Read Online I Married a Communist by Philip Roth - Free Book Online

... Iron Man, I can't handle it—I
have
to go to work."
    I loved when Ira repeated the lingo that rough union guys used among themselves, even guys like Johnny O'Day, whose sentence structure wasn't quite so simple as the average workingman's but who knew the power of their diction and who, despite the potentially corrupting influence of the thesaurus, wielded it effectively all his life. "I have to take it on the slow bell for a while ... All this with management poising the ax ... As soon as we pull the pin ... As soon as the boys hit the bricks ... If they move to force the acceptance of their yellow-dog contract, it looks like blood on the bricks...."
    I loved when Ira explained the workings of his own union, the UE, and described the people at the record factory where he'd worked. "It was a solid union, progressively led, controlled by the rank and file."
Rank and file
—three little words that thrilled me, as did the idea of hard work, tenacious courage, and a just cause to fuse the two. "Of the hundred and fifty members on each shift, a hundred or so attended the biweekly shop meetings. Although most of the work is hourly paid," Ira told me, "there's no whip swinging at that factory. Y'understand? If a boss has something to tell you, he's courteous about it. Even for serious offenses, the offender's called into the office together with his steward. That makes a big difference."
    Ira would tell me all that transpired at an ordinary union meeting—"routine business like proposals for a new contract, the problem of absenteeism, a parking-lot beef, discussion of the looming war" (he meant war between the Soviet Union and the United States), "racism, the wages-causes-prices myth"—going on and on not just because I was, at fifteen and sixteen, eager to learn all that a workingman did, how he talked and acted and thought, but because even after he cleared out of Calumet City to go to New York to work in radio and was solidly established as Iron Rinn on
The Free and the Brave,
Ira continued to speak of the record plant and the union meetings in the charismatic tongue of his fellow workers, talked as though he still went off to work there every morning. Every night, rather, for after a short while he had got himself put on the night shift so that he could have his days for "missionary work," by which, I eventually learned, he meant proselytizing for the Communist Party.
    O'Day had recruited Ira into the party when they were on the docks in Iran. lust as I, anything but orphaned, was the perfect target for Ira's tutorials, the orphaned Ira was the perfect target for O'Day's.

    It was for his union's Washington-Lincoln birthday fund-raiser his first February out in Chicago that somebody got the idea to turn Ira, a wiry man, knobbily jointed, with dark, coarse Indian-like hair and a floppy, big-footed gait, into Abe Lincoln: put whiskers on him, decked him out in a stovepipe hat, high button shoes, and an old-fashioned, ill-fitting black suit, and sent him up to the lectern to read from the Lincoln-Douglas debates one of Lincoln's most telling condemnations of slavery. He got such a big hand for giving to the word "slavery" a strong working-class, political slant—and enjoyed himself so much doing it—that he continued right on with the only thing he remembered by heart from his nine and a half years of schooling, the Gettysburg Address. He brought the house down with the finale, that sentence as gloriously resolute as any sounded in heaven or uttered on earth since the world began. Raising and wiggling one of those huge hairy-knuckled, superflexible hands of his, plunging the longest of his inordinately long fingers right into the eyeball of his union audience each of the three times, he dramatically dropped his voice and rasped "the people."
    "Everybody thought I got carried away by emotion," Ira told me. "That that's what fired me up. But it wasn't emotions. It was the first time I ever felt carried away