American Pastoral

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