I Married a Communist Read Online Free PDF Page B

upon Negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. [Boo. Boo. Boo.]"
    Something rooted deeper than mere courtesy (ambition, the ambition to be admired for my moral conviction) prompted me to break through the shyness and tell him, tell the trinity of Iras, all three of him—the patriot martyr of the podium Abraham Lincoln, the natural, hardy American of the airwaves Iron Rinn, and the redeemed roughneck from Newark's First Ward Ira Ringold—that it was I who had instigated the booing.
    Mr. Ringold came down the stairs from the second-floor flat, sweating heavily, wearing just khaki trousers and a pair of moccasins. Right behind him came Mrs. Ringold, who, before retreating back upstairs, set out a tray with a pitcher of ice water and three glasses. And so it was—four-thirty P.M., October 12, 1948, a blazing hot autumn day and the most astonishing afternoon of my young life—that I tipped my bike onto its side and sat on the steps of my English teacher's stoop with Eve Frame's husband, Iron Rinn of
The Free and the Brave,
discussing a World Series in which Bob Feller had lost two games—unbelievable—and Larry Doby, the pioneering black player in the American League, whom we all admired, but not the way we admired Jackie Robinson, had gone seven for twenty-two.
    Then we were talking about boxing: Louis knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott when Walcott was way ahead on points; Tony Zale regaining the middleweight title from Rocky Graziano right in Newark, at Ruppert Stadium in June, crushing him with a left in the third round, and then losing it to a Frenchman, Marcel Cerdan, over in Jersey City a couple of weeks back, in September ... And then from talking to me about Tony Zale one minute, Iron Rinn was talking to me about Winston Churchill the next, about a speech that Churchill had made a few days earlier that had him boiling, a speech advising the United States not to destroy its atomic bomb reserve because the atomic bomb was all that prevented the Communists from dominating the world. He talked about Winston Churchill the way he talked about Leo Durocher and Marcel Cerdan. He called Churchill a reactionary bastard and a warmonger with no more hesitation than he called Durocher a loudmouth and Cerdan a bum. He talked about Churchill as though Churchill ran the gas station out on Lyons Avenue. It wasn't how we talked about Winston Churchill in my house. It was closer to how we talked about Hitler. In his conversation, as in his brother's, there was no invisible line of propriety observed and there were no conventional taboos. You could stir together anything and everything: sports, politics, history, literature, reckless opinionating, polemical quotation, idealistic sentiment, moral rectitude ... There was something marvelously bracing about it, a different and dangerous world, demanding, straightforward, aggressive, freed from the need to please. And freed from school. Iron Rinn wasn't just a radio star. He was somebody outside the classroom who was not afraid to say anything.
    I had just finished reading about somebody else who wasn't afraid to say anything—Thomas Paine—and the book I'd read, a historical novel by Howard Fast called
Citizen Tom Paine,
was one of the collection in my bicycle basket that I was returning to the library. While Ira was denouncing Churchill to me, Mr. Ringold had stepped over to where the books had tumbled from the basket onto the pavement at the foot of the stoop and was looking at their spines to see what I was reading. Half the books were about baseball and were by John R. Tunis, and the other half were about American history and were by Howard Fast. My idealism (and my idea of a man) was being constructed along parallel lines, one fed by novels about baseball champions who won their games the hard way, suffering adversity and humiliation and many defeats as they struggled toward victory, and the other by novels about heroic Americans who fought against tyranny and