by Philip Roth
The conversation is pointless. Where is Merry?”
“You don’t remember the ‘Now You Are a Woman Party’? To celebrate her first
menstruation.”
“We’re not talking about any party. What party?”
“We’re talking about the humiliation of a daughter by her beauty-queen mother.
We’re talking about a mother who completely colonized her daughter’s self-image.
We’re talking about a mother who didn’t have an inch of feeling for her
daughter—who has about as much depth as those gloves you make. A whole family
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* * *
and all you really fucking care about is skin. Ectoderm. Surface. But what’s
underneath, you don’t have a clue. You think that was real affection she had for
that stuttering girl? She tolerated that stuttering girl, but you can’t tell the
difference between affection and tolerance because you’re too stupid yourself.
Another one of your fucking fairy tales. A menstruation party. A party for it!
Jesus!”
“You mean—no, that wasn’t that. The party? You mean when she took all her
friends to Whitehouse for dinner? That was her twelfth birthday. What is this
‘Now You Are a Woman’ crap? It was a birthday party. Nothing to do with
menstruating. Nothing. Who told you this? Merry didn’t tell you this. I remember
that party. She remembers that party. It was a simple birthday party. We took
all those girls down to that restaurant in Whitehouse. They had a wonderful
time. We had ten twelve-year-old girls. This is all cracked. Somebody is dead.
My daughter is being accused of murder.”
Rita was laughing. “Mr. Law-abiding New Jersey Fucking Citizen, a little bit of
fake affection looks just like love to him.”
“But what you are describing never happened. What you are saying never happened.
It wouldn’t have mattered if it did, but it did not.”
“Don’t you know what’s made Merry Merry? Sixteen years of living in a household
where she was hated by that mother.”
“For what? Tell me. Hated her for what?”
“Because she was everything Lady Dawn wasn’t. Her mother hated her, Swede. It’s
a shame you’re so late in finding out. Hated her for not being petite, for not
being able to have her hair pulled back in that oh-so-spiffy country way. Merry
was hated with that hatred that seeps into you like toxin. Lady Dawn couldn’t
have done a better job if she’d slipped poison into her a meal at a time. Lady
Dawn would look at her with that look of hatred and Merry was turned into a
piece of shit.”
“There was no look of hatred. Something may have gone wrong … but that
wasn’t it. That wasn’t hatred. I know what she’s talking about. What you’re
calling hatred was her mother’s anxiety. I know
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the look. But it was about the stuttering. My God, it wasn’t hatred. It was the
opposite. It was concern. It was distress. It was helplessness.”
“Still protecting that wife of yours,” said Rita, laughing at him again.
“Incredible incomprehension. Simply incredible. You know why else she hated her?
She hated her because she’s your daughter. It’s all fine and well for Miss New
Jersey to marry a Jew. But to raise a Jew? That’s a whole other bag of tricks.
You have a shiksa wife, Swede, but you didn’t get a shiksa daughter. Miss New
Jersey is a bitch, Swede. Merry would have been better off sucking the cows if
she wanted a little milk and nurturance. At least the cows have maternal
feelings.”
He had allowed her to talk, he had allowed himself to listen, only because he
wanted to know; if something had gone wrong, of course he wanted to know. What
is the grudge? What is the grievance? That was the central mystery: how did
Merry get to be who she is? But none of this explained anything. This could not
be what it was all about. This could not be what lay behind the blowing up of
the building. No. A desperate man was giving himself over to a treacherous girl
not because she could possibly begin to know what went wrong but because there
was no one else to give himself over to. He felt less like someone looking for
* * *
an answer than like someone mimicking someone who was looking for an answer.
This whole exchange had been a ridiculous mistake. To expect this kid to talk to
him truthfully. She couldn’t insult him enough. Everything about their lives
transformed absolutely by her hatred. Here was the hater—this insurrectionist
child!
“Where is she?”
“Why do you want to know where she is?”
“I want to see her,” he said.
“Why?”
“She’s my daughter. Somebody is dead. My daughter is being accused of murder.”
“You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you? Do you know how many Vietnamese have
been killed in the few minutes we’ve had the
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luxury to talk about whether or not Dawnie loves her daughter? It’s all
relative, Swede. Death is all relative.”
“Where is she?”
