by Philip Roth
by his father: face to face, between “the girl,” as Lou Levov charitably
referred to her around the Swede, and “the ogre,” as the girl called him. Dawn
hadn’t been afraid; to the Swede’s astonishment she agreed. “I walked out on
that runway in a bathing suit, didn’t I? It wasn’t easy, in case you didn’t
know. Twenty-five thousand people. It’s not a very dignified feeling, in a
bright white bathing suit and bright white high heels, being looked at by
twenty-five thousand people. I appeared in a parade in a bathing suit. In
Camden. Fourth of July. I had to. I hated that day. My father almost died. But I
did it. I taped the back of that damn bathing suit to my skin, Seymour, so it
wouldn’t ride up on me—masking tape on my own behind. I felt like a freak. But I
took the job of Miss New Jersey and so I did the work. A very tiring job. Every
town in the state. Fifty dollars an appearance. But if you work hard, the money
adds up, so I did it. Working hard at something totally different that scared me
to death—but I did it. The Christmas I broke the news to my parents about Miss
Union County—you think that was fun? But I did it. And if I could do all that, I
can do this, because this isn’t being a silly girl on a float, this is my life,
my entire future. This is
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for keeps! But you’ll be there, won’t you? I cannot go there by myself. You have
to be there!”
She was so incredibly gutsy there was no choice but to say, “Where else would I
be?” On the way down to the factory, he warned her not to mention rosary beads
or the cross or heaven and to stay away from Jesus as much as possible. “If he
asks if there are any crosses hanging in the house, say no.” “But that’s a lie.
I can’t say no.” “Then say one.” “That’s a lie.” “Dawnie, it won’t help anything
if you say three. One is just the same as three. It gets your point over. Say
it. For me. Say one.” “We’ll see.” “And you don’t have to mention the other
stuff.” “What other stuff?” “The Virgin Mary.” “That is not stuff.” “The
statues. Okay? Just forget it. If he asks, ‘Do you have any statues?’ just tell
him no, just tell him, ‘We don’t have statues, we don’t have pictures, the one
cross and that’s it.’” Religious ornaments, he explained, statues like those in
her dining room and her mother’s bedroom, pictures like those her mother had on
the walls were sore subjects with his father. He wasn’t defending his father’s
position. He was just explaining that the man had been brought up a certain way,
and that’s the way he was, and there was nothing anybody could do about it, so
why stir him up?
Opposing the father is no picnic and not opposing the father is no picnic—that’s
what he was discovering.
Anti-Semitism was another sore subject. Watch out what you say about Jews. Best
to say nothing about Jews. And stay away from priests, don’t talk about priests.
“Don’t tell him that story about your father and the priests when he was a
caddie at the country club as a kid.” “Why would I ever tell him that?” “I don’t
know, but don’t go near it.” “Why?” “I don’t know—just don’t.”
But he knew why. Because if she told him that the first time her father realized
priests had genitals was in the locker room when he used to caddie on weekends,
that up until then he didn’t even think they were anatomically sexual, his own
father might very well be tempted to ask her, “You know what they do with the
foreskins of the little Jewish boys after the circumcision?” And she would have
* * *
· 387 ·
to say, “I don’t know, Mr. Levov. What do they do with the foreskins?” and Mr.
Levov would reply—the joke was one of his favorites—”They send them to Ireland.
They wait till they got enough of them, they collect them all together, then
they send them to Ireland and they make priests out of them.”
It was a conversation the Swede would never forget, and not so much because of
what his father said—all that he’d expected. It was Dawn who made it an
unforgettable exchange. Her truthfulness, how she had not seriously fudged about
her parents or about anything that he knew was important to her—her courage was
what was unforgettable.
She was more than a full foot shorter than her fiance and, according to one of
the judges who’d confided in Danny Dwyer after the pageant, had failed to be in
the top ten in Atlantic City only because without her high heels she measured
five foot two and a half, in a year when half a dozen other girls equally
talented and pretty were positively statuesque. This petiteness (which may or
may not have disqualified her from a serious shot at runner-up— it hardly
explained to the Swede’s satisfaction why Miss Arizona should walk off winner of
the whole shebang at only five three) had simply deepened the Swede’s devotion
to Dawn. In a youngster as innately dutiful as the Swede—and a handsome boy
always making the extra effort not to be mistaken for the owner of his startling
good looks—Dawn’s being only five foot two quickened in him a manly urge to
shield and to shelter. Up until that drawn-out, draining negotiation between
Dawn and his father, he’d had no idea he was in love with a girl as strong as
this. He even wondered if he wanted to be in love with a girl as strong as this.
