I Married a Communist by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

probably closer to the truth—too dishonest to admit it, but Communists, particularly from among Communist-dominated unions already expelled from the CIO—
    "Red-baiter!" I shouted, and I left the house. I took the 14 bus and went to the rally. I met Paul Robeson. He reached out to shake my hand after Ira introduced me as the kid at the high school he'd told him about. "Here he is, Paul, the boy who led the booing of Stephen A. Douglas." Paul Robeson, the Negro actor and singer, cochairman of the Wallace for President Committee, who only a few months earlier at a Washington demonstration against the Mundt-Nixon bill had sung "Ol' Man River" to a crowd of five thousand protesters at the foot of the Washington Monument, who'd been fearless before the Senate Judiciary Committee, telling them (when asked at their hearings on Mundt-Nixon if he would comply with the bill if it was passed), "I would violate the law," then answering no less forthrightly (when asked what the Communist Party stood for), "For complete equality of the Negro people"—Paul Robeson took my hand in his and said, "Don't lose your courage, young man."
    Standing backstage with the performers and speakers at the Mosque—enveloped simultaneously in two exotic new worlds, the leftist milieu and the world of "the wings"—was as thrilling as it would have been to sit down in the dugout with the players at a major league game. From the wings I heard Ira do Abraham Lincoln again, this time tearing into not Stephen A. Douglas but the warmongers in both political parties: "Supporting reactionary regimes all over the world, arming Western Europe against Russia, militarizing America..." I saw Henry Wallace himself, stood no more than twenty feet away from him before he went onto the stage to address the crowd, and then stood almost at his side when Ira went up to whisper something to him at the gala reception after the rally. I stared at the presidential candidate, a Republican farmer's son from Iowa as American-looking and American-sounding as any American I had ever seen, a politician against high prices, against big business, against segregation and discrimination, against appeasing dictators like Francisco Franco and Chiang Kai-shek, and I remembered what Fast had written of Paine: "His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's could ever be." And in 1954—six years after that night at the Mosque when the candidate of the common man, the candidate of the people and the people's party, raised gooseflesh all over me by clenching his fist and crying out from the lectern, "We are in the midst of a fierce attack upon our freedom"—I got turned down for a Fulbright scholarship.
    I did not and could not have made a scrap of difference, and yet the zealotry to defeat Communism reached even me.

    Iron Rinn had been born in Newark two decades before me, in 1913, a poor boy from a hard neighborhood—and from a cruel family—who briefly attended Barringer High, where he failed every subject but gym. He had bad eyesight and useless glasses and could barely read what was in the lesson books, let alone what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. He couldn't see and he couldn't learn and one day, as he explained it, "I just didn't wake up to go to school."
    Murray and Ira's father was someone Ira refused even to discuss. In the months after the Wallace rally, the most Ira ever told me was this: "My father I couldn't talk to. He never paid the slightest bit of attention to his two sons. He didn't do this on purpose. It was the nature of the beast." Ira's mother, a beloved woman in his memory, died when he was seven, and her replacement he described as "the stepmother you hear about in the fairy tales. A real bitch." He quit high school after a year and a half and, a few weeks later, left the house forever at fifteen and found a job digging ditches in Newark. Till the war broke out, while the country was in the