by Philip Roth
"Keep what out?" Lou Levov asked.
"What you're talking about," said Orcutt. "The permissiveness. Abnormality cloaked as ideology. The perpetual protest. Time was you could step away from it, you could make a stand against it. As you point out, you could even just play cards against it. But these days it's getting harder and harder to find relief. The grotesque is supplanting everything commonplace that people love about this country. Today, to be what they call 'repressed' is a source of shame to people—as not to be repressed used to be."
"That is true, that is true. Let me tell you about Al Haberman. You want to talk about the old-style world and what used to be, let's talk about Al. A wonderful fella, Al, a handsome fella. Got rich cutting gloves. You could in those days. A husband and a wife who had any ambition could get a few skins and make some gloves. Ended up in a small room, two men cutting, a couple of women sewing, they could make the gloves, they could press them and ship them. They made money, they were their own bosses, they could work sixty hours a week. Way, way back when Henry Ford was paying the unheard-of sum of a dollar a day, a fine table cutter would make five dollars a day. But look, in those days it was nothing for an ordinary woman to own twenty, twenty-five pair of gloves. Quite common. A woman used to have a glove wardrobe, different gloves for every outfit—different colors, different styles, different lengths. A woman wouldn't go outside without a pair in any weather. In those days it wasn't unusual for a woman to spend two, three hours at the glove counter and try on thirty pair of gloves, and the lady behind the desk had a sink and she would wash her hands between each color. In a fine ladies' glove, we had quarter sizes into the fours and up to eight and a half. Glove cutting is a wonderful trade—was, anyway. Everything now is 'was.' A cutter like Al always had a shirt and a tie on. In those days a cutter never worked without a shirt and a tie. You could work at seventy-five and eighty years old too. They could start in the way Al did, at fifteen, or even younger, and they could go to eighty. Seventy was a spring chicken. And they could work at their leisure, Saturday and Sunday. These people could work constantly. Money to send their kids to school. Money to fix up their homes nicely. Al could take a piece of leather, say to me, for a gag, 'What do you want, Lou, eight and nine-sixteenths?' And just snip it off without a ruler, measuring it perfectly with just his eye. The cutter was the prima donna. But all that pride of craftsmanship is gone, of course. Of the actual table cutters who could cut a sixteen-button white glove, I think Al Haberman may have been the last guy in America who could do it. The long glove, of course, vanished. Another 'was.' There was the eight-button glove which became very popular, silk-lined, but that was gone by '65. We were already taking gloves that were longer, chopping off the tops, making shorties, and using the top to make another glove. From this point where the thumb seam is, every inch on out they used to put a button, so we still talk, in terms of length, of buttons. Thank God in 1960 Jackie Kennedy walked out there with a little glove to the wrist, and a glove to the elbow, and a glove above the elbow, and a pillbox hat, and all of a sudden gloves were in style again. First Lady of the glove industry. Wore a size six and a half. People in the glove industry were praying to that lady. She herself stocked up in Paris, but so what? That woman put the ladies' fine leather glove back on the map. But when they assassinated Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy left the White House, that and the miniskirt was the end of the ladies' fashion glove. The assassination of John F. Kennedy and the arrival of the miniskirt, and together that was the death knell for the ladies' dress glove. Till then it was a twelve-month, year-round business. There was a time when a woman would not go out unless she wore a pair of gloves, even in the spring and the summer. Now the glove is for cold weather or for driving or for sports—"
"Lou," his wife said, "nobody is talking about—"
"Let me finish, please. Don't interrupt me, please. Al Haberman was a great reader. No schooling but he loved to read. His favorite author was Sir Walter Scott. And Sir Walter Scott, in one of his classic books, gets an argument going between the glovemaker and the shoemaker about who is the better craftsman, and the glovemaker wins the argument. You know what he says? All you do,' he tells the shoemaker, 'is make a mitten for the foot. You don't have to articulate around each toe.' But Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover, so it makes sense he would win the argument. You didn't know Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover? You know who else, aside from Sir Walter and my two sons? William Shakespeare. Father was a glover who couldn't read and write his own name. You know what Romeo says to Juliet when she's up on the balcony? Everybody knows 'Romeo, Romeo, where are you, Romeo'—that she says. But what does Romeo say? I started in a tannery when I was thirteen, but I can answer for you because of my friend Al Haberman, who since has passed away, unfortunately. Seventy-three years old, he came out of his house, slipped on the ice, and broke his neck. Terrible. He told me this. Romeo says, 'See the way she leans her cheek on her hand? I only wish I was the glove on that hand so that I could touch that cheek.' Shakespeare. Most famous author in history."
"Lou dear," Sylvia Levov said again softly, "what does this have to do with what everybody is talking about?"
