by Philip Roth
mischievously stuttering when they repeated the English words she taught them.
In Spanish her own speech was flawless. Another reason to flee to the arms of
the world revolution.
One day, Merry told her father, she noticed a youngish black bum, new to the
park, watching her tutoring her boys. She knew immediately what that meant. A
thousand times before she’d thought it was the FBI and a thousand times she’d
been wrong—in Oregon, in Idaho, in Kentucky, in Maryland, the FBI watching her
at the stores where she clerked; watching in the diners and the cafeterias where
she washed dishes; watching on the shabby streets
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where she lived; watching in the libraries where she hid out to read the
newspapers and to study the revolutionary thinkers, to master Marx, Marcuse,
Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, a French theorist whose sentences, litanized at
bedtime like a supplication, had sustained her in much the same way as the
ritual sacrament of the vanilla milk shake and the BLT. It must be constantly
borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as “a woman
alone in the street” and her revolutionary mission instinctively. The Algerian
woman is not a secret agent. It is without apprenticeship, without briefing,
without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her
handbag. She does not have the sensation of playing a role. There is no
character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a
continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises
directly to the level of
tragedy.
I Thinking: And the New Jersey girl descends to the level of idiocy.
)*’ The New Jersey girl we sent to Montessori school because she was
(, so bright, the New Jersey girl who at Morristown High got only A’s and B’s—
the New Jersey girl rises directly to the level of disgraceful
;, playacting. The New Jersey girl rises to the level of psychosis.
* * *
t: Everywhere, in every city where she went to hide, she thought
‘$ she saw the FBI—but it was in Miami that she was finally discovered while
stuttering away on a park bench trying to teach her boys to speak English. Yet
how could she not teach them? How could she turn away from those who had been
born to nothing, condemned to nothing, who appeared even to themselves to be
human trash? On the second day when she came to the park and found the same
young black bum pretending to be asleep on a bench beneath a blanket of
newspapers, she turned back to the street and began to run and she did not stop
until she saw a blind woman begging in the street, a large black woman with a
dog. The woman was jiggling a cup and saying softly, “Blind, blind, blind.” On
the pavement at her feet lay a ragged wool coat inside which Merry realized she
could hide. But she couldn’t just take it from her; instead she asked the woman
if she could help her beg, and the woman said sure, and
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Merry asked if she could wear the woman’s dark glasses and her coat, and the
woman said, “Anything, honey,” and so Merry stood in the sun in Miami in that
heavy old coat, wearing the dark glasses, shaking the cup for her while the
woman chanted “Blind, blind, blind.” That night she hid out alone beneath a
bridge, but the next day she went back to beg with the black woman, once again
disguised by the coat and the glasses, and eventually she moved in with her and
her dog and took care of her.
That was when she began to study religions. Bunice, the black woman, sang to her
in the mornings when they awoke in the bed where they slept, she and Merry and
the dog. But when Bunice got cancer and died, that was the worst: the clinics,
the ward, the funeral at which she was the only mourner, losing the person she’d
loved most in the world … that was the hardest it ever was.
During the months while Bunice was dying she found in the library the books that
led her to leave behind forever the Judeo-Christian tradition and find her way
to the supreme ethical imperative of ahimsa, the systematic reverence for life
and the commitment to harm no living being.
Her father was no longer wondering at what point he had lost control over her
life, no longer thinking that everything he had ever done had been futile and
that she was in the power of something demented. He was thinking instead that
Mary Stoltz was not his daughter, for the simple reason that his daughter could
not have absorbed so much pain. She was a kid from Old Rimrock, a privileged kid
from paradise. She could not have worked potato fields and slept under bridges
and for five years gone about in terror of arrest. She could never have slept
with the blind woman and her dog. Indianapolis, Chicago, Portland, Idaho,
Kentucky, Maryland, Florida—never could Merry have lived alone in all those
places, an isolated vagabond washing dishes and hiding out from the police and
befriending the destitute on park benches. And never would she have wound up in
Newark. No. Living for six months ten minutes away, walking to the Ironbound
through that underpass, wearing that veil and walking all alone, every morning
and
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every night, past all those derelicts and through all that filth—no! The story
was a lie, its purpose to destroy their villain, who was him. The story was a
caricature, a sensational caricature, and she was an actress, this girl was a
professional, hired and charged with tormenting him because he was everything
they were not. They wanted to kill him off with the story of a pariah exiled in
* * *
the very country where her family had triumphantly rooted itself in every
possible way, and so he refused to be convinced by anything she had said. He
thought, The rape? The bombs? A sitting duck for every madman? That was more
than hardship. That was hell. Merry couldn’t survive any of it. She could not
have survived killing four people. She could not have murdered in cold blood and
survived.
