by Philip Roth
everyone what they needed from him at the factory and everyone what they needed
from him at home—dealing promptly with the suppliers’ screw-ups, with the
union’s exactions, with the buyers’ complaints; contending with an uncertain
marketplace and all the overseas headaches; attending, on demand, to the
importuning of a stuttering child, an independent-minded wife, a putatively
retired, easily riled-up father—did it occur to him that this relentlessly
impersonal use of himself might one day wear him down. He did not think like
that any more than the ground under his feet thought like that. He seemed never
to understand or, even in a moment of fatigue, to admit that his limitations
were not entirely loathsome and that he was not himself a one-hundred-and-
seventy-year-old stone house, its weight borne imperturbably by beams carved of
oak—that he was something more transitory and mysterious.
It wasn’t this house she hated anyway; what she hated were memories she couldn’t
shake loose from, all of them associated with the house, memories that of course
he shared. Merry as a grade school kid lying on the floor of the study next to
Dawn’s desk, drawing pictures of Count while Dawn did the accounts for the farm.
Merry emulating her mother’s concentration, enjoying working with the same
discipline, silently delighting to feel an equal in a common pursuit, and in
some preliminary way offering them a glimpse of herself as the adult—yes, of the
adult friend to them that she would someday be. Memories particularly of when
they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time—the taskmasters, the
examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-
be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines—memories, rather, of
when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery
and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life
when they could reach one another in calm.
The early mornings in the bathroom shaving while Dawn went to wake Merry up—he
could not imagine a better start to the
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morning than catching a glimpse of that ritual. There was never an alarm clock
in Merry’s life—Dawn was her alarm clock. Before six o’clock Dawn was already
out in the barn, but at promptly six-thirty she stopped tending the herd, came
* * *
back in the house, and went up to the child’s room, where, as she sat at the
edge of the bed, daybreak’s comforting observance began. Without a word it
began—Dawn simply stroking Merry’s sleeping head, a pantomime that could go on
for two full minutes. Next, almost singing the whispered words, Dawn lightly
inquired, “A sign of life?” Merry responded not by opening her eyes but by
moving a little finger. “Another sign, please?” On the game went—Merry playing
along by wrinkling her nose, by moistening her lips, by sighing just audibly—
till eventually she was up out of bed ready to go. It was a game embodying a
loss, for Merry the state of being completely protected, for Dawn the project of
completely protecting what once had seemed completely protectable. Waking The
Baby: it continued until the baby was nearly twelve, the one rite of infancy
that Dawn could not resist indulging, that neither one of them ever appeared
eager to outgrow.
How he loved to sight them doing together what mothers and daughters do. To a
father’s eye, one seemed to amplify the other. In bathing suits rushing out of
the surf together and racing each other to the towels—the wife now a little past
her robust moment and the daughter edging up to the beginning of hers. A
delineation of life’s cyclical nature that left him feeling afterward as though
he had a spacious understanding of the whole female sex. Merry, with her growing
curiosity about the trappings of womanhood, putting on Dawn’s jewelry while,
beside her at the mirror, Dawn helped her preen. Merry confiding in Dawn about
her fears of ostracism—of other kids ignoring her, of her girlfriends ganging up
on her. In those quiet moments from which he was excluded (daughter relying on
mother, Dawn and Merry emotionally one inside the other like those Russian
dolls), Merry appeared more poignantly than ever not a small replica of his
wife, or of himself, but an independent little being—something similar, a
version of
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them, yet distinctive and new—for which he had the most passionate affinity.
It wasn’t the house Dawn hated—what she hated, he knew, was that the motive for
having the house (for making the beds, for setting the table, for laundering the
curtains, for organizing the holidays, for apportioning her energies and
differentiating her duties by the day of the week) had been destroyed right
along with Hamlin’s store; the tangible daily fullness, the smooth regularity
that was once the underpinning of all of their lives survived in her only as an
illusion, as a mockingly inaccessible, bigger-than-life-size fantasy, real for
every last Old Rimrock family but hers. He knew this not just because of the
million memories but also because in the top drawer of his office desk he still
kept handy a ten-year-old copy of a local weekly, the Denville-Randolph Courier,
featuring on the first page the article about Dawn and her cattle business. She
had consented to be interviewed only if the journalist promised not to mention
her having been Miss New Jersey of 1949. The journalist agreed and the piece was
titled “Old Rimrock Woman Feels Lucky to Love What She’s Doing,” and concluded
with a paragraph that, simple as it was, made him proud of her whenever he went
back to read it: “‘People are lucky if they get to do what they love and are
good at it,’ Mrs. Levov declared.”
