by Philip Roth
The martinis were Murray's idea. A good though not a great idea, since a drink at the end of a summer's day with somebody I enjoyed, talk with a person like Murray, made me remember the pleasures of companionship. I'd enjoyed a lot of people, had not been an indifferent participant in life, had not backed away from it...
But the story is Ira's. Why it was impossible for him.
"He'd wanted a boy," Murray said. "Was dying to name it after his friend. Johnny O'Day Ringold. Doris and I had Lorraine, our daughter, and whenever he stayed over on the couch, Lorraine could always lift his spirits. Lorraine used to like to watch Ira sleep. Liked standing in the doorway watching Lemuel Gulliver sleep. He got attached to that little girl with those black bangs of hers. And she to him. When he came to the house, she'd get him to play with her Russian nested dolls. He'd given them to her for a birthday. You know, a traditional Russian woman in a babushka, the one replica nestles inside the other, till you get down to the nut-sized doll at the core. They'd make up stories about each of the dolls and how hard these little people worked in Russia. Then he'd nestle the whole thing in one of those hands of his so that you couldn't even see it. lust disappear whole inside those spatulate fingers—such long, peculiar fingers, the fingers Paganini must have had. Lorraine loved it when he did that: the biggest nesting doll of them all was this enormous uncle.
"For Lorraine's next birthday he bought her the album of the Soviet Army Chorus and Band performing Russian songs. More than a hundred men in that chorus, another hundred in the band. The basses' portentous rumblings—terrific sound. She and Ira would have a great time with those records. The singing was in Russian, and they'd listen together, and Ira would pretend to be the bass soloist, mouthing the incomprehensible words and making dramatic 'Russian' gestures, and, when the refrain came, Lorraine would mouth the incomprehensible words of the chorus. My kid knew how to be a comedian.
"There was one song she especially loved. It was beautiful too, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong called 'Dubinushka,' a simple song sung with a balalaika in the background. The words to 'Dubinushka' were printed in English on the inside of the album cover, and she learned them by heart and went around the house singing them for months.
Many songs have I heard in my native land—
Songs of joy and sorrow.
But one of them was deeply engraved in my memory:
It's the song of the common worker.
That was the solo part. But what she liked best to sing was the choral refrain. Because it had 'heave-ho' in it.
Ekh, lift up the cudgel,
Heave-ho!
Pull harder together,
Heave-ho!
When Lorraine was by herself in her room, she'd line up all the hollow dolls and put on the 'Dubinushka' record, and she'd sing tragically 'Heave-ho! Heave-ho!' while pushing the dolls this way and that way all over the floor."
"Stop a minute. Murray, wait," I said, and I got up and went from the deck into the house, into my bedroom, where I had my CD player and my old phonograph. Most of my records were boxed and stored in a closet, but I knew in which box to find what I was looking for. I took out the album Ira had given to me back in 1948, and removed the record on which "Dubinushka" was performed by the Soviet Army Chorus and Band. I pushed the rpm switch to 78, dusted the record, and put it on the turntable. I placed the needle into the margin just before the record's last band, turned the volume up loud enough so that Murray could hear the music through the open doors separating my bedroom from the deck, and went out to rejoin him.
In the dark we listened, though now neither I to him nor he to me but both of us to "Dubinushka." It was just as Murray had described it: beautiful, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong. Except for the crackle off the worn surface of the old record—a cyclical sound not unlike some familiar, natural night noise of the summer countryside—the song seemed to be traveling to us from a remote historical past. It wasn't at all like lying on my deck listening on the radio to the Saturday night concerts live from Tanglewood. "Heave-ho! Heave-ho!" was out of a distant place and time, a spectral residue of those rapturous revolutionary days when everyone craving for change programmatically, naively—madly, unforgivably—underestimates how mankind mangles its noblest ideas and turns them into tragic farce. Heave-ho! Heave-ho! As though human wiliness, weakness, stupidity, and corruption didn't stand a chance against the collective, against the might of the people pulling together to renew their lives and abolish injustice. Heave-ho.
