by Philip Roth
“Good.”
“That’s a terrific way to bring the family together, Eli.”
“Look, Ted, I’ve settled with Tzuref.”
“When are they going?”
“They’re not exactly going, Teddie. I settled it —you won’t even know they’re there.”
“A guy dressed like 1000 B.C and I won’t know it? What are you thinking about, pal?”
“He’s changing his clothes.”
“Yeah, to what? Another funeral suit?”
“Tzuref promised me, Ted. Next time he comes to town, he comes dressed like you and me.”
“What! Somebody’s kidding somebody, Eli.”
Eli’s voice shot up. “If he says he’ll do it, he’ll do it!”
“And, Eli,” Ted asked, “he said it?”
“He said it.” It cost him a sudden headache, this invention.
“And suppose he doesn’t change, Eli. Just suppose. I mean that might happen, Eli. This might just be some kind of stall or something.”
“No,” Eli assured him.
The other end was quiet a moment. “Look, Eli,” Ted said, finally, “he changes. Okay? All right? But they’re still up there, aren’t they? That doesn’t change.”
“The point is you won’t know it.”
Patiently Ted said, “Is this what we asked of you, Eli? When we put our faith and trust in you, is that what we were asking? We weren’t concerned that this guy should become a Beau Brummel, Eli, believe me. We just don’t think this is the community for them. And, Eli, we isn’t me. The Jewish members of the community appointed me, Artie, and Harry to see what could be done. And we appointed you. And what’s happened?”
Eli heard himself say, “What happened, happened.”
“Eli, you’re talking in crossword puzzles.”
“My wife’s having a baby,” Eli explained, defensively.
“I realize that, Eli. But this is a matter of zoning, isn’t it? Isn’t that what we discovered? You don’t abide by the ordinance, you go. I mean I can’t raise mountain goats, say, in my backyard—”
“This isn’t so simple, Ted. People are involved—”
“People? Eli, we’ve been through this and through this. We’re not just dealing with people—these are religious fanatics is what they are. Dressing like that. What I’d really like to find out is what goes on up there. I’m getting more and more skeptical, Eli, and I’m not afraid to admit it. It smells like a lot of hocus-pocus abracadabra stuff to me. Guys like Harry, you know, they think and they think and they’re afraid to admit what they’re thinking. I’ll tell you. Look, I don’t even know about this Sunday school business. Sundays I drive my oldest kid all the way to Scarsdale to learn Bible stories … and you know what she comes up with? This Abraham in the Bible was going to kill his own kid for a sacrifice. She gets nightmares from it, for God’s sake! You call that religion? Today a guy like that they’d lock him up. This is an age of science, Eli. I size people’s feet with an X-ray machine, for God’s sake. They’ve disproved all that stuff, Eli, and I refuse to sit by and watch it happening on my own front lawn.”
“Nothing’s happening on your front lawn, Teddie. You’re exaggerating, nobody’s sacrificing their kid.”
“You’re damn right, Eli—I’m not sacrificing mine. You’ll see when you have your own what it’s like. All the place is, is a hideaway for people who can’t face life. It’s a matter of needs. They have all these superstitions, and why do you think? Because they can’t face the world, because they can’t take their place in society. That’s no environment to bring kids up in, Eli.”
“Look, Ted, see it from another angle. We can convert them,” Eli said, with half a heart.
“What, make a bunch of Catholics out of them? Look, Eli—pal, there’s a good healthy relationship in this town because it’s modern Jews and Protestants. That’s the point, isn’t it, Eli? Let’s not kid each other, I’m not Harry. The way things are now are fine—like human beings. There’s going to be no pogroms in Woodenton. Right? ‘Cause there’s no fanatics, no crazy people—” Eli winced, and closed his eyes a second—”just people who respect each other, and leave each other be. Common sense is the ruling thing, Eli. I’m for common sense. Moderation.”
“Exactly, exactly, Ted. I agree, but common sense, maybe, says make this guy change his clothes. Then maybe—”
“Common sense says that? Common sense says to me they go and find a nice place somewhere else, Eli. New York is the biggest city in the world, it’s only 30 miles away—why don’t they go there?”
