by Philip Roth
allow his wife to become
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accessory to the murder of four people by this wretched, loathsome girl, another
homicidal savior of the world’s oppressed. Insane terroristic behavior coupled
with that bogus ideology—she had done the worst thing that anyone can do. That
would be Shelly’s interpretation and what could the Swede do to change it? How
could he get Shelly to see it otherwise when he could no longer see it
otherwise? Take him aside immediately, the Swede thought, tell him, explain to
Shelly now, say whatever has to be said to stop him from taking action, to stop
him from thinking that turning her in is his duty as a law-abiding citizen, that
it’s a way of protecting innocent lives—tell him, “She was used. She was
malleable. She was a compassionate child. She was a wonderful child. She was
only a child, and she got herself in with the wrong people. She could never have
masterminded anything like that on her own. She just hated the war. We all did.
We all felt angry and impotent. But she was a kid, a confused adolescent, a
high-strung girl. She was too young to have had any real experience, and she got
herself caught up in something that she did not understand. She was attempting
to save lives. I’m not trying to give a political excuse for her, because there
is no political excuse—there is no justification, none. But you can’t just look
at the appalling effect of what she did. She had her reasons, which were very
strong for her, and the reasons don’t matter now—she has changed her philosophy
and the war is over. None of us really know all that happened and none of us can
really know why. There is more behind it, much, much more than we can
understand. She was wrong, of course—she made a tragic, terrible, ghastly
mistake. There’s no defense of her to be made. But she’s not a risk to anyone
anymore. She is now a skinny, pathetic wreck of a girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
She’s quiet, she’s harmless. She’s not a hardened criminal, Shelly. She is a
broken creature who did something terrible and who regrets it to the bottom of
* * *
her soul. What good will it do to call the police? Of course justice must be
served, but she is no longer a danger. There is no need for you to get involved.
We don’t have to call the police to protect anyone. And there’s no need for
vengeance. Vengeance has been taken on her,
· 416 ·
believe me. I know she’s guilty. The question is not if she’s guilty. The
question is what is to be done now. Leave her to me. I will look after her. She
won’t do anything—I’ll see to that. I’ll see that she is taken care of, that she
is given help. Shelly, give me a chance to bring her back to human life—don’t
call the police!”
But he knew what Shelly would think: Sheila had done enough for that family.
They both had. That family was in real trouble now, but there was no more help
from Dr. Salzman. This wasn’t a facelift. Four people were dead. That girl
should get the electric chair. Yes, the number four would transform even Shelly
into an outraged citizen ready to pull the switch. He would go ahead and turn
her in because she was a little bitch who deserved it.
“That second time? Oh, we went everywhere,” Dawn was saying. “It doesn’t really
matter in Europe where you go, everywhere you go there are things that are
beautiful, and we sort of followed that path.”
But the police knew. From Jerry. It’s inevitable. Jerry has already called the
FBI. Jerry. To give Jerry her address. To tell Jerry. To tell anyone. To sit
here so battered as to overlook the implications of disclosing what Merry had
done! Battered, doing nothing—holding Dawn’s hand, thinking back again to
Atlantic City, to the Beau Rivage, to Merry dancing with the headwaiter—mindless
of the consequences of his reckless disclosure, bereft of his lifelong talent
for being Swede Levov, instead floating free of the battering ram that is this
world, dreaming, dreaming, helplessly dreaming, while down in Florida the
hotheaded brother who thought the worst of him and wasn’t a brother to him at
all, who’d been antagonized from the beginning by all the Swede had been blessed
with, by that impossible perfection they’d both had to contend with, the
inflamed and willful and ruthless brother who never did anything halfway, who
would like nothing better than a reckoning—yes, a final reckoning for all the
world to see….
He’d turned her in. Not his brother, not Shelly Salzman, but he, he was the one
who’d done it. What would it have taken to keep my mouth shut? What did I expect
to get by opening it? Relief? Child-
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ish relief? Their reaction? I was after something so ridiculous as their
reaction? By opening his mouth he had made things as bad as they could be—by
retelling to them what Merry had told him, the Swede had done it: turned her in
for killing four people. Now he had planted his own bomb. Without wanting to,
without knowing what he was doing, without even being importuned, he had
yielded—he had done what he should do and he had done what he shouldn’t do: he
had turned her in.
It would have taken another day entirely to keep his mouth shut—a different day,
the abolition of this day. Lead me not into this day! Seeing so much so fast.