"Please? he said, and impatiently, with one hand, without even looking at her, waved away her objection. "And McGovern," he went on, "this is an idea I don't follow at all. What does McGovern have to do with that lousy movie? I voted for McGovern. I campaigned in the whole condominium for McGovern. You should hear what I put up with from Jewish people, how Nixon was this for Israel and that for Israel, and I reminded them, in case they forgot, that Harry Truman had him pegged for Tricky Dicky back in 1948, and now look, the reward they're reaping, my good friends who voted for Mr. Von Nixon and his storm troopers. Let me tell you who goes to those movies: riffraff, bums, and kids without adult supervision. Why my son takes his lovely wife to such a movie is something I'll go to my grave not understanding."
"To see," said Marcia, "how the other half lives."
"My daughter-in-law is a lady. She has no interest in those things."
"Lou," his wife said to him, "maybe not everybody sees it your way."
"I cannot believe that. These are intelligent, educated people."
"You put too much stock in intelligence," Marcia teased him. "It doesn't annihilate human nature."
"That's human nature, those movies? Tell me, what do you tell to children about that movie when they ask? That it's good, wholesome fun?"
"You don't have to tell them a thing," Marcia said. "They don't ask. These days they just go."
And what puzzled him, of course, was that what was happening these days did not seem to displease her, a professor, a Jewish professor—with children.
"I wouldn't say children are going," Shelly Salzman put in, as much, seemingly, to disrupt the unpromising dialogue as to give comfort to the Swede's father. "I would say adolescents."
"And, Dr. Salzman, you approve of this?"
Shelly smiled at the title Lou Levov insisted on using with him after all these years. Shelly was a pale, plump, round-shouldered man in a bow tie and a seersucker jacket, a hardworking family doctor who could not keep the kindness out of his voice. The pallor and the posture, the old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses, the hairless crown of his head, the wiry white curls above his ears—this unstudied lack of luster had made the Swede feel particularly sorry for him during the months of the love affair with Sheila Salzman....Yet he, nice Dr. Salzman, had harbored Merry in his house, hidden her not only from the FBI but from him, her father, the person she'd needed most in the world.
And I was the one, the Swede was thinking, guilty over my secret—even as Shelly was gently saying to the Swede's father, "My approval or disapproval is beside the point of whether they go to those movies or not."
When Dawn had first proposed going for a face-lift to the clinic of a Geneva doctor she had read about in Vogue—a doctor they didn't know, a procedure they knew nothing about—the Swede had quietly contacted Shelly Salzman and went o
ff to see him alone in his office. Their own family doctor was a man the Swede respected, a cautious and thorough elderly man who would have counseled the Swede and answered his questions and tried, on the Swede's behalf, to dissuade Dawn from the idea, but instead the Swede had called Shelly and asked if he might come over to talk about a family problem. Only when he got to Shelly's office did he understand that he had gone there to confess, four years after the fact, to having had the affair with Sheila in the aftermath of Merry's disappearance. When Shelly smiled and asked, "How can I help you?" the Swede found himself on the brink of saying, "By forgiving me." Throughout the conversation, every time the Swede spoke he had to quash the impulse to tell Shelly everything, to say, "I'm not here because of the face-lift. I'm here because I did what I should never have done. I betrayed my wife, I betrayed you, I betrayed myself." But saying this would be a betrayal of Sheila, would it not? He could no more justify his taking it solely upon himself to confess to her husband than he could had she taken it upon herself to confess to his wife. However much he might yearn to be rid of a secret that stained and oppressed him, and imagine that a confession might unburden him, did he have the right to free himself at Sheila's expense? At Shelly's expense? At Dawn's expense? No, there was such a thing as ethical stability No, he could not be so ruthlessly self-regarding. A cheap stunt, a treacherous stunt, and one that probably wouldn't pay off in long-term relief—yet each time the Swede opened his mouth to speak, he needed desperately to say to this kindly man, "I was the lover of your wife," to seek from Shelly Salzman the magical restitution of equilibrium that Dawn must be hoping she'd find in Geneva. But instead he only told Shelly how against the face-lift he was, only enumerated his reasons against it, and then, to his surprise, listened to Shelly telling him that Dawn had perhaps begun to entertain a potentially promising idea. "If she thinks this will help her start over again," Shelly said, "why not give her the opportunity? Why not give this woman every opportunity? There's nothing wrong with it, Seymour. This is life—not a life sentence but life. Nothing immoral about having a facelift. Nothing frivolous about a woman wanting one. She found the idea in Vogue magazine? That shouldn't throw you off. She only found what she was looking for. You don't know how many women come to me who've been through a terrible trauma and they want to talk about something or other, and what turns out to be on their mind is just this, plastic surgery. And without Vogue magazine. The emotional and psychological implications can turn out to be something. The relief they get, those that get relief, is not to be minimized. I can't say I know how it happens, I'm not saying it always happens, but I've seen it happen again and again, women who've lost their husbands, who've been seriously ill ... You don't look like you believe me." But the Swede knew what he looked like: like a man with "Sheila" written all over his face. "I know," said Shelly, "it seems like a purely physical way of dealing with something profoundly emotional, but for many people it's a wonderful survival strategy. And Dawn may be one of them. I don't think you want to be puritanical about this. If Dawn feels strongly about a face-lift, and if you were to go along with her, if you were to support her..." Later that same day Shelly phoned the Swede at the factory—he'd made some inquiries about Dr. LaPlante. "We've got people as good as him here, I'm sure, but if you want to go to Switzerland and get away and let her recuperate there, why not? This LaPlante is tops." "Shelly, thanks, it's awfully kind of you," said the Swede, disliking himself more than ever in the light of Shelly's generosity ... and yet this was the same guy who, with his co-conspirator wife, had provided Merry a hiding place not only from the FBI but from her father and mother. A fact about as fantastic as a fact could be. What kind of mask is everyone wearing? I thought these people were on my side. But the mask is all that's on my side—that's it! For four months I wore the mask myself, with him, with my wife, and I could not stand it. I went there to tell him that. I went to tell him that I had betrayed him, and only didn't so as not to compound the betrayal, and never once did he let on how cruelly he'd betrayed me.
