by Philip Roth
So: the historical record was to be set straight at last. Henry would cleanse from the minds of her Florida friends the libelous portrait in Carnovsky. Life and art are distinct, thought Zuckerman; what could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.
Carol arrived on an evening plane with their two oldest kids and Henry put them up with him at a hotel over on Collins Avenue. Zuckerman slept at his mother’s alone. He didn’t bother making the bed up anew but, between the sheets that had covered her only two nights before, planted his face in her pillow. “Mama, where are you?” He knew where she was, at the mortician’s wearing her gray crepe dress; nonetheless, he couldn’t stop asking. His little mother, five feet two, had disappeared into the enormity of death. Probably the biggest thing she’d ever entered before was L. Bamberger’s department store on Market Street in Newark.
Till that night Zuckerman hadn’t known who the dead were or just how far away. She murmured into his dreams, but no matter how hard he strained to hear, he could not understand. An inch separated them, nothing separated them, they were indivisible—yet no message could make it through. He seemed to be dreaming that he was deaf. In the dream he thought, “Not gone; beyond gone,” and awoke in the dark, bubbling saliva, her pillow soaked with his spittle. “Poor child,” he said, feeling for her as though she were the child, his child, as though she’d died at ten instead of sixty-six. He felt a pain in his head the size of a lemon. It was her brain tumor.
Coming out of sleep that morning, struggling to be freed from a final dream of a nearby object at a dreadful distance, he began readying himself to find her beside him. Mustn’t be frightened. The last thing she’d ever do would be to come back to frighten Nathan. But when he opened his eyes to the daylight and rolled over on his side there was no dead woman on the other half of the bed. There was no way to see her beside him again.
He got up to brush his teeth, then came back into the bedroom and. still in his pajamas, stepped into the closet among her clothes. He put his hand in the pocket of a poplin raincoat that looked hardly ever to have been worn, and found a freshly opened packet of Kleenex. One of the tissues lay folded in the pocket’s seam. He touched it to his nose, but it smelled only of itself.
From a square plastic case down in the pocket he extracted a transparent rain bonnet. It was no bigger than a Band-Aid, folded up to about a quarter-inch thickness, but that it was tucked away so neatly didn’t necessarily mean that she had never used it. The case was pale blue, stamped “COMPLIMENTS OF SYLVIA’S, DISTINCTIVE FASHIONS, BOCA RATON.” The “S” in Sylvia’s was entwined in a rose, something she would have appreciated. Little flowers always bordered her thank-you notes. Sometimes his wives had got the flowered thank-you notes for as little as a thoughtful long-distance call.
In her other pocket, something soft and gauzy. Withdrawing the unseen thing gave him a bad moment, it wasn’t exactly like his mother to be carrying her underwear in her pocket like a drunk. Had the tumor impaired her thinking in pitiful little ways none of them had even known? But it wasn’t a bra or her underpants, only a stocking-colored chiffon hood, something to wear home from the beauty parlor. Newly set hair, hers, or so he was ready to believe, holding the hood up to his nose and searching for some fragrance he remembered. The sharp smells. the decisive noises, the American ideals, the Zionist zeal, the Jewish indignation, all that to a boy was vivid and inspiring, almost superhuman, had belonged to his father; the mother who’d been so enormous to him for the First ten years of his life was as diaphanous in recollection as the chiffon hood. A breast, then a lap, then a fading voice calling after him, “Be careful.” Then a long gap when there is nothing of her to remember, just the invisible somebody, anxious to please, reporting to him on the phone the weather in New Jersey. Then the Florida retirement and the blond hair. Neatly dressed for the tropics in pink cotton slacks and a monogrammed white blouse (wearing the pearl pin he’d bought years before in Orly Airport and brought home for her from his first summer in France), a little brown-skinned blond-haired woman waiting down at the end of the corridor when he gets off the elevator with his bag: the unconstrained grin, the encompassing dark eyes, the sad clinging embrace, instantly followed by the gratitude. Such gratitude! It was as though the President of the United States had arrived at the condominium to call upon some lucky citizen whose name and address had been drawn from a hat.
The last thing he found in her pocket was an item scissored out of The New York Times. Must have been sent to her by someone back home. She’d slipped it out of the envelope down by the mailbox, then put it into her pocket on the way to the beauty parlor or to Sylvia’s in Boca Raton. The headaches and the dizziness still incorrectly diagnosed, she’d driven off with a friend on a rainy afternoon to look at a dress. When it got to be 4 p.m., the two widows would have decided on a restaurant for the early-bird dinner. Looking down the menu, she would have thought: “This is what Victor would order. This is what Nathan would order. This is what Henry would order.” Only then would she choose for herself. “My husband.” she would tell the waitress, “loved ocean scallops. If they’re fresh, and the nice big ones, I’ll have the ocean scallops, please.”
One short paragraph in the Times clipping had been squared off with rough pencil markings. Not by her. Any frame she drew would have been finely made with a freshly sharpened point. The paragraph was from an article in the “New Jersey Section” dated Sunday, December 6, 1970. She died fifteen days later.
