American Pastoral

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American Pastoral Page 9

by Philip Roth


  Hothead—just went nuts and started screaming when I couldn’t have it my way. You

  were the one with the big outlook on things. You were more theoretical than the

  rest of us. Even back then you had to hook up everything with your thoughts.

  Sizing up the situation, drawing conclusions. You kept a sharp watch over

  * * *

  yourself. All the crazy stuff contained inside. A sensible boy. No, not like me

  at all.”

  62

  “Well, we both had a big investment in being right,” I said.

  “Yeah, being wrong,” Jerry said, “was unendurable to me. Absolutely

  unendurable.”

  “And it’s easier now?”

  “Don’t have to worry about it. The operating room turns you into somebody who’s

  never wrong. Much like writing.”

  “Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may

  get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As

  pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.”

  “How is your life? Where are you? I read somewhere, on the back of some book,

  you were living in England with an aristocrat.”

  “I live in New England now, without an aristocrat.”

  “So who instead?”

  “No one instead.”

  “Can’t be. What do you do for somebody to eat dinner with?”

  “I go without dinner.”

  “For now. The Wisdom of the Bypass. But my experience is that personal

  philosophies have a shelf life of about two weeks. Things’ll change.”

  “Look, this is where life has left me. Rarely see anyone. Where I live in

  western Massachusetts, a tiny place in the hills there, I talk to the guy who

  runs the general store and to the lady at the post office. The postmistress.

  That’s it.”

  “What’s the name of the town?”

  “You wouldn’t know it. Up in the woods. About ten miles from a college town

  called Athena. I met a famous writer there when I was just starting out. Nobody

  mentions him much anymore, his sense of virtue is too narrow for readers now,

  but he was revered back then. Lived like a hermit. Reclusion looked awfully

  austere to a kid. He maintained it solved his problems. Now it solves mine.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Certain problems having been taken out of my life—that’s the problem. At the

  store the Red Sox, at the post office the weather— that’s it, my social

  discourse. Whether we deserve the weather.

  · 63 ·

  When I come to pick up my mail and the sun is shining outside, the postmistress

  tells me, ‘We don’t deserve this weather.’ Can’t argue with that.”

  * * *

  “And pussy?”

  “Over. Live without dinner, live without pussy.”

  “Who are you, Socrates? I don’t buy it. Purely the writer. The single-minded

  writer. Nothing more.”

  “Nothing more all along and I could have saved myself a lot of wear and tear.

  That’s all I’ve had anyway to keep the shit at bay.”

  “What’s ‘the shit’?”

  “The picture we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. The

  picture we have of ourselves. Useless. Presumptuous. Completely cocked-up. Only

  we go ahead and we live by these pictures. ‘That’s what she is, that’s what he

  is, this is what I am. This is what happened, this is why it happened—’ Enough.

  You know who I saw a couple of months ago? Your brother. Did he tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He wrote me a letter and invited me to dinner in New York. A nice letter. Out

  of the blue. I drove down to meet him. He was composing a tribute to your old

  man. In the letter he asked for my help. I was curious about what he had in

  mind. I was curious about him writing me to announce that he wanted to write

  something. To you he’s just a brother—to me he’s still ‘the Swede.’ You carry

  those guys around with you forever. I had to drive down. But at dinner he never

  mentioned the tribute. We just uttered the pleasantries. At some place called

  Vincent’s. That was it. As always, he looked terrific.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Your brother’s dead?”

  “Died Wednesday. Funeral two days ago. Friday. That’s why I was in Jersey.

  Watched my big brother die.”

  “Of what? How?”

  “Cancer.”

  “But he’d had prostate surgery. He told me they got it out.”

  Impatiently Jerry said, “What else was he going to tell you?”

  64

  “He was thin, that was all.”

  “That wasn’t all.”

  So, the Swede too. What, astoundingly to Mendy Gurlik, was decimating the

  Daredevils right up the middle; what, astoundingly to me, had, a year earlier,

  made of me “purely a writer”; what, in the wake of all the other isolating

  losses, in the wake of everything gone and everyone gone, had stripped me down

  into someone whose aging powers had now but a single and unswerving aim, a man

  who would be seeking his solace, like it or not, nowhere but in sentences, had

  managed the most astounding thing of all by carrying off the indestructible hero

  of the wartime Weequahic section, our neighborhood talisman, the legendary

  Swede.

