American Pastoral (Nathan Zuckerman)

by Philip Roth

  "You mean you eat vegetables. Is that what you mean? What is wrong with that? How could you refuse to do that? Why should you?"

  "It is an issue of personal sanctity. It is a matter of reverence for life. I am bound to harm no living being, neither man, nor animal, nor plant."

  "But you would die if you did that. How can you be 'bound' to that? You would eat nothing."

  "You ask a profound question. You are a very intelligent man, Daddy. You ask, 'If you respect life in all forms, how can you live?' The answer is you cannot. The traditional way by which a Jain holy man ends his life is by salla khana—self-starvation. Ritual death by salla khana is the price paid for perfection by the perfect Jain"

  "I cannot believe this is you. I have to tell you what I think.

  "Of course you do."

  I cannot believe, clever as you are, that you know what you are saying or what you are doing here or why. I cannot believe that you are telling me that a point will come when you will decide that you will not even destroy plant lite, and that you wont eat anything and that you will just doom yourself to death. For whom, Merry?. For what?"

  "It's all right. It's all right, Daddy. I can believe that you can't believe that you know what I'm saying or what I' m doing or why."

  She addressed him as though hewere the child and she were the parent with nothing but sympathetic understanding with that loving tolerance that he once had so disastrously extended to her. And it galled him. The condescension or a lunatic. Yet he neither bolted for the door nor leaped to do what had to be done. He remained the reasonable father. The reasonable father of someone mad. Do something!. Anything!. In the name of everything reasonable stop being reasonable this child needs a hospital She could not be in any greater peril it she were adrift on a plank in the middle oi the sea. She's gone over the edge of the ship—how that happened is not the question now. She must be rescued immediately!

  "Tell me where you studied religions."

  "In libraries. Nobody looks for you there. I was in libraries often, and so I read. I read a lot."

  "You read a lot when you were a little girl."

  "I did? I like to read."

  "That's where you became a member of this religion. In a library."

  "Yes."

  "And church? Do you go to some sort of a church?"

  "There is no church at the center. There is no god at the center. God is at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And God may say, 'Take life.' And it is then not just permissible but obligatory. That's all over the Old Testament. There are examples even in the New Testament. In Judaism and Christianity the position is taken that life belongs to God. Life isn't sacred, God is sacred. But at the center for us is not a belief in the sovereignty of God but a belief in the sanctity of life."

  The monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to foot—the monotonous, spellbound chant of those whose turbulence can be caged only within the suffocating straitjacket of the most supercoherent of dreams. What was missing from her unstuttered words was not the sanctity of life—missing was the sound of life.

  "How many of you are there?" he asked, working fiercely to adjust to clarifications with which she was only further bewildering him.

  "Three million."

  Three million people like her? It could not be. In rooms like this one? Locked away in three million terrible rooms? "Where are they, Merry?"

  "In India."

  "I'm not asking you about India. I don't care about India. We do not live in India. In America, how many of you are there?"

  "I don't know. It's unimportant."

  "I would think very few."

  "I don't know."

  "Merry, are you the only one?"

  "My spiritual exploration I undertook on my own."

  "I do not understand. Merry, I do not understand. How did you get from Lyndon Johnson to this? How do you get from point A to point Z, where there is no point of contact at all? Merry, it does not hang together."

  "There is a point of contact. I assure you there is. It all hangs together. You just don't see it."

  "Do you?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell it to me then. I want you to tell it to me so that I can understand what has happened to you."

  "There is a logic, Daddy. You mustn't raise your voice. I will explain. It all links up. I have given it much thought. It goes like this. Ahimsa, the Jain concept of nonviolence, appealed to Mahatma Gandhi. He was not a Jain. He was Hindu. But when he was looking in India for a group that was genuinely Indian and not Western and that could point to charitable works as impressive as those the Christian missionaries had produced, he landed on the Jains. We are a small group. We are not Hindus but our beliefs are akin to Hindus'. We are a religion founded in the sixth century b.c. Mahatma Gandhi took from us this notion of ahimsa, nonviolence. We are the core of truth that created Mahatma Gandhi. And Mahatma Gandhi, in his nonviolence, is the core of truth that created Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King is the core of truth that created the civil rights movement. And, at the end of his life, when he was moving beyond the civil rights movement to a larger vision, when he was opposing the war in Vietnam..."

  Without stuttering. Speech that once would have impelled her to grimace and turn white and bang on the table—would have made of her an embattled speaker attacked by the words and obstinately attacking them back—delivered now patiently, graciously, still in that monotonous chant but edged with the gentlest tone of spiritual urgency. Everything she could not achieve with a speech therapist and a psychiatrist and a stuttering diary she had beautifully realized by going mad. Subjecting herself to isolation and squalor and terrible danger, she had attained control, mental and physical, over every sound she uttered. An intelligence no longer impeded by the blight of stuttering.

