by Philip Roth
getting raped.” “B-because I didn’t listen to my daddy?” “That’s not
impossible.” “Girls wind up getting raped whether they listen to their daddies
or not. Sometimes the daddies do the raping. Rapists have ch-ch-chil-dren too.
That’s what makes them daddies.” “Tell Bill and Melissa to come here and spend
the weekend with us.” “Oh, they’d really like to stay out here.” “Look, how
would you like to go away to school in September? To prep school for your last
two years. Maybe you’ve had enough of living at home and living with us here.”
“Always planning. Always trying to figure out the most reasonable
· · 111 ·
course.” “What else should I do? Not plan? I’m a man. I’m a husband. I’m a
father. I run a business.” “I run a b-b-b-business, therefore I am.” “There are
all kinds of schools. There are schools with all kinds of interesting people,
with all kinds of freedom… . You talk to your faculty adviser, I’ll make
inquiries too—and if you’re sick and tired of living with us, you can go away to
school. I understand that there isn’t much for you to do out here anymore. Let’s
all of us think seriously about your going away to school.”
Conversation #67 about New York. “You can be as active in the antiwar movement
as you like here in Morristown and here in Old Rimrock. You can organize people
here against the war, in your school—” “Daddy, I want to do it my w-way.”
“Listen to me. Please listen to me. The people here in Old Rimrock are not
antiwar. To the contrary. You want to be in opposition? Be in opposition here.”
“You can’t do anything about it here. What am I going to do, march around the
general store?” “You can organize here.” “Rimrockians Against the War? That’s
going to make a b-big difference. Morristown High Against the War.” “That’s
right. Bring the war home. Isn’t that the slogan? So do it—bring the war home to
your town. You like to be unpopular? You’ll be plenty unpopular, I can assure
you.” “I’m not looking to be unpopular.” “Well, you will be. Because it’s an
unpopular position here. If you oppose the war here with all your strength,
believe me, you will make an impact. Why don’t you educate people here about the
war? This is part of America too, you know.” “A minute part.” “These people are
Americans, Merry. You can be actively against the war right here in the village.
You don’t have to go to New York.” “Yeah, I can be against the war in our living
* * *
room.” “You can be against the war at the Community Club.” “All twenty people.”
“Morristown is the county seat. Go into Morristown on Saturdays. There are
people there who are against the war. Judge Fontane is against the war, you know
that. Mr. Avery is against the war. They signed the ad with me. The old judge
went to Washington with me. People around here weren’t very happy to see my name
there, you know. But that’s my position. You can organize a march in Morristown.
You can work on the march.”
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“And the Morristown High School paper is going to cover it. That’ll get the
troops out of Vietnam.” “I understand you’re quite vocal about the war at
Morristown High already. Why do you even bother if you don’t think it matters?
You do think it matters. Everyone’s point of view in America matters in terms of
this war. Start in your hometown, Merry. That’s the way to end the war.”
“Revolutions don’t b-b-begin in the countryside.” “We’re not talking about
revolution.” “You’re not talking about revolution.”
And that was the last conversation they ever had to have about New York. It
worked. Interminable, but he was patient and reasonable and firm and it worked.
As far as he knew, she did not go to New York again. She took his advice and
stayed at home, and, after turning their living room into a battlefield, after
turning Morristown High into a battlefield, she went out one day and blew up the
post office, destroying right along with it Dr. Fred Conlon and the village’s
general store, a small wooden building with a community bulletin board out front
and a single old Sunoco pump and the metal pole on which Russ Hamlin—who, with
his wife, owned the store and ran the post office—had raised the American flag
every morning since Warren Gamaliel Harding was president of the United States.
II
The Fall
? ?
f
A
tiny, bone-white girl who looked half Merry’s age but claimed to be some six
years older, a Miss Rita Cohen, came to the Swede four months after Merry’s
disappearance. She was dressed like Dr. King’s successor, Ralph Abernathy, in
freedom-rider overalls and ugly big shoes, and a bush of wiry hair emphatically
framed her bland baby face. He should have recognized immediately who she was—
for the four months he had been waiting for just such a person—but she was so
tiny, so young, so ineffectual-looking that he could barely believe she was at
the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance (doing a
thesis on the leather industry in Newark, New Jersey), let alone the provocateur
who was Merry’s mentor in world revolution.
