by Philip Roth
unsophisticated
334
about abstract art as the Swede was said to be by Dawn might easily have
imagined the guy who went everywhere in those shirts as painting pictures like
the famous one of Firpo knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the second round at
the old Polo Grounds. But then artistic creation obviously was not achieved in
any way or for any of the reasons Swede Levov could understand. According to the
Swede’s interpretation, all of the guy’s effervescence seemed rather to go into
wearing those shirts—all his flamboyance, his boldness, his defiance, and
perhaps, too, his disappointment and his despair.
Well, perhaps not all, the Swede discovered as he stood peering in through the
kitchen door from the big granite step outside. Why he hadn’t just opened the
door and gone straight ahead into his own kitchen to say that Jessie was in
serious need of her husband was because of the way that Orcutt was leaning over
Dawn while Dawn was leaning over the sink, shucking the corn. In the first
instant it looked to the Swede—despite the fact that Dawn needed no such
instruction—as though Orcutt were showing Dawn how to shuck corn, bending over
her from behind and, with his hands on hers, helping her get the knack of
cleanly removing the husk and the silk. But if he was only helping her learn to
shuck corn, why, beneath the florid expanse of Hawaiian shirt, were his hips and
his buttocks moving like that? Why was his cheek pressed against hers like that?
And why was Dawn saying—if the Swede was correctly reading her lips—”Not here,
* * *
not here …”? Why not shuck the corn here? The kitchen was as good a place as
any. No, it took a moment to figure out that, one, they were not merely shucking
corn together and, two, not all of the effervescence, flamboyance, boldness,
defiance, disappointment, and despair nibbling at the edges of the old-line
durability was necessarily sated by wearing those shirts.
So this was why she was always losing her patience with Orcutt— to put me off
the track! Making cracks about his bloodlessness, his breeding, his empty
warmth, putting him down like that whenever we are about to get into bed. Sure
she talks that way—she has to, she’s in love with him. The unfaithfulness to the
house was never unfaithfulness to the house—it was unfaithfulness. “The poor
wife
335
doesn’t drink for no reason. Always holding everything back. So busy being so
polite,” Dawn said, “so Princeton,” Dawn said, “so unerring. He works so hard to
be one-dimensional. That Wasp blandness. Living completely off what they once
were. The man is simply not there half the time.”
Well, Orcutt was there now, right there. What the Swede believed he’d seen,
before quickly turning back to the terrace and the steak on the fire, was Orcutt
putting himself exactly where he intended to be, while telling Dawn exactly
where he was. “There! There! There! There!” And he did not appear to be holding
anything back.
336
8
.t dinner—outdoors, on the back terrace, with darkness coming on so gradually
that the evening seemed to the Swede stalled, stopped, suspended, provoking in
him a distressing sense of nothing more to follow, of nothing ever to happen
again, of having entered a coffin carved out of time from which he would never
be extricated—there were also the Umanoffs, Marcia and Barry, and the Salzmans,
Sheila and Shelly. Only a few hours had passed since the Swede learned that it
was Sheila Salzman, the speech therapist, who had hidden Merry after the
bombing. The Salzmans had not told him. And if only they had—called when she
showed up there, done their duty to him then … He could not complete the
thought. If he were to contemplate head-on all that would not have happened had
Merry never been permitted to become a fugitive from justice … Couldn’t
complete that thought either. He sat at dinner, eternally inert—immobilized,
ineffectual, inert, estranged from those expansive blessings of openness and
vigor conferred on him by his hyperoptimism. A lifetime’s agility as a
businessman, as an athlete, as a U.S. Marine, had in no way conditioned him for
being a captive confined to a futureless box where he was not to think about
what had become of his daughter, was not to think about how the Salzmans had
assisted her, was not to think about … about what had become of his wife. He
was supposed
337
to get through dinner not thinking about the only things he could think about.
He was supposed to do this forever. However much he might crave to get out, he
was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would
explode.
Barry Umanoff, once the Swede’s teammate and closest high school friend, was a
law professor at Columbia, and whenever the folks flew up from Florida Barry and
* * *
his wife were invited for dinner. Seeing Barry always made his father happy, in
part because Barry, the son of an immigrant tailor, had evolved into a
university professor but also because Lou Levov—wrongly, though the Swede
pretended not to care—credited Barry Umanoff with getting Seymour to lay down
his baseball glove and enter the business. Every summer Lou reminded Barry—
“Counselor” as he’d been calling him since high school—of the good deed Barry
had done for the Levov family by the example of his professional seriousness,
and Barry would say that, if he’d been one-hundredth the ballplayer the Swede
was, nobody would have gotten him near a law school.
