by Philip Roth
"Ira? The Grants are leaving. Come upstairs to say good night."
Suddenly he did throw the dish, just let it fly. Marva cried "Momma!" when it struck the wall, but Wondrous shrugged—the irrationality of even white people opposed to jim Crow did not surprise her—and she set about picking up the broken pieces as Ira, dishtowel in hand, streaked for the stairs, bounding up them three at a time, and shouting so as to be heard at the top of the landing. "I can't understand, when you have freedom of choice and you live in a country like ours, where supposedly nobody compels you to do anything, how anybody can sit down to dinner with that Nazi son-of-a-bitch killer. How do they do that? Who compels them to sit down with a man whose life's work is to perfect something new to kill people better than what they killed them with before?"
I was right behind him. I didn't know what he was talking about until I saw that he was headed for Bryden Grant, standing in the doorway wearing a Chesterfield overcoat and a silk scarf and holding his hat in one hand. Grant was a square-faced man with a prominent jaw and a head enviably thick with soft silver hair, a solidly constructed fifty-year-old about whom there was, nonetheless—and just because he was so attractive—something a little porous-looking.
Ira hurtled toward Bryden Grant and didn't stop himself until their faces were only inches apart.
"Grant," he said to him. "Grant, right? Isn't that your name? You're a college graduate, Grant. A Harvard man, Grant. A Harvard man and a Hearst newspaperman, and you're a Grant—of the Grants! You are supposed to know something better than the ABCs. I know from the shit you write that your stock-in-trade is to be devoid of convictions, but are you devoid of any convictions about anything?"
"Ira! Stop this!" Eve Frame had her hands to her face, which was drained of color, and then her hands were clutching at Ira's arms. "Bryden," she cried, looking helplessly back over her shoulder while trying to force Ira into the living room, "I'm terribly, terribly—I don't know—"
But Ira easily swept her away and said, "I repeat: are you devoid, Grant, of any convictions?"
"This is not your best side, Ira. You are not presenting your best side." Grant spoke with the superiority of one who had learned very young not to stoop to defend himself verbally against a social inferior. "Good night, all," he said to those dozen or so guests still in the house who had gathered in the hallway to see what the commotion was about. "Good night, dear Eve," Grant said, throwing her a kiss, and then, turning to open the door to the street, took his wife by the arm to leave.
"Wernher von Braun!" Ira shouted at him. "A Nazi son-of-a-bitch engineer. A filthy fascist son of a bitch. You sit down with him and you have dinner with him. True or false?"
Grant smiled and, with perfect self-control—his calm tone divulging just the hint of a warning—said to Ira, "This is extremely rash of you, sir."
"You have this Nazi at your house for dinner. True or false? People who work and make things that kill people are bad enough, but this friend of yours was a friend of Hitler's, Grant. Worked for Adolf Hitler. Maybe you never heard about all this because the people he wanted to kill weren't Grants, Grant—they were people like me!"
All this time, Katrina had been glaring at Ira from her husband's side, and it was she who now replied on his behalf. Anyone listening for one morning to Van Tassel and Grant might have surmised that Katrina often replied on his behalf. That way he maintained an ominous autocratic demeanor and she got to feed a hunger for supremacy that she did nothing to conceal. While Bryden clearly considered himself more intimidating if he said little and let the authority flow from the inside outward, Katrina's frighteningness—not unlike Ira's—came from her saying it all.
"Nothing you are shouting makes one bit of sense." Katrina Grant's mouth was full-sized and yet—I now noticed—a tiny hole was all that she employed to speak, a hole at the center of her lips the circumference of a cough drop. Through this she extruded the hot little needles that constituted her husband's defense. The spell of the encounter was upon her—this was war—and she did look impressively statuesque, even up against a lug six foot six. "You are an ignorant man, and a naive man, and a rude man, a bullying, simple-minded, arrogant man, you are a boor, and you don't know the facts, you don't know the reality, you don't know what you are talking about, now or ever! You know only what you parrot from the Daily Worker!"
