I Married a Communist by Philip Roth Page B

one she doesn't know. Carries the baby to term, gives it up for adoption, leaves town in disgrace, and winds up stripping in one of those Cal City joints.
    "When he wasn't out being Abe Lincoln for the union on Sundays, Ira used to borrow O'Day's car to take Donna over to Benton Harbor to visit her mother. The mother worked in a little factory that manufactured candy and fudge, stuff they sold to the vacationers on Benton Harbor's main street. Resort sweets. The fudge was famous, shipped fudge all over the Middle West. Ira starts talking to the guy who runs the candy factory, he sees how they make the stuff, and pretty soon he's writing to me about marrying Donna and moving back with her to her hometown, living in a bungalow on the lake and using what's left of his separation pay to buy into this guy's business. There was also the thousand bucks he'd won shooting craps on the troopship coming home—all of it could go into the candy business. That Christmas he mailed Lorraine a gift box of fudge. Sixteen different flavors: chocolate coconut, peanut butter, pistachio, mint chocolate chip, rocky road ... all fresh and creamy, direct from the Fudge Kitchen in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Tell me, what could be further from being a raving Red hell-bent on overthrowing the American system than being a guy in Michigan who gift-wraps fudge to mail out to your old auntie for the holiday season? 'Goodies Made by the Lake'—that's the slogan on the box. Not 'Workers of the World Unite' but 'Goodies Made by the Lake.' If only Ira had married Donna Jones,
that
would have been the slogan he lived by.
    "It was O'Day, not me, who talked him out of Donna. Not because a nineteen-year-old featured at the Cal City Kit Kat Klub as 'Miss Shalimar, Recommended for Good Eating by Duncan Hines' might in any way be a bad risk as a wife and mother; not because the missing Mr. Jones, Donna's father, was a drunk who used to beat his wife and kids; not because the Benton Harbor Joneses were ignorant rednecks and not a family somebody back from four years in the service should be wanting to take on as a lasting responsibility—which is what I politely tried to tell him. But to Ira everything that was a guaranteed recipe for domestic disaster constituted the argument
for
Donna. The lure of the underdog. The struggle of the disinherited up from the bottom was an
irresistible
lure. You drink deep, you drink dregs: humanity to Ira was synonymous with hardship and calamity. Toward hardship, even its disreputable forms, the kinship was unbreakable. It took O'Day to undo the all-around aphrodisiac that was Donna Jones and the sixteen flavors of fudge. It was O'Day who tore into him for personalizing his politics, and O'Day didn't do it with my 'bourgeois' reasoning. O'Day didn't apologize for presuming to criticize Ira's shortcomings. O'Day never apologized for anything. O'Day set people straight.
    "O'Day gave Ira what he called 'a refresher course in matrimony as it pertains to the world revolution,' based on his own encounter with marriage before the war. 'Is this what you came out with me to the Calumet for? To prepare to run a candy factory or to run a revolution? This is no time for ridiculous aberrations! This is it, boy! This is life or death for working conditions as we've known them for the past ten years! All the factions and groups are coming together right here in Lake County.
You
see that. If we can hold this pitch, if nobody jumps ship, then damn it, Iron Man, in a year, two at most, the mills will be ours!'
    "So, some eight months on, Ira told Donna it was all off, and she swallowed some pills and tried to kill herself a little. About a month later—Donna's by then back at the Kit Kat and got herself a new guy—her long-lost drunken father turns up with one of Donna's brothers at Ira's door saying he's going to teach Ira a lesson for what he did to his daughter. Ira's in the doorway fighting the two of them off, and the father pulls