by Philip Roth
Zuckerman was working hard to see where he was—to be where he was—when he was somewhere else. Gregory’s bedroom. Mr. Freytag was holding open the door to the boy’s closet. “He is not one of those kids you see around today who isn’t neat and clean. He’s neat as a pin. Beautifully combed. A lovely dresser. Just look at the shirts. The blues all together, the browns all together, the striped shirts at one end, the checked shirts at the other, the solids in between. Everything perfect.”
“A good boy.”
“In his heart a wonderful boy, but Bobby is a busy man and from his mother, unfortunately, the child got no direction. She couldn’t give herself any, how could she give him? But I’ve been working on him since I’m here, and I tell you, it’s having some influence. We sat yesterday morning, just the two of us right in this room, and I told him about his father. How Bobby used to study. How he used to work in the store. And you should have seen him listening. ‘Yes, Grandpa, yes, I understand.’ I told him how I started out in the handbag business, how with my brother I left school and worked in the tannery to help my father support a family of eight. At fourteen years of age. After the Crash, how I got a pushcart and on weekends and at night went door-to-door, selling imperfect handbags. During the day I twisted challahs in a bakery, and at night I went out with the pushcart, and you know what he said to me, when I finished? He said to me. ‘You had a rough life. Grandpa.’ Bobby has got his job and I’ve got mine. That’s what I realized sitting with that boy. I am going to be a father again. Someone has to do it and it’s going to be me!” He took off his storm coat and looked again at his watch. “We’ll wait,” he said. “Fifteen more minutes, till it’s ten on the button, and if he’s not here, we go. I don’t understand it. I called all his friends. He’s not there. Where does he go all night? Where does he drive to? How do I know if he’s all right? They drive, and where are they going, do they even know? That car of his: mistake number fifty-six. I told Robert, ‘He must not have a car!’” Then he burst into tears. He was a strong, heavyset man, dark-complexioned like Bobby, though now sickly gray from grief. He fought the tears with his entire torso: you could see in his shoulders, in his chest, in the meaty hands that had twisted those Depression challahs, how much he despised his weakness: he looked ready to tear things apart. He was wearing a checkered pair of slacks and a new red flannel shirt—the outfit of a man who wasn’t submitting to anything if he could help it. But he couldn’t help it.
They were sitting on Gregory’s bed. beneath a large poster of a tattooed ten-year-old in mirrored glasses. The room was small and warm and Zuckerman wanted only to get into the bed. He was riding the waves, coasting up the crest and into the light, then down into the stupor’s swell.
“We were playing cards. I said, ‘Honey, watch my discards. You’re not paying attention to my discards. You should never have given me that three.’ A three of diamonds. A three of diamonds—and that’s it. There’s no way to grasp it. Urine coming out of her, out of this woman so spotless all her life. Onto her living-room rug. I saw the urine and I knew it was over. Come in here, come with me, I want to show you something beautiful.”
Another closet. A woman’s fur coat. “See this?”
He saw. but that too was it.
“Look how she cared for this coat. Still in mint condition. The way she looked after everything. You see? Black silk lining with her initials. The best bone buttons. Everything the best. The only thing she let me buy her all her life. I said to her, ‘We’re not poor people anymore, let me get you a diamond pin.’ ‘I don’t need diamonds.” ‘Let me get you a beautiful ring then, with your birthstone in it. You worked in the store all those years like a dog. you deserve it.’ No, her wedding ring is enough. But twelve years ago this last fall, her fifty-fifth birthday, I forced her, literally forced her to come with me to buy the coat. During the fitting you should have seen her—white as a ghost, as though it was our last penny we were throwing away. A woman who for herself wanted nothing.”
“Mine too.”
Mr. Freytag didn’t seem to hear him. Could be that Zuckerman hadn’t spoken. Possible he wasn’t even awake.
“I didn’t want a coat like this sitting in that empty apartment where somebody could break in. She got it out of storage. Zuck, the day … the same day … the morning …”
Back in the living room he stood by the front window and looked out at the street. “We’ll give him five more minutes. Ten.”
“Take your time.”