On the day she showed up at the factory, the Swede had not known that Rita Cohen
had undertaken some fancy footwork—in and out through the basement door beneath
the loading dock—so as to elude the surveillance team the FBI had assigned to
observe from Central Avenue the arrival and departure of everyone visiting his
office.
Three, four times a year someone either called or wrote to ask permission to see
the plant. In the old days, Lou Levov, busy as he might be, always made time for
the Newark school classes, or Boy Scout troops, or visiting notables chaperoned
by a functionary
* * *
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from City Hall or the Chamber of Commerce. Though the Swede didn’t get nearly
the pleasure his father did from being an authority on the glove trade, though
he wouldn’t claim his father’s authority on anything pertaining to the leather
industry—pertaining to anything else, either—occasionally he did assist a
student by answering questions over the phone or, if the student struck him as
especially serious, by offering a brief tour.
Of course, had he known beforehand that this student was no student but his
fugitive daughter’s emissary, he would never have arranged their meeting to take
place at the factory. Why Rita hadn’t explained to the Swede whose emissary she
was, said nothing about Merry until the tour had been concluded, was undoubtedly
so she could size up the Swede first; or maybe she said nothing for so long the
better to enjoy toying with him. Maybe she just enjoyed the power. Maybe she was
just another politician and the enjoyment of power lay behind much of what she
did.
Because the Swede’s desk was separated from the making department by glass
partitions, he and the women at the machines could command a clear view of one
another. He had instituted this arrangement so as to wrest relief from the
mechanical racket
while maintaining access between himself and the floor. His
father had refused to be confined to any office, glass-enclosed or otherwise:
just planted his desk in the middle of the making room’s two hundred sewing
machines—royalty right at the heart of the overcrowded hive, the swarm around
him whining its buzz-saw bee buzz while he talked to his customers and his
contractors on the phone and simultaneously plowed through his paperwork. Only
from out on the floor, he claimed, could he distinguish within the contrapuntal
din the sound of a Singer on the fritz and with his screwdriver be over the
machine before the girl had even alerted her forelady to the trouble. Vicky,
Newark Maid’s elderly black forelady, so testified (with her brand of wry
admiration) at his retirement banquet. While everything was running without a
hitch, Lou was impatient, fidgety—in a word, said Vicky, the insufferable boss—
but when a cutter came around to complain about the fore-
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man, when the foreman came around to complain about a cutter, when skins arrived
months late or in damaged condition or were of poor quality, when he discovered
a lining contractor cheating him on the yield or a shipping clerk robbing him
blind, when he determined that the glove slitter with the red Corvette and the
sunglasses was, on the side, a bookie running a numbers game among the
employees, then he was in his element and in his inimitable way set out to make
things right—so that when they were right, said the next-to-last speaker, the
proud son, introducing his father in the longest, most laudatory of the
evening’s jocular encomiums, “he could begin driving himself—and the rest of us—
nuts with worrying again. But then, always expecting the worst, he was never
disappointed for long. Never caught off guard either. All of which goes to show
that, like everything else at Newark Maid, worrying works. Ladies and gentlemen,
the man who has been my lifelong teacher— and not just in the art of worrying—
the man who has made of my life a lifelong education, a difficult education
sometimes but always a profitable one, who explained to me when I was a boy of
five the secret of making a product perfect—’You work at it,’ he told me— ladies
and gentlemen, a man who has worked at it and succeeded at it since the day he
went off to begin tanning hides at the age of fourteen, the glover’s glover, who
knows more about the glove business than anybody else alive, Mr. Newark Maid, my
father, Lou Levov.” “Look,” began Mr. Newark Maid, “don’t let anybody kid you
tonight. I enjoy working, I enjoy the glove business, I enjoy the challenge, I
don’t like the idea of retiring, I think it’s the first step to the grave. But
* * *
none of that bothers me for one big reason—because I am the luckiest man in the
world. And lucky because of one word. The biggest little word there is: family.
If I was being pushed out by a competitor, I wouldn’t be standing here smiling—
you know me, I would be standing here shouting. But who I am being pushed out by
is my own beloved son. I have been blessed with the most wonderful family a man
could want: a wonderful wife, two wonderful boys, wonderful grandchildren… .”
119
The Swede had Vicky bring a sheepskin into the office and he gave it to the
Wharton girl to feel.
“This has been pickled but it hasn’t been tanned,” he told her. “It’s a hair
sheepskin. Doesn’t have wool like a domestic sheep but hair.”
