anyone. Didn't cry either, not a tear. He was too angry for tears.
"But when the canary died, everybody at the funeral was laughing away except Ira. Ira knew Jimmy only from walking by the cobbler's shop on the way to school and looking in the window at his cage. I don't believe he'd ever stepped inside the shop, and yet, aside from Russomanno, he was the only one around who was in tears.
"When I started to laugh—because it was funny, Nathan, very funny—Ira lost control completely. That was the first time I saw that happen to Ira. He started swinging his fists and screaming at me. He was a big kid even then, and I couldn't rein him in, and suddenly he was swinging at a couple of kids next to us who were also laughing themselves sick, and when I reached down to try to pluck him up and save him from being slaughtered by a whole slew of kids, one of his fists caught me on the nose. He broke my nose at the bridge, a seven-year-old. I was bleeding, the damn thing was obviously broken, and so Ira ran away.
"We didn't find him till the next day. He'd slept back of the brewery on Clifton Avenue. It wasn't the first time. In the yard, under the loading dock. My father found him there in the morning. He dragged him by the scruff of the neck all the way to school and into the room where Ira's class was already in session. When the kids saw Ira, wearing those filthy overalls he'd slept in all night and being flung into the room by his old man, they began to go 'Boo-hoo,' and that was Ira's nickname for months afterward. Boo-hoo Ringold. The fewboy who cried at the canary funeral.
"Luckily, Ira was always bigger than the others his age, and he was strong, and he could play ball. Ira would have been a star athlete if it hadn't been for his eyes. What respect he got in that neighborhood he got from playing ball. But the fights? From then on he was in fights all the time. That's when his extremism began.
"It was a blessing, you know, that we didn't grow up in the Third Ward with the poor Jews. Growing up in the First Ward, Ira was always a loudmouth kike outsider to the Italians, and so, however big and strong and belligerent he was, Boiardo could never perceive him as local talent auditioning for the Mob. But in the Third Ward, among the Jews, it might have been different. There Ira wouldn't have been the official outcast among the kids. If only because of his size, he would probably have come to Longy Zwillman's attention. From what I understand, Longy, who was ten years older than Ira, was a lot like Ira growing up: furious, a big, menacing boy who also quit school, who was fearless in a street fight, and who had the commanding looks along with something of a brain. In bootlegging, in gambling, in vending machines, on the docks, in the labor movement, in the building trades—Longy eventually made it big. But even at the top, when he was teamed up with Bugsy Siegel and Lansky and Lucky Luciano, his closest intimates were the friends he'd grown up with in the streets, Third Ward Jewish boys like himself, whom it took little to provoke. Niggy Rutkin, his hit man. Sam Katz, his bodyguard. George Goldstein, his accountant. Billy Tiplitz, his numbers man. Doc Stacher, his adding machine. Abe Lew, Longy's cousin, ran the retail clerks' union for Longy. Christ, Meyer Ellenstein, another street kid from the Third Ward ghetto—when he was mayor of Newark, Ellenstein all but ran the city for Longy.
"Ira could have wound up one of Longy's henchmen, loyally doing one of their jobs. He was ripe for recruitment. There would have been nothing aberrant in it: crime was what those boys were bred for. It was the next logical step. Had that violence in them that you need as a business tactic in the rackets to inspire fear and gain the competitive edge. Ira could have started off down at Port Newark, unloading the bootleg whiskey from Canada out of the speedboats and into Longy's trucks, and he could have ended up, like Longy, with a millionaire's mansion in West Orange and a rope around his neck.
"It's so fickle, isn't it, who you wind up,
how you wind up? It's only because of a tiny accident of geography that the opportunity to string along with Longy never came Ira's way. The opportunity to launch a successful career by using a blackjack on Longy's competitors, by putting the squeeze on Longy's customers, by supervising the gaming tables at Longy's casinos. The opportunity to conclude it by testifying for two hours in front of the Kefauver committee before going home to hang himself. When Ira met someone tougher and smarter than him who was going to be the big influence, he was already in the army, and so it wasn't a Newark gangster but a Communist steelworker who worked the transformation on him. Ira's Longy Zwillman was Johnny O'Day."
