by Philip Roth
"The upshot was that Eve talked to the girl, and God knows what she said, or promised, or how she begged, but Sylphid showed up at the wedding, in those clothes of hers. A scarf in her hair. She had kinky hair, so she wears these Greek scarves, rakishly as she thought, and they drive her mother crazy. Wears peasant blouses that make her look enormous. Sheer blouses with Greek embroidery on them. Hoop earrings. Lots of bracelets. When she walks, she clinks. You hear her coming. Embroidered schmattas and lots of jewelry. Wore the Greek sandals that you could buy in Greenwich Village. The thongs that tie up to her knees and that dig in and leave marks, and this also makes Eve miserable. But at least the daughter was there, however she looked, and Eve was happy, and so Ira was happy.
"At the end of August, when both their shows were off the air, they married and went up to Cape Cod for a long weekend, and then they got back to Eve's place and Sylphid has disappeared. No note, nothing. They call her friends, they call her father in France, thinking maybe she decided to go back to him. They call the police. On the fourth day Sylphid finally checks in. She's on the Upper West Side with some old teacher she'd had at Juilliard. She'd been staying with her; Sylphid acts as though she didn't know when they were getting back, and that explains why she didn't bother to call from Ninety-sixth Street.
"That evening they all eat dinner together and the silence is awful. It doesn't help the mother any to watch the daughter eat. Sylphid's weight makes Eve frantic on a good night—and this night is not good.
"When she finished each course, Sylphid always cleaned her plate the same way. Ira'd been around army mess halls, crummy diners—lapses of etiquette didn't bother him all that much. But Eve was refinement itself, and watching Sylphid cleaning up was, as Sylphid well knew, a torment for her mother.
"Sylphid would take the side of her index finger, you see, and she'd run it around the edge of the empty plate so as to get all the gravy and the leavings. She'd lick everything off the finger and then she'd do it again and again until her finger squeaked against the plate. Well, on the night that Sylphid decided to come home after her disappearance, she started cleaning her plate that way of hers at dinner, and Eve, who was screwed pretty tight on an ordinary evening, came undone. Could not keep that smile of the ideal mother plastered serenely across her face one second more. 'Stop it!' she screams. 'Stop it! You are twenty-three years old! Stop it, please!'
"Suddenly Sylphid is up on her feet and clubbing at her mother's head—going after her with her fists. Ira leaps up, and that's when Sylphid screams at Eve, 'You kike bitch!' and Ira sinks back into his chair. 'No,' he says. 'No. That won't do. I live here now. I am your mother's husband, and you cannot strike her in my presence. You cannot strike her, period. I forbid it. And you cannot use that word, not in my hearing. Never. Never in my hearing. Never use that filthy word again!'
"Ira gets up and he leaves the house and he takes one of his calming-down hikes—from the Village walks all the way up to Harlem and back. Tries everything so as not to outright explode. Tells himself all the reasons why the daughter is upset. Our stepmother and our father. Remembers how they treated him. Remembers everything he hated about them. Everything awful that he swore he would never be in life. But what's he to do? The kid takes a swing at her mother, calls her a kike, a kike bitch—what is Ira going to do?
"He gets home around midnight and he does nothing. He goes to bed, gets in bed with the brand-new wife, and, amazingly, that's it. In the morning he sits down at breakfast with the brand-new wife and with the brand-new stepdaughter and he explains that they are all going to live together in peace and harmony, and that to do this they must have respect for one another. He tries to explain everything reasonably, the way nothing was ever explained to him when he was a kid. He's still appalled by what he saw and heard, furious about it, yet he is trying his damnedest to believe that Sylphid isn't really an anti-Semite in the true Anti-Defamation League sense of the word. Which more than likely was the case: Sylphid's insistence upon ego-justice for Sylphid was so extensive, so exclusive, so automatic, that a grand historical hostility of even the simplest, most undemanding sort, like hating Jews, could never have taken root in her—there was no room in her. Anti-Semitism was too theoretical for her anyway. The people Sylphid could not endure she could not endure for a good, tangible reason. There was nothing impersonal about it: they stood in her way and blocked her view; they affronted the regal sense of dominance, her droit defille. The whole incident, Ira rightly surmises, hasn't to do with hating Jews. About Jews, about Negroes, about any group that presents a knotty social problem—as opposed to somebody posing an immediate private problem—she does not care one way or the other. She is concerned at that moment only with him. Consequently, she allows to break out into the open a malicious epithet that she instinctively gauges to be so repugnant, so foul and disgusting and out of bounds, as to cause him to walk out the door and never again set foot in her house. 'Kike bitch' is her protest not against the existence of Jews—or even against the existence of her Jewish mother—but against the existence of him.