“Your daughter is safe. Your daughter is loved. Your daughter is fighting for
what she believes in. Your daughter is finally having an experience of the
world.”
“Where is she, damn you!”
“She’s not a possession, you know—she’s not property. She’s not powerless
anymore. You don’t own Merry the way you own your Old Rimrock house and your
Deal house and your Florida condo and your Newark factory and your Puerto Rico
factory and your Puerto Rican workers and all your Mercedes and all your Jeeps
and all your beautiful handmade suits. You know what I’ve come to realize about
you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your
understanding than the nature of reality.”
No one begins like this, the Swede thought. This can’t be what she is. This
bullying infant, this obnoxious, stubborn, angry bullying infant cannot be my
daughter’s protector. She is her jailer. Merry with all her intelligence under
the spell of this childlike cruelty and meanness. There’s more human sense in
one page of the stuttering diary than in all the sadistic idealism in this
reckless child’s head. Oh, to crush that hairy, tough little skull of hers—
right now, between his two strong hands, to squeeze it and squeeze it until all
the vicious ideas came streaming from her nose!
How does a child get to be like this? Can anyone be utterly without
thoughtfulness? The answer is yes. His only contact with his daughter was this
child who did not know anything and would say anything and more than likely do
anything—resort to anything to excite herself. Her opinions were all stimuli:
the goal was excitement.
“The paragon,” Rita said, speaking to him out of the side of her mouth, as
though that would make it all the easier to wreck his life. “The cherished and
triumphant paragon who is in actuality the criminal. The great Swede Levov, ail-
American capitalist criminal.”
She was some clever child crackpot gorging herself on an esca-
* * *
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pade entirely her own, a reprehensible child lunatic who’d never laid eyes on
of New York were full of them—a criminally insane Jewish kid who’d picked up her
facts about their lives from the newspapers and the TV and from the school
friends of Merry’s who were all out peddling the same quotation: “Quaint Old
Rimrock is in for a big surprise.” From the sound of it, Merry had gone around
school the day before the bombing telling that to four hundred kids. That was
the evidence against her, all these kids on TV claiming they heard her say it—
that hearsay and her disappearance were the whole of the evidence. The post
office had been blown up, and the general store along with it, but nobody had
seen her anywhere near it, nobody had seen her do the thing, nobody would have
even thought of her as the bomber if she hadn’t disappeared. “She’s been
tricked!” For days Dawn went around the house crying, “She’s been abducted!
She’s been tricked! She’s somewhere right now being brainwashed! Why does
everybody say she did it? Nobody’s had any contact with her. She is not
connected with it in any way at all. How can they believe this of a child?
Dynamite? What does Merry have to do with dynamite? No! It isn’t true! Nobody
knows a thing!”
He should have informed the FBI of Rita Cohen’s visit the day she’d come to ask
for the scrapbook—at the very least should have demanded proof from her of
Merry’s existence. And he should have taken into his confidence someone other
than Dawn, formulated strategy with a person less likely to kill herself if he
proceeded other than as her desperation demanded. Answering the needs of a wife
incoherent with grief, in no condition to think or act except out of hysteria,
was an inexcusable error. He should have heeded his mistrust and contacted
immediately the agents who had interviewed him and Dawn at the house the day
after the bombing. He should have picked up the phone the moment he understood
who Rita Cohen was, even while she was seated in his office. But instead he had
driven directly home from the office and, because he could
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never calculate a decision free of its emotional impact on those who claimed his
love; because seeing them suffer was his greatest hardship; because ignoring
their importuning and defying their expectations, even when they would not argue
reasonably or to the point, seemed to him an illegitimate use of his superior
strength; because he could not disillusion anyone about the kind of selfless
son, husband, and father he was; because he had come so highly recommended to
everyone, he sat across from Dawn at the kitchen table, watching her deliver a
long, sob-wracked, half-demented speech, a plea to tell the FBI nothing.
Dawn begged him to do whatever the girl wanted: it remained possible for Merry
to go unapprehended if only they kept her out of sight until the destruction of
the store—and the death of Dr. Conlon—had been forgotten. If only they hid her
somewhere, provided for her, maybe even in another country, until this war-mad
witch-hunt was over and a new time had begun; then she could be treated fairly
for something she never, never could have done. “She’s been tricked!” and he
believed this himself—what else could a father believe?—until he heard it, day
after day, a hundred times a day, from Dawn.