"My approval or disapproval," Shelly had been saying to Lou Levov, "is beside the point of whether they go to those movies or not."
"But you are a physician," the Swede's father insisted, "a respected person, an ethical person, a responsible person—"
"Lou," said his wife, "maybe, dear, you're monopolizing the conversation."
"Let me finish, please." To the table at large, he asked, "Am I? Am I monopolizing the conversation?"
"Absolutely not," said Marcia, throwing an arm good-naturedly across his back. "It's delightful to hear your delusions."
"I don't know what that means," he told her.
"It means social conditions may have altered in America since you were taking the kids to eat at the Chinks and Al Haberman was cutting gloves in a shirt and a tie."
"Really?" Dawn said to her. "They've altered? Nobody told us," and, to contain herself, got up and left for the kitchen. Waiting there for Dawn's instructions were a couple of local high school girls who helped to do the serving and the cleaning up whenever the Levovs had dinner guests.
Marcia was to one side of Lou Levov, Jessie Orcutt to the other. Jessie's new glass of Scotch, which she must have managed to pour for herself in the kitchen, he had picked up from her place and moved out of her reach only minutes into the cold cucumber soup. When she then made a move to leave the table, he would not allow her to get up. "Just sit," he told her. "Sit and eat. You don't need that. You need food. Eat your dinner." Each time she so much as shifted in her chair, he laid a hand firmly on hers to remind her she was going nowhere.
A dozen candles burned in two tall ceramic candelabra, and to the Swede, who sat flanked by his mother and by Sheila Salzman, everyone's eyes—deceptively enough, even Marcia's eyes—appeared blessed in that light with spiritual understanding, with kindly lucidity, alive with all the meaning one so craves to find in one's friends. Sheila, like Barry, was on hand every year at Labor Day because of what she had come to mean to his folks. On the phone to Florida the Swede almost never got through a conversation without his father's asking, "And how is that lovely Sheila, that lovely woman, how is she doing?" "She is such a dignified woman," his mother said, "such a refined person. Isn't she Jewish, darling? Your father says no. He insists she isn't."
Why this disagreement should persist for years he could not understand exactly, but the subject of fair-haired Sheila Salzman's religious origins had proved indispensable to his parents' lives. To Dawn, who'd been trying for decades to be as tolerant of the Swede's imperfect parents as he was of her imperfect mother, this was their most inexplicable preoccupation—their most enraging as well (particularly as Dawn knew that, for her adolescent daughter, Sheila had something Dawn didn't have, that somehow Merry had come to trust the speech therapist in a way she no longer trusted her mother). "Are there no Jewish blonds in the world other than you?" Dawn asked him. "It hasn't anything to do with her appearance," the Swede explained, "it has to do with Merry." "What does her being Jewish have to do with Merry?" "I don't know. She was the speech therapist. They're in awe of her," the Swede said, "because of all she did for Merry." "She wasn't the child's mother by any chance—or was she?" "They know that, darling," calmly answered the Swede, "but because of the speech therapy, they've made her into some kind of magician."
And so had he, not so much while she was Merry's therapist—when he had merely found her composure a curious stimulus to sexual imaginings—but after Merry disappeared and grief absconded with his wife.
Thrown violently off his own narrow perch, he felt an intangible need open hugely within him, a need with no bottom to it, and he yielded to a solution so foreign to him that he did not even recognize how improbable it was. In the quiet, thoughtful woman, who had once made Merry less strange to herself by teaching her how to overcome her word phobias and to control the elaborate circumlo-cutionary devices that, paradoxically, only increased her child's sense of being out of control, was someone he found himself wanting to inco
rporate into himself. The man who had lived correctly within marriage for almost twenty years was determined to be senselessly, worshipfully in love. It was three months before he could begin to understand that this was no way around anything, and it was Sheila who had to tell him. He hadn't gotten a romantic mistress—he'd gotten a candid mistress. She sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything—but he was in such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the Caribbean....
What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house—after the bombing, Merry hiding in her house. She told him everything except that. The candor stopped just where it should have begun.
Was everyone's brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?
This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to her; he could talk to Sheila, talk about his doubts, his bewilderment—all the serenity in her allowed for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with "a wonderful floating feeling," according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer's frustration, the lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer.