by Philip Roth
“Some old bastard—” a shaky voice started to explain, but Paul, yanking his uncle’s arm, finally maneuvered him across the street. Neither spoke for a few minutes.
“Nobody,” said Asher, “usually bothers me.”
“Sure.”
“Usually”—there was no keeping the depression out of his voice; were the hat to be pulled down over his ears, it couldn’t hide the truth—“usually I’m not so dolled up.” They were passing a little concrete stoop in front of a church; Asher stopped. “I’m not used to that kind of excitement. Wait a minute.” He still breathed heavily and noisily, as though he were sucking up liquid through a straw. “How about you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Well, I got to sit down,” Asher said, holding his side.
Paul remained standing, waiting for his uncle to regain strength. Asher looked up from where he had dropped on the church steps. “You want to hear a long story?”
“Aren’t you going to be late?”
“I never told this to a soul. You want to hear it or not?”
Traffic had slowed on the street; across the way the bums they had left a block behind were passing before them. Asher dismissed them with a dirty gesture. Then he said, “This is all about how I got married and had my only child. Sit down a minute. I have to catch my wind.”
Why had he not camped with his Uncle Jerry? His sympathy for Asher, worn to a frazzle, now disappeared completely. “What is this, Asher, another fairy tale?”
“What happened. Exactly as it happened. Fact.”
“Well, I didn’t know you’d been married.”
“In Chicago, your wonderful Chicago. Long ago, Paulie.” Asher tilted his hat so that he could see his nephew. “Sit down. This is when I was a student—”
“Asher, I’ve got business today.”
But he got such a curious look for that remark that he did sit down. What right, Asher’s eyes said, do you have to give me the rush act? “When I was a student, Paulie, at the Art Institute, remember? And there was a dark bushy-haired woman taking a course there. She hadn’t a grain of talent in her, this babe, and she was one of the dumbest persons I have ever met, before or since. But you know the way certain vulgar women are very stirring? Do you appreciate this?”
“I suppose so.”
“So I got interested in her, and got her nice and pregnant—and I forgot to mention she was already a married lady. And to a full-scale Chicago gangster, wanted all over, and carrying dangerous weapons, and the works, believe me. This is 1926. Every afternoon outside the Institute, hiding behind the lions, he placed killers, honest to God, to wipe me out. In those days it was nothing to wipe somebody out, of course. Just wipe them right out and nobody raised a peep. I used to walk out with Annette in front of me for protection. What else could I do? This is a fact, Paul. Let’s see how brave somebody else would have been in those circumstances. I changed my place of residence six different times, till finally she tells her husband that she wants to marry me. That’s the only way I could figure to save my life—I proposed. And what happens then is that he agrees, but with a couple of nice conditions thrown in. It turns out he didn’t like her any more than he liked me, so for him it was perfect. I forgot to say, Annette, whose large foibles I was rapidly becoming more and more aware of—this happens in a crisis—was already the mother of four children, all under six years of age. One of the conditions was that we take up residence in Cicero, quite a place as you know, so he can come visit with his kiddies there every Sunday. For him it was ideal. One day a week he fills up the tank, slaps on a couple handfuls of after-shave lotion, and takes them for a nice ride in the country. I took over the running of all the errands. He gave a check for his kids, and I did the shopping, the sizing, the wiping up after, and so on. I moved to Cicero—”
“Asher, you’re making this up. I’m not in the mood. Please,” he said, standing up, “not today.”
