I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "Well, after we left that night, she said to Ira, a propos of Doris, 'I hate those wonderful wives, those doormats.' But it wasn't a doormat Eve saw in Doris. She saw a Jewish woman of the sort she could not abide.

  "I knew this; it didn't take Ira to clue me in. He felt too compromised to anyway. My kid brother could tell me anything, tell anybody anything—had since the day he could talk—but that he couldn't tell me until everything was kaput. But he didn't have to for me to know that the woman had got caught in her own impersonation. The anti-Semitism was just a part of the role she was playing, a careless part of what went into playing the role. In the beginning, I would think, it was almost inadvertent. It was unthinking more than malicious. In that way went along with everything else she did. The thing that's happening to her is unobserved by her.

  "You're an American who doesn't want to be your parents' child? Fine. You don't want to be associated with Jews? Fine. You don't want anybody to know you were born Jewish, you want to disguise your passage into the world? You want to drop the problem and pretend you're somebody else? Fine. You've come to the right country. But you don't have to hate Jews into the bargain. You don't have to punch your way out of something by punching somebody else in the face. The cheap pleasures of Jew hating aren't necessary. You're convincing as a Gentile without them. That's what a good director would have told her about her performance. He would have told her that the anti-Semitism is overdoing the role. It's no less a deformity than the deformity she was trying to obliterate. He would have told her, 'You're a film star already—you don't need anti-Semitism as a part of your superior baggage.' He would have told her, 'As soon as you do that, you're gilding the lily and you're not convincing at all. It's over the top, you're doing too much. The performance is logically too complete, too airless. You're succumbing to a logic that doesn't obtain in real life like that. Drop it, you don't need it, it'll work much better without it.'

  "There is, after all, the aristocracy of art, if it's aristocracy she was after—the aristocracy of the performer to which she could naturally belong. Not only can it accommodate being un-anti-Semitic, it can even accommodate being a Jew.

  "But Eve's mistake was Pennington, taking him for her model. She hit California and she changed her name and she was a knock-out and got into pictures and then, under the studio's pressure and prodding, with its help, she left Mueller and married this silent-screen star, this rich, polo-playing, upper-class genuine aristocrat, and she took her idea of a Gentile from him. He was her director. That's where she screwed up but good. To take for your model, for your Gentile mentor, another outsider guarantees that the impersonation will not work. Because Pennington is not just an aristocrat. He's also homosexual. He's also anti-Semitic. And she picks up his attitudes. All she's trying to do is get away from where she began, and that is no crime. To launch yourself undisturbed by the past into America—that's your choice. The crime isn't even bringing an anti-Semite close to you. That's your choice too. The crime is being unable to stand up to him, unable to defend against the assault, and taking his attitudes for yours. In America, as I see it, you can allow yourself every freedom but that one.

  "In my time, as in yours, the Sandhurst of this sort of thing, the foolproof training ground—if such a thing there is—for Jews de-Jewing themselves, was usually the Ivy League. Remember Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises? Graduates from Princeton, boxes there, never thinks about the Jewish part of himself, and is still an oddity, at least to Ernest Hemingway. Well, Eve took her degree, not at Princeton, but in Hollywood, under Pennington. She settled on Pennington for his seeming normality. That is, Pennington was such an exaggerated Gentile aristocrat that she, an innocent—that is to say, a Jew—thought of him as not exaggerated but normal. Whereas the Gentile woman would have smelled this out and understood it. The Gentile woman of Eve's intelligence would never have consented to marrying him, studio or no studio; she would have understood at the outset that he was defiant and damaging and spitefully superior to the Jewish outsider.

  "The enterprise was flawed from the beginning. She did not have a natural affinity with the common model of what she was interested in, so she impersonated the wrong Gentile. And she was young and she got rigidly fixed in the role, unable to improvise. Once the performance was set, A to Z, she was fearful of pulling any part of it, fearful that the whole act would come undone. There's no self-scrutiny, and so there's no possibility for minor adjustment. She's not the master of the role. The role mastered her. On the stage she would have been able to give a more subtle performance. But then, on the stage she had a level of consciousness that she did not always exhibit in life.

