by Philip Roth
who couldn’t read and write his own name. You know what Romeo says to Juliet
when she’s up on the balcony? Everybody knows ‘Romeo, Romeo, where are you,
Romeo’—that she says. But what does Romeo say? I started in a tannery when I was
thirteen, but I can answer for you because of my friend Al Haberman, who since
has passed away, unfortunately. Seventy-three years old, he came out of his
house, slipped on the ice, and broke his neck. Terrible. He told me this. Romeo
says, ‘See the way she leans her cheek on her hand? I only wish I was the glove
on that hand so that I could touch that cheek.’ Shakespeare. Most famous author
in history.”
“Lou dear,” Sylvia Levov said again softly, “what does this have to do with what
everybody is talking about?”
“Please,” he said, and impatiently, with one hand, without even looking at her,
waved away her objection. “And McGovern,” he went on, “this is an idea I don’t
follow at all. What does McGovern have to do with that lousy movie? I voted for
McGovern. I campaigned in the whole condominium for McGovern. You should hear
what I put up with from Jewish people, how Nixon was this for Israel and that
for Israel, and I reminded them, in case they forgot, that Harry Truman had him
pegged for Tricky Dicky back in 1948, and now look, the reward they’re reaping,
my good friends who voted for Mr. Von Nixon and his storm troopers. Let me tell
you who goes to those movies: riffraff, bums, and kids without adult
supervision. Why my son takes his lovely wife to such a movie is something I’ll
go to my grave not understanding.”
“To see,” said Marcia, “how the other half lives.”
“My daughter-in-law is a lady. She has no interest in those things.”
“Lou,” his wife said to him, “maybe not everybody sees it your way.”
“I cannot believe that. These are intelligent, educated people.”
“You put too much stock in intelligence,” Marcia teased him. “It doesn’t
annihilate human nature.”
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“That’s human nature, those movies? Tell me, what do you tell to children about
that movie when they ask? That it’s good, wholesome fun?”
“You don’t have to tell them a thing,” Marcia said. “They don’t ask. These days
they just go.”
And what puzzled him, of course, was that what was happening these days did not
seem to displease her, a professor, a Jewish professor—with children.
“I wouldn’t say children are going,” Shelly Salzman put in, as much, seemingly,
to disrupt the unpromising dialogue as to give comfort to the Swede’s father. “I
would say adolescents.”
“And, Dr. Salzman, you approve of this?”
Shelly smiled at the title Lou Levov insisted on using with him after all these
years. Shelly was a pale, plump, round-shouldered man in a bow tie and a
seersucker jacket, a hardworking family doctor who could not keep the kindness
* * *
out of his voice. The pallor and the posture, the old-fashioned steel-rimmed
glasses, the hairless crown of his head, the wiry white curls above his ears—
this unstudied lack of luster had made the Swede feel particularly sorry for him
during the months of the love affair with Sheila Salzman… . Yet he, nice Dr.
Salzman, had harbored Merry in his house, hidden her not only from the FBI but
from him, her father, the person she’d needed most in the world.
And I was the one, the Swede was thinking, guilty over my secret—even as Shelly
was gently saying to the Swede’s father, “My approval or disapproval is beside
the point of whether they go to those movies or not.”
When Dawn had first proposed going for a face-lift to the clinic of a Geneva
doctor she had read about in Vogue—a doctor they didn’t know, a procedure they
knew nothing about—the Swede had quietly contacted Shelly Salzman and went off
to see him alone in his office. Their own family doctor was a man the Swede
respected, a cautious and thorough elderly man who would have counseled the
Swede and answered his questions and tried, on the Swede’s behalf, to dissuade
Dawn from the idea, but instead the Swede had
35i
called Shelly and asked if he might come over to talk about a family problem.
Only when he got to Shelly’s office did he understand that he had gone there to
confess, four years after the fact, to having had the affair with Sheila in the
aftermath of Merry’s disappearance. When Shelly smiled and asked, “How can I
help you?” the Swede found himself on the brink of saying, “By forgiving me.”
Throughout the conversation, every time the Swede spoke he had to quash the
impulse to tell Shelly everything, to say, “I’m not here because of the face-
lift. I’m here because I did what I should never have done. I betrayed my wife,
I betrayed you, I betrayed myself.” But saying this would be a betrayal of
Sheila, would it not? He could no more justify his taking it solely upon himself
to confess to her husband than he could had she taken it upon herself to confess
to his wife. However much he might yearn to be rid of a secret that stained and
oppressed him, and imagine that a confession might unburden him, did he have the
right to free himself at Sheila’s expense? At Shelly’s expense? At Dawn’s
expense? No, there was such a thing as ethical stability. No, he could not be so
ruthlessly self-regarding. A cheap stunt, a treacherous stunt, and one that
probably wouldn’t pay off in long-term relief—yet each time the Swede opened his
mouth to speak, he needed desperately to say to this kindly man, “I was the
lover of your wife,” to seek from Shelly Salzman the magical restitution of
equilibrium that Dawn must be hoping she’d find in Geneva. But instead he only
told Shelly how against the face-lift he was, only enumerated his reasons
against it, and then, to his surprise, listened to Shelly telling him that Dawn
had perhaps begun to entertain a potentially promising idea. “If she thinks this
will help her start over again,” Shelly said, “why not give her the opportunity?
Why not give this woman every opportunity? There’s nothing wrong with it,
Seymour. This is life— not a life sentence but life. Nothing immoral about
having a facelift. Nothing frivolous about a woman wanting one. She found the
idea in Vogue magazine? That shouldn’t throw you off. She only found what she
was looking for. You don’t know how many women come to me who’ve been through a
terrible trauma and they want
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to talk about something or other, and what turns out to be on their mind is just
this, plastic surgery. And without Vogue magazine. The emotional and
psychological implications can turn out to be something. The relief they get,
those that get relief, is not to be minimized. I can’t say I know how it
happens, I’m not saying it always happens, but I’ve seen it happen again and
* * *
again, women who’ve lost their husbands, who’ve been seriously ill… You don’t
look like you believe me.” But the Swede knew what he looked like: like a man
with “Sheila” written all over his face. “I know,” said Shelly, “it seems like a<
br />
purely physical way of dealing with something profoundly emotional, but for many
people it’s a wonderful survival strategy. And Dawn may be one of them. I don’t
think you want to be puritanical about this. If Dawn feels strongly about a
face-lift, and if you were to go along with her, if you were to support her …”
Later that same day Shelly phoned the Swede at the factory—he’d made some
inquiries about Dr. LaPlante. “We’ve got people as good as him here, I’m sure,
but if you want to go to Switzerland and get away and let her recuperate there,
why not? This LaPlante is tops.” “Shelly, thanks, it’s awfully kind of you,”
said the Swede, disliking himself more than ever in the light of Shelly’s
generosity… and yet this was the same guy who, with his co-conspirator wife,
had provided Merry a hiding place not only from the FBI but from her father and
mother. A fact about as fantastic as a fact could be. What kind of mask is
everyone wearing? I thought these people were on my side. But the mask is all
that’s on my side—that’s it! For four months I wore the mask myself, with him,
with my wife, and I could not stand it. I went there to tell him that. I went to
tell him that I had betrayed him, and only didn’t so as not to compound the
betrayal, and never once did he let on how cruelly he’d betrayed me.
“My approval or disapproval,” Shelly had been saying to Lou Levov, “is beside
the point of whether they go to those movies or not.”
“But you are a physician,” the Swede’s father insisted, “a respected person, an
ethical person, a responsible person—”
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“Lou,” said his wife, “maybe, dear, you’re monopolizing the conversation.”
“Let me finish, please.” To the table at large, he asked, “Am I? Am I
monopolizing the conversation?”
“Absolutely not,” said Marcia, throwing an arm good-naturedly across his back.
“It’s delightful to hear your delusions.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he told her.
“It means social conditions may have altered in America since you were taking
the kids to eat at the Chinks and Al Haberman was cutting gloves in a shirt and
a tie.”
“Really?” Dawn said to her. “They’ve altered? Nobody told us,” and, to contain
herself, got up and left for the kitchen. Waiting there for Dawn’s instructions
were a couple of local high school girls who helped to do the serving and the
cleaning up whenever the Levovs had dinner guests.
