American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

chaperone was to shake his hand, and he was fit to be tied. But that was a

  pageant rule, in case anybody who was watching might not know it was her father

  and see some kind of embrace and think something untoward was going on. It was

  all so that absolutely nothing smacked of impropriety, but Jim Dwyer, who had

  only

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  recently recovered from the first heart attack and so was on edge anyway, had

  misunderstood, thinking that now she was such a big shot she had dared to rebuff

  her own dad, actually given her father the cold shoulder, and in public, before

  the entire public.

  Of course, for the week that she was in Atlantic City under the watchful eye of

  the pageant, she had not been allowed to see the Swede at all, not in the

  company of her chaperone, not even in a public place, and so, until the very

  last night, he’d just stayed up in Newark and had to be content, like her

  family, to talk to her on the phone. But Dawn’s sincerity in recounting to her

  father this hardship—of her being deprived, for a whole week, of the company of

  her Jewish beau—did not much impress him when, back in Elizabeth, she attempted

  to assuage his grudge at what he remembered for many years afterward as “the

  snub.”

  “That was just an Old World hotel that was the most wonderful place,” Dawn was

  telling the Salzmans. “Huge place. Glorious. Right on the water. Something you

  see in a movie. Big rooms overlooking Lake Geneva. We loved that. I’m boring

  you,” she suddenly said.

  “No, no,” they replied in unison.

  Sheila pretended to be listening intently to every word Dawn spoke. She had to

  be pretending. Not even she could have recovered so completely from the eruption

  in Dawn’s study. If she had—well, it would be hard then to say what sort of

  woman she was. She was nothing like the one he had imagined. And that was not

  because she had been passing herself off with him as something else or somebody

  else but because he had understood her no better than he was able to understand

  anyone. How to penetrate to the interior of people was some skill or capacity he

  did not possess. He just did not have the combination to that lock. Everybody

  who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be good. Everybody who flashed the

  signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of

  intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his

  daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his

  * * *

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  one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself. What

  was he, stripped of all the signs he flashed? People were standing up

  everywhere, shouting “This is me! This is me!” Every time you looked at them

  they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had

  no more idea of who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing

  signs too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, “This isn’t me! This isn’t

  me!” They would if they had any decency. “This isn’t me!” Then you might know

  how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.

  Sheila Salzman may or may not have been listening to Dawn’s every word, but

  Shelly Salzman surely was. The kindly doctor wasn’t merely acting like the

  kindly doctor but appeared to have fallen somewhat under Dawn’s spell—the spell

  of that alluring surface whose underside, as she presented it to people, was as

  charmingly straightforward as it could be. Yes, after all she’d been through,

  she looked and she behaved as though nothing had happened. For him there was

  this two-sidedness to everything: side by side, the way it had been and the way

  it was now. But Dawn made it sound as though the way it had been was still the

  way it was. After the tragic detour their lives had taken, she’d managed in the

  last year to arrive back at being herself, apparently just by not thinking about

  certain things. And arrived back not merely at Dawn with her face-lift and her

  petite gallantry and her breakdowns and her cattle and her decisions to change

  her life but back at the Dawn of Hillside Road, Elizabeth, New Jersey. A gate,

  some sort of psychological gate, had been installed in her brain, a mighty gate

  past which nothing harmful could travel. She locked the gate, and that was that.

  Miraculous, or so he’d thought, until he’d learned that the gate had a name. The

  William Orcutt III Gate.

  Yes, if you’d missed her back in the forties, here once again was Mary Dawn

  Dwyer of Elizabeth’s Elmora section, an up-and-coming Irish looker from a

  working-class family that was starting to do okay, respectable parishioners at

  St. Genevieve’s, the classiest Catholic church in town—miles uptown from the

  church by the

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  docks where her father and his brothers had been altar boys. Once again she was

  in possession of that power she’d had even as a twenty-year-old to stir up

  interest in whatever she said, somehow to touch you inwardly, which was not

  often true of the contestants who won at Atlantic City. But she could do that,

  lay bare something juvenile even in adults, by nothing more than venting

  ordinary lively enthusiasms through that flagrantly perfect, strikingly executed

  heart-shaped face. Maybe, until she spoke and revealed her attitudes as not so

  different from any decent person’s, people were frightened of her for looking

  like that. Discovering that she was not at all a goddess, had no interest in

  pretending to be one—discovering in her almost an excess of no pretense—made

  even more riveting the brilliant darkness of her hair, the angular mask not much

  bigger than a cat’s, and the eyes, the big pale eyes almost alarmingly keen and

  vulnerable. From the message in those eyes one would never have believed that

  this girl was going to grow up to be a shrewd businesswoman resolutely

  determined about turning a profit as a cattle breeder. What excited the Swede’s

  tenderness always was that she who wasn’t at all frail nonetheless looked so

  delicate and frail. This always impressed him: how strong she was (once was) and

  how vulnerable her kind of beauty caused her to appear, even to him, her

  husband, long after one might imagine that married life had dulled the

  infatuation.