“Ted, give them a chance. Introduce them to common sense.”
“Eli, you’re dealing with fanatics. Do they display common sense? Talking a dead language, that makes sense? Making a big thing out of suffering, so you’re going oy-oy-oy all your life, that’s common sense? Look, Eli, we’ve been through all this. I don’t know if you know—but there’s talk that Life magazine is sending a guy out to the Yeshivah for a story. With pictures.”
“Look, Teddie, you’re letting your imagination get inflamed. I don’t think Life’s interested.”
“But I’m interested, Eli. And we thought you were supposed to be.”
“I am,” Eli said, “I am. Let him just change the clothes, Ted. Let’s see what happens.”
“They live in the medieval ages, Eli—it’s some superstition, some rule.”
“Let’s just see,” Eli pleaded.
“Eli, every day—”
“One more day,” Eli said. “If he doesn’t change in one more day….”
“What?”
“Then I get an injunction first thing Monday. That’s that.”
“Look, Eli—it’s not up to me. Let me call Harry—”
“You’re the spokesman, Teddie. I’m all wrapped up here with Miriam having a baby. Just give me the day—them the day.”
“All right, Eli. I want to be fair. But tomorrow, that’s all. Tomorrow’s the judgment day, Eli, I’m telling you.”
“I hear trumpets,” Eli said, and hung up. He was shaking inside—Teddie’s voice seemed to have separated his bones at the joints. He was still in the phone booth when the nurse came to tell him that Mrs. Peck would positively not be delivered of a child until the morning. He was to go home and get some rest, he looked like he was having the baby. The nurse winked and left.
But Eli did not go home. He carried the Bonwit box out into the street with him and put it in the car. The night was soft and starry, and he began to drive the streets of Woodenton. Square cool windows, apricot-colored, were all one could see beyond the long lawns that fronted the homes of the townsmen. The stars polished the permanent baggage carriers atop the station wagons in the driveways. He drove slowly, up, down, around. Only his tires could be heard taking the gentle curves in the road.
What peace. What incredible peace. Have children ever been so safe in their beds? Parents—Eli wondered—so full in their stomachs? Water so warm in its boilers? Never. Never in Rome, never in Greece. Never even did walled cities have it so good! No wonder then they would keep things just as they were. Here, after all, were peace and safety—what civilization had been working toward for centuries. For all his jerkiness, that was all Ted Heller was asking for, peace and safety. It was what his parents had asked for in the Bronx, and his grandparents in Poland, and theirs in Russia or Austria, or wherever else they’d fled to or from. It was what Miriam was asking for. And now they had it—the world was at last a place for families, even Jewish families. After all these centuries, maybe there just had to be this communal toughness—or numbness—to protect such a blessing. Maybe that was the trouble with the Jews all along—too soft. Sure, to live takes guts … Eli was thinking as he drove on beyond the train station, and parked his car at the darkened Gulf station. He stepped out, carrying the box.
At the top of the hill one window trembled with light. What was Tzuref doing up there in that office? Killing babies—probably not. But studying a language no one understood
? Practicing customs with origins long forgotten? Suffering sufferings already suffered once too often? Teddie was right—why keep it up! However, if a man chose to be stubborn, then he couldn’t expect to survive. The world is give-and-take. What sense to sit and brood over a suit. Eli would give him one last chance.
He stopped at the top. No one was around. He walked slowly up the lawn, setting each foot into the grass, listening to the shh shhh shhhh his shoes made as they bent the wetness into the sod. He looked around. Here there was nothing. Nothing! An old decaying house—and a suit.
