by Philip Roth
Have you? What if your husband uses this to try to get Phoebe away from you?
No, no. You really can’t use a work of fiction in a court of law, not even to expose a treacherous, double-dealing woman like me. No, I really don’t think he could do that, however hurtful he may try to be. I’ll take care of Phoebe and I’ll have the day-to-day responsibilities, and he’ll see her from time to time, and that’s how it will end, I’m sure. My mother of course is going to be very upset. As for Sarah, it’s so far from anything she could ever say or do, I don’t think she’ll take it seriously. She’ll realize that if he had lived, he would have changed the names before he’d finished, and that’ll be that.
And you will be, at least among his readers, the Maria of “Christendom.”
I will, won’t I? Oh, I won’t suffer. I think relics are always rather fascinating. I remember when I was at university there was a woman pointed out to me as H. G. Wells’s mistress, one of the many. I was fascinated. She was ninety. It hadn’t seemed to have done her any harm. Even women like me have some extrovert fantasy.
So it’s all worked for you, really. This is how you free yourself from the bullying husband. This is the happy ending. Saved, free to cultivate your child and your sense of yourself as the woman you are, without having to do the loony thing of running off with another man. Without having to do anything.
Except that the poor other man I was to run off with died, remember. Suddenly there is death. Life goes on but he’s not here. There are certain recurrent shocks in life, which you can just steady yourself for—you can take a deep breath and it passes by and it doesn’t hurt so much. But this is different. He was such a support for me in my head for so long. And now he’s not here even to be there. I’ve managed, however. Actually I’ve been so heroic I wouldn’t recognize myself.
And what will it have meant to you?
Oh, the great experience of my life, I think. Yes, without question. A footnote in an American writer’s life. Who would have thought that would happen?
Who would have thought you’d be the angel of death?
No, the footnote’s more me, but yes, I can see how somebody might see it that way. Like in a Buñuel film—the dark young woman that Buñuel has in those films, one of those mysterious creatures, totally innocent of it, but yes, the role assigned her is angel of death. Somewhat more devastating than my role in “Christendom.” I did nothing to instigate it, and yet through my weakness it happened. I think a stronger woman would have had more humor than I did, would have got less caught up, and would have known how to deal with the situation better. But, as I say, I think he would have done it with the next one anyway. Like Mayerling—like the Archduke Rudolf and Maria Vetsera. She wasn’t the first woman that he’d asked to commit suicide with him, she was just the first who agreed to do it. He’d tried with many women. It came out afterwards that he’d had it in his mind for a long time to commit a double suicide.
Are you suggesting that Nathan was trying to commit suicide?
I think he succeeded, but no, he didn’t want that. I think that was the joke, that was exactly the kind of humiliating irony, the kind of self-inflicted brutal life-fact that he admired so: someone wants to be given back his masculine life, and instead he dies. But, no, that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted health and strength and freedom. He wanted virility again, and the force that drives it. I was instrumental, as who isn’t? That is love.
And now, are there any questions you want to ask me?
I can answer questions but I can’t ask them. You ask them.
The smart woman who’s learned not to ask smart questions. You know who I am, don’t you?
No. Well, yes. Yes, I know who you are, and I know, so to speak, why you’ve come back.
Why?
To learn what happened. What it’s like now. What I did. You have the rest of the story to tell. You need the hard evidence, the details, the clues. You want an ending. Yes, I know who you are—the same restless soul.
You look tired.
No, just slightly pale, and unkempt. I’ll be all right. I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m in a marital low. My burdens, fallen from my shoulders, are gathering around my ankles. Resignation’s a hard thing, isn’t it? Especially if you’re not sure it’s the right thing. Anyway, I was lying in my bed and I suddenly woke up, and there was this presence. Just out there. It was your prick. By itself. Where’s the rest of his body, where’s everything else? And it was as if I could touch it. And then it sort of went into a shadow, and then the rest of you assembled itself around it. And I knew it was just a thought. But for a little while it was just there. Last night.
So what is it like now? Right now.