So he’d turned over the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet
slippers, the stuttering book; and now he was to meet Rita Cohen at a room in
the New York Hilton, this time bearing five thousand dollars in unmarked
twenties and tens. And just as he’d known to call the FBI when she asked for the
scrapbook, he now understood that if he acceded any further to her malicious
* * *
daring there’d be no bottom to it, there would only be misery on a scale
incomprehensible to all of them. With the scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet
slippers, and the stuttering book he had been craftily set up; now for the
disastrous payoff.
But Dawn was convinced that if he traveled over to Manhattan, got himself lost
in the crowds, then, at the appointed afternoon hour, certain he wasn’t being
tailed, made his way to the hotel, Merry herself would be there waiting for him—
an absurd fairy-tale
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hope for which there wasn’t a shred of justification, but which he didn’t have
the heart to oppose, not when he saw his wife shedding another layer of sanity
whenever the telephone rang.
For the first time she was got up in a skirt and blouse, gaudily floral bargain-
basement stuff, and wearing high-heeled pumps; when she unsteadily crossed the
carpet in them, she looked tinier even than she had in her work boots. The
hairdo was as aboriginal as before but her face, ordinarily a little pot,
soulless and unadorned, had been emblazoned with lipstick and painted with eye
shadow, her cheekbones highlighted with pink grease. She looked like a third
grader who had ransacked her mother’s room, except that the cosmetics caused her
expressionlessness to seem even more fright-eningly psychopathic than when her
face was just unhumanly empty of color.
“I have the money,” he said, standing in the hotel room doorway towering above
her and knowing that what he was doing was as wrong as it could be. “I have the
money,” he repeated, and prepared himself for the retort about the sweat and
blood of the workers from whom he had stolen it.
“Oh, hi. Do come in,” the girl said. I’d like you to meet my parents. Mom and
Dad, this is Seymour. An act for the factory, an act for the hotel. “Please, do
come in. Do make yourself at home.”
He had the money packed into his briefcase, not just the five thousand in the
tens and twenties she’d asked for but five thousand more in fifties. A total of
ten thousand dollars—and with no idea why. What good would any of it do Merry?
Merry wouldn’t see a penny of it. Still, he said yet again—summoning all his
strength so as not to lose hold—”I’ve brought the money you requested.” He was
trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of
everything.
She had moved onto the bedspread and, with her legs crossed at the ankle and two
pillows propped up behind her head, began lightly to sing: “Oh Lydia, oh Lydia,
my encyclo-pid-e-a, oh Lydia, the tattooed lady …”
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It was one of the old, silly songs he’d taught his little daughter once they saw
that singing, she could always be fluent.
“Come to fuck Rita Cohen, have you?”
“I’ve come,” he said, “to deliver the money.”
“Let’s f-f-f-fuck, D-d-d-dad.”
“If you have any feeling for what everyone is going through—”
* * *
“Come off it, Swede. What do you know about ‘feeling’?”
“Why are you treating us like this?”
“Boo-hoo. Tell me another. You came here to fuck me. Ask anybody. Why does a
middle-aged capitalist dog come to a hotel room to meet a young piece of ass? To
fuck her. Say it, just say, ‘I came to fuck you. To fuck you good.’ Say it,
Swede.”
“I’m twenty-two years old. I do everything. I do it all. Say it, Swede.”
Could this lead to Merry, this onslaught of sneering and mockery? She could not
insult him enough. Was she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared
beforehand? Or was he dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because
she was mad? She was like a gang member. Was she the gang leader, this tiny
white-faced thug? In a gang the authority is given to the one who is most
ruthless. Is she the most ruthless or are there others who are worse, those
others who are holding Merry captive right now? Maybe she is the most
intelligent. Their actress. Maybe she is the most corrupt. Their budding whore.
Maybe this is all a game to them, middle-class kids out on a spree.
“Don’t I suit you?” she asked. “No crude desires in a big guy like you? Come on,
I’m not such a frightening person. You can’t have met your match in little me.
Look at you. Like a naughty boy. A child in terror of being disgraced. Isn’t
there anything else in there except your famous purity? I bet there is. I bet
you’ve got yourself quite a pillar in there,” she said. “The pillar of society.”
“What is the aim of all this talk? Will you tell me?”
