by Philip Roth
impressions, all the students who knew her agreed that she “talked a lot about
the Vietnam war.” Some students remembered her “lashing out in anger” if
somebody else opposed her way of thinking about the presence of American troops
in Vietnam.
* * *
According to her homeroom teacher, Mr. William Pax-man, Meredith had been
“working hard and doing well, A’s or B’s” and had expressed a strong interest in
attending his alma mater, Penn State.
“If you mention her family, people say, “What a nice family,’” Mr. Paxman said.
“We just can’t believe this has happened.”
The only ominous note about her activities came from one of the alleged bomber’s
teachers who has been interviewed by agents from the FBI. “They told me, ‘We
have received a great deal of information about Miss Levov.”’
For a year there is “where the store used to be.” Then construction begins on a
new store, and month after month he watches it
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going up. One day a big red, white, and blue banner appears— “Greatly Expanded!
New! New! New! McPherson’s Store!”—announcing the grand opening on the Fourth of
July. He has to sit Dawn down and tell her they are going to shop at the new
store like everyone else and, though for a while it will not be easy for them,
eventually… . But it is never easy. He cannot go into the new store without
remembering the old store, even though the Russ Hamlins have retired and the new
store is owned by a young couple from Easton who care nothing about the past and
who, in addition to an expanded general store, have put in a bakery that turns
out delicious cakes and pies as well as bread and rolls baked fresh every day.
At the back of the store, alongside the post office window, there is now a
little counter where you can buy a cup of coffee and a fresh bun and sit and
chat with your neighbor or read your paper if you want to. McPherson’s is a
tremendous improvement over Hamlin’s, and soon everybody around seems to have
forgotten their blown-up old-fashioned country store, except for the local
Hamlins and for the Levovs. Dawn cannot go near the new place, simply refuses to
go in there, while the Swede makes it his business, on Saturday mornings, to sit
at the counter with his paper and a cup of coffee, despite what anybody who sees
him there may be thinking. He buys his Sunday paper there too. He buys his
stamps there. He could bring stamps home from his office, could do all the
family mailing in Newark, but he prefers to patronize the post office window at
McPherson’s and to linger there musing over the weather with young Beth
McPherson the way he used to enjoy the same moment with Mary Hamlin, Russ’s
wife.
That is the outer life. To the best of his ability, it is conducted just as it
used to be. But now it is accompanied by an inner life, a gruesome inner life of
tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations,
horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions.
Sleeplessness and self-castigation night after night. Enormous loneliness.
Unflagging remorse, even for that kiss when she was eleven and he was thirty-six
and the two of them, in their wet bathing suits, were driving home together
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from the Deal beach. Could that have done it? Could anythinghsve done it? Could
nothing have done it?
Kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumoiher.
And in the everyday world, nothing to be done but respectably carry on the huge
pretense of living as himself, with all the shame of masquerading as the ideal
man.
* * *
174
1
Sept. i, 1973 Dear Mr. Levov,
Merry is working in the old dog and cat hospital on New Jersey Railroad Avenue
in the Ironbound Section of Newark, 115 N.J. Railroad Avenue, five minutes from
Penn Station. She is there every day. If you wait outside you can catch her
leaving work and heading home just after four p.m. She doesn’t know I’m writing
this letter to you. I am at the breaking point and can’t go on. I want to go
away but I can leave her to no one. You have to take over. Though I warn you
that if you tell her that it was from me that you discovered her whereabouts,
you will be doing her serious harm. She is an incredible spirit. She has changed
everything for me. I got into this over my head because I couldn’t ever resist
her power. That is too much to get into here. You must believe me when I tell
you that I never said anything or did anything other than what Merry demanded me
to say and to do. She is an overwhelming force. You and I were in the same boat.
I lied to her only once. That was about what happened at the hotel. If I had
told her that you refused to make love with me she would have refused to take
the money. She would have been back begging on the streets. I would never have
made you suffer so if I hadn’t the strength of my love for Merry to help me. To
you that will
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sound crazy. I am telling you it is so. Your daughter is divine. You cannot be
in the presence of such suffering without succumbing to its holy power. You
don’t know what a nobody I was before I met Merry. I was headed for oblivion.
But I can’t take anymore, you must not mention ME TO MERRY EXCEPT AS SOMEONE WHO
TORMENTED YOU EXACTLY AS I DID. DO NOT MENTION THIS LETTER IF YOU CARE ABOUT
MERRY’S SURVIVAL. You must take every precaution before getting to the hospital.
