I Married a Communist (30 page)

"You busy, Tom? I can come back tomorrow."

"Stay here," Tommy said to the boy. "Sit down, Brownie."

Deferentially, Brownie said to me, "I just come here every day on my lunch hour and I talk to him about rocks."

"Sit down, Brownie, my boy. So what do you got?"

Brownie laid a worn old satchel at Tommy's feet, and from it he began to extract rock specimens about the size of the ones Tommy was displaying on the hood of his car.

"Black willemite, huh?" Brownie asked.

"No, that's hematite."

"I thought it was a funny-looking willemite. And this?" he asked. "Hendricksite?"

"Yep. Little willemite. There's calcite, too, in there."

"Five bucks for that? Too much?" Brownie asked.

"Somebody may want it," Tommy said.

"You in this business too?" I asked Brownie.

"This was my dad's collection. He was in the mill. Got killed. I'm selling it to get married."

"Nice girl," Tommy told me. "And she's a sweet girl. She's a doll. A Slovak girl. The Musco girl. Nice girl, honest girl, clean girl who uses her head. There's no girls like her anymore. He's gonna live with Mary Musco all his life. I tell Brownie, 'You be good to her, she'll be good to you.' I had a wife like that. Slovak girl. Best in the world. Nobody in the world can take her place."

Brownie held up another specimen. "Bustamite there with that?"

"That's bustamite."

"Got a little willemite crystal on it."

"Yep. There's a little willemite crystal right there."

This went on for close to an hour, until Brownie started packing his specimens back in the satchel to return to the grocery store where he worked.

"He's gonna take my place in Zinc Town," Tommy told me.

"Oh, I don't know," Brownie said. "I won't know as much as you do."

"But you still have to do it." All at once Tommy's voice was fervent, almost anguished, when he spoke. "I want a Zinc Town guy to take over my place here. I want a Zinc Town guy! That's why I'm teaching you here as much as I can. So you can get somewhere. You're the one who's entitled to it. A Zinc Town person. I don't want to teach somebody else, from out of town."

"Three years ago I started coming here lunchtime, I didn't know anything. And he taught me so much. Right, Tommy? I did pretty good today. Tommy can tell you the mine," Brownie said to me. "He can tell you where in the mine it came from. What level, how deep. He says, 'You gotta hold the rocks in your hand.' Right?"

"Right. You gotta hold the rocks in your hand. You gotta handle that mineral. You gotta see the different matrixes that they come in. If you don't learn that, you're not going to learn Zinc Town minerals. He even knows now, he knows if this is from the other mine or if it's from this mine."

"He taught me that," Brownie said. "I couldn't tell what mine it came from in the beginning. I can tell now."

"So," I said, "you're going to be sitting out here someday."

"I hope so. Like this right here, this is from this mine, right, Tom? And this is from this mine too?"

Because in another year I hoped to go off on a scholarship to the University of Chicago and, after Chicago, become the Norman Corwin of my generation, because I was going everywhere and Brownie was going nowhere—but mostly because Brownie's father had been killed in the mill and my own was alive and well and worrying about me in Newark—I spoke even more fervently than Tommy had to this aproned grocer's assistant whose aspiration in life was to marry Mary Musco and fill Tommy's seat. "Hey, you're good! That's good!"

"And why?" said Tom. "Because he learned right here."

"I learned from this man," Brownie told me proudly.

"I want him to be the next one to take my place."

"Here comes some business, Tom. I gotta run," Brownie said. "Nice to meet you," he said to me.

"Nice to meet
you,
" I replied, as though I were the older man and he the child. "When I come back in ten years," I said, "I'll see you out here."

"Oh," said Tom, "he'll be here, all right."

"No, no," Brownie shouted back, for the first time laughing lightheartedly as he headed on foot down the highway. "Tommy'll still be here. Won't you, Tom?"

"We'll see."

In fact, it was Ira who would be out there ten years later. Tommy had educated Ira, too, once Ira was blacklisted from radio and living alone up in the shack and needing a source of income. That was where Ira dropped dead. That's when Ira's aorta gave out, while he was sitting on Tommy's flat rock selling mineral specimens to the tourists and their kids, telling them, "Lady, half a buck a bag here for them when your boys come out, special rocks right from the mine that I mined there for thirty years."

