by Philip Roth
"I don't want that." These things Jerry thinks he knows that he doesn't know. His idea that things are connected. But there ¿5 no connection. How we lived and what she did? Where she was raised and what she did? It's as disconnected as everything else—it's all a part of the same mess! He is the one who knows nothing. Jerry rants. Jerry thinks he can escape the bewilderment by ranting, shouting, but everything he shouts is wrong. None of this is true. Causes, clear answers, who there is to blame. Reasons. But there are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books. Could how we lived as a family ever have come back as this bizarre horror? It couldn't. It hasn't. Jerry tries to rationalize it but you can't. This is all something else, something he knows absolutely nothing about. No one does. It is not rational. It is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish. "I don't want that," the Swede tells him. "I can't have that."
"Too brutal for you. In this world, too brutal. The daughter's a murderer but this is too brutal. A drill instructor in the Marine Corps but this is too brutal. Okay, Big Swede, gentle giant. I got a waiting room full of patients. You're on your own."
III. Paradise Lost
7
IT WAS the summer of the Watergate hearings. The Levovs had spent nearly every night on the back porch watching the replay of the day's session on Channel 13. Before the farm equipment and the cattle had been sold off, it was from there, on warm evenings, that they looked out onto Dawn's herd grazing along the rim of the hill. Up a ways from the house was a field of eighteen acres, and some years they'd have the cows up there all summer and forget them. But if they were merely out of sight nearby, and Merry, in her pajamas, wanted to see them before she went to bed, Dawn would call out, "Hereboy, Hereboy," the kind of thing people had been calling to them for thousands of years, and they'd sound off in return and start up the hill and out from the swamp, come out of wherever they were, bellowing their response as they trudged toward the sound of Dawn's voice. "Aren't they beautiful, our girls?" Dawn would ask her daughter, and the next day Merry and Dawn would be out at sunrise getting them all together again, and he'd hear Dawn say, "Okay, we're going to cross the road," and Merry would open the gate and just with a stick and the dog, Apu the Australian sheepdog, mother and tiny daughter would move some twelve or fifteen or eighteen beasts, each weighing about two thousand pounds. Merry, Apu, and Dawn, sometimes the vet, and the boy down the road to help with the fencing and the haying when an extra hand was needed. I've got Merry to help me hay. If there's a stray calf Merry gets after it. Seymour goes in there and those two cows will be very unpleasant, they 11 paw the grass, they'll shake their heads at him—but Merry goes in, well, they know her, and they just tell her what they want. They know her and they know exactly what she's going to do with them.
How could she ever say to him, "I don't want to talk about my mother"? What in God's name had her mother done? What crime had her mother committed? The crime of being gentle master to these compliant cows?
During this last week, while his parents had been with them, up from Florida for the annual late-summer visit, Dawn hadn't even worried about keeping the two of them entertained. Whenever she returned from the new building site or drove back from the architect's office, they were seated before the set with the father-in-law in the role of assistant counsel to the committee. Her in-laws watched the proceedings all day and then saw the whole thing over again at night. In what time he had left to himself during the day, the Swede's father composed letters to the committee members which he read to everyone at dinner. "Dear Senator Weicker: You're surprised at what was going on in Tricky Dicky's White House? Don't be a shnook. Harry Truman had him figured out in 1948 when he called him Tricky Dicky." "Dear Senator Gurney: Nixon equals Typhoid Mary. Everything he touches he poisons, you included." "Dear Senator Baker: You want to know WHY? Because they're a bunch of common criminals, that's WHY!" "Dear Mr. Dash:" he wrote to the committee's New York counsel, "I applaud you. God bless you. You make me proud to be an American and a Jew."
His greatest contempt he reserved for a relatively insignificant figure, a lawyer named Kalmbach, who'd arranged for large illegal contributions to sift into the Watergate operation, and whose disgrace could not be profound enough to suit the old man. "Dear Mr. Kalmbach: If you were a Jew and did what you did the whole world would say, 'See those Jews, real money-grubbers.' But who is the money-grubber, my dear Mr. Country Club? Who is the thief and the cheat? Who is the American and who is the gangster? Your smooth talk never fooled me, Mr. Country Club Kalmbach. Your golf never fooled me. Your manners never fooled me. Your clean hands I always knew were dirty. And now the whole world knows. You should be ashamed."
"You think I'll get an answer from the son of a bitch? I ought to publish these in a book. I ought to find somebody to print 'em up and just distribute them free so people could know what an ordinary American feels when these sons of bitches ... look, look at that one, look at him." Ehrlichman, Nixon's former chief of staff, had appeared on the screen.
"He makes me nauseous," the Swede's mother said. "Him and that Tricia."
"Please, she's unimportant," her husband said. "This is a real fascist—the whole bunch of 'em, Von Ehrlichman, Von Haldeman, Von Kalmbach—"
"She still makes me nauseous," his wife said. "You'd think she was a princess, the way they carry on about her."
