4
THE TOWNHOUSE on West Eleventh Street where Ira lived with Eve Frame and Sylphid, its urbanity, its beauty, its comfort, its low-key aura of luxurious intimacy, the quiet aesthetic harmony of its thousand details—the warm habitation as a rich work of art—altered my conception of life as much as the University of Chicago would when I enrolled there a year and a half later. I had only to walk through the door to feel ten years older and freed from family conventions that, admittedly, I’d grown up adhering to mostly with pleasure and without much effort. Because of Ira’s presence, because of the lumbering, easygoing way he strode around the place in baggy corduroy pants and old loafers and checked flannel shirts too short in the sleeves, I didn’t feel intimidated by an atmosphere, unknown to me, of wealth and privilege; because of those folksy powers of appropriation that contributed so much to Ira’s appeal—at home both on Newark’s black Spruce Street and in Eve’s salon—-I quickly got the idea of how cozily comfortable, how domesticized, high living could be. High culture as well. It was like penetrating a foreign language and discovering that, despite the alienating exoticism of its sounds, the foreigners fluently speaking it are saying no more than what you’ve been hearing in English all your life.
Those hundreds and hundreds of serious books lining the library shelves—poetry, novels, plays, volumes of history, books about archeology, antiquity, music, costume, dance, art, mythology—the classical records filed six feet high in cabinets to either side of the record player, those paintings and drawings and engravings on the walls, the artifacts arranged along the fireplace mantel and crowding the tabletops—statuettes, enamel boxes, bits of precious stone, ornate little dishes, antique astronomical devices, unusual objects sculpted of glass and silver and gold, some recognizably representational, others odd and abstract—were not decoration, not ornamental bric-a-brac, but possessions bound up with pleasurable living and, at the same time, with morality, with mankind’s aspiration to achieve significance through connoisseurship and thought. In such an environment, roaming from room to room looking for the evening paper, sitting and eating an apple in front of the fire could in themselves be part of a great enterprise. Or so it seemed to a kid whose own house, though clean, orderly, and comfortable enough, had never awakened in him or in anybody else ruminations on the ideal human condition. My house—with its library of the Information Please Almanac and nine or ten other books that had come into our possession as gifts for convalescing family members—seemed by comparison shabby and bleak, a colorless hovel. I could not have believed back then that there was anything on West Eleventh Street that anyone would ever want to flee. It looked to me like the luxury liner of havens, the last place where you would have to worry about having your equilibrium disturbed. At its heart, upright and massively elegant on the library’s oriental rug, utterly graceful in its substantiality and visible the instant you turned from the entryway into the living room, was that symbol, reaching back to civilization’s enlightened beginnings, of the spiritually rarefied realm of existence, the gorgeous instrument whose shape alone embodies an admonishment to every defect of coarseness and crudeness in man’s mundane nature … that stately instrument of transcendence, Sylphid’s gold-leafed Lyon and Healy harp.
***
“That library was to the rear of the living room and up a step,” Murray was remembering. “There were sliding oak doors that closed the one room off from the other, but when Sylphid practiced Eve liked to listen, and so the doors were left open and the sound of that instrument carried through the house. Eve, who’d started Sylphid on the harp out in Beverly Hills when she was seven, couldn’t get enough of it, but Ira could make no sense of classical music—never listened to anything, as far as I know, except the popular stuff on the radio and the Soviet Army Chorus—and so at night, when he preferred to be sitting around downstairs in the living room with Eve, talking, reading the paper, a husband at home and so forth, he kept retreating to his study. Sylphid would be plucking away and Eve would be doing her needlepoint in front of the fire, and when she’d look up, he’d be gone, upstairs writing letters to O’Day.
“But after what she’d been through in that third marriage, the fourth, when it got going, was still pretty wonderful. When she met Ira, she was coming out of a bad divorce and recovering from a nervous breakdown. The third husband, Jumbo Freedman, was a sex clown from the sound of it, expert at entertaining them in the bedroom. Had a high old time of it altogether till she came home early from a rehearsal one day and found him in his upstairs office with a couple of tootsies. But he was everything Pennington wasn’t. She has an affair with him out in California, obviously very passionate, certainly for a woman twelve years with Carlton Pennington, and in the end Freedman leaves his wife and she leaves Pennington, and she, Freedman, and Sylphid decamp for the East. She buys that house on West Eleventh Street and Freedman moves in, sets up his office in what became Ira’s study, and starts trading property in New York as well as in L.A. and Chicago. For a while he is buying and selling Times Square property, and so he meets the big theatrical producers, and they all start to socialize together, and soon enough Eve Frame is on Broadway. Drawing room comedies, thrillers, all starring the one-time silent-screen beauty. One after another is a hit. Eve is making money hand over fist, and Jumbo sees that it’s well spent.
