by Philip Roth
too much like his father. Jewish resentment could be just as bad as the Irish
resentment. It could be worse. They hadn’t moved out here to get caught up in
that stuff. He was no Ivy Leaguer himself. He’d been educated, like Dawn, at
lowly Upsala in East Orange, and thought “Ivy League” was a name for a kind of
clothes before he knew it had
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anything to do with a university. Little by little the picture came into focus,
of course—a world of Gentile wealth where the buildings were covered with ivy
and the people had money and dressed in a certain style. Didn’t admit Jews,
didn’t know Jews, probably didn’t like Jews all that much. Maybe they didn’t
like Irish Catholics—he’d take Dawn’s word for it. Maybe they looked down on
them, too. But Orcutt was Orcutt. He had to be judged according to his own
values and not the values of “the Ivy League.” As long as he’s fair and
respectful to me, I’ll be fair and respectful to him.
All it came down to, in his mind, was that the guy could get boring on the
subject of the past. The Swede wasn’t going to take it to mean more until
somebody proved otherwise. They weren’t out there to get all worked up about
neighbors across the hill whose house they couldn’t even see—they were out there
because, as he liked to joke to his mother, “I want to own the things that money
can’t buy.” Everybody else who was picking up and leaving Newark was headed for
one of the cozy suburban streets in Maplewood or South Orange, while they, by
comparison, were out on the frontier. During the two years when he was down in
South Carolina with the marines, it used to thrill him to think, “This is the
Old South. I am below the Mason-Dixon line. I am Down South!” Well, he couldn’t
commute from Down South but he could skip Maple-wood and South Orange, leapfrog
the South Mountain Reservation, and just keep going, get as far out west in New
Jersey as he could while still being able to make it every day to Central Avenue
in an hour. Why not? A hundred acres of America. Land first cleared not for
agriculture but to furnish timber for those old iron forges that consumed a
thousand acres of timber a year. (The real-estate lady turned out to know almost
as much local history as Bill Orcutt and was no less generous in ladling it out
to a potential buyer from the streets of Newark.) A barn, a millpond, a mill-
stream, the foundation remains of a gristmill that had supplied grain for
Washington’s troops. Back on the property somewhere, an abandoned iron mine.
Just after the Revolution, the original house, a wood structure, and the sawmill
had burned down and the house
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was replaced by this one—according to a date engraved on a stone over the cellar
door and carved into a corner beam in the front room, built in 1786, its
exterior walls constructed of stones collected from the fireplaces of the
Revolutionary army’s former campsites in the local hills. A house of stone such
as he had always dreamed of, with a gambrel roof no less, and, in what used to
* * *
be the kitchen and was now the dining room, a fireplace unlike any he’d ever
seen, large enough for roasting an ox, fitted out with an oven door and a crane
to swing an iron kettle around over the fire; a nineteen-inch-high lintel beam
extending seventeen feet across the whole width of the room. Four smaller
fireplaces in other rooms, all working, with the original chimneypieces, the
wooden carving and moulding barely visible beneath coats and coats of a hundred
and sixty-odd years of paint but waiting there to be restored and revealed. A
central hallway ten feet wide. A staircase with newel posts and railings carved
of pale-striped tiger maple—according to the real-estate lady, tiger maple a
rarity in these parts at that time. Two rooms to either side of the staircase
both upstairs and downstairs, making in all eight rooms, plus the kitchen, plus
the big back porch… . Why the hell shouldn’t it be his? Why shouldn’t he own
it? “I don’t want to live next door to anybody. I’ve done that. I grew up doing
that. I don’t want to see the stoop out the window—I want to see the land. I
want to see the streams running everywhere. I want to see the cows and the
horses. You drive down the road, there’s a falls there. We don’t have to live
like everybody else—we can live any way we want to now. We did it. Nobody
stopped us. They couldn’t. We’re married. We can go anywhere, we can do
anything. Dawnie, we’re free!”
Moreover, getting to be free had not been painless, what with the pressure from
his father to buy in the Newstead development in suburban South Orange, to buy a
modern house with everything in it brand new instead of a decrepit “mausoleum.”
“You’ll never heat it,” predicted Lou Levov the Saturday he first laid eyes on
the huge, vacant old stone house with the For Sale sign, a house on a hilly
country road out in the middle of nowhere, eleven miles west of the
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nearest train stop, the Lackawanna station in Morristown, where the screen-door-
green cars with the yellowish cane seats took people all the way into New York.
Because it came with the hundred acres and with a collapsing barn and a fallen-
down gristmill, because it had been vacant and up for sale for almost a year, it
was going for about half the price of things that sat on just a two-acre lot in
Newstead. “Heat this place, cost you a fortune, and you’ll still freeze to
death. When it snows out here, Seymour, how are you going to get to the train?