"Your dinner guest von Braun," Ira shouted back, "didn't kill enough Americans? Now he wants to work for Americans to kill Russians? Great! Let's kill Commies for Mr. Hearst and Mr. Dies and the National Association of Manufacturers. This Nazi doesn't care who he kills, as long as he gets his paycheck and the veneration of—"
Eve screamed. It was not a scream that seemed theatrical or calculated, but in that hallway full of well-turned-out partygoers—where one man in tights was not, after all, running a rapier through another man in tights—she did seem to have arrived awfully fast at a scream whose pitch was as horrifying as any human note I had ever heard sounded, on or off a stage. Emotionally, Eve Frame did not seem to have to go far to get where she wanted to be.
"Darling," said Katrina, who had stepped forward to take Eve by the shoulders and protectively to embrace her.
"Ah, cut the crap," said Ira, as he started back down the stairs to the kitchen. "Darling's fine."
"She is not fine," said Katrina, "nor should she be. This house is not a political meeting hall," Katrina called after him, "for political thugs! Must you raise the roof every time you open your rabble-rousing mouth, must you drag into a beautiful, civilized home your Communist—"
He was instantly up out of the stairwell, and shouting, "This is a democracy, Mrs. Grant! My beliefs are my beliefs. If you want to know Ira Ringold's beliefs, all you have to do is ask him. I don't give a damn if you don't like them or me. These are my beliefs, and I don't give a damn if nobody likes them! But no, your husband draws his salary from a fascist, so anyone comes along daring to say what the fascists don't like to hear, it's 'Communist, Communist, there's a Communist in our civilized home.' But if you had enough flexibility in your thinking to know that in a democracy the Communist philosophy, any philosophy—"
This time when Eve Frame screamed it was a scream with neither a bottom to it nor a top, a scream that signaled a life-threatening state of emergency and that ended effectively all political discourse and, with it, my first big evening out on the town.
5
"THE JEW HATRED, this contempt for Jews," I said to Murray. "Yet she married Ira, married Freedman before him ..."
It was our second session. Before dinner, we had sat out on the deck overlooking the pond, and while we drank our martinis, Murray had told me about the day's lectures down at the college. I shouldn't have been surprised by his mental energy, even by his enthusiasm for the three-hundred-word writing assignment—discuss, from the perspective of a lifetime, any one line in Hamlet's most famous soliloquy—that the professor had given his elderly students. Yet that a man so close to oblivion should be preparing homework for the next day, educating himself for a life that had all but run out—that the puzzle continued to puzzle him, that clarification remained a vital need—more than surprised me: a sense of error settled over me, bordering on shame, for living to myself and keeping everything at such a distance. But then the sense of error vanished. There were no more difficulties I wished to create.
I grilled chicken on the barbecue and we ate dinner outside on the deck. It was well after eight when we finished our meal, but we were only into the second week of July and, though that morning when I went for my mail the postmistress had informed me that we were going to lose forty-nine minutes of sun that month—and that if we didn't have rain soon, we would all have to go to the store for blackberry and raspberry preserves; and that the local roadkill was running four times greater than this time last year; and that there had been another sighting, near somebody's bird feeder at the edge of the woods, of our resident six-foot-tall black bear—there was as yet no end in sight for this day. Nigh
t was tucked away behind a straightforward sky proclaiming nothing but permanence. Life without end and without upheaval.
"Was she a Jew? She was," said Murray, "a pathologically embarrassed Jew. Nothing superficial about that embarrassment. Embarrassed that she looked like a Jew—and the cast of Eve Frame's face was subtly quite Jewish, all the physiognomic nuances Rebecca-like, right out of Scott's Ivanhoe—embarrassed that her daughter looked like a Jew. When she learned that I spoke Spanish, she told me, 'Everybody thinks Sylphid is Spanish. When we went to Spain, everybody took her for a native.' It was too pathetic even to dispute. Who cared anyway? Ira didn't. Ira had no use for it. Politically opposed. Couldn't stand religion of any kind. At Passover, Doris used to prepare a family seder and Ira wouldn't come near it. Tribal superstition.