  "Now, if you want to be a real American Gentile aristocrat, you would, whether or not you felt it, pretend to great sympathy for the Jews. That would be the cunning way to do it. The point about being an intelligent, sophisticated aristocrat is that, unlike everyone else, you force yourself to overcome, or to appear to overcome, the contemptuous reaction to difference. You can still hate 'em in private if you have to. But not to be able to engage Jews easily, with good-spirited ease, would morally compromise a true aristocrat. Good-spirited and easy—that's the way Eleanor Roosevelt did it. That's the way Nelson Rockefeller did it. That's the way Averell Harriman did it. Jews aren't a problem for these people. Why should they be? But they are for Carlton Pennington. And that's whose route she takes and how she became embedded in all those attitudes she didn't need.

  "For her, as Pennington's mock-aristocratic young wife, the permissible transgression, the civilized transgression, wasn't Judaism and couldn't be; the permissible transgression was homosexuality. Until Ira came along, she was unaware not only of how offensive all the accoutrements of anti-Semitism were but of how damaging they were to her. Eve thought, If I hate Jews, how can I possibly be a Jew? How can you hate the thing you are?

  "She hated what she was and she hated how she looked. Eve Frame, of all people, hated her looks. Her own beauty was her own ugliness, as though that lovely woman had been born with a big purple blotch spread across her face. The indignation at having been born that way, the outrage of it, never left her. She, like Arthur Miller's Mr. Newman, was not her face either.

  "You must be wondering about Freedman. An unsavory character, but Freedman, unlike Doris, wasn't a woman. He was a man, and he was rich, and he offered protection from everything that oppressed Eve as much as or even more than her being a Jew. He ran her finances for her. He was going to make her rich.

  "Freedman, by the way, had a very large nose. You'd think Eve would flee at the sight of him—a swarthy little Jew, a real estate speculator with a big nose and bowed legs and Adler elevated shoes. The guy even has an accent. He's one of those crinkly-haired Polish Jews, with the orange-reddish hair and the old-country accent and the tough little immigrant's vigor and drive. He's all appetite, a heavyset bon vivant, but large as his belly is, his prick, by all reports, is still larger and visible beyond it. Freedman, you see, is her reaction to Pennington as Pennington was her reaction to Mueller: you marry one exaggeration one time, you marry the antithetical exaggeration the next. Third time round she marries Shylock. Why not? By the end of the twenties silent films were all but over, and despite that diction (or because of it, because it was too elocutionary back then), she never took off in talkies, and now it's 1938, and she was terrified that she would never work again, and so she went to the Jew for what you go to a Jew for—money and business and licentious sex. I suppose for a while he sexually resuscitated her. It's not a complicated symbiosis. It was a transaction. A transaction in which she got taken to the cleaners.

  "You have to remember Shylock, you have also to remember Richard III. You'd think Lady Anne would run a million miles from Richard, duke of Gloucester. This is the foul monster who murdered her husband. She spits in his face. 'Why dost thou spit at me?' he says. 'Would it were mortal poison,' she says. Yet the next we know, she's wooed and won. 'I'll have her,' Richard says, 'but I will not keep her long.' The eroti
c power of a foul monster.

  "Eve had no idea in the world how to oppose or how to resist, no idea how to conduct herself in a dispute or a disagreement. But everybody every day has to oppose and resist. You don't have to be an Ira, but you have to steady yourself every day. But for Eve, since every conflict is perceived as an assault, a siren is sounded, an air-raid siren, and reason never enters the picture. One second exploding with spite and fury, the next capitulating, caving in. A woman with a superficial kind of delicacy and gentleness but confused by everything, bitter and poisoned by life, by that daughter, by herself, by her insecurity, by her total insecurity from one minute to the next—and Ira falls for her.

  "Blind to women, blind to politics, head-over-heels committed to both. Seizes everything with the same overengagement. Why Eve? Why choose Eve? He wants most in this world to be worthy of Lenin and Stalin and Johnny O'Day, and so he entangles himself with her. Responds to the oppressed in all forms, and responds to their oppression in exactly the wrong way. If he weren't my brother, I wonder how seriously I would have taken his hubris. Well, that must be what brothers are for—not to stand on ceremony about the bizarre."

  "Pamela," Murray erupted, having had to overcome some minor impediment—the age of his brain—to get to the name. "Sylphid's best friend was an English girl named Pamela. Played the flute. I never met her. She was only described to me. Once I saw her photograph."

