by Philip Roth
in her house—that excited her. She hid her from us, hid Merry from her parents
when she needed her parents most. Marcia Umanoff is the one who sent her
underground!” “Merry didn’t want to stay there even before. She stayed exactly
twice at Barry’s. That was it. The third time she never showed up. You don’t
remember. She went somewhere else to stay and never showed up at the Umanoffs’
again.” “Marcia is the one, Seymour. Who else has her connections? Wonderful
Father This One, wonderful Father That One, pouring blood on the draft records.
So cozy she is with her war-resister priests, so buddy-buddy— but they’re not
priests, Seymour! Priests are not great forward-thinking liberals. Otherwise
they don’t become priests. It’s just that that’s not what priests are supposed
to do—no more than they’re supposed to stop praying for the boys who go over
there. What she likes about these priests is that these aren’t priests. She
doesn’t love them because they are in the Church, she loves them because they
are doing something that, in her estimation, taints the Church. Because they are
doing something outside the Church, outside the regular role of the priest. That
these priests are an affront to what people like me grew up with, that’s what
* * *
she likes. That’s what this fat bitch likes about everything. I hate her. I hate
her guts!” “Fine. Fine with me. Hate her all you want,” he said, “but not for
something she hasn’t done. She didn’t do it, Dawn. You are driving yourself
crazy with something that cannot be true.”
And it wasn’t true. It wasn’t Marcia who had taken Merry in. Marcia was all
talk—always had been: senseless, ostentatious talk, words with the sole purpose
of scandalously exhibiting themselves, uncompromising, quarrelsome words
expressing little more than Marcia’s intellectual vanity and her odd belief that
all her posturing added up to an independent mind. It was Sheila Salzman who’d
taken Merry in, the Morristown speech therapist, the pretty, kindly, soft-spoken
young woman who for a while had given Merry so much hope and confidence, the
teacher who provided Merry all
343
those “strategies” to outwit her impediment and replaced Audrey Hepburn as her
heroine. In the months when Dawn was on sedatives and was in and out of the
hospital; in the months before Sheila and the Swede would back off from ignoring
the whole responsible orientation of their lives; in the months before these two
well-ordered, well-behaved people could bring themselves to stop endangering
their precious stability, Sheila Salzman had been Swede Levov’s mistress, the
first and last.
Mistress. A most un-Swede-like acquisition, incongruous, implausible, even
ridiculous. “Mistress” does not quite make sense in the untarnished context of
that life—and yet, for the four months after Merry disappeared, that is what
Sheila was to him.
At dinner the conversation was about Watergate and about Deep Throat. Except for
the Swede’s parents and the Orcutts, everybody at the table had been to see the
X-rated movie starring a young porno actress named Linda Lovelace. The picture
was no longer playing only in the adult houses but had become a sensation in
neighborhood theaters all over Jersey. What surprised him, Shelly Salzman was
saying, was that the electorate who overwhelmingly chose as president and vice
president Republican politicians hypocritically pretending to deep moral piety
should make a hit out of a movie that so graphically caricatured acts of oral
sex.
“Maybe it’s not the same people,” said Dawn, “who are going to the movie.”
“It’s McGovernites?” Marcia Umanoff asked her.
“At this table it is,” answered Dawn, already inflamed at the outset of dinner
by this woman she could not bear.
“Please,” said the Swede’s father, “what these two things have got to do with
each other is a mystery to me. I don’t know why you people pay good money to go
to that trash in the first place. It’s pure trash—am I right, Counselor?” He
looked to Barry for support.
“It’s a kind of trash,” Barry said.
“Then why do you let it into your lives?”
344
* * *
“It leaks in, Mr. Levov,” Bill Orcutt said to him pleasantly, “whether we like
it or not. Whatever is out there leaks in. It pours in. It’s not the same out
there anymore, in case you haven’t heard.”
“Oh, I heard, sir. I come from the late city of Newark. I heard more than I want
to hear. Look, the Irish ran the city, the Italians ran the city, now let the
colored run the city. That’s not my point. I got nothing against that. It’s the
colored people’s turn to reach into the till? I wasn’t born yesterday. In Newark
corruption is the name of the game. What is new, number one, is race; number
two, taxes. Add that to the corruption, there’s your problem. Seven dollars and
seventy-six cents. That is the tax rate in the city of Newark. I don’t care how
big you are or how small you are, I’m here to tell you that you cannot run a
business with those kind of taxes. General Electric already moved out in 1953.
