by Philip Roth
lived in an apartment in Newark or Passaic or Jersey City, a week in Mt. Freedom
was heaven. And as for Morristown, although solidly Gentile, it was nonetheless
a cosmopolitan community of lawyers, doctors, and stockbrokers where Bucky and
his wife loved going to the movies at the Community, loved the shops, which were
excellent, loved the beautiful old buildings and where there were the
313
1
Jewish shopkeepers with their neon signs up and down Speedwell Avenue. But did
the Swede know that before the war there’d been a swastika scrawled on the golf-
course sign at the edge of Mt. Freedom? Did he know that the Klan held meetings
in Boonton and Dover, rural people, working-class people, members of the Klan?
Did he know that crosses were burned on people’s lawns not five miles from the
Morristown green?
From that day on, Bucky kept trying to land the Swede, who would have been a
considerable catch, and to haul him in for the Morristown Jewish community, to
get him, if not to join the temple outright, at least to play evening basketball
in the Interchurch League for the team the temple fielded. Robinson’s mission
irritated the Swede in just the way his mother had when, some months after Dawn
became pregnant, she’d astonished him by asking if Dawn was going to convert
before the baby was born. “A man to whom practicing Judaism means nothing,
Mother, doesn’t ask his wife to convert.” He had never been so stern with her in
his life, and, to his dismay, she had walked away near tears, and it had taken
numerous hugs throughout the day to get her to understand that he wasn’t “angry”
with her—he had only been making clear that he was a grown man with the
prerogatives of a grown man. Now with Dawn he talked about Robinson—talked a lot
about him as they lay in bed at night. “I didn’t come out here for that stuff. I
never got that stuff anyway. I used to go on the High Holidays with my father,
and I just never understood what they were getting at. Even seeing my father
there never made sense. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t like him—he was bending to
something that he didn’t have to, something he didn’t even understand. He was
just bending to this because of my grandfather. I never understood what any of
that stuff had to do with his being a man. What the glove factory had to do with
his being a man anybody could understand—just about everything. My father knew
what he was talking about when he was talking about gloves. But when he started
about that stuff? You should have heard him. If he’d known as little about
leather as he knew about God, the family would have wound up in the poor-
,L
house.” “Oh, but Bucky Robinson isn’t talking about God, Seymour. He wants to be
your friend,” she said, “that’s all.” “I guess. But I never was interested in
that stuff, Dawnie, back for as long as I can remember. I never understood it.
Does anybody? I don’t know what they’re talking about. I go into those
synagogues and it’s all foreign to me. It always has been. When I had to go to
Hebrew school as a kid, all the time I was in that room I couldn’t wait to get
* * *
out on the ball field. I used to think, ‘If I sit in this room any longer, I’m
going to get sick.’ There was something unhealthy about those places. Anywhere
near any of those places and I knew it wasn’t where I wanted to be. The factory
was a place I wanted to be from the time I was a boy. The ball field was a place
I wanted to be from the time I started kindergarten. That this is a place where
I want to be I knew the moment I laid eyes on it. Why shouldn’t I be where I
want to be? Why shouldn’t I be with who I want to be? Isn’t that what this
country’s all about? I want to be where I want to be and I don’t want to be
where I don’t want to be. That’s what being an American is—isn’t it? I’m with
you, I’m with the baby, I’m at the factory during the day, the rest of the time
I’m out here, and that’s everywhere in this world I ever want to be. We own a
piece of America, Dawn. I couldn’t be happier if I tried. I did it, darling, I
did it—I did what I set out to do!”
For a while, the Swede stopped showing up at the touch-football games just to
avoid having to deflect Bucky Robinson on the subject of his temple. With
Robinson he did not feel like his father—he felt like Orcutt___
No, no. You know whom he really felt like? Not during the hour or two a week he
happened to be on the receiving end of a Bucky Robinson pass, but whom he felt
like all the rest of the time? He couldn’t tell anybody, of course: he was
twenty-six and a new father and people would have laughed at the childishness of
it. He laughed at it himself. It was one of those kid things you keep in your
mind no matter how old you get, but whom he felt like out in Old Rimrock was
Johnny Appleseed. Who cares about Bill Orcutt? Woodrow Wilson knew Orcutt’s
grandfather? Thomas Jefferson
315
knew his grandfather’s uncle? Good for Bill Orcutt. Johnny Apple-seed, that’s
the man for me. Wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant
Christian—nope, Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American. Big. Ruddy. Happy.
