by Philip Roth
Outside, through the wide picture window, I could see the back lawn with its twin oak trees. I say oaks, though fancifully, one might call them sporting-goods trees. Beneath their branches, like fruit dropped from their limbs, were two irons, a golf ball, a tennis can, a baseball bat, basketball, a first-baseman’s glove, and what was apparently a riding crop. Further back, near the scrubs that bounded the Patimkin property and in front of the small basketball court, a square red blanket, with a white O stitched in the center, looked to be on fire against the green grass. A breeze must have blown outside, for the net on the basket moved; inside we ate in the steady coolness of air by Westinghouse. It was a pleasure, except that eating among those Brobdingnags, I felt for quite a while as though four inches had been clipped from my shoulders, three inches from my height, and for good measure, someone had removed my ribs and my chest had settled meekly in towards my back.
There was not much dinner conversation; eating was heavy and methodical and serious, and it would be just as well to record all that was said in one swoop, rather than indicate the sentences lost in the passing of food, the words gurgled into mouthfuls, the syntax chopped and forgotten in heapings, spillings, and gorgings.
TO RON: When’s Harriet calling?
RON: Five o’clock.
JULIE: It was five o’clock.
RON: Their time.
JULIE: Why is it that it’s earlier in Milwaukee? Suppose you took a plane back and forth all day. You’d never get older.
BRENDA: That’s right, sweetheart.
MRS. P.: What do you give the child misinformation for? Is that why she goes to school?
BRENDA: I don’t know why she goes to school.
MR. P. (lovingly): College girl.
RON: Where’s Carlota? Carlota!
MRS. P.: Carlota, give Ronald more.
CARLOTA {calling): More what?
RON: Everything.
MR. P.: Me too.
MRS. P.: They’ll have to roll you on the links.
MR. P. (putting his shirt up and slapping his black, curved belly): What are you talking about? Look at that?
RON (yanking his T-shirt up ): Look at this.
BRENDA: (to me) Would you care to bare your middle?
ME (the choir boy again): No.
MRS. P.: That’s right, Neil.
ME: Yes. Thank you.
CARLOTA (over my shoulder, like an unsummoned spirit): Would you like more?
ME: No.
MR. P.: He eats like a bird.
JULIE: Certain birds eat a lot.
BRENDA: Which ones?
MRS. P.: Let’s not talk about animals at the dinner table. Brenda, why do you encourage her?
RON: Where’s Carlota, I gotta play tonight.
MR. P.: Tape your wrist, don’t forget.
MRS. P.: Where do you live, Bill?
BRENDA: Neil.
MRS. P.: Didn’t I say Neil?
JULIE: You said “Where do you live, Bill?”
MRS. P.: I must have been thinking of something else.
RON: I hate tape. How the hell can I play in tape?
JULIE: Don’t curse.
MRS. P.: THAT’S RIGHT.
MR. P.: What is Mantle batting now?
JULIE: Three twenty-eight.
RON: Three twenty-five.
JULIE: Eight!
RON: Five, jerk! He got three for four in the second game.
JULIE: Four for four.
RON: That was an error, Minoso should have had it.
JULIE: I didn’t think so.
BRENDA (tome): See?
MRS. P.: See what?
BRENDA: I was talking to Bill.
JULIE: Neil.
MR. P.: Shut up and eat.
MRS. P.: A little less talking, young lady.
JULIE: I didn’t say anything.
BRENDA: She was talking to me, sweetie.
MR. P.: What’s this she business. Is that how you call your mother? What’s dessert?
The phone rings, and though we are awaiting dessert, the meal seems at a formal end, for Ron breaks for his room, Julie shouts “Harriet!” and Mr. Patimkin is not wholly successful in stifling a belch, though the failure even more than the effort ingratiates him to me. Mrs. Patimkin is directing Carlota not to mix the milk silverware and the meat silverware again, and Carlota is eating a peach while she listens; under the table I feel Brenda’s fingers tease my calf. I am full.