Similarly. Newark has produced many famous people, ranging from Nathan Zuckerman, the author, to Jerry Lewis, the comedian. Elizabeth’s most famous offspring are military men: General Winfield Scott, a 19th-century Army man, and Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, a World War II hero.
In a kitchen cabinet he found a yellow plastic watering can decorated with white daisies and held it under the tap. He went into the living room to sprinkle her wilting plants. So sick and lost and forgetful that last week, she’d not even tended her garden. Zuckerman turned on the FM station she’d had the dial tuned to and, listening to her favorite music—famous show tunes smothered in strings—proceeded with the watering can along the windowsill. He believed he recognized plants from New Jersey and his high-school days. Could that be? So many years as her companions? He raised the blind. Out past the new condominium that had gone up next door, he saw a wide slice of the bay. So long as her husband was alive, they used to look at the bay ritually from the bedroom balcony every evening after dinner and the TV news. “Oh, Nathan, you should have seen the colors last night at sunset—only you would have the words to describe it.” But after Dr. Zuckerman’s death, she couldn’t face all that ineffable beauty alone and just kept watching television, no matter what was on.
There was no one out sailing yet. It wasn’t even seven. But two stories below, in the parking lot between the two buildings, a very old man in bright green slacks and a bright green cap and a canary-yellow sweater was taking his constitutional, walking uncertainly back and forth between the rows of shining cars. Stopping to lean on the hood of a new two-toned Cadillac, his own perhaps, he looked up to where Zuckerman was standing in his pajamas at the picture window. He waved, Zuckerman waved back and for some reason showed him the watering can. The man called out but too weakly to be heard above the radio. On her FM station they were playing an uninterrupted medley of the tunes from Finian’s Rainbow. “How are things in Glocca Morra, this fine day…?” A spasm of emotion went through him: this fine day in Glocca Morra, where was she? Next they’d play “All the Things You Are” and break him down completely. That was the record to which she’d taught him the box step so that he could dance at his bar mitzvah reception. After he’d finished all his homework they would practice on the rugless floor between the dining- and living-room Orientals, while Henry, with an imaginary clarinet between his fingers, pretended to be Artie Shaw. Henry would mouth the words as Helen Forrest sang—anything to get in
to the act, even half asleep in his pajamas and slippers. At the evening reception, catered in a Bergen Street hall several rungs down from the Schary Manor, everybody in the family applauded (and all his young friends mockingly cheered) as Nathan and Mrs. Zuckerman stepped out under the rainbow lighting and began to fox-trot. When the boy bandleader lowered his sax and started to croon the lyrics—“You are / The promised kiss of springtime”—she looked proudly into the eyes of her thirteen-year-old partner—his hand placed inches away from where he imagined that even inadvertently he might touch the strap of her brassiere—and softly confided into his ear, “You are, darling.”
The apartment, purchased ten years earlier by his father, had been decorated with the help of daughter-in-law Carol. On the longest wall hung two large reproductions framed in faded wormwood. a white Paris street by Utrillo and the hills of a lilac-colored island by Gauguin. The bright linen chosen by the women for the cushions of the bamboo living-room set showed branches of trees bearing lemons and limes. Tropical Eden, that was the idea, even as the strokes hammered her husband down into his grave. She’d done her best, but the organic opposition did better, and she’d lost.
There was nothing to do for her sadness. If ever there had been, the chance was gone.
While he was still watching the old man down in the parking lot totter from one row of cars back to the other, a key turned in the door: Despite the unequivocal gleam off the bay—that dancing of light in which the living exult, proclaiming, “Sunny existence knows nothing of death!”—the likelihood of her reappearance seemed suddenly as strong as it had while he lay on the bed dazed from the hours of dreaming on her pillow. Maybe he was still dazed up on his feet.
There was nothing to fear from her ghost. She’d return only to get a look at him, to see that he hadn’t lost weight in the three months since his last visit, she’d return only to sit with him at the table and listen to him talk. He remembered when he’d first come home from college, the Wednesday evening of his first Thanksgiving vacation—how, with a great unforeseen gush of feeling, he’d told her about the books he was absorbed in at school. This was after they’d cleaned up the dinner dishes; his brother had left even before dessert for the AZA basketball game down ai the Y. and his father was back in the office, dealing with the last of the day’s paperwork. Zuckerman remembered her apron, her housedress, the dark graying hair, remembered the old Newark sofa re-covered—the year he went off to Chicago—in a sober, utilitarian, stain-resistant “Scotch plaid.” She was stretched out on the living-room sofa, smiling faintly at all he was explaining to her, and imperceptibly falling asleep. He put her right out discussing Hobbes and the social contract. But how she loved that he knew it all. What a sedative that was, the most powerful she’d ever dared to take until, after her husband’s death, they got her on phenobarbital.
