by Philip Roth
The eastern terminus of the Morris Canal had been Jersey City and Newark. The Swede knew of the Newark end of the canal from when he was a boy and his father would remind him, if they were downtown and anywhere near Raymond Boulevard, that until as recently as the year the Swede was born a real canal ran up by High Street, near where the Jewish Y was, and down through to where there was now this wide city thoroughfare, Raymond Boulevard, leading traffic from Broad Street under Penn Station and out old Passaic Avenue onto the Skyway.
In the Swede's young mind, the "Morris" in Morris Canal never connected with Morris County—a place that seemed as remote as Nebraska then—but with his father's enterprising oldest brother, Morris. In 1918, at the age of twenty-four, already the owner of a shoe store he ran with his young wife—a cubbyhole Down Neck on Ferry Street, amid all the poor Poles and Italians and Irish, and the family's greatest achievement until the wartime contract with the WACs put Newark Maid on the map—Morris had perished virtually overnight in the influenza epidemic. Even on his tour of the county that day, every time Orcutt mentioned the Morris Canal, the Swede thought first of the dead uncle he had never known, a beloved brother who was much missed by his father and for whom the child had come to believe the canal beneath Raymond Boulevard was named. Even when his father bought the Central Avenue factory (no more than a hundred yards from the very spot where the canal had turned north toward Belleville, a factory that virtually backed on the city subway built beneath the old canal route), he persisted in associating the name of the canal with the story of the struggles of their family rather than with the grander history of the state.
After going around Washington's Morristown headquarters—where he politely pretended he hadn't already seen the muskets and the cannonballs and the old eyeglasses as a Newark fourth grader—he and Orcutt drove southwest a ways, out of Morristown to a church cemetery dating back to the American Revolution. Soldiers killed in the war were buried there, as well as twenty-seven soldiers, buried in a common grave, who were victims of the smallpox epidemic that swept the encampments in the countryside in the spring of 1777- Out among those old, old tombstones, Orcutt was no less historically edifying than he'd been all morning on the road, so that at the dinner table that evening, when Dawn asked where Mr. Orcutt had taken him, the Swede laughed. "I got my money's worth all right. The guy's a walking encyclopedia. I never felt so ignorant in my life." "How boring was it?" Dawn asked. "Why, not at all," the Swede told her. "We had a good time. He's a good guy. Very nice. More there than you think when you first meet him. Much more to Orcutt than the old school tie." He was thinking particularly of the Easton whorehouse but said instead, "Family goes back to the Revolution." "Doesn't that come as a surprise," Dawn replied. "The guy knows everything," he said, feigning indifference to her sarcasm. "For instance, that old graveyard where we were, it's at the top of the tallest hill around, so the rain that falls on the northern roof of the old church there finds its way north to the Passaic River and eventually to Newark Bay, and the rain that falls on the southern side finds its way south to a branch of the Raritan, which eventually goes to New Brunswick." "I don't believe that," said Dawn. "Well, it's true." "I refuse to believe it. Not to New Brunswick." "Oh, don't be a kid, Dawn. It's interesting geologically." Deliberately he added, "Very interesting," to let her know he was having no part of the Irish resentment. It was beneath him and happened also to be beneath her.
In bed that night, he thought that when Merry got to be a schoolgirl he'd inveigle Orcutt into taking her along on this very same trip so she could learn firsthand the history of the county where she was growing up. He wanted her to see where, at the turn of the century, a railroad line used to run up into Morristown from Whitehouse to carry the peaches from the orchards in Hunterdon County. Thirty miles of railroad line just to transport peaches. Among the well-to-do there was a peach craze then in the big cities and they'd ship them from Morristown into New York. The Peach Special. Wasn't that something? On a good day seventy cars of peaches hauled from the Hunterdon orchards. Two million peach trees down there before a blight carried them all away. But he could himself tell her about that train and the trees and the blight when the time came, take her on his own to show her where the tracks used to be. It wouldn't require Orcutt to do it for him.
"The first Morris County Orcutt," Orcutt told him at the cemetery, pointing to a brown weathered gravestone decorated at the top with the carving of a winged angel, a gravestone set close up to the back wall of the church. "Thomas. Protestant immigrant from northern Ireland. Arrived 1774. Age of twenty. Enlisted in a local militia outfit. A private. January 2,1777, fought at Second Trenton. Battle that set the stage for Washington's victory at Princeton the next day."
"Didn't know that," the Swede said.
"Wound up at the logistical base at Morristown. Commissary support for the Continental artillery train. After the war bought a Morristown ironworks. Destroyed by a flash flood, 1795. Two flash floods, '94 and '95. Big supporter of Jefferson. Political appointment from Governor Bloomfield saved his life. Surrogate of Morris County. Master in chancery. Eventually county clerk. There he is. The sturdy, fecund patriarch."
"Interesting," said the Swede—interesting at just the moment he found it all about as deadly as it could get. How it was interesting was that he'd never met anybody like this before.
"Over here," said Orcutt, leading him some twenty feet on to another old brownish stone with an angel carved at the top, this one with an indecipherable rhyme of four lines inscribed near the bottom. "His son William. Ten sons. One died in his thirties but the rest lived long lives. Spread out all over Morris County. None of them farmers. Justices of the peace. Sheriffs. Freeholders. Postmasters. Orcutts everywhere, even into Warren and up into Sussex. William was the prosperous one. Turnpike development. Banking. New Jersey presidential elector in 1828. Pledged to Andrew Jackson. Rode the Jackson victory to a big judicial appointment. State's highest judicial body. Never a member of the bar. That didn't matter then. Died a much-respected judge. See, on the stone? 'A virtuous and useful citizen.' It's his son—over here, this one here—his son George who clerked for August Findley and became a partner. Findley was a state legislator. Slavery issue drove him into the Republican Party...."
As the Swede told Dawn, whether she wanted to hear it or not—no, because she did not want to hear it—"It was a lesson in American history. John Quincy Adams. Andrew Jackson. Abraham Lincoln. Woodrow Wilson. His grandfather was a classmate of Woodrow Wilson's. At Princeton. He told me the class. I forget it now. Eighteen seventy-nine? I'm full of dates, Dawnie. He told me everything. And all we were doing was walking around a cemetery out back of a church at the top of a hill. It was something. It was school."
But once was enough. He'd paid all the attention he could, never stopped trying to keep straight in his mind the progress of the Orcutts through almost two centuries—though each time Orcutt had said "Morris" as in Morris County, the Swede had thought "Morris" as in Morris Levov. He couldn't remember ever in his life feeling more like his father—not like his father's son but like his father— than he did marching around the graves of those Orcutts. His family couldn't compete with Orcutt's when it came to ancestors—they would have run out of ancestors in about two minutes. As soon as you got back earlier than Newark, back to the old country, no one knew anything. Earlier than Newark, they didn't know their names or anything about them, how anyone made a living, let alone whom they'd voted for. But Orcutt could spin out ancestors forever. Every rung into America for the Levovs there was another rung to attain; this guy was there.
Is that why Orcutt had laid it on a little thick? Was it to make clear what Dawn accused him of making clear simply by the way he smiled at you—just who he was and just who you weren't? No, that was thinking not too much like Dawn but way too much like his father. Jewish resentment could be just as bad as the Irish resentment. It could be worse. They hadn't moved out here to get caught up in that stuff. He was no Ivy Leaguer hi
mself. He'd been educated, like Dawn, at lowly Upsala in East Orange, and thought "Ivy League" was a name for a kind of clothes before he knew it had anything to do with a university. Little by little the picture came into focus, of course—a world of Gentile wealth where the buildings were covered with ivy and the people had money and dressed in a certain style. Didn't admit Jews, didn't know Jews, probably didn't like Jews all that much. Maybe they didn't like Irish Catholics—he'd take Dawn's word for it. Maybe they looked down on them, too. But Orcutt was Orcutt. He had to be judged according to his own values and not the values of "the Ivy League." As long as he's fair and respectful to me, I'll be fair and respectful to him.
All it came down to, in his mind, was that the guy could get boring on the subject of the past. The Swede wasn't going to take it to mean more until somebody proved otherwise. They weren't out there to get all worked up about neighbors across the hill whose house they couldn't even see—they were out there because, as he liked to joke to his mother, "I want to own the things that money can't buy." Everybody else who was picking up and leaving Newark was headed for one of the cozy suburban streets in Maplewood or South Orange, while they, by comparison, were out on the frontier. During the two years when he was down in South Carolina with the marines, it used to thrill him to think, "This is the Old South. I am below the Mason-Dixon line. I am Down South!" Well, he couldn't commute from Down South but he could skip Maplewood and South Orange, leapfrog the South Mountain Reservation, and just keep going, get as far out west in New Jersey as he could while still being able to make it every day to Central Avenue in an hour. Why not? A hundred acres of America. Land first cleared not for agriculture but to furnish timber for those old iron forges that consumed a thousand acres of timber a year. (The real-estate lady turned out to know almost as much local history as Bill Orcutt and was no less generous in ladling it out to a potential buyer from the streets of Newark.) A barn, a millpond, a mill-stream, the foundation remains of a gristmill that had supplied grain for Washington's troops. Back on the property somewhere, an abandoned iron mine. Just after the Revolution, the original house, a wood structure, and the sawmill had burned down and the house was replaced by this one—according to a date engraved on a stone over the cellar door and carved into a corner beam in the front room, built in 1786, its exterior walls constructed of stones collected from the fireplaces of the Revolutionary army's former campsites in the local hills. A house of stone such as he had always dreamed of, with a gambrel roof no less, and, in what used to be the kitchen and was now the dining room, a fireplace unlike any he'd ever seen, large enough for roasting an ox, fitted out with an oven door and a crane to swing an iron kettle around over the fire; a nineteen-inch-high lintel beam extending seventeen feet across the whole width of the room. Four smaller fireplaces in other rooms, all working, with the original chimneypieces, the wooden carving and moulding barely visible beneath coats and coats of a hundred and sixty-odd years of paint but waiting there to be restored and revealed. A central hallway ten feet wide. A staircase with newel posts and railings carved of pale-striped tiger maple—according to the real-estate lady, tiger maple a rarity in these parts at that time. Two rooms to either side of the staircase both upstairs and downstairs, making in all eight rooms, plus the kitchen, plus the big back porch.... Why the hell shouldn't it be his? Why shouldn't he own it? "I don't want to live next door to anybody. I've done that. I grew up doing that. I don't want to see the stoop out the window—I want to see the land. I want to see the streams running everywhere. I want to see the cows and the horses. You drive down the road, there's a falls there. We don't have to live like everybody else—we can live any way we want to now. We did it. Nobody stopped us. They couldn't. We're married. We can go anywhere, we can do anything. Dawnie, we're free!"
Moreover, getting to be free had not been painless, what with the pressure from his father to buy in the Newstead development in suburban South Orange, to buy a modern house with everything in it brand new instead of a decrepit "mausoleum." "You'll never heat it," predicted Lou Levov the Saturday he first laid eyes on the huge, vacant old stone house with the For Sale sign, a house on a hilly country road out in the middle of nowhere, eleven miles west of the nearest train stop, the Lackawanna station in Morristown, where the screen-door-green cars with the yellowish cane seats took people all the way into New York. Because it came with the hundred acres and with a collapsing barn and a fallen-down gristmill, because it had been vacant and up for sale for almost a year, it was going for about half the price of things that sat on just a two-acre lot in Newstead. "Heat this place, cost you a fortune, and you'll still freeze to death. When it snows out here, Seymour, how are you going to get to the train? On these roads, you're not. What the hell does he need all that ground for anyway?" Lou Levov demanded of the Swede's mother, who was standing between the two men in her coat and trying her best to stay out of the discussion by studying the tops of the roadside trees. (Or so the Swede thought; later he learned that, in vain, she had been looking down the road for street lights.) "What are you going to do with all the ground," his father asked him, "feed the starving Armenians? You know what? You're dreaming. I wonder if you even know where this is. Let's be candid with each other about this—this is a narrow, bigoted area. The Klan thrived out here in the twenties. Did you know that? The Ku Klux Klan. People had crosses burned on their property out here." "Dad, the Ku Klux Klan doesn't exist anymore." "Oh, doesn't it? This is rock-ribbed Republican New Jersey, Seymour. It is Republican out here from top to bottom." "Dad, Eisenhower is president—the whole country is Republican. Eisenhower's the president and Roosevelt is dead." "Yeah, and this place was Republican when Roosevelt was living. Republican during the New Deal. Think about that. Why did they hate Roosevelt out here, Seymour?" "I don't know why. Because he was a Democrat." "No, they didn't like Roosevelt because they didn't like the Jews and the Italians and the Irish—that's why they moved out here to begin with. They didn't like Roosevelt because he accommodated himself to these new Americans. He understood what they needed and he tried to help them. But not these bastards. They wouldn't give a Jew the time of day. I'm talking to you, son, about bigots. Not about the goose step even—just about hate. And this is where the haters live, out here."
The answer was Newstead. In Newstead he would not have the headache of a hundred acres. In Newstead it would be rock-ribbed Democrat. In Newstead he could live with his family among young Jewish couples, the baby could grow up with Jewish friends, and the commute door-to-door to Newark Maid, taking South Orange Avenue straight in, was half an hour tops...."Dad, I drive to Morristown in fifteen minutes." "Not if it snows you don't. Not if you obey the traffic laws you don't." "The 8:28 express gets me to Broad Street 8:56. I walk to Central Avenue and I'm at work six minutes after nine." "And if it snows? You still haven't answered me. If the train breaks down?" "Stockbrokers take this train to work. Lawyers, businessmen who go into Manhattan. Wealthy people. It's not the milk train—it doesn't break down. On the early-morning trains they've got their own parlor car, for God's sake. It's not the sticks." "You could have fooled me," his father replied.
But the Swede, rather like some frontiersman of old, would not be turned back. What was impractical and ill-advised to his father was an act of bravery to him. Next to marrying Dawn Dwyer, buying that house and the hundred acres and moving out to Old Rimrock was the most daring thing he had ever done. What was Mars to his father was America to him—he was settling Revolutionary New Jersey as if for the first time. Out in Old Rimrock, all of America lay at their door. That was an idea he loved. Jewish resentment, Irish resentment—the hell with it. A husband and wife each just twenty-five years of age, a baby of less than a year—it had been courageous of them to head out to Old Rimrock. He'd already heard tell of more than a few strong, intelligent, talented guys in the leatherware business beaten down by their fathers, and he wasn't going to let it happen to him. He'd fallen in love with the same business as his old man had, he'd taken his b
irthright, and now he was moving beyond it to damn well live where he wanted.
No, we are not going to have anybody's resentment. We are thirty-five miles out beyond that resentment. He wasn't saying it was always easy to blend across religious borders. He wasn't saying there wasn't prejudice—he'd faced it as a recruit in the Marine Corps, in boot camp on a couple of occasions faced it head-on and faced it down. She'd had her own brush with blatant anti-Semitism at the pageant in Atlantic City when her chaperone referred distastefully to 1945, when Bess Myerson became Miss America, as "the year the Jewish girl won." She'd heard plenty of casual cracks about Jews as a kid, but Atlantic City was the real world and it shocked her. She wouldn't repeat it at the time because she was fearful that he would turn against her for remaining politely silent and failing to tell the stupid woman where to get off, especially when her chaperone added, "I grant she was good-looking, but it was a great embarrassment to the pageant nonetheless." Not that it mattered one way or the other anymore. Dawn was a mere contestant, twenty-two years old—what could she have said or done? His point was that they both were aware, from firsthand experience, that these prejudices existed. In a community as civilized as Old Rimrock, however, differences of religion did not have to be as hard to deal with as Dawn was making them. If she could marry a Jew, she could surely be a friendly neighbor to a Protestant—sure as hell could if her husband could. The Protestants are just another denomination. Maybe they were rare where she grew up—they were rare where he grew up too—but they happen not to be rare in America. Let's face it, they are America. But if you do not assert the superiority of the Catholic way the way your mother does, and I do not assert the superiority of the Jewish way the way my father does, I'm sure we'll find plenty of people out here who won't assert the superiority of the Protestant way the way their fathers and mothers did. Nobody dominates anybody anymore. That's what the war was about. Our parents are not attuned to the possibilities, to the realities of the postwar world, where people can live in harmony, all sorts of people side by side no matter what their origins. This is a new generation and there is no need for that resentment stuff from anybody, them or us. And the upper class is nothing to be frightened of either. You know what you're going to find once you know them? That they are just other people who want to get along. Let's be intelligent about all this.