by Philip Roth
“Oh, darling, you’re so brave, you’re such an inspiration, it’s such a tonic
when we come to see you. I love you so.”
“Good, Ma. I love you. But you mustn’t lose control in front of Dawn.”
“Yes, yes, whatever you say.”
“That’s my girl.”
His father, continuing to watch the television set—and after having miraculously
contained himself for ten full days—said to him, “No news.”
“No news,” the Swede replied.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“O-kay,” his father said, feigning fatalism, “o-kay—if that’s the way it is,
that’s the way it is,” and went back to watching TV.
“Do you still think she’s in Canada, Seymour?” his mother asked.
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“I never thought she was in Canada.”
“But that’s where the boys went…”
“Look, why don’t we save this discussion? There’s nothing wrong with asking
questions but Dawn will be in and out—”
“I’m sorry, you’re right,” his mother replied. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Not that the situation has changed, Mother. Everything is exactly the same.”
“Seymour…” She hesitated. “Darling, one question. If she gave herself up
now, what would happen? Your father says—”
“Why are you bothering him with that?” his father said. “He told you about Dawn.
Learn to control yourself.”
“Me control myself?”
“Mother, you must stop thinking these thoughts. She is gone. She may never want
to see us again.”
” Why?” his father erupted. “Of course she wants to see us again. This I refuse
to believe!”
“Now who’s controlling himself?” his mother asked.
“Of course she wants to see us again. The problem is she can’t.”
“Lou dear,” his mother said, “there are children, even in ordinary families, who
grow up and go away and that’s the end of it.”
“But not at sixteen. For Christ’s sake, not under these circumstances. What are
you talking about ‘ordinary’ families? We are an ordinary family. This is a
child who needs help. This is a child who is in trouble and we are not a family
who walks out on a child in trouble!”
* * *
“She’s twenty years old, Dad. Twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one,” his mother said, “last January.”
“Well, she’s not a child,” the Swede told them. “All I’m saying is that you must
not set yourself up for disappointment, neither of you.”
“Well, I don’t,” his father said. “I have more sense than that. I assure you I
don’t.”
“Well, you mustn’t. I seriously doubt that we will ever see her again.”
The only thing worse than their never seeing her again would be
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their seeing her as he had left her on the floor of that room. Over these last
few years, he had been moving them in the direction, if not of total
resignation, of adaptation, of a realistic appraisal of the future. How could he
now tell them what had happened to Merry, find words to describe it to them that
would not destroy them? They haven’t the faintest picture in their mind of what
they’d see if they were to see her. Why does anyone have to know? What is so
indispensable about any of them knowing?
“You got reason to say that, son, that we’ll never see her?”
“The five years. The time that’s gone by. That’s reason enough.”
“Seymour, sometimes I’m walking on the street, and I’m behind someone, a girl
who’s walking in front of me, and if she’s tall—”
He took his mother’s hands in his. “You think it’s Merry.”
“Yes.”
“That happens to all of us.”
“I can’t stop it.”
“I understand.”
“And every time the phone rings,” she said.
“I know.”
“I tell her,” his father said, “that she wouldn’t do it with a phone call
anyway.”
“And why not?” she said to her husband. “Why not phone us? That’s the safest
thing she could possibly do, to phone us.”
“Ma, none of this speculation means anything. Why not try to keep it to a
minimum tonight? I know you can’t help having these thoughts. You can’t be free
of it, none of us can be. But you have to try. You can’t make happen what you
want to happen just by thinking about it. Try to free yourself from a little of
it.”
“Whatever you say, darling,” his mother replied. “I feel better now, just
talking about it. I can’t keep it inside me all the time.”
* * *
“I know. But we can’t start whispering around Dawn.”
It was never difficult, as it was with his restless father—who spent so much of
life in a transitional state between compassion and antagonism, between
comprehension and blindness, between
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gentle intimacy and violent irritation—to know what to make of his mother. He
had never feared battling with her, never uncertainly wondered what side she was
on or worried what she might be inflamed by next. Unlike her husband, she was a
big industry of nothing other than family love. Hers was a simple personality
for whom the well-being of the boys was everything. Talking to her he’d felt,
since earliest boyhood, as though he were stepping directly into her heart. With
his father, to whose heart he had easy enough access, he had first to collide
with that skull, the skull of a brawler, to split it open as bloodlessly as he
could to get at whatever was inside.