“Being Eve, she goes along with this guy’s extravagance, acquiescing to his wild ways, is even caught up in the wild ways. Sometimes when Eve would start to cry out of nowhere and Ira would ask her why, she would tell him, ‘The things he made me do—what I had to do…’ After she wrote that book and her marriage to Ira was all over the papers, Ira got a letter from some woman in Cincinnati. Said that if he was interested in a little book of his own, he might want to come out to Ohio for a talk. She’d been a nightclub entertainer back in the thirties, a singer, a girlfriend of Jumbo’s. She said Ira might like to see some photographs Jumbo had taken. Maybe she and Ira could collaborate on a memoir of their own—he’d supply the words, she, for a price, would fork over the pictures. At the time Ira was so hell-bent on getting his revenge that he wrote the woman back, sent her a check for a hundred dollars. She claimed to have two dozen, and so he sent her the hundred bucks she was asking for just in order to see one.”
“Did he get it?”
“She was true to her word. She sent him one, all right, by return mail. But because I wasn’t going to allow my brother to further distort people’s idea of what his life had meant, I took it from him and destroyed it. Stupid. Sentimental, priggish, stupid, and not very farsighted of me, either. Circulating the picture would have been benevolent compared to what happened.”
“He wanted to disgrace Eve with the picture.”
“Look, once upon a time all Ira thought about was how to alleviate the effects of human cruelty. Everything was funneled through that. But after that book of hers came out, all he thought about was how to inflict it. They stripped him of his job, his domestic life, his name, his reputation, and when he realized he’d lost all of that, lost the status and no longer had to live up to it, he shed Iron Rinn, he shed The Free and the Brave, he shed the Communist Party. He even stopped talking so much. All that endless outraged rhetoric. Going on and on when what this huge man really wanted to do was to lash out. The talk was the way to blunt those desires.
“What do you think the Abe Lincoln act was about? Putting on that stovepipe hat. Mouthing Lincoln’s words. But everything that ever tamed him, all the civilizing accommodations, he shed, and he was stripped right back to the Ira who’d dug ditches in Newark. Back to the Ira who’d mined zinc up in the Jersey hills. He re-claimed his earliest experience, when his tutor was the shovel. He made contact with the Ira before all the moral correction took place, before he’d been to Miss Frame’s Finishing School and taken all those etiquette lessons. Before he went to finishing school with you, Nathan, acting out the drive to father and showing you what a good, nonviolent man he could be. Before he went to finishing school with me. Before he went to finishing school with O’Day, the finishing school of Marx and Engels. The finishing school of political action. Because O’Day was the first Eve, really, and Eve just another version of O’Day, dragging him up out of the Newark ditch and into the world of light.
“Ira knew his own nature. He knew that he was physically way out of scale and that this made him a dangerous man. He had the rage in him, and the violence, and standing six and a half feet tall, he had the means. He knew he needed his Ira-tamers—knew he needed all his teachers, knew he needed a kid like you, knew that he hungered for a kid like you, who’d got all he’d never got and was the admiring son. But after I Married a Communist appeared, he shed the finishing school education, and he reclaimed the Ira you never saw, who beat the shit out of guys in the army, the Ira who, as a boy starting out on his own, used the shovel he dug with to protect himself against those Italian guys. Wielded his work tool as a weapon. His whole life was a struggle not to pick up that shovel. But after her book, Ira set out to become his own uncorrected first self.”
“And did he?”
“Ira never shirked a man-sized job, however onerous. The ditchdigger made his impact on her. He put her in touch with what she had done. ‘Okay, I’ll educate her,’ he told me, ‘without the dirty picture.’”
“And he did it.”
“He did it, all right. Enlightenment through the shovel.”
