by Philip Roth
‘I’m not a religious man, but when I look around this table, I know that
something is shining down on
· 69 ·
me.’ It was him they were really out to get. And they did it. They got him. The
bomb might as well have gone off in their living room. The violence done to his
life was awful. Horrible. Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, ‘Why
are things the way they are?’ Why should he bother, when the way they were was
always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is
no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn’t even know the question
existed.”
Had Jerry ever before been so full of his brother’s life and his brother’s
story? It did not strike me that all the despotic determination concentrated in
that strange head could ever have allowed him to divide his attention into very
many parts. Not that death ordinarily impinges upon the majesty of self-
obsession; generally it intensifies it: “What about me? What if this happens to
me?”
* * *
“He told you it was horrible?”
“Once. Only once,” Jerry replied. “No, Seymour just took it and took it. You
could stay on this guy and stay on this guy and he’d just keep making the
effort,” Jerry said bitterly. “Poor son of a bitch, that was his fate—built for
bearing burdens and taking shit,” and with his saying this, I remembered those
scrimmage pileups from which the Swede would extricate himself, always still
clutching the ball, and how seriously I’d fallen in love with him on that late-
autumn afternoon long ago when he’d transformed my ten-year-old existence by
selecting me to enter the fantasy of Swede Levov’s life—when for a moment it had
seemed that I, too, had been called to great things and that nothing in the
world could ever obstruct my way now that our god’s benign countenance had shed
its light on me alone. “Basketball was never like this, Skip.” How captivat-
ingly that innocence spoke to my own. The significance he had given me. It was
everything a boy could have wanted in 1943.
“Never caved in. He could be tough. Remember, when we were kids, he joined the
marines to fight the Japs? Well, he was a goddamn marine. Caved in only once,
down in Florida,” Jerry said. “It just got to be too much for him. He’d brought
the whole family down to visit us, the boys and the second superbly selfish Mrs.
· 70 ·
Levov. That was two years ago. We all went to this stone-crab place. Twelve of
us for dinner. Lots of noise, the kids all showing off and laughing. Seymour
loved it. The whole handsome family there, life just the way it’s supposed to
be. But when the pie and coffee came he got up from the table, and when he
didn’t come back right away I went out and found him. In the car. In tears.
Shaking with sobs. I’d never seen him like that. My brother the rock. He said,
‘I miss my daughter.’ I said, ‘Where is she?’ I knew he always knew where she
was. He’d been going to see her in hiding for years. I believe he saw her
frequently. He said, ‘She’s dead, Jerry’ I didn’t believe him at first. It was
to throw me off the track, I thought. I thought he must have just seen her
somewhere. I thought, He’s still going to wherever she is and treating this
killer like his own child—this killer who is now in her forties while everybody
she killed is still killed. But then he threw his arms around me and he just let
go, and I thought, Is it true, the family’s fucking monster’s really dead? But
why is he crying if she’s dead? If he had half a brain, he would have realized
that it was just too extraordinary to have a child like that—if he had half a
brain, he would have been enraged by this kid and estranged from this kid long
ago. Long ago he would have torn her out of his guts and let her go. The angry
kid who gets nuttier and nuttier— and the sanctified cause to hang her craziness
on. Crying like that—for her? No, I couldn’t buy it. I said to him, ‘I don’t
know whether you’re lying to me or you’re telling me the truth. But if you’re
telling me the truth, that she’s dead, it’s the best news I ever heard. Nobody
else is going to say this to you. Everybody else is going to commiserate. But I
grew up with you. I talk straight to you. The best thing for you is for her to
be dead. She did not belong to you. She did not belong to anything that you
were. She did not belong to anything anyone is. You played ball—there was a
field of play. She was not on the field of play. She was nowhere near it. Simple
as that. She was out of bounds, a freak of nature, way out of bounds. You are to
stop your mourning for her. You’ve kept this wound open for twenty-five years.
And twenty-five years is enough. It’s driven you mad. Keep it open any longer
and it’s going to kill
you. She’s dead? Good! Let her go. Otherwise it will rot in your gut and take
your life too.’ That’s what I told him. I thought I could let the rage out of
* * *
him. But he just cried. He couldn’t let it go. I said this guy was going to get
killed from this thing, and he did.”
Jerry said it and it happened. It is Jerry’s theory that the Swede is nice, that
is to say passive, that is to say trying always to do the right thing, a
socially controlled character who doesn’t burst out, doesn’t yield to rage ever.
