American Pastoral

Home > Fiction > American Pastoral > Page 35
American Pastoral Page 35

by Philip Roth


  now. “Tell me the truth, please.”

  “I only speak the truth.”

  “I gave her ten thousand dollars for you. I gave her cash. Did you or did you

  not get that money?”

  Her laugh was kindly. “Ten thousand dollars? Not yet, Daddy.”

  “Then I must have an answer from you. Who is the Rita Cohen who told me where I

  could find you? Is this the Melissa from New York?”

  “You found me,” she replied, “because you have been looking. I never expected

  not to be found by you. You sought me out because you must seek me.”

  “Did you come to Newark to help me find you? Is that why you came here?”

  But she replied, “No.”

  * * *

  “Then why did you come? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? You know

  where the office is. You know how very close it is. Where’s the logic, Merry?

  This close and …”

  “I got a ride, and here I was, you see.”

  “Like that. Coincidence. No logic. No logic anywhere.”

  “The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any. I

  relinquish all influence over everything. As to what constitutes a coincidence,

  you and I, Daddy—”

  253

  “Do you ‘relinquish all influence’?” he cried. “Do you, ‘all influence’?” The

  most maddening conversation of his life. The know-it-all-ism of her absurdly

  innocent, profoundly insane, unstutter-ing solemnity, the awful candor of the

  room and of the street outside, the awful candor of everything outside him that

  was so powerfully controlling him. “You have an influence over me,” he shouted,

  “you are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me! What you

  sit there calling ‘coincidence’ is influence—your powerlessness is power over

  me, goddamn it! Over your mother, over your grandfather, over your grandmother,

  over everyone who loves you—wearing that veil is bullshit, Merry, complete and

  absolute bullshit! You are the most powerful person in the world!”

  There was no solace to be found in thinking, This is not my life, this is the

  dream of my life. That was not going to make him any less miserable. Nor was the

  rage with his daughter, nor was the rage with the little criminal whom he had

  allowed to be cast as their savior. A cunning and malicious crook who suckered

  him without half trying. Took him for all she could get in four ten-minute

  visits. The viciousness. The audacity. The unshatterable nerves. God alone knew

  where such kids came from.

  Then he remembered that one of them came from his house. Rita Cohen merely came

  from somebody else’s house. They were brought up in houses like his own. They

  were raised by parents like him. And so many were girls, girls whose political

  identity was total, who were no less aggressive and militant, no less drawn to

  “armed action” than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their

  violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to

  take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most

  ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that

  propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They are willing to do

  anything they can imagine to make history change. The draft isn’t even hanging

  over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorize against the

  war, competent to rob at gunpoint, equipped

  · 254 ·

  in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or

  inner contradiction—girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably

  extremist, completely unsociable. He read the names of girls in the papers who

  were wanted by the authorities for crimes allegedly stemming from antiwar

  activities, girls that he imagined Merry knew, girls with whose lives he

  imagined his daughter’s to be now interlinked: Bernadine, Patricia, Judith,

  Cathlyn, Susan, Linda… . His father, after foolishly watching a TV news

  special about the police hunt for the underground Weathermen, among them Mark

  Rudd and Katherine Boudin and Jane Alpert—all in their twenties, Jewish, middle

  class, college-educated, violent in behalf of the antiwar cause, committed to

  revolutionary change and determined to overturn the United States government—

  * * *

  went around saying, “I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework.

  What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid,

  their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think

  they can find oppression. Can’t live without it. Once Jews ran away from

  oppression; now they run away from no-oppression. Once they ran away from being

  poor; now they run away from being rich. It’s crazy. They have parents they

  can’t hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate

  America instead.” But Rita Cohen was a case unto herself: a vicious slut and a

  common crook.

  Then how is he to explain her letter, if that is all she is? What happened to

  our smart Jewish kids? They are crazy. Something is driving them crazy.

  Something has set them against everything. Something is leading them into

  disaster. These are not the smart Jewish children intent on getting ahead by

  doing what they are told better than anyone else does. They only feel at home

  doing better than anyone else as they are not told. Distrust is the madness to

  which they have been called.