And then he realized that she hadn’t survived. Whatever the truth might be,
whatever had truly befallen her, her determination to leave behind her, in ruin,
her parents’ contemptible life had driven her to the disaster of destroying
herself.
Of course this all could have happened to her. Things happen like this every day
all over the face of the earth. He had no idea how people behaved.
“You’re not my daughter. You are not Merry.”
“If you wish to believe that I am not, that may be just as well. That may be for
the best.”
“Why don’t you ask me about your mother, Meredith? Should I ask you? Where was
your mother born? What is her maiden name? What is her father’s name?”
“I don’t want to talk about my mother.”
“Because you know nothing about her. Or about me. Or about the person you
pretend to be. Tell me about the house at the shore. Tell me the name of your
first-grade teacher. Who was your second-grade teacher? Tell me why you are
pretending to be my daughter!”
“If I answer the questions, you will suffer even more
. I don’t know how much
suffering you want.”
“Oh, don’t worry about my suffering, young lady—just answer the questions. Why
are you pretending to be my daughter? Who are you? Who is ‘Rita Cohen’? What are
you two up to? Where is my
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daughter? I will turn this matter over to the police unless you tell me now what
is going on here and where my daughter is.”
“Nothing I’m doing is actionable, Daddy.”
The awful legalism. Not only the awful Jainism, but this shit too. “No,” he
said, “now it isn’t—now it’s just horrible! What about what you did do!”
“I killed four people,” she replied, as innocently as she might once have told
him, “I baked tollhouse cookies this afternoon.”
“No!” he shouted. The Jainism, the legalism, the egregious innocence, all of it
desperation, all of it to distance herself from the four who are dead. “This
will not do! You are not an Algerian woman! You are not from Algeria and you are
not from India! You are an American girl from Old Rimrock, New Jersey! A very,
very screwed-up American girl! Four people? No!” And now he refused to believe
it, now it was he for whom the guilt made no sense and could not be. She had
been much too blessed for this to be true. So had he. He could never father a
child who killed four people. Everything life had provided her, everything life
offered her, everything life demanded of her, everything that had happened to
her from the day she was born made that impossible. Killing people? It was not
one of their problems. Mercifully life had omitted that from their lives.
* * *
Killing people was as far as you could get from all that had been given to the
Levovs to do. No, she was not, she could not, be his. “If you are so big on not
lying or taking anything, small or great—all that crap, Merry, completely
meaningless crap—I beg you to tell me the truth!”
“The truth is simple. Here is the truth. You must be done with craving and
selfhood.”
“Merry,” he cried, “Merry, Merry,” and, the unbridled unchecked in him,
powerless not to attack, with all his manly brawn he fell upon her huddled there
on the grimy pallet. “It isn’t you! You could not have done it!” She put up no
resistance as he tore from her face the veil cut from the end of a stocking.
Where the heel should be was her chin. Nothing is more fetid than something
where your foot has been, and she puts her mouth up against it. We
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loved her, she loved us—and as a result she wears her face in a stocking. “Now
speak!” he commanded her.
But she wouldn’t. He pried her mouth open, disregarding a guideline he had never
before overstepped—the injunction against violence. It was the end of all
understanding. There was no way for understanding to be there anymore, even
though he knew violence to be inhuman and futile, and understanding—talking
sense to each other for however long it took to bring about accord—all there was
that could achieve a lasting result. The father who could never use force on his
child, for whom force was the embodiment of moral bankruptcy, pried open her
mouth and with his fingers took hold of her tongue. One of her front teeth was
missing, one of her beautiful teeth. That proved it wasn’t Merry. The years of
braces, the retainer, the night brace, all those contraptions to perfect her
bite, to save her gums, to beautify her smile—this could not be the same girl.