We sat under the biggest of the oak trees while out on the basketball court Mr. Patimkin played five and two with Julie. In the driveway Ron was racing the motor of the Volkswagen. “Will somebody please move the Chrysler out from behind me?” he called angrily. “I’m late as it is.”
“Excuse me,” Brenda said, getting up.
“I think I’m behind the Chrysler,” I said.
“Let’s go,” she said.
We backed the cars out so that Ron could hasten on to his game. Then we reparked them and went back to watching Mr. Patimkin and Julie.
“I like your sister,” I said.
“So do I,” she said. “I wonder what she’ll turn out to be.”
“Like you,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Better probably.” And then she added, “or maybe worse. How can you tell? My father’s nice to her, but I’ll give her another three years with my mother … Bill,” she said, musingly.
“I didn’t mind that,” I said. “She’s very beautiful, your mother.”
“I can’t even think of her as my mother. She hates me. Other girls, when they pack in September, at least their mothers help them. Not mine. She’ll be busy sharpening pencils for Julie’s pencil box while I’m carrying my trunk around upstairs. And it’s so obvious why. It’s practically a case study.”
“Why?”
“She’s jealous. It’s so corny I’m ashamed to say it. Do you know my mother had the best back-hand in New Jersey? Really, she was the best tennis player in the state, man or woman. You ought to see the pictures of her when she was a girl. She was so healthy-looking. But not chubby or anything. She was soulful, truly. I love her in those pictures. Sometimes I say to her how beautiful the pictures are. I even asked to have one blown up so I could have it at school. We have other things to do with our money, young lady, than spend it on old photographs.’ Money! My father’s up to here with it, but whenever I buy a coat you should hear her. ‘You don’t have to go to Bonwit’s, young lady, Ohrbach’s has the strongest fabrics of any of them.’ Who wants a strong fabric! Finally I get what I want, but not till she’s had a chance to aggravate me. Money is a waste for her. She doesn’t even know how to enjoy it. She still thinks we live in Newark.”
“But you get what you want,” I said.
“Yes. Him,” and she pointed out to Mr. Patimkin who had just swished his third straight set shot through the basket to the disgruntlement, apparently, of Julie, who stamped so hard at the ground that she raised a little dust storm around her perfect young legs.
“He’s not too smart but he’s sweet at least. He doesn’t treat my brother the way she treats me. Thank God, for that. Oh, I’m tired of talking about them. Since my freshman year I think every conversation I’ve ever had has always wound up about my parents and how awful it is. It’s universal. The only trouble is they don’t know it.”
From the way Julie and Mr. Patimkin were laughing now, out on the court, no problem could ever have seemed less universal; but, of course, it was universal for Brenda, more than that, cosmic—it made every cashmere sweater a battle with her mother, and her life, which, I was certain, consisted to a large part of cornering the market on fabrics that felt soft to the skin, took on the quality of a Hundred Years’ War …
I did not intend to allow myself such unfaithful thoughts, to line up with Mrs. Patimkin while I sat beside Brenda, but I could not shake from my elephant’s brain that she-still thinks-we-live-in-Newark remark. I did not speak, however, fearful that my tone would shatter our post-dinner ease and intimacy. It
had been so simple to be intimate with water pounding and securing all our pores, and later, with the sun heating them and drugging our senses, but now, in the shade and the open, cool and clothed on her own grounds, I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, and is the underside of love. It will not always stay the underside—but I am skipping ahead.
Suddenly, little Julie was upon us. “Want to play?” she said to me. “Daddy’s tired.”
“C’mon,” Mr. Patimkin called. “Finish for me.”
I hesitated—I hadn’t held a basketball since high school—but Julie was dragging at my hand, and Brenda said, “Go ahead.”
Mr. Patimkin tossed the ball towards me while I wasn’t looking and it bounced off my chest, leaving a round dust spot, like the shadow of a moon, on my shirt. I laughed, insanely.
