American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  Everything justified by the profit principle! Everything! Newark’s just a black

  colony for my own father. Exploit it and exploit it and then, when there’s

  trouble, fuck it!”

  These thoughts and thoughts even stupider—engendered in her by the likes of The

  Communist Manifesto—would surely foreclose any chance of ever seeing her again.

  Despite all that he could tell Angela Davis that might favorably influence her

  about his refusal to desert Newark and his black employees, he knows that the

  personal complications of that decision could not begin to conform to the utter

  otherworldliness of the ideal of St. Angela, and so he decides instead to

  explain to a vision that he is one of two white trustees (this is not true—the

  father of a friend is the trustee) of an antipov-erty organization that meets

  regularly in Newark to promote the city’s comeback, which (also not true—how

  could it be?) he still believes in. He tells Angela that he attends evening

  meetings all over Newark despite his wife’s fears. He is trying to do everything

  he can for the liberation of her people. He reminds himself to repeat these

  words to her every night: the liberation of the people, America’s black

  colonies, the inhumanity of the society, embattled humanity.

  He does not tell Angela that his daughter is childishly boasting, lying in order

  to impress her, that his daughter knows nothing about dynamite or revolution,

  that these are just words to her and she blurts them out to make herself feel

  * * *

  powerful despite her speech impediment. No, Angela is the person who knows

  Merry’s whereabouts, and if Angela has come to him like this, it’s no mere

  165

  friendly visit. Why would Angela Davis drop out of nowhere into the Levovs’ Old

  Rimrock kitchen at midnight every single night if she weren’t the revolutionary

  leader assigned to looking after his daughter’s well-being? What’s in it for her

  otherwise—why else would she keep coming back?

  So he says to her yes, his daughter is a soldier of freedom, yes, he is proud,

  yes, everything he has heard about Communism is a lie, yes, the United States is

  concerned solely with making the world safe for business and keeping the have-

  nots from encroaching on the haves—yes, the United States is responsible for

  oppression everywhere. Everything is justified by her cause, Huey Newton’s

  cause, Bobby Seale’s cause, George Jackson’s cause, Merry Levov’s cause.

  Meanwhile he mentions Angela’s name to no one, certainly not to Vicky, who

  thinks Angela Davis is a troublemaker and who says as much to the girls at work.

  Alone then and in secret he prays—ardently prays to God, to Jesus, to anyone, to

  the Blessed Virgin, to St. Anthony, St. Jude, St. Anne, St. Joseph—for Angela’s

  acquittal. And when it happens he is jubilant. She is free! But he does not send

  her the letter that he sits up writing in the kitchen that night, nor does he

  some weeks later when Angela, in New York, behind a four-sided shield of

  bulletproof glass and before fifteen thousand exultant supporters, demands the

  freedom of political prisoners deprived of due process and unjustly imprisoned.

  Free the Rimrock Bomber! Free my daughter! Free her, please! cries the Swede. “I

  think it’s about time,” Angela says, “for all of us to begin to teach the rulers

  of this country a few lessons,” and yes, cries the Swede, yes, it is about time,

  a socialist revolution in the United States of America! But nonetheless he

  remains alone at his kitchen table because he still cannot do anything that he

  should do or believe anything that he should believe or even know any longer

  what it is he does believe. Did she do it or didn’t she do it? He should have

  fucked Rita Cohen, if only to find out—fucked the conniving little sexual

  terrorist until she was his slave! Until she took him to the hideout where they

  made the bombs! If you want to see your daughter as much as you say, you’ll just

  calm down and come

  · 166 ·

  over here and give Rita Cohen a nice big fuck. He should have looked at her cunt

  and tasted it and fucked her. Is that what any father would have done? If he

  would do anything for Merry, why not that? Why did he run?

  And this is just a part of what is meant by “Five years pass.” A very tiny part.

  Everything he reads or sees or hears has a single significance. Nothing is

  impersonally perceived. For one whole year he cannot go into the village without

  seeing where the general store used to be. To buy a newspaper or a quart of milk

  or a tank of gas he has to drive almost clear into Morristown, and so does

  everybody else in Old Rimrock. The same to buy a stamp. Basically the village is

  one street. Going east there is the new Presbyterian church, a white

  pseudocolonial building that doesn’t look like much of anything and that

  replaced the old Presbyterian church that burned to the ground in the twenties.