My life began again when I absolutely gave up on him, and started writing again, and met you—all sorts of things happened that were really wonderful. And I felt much better. But living again in such a cold way fills me with, not horror, but terrible pain. Sometimes I feel it so acutely I can’t even sit still. Saturday, as people always do, he supplied some unreasonable behavior, just enough to make me feel in a bit of a rage, and I said to him, I can’t put up with any more of being the outdated, extraneous wife. Unfortunately I said it once before, and of course did nothing, and these things have a diminishing impact. Getting ready not to do things is most exhausting. On the other hand, things one says repeatedly do sometimes happen. But frankly what it is, since you ask, is boring now. I’m the one who’s bored, because you’re not here. Now I think, “I can’t spend the whole rest of my life being so bored, apart from everything else.” You brought such clandestine excitement. And the talk. The intensity of all that lovely talk. Most people have sex cut off from love, and maybe it appears that we had the opposite, love cut off from sex. I don’t know. That endless, issueless, intimate talk—sometimes it must have seemed to you like the conversation of two people in jail, but to me it was the purest form of eros. It was clearly different and less fulfilling for a man who’d spent his whole life getting to the solace of sex so very quickly and was far more compelled to consummation. But for me it had its power. For me those times were tremendous.
But of course—you’re the great talker, Maria.
Am I? Well, you’ve got to have someone to talk to. I could certainly talk to you. You listened. I can never talk to Michael. I try, and I see the glassy look in his eye, and I get out my book.
Keep talking to me then.
I will. I will. I know now what a ghost is. It is the person you talk to. That’s a ghost. Someone who’s still so alive that you talk to them and talk to them and never stop. A ghost is the ghost of a ghost. It’s my turn now to invent you.
And how’s your little girl?
Very well. She can speak so well now. “I want a piece of paper.” “I want a pencil.” “I’m going outside.”
How old is she?
She’s not quite two.
5. Christendom
AT SIX in the evening, only a few hours after leaving Henry at Agor and arriving in London with the notes I’d amassed on the quiet flight up from Tel Aviv, my mind suffused still with all those implacable, dissident, warring voices and the anxieties stirring up their fear and resolve—in under five hours back from that unharmonious country where it appears that nothing, from the controversy to the weather, is ever blurred or underdone—I was seated in a church in London’s West End. With me were Maria, Phoebe, and some three or four hundred others, many of whom had rushed from work to be in time for the carol service. It was just two weeks before Christmas; in the Strand the heavy traffic was at a standstill and the streets leading out of the West End were clogged with cars and shoppers. After a mild afternoon, the evening had turned cold, and a light fog diffused the beams of the cars. Phoebe was so excited by the traffic and the traffic lights and the Christmas lights and the jostling crowds that she had to be taken to the bathroom in the crypt while I found our seats in the reserved pew, just down the row from Georgina and Sarah, Maria’s sisters. As a longtime member of
the board of the charity for whom the collection would be taken, Maria’s mother, Mrs. Freshfield, was to read one of the lessons.
Maria led Phoebe around to her grandmother, who was sitting with the other readers in the first row, and then to see her two aunts. They rejoined me in our seats just as the choir was filing in, the bigger boys first, in blue school blazers, striped ties, and gray trousers, then the smaller boys, in their short pants. The choirmaster, a neatly attired young man with prematurely gray hair and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, seemed to me a composite of kindly schoolteacher and circus lion-tamer—when, with the tiniest inclination of his head, he directed the boys to be seated, even the smallest responded as though the whip had cracked dangerously nearby. Maria pointed out to Phoebe the Christmas tree off to one side of the nave; though impressively tall, it was rather sparsely decorated with red, white, and blue tinsel, and pinned to the top was a lopsided silver star that looked like the handiwork of a Sunday School class. In front of us, directly beneath the pulpit, was a large circular arrangement of white chrysanthemums and carnations embedded in evergreen and holly branches. “See the flowers?” Maria said, and a little confused but utterly enthralled, Phoebe replied, “Grandma story.” “Soon,” Maria whispered, straightening the pleats in the child’s plaid dress, and then the organ solo began and with it the mild undercurrent of antipathy in me.