On the porch he slid behind a pillar. He felt someone was watching him. But only the stars gleamed down. And at his feet, off and away, Woodenton glowed up. He set his package on the step of the great front door. Inside the cover of the box he felt to see if his letter was still there. When he touched it, he pushed it deeper into the green suit, which his fingers still remembered from winter. He should have included some light bulbs. Then he slid back by the pillar again, and this time there was something on the lawn. It was the second sight he had of him. He was facing Woodenton and barely moving across the open space towards the trees. His right fist was beating his chest. And then Eli heard a sound rising with each knock on the chest. What a moan! It could raise hair, stop hearts, water eyes. And it did all three to Eli, plus more. Some feeling crept into him for whose deepness he could find no word. It was strange. He listened—it did not hurt to hear this moan. But he wondered if it hurt to make it. And so, with only stars to hear, he tried. And it did hurt. Not the bumblebee of noise that turned at the back of his throat and winged out his nostrils. What hurt buzzed down. It stung and stung inside him, and in turn the moan sharpened. It became a scream, louder, a song, a crazy song that whined through the pillars and blew out to the grass, until the strange hatted creature on the lawn turned and threw his arms wide, and looked in the night like a scarecrow.
Eli ran, and when he reached the car the pain was only a bloody scratch across his neck where a branch had whipped back as he fled the greenie’s arms.
The following day his son was born. But not till one in the afternoon, and by then a great deal had happened.
First, at nine-thirty the phone rang. Eli leaped from the sofa—where he’d dropped the night before—and picked it screaming from the cradle. He could practically smell the hospital as he shouted into the phone, “Hello, yes!”
“Eli, it’s Ted. Eli, he did it. He just walked by the store. I was opening the door, Eli, and I turned around and I swear I thought it was you. But it was him. He still walks like he did, but the clothes, Eli, the clothes.”
“Who?”
“The greenie. He has on man’s regular clothes. And the suit, it’s a beauty.”
The suit barreled back into Eli’s consciousness, pushing all else aside. “What color suit?”
“Green. He’s just strolling in the green suit like it’s a holiday. Eli … is it a Jewish holiday?”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s walking straight up Coach House Road, in this damn tweed job. Eli, it worked. You were right.”
“We’ll see.”
“What next?”
“We’ll see.”
He took off the underwear in which he’d slept and went into the kitchen where he turned the light under the coffee. When it began to perk he held his head over the pot so it would steam loose the knot back of his eyes. It still hadn’t when the phone rang.
“Eli, Ted again. Eli, the guy’s walking up and down every street in town. Really, he’s on a tour or something. Artie called me, Herb called me. Now Shirley calls that he just walked by our house. Eli, go out on the porch you’ll see.”
Eli went to the window and peered out. He couldn’t see past the bend in the road, and there was no one in sight.
“Eli?” He heard Ted from where he dangled over the telephone table. He dropped the phone into the hook, as a few last words floated up to him—”Eliyousawhim…?” He threw on the pants and shirt he’d worn the night before and walked barefoot on to his front lawn. And sure enough, his apparition appeared around the bend: in a brown hat a little too far down on his head, a green suit too far back on the shoulders, an unbuttoned-down button-down shirt, a tie knotted so as to leave a two-inch tail, trousers that cascaded onto his shoes—he was shorter than that black hat had made him seem. And moving the clothes was that walk that was not a walk, the tiny-stepped shlumpy gait. He came round the bend, and for all his strangeness—it clung to his whiskers, signaled itself in his locomotion—he looked as if he belonged. Eccentric, maybe, but he belonged. He made no moan, nor did he invite Eli with wide-flung arms. But he did stop when he saw him. He stopped and put a hand to his hat. When he felt for its top, his hand went up too high. Then it found the level and fiddled with the brim. The fingers fiddled, fumbled, and when they’d finally made their greeting, they traveled down the fellow’s face and in an instant seemed to have touched each one of his features.They dabbed the eyes, ran the length of the nose, swept over the hairy lip, until they found their home in the hair that hid a little of his collar. To Eli the fingers said, I have a face, I have a face at least. Then his hand came through the beard and when it stopped at his chest it was like a pointer—and the eyes asked a question as tides of water shifted over them. The face is all right, I can keep it? Such a look was in those eyes that Eli was still seeing them when he turned his head away. They were the hearts of his jonquils, that only last week had appeared—they were the leaves on his birch, the bulbs in his coach lamp, the droppings on his lawn: those eyes were the eyes in his head. They were his, he had made them. He turned and went into his house and when he peeked out the side of the window, between shade and molding, the green suit was gone.
The phone.
“Eli, Shirley.”
“I saw him, Shirley,” and he hung up.