  And here on the floor is the result in one of its more heartbreaking forms: the

  religious conversion. If you fail to bring the world into subjection, then

  subject yourself to the world.

  255

  “I love you,” he was telling Merry, “you know I would look for you. You are my

  child. But how could I find you in a million years, wearing that mask and

  weighing eighty-eight pounds and living the way you live? How could anyone have

  found you, even here? Where were you?” he cried, as angry as the angriest father

  ever betrayed by a daughter or a son, so angry he feared that his head was about

  to spew out his brains just as Kennedy’s did when he was shot. “Where have you

  been? Answer me!”

  So she told him where she’d been.

  And how did he listen? Wondering: If there was some point in their lives before

  she took the wrong path, where and when was it? Thinking: There was no such

  point, there was never any controlling Merry however many years she managed to

  deceive them, to seem safely theirs and under their sway. Thinking: Futile,

  every last thing he had ever done. The preparations, the practice, the

  obedience; the uncompromising dedication to the essential, to the things that

  matter most; the systematic system building, the patient scrutiny of every

  problem, large or small; no drifting, no laxity, no laziness; faithfully meeting

  every obligation, addressing energetically every situation’s demands … a list

  as long as the U.S. Constitution, his articles of faith—and all of it futility.

  The systemization of futility is all it had ever been. All he had ever

  restrained by his responsibility was himself.

  Thinking: She is not in my power and she never was. She is in the powe
r of

  something that does not give a shit. Something demented. We all are. Their

  elders are not responsible for this. They are themselves not responsible for

  this. Something else is.

  Yes, at the age of forty-six, in 1973, almost three-quarters of the way through

  the century that with no regard for the niceties of burial had strewn the

  corpses of mutilated children and their mutilated parents everywhere, the Swede

  found out that we are all in the power of something demented. It’s just a matter

  of time, honky. We all are!

  He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of

  the violent Uncorrupted who called him a

  * * *

  · 256 ·

  criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have. The

  Swede finally found out! They were delirious with joy, delighted having

  destroyed his once-pampered daughter and ruined his privileged life, shepherding

  him at long last to their truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every

  Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for

  everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their

  insatiable greed. The something that’s demented, honky, is American history!

  It’s the American empire! It’s Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard

  Oil and Newark Maid Leath-erware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the

  fucked-over-by-America human race!

  She told him that for the first seventy-two hours after the bombing she had been

  hidden in the Morristown home of Sheila Salz-man, her speech therapist. Safely

  she made her way to Sheila’s house, was taken in, and lived hidden away in an

  anteroom to Sheila’s office during the day and in the office itself at night.

  Then her underground wandering began. In just two months she had fifteen aliases

  and moved every four or five days. But in Indianapolis, where she was befriended

  by a movement minister who knew only that she was an antiwar activist gone

  underground, she took a name from a tombstone in a cemetery, the name of a baby

  born within a year of herself who had died in infancy. She applied for a

  duplicate birth certificate in the baby’s name, which was how she became Mary

  Stoltz. After that, she obtained a library card, a Social Security number, and

  when she turned seventeen, a driver’s license. For nearly a year, Mary Stoltz

  washed dishes in the kitchen of an old people’s home—a job she got through the

  minister—until one morning he reached her on the pay phone and said that she was

  to leave work immediately and meet him at the Greyhound station. There he gave

  her a ticket to Chicago, told her to stay two days, then to buy a ticket for

  Oregon—north of Portland was a commune where she could find sanctuary. He gave

  her the commune’s address and some money to buy clothes, food, and the tickets,

  and she left for Chicago, where she was raped on

  257

  the night she arrived. Held captive and raped and robbed. Just seventeen.

  In the kitchen of a dive not as friendly as the kitchen at the old people’s

  home, she washed dishes to earn the money to get to Oregon. There was no

  minister to advise her in Chicago and she was afraid that if she tried to make

  contact with the underground she would do something wrong and be apprehended.

  She was too frightened even to use a pay phone to call the Indianapolis

  minister. She was raped again (in the fourth rooming house where she went to

  live) but this time she wasn’t robbed, and so after six weeks as a dishwasher

  she had put together enough money to head for the commune.

