by Philip Roth
Newark haven of Grossman’s Dress Shop; about how, in the attic space above the
shop, she and her mother slept in the double bed in their one big room while
Harold slept in the kitchen, on a sofa he made up each night and unmade each
morning so they could eat breakfast there before going to school. She asked if I
remembered Harold, now a retired pharmacist in Scotch Plains, and told me how
just the week before she’d gone out to the cemetery in Brooklyn to visit her
father’s grave—as frequently as once a month she went out there, all the way to
Brooklyn, she said, surprised herself by how much this graveyard now mattered to
her. “What do you do at the cemetery?” “I unabashedly talk to him,” Joy said.
“When I was ten it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now. I thought then it was odd
that people had two parents. Our threesome seemed right.” “Well, all this,” I
told her, as we stood there just swaying together to the one-man band closing
the day down singing, “Dream … when you’re feelin’ blue, … dream …
that’s the thing to do”—”all this I did not know,” I told her, “on the harvest
moon hayride in October 1948.”
“I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anybody to know. I didn’t want anybody
to find out Harold slept in the kitchen. That’s why I wouldn’t let you undo my
bra. I didn’t want you to be my boyfriend and come to pick me up and see where
my brother had to sleep. It had nothing to do with you, sweetheart.”
“Well, I feel better for being told that. I wish you’d told me sooner.”
“I wish I had,” she said, and first we were laughing and then, unexpectedly, Joy
began to cry and, perhaps because of that damn song, “Dream,” which we used to
dance to with the lights turned down in somebody or other’s basement back when
the Pied Pipers still had Jo Stafford and used to sing it the way it’s supposed
to be sung—in locked harmony, to that catatonic forties beat, with the ethereal
tinkle of the xylophone hollowly sounding behind them—
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or perhaps because Alan Meisner had become a Republican and second baseman Bert
Bergman had become a corpse and Ira Pos-ner, instead of shining shoes at the
newsstand outside the Essex County courthouse, had escaped his Dostoyevskian
family and become a psychiatrist, because Julius Pincus had disabling tremors
from the drug that prevented the rejection from his body of the fourteen-year-
old girl’s kidney keeping him alive and because Mendy Gurlik was still a horny
seventeen-year-old kid and because Joy’s brother, Harold, had slept for ten
years in a kitchen and because Schrimmer had married a woman nearly half his age
who had a body that didn’t make him want to slit his throat but to whom he now
had to explain every single thing about the past, or perhaps because I seemed
alone in having wound up with no children, grandchildren, or, in Minskoff’s
words, “anything like that,” or perhaps because after all these years of
separation this reuniting of perfect strangers had all gone on a little too
* * *
long, a load of unruly emotion began sliding around in me, too, and there I was
thinking again of the Swede, of the notorious significance that an outlaw
daughter had thrust on him and his family during the Vietnam War. A man whose
discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror
of self-reflection. All that normalcy interrupted by murder. All the small
problems any family expects to encounter exaggerated by something so impossible
ever to reconcile. The disruption of the anticipated American future that was
simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s
getting smarter—smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the
generations before—out of each new generation’s breaking away from the
parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with
your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional
Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities
and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal
among equals.
And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on
the run who was to have been the perfected
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image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his
father the perfected image of his father’s father … the angry, rebarbative
spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful
Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive—initiating the Swede
into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade
blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague
America infiltrating the Swede’s castle and there infecting everyone. The
daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into
everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence,
and the desperation of the counterpastoral— into the indigenous American
berserk.
The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when
everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating
back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant
struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman
farmer’s castle of our superordinary Swede. A guy stacked like a deck of cards
for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going
to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known
that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to
lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a
charm. Handles his handful of an old man well enough. He was really living it
out, his version of paradise. This is how successful people live. They’re good
citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them.
There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes
impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is
someone not set up for life’s working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.
But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for
tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man
not set up for tragedy—that is every man’s tragedy.
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He kept peering in from outside at his own life. The struggle of his life was to
bury this thing. But how could he?
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.
After all the effervescent strain of resuscitating our class’s mid-century
innocence—together a hundred aging people recklessly turning back the clock to a
time when time’s passing was
a matter of indifference—with the afternoon’s
exhilarations finally coming to an end, I began to contemplate the very thing
that must have baffled the Swede till the moment he died: how had he become
history’s plaything? History, American history, the stuff you read about in
books and study in school, had made its way out to tranquil, untrafficked Old
Rimrock, New Jersey, to countryside where it had not put in an appearance that
was notable since Washington’s army twice wintered in the highlands adjacent to
Morristown. History, which had made no drastic impingement on the daily life of
the local populace since the Revolutionary War, wended its way back out to these
cloistered hills and, improbably, with all its predictable unforeseenness, broke
helter-skelter into the orderly household of the Seymour Levovs and left the
place in a shambles. People think of history in the long term, but history, in
fact, is a very sudden thing.
In earnest, right then and there, while swaying with Joy to that out-of-date
music, I began to try to work out for myself what exactly had shaped a destiny
unlike any imagined for the famous Weequahic three-letterman back when this
music and its sentimental exhortation was right to the point, when the Swede,
his neighborhood, his city, and his country were in their exuberant heyday, at
the peak of confidence, inflated with every illusion born of hope. With Joy
Helpern once again close in my arms and quietly sobbing to hear the old pop tune
enjoining all of us sixty-odd-year-olds,
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“Dream … and they might come true,” I lifted the Swede up onto the stage.
