by Philip Roth
in. At home there is that tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines
the world to be and the way the world is for her. Well, no longer is there that
dissonance to disturb her equilibrium. Here are her Rim-rockian fantasies, and
the culmination is horrifying.
Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time—they did not have enough time
with her. When she’s your ward, when she’s there, you can do it. If you have
contact with your child steadily over time, then the stuff that is off—the
mistakes in judgment that are made on both sides—is somehow, through that
* * *
steady, patient contact, made better and better, until at last, inch by inch,
day by day and inch by inch, there is remediation, there are the ordinary
satisfactions of parental patience rewarded, of things working out… . But
this. Where was the remediation for this? Could he bring Dawn here to see her,
Dawn in her bright, tight new face and Merry sitting cross-legged on the pallet
in her tattered sweatshirt and ill-shapen trousers and black plastic shower
clogs, meekly
· 238 ·
composed behind that nauseating veil? How broad her shoulder bones were. Like
his. But hanging off those bones there was nothing. What he saw sitting before
him was not a daughter, a woman, or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow’s
clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life,
a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could
have fooled only a bird. How could he bring Dawn here? Driving Dawn down
McCarter Highway, turning off McCarter and into this street, the warehouses, the
rubble, the garbage, the debris … Dawn seeing this room, smelling this room,
her hands touching the walls of this room, let alone the unwashed flesh, the
brutally cropped, bedraggled hair…
He kneeled down to read the index cards positioned just about where she once
used to venerate, over her Old Rimrock bed, magazine photos of Audrey Hepburn.
I renounce all killing of living beings, whether subtile or gross, whether
movable or immovable.
I renounce all vices of lying speech arising from anger, or greed, or fear, or
mirth.
I renounce all taking of anything not given, either in a village, or a town, or
a wood, either of little or much, or small or great, or living or lifeless
things.
I renounce all sexual pleasures, either with gods, or men, or animals.
I renounce all attachments, whether little or much, small or great, living or
lifeless; neither shall I myself form such attachments, nor cause others to do
so, nor consent to their doing so.
As a businessman the Swede was astute, and if need be, beneath the genial
surface of the man’s man—capitalizing on the genial surface—he could be as
artfully calculating as the deal required. But he could not see how even the
coldest calculation could help
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him here. Neither could all the fathering talent in the world collected and
gathered up and mobilized in one man. He read through her five vows again,
considered them as seriously as he could, all the while bewildering himself with
the thought, For purity—in the name of purity.
Why? Because she’d killed someone, or because she would have needed purity
whether she’d never killed a fly? Did it have to do with him? That foolish kiss?
That was ten years behind them, and besides, it had been nothing, had come to
nothing, did not appear to have meant anything much to her even at the time.
Could something as meaningless, as commonplace, as ephemeral, as understandable,
as forgivable, as innocent … No! How could he be asked again and again to
take seriously things that were not serious? Yet that was the predicament that
* * *
Merry had forced on him all the way back when she was blasting away at the
dinner table about the immorality of their bourgeois life. How could anybody
take that childish ranting seriously? He had done as well as any parent could
have—he had listened and listened when it was all he could do not to get up from
dinner and walk away until she’d spewed herself out; he had nodded and agreed to
as much as he could even marginally agree to, and when he opposed her—say, about
the moral efficacy of the profit motive—always it was with restraint, with all
the patient reasonableness he could muster. And this was not easy for him, given
that it was the profit motive to which a child requiring tens of thousands of
dollars’ worth of orthodontia, psychiatry, and speech therapy—not to mention
ballet lessons and riding lessons and tennis lessons, all of which, growing up,
she at one time or another was convinced she could not survive without—might be
thought to owe if not a certain allegiance then at least a minuscule portion of
gratitude. Perhaps the mistake was to have tried so hard to take seriously what
was in no way serious; perhaps what he should have done, instead of listening so
intently, so respectfully, to her ignorant raving was to reach over the table
and whack her across the mouth.
