American Pastoral (Nathan Zuckerman)

by Philip Roth

  "Me control myself?"

  "Mother, you must stop thinking these thoughts. She is gone. She may never want to see us again."

  "Why?" his father erupted. "Of course she wants to see us again. This I refuse to believe!"

  "Now who's controlling himself?" his mother asked.

  "Of course she wants to see us again. The problem is she can't."

  "Lou dear," his mother said, "there are children, even in ordinary families, who grow up and go away and that's the end of it."

  "But not at sixteen. For Christ's sake, not under these circumstances. What are you talking about 'ordinary' families? We are an ordinary family. This is a child who needs help. This is a child who is in trouble and we are not a family who walks out on a child in trouble!"

  "She's twenty years old, Dad. Twenty-one."

  "Twenty-one," his mother said, "last January."

  "Well, she's not a child," the Swede told them. "All I'm saying is that you must not set yourself up for disappointment, neither of you."

  "Well, I don't," his father said. "I have more sense than that. I assure you I don't."

  "Well, you mustn't. I seriously doubt that we will ever see her again."

  The only thing worse than their never seeing her again would be their seeing her as he had left her on the floor of that room. Over these last few years, he had been moving them in the direction, if not of total resignation, of adaptation, of a realistic appraisal of the future. How could he now tell them what had happened to Merry, find words to describe it to them that would not destroy them? They haven't the faintest picture in their mind of what they'd see if they were to see her. Why does anyone have to know? What is so indispensable about any of them knowing?

  "You got reason to say that, son, that we'll never see her?"

  "The five years. The time that's gone by. That's reason enough."

  "Seymour, sometimes I'm walking on the street, and I'm behind someone, a girl who's walking in front of me, and if she's tall—"

  He took his mother's hands in his. "You think it's Merry."

  "Yes."

  "That happens to all of us."

  "I can't stop it."

  "I understand."

  "And every time the phone rings," she said.

  "I know."

  "I tell her," his father said, "that she wouldn't do it with a phone call anyway."

  "And why not?" she said to her husband. "Why not phone us? That's the safest thing she could possibly do, to phone us."

  "Ma, none of this speculation means anything. Why not try to keep it to a minimum tonight? I know you can't help having these thoughts. You can't be free of it, none of us can be. But you have to try. You can't make happen what you want to happen just by thinking about it. Try to free yourself from a little of it."

  "Whatever you say, darling," his mother replied. "I feel better now, just talking about it. I can't keep it inside me all the time."

  "I know. But we can't start whispering around Dawn."

  It was never difficult, as it was with his restless father—who spent so much of life in a transitional state between compassion and antagonism, between comprehension and blindness, between gentle intimacy and violent irritation—to know what to make of his mother. He had never feared battling with her, never uncertainly wondered what side she was on or worried what she might be inflamed by next. Unlike her husband, she was a big industry of nothing other than family love. Hers was a simple personality for whom the well-being of the boys was everything. Talking to her he'd felt, since earliest boyhood, as though he were stepping directly into her heart. With his father, to whose heart he had easy enough access, he had first to collide with that skull, the skull of a brawler, to split it open as bloodlessly as he could to get at whatever was inside.

  It was astonishing how small a woman she had become. But what hadn't been consumed by osteoporosis had, in the last five years, been destroyed by Merry. Now the vivacious mother of his youth, who well into middle age was being complimented on her youthful vigor, was an old lady, her spine twisted and bent, a hurt and puzzled expression embedded in the creases of her face. Now, when she did not realize people were watching her, tears would rise in her eyes, eyes bearing that look both long accustomed to living with pain and startled to have been in so much pain so long. Yet all his boyhood recollections (which, however hard to credit, he knew to be genuine; even the ruthlessly unillusioned Jerry would, if asked, have to corroborate them) were of his mother towering over the rest of them, a healthy, tall reddish blonde with a wonderful laugh, who adored being the woman in that masculine household. As a small child he had not found it nearly so odd and amazing as he did looking at her now to think that you could recognize people as easily by their laugh as by their face. Hers, back when she had something to laugh about, was light and like a bird in flight, rising, rising, and then, delightfully, if you were her child, rising yet again. He didn't even have to be in the same room to know where his mother was—he'd hear her laughing and could pinpoint her on the map of the house that was not so much in his brain as it was his brain (his cerebral cortex divided not into frontal lobes, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, and occipital lobes but into the downstairs, the upstairs, and the basement—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, etc.).

