I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "'I'm Bill Smith,'" Ira began, plunking down into his high-backed leather chair and throwing his legs up onto his desktop. "'I'm Bob Jones. I'm Harry Campbell. My name doesn't matter. It's not a name that bothers anyone. I'm white and Protestant, and so you don't have to worry about me. I get along with you, I don't bother you, I don't annoy you. I don't even hate you. I quietly earn my living in a nice little town. Centerville. Middletown. Okay Falls. Forget the name of the town. Could be anywhere. Let's call it Anywhere. Many people here in Anywhere give lip service to the fight against discrimination. They talk about the need to wreck the fences that keep minorities in social concentration camps. But too many carry on their fight in abstract terms. They think and speak of justice and decency and right, about Americanism, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. All this is fine, but it shows they are really unaware of the what and why of racial, religious, and national discrimination. Take this town, take Anywhere, take what happened here last year when a Catholic family right around the corner from me found that zealous Protestantism can be just as cruel as Torquemada was. You remember Torquemada. The hatchet man for Ferdinand and Isabella. Ran the Inquisition for the king and queen of Spain. Guy who expelled the Jews from Spain for Ferdinand and Isabella back in 1492. Yeah, you heard right, pal—1492. There was Columbus, sure, there was the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—and then there was Torquemada. There's always Torquemada. Maybe there always will be ... Well, here's what happened right here in Anywhere, USA, under the Stars and Stripes, where all men are created equal, and not in 1492..."'

  Ira flipped through the pages. "And it goes on like that ... and here, the ending. This is the end. The narrator again. A fifteen-year-old kid has the courage to write this, y'understand? Tell me the network that would have the courage to put it on. Tell me the sponsor who in the year 1949 would stand up to Commandant Wood and his committee, who would stand up to Commandant Hoover and his storm-trooper brutes, who would stand up to the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans and the VFW and the DAR and all our darling patriots, who wouldn't give a shit if they called him a goddamn Red bastard and threatened to boycott his precious product. Tell me who would have the courage to do that because it is the right thing to do. Nobody! Because they don't give any more of a shit about freedom of speech than the guys I was with in the army gave a shit about it. They didn't talk to me. Did I ever tell you that? I walked into the mess hall, y'understand, two hundred and some-odd men, nobody said hello, nobody said anything because of the stuff I was saying and the letters I was writing to Stars and Stripes. Those guys gave you the distinct impression that World War II was being fought to spite them. Contrary to what some people may think about our darling boys, they didn't have the slightest notion, didn't know what the hell they were there for, didn't give a shit about fascism, about Hitler—what did they care? Get them to understand the social problems of Negroes? Get them to understand the devious ways capitalism endeavors to weaken labor? Get them to understand why when we bomb Frankfurt the I. G. Farben plants are not touched? Maybe I am myself handicapped by my lack of education, but the picayune minds of 'our boys' make me violently sick! 'It all comes to this,'" he suddenly read from my script. '"If you want a moral, here it is: The man who swallows the guff about racial, religious, and national groups is a sap. He hurts himself, his family, his union, his community, his state, and his country. He's the stooge of Torquemada.' Written," Ira said, angrily tossing the script down on his desk, "by a fifteen-year-old kid!"

  There must have been another fifty people who showed up after dinner. Despite the extraordinary stature Ira had imposed on me up in his study, I would never have had the courage to stay and mingle with everybody pressed into the living room had it not been for Sylphid's again coming to my rescue. There were actors and actresses, directors, writers, poets, there were lawyers and literary agents and theatrical producers, there was Arthur Sokolow, and there was Sylphid, who not only called all the guests by their given names but knew in caricatured detail their every flaw. She was a reckless, entertaining talker, a great hater with the talent of a chef for filleting, rolling, and roasting a hunk of meat, and I, whose aim was to be radio's bold, uncompromising teller of the truth, was in awe of how she did nothing to rationalize, let alone to hide, her amused contempt. That one is the vainest man in New York ... that one's need to be superior ... that one's insincerity ... that one hasn't the faintest idea ... that one got so drunk ... that one's talent is so minute, so infinitesimal ... that one is so embittered ... that one is so depraved ... what's most laughable about that lunatic is her grandiosity...