It was astonishing how small a woman she had become. But what hadn’t been
consumed by osteoporosis had, in the last five years, been destroyed by Merry.
Now the vivacious mother of his youth, who well into middle age was being
complimented on her youthful vigor, was an old lady, her spine twisted and bent,
a hurt and puzzled expression embedded in the creases of her face. Now, when she
did not realize people were watching her, tears would rise in her eyes, eyes
bearing that look both long accustomed to living with pain and startled to have
been in so much pain so long. Yet all his boyhood recollections (which, however
hard to credit, he knew to be genuine; even the ruthlessly unillusioned Jerry
would, if asked, have to corroborate them) were of his mother towering over the
rest of them, a healthy, tall reddish blonde with a wonderful laugh, who adored
being the woman in that masculine household. As a small child he had not found
it nearly so odd and amazing as he did looking at her now to think that you
could recognize people as easily by their laugh as by their face. Hers, back
when she had something to laugh about, was light and like a bird in flight,
rising, rising, and then, delightfully, if you were her child, rising yet again.
He didn’t even have to be in the same room to know where his mother was—he’d
hear her laughing and could pinpoint her on the map of the house that was not so
much in his brain as it was his brain (his cerebral cortex divided not into
frontal lobes, parietal
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lobes, temporal lobes, and occipital lobes but into the downstairs, the
up
stairs, and the basement—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, etc.).
What had been oppressing her when she arrived from Florida the week before was
the letter she was carrying secreted in her purse, a letter addressed by Lou
Levov to the second wife Jerry had left, from whom he had only recently
separated. Sylvia Levov had been given a stack of letters to mail by her
husband, but that one she simply could not send. Instead she had dared to go off
alone and open it, and now she had brought the contents north with her to show
Seymour. “You know what would happen with Jerry if Susan ever got this? You know
the rampage Jerry would go on? He . is not a boy without a temper. He never was.
He’s not you, dear, he is not a diplomat. But your father has to stick his nose
in everywhere, and what the results will be means nothing to him, so long as
he’s got his nose in the wrong place. All he has to do is send her this, and put
Jerry in the wrong like this, and there will be hell to pay with your brother—
unmitigated hell.”
* * *
The letter, two pages long, began, “Dear Susie, The check enclosed is for you
and for nobody else’s information. It is found money. Put it somewhere where
nobody knows about it. I’ll say nothing and you say nothing. I want you to know
that I have not forgotten you in my will. This money is yours to do whatever you
want with. The children I’ll take care of separately. But if you decide to
invest it, and I strongly hope you do, my suggestion is gold stocks. The dollar
isn’t going to be worth a thing. I myself have just put ten thousand into three
gold stocks. I will give you the names. Ben-nington Mines. Castworp Development.
Schley-Waiggen Mineral Corp. Solid investments. I got the names from the
Barrington Newsletter that has never steered me wrong yet.”
Stapled to the letter—stapled so that when she opened the letter the enclosure
didn’t just flutter away to get lost under the sofa— there was a check made out
to Susan R. Levov for seventy-five hundred dollars. A check for twice that
amount had gone off to her the day after she had called, sobbing and screaming
for help, to say
· 296 ·
that Jerry had left her that morning for the new nurse in his office. The
position of new nurse in the office was one that she had herself occupied before
Jerry began the affair with her that ended in his divorcing his first wife.
According to the Swede’s mother, after Jerry found out about the check for
fifteen thousand he proceeded over the phone to call his father “every name in
the book,” and that night, for the first time in his life, Lou Levov had chest
pain that necessitated her calling their doctor at two a.m.