“Speak!” he demanded, and at last the true smell of her reached him, the lowest
human smell there is, excluding only the stench of the rotting living and the
rotting dead. Strangely, though she had told him she did not wash so as to do no
harm to the water, he had smelled nothing before—neither when they’d embraced on
the street nor sitting in the dimness across from her pallet—nothing other than
a sourish, nauseatingly unfamiliar something that he ascribed to the piss-soaked
building. But what he smelled now, while pulling open her mouth, was a human
being and not a building, a mad human being who grubs about for pleasure in its
own shit. Her foulness had reached him. She is disgusting. His daughter is a
human mess stinking of human waste. Her smell is the smell of everything organic
breaking down. It is the smell of no coherence. It is the smell of all she’s
become. She could do it, and she did do it, and this reverence for life is the
final obscenity.
He tried to locate a muscle in his head somewhere to plug the opening at the top
of his throat, something to stop him up and prevent their sliding still further
into the filth, but there was no such muscle. A spasm of gastric secretions and
undigested food
265
started up the intestinal piping and, in a bitter, acidic stream, surged
sickeningly onto his tongue, and when he cried out, ” Who are you!” it was
spewed with his words onto her face.
Even in the dimness of that room, once he was over her he knew very well who she
was. It was not necessary for her to speak with her face unprotected to inform
* * *
him that the inexplicable had forever displaced whatever he once thought he
knew. If she was no longer branded as Merry Levov by her stutter, she was marked
unmistakably by the eyes. Within the chiseled-out, oversized eye sockets, the
eyes were his. The tallness was his and the eyes were his. She was all his. The
tooth she was missing had been pulled or knocked out.
She looked not at him when he retreated to the door but anxiously all around her
narrow room, as though in his frenzy he had battered most brutally the harmless
microorganisms that dwelled with her in her solitude.
Four people. Little wonder that she had vanished. Little wonder that he had.
This was his daughter, and she was unknowable. This murderer is mine. His vomit
was on her face, a face that, but for the eyes, was now most unlike her mother’s
or her father’s. The veil was off, but behind the veil there was another veil.
Isn’t there always?
“Come with me,” he begged.
“You go, Daddy. Go.”
“Merry, you are asking me to do something that is excruciatingly painful. You
are asking me to leave you. I just found you. Please,” he begged her, “come with
me. Come home.”
“Daddy, let me be.”
“But I must see you. I cannot leave you here. I must see you!”
“You’ve seen me. Please go now. If you love me, Daddy, you’ll let me be.”
The most perfect girl of all, one’s daughter, had been raped.
All he could think of was the two times she had been raped. Four people blown up
by her—so grotesque, so out of scale, it was unimaginable. It had to be. To see
the faces, to hear the names, to learn
· 266 ·
that one was a mother of three, the second just married, the third about to
retire… . Did she know what or who they were … care who they were … ?
He could not imagine any of it. Wouldn’t. Only the rape was imaginable. Imagine
the rape and the rest is blocked out: their faces remain out of sight, their
spectacles, their hairdos, their fam
ilies, their jobs, their birth dates, their
addresses, their blameless innocence.
Not one Fred Conlon—four Fred Conlons.
The rape. The rape obscured everything else. Concentrate on the rape.
What were the details? Who were these men? Was it somebody who was part of that
life, somebody who was against the war and on the run like her, was it somebody
she knew or was it a stranger, a bum, an addict, a madman who’d followed her
home and into the hallway with a knife? What went on? Had they held her down and
threatened her with a knife? Had they beaten her? What did they make her do?
Were there no people to help her? Just what did they make her do? He would kill
them. She had to tell him who they were. I want to find out who those people
are. I want to know where it happened. I want to know when it happened. We’re
going to go back and find those people and I’m going to kill them!
Now that he could not stop imagining the rapes, there was no relief, not for one
second, from the desire to go out and kill somebody. With all the walls he’d
* * *
built up, she gets raped. All of that protection and he could not prevent her
from getting raped. Tell me everything about it! I’m going to kill them!
But it was too late. It had happened. He could do nothing to make it not happen.
For it to not happen, he would have had to kill them before it happened—and how