  How delicious to belittle people—and to watch them being belittled. Especially for a boy whose every impulse at that party was to revere. Worried as I was about getting home late, I couldn't deprive myself of this first-class education in the pleasures of spite. I'd never met anyone like Sylphid: so young and yet so richly antagonistic, so worldly-wise and yet, costumed in something long and gaudy as if she were a fortuneteller, so patently oddballish. So happy-go-lucky about being repelled by everything. I'd had no idea how very tame and inhibited I was, how eager to please, until I saw how eager Sylphid was to antagonize, no idea how much freedom there was to enjoy once egoism unleashed itself from the restraint of social fear. There was the fascination: her formidability. I saw that Sylphid was fearless, unafraid to cultivate within herself the threat that she could be to others.

  The two people she announced herself least able to endure were a couple whose Saturday morning radio show happened to be a favorite of my mother's. The program, called Van Tassel and Grant, emanated from the Hudson River farmhouse, up in Dutchess County, New York, of the popular novelist Katrina Van Tassel Grant and her husband, the Journal-American columnist and entertainment critic Bryden Grant. Katrina was an alarmingly thin sixfooter with long dark ringlets that once must have been thought alluring and a bearing that suggested that she did not lack for a sense of the influence she brought to bear on America through her novels. The little I knew about her up until that night—that dinnertime in the Grant house was reserved for discussion with her four handsome children of their obligations to society, that her friends in traditional old Staatsburg (where her ancestors, the Van Tassels, first settled, reportedly as local aristocracy, in the seventeenth century, long before the arrival of the English) had impeccable ethical and educational credentials—I had happened to overhear when my mother was tuned in to Van Tassel and Grant.

  "Impeccable" was a word much favored in Katrina's weekly monologue on her rich and varied record-breaking existence in the bustling city and the bucolic countryside. Not only were her sentences infested with "impeccable," but so were my mother's after an hour of listening to Katrina Van Tassel Grant—whom my mother thought "cultivated"—lauding the superiority of whoever was so fortunate as to be brought within the Grants' social purview, whether it was the man who fixed her teeth or the man who fixed her toilet. "An impeccable plumber, Bryden, impeccable," she said, while my mother, like millions of others, listened enraptured to a discussion of the drainage difficulties that afflict the households of even the most wellborn of Americans, and my father, who was solidly in Sylphid's camp, said, "Oh, turn that woman off, will you, please?"

  It was Katrina Grant about whom Sylphid had muttered to me, "What's most laughable about that lunatic is her grandiosity"; it was about the husband, Bryden Grant, that she had said, "That one is the vainest man in New York."

  "My mother goes to lunch with Katrina and she comes home white with rage. 'That woman is impossible. She tells me about the theater and she tells me about the latest novels and she thinks she knows everything and she knows nothing.' And it's true: when they go to lunch, Katrina invariably lectures Mother on the one thing Mother happens to know all about. Mother can't stand Katrina's books. She can't even read them. She bursts out laughing when she tries, and then she tells Katrina how wonderful they are. Mother has a nickname for everyone who frightens
her—Katrina's is 'Loony.' 'You should have heard Loony on the O'Neill play,' she tells me. 'She outdid herself.' Then Loony calls at nine the next morning and Mother spends an hour with her on the phone. My mother goes through vehement indignation the way a spendthrift goes through a bankroll, then she turns right around and sucks up to her because of the 'Van' in her name. And because when Bryden drops Mother's name in his column, he calls her 'the Sarah Bernhardt of the Airwaves.' Poor Mother and her social ambitions. Katrina is the most pretentious of all the rich, pretentious river folk up in Staatsburg, and he's supposed to be a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. Here," she said, and in the midst of the party, with guests everywhere so closely huddled together that they looked as though they had all they could do to keep their muzzles out of one another's drinks, Sylphid turned to search the wall of bookcases behind us for a novel by Katrina Van Tassel Grant. To either side of the living room fireplace, bookcases extended from floor to ceiling, rising so high that a library ladder had to be mounted to get to the topmost shelves.