"These so-called patriots," Lou Levov said to Dawn, "would take this country and make Nazi Germany out of it. You know the book It Can't Happen Here? There's a wonderful book, I forget the author, but the idea couldn't be more up-to-the-moment. These people have taken us to the edge of something terrible. Look at that son of a bitch."
"I don't know which one I hate more," his wife said, "him or the other one."
"They're the same thing," the old man told her, "they're interchangeable, the whole bunch of them."
Merry's legacy. That his father might have been no less incensed if she were there, sitting with them all in front of the set, the Swede recognized, but now that she was gone who better was there to hate for what had become of her than these Watergate bastards?
It was during the Vietnam War that Lou Levov had begun mailing Merry copies of the letters he sent to President Johnson, letters that he had written to influence Merry's behavior more than the president's. Seeing his teenage granddaughter as enraged with the war as he could get when things started to go too wrong with the business, the old man became so distressed that he would take his son aside and say, "Why does she care? Where does she even get this stuff? Who feeds it to her? What's the difference to her anyway? Does she carry on like this at school? She can't do this at school, she could harm her chances at school. She can harm her chances for college. In public people won't put up with it, they'll chop her head off, she's only a child...." To control, if he could, not so much Merry's opinions as the ferocity with which she sputtered them out, he would ostentatiously ally himself with her by sending articles clipped from the Florida papers and inscribed in the margins with his own antiwar slogans. When he was visiting he would read aloud to her from the portfolio of his Johnson letters that he carried around the house under his arm—in his effort to save her from herself, tagging after the child as though he were the child. "We've got to nip this in the bud," he confided to his son. "This won't do, not at all."
"Well," he'd say—after reading to Merry yet another plea to the president reminding him what a great country America was, what a great president FDR had been, how much his own family owed to this country and what a personal disappointment it was to him and his loved ones that American boys were halfway around the world fighting somebody else's battle when they ought to be at home with their loved ones—"well, what do you think of your grandfather?"
"J-j-johnson's a war criminal," she'd say. "He's not going to s-s-s-stop the w-w-war, Grandpa, because you tell him to."
"He's also a man trying to do his job, you know."
"He's an imperialist dog."
"Well, that is one
opinion."
"There's no d-d-d-difference between him and Hitler."
"You're exaggerating, sweetheart. I don't say Johnson didn't let us down. But you forget what Hitler did to the Jews, Merry dear. You weren't born then, so you don't remember."
"He did nothing that Johnson isn't doing to the Vietnamese."
"The Vietnamese aren't being put into concentration camps."
"Vietnam is one b-b-big camp! The 'American boys' aren't the issue. That's like saying, 'Get the storm troopers out of Auschwitz in time for Chris-chris-chris-christmas."'
"I gotta be political with the guy, sweetheart. I can't write the guy and call him a murderer and expect that he's going to listen. Right, Seymour?"
"I don't think that would help," the Swede said.
"Merry, we all feel the way you do," her grandfather told her. "Do you understand that? Believe me, I know what it is to read the newspaper and start to go nuts. Father Coughlin, that son of a bitch. The hero Charles Lindbergh—pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler, and a so-called national hero in this country. Mr. Gerald L. K. Smith. The great Senator Bilbo. Sure we have bastards in this country—homegrown and plenty of 'em. Nobody denies that. Mr. Rankin. Mr. Dies. Mr. Dies and his committee. Mr. J. Parnell Thomas from New Jersey. Isolationist, bigoted, know-nothing fascists right there in the U.S. Congress, crooks like J. Parnell Thomas, crooks who wound up in jail and their salaries were paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Awful people. The worst. Mr. McCarran. Mr. Jenner. Mr. Mundt. The Goebbels from Wisconsin, the Honorable Mr. McCarthy, may he burn in hell. His sidekick Mr. Cohn. A disgrace. A Jew and a disgrace! There have always been sons of bitches here just like there are in every country, and they have been voted into office by all those geniuses out there who have the right to vote. And what about the newspapers? Mr. Hearst. Mr. McCormick. Mr. Westbrook Pegler. Real fascist, reactionary dogs. And I have hated their guts. Ask your father. Haven't I, Seymour—hated them?"
"You have."
"Honey, we live in a democracy. Thank God for that. You don't have to go around getting angry with your family. You can write letters. You can vote. You can get up on a soapbox and make a speech. Christ, you can do what your father did—you can join the marines."
"Oh, Grandpa—the marines are the prob-prob-prob—"
"Then damn it, Merry, join the other side," he said, momentarily losing his grip. "How's that? You can join their marines if you want to. It's been done. That's true. Look at history. When you're old enough you can go over and fight for the other army if you want it. I don't recommend it. People don't like it, and I think you're smart enough to understand why they don't. 'Traitor' isn't a pleasant thing to be called. But it's been done. It's an option. Look at Benedict Arnold. Look at him. He did it. He went over to the other side, as far as I remember. From school. And I suppose I respect him. He had guts. He stood up for what he believed in. He risked his own life for what he believed in. But he happened to be wrong, Merry, in my estimation. He went over to the other side in the Revolutionary War and, as far as I'm concerned, the man was dead wrong. Now you don't happen to be wrong. You happen to be right. This family is one hundred percent against this goddamn Vietnam thing. You don't have to rebel against your family because your family is not in disagreement with you. You are not the only person around here against this war. We are against it. Bobby Kennedy is against it—"
"Now," said Merry, with disgust.
