American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  the flamethrowers, had cut down hundreds and hundreds of young marines,

  eighteen-year-olds, nineteen-year-olds, boys barely older than he was. He had a

  map up in his room with pins sticking out of it, pins he had inserted to mark

  where the marines, closing in on Japan, had assaulted from the sea a tiny atoll

  or an island chain where the Japs, dug into coral fortresses, poured forth

  ferocious mortar and rifle fire. Okinawa was invaded on April 1,1945, Easter

  Sunday of his senior year and just two days after he’d hit a double and a home

  run in a losing game against West Side. The Sixth Marine Division overran

  Yontan, one of the two island air bases, within three hours of wading ashore.

  Took the Motobu Peninsula in thirteen days. Just off the Okinawa beach, two

  kamikaze pilots attacked the flagship carrier Bunker Hill on May 14—the day

  after the Swede went four for four against Irvington High, a single, a triple,

  and two doubles—plunging their planes, packed with bombs, into the flight deck

  jammed with American planes all gassed up to take off and laden with ammunition.

  The blaze climbed a thousand feet into the sky, and in the explosive firestorm

  that raged for eight hours, four hundred sailors and aviators died. Marines of

  the Sixth Division captured Sugar Loaf Hill, May 14, 1945—three more doubles for

  the Swede in a winning game against East Side—maybe the worst, most savage

  single day of fighting in marine history. Maybe the worst in human history. The

  caves and tunnels that honeycombed Sugar Loaf Hill at the southern end of the

  island, where the Japs had fortified and hidden their army, were blasted with

  flamethrowers and then sealed with grenades and demolition charges. Hand-to-hand

  fighting went on day and night.

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  Jap riflemen and machine gunners, chained to their positions and unable to

  retreat, fought until they died. The day the Swede graduated from Weequahic

  High, June 22—having racked up the record number of doubles in a single season

  by a Newark City League player—the Sixth Marine Division raised the American

  flag over Okinawa’s second air base, Kadena, and the final staging area for the

  invasion of Japan was secured. From April 1, 1945, to June 21, 1945—coinciding,

  give or take a few days, with the Swede’s last and best season as a high school

  * * *

  first baseman—an island some fifty miles long and about ten miles wide had been

  occupied by American forces at the cost of 15,000 American lives. The Japanese

  dead, military and civilian, numbered 141,000. To conquer the Japanese homeland

  to the north and end the war meant the number of dead on each side could run

  ten, twenty, thirty times as great. And still the Swede went out and, to be a

  part of the final assault on Japan, joined the U.S. Marines, who on Okinawa, as

  on Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, and Guadalcanal, had absorbed casualties that were

  stupefying.

  The marines. Being a marine. Boot camp. Knocked us around every which way,

  called us all kinds of names, physically and mentally murdered us for three

  months, and it was the best experience I ever had in my life. Took it on as a

  challenge and I did it. My name became “Ee-oh.” That’s the way the southern

  drill instructors pronounced Levov, dropping the L and the two v’s—all

  consonants overboard—and lengthening out the two vowels. “Ee-oh!” Like a donkey

  braying. “Ee-oh!” “Yes, sir!” Major Dunleavy, the athletic director, big guy,

  Purdue football coach, stops the platoon one day and the hefty sergeant we

  called Sea Bag shouts for Private Ee-oh and out I run with my helmet on, and my

  heart was pounding because I thought my mother had died. I was just a week away

  from being assigned to Camp Lejeune, up in North Carolina, for advanced weaponry

  training, but Major Dunleavy pulled the plug on that and so I never got to fire

  a bar. And that was why I’d joined the marines—wanted more than anything to fire

  the bar from flat on my belly with the barrel elevated on a mount. Eighteen

  years old

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  and that was the Marine Corps to me, the rapid-firing, air-cooled .30 caliber

  machine gun. What a patriotic kid that innocent kid was. Wanted to fire the tank

  killer, the hand-held bazooka rocket, wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t scared

  and could do that stuff. Grenades, flamethrowers, crawling under barbed wire,

  blowing up bunkers, attacking caves. Wanted to hit the beach in a duck. Wanted

  to help win the war. But Major Dunleavy had got a letter from his friend in

  Newark, what an athlete this Levov was, glowing letter about how wonderful I

  was, and so they reassigned me and made me a drill instructor to keep me on the

  island to play ball—by then they’d dropped the atomic bomb and the war was over

  anyway. “You’re in my unit, Swede. Glad to have you.” A great break, really.