  "I met Pamela," I said. "I knew Pamela."

  "Attractive?"

  "I was fifteen. I wanted something unheard-of to happen to me. That makes every girl attractive."

  "A beauty, according to Ira."

  "According to Eve Frame," I said, "'a Hebrew princess.' That's what she called Pamela that night I met her."

  "What else? She must romantically aggrandize everything. The exaggeration washes away the stain. You had better be a princess if you are a Hebrew woman expecting to be made welcome in the home of Eve Frame. Ira had a fling with the Hebrew princess."

  "Did he?"

  "Ira fell in love with Pamela and wanted her to run off with him. He used to take her out to Jersey on her day off. In Manhattan she had a small apartment by herself, near Little Italy, a ten-minute walk from West Eleventh Street, but it was dangerous for Ira to show up at her place. You couldn't miss a guy that size on the street, and in those days he was doing his Lincoln all over town, free for schools and so on, and a lot of people in Greenwich Village knew who he was. On the street he was always talking to people, finding out what they did for a living and telling them how they were getting screwed by the system. So on Mondays he took the girl to Zinc Town with him. They'd spend the day and then he'd drive like hell to get back in time for dinner."

  "Eve never knew?"

  "Never knew. Never found out."

  "And I couldn't, as a kid, have imagined it," I said. "Never had Ira down for a lady's man. Didn't go with dressing up in Lincoln's suit. I'm so stuck in my early vision of him, even now I find it unbelievable."

  Murray, laughing, said, "That a man has a lot of sides that are unbelievable is, I thought, the subject of your books. About a man, as your fiction tells it, everything is believable. Christ, yes, women. Ira's women. A big social conscience and the wide sexual appetite to go with it. A Communist with a conscience and a Communist with a cock.

  "When I'd get disgusted about the women, Doris defended that, too. Doris, who you would think, from the life she led, would be the first to condemn it. But she understood him as a sister-in-law in a gentle way. About his weakness for women, she had a surprisingly gentle point of view. Doris was not so ordinary as she looked. She wasn't as ordinary as Eve Frame thought she was. Nor was Doris a saint. Eve's contempt for Doris also had something to do with her forgiving point of view. What does Doris care? He's betraying that prima donna—fine with her. 'A man attracted to women all the time. And women attracted to him. And is this bad?' Doris asked me. 'Isn't this human? Did he kill a woman? Did he take money from a woman? No. So what's so bad?' Some needs my brother knew very well how to take care of. Others he was hopeless about."

  "Which were those others?"

  "The need to choose your fight. Couldn't do it. Had to fight everything. Had to fight on all fronts, all the time, everyone and everything. Back in that era, there were a lot of angry Jewish guys around like Ira. Angry Jews all over America, fighting something or other. One of the privileges of being American and Jewish was that you could be angry in the world in Ira's way, aggressive about your beliefs and leaving no insult unavenged. You didn't have to shrug and resign yourself. You didn't have to muffle anything. To be an American with your own inflection wasn't that difficult anymore. Just get out in the open and argue your point. That's one of the biggest things that America gave to the Jews—gave them their anger. Especially our generation, Ira's and mine. Especially after the war. The America we came home to offered us a place to really get pissed off, without the Jewish governor on. Angry Jewish guys in Hollywood. Angry Jewish guys in the garment business. The lawyers, the angry Jewish guys in the courtroom. Everywhere. In the bakery line. At the ballpark. On the ball field. Angry Jewish guys in the Communist Party, guys who could be belligerent and antagonistic. Guys who could throw a punch, too. America was paradise for angry Jews. The shrinking Jew still existed, but you didn't have to be one if you didn't want to.

  "My union. My union wasn't the teachers' union—it was the Union of Angry Jews. They organized. Know their motto? Angrier than Thou. That should be your next book. Angry Jews since World War II. Sure, there are the affable Jews—the inappropriate-laughing Jews, the I-love-everyone-deeply Jews, the I-was-never-so-moved Jews, the Momma-and-Poppa-were-saints Jews, the I-do-it-all-for-my-gifted-children Jews, the I'm-sitting-here-listening-to-Itzhak-Perlman-and-I'm-crying Jews, the entertaining Jew of perpetual punning, the serial Jewish joker—but I don't think that's a book you'll write."