All this sentiment. He wondered if it was only to compensate for the damage that he was reputed to have done her with the portrait of the mother in Carnovsky, if that was the origin of these tender memories softening him up while he watered her plants. He wondered if watering the plants wasn’t itself willed, artificial, a bit of heart-pleasing Broadway business as contrived as his crying over her favorite kitsch show tune. Is this what writing has done? All that self-conscious self-mining—and now I can’t even be allowed to take purely the shock of my own mother’s death. Not even when I’m in tears am I sure what gives.
He had to smile when he saw who came in: no, it wasn’t the specter of his mother returned from the dead with a key to the door so as to hear from him now about Locke and Rousseau but a small, bottom-heavy, earthbound stranger, the color of bittersweet chocolate. She was dressed in a roomy turquoise slacks suit and wore a wig of shiny black curls. This would be Olivia, the eighty-three-year-old cleaning woman. Who he was, this man in pajamas humming to Mrs. Zuckerman’s music and watering her plants with her flowered can, she was not so quick to figure out.
“Who you!” she shouted and, stamping her foot, showed him the way out.
“You’re Olivia. Take it easy. Olivia. I’m Mrs. Zuckerman’s son. I’m Nathan. From New York. Islept here last night. You can close the door and come in.” He extended his hand. “I’m Nathan Zuckerman.”
“My God, you like t’ scared me to death. My heart just flutterin”. You say you Nathan?”
“Yes.”
“What you do for a livin’?”
“I’m the writer.”
She walked straight up to shake his hand. “Well, you a good-lookin’ man, ain’t you?”
“You’re a good-looking woman. How do you do?”
“Where’s your mamma?”
He told her and she dropped backwards onto the sofa. “My Miz Zuckerman? My Miz Zuckerman? My beautiful Miz Zuckerman? That cain’t be! I seen her last Thursday. All dressed up—goin’ out. Wearin’ that white coat with the big collar. I say to her, ‘Oh, Miz Zuckerman, how beautiful you looks.’ She cain’t be dead, not my Miz Zuckerman!”
He sat beside her on the sofa, holding and stroking her hand until finally she was able to be consoled.
“You wants me to clean up anyway?” Olivia asked.
“If you feel you can, why not?”
“You wants me to fix you a egg?”
“No, I’m all right, thanks. You always come this early?”
“Most usually I gets here six-thirty sharp. Me and Miz Zuckerman, we likes a early start. Oh, I cain’t believe that woman is dead. People always dyin’, but you never gets used to it. The nicest woman in the world.”
“She went quickly, Olivia. Without any pain.”
“I say to Miz Zuckerman, ‘Miz Zuckerman, your place so clean it hard for me to make it clean.’”
“I understand.”
“I tells her all the time. ‘You wastin’ your money on me. Everything so sparklin’ here, I just rubs around to make it more sparklin’ but I cain’t.” I never comes in here we don’t hug and kiss soon as we sees each other. That woman she kind to everybody. They comes in here, the other ladies, and she sit in her chair, that one, and they start peskerin’ her to give ‘em some advice. The widow mens, they’s no different. She go downstairs with them and she stand there and she show them how to fold up their laundry out of the dryin’ machine. They wants to marry her practically the day your father pass. The man upstairs want to take her on a fancy cruise, and some other ones down in the lobby, they’s linin’ up like little boys to takes her Sunday afternoon to the movie. But she love your daddy too much for any monkey business. Not her. She don’t play that. She always sayin’ to me, after Dr. Zuckerman pass, ‘I was lucky all my life, Olivia. I had the three best mens in the world.’ She tell me all the tales from when you and the dentist was little boys. What you write them books about?”
“Good question,” he said.
“Okay, you can go right back to what you was doin’. I gon’ get myself along now.” And as though she’d just stopped by to chew the fat, she got up and went off to the bathroom with her shopping bag. She came out wearing a red cotton beret and, over her slacks, a long red apron. “Wants me to spray the shoe closet?”
“Whatever you usually do.”
“Most usually I sprays. Keep the shoes good.”
“Then do it.”
Henry’s eulogy lasted nearly an hour. Nathan kept count as Henry slipped each page beneath the last. Seventeen—some five thousand words. It would have taken him a week to write five thousand words, but Henry had done it overnight, and in a hotel suite with three young children and a wife. Zuckerman couldn’t write if there was a cat in the room. That was one of the differences between them.
A hundred mourners were gathered in the mortuary chapel, mostly lonely widowed Jewish women in their sixties and seventies who’d been transplanted South after a lifetime in New York and New Jersey. By the time Henry had finished, they all wished they’d had such a son, and not only because of his height. posture, profile, and lucrative practice: it was the depth of the filial devotion. Zuckerman
thought, If sons were like that, I’d have had one myself. Not that Henry was out to put something over on them; it was by no means a ludicrously idealized portrait—the virtues were all hers. Yet they were virtues of the kind that made life happy for a little boy. Chekhov, drawing on material resembling Henry’s, had written a story one-third that length called “The Darling.” However. Chekhov wasn’t undoing the damage of Carnovsky.