“Can’t you catch?” Julie said.
Like her sister, she seemed to have a knack for asking practical, infuriating questions.
“Yes.”
“Your turn,” she said. “Daddy’s behind forty-seven to thirty-nine. Two hundred wins.”
For an instant, as I placed my toes in the little groove that over the years had been nicked into a foul line, I had one of those instantaneous waking dreams that plague me from time to time, and send, my friends tell me, deadly cataracts over my eyes: the sun had sunk, crickets had come and gone, the leaves had blackened, and still Julie and I stood alone on the lawn, tossing the ball at the basket; “Five hundred wins,” she called, and then when she beat me to five hundred she called, “Now you have to reach it,” and I did, and the night lengthened, and she called, “Eight hundred wins,” and we played on and then it was eleven hundred that won and we played on and it never was morning.
“Shoot,” Mr. Patimkin said. “You’re me.”
That puzzled me, but I took my set shot and, of course, missed. With the Lord’s blessing and a soft breeze, I made the lay-up.
“You have forty-one. I go,” Julie said.
Mr. Patimkin sat on the grass at the far end of the court. He took his shirt off, and in his undershirt, and his whole day’s growth of beard, looked like a trucker. Brenda’s old nose fitted him well. There was a bump in it, all right; up at the bridge it seemed as though a small eight-sided diamond had been squeezed in under the skin. I knew Mr. Patimkin would never bother to have that stone cut from his face, and yet, with joy and pride, no doubt, had paid to have Brenda’s diamond removed and dropped down some toilet in Fifth Avenue Hospital.
Julie missed her set shot, and I admit to a slight, gay, flutter of heart.
“Put a little spin on it,” Mr. Patimkin told her.
“Can I take it again?” Julie asked me.
“Yes.” What with paternal directions from the sidelines and my own grudging graciousness on the court, there did not seem much of a chance for me to catch up. And I wanted to, suddenly, I wanted to win, to run little Julie into the ground. Brenda was back on one elbow, under the tree, chewing on a leaf, watching. And up in the house, at the kitchen window, I could see that the curtain had swished back—the sun too low now to glare off electrical appliances—and Mrs. Patimkin was looking steadily out at the game. And then Carlota appeared on the back steps, eating a peach and holding a pail of garbage in her free hand. She stopped to watch too.
It was my turn again. I missed the set shot and laughingly turned to Julie and said, “Can I take it again?”
“No!”
So I learned how the game was played. Over the years Mr. Patimkin had taught his daughters that free throws were theirs for the asking; he could afford to. However, with the strange eyes of Short Hills upon me, matrons, servants, and providers, I somehow felt I couldn’t. But I had to and I did.
“Thanks a lot, Neil,” Julie said when the game was ended—at 100—and the crickets had come.
“You’re welcome.”
Under the trees, Brenda smiled. “Did you let her win?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
There was something in my voice that prompted Brenda to say, comfortingly, “Even Ron lets her win.”
“It’s all nice for Julie,” I said.
3
The next morning I found a parking space on Washington Street directly across from the library. Since I was twenty minutes early I decided to stroll in the park rather than cross over to work; I didn’t particularly care to join my colleagues, who I knew would be sipping early morning coffee in the binding room, smelling still of all the orange crush they’d drunk that weekend at Asbury Park. I sat on a bench and looked out towards Broad Street and the morning traffic. The Lackawanna commuter trains were rambling in a few blocks to the north and I could hear them, I thought—the sunny green cars, old and clean, with windows that opened all the way. Some mornings, with time to kill before work, I would walk down to the tracks and watch the open windows roll in, on their sills the elbows of tropical suits and the edges of briefcases, the properties of businessmen arriving in town from Maplewood, the Oranges, and the suburbs beyond.