He sat frozen for a long time. The sun moved around the windows. The coffee steam smelled up the house. The phone began to ring, stopped, began again. The mailman came, the cleaner, the bakery man, the gardener, the ice cream man, the League of Women Voters lady. A Negro woman spreading some strange gospel calling for the revision of the Food and Drug Act knocked at the front, rapped the windows, and finally scraped a half-dozen pamphlets under the back door. But Eli only sat, without underwear, in last night’s suit. He answered no one.
Given his condition, it was strange that the trip and crash at the back door reached his inner ear. But in an instant he seemed to melt down into the crevices of the chair, then to splash up and out to where the clatter had been. At the door he waited. It was silent, but for a fluttering of damp little leaves on the trees. When he finally opened the door, there was no one there. He’d expected to see green, green, green, big as the doorway, topped by his hat, waiting for him with those eyes. But there was no one out there, except for the Bonwit’s box which lay bulging at his feet. No string tied it and the top rode high on the bottom.
The coward! He couldn’t do it! He couldn’t!
The very glee of that idea pumped fuel to his legs. He tore out across his back lawn, past his new spray of forsythia, to catch a glimpse of the bearded one fleeing naked through yards, over hedges and fences, to the safety of his hermitage. In the distance a pile of pink and white stones—which Harriet Knudson had painted the previous day—tricked him. “Run,” he shouted to the rocks, “Run, you…” but he caught his error before anyone else did, and though he peered and craned there was no hint anywhere of a man about his own size, with white, white, terribly white skin (how white must be the skin of his body!) in cowardly retreat. He came slowly, curiously, back to the door. And while the trees shimmered in the light wind, he removed the top from the box. The shock at first was the shock of having daylight turned off all at once. Inside the box was an eclipse. But black soon sorted from black, and shortly there was the glassy black of lining, the coarse black of trousers, the dead black of fraying threads, and in the center the mountain of black: the hat. He picked the box from the
doorstep and carried it inside. For the first time in his life he smelted the color of blackness: a little stale, a little sour, a little old, but nothing that could overwhelm you. Still, he held the package at arm’s length and deposited it on the dining room table.
Twenty rooms on a hill and they store their old clothes with me! What am I supposed to do with them? Give them to charity? That’s where they came from. He picked up the hat by the edges and looked inside. The crown was smooth as an egg, the brim practically threadbare. There is nothing else to do with a hat in one’s hands but put it on, so Eli dropped the thing on his head. He opened the door to the hall closet and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. The hat gave him bags under the eyes. Or perhaps he had not slept well. He pushed the brim lower till a shadow touched his lips. Now the bags under his eyes had inflated to become his face. Before the mirror he unbuttoned his shirt, unzipped his trousers, and then, shedding his clothes, he studied what he was. mat a silly disappointment to see yourself naked in a hat. Especially in that hat. He sighed, but could not rid himself of the great weakness that suddenly set on his muscles and joints, beneath the terrible weight of the stranger’s strange hat.
He returned to the dining room table and emptied the box of its contents: jacket, trousers, and vest (it smelled deeper than blackness). And under it all, sticking between the shoes that looked chopped and bitten, came the first gleam of white. A little fringed serape, a gray piece of semi-underwear, was crumpled at the bottom, its thready border twisted into itself. Eli removed it and let it hang free. What is it? For warmth? To wear beneath underwear in the event of a chest cold? He held it to his nose but it did not smell from Vick’s or mustard plaster. It was something special, some Jewish thing. Special food, special language, special prayers, why not special BVD’s? So fearful was he that he would be tempted back into wearing his traditional clothes—reasoned Eli—that he had carried and buried in Woodenton everything, including the special underwear. For that was how Eli now understood the box of clothes. The greenie was saying, Here, I give up. I refuse even to be tempted. We surrender. And that was how Eli continued to understand it until he found he’d slipped the white fringy surrender flag over his hat and felt it clinging to his chest. And now, looking at himself in the mirror, he was momentarily uncertain as to who was tempting who into what. Why did the greenie leave his clothes? Was it even the greenie? Then who was it? And why? But, Eli, for Christ’s sake, in an age of science things don’t happen like that. Even the goddam pigs take drugs…