by Philip Roth
to bring her under her own control again. Acting the role of herself, without
rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room.
“What can be done for her?” he was growling, and all the while, down on his
knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the glass and
dumping them into Dawn’s wastebasket. “What can be done for her? What can be
done for anyone? Nothing can be done. She was sixteen. Sixteen years old and
completely crazy. She was a minor. She was my daughter. She blew up a building.
She was a lunatic. You had no right to let her go!”
Without its glass, the picture of the immovable Count he hung again over the
desk, and then, as though listening to people unabat-edly chattering on about
something or other were the task assigned him by the forces of destiny, he
returned from the savagery of where he’d been to the solid and orderly
ludicrousness of a dinner party. That’s what was left to hold him together—a
dinner party. All there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his
life continued careering toward destruction—a dinner party.
To the candlelit terrace he duteously returned, while bearing within him
everything that he could not understand.
* * *
379
Dishes had been cleared, the salad eaten, and dessert served, fresh strawberry-
rhubarb pie from McPherson’s. The Swede saw that the guests had rearranged
themselves for the last course. Orcutt, hiding still the vicious shit that he
was behind the Hawaiian shirt and the raspberry trousers, had moved across the
table and sat talking with the Umanoffs, all of them amiable and laughing
together now that Deep Throat was off the agenda. Deep Throat had never been the
real subject anyway. Boiling away beneath Deep Throat was the far more
disgusting and transgressive subject of Merry, of Sheila, of Shelly, of Orcutt
and Dawn, of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity
among neighbors and friends, the subject of cruelty. The mockery of human
integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed—that was the subject here tonight!
The Swede’s mother had come around to sit beside Dawn, who was talking with the
Salzmans, and his father and Jessie were nowhere to be seen.
Dawn asked, “Important?”
“The Czech guy. The consul. The information I wanted. Where’s my dad?”
He waited for her to say “Dead,” but after she looked around she mouthed only
“Don’t know” and turned back to Shelly and Sheila.
“Daddy left with Mrs. Orcutt,” his mother whispered. “They went somewhere
together. I think in the house.”
Orcutt came up to him. They were the same size, both big men, but the Swede had
always been the stronger, going back to their twenties, to when Merry was born
and the Levovs moved out to Old Rimrock from their apartment on Elizabeth Avenue
in Newark and the newcomer had showed up for the Saturday morning touch-football
games back of Orcutt’s house. Out there just for the fun of it, to enjoy the
fresh air and the feel of the ball and the camaraderie, to make some new
friends, the Swede had not the slightest inclination to appear showy or
superior, except when he simply had no choice: when Orcutt, who off the field
had never been other than kind and considerate, began to use his hands more
recklessly than the Swede considered sportsmanlike—in a way that the Swede
· 380 ·
considered cheap and irritating, for a pickup game the worst sort of behavior
even if Orcutt’s team did happen to have fallen behind. After it had occurred
for two weeks in a row, he decided the third week to do what he of course could
have done at any time—to dump him. And so, near the end of the game, with a
single, swift maneuver—employing the other person’s weight to do the damage—he
managed at once to catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson and to make sure Orcutt
was sprawled in the grass at his feet, before he pranced away to pile on the
score. Pranced away and thought, of all things, “I don’t like being looked down
on,” the words that Dawn had used to decline joining The Orcutt Family Cemetery
Tour. He had not realized, not till he was speeding alone toward the goal line,
how much Dawn’s assailability had gotten to him nor how unsettled he was by the
remotest likelihood (a likelihood that, to her face, he had dismissed) of his
wife’s being ridiculed out here for growing up in Elizabeth the daughter of an
Irish plumber. When, after scoring, he turned around and saw Orcutt still on the
ground, he thought, “Two hundred years of Morris County history, flat on its
ass—that’ll teach you to look down on Dawn Levov. Next time you’ll play the
whole game on your ass,” before trotting back up the field to see if Orcutt was
all right.
* * *
The Swede knew that once he got him on the floor of the terrace he would have no
difficulty in slamming Orcutt’s head against the flagstones as many times as
might be required to get him into that cemetery with his distinguished clan.
Yes, something is wrong with this guy, there always was, and the Swede had known
it all along— knew it from those terrible paintings, knew it from the reckless
use of his hands in a backyard pickup game, knew it even at the cemetery, when
for one solid hour Orcutt got to goyishly regale a Jewish sightseer… . Yes,
big dissatisfaction there right from the start. Dawn said it was art, modern
art, when all the time, baldly displayed on their living room wall, was William
Orcutt’s dissatisfaction. But now he has my wife. Instead of that misfortune
Jessie, he’s got revamped and revitalized Miss New Jersey of 1949. Got it made,
got it all now, the greedy, thieving son of a bitch.
· 381 ·
“Your father’s a good man,” Orcutt said. “Jessie doesn’t usually get all this
attention when she goes out. It’s why she doesn’t go out. He’s a very generous
man. He doesn’t hold anything back, does he? Nothing left undisclosed. You get
the whole person. Unguarded. Unashamed. Works himself up. It’s wonderful. An
amazing person, really. A huge presence. Always himself. Coming from where I do,
you have to envy all that.”
Oh, I’ll bet you do, you son of a bitch. Laugh at us, you fucker. Just keep
laughing.
“Where are they?” the Swede asked.
“He told her there’s only one way to eat a fresh piece of pie. That’s sitting at
a kitchen table with a nice cold glass of milk. I guess they’re in the kitchen
with the milk. Jessie’s learning a lot more about making a glove than she may
ever need to know, but that’s all right too. No harm in that. I hope you didn’t
mind that I couldn’t leave her home.”
“We wouldn’t want you to leave her home.”
“You’re all very understanding.”
“I was looking at the model of your house,” the Swede told him, “in Dawn’s
study.” But what he was looking at was a mole on the left side of Orcutt’s face,
a dark mole buried in the crease that ran from his nose to the corner of his
mouth. Along with the snout nose Orcutt had an ugly mole. Does she find the mol
e
appealing? Does she kiss the mole? Doesn’t she ever find this guy just a wee bit
fat in the face? Or, when it comes to an upper-class Old Rimrock boy, is she as
unmindful of his looks, as unperturbed, as professionally detached as the
whorehouse ladies over in Easton?
“Uh-oh,” said Orcutt, amiably feigning how uncertain he was. Uses his hands when
he plays football, wears those shirts, paints those paintings, fucks his
neighbor’s wife, and manages through it all to maintain himself as the ever-
reasonable unknowable man. All facade and subterfuge. He works so hard, Dawn
said, at being one-dimensional. Up top the gentleman, underneath the rat. Drink
the devil that lurks in his wife; lust and rivalry the devils lurking in him.
Sealed and civilized and predatory. To reinforce the genealogi-
· 382 ·
cal aggression—the overpowering by origins—the aggression of scrupulous manners.
The humane environmentalist and the calculating predator, protecting what he has
* * *
by birthright and taking surreptitiously what he doesn’t have. The civilized
savagery of William Orcutt. His civilized form of animal behavior. I prefer the
cows. “It’s supposed to be seen after dinner—with the spiel,” Orcutt said. “Did
it make any sense without the spiel?” he asked. “I wouldn’t think so.”
But of course—being unknowable is the goal. Then you move instrumentally through
life, appropriating the beautiful wives. In the kitchen he should have hit those
two over the head with a skillet.
“It did. A lot,” the Swede said. And then, as he could never stop himself from
doing with Orcutt, he added, “It’s interesting. I get the idea now about the
light. I get the idea of the light washing over those walls. That’s going to be
something to see. I think you’re going to be very happy in it.”
Orcutt laughed. “You, you mean.”
But the Swede had not heard his own error. He hadn’t heard it because of the
huge thought that had just come at him: what he should have done and failed to
do.
He should have overpowered her. He should not have left her there. Jerry was
right. Drive to Newark. Leave immediately. Take Barry. The two of them could
subdue her and bring her back in the car to Old Rimrock. And if Rita Cohen is
there? I’ll kill her. If she is anywhere near my daughter, I’ll pour gasoline
all over that hair and set the little cunt on fire. Destroying my daughter.
Showing me her pussy. Destroying my child. There’s the meaning—they are
destroying her for the pleasure of destroying her. Take Sheila. Take Sheila.
Calm down. Take Sheila to Newark. Merry listens to Sheila. Sheila will talk to
her and get her out of that room.
“—leave it to our visiting intellectual to get everything wrong. The complacent
rudeness with which she plays the old French game of beating up on the
bourgeoisie… .” Orcutt was confiding to the Swede his amusement with
Marcia’s posturing. “It’s to her
· 383 ·
credit, I suppose, that she doesn’t defer to the regulation dinnerparty
discipline of not saying anything about anything. But still it’s amazing,
constantly amazes me, how emptiness always goes with cleverness. She hasn’t the
faintest idea, really, of what she’s talking about. Know what my father used to
say? ‘All brains and no intelligence. The smarter the stupider.’ Applies.”
