by Philip Roth
the president of the United States that, absent the stuttering that never failed
* * *
to impart to her abhorrence the exterminating adamance of a machine gun, Merry
herself couldn’t have topped in her heyday. Nixon liberates him to say anything—
as Johnson liberated Merry. It is as though in his uncen-sored hatred of Nixon,
Lou Levov is merely mimicking his granddaughter’s vituperous loathing of LBJ.
Get Nixon. Get the bastard in some way. Get Nixon and all will be well. If we
can just tar and feather Nixon, America will be America again, without
everything loathsome and lawless that’s crept in, without all this violence and
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malice and madness and hate. Put him in a cage, cage the crook, and we’ll have
our great country back the way it was!
Dawn ran in from the kitchen to see what was wrong, and soon they were all in
tears, holding one another, huddled together and weeping on that big old back
porch as though the bomb had been planted right under the house and the porch
was all that was left of the place. And there was nothing the Swede could do to
stop them or to stop himself.
The family had never seemed so wrecked as this. Despite all that he had summoned
up to lessen the aftershock of the day’s horror and to prevent himself from
cracking—despite the resolve with which he had rearmed himself after hurrying
through the underpass and finding his car still there, undamaged, where he had
left it on that grim Down Neck street; despite the resolve with which he had for
a second time rearmed himself after Jerry pummeled him on the phone; despite the
resolve he’d had to summon up a third time, beneath the razor ribbon of his
parking lot fence, with the key to his car in his hand; despite the self-
watchfulness, despite the painstaking impersonation of impregnability, despite
the elaborate false front of self-certainty with which he was determined to
protect those he loved from the four she had killed—he had merely to misspeak,
to say “Merry’s big beefsteak tomatoes” instead of “Dawn’s,” for them to sense
that something unsurpassingly awful had happened.
In addition to the Levovs there were six guests for dinner that evening. The
first to arrive were Bill and Jessie Orcutt, Dawn’s architect and his wife,
who’d been friendly enough neighbors a few miles down the road all these years,
in Orcutt’s old family house, and became acquaintances and then dinner guests
when Bill Orcutt began designing the new Levov home. Orcutt’s family had long
been the prominent legal family in Morris County, lawyers, judges, state
senators. As president of the local landmarks society, already established as
the historical conscience of a new conservationist generation, Orcutt had been a
leader in the losing battle to keep
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Interstate 287 from cutting through the historical center of Morris-town and a
victorious opponent of the jetport that would have destroyed the Great Swamp,
just west of Chatham, and with it much of the county’s wildlife. He was trying
now to keep Lake Hopatcong from devastation by pollutants. Orcutt’s bumper
sticker read, “Morris Green, Quiet, and Clean,” and he’d good-naturedly slapped
one on the Swede’s car the first time they met. “Need all the help we can get,”
he said, “to keep the modern ills at bay.” Once he learned that his new
neighbors were originally city kids to whom the rural Morris Highlands was an
unknown landscape, he volunteered to take them on a county tour, one that, as it
turned out, went on all one day and would have extended into the next had not
the Swede lied and said he and Dawn and the baby had to be in Elizabeth, at his
in-laws’, Sunday morning.
* * *
Dawn had said no to the tour right off. Something in Orcutt’s proprietary manner
had irritated her at that first meeting, something she found gratingly
egotistical in his expansive courtesy, causing her to believe that to this young
country squire with the charming manners she was nothing but laughable lace-
curtain Irish, a girl who’d somehow got down the knack of aping her betters so
as now to come ludicrously barging into his privileged backyard. The confidence,
that’s what unstrung her, that great confidence. Sure she’d been Miss New
Jersey, but the Swede had seen her on a few occasions with these rich Ivy League
guys in their Shetland sweaters. Her affronted defensiveness always came as a
surprise. She didn’t seem ever to feel deficient in confidence until she met
them and felt the class sting. “I’m sorry,” she’d say, “I know it’s just my
Irish resentment, but I don’t like being looked down on.” And as much as this
resentment of hers had always secretly attracted him—in the face of hostility,
he thought proudly, my wife is no pushover—it perturbed and disappointed him as
well; he preferred to think of Dawn as a young woman of great beauty and
accomplishment who was too renowned to have to feel resentful. “The only
difference between them and us”—by “them” she meant Protestants—”is, on our
side, a little more liquor. And not much at that. ‘My new Celtic
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neighbor. And her Hebrew husband.’ I can hear him already with the other nobs.
I’m sorry—if you can do it that’s fine with me, but I for one cannot revere his
contempt for our embarrassing origins.”