When "Dubinushka" was over, Murray was silent and I began to hear once again everything I had filtered out while listening to him talk: the snores, twangs, and trills of the frogs, the rails in Blue Swamp, the reedy marsh just east of my house, kuck-ing and kek- ing and ki-tic-ing away, and the wrens there chattering their accompaniment. And the loons, the crying and the laughing of the manic-depressive loons. Every few minutes there was the whinny of a distant screech owl, and, continuously throughout, the western New England string ensemble of crickets sawed away at cricket Bartok. A raccoon twittered in the nearby woods, and, as time wore on, I even thought I was hearing the beavers gnawing on a tree back where the woodland tributaries feed my pond. Some deer, fooled by the silence, must have prowled too close to the house, for all at once—the deer having sensed our presence—their Morse code of flight is swiftly sounded: the snorting, the in-place thud, the stamping, hooves pounding, the bounding away. Their bodies barge gracefully into the thicket of scrub, and then, subaudibly, they race for their lives. Only Murray's murmurous breathing is heard, the eloquence of an old man evenly expirating.
Close to half an hour must have passed before he spoke. The arm of the phonograph hadn't returned to the starting position, and now I could hear the needle, too, whirring atop the label. I didn't go in to fix it and interrupt whatever it was that had quieted my storyteller and created the intensity of his silence. I wondered how long it would be before he said something, if perhaps he wouldn't speak at all but just get up and ask to be driven back to the dormitory—if whatever thoughts had been set loose in him would require a full night's sleep to subdue.
But, softly laughing, Murray said at last, "That hit me."
"Did it? Why?"
"I miss my girl."
"Where is she?"
"Lorraine is dead."
"When did that happen?"
"Lorraine died twenty-six years ago. Nineteen seventy-one. Died at thirty, leaving two kids and a husband. Meningitis, and overnight she was dead."
"And Doris is dead."
"Doris? Sure."
I went into the bedroom to lift the needle and return it to its rest. "Want to hear more?" I called to Murray.
He laughed heartily this time and said, "Trying to see how much I can take? Your idea of my strength, Nathan, is just a little too grand. I've met my match in 'Dubinushka.'"
"I doubt that," I said, going back outside and sitting in my chair. "You were telling me—?"
"I was telling you ... I was telling you ... Yes. That when Ira got booted off the air, Lorraine was desolate. She was only nine or ten, but she was up in arms. After Ira got fired for being a Communist, she wouldn't salute the flag."
"The American flag? Where?"
"At school," Murray said. "Where else do you salute the flag? The teacher tried to protect her, took her to one side and said you have to salute the flag. But this child wouldn't do it. A lot of anger. The real Ringold anger. She loved her uncle. She took after him."
"What happened?"
"I had a long talk with her and she got back to saluting the flag."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I loved my brother, too. I didn't think it was right either. I told her I thought as she did, that it was dead wrong to fire a person for his political beliefs. I believed in freedom of thought. Absolute freedom of thought. But I told her you don't go looking for that kind of fight. It's not an important issue. What are you achieving? What are you winning? I told her, Don't pick a fight
you know you can't win, one that isn't even worth winning. I told her what I used to try to tell my brother about the problem of impassioned speech—tried from the time he was a little kid, for all the good it did him. It's not being angry that's important, it's being angry about the right things. I told her, Look at it from the Darwinian perspective. Anger is to make you effective. That's its survival function. That's why it's given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato."
As my teacher some fifty years earlier, Murray Ringold used to play things up, make a show out of the lesson, dozens of tricks to get us to stay alert. Teaching was a passionate occupation for him, and he was an exciting guy. But now, though by no means an old man who'd run out of juice, he no longer found it necessary to tear himself apart to make clear his meaning, but had brought himself close to being totally dispassionate. His tone was more or less unvaried, mild—no attempt to lead you (or mislead you) by being overtly expressive with his voice or his face or his hands, not even when singing "Heave-ho. Heave-ho."