The Courier story testified just how much she had loved the house, as well as
everything else about their lives. Beneath a photograph of her standing before
the pewter plates lined up on the fireplace mantel—in her white turtleneck shirt
and cream-colored blazer, with her hair styled in a pageboy and her two delicate
hands in front of her, the fingers decorously intertwined, looking sweet though
a bit plain—the caption read, “Mrs. Levov, the former Miss New Jersey of 1949,
loves living in a 170-year-old home, an environment which she says reflects the
values of her family.” When Dawn called the paper in a fury about mentioning
Miss New Jersey, the journalist answered that he had kept to his promise not to
mention it in the article; it was the editor who had put it in the caption.
* * *
No, she had not hated the house, of course she hadn’t—and that
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didn’t matter anyway. All that mattered now was the restoration of her well-
being; the foolish remarks she might make to this one or that one were of no
consequence beside the recovery taking hold. Maybe what was agitating him was
that the self-adjustments on which she was building a recovery were not
regenerative for him or entirely admirable to him, were even something of an
affront to him. He could not tell people—certainly couldn’t convince himself—
> that he hated the things he’d loved….
He was back to it. But he couldn’t help it, not when he remembered how at seven
Merry would eat herself sick with the raw batter while baking two dozen
tollhouse cookies, and a week later they’d still be finding batter all over the
place, even up on top of the refrigerator. So how could he hate the
refrigerator? How could he let his emotions be reshaped, imagine himself being
rescued, as Dawn did, by their leaving it behind for an all-but-silent new
IceTemp, the Rolls-Royce of refrigerators? He for one could not say he hated the
kitchen in which Merry used to bake her cookies and melt her cheese sandwiches
and make her baked ziti, even if the cupboards weren’t stainless steel or the
counters Italian marble. He could not say he hated the cellar where she used to
go to play hide-and-seek with her screaming friends, even if sometimes it
spooked even him a little to be down there in the wintertime with those
scuttling mice. He could not say he hated the massive fireplace adorned with the
antique iron kettle that was all at once insufferably corny in Dawn’s
estimation, not when he remembered how, early every January, he would chop up
the Christmas tree and set it afire there, the whole thing in one go, so that
the explosive blaze of the bone-dry branches, the great whoosh and the loud
crackling and the dancing shadows, cavorting devils climbing to the ceiling from
the four walls, would transport Merry into a delirium of terrified delight. He
could not say he hated the ball-and-claw-foot bathtub where he used to give her
baths, just because decades of indelible mineral stains from the well water
streaked . the enamel and encircled the drain. He could not even hate the f ^
toilet whose handle required all that jiggling to get the thing to
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stop gushing, not when he remembered her kneeling beside it and throwing up
while he knelt next to her, holding her sick little forehead.
Nor could he say he hated his daughter for what she had done— if he could! If
only, instead of living chaotically in the world where she wasn’t and in the
world where she once was and in the world where she might now be, he could come
to hate her enough not to care anything about her world, then or now. If only he
could be back thinking like everybody else, once again the totally natural man
instead of this riven charlatan of sincerity, an artless outer Swede and a
tormented inner Swede, a visible stable Swede and a concealed beleaguered Swede,
an easygoing, smiling sham Swede enshrouding the Swede buried alive. If only he
could even faintly reconstitute the undivided oneness of existence that had made
for his straightforward physical confidence and freedom before he became the
father of an alleged murderer. If only he could be as unknowing as some people
perceived him to be—if only he could be as perfectly simple as the legend of
Swede Levov concocted by the hero-worshiping kids of his day. If only he could
say, “I hate this house!” and be Weequahic’s Swede Levov again. If he could say,
“I hate that child! I never want to see her again!” and then go ahead, disown
her, forevermore despise and reject her and the vision for which she was
willing, if not to kill, then to cruelly abandon her own family, a vision having
* * *
nothing whatsoever to do with “ideals” but with dishonesty, criminality,
megalomania, and insanity. Blind antagonism and an infantile desire to menace—
those were her ideals. In search always of something to hate. Yes, it went way,
way beyond her stuttering. That violent hatred of America was a disease unto
itself. And he loved America. Loved being an American. But back then he hadn’t
dared begin to explain to her why he did, for fear of unleashing the demon,
insult. They lived in dread of Merry’s stuttering tongue. And by then he had no
influence anyway. Dawn had no influence. His parents had no influence. In what
way was she “his” any longer if she hadn’t even been his then, certainly not
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his if to drive her into her frightening blitzkrieg mentality it required no
more than for her own father to begin to explain why his affections happened to
be for the country where he’d been born and raised. Stuttering, sputtering
little bitch! Who the fuck did she think she was?
