by Philip Roth
the paperbacks, the mimeographed booklets with the satiric cartoons. There was a
copy of The Communist Manifesto. Where did she get that? Not in Old Rimrock. Who
was supplying her with all this literature? Bill and Melissa. These weren’t just
diatribes against the war—they were written by people wanting to overthrow
capitalism and the U.S. government, people screaming for violence and
revolution. It was awful for him to come upon passages that, being the good
student she was, she had neatly underlined, but he could not stop reading …
and now he believes he can remember something in that drawer written by Angela
Davis. There was no way of his knowing for sure because the FBI had confiscated
it all, put all those publications into evidence bags, sealed them, and removed
them from the house. They had dusted her room, looking for a solid set of
fingerprints that they could use to match up with anything incriminating. They
collected the household phone bills to trace Merry’s calls. They searched her
room for hiding places: pried up floorboards from beneath her rug, removed
wainscoting from the walls, took the globe off the ceiling light—they went
through the clothes in her closet, looking for things hidden in the sleeves.
After the bombing, the state police stopped all traffic on Arcady Hill Road,
closed off the area, and twelve FBI agents spent sixteen hours combing the house
from the attic to the basement; when finally, in the kitchen, they searched the
dustbag of the vacuum cleaner for “papers,” Dawn had let out a scream. And all
because of Merry’s reading Karl Marx and Angela Davis! Yes, now he remembers
clearly sitting at Merry’s desk trying to read Angela
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Davis himself, working at it, wondering how his child did it, thinking, Reading
this stuff is like deep-sea diving. It’s like being in an Aqua-Lung with the
window right up against your face and the air in your mouth and no place to go,
no place to move, no place to put a crowbar and escape. It’s like reading those
tiny pamphlets and illustrated holy cards about the saints that the old lady
Dwyer used to give her in Elizabeth. Luckily the child outgrew them, but for a
while, whenever she misplaced her fountain pen, she’d pray to St. Anthony, and
whenever she thought she hadn’t studied enough for a test, she prayed to St.
Jude, and whenever her mother made her spend a Saturday morning cleaning up her
* * *
messy room, she prayed to St. Joseph, the patron saint of laborers. Once when
she was nine and some diehards down at Cape May reported that the Virgin Mary
appeared to their children in their barbecue and people flocked in from miles
around and kept vigil in their yard, Merry was fascinated, perhaps less by the
mystery of the Virgin’s appearance in New Jersey than by a child’s having been
singled out to see her. “I wish I could see that,” she told her father, and she
told him about how apparitions of the Virgin Mary had appeared to three shepherd
children in Fatima, in Portugal, and he nodded and held his tongue, though when
her grandfather got wind of the Cape May vision from his granddaughter, he said
to her, “I guess next they’ll see her at the Dairy Queen,” a remark Merry
repeated down in Elizabeth. Grandma Dwyer then prayed to St. Anne to help Merry
stay Catholic despite her upbringing, but in a couple of years saints and prayer
had disappeared from Merry’s life; she stopped wearing the Miraculous Medal,
with the impression on it of the Blessed Virgin, which she had sworn to Grandma
Dwyer to wear “perpetually” without even taking it off to bathe. She outgrew the
saints just as she would have outgrown the Communism. And she would have
outgrown it—Merry outgrew everything. It was merely a matter of months. Maybe
weeks and the stuff in that drawer would have been completely forgotten. All she
had to do was wait. If only she could have waited. That was Merry’s story in a
nutshell. She was impatient. She was always impatient. Maybe it was the
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stuttering that made her impatient, I don’t know. But whatever it was she was
passionate about, she was passionate for a year, she did it in a year, and then
she got rid of it overnight. Another year and she would have been ready for
college. And by then she would have found something new to hate and new to love,
something new to be intense about, and that would have been that.
At the kitchen table one night Angela Davis appears to the Swede, as Our Lady of
Fatima did to those children in Portugal, as the Blessed Virgin did down in Cape
May. He thinks, Angela Davis can get me to her—and there she is. Alone in the
kitchen at night the Swede begins to have heart-to-heart talks with Angela
Davis, at first about the war, then about everything important to both of them.
As he envisions her, she has long lashes and wears large hoop earrings and is
more beautiful even than she looks on television. Her legs are long and she
wears colorful minidresses to expose them. The hair is extraordinary. She peers
defiantly out of it like a porcupine. The hair says, “Do not approach if you
don’t like pain.”
He tells her whatever she wants to hear, and whatever she tells him he believes.