“I see little signs now of how ill she was. She would iron half a shirt and have to sit down for fifteen minutes. I couldn’t add two and two. I thought the exhaustion was all in her head. Oh, am I angry! Am I furious! Okay, damn it, we go! We’re going. I get you a hat and we go. And boots. I’ll get you a pair of Bobby’s boots. How does a grown man go out in this weather without a hat, without boots, without anything? All you need is to get sick!”
In the car to the cemetery, what is there to think? On the road to the cemetery, stupefied or wide awake, it’s simple: what is coming. No, it stays unseen, out of sight, and you come to it. illness is a message from the grave. Greetings: You and your body are one—it goes, you follow. His parents were gone and he was next. Out to the cemetery in a long black car. No wonder Mr. Freytag had fallen back in alarm: all that was missing was the box.
The old man bent forward, his face in his hands. “She was my memory.”
“Mine too.”
“Stop!” Mr. Freytag was hammering his fist on the glass partition. “Pull over! Here!” To Zuckerman he cried, “That’s it, the store, my friend’s store!”
The car edged to the side of a wide bleak boulevard. Low warehouses, vacant shops, auto wreckers on three comers.
“He used to be our janitor. A Mexican boy. a sweet lovely boy. He bought this place with his cousin. Business is murder. Whenever I come by, I buy something, even if I don’t need it. Three beautiful little children and the poor wife is a double mastectomy. A girl of thirty-four. Awful.”
Ricky kept the motor idling as Mr. Freytag and Zuckerman passed across the pavement arm-in-arm. The snow was covering everything.
“Where’s Manuel?” Mr. Freytag asked the girl at the checkout counter. She pointed through the dimness to the rear of the store. Passing the rows of canned goods, Zuckerman became terrified: he would fall and pull everything down.
Manuel, a roundish man with a fleshy dark Indian face, was kneeling on the floor, stamping the price on breakfast cereal boxes. He greeted Mr. Freytag with a hearty laugh. “Hey, Big Man! What do you say. Big Man?”
Mr. Freytag motioned for Manuel to leave what he was doing and come close. Something he had to confide.
“What is it. Big Man?’
His tips to Manuel’s ear, he whispered, “I lost my wife.”
“Oh, no.”
“Lost my wife of forty-five years. Twenty-three days ago.’’
“Oh no. That’s no good. That’s bad.”
“I’m on my way to the cemetery. A storm is coming.’’
“Oh. that was such a nice lady. Such a good lady.”
“I stopped to buy some salt. I need the coarse kosher salt.’’
Manuel led him to the salt. Mr. Freytag removed two boxes from the rack. At the register Manuel refused his money. After bagging the boxes himself he accompanied them out into the snow in his shirt sleeves.
They shook hands to part. Mr. Freytag, close to tears, said, “You’ll tell Dolores.”
“It’s no good.” said Manuel. “No good.”
Back in the car, remembering something more to say, Mr. Freytag reached to roll down the window. When he couldn’t find a handle anywhere on the door, he began to pound at the glass. “Open it! I can’t open it!”
Ricky pushed a button and, to the old man’s relief, the window slid away. “Manuel!” he called out, into the snowfall. “Hey, Manuel—come here!”
The young grocer, turning in the doorway, wearily passed a hand back through his dark hair
to brush away the snow. “Yes, sir.”
“You better shovel this, Manuel. All you need on top of everything is for somebody to slip.”
Mr. Freytag wept the rest of the way. In his lap he held the two boxes of coarse kosher salt, cradling the bag as though it contained Mrs. Freytag’s remains. The snow whacking against the car windows, heavy whirling clots of it, caused Zuckerman to wonder if he shouldn’t tell Ricky to rum back. The storm was here. But Zuckerman was feeling like a clean table, like an empty table, like a pale scrubbed wooden table, waiting to be set. No force left.
They passed beneath a railway bridge sprayed in six colors with mongoloid hieroglyphs, “Hateful bastards,” said Mr. Freytag when he saw the public property defaced. The underpass was riddled with potholes, the potholes awash with black water. “Criminal,” said Mr. Freytag as Ricky took the roadway at a crawl. “Funerals drive under here. Hearses, mourners, but Daley lines his pockets and everybody else can go to hell.”