"I think when he first met Eve Frame he was so bowled over by her, by everything—fresh to New York, fresh to The Free and the Brave, squiring around on his arm The American Radio Theater—I think that her being or not being a Jew never came up. What difference did it make to him? But anti-Semitism? That made all the difference. Years later he told me how whenever he said the word 'Jew' in public she would try to quiet him down. They'd take the elevator in an apartment building after visiting somebody somewhere and there'd be a woman with a baby in her arms or a baby in a carriage, and Ira wouldn't even notice them, but when they got into the street, Eve would say, 'What a perfectly hideous child.' Ira couldn't figure what was eating her until he realized that the hideous child was always the child of a woman who looked to her grossly Jewish.
"How could he stand five minutes of that crap? Well, he couldn't. But it wasn't the army, Eve Frame was no southern hillbilly, and he wasn't about to take a swing at her. Pummeled her instead with adult education. Ira tried to be an O'Day to Eve, but she was no Ira. The Social and Economic Origins of Anti-Semitism. That was the course. Sat her down in his study and read aloud to her from his books. Read aloud to her from the notepads he'd carried around with him during the war, where he'd put down his observations and thoughts. 'There is nothing superior in being Jewish—and there is nothing inferior or degrading. You are Jewish, and that's it. That's the story.'
"He bought her what was one of his favorite novels back then, a book by Arthur Miller. Ira must have given away dozens of copies of it. Called Focus. He gave Eve a copy, then marked it all up for her, so she wouldn't miss the important passages. He explained it to her the way O'Day used to explain books at the base library in Iran. Remember Focus, Miller's novel?"
I remembered it well. Ira had given me a copy too, for my sixteenth birthday, and, like O'Day, explained it to me. During my last years of high school, Focus took its place, alongside On a Note of Triumph and the novels of Howard Fast (and two war novels that he gave me, The Naked and the Dead and The Young Lions), as a book that affirmed my own political sympathies as well as furnishing a venerated source from which I could take lines for my radio plays.
Focus was published in 1945, the year Ira returned from overseas with his duffel bags full of books and the thousand bucks he'd won on the troopship shooting craps, and three years before the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman made Arthur Miller a famous playwright. The book tells of the harshly ironic fate of a Mr. Newman, a personnel officer for a big New York corporation, a cautious, anxiety-ridden conformist in his forties—too cautious to become actively the racial and religious bigot he is secretly in his heart. After Mr. Newman is fitted for his first pair of glasses, he discovers that they set off "the Semitic prominence of his nose" and make him dangerously resemble a Jew. And not just to himself. When his crippled old mother sees her son in his new glasses, she laughs and says, "Why, you almost look like a Jew." When he turns up at work in the glasses, the response to his transformation is not so benign: he is abruptly demoted from his visible position in personnel to a lowly job as a clerk, a job from which Mr. Newman resigns in humiliation. From that moment on, he who himself despises Jews for their looks, their odors, their meanness, their avarice, their bad manners, even for "their sensuous lust for women," is marked as a Jew everywhere he goes. So socially wide-ranging is the animosity he incites that it feels to the reader—or did to me as an adolescent—that it cannot be Newman's face alone that is responsible but that the source of his persecution is a mammoth, spectral incarnation of the extensive anti-Semitism that he was himself too meek to enact. "He had gone all his life bearing this revulsion toward Jews" and now that revulsion, materialized on his Queens street and throughout New York as in a terror-filled nightmare, ostracizes him brutally—in the end, violently—from the neighbors whose acceptance he had courted with his obedient conformism to their ugliest hatreds.
I went into the house and came back with the copy of Focus I probably hadn't opened since I got it from Ira and read it through in one night, then through again twice more, before setting it between the bookends on the bedroom desk where I kept my stash of sacred texts. On the title page Ira had inscribed a message to me. When I gave the book to Murray, he handled it a moment (a relic of his brother) before turning to the inscription to read it aloud:
Nathan—There are so few times I find anybody to hold an intelligent conversation with. I read lots and believe that what good I get from that must be stimulated and take form in discussion with other people. You are one of those few people. I feel slightly less pessimistic as regards the future because of knowing a young person like you.