  Once my hair grew in, I was a human being again. Instead of being called

  “shithead” all the time or “shithead-move-your-ass,” suddenly I was a DI the

  recruits called Sir. What the DI called the recruits was You People! Hit the

  deck, You People! On your feet, You People! Double time, You People, double time

  hup! Great, great experience for a kid from Keer Avenue. Guys I would never have

  met in my life. Accents from all over the place. The Midwest. New England. Some

  farm boys from Texas and the Deep South I couldn’t even understand. But got to

  know them. Got to like them. Hard boys, poor boys, lots of high school athletes.

  Used to live with the boxers. Lived with the recreation gang. Another Jewish

  guy, Manny Rabinowitz from Altoona. Toughest Jewish guy I ever met in my life.

  What a fighter. A great friend. Didn’t even finish high school. Never had a

  friend like that before or since. Never laughed so hard in my life as I did with

  Manny. Manny was money in the bank for me. Nobody ever gave us any Jewboy shit.

  A little back in boot camp, but that was it. When Manny fought, the guys would

  bet their cigarettes on him. Buddy Falcone and Manny Rabinowitz were always the

  two winners for us whenever we fought another base. After the fight with Manny

  the other guy would say that nobody had ever hit him as hard in his life. Manny

  ran the entertainment with me, the boxing smokers. The duo—the Jewish

  leathernecks. Manny got the wiseguy recruit who made all the trouble

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  * * *

  and weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds to fight somebody a hundred and

  sixty pounds who he could be sure would beat the shit out of him. “Always pick a

  redhead, Ee-oh,” Manny said, “he’ll give you the best fight in the world.

  Redhead’ll never quit.” Manny the scientist. Manny going up to Norfolk to fight

  a sailor, a middleweight contender before the war, and whipping him. Exercising

  the battalion before breakfast. Marching the recruits down to the pool every

  night to teach them to swim. We practically threw them in—the old-fashioned way

  of teaching swimming, but you had to swim to be a marine. Always had to be ready

  to do ten more push-ups than any of the recruits. They’d challenge me, but I was

  in shape. Getting on the bus going to play ball. The long distances we flew. Bob

  Collins on
the team, the big St. John’s guy. My teammate. Terrific athlete.

  Boozer. With Bob C. got drunk for the first time in my life, talked for two

  hours nonstop about playing ball for Weequahic and then threw up all over the

  deck. Irish guys, Italian guys, Slovaks, Poles, tough little bastards from

  Pennsylvania, kids who’d run away from fathers who worked in the mines and beat

  them with belt buckles and with their fists—these were the guys I lived with and

  ate with and slept alongside. Even an Indian guy, a Cherokee, a third baseman.

  Called him Piss Cutter, the same as the name for our caps. Don’t ask me why. Not

  all of them decent people but on the whole all right. Good guys. Lots of

  organized grabass. Played against Fort Benning. Cherry Point, North Carolina,

  the marine air base. Beat them. Beat Charleston Navy Yard. We had a couple of

  boys who could throw that ball. One pitcher went on to the Tigers. Went down to

  Rome, Georgia, to play ball, over to Waycross, Georgia, to an army base. Called

  the army guys doggies. Beat them. Beat everybody. Saw the South. Saw things I

  never saw. Saw the life the Negroes live. Met every kind of Gentile you can

  think of. Met beautiful southern girls. Met common whores. Used a condom.

  Skinned ‘er back and squeezed ‘er down. Saw Savannah. Saw New Orleans. Sat in a

  rundown slopchute in Mobile, Alabama, where I was damn glad the shore patrol was

  just outside the door. Playing basketball and baseball with the Twenty-second

  Regiment.

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  Got to be a United States Marine. Got to wear the emblem with the anchor and the

  globe. “No pitcher in there, Ee-oh, poke it outta here, Ee-oh—” Got to be Ee-oh

  to guys from Maine, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, Ohio—guys

  without an education from all over America calling me Ee-oh and nothing more.

  Just plain Ee-oh to them. Loved that. Discharged June 2,1947. Got to marry a

  beautiful girl named Dwyer. Got to run a business my father built, a man whose

  own father couldn’t speak English. Got to live in the prettiest spot in the

  world. Hate America? Why, he lived in America the way he lived inside his own

  skin. All the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that

  success and happiness had been American, and he need no longer keep his mouth

  shut about it just to defuse her ignorant hatred. The loneliness he would feel

  as a man without all his American feelings. The longing he would feel if he had

  to live in another country. Yes, everything that gave meaning to his

  accomplishments had been American. Everything he loved was here.

  For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was

  something he could not let go of any more than he could have let go of loving

  his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency.

  How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country?