Will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn’t get it as an asset
either. According to this theory, it’s the no-rage that kills him in the end.
Whereas aggression is cleansing or curing.
It would seem that what kept Jerry going, without uncertainty or remorse and
unflaggingly devoted to his own take on things, was that he had a special talent
for rage and another special talent for not looking back. Doesn’t look back at
all, I thought. He’s unseared by memory. To him, all looking back is bullshit-
nostalgia, including even the Swede’s looking back, twenty-five years later, at
his daughter before that bomb went off, looking back and helplessly weeping for
all that went up in that explosion. Righteous anger at the daughter? No doubt
that would have helped. Incontestable that nothing is more uplifting in all of
life than righteous anger. But given the circumstances, wasn’t it asking a lot,
asking the Swede to overstep the limits that made him identifiably the Swede?
People must have been doing that to him all his life, assuming that because he
was once upon a time this mythic character the Swede he had no limits. I’d done
something like that in Vincent’s restaurant, childishly expecting to be wowed by
his godliness, only to be confronted by an utterly ordinary humanness. One price
you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes.
“You know Seymour’s ‘fatal attraction’? Fatally attracted to his duty,” Jerry
said. “Fatally attracted to responsibility. He could have played ball anywhere
he wanted, but he went to Upsala because my father wanted him near home. Giants
offered him a Double A contract, might have played one day with Willie Mays—
instead he went down to Central Avenue
to work for Newark Maid. My father
started him off at a tannery. Puts him for six months working in a tannery on
Frelinghuysen Avenue. Up six mornings a week at five a.m. You know what a
tannery is? A tannery is a shithole. Remember those days in the summer? A strong
wind from the east and the tanning stench wafts over Weequahic Park and covers
the whole neighborhood. Well, he gets out of the tannery, Seymour does, strong
as an ox, and my father sits him down at a sewing machine for another six months
and Seymour doesn’t let out a peep. Just masters the fucking machine. Give him
the pieces of a glove and he can close it up better than the sewers and in half
the time. He could have married any beauty he wanted. Instead he marries the
bee-yoo-ti-full Miss Dwyer. You should have seen them. Knockout couple. The two
of them all smiles on their outward trip into the USA. She’s post-Catholic, he’s
post-Jewish, together they’re going to go out there to Old Rimrock to raise
little post-toasties. Instead they get that fucking kid.”
“What was wrong with Miss Dwyer?”
“No house they lived in was right. No amount of money in the bank was enough. He
set her up in the cattle business. That didn’t work. He set her up in the
nursery tree business. That didn’t work. He took her to Switzerland for the
world’s best face-lift. Not even into her fifties, still in her forties, but
that’s what the woman wants, so they schlep to Geneva for a face-lift from the
guy who did Princess Grace. He would have been better off spending his life in
Double A ball. He would have been better off knocking up some waitress down
there in Phoenix and playing first base for the Mud-hens. That fucking kid! She
stuttered, you know. So to pay everybody back for her stuttering, she set off
the bomb. He took her to speech therapists. He took her to clinics, to
psychiatrists. There wasn’t enough he could do for her. And the reward? Boom!
Why does this girl hate her father? This great father, this truly great father.
Good-looking, kind, providing, thinks about nothing really but them, his family—
* * *
why does she take off after him? That our own ridiculous father should have
produced such a brilliant father—and that he should then produce her? Somebody
tell me
· 73 ·
what caused it. The genetic need to separate? For that she has to run from
Seymour Levov to Che Guevara? No, no. What is the poison that caused it, that
caused this poor guy to be placed outside his life for the rest of his life? He
kept peering in from outside at his own life. The struggle of his life was to
bury this thing. But could he? How? How could a big, sweet, agreeable putz like
my brother be expected to deal with this bomb? One day life started laughing at
him and it never let up.”
That was as far as we got, as much of an earful as I was to hear from Jerry—
anything more I wanted to know, I’d have to make up—because just then a small,
gray-haired woman in a brown pantsuit came up to introduce herself, and Jerry,
not a man equipped by nature to stand around more than five seconds while
someone else was getting a third party’s attention, shot me a mock salute and
disappeared, and when I went looking for him later, I heard that he’d had to
leave, to catch a Newark plane back to Miami.