  What had been oppressing her when she arrived from Florida the week before was the letter she was carrying secreted in her purse, a letter addressed by Lou Levov to the second wife Jerry had left, from whom he had only recently separated. Sylvia Levov had been given a stack of letters to mail by her husband, but that one she simply could not send. Instead she had dared to go off alone and open it, and now she had brought the contents north with her to show Seymour. "You know what would happen with Jerry if Susan ever got this? You know the rampage Jerry would go on? He is not a boy without a temper. He never was. He's not you, dear, he is not a diplomat. But your father has to stick his nose in everywhere, and what the results will be means nothing to him, so long as he's got his nose in the wrong place. All he has to do is send her this, and put Jerry in the wrong like this, and there will be hell to pay with your brother—unmitigated hell."

  The letter, two pages long, began, "Dear Susie, The check enclosed is for you and for nobody else's information. It is found money. Put it somewhere where nobody knows about it. I'll say nothing and you say nothing. I want you to know that I have not forgotten you in my will. This money is yours to do whatever you want with. The children I'll take care of separately. But if you decide to invest it, and I strongly hope you do, my suggestion is gold stocks. The dollar isn't going to be worth a thing. I myself have just put ten thousand into three gold stocks. I will give you the names. Bennington Mines. Castworp Development. Schley-Waiggen Mineral Corp. Solid investments. I got the names from the Barrington Newsletter that has never steered me wrong yet."

  Stapled to the letter—stapled so that when she opened the letter the enclosure didn't just flutter away to get lost under the sofa—there was a check made out to Susan R. Levov for seventy-five hundred dollars. A check for twice that amount had gone off to her the day after she had called, sobbing and screaming for help, to say that Jerry had left her that morning for the new nurse in his office. The position of new nurse in the office was one that she had herself occupied before Jerry began the affair with her that ended in his divorcing his first wife. According to the Swede's mother, after Jerry found out about the check for fifteen thousand he proceeded over the phone to call his father "every name in the book," and that night, for the first time in his life, Lou Levov had chest pain that necessitated her calling their doctor at two A.M.

  And now, four months later, he was at it again. "Seymour, what should I do? He goes around screaming, 'A second divorce, a second broken family, more grandchildren in a broken home, three more wonderful children without parental guidance.' You know how he goes on. It's on and on, it's over and over, till I think I'm going out of my mind. 'Where did my son get so good at getting divorced? Who in the history
of this entire family has ever been divorced? No one!' I cannot take it anymore, dear. He screams at me, 'Why doesn't your son just go to a whorehouse? Marry a whore out of a whorehouse and get it over with!' He'll get in another fight with Jerry, and Jerry doesn't pull his punches. Jerry doesn't have your considerateness. He never did. When they had that fight about the coat, when Jerry made that coat out of the hamsters—do you remember? Maybe you were in the service by then. Hamster skins Jerry got somewhere, I think at school, and made them into a coat for some girl. He thought he was doing her a favor. But she received this thing, I think by mail, in a box, all wrapped up and it smelled to high heaven, and the girl burst into tears, and her mother telephoned, and your father was fit to be tied. He was mortified. And they had an argument, he and Jerry, and it scared me to death. A fifteen-year-old boy and he screamed so at his own father, his 'rights,' his 'rights,' you could have heard him on Broad and Market about his 'rights.' Jerry does not back down. He doesn't know the meaning of 'back down.' But now he won't be shouting at a man who is forty-five, he will be shouting at a man who is sevens-five, and with angina, and this time it won't be indigestion afterwards. There won't be a headache. This time there will be a full-scale heart attack." "There won't be a heart attack. Mother, calm down." "Did I do the wrong thing? I never touched another person's mail in my life. But how could I let him send this to Susan? Because she won't keep it to herself. She'll do what she did the last time. She'll use it against Jerry—she'll tell him. And this time Jerry will kill him." "Jerry won't kill him. He doesn't want to kill him and he won't. Mail it, Momma. You still have the envelope?" "Yes." "It isn't torn? You didn't tear it?" "I'm ashamed to tell you—it's not torn, I used steam. But I don't want him to drop dead." "He won't. He hasn't yet. You stay out of it, Ma. Mail Susan the envelope with the check, with the letter. And when Jerry calls, you just go out and take a walk." "And when he gets chest pains again?" "If he gets chest pains again, you'll call the doctor again. You just stay out of it. You cannot intervene to protect him from himself. It's too late in the day for that." "Oh, thank goodness I have you. You're the only one I can turn to. All your own troubles, all you've gone through, and you're the only one in this family who says things to me that are not completely insane."

