by Philip Roth
could he manage that? Swede Levov? Off the playing field, when had Swede Levov
laid a hand on anyone? Nothing so repelled this muscular man as the use of
force.
The places she was in. The people. How did she survive without people? That
place she was in now. Were all her places like that or even worse? All right,
she should not have done what she did, should never have done it, yet to think
of how she’d had to live___
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He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did
not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who’d
come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the
perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the
riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss
each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, “Leave! Leave! Leave!”
He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world.
And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in
flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going
off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting
crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television
sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily
loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new
furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen
tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but
out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The
shattering of the glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is
intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is
shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wanton free-for-all free of
charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In
Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive,
something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary
perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the
stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward
promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the
magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments:
the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again
to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering
that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its
abatement will take the next five hundred years. The
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fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.
And all the while the Swede is there in the factory with Vicky, waiting with
just Vicky beside him for his place to go up, waiting for police with pistols,
for soldiers with submachine guns, waiting for protection from the Newark
police, the state police, the National Guard—from someone—before they burn to
the ground the business built by his father, entrusted to him by his father . .
. and that wasn’t as bad as this. A police car opens fire into the bar across
the street, out his window he sees a woman go down, buckle and go down, shot
dead right on the street, a woman killed in front of his eyes … and not even
* * *
that was as bad as this. People screaming, shouting, firemen pinned to the
ground by gunfire so they cannot fight the flames; explosions, the sound
suddenly of bongo drums, in the middle of the night a volley of pistol shots
blowing out every one of the street-level windows displaying Vicky’s signs …
and this is worse by far. And then they left, everyone, fled the smoldering
rubble—manufacturers, retailers, the banks, the shop owners, the corporations,
the department stores; in the South Ward, on the residential blocks, there are
two moving vans per day on every street throughout the next year, homeowners
fleeing, deserting the modest houses they treasure for whatever they can get …
but he stays on, refuses to leave, Newark Maid remains behind, and that did not
prevent her from getting raped. Not even during the worst of it does he abandon
his factory to the vandals; he does not abandon his workers afterward, does not
turn his back on these people, and still his daughter is raped.
Hanging on the wall directly back of his desk, framed and under glass, there is
a letter from the Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder thanking Mr.
Seymour I. Levov for his testimony as an eyewitness to the riots, praising him
for his courage, for his devotion to Newark, an official letter signed by ten
distinguished citizens, two of them Catholic bishops, two of them ex-governors
of the state; and on the wall alongside that, also framed and under glass, an
article that six months earlier appeared in the Star-Ledger,
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with his photograph and the headline, “Glove Firm Lauded for Staying in Newark”—
and still she is raped.
The rape was in his bloodstream and he would never get it out. The odor of it
was in his bloodstream, the look of it, the legs and the arms and the hair and
the clothing. There were the sounds— the thud, her cries, the careening in a
tiny enclosure. The horrible bark of a man coming. His grunting. Her whimpering.
The stupen-dousness of the rape blotted out everything. All unsuspectingly, she
had stepped out of her doorway and they had grabbed her from behind and thrown
her down and there was her body for them to do with as they wished. Only some
cloth covered her body and they tore it off. There was nothing between her body
and their hands. Inside her body. Filling the inside of her body. The tremendous
force with which they did it. The tearing force. They knocked out her tooth. One
of them was insane. He sat over her and let loose a stream of shit. They were
all over her. These men. They were speaking a foreign language. Laughing.
Whatever they felt the urge to do, they did. One waited behind the other. She
saw him waiting. There was nothing she could do.
And nothing he could do. The man grows crazier and crazier to do something just
when there is nothing left for him to do.
Her body in the crib. Her body in the bassinet. Her body when she starts to
stand on his stomach. The belly showing between her dungarees and her shirt
while she hangs upside down from him when he comes home from work. Her body when
she leaves the earth and leaps into his arms. The abandon of her body flying
into his arms, granting him a father’s permission to touch. The unquestioning
adoration of him that is in that leaping body, a body seemingly all finished, a
perfected creation in miniature, with all of the miniature’s charm. A body that
looks quickly put on after having just been freshly ironed—no folds anywhere.
The naive freedom with which she discloses it. The tenderness this evokes. Her
bare feet padded like a little animal’s feet. New and unworn, her uncorrupted
&nb
sp; paws. Her grasping toes. The stalky legs. Utilitarian legs. Firm. The most
muscular part of her. Her sorbet-colored
· 270 ·
* * *
underpants. At the great divide, her baby tuchas, the gravity-defying behind,
improbably belonging to the upper Merry and not as yet to the lower. No fat. Not
an ounce anywhere. The cleft, as though an awl had made it—that beautifully
beveled joining that will petal outward, evolving in the cycle of time into a
woman’s origami-folded cunt. The implausible belly button. The geometric torso.