He has to. She praises his daughter, whom she calls “a soldier of freedom, a
pioneer in the great struggle against repression.” He should take pride in her
political boldness, she says. The antiwar movement is an anti-imperialist
movement, and by lodging a protest in the only way America understands, Merry,
at sixteen, is in the forefront of the movement, a Joan of Arc of the movement.
His daughter is the spearhead of the popular resistance to a fascist government
and its terrorist suppression of dissent. What she did was criminal only
inasmuch as it is defined as criminal by a state that is itself criminal and
will commit ruthless aggression anywhere in the world to preserve the unequal
distribution of wealth and the oppressive institutions of class domination. The
disobedience of oppressive laws, she explains to him, including violent
disobedience, goes back to abolitionism—his daughter is one with John Brown!
Merry’s was not a criminal act but a political act in the power struggle between
the counterrevolutionary fascists and the forces of
160
* * *
resistance—blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians, draft resist-ers, antiwar
activists, heroic white kids like Merry herself, working, either by legal means
or by what Angela calls extralegal means, to overthrow the capitalist-inspired
police state. And he should not fear for her fugitive life—Merry is not alone,
she is part of an army of eighty thousand radical young people who have gone
underground the better to fight the social wrongs fostered by an oppressive
politico-economic order. Angela tells him that everything he has heard about
Communism is a lie. He must go to Cuba if he wants to see a social order that
has abolished racial injustice and the exploitation of labor and is in harmony
with the needs and aspirations of its people.
Obediently he listens. She tells him that imperialism is a weapon used by
wealthy w
hites to pay black workers less for their work, and that’s when he
seizes the opportunity to tell her about the black forelady, Vicky, thirty years
with Newark Maid, a tiny woman of impressive wit, stamina, and honesty, with
twin sons, Newark Rutgers graduates, Donny and Blaine, both of them now in
medical school. He tells her how Vicky alone stayed with him in the building,
round the clock, during the ‘67 riots. On the radio, the mayor’s office was
advising everyone to get out of the city immediately, but he had stayed, because
he thought that by being there he could perhaps protect the building from the
vandals and also for the reason that people stay when a hurricane hits, because
they cannot leave behind the things they cherish. For something like that
reason, Vicky stayed.
In order to appease any rioters who might be heading from South Orange Avenue
with their torches, Vicky had made signs and stuck them where they would be
visible, in Newark Maid’s first-floor windows, big white cardboard signs in
black ink: “Most of this factory’s employees are negroes.” Two nights later
every window with a sign displayed in it was shot out by a band of white guys,
either vigilantes from north Newark or, as Vicky suspected, Newark cops in an
unmarked car. They shot the windows out and drove away, and that was the total
damage done to the Newark
· 161 ·
Maid factory during the days and nights when Newark was on fire. And he tells
this to St. Angela.
A platoon of the young National Guardsmen who were on Bergen Street to seal off
the riot zone had camped out back by the Newark Maid loading dock on the second
day of fighting, and when he and Vicky went down with hot coffee, Vicky talked
to each of them—uniformed kids, in helmets and boots, conspicuously armed with
knives and rifles and bayonets, white country boys up from south Jersey who were
scared out of their wits. Vicky told them, “Think before you shoot into
somebody’s window! These aren’t ‘snipers’! These are people! These are good
people! Think!” The Saturday afternoon the tank sat out in front of the factory—
and the Swede, seeing it there, could at last phone Dawn to tell her, “We’ll
make it”—Vicky had gone up and knocked on the lid with her fists until they
opened up. “Don’t go nuts!” she shouted at the soldiers inside. “Don’t go crazy!
People have to live here when you’re gone! This place is their home!” There’d
been a lot of criticism afterward of Governor Hughes for sending in tanks, but
not from the Swede—those tanks put a stop to what could have been total
disaster. Though this he does not say to Angela.
For the two worst, most terrifying days, Friday and Saturday, July 14 and 15,
1967, while he kept in touch with the state police on a walkie-talkie and with
his father on the phone, Vicky would not desert him. She told him, “This is mine
too. You just own it.” He tells Angela how he knew the way things worked between
Vicky and his family, knew it was an old and lasting relationship, knew how
close they all were, but he had never properly understood that her devotion to
Newark Maid was no less than his. He tells Angela how, after the riots, after
* * *
living under siege with Vicky at his side, he was determined to stand alone and
not leave Newark and abandon his black employees. He does not, of course, tell
her that he wouldn’t have hesitated—and wouldn’t still—to pick up and move were
it not for his fear that, if he should join the exodus of businesses not yet
burned down, Merry would at last have her airtight case against
· 162 ·
him. Victimizing black people and the working class and the poor solely for
self-gain, out of filthy greed!
In the idealistic slogans there was no reality, not a drop of it, and
I yet what else could he do? He could not provide his daughter with
I the justification for doing something crazy. So he stayed in Newark, and after
the riots Merry did something crazier than crazy. The
I Newark riots, then the Vietnam War; the city, then the entire country, and
that took care of the Seymour Levovs of Arcady Hill Road. First the one colossal
blow—seven months later, in February ‘68,
I the devastation of the next. The factory under siege, the daughter at
| large, and that took care of their future.
On top of everything else, after the sniper fire ended and the flames were
extinguished and twenty-one Newarkers were counted dead by gunfire and the
National Guard was withdrawn and Merry had disappeared, the quality of the
Newark Maid line began to fall
I off because of negligence and indifference on the part of his employees, a
marked decline in workmanship that had the effect of sabotage even if he
couldn’t call it that. He does not tell Angela, for all that he is tempted to,
about the struggle his decision to stay on in Newark has precipitated between
himself and his own father; might only antagonize her against Lou Levov and
deter her from
| leading them to Merry.
“What we’ve got now,” his father argued each time he flew up
I from Florida to plead with his son to get the hell out before a second riot
destroyed the rest of the city, “is that every step of the way we’re no longer
making one step, we’re making two, three, and four steps. Every step of the way
you have got to go back a step to get it cut again, to get it stitched again,
and nobody is doing a day’s work and nobody is doing it right. A whole business
is going down the drain because of that son of a bitch LeRoi Jones, that Peek-A-
Boo-Boopy-Do, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hat. I built
this with my hands! With my blood! They think somebody gave it to me? Who? Who
gave it to me? Who gave me anything, ever? Nobody! What I have I built! With
work—w-o-r-k! But they took that city and now they are going to take that
business
· 163 ·
and everything that I built up a day at a time, an inch at a time, and they are
going to leave it all in ruins! And that’ll do ‘em a world of good! They burn
down their own houses—that’ll show whitey! Don’t fix ‘em up—burn ‘em down. Oh,
* * *
that’ll do wonders for a man’s black pride—a totally ruined city to live in! A
great city turned into a total nowhere! They’re just going to love living in
that! And I hired ‘em! How’s that for a laugh? / hired ‘em! ‘You’re nuts,
Levov’—this is what my friends in the steam room used to tell me—’What are you
hiring schvartzes for? You won’t get gloves, Levov, you’ll get dreck.’ But I
hired ‘em, treated them like human beings, kissed Vicky’s ass for twenty-five
years, bought all the girls a Thanksgiving turkey every goddamn Thanksgiving,
came in every morning with my tongue hanging out of my mouth so I could lick
their asses with it. ‘How is everybody,’ I said, ‘how are we all, my time is
yours, I don’t want you complaining to anybody but me, here at this desk isn’t
just a boss, here is your ally, your buddy, your friend.’ And the party I gave
for Vicky’s twins when they gradua
ted? And what a jerk-off I was. Am. To this
day! I’m by the pool and my wonderful friends look up from the paper and they
tell me they ought to take the schvartzes and line ‘em up and shoot ‘em, and I’m
the one who has to remind them that’s what Hitler did to the Jews. And you know
what they tell me, as an answer? ‘How can you compare schvartzes to Jews?’ They
are telling me to shoot the schvartzes and I am hollering no, and meanwhile I’m
the one whose business they are ruining because they cannot make a glove that
fits. Bad cutting, the stretch is wrong—the glove won’t even go on. Careless
people, careless, and it is inexcusable. One operation goes wrong, the whole
operation is spoiled all the way through, and, still, when I am arguing with
these fascist bastards, Seymour, Jewish men, men of my age who have seen what
I’ve seen, who should know better a million times over, when I am arguing with
them, I am arguing against what I should be arguing forr “Well, sometimes you
wind up doing that,” the Swede said. “Why? Tell me why!” “I suppose out of
conscience.” “Conscience? Where is theirs,
164
the schvartzes’ conscience? Where is their conscience after working for me for
twenty-five years?”
Whatever it cost him to deny his father relief from his suffering, stubbornly to
defy the truth of what his father was saying, the Swede could not submit to the
old man’s arguments, for the simple reason that if Merry were to learn—and she
would, through Rita Cohen, if Rita Cohen actually had anything to do with her—
that Newark Maid had fled the Central Avenue factory she would be all too
delighted to think, “He did it! He’s as rotten as the rest! My own father!
