American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  care unit, during his stewardship there had been a long-overdue modernization of

  emergency room facilities. But who gives a shit about the emergency room of a

  community hospital out in the sticks? Who gives a shit about a rural general

  store whose owner has been running it since 1921? We’re talking about humanity!

  When has there ever been progress for humanity without a few small mishaps and

  mistakes? The people are angry and they have spoken! Violence will be met by

  violence, regardless of consequences, until the people are liberated! Fascist

  America down one post office, facility completely destroyed.

  Except, as it happened, Hamlin’s was not an official U.S. post office nor were

  the Hamlins U.S. postal employees—theirs was merely a postal station contracted,

  for x number of dollars, to handle a little postal business on the side.

  Hamlin’s was no more a government installation than the office where your

  accountant makes out your tax forms. But that is a mere technicality to world

  revolutionaries. Facility destroyed! Eleven hundred Old Rimrock residents

  forced, for a full year and a half, to drive five miles to buy their stamps and

  to get packages weighed and to send anything registered or special delivery.

  That’ll show Lyndon Johnson who’s boss.

  They were laughing at him. Life was laughing at him.

  Mrs. Conlon had said, “You are as much the victims of this tragedy as we are.

  The difference is that for us, though recovery will take time, we will survive

  as a family. We will survive as a loving family. We will survive with our

  memories intact and with our

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  memories to sustain us. It will not be any easier for us than it will be for you

  to make sense of something so senseless. But we are the same family we were when

  Fred was here, and we will survive.”

  The clarity and force with which she implied that the Swede and his family would

  not survive made him wonder, in the weeks that followed, if her kindness and her

  compassion were so all-encompassing as he had wanted at first to believe.

  * * *

  He never went to see her again.

  He told his secretary that he was going over to New York, to the Czech mission,

  where he’d already had preliminary discussions about a trip to Czechoslovakia

  later in the fall. In New York he had examined specimen gloves as well as shoes,

  belts, pocketbooks, and wallets manufactured in Czechoslovakia, and now the

  Czechs were working up plans for him to visit factories in Brno and Bratislava

  so he could see the glove setup firsthand and examine a more extensive sample of

  their work while it was in production and when it came off the floor. There was

  no longer any question that in Czechoslovakia leather apparel could be more

  cheaply made than in Newark or Puerto Rico—and probably better made, too. The

  workmanship that had begun falling off in the Newark plant since the riots had

  continued to deteriorate, especially once Vicky retired as making room forelady.

  Even granting that what he’d seen at the Czech mission might not be

  representative of day-to-day production, it had been impressive enough. Back in

  the thirties the Czechs had flooded the American market with fine gloves, over

  the years excellent Czech cutters had been employed by Newark Maid, and the

  machinist who for thirty years had been employed full-time tending Newark Maid’s

  sewing machines, keeping those workhorses running—replacing worn-out shafts,

  levers, throat plates, bobbins, endlessly adjusting each machine’s timing and

  tension— was a Czech, a wonderful worker, expert with every glove machine on

  earth, able to fix anything. Even though the Swede had assured his father he had

  no intention of signing over any aspect of their operation to a Communist

  government until he’d returned with a

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  thorough report, he was confident that pulling out of Newark wasn’t far down the

  line.

  Dawn by this time had her new face and had begun the startling comeback, and as

  for Merry… well, Merry dear, Merry darling, my precious one-and-only Merry-

  child, how can I possibly remain on Central Avenue struggling to keep my

  production up, taking the beating we’re taking there from black people who care

  nothing any longer about the quality of my product—people who are careless,

  people who’ve got me over a barrel because they know there’s nobody trainable

  left in Newark to replace them—for fear that if I leave Central Avenue you will

  call me a racist and never see me again? I have waited so long to see you again,

  your mother has waited, Grandpa and Grandma have waited, we have all been

  waiting twenty-four hours a day every day of every year for five years to see

  you or to hear from you or somehow to get some word of you, and we can postpone

  our lives no longer. It’s 1973. Mother is a new woman. If we are ever again

  going to live, now is when we must begin.

  Nonetheless, he was waiting not for the pleasant consul at the Czech mission to

  welcome him with a glass of slivovitz (as his father or his wife would think if

  they happened to phone the office) but across from the dog and cat hospital on

  New Tersey Railroad Avenue, a ten-minute car ride from the Newark Maid factory.

  Ten minutes away. And for years? In Newark, for years? Merry was living in the

  one place in the world he would never have guessed had he been given a thousand

  guesses. Was he deficient in intelligence, or was she so provocative, so

  perverse, so insane he still could not imagine anything she might do? Was he

  deficient also in imagination? What father wouldn’t be? It was preposterous. His

  daughter was living in Newark, working across the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks,

  and not at the end of the Ironbound where the Portuguese were reclaiming the

  poor Down Neck streets but here at the Ironbound’s westernmost edge, in the

  shadow of the railroad viaduct that closed off Railroad Avenue all along the

  western side of the street. That grim fortification was the city’s Chinese wall,

  * * *

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  brownstone boulders piled twenty feet high, strung out for more than a mile and

  intersected only by half a dozen foul underpasses. Along this forsaken street,

  as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian

  length of unguarded wall barren even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that

  managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed

  away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a

  weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its

  ugliness.

  On the east side of the street, the dark old factories—Civil War factories,

  foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys

  pumping smoke for a hundred years—were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out

  with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblock. These

  were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet

  crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the

  cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out

  g
oods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombs. It was Newark that was entombed

  there, a city that was not going to stir again. The pyramids of Newark: as huge

  and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every

  historical right to be.

  The rioters hadn’t crossed beneath the elevated railroad tracks— if they had,

  these factories, the whole block of them, would be burned-out rubble like the

  West Market Street factories back of Newark Maid.

  His father used to tell him, “Brownstone and brick. There was the business.

  Brownstone quarried right here. Know that? Out by Belleville, north along the

  river. This city’s got everything. What a business that must have been. The guy

  who sold Newark brownstone and brick—he was sittin’ pretty.”

  On Saturday mornings, the Swede would drive Down Neck alongside his father to

  pick up the week’s finished gloves from the Italian families paid to do

  piecework in their homes. As the car bounced along the streets paved with

  bricks, past one poor little

  · 219 ·

  Ik

  frame house after another, the massive railroad viaduct remained brokenly within

  view. It would not go away. This was the Swede’s first encounter with the

  manmade sublime that divides and dwarfs, and in the beginning it was frightening

  to him, a child susceptible to his environment even then, with a proclivity to

  be embraced by it and to embrace it in return. Six or seven years old. Maybe

  five, maybe Jerry hadn’t even been born yet. The dwarfing stones causing the

  city to be even more gigantic for him than it already was. The manmade horizon,

  the brutal cut in the body of the giant city—it felt as though they were

  entering the shadow world of hell, when all the boy was seeing was the

  railroad’s answer to the populist crusade to hoist the tracks above the grade

  crossings so as to end the crashes and the pedestrian carnage. “Brownstone and

  brick,” said his father admiringly. ” There was a guy whose worries were over.”

  That had all taken place before they’d moved to Keer Avenue, when they were

  living across from the synagogue in a three-family house at the poor end of

  Wainwright Street. His father didn’t have even a loft then but got his skins

  from a fellow who was also Down Neck and who trafficked out of his garage in

  whatever the workers could carry from the tanneries hidden within their big

  * * *

  rubber boots or wrapped around them beneath their overalls. The hide man was

  himself a tannery worker, a big, gruff Pole with tattoos up and down his massive

  arms, and the Swede had vague memories of his father’s standing at the garage’s

  one window holding the finished hides up to the light and searching them for

  defects, then stretching them over his knee before making his selection. “Feel

  this,” he’d say to the Swede once they were safely back in the car, and the

  child would crease a delicate kidskin as he’d seen his father do, finger the

  fineness appreciatively, the velvet texture of the skin’s close, tight grain. ”

  That’s leather,” his father told him. “What makes kidskin so delicate, Seymour?”

  “I don’t know.” “Well, what is a kid?” “A baby goat.” “Right. And what does he

  eat?” “Milk?” “Right. And because all the animal has eaten is milk, that’s what

  makes the grain smooth and beautiful. Look at the pores of this skin with a

  magni-

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  fying glass and they’re so fine you can’t even see ‘em. But the kid starts

  eating grass, that skin’s a different story. The goat eats grass and the skin is

  like sandpaper. The finest glove leather for a formal glove is what, Seymour?”