"Why didn't I tell him, that first time he stayed over with us, to can the marriage and get out? Because that marriage, that woman, that beautiful house, all those books, records, the paintings on the wall, that life she had full of accomplished people, polished, interesting, educated people—it was everything he'd never known. Forget that he was now somebody himself. The guy had a home. He never had that before, and he was by then thirty-five. Thirty-five and he wasn't living in a room anymore, wasn't eating in cafeterias anymore, wasn't sleeping with waitresses and barmaids and worse—women, some of them, who couldn't write their names.
"After his discharge, when he first got to Calumet City to live with O'Day, Ira had an affair with a nineteen-year-old stripper. Girl named Donna Jones. Ira met her in the laundromat. Thought at first she was a local high school kid, and for a while she didn't bother to set him straight. Petite, scrappy, brassy, tough. At least the surface was tough. And she's a little pleasure factory. The kid has her hand on her pussy all the time.
"Donna's from Michigan, a resort town on the lake called Benton Harbor. In Benton Harbor, Donna used to work summers at a hotel on the lakefront. Sixteen, a chambermaid, and she gets knocked up by one of the customers over from Chicago. Which one she doesn't know. Carries the baby to term, gives it up for adoption, leaves town in disgrace, and winds up stripping in one of those Cal City joints.
"When he wasn't out being Abe Lincoln for the union on Sundays, Ira used to borrow O'Day's car to take Donna over to Benton Harbor to visit her mother. The mother worked in a little factory that manufactured candy and fudge, stuff they sold to the vacationers on Benton Harbor's main street. Resort sweets. The fudge was famous, shipped fudge all over the Middle West. Ira starts talking to the guy who runs the candy factory, he sees how they make the stuff, and pretty soon he's writing to me about marrying Donna and moving back with her to her hometown, living in a bungalow on the lake and using what's left of his separation pay to buy into this guy's business. There was also the thousand bucks he'd won shooting craps on the troopship coming home—all of it could go into the candy business. That Christmas he mailed Lorraine a gift box of fudge. Sixteen different flavors: chocolate coconut, peanut butter, pistachio, mint chocolate chip, rocky road ... all fresh and creamy, direct from the Fudge Kitchen in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Tell me, what could be further from being a raving Red hell-bent on overthrowing the American system than being a guy in Michigan who gift-wraps fudge to mail out to your old auntie for the holiday season? 'Goodies Made by the Lake'—that's the slogan on the box. Not 'Workers of the World Unite' but 'Goodies Made by the Lake.' If only Ira had married Donna Jones, that would have been the slogan he lived by.
"It was O'Day, not me, who talked him out of Donna. Not because a nineteen-year-old featured at the Cal City Kit Kat Klub as 'Miss Shalimar, Recommended for Good Eating by Duncan Hines' might in any way be a bad risk as a wife and mother; not because the missing Mr. Jones, Donna's father, was a drunk who used to beat his wife and kids; not because the Benton Harbor Joneses were ignorant rednecks and not a family somebody back from four years in the service should be wanting to take on as a lasting responsibility—which is what I politely tried to tell him. But to Ira everything that was a guaranteed recipe for domestic disaster constituted the argument for Donna. The lure of the underdog. The struggle of the disinherited up from the bottom was an irresistible lure. You drink deep, you drink dregs: humanity to Ira was synonymous with hardship and calamity. Toward hardship, even its disreputable forms, the kinship was unbreakable. It took O'Day to undo the all-around aphrodisiac that was Donna Jones and the sixteen flavors of fudge. It was O'Day who tore into him for personalizing his politics, and O'Day didn't do it with my 'bourgeois' reasoning. O'Day didn't apologize for presuming to criticize Ira's shortcomings. O'Day never apologized for anything. O'Day set people straight.
