The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  His letter writing. With each passing month it is getting harder for him to keep track of who among the hundreds and hundreds of old-timers is retired and in Florida, and thus capable still of writing him back, and who is dead. And it isn’t a matter of losing his faculties, either—it’s losing all those friends, “non-stop,” as he graphically describes the decimation that occurred in the ranks of his former clientele during just this last year. “I wrote five full pages of news to that dear and lovely prince of a man, Julius Lowenthal. I even put in a clipping that I’ve been saving up from the Times about how they ruined the river over in Paterson where he had his law practice. I figured it would be interesting to him down there—this pollution business was made to order for the kind of man he was. I tell you”—pointing a finger—“Julius Lowenthal was one of the most civic-minded people you could ever want to meet. The synagogue, orphans, sports, the handicapped, colored people—he gave of his time to everything. That man was the genuine article, the best. Well, you know what’s coming. I stamp and seal the envelope and put it by my hat to take to mail in the morning, and not until I brush my teeth and get into bed and turn out the light does it dawn on me that my dear old friend is gone now since last fall. I have been thinking about him playing cards alongside a swimming pool in Miami—playing pinochle the way only he could play with that legal mind of his—and in actuality he is underground. What is even left of him by now?” That last thought is too much, even for him, especially for him, and he moves his hand angrily past his face, as though to shoo away, like a mosquito that is driving him crazy, this terrible, startling image of Julius Lowenthal decomposing. “And, unbelievable as it may sound to a young person,” he says, recovering most of his equilibrium, “this is actually becoming a weekly occurrence, right down to licking the envelope and pasting on the stamp.”

  It will be hours before Claire and I are finally alone together, and she is able at last to unburden herself of the enigmatic decree issued by him into her ear while we four stood grouped in the fumy wake of the departed bus. The sun is softening us like so much macadam; poor confused Dazzle (barely grown accustomed to this rival) continues carrying on in the air around my father’s feet; and Mr. Barbatnik—a short leprechaunish gentleman, with a large, long-eared Asian face, and astonishing scoop-like hands suspended from powerful forearms mapped with a body builder’s veins—Mr. Barbatnik hangs back, as shy as a schoolgirl, his jacket folded neatly over his arm, waiting for this living, throbbing valentine, my father, to make the introductions. But my father has urgent business to settle first—like the messenger in a classical tragedy, immediately as he comes upon the stage he blurts out what he has traveled all this way to say. “Young woman,” he whispers to Claire, for so it would seem he has been envisioning her, allegorically, as all that and only that, “young woman,” commands my father out of the power vested in him by his daydreams—“don’t let—don’t let—please!”

  These, she tells me at bedtime, were the only words that she could hear, pinned as she was against his massive chest; most likely, I say, because these are the only words he uttered. For him, at this point, they say it all.

  And having thus ordained the future, if only for the moment, he is ready now to move on to the next event in the arrival ceremonies he must have been planning now for weeks. He reaches into the pocket of the nubby linen jacket slung across his arm—and apparently finds nothing. Suddenly he is slapping at the lining of the jacket as though performing resuscitation upon it. “Oh Christ,” he moans, “it’s lost. My God, it’s on the bus!” Whereupon Mr. Barbatnik edges forward and, as discreetly as a best man to a half-dazed bridegroom, says in a soft voice, “Your pants, Abe.” “Of course,” my father snaps back, and reaching (still with a little desperation in the eyes) into the pocket of his houndstooth trousers—he is dressed, as they say, to the nines—extracts a small packet that he places in Claire’s palm. And now he is beaming.

  “I didn’t tell you on the phone,” he says to her, “so it would come as a total surprise. Every year you hold on to it I guarantee it will go up in value ten percent at least. Probably fifteen, and maybe more. It’s better than money. And wait till you see the wonderful skill that goes into it. It’s fantastic. Go ahead. Open it up.”

  So, while we all continue to cook away in the parking lot, my affable mate, who knows how to please, and loves pleasing, deftly unties the ribbon and removes the shiny yellow wrapping paper, not failing to remark upon its prettiness. “I picked that out too,” my father tells her. “I thought that color would be up your alley—didn’t I, Sol,” he says, turning to his companion, “didn’t I say I’ll bet she’s a girl who likes yellow?”

