by Philip Roth
sliced the tomatoes, shucked the two dozen ears of corn the Orcutts had brought
over in a bag from their garden—the pros and cons of a transparent link rather
than the board-and-batten enclosure Orcutt had first proposed to unify it with
the exterior of the garage. And meanwhile on the back terrace that looked out
toward the hill where, in another time, on an evening like this one, Dawn’s herd
would be silhouetted against the flamboyance of the late-sum-
327
mer sunset, the Swede prepared the barbecue coals. Keeping him company were his
father and Jessie Orcutt, who rarely these days was seen out socializing with
Bill but who, according to Dawn, was going through what had wearily been
described—by Orcutt, phoning to ask if they wouldn’t mind his wife’s coming
along with him for dinner—as “the calm that heralds the manic upswing.”
The Orcutts had three boys and two girls, all grown now, living and working at
jobs in New York, five kids to whom Jessie, from all reports, had been a
conscientious mother. It was after they’d gone that the heavy drinking began, at
first only to lift her spirits, then to suppress her misery, and in the end for
its own sake. Yet back when the two couples had first met, it was Jessie’s
soundness that had impressed the Swede: so fresh, so outdoorsy, so cheerily at
one with life, not the least bit false or insipid … or that’s how she’d struck
the Swede, if not his wife.
Jessie was a Philadelphia heiress, a finishing-school girl, who always during
the day, and sometimes in the evening, wore her mud-spattered jodhpurs and who
generally had her hair arranged in flossy flaxen braids. What with those braids
and her pure, round, unblemished face—behind which, said Dawn, if you bit into
it, you’d find not a brain but a Mclntosh apple—she could have passed for a
Minnesota farm girl well into her forties, except on those days when her hair
was worn up and she could look as much like a young boy as like a young girl.
The Swede would never have imagined that there was anything missing from
Jessie’s endowment to prevent her from sailing right on through into old age as
the laudable mother and lively wife who could make a party for everyone’s
children out of raking the leaves and whose Fourth of July picnics, held on the
lawn of the old Orcutt estate, were a treasured tradition among her friends and
neighbors. Her character struck the Swede back then as a compound in which you’d
find just about everything toxic to desperation and dread. At the core of her he
could imagine a nucleus of confidence plaited just as neatly and tightly as her
braided hair.
Yet hers was another life broken cleanly in two. Now the hair was
· 328 ·
a ganglion of iron-gray hemp always in need of brushing, and Jessie was a
haggard old woman at fifty-four, an undernourished drunk hiding the bulge of a
drunk’s belly beneath her shapeless sack dresses. All she could ever find to
* * *
talk about—on the occasions when she managed to leave the house and go out among
people— was the “fun” she’d had back before she’d ever had a drink, a husband, a
child, or a single thought in her head, before she’d been enlivened (as she
certainly had looked to him to be) by the stupendous satisfactions of being a
dependable person.
That people were manifold creatures didn’t come as a surprise to the Swede, even
if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What
was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run
out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of
themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It
was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of
themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all
sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was
a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an
accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise
something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd
it made him seem to himself to think that he who had always felt blessed to be
numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the
abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.
“We had a place outside Paoli,” Jessie was telling his father. “We always raised
animals. When I was seven I got the most wonderful thing. Somebody gave me a
pony and a cart. And after that there was nothing to stop me. I just loved
horses. I’ve ridden all my life. Showed and hunted. Was involved in a drag down
there in school in Virginia. When I went to school in Virginia I was the whip.”
“Wait a minute,” said Mr. Levov. “Whoa. I don’t know what a drag and a whip is.
Slow down, Mrs. Orcutt. You got a guy from Newark here.”
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She pursed her lips—when he called her “Mrs. Orcutt”—seemingly for his having
addressed her as though he were her social inferior, which, the Swede knew, was
in part why his father had called her “Mrs. Orcutt.” But she was “Mrs. Orcutt”
to Lou Levov also because of the distancing disdain he had for the drink in her
glass, her third Scotch and water in under an hour, and the cigarette—her
fourth—burning down between the fingers of her trembling hand. He was amazed by
her lack of control—by anyone’s lack of control but particularly by the lack of
control of the goy who drank. Drink was the devil that lurked in the goy—”Big-
shot goyim,” his father said, “the presidents of companies, and they’re like
Indians with firewater.”
‘“Jessie,”’ she said, “‘Jessie,’ please,” her grin painfully artificial,
disguising, by the Swede’s estimate, about ten percent of the agony she now felt
at having decided against staying alone at home with her dogs and her TV tray
and her own J&B and, in a ridiculous eruption of hope, opting instead for going
out like a wife with her husband. At home there was a phone next to the J&B; she
could reach over her glass and pick it up and dial, and even if only half
dressed, she could tell the people she knew, without having to face the terror
of facing them, how much she liked them. Months might go by without one of
Jessie’s phone calls, and then she’d phone three times after they were already
in bed for the night. “Seymour, I’m calling to tell you how much I like you.”
“Well, Jessie, thank you. I like you too.” “Do you?” “Of course I do. You know
that.” “Yes, I like you, Seymour. I always liked you. Did you know I liked you?”
“Yes, I did.” “I always admired you. So does Bill. We’ve always admired you and
liked you. We like Dawn.” “Well, we like you, Jessie.” The night after the
bombing, around midnight, after Merry’s photograph had been on television and
everybody in America knew that the day before she had said to somebody at school
that Old Rimrock was in for a big surprise, Jessie tried to walk the three miles
* * *
to the
ir house to see the Levovs but on the unpaved country road, alone in the
dark, had twisted her ankle and,
330
two hours later, still lying there, was nearly run over by a pickup truck.
“Okay, my friend Jessie, fill me in. What is a drag and a whip?” You couldn’t
say his father didn’t try to get along with people for all that he really
couldn’t. If she was a guest of his children, then she was his friend,
regardless of how repelled he might be by the cigarettes, by the whiskey, by the
unkempt hair and the rundown shoes and the burlap tent concealing the ill-used
body—by all the privilege she had squandered and the disgrace she had made of
her life.
“A drag is a hunt and it’s not with a fox. It’s over a line that’s laid by a man
on a horse ahead of you … that has a scent in a bag. It’s to make the effect
of a hunt. The hounds go after it. There are huge, huge fences, and it’s done in
a sort of a course. It’s a lot of fun. You go very fast. Huge, huge, thick brush
fences. Eight, ten feet wide with bars on top. Quite exciting. Down there
there’s a lot of stee-plechasing and a lot of good riders and everybody gets out
there and bombs through those places and it’s fun.”
It appeared to the Swede to be as much her confoundment with her predicament—a
tipsy woman, out at a party, blabbing uncontrollably—as his father’s genial I’m-
just-a-dope inquiry that drew her disastrously on, each slurred word
unsuccessfully stimulating her mouth to try to produce one that rang clear as a
bell. Clear as the “Daddy!” that had pealed out perfectly from behind the veil
of his daughter the Jain.
He knew what his father was thinking without bothering to look up from where he
was using the tongs to make a pyramid of the reddest coals. Fun, his father was
thinking, what is it with them and fun? What is this fun? What is so much fun?
His father was wondering, as he had ever since his son had bought the house and
the hundred acres forty miles west of Keer Avenue, Why does he want to live with
these people? Forget the drinking. Sober’s just as bad. They would bore me to
death in two minutes.
Dawn had one brief against them, his father had another.
“Anyway,” Jessie was saying, trying, with the cigarette-holding hand, to stir
into being some sort of conclusion, “that was why I went to school with my
horse.”
“You went to school with a horse?”
Again she impatiently pursed her lips, probably because this father, who thought
he was helping her out with his questions, was driving her even more rapidly
than usual to whatever collapse was in store. “Yes. We both got on the train at
the same time,” she told him. “Wasn’t I lucky?” she asked, and to the surprise
of both Levov men, as though she weren’t at all in serious straits—as though
that was just a laughable illusion that disgustingly self-satisfied sober people
persisted in having about drunks—laid a flirtatious hand on the side of Lou
Levov’s head.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand how you got on the train with a horse. How big
was this horse?”
“In those days horses were on horsecars.”
* * *
“Ah-hah,” said Mr. Levov, as though his lifelong bewilderment at the pleasures
of Gentiles had at last been put to rest. He took her hand from where it lay on
his hair and, as though to squeeze into her everything he knew about life’s
purpose that she would seem to have forgotten, held it firmly between his own
hands. Meanwhile, under the impetus of that force which, by failing to size up
the situation, would lead her into humiliation before the night was through,
Jessie went waveringly on.
“They were all leaving with the polo circuit and they were all going down south
in the winter train. The train stopped in Philadelphia. So I put my horse in
with them. I put my horse in the car two cars up from where I was bunked in,
waved good-bye to the family, and it was great.”
“How old were you?”
“I was thirteen. I didn’t feel homesick at all, and it was just great, great,
great”—here she began to cry—”fun.”
Thirteen, his father was thinking, a pisherke, and you waved good-bye to the
family? What was the matter? Was something the
332
matter with them? What the hell were you waving good-bye to your family for at
thirteen? No wonder you’re shicker now.
But what he said was “That’s all right, let it all out. Why not? You’re among
friends.” Unsavory as the job must have seemed to him, it had to be done, and so
he removed the glass from her one hand, discarded for her the freshly lit
cigarette in the other, and took her into his arms, which was perhaps all she
had been asking for all along.
“I see where I have to be a father again,” he said to her softly, and she could
say nothing, she could only weep and let herself be rocked by the Swede’s
father, whom, on the one other occasion she had met him in her life—when, some
fifteen years back, they had gone to picnic on the Orcutts’ lawn for Fourth of
July—she had tried to interest in skeet shooting, yet another of those
diversions that had long defied Lou Levov’s Jewish comprehension. For “fun”
pulling a trigger and shooting with a gun. They’re meshugeh.
That was the day when, on the way back home, they’d passed a handmade sign on
the road by the Congregational church that said “Tent Sale” and Merry had begged
the Swede, in her fervent way, to stop and buy one for her.
If Jessie could cry on his father’s shoulder over waving good-bye to her family
at the age of thirteen, about being shipped off alone at thirteen with nothing
but a horse, why shouldn’t that memory of his—”Daddy, stop, they’re selling t-t-
t-tents!”—bring the Swede to the edge of tears about his daughter the Jain when
she was six?
Figuring that Orcutt ought to know what was happening to Jessie and needing time
to collect himself, feeling suddenly the full weight of the situation he was so
strenuously working to obliterate from his thinking at least until the guests
went home—the situation he was in as the father of a daughter who had killed not
just one person more or less accidentally but, in the name of truth and justice,
three more people quite indifferently, a daughter who, having repudiated
everything she had ever learned from him and her mother, had now gone on to
disown virtually the whole of civilized
333
* * *
existence, beginning with cleanliness and ending with reason—the Swede left his
father temporarily to tend alone to Jessie and went around, by way of the back
of the house, to the rear kitchen door to get Orcutt. Through the door’s glass
panes he could see a stack of papers on the table, a new batch of Orcutt’s
drawings, probably of the troublesome link, and then, by the sink, he saw Orcutt
himself.
Orcutt had on his raspberry-colored linen pants and, hanging clear of the pants,
a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt decorated with a colorful array of tropical flora
best described in a word favored
by Sylvia Levov for everything distasteful to
her in wearing apparel: “loud.” Dawn maintained that the outfit was just part of
that superconfident Orcutt facade by which, as a young newcomer to Old Rimrock,
she had once been so ridiculously intimidated. According to Dawn’s
interpretation—which, when she told it to him, struck the Swede as not without a
tinge still of the old resentment—the message of the Hawaiian summer shirts was
simply this: I am William Orcutt III and I can wear what other people around
here wouldn’t dare to wear. “The grander you believe you are in the great world
of Morris County,” said Dawn, “the more flamboyant you think you can be. The
Hawaiian shirt,” she said, smiling her mocking smile, “is Wasp extremism—Wasp
motley. That’s what I’ve learned living out here—even the William Orcutt the
Thirds have their little pale moments of exuberance.”
Just the year before, the Swede’s father had made a similar observation. “I’ve
noticed this about the rich goyim in the summertime. Comes the summer, and these
reserved, correct people wear the most incredible costumes.” The Swede had
laughed. “It’s a form of privilege,” he said, repeating Dawn’s line. “Is it?”
asked Lou Levov, laughing along with him. “Maybe it is,” Lou concluded. “Still,
I got to hand it to this goy: you have to have guts to wear those pants and
those shirts.”
Certainly, seeing Orcutt dressed like that down in the village, a burly guy, big
and substantial-looking, you would not have imagined—if you were the Swede—his
paintings having that rubbed-out look as their distinctive feature. A person as
