by Philip Roth
years after the ‘67 riots, held on in the face of industry-wide economic
realities and his father’s imprecations as long as he possibly could, but when
he was unable to stop the erosion of the workmanship, which had deteriorated
steadily since the riots, he’d given up, managing to get out more or less
unharmed by the city’s collapse. All the Newark Maid factory had suffered in the
four days of rioting were some broken windows, though fifty yards from the gate
to his loading dock, out on West Market, two other buildings had been gutted by
fire and abandoned.
* * *
“Taxes, corruption, and race. My old man’s litany. Anybody at all, people from
all over the country who couldn’t care less about the fate of Newark, made no
difference to him—whether it was down in Miami Beach at the condo, on a cruise
ship in the Caribbean, they’d get an earful about his beloved old Newark,
butchered to death by taxes, corruption, and race. My father was one of those
Prince Street guys who loved that city all his life. What happened to Newark
broke his heart.
“It’s the worst city in the world, Skip,” the Swede was telling me. “Used to be
the city where they manufactured everything. Now it’s the car-theft capital of
the world. Did you know that? Not the most gruesome of the gruesome developments
but it’s awful enough. The thieves live mostly in our old neighborhood. Black
kids. Forty cars stolen in Newark every twenty-four hours. That’s the statistic.
Something, isn’t it? And they’re murder weapons—once they’re stolen, they’re
flying missiles. The target is anybody in the street— old people, toddlers,
doesn’t matter. Out in front of our factory was the Indianapolis Speedway to
them. That’s another reason we left. Four, five kids drooping out the windows,
eighty miles an hour— right on Central Avenue. When my father bought the
factory, there were trolley cars on Central Avenue. Further down were the auto
showrooms. Central Cadillac. LaSalle. There was a factory where somebody was
making something in every side street. Now there’s a liquor store in every
street—a liquor store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church. Everything
else in ruins or boarded up. But when my father bought the factory, a stone’s
throw away Kiler made watercoolers, Fortgang made fire alarms, Lasky made
corsets, Robbins made pillows, Honig made pen points—Christ, I sound like my
father. But he was right—’The joint’s jumpin’,’ he used to say. The major
industry now is car theft. Sit at a light in Newark, anywhere in Newark, and all
you’re doing is looking around you. Bergen near Lyons is where I got rammed.
Remember Henry’s, ‘the Sweet Shop,’ next to the Park Theater? Well, right there,
where Henry’s used to be. Took my first high school date to Henry’s for a soda.
In a booth there. Arlene Danziger. Took her for a black-and-white soda after the
movie. But a black-and-white doesn’t mean a soda anymore on Bergen Street. It
means the worst kind of hatred in the world. A car coming the wrong way on a
one-way street and they ram me. Four kids drooping out the windows. Two of them
get out, laughing, joking, and point a gun at my head. I hand over the keys and
one of them takes off in my car. Right in front of what used to be Henry’s. It’s
something horrible. They ram cop cars in broad daylight. Front-end collisions.
To explode the air bags. Doughnuting. Heard of doughnuting? Doing doughnuts? You
haven’t heard about this? This is what they steal the cars for. Top speed, they
slam on the brakes, yank the emergency brake, twist the steering wheel, and the
car starts spinning. Wheeling the car in circles at tremendous speeds. Killing
pedestrians means nothing to them. Killing motorists means nothing to them.
Killing themselves
means nothing to them. The skid marks are enough to frighten you. They killed a
woman right out in front of our place, same week my car was stolen. Doing a
doughnut. I witnessed this. I was leaving for the day. Tremendous speed. The car
groaning. Ungodly screeching. It was terrifying. It made my blood run cold. Just
driving her own car out of 2nd Street, and this woman, young black woman, gets
it. Mother of three kids. Two days later it’s one of my own employees. A black
guy. But they don’t care, black, white doesn’t matter to them. They’ll kill
anyone. Fellow named Clark Tyler, my shipping guy—all he’s doing is pulling out
of our lot to go home. Twelve hours of surgery, four months in a hospital.