And how stoical he had always been in his ability not to see, how prodigious had
been his powers to regularize. But in the three extra killings he had been
confronted by something impossible to regularize, even for him. Being told it
was horrible enough, but only by retelling it had he understood how horrible.
* * *
One plus three. Four. And the instrument of this unblinding is Merry. The
daughter has made her father see. And perhaps this was all she had ever wanted
to do. She has given him sight, the sight to see clear through to that which
will never be regularized, to see what you can’t see and don’t see and won’t see
until three is added to one to get four.
He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how
improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the
generations, history—utterly improbable.
He had seen that we don’t come from one another, that it only appears that we
come from one another.
He had seen the way that it is, seen out beyond the number four to all there is
that cannot be bounded. The order is minute. He had thought most of it was order
and only a little of it was disorder. He’d had it backwards. He had made his
fantasy and Merry had unmade it for him. It was not the specific war that she’d
had in mind, but it was a war, nonetheless, that she brought home to America—
home into her very own house.
And just then they heard his father scream: “No!” They heard
· 418 ·
Lou Levov screaming, “Oh my God! No!” The girls in the kitchen were screaming.
The Swede understood instantaneously what was happening. Merry had appeared in
her veil! And told her grandfather that the death toll was four! She’d taken the
train up from Newark and walked the fiv
e miles from the village. She’d come on
her own! Now everyone knew!
The thought of her walking the length of that underpass one more time had
terrified him all through dinner—in her rags and sandals walking alone through
that filth and darkness among the underpass derelicts who understood that she
loved them. However, while he had been at the table formulating no solution, she
had been nowhere near the underpass but—he all at once envisioned it—already
back in the countryside, here in the lovely Morris County countryside that had
been tamed over the centuries by ten American generations, back walking the
hilly roads that were edged now, in September, with the red and burnt orange of
devil’s paintbrush, with a matted profusion of asters and goldenrod and Queen
Anne’s lace, an entangled bumper crop of white and blue and pink and wine-
colored flowers artistically topping their workaday stems, all the flowers she
had learned to identify and classify as a 4-H Club project and then on their
walks together had taught him, a city boy, to recognize—”See, Dad, how there’s a
n-notch at the tip of the petal?”—chicory, cinquefoil, pasture thistle, wild
pinks, joe-pye weed, the last vestiges of yellow-flowered wild mustard sturdily
spilling over from the fields, clover, yarrow, wild sunflowers, stringy alfalfa
escaped from an adjacent farm and sporting its simple lavender blossom, the
bladder campion with its clusters of white-petaled flowers and the distended
little sac back of the petals that she loved to pop loudly in the palm of her
hand, the erect mullein whose tonguelike velvety leaves she plucked and wore
inside her sneakers—so as to be like the first settlers, who, according to her
history teacher, used mullein leaves for insoles—the milkweed whose exquisitely
made pods she would carefully tear open as a kid so she could blow into the air
the silky seed-bearing down, thus feeling herself at one with nature, imagining
that she was the everlast-
· 419
* * *
ing wind. Indian Brook flowing rapidly on her left, crossed by little bridges,
dammed up for swimming holes along the way and opening into the strong trout
stream where she’d fished with her father— Indian Brook crossing under the road,
flowing eastward from the mountain where it arises. On her left the pussy
willows, the swamp maples, the marsh plants; on her right the walnut trees
nearing fruition, only weeks from dropping the nuts whose husks when she pulled
them apart would darkly stain her fingers and pleasantly stink them up with an
acid pungency. On her right the black cherry, the field plants, the mowed
fields. Up on the hills the dogwood trees; beyond them the woodlands—the maples,
the oaks, and the locusts, abundant and tall and straight. She used to collect
their beanpods in the fall. She used to collect everything, catalog everything,
explain to him everything, examine with the pocket magnifying glass he’d given
her every chameleonlike crab spider that she brought home to hold briefly
captive in a moistened mason jar, feeding it on dead houseflies until she
released it back onto the goldenrod or the Queen Anne’s lace (“Watch what
happens now, Dad”) where it resumed adjusting its color to ambush its prey.