She could not survive the FBI. Her name is Mary Stoltz. She must be allowed to
fulfill her destiny. We can only stand as witnesses to the anguish that
sanctifies her.
The Disciple Who Calls Herself “Rita Cohen”
He could never root out the unexpected thing. The unexpected thing would be
waiting there unseen, for the rest of his life ripening, ready to explode, just
a millimeter behind everything else. The unexpected thing was the other side of
everything else. He had already parted with everything, then remade everything,
and now, when everything appeared to be back under his control, he was being
incited to part with everything again. And if that should happen, the unexpected
thing becoming the only thing …
Thing, thing, thing, thing—but what other word was tolerable? They could not be
forever in bondage to this fucking thing! For five years he had been waiting for
just such a letter—it had to come. Every night in bed he begged God to deliver
it the following morning. And then, in this amazing transitional year, 1973, the
year of Dawn’s miracle, during these months when Dawn was giving herself over to
designing the new house, he had begun to dread what he might find in the
morning’s mail or hear each time he picked up the phone. How could he allow the
unexpected thing back into their lives now that Dawn had ruled out of their
lives forever the improbability of what had happened? Leading his wife back to
herself had been like flying them through a five-year storm. He had fulfilled
every demand. To disentangle her from her horror, there
· 176 ·
* * *
wasn’t anything he had omitted to do
. Life had returned to something like its
recognizable proportions. Now tear the letter up and throw it away. Pretend it
never arrived.
Because Dawn had twice been hospitalized in a clinic near Princeton for suicidal
depression, he had come to accept that the damage was permanent and that she
would be able to function only under the care of psychiatrists and by taking
sedatives and an anti-depressant medication—that she would be in and out of
psychiatric hospitals and that he would be visiting her in those places for the
rest of their lives. He imagined that once or twice a year he would find himself
sitting at the side of her bed in a room where there were no locks on the door.
There would be flowers he’d sent her in a vase on the writing desk; on a
windowsill, the ivy plants he’d brought from her study, thinking it might help
her to care for something; on the bedside table framed photographs of himself
and Merry and Dawn’s parents and brother. At the side of the bed he himself
would be holding her hand while she sat propped up against the pillows in her
Levi’s and a big turtleneck sweater and wept. “I’m frightened, Seymour. I’m
frightened all the time.” He would sit patiently there beside her whenever she
began to tremble and he would tell her to just breathe, slowly breathe in and
out and think of the most pleasant place on earth that she knew of, imagine
herself in the most wonderfully calming place in the entire world, a tropical
beach, a beautiful mountain, a holiday landscape from her childhood … and he
would do this even when the trembling was brought on by a tirade aimed at him.
Sitting up on the bed, with her arms crossed in front of her as though to warm
herself, she would hide the whole of her body inside the sweater—turn the
sweater into a tent by extending the turtleneck up over her chin, stretching the
back under her buttocks, and drawing the front across her bent knees, down over
her legs, and beneath her feet. Often she sat tented like that all the time he
was there. “You know when I was in Princeton last? I do! I was invited by the
governor. To his mansion. Here, to Princeton, to his mansion. I had dinner at
the governor’s mansion. I was >twenty-two—in an evening gown and
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scared to death. His chauffeur drove me from Elizabeth and I danced in my crown
with the governor of New Jersey—so how did this happen? How have I wound up
here? You, that’s how! You wouldn’t leave me alone! Had to have me! Had to marry
me! I just wanted to become a teacher! That’s what I wanted. I had the job. I
had it waiting. To teach kids music in the Elizabeth system, and to be left
alone by boys, and that was it. I never wanted to be Miss America! I never
wanted to marry anyone! But you wouldn’t let me breathe—you wouldn’t let me out
of your sight. All I ever wanted was my college education and that job. I should
never have left Elizabeth! Never! Do you know what Miss New Jersey did for my
life? It ruined it. I only went after the damn scholarship so Danny could go to
college and my father wouldn’t have to pay. Do you think if my father didn’t
have the heart attack I would have entered for Miss Union County? No! I just
wanted to win the money so Danny could go to college without the burden on my
dad! I didn’t do it for boys to go traipsing after me everywhere—I was trying to
help out at home! But then you arrived. You! Those hands! Those shoulders!