  "Here," she said. "Eloise and Abelard." "My mother read that," I said. "Your mother's a shameless hussy," Sylphid replied, rendering me weak in the knees until I realized she was joking. Not just my mother, but nearly half a million Americans had bought it and read it. "Here—open to a page, any page, put a finger down anywhere, and then prepare to be ravished, Nathan of Newark."

  I did as she told me, and when Sylphid saw where my finger was pointing she smiled and said, "Oh, you don't have to look very far to find V.T.G. at the top of her talent." Aloud to me Sylphid read, '"His hands clasped about her waist, drawing her to him, and she felt the powerful muscles of his legs. Her head fell back. Her mouth parted to receive his kiss. One day he would suffer castration as a brutal and vengeful punishment for this passion for Eloise, but for now he was far from mutilated. The harder he grasped, the harder was the pressure on her sensitive areas. How aroused he was, this man whose genius would revamp and revitalize the traditional teaching of Christian theology. Her nipples were drawn hard and sharp, and her gut tightened as she thought, "I am kissing the greatest writer and thinker of the twelfth century!" "Your figure is magnificent," he whispered in her ear, "swelling breasts, small waist! And not even the full satin skirts of your gown can conceal from view your loveliness of hip and thigh." Best known for his solution of the problem of universals and for his original use of dialectics, he knew no less well, even now, at the height of his intellectual fame, how to melt a woman's heart.... By morning they were sated. At last it was her chance to say to the canon and master of Notre Dame, "Now teach me, please. Teach me, Pierre! Explain to me your dialectical analysis of the mystery of God and the Trinity." This he did, patiently going into the ins and outs of his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma, and then he took her as a woman for the eleventh time.'

  "Eleven times," said Sylphid, hugging herself from the sheer delight of what she'd heard. "That husband of hers doesn't know what two is. That little fairy doesn't know what one is." And it was a while before she was able to stop laughing—before either of us could. "'Oh, teach me, please, Pierre,'" cried Sylphid, and for no reason in the world—other than her happiness—she kissed me loudly on the tip of my nose.

  After Sylphid had returned Eloise and Abelard to the shelves and we were both more or less sober again, I felt emboldened enough to ask her a question I'd been wanting to ask all evening. One of the questions I'd been wanting to ask. Not "What was it like to grow up in Beverly Hills?"; not "What was it like to live next door to limmy Durante?"; not "What was it like having movie star parents?" Because I was afraid of her ridiculing me, I asked only what I considered to be my most serious question.

  "What's it like," I said, "to play at Radio City Music Hall?"

  "It's a horror. The conductor's a horror. 'My dear lady, I know it's so difficult to count to four in that bar, but if you wouldn't mind, that would be so nice.' The more polite he is, the nastier you know he's feeling. If he's really angry, he says, 'My dear dear lady.' The 'dear' dripping with venom. 'That's not quite right, dear, that should be done arpeggiated.' And you have your part printed non- arpeggiated. You can't go back, without seeming argumentative and wasting time, and say, 'Excuse me, maestro, actually it's printed the other way.' So everybody looks at you, thinking, Don't you know how it's supposed to be done, idiot—he has to tell you? He's the world's worst conductor. All he's conducting is music from the standard repertoire, and still you have to think, Has he never heard this piece before? Then there's the band car. At the Music Hall. You know, this platform that moves the band into view. It moves up and backward and forward and down, and every time it moves, it jerks—it's on a hydraulic lift—and you sit and hold on to your harp for dear life even as it's going out of tune. Harpists spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune. I hate all harps."

  "Do you really?" I said, laughing away, in part because she was being funny and in part because, imitating the conductor, she'd been laughing too.

  "They're impossibly difficult to play. They break down all the time. You breathe on a harp," she said, "and it's out of tune. Trying to have a harp in perfect condition makes me crazy. Moving it around—it's like moving an aircraft carrier."