Permanent disability. Head injuries, internal injuries, broken pelvis, broken
shoulder, fractured spine. A high-speed chase, crazy kid in a stolen car and the
cops are chasing him, and the kid plows right into him, crushes the driver’s-
side door, and that’s it for Clark. Eighty miles an hour down Central Avenue.
The car thief is twelve years old. To see over the wheel he has to roll up the
* * *
floor mats to sit on. Six months in Jamesburg and he’s back behind the wheel of
another stolen car. No, that was it for me, too. My car’s robbed at gunpoint,
they cripple Clark, the woman gets killed—that week did it. That was enough.”
Newark Maid manufactured now exclusively in Puerto Rico. For a while, after
leaving Newark, he’d contracted with the Communist government in Czechoslovakia
and divided the work between his own factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and a Czech
glove factory in Brno. However, when a plant that suited him went up for sale in
Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, over near Mayagiiez, he’d bailed out on the Czechs,
whose bureaucracy had been irritating from the start, and unified his
manufacturing operation by purchasing a second Puerto Rico facility, another
good-sized factory, moved in the machinery, started a training program, and
hired an additional three hundred people. By the eighties, though, even Puerto
Rico began to grow expensive and about everybody but Newark Maid fled to
wherever in the Far East the labor force was abundant and cheap, to the
Philippines first, then Korea and Taiwan, and now to China.
26
Even baseball gloves, the most American glove of all, which used to be made by
friends of his father’s, the Denkerts up in Johnstown, New York, for a long time
now had been manufactured in Korea. When the first guy left Gloversville, New
York, in ‘52 or ‘53 and went to the Philippines to make gloves, they laughed at
him, as though he were going to the moon. But when he died, around 1978, he had
a factory there with four thousand workers and the whole industry had gone
essentially from Gloversville to the Philippines. Up in Gloversville, when the
Second World War began, there must have been ninety glove factories, big and
small. Today there isn’t a one—all of them out of business or importers from
abroad, “people who don’t know a fourchette from a thumb,” the Swede said.
“They’re business people, they know if they need a hundred thousand pair of this
and two hundred thousand pair of that in so many colors and so many sizes, but
they don’t know the details on how to get it done.” “What’s a fourchette?” I
asked. “The part of the gl
ove between the fingers. Those small oblong pieces
between the fingers, they’re die-cut along with the thumbs—those are the
fourchettes. Today you’ve got a lot of underqualified people, probably don’t
know half what I knew when I was five, and they’re making some pretty big
decisions. A guy buying deerskin, which can run up to maybe three dollars and
fifty cents a foot for a garment grade, he’s buying this fine garment-grade
deerskin to cut a little palm patch to go on a pair of ski gloves. I talked to
him just the other day. A novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and
he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and
come out a long, long ways ahead. You multiply this over a large order, you’re
talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew it. He could have
put a hundred grand in his pocket.”
The Swede found himself hanging on in P.R., he explained, the way he had hung on
in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the
intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could
give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father’s
days; but also, he had to admit, staying on because his family so much enjoyed
the vacation home he’d built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not
very far from the Ponce plant. The life the kids lived there they just loved …
and off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving,
catamaraning … and though it was clear from all he had just been telling me
that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn’t appear to have any
judgment at all as to what was and wasn’t interesting about his world. Or, for
reasons I couldn’t understand, he didn’t want his world to be interesting. I
would have given anything to get him back to Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins,
* * *
and Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove
done, even back to the guy who’d paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of
deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil
way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of
his boys on land and sea.
While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in
a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his
prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds
underweight.
“The operation went okay?”
“Just fine,” he replied.
“A couple friends of mine,” I said, “didn’t emerge from that surgery as they’d
hoped to. That operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get
the cancer out.”
“Yes, that happens, I know.”
“One wound up impotent,” I said. “The other’s impotent and incontinent. Fellows
my age. It’s been rough for them. Desolating. It can leave you in diapers.”
The person I had referred to as “the other” was me. I’d had the surgery in
Boston, and—except for confiding in a Boston friend who had helped me through
the ordeal till I was back on my feet—when I returned to the house where I live
alone, two and a half hours west of Boston, in the Berkshires, I had thought it
best to
28
keep to myself both the fact that I’d had cancer and the ways it had left me
impaired.