  And intelligence was what he was hearing, Merry's quick, sharp, studious brain, the logical mind she'd had since earliest childhood. And hearing it opened him up to pain such as he had never before imagined. The intelligence was intact and yet she was mad, her logic a brand of logic bereft totally of the power to reason with which it had already entwined itself by the time she was ten. It was absurd—this being reasonable with her was his madness. Sitting there trying to act as though he were respectful of her religion when her religion consisted of an absolute failure to understand what life is and is not. The two of them acting as if he had come there to be educated. Being lectured, by her!

  "...we do not understand salvation as in any way the union of the human soul with something beyond itself. The spirit of Jain piety lives in founder Mahavira's saying, 'O man, thou art thine own friend. Why seekest thou for a friend beyond thyself?'"

  "Merry, did you do it? I must ask you this now. Did you do it?"

  It was the question he had expected to ask her first, once they had reached her room and before everything else that was horrible began painfully to be sifted through and scrutinized. He thought he had waited because he did not want her to think that his first consideration was anything other than at long last seeing her and seeing to her, attending to her well-being; but now that he had asked, he knew that he hadn't already asked because he could not bear to hear an answer.

  "Do what, Daddy?"

  "Did you bomb the post office?"

  "Yes."

  "You intended to blow up Hamlin's too?"

  "There was no other way to do it."

  "Except not to do it. Merry, you must tell me now who made you do it?"

  "Lyndon Johnson."

  "That will not do. No! Answer me. Who talked you into it? Who brainwashed you? Who did you do it for?"

  There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, "Lead me not into temptation." If people were not led by others, why was that the famous prayer that it was? A child who had been blessed with every privilege could not have done this on her own. Blessed with love. Blessed with a loving and ethical and prosperous family. Who had enlisted her and lured her into this?

  "How
strongly you still crave the idea" she said, "of your innocent offspring."

  "Who was it? Don't protect them. Who is responsible?"

  "Daddy, you can detest me alone. It's all right."

  "You are telling me you did it all on your own. Knowing that Hamlin's would be destroyed too. That's what you are saying."

  "Yes. I am the abomination. Abhor me."

  He remembered then something she had written in the sixth or seventh grade, before she'd gone on to Morristown High. The students in her class at her Montessori school were asked ten questions about their "philosophy," one a week. The first week the teacher asked, "Why are we here?" Instead of writing as the other kids did—here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc.—Merry answered with her own question: "Why are apes here?" But the teacher found this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question more seriously—"Expand on this," the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: "Why are kangaroos here?" It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher that she had a "stubborn streak." The final question assigned to the class was "What is life?" Merry's answer was something her father and mother chuckled over together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily away with their phony deep thoughts, she—after an hour of thinking at her desk—wrote a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: "Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive." "You know," said the Swede, "it's smarter than it sounds. She's a kid—how has she figured out that life is short? She is somethin', our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard." But once again the teacher didn't agree, and she wrote beside Merry's answer, "Is that all?" Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank God, that is all; even that is unendurable.

  The truth was that he had known all along: without a tempter's assistance, everything angry inside her had broken into the open. She was unintimidated, she was unintimidatable, this child who had written for her teacher not, like the other kids, that life was a beautiful gift and a great opportunity and a noble endeavor and a blessing from God but that it was just a short period of time in which you were alive. Yes, the intention had been all her own. That had to be. Her antagonism had been intent on murder and nothing less. Otherwise this mad repose would not be the result.

  He tried to let reason rise once again to the surface. How hard he tried. What does a reasonable man say next? If, after being battered and once again brought nearly to tears by what he'd just heard uttered so matter-of-factly—everything incredible uttered so matter-of-factly—a man could hold on and be reasonable, what does he go ahead to say? What does a reasonable, responsible father say if he is able still to feel intact as a father?

  "Merry, may I tell you what I think? I think you are terrified of being punished for what you've done. I think that rather than evade your punishment you have taken it into your own hands. I don't believe that's a difficult conclusion to reach, honey. I don't believe I'm the only person in the world who, seeing you here, seeing you here looking like this, would come up with that idea. You're a good girl and so you want to do penance. But this is not penance. Not even the state would punish you like this. I have to say these things, Merry. I have to tell you truthfully what this looks like to me."

  "Of course you do."

  "Just look at what you've done to yourself—you are going to die if you keep this up. Another year of this and you will die—from self-starvation, from malnutrition, from filth. You cannot go back and forth every day under those railroad tracks. That underpass is a home for derelicts—for derelicts who do not play by your rules. Their world is a ruthless world, Merry, a terrible world—a violent world."

  "They won't harm me. They know that I love them."

  The words sickened him, the flagrant childishness, the sentimental grandiosity of the self-deception. What does she see in the hopeless scurryings of these wretched people that could justify such an idea? Derelicts and love? To be a derelict living in an underpass is to have clobbered out of you a hundred times over the minutest susceptibility to love. This was awful. Now that her speech is finally cleared of the stuttering, all that comes through is this junk. What he had dreamed about—that his wonderful, gifted child would one day stop stuttering—had come to pass. She had mastered miraculously the agitated stuttering only to reveal, at the eye of the storm that was her erupted personality, this insane clarity and calm. What a great revenge to take: This is what you wanted, Daddy? Well, here it is.