  Just a little ways from the church are The Oaks, a pair of two-hundred-year-old

  oak trees that are the town’s pride. Some thirty yards beyond The Oaks is the

  old blacksmith shop that was converted, just before Pearl Harbor, into the Home

  Shop, where local women go to buy wallpaper and lampshades and decorative

  knicknacks and to get advice from Mrs. Fowler about interior decorating. Down at

  the far end of the street is the auto-repair garage run by Perry Hamlin, a hard-

  drinking cousin of Russ Hamlin’s who also canes chairs, and then beyond that,

  * * *

  encompassing some five hundred acres, is the rolling terrain of the dairy farm

  owned and worked by Paul Hamlin, who is Perry’s younger brother. Hills like

  these where Hamlins have farmed now for close to two hundred years run northeast

  to southwest, in a thirty- or forty-mile-wide swath, crossing north Jersey at

  around Old Rimrock, a range of small hills that continue up into New York to

  become the Catskills and from there all the way up to Maine.

  Diagonally across from where the store used to be is the yellow-stuccoed six-

  room schoolhouse. Before they sent her to the Mon-tessori school and then on to

  Morristown High, Merry had been a

  · 167 ·

  pupil there for the first four grades. Every kid who goes there now sees every

  day where the store used to be, as do their teachers, as do their parents when

  they drive into the village. The Community Club meets at the school, they hold

  their chicken suppers there, people vote there, and everybody who drives up

  there and sees where the store used to be thinks about the explosion and the

  good man it killed, thinks about the girl who set off the explosion, and, with

  varying degrees of sympathy or of contempt, thinks about her family. Some people

  are overly friendly; others, he knows, try their best to avoid running into him.

  He receives anti-Semitic mail. It is so vile it sickens him for days on end. He

  overhears things. Dawn overhears things. “Lived here all my life. Never saw

  anything like this before.” “What can you expect? They have no business being

  out here to begin with.” “I thought they were nice people, but you never know.”

  An editorial from the local paper, recording the tragedy
and commemorating Dr.

  Conlon, is thumbtacked to the Community Club bulletin board and hangs there,

  right out by the street. There is no way that the Swede can take it down, much

  as he would like to, for Dawn’s sake at least. You would think that what with

  exposure to the rain and the wind and the sun and the snow the thing would rot

  away in a matter of weeks, but it not only remains intact but is almost

  completely legible for one whole year. The editorial is called “Dr. Fred.” “We

  live in a society where violence is becoming all too prevalent … we do not

  know why and we may never understand … the anger that all of us feel… our

  hearts go out to the victim and his family, to the Hamlins, and to an entire

  community that is trying to understand and to cope with what has happened … a

  remarkable man and a wonderful physician who touched all our lives … a special

  fund in memory of ‘Doctor Fred’ … to contribute to this memorial, which will

  help indigent local families in time of medical need … in this time of grief,

  we must rededicate ourselves, in his memory… .” Alongside the editorial is

  an article headlined “Distance Heals All Wounds,” which begins, “We’d all just

  as soon forget…” and continues, “… that soothing distance will come

  quicker to some than others. … The Rev. Peter

  · 168 ·

  Baliston of the First Congregational Church, in his sermon, sought to find some

  good in all the tragedy … will bring the community closer together in a

  shared sorrow…. The Rev. James Viering of St. Patrick’s Church gave an

  impassioned homily….” Beside that article is a third clipping, one that has no

  business being there, but he cannot tear that one down any more than he can go

  ahead and tear down the others, so it, too, hangs there for a year. It is the

  interview with Edgar Bartley—both the interview and the picture of Edgar from

  the paper, showing him standing in front of his family’s house with a shovel and

  his dog and behind him the path to the house freshly cleared of snow. Edgar

  Bartley is the boy from Old Rimrock who’d taken Merry to the movies in

  Morristown some two years before the bombing. He was a year ahead of her at the

  high school, a boy as tall as Merry and, as the Swede remembered him, nice

  enough looking though terrifically shy and a bit of an oddball. The newspaper

  * * *

  story describes him as Merry’s boyfriend at the time of the bombing, though as

  far as her parents knew, Merry’s date with Edgar Bartley two years earlier was

  the one and only date she’d ever had with him or with anyone. Whatever, someone

  has underlined in black all the quotations attributed to Edgar. Maybe a friend

  of his did it as a joke, a high school joke. Maybe the article with the

  photograph was hung there as a joke in the first place. Joke or not, there it

  remains, month after month, and the Swede cannot get rid of it. “It doesn’t seem

  real…. I never thought she would do something like this. … I knew her as a

  very nice girl. I never heard her say anything vicious. I’m sure something

  snapped. … I hope they find her so that she can get the help that she needs.

  … I always thought of Old Rimrock as a place where nothing can happen to you.

  But now I’m like everybody, I’m looking over my shoulder. It’s going to take

  time before things return to normal… . I’m just moving on. I have to. I have

  to forget about it. Like nothing happened. But it’s very sad.”