GE, Westinghouse, Breyer’s down on Raymond Boulevard, Celluloid, all left the
city. Everyone of them big employers, and before the riots, before the racial
hatred, they got out. Race is just the icing on the cake. Streets aren’t
cleaned. Burned-out cars nobody takes away. People in abandoned buildings. Fires
in abandoned buildings. Unemployment. Filth. Poverty. More filth. More poverty.
Schooling nonexistent. Schools a disaster. On every street corner dropouts.
Dropouts doing nothing. Drop-outs dealing drugs. Dropouts looking for trouble.
The projects— don’t get me started on the projects. Police on the take. Every
kind of disease known to man. As far back as the summer of ‘64 I told my son,
‘Seymour, get out.’ ‘Get out,’ I said, but he won’t listen. Paterson goes up,
Elizabeth goes up, Jersey City goes up. You got to be blind in both eyes not to
see what is next. And I told this to Seymour. ‘Newark is the next Watts,’ I told
him. ‘You heard it here first. The summer of ‘67.’ I predicted it in those very
words. Didn’t I, Seymour? Called it practically to the day.”
“That is true,” the Swede acknowledged.
“Manufacturing is finished in Newark. Newark is finished. The riots were just as
bad if not worse in Washington, in Los Angeles, in Detroit. But, mark my words,
Newark will be the city that never comes back. It can’t. And gloves? In America?
Kaput. Also finished.
345
Only my son hangs on. Five more years and outside of the government contracts
there won’t be a pair of gloves made in America. Not in Puerto Rico either.
They’re already in the Philippines, the big boys. It will be India, it’ll be
Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh—you’ll see, every place around the world making
gloves except here. The union alone didn’t break us, however. Sure, the union
didn’t understand, but some of the manufacturers didn’t understand either—’I
wouldn’t pay the son
s of bitches another five cents,’ and here the guy is
driving a Cadillac and sitting in Florida in the winter. No, a lot of the
manufacturers didn’t think straight. But the unions never understood the
competition from overseas, and there is no doubt in my mind that the union
speeded up the demise of the glove industry by being tough and making it so that
people couldn’t make money. The union rate on piecework ran a lot of people out
of business or offshore. In the thirties our competition was heavy from
Czechoslovakia, from Austria, from Italy. The war came along and saved us.
Government contracts. Seventy-seven million pairs of gloves purchased by the
quartermaster. The glove man got rich. But then the war ended, and I tell you,
as far back as that, even in the good days, it was already the beginning of the
end. Our downfall was that we could never compete with overseas. We hastened it
because there wasn’t some good judgment on either side. But it could not be
saved regardless. The only thing that could have stopped it—and I was not for
this, I don’t think you can stop world trade and I don’t think you should try—
but the only thing that could have stopped it is if we put up trade barriers,
making it not just five percent duties but thirty percent, forty percent—”
* * *
“Lou,” said his wife, “what does any of this have to do with this movie?”
“This movie? These goddamn movies? Well, of course, they’re not new either, you
know. We had a pinochle club, this is years ago … you remember, the Friday
Night Club? And we had a guy in the electrical business. You remember him,
Seymour, Abe Sacks?”
“Sure,” the Swede said.
“Well, I hate to tell you but he had all these kind of movies right
· 346 ·
in his house. Sure they existed. On Mulberry Street, where we used to go with
the kids to eat Chinks, was a saloon where you could go in and buy whatever
filth you wanted. And you know something? I watched five minutes and I went back
in the kitchen and, to his credit, so did my dear friend, he’s dead now, a
wonderful fella, my mind is going, the glove cutter, what the hell was his name—
”
“Al Haberman,” said his wife.
“Right. The two of us just played gin for an hour, until there was this
hullabaloo in the living room where they were showing the movie, and what
happened was the whole damn movie, the camera, the whole what-do-you-call-it
caught fire. I couldn’t have been happier. That is thirty, forty years ago, and
to this day I remember sitting with Al Haberman playing cards while the rest of
them were drooling like idiots in the living room.”
He was by now telling this to Orcutt, directing his remarks solely at him. As
though, despite the evidence of the drunken woman Lou Levov was sitting next to,
despite the incontrovertible evidence of so much of Jewish lore, the anarchy of
a highborn Gentile remained essentially unimaginable to him, and Orcutt,
therefore, of everyone at the table, could best appreciate the platitude he was
getting at. They’re supposed to be the dependable ones in control of themselves.
Aren’t they? They marked the territory. Didn’t they? They made the rules, the
very rules that the rest of us who came here have agreed to follow. Could Orcutt
fail to admire him for sitting in that kitchen, sitting there patiently playing
gin until at last the forces of good overcame the forces of evil and that dirty
movie went up in smoke back in 1935?