Early in 1949, some ten weeks after Henry Wallace was so badly defeated—and, I now know, after her abortion—Eve Frame threw a big party (preceded by a smaller dinner party) to try to cheer Ira up, and he called our house to invite me to come. I had seen him only once again in Newark after the Wallace rally at the Mosque, and until I got the astonishing phone call (“Ira Ringold, buddy. How’s my boy?”) I’d begun to believe that I’d never see him again. After the second time that we’d met—and gone off for our first walk ever in Weequahic Park, where I learned about “Eye-ran”—I’d mailed to him in New York a carbon copy of my radio play The Stooge of Torquemada. As the weeks went by and there was no response from him, I realized the mistake I’d made in giving to a professional radio actor a play of mine, even one that I considered my best. I was sure that now that he’d seen how little talent I had, I’d killed any interest he might have had in me. Then, while I was doing my homework one night, the phone rang and my mother came running into my room. “Nathan—dear, it’s Mr. Iron Rinn!”
He and Eve Frame were having people to dinner, and among them would be Arthur Sokolow, whom he’d given my script to read. Ira thought I might like to meet him. My mother made me go to Bergen Street the next afternoon to buy a pair of black dress shoes, and I took my one suit to the tailor shop on Chancellor Avenue to have Schapiro lengthen the sleeves and the trousers. And then early one Saturday evening, I popped a Sen-Sen in my mouth and, my heart beating as though I were intent on crossing the state line to commit murder, I went out to Chancellor Avenue and boarded a bus to New York.
My companion at the dinner table was Sylphid. All the traps laid for me—the eight pieces of cutlery, the four differently shaped drinking glasses, the large appetizer called an artichoke, the serving dishes presented from behind my back and over my shoulder by a solemn black woman in a maid’s uniform, the finger bowl, the enigma of the finger bowl—everything that made me feel like a very small boy instead of a large one, Sylphid all but nullified with a sardonic wisecrack, a cynical explanation, even just with a smirk or with a roll of her eyes, helping me gradually to understand that there wasn’t as much at stake as all the pomp suggested. I thought she was splendid, in her satire particularly.
“My mother,” Sylphid said, “likes to make everything a strain the way it was when she grew up in Buckingham Palace. She makes the most of every opportunity to turn everyday life into a joke.” Sylphid kept it up throughout the meal, dropped into my ear remarks rife with the worldliness of someone who’d grown up in Beverly Hills—next door to Jimmy Durante—and then in Greenwich Village, America’s Paris. Even when she teased me I felt relieved, as if my mishap might not lie but one course away. “Don’t worry too much about doing the right thing, Nathan. You’ll look a lot less comical doing the wrong thing.”
I also took heart from watching Ira. He ate the same way here as he did at the hot dog stand across from Weequahic Park; he talked the same way too. He alone among the men at the table was without a tie and a dress shirt and a jacket, and though he didn’t lack for ordinary table manners, it was clear from watching him spear and swallow his food that the subtleties of Eve’s kitchen were not overscrupulously assessed by his palate. He did not seem to draw any line between conduct permissible at a hot dog stand and in a splendid Manhattan dining room, neither conduct nor conversation. Even here, where the silver candelabra were lit with ten tall candles and bowls of white flowers illuminated the sideboard, everything made him hot under the collar—on this night, only a couple of months after the crushing Wallace defeat (the Progressive Party had received little more than a million votes nationwide, about a sixth of what it had anticipated), even something seemingly as uncontroversial as Election Day.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he announced to the table, and everyone else’s voice faded while his, strong and natural, charged with protest and barbed with contempt for the stupidity of his fellow Americans, promptly commanded, You just listen to me. “I think this darling country of ours doesn’t understand politics. Where else in the world, in a democratic nation, do people go to work on Election Day? Where else are the schools still open? If you’re young and you’re growing up and you say, ‘Hey, it’s Election Day, don’t we have a day off?’ your father and mother say, ‘No, it’s Election Day, that’s all,’ and what are you left to think? How important can Election Day be if I have to go to school? How can it be important if the stores and everything else are open? Where the hell are your values, you son of a bitch?”
By “son of a bitch” he was alluding to nobody present at the table. He was addressing everyone in his life he had ever had to fight.
Here Eve Frame put her finger to her lips to get him to rein himself in. “Darling,” she said in a voice so soft it was barely audible. “Well, what’s more important,” he loudly replied, “to stay home on Columbus Day? You close the schools up because of a shitty holiday, but you don’t close them up because of Election Day?” “But nobody’s arguing the point,” Eve said with a smile, “so why be angry?” “Look, I get angry,” he said to her, “I always got angry, I hope to my dying day I stay angry. I get in trouble because I get angry. I get in trouble because I won’t shut up. I get very angry with my darling country when Mr. Truman tells people, and they believe him, that Communism is the big problem in this country. Not the racism. Not the inequities. That’s not the problem. The Communists are the problem. The forty thousand or sixty thousand or a hundred thousand Communists. They’re going to overthrow the government of a country of a hundred and fifty million people. Don’t insult my intelligence. I’ll tell you what’s going to overthrow the whole goddamn place—the way we treat the colored people. The way we treat the working people. It’s not going to be the Communists who overthrow this country. This country is going to overthrow itself by treating people like animals!”
