by Philip Roth
“There is a point of contact. I assure you there is. It all hangs together. You
just don’t see it.”
* * *
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell it to me then. I want you to tell it to me so that I can understand what
has happened to you.”
“There is a logic, Daddy. You mustn’t raise your voice. I will explain. It all
links up. I have given it much thought. It goes like this. Ahitnsa, the Jain
concept of nonviolence, appealed to Ma-hatma Gandhi. He was not a Jain. He was
Hindu. But when he was looking in India for a group that was genuinely Indian
and not Western and that could point to charitable works as impressive as those
the Christian missionaries had produced, he landed on the Jains. We are a small
group. We are not Hindus but our beliefs are akin to Hindus’. We are a religion
founded in the sixth century b.c. Mahatma Gandhi took from us this notion of
ahimsa, nonviolence. We are the core of truth that created Mahatma Gandhi. And
Mahatma Gandhi, in his nonviolence, is the core of truth that created Martin
Luther King. And Martin Luther King is the core of truth that created the civil
rights movement. And, at the end of his life, when he was moving beyond the
civil rights movement to a larger vision, when he was opposing the war in
Vietnam …”
Without stuttering. Speech that once would have impelled her to grimace and turn
white and bang on the table—would have made of her an embattled speaker attacked
by the words and obstinately attacking them back—delivered now patiently,
graciously, still in that monotonous chant but edged with the gentlest tone of
spiritual urgency. Everything she could not achieve with a speech therapist and
a psychiatrist and a stuttering diary she had beautifully realized by going mad.
Subjecting herself to isolation and squalor and terrible danger, she had
attained control, mental and physical, over every sound she uttered. An
intelligence no longer impeded by the blight of stuttering.
And intelligence was what he was hearing, Merry’s quick, sharp, studious brain,
the logical mind she’d had since earliest childhood.
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[And hearing it opened him up to pain such as he had never before [imagined. The
intelligence was intact and yet she was mad, her [logic a brand of logic bereft
totally of the power to reason with [which it had already entwined itself by the
time she was ten. It was (absurd—this being reasonable with her was his madness.
Sitting ¦there trying to act as though he were respectful of her religion [when
her religion consisted of an absolute failure to understand [what life is and is
not. The two of them acting as if he had come [there to be educated. Being
lectured, by her!
“… we do not understand salvation as in any way the union of the human soul
with something beyond itself. The spirit of Jain piety lives in founder
Mahavira’s saying, ‘O man, thou art thine own friend. Why seekest thou for a
friend beyond thyself?’” “Merry, did you do it? I must ask you this now. Did you
do it?” It was the question he had expected to ask her first, once they had
reached her room and before everything else that was horrible began painfully to
be sifted through and scrutinized. He thought he had waited because he did not
want her to think that his first I consideration was anything other than at long
last seeing her and [seeing to her, attending to her well-being; but now that he
had | asked, he knew that he hadn’t already asked because he could not bear to
hear an answer. “Do what, Daddy?” “Did you bomb the post office?” “Yes.”
“You intended to blow up Hamlin’s too?” “There was no other way to do it.”
“Except not to do it. Merry, you must tell me now who made you do it?”
* * *
“Lyndon Johnson.”
“That will not do. No! Answer me. Who talked you into it? Who brainwashed you?
Who did you do it for?”
There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, “Lead me not into temptation.”
If people were not led by others, why was that the famous prayer that it was? A
child who had been blessed with every
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privilege could not have done this on her own. Blessed with love. Blessed with a
loving and ethical and prosperous family. Who had enlisted her and lured her
into this?
“How strongly you still crave the idea,” she said, “of your innocent offspring.”
“Who was it? Don’t protect them. Who is responsible?”
“Daddy, you can detest me alone. It’s all right.”
“You are telling me you did it all on your own. Knowing that Hamlin’s would be
destroyed too. That’s what you are saying.”
“Yes. I am the abomination. Abhor me.”
He remembered then something she had written in the sixth or seventh grade,
before she’d gone on to Morristown High. The students in her class at her
Montessori school were asked ten questions about their “philosophy,” one a week.