“What happens to the hair?” she asked him. “Does it get used?”
“Good question. The hair is used to make carpet. Up in Amsterdam, New York.
Bigelow. Mohawk. But the primary value is the skins. The hair is a by-product,
and how you get the hair off the skin and all the rest of it is another story
entirely. Before synthetics came along, the hair mostly went into cheap carpets.
There’s a company that brokered all the hair from the tanneries to the car-
petmakers, but you don’t want to go into that,” he said, observing how before
they’d really even begun she’d filled with notes the top sheet of a fresh yellow
legal pad. “Though if you do,” he added, touched by—and attracted by—her
thoroughness, “because I suppose it does all sort of tie together, I could send
you to talk to those people. I think the family is still around. It’s a niche
that not many people know about. It’s interesting. It’s all interesting. You’ve
settled on an interesting subject, young lady.”
“I think I have,” she said, warmly smiling over at him.
“Anyway, this skin”—he’d taken it back from her and was stroking it with the
side of a thumb as you might stroke the cat to get the purr going—”is called a
cabretta in the industry’s terminology. Small sheep. Little sheep. They only
live twenty or thirty degrees north and south of the equator. They’re sort of on
a semiwild grazing basis—families in an African village will each own four or
five sheep, and they’ll all be flocked together and put out in the bush. What
you were holding in your hand isn’t raw anymore. We buy them in what’s called
the pickled stage. The hair’s been removed and the preprocessing has been done
to preserve them to get here. We used to bring them in raw—huge bales tied with
rope and so on, skins just dried in the air. I actually have a ship’s manifest—
it’s somewhere here, I can find it for you if you want to see it—a copy of a
ship’s manifest from 1790, in which skins were
120
landed in Boston similar to what we were bringing in up to last year. And from
the same ports in Africa.”
It could have been his father talking to her. For all he knew, every word of
every sentence uttered by him he had heard from his father’s mouth before he’d
finished grade school, and then two or three thousand times again during the
decades they’d run the business together. Trade talk was a tradition in glove
families going back hundreds of years—in the best of them, the father passed the
secrets on to the son along with all the history and all the lore. It was true
in the tanneries, where the tanning process is like cooking and the recipes are
handed down from the father to the son, and it was true in the glove shops and
it was true on the cutting-room floor. The old Italian cutters would train their
* * *
sons and no one else, and those sons accepted the tutorial from their fathers as
he had accepted the tutorial from his. Beginning when he was a kid of five and
extending into his maturity, the father as the authority was unopposed:
accepting his authority was one and the same with extracting from him the wisdom
that had made Newark Maid manufacturer of the country’s best ladies’ glove. The
Swede quickly came to love in the same wholehearted way the very things his
father did and, at the factory, to think more or less as he did. And to sound as
he did—if not on every last subject, then whenever a conversation came around to
leather or Newark or gloves.
Not since Merry had disappeared had he felt anything like this loquacious. Right
up to that morning, all he’d been wanting was to w
eep or to hide; but because
there was Dawn to nurse and a business to tend to and his parents to prop up,
because everybody else was paralyzed by disbelief and shattered to the core,
neither inclination had as yet eroded the protective front he provided the
family and presented to the world. But now words were sweeping him on, buoying
him up, his father’s words released by the sight of this tiny girl studiously
taking them down. She was nearly as small, he thought, as the kids from Merry’s
third-grade class, who’d been bused the thirty-eight miles from their rural
schoolhouse one day back in the late fifties so that Merry’s daddy could show
them how
121
he made gloves, show them especially Merry’s magical spot, the laying-off table,
where, at the end of the making process, the men shaped and pressed each and
every glove by pulling it carefully down over steam-heated brass hands veneered
in chrome. The hands were dangerously hot and they were shiny and they stuck
straight up from the table in a row, thin-looking as hands that had been
flattened in a mangle and then amputated, beautifully amputated hands afloat in
space like the souls of the dead. As a little girl, Merry was captivated by
their enigma, called them “the pancake hands.” Merry as a little girl saying to
her classmates, “You want to make five dollars a dozen,” which was what
glovemakers were always saying and what she’d been hearing since she was born—
five dollars a dozen, that was what you shot for, regardless. Merry whispering
to the teacher, “People cheating on piece rates is always a problem. My daddy
had to fire one man. He was stealing time,” and the Swede telling her, “Honey,