by Philip Roth
skin, and he can’t get a thumb out of the same hide as the trank, so he cheats—
he takes the next skin and cuts the thumb, and it doesn’t match, and it’s no
goddamn good to me at all. See here? Twisted fingers. This is what Mario was
showing you this morning. When you’re cutting a fourchette or a thumb or
anything, you got to pull it straight. If you don’t pull it straight, you’re
going to have a problem. If he pulled that fourchette crookedly on the bias,
then when it’s sewn together the finger is going to corkscrew just like this.
That’s what your mother is looking for. Because remember and don’t forget—a
Levov makes a glove that is perfect.” Whenever his mother found something wrong
she gave the glove to the Swede, who stuck a pin where the defect was, through
the stitch and never through leather. “Holes in leather stay,” his father warned
him. “It’s not like fabric, where the holes disappear. Always through the
stitch, always!” After the boy and his mother had inspected the gloves in a lot,
his mother used special thread to tack the gloves together, thread that breaks
easily, his father explained, so that when the buyer pulls them apart the knots
sewn on each side won’t tear through the leather. After the gloves were tacked,
the Swede’s mother tissued them—laid a pair down on a sheet of tissue paper,
folded the paper over, then over again so that each pair was protected together.
A dozen pairs, counted out loud for her by the Swede, went into a box. It wasn’t
a fancy box back in the early days, just a plain brown box with a size
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scale on the end showing the sizes. The fancy black box with the gold trim and
the name Newark Maid stamped in gold came along only when his father landed the
* * *
breakthrough Bamberger’s account and, afterward, the account with Macy’s Little
Accessory Shop. A distinctive, attractive box with the company name and a gold
and black woven label in every glove made all the difference not only to the
shop but to the knowledgeable upscale customer.
Every Saturday when they drove Down Neck to collect that week’s finished gloves,
they’d bring along the gloves the Swede had marked with a pin where his mother
had discovered a defect. If a glove bristled with three pins or more, his father
would have to warn the family who had made it that if they wanted to work for
Newark Maid, sloppiness would not be tolerated. “Lou Levov doesn’t sell a table-
cut glove unless it is a perfect table-cut glove,” he told them. “I’m not here
to play games. I’m here like you are—I’m here to make money. ‘Na mano lava ‘nad,
and don t forget it.”
“What is calfskin, Seymour?” “The skin from young calves.” “What kind of grain?”
“It has a tight, even grain. Very smooth. Glossy.” “What’s it used for?” “Mostly
for men’s gloves. It’s heavy.” “What is Cape?” “The skin of the South African
haired sheep.” “Cabretta?” “Not the wool-type sheep but the hair-type sheep.”
“From where?” “South America. Brazil.” “That’s part of the answer. The animals
live a little north and south of the equator. Anywhere around the world.
Southern India. Northern Brazil. A band across Africa—” “We got ours from
Brazil.” “Right. That’s true. You’re right. I’m only telling you they come from
other countries too. So you’ll know. What’s the key operation in preparing the
skin?” “Stretching.” “And never forget it. In this business, a sixteenth of an
inch makes all the difference in the world. Stretching! Stretching is a hundred
percent right. How many parts in a pair of gloves?” “Ten, twelve if there’s a
binding.” “Name ‘em.” “Six fourchettes, two thumbs, two tranks.” “The unit of
measurement in the glove trade?” “Buttons.” “What’s a one-button glove?” “A one-
button glove is one inch long if you measure from the base of the thumb to the
top.” “Approximately one inch long. What is silking?” “The
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three rows of stitching on the back of the glove. If you don’t do the end
pulling, all the silking is going to come right out.” “Excellent. I didn’t even
ask you about end pulling. Excellent. What’s the most difficult seam to make on
a glove?” “Full pique.” “Why? Take your time, son—it’s difficult. Tell me why.”
The prixseam. The gauge seam. Single draw points. Spear points. Buckskin. Mocha.
English does. Soaking. Dehairing. Pickling. Sorting. Taxing. The grain finish.
The velvet finish. Pasted linings. Skeleton linings. Seamless knitted wool. Cut-
and-sewed knitted wool… .
As they drove back and forth Down Neck, it never stopped. Every Saturday morning
from the time he was six until he was nine and Newark Maid became a company with
its own loft.