Towering over me with your jaw! This huge animal I couldn’t get rid of. You
wouldn’t leave me be! Every time I looked up, there was my boyfriend, gaga
because I was a ridiculous beauty queen! You were like some kid! You had to make
me into a princess. Well, look where I have wound up! In a madhouse! Your
princess is in a madhouse!”
For years to come she would be wondering how what happened to her could have
happened to her and blaming him for it, and he would be bringing her food she
liked, fruit and candy and cookies, in the hope that she might eat something
aside from bread and water, and bringing her magazines in the hope that she
might be able to concentrate on reading for even just half an hour a day, and
* * *
bringing clothes that she could wear around the hospital grounds to accommodate
to the weather when the seasons changed. At nine o’clock every evening, he would
put away in her dresser whatever he’d brought for her, and he would hold her and
kiss her good-bye, hold her and tell her he’d be seeing her the next night after
work,
· 178 ·
and then he would drive the hour in the dark back to Old Rimrock remembering the
terror in her face when, fifteen minutes before visiting hours were to end, the
nurse put her head in the door to kindly tell Mr. Levov that it was almost time
for him to go.
The next night she’d be angry all over again. He had swayed her from her real
ambitions. He and the Miss America Pageant had put her off her program. On she
went and he couldn’t stop her. Didn’t try. What did any of what she said have to
do with why she was suffering? Everybody knew that what had broken her was quite
enough in itself and that what she said had no bearing on anything. That first
time she was in the hospital, he simply listened and nodded, and strange as it
was to hear her going angrily on about an adventure that at the time he was
certain she couldn’t have enjoyed more, he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t
better for her to identify what had happened to her in 1949, not what had
happened to her in 1968, as the problem at hand. “All through high school people
were telling me, ‘You should be Miss America.’ I thought it was ridiculous.
Based on what should I be Miss America? I was a clerk in a dry-goods store after
school and in the summer, and people would come up to my cash register and say,
‘You should be Miss America.’ I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand when people
said I should do things because of the way that I looked. But when I got a call
from the Union County pageant to come to that tea, what could I do? I was a
baby. I thought this was a way for me to kick in a little money so my father
wouldn’t have to work so hard. So I filled out the application and I went, and
after all the other girls left, that woman put her arm around me and she told
all her neighbors, ‘I want you to know that you’ve just spent the afternoon with
the next Miss America.’ I thought, ‘This is all so silly. Why do people keep
saying these things to me? I don’t want to be doing this.’ And when I won Miss
Union County, people were already saying to me, ‘We’ll see you in Atlantic
City’—people who know what they’re talking about saying I’m going to win this
thing, so how could I back out? I couldn’t. The whole front page of the
Elizabeth Journal was about me winning Miss Union County. I was mortified. I
was. I thought
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somehow I could keep it all a secret and just win the money. I was a baby! I was
sure at least I wasn’t going to win Miss New Jersey, I was positive. I looked
around and there was this sea of good-looking girls and they all knew what to
do, and I
didn’t know anything. They knew how to use hair rollers and put false
eyelashes on, and I couldn’t roll my hair right until I was halfway through my
Miss New Jersey year. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, look at their makeup,’ and they
had beautiful wardrobes and I had a prom dress and borrowed clothes, and so I
was convinced there was no way I could ever win. I was so introverted. I was so
unpolished. But I won again. And then they were coaching me on how to sit and
how to stand, even how to listen—they sent me to a model agency to learn how to
walk. They didn’t like the way I walked. I didn’t care how I walked—I walked! I
walked well enough to become Miss New Jersey, didn’t I? If I don’t walk well
enough to become Miss America, the hell with it! But you have to glide. No! I
will walk the way I walk! Don’t swing your arms too much, but don’t hold them
stiffly at your side. All these little tricks of the trade to make me so self-
conscious I could barely move! To land not on your heels but on the balls of
* * *
your feet—this is the kind of thing I went through. If I can just drop out of
this thing! How can I back out of this thing? Leave me alone! All of you leave
me alone! I never wanted this in the first place! Do you see why I married you?
Now do you understand? One reason only! I wanted something that seemed normal!
So desperately after that year, I wanted something normal! How I wish it had
never happened! None of it! They put you up on a pedestal, which I didn’t ask
for, and then they rip you off it so damn fast it can blind you! And I did not
ask for any of it! I had nothing in common with those other girls. I hated them
and they hated me. Those tall girls with their big feet! None of them gifted.