  * * *

  And how plain Sheila looked sitting alongside her, purportedly listening to her,

  plain and proper, sensible, dignified, and dreary. So dreary. Everything in her

  severely withheld. Hidden. There was nothing hearty in Sheila. There was lots in

  Dawn. There once was in him. That once described everything there was in him. It

  was not easy to understand how he could ever have found in this prim, severe,

  hidden whatever-she-was a woman more magnetic than Dawn. How pathetic he must

  have been, how depleted, a broken, helpless creature escaping from everything

  that had collapsed, running in the headlong way that someone in trouble will

  take flight in order to make a bad thing worse. Almost all there was to attract

  him was that Sheila was someone else. Her clarity, her candor, her

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  equilibrium, her perfect self-control were at first almost bes
ide the point.

  Shrinking from such a blinding catastrophe—disconnected as he’d never been

  before from his ready-made life; notorious and disgraced as he’d never been

  before—he turned in a daze to the one woman other than his wife whom he knew

  even remotely in a personal way. That was how he got there, seeking asylum,

  hounded—the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so

  intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary

  moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of

  being untrue. But amorousness had little to do with his clutching. He could not

  offer the passionate love that Dawn drew from him. Lust was far too natural a

  task for someone suddenly so misshapen—the father of someone gruesomely

  misbegotten. He was there for the illusion. He lay atop Sheila like a person

  taking cover, digging in, a big male body in hiding, a man disappearing: because

  she was somebody else, maybe he could be somebody else too.

  But that she was someone else was what made it all wrong. Alongside Dawn, Sheila

  was a well-groomed impersonal thinking-machine, a human needle threaded with a

  brain, nobody he could want to touch, let alone sleep with. Dawn was the woman

  who had inspired the feat for which even his record-breaking athletic career had

  barely fortified him: vaulting his father. The feat of standing up to his

  father. And how she had inspired it was by looking as spectacular as she looked

  and yet talking like everyone else.

  Was it bigger, more important, worthier things that inclined others to a

  lifelong mate? Or at the heart of everyone’s marriage was there something

  irrational and unworthy and odd?

  Sheila would know. She knew it all. Yes, she’d have an answer to that one too. .

  . . She’d come so far, Sheila had said, she’d gotten so much stronger I thought

  that she could make it on her own. She’s a strong girl, Seymour. She’s a crazy

  girl. She’s crazy! She’s troubled. And the father plays no role with the

  troubled daughter? I’m sure he played plenty of a role. I just thought something

  terrible had happened at home. …

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  Oh, he wanted his wife back—it was impossible to exaggerate the extent to which

  he wanted her back, the wife so serious about being a serious mother, the woman

  so fiercely disinclined to be thought spoiled or vain or frivolously nostalgic

  for her once-glamorous eminence that she would not wear even as a joke for her

  family the crown in the hatbox at the top of her closet. His endurance had run

  out—he wanted that Dawn back right now.

  “What were the farms like?” Sheila asked her. “In Zug. You were going to tell us

  about the farms.” This interest of Sheila’s in figuring it all out—how could he

  have wanted anything to do with her? These deep thinkers were the only people he

  * * *

  could not stand to be around for long, these people who’d never manufactured

  anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made

  of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold

  anything and didn’t know how to sell anything, who’d never hired a worker, fired

  a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker—people who knew nothing of

  the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who

  nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. All that

  awareness, all that introspective Sheila-like gazing into every nook and cranny

  of one’s soul went repellently against the grain of life as he had known it. To

  his way of thinking it was simple: you had only to carry out your duties

  strenuously and unflaggingly like a Levov and orderliness became a natural

  condition, daily living a simple story tangibly unfolding, a deeply un-agitating

  story, the fluctuations predictable, the combat containable, the surprises

  satisfying, the continuous motion an undulation carrying you along with the

  utmost faith that tidal waves occur only off the coast of countries thousands

  and thousands of miles away—or so it all had seemed to him once upon a time,

  back when the union of beautiful mother and strong father and bright, bubbly

  child rivaled the trinity of the three bears.