But what would that have taught her about the profit motive—
· 240 ·
what would it have taught her about him? Yet if he had, if, then the veiled
mouth could be taken seriously. He could now berate himself, “Yes, I did it to
her, I did it with my outbursts, my temper.” But it seemed as though he had done
whatever had been done to her because he could not abide a temper, had not
wanted one or dared to have one. He had done it by kissing her. But that
couldn’t be. None of this could possibly be.
Yet it was. Here we are. Here she is, imprisoned in this rat hole with these
“vows.”
She was better off steeped in contempt. If he had to choose between angry, fat
Merry stuttering with Communist outrage and this Merry, veiled, placid, dirty,
infinitely compassionate, this raggedly attired scarecrow Merry … But why
have to choose either? Why must she always be enslaving herself to the handiest
empty-headed idea? From the moment she had become old enough to think for
herself she had been tyrannized instead by the thinking of crackpots. What had
he done to produce a daughter who, after excelling for years at school, refused
to think for herself—a daughter who had to be either violently against
everything in sight or pathetically for everything, right down to the
microorganisms in the air we breathe? Why did a girl as smart as she was strive
to let other people do her thinking for her? Why was it beyond her to strive—as
he had every day of his life—to be all that one is, to be true to that? “But the
one who doesn’t think for himself is you!” she’d told him when he’d suggested
that she might be parroting the cliches of others. “You’re the living example of
the person who never thinks for himself!” “Am I really?” he said, laughing.
“Yes! You’re the most conformist man I ever met! All you do is what’s expec-
expec-expected of you!” “That’s terrible too?” “It’s not thinking, D-d-dad! It
isn’t! It’s being a s-s-stupid aut-aut-aut-aut-aut-automaton! A r-r-r-r-robot!”
&
nbsp; “Well,” he replied, believing that it was all a phase, a bad-tempered phase she
would outgrow, “I guess you’re just stuck with a comformist father—better luck
next time,” and pretended that he had not been terrified by the sight of her
distended, pulsating, frothing lips hammering “r-r-r-r-robot” into
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* * *
his face with the ferocity of a lunatic riveter. A phase, he thought, and felt
comforted, and never once considered that thinking “a phase” might be a not bad
example of not thinking for yourself.
Fantasy and magic. Always pretending to be somebody else. What began benignly
enough when she was playing at Audrey Hepburn had evolved in only a decade into
this outlandish myth of selflessness. First the selfless nonsense of the People,
now the selfless nonsense of the Perfected Soul. What next, Grandma Dwy-er’s
Cross? Back to the selfless nonsense of the Eternal Candle and the Sacred Heart?
Always a grandiose unreality, the remotest abstraction around—never self-
seeking, not in a million years. The lying, inhuman horror of all this
selflessness.
Yes, he had liked his daughter better when she was as self-seeking as everyone
else rather than blessed with flawless speech and monstrous altruism.
“How long have you been here?” he asked her.
“Where?”
“This room. This street. In Newark. How long have you been in Newark?”
“I came six months ago.”
“You’ve been …” Because there was everything to say, to ask, to demand to
know, he could say no more. Six months. In Newark six months. There was no here
and now for the Swede, there were just two inflammatory words matter-of-factly
spoken: six months.
He stood over her, facing her, his power pinned to the wall, rocking almost
imperceptibly back on the heels of his shoes, as though in this way he might
manage to take leave of her through the wall, then rocking forward onto his
toes, as though at any moment to grab her, to whisk her up into his arms and
out. He couldn’t return home to sleep in perfect safety in the Old Rimrock house
knowing that she was in those rags in that veil on that mat, looking like the
loneliest person on earth, sleeping only inches from a hallway that sooner or
later had to catch up with her.
This girl was mad by the time she was fifteen, and kindly and stupidly he had
tolerated that madness, crediting her with nothing
· 242 ·
worse than a point of view he didn’t like but that she would surely outgrow
along with her rebellious adolescence. And now look what she looked like. The
ugliest daughter ever born of two attractive parents. I renounce this! I
renounce that! I renounce everything! That couldn’t be it, could it? All of it
to renounce his looks and Dawn’s? All of it because the mother was once Miss New
Jersey? Is life this belittling? It can’t be. I won’t have it!
“How long have you been a Jain?”
“One year.”
“How did you find out about all this?”
“Studying religions.”
