by Philip Roth
the operation, when she could not stop vomiting, he was there to clean her up
and to comfort her. During the next several days, when she wept from the pain,
he sat at her bedside and, as he had night after night at the psychiatric
clinic, held her hand, certain that this grotesque surgery, this meaningless,
futile ordeal, was ushering in the final stage of her downfall as a recognizable
human being: far from assisting at his wife’s recovery, he understood himself to
be acting as the unwitting accomplice to her mutilation. He looked at her head
buried in bandages and felt he might as well be witnessing the preparation for
burial of her corpse.
He was totally wrong. As it was to turn out, only a few days before the letter
from Rita Cohen reached his office, he happened to pass Dawn’s desk and to see
there a brief handwritten letter beside an envelope addressed to the plastic
surgeon in Geneva: “Dear Dr. LaPlante: A year has passed since you did my face.
I do not feel that when I last saw you I understood what you have given me. That
you would spend five hours of your time for my beauty fills me with awe. How can
I thank you enough? I feel it’s taken me these full twelve months to recover
from the surgery. I believe, as you said, that my system was more beaten down
than I had realized. Now it is as if I have been given a new life. Both from
within and from the outside. When I meet old friends I have not seen for a
while, they are puzzled as to what happened to me. I don’t tell them. It is
quite wonderful, dear doctor, and without you it would never have been possible.
Much love and thank you, Dawn Levov.”
Almost immediately after the reconstitution of her face to its former pert,
heart-shaped pre-explosion perfection, she decided to build a small contemporary
house on a ten-acre lot the other side of Rimrock ridge and to sell the big old
house, the outbuildings, and their hundred-odd acres. (Dawn’s beef cattle and
the farm machinery had been sold off in ‘69, the year after Merry became a
fugitive from justice; by then it was clear that the business was too
· 188 ·
demanding for Dawn to continue to run on her own, and so he took an ad in one of
the monthly cattle magazines and within only weeks had got rid of the baler, the
kicker, the rake, the livestock— everything, the works.) When he overheard her
telling the architect, their neighbor Bill Orcutt, that she had always hated
their house, the Swede was as stunned as if she were telling Orcutt she had
always hated her husband. He went for a long walk, needed to walk almost the
five miles down into the village to keep reminding himself that it was the house
she said she’d always hated. But even her meaning no more than that left him so
* * *
miserable it took all his considerable powers of suppression to turn himself
around and head home for lunch, where Dawn and Orcutt were to review with him
Orcutt’s first set of sketches.
Hated their old stone house, the beloved first and only house? How could she? He
had been dreaming about that house since he was sixteen years old and, riding
with the baseball team to a game against Whippany—sitting there on the school
bus in his uniform, idly rubbing his fingers around the deep pocket of his mitt
as they drove along the narrow roads curving westward through the rural Jersey
hills—he saw a large stone house with black shutters set on a rise back of some
trees. A little girl was on a swing suspended from a low branch of one of those
big trees, swinging herself high into the air, just as happy, he imagined, as a
kid can be. It was the first house built of stone he’d ever seen, and to a city
boy it was an architectural marvel. The random design of the stones said “House”
to him as not even the brick house on Keer Avenue did, despite the finished
basement where he’d taught Jerry Ping-Pong and checkers; despite the screened-in
back porch where he’d lie in the dark on the old sofa and listen on hot nights
to the Giant games; despite the garage where as a boy he would use a roll of 1
black tape to affix a ball to the end of a rope hanging from a cross beam,
where, all winter long, assuming his tall, erect, no-nonsense stance, he would
duteously spend half an hour swinging at it with his bat after he came home from
basketball practice, so as not to lose his timing; despite the bedroom under the
eaves, with the two
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dormer windows, where the year before high school he’d put himself to sleep
reading and rereading The Kid from Tomkinsville—”A gray-haired man in a dingy
shirt and a blue baseball cap well down over his eyes shoved an armful of
clothes at the Kid and indicated his locker. ‘Fifty-six. In the back row,
there.’ The lockers were plain wooden stalls about six feet high with a shelf
one or two feet from the top. The front of his locker was open and along the
edge at the top was pasted: ‘tucker, no. 56.’ There was his uniform with the
word ‘dodgers’ in blue across the front and the number 56 on the back of the
shirt… .”