The mainspring of Orcutt’s character—and this she was sure of without having
even to speak to him—was knowing all too well just how far back he and his
manners reached into the genteel past, and so she stayed at home the day of the
tour, perfectly content to be alone with the baby.
Her husband and Orcutt, promptly at eight, headed diagonally to the northwest
corner of the county and then, backtracking, followed the southward meandering
spine of the old iron mines, Orcutt all the while recounting the glory days of
the nineteenth century, when iron was king, millions of tons pulled from this
very ground; starting from Hibernia and Boonton down to Morristown, the towns
and villages had been thick with rolling mills, nail and spike factories,
foundries and forging shops. Orcutt showed him the site of the old mill in
Boonton where axles, wheels, and rails were manufactured for the original Morris
and Essex Railroad. He showed him the powder company plant in Kenvil that made
dynamite for the mines and then, for the First World War, made TNT and more or
less paved the way for the government to build the arsenal up at Picatinny,
where they’d manufactured the big shells for the Second World War. It was at the
Kenvil plant that there’d been the munitions explosion in 1940—fifty-two killed,
carelessness the culprit, though at first foreign agents, spies, were suspected.
He drove him partway along the western course of the old Morris Canal, where
barges had carried the anthracite in from Phillipsburg to fuel the Morris
foundries. With a little smile, Orcutt added—to the Swede’s surprise—that
directly across the Delaware from Phillipsburg was Easton, and “Easton,” he
said, “was where the whorehouse was for young men from Old Rimrock.”
The eastern terminus of the Morris Canal had been Jersey City and Newark. The
Swede knew of the Newark end of the canal from when he was a boy and his father
would remind him, if they were downtown and anywhere near Raymond Boulevard,
that until as
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recently as the year the Swede was born a real canal ran up by High Street, near
where the Jewish Y was, and down through to where there was now this wide city
* * *
thoroughfare, Raymond Boulevard, leading traffic from Broad Street under Penn
Station and out old Passaic Avenue onto the Skyway.
In the Swede’s young mind, the “Morris” in Morris Canal never connected with
Morris County—a place that seemed as remote as Nebraska then—but with his
father’s enterprising oldest brother, Morris. In 1918, at the age of twenty-
four, already the owner of a shoe store he ran with his young wife—a cubbyhole
Down Neck on Ferry Street, amid all the poor Poles and Italians and Irish, and
the family’s greatest achievement until the wartime contract with the WACs put
Newark Maid on the map—Morris had perished virtually overnight in the influenza
epidemic. Even on his tour of the county that day, every time Orcutt mentioned
the Morris Canal, the Swede thought first of the dead uncle he had never known,
a beloved brother who was much missed by his father and for whom the child had
come to believe the canal beneath Raymond Boulevard was named. Even when his
father bought the Central Avenue factory (no more than a hundred yards from the
very spot where the canal had turned north toward Belleville, a factory that
virtually backed on the city subway built beneath the old canal route), he
persisted in associating the name of the canal with the story of the struggles
of their family rather than with the grander history of the state.
After going around Washington’s Morristown headquarters— where he politely
pretended he hadn’t already seen the muskets and the cannonballs and the old
eyeglasses as a Newark fourth grader— he and Orcutt drove southwest a ways, out
of Morristown to a church cemetery dating back to the American Revolution.
Soldiers killed in the war were buried there, as well as twenty-seven soldiers,
buried in a common grave, who were victims of the smallpox epidemic that swept
the encampments in the countryside in the spring of 1777. Out among those old,
old tombstones, Orcutt was no less historically edifying than he’d been all
morning on the road,
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so that at the dinner table that evening, when Dawn asked where Mr. Orcutt had
taken him, the Swede laughed, “I got my money’s worth all right. The guy’s a
walking encyclopedia. I never felt so ignorant in my life.” “How boring was it?”
Dawn asked. “Why, not at all,” the Swede told her. “We had a good time. He’s a
good guy. Very nice. More there than you think when you first meet him. Much
more to Orcutt than the old school tie.” He was thinking particularly of the
Easton whorehouse but said instead, “Family goes back to the Revolution.”
“Doesn’t that come as a surprise,” Dawn replied. “The guy knows everything,” he
said, feigning indifference to her sarcasm. “For instance, that old graveyard
where we were, it’s at the top of the tallest hill around, so the rain that
falls on the northern roof of the old church there finds its way north to the
Passaic River and eventually to Newark Bay, and the rain that falls on the
southern side finds its way south to a branch of the Raritan, which eventually
goes to New Brunswick.” “I don’t believe that,” said Dawn. “Well, it’s true.” “I
refuse to believe it. Not to New Brunswick.” “Oh, don’t be a kid, Dawn. It’s
interesting geologically” Deliberately he added, “Very interesting,” to let her
know he was having no part of the Irish resentment. It was beneath him and
happened also to be beneath her.