  “I got lost, yes. Oh, lots and lots of farms,” said Dawn, gratified just by the

  thought of all those farms. “They showed us their best cows. Wonderful warm

  barns. We were there in the early spring

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  when they haven’t been out to pasture yet. They’re living under the house and

  the chalet is on top. Porcelain stoves, very ornate …” / don’t understand

  how you could be so shortsighted. So taken in by a girl who was obviously crazy.

  She was running. There was no bringing her back there. She wasn’t the same girl

  that she’d been. Something had gone wrong. She’d gotten so fat. I just thought

  she was so fat and so angry that something very bad must have gone on at home.

  That it was my fault. I didn’t think that. We all have homes. That’s where

  everything always goes wrong. “… and they gave us wine that they made,

  little things to eat, and so friendly,” Dawn said. “When we went back the second

  time it was fall. The cows live up in the mountains all summer and they milk

  them and the cow that made the most milk all summer would be the first one to

  come down with a great bell on her neck. That was the number-one cow. They put

  flowers on her horns and had great celebrations. When they come down from the

  high mountain pastures they come down in a line, the leading cow the first one.”

  What if she went on to kill somebody else? Isn’t that a bit of a responsibility?

  She did, you know. She killed three more people. What do you think of that?

  Don’t say these things just to torture me. I’m telling you something! She killed

  three more people! You could have prevented that! You’re torturing me. You’re

  trying to torture me. She killed three more people! “And all the people, all the

  children, the girls and the women who had been milking all summer would come in

  beautiful clothes, all dressed in Swiss outfits, and a band, music, a big fiesta

  down in the square. And then the cows would all go in for the winter in the

  barns under the houses. Very clean and very nice. Oh, that was an occasion,

  seeing that. Seymour took lots of pictures of all their cows so we could put

  them on the projector.”

  “Seymour took pictures?” his mother asked. “I thought you couldn’t take a

  picture if it killed you,” and she leaned over and kissed him. “My wonderful

  son,” whispered Sylvia Levov, in her eyes adoring admiration shining for her

  firstborn boy.

  “Well, he did back then, the wonderful son. He was a Leica man

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  * * *

  back then,” Dawn was saying. “You took good pictures, didn’t you, dear?”

  Yes, he had. That was him all right. That was the wonderful son himself who had

  taken the pictures, who had bought Merry the Swiss girl’s outfit, who had bought

  Dawn the jewelry in Lausanne, and who had told his brother and Sheila that Merry

  killed four people. Who had bought for the family, as a memento of Zug, of the<
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  gloriously Switzerlandish state of their lives, the ceramic candelabra, now half

  encased with candle drippings, and who had told his brother and Sheila that

  Merry killed four people. Who had been a Leica man and told those two—the two he

  could least trust in the world and over whom he had no control—what Merry had

  done.

  “Where else did you go?” Sheila asked Dawn, careful to give no indication that

  in the car she would tell Shelly, and Shelly would say, “My God, my God”;

  because he was such a mild and decent person, he might even cry. But when they

  got home, the instant they were home, the first thing he would do would be to

  call the police. Once before he had harbored this murderer. For three days. That

  had been frightening, awful, brutally nerve-racking. But only one was dead, and

  bad as it was, you could wrap your mind around that number—and as his wife had

  insisted, as idiotically, he had agreed, they had no alternative; the girl was

  her client, a promise had been made, professional conscience wouldn’t allow . .

  . But four people. This was too much. This was unacceptable. Four innocent

  people, to kill them off—no, this was barbarism, gruesome, depraved, this was

  evil, and they certainly did have an alternative: the law. Obligation to the

  law. They knew where she was. They could be prosecuted for keeping a secret like

  this. No, it was not going to spin any farther out of Shelly’s control. The

  Swede saw it all. Shelly would phone the police—he had to. “Four people. She’s

  in Newark. Seymour Levov knows the address. He was there. He was with her there

  today.” Shelly was exactly as Lou Levov had described him—”a physician, a

  respected person, an ethical person, a responsible person”—and he would not