Not Dawn? No. Dawn wanted nothing further to do with their catastrophe. She was
just biding her time with him until the house was built. Go and do it yourself.
Get back in the fucking car and get her. Do you love her or don’t you love her?
You’re acceding to her the way you acceded to your father, the way you have
acceded to everything in your life. You’re afraid of letting the beast out of
the bag. Quite a critique she has made of decorum. You keep yourself a secret.
You don’t choose ever1. But how could he bring Merry home, now, tonight, in that
veil, with his father here? If his father were to see her, he’d expire on the
spot. To where else then? Where would he take her? Could the two of them go live
in Puerto Rico? Dawn wouldn’t care where he went. As long as she had her Orcutt.
He had to get her before she again set foot in that underpass. Forget Rita
Cohen. Forget that inhuman idiot Sheila Salzman. Forget Orcutt. He does not
matter. Find a place for Merry to live where there is not that underpass. That’s
all that matters. Start with the underpass. Save her from getting herself killed
in the underpass. Before the morning, before she has even left her room—start
there.
* * *
He had been cracking up in the only way he knew how, which is not really
cracking up at all but sinking, all evening long being unmade by steadily
sinking under the weight. A man who never goes full out and explodes, who only
sinks… but now it was clear what to do. Go get her out of there before dawn.
After Dawn. After Dawn life was inconceivable. There was nothing he could do
without Dawn. But she wanted Orcutt. “That Wasp blandness,” she’d said, all but
yawning to make her point. But that blandness had terrific glamour for a little
Irish Catholic girl. The mother of Merry Levov needs nothing less than William
Orcutt III. The cuckolded husband understands. Of course. Under-
384
stands everything now. Who will get her back to the dream of where she has
always wanted to go? Mr. America. Teamed up with Orcutt she’ll be back on the
track. Spring Lake, Atlantic City, now Mr. America. Rid of the stain of our
child, the stain on her credentials, rid of the stain of the destruction of the
store, she can begin to resume the uncontaminated life. But I was stopped at the
general store. And she knows it. Knows that I am allowed in no farther. I’m of
no use anymore. This is as far as she goes with me.
He brought a chair around, sat himself down between his wife and his mother,
and, even as Dawn spoke, took her hand in his. There are a hundred different
ways to hold someone’s hand. There are the ways you hold a child’s hand, the
ways you hold a friend’s hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent’s hand, the
ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and of the dead. He
held Dawn’s hand the way a man holds the hand of a woman he adores, with all
that excitement passing into his grip, as though pressure on the palm of the
hand effects a transference of souls, as though the interlinking of fingers
symbolizes every intimacy. He held Dawn’s hand as though he possessed no
information about the condition of his life.
But then he thought: She wants to be back with me, too. But she can’t because
it’s all too awful. What else can she do? She must think she’s poison. She gave
birth to a murderer. She has to put on a new crown.
He should have listened to his father and never married her. He had defied him,
just that one time, but that was all it had taken— that did it. His father had
said, “There are hundreds and thousands of lovely Jewish girls, but you have to
find her. You found one down in South Carolina, Dunleavy, and finally you saw
the
light and got rid of her. So now you come home and find Dwyer up here. Why,
Seymour?” The Swede could not say to him, “The girl in South Carolina was
beautiful, but not half as beautiful as Dawn.” He could not say to him, “The
authority of beauty is a very irrational thing.” He was twenty-three years old
and could only say, “I’m in love with her.”
385
I ‘, i
“‘In love,’ what does that mean? What is ‘in love’ going to do for you when you
have a child? How are you going to raise a child? As $ a Catholic? As a
Jew? No, you are going to raise a child who won’t f, be one thing or the
other—all because you are ‘in love’.” {·
His father was right. That was what happened. They raised a child who was
neither Catholic nor Jew, who instead was first a stutterer, then a killer, then
a Jain. He had tried all his life never to do the wrong thing, and that was what
he had done. All the wrongness that he had locked away in himself, that he had
* * *
buried as deep as a man could bury it, had come out anyway, because a girl was
beautiful. The most serious thing in his life, seemingly from the time he was
born, was to prevent the suffering of those he loved, to be kind to people, a
kind person through and through. That was why he had brought Dawn to meet
secretly with his father at the factory office—to try to resolve the religious
impasse and avoid making either of them unhappy. The meeting had been suggested