by Philip Roth
father’s imagination still hadn’t prepared him for her incognito. It had not
required this to elude the FBI. How she got to this was too horrible for him to
contemplate. But to run from his own child? In fear? There was her soul to
cherish. “Life!” he instructed himself. “I cannot let her go! Our life!” And by
then Merry had seen him, and had it even been possible for him, he did not fall
to pieces and run, because it was now too late to run.
And to what would he have run anyway? To that Swede who did it all so
effortlessly? To that Swede blessedly oblivious of himself and his thoughts? To
the Swede Levov who once upon a time … He might as well turn for help to that
hefty black woman with the scarred face, expect to find himself by asking her,
“Madam, do you know where it is that I am? Have you any idea where I went?”
Merry had seen him. How could she miss him? How could she have missed him even
on a street where there was life and not death, where there was a throng of the
striving and the harried and the driven and the decisive and not this malignant
void? There was her handsome, utterly recognizable six-foot-three father, the
handsomest father a girl could have. She raced across the street, this frightful
creature, and like the carefree child he used to enjoy envisioning back when he
was himself a carefree child—the girl running from her swing outside the stone
house—she threw herself upon his chest, her arms encircling his neck. From
beneath the veil she wore across the lower half of her face—obscuring her
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* * *
mouth and her chin, a sheer veil that was the ragged foot off an old nylon
stocking—she said to the man she had come to detest, “Daddy! Daddy!”
faultlessly, just like any other child, and looking like a person whose tragedy
was that she’d never been anyone’s child.
They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of
all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos—for
whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition’s chosen path to certainty, the
rigorous daily given of life—and the daughter who is chaos itself.
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s,
‘he had become a Jain. Her father didn’t know what that meant until, in her
unhampered, chantlike speech—the unimpeded speech with which she would have
spoken at home had she ever been able to master a stutter while living within
her parents’ safekeeping—she patiently told him. The Jains were a relatively
small Indian religious sect—that he could accept as fact. But whether Merry’s
practices were typical or of her own devising he could not be certain, even if
she contended that every last thing she now did was an expression of religious
belief. She wore the veil to do no harm to the microscopic organisms that dwell
in the air we breathe. She did not bathe because she revered all life, including
the vermin. She did not wash, she said, so as “to do no harm to the water.” She
did not walk about after dark, even in her own room, for fear of crushing some
living object beneath her feet. There are souls, she explained, imprisoned in
every form of matter; the lower the form of life, the greater is the pain to the
soul imprisoned there. The only way ever to become free of matter and to arrive
at what she described as “self-sufficient bliss for all eternity” was to become
what she reverentially called “a perfected soul.” One achieves this perfection
only through the rigors of asceticism and self-denial and through the doctrine
of ahitnsa or nonviolence.
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The five “vows” she’d taken were typewritten on index cards and taped to the
wall above a narrow pallet of dirty foam rubber on the unswept floor. That was
where she slept, and given that there was nothing but the pallet in one corner
of the room and a rag pile— her clothing—in the other, that must be where she
sat to eat whatever it was she survived on. Very, very little, from the look of
her; from the look of her she could have been not fifty minutes east of Old
Rimrock but in Delhi or Calcutta, near starvation not as a devout purified by
her ascetic practices but as the despised of the lowest caste, miserably moving
about on an untouchable’s emaciated limbs.
The room was tiny, claustrophobically smaller even than the cell in the
juveniles’ prison where, when he could not sleep, he would imagine visiting her
after she was apprehended. They had reached her room by walking from the dog and
cat hospital down toward the station, then turning west through an underpass
that led to McCarter Highway, an underpass no more than a hundred and fifty feet
long but of the kind that causes drivers to hit the lock button on the door.
There were no lights overhead, and the walkways were strewn with broken pieces
of furniture, with beer cans, bottles, lumps of things that were unidentifiable.
There were license plates underfoot. The place hadn’t been cleaned in ten years.
Maybe it had never been cleaned. Every step he took, bits of glass crunched
beneath his shoes. There was a bar stool upright in the middle of the walkway.
