by Philip Roth
He calls his brother. It is the wrong brother from whom to seek consolation, but what can he do? When it comes to consolation, it is always the wrong brother, the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wrong wife, which is why one must be content to console oneself and be strong and go on in life consoling others. But he needs some relief from this rape, needs the rape taken out of his heart, where it is stabbing him to death, he cannot put up with it, and so he calls the only brother he has. If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this. Nothing else can be made to come true.
It is half past five on a Friday afternoon. Jerry is in the office seeing postoperative patients. But he can talk, he says. The patients can wait. "What is it? What's wrong with you?"
He has only to hear Jerry's voice, the impatience in it, the acerbic cocksuredness in it, to think, He's no good to me. "I found her. I just came from Merry. I found her in Newark. She's here. In a room. I saw her. What this girl has been through, what she looks like, where she lives—you can't imagine it. You cannot begin to imagine it." He proceeds to recount her story, not breaking down, trying to repeat what she said to him about where she had been, how she had lived, and what had become of her, trying to get it into his head, his own head, trying to find in his head the room for it all when he could not even find enough room for that room in which she lived. He comes closest to crying when he tells his brother that she had twice been raped.
"Are you done?" asks Jerry.
"What?"
"If you're done, if that's it, tell me what you are going to do now. What are you going to do, Seymour?"
"I don't know what there is to do. She did it. She blew up Hamlin's. She killed Conlon." He cannot tell him about Oregon and the other three. "She did it on her own."
"Well, sure she did it. Jesus. Who did we think did it? Where is she now, in that room?"
"Yes. It's awful."
"Then go back to the room and get her."
"I can't. She won't let me. She wants me to leave her alone."
"Fuck what she wants. Get back in your fucking car and get over there and drag her out of that fucking room by her hair. Sedate her. Tie her up. But get her. Listen to me. You're paralyzed. I'm not the one who thinks holding his family together is the most important thing in existence—you are. Get back in that car and get her!"
"That won't work. I can't drag her. There's more to this than you understand. Once you get beyond the point of forcing somebody back into their house—then what? There's bravado about it—but then what? It's complicated, too complicated. It won't work your way."
"That's just the way it works."
"She killed three other people. She has killed four people."
"Fuck the four people. What's the matter with you? You're acceding to her the way you acceded to your father, the way you have acceded to everything in your life."
"She was raped. She's crazy, she's gone crazy. You just look at her and you know it. Twice she was raped."
"What did you think was going to happen? You sound surprised. Of course she got raped. Either get off your ass and do something or she's going to get raped for a third time. Do you love her or don't you love her?"
"How can you ask that?"
"You force me to."
"Please, not now, don't tear me down, don't undermine me. I love my daughter. I never loved anything more in the world."
"As a thing."
"What? What is that?"
"As a thing—you loved her as a fucking thing. The way you love your wife. Oh, if someday you could become conscious of why you are doing what you are doing. Do you know why? Do you have any idea? Because you're afraid of creating a bad scene! You're afraid of letting the beast out of the bag!"
"What are you talking about? What beast? What beast?" No, he is not expecting perfect consolation, but this attack—why is he launching this attack without even the pretext of consoling? Why, when he has just explained to Jerry how everything has turned out thousands and thousands of times worse than the worst they'd expected?
"What are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it's going to hurt somebody's feelings. What you are is you're always compromising. What you are is always complacent. What you are is always trying to find the bright side of things. The one with the manners. The one who abides everything patiently. The one with the ultimate decorum. The boy who never breaks the code. Whatever society dictates, you do. Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter spit in it for you, didn't she? Four people? Quite a critique she has made of decorum."