The park, bordered by Washington Street on the west and Broad on the east, was empty and shady and smelled of trees, night, and dog leavings; and there was a faint damp smell too, indicating that the huge rhino of a water cleaner had passed by already, soaking and whisking the downtown streets. Down Washington Street, behind me, was the Newark Museum—I could see it without even looking: two oriental vases in front like spittoons for a rajah, and next to it the little annex to which we had traveled on special buses as schoolchildren. The annex was a brick building, old and vine-covered, and always reminded me of New Jersey’s link with the beginning of the country, with George Washington, who had trained his scrappy army—a little bronze tablet informed us children—in the very park where I now sat. At the far end of the park, beyond the Museum, was the bank building where I had gone to college. It had been converted some years before into extension of Rutgers University; in fact in what once had been the bank president’s waiting room I had taken a course called Contemporary Moral Issues. Though it w3s summer now nnd I was out of college three years, it w3s not hard for me to remember the other students my friends, who had worked evenings in Bamberger’s and Kresge’s and had used the commissions they’d earned pushing ladies’ out-of-season shoes to pay their laboratory fees. And then I looked out to Broad Street again. Jammed between a grimy-windowed bookstore and a cheesy luncheonette was the marquee of a tiny art theater—how many years had passed since I’d stood beneath that marquee, lying about the year of my birth so as to see Hedy Lamarr swim naked in Ecstasy; and then, having slipped the ticket taker an extra quarter, what disappointment I had felt at the frugality of her Slavic charm … Sitting there in the park, I felt a deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection.
Suddenly it was nine o’clock and everything was scurrying. Wobbly-heeled girls revolved through the doors of the telephone building across the way, traffic honked desperately, policeman barked, whistled, and waved motorists to and fro. Over at St. Vincent’s Church the huge dark portals swung back and those bleary-eyes that had risen early for Mass now blinked at the light. Then the worshipers had stepped off the church steps and were racing down the streets towards desks, riling cabinets, secretaries, bosses, and—if the Lord had seen fit to remove a mite of harshness from their lives—to the comfort of air-conditioners pumping at their windows. I got up and crossed over to the library, wondering if Brenda was awake yet.
The pale cement lions stood unconvincing guard on the library steps, suffering their usual combination of elephantiasis and arteriosclerosis, and I was prepared to pay them as little attention as I had for the past eight months were it not for a small colored boy who stood in front of one of them. The lion had lost all of its toes the summer before to a safari of juvenile delinquents, and now a new tormentor stood before him, sagging a little in his knees, and growling. He would growl, low and long, drop
back, wait, then growl again. Then he would straighten up, and, shaking his head, he would say to the lion, “Man, you’s a coward …” Then, once again, he’d growl.
The day began the same as any other. From behind the desk on the main floor, I watched the hot high-breasted teen-age girls walk twitchingly up the wide flight of marble stairs that led to the main reading room. The stairs were an imitation of a staircase somewhere in Versailles, though in their toreador pants and sweaters these young daughters of Italian leatherworkers, Polish brewery hands, and Jewish furriers were hardly duchesses. They were not Brenda either, and any lust that sparked inside me through the dreary day was academic and time-passing. I looked at my watch occasionally, thought of Brenda, and waited for lunch and then for after lunch, when I would take over the Information Desk upstairs and John McKee, who was only twenty-one but wore elastic bands around his sleeves, would march starchily down the stairs to work assiduously at stamping books in and out. John McRubberbands was in his last year at Newark State Teachers College where he was studying at the Dewey Decimal System in preparation for his lifework. The library was not going to be my lif ework, I knew it. Yet, there had been some talk—from Mr. Scapello, an old eunuch who had learned somehow to disguise his voice as a man’s—that when I returned from my summer vacation I would be put in charge of the Reference Room, a position that had been empty ever since that morning when Martha Winney had fallen off a high stool in the Encyclopedia Room and shattered all those frail bones that come together to form what in a woman half her age we would call the hips.