American Pastoral (Nathan Zuckerman)

by Philip Roth

  Barry's wife, Marcia, a literature professor in New York, was, by even the Swede's generous estimate, "a difficult person," a militant nonconformist of staggering self-certainty much given to sarcasm and calculatedly apocalyptic pronouncements designed to bring discomfort to the lords of the earth. There was nothing she did or said that didn't make clear where she stood. She had barely to move a muscle—swallow while you were speaking, tap with a fingernail on the arm of her chair, even nod her head as if she were in total agreement—to inform you that nothing you were saying was correct. To encompass all her convictions she dressed in large block-printed caftans—an extensive woman, for whom a disheveled appearance was less a protest against convention than a sign that she was a thinker who got right to the point. No nonsense, no commonplace stood between her and the harshest truths.

  Yet Barry enjoyed her. Since they couldn't have been more dissimilar, perhaps theirs was one of those so-called attractions of opposites. In Barry, there was such thoughtfulness and kindly concern—ever since he was a kid, and the poorest kid the Swede had known, he'd been a diligent, upright gentleman, a solid catcher in baseball, eventually the class valedictorian, who, after his stint in the service, went to NYU on the GI Bill. That's where he met and married Marcia Schwartz. It was hard for the Swede to understand how a strongly built, not unhandsome guy like Barry could free himself at the age of twenty-two from the desire to be with anybody else in this world but Marcia Schwartz, already so opinionated as a college girl that the Swede had to battle in her presence to stay awake. Yet Barry liked her. Sat there and listened to her. Didn't at all seem to care that she was a slob, dressed even in college like somebody's grandmother, and with those buoyant eyes, unnervingly enlarged by the heavy spectacles. Dawn's opposite in every way. For Marcia to have spawned a self-styled revolutionary—yes, had Merry been raised within earshot of Marcia's mouth ... but Dawn? Pretty, petite, unpolitical Dawn—why Dawn? Where do you look for the cause? Where is the explanation for this mismatch? Was it nothing more than a trick played by their genes? During the March on the Pentagon, the march to stop the war in Vietnam, Marcia Umanoff had been thrown into a paddy wagon with some twenty other women and, very much to her liking, locked up overnight in a D.C. jail, where she didn't stop talking protest talk till they were all let out in the morning. If Merry had been her daughter, things would make sense. If only Merry had fought a war of words, fought the world with words alone, like this strident yenta. Then Merry's would be not a story that begins and ends with a bomb but another story entirely. But a bomb. A bomb. A bomb tells the whole fucking story.

  Hard to grasp Barry's marrying that woman. Maybe it had to do with his family's being so poor. Who knows? Her animus, her superior airs, the sense she gave of being unclean, everything intolerable to the Swede in a friend, let alone in a mate—well, those were the very characteristics that seemed to enliven Barry's appreciation of his wife. It was a puzzle, it truly was, how one perfectly reasonable man could adore what a second perfectly reasonable man couldn't abide for half an hour. But just because it was a puzzle, the Swede tried his best to restrain his aversion and neutralize his judgment and see Marcia Umanoff as simply an oddball from another world, the academic world, the intellectual world, where always to be antagonizing people and challenging whatever they said was apparently looked on with admiration. What it was they got out of being so negative was beyond him; it seemed to him far more productive when everybody grew up and got over that. Still, that didn't mean that Marcia was really out to needle people and work them over just because she was so often needling people and working them over. He couldn't call her vicious once he'd recognized that this was the way she was accustomed to socializing in Manhattan; moreover, he couldn't believe that Barry Umanoff—who at one time was closer to him than his own kid brother—could marry someone vicious. As usual, the Swede's default reaction to not being able to fathom cause and effect (as opposed to his father's reflexive suspiciousness) was to fall back on a lifelong strategy and become tolerant and charitable. And so he was content to chalk up Marcia as "difficult," allowing at worst, "Well, let's just say she's no bargain."

  But Dawn loathed her. Loathed her because she knew herself to be loathed by Marcia for having been Miss New Jersey. Dawn couldn't stand people who made that story the whole of her story, and Marcia was especially exasperating because the pleasure of explaining Dawn by a story that had never explained her—and hardly explained her now—was so smugly exhibited. When they'd all first met, Dawn told the Umanoffs about her father's heart attack and how no money was coming into the house and how she realized that the door to college was about to be slammed shut on her brother ... the whole scholarship story, but none of it made Miss New Jersey seem like anything but a joke to Marcia Umanoff. Marcia barely bothered to hide the fact that when she looked at Dawn Levov she saw no one there, that she thought Dawn pretentious for raising cows, thought she was doing it for the image—it wasn't a serious operation Dawn ran twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week; as far as Marcia was concerned it was a pretty House and Garden fantasy contrived by a rich, silly woman who lived, not in stinky-smelling New Jersey, no, no, who lived in the country. Dawn loathed Marcia because of her undisguised superiority to the Levovs' wealth, to their taste, to the rural way of life they loved, and loathed her beyond loathing because she was convinced that privately Marcia was altogether pleased about what Merry was alleged to have done.