  “Kid.” “That’s my boy. But it’s not only the kid, son, it’s the tanning. You’ve

  got to know your tannery. It’s like a good cook and a bad cook. You get a good

  piece of meat and a bad cook can spoil it for you. How come someone makes a

  wonderful cake and the other doesn’t? One is moist and nice and the other is

  dry. Same thing in leather. I worked in the tannery. It’s the chemicals, it’s

  the time, it’s the temperature. That’s where the difference comes in. That, and

  not buying second-rate skins to begin with. Cost as much to tan a bad skin as a

  good skin. Cost more to tan a bad one—you work harder at it. Beautiful,

  beautiful,” he said, “wonderful stuff,” once again lovingly kneading the kidskin

  between his fingertips. “You know how you get it like this, Seymour?” “How,

  Daddy?” “You work at it.”

  There were eight, ten, twelve immigrant families scattered throughout Down Neck

  to whom Lou Levov distributed the skins along with his own patterns, people from

  Naples who had been glovers in the old country and the best of whom wound up

  working at Newark Maid’s first home when he could come up with the rent for the

  small loft on West Market Street on the top floor of the chair factory. The old

  Italian grandfather or the father did the cutting on the kitchen table, with the

  French rule, the shears, and the spud knife he’d brought from Italy. The

  grandmother or the mother did the sewing, and the daughters did the laying off—

  ironing the glove—in the old-fashioned way, with irons heated up in a box set

  atop the kitchen’s potbellied stove. The women worked on antique Singers,

  nineteenth-century machines that Lou Levov, who’d learned to reassemble them,

  had bought for a song and then repaired himself; at least once a week, he’d have

  to drive all the way Down Neck at night and spend an hour getting a machine

  running right again. Otherwise, both day and night, he was all over Jersey

  peddling the gloves the Italians had made for him, selling them at first out of

  the trunk of the car, right on a main downtown street,

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  and, in time, directly to apparel shops and department stores that were Newark

  Maid’s first solid accounts. It was in a tiny kitchen not half a mile from where

  the Swede was now standing that the boy had seen a pair of gloves cut by the

  oldest of the old Neapolitan artisans. He believed that he could remember

  sitting in his father’s lap while Lou Levov sampled a glass of the family’s

  homemade wine and across from them a cutter said to be a hundred years old who

  was supposed to have made gloves for the queen of Italy smoothed the ends of a

  trank with half a dozen twists of his knife’s dull blade. “Watch him, Seymour.

  See how small the skin is? The most difficult thing in the world to cut a

  * * *

  kidskin efficiently. Because it’s so small. But watch what he does. You’re

  watching a genius and you’re watching an artist. The Italian cutter, son, is

  always more artistic in his outlook. And this is the master of them all.”

  Sometimes hot meatballs would be frying in a pan, and he remembered how one of

  the Italian cutters, who always purred “Che bellezza…” and called him

  Piccirell’, sweet little thing, when he stroked the Swede’s blond head, taught

  him how to dip the crisp Italian bread in a pot of tomato sauce. No matter how

  tiny the yard out back, there were tomato plants growing, and a grapevine and a

  pear tree, and in every household there was always a grand
father. It was he who

  had made the wine and to whom Lou Levov uttered, in a Neapolitan dialect and

  with what he took to be the appropriate gesture, his repertoire’s one complete

  Italian sentence, ” ‘Na mano lava ‘nad”—One hand washes the other—when he laid

  out on the oilcloth the dollar bills for the week’s piecework. Then the boy and

  his father got up from the table with the finished lot and left for home, where

  Sylvia Levov would examine each glove, with a stretcher meticulously examine

  each seam of each finger and each thumb of every glove. “A pair of gloves,” his

  father told the Swede, “are supposed to match perfectly—the grain of the

  leather, the color, the shading, everything. The first thing she looks to see is

  if the gloves match.” While his mother worked she taught the boy about all the

  mistakes that can occur in the making of a glove, mistakes she had been taught

  to recognize as her husband’s wife. A

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  skipped stitch can turn into an open seam, but you can’t see it, she told the

  child, without putting the stretcher into the glove and tensioning the seam.

  There are stitch holes that aren’t supposed to be there but are because the

  sewer stitched wrong and then just tried to go on. There is something called

  butcher cuts that occur if the animal was cut too deeply when it was flayed.

  Even after the leather is shaved they’re there, and though they don’t

  necessarily break when you stress the glove with the stretcher, they could break

  if someone put the glove on. In every batch they brought up from Down Neck his

  father found at least one glove where the thumb didn’t match the palm. This

  drove him wild. “See that? See, the cutter is trying to make his quota out of a