Ira, April 1949
My former teacher flipped through Focus to see what I had underlined in 1949. He stopped a quarter of the way in and again read aloud to me, this time from one of the printed pages. "'His face,'" Murray read. '"He was not this face. Nobody had a right to dismiss him like that because of his face. Nobody! He was him, a human being with a certain definite history and he was not this face which looked like it had grown out of another alien and dirty history.'
"She reads this book at Ira's request. She reads what he underlines for her. She listens to his lecture. And what is the subject of the lecture? The subject is the subject of the book—the subject is the Jewish face. Well, as Ira used to say: It's hard to know how much she hears. This was a prejudice that, no matter what she heard, no matter how much she heard, she could not let go of."
"Focus didn't help," I said when Murray handed back the book to me.
"Look, they met Arthur Miller at a friend's house. Maybe it was at a party for Wallace, I don't remember. After Eve was introduced to him, she volunteered to Arthur Miller how gripping she had found his book. Probably wasn't lying, either. Eve read many books, and with a far wider understanding and appreciation than Ira, who if he didn't find political and social implications in the book, the whole thing was no good. But whatever she learned from reading or from music or art or acting—or from personal experience, from all the tremulous living she'd done—remained apart from where the hatred did its work. She couldn't escape it. Not that she was a person who couldn't make a change. She changed her name, changed husbands, changed from movies to the stage to radio when her professional fortunes altered and a change had to be made, but this was fixed in her.
"I don't mean that things didn't get better the longer Ira hammered away—or didn't look as though they'd gotten better. To avoid those lectures of his, she probably censored herself at least a little. But a change of heart? When she had to—to hide the way she felt from her social set, from the prominent Jews in her social set, to hide the way she felt from Ira himself—-she did it. Indulged him, patiently listened when he was off and running about anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church and the Polish peasantry and in France during the Dreyfus affair. But when she found a face inexcusably Jewish (like the one on my wife, like Doris's), her thoughts weren't Ira's or Arthur Miller's.
"Eve hated Doris. Why? A woman who'd worked in a hospital lab? A former lab technician? A Newark mother and housewife? What threat could she possibly pose to a famous star? How much effort would it have taken to tolerate her? Doris had scoliosis, there was pain
as she aged, she had to have an operation to insert a rod and that didn't go very well, and so on and so forth. The fact is that Doris, who to me was pretty as a picture from the day I met her till the day she died, had a deformation of the spine and you noticed it. Her nose was not so straight as Lana Turner's. You noticed that. She grew up speaking English the way it was spoken in the Bronx when she was a kid—and Eve could not bear to be in her presence. Couldn't look at her. My wife was too upsetting for her to look at.
"During those three years they were married, we were invited for dinner exactly once. You could see it in Eve's eyes. What Doris wore, what Doris said, what Doris looked like—all repellent to her. Me, Eve was apprehensive of; she didn't care for me for other reasons. I was a schoolteacher from Jersey, a nobody in her world, but she must have seen in me a potential foe and so she was always polite. And charming. The way she was with you, I'm sure. I had to admire the pluck in her: a fragile, high-strung person, easily addled, who'd come as far as she had, a woman of the world—that requires tenacity. To keep trying, to keep surfacing after all she'd been through, after all her career setbacks, to make a success in radio, to create that house, to establish that salon, to entertain all those people ... Sure, she was wrong for Ira. And he for her. They had no business together. Nonetheless, to take him on, to take on yet another husband, to get a big new life going again, that took something.
"If I separated out her marriage to my brother, if I separated out her attitude to my wife, if I tried looking at her separate from that stuff—well, she was a bright, peppy little thing. Separate out all that and she was probably the same bright, peppy little thing who'd gone out to California and taken on being a silent-movie actress at the age of seventeen. She had spirit. You saw it in those silent films. Under all that civility, she masked a lot of spirit—I venture to say, Jewish spirit. There was a generous side to her when she could relax, which was not often. When she was relaxed, you felt that there was something in her wanting to do the right thing. She tried to pay attention. But the woman was hog-tied—it wouldn't work. You couldn't establish any sort of independent relationship with her, and she couldn't take any independent interest in you. You couldn't count on her judgment for very long, either, not with Sylphid at her other side.