  In Chicago the loneliness had been so all-enveloping, she felt it as a current

  coursing through her. There wasn’t a day, on some days not an hour, when she did

  not set out to phone Old Rimrock. But instead, before remembering her childhood

  room could completely undo her, she would find a diner or a luncheonette and sit

  on a stool at the counter and order a BIT and a vanilla milk shake. Saying the

  familiar words, watching the bacon curl on the grill, watching for her toast to

  pop up, carefully removing the toothpicks when she was served, eating the

  layered sandwich between sips of the shake, concentrating on crunching the

  tasteless fibers from the lettuce, extracting the smoke-scented fat from the

  brittle bacon and the flowery juices from the soft tomato, swilling everything

  in with the mash of the mayonnaised toast, grinding patiently away with her jaws

  and her teeth, thoughtfully pulverizing every mouthful into a silage to settle

  her down—concentrating on her BLT as fixedly as her mother’s livestock focusing

  * * *

  on the fodder at the trough—gave her the courage to go on alone. She would eat

  the sandwich and drink the shake and remember how she got there and go on. By

  the time she left Chicago she had discovered she no longer needed a home; she

  would never again come close to succumbing to the yearning for a family and a

  home.

  In Oregon she was involved in two bombings.

  Instead of stopping her, killing Fred Conlon had only inspired

  · 258 ·

  her; after Fred Conlon, instead of her being crippled by conscience, she was

  delivered from all residual fear and compunction. The horror of having killed,

  if only inadvertently, an innocent man, a man as good as any she would ever hope

  to know, had not taught her anything about that most fundamental prohibition,

  which, stupefyingly enough, she had failed to learn to observe from being raised

  by Dawn and him. Killing Conlon only confirmed her ardor as an idealistic

  revolutionary who did not shrink from adopting any means, however ruthless, to

  attack the evil system. She had proved that being in opposition to everything

  decent in honky America wasn’t just so much hip graffiti emblazoned on her

  bedroom wall.

  He said, “You planted the bombs.”

  “I did.”

  “At Hamlin’s and in Oregon you planted the bombs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was anyone killed in Oregon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “People.”

  “People,” he repeated. “How many people, Merry?”

  “Three,” she said.

  There was plenty to eat at the commune. They grew a lot of their own food and so

  there was no need, as there had been when she first got to Chicago, to scavenge

  for wilted produce outside supermarkets at night. At the commune she began to

  sleep with a woman she fell in love with, the wife of a weaver whose loom Merry

  learned to operate when she was not working with the bombs. Assembling bombs had

  become her specialty after she’d successfully planted her second and third. She

  loved the patience and the precision required to safely wire the dynamite to the

  blasting cap and the blasting cap to the Woolworth’s alarm clock. That’s when

  the stuttering first began to disappear. She never stuttered when she was with

  the dynamite.

  Then something happened between the woman and her hus-

  · 259 ·

  * * *

  band, a violent argument that necessitated Merry’s leaving the commune to

  restore peace.

  It w
as while hiding in eastern Idaho, where she worked in the potato fields,

  that she decided to flee to Cuba. At night in the farm camp barracks she began

  to study Spanish. Living in the camp with the other laborers, she felt even more

  passionately committed to her beliefs, though the men were frightening when they

  were drunk and again there were sexual incidents. She believed that in Cuba she

  could live among workers without having to worry about their violence. In Cuba

  she could be Merry Levov and not Mary Stoltz.

  She had concluded by this time that there could never be a revolution in America

  to uproot the forces of racism and reaction and greed. Urban guerrilla warfare

  was futile against a thermonuclear superstate that would stop at nothing to

  defend the profit principle. Since she could not help to bring about a

  revolution in America, her only hope was to give herself to the revolution that

  was. That would mark the end of her exile and the true beginning of her life.

  The next year was devoted to rinding her way to Cuba, to Fidel, who had

  emancipated the proletariat and who had eradicated injustice with socialism. But

  in Florida she had her first close brush with the FBI. There was a park in Miami

  full of Dominican refugees. It was a good place to practice Spanish and soon she

  found herself teaching the boys there how to speak English. Affectionately they

  called her La Farfulla, the stutterer, which did not prevent them from

 

‹ Prev