No brains probably, but didn’t need ‘em—a great walker was all Johnny Appleseed
needed to be. All physical joy. Had a big stride and a bag of seeds and a huge,
spontaneous affection for the landscape, and everywhere he went he scattered the
seeds. What a story that was. Going everywhere, walking everywhere. The Swede
had loved that story all his life. Who wrote it? Nobody, as far as he could
remember. They’d just studied it in grade school. Johnny Appleseed, out there
everywhere planting apple trees. That bag of seeds. I loved that bag. Though
maybe it was his hat—did he keep the seeds in his hat? Didn’t matter. “Who told
him to do it?” Merry asked him when she got old enough for bedtime stories—
though still baby enough, should he try to tell any other story, like the one
about the train that used to carry only peaches, to cry, “Johnny! I want
Johnny!” “Who told him? Nobody told him, sweetheart. You don’t have to tell
Johnny Appleseed to plant trees. He just takes it on himself.” “Who is his
wife?” “Dawn. Dawn Appleseed. That’s who his wife is.” “Does he have a child?”
“Sure he has a child. And you know what her name is?” “What?” “Merry Appleseed!”
“Does she plant apple seeds in a hat?” “Sure she does. She doesn’t plant them in
the hat, honey, she stores them in the hat—and then she throws them. Far as she
can, she casts them out. And everywhere she throws the seed, wherever it lands
on the ground, do you know what happens?” “What?” “An apple tree grows up, right
there.” And every time he walked into Old Rimrock village he could not restrain
himself—first thing on the weekend he pulled on his boots and walked the five
hilly miles into the village and the five hilly miles back, early in the morning
walked all that way just to get the Saturday paper, and he could not help
himself—he thought, “Johnny Appleseed!” The pleasure of it. The pure,
buoyant
unrestrained pleasure of striding. He didn’t care if he played ball ever again—
he just wanted to step out and stride. It seemed somehow that the ballplaying
had cleared the way to
· 316 ·
* * *
allow him to do this, to stride in an hour down to the village, pick up the
Lackawanna edition of the Newark News at the general store with the single
Sunoco pump out front and the produce out on the steps in boxes and burlap bags.
It was the only store down there in the fifties and hadn’t changed since the
Hamlin son, Russ, took it over from his father after World War I—they sold
washboards and tubs, there was a sign up outside for Frostie, a soft drink,
another nailed to the clapboards for Fleischmann’s Yeast, another for Pittsburgh
Paint Products, even one out front that said “Syracuse Plows,” hanging there
from when the store sold farm equipment too. Russ Hamlin could remember from
earliest boyhood a wheelwright shop perched across the way, could still recall
watching wagon wheels rolled down a ramp to be cooled in the stream; remembered,
too, when there was a distillery out back, one of many in the region that had
made the famous local applejack and had shut down only with the passage of the
Volstead Act. Clear at the back of the store there was one window that was the
U.S. post office—one window was it, and thirty or so of those boxes with the
combination locks. Hamlin’s general store, with the post office inside, and
outside the bulletin board and the flagpole and the gas pump—that’s what had
served the old farming community as its meeting place since the days of Warren
Gamaliel Harding, when Russ became proprietor. Diagonally across the street,
alongside where there’d been the wheelwright shop, was the six-room school-house
that would be the Levovs’ daughter’s first school. Kids sat on the steps of the
store. Your girl would meet you there. A meeting place, a greeting place. The
Swede loved it. The familiar old Newark News he picked up had a special section
out here, the second section, called “Along the Lackawanna.” Even that pleased
him, and not just reading through it at home for the local Morris news but
merely carrying it home in his hand. The word “Lackawanna” was pleasing to him
in and of itself. From the front counter he’d pick up the paper with “Levov”
scrawled at the top in Mary Hamlin’s hand, charge a quart of milk if they needed
it, a loaf of bread, a dozen fresh-laid eggs from Paul Hamlin’s farm up the
road, say “See ya,
317
Russell” to the owner, and then he’d turn and stride all the way back, past the
white pasture fences he loved, the rolling hay fields he loved, the corn fields,
the turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the
springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows, the acres
and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country dweller’s puppy love for
nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he loved and the
substantial old stone house he loved—pretending, as he went along, to throw the
apple seed everywhere.