It was Barry and Marcia Umanoff with whom Merry had stayed overnight a couple of
times in New York before the Swede finally forbade her going into New York at
all, and it was Barry from whom the Swede had sought legal advice after Merry’s
disappearance from Old Rimrock. Barry took him to meet Schevitz, the Manhattan
litigator. When the Swede asked Schevitz to level with him—what was the worst
that could be laid on his daughter if she was apprehended and found guilty?—he
was told, “Seven to ten years.” “But,” said Schevitz, “if it’s done in the
passion of the antiwar movement, if it’s done accidentally, if everything was
done to try to prevent anyone from getting hurt… And do we know she did it
alone? We don’t. Do we even know she did it? We don’t. No significant political
history, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of violent rhetoric, but is this a kid who, on
her own, would kill someone deliberately? How do we know she made the bomb or
set the bomb? To make a bomb you have to be fairly sophisticated—could this kid
light a match?” “She was excellent in science,” the Swede said. “For
· 338 ·
her chemistry project she got an A.” “Did she make a bomb for her chemistry
project?” “No, of course not—no.” “Then we don’t know, do we, whether she could
light a match or not. It might have been all rhetoric to her. We don’t know what
she did and we don’t know what she meant to do. We don’t know anything and
neither does anyone else. She could have won the Westinghouse Science Prize and<
br />
we wouldn’t know. What can be proved? Probably very little. The worst, since you
ask me, is seven to ten. But let’s assume she’s treated as a juvenile. Under
juvenile law she gets two to three, and even if she pleads guilty to something,
the record is sealed and nobody can get at it. Look, it all depends on her role
in the homicide. It doesn’t have to be too bad. If the kid will come in, even if
she did have something to do with it, we might get her off with practically
nothing.” And until a few hours ago—when he’d learned that on the Oregon commune
making bombs was her specialty, when from her own unstuttering mouth he heard
that it was not a single possibly accidental death for which she was responsible
but the coldhearted murder of four people—Schevitz’s words were sometimes all he
had to keep him from giving up hope. This man did not deal in fairy tales. You
could see that as soon as you walked into his office. Schevitz was somebody who
liked to be proved right, somebody whose wish to prevail was his vocation. Barry
had made it clear beforehand that Schevitz was not a guy interested in making
people feel good. He was not addressing the Swede’s yearnings when he said, If
the kid will come in we might get her off. But this was back when they thought
they could find a jury that would believe she didn’t know how to light a match.
This was before five o’clock that afternoon.
Barry’s wife, Marcia, a literature professor in New York, was, by even the
Swede’s generous estimate, “a difficult person,” a militant nonconformist of
staggering self-certainty much given to sarcasm and calculatedly apocalyptic
pronouncements designed to bring discomfort to the lords of the earth. There was
nothing she did or said that didn’t make clear where she stood. She had barely
to move a muscle—swallow while you were speaking, tap with a fingernail
339
* * *
on the arm of her chair, even nod her head as if she were in total agreement—to
inform you that nothing you were saying was correct. To encompass all her
convictions she dressed in large block-printed caftans—an extensive woman, for
whom a disheveled appearance was less a protest against convention than a sign
that she was a thinker who got right to the point. No nonsense, no commonplace
stood between her and the harshest truths.
Yet Barry enjoyed her. Since they couldn’t have been more dissimilar, perhaps
theirs was one of those so-called attractions of opposites. In Barry, there was
such thoughtfulness and kindly concern—ever since he was a kid, and the poorest
kid the Swede had known, he’d been a diligent, upright gentleman, a solid
catcher in baseball, eventually the class valedictorian, who, after his stint in
the service, went to NYU on the GI Bill. That’s where he met and jnarried Marcia
Schwartz. It was hard for the Swede to understand how a strongly built, not
unhandsome guy like Barry could free himself at the age of twenty-two from the
desire to be with anybody else in this world but Marcia Schwartz, already so
opinionated as a college girl that the Swede had to battle in her presence to
stay awake. Yet Barry liked her. Sat there and listened to her. Didn’t at all
seem to care that she was a slob, dressed even in college like somebody’s
grandmother, and with those buoyant eyes, unnervingly enlarged by the heavy
spectacles. Dawn’s opposite in every way. For Marcia to have spawned a self-
styled revolutionary —yes, had Merry been raised within earshot of Marcia’s
mouth … but Dawn? Pretty, petite, unpolitical Dawn—why Dawn? Where do you look
for the cause? Where is the explanation for this mismatch? Was it nothing more
than a trick played by their genes? During the March on the Pentagon, the march
to stop the war in Vietnam, Marcia Umanoff had been thrown into a paddy wagon
with some twenty other women and, very much to her liking, locked up overnight
in a D.C. jail, where she didn’t stop talking protest talk till they were all
let out in the morning. If Merry had been her daughter, things would make sense.