The stone house was not only engagingly ingenious-looking to his eyes—all that
irregularity regularized, a jigsaw puzzle fitted patiently together into this
square, solid thing to make a beautiful shelter—but it looked indestructible, an
impregnable house that could never burn to the ground and that had probably been
standing there since the country began. Primitive stones, rudimentary stones of
the sort that you would see scattered about among the trees if you took a walk
along the paths in Weequahic Park, and out there they were a house. He couldn’t
get over it.
At school he’d find himself thinking about which girl in each of his classes to
marry and take to live with him in that house. After the ride with the team to
Whippany, he had only to hear someone saying “stone”—even saying “west”—and he
would imagine himself going home after work to that house back of the trees and
seeing his daughter there, his little daughter high up in the air on the swing
he’d built for her. Though he was only a high school sophomore, he could imagine
a daughter of his own running to kiss him, see her flinging herself at him, see
himself carrying her on his shoulders into that house and straight on through to
the kitchen, where standing by the stove in her apron, preparing their dinner,
would be the child’s adoring mother, who would be whichever Weequahic girl had
shimmied down in the seat in front of him at the Roosevelt movie theater just
the Friday before, her hair hanging over the back of her chair, within stroking
distance, had he dared. All of his life he had this ability to imagine himself
190
* * *
completely. Everything always added up to something whole. How could it not when
he felt himself to add up, add up exactly to one? Then he saw Dawn at Upsala.
She’d be crossing the common to Old Main where the day students hung out between
classes; she’d be standing under the eucalyptus trees talking with a couple of
the girls who lived in Kenbrook Hall. Once he followed her down Prospect Street
toward the Brick Chu
rch bus station when suddenly she stopped in front of the
window at Best & Co. After she went inside the store, he went up to the window
to look at the mannequin in a long “New Look” skirt and imagined Dawn Dwyer in a
fitting room trying the skirt on over her slip. She was so lovely that it made
him extraordinarily shy even to glance her way, as though glancing were itself
touching or clinging, as though if she knew (and how could she not?) that he was
uncontrollably looking her way, she’d do what any sensible, self-possessed girl
would do, disdain him as a beast of prey. He’d been a U.S. Marine, he’d been
engaged to a girl in South Carolina, at his family’s request had broken off the
engagement, and it was years since he’d thought about that stone house with the
black shutters and the swing out front. Sensationally handsome as he was, fresh
from the service and a glamorous campus athletic star however determinedly he
worked at containing conceit and resisting the role, it took him a full semester
to approach Dawn for a date, not only because nakedly confronting her beauty
gave him a bad conscience and made him feel shamefully voyeuristic but because
once he approached her there’d be no way to prevent her from looking right
through him and into his mind and seeing for herself how he pictured her: there
at the stove of the stone house’s kitchen when he came trundling in with their
daughter, Merry, on his back—”Merry” because of the joy she took in the swing
he’d built her. At night he played continuously on his phonograph a song popular
that year called “Peg o’ My Heart.” A line in the song went, “It’s your Irish
heart I’m after,” and every time he saw Dawn Dwyer on the paths at Upsala, tiny
and exquisite, he went around the rest of the day unaware that he was whistling
that damn song nonstop. He would find himself whis-
191
tling it even during a ballgame, while swinging a couple of bats in the on-deck
circle, waiting his turn at the plate. He lived under two skies then—the Dawn
Dwyer sky and the natural sky overhead.
But still he didn’t immediately approach her, for fear that she’d see what he
was thinking and laugh at his intoxication with her, this ex-marine’s
presumptuous innocence about the Upsala Spring Queen. She would think that his
imagining, before they were even introduced, that she was especially intended to
satisfy Seymour Levov’s yearnings meant that he was still a child, vain and
spoiled, when in fact what it meant to the Swede was that he was fully charged
up with purpose long, long before anyone else he knew, with a grown man’s aims
and ambitions, someone who excitedly foresaw, in perfect detail, the outcome of
his story. He had come home from the service at twenty in a rage to be “mature.”
If he was a child, it was only insofar as he found himself looking ahead into
responsible manhood with the longing of a kid gazing into a candy-store window.