“Well,” said the Swede, “I got off easy, I guess.”
“I’d say you did,” I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of
self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wanted. To respect
everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be
inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by
incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by anger … life just unraveling
for the Swede like a fluffy ball of yarn.
This line of thinking brought me back to his letter, his request for
professional advice about the tribute to his father that he was trying to write.
I wasn’t myself going to bring up the tribute, and yet the pilzzle remained not
only as to why he didn’t but as to why, if he didn’t, he had written me about it
in the first place. I could only conclude—given what I now knew of this life
neither overly rich in contrasts nor troubled too much by contradiction—that the
letter and its contents had to do with the operation, with something
uncharacteristic that arose in him afterward, some surprising new emotion that
had come to the fore. Yes, I thought, the letter grew out of Swede Levov’s
belated discovery of what it means to be not healthy but sick, to be not strong
but weak; what it means to not look great—what physical shame is, what
humiliation is, what the gruesome is, what extinction is, what it is like to ask
“Why?” Betrayed all at once by a wonderful body that had furnished him only with
assurance and had constituted the bulk of his advantage over others, he had
momentarily lost his equilibrium and had clutched at me, of all people, as a
means of grasping his dead father and calling up the father’s power to protect
him. For a moment his nerve was shattered, and this man who, as far as I could
* * *
tell, used himself mainly to conceal himself had been transformed into an
impulsive, devitalized being in dire need of a blessing. Death had burst into
the dream of his life (as, for the second time in ten years, it had burst into
mine), and the things that disquiet men our age disquieted even him.
29
I wondered if he was willing any longer to recall the sickbed vulnerability that
had made certain inevitabilities as real for him as the exterior of his family’s
life, to remember the shadow that had insinuated itself like a virulent icing
between the layers and layers of contentment. Yet he’d showed up for our dinner
date. Did that mean the unendurable wasn’t blotted out, the safeguards weren’t
back in place, the emergency wasn’t yet over? Or was showing up and going
blithely on about everything that was endurable his way of purging the last of
his fears? The more I thought about this simple-seeming soul sitting across from
me eating zabaglione and exuding sincerity, the farther from him my thinking
carried me. The man within the man was scarcely perceptible to me. I could not
make sense of him. I couldn’t imagine him at all, having come down with my own
strain of the Swede’s disorder: the inability to draw conclusions about anything
but exteriors. Rooting around trying to figure this guy out is ridiculous, I
told myself. This is the jar you cannot open. This guy cannot be cracked by
thinking. That’s the mystery of his mystery. It’s like trying to get something
out of Michelangelo’s David.
I’d given him my number in my letter—why hadn’t he called to break the date if
he was no longer deformed by the prospect of death? Once it was all back to how
it had always been, once he’d recovered that special luminosity that had never
failed to win whatever he wanted, what use did he have for me? No, his letter, I
thou
ght, cannot be the whole story—if it were, he wouldn’t have come. Something
remains of the rash urge to change things. Something that overtook him in the
hospital is still there. An unexam-ined existence no longer serves his needs. He
wants something recorded. That’s why he’s turned to me: to record what might
otherwise be forgotten. Omitted and forgotten. What could it be?
Or maybe he was just a happy man. Happy people exist too. Why shouldn’t they?
All the scattershot speculation about the Swede’s motives was only my
professional impatience, my trying to imbue Swede Levov with something like the
tendentious meaning Tolstoy assigned to Ivan Ilych, so belittled by the author
in the uncharitable
story in which he sets out to heartlessly expose, in clinical terms, what it is
to be ordinary. Ivan Ilych is the well-placed high-court official who leads “a
decorous life approved of by society” and who on his deathbed, in the depths of
his unceasing agony and terror, thinks, “‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to
have done.’” Ivan Ilych’s life, writes Tolstoy, summarizing, right at the
outset, his judgment of the presiding judge with the delightful St. Petersburg
house and a handsome salary of three thousand rubles a year and friends all of
good social position, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most
terrible. Maybe so. Maybe in Russia in 1886. But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in
1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after
their morning round of golf and start to crow, “It doesn’t get any better than
this,” they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.
Swede Levov’s life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and