“Fact!” Asher reprimanded him. “Hard fact. My life for a change!” He slammed his foot on the concrete. “Please yourself! I gave up my schooling, Paulie, and I moved into this brute’s bed—you listening? He even left me an old frayed dressing gown, all gold and shoulder pads, to slip into at bedtime. And soon we had a little son of our own. Annette gave up her painting, but not much of a loss to the arts, my friend, not like me giving it up, believe me. So this brought the grand total in the house to seven, four of us with stool in our diaper regular. And Annette always in her nightie, with ashes dribbling down, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Under a lamppost outside was posted a fellow with a sour expression to keep me strictly in line, just like in the movies. Every time I spend a penny he records it in his little notebook. How do you like that? Jot, jot, with his tongue between his teeth—he could hardly write, the dumb ox. The idea was that I shouldn’t have any pocket change for myself at the end of the week. This hoodlum used to drive alongside me in his car to the A&P, Paul. He used to wait outside the shoemaker and the candy store, till we got to nod hello, how do you do, to each other. But one night I sneaked out, Paul—you want to stand there, you stand there, I’m telling you the facts of my life. One night out I sneaked, under cover of darkness, and I went to live awhile in various Western towns, and then finally I moved a little bit east at a time, by way of the south, and finally New York. A harrowing experience. But tout passe, you follow me? Even if we have to help it along. Out of such experiences I welded a vision of life, I came to understand the highest law of them all, that even the little animals in the forest don’t even have to be told. Self-preservation!”
He stood up, shaking out his legs. “The son-of-a-bitch little bum,” he mumbled, and then he and his nephew exchanged a glance. Afterwards their gaze dropped to the pavement. Any embarrassment they felt had not to do with the truth or falsity of Asher’s story, but with some plot that the two of them seemed to share.
From the church steps to Astor Place they said nothing. There was a crowd around the subway entrance; businessmen hurried into banks on two corners, and Village housewives swarmed around the supermarket. The rushing and scurrying made Paul even more certain that he and Asher were somehow accomplices. They might have been about to rob the Chemical Corn Bank across the street. Asher said, “The movies on Forty-second Street are open all day.”
“I told you I wouldn’t jump out of any windows.”
“Then what then?”
It was not out of trust or love for Asher that once again he told him a secret; it was simply that he was thrown in with him. “I’m going to look for a job.”
“Is that the plan you woke up with? Does that explain the silence?”
“I suppose so.”
“Because,” his uncle said, reaching into his jacket, “I don’t want to influence you unduly. This decision is yours.” From his pocket he took a dark tie like the one he himself was wearing. “There’s a little thief downstairs from me that sells everything. I bought two. You want to come?”
Paul’s hand was smacking his forehead. “Asher, what are you trying to do? Tempt? Tease? What, test me? Haven’t things been difficult enough without this? Do you consider this a helpful suggestion?”
“I only think,” said Asher, not so definite about himself, “you should do what you want to do.”
“What do you think—” Several shoppers turned to look at him; he lowered his voice. “What do you think I’ve been sweating my insides out about since I got here? Put that tie away, will you? Get it away! What’s the matter with you!”
“I don’t know,” Asher said. “A funeral … I might have talked too much.” He rolled the tie up into a ball. “I don’t want to be responsible for your flying in the face of your real nature.”
“My real nature,” Paul said, exercising immense control, “is just what I’m expressing. Put the tie away, please!”
“It’s away. Calm yourself.” When he moved into the mouth of the stairway leading down to the subway, Paul didn’t follow. Asher asked, “What kind of job are you getting?”
“A high-paying one.”
“That’s your real nature?”
“Let me map it out for you,” Paul said. “You and I are different types. Let’s keep that straight.”
“Granted—”
“I can’t preserve only myself. That’s not what I want to do. I’m going to have to preserve my wife too. She’s a helpless girl without a lot of strength, you understand? I took away her youth from her—don’t stop me, don’t interrupt. My leaving is going to be a big blow despite all the horror we have had together. She’s going to need psychoanalysis—don’t stop me, please.” But Asher had only been showing him a pair of skeptical eyes. “Whatever you think is beside the point anyway. If she thinks she needs one, then I’ll give her one, and put her on her feet, and then maybe someday I’ll be through and free and get some peace. I’ll get a high-paying job and I’ll send money every week, and we’ll live separate lives, and that’s my way of working things out. You work your life out one way—”
“What could I do with five kids?”