  How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had

  given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist”

  parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the

  unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations,

  including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The

  family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest

  of the low—now to her “capitalist dogs.” There wasn’t much difference, and she

  knew it, between hating America and hating them. He loved the America she hated

  and blamed for everything that was imperfect in life and wanted violently to

  * * *

  overturn, he loved the “bourgeois values” she hated and ridiculed and wanted to

  subvert, he loved the mother she hated and had all but murdered by doing

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  i’f

  what she did. Ignorant little fucking bitch! The price they had paid! Why

  shouldn’t he tear up this Rita Cohen letter? Rita Cohen! They were back! The

  sadistic mischief-makers with their bottomless talent for antagonism who had

  extorted the money from him, who, for the fun of it, had extracted from him the

  Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the stuttering diary, and the ballet shoes, these

  delinquent young brutes calling themselves “revolutionaries” who had so

  viciously played with his hopes five years back had decided the time had again

  rolled around to laugh at Swede Levov.

  We can only stand as witnesses to the anguish that sanctifies her. The Disciple

  Who Calls Herself “Rita Cohen.”They were laughing at him. They had to be

  laughing. Because the only thing worse than its all being a wicked joke was its

  not being a wicked joke. Your daughter is divine. My daughter is anything and

  everything but. She is all too frail and misguided and wounded—she’s hopeless!

  Why did you tell her that you slept with me? And tell me that it was she who

  wanted you to. You say these things because you hate us. And you hate us because

  we don’t do such things. You hate us not because we’re reckless but because

  we’re prudent and sane and industrious and agree to abide by the law. You hate

  us because we haven’t failed. Because we’ve worked hard and honestly to become

  the best in the business and because of that we have prospered, so you envy us

  and you hate us and want to destroy us. And so you used her. A sixteen-year-old

  kid with a stutter. No, nothing small about you people. Made her into a

  “revolutionary” full of great thoughts and high-minded ideals. Sons of bitches.

  You enjoy the spectacle of our devastation. Cowardly bastards. It isn’t cliches

  that enslaved her, it’s you who enslaved her in the loftiest of the shallow

  cliches—and that resentful kid, with her stutterer’s hatred of injustice, had no

  protection at all. You got her to believe she was at one with the downtrodden

  people—and made her into your patsy, your stooge. And Dr. Fred Conlon, as a

  result, is dead. That was who you killed to stop the war: the chief of staff up

  at the hospital in Dover, the guy who in a small community hospital established

  a coronary care unit of eight beds. That was his crime.

  · 214 ·

  Instead of exploding in the middle of the night when the village was empty, the

  bomb, either as planned or by mistake, went off at five a.m., an hour before

  Hamlin’s store opened for the day and the moment that Fred Conlon turned away

  from having dropped into the mailbox envelopes containing checks for household

  bills that he’d paid at his desk the evening before. He was on his way to the

  hospital. A chunk of metal flying out of the store struck him at the back of the

  skull.

  Dawn was under sedation and couldn’t see anyone, but the Swede had gone to Russ

  and Mary Hamlin’s house and expressed his sympathy about the store, told the

  Hamlins how much the store had meant to Dawn and him, how it was no less a part

  of their lives than it was of everyone else’s in the community; then he went to

  the wake—in the coffin Conlon looked fine, fit, just as affable as ever—and the

  following week, with their doctor already arranging for Dawn’s hospitalization,

  the Swede went alone to visit Conlon’s widow. How he managed to get to that


  woman’s house for tea is another story—another book—but he did it, he did it,

  and heroically she served him tea while he extended his family’s condolences in

  the words that he had revised in his mind five hundred times but that, when

  * * *

  spoken, were still no good, even more hollow than those he’d uttered to Russ and

  Mary Hamlin: “deep and sincere regrets … the agony of your family … my

  wife would like you to know….” After listening to everything he had to say,

  Mrs. Conlon quietly replied, displaying an outlook so calm and kind and

  compassionate that the Swede wanted to disappear, to hide like a child, while at

  the same time the urge was nearly overpowering to throw himself at her feet and

  to remain there forever, begging for her forgiveness. “You are good parents and

  you raised your daughter the way you thought best,” she said to him. “It was not

  your fault and I don’t hold anything against you. You didn’t go out and buy the

  dynamite. You didn’t make the bomb. You didn’t plant the bomb. You had nothing

  to do with the bomb. If, as it appears, your daughter turns out to be the one

  who is responsible, I will hold no one responsible but her. I feel badly for you

  and your family, Mr.

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  Levov. I have lost a husband, my children have lost a father. But you have lost

  something even greater. You are parents who have lost a child. There is not a

  day that goes by that you won’t be in my thoughts and in my prayers.” The Swede

  had known Fred Conlon only slightly, from cocktail parties and charity events

  where they found themselves equally bored. Mainly he knew him by reputation, a

  man who cared about his family and the hospital with the same devotion—a hard

  worker, a good guy. Under him, the hospital had begun to plan a building

  program, the first since its construction, and in addition to the new coronary