And now, four months later, he was at it again. “Seymour, what should I do? He
goes around screaming, ‘A second divorce, a second broken family, more
grandchildren in a broken home, three more wonderful children without parental
guidance.’ You know how he goes on. It’s on and on, it’s over and over, till I
think I’m going out of my mind. ‘Where did my son get so good at getting
divorced? Who in the history of this entire family has ever been divorced? No
one!’ I cannot take it anymore, dear. He screams at me, ‘Why doesn’t your son
just go to a whorehouse? Marry a whore out of a whorehouse and get it over
with!’ He’ll get in another fight with Jerry, and Jerry doesn’t pull his
punches. Jerry doesn’t have your considerateness. He never did. When they had
that fight about the coat, when Jerry made that coat out of the hamsters—do you
remember? Maybe you were in the service by then. Hamster skins Jerry got
somewhere, I think at school, and made them into a coat for some girl. He
thought he was doing her a favor. But she received this thing, I think by mail,
in a box, all wrapped up and it smelled to high heaven, and the girl burst into
tears, and her mother telephoned, and your father was fit to be tied. He was
mortified. And they had an argument, he and Jerry, and it scared me to death. A
fifteen-year-old boy and he screamed so at his own father, his ‘rights,’ his
‘rights,’ you could have heard him on Broad and Market about his ‘rights.’ Jerry
does not back down. He doesn’t know the meaning of ‘back down.’ But now he won’t
be shouting at a man who is forty-five, he will be shouting at a man who is
seventy-five, and with angina, and this time it won’t be indigestion afterwards.
There won’t be a headache. This time there will be a full-scale heart
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attack.” “There won’t be a heart attack. Mother, calm down.” “Did I do the wrong
thing? I never touched another person’s mail in my life. But how could I let him
send this to Susan? Because she won’t keep it to herself. She’ll do what she did
the last time. She’ll use it against Jerry—she’ll tell him. And this time Jerry
will kill him.” “Jerry won’t kill him. He doesn’t want to kill him and he won’t.
Mail it, Momma. You still have the envelope?” “Yes.” “It isn’t torn? You didn’t
* * *
tear it?” “I’m ashamed to tell you—it’s not torn, I used steam. But I don’t want
him to drop dead.” “He won’t. He hasn’t yet. You stay out of it, Ma. Mail Susan
the envelope with the check, with the letter. And when Jerry calls, you just go
out and take a walk.” “And when he gets chest pains again?” “If he gets chest
pains again, you’ll call the doctor again. You just stay out of it. You cannot
intervene to protect him from himself. It’s too late in the day for that.” “Oh,
thank goodness I have you. You’re the only one I can turn to. All your own
troubles, all you’ve gone through, and you’re the only one in this family who
says things to me that are not completely insane.”
“Dawn’s holding up?” his father asked.
“She’s doing fine.”
“She looks like a million bucks,” his father said. “That girl looks like herself
again. Getting rid of those cows was the smartest thing you ever did. I never
liked ‘em. I never saw why she needed them. Thank God for that face-lift. I was
against it but I was wrong. Dead wrong. I got to admit it. That guy did a
wonderful job. Thank God our Dawn doesn’t look anymore like all that she went
through.”
“He did do a great job,” the Swede said. “Erased all that suffering. He gave her
back her face.” No longer does she have to look in the mirror at the record of
her misery. It had been a brilliant stroke: she had got the thing out from
directly in front of her.
“But she’s waiting. I see it, Seymour. A mother sees such things. Maybe you
erase the suffering from the face, but you can’t remove the memory inside. Under
that face, the poor thing is wait-ing.”
· 298 ·
“Dawn’s not a poor thing, Ma. She’s a fighter. She’s fine. She’s made tremendous
strides.” True—all the while he has been stoically enduring it she has made
tremendous strides by finding it unendurable, by being devastated by it,
destroyed by it, and then by denuding herself of it. She doesn’t resist the
blows the way he does; she receives the blows, f
alls apart, and when she gets
herself up again, decides to make herself over. Nothing that isn’t admirable in
that— abandon first the face assaulted by the child, abandon next the house
assaulted by the child. This is her life, after all, and she will get the
original Dawn up and going again if it’s the last thing she does. “Ma, let’s
stop this. Come on outside with me while I start the coals.”
“No,” his mother said, looking ready to cry again. “Thank you, darling. I’ll
stay here with Daddy and watch the television.”
“You watched it all day. Come outside and help me.”
“No, thank you, dear.”
“She’s waiting for them to get Nixon on,” his father said. “When they get Nixon
on and drive a stake through his heart, your mother will be in seventh heaven.”
“And you won’t?” she said. “He can’t sleep,” she told the Swede, “because of
that matnzer. He’s up in the middle of the night writing him letters. Some I
have to censor myself, I have to physically stop him, the language is so
filthy.”
“That skunk!” the Swede’s father said bitterly. “That miserable fascist dog!”
and out of him, with terrifying force, poured a tirade of abuse, vitriol about