It had got there from where? Who had brought it? There was a twisted pair of
men’s pants. Filthy. Who was the man? What had happened to him? The Swede would
not have been surprised to see an arm or a leg. A garbage sack blocked their
* * *
way. Dark plastic. Knotted shut. What was in it? It was large enough for a dead
body. And there were bodies, too, that were living, people shifting around in
the filth, dangerous-looking people back in the dark. And above the blackened
rafters, the thudding of a train—the noise of the trains rolling into the
station heard from beneath their wheels. Five, six hundred trains a day rolling
overhead.
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To get where Merry rented a room just off McCarter Highway, you had to make it
through an underpass not just as dangerous as any in Newark but as dangerous as
any underpass in the world.
They were walking because she would not drive with him. “I only walk, Daddy, I
do not go in motor vehicles,” and so he had left his car out on Railroad Avenue
for whoever came along to steal it, and walked beside her the ten minutes it
took to reach her room, a walk that would have brought him to tears within the
first ten steps had he not continued to recite to himself, “This is life! This
is our life! I cannot let her go,” had he not taken her hand in his and, as they
traversed together that horrible underpass, reminded himself, “This is her hand.
Merry’s hand. Nothing matters but her hand.” Would have brought him to tears
because when she was six and seven years old she’d loved to play marines, either
him yelling at her or her yelling at him, “‘Tens/iun/ Stand at ease! Rest!”; she
loved to march with him—”Forward march! To the left flank march! To the rear
march! Right oblique march!”; loved to do marine calisthenics with him—”You
People, hit the deck!”; she loved to call the ground “the deck,” to call their
bathroom “the head,” to call her bed “the rack” and Dawn’s food “the chow”; but
&n
bsp; most of all she loved to count Parris Island cadence for him as she started out
across the pasture—mounted up on his shoulders—to find Momma’s cows. “By yo leh,
rah, leh, rah, leh, rah yo leh. Leh, rah, yo leh… .” And without stuttering.
When they played marines, she did not stutter over a single word.
The room was on the ground floor of a house that a hundred years ago might have
been a boardinghouse, not a bad one either, a respectable boardinghouse,
brownstone below the parlor floor, neat brickwork above, curved railings of cast
iron leading up the brick steps to the double doorway. But the old boardinghouse
was now a wreck marooned on a narrow street where there were only two other
houses left. Incredibly, two of the old Newark plane trees were left as well.
The house was tucked between abandoned warehouses and overgrown lots studded
with chunks of rusted iron junk, mechanical debris scattered amid the weeds.
· 234 ·
From over the door of the house, the pediment was gone, ripped out; the cornices
had been ripped out too, carefully stolen and taken away to be sold in some New
York antiques store. All over Newark, the oldest buildings were missing
ornamental stone cornices—cornices from as high up as four stories plucked off
in broad daylight with a cherry picker, with a hundred-thousand-dollar piece of
equipment; but the cop is asleep or paid off and nobody stops whoever it is,
from whatever agency that has a cherry picker, who is making a little cash on
the side. The turkey frieze that ran around the old Essex produce market on
Washington and Linden, the frieze with the terra-cotta turkeys and the huge
cornucopias overflowing with fruit—stolen. Building caught fire and the frieze
disappeared overnight. The big Negro churches (Bethany Baptist closed down,
boarded up, looted, bulldozed; Wycliffe Presbyterian disastrously gutted by
fire)—cornices stolen. Aluminum drainpipes even from occupied buildings, from
standing buildings—stolen. Gutters, leaders, drainpipes—stolen. Everything was
gone that anybody could get to. Just reach up and take it. Copper tubing in
boarded-up factories, pull it out and sell it. Anyplace where the windows are
* * *
gone and boarded up tells people immediately, “Come in and strip it. Whatever’s
left, strip it, steal it, sell it.” Stripping stuff—that’s the food chain. Drive
by a place where a sign says this house is for sale, and there’s nothing there,
there’s nothing to sell. Everything stolen by gangs in cars, stolen by the men
who roam a city with shopping carts, stolen by thieves working alone. The people
are desperate and they take anything. They “go junkin’” the way a shark goes
fishing.