That evening at Vincent’s, for a thousand different excellent reasons, he could
not bring himself to ask me to do this. For all I know he had no intention of
asking me to do this. To get me to write his story may not have been why he was
there at all. Maybe it was only why I was there.
Basketball was never like this.
He’d invoked in me, when I was a boy—as he did in hundreds of other boys—the
strongest fantasy I had of being someone else. But to wish oneself into
another’s glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on
psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you
are. To embrace your hero in his destruction, however—to let your hero’s life
occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself
into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he
is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic
fall—well, that’s worth thinking about.
So then … I am out there on the floor with Joy, and I am thinking of the Swede
and of what happened to his country in a mere twenty-five years, between the
triumphant days at wartime Weequahic High and the explosion of his daughter’s
bomb in 1968, of that mysterious, troubling, extraordinary historical
transition. I am thinking of the sixties and of the disorder occasioned by the
Vietnam War, of how certain families lost their kids and certain families didn’t
and how the Seymour Levovs were one of those that did—families full of tolerance
and kindly, well-intentioned liberal goodwill, and theirs were the kids who went
on a rampage, or went to jail, or disappeared underground, or fled to Sweden or
Canada. I am thinking of the Swede’s great fall and of how he must have imagined
that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibility. There is where it
must begin. It doesn’t matter if he was the cause of anything. He makes himself
responsible anyway. He has been doing that all his life, making himself
* * *
unnaturally responsible, keeping under control not just himself but whatever
else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together.
Yes,
the cause of the disaster has for him to be a transgression. How else would the
Swede explain it to himself? It has to be a transgression, a single
transgression, even if it is only he who identifies it as a transgression. The
disaster that befalls him begins in a failure of his responsibility, as he
imagines it.
But what could that have been?
Dispelling the aura of the dinner at Vincent’s, when I’d rushed to conclude the
most thoughtless conclusion—that simple was that simple—I lifted onto my stage
the boy we were all going to follow into America, our point man into the next
immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here, an American not by
sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the
Supreme Court, not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best.
Instead—by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world—he does it the ordinary
way, the natural way, the regular American-guy way. To the honeysweet strains of
“Dream,” I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed
… I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life—not his life
as a god or a demigod in whose triumphs one could exult as a boy but his life as
another assailable man—and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found
him in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was
eleven, back when she couldn’t stay out of his lap or stop calling him by cute
pet names, couldn’t “resist,” as she put it, examining with the tip of her
finger the close way his ears were fitted to his skull. Wrapped in a towel, she
would run through the house and out to the clothesline to fetch a dry bathing
suit, shouting as she went, “Nobody look!” and several evenings she had barged
into the bathroom where he was bathing and, when she saw him, cried out, “Oh,
pardonnez-moi—j’ai pense que—” “Scram,” he told her, “get-outahere-moi.” Driving
alone with him back from the beach one day that summer, dopily sun-drunk,
lolling against his bare shoulder, she had turned up her face and, half
innocently, half audaciously, precociously playing the grown-up girl, said,
“Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” Sun-drunk himself, vo-
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luptuously fatigued from rolling all morning with her in the heavy surf, he had
looked down to see that one of the shoulder straps of her swimsuit had dropped
over her arm, and there was her nipple, the hard red bee bite that was her
nipple. “N-n-no,” he said—and stunned them both. “And fix your suit,” he added
feebly. Soundlessly she obeyed. “I’m sorry, cookie—” “Oh, I deserve it,” she
said, trying with all her might to hold back her tears and be his chirp-ingly
charming pal again. “It’s the same at school. It’s the same with my friends. I
get started with something and I can’t stop. I just get c-c-carried awuh-awuh-
awuh-awuh—”
It was a while since he’d seen her turn white like that or seen her face
contorted like that. She fought for the word longer than, on that particular
day, he could possibly bear. “Awuh-awuh—” And yet he knew better than anyone
what not to do when, as Merry put it, she “started phumphing to beat the band.”
He was the parent she could always rely on not to
jump all over her every time
she opened her mouth. “Cool it,” he would tell Dawn, “relax, lay off her,” but
Dawn could not help herself. Merry began to stutter badly and Dawn’s hands were
clasped at her waist and her eyes fixed on the child’s lips, eyes that said, “I
know you can do it!” while saying, “I know that you can’t!” Merry’s stuttering
just killed her mother, and that killed Merry. “I’m not the problem—Mother is!”
* * *
And so was the teacher the problem when she tried to spare Merry by not calling
on her. So was everybody the problem when they started feeling sorry for her.
And when she was fluent suddenly and free of stuttering, the problem was the
compliments. She resented terribly being praised for fluency, and as soon as she
was praised she lost it completely—sometimes, Merry would say, to the point that
she was afraid “I’m going to short out my whole system.” Amazing how this child
could summon up the strength to joke about it—his precious lighthearted
jokester! If only it were within Dawn’s power to become a little lighthearted
about it herself. But it was the Swede alone who could always manage to be close
to perfect with her, though even he had all he could do not to cry out in
exasperation, “If you dare the gods and are fluent, what terrible thing do you
· 90 ·
think will happen?” The exasperation never surfaced: he did not wring his hands
like her mother, when she was in trouble he did not watch her lips or mouth her
words with her like her mother, he did not turn her, every time she spoke, into
the most important person not merely in the room but in the entire world—he did
everything he could not to make her stigma into Merry’s way of being Einstein.