“Well, I’m sorry to say, Mr. Levov, that you can’t keep it out any longer just
by playing cards,” Orcutt told him. “That was a way to keep it out that doesn’t
exist any longer.”
“Keep what out?” Lou Levov asked.
“What you’re talking about,” said Orcutt. “The permissiveness. Abnormality
cloaked as ideology. The perpetual protest. Time was you could step away from
it, you could make a stand against it. As you point out, you could even just
play cards against it. But these
347
days it’s getting harder and harder to find relief. The grotesque is supplanting
everything commonplace that people love about this country. Today, to be what
they call ‘repressed’ is a source of shame to people—as not to be repressed used
to be.”
* * *
“That is true, that is true. Let me tell you about Al Haberman. You want to talk
about the old-style world and what used to be, let’s talk about Al. A wonderful
fella, Al, a handsome fella. Got rich cutting gloves. You could in those days. A
husband and a wife who had any ambition could get a few skins and make some
gloves. Ended up in a small room, two men cutting, a couple of women sewing,
they could make the gloves, they could press them and ship them. They made
money, they were their own bosses, they could work sixty hours a week. Way, way
back when Henry Ford was paying the unheard-of sum of a dollar a day, a fine
table cutter would make five dollars a day. But look, in those days it was
nothing for an ordinary woman to own twenty, twenty-five pair of gloves. Quite
common. A woman used to have a glove wardrobe, different gloves for every
outfit—different colors, different styles, different lengths. A woman wouldn’t
go outside without a pair in any weather. In those days it wasn’t unusual for a
woman to spend two, three hours at the glove counter and try on thirty pair of
gloves, and the lady behind the desk had a sink and she would wash her hands
between each color. In a fine ladies’ glove, we had quarter sizes into the fours
and up to eight and a half. Glove cutting is a wonderful trade—was, anyway.
Everything now is ‘was.’ A cutter like Al always had a shirt and a tie on. In
those days a cutter never worked without a shirt and a tie. You could work at
seventy-five and eighty years old too. They could start in the way Al did, at
fifteen, or even younger, and they could go to eighty. Seventy was a spring
chicken. And they could work at their leisure, Saturday and Sunday. These people
could work constantly. Money to send their kids to school. Money to fix up their
homes nicely. Al could take a piece of leather, say to me, for a gag, ‘What do
you want, Lou, eight and nine-sixteenths?’ And just snip it off without a ruler,
measuring it perfectly with just his eye. The cutter was the prima donna. But
· 348 ·
all that pride of craftsmanship is gone, of course. Of the actual table cutters
who could cut a sixteen-button white glove, I think Al Haberman may have been
the last guy in America who could do it. The long glove, of course, vanished.
Another ‘was.’ There was the eight-button glove which became very popular, silk-
lined, but that was gone by ‘65. We were already taking gloves that were longer,
chopping off the tops, making shorties, and using the top to make another glove.
From this point where the thumb seam is, every inch on out they used to put a
button, so we still talk, in terms of length, of buttons. Thank God in i960
Jackie Kennedy walked out there with a little glove to the wrist, and a glove to
the elbow, and a glove above the elbow, and a pillbox hat, and all of a
sudden
gloves were in style again. First Lady of the glove industry. Wore a size six
and a half. People in the glove industry were praying to that lady. She herself
stocked up in Paris, but so what? That woman put the ladies’ fine leather glove
back on the map. But when they assassinated Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy left
the White House, that and the miniskirt was the end of the ladies’ fashion
glove. The assassination of John F. Kennedy and the arrival of the miniskirt,
and together that was the death knell for the ladies’ dress glove. Till then it
was a twelve-month, year-round business. There was a time when a woman would not
go out unless she wore a pair of gloves, even in the spring and the summer. Now
the glove is for cold weather or for driving or for sports—”
“Lou,” his wife said, “nobody is talking about—” “Let me finish, please. Don’t
interrupt me, please. Al Haberman was a great reader. No schooling but he loved
to read. His favorite author was Sir Walter Scott. And Sir Walter Scott, in one
of his classic books, gets an argument going between the glovemaker and the
shoemaker about who is the better craftsman, and the glove-maker wins the
argument. You know what he says? ‘All you do,’ he tells the shoemaker, ‘is make
a mitten for the foot. You don’t have to articulate around each toe.’ But Sir
Walter Scott was the son of a glover, so it makes sense he would win the
argument. You didn’t know Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover? You know who
else,
* * *
349
aside from Sir Walter and my two sons? William Shakespeare. Father was a glover