The first week the teacher asked, “Why are we here?” Instead of writing as the
other kids did—here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc.—
Merry answered with her own question: “Why are apes here?” But the teacher found
this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question
more seriously—”Expand on this,” the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as
she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: “Why are
kangaroos here?” It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher
that she had a “stubborn streak.” The final question assigned to the class was
“What is life?” Merry’s answer was something her father and mother chuckled over
together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily
away with their phony deep thoughts, she—after an hour of thinking at her desk—
wrote a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: “Life is just a short
period of time in which you are alive.” “You know,” said the Swede, “it’s
smarter than it sounds. She’s a kid—how has she figured out that life is short?
She is somethin’, our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard.” But
once again the teacher didn’t agree, and she wrote beside Merry’s answer, “Is
that all?” Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank God, that is all; even
that is unendurable.
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The truth was that he had known all along: without a tempter’s assistance,
everything angry inside her had broken into the open. She was unintimidated, she
was unintimidatable, this child who had written for her teacher not, like the
other kids, that life was a beautiful gift and a great opportunity and a noble
endeavor and a blessing from God but that it was just a short period of time in
which you were alive. Yes, the intention had been all her own. That had to be.
Her antagonism had been intent on murder and nothing less. Otherwise this mad
repose would not be the result.
* * *
He tried to let reason rise once again to the surface. How hard he tried. What
does a reasonable man say next? If, after being battered
and once again brought
nearly to tears by what he’d just heard uttered so matter-of-factly—everything
incredible uttered so mat-ter-of-factly—a man could hold on and be reasonable,
what does he go ahead to say? What does a reasonable, responsible father say if
he is able still to feel intact as a father?
“Merry, may I tell you what I think? I think you are terrified of being punished
for what you’ve done. I think that rather than evade your punishment you have
taken it into your own hands. I don’t believe that’s a difficult conclusion to
reach, honey. I don’t believe I’m the only person in the world who, seeing you
here, seeing you here looking like this, would come up with that idea. You’re a
good girl and so you want to do penance. But this is not penance. Not even the
state would punish you like this. I have to say these things, Merry. I have to
tell you truthfully what this looks like to me.”
“Of course you do.”
“Just look at what you’ve done to yourself—you are going to die if you keep this
up. Another year of this and you will die—from self-starvation, from
malnutrition, from filth. You cannot go back and forth every day under those
railroad tracks. That underpass is a home for derelicts—for derelicts who do not
play by your rules. Their world is a ruthless world, Merry, a terrible world—a
violent world.”
“They won’t harm me. They know that I love them.”
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The words sickened him, the flagrant childishness, the sentimental grandiosity
of the self-deception. What does she see in the hopeless scurryings of these
wretched people that could justify such an idea? Derelicts and love? To be a
derelict living in an underpass is to have clobbered out of you a hundred times
over the minutest susceptibility to love. This was awful. Now that her speech is
finally cleared of the stuttering, all that comes through is this junk. What he
had dreamed about—that his wonderful, gifted child would one day stop
stuttering—had come to pass. She had mastered miraculously the agitated
stuttering only to reveal, at the eye of the storm that was her erupted
personality, this insane clarity and calm. What a great revenge to take: This is
what you wanted, Daddy? Well, here it is.
Her being able successfully to explain and to talk was now the worst thing of
all.
The harshness he felt but didn’t want her to hear was in his voice nonetheless
when he said, “You will meet a violent end, Meredith. Keep trying them out twice
a day, keep it up and you’ll find out just how much they know about your love.
Their hunger, Merry, is not for love. Somebody will kill you!”
“But only to be reborn.”
“I doubt that, honey. I seriously doubt that.”
“Will you concede that my guess is as good as yours, Dad?”
“Won’t you at least take off that mask while we’re talking? So I can see you?”
“See me stutter, do you mean?”
* * *
“Well, I don’t know if wearing that is what accounts for the disappearance of
your stutter or not. You tell me that it has. You tell me that the stutter was
only your way of doing no violence to the air and the things that live in the
air … is that correct? Have I understood what you were saying?”
“Yes.”