"But having figured all this out overnight, Ira goes ahead—cagily he thinks—not to ask Sylphid for an apology due him, let alone to take the hint and disappear, but to offer her an apology. This is how the shrewdie is going to tame her, by offering an apology for his being an interloper. For his being a stranger, an outsider, for his being not her own father but an unknown quantity whom she doesn't have any reason in the world to like or to trust. He tells her that since he's another human being, and human beings don't have a great record going for them, there's probably every reason to dislike him and distrust him. He says, 'I know the last guy wasn't so hot. But why don't you try me out? My name isn't Jumbo Freedman. I'm a different person from a different outfit with a different serial number. Why not give me a chance, Sylphid? How about giving me ninety days?'
"Then he explains to Sylphid Jumbo Freedman's rapacity—how it stems from America's corruption. 'It's a dirty game, American business. It's an insider's game,' he tells her, 'and Jumbo was the classic insider. Jumbo isn't even a speculator in real estate, which would be bad enough. He is a stalking horse for the speculator. He gets a piece of the deal and he doesn't even put down a dime. Now, basically, in America big money is made through secrets. Y'understand? Transactions that are deep underground. Sure, everybody's supposed to play by the same rules. Sure, there is the pretense to virtue, the pretense that everybody is playing fair. Look, Sylphid—do you know the difference between a speculator and an investor? An investor holds the real estate and has the risk involved; he rides the gains or suffers the loss. A speculator trades. Trades land like sardines. Fortunes are made this way. Now, before the Crash occurred, people had speculated with money they had got through taking out the value of the property, extracting from the banks the amortized value in terms of cash. What happened was that when all of these loans were called, they lost their land. The land went back to the banks. Enter the Jumbo Freedmans of the world. For the banks to raise some cash on this worthless paper they were holding, they had to sell it at an enormous discount, a penny on a dollar...'
"Ira the educator, the Marxist economist, Ira the star pupil of Johnny O'Day. Well, Eve is elated, a new woman, everything is wonderful again. A real man for herself, a real father for her daughter. At last a father who does what a father is supposed to do!
'"Now, the illegal part of this, Sylphid, the way it is a fixed deal,' Ira explains, 'the collusion involved ...'
"When the lecture is finally over, Eve gets up and goes over and takes Sylphid's hand and she says, 'I love you.' But not once. Uh-uh. It's 'I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you—' She keeps holding tight to the kid's hand and saying 'I love you.' Each repetition is more heartfelt than the last. She's a performer—she can convince herself when something is heartfelt. 'I love you I love you I love you'—and does Ira think to himself, Go? Does Ira think to himself, This woman is under assault, this woman is up against something I know
a little something about: this is a family at war and nothing I do is going to work.
"No. He thinks that the Iron Man who has beaten back every disadvantage to get to where he's gotten is not going to be defeated by a twenty-three-year-old. The guy is tenderized by sentiment: he's madly in love with Eve Frame, he's never known a woman like her, he wants to have a child by her. He wants to have a home and a family and a future. He wants to eat dinner the way people do—not alone at some counter somewhere, pouring sugar into his coffee out of a grimy canister, but around a nice table with a family of his own. lust because a twenty-three-year-old throws a temper tantrum, is he going to deny himself everything he has ever dreamed of? Fight the bastards. Educate the bastards. Change them. If anybody can make things work and straighten people out, it's Ira and his persistence.