  "Then why do you play the harp?"

  "Because the conductor's right—I am stupid. Oboists are smart. Fiddle players are smart. But not harpists. Harpists are dummies, moronic dummies. How smart can you be to pick an instrument that's going to ruin and run your life the way the harp does? There's no way, had I not been seven years old and too stupid to know better, that I would have begun playing the harp, let alone be playing it still. I don't even have conscious memories of life before harp."

  "Why did you start so young?"

  "Most little girls who start the harp start the harp because Mommy thinks it's such a lovely thing for them to do. It looks so pretty and all the music is so damned sweet, and it's played politely in small rooms for polite people who aren't the least bit interested. The column painted in gold leaf—you need sunglasses to look at it. Really refined. It sits there and reminds you of itself all the time. And it's so monstrously big, you can never put it away. Where are you going to put it? It's always there, sitting there and mocking you. You can never get away from it. Like my mother."

  A young woman still in her coat and carrying a small black case in her hand appeared suddenly beside Sylphid, apologizing in an English accent for arriving late. With her were a stout, dark-haired young man—elegantly turned out and, as though corseted in all his privilege, holding his youthful chubbiness militarily erect—and a virginally sensuous young woman, ripish-looking, just verging on fullness, with a cascade of curling reddish gold hair to offset her fair complexion. Eve Frame rushed up to meet all the newcomers. She embraced the girl carrying the small black case, whose name was Pamela, and was then introduced by Pamela to the glamorous couple, affianced and soon to be married, who were Rosalind Halladay and Ramón Noguera.

  Within only minutes Sylphid was in the library, the harp against her knees and cradled on her shoulder while she tuned it, Pamela was out of her coat and was alongside Sylphid fingering the keys of her flute, and, seated beside the two of them, Rosalind tuned a stringed instrument that I assumed was a violin but that I shortly discovered was something slightly larger called a viola. Gradually everybody in the living room turned toward the library, where Eve Frame stood waiting for silence, Eve Frame wearing an outfit I later described to my mother as well as I could and that my mother then told me was a white pleated chiffon gown and capelet with an emerald green chiffon sash. When I described her hairdo as I remembered it, my mother told me it was called a feather cut, with long curls all around and a smooth crown. Even while Eve Frame patiently waited, a faint smile intensifying her loveliness (and her fascination to me), a joyful excitement was evidently mounting within her. When she spoke, when she said, "Something beautiful is about to happen," all her elegant reserve seemed on the brink of being sw
ept away.

  It was quite a performance, particularly to an adolescent who in half an hour was going to have to get back on the number 107 Newark bus and return to a household whose intensities no longer left him anything other than frustrated. Eve Frame came and went in less than a minute, but in just the grand way she strode down the step and back into the living room in her white pleated chiffon gown and capelet, she gave the whole evening a new meaning: the adventure for which life is lived was about to unfold.

  I don't want to make it seem as though Eve Frame appeared to be playing a role. Far from it: this was her freedom being revealed, Eve Frame unimpeded, rapturously unintimidated, in a state of serene exaltation. If anything, it was as if we had been assigned by her nothing less than the role of our lives—the role of privileged souls whose fondest dream had been made to come true. Reality had fallen victim to artistic wizardry; some store of hidden magic had purified the evening of its mundane social function, purged that glittering half-drunk assemblage of all vile instincts and low-down schemes. And this illusion had been created out of practically nothing: a few perfectly enunciated syllables from the edge of the library step, and all the nonsensical self-seeking of a Manhattan soirée dissolved into a romantic endeavor to flee into aesthetic bliss.

  "Sylphid Pennington and the young London flutist Pamela Solomon will play two duets for flute and harp. The first is by Fauré and is called 'Berceuse.' The second is by Franz Doppler, his 'Casilda Fantasie.' The third and final selection will be the lively second movement, the Interlude, from the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp by Debussy. The violist is Rosalind Halladay, who is visiting New York from London. Rosalind is a native of Cornwall, England, and a graduate of London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In London, Rosalind Halladay now plays with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House."