It never fails. I am never more of a Jew than I am in a church when the organ begins. I may be estranged at the Wailing Wall but without being a stranger—I stand outside but not shut out, and even the most ludicrous or hopeless encounter serves to gauge, rather than to sever, my affiliation with people I couldn’t be less like. But between me and church devotion there is an unbridgeable world of feeling, a natural and thoroughgoing incompatibility—I have the emotions of a spy in the adversary’s camp and feel I’m overseeing the very rites that embody the ideology that’s been responsible for the persecution and mistreatment of Jews. I’m not repelled by Christians at prayer, I just find the religion foreign in the most far-reaching ways—inexplicable, misguided, profoundly inappropriate, and never more so than when the congregants are observing the highest standards of liturgical decorum and the cleric most beautifully enunciating the doctrine of love. And yet there I was, behaving as every well-trained spy aspires to do, looking quite at ease, I thought, agreeable, untrammeled, while squeezed up against my shoulder sat my pregnant Christian-born English wife, whose mother was to read the lesson from St. Luke.
By conventional standards Maria and I must certainly have seemed, because of the dissimilar backgrounds and the difference in age, to be a strangely incongruous couple. Whenever our union seemed incongruous even to me, I wondered if it wasn’t a mutual taste for incongruity—for assimilating a slightly untenable arrangement, a shared inclination for the sort of unlikeness that doesn’t, however, topple into absurdity—that accounted for our underlying harmony. It was still beguiling for people raised in such alien circumstances to discover in themselves interests so strikingly similar—and, of course, the differences continued to be pretty exhilarating too. Maria was keen, for instance, to pin my professional “seriousness” to my class origins. “This artistic dedication of yours is slightly provincial, you know. It’s far more metropolitan to have a slightly anarchic view of life. Yours only seems anarchic and isn’t at all. About standards you’re something of a hick. Thinking things matter.” “It’s the hicks who think things matter who seem to get things done.” “Like books written, yes,” she said, “that is so. That’s why there are so few upper-class artists and writers—they haven’t got the seriousness. Or the standards. Or the irritation. Or the ire.” “And the values?” “Well,” she said, “we certainly haven’t got that. That really is over the top. One used to expect the upper classes at least to pay for it all, but they won’t even do that anymore. On that score, I was a renegade, at least as a child. I’m over it now, but when I was little I used terribly to want to be remembered after my death for something I had achieved.” “I wanted to be remembered,” I said, “before my death.” “Well, that is also important,” Maria said, “—in fact, slightly more important. Slightly provincial, unsophisticated, and hickish, but I must say, attractive in you. The famous Jewish intensity.” “Counterbalanced in you by the famous English insouciance.” “And that,” she said, “is a gentle way of describing my fear of failure.”
After the organ solo, we rose and everyone began to sing the first carol, except me and children like Phoebe who were too small to know the words and couldn’t read them from the program. The assemblage sang with tremendous zest, an eruption of good clean vehemence that I hadn’t anticipated from the chastening authority of the choirmaster or the genteel solemnity of the minister who was to make the blessing. The men with briefcases, the shoppers with their parcels and bundles and bags, those who at the worst of the rush hour had come all the way into the West End with overexcited little children or with their elderly relatives—no longer were they unattached and on their own, but merely by opening their mouths and singing out, this crowd of disparate Londoners had turned into a battalion of Christmas-savoring Christians, relishing every syllable of Christian praise with enormous sincerity and gusto. It sounded to me as though they’d been hungering for weeks for the pleasure of affirming that enduring, subterranean association. They weren’t rapturous or in a delirium—to use the appropriately old-fashioned word, they seemed gladdened. It may well be a little hickish to find the consolations of Christianity a surprise, but I was struck nonetheless to hear from their voices just how delightful it was—in Zionist argot, how very normal they felt—to be the tiniest component of something immense whose indispensable presence had been beyond Western society’s serious challenge for a hundred generations. It was as though they were symbolically feasting upon, communally devouring, a massive spiritual baked potato.