Aside from the number of crosses in her house, the only other thing she lied
about outright was the baptism, an issue on which she finally appeared to
capitulate, but only after three solid hours of negotiations during which it
seemed to the Swede that, amazingly enough, his father had yielded on that issue
almost right off the bat. Not until later did he realize that his father had
deliberately let the
· 388 ·
negotiation string out until the twenty-two-year-old girl was at the end of her
strength and then, shifting by a hundred and eighty degrees his position on
baptism, wrapped up the deal giving her only Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and
the Easter bonnet.
But after Merry was born, Dawn got the child baptized anyway. She could have
performed the baptism herself or got her mother to do it but she wanted the real
thing, and so she got a priest and some godparents and took the baby to the
church, and until Lou Levov happened to come upon the baptismal certificate in a
dresser in the unused back bedroom of the Old Rimrock house, no one ever knew—
only the Swede, whom Dawn told in the evening, after the freshly baptized baby
had been put to bed cleansed of original sin and bound for heaven. By the time
the baptismal certificate was unearthed, Merry was a family treasure six years
old, and the uproar was short-lived. Though that didn’t mean that the Swede’s
father could shake the conviction that what lay behind Merry’s difficulties all
along was the secret baptism: that, and the Christmas tree, and the Easter
bonnet, enough for that poor kid never to know who she was. That and her grandma
Dwyer—she didn’t help either. Seven years after Merry was born, Dawn’s father
had the second heart a
ttack, dropped dead while installing a furnace, and from
then on there was no dragging Grandma Dwyer out of St. Genevieve’s. Every time
she could get her hands on Merry, she spirited the child off to church, and God
alone knew what they pumped into her there. The Swede, far more confident with
* * *
his father—about this, about everything, really, than he’d been before becoming
a father himself—would tell him, “Dad, Merry takes it all with a grain of salt.
It’s just Grandma to her, and what Grandma does. Going to church with Dawn’s
mother doesn’t mean a thing to Merry either way.” But his father wasn’t buying
it. “She kneels, doesn’t she? They’re up there doing all that stuff, and Merry
is kneeling—right?” “Well, sure, I guess so, sure, she kneels. But it doesn’t
mean anything to her.” “Yeah? Well it does to me—it means plenty!”
Lou Levov backed off—that is, with his son—from attributing Merry’s screaming to
the baptism. But alone with his wife he wasn’t
· 389 ·
so cautious, and when he was riled up about “some Catholic crap” the Dwyer woman
had inflicted on his granddaughter, he wondered aloud if it wasn’t the secret
baptism that all along lay behind the screaming that scared the hell out of the
whole family during Merry’s first year. Perhaps everything bad that ever
happened to Merry, not excluding the worst thing that happened to her, had
originated then and there.
She entered the world screaming and the screaming did not stop. The child opened
her mouth so wide to scream that she broke the tiny blood vessels in her cheeks.
At first the doctor figured it was colic, but when it went on for three months,
another explanation was needed and Dawn took her for all kinds of tests, to all
kinds of doctors—and Merry never disappointed you, she screamed there too. At
one point Dawn even had to wring some urine out of the diaper to take it to the
doctor for a test. They had happy-go-lucky Myra as their housekeeper then, a
large, cheery bartender’s daughter from Morristown’s Little Dublin, and though
she would pick up Merry and nestle her into that pillowy, plentiful bosom of
hers and coo and coo at her as sweetly as though she were her own, if Merry was
already off and screaming, Myra got results no better than Dawn’s. There was
nothing Dawn didn’t try to outwit whatever mechanism triggered the screaming.
When she took Merry with her to the supermarket, she made elaborate preparations
beforehand, as though to hypnotize the child into a state of calm. Just to go
out shopping, she would give her a bath and a nap, put her in nice clean
clothes, get her all set in the car, wheel her around the store in the shopping
cart—and everything might be going fine, until somebody came along and leaned
over the cart and said, “Oh, what a cute baby,” and that would be it:
inconsolable for the next twenty-four hours. At dinnertime, Dawn would tell the
Swede, “All that hard work for nothing. I’m going crazier and crazier. I’d stand
on my head if it helped—but nothing helps.” The home movie of Merry’s first
birthday showed everybody singing “Happy Birthday” and Merry, in her high chair,
screaming. But only weeks later, for no apparent reason, the fury of the
screaming began to ebb, then
390
the frequency, and by the time she was one and a half, everything was wonderful
and remained wonderful and went on being wonderful until the stuttering.
