I Married a Communist (21 page)

Now Sokolow merely smiled, and in a voice that surprised me by its gentleness, he said, "Young Mr. Zuckerman. This must be some night for you." I nodded but again found myself tongue-tied, unable to ask if he had any advice for me or any criticism of my play. A well-developed sense of reality (for a fifteen-year-old) told me that Arthur Sokolow hadn't read the play.

As I was stepping out of the bedroom with my coat, I saw Katrina Van Tassel Grant coming toward me from the bathroom. I was a tall boy for my age but, in high-heeled shoes, she towered above me, though perhaps I would have fallen under the spell of her imposingness, felt that she considered herself to be the loftiest example of something or other, even had I been a foot taller. It all happened so spontaneously that I couldn't begin to understand how this person I was supposed to hate—and to hate so effortlessly—could be so impressive up close. A trashy writer as well as a supporter of Franco's and a foe of the USSR, yet where, when I needed it, was my antipathy? When I heard myself saying, "Mrs. Grant? Would you sign your name—for my mother?" I had to wonder who I suddenly was or what sort of hallucination I was having. This was worse than I'd behaved with the Cuban tobacco tycoon.

Smiling at me, Mrs. Grant came up with a suggestion as to who I might indeed be to explain my presence in this grand house. "Aren't you Sylphid's young man?"

I hadn't even to think to lie. "Yes," I said. I didn't know that I looked old enough, but perhaps teenage boys were a specialty of Sylphid's. Or perhaps Mrs. Grant still thought of Sylphid as just a kid. Or maybe she'd seen Sylphid kiss me on the nose, and assumed that kiss had to do with the two of us rather than with Abelard taking Eloise for the eleventh time.

"Are you a musician too?"

"Yes," I said.

"What instrument do you play?"

"The same. The harp."

"Isn't that unusual for a boy?"

"No."

"What shall I write on?" she asked.

"I think in my wallet there's a piece of paper—" But then I remembered that pinned inside my wallet was the Wallace-for-President button that I'd worn to school on my shirt pocket every day for two months and that, after the disastrous election, I had refused to part with. I now flashed it like a police badge whenever I went to get money to pay for something. "I forgot my wallet," I said.

From the beaded bag that she carried in one hand, she extracted a notepad and a silver pen. "What's your mother's name?"

She had asked kindly enough, but I couldn't tell her.

"Don't you remember?" she said with a harmless smile.

"Just
your
name. That's enough. Please."

As she was writing, she said to me, "What is your background, young man?"

I didn't at first understand that she was asking to what subspecies of humanity I belonged. The word "background" was impenetrable—and then it wasn't. I had no intention of being humorous when I replied, "I don't have one."

Now, why had she seemed a greater star to me, a more
frightening
star, than Eve Frame? Especially after Sylphid's dissection of her and her husband, how could I be so overwhelmed by the cravenness of fandom and address her in the tones of a nincompoop?

It was her power, of course, the power of celebrity; it was the power of one who partook of her husband's power as well, for with a few words spoken over the radio or with a remark in his column—with an
ellipsis
in his column—Bryden Grant was able to make and break show-business careers. Hers was the chilling power of someone whom people are always smiling at and thanking and hugging and hating.

But why did
I
kiss her ass? I didn't have a show-business career. What did I have to gain—or to lose? It had taken under a minute for me to abandon every principle and belief and allegiance I had. And I would have continued to if she had not mercifully signed her name and returned to the party. Nothing was required of me except to ignore her, as she was having no trouble ignoring me until I asked for the autograph for my mother. But my mother wasn't somebody who collected autographs, nor had anyone forced me to fawn and lie. It was just the easiest thing to do. It was worse than easy. It was automatic.

"Don't lose your courage," Paul Robeson had warned me backstage at the Mosque. Proudly I shook his hand, and I had lost it, first time out. Pointlessly lost it. I wasn't pulled into police headquarters and beaten with a truncheon. I walked out into the hallway with my coat. That was all it took for little Tom Paine to go off the rails.

I headed down the stairs seething with the self-disgust of someone young enough to think that you had to mean everything you said. I would have given anything to have had the wherewithal to go back and somehow put her in her place—just because of how pathetically I had behaved instead. Soon enough my hero would do that for me, however, and with none of my egregious politeness diluting the rich recklessness of his antagonism. Ira would more than make up for all that I had omitted to say.

I found Ira in the basement kitchen, drying the dishes that were being washed in the double sink by Wondrous, the maid who'd served our dinner, and a girl about my age who turned out to be her daughter, Marva. When I walked in, Wondrous was saying to Ira, "I did not want to waste my vote, Mr. Ringold. I did not want to waste my precious vote."

"Tell her," Ira said to me. "The woman won't believe me. I don't know why. You tell her about the Democratic Party. I don't know how a Negro woman can get it into her head that the Democratic Party is going to stop breaking its promises to the Negro race. I don't know who told her that or why she would believe him. Who told you, Wondrous? I didn't. Damn it, I told you six months ago—they are not going to bring an end to Jim Crow, your weak-kneed liberals of the Democratic Party. They are not and never have been the partners of the Negro people! There was only one party in the election that a Negro could vote for, one party that fights for the underdog, one party dedicated to making the Negro in this country a first-class citizen. And it was not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman!"

"I could not throw away my vote, Mr. Ringold. That's all I would be doing. Throwing it down the drain."

"The Progressive Party nominated more Negro candidates for office than any party in American history—fifty Negro candidates for important national offices on Progressive Party tickets! For offices no Negro has ever been nominated for, let alone held! That's throwing a vote down the drain? Damn it, don't insult your intelligence, and don't insult mine. I get damn angry with the Negro community when I think that you were not alone in not thinking what you were doing."

"I'm sorry, but a man who loses like that man lost cannot do nothing for us. We got to live somehow, too."

"Well, what you
did
was nothing. Worse than nothing. What you did with your vote was to put back in power the people who are going to give you segregation and injustice and lynching and the poll tax for as long as you live. As long as Marva lives. As long as Marva's
children
live. Tell her, Nathan. You met Paul Robeson. He met Paul Robeson, Wondrous. To my mind, the greatest Negro in American history. Paul Robeson shook his hand, and what did he tell you, Nathan? Tell Wondrous what he said to you."

"He said, 'Don't lose your courage.'"

"And that's what you lost, Wondrous. You lost your courage in the voting booth. I am surprised at you."

"Well," she said, "you all can wait if you want, but we got to live somehow."

"You let me down. What's worse, you let Marva down. You let Marva's
children
down. I don't understand it and I never will. No, I do not understand the working people of this country! What I hate with a passion is listening to people who do not know how to vote in their own goddamn interest! I would like to throw this dish, Wondrous!"

"Do what you want, Mr. Ringold. Ain't
my
dish."

"I get so goddamn angry about the Negro community and what they did and did not do for Henry Wallace, what they did not do for
themselves,
that I would really like to break this dish!"

"Good night, Ira," I said, while Ira stood there threatening to break the dinner dish that he was finishing drying. "I have to go home."

Just then, Eve Frame's voice came from the top of the landing: "Come say good night to the Grants, dear."

Ira pretended not to hear and turned again to Wondrous. "Many are the fine words, Wondrous, bantered by men everywhere of a new world—"

"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—"