  The privileged place in Marcia's feelings went to the Vietnamese—the North Vietnamese. She never for a moment compromised her political convictions or her compassionate comprehension of international affairs, not even when she saw from six inches away the misery that had befallen her husband's oldest friend. And this was what led Dawn to make the accusations that the Swede knew to be false, not because he could swear to Marcia's honorableness but because for him the probity of Barry Umanoff was beyond question. "I will not have her in this house! A pig has more humanity in her than that woman does! I don't care how many degrees she has—she is callous and she is blind! She is the most blind, self-involved, narrow-minded, obnoxious so-called intelligent person I have ever met in my life and I will not have her in my house!" "Well, I can't very well ask Barry to come by himself." "Then Barry can't come." "Barry has to come. I want Barry to come. My father gets a terrific boot out of seeing Barry here. He expects to see Barry here. It's Barry, Dawn, who got me to Schevitz." "But that woman took Merry in. Don't you see? That's where Merry went! To New York—to them! That's who gave her a hiding place! Somebody did, somebody had to. A real bomb thrower in her house—that excited her. She hid her from us, hid Merry from her parents when she needed her parents most. Marcia Umanoff is the one who sent her underground!" "Merry didn't want to stay there even before. She stayed exactly twice at Barry's. That was it. The third time she never showed up. You don't remember. She went somewhere else to stay and never showed up at the Umanoffs' again." "Marcia is the one, Seymour. Who else has her connections? Wonderful Father This One, wonderful Father That One, pouring blood on the draft records. So cozy she is with her war-resister priests, so buddy-buddy—but they're not priests, Seymour! Priests are not great forward-thinking liberals. Otherwise they don't become priests. It's just that that's not what priests are supposed to do—no more than they're supposed to stop praying for the boys who go over there. What she likes about these priests is that these aren't priests. She doesn't love them because they are in the Church, she loves them because they are doing something that, in her estimation, taints the Church. Because they are doing something outside the Church, outside the regular role of the priest. That these priests are an affront to what people like me grew up with, that's what she likes. That's what this fat bitch likes about everything. I hate her. I hate her guts!" "Fine. Fine with me. Hate her all you want," he said, "but not for something she hasn't done. She didn't do it, Dawn. You are driving yourself crazy with something that cannot be true."

  And it wasn't true. It wasn't Marcia who ha
d taken Merry in. Marcia was all talk—always had been: senseless, ostentatious talk, words with the sole purpose of scandalously exhibiting themselves, uncompromising, quarrelsome words expressing little more than Marcia's intellectual vanity and her odd belief that all her posturing added up to an independent mind. It was Sheila Salzman who'd taken Merry in, the Morristown speech therapist, the pretty, kindly, soft-spoken young woman who for a while had given Merry so much hope and confidence, the teacher who provided Merry all those "strategies" to outwit her impediment and replaced Audrey Hepburn as her heroine. In the months when Dawn was on sedatives and was in and out of the hospital; in the months before Sheila and the Swede would back off from ignoring the whole responsible orientation of their lives; in the months before these two well-ordered, well-behaved people could bring themselves to stop endangering their precious stability, Sheila Salzman had been Swede Levov's mistress, the first and last.

  Mistress. A most un-Swede-like acquisition, incongruous, implausible, even ridiculous. "Mistress" does not quite make sense in the untarnished context of that life—and yet, for the four months after Merry disappeared, that is what Sheila was to him.

  At dinner the conversation was about Watergate and about Deep Throat. Except for the Swede's parents and the Orcutts, everybody at the table had been to see the X-rated movie starring a young porno actress named Linda Lovelace. The picture was no longer playing only in the adult houses but had become a sensation in neighborhood theaters all over Jersey. What surprised him, Shelly Salzman was saying, was that the electorate who overwhelmingly chose as president and vice president Republican politicians hypocritically pretending to deep moral piety should make a hit out of a movie that so graphically caricatured acts of oral sex.

  "Maybe it's not the same people," said Dawn, "who are going to the movie."

  "It's McGovernites?" Marcia Umanoff asked her.

  "At this table it is," answered Dawn, already inflamed at the outset of dinner by this woman she could not bear.

  "Please," said the Swede's father, "what these two things have got to do with each other is a mystery to me. I don't know why you people pay good money to go to that trash in the first place. It's pure trash—am I right, Counselor?" He looked to Barry for support.

  "It's a kind of trash," Barry said.

  "Then why do you let it into your lives?"

  "It leaks in, Mr. Levov," Bill Orcutt said to him pleasantly, "whether we like it or not. Whatever is out there leaks in. It pours in. It's not the same out there anymore, in case you haven't heard."