"And things do calm down. No fisticuffs. No explosions. Sylphid appears to be getting the message. Sometimes at the dinner table she even tries for two minutes to listen to what Ira is saying. And he thinks, It was the shock of my arrival. That's all it was. Because he's Ira, because he doesn't give in, because he doesn't quit, because he explains everything to everybody sixty-two times, he believes he's got it licked. Ira demands respect from Sylphid for her mother and he believes he's going to get it. But that is just the demand that Sylphid cannot forgive. As long as she can boss her mother around she can have everything she wants, which makes Ira an obstacle right off. Ira shouted, Ira yelled, but he was the first man in Eve's life who ever treated her decently. And that's what Sylphid couldn't take.
"Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she'd also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night. Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished. He had the station wagon, and he'd pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs. The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant. At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside. At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid's ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated. Every Friday. He hated the physical imposition that it was—those things weigh about eighty pounds—but he did it. I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, 'She married me to carry her daughter's harp! That's why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!'
"On those Friday night trips, Ira found he could talk to Sylphid in ways he couldn't when Eve was around. He'd ask her about being a movie star's child. He'd say to her, 'When you were a little girl, when did it dawn on you that something was up, that this wasn't the way everyone grew up?' She told him it was when the tour buses went up and down their street in Beverly Hills. She said she never saw her parents' movies until she was a teenager. Her parents were trying to keep her normal and so they downplayed those movies around the house. Even the rich kid's life in Beverly Hills with the other movie stars' kids seemed normal enough until the tour buses stopped in front of her house and she could hear the tour guide saying, 'This is Carlton Pennington's house, where he lives with his wife, Eve Frame.'
"She told him about the production that birthday parties were for the movie stars' kids—clowns, magicians, ponies, puppet shows, and every child attended by a nanny in a white nurse's uniform. At the dining table, behind every child would be a nanny. The Penningtons had their own screening room and they ran movies. Kids would come over. Fifteen, twenty kids. And the nannies came for that too and they all sat at the back. At the movies Sylphid had to be dressed to the nines.
"She told him about her mother's clothes, how alarming her mother's clothes were to a little kid like her. She told him about all the girdles and the bras and the corsets and the waist cinchers and the stockings and the impossible shoes—all that stuff they wore in those days. Sylphid thought how could she possibly ever pull it off. Not in a million years. The hairdos. The slips. The heavy perfume. She remembered wondering how this was all going to happen to her.
"She even told him about her father, just a few things, but enough for Ira to realize how adoring of him she'd been as a child. He had a boat, a boat called the Sylphid, docked off the coast of Santa Monica. On Sundays, they sailed to Catalina, her father at the helm. The two of them rode horses together. In those days there was a bridle path that went up Rodeo Drive and down to Sunset Boulevard. Her father used to play polo behind the Beverly Hills Hotel and then go riding alone with Sylphid along the bridle path. One Christmas her father had presents for her dropped from a Piper Cub by one of the stuntmen from the studio. Swooped low over the back lawn and dropped them. Her father, she told him, had his shirts made in London. His suits and his shoes were made in London. Back then, no one in Beverly Hills walked around without ties and suits, but he was the best dressed of them all. To Sylphid, there had been no father more handsome, more delightful, more charming in all of Hollywood. And then, when she was twelve, her mother divorced him, and Sylphid found out about his escapades.
"She told Ira all this stuff on those Friday nights, and in Newark he told it to me, and I was supposed to come away thinking that I had been dead wrong, that Ira would make this kid his pal yet. It was still the beginning of all of them living together, and all the conversations were to try to make some contact with Sylphid, to make peace with her and so on. And it seemed to work—something like intimacy began to develop. He even started going in at night when Sylphid was practicing. He'd ask her, 'How the hell do you play that thing? I gotta tell you, every time I see anybody playing a harp—' And Sylphid would say, 'You think of Harpo Marx,' and they'd both laugh because that was true. 'Where does the sound come from?' he asked her. 'Why are the strings different colors? How can you remember which pedal is which? Don't your fingers hurt?' He asked a hundred questions to show he was interested, and she answered them and explained how the harp worked and showed him her calluses, and things were looking up, things were definitely beginning to look good.
"But then that morning after Eve said that she could not have the baby, and she wept and she wept, and he thought, Okay, that's it, and agreed to take her to the doctor in Camden—that morning he hears Sylphid at the bottom of the stairs. She is giving it to her mother, really laying into her, and Ira jumps out of bed to open the bedroom door, and that's when he hears what Sylphid is saying. This time she's not calling Eve a kike bitch. It's worse than that. Bad enough to send my brother straight back to Newark. And that's how you came to meet him. It puts him on our couch for two nights.