  The only solace the Swede can take from the Community Club bulletin board is

  that no one has posted there the clipping whose headline reads “Suspected Bomber

  Is Described as Bright, Gifted

  · 169 ·

  but with ‘Stubborn Streak.’” That one he would have torn down. He would have had

  to go there in the middle of the night and just do it. This one article is no

  worse, probably, than any of the others that were appearing then, not just in

  their local weekly but in the New York papers—the Times, the Daily News, the

  Daily Mirror, the Post; in the Jersey dailies—the Newark News, the Newark Star-

  Ledger, the Morristown Record, the Bergen Record, the Trenton Times, the Pater-

  son News; in the nearby Pennsylvania papers—the Philadelphia Inquirer, the

  Philadelphia Bulletin, and the Easton Express; and in Time and Newsweek. Most of

  the papers and the wire services dropped the story after the first week, but the

  Newark News and the Morristown Record in particular wouldn’t let up—the News had

  three star reporters on the case, and both papers were churning out their

  stories about the Rimrock Bomber every single day for weeks. The Record, with

  its local orientation, couldn’t stop reminding its readers that the Rimrock

  bombing was the most shattering disaster in Morris County since the September

  12, 1940, Hercules Powder Company explosion, some twelve miles away in Kenvil,

  when fifty-two people were killed and three hundred injured. There had been a

  murder of a minister and a choirmaster in the late twenties, down in Middlesex

  County, in a lane just outside New Brunswick, and in the Morris village of

  Brookside there had been a murder by an inmate who had walked off the grounds of

  the Greystone mental asylum, visited his uncle in Brookside, and split the man’s

  head open with an ax—and these stories, too, are dug up and rehashed. And, of

  course, the Lindbergh kidnapping down in Hopewell, New Jersey, the abduction and

  murder of the infant son of Charles A. Lindbergh, the famous transatlantic

  aviator—that, too, the papers luridly recall, reprinting details over thirty

  years old about the ransom, the baby’s battered corpse, the Flemington trial,

  reprinting newspaper excerpts from April 1936 about the electrocution of the

  convicted kidnapper-murderer, an immigrant carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann. Day

  after day, Merry Levov is mentioned in the context of the region’s slender

  history of atrocities—her name several times appearing right alongside

  Hauptmann’s—and

  170

  I

  yet nothing of what’s written wounds him as savagely as the story about her

  “stubborn streak” in the local weekly. There is something concealed there—yet

  implicit—a degree of provincial smugness, of simplemindedness, of sheer

  * * *

  stupidity, that is so enraging to him that he could not have borne to see it

  hanging up for everybody to read and to shake their heads over at the Community

  Club bulletin board. Whatever Merry may or may not have done, he could not have

  allowed her life to be on display like that just outside the school.

  SUSPECTED BOMBER IS DESCRIBED

  AS BRIGHT, GIFTED BUT WITH

  “STUBBORN STREAK”

  To her teachers at Old Rimrock Community School, Meredith “Merry” Levov, who

  allegedly bombed Hamlin’s General Store and killed Old Rimrock’s Dr. Fred

  Conlon, was known as a multi-talented child, an excellent student and somebody

  who never challenged authority. People looking to her childhood for some clue

  about her alleged violent act remained stymied when they remembered her as a

  cooperative girl full of energy.

  “We are in disbelief,” ORCS Principal Eileen Morr
ow said about the suspected

  bomber. “It is hard to understand why this happened.”

  As a student at the six-room elementary school, Principal Morrow said, Merry

  Levov was “very helpful and never in trouble.”

  “She’s not the kind of person who would do that,” Mrs. Morrow said. “At least

  not when we knew her here.”

  At ORCS, Merry Levov had a straight A average and was involved in school

  activities, Mrs. Morrow said, and was well liked by both students and faculty.

  “She was hard-working and enthusiastic and set very high standards for herself,”

  Mrs. Morrow said. “Her teachers respected her as a quality student and her peers

  admired her.”

  171

  At ORCS Merry Levov was a talented art student and a leader in team sports,

  particularly kickball. “She was just a normal kid growing up,” Mrs. Morrow said.

  “This is something we would never have dreamt could happen,” the principal said.

  “Unfortunately, nobody can see the future.”

  Mrs. Morrow said that Meredith associated with “model students” at the school,

  though she did show a “stubborn streak,” for example, sometimes refusing to do

  school assignments which she thought unnecessary.

  Others remembered the alleged bomber’s stubborn streak, when she went on to

  become a student at Morris-town High School. Sally Curren, a 16-year-old

  classmate, described Meredith as someone with an attitude she described as

  “arrogant and superior to everybody else.”

  But 16-year-old Barbara Turner said Meredith “seemed nice enough, though she had

  her beliefs.”

  Though Morristown High students asked about Merry had many different