This was how Ira had ended his days—as the overseer at the rock dump whom the local old-timers all called Gil, out there even in the wintertime, making fires for certain people for a few bucks. But I didn't learn this until the night that Murray told me Ira's story there on my deck.

The day before I left that second year, Artie Sokolow and his family drove out to Zinc Town from New York to spend the afternoon with Ira. Ella Sokolow, Artie's wife, was about seven months pregnant, a jolly, dark-haired, freckled-faced woman whose Irish immigrant father, Ira told me, had been a steamfitter up in Albany, one of those big, idealistic union men who are patriotic through and through. "The 'Marseillaise,' 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' the Russian national anthem," Ella laughingly explained that afternoon, "the old man would stand up for all of them."

The Sokolows had twin boys of six, and though the afternoon began happily enough with a game of touch football—refereed in a manner by Ira's neighbor, Ray Svecz—and was followed by a picnic lunch that Ella had brought along from the city and that all of us, including Ray, ate up the slope from the pond, it ended with Artie Sokolow and Ira down by the pond, toe to toe and barking at each other in a way that horrified me.

I had been sitting on the picnic blanket talking to Ella about
My Glorious Brothers,
a book by Howard Fast that she had just finished reading. It was a historical novel set in ancient Judea, about the Maccabees' struggle against Antiochus IV in the second century
B.C.,
and I, too, had read it and even reported on it in school for Ira's brother the second time he was my English teacher.

Ella had been listening to me the way she listened to everyone: taking it all in as if she were being warmed by your words. I must have gone on for close to fifteen minutes, repeating word for word the internationalist-progressive critique I'd written for Mr. Ringold, and all the time Ella gave every indication that what I was saying couldn't have been more interesting. I knew how much Ira admired her as a lifelong radical, and I wanted her to admire me as a radical too. Her background, the physical grandeur of her pregnancy, and certain gestures she made—sweeping gestures with her hands that made her seem to me strikingly uninhibited—all bestowed on Ella Sokolow a heroic authority that I wanted to impress.

"I read Fast and I respect Fast," I'd been telling her, "but I think he lays too much emphasis on the Judeans' fight to return to their past condition, to their worship of tradition and the days of post-Egyptian slavery. There's entirely too much that's merely nationalistic in the book—"

And that was when I heard Ira shout, "You're caving in! Running scared and caving in!"

"If it's not there," Sokolow shot back, "no one knows it's not there!"

"I know it's not there!"

The rage in Ira's voice made it impossible for me to go on. All I could think about, suddenly, was the story—which I had refused to believe—that ex-Sergeant Erwin Goldstine had told me in his Maplewood kitchen, about Butts, about the guy in Iran Ira had tried to drown in the Shatt-al-Arab.

I said to Ella, "What's the matter?"

"Just give them room," she said, "and hope they calm down.
You
calm down."

"I just want to know what they're arguing about."

"They're blaming each other for things that have gone wrong. They're arguing over things having to do with the show. Calm down, Nathan. You haven't been around enough angry people. They'll cool off."

But they didn't look it. Ira particularly. He was storming back and forth at the edge of the pond, his long arms lashing out every which way, and each time he turned back to Artie Sokolow, I thought he was going to pounce on him with his fists. "Why do you
make
these goddamn changes!" Ira shouted.

"Keep it in," Sokolow replied, "and we stand to lose more than we gain."

"Bullshit! Let the bastards know we mean business! lust put the fucking thing back in!"

I said to Ella, "Shouldn't we do something?"

"I've heard men arguing all my life," she told me. "Men having one another's carcasses for the sins of omission and commission that they don't seem able to avoid perpetrating. If they were hitting each other it would be something else. But otherwise, your responsibility is to stay away. If you enter where people are already agitated, anything you do will fuel the fire."

"If you say so."

"You've led a very protected life, haven't you?"

"Have I?" I said. "I try not to."

"Best to stay out of it," she told me, "partly out of dignity, to let the guy cool down without your intervention, and partly out of self-defense, and partly because your intervention is only going to make it worse."