  “Did he know,” I asked, “when I saw him, that he was in trouble?”

  * * *

  “He had his hopes, but sure he knew. Metastasized. All through him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “His fiftieth was coming up next month. You know what he said at the hospital on

  Tuesday? To me and his kids the day before he died? Most of the time he was

  incoherent, but twice he said, so we could understand him, ‘Going to get to my

  fiftieth.’ He’d heard everyone from his class was asking, ‘Will the Swede be

  there?’ and he didn’t want to let them down. He was very stoical. He was a very

  nice, simple, stoical guy. Not a humorous guy. Not a passionate guy. Just a

  sweetheart whose fate it was to get himself fucked over by some real crazies. In

  one way he could be conceived as completely banal and conventional. An absence

  of negative values and nothing more. Bred to be dumb, built for convention, and

  so on. That ordinary decent life that they all want to live, and that’s it. The

  social norms, and that’s it. Benign, and that’s it. But what he was trying to do

  was to survive, keeping his group intact. He was trying to get through with his

  platoon intact. It was a war for him, finally. There was a noble side to this

  guy. Some excruciating renunciations went on in that life. He got caught in a

  war he didn’t start, and he fought to keep it all together, and he went down.

  Banal, conven-

  · 65 ·

  tional—maybe, maybe not. People could think that. I don’t want to get into

  judging. My brother was the best you’re going to get in this country, by a long

  shot.”

  I was wondering while he spoke if this had been Jerry’s estimate of the Swede

  while he was alive, if there wasn’t perhaps a touch of mourner’s rethinking

  here, remorse for a harsher Jerry-like view he might once have held of the

  handsome older brother, sound, well adjusted, quiet, normal, somebody everybody

  looked up to, the n
eighborhood hero to whom the smaller Levov had been endlessly

  compared while himself evolving into something slightly ersatz. This kindly

  unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry,

  compassion just a few hours old. That can happen when people die—the argument

  with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at

  times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing

  way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the

  limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for

  admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one

  permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish

  of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering

  afterward—even an outsider can’t judge. The sight of a coffin going into the

  ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so

  disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for

  the mind in its search for the truth, this I don’t profess to know.

  “My father,” Jerry said, “was one impossible bastard. Overbearing. Omnipresent.

  I don’t know how people worked for him. When they moved to Central Avenue, the

  first thing he had the movers move was his desk, and the first place he put it

  was not in the glass-enclosed office but dead center in the middle of the

  factory floor, so he could keep his eye on everybody. You can’t imagine the

  noise out there, the sewing machines whining, the clicking machines pounding,

  hundreds of machines going all at once, and right in the middle his desk and his

  telephone and the great man himself.

  66

  * * *

  The owner of the glove factory, but he would always sweep his own floors,

  especially around the cutters, where they cut the leather, because he wanted to

  see from the size of the scraps who was losing money for him. I told him early

  on to fuck off, but Seymour wasn’t built like me. He had a big, generous nature

  and with that they really raked him over the coals, all the impossible ones. Un-

  satisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives, and the little murderer herself, the

  monster daughter. The monster Merry. The solid thing he once was. At Newark Maid

  he was an absolute, unequivocal success. Charmed a lot of people into giving

  their all for Newark Maid. Very adroit businessman. Knew how to cut a glove,

  knew how to cut a deal. Had an in on Seventh Avenue with the fashion people. The

  designers there would tell the guy anything. That’s how he stayed abreast of the

  pack. In New York, he was always stopping into the department stores, shopping

  the competition, looking for something unique about the other guy’s product,

  always in the stores taking a look at the leather, stretching the glove, doing

  everything just the way my old man taught him. Did most of the selling himself.

  Handled all the big house accounts. The lady buyers went nuts for Seymour. You

  can imagine. He’d come over to New York, take these tough Jewish broads out to

  dinner—buyers who could make or break you—wine and dine them, and they’d fall

  head over heels for the guy. Instead of him buttering them up, by the end of the

  evening they’d be buttering him up. Come Christmastime they’d be sending my

  brother the theater tickets and the case of Scotch rather than the other way

  around. He knew how to get the confidence of these people just by being himself.