"O'Day gave Ira what he called 'a refresher course in matrimony as it pertains to the world revolution,' based on his own encounter with marriage before the war. 'Is this what you came out with me to the Calumet for? To prepare to run a candy factory or to run a revolution? This is no time for ridiculous aberrations! This is it, boy! This is life or death for working conditions as we've known them for the past ten years! All the factions and groups are coming together right here in Lake County. You see that. If we can hold this pitch, if nobody jumps ship, then damn it, Iron Man, in a year, two at most, the mills will be ours!'
"So, some eight months on, Ira told Donna it was all off, and she swallowed some pills and tried to kill herself a little. About a month later—Donna's by then back at the Kit Kat and got herself a new guy—her long-lost drunken father turns up with one of Donna's brothers at Ira's door saying he's going to teach Ira a lesson for what he did to his daughter. Ira's in the doorway fighting the two of them off, and the father pulls a knife and O'Day takes one swing and breaks the bastard's jaw and grabs the knife ... That was the first family Ira was going to marry into.
"From such a farce it's not always a short way back, but by '48 the putative savior of little Donna has become Iron Rinn of The Free and the Brave and is up and ready for his next big mistake. You should have heard him when he learned Eve was pregnant. A child. A family of his own. And not with an ex-stripper whom his brother had disapproved of but with a renowned actress whom American radioland adored. It was the greatest thing ever to come his way. That solid foothold he'd never had before. He could hardly believe it. Two years—and this! The man wasn't impermanent anymore."
"She was pregnant? When was that?"
"After they were married. It didn't last but ten weeks. That's why he'd stayed with me and how you two met. She'd decided to abort."
We were sitting out back, on the deck, looking toward the pond and, in the distance, to the mountain range in the west. I live here by myself and the house is small, a room where I write and eat my meals—a workroom with a bathroom and a kitchen alcove off at one end, a stone fireplace at right angles to a wall of books, and a row of five twelve-over-twelve sash windows looking onto the broad hay field and a protective squadron of old maples that separates me from the dirt road. The other room is where I sleep, a nice-sized rustic-looking room with a single bed, a dresser, a wood-burning stove, exposed old beams upright in the four corners, more bookshelves, an easy chair where I do my reading, a small writing desk, and, in the west wall, a sliding glass door that opens onto the deck where Murray and I were each drinking a martini before dinner. I'd bought the house, winterized it—it had been somebody's summer cottage—and come here when I was sixty to live alone, by and large apart from people. That was four years ago. Though it isn't always desirable living as austerely as this, without the varied activities that ordinarily go to make up a human existence, I believe I made the least harmful choice. But my seclusion is not the story here. It is not a story in any way. I came here because I don't want a story any longer. I've had my story.
I wondered if Murray had as yet recognized my house as an upgraded replica of the two-room shack on the lersey side of the Delaware Water Gap that was Ira's beloved retreat and the spot where I happened to have got my first taste of rural America when I went up, in the summers of '49 and '50, to spend a week with him. I'd loved my first time living alone with Ira in that shack, and I thought of his place immediately when I was shown this house. Though I had been looking for somethi
ng larger and more conventionally a house, I bought it right off. The rooms were about the same size as Ira's and similarly situated. The long oval pond was about the same dimensions as his and about the same distance from the back door. And though my place was much brighter—over time, his stained pine-board walls had gone almost black, the beamed ceilings were low (ridiculously low for him), and the windows were small and not that plentiful—mine was tucked away on a dirt road as his was, and, if from the outside it didn't have that dark, drooping ramshackle look that proclaimed, "Hermit here—back off," the owner's state of mind was discernible in the absence of anything like a path across the hay field that led to the bolted front door. There was a narrow dirt drive that swung up and around to the workroom side of the house, to an open shed where, in the winter, I parked my car; a tumbledown wooden structure that predated the cottage, the shed could have been lifted right off Ira's overgrown eight acres.
How did the idea of Ira's shack maintain its hold so long? Well, it's the earliest images—of independence and freedom, particularly—that do live obstinately on, despite the blessing and the bludgeoning of life's fullness. And the idea of the shack, after all, isn't Ira's. It has a history. It was Rousseau's. It was Thoreau's. The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you've worn and the costumes you've gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods—Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The "forest dweller," the last stage on life's way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, the old Chinese man all alone under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.