Understanding all too well why she wanted to sell the old house, he acceded to
her wish without even trying to make her understand that the reason she wanted
to go—because Merry was still there, in every room, Merry at age one, five, ten—
was the reason he wanted to stay, a reason no less important than hers. But as
she might not survive their staying—and he, it still seemed, could endure
anything, however brutally it flew in the face of his own inclinations—he agreed
to abandon the house he loved, not least for the memories it held of his
fugitive child. He agreed to move into a brand-new house, open everywhere to the
sun, full of light, just big enough for the two of them, with only a small extra
room for guests out over the garage. A modern dream house—”luxuriously austere”
was how Orcutt described it back to Dawn after sounding her out on what she had
* * *
in mind—with electric baseboard heating (instead of the insufferable forced hot
air that gave her sinusitis) and built-in Shaker-like furniture (instead of
those dreary period pieces) and recessed ceiling lighting (instead of the
million stand-
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ing lamps beneath the gloomy oak beams) and large, clear casement windows
throughout (instead of those mullioned old sashes that were always sticking),
and with a basement as technologically up-to-date as a nuclear submarine
(instead of that dank, cavernous cellar where her husband took guests to see the
wine he had “laid down” for drinking in his old age, reminding them as they
shuffled between the mildewed stone walls to be on guard against the low-slung
cast-iron drainage pipes: “Your head, be careful, watch it there …”). He
understood everything, all of it, understood just how awful it was for her, and
so what could he do but accede? “Property is a responsibility,” she said. “With
no machinery and no cattle, you grow up a lot of grass. You’re going to have to
keep this mowed two or three times a year to keep it down. You have to have it
bush-hogged—you can’t just let things grow up into woods. You’ve got to keep
them mowed and it’s just ridiculously expensive and it’s crazy for you to keep
laying that money out year after year. There’s keeping the barns from falling
down—there’s a responsibility you have with land. You just can’t let it go. The
best thing to do, the only thing to do,” she told him, “is to move.”
Okay. They’d move. But why did she have to tell Orcutt she’d hated that house
“from the day we found it”? That she was there only because her husband had
“dragged” her there when she was too young to have any idea what it would be
like trying to run a huge, antiquated, dark barn of a place in which something
was always leaking or rotting or in need of repair? The reason she first went
into cattle, she told him, was to get out of that terrible house.
And if that was true? To find this out so late in the game! It was like
discovering an infidelity—all these years she had been unfaithful to the house.
How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when
there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year
in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? How he had loved the
providing. Had he only been given the opportunity to provide for more than the
three of them. If only there had been more children in that big house, if only
Merry had been raised among brothers and
193
sisters whom she loved and who loved her, this thing might never have happened
to them. But Dawn wanted from life something other than to be the slavish mom to
half a dozen kids and the nursemaid to a two-hundred-year-old house—she wanted
to raise beef cattle. Because of her being introduced, no matter where they
went, as “a former Miss New Jersey,” she was sure that even though she had a
bachelor’s degree people were always dismissing her as a bathing beauty, a
mindless china doll, capable of doing nothing more productive for society than
standing around looking pretty. It did not matter how many times she patiently
explained to them, when they brought up her title, that she had entered at the
local Union Count
y level only because her father had the heart attack, and money
was tight, and her brother Danny was graduating St. Mary’s, and she thought that
if she won—and she believed she had a chance not because of having been Upsala
Spring Queen but because she was a music-education major who played classical
piano—she could use the scholarship money that went with the title for Danny’s
college tuition, thereby unburdening…
* * *
But it didn’t matter what she said or how much she said or how often she
mentioned the piano: nobody believed her. Nobody really believed that she never
wanted to look better than everybody else. They only thought that there are lots
of other ways to get a scholarship than to go walking around Atlantic City in
high heels and a bathing suit. She was always telling people her serious reasons
for becoming Miss New Jersey and nobody even listened. They smiled. To them she
couldn’t have serious reasons. They didn’t want her to have serious reasons. All
she could have for them was that face. Then they could go away saying, “Oh her,
she’s nothing but a face,” and pretend they weren’t jealous or intimidated by
her looks. “Thank God,” Dawn would mutter to him, “I didn’t win Miss
Congeniality. If they think Miss New Jersey has to be dumb, imagine if I’d won
the booby prize. Though,” she’d then add wistfully, “it would have been nice to
bring home the thousand dollars.”
After Merry was born, when they first began going to Deal in the summer, people
used to stare at Dawn in her bathing suit. Of
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course she never wore the white Catalina one-piece suit that she’d worn on the
runway in Atlantic City, with the logo, just below the hip, of the traditional