If he hangs up, he will be alone in that hallway behind the man who is waiting behind the man who is down on the stairs tearing at Merry, he will be seeing everything he does not want to see, knowing everything he cannot stand to know. He cannot sit there imag ining the rest of that story. If he hangs up, he will never know what Jerry has to say after he says all this stuff that he for some reason wants to say about the beast. What beast? All his relations with people are like this—it isn't an attack on me, it is Jerry. Nobody can control him. He was born like this. I knew that before I called him. I've known it all my life. We do not live the same way. A brother who isn't a brother. I panicked. I am in a panic. This is panic. I called the worst person to call in the world. This is a guy who wields a knife for a living. Remedies what is ailing with a knife. Cuts out what is rotting with a knife. I am on the ropes, I am dealing with something that nobody can deal with, and for him it's business as usual—he just keeps coming at me with his knife.
"I'm not the renegade," the Swede says. "I'm not the renegade—you are."
"No, you're not the renegade. You're the one who does everything right."
"I don't follow this. You say that like an insult." Angrily he says, "What the hell is wrong with doing things right?"
"Nothing. Nothing. Except that's what your daughter has been blasting away at all her life. You don't reveal yourself to people, Seymour. You keep yourself a secret. Nobody knows what you are. You certainly never let her know who you are. That's what she's been blasting away at—that facade. All your fucking norms. Take a good look at what she did to your norms."
"I don't know what you want from me. You've always been too smart for me. Is this your response? Is this it?"
"You win the trophy. You always make the right move. You're loved by everybody. You marry Miss New Jersey, for God's sake. There's thinking for you. Why did you marry her? For the appearance. Why do you do everything? For the appearance!"
"I loved her! I opposed my own father I loved her so much!"
Jerry is laughing. "Is that what you believe? You really think you stood up to him? You married her because you couldn't get out of it. Dad raked her over the coals in his office and you sat there and didn't say shit. Well, isn't that true?"
"My daughter is in that room, Jerry. What is this all about?"
But Jerry does not hear him. He hears only himself. Why is this Jerry's grand occasion to tell his brother the truth? Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harboring for you for all these years? What in your suffering makes their superiority so fulsome, so capacious, makes the expression of it so enjoyable? Why this occasion for launching his protest at living in the shadow of me? Why, if he had to tell me all this, couldn't he have told it to me when I was feeling my oats? Why does he even believe he's in my shadow? Miami's biggest cardiac surgeon! The heart victim's savior, Dr. Levov!
"Dad? He fucking let you slide through—don't you know that? If Dad had said, Took, you'll never get my approval for this, never, I am not having grandchildren half this and half that,' then you would have had to make a choice. Bu
t you never had to make a choice. Never. Because he let you slide through. Everybody has always let you slide through. And that is why, to this day, nobody knows who you are. You are unrevealed—that is the story, Seymour, unrevealed. That is why your own daughter decided to blow you away. You are never straight about anything and she hated you for it. You keep yourself a secret. You don't choose ever."
"Why are you saying this? What do you want me to choose? What are we talking about?"
"You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy—she's out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that loopy world out there, with what's going on out there—what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, New Jersey, of course she doesn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the world. She can't get enough of it—she's still acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You're still in your old man's dreamworld, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life—ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the great one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is!"
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964.
"You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance—she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone—and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of the hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts: if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The message is simple: You will take me as I come—there is no choice. He cannot endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose.
And these two are brothers, the same parents' sons, one for whom the aggression's been bred out, the other for whom the aggression's been bred in.
"If you were a father who loved his daughter," Jerry shouts at the Swede, "you would never have left her in that room! You would never have let her out of your sight!"
The Swede is in tears at his desk. It is as though Jerry has been waiting all his life for this phone call. That something's grotesquely out of whack has made him furious with his older brother, and now there is nothing he will not say. All his life, thinks the Swede, waiting to lay into me with these terrible things. People are infallible: they pick up on what you want and then they don't give it to you.
"I didn't want to leave her," says the Swede. "You don't understand. You don't want to understand. That isn't why I left her. It killed me to leave her! You don't understand me, you won't. Why do you say I don't love her? This is terrible. Horrible." He suddenly sees his vomit on her face and he cries out, "Everything is horrible!"