“I’m not questioning anything!” In talking they had moved down the stairs and stood now in the grim half-light. Trains rushing through the station beneath them whisked candy wrappers up against their cuffs. Paul was all but pleading. “You work your life out one way, I work mine out another. I’ve figured this all out, Asher, and maybe I’ll be a better man for it. A happier one.” But he could not help sighing. Was Asher a happy man for what he had worked out? He swallowed and tried to harden his insides. “Today is the day for acting things out. It’s a crucial day and it’s not gotten off to a good start. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why you had to taunt that bum, for one thing—”
“I don’t approve of begging,” said Asher sharply. There was another rush beneath them, and until the noise passed they had to stand silently facing each other. And Paul realized that he despised this uncle of his—as much as Asher had despised that bum. An equation began to work itself out while that interminable train roared north: he was to Asher as Asher to the bum—
“—public nuisance. Shouldn’t be allowed—”
“Nobody likes begging,” Paul said. “I didn’t think that was the point.”
“We don’t share the same attitude about human needs. I, for instance, wouldn’t worry about my ex-wife’s psychoanalysis. I wouldn’t consider that cutting the bonds.”
Asher tried to move down a step, but Paul was holding on to his sleeve. Now they could both see into the change booth, where a Negro was reading a book. “It’s not easy, Asher, giving birth to yourself all over again at twenty-seven. I’m cutting plenty of bonds, don’t kid yourself. Plenty. Look at you,” he said, holding his uncle. “Even you feel obliged still to go to my father’s funeral. Isn’t that right? If you were all you claim you were, or are, why bother?” That off his chest, he felt in the right; since he had watched Asher ironing his suit at eight in the morning, he had wanted to say it. “Why bother with ceremonies or institutions or anything?”
“Funerals give a sharper edge to myself. In a funeral yard I often arrive at further refinements in my quest for self-understanding.”
“That isn’t where people usually go to get a better grip on the objective facts.”
“Another thing that separates me from people.” A train had pulled into the station, and Asher was waving an arm at it and running.
Paul charged after him, and, despite the people nearby, he called, “What about your mother’s plants, Asher—what about—Asher, you’re going because nobody cuts all—” But Asher had slid safely behind the subway doors.
The crumb! The saboteur! The sloppy—
But he left off with condemnations, experience having taught him that what he chose to curse in others was sometimes what he was not much at home with in himself. He raced up the stairs and, in the sunlight again, headed for Cooper Union. He made another effort at hardening himself in the area between his neck and his groin. Alas, he succeeded. Jesus! He was getting better at it. What a thing—he thought, having a light philosophical moment while boarding the Madison Avenue bus—is a man.
In the Fifties, one could not see the sidewalk for the shoppers. While lights changed, he stood beneath a clock and tried to figure out exactly what to do. He crossed in the next swarm forward and made his way into a luncheonette, where he had a cup of coffee. When he was finished, the empty cup gave him something to stare into. There were two sets of events to contemplate: Libby waking alone in Chicago, and what was happening in Brooklyn. Absent from both he nevertheless saw both unraveling at the bottom of his cup. The counter girl came along with the Silex pot and poured, wiping out his imaginings. He rose and made his way to the telephone booth at the end of the counter.
In the Yellow Pages he found a longer list under “Employment Agencies” than he had expected. The length of the list set him back for at least two minutes. Finally he settled on writing down the names of all the agencies beginning with A and B. He also wrote down a name beginning with S, so as not to narrow his chances, then closed the book and left the store.
Neither his gait nor his expression revealed anything other than sternness and decision. As he walked he leaned forward at a sharper angle than the men around him; everybody seemed younger than himself—though that, of course, was illusion. What hair he had left, it was true, he wore longer than the others, and his suit did not come up to theirs for style and newness. He felt out of his element.