“How much do you weigh, Meredith?”
“More than enough, Daddy.”
* * *
Her eye sockets were huge. Half an inch above the veil, big, big dark eye
sockets, and inches above the eye sockets the hair, which no longer streamed
down her back but seemed just to have happened onto her head, still blond like
his but long and thick no longer because of a haircut that was itself an act of
violence. Who’d done it? She or someone else? And with what? She could not, in
keeping with her five vows, have renounced any attachment as savagely as she had
renounced her once-beautiful hair.
“But you don’t look as though you eat anything” and despite his intention to
state this to her unemotionally, he as good as moaned—unbidden a voice emerged
from the Swede wretchedly laced with all his dismay. “What do you eat?”
“I destroy plant life. I am insufficiently compassionate as yet to refuse to do
that.”
“You mean you eat vegetables. Is that what you mean? What is wrong with that?
How could you refuse to do that? Why should you?”
“It is an issue of personal sanctity. It is a matter of reverence for life. I am
bound to harm no living being, neither man, nor animal, nor plant.”
“But you would die if you did that. How can you be ‘bound’ to that? You would
eat nothing.”
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“You ask a profound question. You are a very intelligent man, Daddy. You ask,
‘If you respect life in all forms, how can you live?’ The answer is you cannot.
The traditional way by which a Jain holy man ends his life is by salla khana—
self-starvation. Ritual death by salla khana is the price paid for perfection by
the perfect Jain.”
“I cannot believe this is you. I have to tell you what I think.”
“Of course you do.”
“I cannot believe, clever as you are, that you know what you are saying or what
you are doing here or why. I cannot believe that you are telling me that a point
will come when you will decide that you will not even destroy plant life, and
that you won’t eat anything, and that you will just doom yourself to death. For
whom, Merry? For what?”
“It’s all right. It’s all right, Daddy. I can believe that you can’t believe
that you know what I’m saying or what I’m doing or why.”
She addressed him as though he were the child and she were the parent, with
nothing but sympathetic understanding, with that loving tolerance that he once
had so disastrously extended to her. And it galled him. The condescension of a
lunatic. Yet he neither bolted for the door nor leaped to do what had to be
done. He remained the reasonable father. The reasonable father of someone mad.
Do something! Anything! In the name of everything reasonable, stop being
reasonable. This child needs a hospital. She could not be in any greater peril
if she were adrift on a plank in the middle of the sea. She’s gone over the edge
of the ship—how that happened is not the question now. She must be rescued
immediately!
“Tell me where you studied religions.”
“In libraries. Nobody looks for you there. I was in libraries often, and so I
read. I read a lot.”
* * *
“You read a lot when you were a little girl.”
“I did? I like to read.”
“That’s where you became a member of this religion. In a library.”
· 244 ·
“Yes.”
“And church? Do you go to some sort of a church?”
“There is no church at the center. There is no god at the center. God is at the
center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And God may say, ‘Take life.’ And it is
then not just permissible but obligatory. That’s all over the Old Testament.
There are examples even in the New Testament. In Judaism and Christianity the
position is taken that life belongs to God. Life isn’t sacred, God is sacred.
But at the center for us is not a belief in the sovereignty of God but a belief
in the sanctity of life.”
The monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to
foot—the monotonous, spellbound chant of those whose turbulence can be caged
only within the suffocating straitjacket of the most supercoherent of dreams.
What was missing from her unstuttered words was not the sanctity of life—missing
was the sound of life.
“How many of you are there?” he asked, working fiercely to adjust to
clarifications with which she was only further bewildering him.
“Three million.”
Three million people like her? It could not be. In rooms like this one? Locked
away in three million terrible rooms? “Where are they, Merry?”
“In India.”
“I’m not asking you about India. I don’t care about India. We do not live in
India. In America, how many of you are there?”
“I don’t know. It’s unimportant.”
“I would think very few.”
“I don’t know.”
“Merry, are you the only one?”
“My spiritual exploration I undertook on my own.”
“I do not understand. Merry, I do not understand. How did you get from Lyndon
Johnson to this? How do you get from point A to point Z, where there is no point
of contact at all? Merry, it does not hang together.”
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