In bed that night, he thought that when Merry got to be a schoolgirl he’d
inveigle Orcutt into taking her along on this very same trip so she could learn
firsthand the history of the county where she was growing up. He wanted her to
see where, at the turn of the century, a railroad line used to run up into
Morristown from Whitehouse to carry the peaches from the orchards in Hunter-don
County. Thirty miles of railroad line just to transport peaches. Among the well-
to-do there was a peach craze then in the big cities and they’d ship them from
Morristown into New York. The Peach Special. Wasn’t that something? On a good
day seventy cars of peaches hauled from the Hunterdon orchards. Two million
peach trees down there before a blight carried them all away. But he could
* * *
himself tell her about that train and the trees and the blight when the time
came, take her on his own to show her
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where the tracks used to be. It wouldn’t require Orcutt to do it for him.
“The first Morris County Orcutt,” Orcutt told him at the cemetery, pointing to a
brown weathered gravestone decorated at the top with the carving of a winged
angel, a gravestone set close up to the back wall of the church. “Thomas.
Protestant immigrant from northern Ireland. Arrived 1774. Age of twenty.
Enlisted in a local militia outfit. A private. January 2,1777, fought at Second
Trenton. Battle that set the stage for Washington’s victory at Princeton the
next day.”
“Didn’t know that,” the Swede said.
“Wound up at the logistical base at Morristown. Commissary support for the
Continental artillery train. After the war bought a Morristown ironworks.
Destroyed by a flash flood, 1795. Two flash floods, ‘94 and ‘95. Big supporter
of Jefferson. Political appointment from Governor Bloomfield saved his life.
Surrogate of Morris County. Master in chancery. Eventually county clerk. There
he is. The sturdy, fecund patriarch.”
“Interesting,” said the Swede—interesting at just the moment he found it all
about as deadly as it could get. How it was interesting was that he’d never met
anybody like this before.
“Over here,” said Orcutt, leading him some twenty feet on to another old
brownish stone with an angel carved at the top, this one with an indecipherable
rhyme of four lines inscribed near the bottom. “His son William. Ten sons. One
died in his thirties but the rest lived long lives. Spread out all over Morris
County. None of them farmers. Justices of the peace. Sheriffs. Freeholders.
Postmasters. Orcutts everywhere, even into Warren and up into Sussex. William
was the prosperous one. Turnpike development. Banking. New Jersey presidential
elector in 1828. Pledged to Andrew Jackson. Rode the Jackson victory to a big
judicial appointment. State’s highest judicial body. Never a member of the bar.
That didn’t matter then. Died a much-respected judge. See, on the stone? ‘A
virtuous and useful citizen.’ It’s his son—over here, this one here— his son
George who clerked for August Findley and became a
·- 305
partner. Findley was a state legislator. Slavery issue drove him into the
Republican Party… .”
As the Swede told Dawn, whethe
r she wanted to hear it or not—no, because she did
not want to hear it—”It was a lesson in American history. John Quincy Adams.
Andrew Jackson. Abraham Lincoln. Woodrow Wilson. His grandfather was a classmate
of Woodrow Wilson’s. At Princeton. He told me the class. I forget it now.
Eighteen seventy-nine? I’m full of dates, Dawnie. He told me everything. And all
we were doing was walking around a cemetery out back of a church at the top of a
hill. It was something. It was school.”
But once was enough. He’d paid all the attention he could, never stopped trying
to keep straight in his mind the progress of the Orcutts through almost two
centuries—though each time Orcutt had said “Morris” as in Morris County, the
Swede had thought “Morris” as in Morris Levov. He couldn’t remember ever in his
life feeling more like his father—not like his father’s son but like his father—
* * *
than he did marching around the graves of those Orcutts. His family couldn’t
compete with Orcutt’s when it came to ancestors—they would have run out of
ancestors in about two minutes. As soon as you got back earlier than Newark,
back to the old country, no one knew anything. Earlier than Newark, they didn’t
know their names or anything about them, how anyone made a living, let alone
whom they’d voted for. But Orcutt could spin out ancestors forever. Every rung
into America for the Levovs there was another rung to attain; this guy was
there.
Is that why Orcutt had laid it on a little thick? Was it to make clear what Dawn
accused him of making clear simply by the way he smiled at you—just who he was
and just who you weren’t? No, that was thinking not too much like Dawn but way