Seated across from me was Arthur Sokolow, the radio writer, another of those assertive, self-educated Jewish boys whose old neighborhood allegiances (and illiterate immigrant fathers) strongly determined their brusque, emotional style as men, young guys only recently back from a war in which they’d discovered Europe and politics, in which they’d first really discovered America through the soldiers they had to live alongside, in which they’d begun, without formal assistance but with a gigantic naive faith in the transforming power of art, to read the fifty or sixty opening pages of the novels of Dostoyevsky. Until the blacklist destroyed his career, Arthur Sokolow, though not as eminent a writer as Corwin, was certainly in the ranks of the other radio writers I most admired: Arch Oboler, who wrote Lights Out, Himan Brown, who wrote Inner Sanctum, Paul Rhymer, who wrote Vic and Sade, Carlton E. Morse, who wrote I Love a Mystery, and William N. Robson, who’d done a lot of war radio from which I also drew for my own plays. Arthur Sokolow’s prizewinning radio dramas (as well as two Broadway plays) were marked by their intense hatred of corrupt authority as represented by a grossly hypocritical father. I kept fearing throughout dinner that Sokolow, a short, wide tank of a man, a defiant pile driver who’d once been a Detroit high school fullback, was going to point at me and denounce me to everyone at the table as a plagiarist because of all I had stolen from Norman Corwin.
Following dinner, the men were invited up to Ira’s second-floor study for cigars while the women went to Eve’s room to freshen up before the after-dinner guests began to arrive. Ira’s study overlooked the floodlit statuary in the rear garden, and on the three walls of bookshelves he kept all his Lincoln books, the political library he’d carried home in three duffel bags from the war, and the library he’d since accumulated browsing in the secondhand bookshops on Fourth Avenue. After passing around the cigars and advising his guests to take whatever they liked from the whiskey cart, Ira got his copy of my radio play out of the top drawer of the massive mahogany desk—the one where I imagined he kept up his correspondence with O’Day—and began to read aloud the play’s opening speech. And to read it not to denounce me for plagiarism. Rather, he began by telling his friends, including Arthur Sokolow, “You know what gives me hope for this country?” and he pointed at me, all aglow and tremulously waiting to be seen through. “I got more faith in a kid like this than in all those so-called mature people in our darling country who went into the voting booth prepared to vote for Henry Wallace, and all of a sudden they saw a big picture of Dewey in front of their eyes—and I’m talking about people in my own family—so they pulled down Harry Truman’s lever. Harry Truman, who is going to lead this country into World War III, and that’s their enlightened choice! The Marshall Plan, that is their choice. All they can think is to bypass the United Nations and to hem in the Soviet Union and to destroy the Soviet Union while siphoning off into their Marshall Plan hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to raising the standard of living for the poor in this country. But tell me, who is going to hem in Mr. Truman when he drops his atomic bombs on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad? You think they won’t drop atomic bombs on innocent Russian children? To preserve our wonderful democracy they won’t do that? Tell me another one. Listen to this kid here. Still in high school and he knows more about what’s wrong with this country than every one of our darling countrymen in the voting booth.”
Nobody laughed or even smiled. Arthur Sokolow was backed against the bookcases, quietly paging through a book he’d taken down from Ira’s Lincoln collection, and the rest of the men stood smoking their cigars and sipping their whiskey and acting as though my view of America were what they’d gone out with their wives to hear that night. Only much later did I realize that the collective seriousness with which my introduction was received signified nothing more than how accustomed they were to the agitations of their overbearing host.
“Listen,” said Ira, “just listen to this. Play about a Catholic family in a small town and the local bigots.” Whereupon Iron Rinn launched into my lines: Iron Rinn inside the skin, inside the voicebox, of an ordinary, good-natured, Christian American of the kind I’d had in mind and knew absolutely nothing about.
“‘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 swept 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.”