“Well… even if I were to concede that, I have to tell you I think you might
eventually have a better life with your stutter. I don’t
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minimize the hardship it was for you. But if it turns out you had to carry
things to this extreme to be rid of that damn thing … then I really do wonder
… well, if it’s the best trade-off imaginable.”
“You can’t explain away what I’ve done by motives, Daddy. I certainly wouldn’t
explain away what you’ve done by motives.”
“But I do have motives. Everyone has motives.”
“You cannot reduce the journey of a soul to that kind of psychology. It is not
worthy of you.”
“Then you explain it. Explain it to me, please. How do you explain that when you
took all this … what looks to me like misery and nothing more, that when you
did that, took upon yourself real suffering, which is all this is, suffering
that you have chosen, Merry, real suffering and nothing more or less than
suffering”—his voice was wavering but on he went, reasonable, reasonable,
responsible, responsible—”then, only then—do you see what I’m saying?—the
stutter vanished?”
“I’ve told you. I am done with craving and selfhood.”
“Sweet, sweet child and girl.” He sat down amid the filth of the floor, helpless
to do anything other than try to his utmost not to lose control.
In the tiny room, where they now sat no more than an arm’s length from each
other, there was no light other than what fell through the dirty transom. She
lived without light. Why? Had she renounced the vice of electricity too? She
lived without light, she lived without everything. This was how their life had
worked out: she lived in Newark with nothing, he lived in Old Rimrock with
everything except her. Was his good fortune to blame for that too? The revenge
of the have-nots upon those who have and own. All the self-styled have-nots, the
playacting Rita Cohens seeking to associate themselves with their parents’ worst
enemies, modeling themselves on whatever was most loathsome to those who most
loved them.
There used to be a slogan she’d crayoned in two colors on a piece of cardboard,
a handmade poster that she’d hung over her desk,
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replacing his Weequahic football pennant; the poster had hung there undisturbed
all during the year before her disappearance. Till it went up, she had always
coyly coveted the Weequahic pennant because the Swede’s high school sweetheart
had taken it to sewing class in 1943 and stitched into the felt along the bottom
edge of the orange and brown triangle, in thick white thread, “To All-City
Levov, XXXX, Arlene.” The poster was the only thing he had dared to remove from
* * *
her room and destroy, and even doing that much had taken three months;
appropriating the property of another, adult or child, was simply repugnant to
him. But three months after the bombing he marched up the stairs and into her
room and tore the poster down. It read: “We are against everything that is good
and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the
incubation of your mother’s nightmares.” In large square letters the
attribution: “weathermen motto.” And because he was a tolerant man he’d
tolerated that too. “Honky” in his daughter’s hand. Hanging there for a year in
his own home, each red letter shadowed heavily in black.
And because even though he hadn’t liked it one bit he did not believe it was his
right blah-blah blah-blah blah, because—out of regard for her property and her
personal freedom—he couldn’t even pull down an awful poster, because he was not
capable of even that much righteous violence, now the hideous realization of the
nightmare had come along to test even further the limits of his enlightened
toleran
ce. She thinks if she raises a hand she’ll swat and kill an innocent mite
that is innocently floating by her—so in touch is she with the environment that
any and every move she makes will have the most stupendously dire consequences—
and he thinks that if he removes a hateful and disgusting poster that she has
put up, he’ll do damage to her integrity, to her psyche, to her First Amendment
rights. No, he wasn’t a Jain, thought the Swede, but he might as well have been—
he was just as pathetically and naively nonviolent. The idiocy of the
uprightness of the goals he had set.
“Who is Rita Cohen?” he asked.
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“I don’t know. Who is she?”
“The girl who came to me in your behalf. In ‘68. After you disappeared. She came
to my office.”
“Nobody has ever come to you in my behalf, no one I have ever sent.”
“Yes, a short little girl. Very pale. Her hair in an Afro. Dark hair. I gave her
your ballet slippers and your Audrey Hepburn scrapbook and your diary. Is she
the person who put you up to this? Is she the person who made the bomb? You used
to talk to somebody on the phone when you were still at home—those secret
conversations you had.” The secret conversations that, like the poster, he had
also “respected.” If only he had torn down that poster and pulled the plug on
her phone and locked her up then and there! “Was that the person?” he asked her