  "Oh, I heard, sir. I come from the late city of Newark. I heard more than I want to hear. Look, the Irish ran the city, the Italians ran the city, now let the colored run the city. That's not my point. I got nothing against that. It's the colored people's turn to reach into the till? I wasn't born yesterday. In Newark corruption is the name of the game. What is new, number one, is race; number two, taxes. Add that to the corruption, there's your problem. Seven dollars and seventy-six cents. That is the tax rate in the city of Newark. I don't care how big you are or how small you are, I'm here to tell you that you cannot run a business with those kind of taxes. General Electric already moved out in 1953. GE, Westinghouse, Breyer's down on Raymond Boulevard, Celluloid, all left the city. Everyone of them big employers, and before the riots, before the racial hatred, they got out. Race is just the icing on the cake. Streets aren't cleaned. Burned-out cars nobody takes away. People in abandoned buildings. Fires in abandoned buildings. Unemployment. Filth. Poverty. More filth. More poverty. Schooling nonexistent. Schools a disaster. On every street corner dropouts. Dropouts doing nothing. Dropouts dealing drugs. Dropouts looking for trouble. The projects—don't get me started on the projects. Police on the take. Every kind of disease known to man. As far back as the summer of '64 I told my son, 'Seymour, get out.' 'Get out,' I said, but he won't listen. Paterson goes up, Elizabeth goes up, Jersey City goes up. You got to be blind in both eyes not to see what is next. And I told this to Seymour. 'Newark is the next Watts,' I told him. 'You heard it here first. The summer of '67.' I predicted it in those very words. Didn't I, Seymour? Called it practically to the day."

  "That is true," the Swede acknowledged.

  "Manufacturing is finished in Newark. Newark is finished. The riots were just as bad if not worse in Washington, in Los Angeles, in Detroit. But, mark my words, Newark will be the city that never comes back. It can't. And gloves? In America? Kaput. Also finished. Only my son hangs on. Five more years and outside of the government contracts there won't be a pair of gloves made in America. Not in Puerto Rico either. They're already in the Philippines, the big boys. It will be India, it'll be Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh—you'll see, every place around the world making gloves except here. The union alone didn't break us, however. Sure, the union didn't understand, but some of the manufacturers didn't understand either—T wouldn't pay the sons of bitches another five cents,' and here the guy is driving a Cadillac and sitting in Florida in the winter. No, a lot of the manufacturers didn't think straight. But the unions never understood the competition from overseas, and there is no doubt in my mind that the union speeded up the demise of the glove industry by being tough and making it so that people couldn't make money. The union rate on piecework ran a lot of people out of business or offshore. In the thirties our competition was heavy from Czechoslovakia, from Austria, from Italy. The war came along and saved us. Government contracts. Seventy-seven million pairs of gloves purchased by the quartermaster. The glove man got rich. But then the war ended, and I tell you, as far back as that, even in the good days, it was already the beginning of the end. Our downfall was that we could never compete with overseas. We hastened it because there wasn't some good judgment on either side. But it could not be saved regardless. The only thing that could have stopped it—and I was not for this, I don't think you can stop world trade and I don't think you should try—but the only thing that could have stopped it is if we put up trade barriers, making it not just five percent duties but thirty percent, forty percent—"

  "Lou," said his wife, "what does any of this have to do with this movie?"

  "This movie? These goddamn movies? Well, of course, they're not new either, you know. We had a pinochle club, this is years ago ... you remember, the Friday Night Club? And we had a guy in the electrical business. You remember him, Seymour, Abe Sacks?"

  "Sure," the Swede said.

  "Well, I hate to tell you but he had all these kind of movies right in his house. Sure they existed. On Mulberry Street, where we used to go with the kids to eat Chinks, was a saloon where you could go in and buy whatever filth you wanted. And you know something? I watched five minutes and I went back in the kitchen and, to his credit, so did my dear friend, he's dead now, a wonderful fella, my mind is going, the glove cutter, what the hell was his name—"

  "Al Haberman," said his wife.

  "Right. The two of us just played gin for an hour, until there was this hullabaloo in the living room where they were showing the movie, and what happened was the whole damn movie, the camera, the whole what-do-you-call-it caught fire. I couldn't have been happier. That is thirty, forty years ago, and to this day I remember sitting with Al Haberman playing cards while the rest of them were drooling like idiots in the living room."

  He was by now telling this to Orcutt, directing his remarks solely at him. As though, despite the evidence of the drunken woman Lou Levov was sitting next to, despite the incontrovertible evidence of so much of Jewish lore, the anarchy of a highborn Gentile remained essentially unimaginable to him, and Orcutt, therefore, of everyone at the table, could best appreciate the platitude he was getting at. They're supposed to be the dependable ones in control of themselves. Aren't they? They marked the territory. Didn't they? They made the rules, the very rules that the rest of us who came here have agreed to follow. Could Orcutt fail to admire him for sitting in that kitchen, sitting there patiently playing gin until at last the forces of good overcame the forces of evil and that dirty
movie went up in smoke back in 1935?

  "Well, I'm sorry to say, Mr. Levov, that you can't keep it out any longer just by playing cards," Orcutt told him. "That was a way to keep it out that doesn't exist any longer."