  Claire takes from its velvet-lined case a small sterling-silver paperweight engraved with a bouquet of roses.

  “David told me how hard you work in the garden you made, and the way you love all the flowers. Take it, please. You can use it on your desk at school. Wait till your pupils see it.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she says, and calming Dazzle with just a glance, kisses my father on the cheek.

  “Look at the handiwork,” he says. “You can even see the little thorns. Some person actually did that, by hand. An artist.”

  “It’s lovely, it’s a lovely gift,” she says.

  And only now does he turn and embrace me. “I got you something too,” he says. “It’s in my bag.”

  “You hope,” I say.

  “Wise guy,” and we kiss.

  At last he is ready to introduce his companion, dressed, I now realize, in the same spanking-new, color-coordinated outfit, except where my father is in shades of tan and brown, Mr. Barbatnik wears silver and blue.

  “Thank God for this man,” my father says as we drive slowly out of town behind a farmer’s pickup truck bearing a bumper sticker informing the other motorists that ONLY LOVE BEATS MILK. The bumper sticker on our car, affixed by Claire in sympathy with the local ecologists, reads DIRT ROADS ARE DOWN TO EARTH.

  Excited and garrulous as a small boy—much as I used to be when he was doing the driving around these roads—my father cannot stop talking now about Mr. Barbatnik: one in a million, the finest person he has ever known … Mr. Barbatnik, meanwhile, sits quietly beside him, looking into his lap, as humbled, I think, by Claire’s buoyant, summery fullness as by the fact that my father is selling him to us much the way, in the good old days, he used to sell the life-lengthening benefits of a summer in our hotel.

  “Mr. Barbatnik is the guy who I tell you about from the Center. If it wasn’t for him I would absolutely be a voice in the wilderness there about that son of a bitch George Wallace. Claire, pardon me, please, but I hate that lousy cockroach with a passion. You shouldn’t have to ever hear the kinds of things so-called decent people think in their private thoughts. It’s a disgrace. Only Mr. Barbatnik and me, we make a team, and we give it to them, but good.”

  “Not,” says Mr. Barbatnik philosophically, in heavily accented English, “that it makes much difference.”

  “And, tell me, what could make a difference with those ignorant bigots? At least let them hear what someone else thinks of them! Jewish people so full of hatred that they go out and vote for a George Wallace—it’s beyond me. Why? People who have lived and seen a whole lifetime as a minority, and the suggestion that they make in all seriousness is that they ought to line up the colored in front of machine guns and let them have it. Take actual people and mow them down.”

  “This of course isn’t everybody that says that,” Mr. Barbatnik puts in. “This is just one particular person, of course.”

  “I tell them, look at Mr. Barbatnik—ask him if that isn’t the same thing that Hitler did with the Jews. And you know what their answer is, grown men who have raised families and run successful businesses and live in retirement now in condominiums like supposed civilized people? They say, ‘How can you compare niggers with Jews?’”

  “What’s eating this particular person, and the group that he is the leader of—”

/>   “And who appointed him leader, by the way? Of anything? Himself! Go ahead, Sol, I’m sorry. I just wanted to make clear to them what kind of a little dictator we’re dealing with.”

  “What’s eating them,” Mr. Barbatnik says. “is that they owned homes, some of them, and businesses, and then came the colored, and when they tried to get out what they put in, they took a licking.”

  “Of course it’s all economics when you get down to it. It always is. Wasn’t it the same with the Germans? Wasn’t it the same in Poland?” Here, abruptly, he breaks off his historical analysis to say to Claire and me, “Mr. Barbatnik only got here after the war.” Dramatically, and yes, with pride, he adds, “He is a victim of the Nazis.”

  When we turn in the drive and I point out the house halfway up the hillside, Mr. Barbatnik says, “No wonder you look so happy, you two.”

  “They rent it,” my father says. “I told him, he likes it so much, why don’t he buy it? Make the guy an offer. Tell him you’ll pay him cash. At least see if you get a nibble.”

  “Well,” I say, “we’re happy enough renting for now.”