His skull looked so fragile and small now. Yet within it were cradled ninety years of the past. There was a great deal in there. All the dead were there, for one thing, their deeds and their misdeeds converging with all the unanswerable questions, those things about which you can never be sure ... to produce for him an exacting task: to reckon fairly, to tell this story without too much error.
Time, we know, goes very fast near the end, but Murray had been near the end so long that, when he spoke as he did, patiently, to the point, with a certain blandness—only intermittently pausing to wholeheartedly sip that martini—I had the feeling that time had dissolved for him, that it ran neither quickly nor slowly, that he was no longer living in time but exclusively within his own skin. As though that active, effortful, outgoing life as a conscientious teacher and citizen and family man had been a long battle to reach a state of ardorlessness. Aging into decrepitude was not unendurable and neither was the unfathomability of oblivion; neither was everything's coming down to nothing. It had all been endurable, even despising, without remission, the despicable.
In Murray Ringold, I thought, human dissatisfaction has met its match. He has outlived dissatisfaction. This is what remains after the passing of everything, the disciplined sadness of stoicism. This is the cooling. For so long it's so hot, everything in life is so intense, and then little by little it goes away, and then comes the cooling, and then come the ashes. The man who first taught me how you box with a book is back now to demonstrate how you box with old age.
And an amazing, noble skill it is, for nothing teaches you less about old age than having lived a robust life.
3
"THE REASON Ira came to see me," Murray continued, "and to stay overnight with us the day before you two met was because of what he'd heard that morning."
"She'd told him about wanting the abortion."
"No, she'd already told him that the night before, told him that she was going to Camden for an abortion. There was a doctor in Camden whom a lot of rich people went to back when abortion was a dodgy business. Her decision didn't come as a total surprise. For weeks she'd been back and forth, uncertain what to do. She was forty-one years old—she was older than Ira. Her face didn't show it, but Eve Frame wasn't a kid. She was concerned to be having a baby at her age. Ira understood that, but he couldn't accept it and refused to believe that her being forty-one was something to stand in their way. He wasn't that cautious, you know. He had that all-out steamrolling side, and so he tried and tried to convince her that they had nothing to worry about.
"He thought he had convinced her. But a new issue emerged—work. It had been hard enough to tend a career and a child the first time around, with Sylphid, the daughter. Eve was only eighteen when Sylphid was born—she was a starlet then out in Hollywood. She was married to that actor, Pennington. Big name when I was young. Carlton Pennington, the silent-film hero with a profile molded precisely to classical specifications. Tall, slender, graceful man with hair as dark and sleek as a raven and a dark mustache. Elegant to the marrow of his bones. Member in good standing of both the social aristocracy and the aristocracy of eros—his acting capitalizes on the interplay of both. A fairy-tale prince—and a carnal powerhouse—in one, guaranteed to drive you to ecstasy in a silver-plated Pierce-Arrow.
"Studio arranged the wedding. She and Pennington had made such a hit together, and she was so enamored of him, that the studio decided they ought to get married. And once they were married, that they ought to have a child. All this was to squelch the rumors that Pennington was gay. Which, of course, he was.
"In order to marry Pennington there was a first husband to be gotten rid of. Pennington was the second husband. The first was a fellow named Mueller, whom she'd run away with when she was sixteen. An uneducated roughneck just back from five years in the navy, a big, burly German-American boy who'd grown up the son of a bartender in Kearny, near Newark. Crude background. Crude guy. A sort of Ira without the idealism. She met him at a neighborhood theater group. He wanted to be an actor and she wanted to be an actress. He was living in a boarding house and she was in high school and still living at home, and they ran off together to Hollywood. That's how Eve wound up in California, eloped as a kid with the bartender's boy. Within the year she was a star, and, so as to get rid of Mueller, who was nothing, her studio paid him off. Mueller did appear in a few silent films—as part of the payoff—and he even had a couple of roles as a tough in the first talkies, but his connection to Eve was all but erased from the record books. Until much later on, that is. We'll get back to Mueller. The point is that she marries Pennington, a coup for everyone: there's the studio wedding, there's the little baby, and then the twelve years with Pennington living the life of a nun.
