by Roth, Philip
During the year that Helen had lived with us in Iowa City, where I was teaching in the Writers’ Workshop of the state university, I’d served as a surrogate father. Helen was alarmingly needy but also very engaging, and taking serious parental responsibility for her wasn’t simply a burden. Her pathetic difficulties with her studies required lots of attention, but she was a little girl quick to smile and genial with our best friends, and it could be fun to take her to the Iowa football games or to ice skate with her on the river or, with her help, to rake the leaves from the lawn in the fall. Josie was pleased when Helen and I began to grow close, but as the months went by and family life became routinized, there were also astonishing outbursts to throw a lurid shadow over this too. A sudden tirade about the probity of men would end with a warning that if ever I laid a finger on her ten-year-old daughter she would drive a knife into my heart. One evening, following a bedroom argument culminating in just such a threat, I waited until everyone had fallen asleep and then rounded up all the kitchen knives and locked them in the trunk of the car. Early the next morning, when Helen was alone in the kitchen making herself some breakfast, I came down in my robe to find her looking mightily perturbed. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. “It’s getting to be late for school! I have to cut my grapefruit and I can’t find a knife!” I went out to the garage and got her one.
By 1967, then, I was still saddled with alimony amounting to about half my income; my lawyer led me to understand that the alimony could be expected to increase proportionally with any substantial increase in my income and that I would be paying it for the rest of my life, unless Josie one day remarried. To me the alimony was court-ordered robbery and never more galling to pay than when I remembered, while making out the check, how the brief marriage had come to be in the first place. That was a story I couldn’t forget. I couldn’t forget it because I was the fall guy but also because the urine story was one of the best stories I’d ever heard. Had I been a dermatologist or an engineer or a shoemaker, after five years there might have been little more than the alimony left to dwell on; but what obsessed me no less than what was being taken from me was the story that she’d bestowed on me—for a man in my business it was too good to give up.
Actually, When She Was Good was intended to have provided me with a setting for that urine story, but after several fragmentary, unsatisfactory drafts, it veered away from this purpose and ended up as an imaginary elaboration, at once freely invented and yet close to the spirit—and even to the pattern of events—of the legend of her upbringing, her adolescence, and her first marriage as it had been narrated to me over the kitchen table throughout our early months as lovers in Chicago.
Between 1959 and 1962, during several week-long visits to her home in Port Safehold, a small Michigan resort town on the eastern shore of the lake, I’d got to know some of the main characters in Josie’s tale. Port Safehold could have been Bombay, so strong was its hold on me—and this, long before I thought that an environment like it could ever provide the backdrop for a story of mine; what made me so curious was that it was the backdrop for the grim saga of gentile family suffering that was hers. I was a guest of her maternal grandfather, Merle Hebert—known to relatives as Daddy Merle—in the very room where Josie had grown up after her family, whom her father could never really support, had moved in with the Heberts. Sitting out on the front porch with Daddy Merle after supper, I’d get him to talking about the old days and, though he was a gentle, decorous fellow, a retired carpenter and simple small-towner claiming proudly to bear no one a grudge, when I asked about Smoky Jensen he had to admit that his son-in-law had been something of a disappointment. Josie’s mother was living then in a little apartment near the commercial crossroads of the town, not far from the local newspaper where she worked as the advertising manager. She seemed more worldly and self-sufficient than the woman Josie had described to me as her father’s defenseless victim, and we quickly developed a friendship. When I came to write When She Was Good, however, I discounted my observations and, following Josie’s narrative lead—which she’d instinctively decided was more damning all around and which certainly made everything harsher and dramatically more vivid—I imagined, as the affronted young heroine’s mother, a childish, daughterly woman totally undefended against her irresponsible husband.