Yet, Jewishly, I still thought, what do they need all this stuff for? Why do they need these wise men and all these choruses of angels? Isn’t the birth of a child wonderful enough, more mysterious, for lacking all this stuff? Though frankly I’ve always felt that the place where Christianity gets dangerously, vulgarly obsessed with the miraculous is Easter, the Nativity has always struck me as a close second to the Resurrection in nakedly addressing the most childish need. Holy shepherds and starry skies, blessed angels and a virgin’s womb, being materializing on this planet without the heaving and the squirting, the smells and the excretions, without the plundering satisfaction of the orgasmic shudder—what sublime, offensive kitsch, with its fundamental abhorrence of sex.
Certainly the elaboration of the story of the Virgin Birth had never before struck me as quite so childish and spinsterishly unacceptable as it did that evening, fresh from my Sabbath at Agor. When I heard them singing about that Disneyland Bethlehem, in whose dark streets shineth the everlasting light, I thought of Lippman distributing his leaflets in the marketplace there and consoling, with his Realpolitik, the defiant Arab enemy: “Don’t give up your dream, dream of Jaffa, go ahead; and someday, if you have the power, even if there are a hundred pieces of paper, you will take it from me by force.”
When her turn came, Maria’s mother ascended to the pulpit lectern and, in that tone of simplicity with which you induce first gullibility and then sleep in children to whom you’re telling a bedtime story, charmingly read from St. Luke the fifth lesson, “The Angel Gabriel salutes the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Her own writing disclosed a stronger affinity to a lowly, more corporeal existence: three books—The Interior of the Georgian Manor House, The Smaller Georgian Country House, and Georgians at Home—as well as numerous articles over the years in Country Life, had earned for her a solid reputation among students of Georgian interior design and furnishings, and she was regularly asked to speak to local Georgian societies all over England. A woman who took her work “dead seriously,” according to Maria—“a very reliable source of information”—though on this occasion looking less like someone who spent her London
days in the V & A archives and the British Library than like the perfect hostess, a short, pretty woman some fifteen years older than I, with a soft round face that reminded me of a porcelain plate and that very fine hair that turns from a mousy blond to snowy white with very little difference of effect, hair that’s been done for thirty years by the same very good, old-fashioned hairdresser. Mrs. Freshfield had the air of someone who never put a foot wrong—which Maria claimed had nearly been so: her big mistake had been her husband, but she’d made that only once, and after her marriage to Maria’s father had never again been distracted from Georgian interiors by the inexplicable yearning for an attractive man.
“She was the beauty of the Sixth,” Maria explained to me, “the Queen of Hockey—she carried off all the prizes. He was academically rather stupid, but terribly athletic, and he had enormous glamour. The black Celt. He stood out a mile. Elegant and, even before he arrived at university, quite stuck up about his glamour. Nobody could understand what it was that made him so famous. There were all these other boys wanting to be judges, or cabinet ministers, or soldiers, and this stupid twit was turning on the girls. Mother hadn’t been turned on before. After, she never wanted to be again. And she wasn’t—from all the evidence, never so much as touched again. She did everything to give us a solid world, a good and solid, traditional English upbringing—that became the entire meaning of her life. He had always behaved beautifully to us; no man could have enjoyed three little girls more. We enjoyed him too. He behaved beautifully to everyone, except her. But if you’re convinced that your wife is fundamentally uninterested in what interests you, which is your erotic power, and if the history of your relationship is that you can hardly communicate with her at all, and there’s nothing really but resentment between you in the end, and however sterling a character she may have, she doesn’t really come across—I think that’s the expression—and you yourself have lots of vitality and are rather highly sexed, as he was—and like all you boys, he seemed to find it a great torture, you just want it so much—then you have no choice, really, do you? First you devote lots of hours to the humiliation of your wife, with her best friends ideally, and then with the obliging neighbors, until having exhausted every possibility for betrayal in the immediate hundred square miles, you vanish, and there’s an acrimonious divorce, and after there’s never enough money, and your little girls are forever susceptible to dark men with beautiful manners.”