  “Renting is throwing money down the drain. Find out from him, will you? What can it hurt? Cash on the barrelhead, see if he bites. I can help you out, Uncle Larry can help you out, as far as that goes, if it’s a straight money deal that he’s after. But definitely you ought to own a little piece of property at your stage of the game. And up here, you can’t miss, that’s for sure. You never could. In my time, Claire, you could buy a little place like this for under five thousand. Today that little house and—and how far does the property go? To the tree line? All right, say four, say five acres—”

  Up the dirt drive and in through the kitchen door—and right past the blooming garden he has heard so much about—he continues with his realtor’s spiel, so delighted is the man to be back home in Sullivan County, and with his only living loved one, who by all outward appearances seems finally to have been plucked from his furnace and plunked down before the hearth.

  Inside the house, before we can even offer a cold drink, or show them to their room or to the toilet, my father begins to unpack his bag on the kitchen table. “Your present,” he announces to me.

  We wait. His shoes come out. His freshly laundered shirts. His shiny new shaving kit.

  My present is an album bound in black leather containing thirty-two medallions the size of silver dollars, each in its own circular cavity and protected on both sides by a transparent acetate window. He calls them “Shakespeare Medals”—a scene from one of the plays is depicted on the face side, and on the other, in tiny script, a quotation from the play is inscribed. The medals are accompanied by instructions for placing them in the album. The first instruction begins, “Put on a pair of lint-free gloves…” My father hands me the gloves last of all. “Always wear the gloves when you handle the medals,” he tells me. “They come with the set. Otherwise, they say that there can be harmful chemical effects to the medals from being touched by human skin.”

  “Oh, this is nice of you,” I say. “Though I don’t quite know why now, such an elaborate gift—”

  “Why? Because it’s time,” he answers, with a laugh, and, too, with a wide gesture that encompasses all the kitchen appliances. “Look, Davey, what they engrave for you. Claire, look at the outside.”

  Centered within the arabesque design that is embossed in silver and serves as a border to the album’s funereal cover are three lines, which my father points out to us, word by word, with his index finger. We all read the words in silence—all except him.

  FIRST EDITION STERLING SILVER PROOF SET MINTED FOR THE PERSONAL COLLECTION OF PROFESSOR DAVID KEPESH

  I don’t know what to say. I say, “This must have cost an awful lot. It’s really something.”

  “Isn’t it? But, no, the cost don’t hurt, not the way they set it up. You just collect one medal a month, to begin with. You start off with Romeo and Juliet—wait’ll I show Claire Romeo and Juliet—and you work your way up from there, till you’ve got them all. I’ve been saving for you all this time. The only one who knew was Mr. Barbatnik. Look, Claire, come here, you gotta look up close—”

  It is a while before they can locate the medallion depicting Romeo and Juliet, for in its designated slot in the lower left-hand corner of the page labeled “Tragedies” it seems he has placed Two Gentlemen from Verona. “Where the hell is Romeo and Juliet?” he asks. The four of us are able to discover it finally under “Histories” in the slot marked The Life and Death of King John. “But then where did I put The Life and Death of King John?” he asks. “I thought I got ’em all in right, Sol.” he says to Mr. Barbatnik, frowning. “I thought we checked.” Mr. Barbatnik nods—they did. “Anyway,” says my father, “the point is—what was the point? Oh, the back. Here, I want Claire to read what it says on the back, so everyone can hear. Read this, dear.”

  Claire reads aloud the inscription: “‘… and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Romeo and Juliet, Act Two, Scene Two.”

  “Isn’t that something?” he says to her.

  “Yes.”

  “And he can take it to school, too, you see. That’s what’s so useful. It’s something not just for the home, but that he can have ten and twenty years from now to show his classes. And just like yours, it is sterling silver, and something that I guarantee will keep abreast of the inflation, and long after paper money is as good as worthless. Where will you put it?” This last asked of Claire, not me.

  “For now,” she says, “on the coffee table, so people can see. Come into the living room, everybody; well put it there.”

  “Wonderful,” says my father. “Only remember, don’t let your company take the medals out, unless they put on the gloves.”