  He’d find out a buyer’s favorite charity, get a ticket to the annual dinner at

  the Waldorf-Astoria, show up like a movie star in his tuxedo, on the spot make a

  fat donation to cancer, muscular dystrophy, whatever it was, United Jewish

  Appeal—next thing Newark Maid had the account. Knew all the stuff: what colors

  are going to be next season’s colors, whether the length is going to be up or

  down. Attractive, responsible, hardworking guy. A couple of unpleasant strikes

  in the sixties, a lot of tension. But his employees are out on the picket line

  · 67 ·

  and they see him pull up in the car and the women who sew the gloves start

  falling all over themselves apologizing for not being at the machines. They were

  more loyal to my brother than they were to their union. Everybody loved him, a

  perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt forever. No reason

  for him to know anything about anything except gloves. Instead he is plagued

  with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his life. The incessant

  questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my

  brother. He got the meaning for his life some other way. I don’t mean he was

  simple. Some people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kind.

  But Seymour was never that simple. Simple is never that simple. Still, the self-

  questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there’s anything worse than

  self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too

  late. His life was blown up by that bomb. The real victim of that bombing was

  him.”

  “What bomb?”

  “Little Merry’s darling bomb.”

  “I don’t know what ‘Merry’s darling bomb’ is.”

  “Meredith Levov. Seymour’s daughter. The ‘Rimrock Bomber’ was Seymour’s

  daughter. The high school kid who blew up the post office and killed the doctor.

  The kid who stopped the war in Vietnam by blowing up somebody out mailing a

  letter at five a.m. A doctor on his way to the hospital. Charming child,” he

  said in a voice that was all contempt and still didn’t seem to contain the load

  of contempt and hatred that he felt. “Brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by

  blowing up the post office in the general store. Place is so small the post

  office is in the general store—just a window at the back of the general store

  * * *

  and a couple rows of those boxes with the locks, and that’s the whole post

  office. Get your stamps right in there with the Rinso and the Lifebuoy and the

  Lux. Quaint Americana. Seymour was into quaint Americana. But the kid wasn’t. He

  took the kid out of real time and she put him right back in. My brother thought

  he could take his family out of human confusion and into Old Rimrock, and she

  put them right back in.

  · 68 ·

  Somehow she plants a bomb back behind the post office window, and when it goes

  off it takes out the general store too. And takes out the guy, this doctor,

  who’s just stopping by the collection box to drop off his mail. Good-bye,

  Americana; hello, real time.”

  “This passed me by. I had no idea.”

  “That was ‘68, back when the wild behavior was still new. People suddenly forced

  to make sense of madness. All that public display. The dropping of inhibitions.

  Authority powerless. The kids going crazy. Intimidating everybody. The adults

  don’t know what to make of it, they don’t know what to do. Is this an act? Is

  the ‘revolution’ real? Is it a game? Is it cops and robbers? What’s going on

  here? Kids turning the country upside down and so the adults start going crazy

  too. But Seymour wasn’
t one of them. He was one of the people who knew his way.

  He understood that something was going wrong, but he was no Ho-Chi-Minhite like

  his darling fat girl. Just a liberal sweetheart of a father. The philosopher-

  king of ordinary life. Brought her up with all the modern ideas of being

  rational with your children. Everything permissible, everything forgivable, and

  she hated it. People don’t like to admit how much they resent other people’s

  children, but this kid made it easy for you. She was miserable, self-righteous—

  little shit was no good from the time she was born. Look, I’ve got kids, kids

  galore—I know what kids are like growing up. The black hole of self-absorption

  is bottomless. But it’s one thing to get fat, it’s one thing to let your hair

  grow long, it’s one thing to listen to rock-and-roll music too loud, but it’s

  another to jump the line and throw a bomb. That crime could never be made right.

  There was no way back for my brother from that bomb. That bomb detonated his

  life. His perfect life was over. Just what she had in mind. That’s why they had

  it in for him, the daughter and her friends. He was so in love with his own good

  luck, and they hated him for it. Once we were all up at his place for

  Thanksgiving, the Dwyer mother, Dawn’s kid brother Danny, Danny’s wife, all the

  Levovs, our kids, everybody, and Seymour got up to make a toast and he said,

 

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