The dog and cat hospital was located on the corner in a small, decrepit brick
building next door to an empty lot, a tire dump, patchy with weeds nearly as
tall as he was, the twisted wreckage of a wire-mesh fence lying at the edge of
the sidewalk where he waited for his daughter … who lived in Newark… and
for how long… and where, in what kind of quarters in this city? No, he did
not lack imagination any longer—the imagining of the abhorrent was now
effortless, even though it was impossible still to envisage how she had got
herself from Old Rimrock to here. There was no delusion that he could any longer
clutch at to soften whatever surprise was next.
This place where she worked certainly didn’t make it look as if she continued to
believe her calling was to change the course of American history. The building’s
rusted fire escape would just come down, just come loose from its moorings and
crash onto the street, if anyone stepped on it—a fire escape whose function was
not to save lives in the event of a fire but to uselessly hang there testifying
* * *
to the immense loneliness inherent to living. For him it was stripped of any
other meaning—no meaning could make better use of that building. Yes, alone we
are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even
deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t
surprise us, as
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astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out,
but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely.
My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even
blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely
if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—
not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal
of manmade explosives can’t touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot
child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with
your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers, the force that
overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it—bow down in
submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi
Minh and Mao Tse-tung—bow down to the great god
Loneliness!
I’m lonesome, she used to say to him when she was a tiny girl, and he could
never figure out where she had picked up that word. Lonesome. As sad a word as
you could hear out of a two-year-old’s mouth. But she had learned to say so much
so soon, had talked so easily at first, so intelligently—maybe that was what lay
behind the stutter, all those words she uncannily knew before other kids could
pronounce their own names, the emotional overload of a vocabulary that included
even “I’m lonesome.”
He was the one she could talk to. “Daddy, let’s have a conversation.” More often
than not, the conversations were about Mother. She would tell him that Mother
had too much say about her clothes, too much say about her hair. Mother wanted
to dress her more adultlike than the other kids. Merry wanted long hair like
Patti, and Mother wanted it cut. “Mother would really be happy if I had to wear
a uniform the way she did at St. Genevieve’s.” “Mother’s conservative, that’s
all. But you do like shopping with her.” “The best part of shopping with Mother
is that you get a nice little lunch, which is fun. And sometimes it’s fun
picking out clothes. But still, Mother has too much s-s-s-s-say.” At lunch in
school she never ate what Mother gave her. “Baloney on white
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bread is disgusting. Liverwurst is disgusting. Tuna in the lunch bag gets all
wet. The only thing that I like is Virginia ham, but with the crusts off. I like
hot s-s-soup.” But when she took hot soup to school she was always breaking the
thermos. If not the first week, the second. Dawn got her special breakproof
ones, but even those she could break. That was the extent of her
destructiveness.
After school, when she baked with her friend Patti, Merry would always have to
crack the eggs because Patti said cracking eggs made her sick. Merry thought
this was silly, and so one afternoon she cracked the egg right in front of her
and Patti threw up. And that was her destructiveness—breaking a thermos and
cracking an egg. And getting rid of whatever her mother gave her for lunch.
Never complained about it, just wouldn’t eat it. And when Dawn began suspecting
what was up and asked her what she had for lunch, Merry might have thrown it out
without checking. “You’re sometimes a troublesome child,” Dawn told her. “I’m
not. I’m not that t-t-t-troublesome if you don’t ask what I had for lunch.”
Exasperated, her mother said, “It isn’t always easy being you, is it, Merry?” “I
* * *
think it’s easier being me, Mom, than maybe it is being n-n-near me.” To her
father she confided, “I didn’t think the fruit was that ex-ex-citing, so I threw
that out too.” “And the milk you threw out.” “The milk was a little bit warm,
Dad.” But there was always a dime at the bottom of the lunch bag for ice cream,
and so that’s what she would have. Didn’t like mustard. That was another
complaint in the years before she began to complain about capitalism. “What kid
does?” she asked him. The answer was Patti. Patti would eat sandwiches with
mustard and processed cheese; Merry, as she confided to her father in their
conversations, didn’t understand that “at all.” Melted cheese sandwiches were
what Merry preferred to everything else. Melted Muenster cheese and white bread.