Meanwhile, Ira hadn't stopped roaring. "One fucking punch a week—and now we're not even going to get
that
in? So what are we doing on the radio, Arthur? Advancing our careers? A fight is being forced upon us, and you are running! It's the showdown, Artie, and you are gutlessly running away!"

Impotent though I knew I would be if these two powder kegs were to start swinging, I nonetheless jumped up and, with Ray Svecz trailing behind me in his goofy way, ran toward the pond. Last time I'd pissed in my pants. I couldn't let that happen again. With no more idea than Ray had of what could be done to avert a disaster, I ran directly into the fray.

By the time we reached them, Ira had already backed off and was pointedly walking away from Sokolow. It was clear he was still furious with the guy, but it was also evident how hard he was trying to bring himself down. Ray and I caught up with him and then walked along beside him while, intermittently, beneath his breath, Ira carried on a rapid conversation with himself.

The admixture of his absence and his presence so disturbed me that I finally spoke. "What's wrong?" When he didn't seem to hear, I tried to think of what to say that would get his attention. "It's about a script?" All at once he flared up and said, "I'll kill him if he does it again!" And it was not an expression he was using merely for dramatic effect. It was difficult, despite my resistance, not to believe one hundred percent in the meaning of his words.

Butts, I thought. Butts. Garwych. Solak. Becker.

On his face was a look of total fury. Pristine fury. Fury, which along with terror is the primordial power. All that he was had evolved out of that look—also all that he was not. I thought, He's lucky he's not locked up, an alarmingly unexpected conclusion to occur spontaneously to a hero-worshiping kid interlinked for two years with the virtuousness of his hero, and one I dismissed once I was no longer so agitated—and one that I was then to have verified for me by Murray Ringold forty-eight years on.

Eve had made her way out of her past by impersonating Pennington; Ira had made his way out of his by force.

Ella's twin boys, who'd fled from the edge of the pond when the argument flared up, were lying in her arms on the picnic blanket when I returned with Ray. "I think daily living may be harsher than you know," Ella said to me.

"Is this daily living?" I asked.

"Wherever
I've
lived," she said. "Go on. Go on about Howard Fast."

I did my best, but it continued to unsettle me, if not Sokolow's working-class wife, to think of her husband and Ira squaring off.

Ella laughed aloud when I was through. You could hear her naturalness in her laugh as well as all the crap that she had learned to put up with. She laughed the way some people blush: all at once and completely. "Wow," she said. "I'm not sure now
what
I read. My own evaluation of
My Glorious Brothers
is simple. Maybe I don't do enough deep thinking, but I just think, Here's a bunch of rough, tough, and decent guys who believe in the dignity of all men and are willing to die for it."

Artie and Ira had by then cooled off enough to make their way up from the pond to the picnic blanket, where Ira said (trying, apparently, to say something that might ease everybody, himself included, back into the original spirit of the day), "I gotta read it.
My Glorious Brothers.
I gotta get that book."

"It'll put steel in your spine, Ira," Ella said to him, and then, opening wide the big window that was her laugh, she added, "not that I ever thought yours needed any."

Whereupon Sokolow leaned over her and bellowed, "Yes? Whose does?
Just whose does?
"

With that, the Sokolow twins burst into tears, and this in turn caused poor Ray to do the same. Angry herself now for the first time, in something like a mad rage, Ella said, "Christ Almighty, Arthur! Hold yourself together!"

What had lain beneath the afternoon's eruptions I understood more fully that evening when, alone with me in the shack, Ira started in angrily about the lists.

"Lists. Lists of names and accusations and charges. Everybody," Ira said, "has a list.
Red Channels.
Joe McCarthy. The VFW. The HUAC. The American Legion. The Catholic magazines. The Hearst newspapers. Those lists with their sacred numbers—141, 205, 62, 111. Lists of anybody in America who has ever been disgruntled about anything or criticized anything or protested anything—or associated with anybody who has ever criticized or protested anything—all of them now Communists or fronting for Communists or 'helping' Communists or contributing to Communist 'coffers,' or 'infiltrating' labor or government or education or Hollywood or the theater or radio and TV. Lists of 'fifth columnists' busily being compiled in every office and agency in Washington. All the forces of reaction swapping names and mistaking names and linking names together to prove the existence of a mammoth conspiracy
that does not exist.
"