  "Dawn's holding up?" his father asked.

  "She's doing fine."

  "She looks like a million bucks," his father said. "That girl looks like herself again. Getting rid of those cows was the smartest thing you ever did. I never liked 'em. I never saw why she needed them. Thank God for that face-lift. I was against it but I was wrong. Dead wrong. I got to admit it. That guy did a wonderful job. Thank God our Dawn doesn't look anymore like all that she went through."

  "He did do a great job," the Swede said. "Erased all that suffering. He gave her back her face." No longer does she have to look in the mirror at the record of her misery. It had been a brilliant stroke: she had got the thing out from directly in front of her.

  "But she's waiting. I see it, Seymour. A mother sees such things. Maybe you erase the suffering from the face, but you can't remove the memory inside. Under that face, the poor thing is waiting."

  "Dawn's not a poor thing, Ma. She's a fighter. She's fine. She's made tremendous strides." True—all the while he has been stoically enduring it she has made tremendous strides by finding it unendurable, by being devastated by it, destroyed by it, and then by denuding herself of it. She doesn't resist the blows the way he does; she receives the blows, falls apart, and when she gets herself up again, decides to make herself over. Nothing that isn't admirable in that—abandon first the face assaulted by the child, abandon next the house assaulted by the child. This is her life, after all, and she will get the original Dawn up and going again if it's the last thing she does. "Ma, let's stop this. Come on outside with me while I start the coals."

  "No," his mother said, looking ready to cry again. "Thank you, darling. I'll stay here with Daddy and watch the television."

  "You watched it all day. Come outside and help me."

  "No, thank you, dear."

  "She's waiting for them to get Nixon on," his father said. "When they get Nixon on and drive a stake through his heart, your mother will be in seventh heaven."

  "And you won't?" she said. "He can't sleep," she told the Swede, "because of that mamzer. He's up in the middle of the night writing him letters. Some I have to censor myself, I have to physically stop him, the language is so filthy."

  "That skunk!" the Swede's father said bitterly. "That miserable fascist dog!" and out of him, with terrifying force, poured a tirade of abuse, vitriol about the president of the United States that, absent the stuttering that never failed to impart to her abhorrence the exterminating adamance of a machine gun, Merry herself couldn't have topped in her heyday. Nixon liberates him to say anything—as Johnson liberated Merry. It is as though in his uncensored hatred of Nixon, Lou Levov is merely mimicking his granddaughter's vituperous loathing of LBJ. Get Nixon. Get the bastard in some way. Get Nixon and all will be well. If we can just tar and feather Nixon, America will be America again, without everything loathsome and lawless that's crept in, without all this violence and malice and madness and hate. Put him in a cage, cage the crook, and we'll have our great country back the way it was!

  Dawn ran in from the kitchen to see what was wrong, and soon they were all in tears, holding one another, huddled together and weeping on that big old back porch as though the bomb had been planted right under the house and the porch was all that was left of the place. And there was nothing the Swede could do to stop them or to stop himself.

  The family had never seemed so wrecked as this. Despite all that he had summoned up to lessen the aftershock of the day's horror and to prevent himself from cracking—despite the resolve with which he had rearmed himself after hurrying through the underpass and finding his car still there, undamaged, where he had left it on that grim Down Neck street; despite the resolve with which he had for a second time rearmed himself after Jerry pummeled him on the phone; despite the resolve he'd had to summon up a third time, beneath the razor ribbon of his parking lot fence, with the key to his car in his hand; despite the self-watchfulness, despite the painstaking impersonation of impregnability, despite the elaborate false front of self-certainty with which he was determined to protect those he loved from the four she had killed—he had merely to misspeak, to say "Merry's big beefsteak tomatoes" instead of "Dawn's," for them to sense that something unsurpassingly awful had happened.