Walking northwest into a horizon still thinly alive with light, walking up
through the twilight call of the thrushes: up past the white pasture fences she
hated, up past the hay fields, the corn fields, the turnip fields she hated, up
past the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the
falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes (“The pioneers used them, Mom, to
scrub their pots and pans”), the meadows, the acres and acres of woods she
hated, up from the village, tracing her father’s high-spirited, happy Johnny
Appleseed walk until, just as the first few stars appeared, she reached the
century-old maple trees that she hated and the substantial old stone house,
imprinted with her being, that she hated, the house in which there lived the
substantial family, also imprinted with her being, that she also hated.
At an hour, in a season, through a landscape that for so long now has been bound
up with the idea of solace, of beauty and sweetness
· 420
and pleasure and peace, the ex-terrorist had come, quite on her own, back from
Newark to all that she hated and did not want, to a coherent, harmonious world
that she despised and that she, with her embattled youthful mischief, the
strangest and most unlikely attacker, had turned upside down. Come back from
Newark and immediately, immediately confessed to her father’s father what her
great idealism had caused her to do.
“Four people, Grandpa,” she’d told him, and his heart could not bear it. Divorce
was bad enough in a family, but murder, and the murder not merely of one but of
one plus three? The murder of four?
“No!” exclaimed Grandpa to this veiled intruder reeking of feces who claimed to
be their beloved Merry, “Nof and his heart gave up, gave out, and he died.
There was blood on Lou Levov’s face. He was standing beside the kitchen table
clutching his temple and unable to speak, the once-imposing father, the giant of
the family of six-footers at five foot seven, speckled now with blood and, but
for his potbelly, looking barely like himself. His face was vacant of everything
except the struggle not to weep. He appeared helpless to prevent even that. He
could not prevent anything. He never could, though only now did he look prepared
to believe that manufacturing a superb ladies’ dress glove in quarter sizes did
not guarantee the making of a life that would fit to perfection everyone he
loved. Far from it. You think you can protect a family and you cannot protect
even yourself. There seemed to be nothing left of the man who could not be
diverted from his task, who neglected no one in his crusade against disorder,
against the abiding problem of human error and insufficiency—nothing to be seen,
in the place where he stood, of that eager, unbending stalk of a man who, just
thirty minutes earlier, would jut his head forward to engage even his allies.
* * *
The combatant had borne all the disappointment he could. Nothing blunt remained
within him for bludgeoning deviancy to death. What
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should be did not exist. Deviancy prevailed. You can’t stop it. Improbably, what
was not supposed to happen had happened and what was supposed to happen had not
happened.
The old system that made order doesn’t work anymore. All that was left was his
fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing.
At the table was Jessie Orcutt, seated before a half-empty dessert plate and an
untouched glass of milk and holding in her hand a fork whose tines were tipped
red with blood. She had stabbed at him with it. The girl at the sink was telling
them this. The other girl had run screaming out of the house, so there was just
the one still in the kitchen to recount the story as best she could through her
tears. Because Mrs. Orcutt would not eat, the girl said, Mr. Levov had started
to feed Mrs. Orcutt the pie himself, a b
ite at a time. He was explaining to her
how much better it was for her to drink milk instead of Scotch whiskey, how much
better for herself, how much better for her husband, how much better for her
children. Soon she would be having grandchildren and it would be better for
them. With each bite she swallowed he said, “Yes, Jessie good girl, Jessie very
good girl,” and told her how much better it would be for everybody in the world,
even for Mr. Levov and his wife, if Jessie gave up drinking. After he had fed
her almost all of one whole slice of the strawberry-rhubarb pie, she had said,
“I feed Jessie,” and he was so happy, so pleased with her, he laughed and handed
over the fork, and she had gone right for his eye.
It turned out she’d missed it by no more than an inch. “Not bad,” Marcia said to
everyone in the kitchen, “for somebody as drunk as this babe is.” Meanwhile
Orcutt, appalled by a scene exceeding any previously contrived by his wife to
humiliate her civic-minded, adulterous mate, who looked not at all invincible,
not at all important to himself or anyone else, who looked just as silly as he
had the morning the Swede had dumped him in the midst of their friendly football
game—Orcutt tenderly lifted Jessie up from the chair and to her feet. She showed
no remorse, none, seemed to have been stripped of all receptors and all
transmitters,
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without a single cell to notify her that she had overstepped a boundary
fundamental to civilized life.
“One drink less,” Marcia was saying to the Swede’s father, whose wife was
already dabbing at the tiny wounds in his face with a damp napkin, “and you’d be
blind, Lou.” And then this large, unimpeded social critic in a caftan could not