The anatomical precision of the rib cage. The pliancy of her spine. The bony
ridges of her back like keys on a small xylophone. The lovely dormancy of the
invisible bosom before the swell begins. All the turbulent wanting-to-become
blessedly, blessedly dormant. Yet in the neck somehow is the woman to be, there
in that building block of a neck ornamented with down. The face. That’s the
glory. The face that she will not carry with her and that is yet the fingerprint
of the future. The marker that will disappear and yet be there fifty years
later. How little of her story is revealed in his child’s face. Its youngness is
all he can see. So very new in the cycle. With nothing as yet totally defined,
time is so powerfully present in her face. The skull is soft. The flare of the
unstructured nose is the whole nose. The color of her eyes. The white, white
whiteness. The limpid blue. Eyes unclouded. It’s all unclouded, but the eyes
particularly, windows, washed windows with nothing yet of the revelation of
what’s within. The history in her brow of the embryo. The dried apricots that
are her ears. Delicious. If once you started eating them you’d never stop. The
little ears always older than she is. The ears that were never just four years
old and yet hadn’t really changed since she was fourteen months. The
preternatural fineness of her hair. The health of it. More reddish, more like
his mother’s than his then, still touched with fire then. The smell of the whole
day in her hair. The carefreeness, the abandon of that body in his arms. The
catlike abandon to the all-powerful father, the reassuring giant. It is so, it
is true—in the abandon of her body to him, she excites an instinct for
reassurance that is so abundant that it must be close to what Dawn says she felt
when she was lactating. What he feels when his daughter leaves the earth to leap
into his arms is the absoluteness of their intimacy. And built into it always is
the
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knowledge that he is not going too far, that he cannot, that it is an enormous
freedom and an enormous pleasure, the equivalent of her breast-feeding bond with
Dawn. It’s true. It’s undeniable. He was wonderful at it and so was she. So
wonderful. How did all this happen to this wonderful kid? She stuttered. So
what? What was the big deal? How did all this happen to this perfectly normal
child? Unless this is the sort of thing that does happen to the wonderful,
perfectly normal kids. The nuts don’t do these things—the normal kids do. You
protect her and protect her—and she is unprotectable. If you don’t protect her
it’s unendurable, if you do protect her it’s unendurable. It’s all unendurable.
The awfulness of her terrible autonomy. The worst of the world had taken his
child. If only that beautifully chiseled body had never been born.
He calls his brother. It is the wrong brother from whom to seek consolation, but
what can he do? When it comes to consolation, it is always the wrong brother,
the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wrong wife, which is why one must be
content to console oneself and be strong and go on in life consoling others. But
he needs some relief from this rape, needs the rape taken out of his heart,
where it is stabbing him to death, he cannot put up with it, and so he calls the
only brother he has. If he had another brother he would call him. But for a
brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only
Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this.
Nothing else can be made to come true.
It is half past five on a Friday afternoon. Jerry is in the office seeing
postoperative patients. But he can talk, he says. The patients can wait. “What
is it? What’s wrong with you?”
* * *
He has only to hear Jerry’s voice, the impatience in it, the acerbic
cocksuredness in it, to think, He’s no good to me. “I found her. I just came
from Merry. I found her in Newark. She’s here. In a room. I saw her. What this
girl has been through, what she looks like, where she lives—you can’t imagine
it. You cannot begin to imagine it.” He proceeds to recount her story, not
breaking down, trying to repeat what she said to him about where she had been,
how she
· 272 ·
had lived, and what had become of her, trying to get it into his head, his own
head, trying to find in his head the room for it all when he could not even find
enough room for that room in which she lived. He comes closest to crying when he
tells his brother that she had twice been raped.
“Are you done?” asks Jerry.
“What?”
“If you’re done, if that’s it, tell me what you are going to do now. What are
you going to do, Seymour?”
“I don’t know what there is to do. She did it. She blew up Ham-lin’s. She killed
Conlon.” He cannot tell him about Oregon and the other three. “She did it on her
own.”
“Well, sure she did it. Jesus. Who did we think did it? Where is she now, in
that room?”
“Yes. It’s awful.”
“Then go back to the room and get her.”
“I can’t. She won’t let me. She wants me to leave her alone.”
“Fuck what she wants. Get back in your fucking car and get over there and drag
her out of that fucking room by her hair. Sedate her. Tie her up. But get her.
Listen to me. You’re paralyzed. I’m not the one who thinks holding his family
together is the most important thing in existence—you are. Get back in that car
and get her!”
“That won’t work. I can’t drag her. There’s more to this than you understand.
Once you get beyond the point of forcing somebody back into their house—then
what? There’s bravado about it—but then what? It’s complicated, too complicated.
It won’t work your way.”
“That’s just the way it works.”
“She killed three other people. She has killed four people.”
“Fuck the four people. What’s the matter with you? You’re acceding to her the
way you acceded to your father, the way you have acceded to everything in your
life.”
“She was raped. She’s crazy, she’s gone crazy. You just look at her and you know
it. Twice she was raped.”
“What did you think was going to happen? You sound surprised.
273
* * *
Of course she got raped. Either get off your ass and do something or she’s going
to get raped for a third time. Do you love her or don’t you love her?”
“How can you ask that?”
“You force me to.”
�
�Please, not now, don’t tear me down, don’t undermine me. I love my daughter. I
never loved anything more in the world.”
“As a thing.”
“What? What is that?”
“As a thing—you loved her as a fucking thing. The way you love your wife. Oh, if
someday you could become conscious of why you are doing what you are doing. Do
you know why? Do you have any idea? Because you’re afraid of creating a bad
scene! You’re afraid of letting the beast out of the bag!”
“What are you talking about? What beast? What beast?” No, he is not expecting
perfect consolation, but this attack—why is he launching this attack without
even the pretext of consoling? Why, when he has just explained to Jerry how
everything has turned out thousands and thousands of times worse than the worst
they’d expected?
“What are you? Do you know? What you are is you’re always trying to smooth
everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is
never telling the truth if you think it’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings.
What you are is you’re always compromising. What you are is always complacent.
What you are is always trying to find the bright side of things. The one with
the manners. The one who abides everything patiently. The one with the ultimate
decorum. The boy who never breaks the code. Whatever society dictates, you do.
Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter spit in it
for you, didn’t she? Four people? Quite a critique she has made of decorum.”