  I was laughing aloud at Murray's taxonomy, and he was too.

  But after a moment, his laughter deteriorated into a cough, and he said, "I better settle down. I'm ninety years old. I better get to the point."

  "You were telling me about Pamela Solomon."

  "Well," Murray said, "she eventually played flute for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. I know this because when that plane went down back in the sixties, or maybe it was the seventies—whichever, a dozen members of the Cleveland Symphony on board, and Pamela Solomon listed among the dead. She was a very talented musician, apparently. When she first got to America she was a bit of a bohemian as well. Daughter of a proper, stifling London fewish family, her father a doctor more English than the English. Pamela couldn't bear her family's propriety, and so she came to America. Attended Juilliard and, fresh from restrained England, fell for unrestrainable Sylphid: the cynicism, the sophistication, the American brashness. She was impressed by Sylphid's luxurious house, impressed by Sylphid's mom, the star. Motherless in America, she wasn't unhappy being gathered under Eve's wing. Though she lived only blocks away, the nights when she was visiting Sylphid she would end up having dinner and sleeping over at the house. In the mornings, down in the kitchen, she wandered around in her nightie, making herself coffee and toast and pretending either that she didn't have genitals or that Ira didn't.

  "And Eve buys it, treats delightful young Pamela like her Hebrew princess and nothing more. The English accent washes away the Semitic stigma, and all in all she's so happy Sylphid has such a talented, well-behaved friend, she's so happy Sylphid has any friend, that she's deficient in sizing up the implications of Pamela's tuchas moving up and down the stairs inside the little-girl nightie.

  "One night Eve and Sylphid went to a concert and Pamela happened to be staying over, and she wound up at home with Ira and they sat in the living room, alone together for the first time, and he asked Pamela about where she came from. His opening gambit with everyone. Pamela gave him a charming comical account of her proper family and the insufferable schools they sent her to. He asked about her job at Radio Cit
y. She was third flute-piccolo, a combined job. She was the one who got Sylphid her job subbing there. The girls would jabber together about the orchestra all the time—the politics, and the stupid conductor, and do you believe that tux he's wearing, and why doesn't he get a haircut, and nothing he does with his hands and his stick makes any sense at all. Kid stuff.

  "To Ira, that night, she said, 'The principal cellist keeps flirting with me. I'm going out of my mind.' 'How many women in the orchestra?' 'Four.' 'Out of?' 'Seventy-four.' 'And how many of the men make passes at you? Seventy?' 'Uh-huh,' she said, and she laughed. 'Well, no, they don't all have the nerve, but anyone who has the nerve,' she told him. 'What do they say to you?' 'Oh—"That dress looks really great." "You always look so beautiful when you come to rehearsal." "I'm playing a concert next week, and I need a flutist." Things like that.' 'And what do you do about it?' 'I can take care of myself.' 'Do you have a boyfriend?' That's when Pamela told him that she had been having an affair for two years with the principal oboist.

  '"A single man?' Ira asked her. 'No,' she told him, 'he's married.' 'It never bothers you that he's married?' And Pamela said, 'It's not the formal arrangement of life that interests me.' 'What about his wife?' 'I don't know his wife. I never met her. I never intend to meet her. I don't want to know anything about her particularly. It has nothing to do with his wife, it has nothing to do with his children. He loves his wife and he loves his children.' 'What does it have to do with?' 'It has to do with our pleasure. I do what I want to do for my own pleasure. Don't tell me you still believe in the sanctity of marriage. You think you take a vow and that's it, the two of you are faithful forever?' 'Yes,' he tells her, 'I believe that.' 'You've never—' 'Nope.' 'You're faithful to Eve.' 'Sure.' 'You intend to be faithful for the rest of your life?' 'Depends.' 'On what?' 'On you,' Ira said. Pamela laughs. They both laugh. 'It depends,' she says, 'on my convincing you that it's all right? That you're free to do so? That you're not the bourgeois proprietor of your wife and she's not the bourgeois proprietress of her husband?' 'Yes. Try to convince me.' 'Are you really such a hopelessly typical American that you're enslaved by middle-class American morality?' 'Yes, that's me—the hopelessly typical enslaved American. What are you?' 'What am I? I'm a musician.' 'What does that mean?' 'I'm given a score and I play it. I play what's given to me. I'm a player.'