After I’d already written about his brother—which is what I would do in the
months to come: think about the Swede for six, eight, sometimes ten hours at a
stretch, exchange my solitude for his, inhabit this person least like myself,
disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of
apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of
him, as time wore on, the most important figure of my life—just before I set
about to alter names and disguise the most glaring marks of identification, I
had the amateur’s impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he
thought. It was an impulse I quashed: I hadn’t been writing and publishing for
nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it. “That’s not my brother,” he’d
tell me, “not in any way. You’ve misrepresented him. My brother couldn’t think
like that, didn’t talk like that,” etc.
Yes, by this time Jerry might well have recovered the objectivity that had
deserted him directly after the funeral, and with it the old resentment that
helped make him the doctor at the hospital every-
74
I
body was afraid to talk to because he was never wrong. Also, unlike most people
whose dear one winds up as a model for the life-drawing class, Jerry Levov would
probably be amused rather than outraged by my failure to grasp the Swede’s
tragedy the way he did. A strong possibility: Jerry’s flipping derisively
through my pages and giving me, item by item, the bad news. “The wife was
nothing like this, the kid was nothing like this—got even my father wrong. I
won’t talk about what you do with me. But missing my father, man, that’s missing
the side of a barn. Lou Levov was a brute, man. This guy is a pushover. He’s
charming. He’s conciliatory. No, we had something over us light-years away from
that. We had a sword. Dad on the rampage—laid down the law and that was it. No,
nothing bears the slightest resemblance to … here, for instance, giving my
brother a mind, awareness. This guy responds with consciousness to his loss. But
my brother is a guy who had cognitive problems— this is nowhere like the mind he
had. This is the mind he didn’t have. Christ, you even give him a mistress.
Perfectly misjudged, Zuck. Absolutely off. How could a big man like you fuck up
like this?”
* * *
Well, Jerry wouldn’t have gotten much of an argument from me had that turned out
to be his reaction. I had gone out to Newark and located the abandoned Newark
Maid factory on a barren stretch of lower Central Avenue. I went out to the
Weequa-hic section to look at their house, now in disrepair, and to look at Keer
Avenue, a street where it didn’t seem like a good idea to get out of the car and
walk up the driveway to the garage where the Swede used to practice his swing in
the wintertime. Three black kids were sitting on the front steps eyeing me in
the car. I explained to them, “A friend of mine used to live here.” When I got
no answer, I added, “Back in the forties.” And then I drove away. I drove to
Morristown to look at Merry’s high school and then on west to Old Rimrock, where
I found the big stone house up on Arcady Hill Road where the Seymour Levovs once
had lived as a happy young family; later, down in the village, I drank a cup of
coffee at the counter of the new general store (McPherson’s) that had replaced
the old general
· 75 ·
store (Hamlin’s) whose post office the teenage Levov daughter had blown up “to
bring the war home to America.” I went to Elizabeth, where the Swede’s beautiful
Dawn was born and raised, and walked around her pleasant neighborhood, the
residential Elmora section; I drove by her family’s church, St. Genevieve’s, and
then headed due east to her father’s ne
ighborhood, the old port on the Elizabeth
River, where the Cuban immigrants and their offspring replaced, back in the
sixties, the last of the Irish immigrants and their offspring. I was able to get
the New Jersey Miss America Pageant office to dig up a glossy photo of Mary Dawn
Dwyer, age twenty-two, being crowned Miss New Jersey in May of 1949. I found
another picture of her—in a 1961 number of a Morris County weekly— standing
primly before her fireplace mantel in a blazer, a skirt, and a turtleneck
sweater, a picture captioned, “Mrs. Levov, the former Miss New Jersey of 1949,
loves living in a 170-year-old home, an environment which she says reflects the
values of her family.” At the Newark Public Library I scanned microfilmed sports
pages of the Newark News (expired 1972), looking for accounts and box scores of
games in which the Swede had shined for Weequahic High (in extremis 1995) and
Upsala College (expired 1995). For the first time in fifty years I reread the
baseball books of John R. Tunis and at one point even began to think of my book
about the Swede as The Kid from Keer Avenue, calling it after Tunis’s 1940 story
for boys about the Tomkinsville, Connecticut, orphan whose only fault, as a
major leaguer, is a tendency to keep his right shoulder down and his swing up,
but a fault, alas, that is provocation enough for the gods to destroy him.
Yet despite these efforts and more to uncover what I could about the Swede and
his world, I would have been willing to admit that my Swede was not the primary
Swede. Of course I was working with traces; of course essentials of what he was
to Jerry were gone, expunged from my portrait, things I was ignorant of or I
didn’t want; of course the Swede was concentrated differently in my pages from