“If there’s one brick still on top of the other,” cried his father, “the idea
gets into their heads that the mortar might be useful, so they’ll push them
apart and take that. Why not? The mortar! Seymour, this city isn’t a city—it’s a
carcass! Get out!”
The street where Merry lived was paved with bricks. There couldn’t be more than
a dozen of these brick streets intact in the entire city. The last of the
cobblestone streets, a pretty old cobblestone street, had been stolen about
three weeks after the riots.
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While the rubble still reeked of smoke where the devastation was the worst, a
developer from the suburbs had arrived with a crew around one a.m., three trucks
and some twenty men moving stealthily, and during the night, without a cop to
bother them, they’d dug up the cobblestones from the narrow side street that cut
diagonally back of Newark Maid and carted them all away. The street was gone
when the Swede showed up for work the next morning.
“Now they’re stealing streets?” his father asked. “Newark can’t even hold on to
its streets? Seymour, get the hell out!” His father’s had become the voice of
reason.
Merry’s street was just a couple of hundred feet long, squeezed into the
triangle between McCarter—where, as always, the heavy truck traffic barreled by
night and day—and the ruins of Mulberry Street. Mulberry the Swede could recall
as a Chinatown slum as long ago as the 1930s, back when the Newark Levovs,
Jerry, Seymour, Momma, Poppa, used to file up the narrow stairwell to one of the
family restaurants for a chow mein dinner on a Sunday afternoon and, later,
driving home to Keer Avenue, his father would tell the boys unbelievable stories
about the Mulberry Street “tong wars” of old.
Of old. Stories of old. There were no longer stories of old. There was nothing.
There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk
slumped against a pole. The pole still held up a sign telling you what corner
you were on. And that’s all there was.
Above and beyond the roofline of her house, he could see the skyline of
commercial Newark half a mile away and those three familiar, comforting words,
the most reassuring words in the English language, cascading down the elegantly
ornate cliff that was once the focal point of a buzzing downtown—ten stories
high the huge, white stark letters heralding fiscal confidence and institutional
permanence, civic progress and opportunity and pride, indestructible letters
that you could read from the seat of your jetliner descending from the north
toward the international airport:
FIRST FIDELITY BANK.
· 236 ·
* * *
That’s what was left, that lie. First. Last, last fidelity bank. From down on
the earth where his daughter now lived at the corner of Columbia and Green—where
his daughter lived even worse than her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh
from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement—you could see a mammoth signboard
designed for concealing the truth. A sign in which only a madman could believe.
A sign in a fairy tale.
Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success.
Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one
with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total
vandalization of their world.
Her room had no window, only a narrow transom over the door that opened onto the
unlit hallway, a twenty-foot-long urinal whose decaying plaster walls he wanted
to smash apart with his fists the moment he entered the house and smelled it.
The hallway led out to the street through a door that had neither lock nor
handle, nor glass in the double frame. Nowhere in her room could he see a faucet
or a radiator. He could not imagine what the toilet was like or where it might
be and wondered if the hallway was it for her as well as for the bums who
wandered in off the highway or down from Mulberry Street. She would have lived
better than this, far better, if she were one of Dawn’s cattle, in the shed
where the herd gathered in the worst weather with the proximity of one another’s
carcasses to warm them, and the rugged coats they grew in winter, and Merry’s
mother, even in the sleet, even on an icy, wintry day, up before six carrying
hay bales to feed them. He thought of the cattle not at all unhappy out there in
/>
the winter and he thought of those two they called the “derelicts,” Dawn’s
retired giant, Count, and the old mare Sally, each of them in human years
comparable to seventy or seventy-five, who found each other when they were both
over the hill and then became inseparable—one would go and the other would
follow, doing all the things together that would keep them well and happy. It
was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they had.
Remembering how when it was sunny they
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would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had
become an animal.
It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel
like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how
he and Dawn could have been the source of it all. How could their innocent
foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at
home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of
course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have
been problems even without a war in Vietnam. She might have wallowed a long
while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how
unrestrained she could be. But she would have been at home. At home you flip out
a little and that’s it. You do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated
pleasure, you don’t get to the point where you flip out a little so many times
that finally you decide it’s such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot?
At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalor. At home you
can’t live where the disorder is. At home you can’t live where nothing is reined