"She used to take Sylphid to see Pennington in Europe even after she married Ira. Pennington's dead now, but he lived on the French Riviera after the war. He had a villa up in the hills back of St. Tropez. Drunk every night, on the prowl, a bitter ex-somebody ranting and raving about the Jews who run Hollywood who ruined his career. She'd take Sylphid over to France to see Pennington, and they'd all go out for dinner in St. Tropez and he'd drink a couple bottles of wine and be staring all through dinner at some waiter, and then he'd send Sylphid and Eve back to their hotel. The next morning they'd go to Pennington's for breakfast and the waiter would be at the table in a bathrobe and they'd all have fresh figs together. Eve would return to Ira in tears, saying the man was fat and drunk and there was always some eighteen-year-old sleeping there, a waiter, or a beach bum, or a street cleaner, and she could never go to France again. But back she went-—for good or bad, she took Sylphid to St. Tropez two or three times a year to see her father. It couldn't have been easy on the kid.
"After Pennington, Eve marries a real estate speculator, this guy Freedman, who she claimed spent everything she had and all but got her to sign over the house. So when Ira shows up on the radio scene in New York, naturally she falls for him. The noble rail-splitter, outgoing, unpolluted, a great big walking conscience yapping away about justice and equality for all. Ira and his ideals had attracted all sorts, from Donna Jones to Eve Frame, and everything problematic in between. Women in distress were crazy about him. The vitality. The energy. The Samson-like revolutionary giant. The luggish sort of chivalry he had. And Ira smelled good. Do you remember that? A natural smell of his. Lorraine used to say, 'Uncle Ira smells like maple syrup.' He did. He smelled like sap.
"In the beginning, the fact that Eve would deliver up her daughter to Pennington used to drive Ira nuts. I think he felt that it wasn't only to give Sylphid a chance to see Pennington—that there was still something about Pennington that Eve found attractive. And maybe she did. Maybe it was Pennington's queerness. Maybe it was that wellborn background. Pennington was old California money. That's the money he lived on in France. Some of the jewelry that Sylphid wore was Spanish jewelry collected by her father's family. Ira would say to me, 'His daughter is in the house with him,
in one room, and he's in another room with a sailor. She should protect her daughter from this stuff. She shouldn't drag her over to France to have her witness stuff like that. Why doesn't she protect her daughter?'
"I know my brother—I know what he wants to say. He wants to say, I forbid you to go ever again. I told him, 'You're not the girl's father. You can't forbid her kid to do anything.' I said, 'If you want to leave the marriage because of this, leave it because of this. Otherwise, stay and live with it.'
"It was the first shot I'd had at even hinting at what I'd been wanting to say all along. Having a fling with her was one thing. A movie star—why not? But marriage? Glaringly wrong in every way. This woman has no contact with politics and especially not with Communism. Knows her way around the complicated plots of the Victorian novelists, can rattle off the names of the people in Trollope, but completely unknowing about society and the workaday doings of anything. The woman is dressed by Dior. Fabulous clothes. Owns a thousand little hats with little veils. Shoes and handbags made out of reptiles. Spends lots of money on clothes. While Ira is a guy who spends four ninety-nine for a pair of shoes. He finds one of her bills for an eight-hundred-dollar dress. Doesn't even know what this means. He goes to her closet and looks at the dress and tries to figure out how it can cost so much. As a Communist, he should be irritated by her from the first second. So what explains this marriage with her and not with a comrade? In the party, couldn't he have found somebody who supported him, who was together with him in the fight?