Yet within an hour he apparently had a job. It was amazing, for he had not really envisioned success. He had imagined that it was all going to be demoralizing and enervating, just as at first he had imagined himself sweating out his decision in some fetid hotel rather than on Asher’s uncomfortable but unfetid sofa. He had seen the weeks ahead given over not to work but to the searching after it. But here he was back out in the reception room, while inside his office the man who had interviewed him was on the phone with a trade-magazine editor in need of somebody to write copy about the paint and wallpaper industries. He would be an associate editor. Sixty-eight hundred a year; thirty-four hundred for Libby, an equal amount for himself. All right, four thousand for Libby. There would be raises; he would manage somehow; he could live in one room. Will!
Quickly he made some plans. He would get a cheap room. He would keep a budget. Before being interviewed by the editor, he would make a quick stop at the Fifth Avenue library and look up paint and wallpaper in the encyclopedia, just to be on the ball. He would continue to lie—he was not married, he had been in Europe for the last year—
Sitting, waiting, in the reception room of the employment office, he asked himself a question: Where am I?
What am I doing here, now?
At first he was only going down to the men’s room to get a grip on himself. Passing the water cooler he wished he had a pill to pop into his mouth. He was suffering from a momentary feeling of displacement—the new-job jitters, a pheno barb could handle it. But he had no pills with him, having no faith in solutions of that kind. It was his wife who would try anything. He drank some water, but all he felt of it was what slid down the pipe to his stomach; there was no draining off, no sudden flowering of his sense of reality.
When he turned, wiping his mouth, he found that there was a smile waiting for him from the receptionist. Are you single? Are you romantically inclined? Do you like me? That was all included in the smile, which he now returned. A stunning healthy girl with a wonderful chest. What skin … But for all its smoothness, the skin of the receptionist was no more solace to him than the water. Instead of walking right up and starting a conversation, he walked by her and into the Down elevator. On the main floor he stepped out into the street. Fresh air. But all it did was move over his skin. Between where the water slid and what could be touched by a pleasant June day, he was still in a state of disequilibrium. He was in the wrong place. He began pacing up and down in the shadow of the office building, exercising his legs as though they were the props of his will. Will! Force yourself ba
ck! He summoned up all his strength, once, twice, but it didn’t work. Perhaps what he should do was walk to a Western Union office and send a telegram. What would Libby do when he didn’t come home? What had she done already? He had better telephone. Hear her voice and hang up. So long as she was not dead.
A taxi passed just then, and he waved an arm at it. His impulse had been to do something—telegram, telephone—and what he did was get into the cab. If there had been a phone hanging in the middle of the street he would doubtless have lifted it, asked for Chicago, and then waited for the voice of his wife. But instead of a phone there was the cab. He held his head in his hands all the way to Brooklyn.
Three blocks from the cemetery he asked the driver to let him out. When he paid and tipped the fellow, the feel of the change in his palm gave him a start. He would return to the agency in the afternoon, he would say he had suddenly been taken ill. Further, he would try to make a date with the receptionist. He would even buy some pills to help him through the next week or so. What did it hurt? This was no time to be stolid. He would get a new suit with a conservative cut to it. He would wind up looking like Wallach himself. He would change over, why not? He would send Libby a telegram. A letter.
He thought and thought, short, crisp, forward-looking thoughts, while he walked toward the cemetery. After all, he did not even have to go inside the place. He wanted only to catch a glimpse of the proceedings to be convinced that it had really happened.
Yes, this was a necessary, a symbolic trip for him. He was bringing (he phrased it carefully in his mind as he slid furtively along the fence surrounding the graveyard), he was bringing the first part of his life to a formal conclusion. He would see his father lowered into the ground, covered up, and that would be that. A man’s father dies only once, and regardless of their misunderstandings … no, that wasn’t precisely what had drawn him here, though that was in it. Actually it didn’t really make any difference to him, or to anybody, whether he was present or not. Staying away would, in fact, give to the event more weight than it deserved, make of his father a martyr—no, no, that wasn’t precisely so. If his coming to the cemetery meant anything—he let his lids close over his eyes, for he was exhausted—it was that he wanted to go back to Libby and give it one last try … No! He did not want to go back to Libby! As solutions went that was the most unrealistic. The trouble was that she had already picked out a name for the baby, the trouble was a father dies only—