Imagine the vileness with which she would have assaulted him for revealing to
her that just reciting the names of the forty-eight states used to thrill him
back when he was a little kid. The truth of it was that even the road maps used
to give him a kick when they gave them away free at the gas station. So did the
offhand way he had got his nickname. The first day of high school, down in the
gym for their first class, and him just jerking around with the basketball while
the other kids were still all over the place getting into their sneakers. From
fifteen feet out he dropped in two hook shots—swish! swish!—just to get started.
And then that easygoing way that Henry “Doc” Ward, the popular young phys ed
teacher and wrestling coach fresh from Montclair State, laughingly called from
his office doorway—called out to this lanky blond fourteen-year-old with the
brilliant blue gaze and the easy, effortless style whom he’d never seen in his
gym before—”Where’d you learn that, Swede?” Because the name differentiated
Seymour Levov from Seymour Munzer and Seymour Wishnow, who were also on the
class roll, it stuck all through gym his freshman year; then other teachers and
coaches took it up, then kids in the school, and afterward, as long as Weequahic
remained the old Jewish Weequahic and people there still cared about the past,
Doc Ward was known as the guy who’d christened Swede Levov. It just stuck.
Simple as that, an old American nickname, proclaimed by a gym teacher,
bequeathed in a gym, a name that made him mythic in a way that Seymour would
never have done, mythic not only during his school years but to his schoolmates,
in memory, for the rest of their days. He carried it with him like an invisible
passport, all the while wandering deeper and deeper into an American’s life,
forthrightly evolving into a large, smooth, optimistic American such as his
conspicuously raw
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forebears—including the obstinate father whose American claim was not
inconsiderable—couldn’t have dreamed of as one of their own.
The way his father talked to people, that got him too, the American way his
father said to the guy at the pump, “Fill ‘er up, Mac. Check the front end, will
ya, Chief?” The excitement of their trips in the DeSoto. The tiny, musty tourist
cabins they stopped at overnight while meandering up through the scenic back
roads of New York State to see Niagara Falls. The trip to Washington when Jerry
was a brat all the way. His first liberty home from the marines, the pilgrimage
to Hyde Park with the folks and Jerry to stand together as a family looking at
FDR’s grave. Fresh from boot camp and there at Roosevelt’s grave, he felt that
something meaningful was happening; hardened and richly tanned from training
through the hottest months on a parade ground where the temperat
ure rose some
days to a hundred twenty degrees, he stood silent, proudly wearing his new
* * *
summer uniform, the shirt starched, the khaki pants sleekly pocketless over the
rear and perfectly pressed, the tie pulled taut, cap centered on his close-
shaven head, black leather dress shoes spit-shined, agleam, and the belt—the
belt that made him feel most like a marine, that tightly woven khaki fabric belt
with the metal buckle—girding a waist that had seen him through some ten
thousand sit-ups as a raw Parris Island recruit. Who was she to sneer at all
this, to reject all this, to hate all this and set out to destroy it? The war,
winning the war—did she hate that too? The neighbors, out in the street, crying
and hugging on V-J Day, blowing car horns and marching up and down front lawns
loudly banging kitchen pots. He was still at Parris Island then, but his mother
had described it to him in a three-page letter. The celebration party at the
playground back of the school that night, everyone they knew, family friends,
school friends, the neighborhood butcher, the grocer, the pharmacist, the
tailor, even the bookie from the candy store, all in ecstasy, long lines of
staid middle-aged people madly mimicking Carmen Miranda and dancing the conga,
one-two-three kick, one-two-three kick, until after two a.m. The war.
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Winning that war. Victory, victory, victory had come! No more death and war!
His last months of high school, he’d read the paper every night, following the
marines across the Pacific. He saw the photographs in Life—photographs that
haunted his sleep—of the crumpled bodies of dead marines killed on Peleliu, an
island in a chain called the Palaus. At a place called Bloody Nose Ridge, Japs
ferreted in old phosphate mines, who were themselves to be burned to a crisp by
