I Married a Communist by Philip Roth Page A

he was, Boiardo could never perceive him as local talent auditioning for the Mob. But in the Third Ward, among the Jews, it might have been different. There Ira wouldn't have been the official outcast among the kids. If only because of his size, he would probably have come to Longy Zwillman's attention. From what I understand, Longy, who was ten years older than Ira, was a lot like Ira growing up: furious, a big, menacing boy who also quit school, who was fearless in a street fight, and who had the commanding looks along with something of a brain. In bootlegging, in gambling, in vending machines, on the docks, in the labor movement, in the building trades—Longy eventually made it big. But even at the top, when he was teamed up with Bugsy Siegel and Lansky and Lucky Luciano, his closest intimates were the friends he'd grown up with in the streets, Third Ward Jewish boys like himself, whom it took little to provoke. Niggy Rutkin, his hit man. Sam Katz, his bodyguard. George Goldstein, his accountant. Billy Tiplitz, his numbers man. Doc Stacher, his adding machine. Abe Lew, Longy's cousin, ran the retail clerks' union for Longy. Christ, Meyer Ellenstein, another street kid from the Third Ward ghetto—when he was mayor of Newark, Ellenstein all but ran the city for Longy.
    "Ira could have wound up one of Longy's henchmen, loyally doing one of their jobs. He was ripe for recruitment. There would have been nothing aberrant in it: crime was what those boys were bred for. It was the next logical step. Had that violence in them that you need as a business tactic in the rackets to inspire fear and gain the competitive edge. Ira could have started off down at Port Newark, unloading the bootleg whiskey from Canada out of the speedboats and into Longy's trucks, and he could have ended up, like Longy, with a millionaire's mansion in West Orange and a rope around his neck.
    "It's so fickle, isn't it, who you wind up, how you wind up? It's only because of a tiny accident of geography that the opportunity to string along with Longy never came Ira's way. The opportunity to launch a successful career by using a blackjack on Longy's competitors, by putting the squeeze on Longy's customers, by supervising the gaming tables at Longy's casinos. The opportunity to conclude it by testifying for two hours in front of the Kefauver committee before going home to hang himself. When Ira met someone tougher and smarter than him who was going to be the big influence, he was already in the army, and so it wasn't a Newark gangster but a Communist steelworker who worked the transformation on him. Ira's Longy Zwillman was Johnny O'Day."

    "Why didn't I tell him, that first time he stayed over with us, to can the marriage and get out? Because that marriage, that woman, that beautiful house, all those books, records, the paintings on the wall, that life she had full of accomplished people, polished, interesting, educated people—it was everything he'd never known. Forget that he was now somebody himself. The guy had a
home.
He never had that before, and he was by then thirty-five. Thirty-five and he wasn't living in a room anymore, wasn't eating in cafeterias anymore, wasn't sleeping with waitresses and barmaids and worse—women, some of them, who couldn't write their names.
    "After his discharge, when he first got to Calumet City to live with O'Day, Ira had an affair with a nineteen-year-old stripper. Girl named Donna Jones. Ira met her in the laundromat. Thought at first she was a local high school kid, and for a while she didn't bother to set him straight. Petite, scrappy, brassy, tough. At least the surface was tough. And she's a little pleasure factory. The kid has her hand on her pussy all the time.
    "Donna's from Michigan, a resort town on the lake called Benton Harbor. In Benton Harbor, Donna used to work summers at a hotel on the lakefront. Sixteen, a chambermaid, and she gets knocked up by one of the customers over from Chicago. Which