Eventually the book became for me a time machine through which to look backward and discover the origins of that deranged hypermorality to whose demands I had proved so hopelessly accessible in my early twenties. I was trying to come to some understanding of this destructive force, but separate from my own ordeal, to exorcise her power over me by taking it back to its local origins and tracing in detail the formative history of injury and disappointment right on down to its grisly consequences—again, not as they’d erupted in the context of our marriage (I was fighting too hard to be free of our marriage to spare the energy for that) but as they might have evolved had she been, instead of a Josie who’d escaped her past at least geographically and had wound up a working woman in Hyde Park, a Lucy imprisoned in the enraging, emotionally overcharged hometown with its full roster, for her, of betrayers, cowards, and vicious enemies. I was ridding myself in When She Was Good of the narrative spell that her legend had so successfully cast over my will, a purgation achieved by taking the victim’s gruesome story as gospel, but then enlarging it with a hard-won, belated understanding of the inner deformation suffered by the victim herself—perhaps suffered even more grotesquely than anything else and ending inescapably in her self-destruction.
Lucy’s hideous death at the end of When She Was Good was neither wishful thinking nor authorial retribution. I simply didn’t see how the disintegration of someone so relentlessly exercised over the most fundamental human claims, so enemy-ridden and unforgivingly defiant, could lead, in that little town, to anything other than the madhouse or the grave.
* * *
IN APRIL 1968 I was virtually the only customer eating an early dinner at Ballato’s Restaurant on Houston Street when the news came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been shot. The owner, my friend the late John Ballato, a courtly gentleman, Sicilian-born and at one time a syndicalist in New York’s Little Italy, brought his fist down violently on the table where we had been sitting and talking together. “Those sons of bitches!” John said angrily, his eyes filling with tears. “Those dogs!” I went to the phone and called May, who was working late at the Quaker Center. We agreed to meet back at her apartment, where we later sat up on the bed together and watched again and again the TV footage from Memphis, which never stopped being terrible or true no matter how many times it was played. I phoned friends. I phoned my father. “Newark’s going to go up,” he said, “you’ll see.” He said it several times and of course he was right. Watching the television clips of King’s great public moments, May sporadically began to cry. I didn’t—for all his force, King, whom I had never met, had always struck me as personally remote, almost featureless, his moral self-conception on the scale of a mountain rather than of a man, and so what his death provoked in me wasn’t tears of pity and grief but a sense of foreboding and fear: an unspeakable crime was going to cause unimaginable social disaster.
When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated a few months later, May and I were up watching the aftermath of the California primary and so learned he’d been shot only seconds after it happened. I had signed ads in behalf of Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and been to a few meetings and gatherings backing his candidacy, but the previous summer May and I had nonetheless enjoyed enormously a dinner with Kennedy on Martha’s Vineyard, at the house of his speechwriter, Dick Goodwin, who’d become a Vineyard acquaintance. Kennedy was crackling that evening with energy and charm, perhaps having the best time of the ten of us at the table. He was clearly getting a kick out of flirtatiously quizzing May, who was seated beside him, about her Cleveland society background; at the close of the dinner, he said to her in a voice deliberately loud enough
for me to overhear, “And is Mr. Roth going to marry you?” May smiled and said, “That remains to be seen.” “Mr. Roth,” he said, flashing at me that smile of his as distinctive as Franklin Roosevelt’s and weighted with a similar bravado, “do you intend to marry this woman?” “It depends, Senator, if I can ever get a divorce in your state from the wife I’m already married to.” “And,” Kennedy replied, “you’d like me to look into that—is that it?” “I wouldn’t say no. I don’t have to tell you I could make it worth your while.” Whereupon Senator Kennedy, happily puffing on his cigar, turned to one of his legislative aides and told him to find out about getting a divorce for Mr. Roth so that he could marry Miss Aldridge as soon as possible.