After school she’d bring Patti home with her, and because Merry had thrown out
her lunch, they made melted cheese sandwiches. Sometimes they would just melt
cheese on a piece of foil. She was sure that she could survive on melted cheese
alone, she told her father, if she ever had to. That was probably the most
irresponsible thing the
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child had ever done—after school with Patti melting cheese on pieces of foil and
gobbling it down—until she blew up the general store. She couldn’t even bring
herself to say how much Patti got on her nerves, for fear of hurting Patti’s
feelings. “The problem is when somebody comes over to your house, after a while
you get s-s-s-sick of them.” But always she acted with Dawn as though she wanted
Patti to stay longer. Mom, can Patti stay for dinner? Mom, can Patti stay
overnight? Mom, can Patti wear my boots? Mom, can you drive me and Patti to the
village?
In fifth grade she gave her mother a Mother’s Day gift. On a doily in school
they were asked to write something they would do for their mothers, and Merry
wrote that she would prepare dinner every Friday night, a fairly generous offer
for a ten-year-old but one she made good on and kept up largely because that way
she could be sure that one night a week they got baked ziti; also, if you made
dinner you didn’t have to clean up. With Dawn’s help she would sometimes make
lasagna or stuffed shells, but the baked ziti she made by herself. Sometimes on
Friday it would be macaroni and cheese but mostly it was baked ziti. The
important thing, she told her father, was to see that the cheese melted, though
it was equally important to be sure that the top zitis got hard and crunchy. He
was the one who cleaned up when she cooked the baked ziti, and there was always
a lot to clean up. But he loved it. “Cooking is fun and cleaning up is not,” she
confided in him, but that was not his experience when Merry was cooking. When he
heard from a Bloomingdale’s buyer that a restaurant on West 49th Street had the
best baked ziti in New York, he began to take the family to Vincent’s once a
month. They’d go to Radio City or to a Broadway musical, and then to Vincent’s.
Merry loved Vincent’s. And a young waiter named Billy loved her, as it turned
out, because of a kid brother he had at home who also stuttered. He told Merry
about the TV stars and the movie stars who showed up at Vincent’s to eat. “See
where your dad is sitting? See his chair, signorina? Danny Thomas sat in that
chair last night. You know what Danny Thomas says when people come up to his
table and introduce themselves to him?”
· 228 ·
“I d-d-don’t,” said the signorina. “He says, ‘Nice to see you.’” And on Monday,
at school, she repeated to Patti whatever Billy at Vincent’s in New York had
told her the day before. Had there ever been a happier child? A less destructive
child? A little signorina any more loved by her mother and father? No.
A black woman in tight yellow slacks, a woman colossal as a dray horse through
the hindquarters, tottered up to him on her high-heeled shoes, extending a tiny
* * *
scrap of paper in one hand. Her face was badly scarred. He knew she had come to
inform him that his daughter was dead. That was what was written on the paper.
It was a note from Rita Cohen. “Sir,” she said, “can you tell me where the
Salvation Army is?” “Is there one?” he asked. She did not look as though she
thought there was. But she replied, “I believe so, yeah.” She held up the piece
of paper. “Says so. Do you know where it is, sir?” Anything beginning with sir
or ending with sir usually means “I want money,” and so he reached into his
pocket, passed her some bills, and she lurched away, disappeared down into the
underpass on those ill-fitting shoes, and after that he saw no one.
He waited for forty more minutes and would have waited another forty, have
waited there until it grew dark, might well have remained long after that, a man
in a seven-hundred-dollar custom-made suit with his back against a lamppost like
a vagrant in threadbare rags, a man who from all appearances had meetings to
attend and business to transact and social obligations to fulfill, self-
consciously loitering on a blighted street near the railroad station, maybe a
rich out-of-towner under the mistaken impression that he’d landed in the red-
light district, pretending to stare aimlessly into space while his head is full
of secrets and his heart is (as it was) thumping away. On the chance that,
horribly enough, Rita Cohen was telling the truth and always had been, he might
well have stood vigil there all night long and through to the next morning,
thinking to catch Merry coming to work. But, mercifully, if that is the word, in
only forty minutes she appeared, a figure tall and female but one
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he might never have taken for his daughter had he not been told to look for her
there.
Again imagination had failed him. He felt as though he had no control over
muscles that he’d mastered at the age of two— he wouldn’t have been surprised if
everything, not excluding his blood, had come gushing from him onto the
pavement. This was too much to battle with. This was too much to bring home to
Dawn’s new face. Not even electrically operated skylights over a modern kitchen
whose heart was a state-of-the-art cooking island would enable her to find her
way back from this. Eighteen hundred nights at the mercy of a murderer’s