They passed through the tunnel, turned sharply along a steep railroad embankment littered with rusted chunks of abandoned machinery, and there, across the road, beyond a high black fence of iron palings, the gravestones began, miles and miles of treeless cemetery, ending at the far horizon in a large boxlike structure that was probably nothing but a factory, but that smoking foully away through the gray of the storm looked like something far worse.
“Here!” Mr. Freytag was rapping on the partition. “This gate!” And saw for the First time that their driver wasn’t a man. He pulled at Nathan’s sleeve but Nathan wasn’t there. Out where everything ended, he had ended too. He was no longer even that table.
Ricky had unfurled a black umbrella and was shepherding the two passengers to the cemetery gate. A job to do and she did it. Dignity. For whomever.
“I saw the braid, a girl’s braid, and it didn’t even register.” Mr. Freytag had struck up a conversation. “All I see is grief.”
“That’s all right, sir.”
“A young girl. With a car this size. In weather like this.”
“I began my career for a Jewish funeral home. My first position as a chauffeur.”
“Is that so? But—what did you drive?”
“The relatives of the deceased.”
“Amazing.”
“I always used to say to my husband that there must be Jewish ESP, the way the word gets out when a Jewish person dies. The mourners come in droves, they come from everywhere to comfort the bereaved. It was my first experience of Jewish people. My respect for Jews began right there.”
Mr. Freytag burst into tears. “I got three shoeboxes filled with condolence cards.”
“Well,” Ricky said to him, “that shows how much she was loved.”
“You have children, young lady?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“Oh, you must, you must.”
Along a whitening path, alone, the two men entered the Jewish burial ground. They stood together before a mound of raw earth and a headstone bearing the family name. Now he was in a rage. “But this is not what I wanted! Why haven’t they flattened it? Why hasn’t this been leveled off? They left it like a garbage dump! Three whole weeks and now it’s snowing and they still haven’t made it right! Here it is—I don’t get it. Julie’s grave, I say the words, they have no meaning. Look how they left it!” He was leading Zuckerman by the hand from one family plot to the next. “My brother is here, my sister-in-law here, then Julie”—the pile left like a garbage dump—”and I’ll be here. And there,” he said, waving toward the smoking factory, “off there, the old part—her father and mother, my father, my mother, my two beautiful young sisters, one of them age sixteen years, dying in my arms…” They were standing again before the footstone engraved “PAUL FREYTAG 1899-1970.” “You got pockets in there, Paul? My stupid brother. Made his money in gloves. Wouldn’t spend a penny. Bought day-old bread all his life. AH he thought about was his money. His money and his pecker. Pardon me but that’s the truth. Always on his wife. No consideration. Wouldn’t leave his poor wife alone, not even when she had cancer of the vagina. Little guy who looked like a candy-store owner. And she was a doll. The sweetest nature. A clever woman too. The best card player, Tilly—she could beat ‘em all. What times we had, the four of us. Sold his business in 1965 for a hundred thousand and the building for another hundred. They paid him three, four thousand a year just to stay on and look after his accounts. But he wouldn’t give that wonderful woman a nickel to buy a thing. For the two years he was sick wouldn’t even buy himself a remote-control switch so he doesn’t have to get out of bed to change the channels. Saving it right to the end. The end. The end, Paul! You got pockets in there, you tight bastard? He’s gone—they’re all gone. And I stand on the edge and wait to be pushed. You know how I live with death now? I go to bed at night and I say, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ That’s how you lose your fear of death—you don’t give a shit anymore.”