The flutist was a mournful-looking girl, long-faced, dark-eyed, and slender, and the more I looked at her and the more enamored I became of her—and the more I looked at Rosalind and the more enamored I became of her—the more trenchantly I saw how deficient my friend Sylphid was in anything designed to promote a man’s desire. With her square trunk and stout legs and that odd excess of flesh that thickened her a bit like a bison across the upper back, Sylphid looked to me, while playing the harp—and even despite the classical elegance of her hands moving along the strings—like a wrestler wrestling the harp, one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers. Because this was a thought that I was ashamed to be having, it only gathered substance the longer the performance continued.
I couldn’t make head or tail of the music. Like Ira, I was deaf to the sound of anything other than the familiar (in my case, to what I heard Saturday mornings on Make-Believe Ballroom and Saturday nights on Your Hit Parade), but the sight of Sylphid gravely under the spell of the music she was disentangling from those strings and, too, the passion of her playing, a concentrated passion that you could see in her eyes—a passion liberated from everything in her that was sardonic and negative—made me wonder what powers might have been hers if, in addition to her musicianship, her face were as alluringly angular as her delicate mother’s.
Not until decades later, after Murray Ringold’s visit, did I understand that the only way Sylphid could begin to feel at ease in her skin was by hating her mother and playing the harp. Hating her mother’s infuriating weakness and producing ethereally enchanting sounds, making with Faure and Doppler and Debussy all the amorous contact the world would allow.
When I looked at Eve Frame, in the front rank of the spectators, I saw that she was looking at Sylphid with a gaze so needy that you would think that in Sylphid was the genesis of Eve Frame rather than the other way around.
Then everything that had stopped was starting up again. There was the applause, the bravos, the bows, and Sylphid, Pamela, and Rosalind came down from the stage that the library had become and Eve Frame was there to embrace each of them in turn. I was close enough to hear her say to Pamela, “You know what you looked like, my darling? A Hebrew princess!” And to Rosalind, “And you were lovely, absolutely lovely!” And finally to her daughter, “Sylphid, Sylphid,” she said, “Sylphid Juliet, never, never have you played more beautifully! Never, darling! The Doppler was especially lovely.”
“The Doppler, Mother, is salon garbage,” Sylphid said.
“Oh, I love you!” cried Eve. “Your mother loves you so!”
Others started coming up to congratulate the trio of musicians, and the next I knew, Sylphid slipped an arm around my waist and was good-naturedly introducing me to Pamela, to Rosalind, and to Rosalind’s fiancé. “This is Nathan of Newark,” Sylphid said. “Nathan is a political protégé of the Beast’s.” Since she said it with a smile, I smiled too, trying to believe that the epithet was harmlessly meant, no more than a family joke about Ira’s height.
I looked all around the room for Ira and saw that he wasn’t there, but rather than asking to be excused to go and find him, I allowed myself to remain appropriated within Sylphid’s grip—and engulfed by the sophistication of her friends. I had never seen anyone as young as Ramón Noguera so well dressed or so smoothly decorous and urbane. As for the dark Pamela and the fair Rosalind, each seemed so pretty to me that I couldn’t look openly at either of them for more than a split second at a time, though simultaneously I was unable to forgo the opportunity to stand casually within only inches of their flesh.
Rosalind and Ramón were to be married in three weeks at the Nogueras’ estate just outside Havana. The Nogueras were tobacco growers, Ramón’s father having inherited from Ramón’s grandfather thousands of farm acres in a region called the Partido, land that would be inherited by Ramón, and in time by the children of Ramón and Rosalind. Ramón was formidably silent—grave with his sense of self-destiny, diligently resolved to act out the position of authority bestowed upon him by the cigar smokers of the world, while Rosalind—who only a few years back had been a poor London music student from a remote corner of rural England but who was now as close to the end of all her fears as she was to the beginning of all that spending—grew more and more vivacious. And loquacious. She told us about Ramón’s grandfather, the most renowned and revered of the Nogueras, for some thirty years a provincial governor as well as a vast landowner until he entered the cabinet of President Mendiata (whose chief of staff, I happened to know, was the infamous Fulgencio Batista); she told us about the beauty of the tobacco plantations where, under cloth, they grew the wrapper leaf for the Cuban cigars; and then she told us about the grand Spanish-style wedding that the Nogueras had planned for them. Pamela, a childhood friend, was being flown from New York to Havana, at the expense of the Noguera family, and would be put up at a guesthouse on the estate; and if Sylphid could find the time, said the overbrimming Rosalind, she was welcome to come along with Pamela.