  Lunch is served on the screened-in porch. The recipe for the cold beet soup Claire found in Russian Cooking, one of her dozen or so manuals in a Time-Life series on “Foods of the World” shelved neatly between the radio—whose dial seems set to play only Bach—and the wall hung with two of her sister’s calm watercolors of the ocean and the dunes. The cucumber and yogurt salad, heavily flavored with crushed garlic and fresh mint from the herb garden just beyond the screen door, is out of the same set, the volume on the cuisine of the Middle East. The cold roast chicken seasoned with rosemary is a longstanding recipe of her own.

  “My God,” says my father, “what a spread!” “Excellent,” says Mr. Barbatnik. “Gentlemen, thank you,” says Claire, “but I’ll bet you’ve had better.” “Not even in Lvov, when my mother was cooking,” says Mr. Barbatnik, “have I tasted such a wonderful borscht.” Says Claire, smiling, “I suspect that’s a little extravagant, but thank you, again.” “Listen, my dear girl,” says my father, “if I had you in the kitchen, I’d still be in my old line. And you’d get more than you get being a schoolteacher, believe me. A good chef, even in the old days, even in the middle of the Depression—”

  But in the end Claire’s biggest hit is not the exotic Eastern dishes which, in her Clairish way, she has tried today for the first time in the hope of making everybody—herself included—feel instantaneously at home together, but the hearty iced tea she brews with mint leaves and orange rinds according to her grandmother’s recipe. My father cannot seem to get enough, cannot stop praising it to the skies, not after he has learned over the blueberries that Claire takes the bus to Schenectady every month to visit this ninety-year-old woman from whom she learned everything she knows about preparing a meal and growing a garden, and probably about raising a child too. Yes, it looks from the girl as though his renegade son has decided to go straight, and in a very big way.

  After lunch I suggest to the two men that they might like to rest until the heat has abated somewhat and we can go for a little walk along the road. Absolutely not. What am I even talking about? As soon as we digest our food, my father says, we must drive over to the hotel. This surprises me, as it surprised me a little at lunch to hear him speak so easily about his “old line.” Since
moving to Long Island a year and a half ago, he has shown no interest whatsoever in seeing what two successive owners have made of his hotel, barely hanging on now as the Royal Ski and Summer Lodge. I had thought he would be just as happy staying away, but in fact he is boiling over again with enthusiasm, and after a visit to the toilet, is pacing the porch, waiting for Mr. Barbatnik to awaken from the little snooze he is enjoying in my wicker easy chair.

  What if he should drop dead from all this fervor in his heart? And before I have married the devoted girl, bought the cozy house, raised the handsome children …

  Then what am I waiting for? If later, why not now, so he too can be happy and count his life a success?

  What am I waiting for?

  Down the main drag and through every last store still there and open for business my father leads the three of us, he alone seemingly oblivious to the terrific heat. “I can remember when there were four butchers, three barbershops, a bowling alley, three produce markets, two bakeries, an A&P, three doctors, and three dentists. And now, look,” he says—and without chagrin; rather with the proud sagacity of one who imagines he actually knew to get out when the getting was good—“no butchers, no barbers, no bowling alley, just one bakery, no A&P, and unless things have changed since I left, no dentists and only one doctor. Yes,” he announces, avuncular now, taking the overview, sounding a little like his friend Walter Cronkite, “the old, opulent hotel era is over—but it was something! You should have seen this place in summertime! You know who used to vacation here? You name it! The Herring King! The Apple King!—” And to Mr. Barbatnik and to Claire (who does not let on that she already made this same sentimental journey some weeks ago at the side of his son, who had explained at the time just what a herring king was) he begins a rapid-fire anecdotal history of his life’s major boulevard, foot by foot, year by year, from Roosevelt’s inauguration right on up through L.B.J. Putting an arm around his sopping half-sleeve shirt, I say, “I bet if you set your mind to it you could go back before the Flood.” He likes that—yes, he likes just about everything today. “Oh, could I! This is some treat! This is really Memory Lane!” “It’s awfully hot, Dad,” I warn him. “It’s nearly ninety degrees. Maybe if we slow down—” “Slow down?” he cries, and showing off, pulls Claire along on his arm as he breaks into a crazy little trot down the street. Mr. Barbatnik smiles, and mopping his brow with his handkerchief, says to me, “He’s been hoping a long time.”