On these roads, you’re not. What the hell does he need all that ground for
anyway?” Lou Levov demanded of the Swede’s mother, who was standing between the
two men in her coat and trying her best to stay out of the discussion by
studying the tops of the roadside trees. (Or so the Swede thought; later he
learned that, in vain, she had been looking down the road for street lights.)
“What are you going to do with all the ground,” his father asked him, “feed the
starving Armenians? You know what? You’re dreaming. I wonder if you even know
where this is. Let’s be candid with each other about this—this is a narrow,
bigoted area. The Klan thrived out here in the twenties. Did you know that? The
Ku Klux Klan. People had crosses burned on their property out here.” “Dad, the
Ku Klux Kian doesn’t exist anymore.” “Oh, doesn’t it? This is rock-ribbed
Republican New Jersey, Seymour. It is Republican out here from top to bottom.”
“Dad, Eisenhower is president— the whole country is Republican. Eisenhower’s the
president and Roosevelt is dead.” “Yeah, and this place was Republican when
Roosevelt was living. Republican during the New Deal. Think about that. Why did
they hate Roosevelt out here, Seymour?” “I don’t know why. Because he was a
Democrat.” “No, they didn’t like Roosevelt because they didn’t like the Jews and
the Italians and the Irish—that’s why they moved out here to begin with. They
didn’t like Roosevelt because he accommodated himself to these new Americans. He
understood what they needed and he tried to help them. Bu
t not these bastards.
They wouldn’t give a Jew the time of day. I’m talking to you, son, about bigots.
Not about the goose step even—just about hate. And this is where the haters
live, out here.”
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* * *
The answer was Newstead. In Newstead he would not have the headache of a hundred
acres. In Newstead it would be rock-ribbed Democrat. In Newstead he could live
with his family among young Jewish couples, the baby could grow up with Jewish
friends, and the commute door-to-door to Newark Maid, taking South Orange Avenue
straight in, was half an hour tops… .”Dad, I drive to Morristown in fifteen
minutes.” “Not if it snows you don’t. Not if you obey the traffic laws you
don’t.” “The 8:28 express gets me to Broad Street 8:56. I walk to Central Avenue
and I’m at work six minutes after nine.” “And if it snows? You still haven’t
answered me. If the train breaks down?” “Stockbrokers take this train to work.
Lawyers, businessmen who go into Manhattan. Wealthy people. It’s not the milk
train—it doesn’t break down. On the early-morning trains they’ve got their own
parlor car, for God’s sake. It’s not the sticks.” “You could have fooled me,”
his father replied.
But the Swede, rather like some frontiersman of old, would not be turned back.
What was impractical and ill-advised to his father was an act of bravery to him.
Next to marrying Dawn Dwyer, buying that house and the hundred acres and moving
out to Old Rimrock was the most daring thing he had ever done. What was Mars to
his father was America to him—he was settling Revolutionary New Jersey as if for
the first time. Out in Old Rimrock, all of America lay at their door. That was
an idea he loved. Jewish resentment, Irish resentment—the hell with it. A
husband and wife each just twenty-five years of age, a baby of less than a year—
it had been courageous of them to head out to Old Rimrock. He’d already heard
tell of more than a few strong, intelligent, talented guys in the leatherware
business beaten down by their fathers, and he wasn’t going to let it happen to
him. He’d fallen in love with the same business as his old man had, he’d taken
his birthright, and now he was moving beyond it to damn well live where he
wanted.
No, we are not going to have anybody’s resentment. We are thirty-five miles out
beyond that resentment. He wasn’t saying it was always easy to blend across
religious borders. He wasn’t saying there wasn’t prejudice—he’d faced it as a
recruit in the Marine
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Corps, in boot camp on a couple of occasions faced it head-on and faced it down.