"That morning, that moment, was when Ira realized that it wasn't true that Eve felt she was too old to have a child with him. The alarm sounds and he realizes that it wasn't true that Eve was worried about the effect of a new baby on her career. He realizes that Eve had wanted the baby too, no less than he did, that it had been no easy thing to decide to abort the child of a man she loved, especially at the age of forty-one. This is a woman whose deepest sense is her sense of incapacity, and to experience the incapacity of not being generous enough to do this, of not being big enough to do this, of not being free enough to do this—that was why she had been crying so hard.
"That morning he realizes that the abortion wasn't Eve's decision—it was Sylphid's. That morning he realizes that it wasn't his baby to decide what to do with—it was Sylphid's baby to decide what to do with. The abortion was Eve evading the wrath of her daughter. Yes, the alarm sounds, but still not loud enough for Ira to clear out.
"Yes, all kinds of elemental things percolated up from Sylphid that had nothing to do with playing the harp. What he hears Sylphid saying to her mother is, 'If you ev
er, ever try that again, I'll strangle the little idiot in its crib!'"
4
THE TOWNHOUSE on West Eleventh Street where Ira lived with Eve Frame and Sylphid, its urbanity, its beauty, its comfort, its low-key aura of luxurious intimacy, the quiet aesthetic harmony of its thousand details—the warm habitation as a rich work of art—altered my conception of life as much as the University of Chicago would when I enrolled there a year and a half later. I had only to walk through the door to feel ten years older and freed from family conventions that, admittedly, I'd grown up adhering to mostly with pleasure and without much effort. Because of Ira's presence, because of the lumbering, easygoing way he strode around the place in baggy corduroy pants and old loafers and checked flannel shirts too short in the sleeves, I didn't feel intimidated by an atmosphere, unknown to me, of wealth and privilege; because of those folksy powers of appropriation that contributed so much to Ira's appeal—at home both on Newark's black Spruce Street and in Eve's salon—-I quickly got the idea of how cozily comfortable, how domesticized, high living could be. High culture as well. It was like penetrating a foreign language and discovering that, despite the alienating exoticism of its sounds, the foreigners fluently speaking it are saying no more than what you've been hearing in English all your life.
Those hundreds and hundreds of serious books lining the library shelves—poetry, novels, plays, volumes of history, books about archeology, antiquity, music, costume, dance, art, mythology—the classical records filed six feet high in cabinets to either side of the record player, those paintings and drawings and engravings on the walls, the artifacts arranged along the fireplace mantel and crowding the tabletops—statuettes, enamel boxes, bits of precious stone, ornate little dishes, antique astronomical devices, unusual objects sculpted of glass and silver and gold, some recognizably representational, others odd and abstract—were not decoration, not ornamental bric-a-brac, but possessions bound up with pleasurable living and, at the same time, with morality, with mankind's aspiration to achieve significance through connoisseurship and thought. In such an environment, roaming from room to room looking for the evening paper, sitting and eating an apple in front of the fire could in themselves be part of a great enterprise. Or so it seemed to a kid whose own house, though clean, orderly, and comfortable enough, had never awakened in him or in anybody else ruminations on the ideal human condition. My house—with its library of the Information Please Almanac and nine or ten other books that had come into our possession as gifts for convalescing family members—seemed by comparison shabby and bleak, a colorless hovel. I could not have believed back then that there was anything on West Eleventh Street that anyone would ever want to flee. It looked to me like the luxury liner of havens, the last place where you would have to worry about having your equilibrium disturbed. At its heart, upright and massively elegant on the library's oriental rug, utterly graceful in its substantiality and visible the instant you turned from the entryway into the living room, was that symbol, reaching back to civilization's enlightened beginnings, of the spiritually rarefied realm of existence, the gorgeous instrument whose shape alone embodies an admonishment to every defect of coarseness and crudeness in man's mundane nature ... that stately instrument of transcendence, Sylphid's gold-leafed Lyon and Healy harp.