"Now you're getting it. Right! My brother is developing the beginning of a point of view. A point of view of his own instead of everybody else's point of view. Taking something other than the party line. Good. Now we're getting somewhere. Thinking becoming just a little untranquilized. Everything is horrible. And so what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Look, do you want me to come up there and get her? Do you want me to get her, yes or no?"
"No."
"Then why did you call me?"
"I don't know. To help me."
"Nobody can help you."
"You're a hard man. You are a hard man with me."
"Yeah, I don't come off looking very good. I never do. Ask our father if I do. You're the one who always comes off looking good. And look where it's got you. Refusing to give offense. Blaming yourself. Tolerant respect for every position. Sure, it's 'liberal'—I know, a liberal father. But what does that mean? What is at the center of it? Always holding things together. And look where the fuck it's got you!"
"I didn't make the war in Vietnam. I didn't make the television war. I didn't make Lyndon Johnson Lyndon Johnson. You forget where this begins. Why she threw the bomb. That fucking war."
"No, you didn't make the war. You made the angriest kid in America. Ever since she was a kid, every word she spoke was a bomb."
"I gave her all I could, everything, everything, I gave everything. I swear to you I gave everything." And now he is crying easily, there is no line between him and his crying, and an amazing new experience it is—he is crying as though crying like this has been the great aim of his life, as though all along crying like this was his most deeply held ambition, and now he has achieved it, now that he remembers everything he gave and everything she took, all the spontaneous giving and taking that had filled their lives and that one day, inexplicably (despite whatever Jerry might say, despite all the blame that it is his pleasure now to heap upon the Swede), quite inexplicably, became repugnant to her. "You talk about what I'm dealing with as though anybody could deal with it. But nobody could deal with it. Nobody! Nobody has the weapons for this. You think I'm inept? You think I'm inadequate? If I'm inadequate, where are you going to get people who are adequate ... if I'm ... do you understand what I'm saying? What am I supposed to be? What are other people if I am inadequate?"
"Oh, I understand you."
Crying easily was always about as difficult for the Swede as losing his balance when he walked or deliberately being a bad influence on somebody; crying easily was something he sometimes almost envied in other people. But whatever chunks and fragments remain of the big manly barrier against crying, his brother's response to his pain demolishes. "If what you are telling me is what I was..." he begins, "...wasn't, wasn't enough, then, then ... I'm telling you— I'm telling you that what anybody is is not enough."
"You got it! Exactly! We are not enough. We are none of us enough! Including even the man who does everything right! Doing things right," Jerry says with disgust, "going around in this world doing things right. Look, are you going to break with appearances and pit your will against your daughter's or aren't you? Out on the field you did it. That's how you scored, remember? You pitted your will against the other guy's and you scored. Pretend it's a game if that helps. It doesn't help. For the typical male activity you're there, the man of action, but this isn't the typical male activity. Okay. Can't see yourself doing that. Can only see yourself playing ball and maki
ng gloves and marrying Miss America. Out there with Miss America, dumbing down and dulling out. Out there playing at being Wasps, a little Mick girl from the Elizabeth docks and a Jewboy from Weequahic High. The cows. Cow society. Colonial old America. And you thought all that facade was going to come without cost. Genteel and innocent. But that costs, too, Seymour. I would have thrown a bomb. I would become a Jain and live in Newark. That Wasp bullshit! I didn't know just how entirely muffled you were internally. But this is how muffled you are. Our old man really swaddled you but good. What do you want, Seymour? You want to bail out? That's all right too. Anybody else would have bailed out a long time ago. Go ahead, bail out. Admit her contempt for your life and bail out. Admit that there is something very personal about you that she hates and bail the fuck out and never see the bitch again. Admit that she's a monster, Seymour. Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters. Bail out! But if you are not going to bail out, if that is what you are calling to tell me, then for Christ's sake go in there and get her. I'll go in and get her. How about that? Last chance. Last offer. You want me to come, I'll clear out the office and get on a plane and I'll come. And I'll go in there, and, I assure you, I'll get her off the McCarter Highway, the little shit, the selfish little fucking shit, playing her fucking games with you! She won't play them with me, I assure you. Do you want that or not?"