by Philip Roth
swim girl in her bathing cap. He loved that bathing suit, it fit her so
marvelously, but after Atlantic City she never put it on again. They stared at
her no matter what style or color suit she wore, and sometimes they would come
up and snap her picture and ask for an autograph. More disturbing, however, than
the staring and the photographs was their suspidousness of her. “For some
strange reason,” she said, “the women always think that because I’m a former
whatever I want their husbands.” And probably, the Swede thought, what made it
so frightening for them is that they believed Dawn could get their husbands—
they’d noticed how men looked at her and how attentive they were to her wherever
she went. He’d noticed it himself but never worried, not about a wife as proper
as Dawn who’d been brought up as strictly as she was. But all of this so rankled
Dawn that first she gave up going to the beach club in a bathing suit, any
bathing suit; then, much as she loved the surf, she gave up going to the beach
club at all and whenever she wanted to swim drove the four miles down to Avon,
where, as a child, she used to vacation with her family for a week in the
summertime. On the beach at Avon she was just a simple, petite Irish girl with
her hair pulled back about whom nobody cared one way or another.
She went to Avon to get away from her beauty, but Dawn couldn’t get away from it
any more than she could openly flaunt it. You have to enjoy power, have a
certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it
overshadows everything else. As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart
and makes you exceptional—and enviable, and hateable—to accept your beauty, to
accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you’re
well advised to develop a sense of humor. Dawn was not a stick, she had spirit
and she had spunk, and she could be cutting in a very humorous way, but that
wasn’t quite the inward humor it took to do the job and make her free. Only
after she was married and no longer a virgin did she discover the place where it
was okay
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for her to be as beautiful as she was, and that place, to the profit of both
husband and wife, was with the Swede, in bed.
They used to call Avon the Irish Riviera. The Jews without much money went to
Bradley Beach, and the Irish without much money went next door to Avon, a
seaside town all of ten blocks long. The swell Irish—who had the money, the
* * *
judges, the builders, the fancy surgeons—went to Spring Lake, beyond the
imposing manorial gates just south of Belmar (another resort town, which was
more or less a mixture of everybody). Dawn used to get taken to stay in Spring
Lake by her mother’s sister Peg, who’d married Ned Ma-honey, a lawyer from
Jersey City. If you were an Irish lawyer in that town, her father told her, and
you played ball with City Hall, Mayor “I-am-the-law” Hague took care of you.
Since Uncle Ned, a smooth talker, a golfer, and good-looking, had been on the
Hudson County gravy train from the day he graduated John Marshall and signed on
across the street with a powerful firm right there in Journal Square, and since
he seemed to love pretty Mary Dawn best of all his nieces and nephews, every
summer after the child had spent her week in the Avon rooming house with her
mother and father and Danny, she went on by herself to spend the next week with
Ned and Peg and all the Mahoney kids at the huge old Essex and Sussex Hotel
right on the oceanfront at Spring Lake, where every morning in the airy dining
room overlooking the sea she ate French toast with Vermont maple syrup. The
starched white napkin that covered her lap was big enough to wrap around her
waist like a sarong, and the sparkling silverware weighed a ton. On Sunday, they
all went together to St. Catherine’s, the most gorgeous church the little girl
had ever seen. You got there by crossing a bridge—the loveliest bridge she had
ever seen, narrow and humpbacked and made of wood—that spanned the lake back of
the hotel. Sometimes when she was unhappy at the swim club she’d drive beyond
Avon into Spring Lake and remember how Spring Lake used to materialize out of
nowhere every summer, magically full blown, Mary Dawn’s Brigadoon. She
remembered how she dreamed of getting married in St. Catherine’s, of being a
bride there in a white
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dress, marrying a rich lawyer like her Uncle Ned and living in one of those
grand summer houses whose big verandas overlooked the lake and the bridges and
the dome of the church while only minutes from the booming Atlantic. She could
have done it, too, could have had it just by snapping her fingers. But her
choice was to fall in love with and marry Seymour Levov of Newark instead of any
one of those dozens and dozens of smitten Catholic boys she’d met through her
Mahoney cousins, the smart, rowdy boys from Holy Cross and Boston College, and
so her life was not in Spring Lake but down in Deal and up in Old Rimrock with
Mr. Levov. “Well, that’s the way it happened,” her mother would say sadly to
whoever would listen. “Could have had a wonderful life there just like Peg’s.