Once, from an upstairs window, Dawn saw him approaching the house from the foot
of their hill while he was doing just that, flinging out one arm, flinging it
out not as though he were throwing a ball or swinging a bat but as though he
were pulling hand-fuls of seed from the grocery bag and throwing them with all
his strength across the face of the historic land that was now no less his than
it was William Orcutt’s. “What are you practicing out there?” she said, laughing
at him when he burst into the bedroom looking, from all that exercise, handsome
as hell, big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself, someone to whom
something marvelous was happening. When people raise their glasses and toast a
youngster, when they say to him, “May you have health and good fortune!” the
picture that they have in mind—or that they should have in mind—is of the earthy
human specimen, the very image of unrestricted virility, who burst so happily
into that bedroom and found there, all alone, a little magnificent beast, his
young wife, stripped of all maidenly constraints and purely, blissfully his.
“Seymour, what are you doing down at Hamlin’s—taking ballet lessons?” Easily, so
easily, with those large protecting hands of his he raised the hundred and three
* * *
pounds of her up from the floor where she stood barefoot in her nightgown, and
using all his considerable strength, he held her to him as though he were
holding together, binding together, into one unshatterable entity, the wonderful
new irreproachable existence of husband and father Seymour Levov, Arcady Hill
Road, Old Rimrock, New Jersey, USA. What he had been doing out on the road—
which, as though it were
· 318 ·
a shameful or superficial endeavor, he could not bring himself openly to confess
even to Dawn—was making love to his life.
About the intensity of his physical intimacy with his young wife he was actually
more discreet. Together they were rather prudish around people, and no one would
have guessed at the secret that was their sexual life. Before Dawn he had never
slept with anybody he’d dated—he’d slept with two whores while he was in the
Marine Corps, but that didn’t count really, and so only after they were married
did they discover how passionate he could be. He had tremendous stamina and
tremendous strength, and her smallness next to his largeness, the way he could
lift her up, the bigness of his body in bed with her seemed to excite them both.
She said that when he would fall asleep after making love she felt as though she
were sleeping with a mountain. It thrilled her sometimes to think she was
sleeping beside an enormous rock. When she was lying under him, he would plunge
in and out of her very hard but at the same time holding himself at a distance
so she would not be crushed, and because of his stamina and strength he could
keep this up for a long time without getting tired. With one arm he could pick
her up and turn her around on her knees or he could sit her on his lap and move
easily under the weight of her hundred and three pounds. For months and months
following their marriage, she would begin to cry after she had reached her
orgasm. She would come and she would cry and he didn’t know what to make of it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her. “I don’t know.” “Do I hurt you?” “No. I don’t
know where it comes from. It’s almost as if the sperm, when you shoot it into my
body, sets off the tears.” “But I don’t hurt you.” “No.” “Does it please you,
Dawnie? Do you like it?” “I love it. There’s something about it … it just gets
to a place that nothing else gets to. And that’s the place where the tears are.
You reach a part of me that nothing else ever reaches.” “Okay. As long as I
don’t hurt you.” “No, no. It’s just strange … it’s just strange … it’s just
strange not being alone,” she said. She stopped crying only when he went down on
her for the first time. “You don’t cry this way,” he said. “
It was so
different,” she said. “How? Why?” “I guess
319
… I don’t know. I guess I’m alone again.” “Do you want me not to do it again?”
“Oh, no,” she laughed, “absolutely not.” “Okay.” “Seymour … how did you know
how to do that? Did you ever do that before?” “Never.” “Why did you then? Tell
me.” But he couldn’t explain things as well as she could and so he didn’t try.
He was just overtaken by the desire to do something more, and so he lifted her
buttocks in one hand and raised her body into his mouth. To stick his face there
and just go. Go to where he had never been before. Ecstatically complicitous, he
and Dawn. He had no reason to believe she would ever do it for him, of course,
and then one Sunday morning she just did it. He didn’t know what to think. His
little Dawn put her beautiful little mouth around his cock. He was stunned. They
both were. It was taboo for both of them. From then on, it just went on for
years and years. It never stopped. “There’s something so touching about you,”
she whispered to him, “when you get to the point where you’re out of control.”
So touching to her, she told him, this very restrained, good, polite, well-
brought-up man, a man always so in charge of his strength, who had mastered his
tremendous strength and had no violence in him, when he got past the point of no
* * *
return, beyond the point of anyone’s being embarrassed about anything, when he
was beyond the point of being able to judge her or to think that somehow she was
a bad girl for wanting it as much as she wanted it from him then, when he just
wanted it, those last three or four minutes that would culminate in the
screaming orgasm…. “It makes me feel so extremely feminine,” she told him, “it
makes me feel extremely powerful… it makes me feel both.” When she got out of