What had gone wrong for Merry was what her Jewish grandfather had known would go
wrong from the morning of the meeting on Central Avenue. The Swede had sat in a
chair in the corner of the office, well out of the line of fire; whenever Dawn
said the name Jesus, he looked miserably through the glass at the hundred and
twenty women working at the sewing machines on the floor—the rest of the time he
looked at his feet. Lou Levov sat iron-faced at his desk, not his favorite desk,
out amid the clamorous activity of the making department, but at the desk he
rarely ever used, tucked away for the sake of quiet within the glass enclosure.
And Dawn didn’t cry, didn’t go to pieces, and lied, really, hardly at all—just
* * *
held her ground throughout, all sixty-two and a half inches of her. Dawn—whose
only preparation for such a grilling was the Miss New Jersey prepageant
interview, heavily weighted in the scoring, when she stood before five seated
judges and answered questions about her biography—was sensational.
Here’s the opening of the inquisition that the Swede never forgot:
WHAT IS YOUR FULL NAME, MISS DWYER?
Mary Dawn Dwyer.
DO YOU WEAR A CROSS AROUND YOUR NECK, MARY DAWN?
I have. In high school I did for a while.
SO YOU THINK OF YOURSELF AS A RELIGIOUS PERSON.
No. That isn’t why I wore it. I wore it because I’d been to a retreat and when I
got home I just started wearing a cross. It wasn’t a huge religious symbol. It
was just a sign really of having been to this weekend retreat, where I made a
lot of friends. It was much more that than a sign of being a devout Catholic.
ANY CROSSES IN YOUR HOUSE? HANGING UP?
Only one.
IS YOUR MOTHER DEVOUT?
Well, she goes to church.
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HOW OFTEN?
Often. Every Sunday. Without fail. And then there’ll be times during Lent when
they’ll go every day.
AND WHAT DOES SHE GET OUT OF IT?
Get out of it? I don’t know if I understand. She gets comfort. There’s a comfort
about being in a church. When my grandmother died she went to church a lot. When
someone dies or someone is sick, it helps give you some kind of comfort.
Something to do. You start saying your rosary for special intentions—
ROSARIES ARE THE BEADS?
Yes, sir.
AND YOUR MOTHER DOES THAT?
Well, sure.
I SEE. AND YOUR FATHER’S LIKE THAT TOO?
Like what?
DEVOUT.
Yes. Yes, he is. Going to church makes him feel like a good man. That he’s doing
his duty. My father is very conventional in terms of morality. He grew up with a
much more extremely Catholic upbringing than I did. He’s a workingman. He’s a
plumber. Oil heating. In his view the Church is a big powerful thing that makes
* * *
you do what’s right. He’s someone who is very caught up in issues of right and
wrong and being punished for doing wrong and the prohibitions against sex.
i wouldn’t disagree with that.
I don’t think you would. You and my father aren’t that different, when you come
down to it.
EXCEPT THAT HE IS CATHOLIC. HE IS A DEVOUT CATHOLIC AND I AM A JEW. THAT S NO
SMALL DIFFERENCE.
Well, maybe it’s not such a big difference either. it is. Yes, sir.
WHAT ABOUT JESUS AND MARY?
What about them?
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THEM?
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As individuals? I don’t think in terms of them as individuals. I do remember
being little and telling my mother that I loved her more than anybody else, and
she told me that wasn’t right, I had to love God more.
GOD OR JESUS?
I think it was God. Maybe it was Jesus. But I didn’t like it. I wanted to love
her the most. Other than that, I can’t remember any specific examples of Jesus
as a person or an individual. The only time for me the people are real is when
you do the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday and you follow Jesus up the hill
to his crucifixion. That’s a time when he becomes a real figure. And, of course,
Jesus in the manger.
JESUS IN THE MANGER. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT JESUS IN THE MANGER?
What do I think about it? I like little baby Jesus in the manger.
WHY?
Well, there’s always something so pleasant and comforting about the scene. And
important. This moment of humility. There’s all that straw and little animals
around, all cuddled up. It’s just a nice, warming scene. You never imagine it as
cold and windy out there. There’s always some candles. Everyone’s just adoring
this little baby.
that’s all. everybody is just adoring this little baby.
Yes. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
AND WHAT ABOUT JEWS? LET’S GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS, MARY DAWN. WHAT DO YOUR
PARENTS SAY ABOUT JEWS?
(Pause.) Well, I don’t hear much about Jews at home.
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS SAY ABOUT JEWS? I WOULD LIKE AN ANSWER.
I think what’s more remarkable than what I think you’re getting at is that my