She’d had her own brush with blatant anti-Semitism at the pageant in Atlantic
City when her chaperone referred distastefully to 1945, when Bess Myerson became
Miss America, as “the year the Jewish girl won.” She’d heard plenty of casual
cracks about Jews as a kid, but Atlantic City was the real world and it shocked
her. She wouldn’t repeat it at the time because she was fearful that he would
turn against her for remaining politely silent and failing to tell the stupid
woman where to get off, especially when her chaperone added, “I grant she was
good-looking, but it was a great embarrassment to the pageant nonetheless.” Not
that it mattered one way or the other anymore. Dawn was a mere contestant,
twenty-two years old—what could she have said or done? His point was that they
both were aware, from firsthand experience, that these prejudices existed. In a
community as civilized as Old Rim-rock, however, differences of religion did not
have to be as hard to deal with as Dawn was making them. If she could marry a
Jew, she could surely be a friendly neighbor to a Protestant—sure as hell could
if her husband could. The Protestants are just another denomination. Maybe they
were rare where she grew up—they were rare where he grew up too—but they happen
not to be rare in America. Let’s face it, they are America. But if you do not
assert the superiority of the Catholic way the way your mother does, and I do
not assert the superiority of the Jewish way the way my father does, I’m sure
we’ll find plenty of people out here who won’t assert the superiority of the
Protestant way the way their fathers and mothers did. Nobody dominates anybody
* * *
anymore. That’s what the war was about. Our parents are not attuned to the
possibilities, to the realities of the postwar world, where people can live in
harmony, all sorts of people side by side no matter what their origins. This is
a new generation and there is no need for that resentment stuff from anybody,
them or us. And the upper class is nothing to be frightened of either. You know
what you’re going to find once you know them? That they are just other people
who want to get along. Let’s be intelligent about all this.
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As it worked out, he never had to make a case as thorough as this to get Dawn to
lay off about Orcutt, since Orcutt was never much in their lives after the
sightseeing trip that Dawn kept referring to as “The Orcutt Family Cemetery
Tour.” Nothing like a social life developed back then between the Orcutts and
the Levovs, not even a casual friendship, though the Swede did show up Saturday
mornings at the pasture back of Orcutt’s house for the weekly touch-football
game with Orcutt’s local friends and some other fellows like the Swede, ex-GIs
from around Essex County trickling out with new families to the wide-open
spaces.
Among them was an optician named Bucky Robinson, a short, muscular, pigeon-toed
guy with a round angelic face, who’d been second-string quarterback for Hillside
High, Weequahic’s traditional Thanksgiving Day rival, when Swede was finishing
high school. The first week Bucky showed up, the Swede overheard him telling
Orcutt about Swede Levov’s senior year, enumerating on his fingers, “all-city
end in football; all-city, all-county center in basketball; all-city, all-
county, all-state first baseman in baseball… .” Though ordinarily the Swede
would have found this awe of him, so nakedly demonstrated, not at all to his
liking in an environment where he only wished to inspire neighborly goodwill,
where being just another of the guys who showed up to play ball was fine with
him, he seemed not to mind that Orcutt was the one standing there enduring the
excess of Bucky’s enthusiasm. He had no quarrel with Orcutt and no reason to
have any, yet seeing everything he would ordinarily prefer to hide behind a
modest demeanor being revealed so passionately to Orcutt by Bucky was more
pleasurable than he might have imagined, almost like the satisfaction of a
desire he personally knew nothing about—a desire for revenge.
When, for several weeks running, Bucky and the Swede wound up together on the
same team, the newcomer couldn’t believe his good fortune: while to everybody
else the new neighbor was Seymour, Bucky at every opportunity called him Swede.
It did not matter who else might be in the clear, wildly waving his arms in the
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air—the Swede was the receiver Bucky saw. “Big Swede, way to go!�
� he’d shout
whenever the Swede came back to the huddle having gathered in yet another
Robinson pass—Big Swede, which nobody but Jerry had called him since high
school. And with Jerry it was always sardonic.
One day Bucky hitched a ride with the Swede to a local garage where his car was
being repaired and, as they were driving along, announced surprisingly that he
was Jewish too and that he and his wife had recently become members of a
Morristown temple. Out here, he said, they were more and more involving
themselves with the Morristown Jewish community. “It can be very sustaining in a
Gentile town,” Bucky told the Swede, “to know you have Jewish friends nearby.”
Though not enormous, Morristown’s was an established Jewish community, went back
to before the Civil War, and included quite a few of the town’s influential
people, among them a trustee at Morristown Memorial Hospital—through whose
insistence the first Jewish doctors had, two years back, finally been invited to
* * *
join the hospital staff—and the owner of the town’s best department store.
Successful Jewish families had been living in the big stucco houses on Western
Avenue for fifty years now, though on the whole this wasn’t an area known to be
terribly friendly toward Jews. As a child Bucky had been taken by his family up
to Mt. Freedom, the resort town in the nearby hills, where they would stay for a
week each summer at Lieberman’s Hotel and where Bucky first fell in love with
the beauty and serenity of the Morris countryside. Up at Mt. Freedom, needless
to say, it was great for Jews: ten, eleven large hotels that were all Jewish, a
summer turnover in the tens of thousands that was entirely Jewish—the
vacationers themselves jokingly referred to the place as “Mt. Friedman.” If you