  In addition to the Levovs there were six guests for dinner that evening. The first to arrive were Bill and Jessie Orcutt, Dawn's architect and his wife, who'd been friendly enough neighbors a few miles down the road all these years, in Orcutt's old family house, and became acquaintances and then dinner guests when Bill Orcutt began designing the new Levov home. Orcutt's family had long been the prominent legal family in Morris County, lawyers, judges, state senators. As president of the local landmarks society, already established as the historical conscience of a new conservationist generation, Orcutt had been a leader in the losing battle to keep Interstate 287 from cutting through the historical center of Morristown and a victorious opponent of the jetport that would have destroyed the Great Swamp, just west of Chatham, and with it much of the county's wildlife. He was trying now to keep Lake Hopatcong from devastation by pollutants. Orcutt's bumper sticker read, "Morris Green, Quiet, and Clean," and he'd good-naturedly slapped one on the Swede's car the first time they met. "Need all the help we can get," he said, "to keep the modern ills at bay." Once he learned that his new neighbors were originally city kids to whom the rural Morris Highlands was an unknown landscape, he volunteered to take them on a county tour, one that, as it turned out, went on all one day and would have extended into the next had not the Swede lied and said he and Dawn and the baby had to be in Elizabeth, at his in-laws', Sunday morning.

  Dawn had said no to the tour right off. Something in Orcutt's proprietary manner had irritated her at that first
meeting, something she found gratingly egotistical in his expansive courtesy, causing her to believe that to this young country squire with the charming manners she was nothing but laughable lace-curtain Irish, a girl who'd somehow got down the knack of aping her betters so as now to come ludicrously barging into his privileged backyard. The confidence, that's what unstrung her, that great confidence. Sure she'd been Miss New Jersey, but the Swede had seen her on a few occasions with these rich Ivy League guys in their Shetland sweaters. Her affronted defensiveness always came as a surprise. She didn't seem ever to feel deficient in confidence until she met them and felt the class sting. "I'm sorry," she'd say, "I know it's just my Irish resentment, but I don't like being looked down on." And as much as this resentment of hers had always secretly attracted him—in the face of hostility, he thought proudly, my wife is no pushover—it perturbed and disappointed him as well; he preferred to think of Dawn as a young woman of great beauty and accomplishment who was too renowned to have to feel resentful. "The only difference between them and us"—by "them" she meant Protestants—"is, on our side, a little more liquor. And not much at that. 'My new Celtic neighbor. And her Hebrew husband.' I can hear him already with the other nobs. I'm sorry—if you can do it that's fine with me, but I for one cannot revere his contempt for our embarrassing origins."

  The mainspring of Orcutt's character—and this she was sure of without having even to speak to him—was knowing all too well just how far back he and his manners reached into the genteel past, and so she stayed at home the day of the tour, perfectly content to be alone with the baby.

  Her husband and Orcutt, promptly at eight, headed diagonally to the northwest corner of the county and then, backtracking, followed the southward meandering spine of the old iron mines, Orcutt all the while recounting the glory days of the nineteenth century, when iron was king, millions of tons pulled from this very ground; starting from Hibernia and Boonton down to Morristown, the towns and villages had been thick with rolling mills, nail and spike factories, foundries and forging shops. Orcutt showed him the site of the old mill in Boonton where axles, wheels, and rails were manufactured for the original Morris and Essex Railroad. He showed him the powder company plant in Kenvil that made dynamite for the mines and then, for the First World War, made TNT and more or less paved the way for the government to build the arsenal up at Picatinny, where they'd manufactured the big shells for the Second World War. It was at the Kenvil plant that there'd been the munitions explosion in 1940—fifty-two killed, carelessness the culprit, though at first foreign agents, spies, were suspected. He drove him partway along the western course of the old Morris Canal, where barges had carried the anthracite in from Phillipsburg to fuel the Morris foundries. With a little smile, Orcutt added—to the Swede's surprise—that directly across the Delaware from Phillipsburg was Easton, and "Easton," he said, "was where the whorehouse was for young men from Old Rimrock."