Better than Peg’s. St. Catherine’s and St. Margaret’s are there. St. Catherine’s
is right by the lake there. Beautiful building. Just beautiful. But Mary Dawn’s
the rebel in the family—always was. Always did just what she wanted, and from
the time she marched off to be in that contest, fitting in like everybody else
is apparently not something she wanted.”
Dawn went to Avon strictly to swim. She still hated lying on the beach to take
the sun, still resented having been made to expose her fair skin to the sun
every day by the New Jersey pageant people— on the runway, they told her, her
white swimsuit would look striking against a deep tan. As a young mother she
tried to get as far as she could from everything that marked her as “a former
whatever” and that aroused insane contempt in other women and made her feel
unhappy and like a freak. She even gave away to charity all the clothes the
pageant director (who had his own idea of what kind of girl should be presented
by New Jersey to the Miss America judges) had picked out for her at the
designers’ showrooms in New York during Dawn’s daylong buying trip for Atlantic
City. The Swede thought she’d looked great in those gowns and he hated to see
them go, but at least, at his urging, she kept the state crown so that someday
she could show it to their grandchildren.
And then, after Merry started at nursery school, Dawn set out to prove to the
world of women, for neither the first time nor the last,
* * *
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that she was impressive for something more than what she looked like. She
decided to raise cattle. That idea, too, went back to her childhood—way back to
her grandfather, her mother’s father, who as a twenty-year-old from County Kerry
came to the port in the 1880s, married, settled in south Elizabeth close to St.
Mary’s, and proceeded to father eleven children. His living he earned at first
as a hand on the docks, but he bought
a couple of cows to provide milk for the
family, wound up selling the surplus to the big shots on West Jersey Street—the
Moores from Moore Paint, Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s family, Nicholas Murray Butler
the Nobel Prize winner— and soon became one of the first independent milkmen in
Elizabeth. He had about thirty cows on Murray Street, and though he didn’t own
much property, it didn’t matter—in those days you could let them graze anywhere.
All his sons went into the business and stayed in it until after the war, when
the big supermarkets came along and knocked out the little man. Dawn’s father,
Jim Dwyer, had worked for her mother’s family, and that was how Dawn’s parents
had met. When he was still only a kid, before refrigeration, Jim Dwyer used to
go out on the milk truck at twelve o’clock at night and stay out till morning
delivering milk off the back of the truck. But he hated it. Too tough a life.
The heck with that, he finally said, and took up plumbing. Dawn, as a small
child, loved to visit the cows, and when she was about six or seven, she was
taught by one of her cousins how to milk them, and that thrill—squirting the
milk out of those udders, the animals just standing there eating hay and letting
her tug to her heart’s content—she never forgot.
With beef cattle, however, she wouldn’t need the manpower to milk and she could
run the operation almost entirely by herself. The Simmental, which made a lot of
milk but was a beef animal as well, still weren’t a registered breed in the
United States at that time, so she could get in on the ground floor.
Crossbreeding—Simmental to polled Hereford—was what interested her, the genetic
vigor, the hybrid vigor, the sheer growth that results from crossbreeding. She
studied the books, took the magazines, the catalogs started coming in the mail,
and at night she would call him over to where
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she was paging through a catalog and say, “Isn’t that a good-looking heifer?
Have to go out and take a look at her.” Pretty soon they were traveling together
to shows and sales. She loved the auctions. “This reminds me just a little too
much,” she whispered to the Swede, “of Atlantic City. It’s the Miss America
Pageant for cows.” She wore a tag identifying herself—”Dawn Levov, Arcady
Breeders,” which was the name of her company, taken from their Old Rimrock
address, Box 62, Arcady Hill Road—and found it very hard to resist buying a nice
cow.
A cow or a bull would be led into the ring and paraded around and the show
sponsors would give the background of the animal, the sire and the dam and what
they did, what the potential was, and then the people would bid, and though Dawn
bought carefully, her pleasure just in raising her hand and topping the previous
bid was serious pleasure. Much as he wanted more children, not more cows, he had
to admit that she was never so fascinating to him, not even when he first saw
her at Upsala, as in those moments at the auctions when her beauty came
enticingly cloaked in the excitement of bidding and buying. Before Count
arrived—the champion bull she bought at birth for ten thousand dollars, which
her husband, who was a hundred percent behind her, still had to tell her was an
awful lot of money—his accountant would look at her figures for Arcady Breeders
at the end of each year and tell the Swede, “This is ridiculous, you can’t go on
this way.” But they really couldn’t take a beating as long as it was mostly her
own time she put into it, and so he told the accountant, “Don’t worry, she’ll
* * *
make some money.” He wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping her, even if eventually
she didn’t make a cent, because, as he said to himself when he watched her and
the dog out with the herd, “These are her friends.”