He was by no means a political figure constructed on anything other than the human scale, and so, the night of his assassination and for days afterward, one felt witness to the violent cutting down not of a monumental force for justice and social change like King or the powerful embodiment of a people’s massive misfortunes or a titan of religious potency but rather of a rival—of a vital, imperfect, high-strung, egotistical, rivalrous, talented brother, who could be just as nasty as he was decent. The murder of a boyish politician of forty-two, a man so nakedly ambitious and virile, was a crime against ordinary human hope as well as against the claims of robust, independent appetite and, coming after the murders of President Kennedy at forty-six and Martin Luther King at thirty-nine, evoked the simplest, most familiar forms of despair.
Between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Josie too was violently killed. Death came instantly, in the early hours of a May morning, when the car in which she was being driven across Central Park left the road and struck a tree, a lamppost, or a concrete abutment—nobody who spoke to me seemed to know precisely how or where the collision took place. The driver was an editor who had been Josie’s boss at her publishing job until, as I was led to understand, he had recently fired her. The fact that he was black made me remember those accusing calls I would get from her in the middle of the night, after I’d moved up from Princeton to a New York hotel, when she’d contend drunkenly that I was with a “Negress”—made me remember them without, however, leading me to understand her any better. I remembered that the pregnant woman from whom she’d bought the urine specimen was black as well—could she be the “Negress” Josie would imagine me with in my New York bed? Only the gods of Paranoia knew the answer to that.
The editor had escaped serious injury and appeared at the funeral wearing a small Band-Aid over one eye but still looking dazed and shaken. We merely shook hands when we were introduced; I figured it was best to display no curiosity about the car crash, since a number of Josie’s mourners—members of her therapy group who knew the history of my sadism inside out—must already have been wondering if I hadn’t somehow been an accomplice to it. Nor did the editor, either then or later, give any indication of wanting to talk to me about the circumstances of the accident. In fact, after shaking his hand at the funeral—and despite his having been cast as the instrument to tear asunder my eternal marriage and extinguish every last responsibility that she and the State of New York claimed to be mine—I never saw, or heard of, my emancipator again.
It would have been ridiculous for me to have thought that in When She Was Good I had divined Josie’s death, which took place in entirely different circumstances from Lucy Nelson’s and resulted from an accident in which her will did not figure, whereas Lucy’s own enraged decision leads to her freezing to death in the snow. And yet, a year after the publication of When She Was Good, when I got the news that she was dead, I was transfixed at first by the uncanny overlapping of the book’s ending with the actual event. I also found it hard to believe that Josie’s will hadn’t figured in the accident, probably because I had never forgotten how, in the midst of an argument en route from Italy to France in the late spring of 1960, she had furiously tried to take the wheel and kill us both while I was driving north through the mountains in our little Renault. However, if the real circumstances had indeed “validated” the fatal destiny of that personification of Josie’s defiant extremism which I presented as Lucy Nelson, I would never know. And what difference would knowing have made anyway?
Josie’s daughter had by this time left her Chicago-area boarding school and, at seventeen, come to live with Josie in New York, where she was attending a public high school and where, for her outspoken antiwar sentiments, she had come to be known, according to a friend of mine who lived on their street, as Hanoi Helen. It was she who called me at my apartment early on Saturday morning, as I was sitting down to work after returning from May’s. Like Peter Tarnopol in an all but identical situation in My Life as a Man, I didn’t believe her when she said that Josie was dead. I had already been deceived by my wife more than once, and though it was almost impossible to envision Helen—with whom my relationship was still affectionate, though now more avuncular than anxiously paternal—acting wittingly as Josie’s coconspirator in a hoax so grotesque, my immediate response was total disbelief: it was a trick, I thought, to get me to say something self-incriminating that could be recorded and used to sway the judge to increase the alimony in our next court go-round. I also didn’t believe then that miracles happen, that one’s worst enemy, who one has hoped and prayed would disappear from one’s life, could suddenly be eradicated in a car accident, and in, of all places, Central Park, where May and I, along with tens of thousands of others, were only recently demonstrators against the war and where the two of us took our long Sunday walks. All I had done the night before was to close my eyes and go to sleep, and now everything was over. Who could be naïve enough to buy that? It would have been only slightly more incredible (if aesthetically symmetrical) had I learned that she’d been bludgeoned to death in Tompkins Square Park on the very spot where the urine purchase had been negotiated nine years earlier.