  Her being able successfully to explain and to talk was now the worst thing of all.

  The harshness he felt but didn't want her to hear was in his voice nonetheless when he said, "You will meet a violent end, Meredith. Keep trying them out twice a day, keep it up and you'll find out just how much they know about your love. Their hunger, Merry, is not for love. Somebody will kill you!"

  "But only to be reborn."

  "I doubt that, honey. I seriously doubt that."

  "Will you concede that my guess is as good as yours, Dad?"

  "Won't you at least take off that mask while we're talking? So I can see you?"

  "See me stutter, do you mean?"

  "Well, I don't know if wearing that is what accounts for the disappearance of your stutter or not. You tell me that it has. You tell me that the stutter was only your way of doing no violence to the air and the things that live in the air ... is that correct? Have I understood what you were saying?"

  "Yes."

  "Well ... even if I were to concede that, I have to tell you I think you might eventually have a better life with your stutter. I don't minimize the hardship it was for you. But if it turns out you had to carry things to this extreme to be rid of that damn thing ... then I really do wonder ... well, if it's the best trade-off imaginable."

  "You can't explain away what I've done by motives, Daddy. I certainly wouldn't explain away what you've done by motives."

  "But I do have motives. Everyone has motives."

  "You cannot reduce the journey of a soul to that kind of psychology. It is not worthy of you."

  "Then you explain it. Explain it to me, please. How do you explain that when you took all this ... what looks to me like misery and nothing more, that when you did that, took upon yourself real suffering, which is all this is, suffering that you have chosen, Merry, real suffering and nothing more or less than suffering"—his voice was wavering but on he went, reasonable, reasonable, responsible, responsible—"then, only then—do you see what I'm saying?—the stutter vanished?"

  "I've told you. I am done with craving and selfhood."

  "Sweet, sweet child and girl." He sat down amid the filth of the floor, helpless to do anything other than try to his utmost not to lose control.

  In the tiny room, where they now sat no more than an arm's length from each other, there was no light other than what fell through the dirty transom. She lived without light. Why? Had she renounced the vice of electricity too? She lived without light, she lived without everything. This was how their life had worked out: she lived in Newark with nothing, he lived in Old Rimrock with everything except her. Was his good fortune to blame for that too? The revenge of the have-nots upon those who have and own. All the self-styled have-nots, the playacting Rita Cohens seeking to associate themselves with their parents' worst enemies, modeling themselves on whatever was most loathsome to those who most loved them.

  There used to be a slogan she'd crayoned in two colors on a piece of cardboard, a handmade poster that she'd hung over her desk, replacing his Weequahic football pennant; the poster had hung there undisturbed all during the year before her disappearance. Till it went up, she had always coyly coveted the Weequahic pennant because the Swede's high school sweetheart had taken it to sewing class in 1943 and stitched into the felt along the bottom edge of the orange and brown triangle, in thick white thread, "To All-City Levov, XXXX, Arlene." The poster was the only thing he had dared to remove from her room and de
stroy, and even doing that much had taken three months; appropriating the property of another, adult or child, was simply repugnant to him. But three months after the bombing he marched up the stairs and into her room and tore the poster down. It read: "We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmares." In large square letters the attribution: "WEATHERMEN MOTTO." And because he was a tolerant man he'd tolerated that too. "Honky" in his daughter's hand. Hanging there for a year in his own home, each red letter shadowed heavily in black.

  And because even though he hadn't liked it one bit he did not believe it was his right blah-blah blah-blah blah, because—out of regard for her property and her personal freedom—he couldn't even pull down an awful poster, because he was not capable of even that much righteous violence, now the hideous realization of the nightmare had come along to test even further the limits of his enlightened tolerance. She thinks if she raises a hand she'll swat and kill an innocent mite that is innocently floating by her—so in touch is she with the environment that any and every move she makes will have the most stupendously dire consequences—and he thinks that if he removes a hateful and disgusting poster that she has put up, he'll do damage to her integrity, to her psyche, to her First Amendment rights. No, he wasn't a Jain, thought the Swede, but he might as well have been—he was just as pathetically and naively nonviolent. The idiocy of the uprightness of the goals he had set.

  "Who is Rita Cohen?" he asked.

  "I don't know. Who is she?"

  "The girl who came to me in your behalf. In '68. After you disappeared. She came to my office."

  "Nobody has ever come to you in my behalf, no one I have ever sent."

  "Yes, a short little girl. Very pale. Her hair in an Afro. Dark hair. I gave her your ballet slippers and your Audrey Hepburn scrapbook and your diary. Is she the person who put you up to this? Is she the person who made the bomb? You used to talk to somebody on the phone when you were still at home—those secret conversations you had." The secret conversations that, like the poster, he had also "respected." If only he had torn down that poster and pulled the plug on her phone and locked her up then and there! "Was that the person?" he asked her now. "Tell me the truth, please."