He drew Nathan back to the upturned chunks of frozen earth heaped up over his wife. “Her Bobby. Her baby. How she nursed him in that dark room. How that kid suffered with those mumps. And that’s what changes a life. I don’t believe it. Zuck, it’s idiotic. Would Bobby have chosen that girl for a wife if he had known he was a hundred percent? Not in a million years. He actually didn’t think he was good enough for anything better. That Julie’s Robert should have such a thought! Yet this, I believe, is what happened. With what that kid had to offer, with all his achievements, the respect and admiration he has in his field—and his downfall? The mumps! And a son who tells his father to eat shit! Would Bobby have produced, on his own, a boy so full of contempt? He would have had a child who has feelings, feelings like we have feelings. A child who worked and who studied and stayed home, and who wanted to excel like his father. Is that what death and dying is supposed to be about? Is that what the hardship and the struggle is for? For a piece of contempt who gets on the phone with his father and tells him to go eat shit? Who thinks to himself, ‘This family, these people, I’m not even theirs and look what they do.’ Who thinks, ‘Watch me bend them around my finger with all their stupid Jewish love!’ Because who is he? Do we even know where he comes from? She wanted a baby, right away, off the bat, had to have a baby. So they found a little orphan baby, and what in his roots that we don’t know makes him behave this way to Bobby? I have a brilliant son. And all that brilliance locked in his genes! Everything we gave him, trapped like that in Bobby’s genes, while everything we are not, everything we are against—How can all of this end with Gregory? Eat shit? To his father! I’ll break his neck for what he’s done to this family! I’ll kill that little bastard! I will!”
Zuckerman, with what strength remained in his enfeebled arms, pounced upon the old man’s neck. He would kill—and never again suppose himself better than his crime: an end to denial; of the heaviest judgment guilty as charged. “Your sacred genes! What do you see inside your head? Genes with JEW sewed on them? Is that all you see in that lunatic mind, the unstained natural virtue of Jews?”
“Stop!” Mr. Freytag began pushing him off with his thick gloved hands. “Stop this! Zuck!”
“What’s he do all night long? He’s out studying fucking!”
“Zuck, no—Zuck. the dead!”
“We are the dead! These bones in boxes are the Jewish living! These are the people running the show!”
“Help me!” He struggled free, turned to the gate, stumbled—and Zuckerman slid after him. “Hurry!” Mr. Freytag called. “Something’s happened!” And wailing for help as he ran, the old man to be strangled was gone.
Just white snow whirling now, all else obliterated but the chiseled stones, and his hands frantically straining to throttle that throat. “Our genes! Our sacred little packet of Jewish sugars!” Then his legs flew off and he was sitting. From there he began his recitation, at the top of his voice read aloud the words he saw carved all around him in rock. “Honor thy Finkelstein! Do not commit Kaufman! Make no idols in the form of Levine! Thou
shalt not take in vain the name of Katz!”
“He—he—snapped!”
“O Lord,” cried Zuckerman, sledding inch by inch on his palms and his knees, “who bringeth forth from the earth the urge to spurt that maketh monkeys of us all, blessed art thou!” Eyes all but blinded by the melting snow, icy water ringing his collar and freezing slush filling his socks, he continued to crawl toward the last of the fathers demanding to be pleased. “Freytag! For-bidder! Now I murder you!”
But the boots stopped him: two tall cavalry boots burnished with oil and shedding the snow, ominous powerful sleek splendid boots that would have prompted caution in his bearded forebears too.
“This”—Zuckerman laughed, spewing flakes of burning ice—“this is your protection, Poppa Freytag? This great respecter of the Jews?” He strained to find the power to leave the graveyard ground. “Out of my way, you innocent bitch!” But against Ricky’s boots got nowhere.
He awoke in a hospital cubicle. Something was wrong with his mouth. His head was enormously large. Ail he was aware of was this huge echoing hole which was the inside of his head. Within the enormous head there was something barely moving that was just as enormous. This was his tongue. The whole of his mouth, from ear to ear, was just pain.
Standing beside his bed was Bobby. “You’re going to be all right,” he said.
Zuckerman could begin to fee! his lips now, lips swelled nearly to the size of his tongue. But below the lips, nothing.
“We’re waiting for the plastic surgeon. He’s going to sew up your chin. You’ve burst all the skin on the underside of your jaw. We don’t know whether you’ve broken it, but the gash under your chin he can put together, and then we’ll get some X-rays of your mouth and see the extent of the damage. Also of your head. I don’t think the skull’s fractured, but we better look. So far it seems you got off lightly: the gash and a few smashed teeth. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”