If only Merry had fought a war of words, fought the world with words alone, like
this strident yenta. Then Merry’s
· 340 ·
would be not a story that begins and ends with a bomb but another story
entirely. But a bomb. A bomb. A bomb tells the whole fucking story.
Hard to grasp Barry’s marrying that woman. Maybe it had to do with his family’s
being so poor. Who knows? Her animus, her superior airs, the sense she gave of
being unclean, everything intolerable to the Swede in a friend, let alone in a
mate—well, those were the very characteristics that seemed to enliven Barry’s
appreciation of his wife. It was a puzzle, it truly was, how one perfectly
reasonable man could adore what a second perfectly reasonable man couldn’t abide
for half an hour. But just because it was a puzzle, the Swede tried his best to
restrain his aversion and neutralize his judgment and see Marcia Umanoff as
simply an oddball from another world, the academic world, the intellectual
world, where always to be antagonizing people and challenging whatever they said
was apparently looked on with admiration. What it was they got out of being so
negative was beyond him; it seemed to him far more productive when everybody
grew up and got over that. Still, that didn’t mean that Marcia was really out to
needle people and work them over just because she was so often needling people
and working them over. He couldn’t call her vicious once he’d recognized that
this was the way she was accustomed to socializing in Manhattan; moreover, he
couldn’t believe that Barry Umanoff— who at one time was closer to him than his
own kid brother— could marry someone vicious. As usual, the Swede’s default
reaction to not being able to fathom cause and effect (as opposed to his
father’s reflexive suspiciousness) was to fall back on a lifelong strategy and
become tolerant and charitable. And so he was content to chalk up Marcia as
“difficult,” allowing at worst, “Well, let’s just say she’s no bargain.”
* * *
But Dawn loathed her. Loathed her because she knew herself to be loathed by
Marcia for having been Miss New Jersey. Dawn couldn’t stand people who made that
story the whole of her story, and Marcia was especially exasperating because the
pleasure of explaining Dawn by a story that had never explained her—and
34i
hardly explained her now—was so smugly exhibited. When they’d all first met,
Dawn told the Umanoffs about her father’s heart attack and how no money was
coming into the house and how she realized that the door to college was about to
be slammed shut on her brother … the whole scholarship story, but none of it
made Miss New Jersey seem like anything but a joke to Marcia Umanoff. Marcia
barely bothered to hide the fact that when she looked at Dawn Levov she saw no
one there, that she thought Dawn pretentious for raising cows, thought she was
doing it for the image—it wasn’t a serious operation Dawn ran twelve, fourteen
hours a day, seven days a week; as far as Marcia was concerned it was a pretty
House and Gard
en fantasy contrived by a rich, silly woman who lived, not in
stinky-smelling New Jersey, no, no, who lived in the country. Dawn loathed
Marcia because of her undisguised superiority to the Levovs’ wealth, to their
taste, to the rural way of life they loved, and loathed her beyond loathing
because she was convinced that privately Marcia was altogether pleased about
what Merry was alleged to have done.
The privileged place in Marcia’s feelings went to the Vietnamese—the North
Vietnamese. She never for a moment compromised her political convictions or her
compassionate comprehension of international affairs, not even when she saw from
six inches away the misery that had befallen her husband’s oldest friend. And
this was what led Dawn to make the accusations that the Swede knew to be false,
not because he could swear to Marcia’s honorableness but because for him the
probity of Barry Umanoff was beyond question. “I will not have her in this
house! A pzghas more humanity in her than that woman does! I don’t care how many
degrees she has—she is callous and she is blind! She is the most blind, self-
involved, narrow-minded, obnoxious so-called intelligent person I have ever met
in my life and I will not have her in my house!” “Well, I can’t very well ask
Barry to come by himself.” “Then Barry can’t come.” “Barry has to come. I want
Barry to come. My father gets a terrific boot out of seeing Barry here. He
expects to see Barry here. It’s Barry, Dawn, who got me to Schevitz.” “But that
woman took
· 342 ·
Merry in. Don’t you see? That’s where Merry went! To New York— to them! That’s
who gave her a hiding place! Somebody did, somebody had to. A real bomb thrower