I asked Helen to repeat for me slowly what she had just said. When she did—“Mother’s dead”—I said skeptically, “And where is she now?” Her response was graphic enough to stun me out of my self-protecting incredulity. “In the morgue,” she said, and began to cry. “You have to identify her, Philip—I can’t!” Within minutes I was down at the apartment in the West Twenties, where Helen was being kept company by one of Josie’s close friends. Scattered around the apartment, which, of course, I’d never seen before, were all sorts of familiar things that we had accumulated in our marriage, most of them inexpensive little art objects that we’d brought back from Italy after our year there on my Guggenheim. I couldn’t take my eyes off the shelves of books—there had been a highly emotional dispute in front of the judge about whose books were whose, after which, in accord with his wisdom, the secondhand Modern Library novels that I’d purchased as a graduate student for twenty-five cents apiece were divided evenly between us. I’d forgotten about them (almost) until I recognized a couple of my books on her living-room shelves, and once again, despite the presence of Josie’s friend and Helen’s obvious distress, I felt as though some trick was being played, madly excessive, ghoulish perhaps, but in the face of which I had better watch every word I said. I was in a state akin to shock and persisted in believing that she wasn’t dead at all, that, if anything, she was kneeling behind the door to the next room, along with her lawyer and maybe even the judge. See how he’s enjoying this, Your Honor? It’s just as we’ve told you—his heart is flint!
How could she be dead if I didn’t do it?
Helen asked again if I would go to the morgue. I said I didn’t see where it was my place to identify the body, there were plenty of people to do that other than her or me; if she wished, however, I would make the funeral arrangements. Only a little later I was on my way to Frank Campbell’s Funeral Chapel on Madison and Eighty-first Street. In those days I didn’t casually ride taxis in New York and, in fact, was walking over to catch a subway uptown when I realized that there was no need to economize in quite the way I did only the day before, when she and I were dividi
ng my income. That was the first tangible result of my no longer being married to her—I could take a taxi to the funeral home to bury her.
The ride from the West Twenties on a Saturday morning didn’t take more than ten or so minutes. Outside Campbell’s door, when I went to pay the driver, he turned around and smiled at me: “Got the good news early, huh?” I was flabbergasted by what he’d said and afterward could only conclude that all the way up in the taxi I, the son of a family of irrepressible whistlers, must have been whistling away—how else could he have known?
Helen had told me that Josie had instructed her that when she died she wanted a Jewish funeral service, and so a Jewish funeral service she got. There was a certain sweetness to be found in sitting alongside the rabbi in the funeral director’s office, deciding on the appropriate psalms for him to read, especially as he turned out to be (for reasons no more fathomable than anything else about her leaving this life while there was still litigation to attend to) one of the New York rabbis on record as considering me a menace to the Jews. I didn’t go so far as to wear a yarmulke at the service, but had the rabbi asked me to, I would have forsworn my secular convictions out of respect for the beliefs of the deceased. When I saw the casket, I said to Josie, “You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it.” Whereupon the late Jew replied, “Mazel tov.” That is, I replied on her behalf. And I did because she’d never reply to me again and I’d never have to reply to her or to a subpoena of hers—that is, outside of fiction. She was dead, I hadn’t done it, but it would still take years of hapless experimentation before I could decontaminate myself of my rage and discover how to expropriate the hatred of her as an objective subject rather than be driven by it as the motive dictating everything. My Life as a Man would turn out to be far less my revenge on her than, given the unyielding problems it presented, hers on me. Writing it consisted of making one false start after another and, over the years it took to finish it, very nearly broke my will. The only experience worse than writing it, however, would have been for me to have endured that marriage without afterward having been able to find ways of reimagining it into a fiction with a persuasive existence independent of myself.