She worked like hell, all by herself, keeping track of the calving, getting the
calves drinking out of a plastic bottle with a nipple if they didn’t get the
idea of sucking, tending to the mothers’ feeding before she put them back in the
herd. For the fencing she had to hire a man, but she was out there with him
baling hay, the eighteen hundred, two thousand bales that saw them through the
winter,
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and when Count was on in years and got lost one winter day she was heroic in
hunting him down, for three days combed the woods for him before she found him
where he had got himself onto a little island out in the swamp. Getting him back
to the barn was ghastly. Dawn weighed a hundred and three pounds and was five
feet two inches tall, and Count weighed about twenty-five hundred pounds, a very
long, very beautiful animal with big brown spots around either eye, sire of the
most sought-after calves. Dawn kept all the bull calves, breeding for other
cattle owners, who would keep these bulls in their herds; the heifers she didn’t
sell often, but when she did, people wanted them. Count’s progeny won year after
year at the national shows and the investment returned itself many times over.
But then Count got stranded out in the swamp because he had thrown his stifle
out; it was icy and he must have got his foot caught in a hole, between roots,
and when he saw that to get off this little island he had to get through wet
mud, he just quit, and it was three days before Dawn could find him anywhere.
Then, with the dog and Merry, she went out with a halter and tried to get him
out but he hurt too much and didn’t want to get up. So they came back later with
some pills, loaded him up with cortisone and different things and sat there with
him for another few hours in the rain, and then they tried again to move him.
They had to get him through roots and stones and deep muck, and he’d walk a bit
and stop, walk a bit and stop, and the dog got behind him and she’d bark and so
he’d walk another couple of steps, and that was the way it went for hours. They
had him on a rope and he’d take his head, this great big head, all curly with
those beautiful eyes, and he’d pull the rope and just swing the two of them,
Dawn and Merry together—boom! So then they’d get themselves up and start all
over again. They had some grain and he’d eat a little and then he’d come a
little farther, but all together it took four hours to get him out of the woods.
Ordinarily he led very well, but he hurt so that they had to get him home almost
piece by piece. Seeing his petite wife—a wopi-an who could, if she’d wanted to,
have been just a pretty face—and his small daughter drenched and covered with
mud when they
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emerged with the bull on the rain-soaked field back of the barn was something
the Swede never forgot. “This is right,” he thought. “She is happy. We have
Merry and that’s enough.” He was not a religious man but at that moment he
offered up thanks, saying aloud, “Something is shining down on me.”
To get the bull to the barn took Dawn and Merry nearly another hour, and there
he just lay down in the hay for four days. They got the vet, and the vet said,
“You’re not going to get him any better. I can make him more comfortable, that’s
all I can do for you.” Da
wn brought him water to drink in buckets and food to
eat, and one day (as Merry used to tell the story to whoever came to the house)
he decided, “Hey, I’m all right,” and he got up and he wandered out and he took
it easy and that’s when he fell in love with the old mare and they became
inseparable. The day they had to ship Count— send him to the butcher—Dawn was in
* * *
tears and kept saying, “I can’t do this,” and he kept saying, “You’ve got to do
this,” and so they did it. Magically (Merry’s word) the night before Count left
he bred a perfect little heifer, his parting shot. She got the brown spots
around the eyes—”He th-th-th-threw brown eyes all around him”—but after that,
though the bulls were well bred, never again was there an animal to compare with
the Count.
So did it matter finally that she told people she hated the house? He was now
far and away the stronger partner, she was now far and away the weaker; he was
the fortunate, doubtlessly undeserving recipient of so much—what the hell, to
whatever demand she made on him, he acceded. If he could bear something and Dawn
couldn’t, he didn’t understand how he could do anything but accede. That was the
only way the Swede knew for a man to go about being a man, especially one as
lucky as himself. From the very beginning it had been a far greater strain for
him to bear her disappointments than to bear his own; her disappointments seemed
to dangerously rob him of himself—once he had absorbed her disappointments it
became impossible for him to do nothing about them. Half measures wouldn’t
suffice. His effort to arrive at what she wanted always had to be wholehearted;
never was he free of his quiet whole-
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heartedness. Not even when everything was on top of him, not even when giving