"Okay, now. Now is better than not now, isn't it? Be realistic, Merry—it doesn't help anything not to be. Bobby Kennedy is against it. Senator Eugene McCarthy is against it. Senator Javits is against it, and he's a Republican. Senator Frank Church is against it. Senator Wayne Morse is against it. And how he is. I admire that man. I've written him to tell him and I have gotten the courtesy of a hand-signed reply. Senator Fulbright, of course, is against it. It's Fulbright who, admittedly, introduced the Tonkin Gulf resolu—"
"F-f-f-ful—"
"Nobody is saying—"
"Dad," said the Swede, "let Merry finish."
"I'm sorry, honey," said Lou Levov. "Finish."
"Ful-ful-fulbright is a racist."
"Is he? What are you talking about? Senator William Fulbright from Arkansas? Come on with that stuff. I think there's where you've got your facts wrong, my friend." She had slandered one of his heroes who'd stood up to Joe McCarthy, and to prevent himself from lashing out at her about Fulbright took a supreme effort of will. "But now just let me finish what I was saying. What was I saying? Where was I? Where the hell was I, Seymour?"
"Your point," the Swede said, acting evenhandedly as the moderator for these two dynamos, a role he preferred to being the adversary of either, "is that both of you are against the war and want it to stop. There's no reason for you to argue on that issue—I believe that's your point. Merry feels it's all gone beyond writing letters to the president. She feels that's futile. You feel that, futile or not, it's something within your power to do and you're going to do it, at least to continue to put yourself on record."
"Exactly!" the old man cried. "Here, listen to what I tell him here. 'I am a lifetime Democrat.' Merry, listen—T am a lifetime Democrat—'"
But nothing he told the president ended the war, nor did anything he told Merry nip the catastrophe in the bud. Yet alone in the family he had seen it coming. "I saw it coming. I saw it clear as day. I saw it. I knew it. I sensed it. I fought it. She was out of control. Something was wrong. I could smell it. I told you. 'Something has to be done about that child. Something is going wrong with that child.' And it went in one ear and out the other. I got, 'Dad, take it easy.' I got, 'Dad, don't exaggerate. Dad, it's a phase. Lou, leave her alone, don't argue with her.' 'No, I will not leave her alone. This is my granddaughter. I refuse to leave her alone. I refuse to lose a granddaughter by leaving her alone. Something is haywire with that child.' And you looked at me like I was nuts. All of you. Only I wasn't nuts. I was right. With a vengeance I was right!"
There were no messages for him when he got home. He had been praying for a message from Mary Stoltz.
"Nothing?" he said to Dawn, who was in the kitchen preparing a salad out of greens she'd pulled from the garden.
"Nope."
He poured a drink for himself and his father and carried the glasses out to the back porch, where the set was still on.
"You going to make a steak, darling?" his mother asked him.
"Steak, corn, salad, and Merry's big beefsteak tomatoes." He'd meant Dawn's tomatoes but did not correct himself once it was out.
"No one makes a steak like you," she said, after the first shock of his words had worn off.
"Good, Ma."
"My big boy. Who could want a better son?" she said, and when he embraced her she went to pieces for the first time that week. "I'm sorry. I was remembering the phone calls."
"I understand," he said.
"She was a little girl. You'd call, you'd put her on, and she'd say, 'Hi, Grandma! Guess what?' 'I don't know, honey—what?' And she'd tell me."
"Come on, you've been terrific so far. You can keep it up. Come on. Buck up."
"I was looking at the snapshots, when she was a baby..."
"Don't look at them," he said. "Try not to look at them. You can do it, Ma. You have to."
"Oh, darling, you're so brave, you're such an inspiration, it's such a tonic when we come to see you. I love you so."
"Good, Ma. I love you. But you mustn't lose control in front of Dawn."
"Yes, yes, whatever you say."
"That's my girl."
His father, continuing to watch the television set—and after having miraculously contained himself for ten full days—said to him, "No news."
"No news," the Swede replied.
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"O-kay," his father said, feigning fatalism, "o-kay—if that's the way it is, that's the way it is," and went back to watching TV.
"Do you still think she's in Canada, Seymour?" his mother asked.
"I
never thought she was in Canada."
"But that's where the boys went..."
"Look, why don't we save this discussion? There's nothing wrong with asking questions but Dawn will be in and out—"
"I'm sorry, you're right," his mother replied. "I'm terribly sorry."
"Not that the situation has changed, Mother. Everything is exactly the same."
"Seymour..." She hesitated. "Darling, one question. If she gave herself up now, what would happen? Your father says—"
"Why are you bothering him with that?" his father said. "He told you about Dawn. Learn to control yourself."