Rosalind spoke with eager innocence, with a joyful blend of pride and accomplishment, about the enormous wealth of the Nogueras while I kept thinking, But what about the Cuban peasants who are the tobacco workers—who flies them back and forth from New York to Havana for a family wedding? In what sort of “guesthouses” do they live on the beautiful tobacco plantations? What about disease and malnutrition and ignorance among your tobacco workers, Miss Halladay? Instead of obscenely squandering all that money on your Spanish-style wedding, why not begin to compensate the Cuban masses whose land your fiancé’s family illegitimately holds?
But I was as close-mouthed as Ramón Noguera, though, internally, nowhere near as emotionally composed as he looked to be, unflinchingly staring straight ahead as if reviewing the troops. Everything Rosalind said appalled me, and yet I could not be socially incorrect enough to tell her so. Nor could I summon up the strength to confront Ramón Noguera with the Progressive Party’s assessment of his riches and their source. Nor could I move voluntarily away from Rosalind’s English radiance, a young woman both physically lovely and musically gifted who seemed not to understand that by abandoning her ideals for Ramón’s allurements—or, if not her ideals, by abandoning mine—by marrying into Cuba’s oligarchical, landholding upper class, she was not only fatally compromising the values of an artist but, in my political estimation, trivializing herself with someone far less worthy of her talent—and her reddish gold hair and eminently caressable skin—than, for instance, me.
As it turned out, Ramón had reserved a table at the Stork Club for Pamela, Rosalind, and himself, and when he asked Sylphid to join them, he also, with a certain vacant aplomb, a kind of upper-class analogue to courtesy, turned to extend an invitation to me. “Please, sir,” he said, “come as my guest.”
“I can’t, no—” I said, but then, without explaining—as I knew that I should, that I had to, that I must … as I knew Ira would—”I don’t approve of you or your kind!” but adding instead, “Thanks. Thanks just the same,” I turned and, as though I were escaping the plague rather than a marvelous opportunity for a budding writer to see Sherman Billingsley’s famous Stork Club and the table where Walter Winchell sat, I rushed away from the temptations being dangled by the first plutocrat I had ever laid eyes on.
Alone I went up to a second-floor guest bedroom, where I was able to find my coat at the bottom of the dozens piled on the twin beds, and there I ran into Arthur Sokolow, who was said by Ira to have read my play. I’d been too shy to say anything to him up in Ira’s study after Ira’s brief reading, and, occupying himself with browsing through that Lincoln book, he hadn’t appeared to have anything to say to me. Several times during the party, however, I’d overheard something he was aggressively telling someone in the living room. “That got me so goddamn mad,” I heard him say. “I sat down in a white heat and wrote the piece overnight”; I heard him say, “The possibilities were unlimited. There was an atmosphere of freedom, of willingness to establish new frontiers”; then I heard him laugh and say, “Well, they fed me against the ranking number-one program in radio…,” and the impact on me was as though I had encountered the indispensable truth.
I got my strongest picture ever of what I wanted my life to be like when, by deliberately roaming within earshot of him, I listened to Sokolow describing to a couple of women a play he was planning to write for Ira, a one-man show based not on the speeches but on the entire life of Abraham Lincoln, from his birth to his death. “The First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural—that’s not the story. That’s the rhetoric. I want Ira up there telling the story. Telling how goddamn difficult it was: no schooling, the stupid father, the terrific stepmother, the law partners, running against Douglas, losing, that hysterical shopper his wife, the brutal loss of the son-—the death of Willie—the condemnation from every side, the daily political assault from the moment the man took office. The savagery of the war, the incompetence of the generals, the Emancipation Proclamation, the victory, the Union preserved and the Negro freed—then the assassination that changed this country forever. Wonderful stuff there for an actor. Three hours. No intermission. Leave them speechless in their seats. Leave them grieving for what America might be like today, for the Negro and the white man, if he’d served his second term and overseen Reconstruction. I’ve thought a lot about that man. Killed by an actor. Who else?” He laughed. “Who else would be so vain and so stupid as to kill Abraham Lincoln? Can Ira do three hours up there alone? The oratorical stuff—that we know he can do. Otherwise, together we’ll work on it, and he’ll get it: a mightily harassed leader full of wit and cunning and intellectual power, a huge creature alternately high-spirited and savagely depressed, and,” said Sokolow, laughing again, “not yet apprised of the fact that he is ‘Lincoln’ of the Memorial.”
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—”
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.