Marcia was to one side of Lou Levov, Jessie Orcutt to the other. Jessie’s new
glass of Scotch, which she must have managed to pour for herself in the kitchen,
he had picked up from her place and moved out of her reach only minutes into the
cold cucumber soup. When she then made a move to leave the table, he would not
allow her to get up. “Just sit,” he told her. “Sit and eat. You don’t need that.
You need food. Eat your dinner.” Each time she so much as shifted in her chair,
he laid a hand firmly on hers to remind her she was going nowhere.
A dozen candles burned in two tall ceramic candelabra, and to the Swede, who sat
flanked by his mother and by Sheila Salz-man, everyone’s eyes—deceptively
enough, even Marcia’s eyes— appeared blessed in that light with spiritual
understanding, with kindly lucidity, alive with all the meaning one so craves to
find in one’s friends. Sheila, like Barry, was on hand every year at Labor Day
* * *
because of what she had come to mean to his folks. On the phone to Florida the
Swede almost never got through a conversation without his father’s asking, “And
how is that lovely Sheila, that lovely woman, how is she doing?” “She is such a
dignified woman,”
· 354 ·
his mother said, “such a refined person. Isn’t she Jewish, darling? Your father
says no. He insists she isn’t.”
Why this disagreement should persist for years he could not understand exactly,
but the subject of fair-haired Sheila Salzman’s religious origins had proved
indispensable to his parents’ lives. To Dawn, who’d been trying for decades to
be as tolerant of the Swede’s imperfect parents as he was of her imperfect
mother, this was their most inexplicable preoccupation—their most enraging as
well (particularly as Dawn knew that, for her adolescent daughter, Sheila had
something Dawn didn’t have, that somehow Merry had come to trust the speech
therapist in a way she no longer trusted her mother). “Are there no Jewish
blonds in the world other than you?” Dawn asked him. “It hasn’t anything to do
with her appearance,” the Swede explained, “it has to do with Merry.” “What does
her being Jewish have to do with Merry?” “I don’t know. She was the speech
therapist. They’re in awe of her,” the Swede said, “because of all she did for
Merry.” “She wasn’t the child’s mother by any chance—or was she?” “They know
that, darling,” calmly answered the Swede, “but because of the speech therapy,
they’ve made her into some kind of magician.”
And so had he, not so much while she was Merry’s therapist— when he had merely
found her composure a curious stimulus to sexual imaginings—but after Merry
disappeared and grief absconded with his wife.
Thrown violently off his own narrow perch, he felt an intangible need open
hugely within him, a need with no bottom to it, and he yielded to a solution so
foreign to him that he did not even recognize how improbable it was. In the
quiet, thoughtful woman, who had once made Merry less strange to herself by
teaching her how to overcome her word phobias and to control the elaborate
circumlo-cutionary devices that, paradoxically, only increased her child’s sense
of being out of control, was someone he found himself wanting to incorporate
into himself. The man who had lived correctly within marriage for almost twenty
years was determined to be senselessly, worshipfully in love. It was three
months before he
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could begin to understand that this was no way around anything, and it was
Sheila who had to tell him. He hadn’t gotten a romantic mistress—he’d gotten a
candid mistress. She sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told
him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric
clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything—but he was in
such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together
to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the
university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and
they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the
Caribbean….
What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house—after the bombing, Merry
hiding in her house. She told him everything except that. The candor stopped
just where it should have begun.
* * *
Was everyone’s brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see
what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in
and out, a hundred different ti
mes a day go from being smart to being smart
enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever
lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father,
or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?
This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to her; he could talk to
Sheila, talk about his doubts, his bewilderment— all the serenity in her allowed
for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity
that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with “a wonderful floating
feeling,” according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer’s frustration, the
lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress
who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer.
Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing.
All the trust between them, like all the happiness he’d ever
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known (like the killing of Fred Conlon—like everything), had been an accident.
She’d been with Merry and said nothing.
And said nothing now. The eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the
peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathology. Why
would anyone say that? She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about
Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, her
advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled
everybody else’s head. This way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the