The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  Until her grandmother had taken her place in the pulpit, Phoebe had been mostly intrigued by the tiny trebles in their short pants, some of whom, not halfway through the hour, were looking as though they wouldn’t have minded being home in bed. But when Grandmother stepped into the pulpit to read, the child suddenly found everything amusing—tugging at Maria’s hand, she began to laugh and get excited, and could be quieted only by climbing onto Mummy’s lap, where she was gently rocked into a semi-stupor.

  A solo followed, sung by a slender boy of about eleven whose untainted charm reminded me of a doctor with too much bedside manner. After he concluded his part and the entire choir had seraphically joined in, he brazenly focused a coquettish smile upon the choirmaster, who in turn acknowledged how remarkable a boy the beautiful soloist was with a half-suppressed but lingering smile of his own. Still not about to be taken in by all this Christian heartiness, I was relieved to think that I’d caught a little whiff of homoerotic pedophilia. I wondered if in fact my skepticism hadn’t already prompted the rector to single me out as someone privately making unseasonal observations. On the other hand, as we were seated in pews reserved for the readers’ families, it may have been that he had simply recognized Maria as her mother’s daughter and that alone explained the scrutinizing appraisal of the gentleman next to the Freshfield girl who appeared to have come to the carol service determined not to sing.

  We stood for the carols and sat for the lessons and remained seated when the choir sang “The Seven Joys of Mary” and “Silent Night.” When the program directed “All kneel” for the blessing, which came after the collection, I remained obstinately upright, fairly sure I was the only one in all the church failing to assume a posture of devout submission. Maria leaned forward just enough so as not to affront the rector—or her mother, should she turn out to have eyes in the back of her skull—and I was thinking that if my grandparents had disembarked at Liverpool instead of continuing on in steerage for New York, if family fate had consigned me to schools here rather than to the municipal education system of Newark, New Jersey, my head would always have been sticking up like this when everyone else’s was bowed in prayer. Either that, or I would have tried to keep my origins to myself, and to avoid seeming a little boy inexplicably bent on making himself strange, I too would have kneeled, however well I understood that Jesus was a gift to neither me nor my family.

  After the rector’s blessing everyone rose for the final carol, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Inclining her head conspiratorially toward me, Maria whispered, “You are a very forbearing anthropologist,” and holding Phoebe so as to keep her from slumping over with fatigue, she proceeded to sing out rousingly, along with everyone else, “Christ, by highest heaven adored / Christ, the everlasting Lord,” while I remembered how shortly after our arrival in England her ex-husband had referred to me on the phone as “the aging Jewish writer.” When I’d asked how she’d responded, she slipped her arms around me and said, “I told him that I liked all three.”

  Following the organ finale we took a stairway by the porch of the church down into a spacious, low-ceilinged, whitewashed crypt, where mulled wine and mince pie were being served. It took some time to navigate little Phoebe through all of the people heading down the stairs for refreshment. The child was to spend the night with her grandmother, a treat for both, while I took Maria out to celebrate her birthday. Everyone said how lovely the singing had been and told Mrs. Freshfield how wonderfully she had read. An elderly gentleman whose name I couldn’t catch, a friend of the family who had also read one of the lessons, explained to me the purpose of the charity for which the collection had been taken—“Been going on for a hundred years,” he said, “—there are so many poor and lonely people.”

  Fortunately there was our new house to give us all something to talk about, and there were Polaroid snapshots to look at, taken by Maria when she had driven over the day before to check on the construction. The house was to be renovated over the next six months while we stayed in a rented mews house in Kensington. Actually it was two connecting, smallish brick houses, on the site of an old boatyard in Chiswick, that we were converting into one large enough for the family and the nanny and for studios for Maria and me.

  We talked about how Chiswick wasn’t as far out as it seemed and yet with the gate closed on the stone wall to the street it had the seclusion of a remote rural village—the quiet Nathan needed for his work, Maria told everyone. On the rear-street side there was the wall and a paved garden with daffodils and irises and a small apple tree; at the front of the house, beyond a raised terrace where we could sit on warm evenings, there was a wide tow-path and the river. Maria said that it looked as though most of the people who walked along the towpath were either lovers having assignations or women with small children—“one way or another,” she said, “people in a very good mood.” There were people fishing for trout now that the river was cleaned up, and early in the morning, when you opened the shutters on what was to be our bedroom, you could see rowing eights out to practice. In the summer there were small boats going up for holidays on the river and the steamers carrying sightseers from Charing Cross to Kew Gardens. In late autumn the fog came down and in winter barges went by with their cargo covered, and often in the morning there was mist. And there were always gulls—ducks as well, that walked up the terrace steps to be fed, if you fed them, and, occasionally, there were swans. Twice a day at high tide the river rose over the towpath and lapped at the terrace wall. The elderly gentleman said that it sounded as though for Maria it would be like living in Gloucestershire again while only fifteen minutes by the Underground from Leicester Square. She said, no, no, it wasn’t the country or London, and it wasn’t the suburbs either, it was living on the river … on and on, amiably, amicably, aimlessly.

  And nobody asked about Israel. Either Maria hadn’t mentioned my being there or they weren’t interested. And probably just as well: I wasn’t sure how much Agor ideology I could manage to get across to Mrs. Freshfield.

  To Maria, however, I’d talked all afternoon about my trip. “Your journey,” she’d called it, after hearing about Lippman and reading my letter to Henry, “to the Jewish heart of darkness.” A good description, that, of my eastward progress and I delineated it further in my notes—from the Tel Aviv café and the acid dolefulness of disheartened Shuki, inland to the Jerusalem Wailing Wall and my prickly intermingling there with the pious Jews, and then on to the desert hills, the plunge into the heart, if not of darkness, of demonic Jewish ardor. The militant zealotry of Henry’s settlement didn’t, to my mind, make their obdurate leader the Kurtz of Judea, however; the book suggested to me by the settlers’ fanatical pursuit of God-promised deliverance was a Jewish Moby-Dick, with Lippman as the Zionist Ahab. My brother, without realizing, could well have signed onto a ship destined for destruction, and there was nothing to be done about it, certainly not by me. I hadn’t mailed the letter and wouldn’t—Henry, I was sure, could only see it as more domination, an attempt to drown him in still more of my words. Instead I copied it into my notes, into that ever-enlarging storage plant for my narrative factory, where there is no clear demarcation dividing actual happenings eventually consigned to the imagination from imaginings that are treated as having actually occurred—memory as entwined with fantasy as it is in the brain.

  Georgina, younger by a year than Maria, and Sarah, three years older, were not tall and dark-haired like the middle sister and their father but resembled the mother more, slight, shortish women, with straight fair hair that they didn’t much bother about and the same soft, round, agreeable faces that had probably been prettiest when they were girls of fifteen living in Gloucestershire. Georgina had a job with a London public relations firm and Sarah had recently become an editor with a company specializing in medical texts, her fourth publishing job in as many years and work having little to do with anything she cared about. Yet Sarah was the sister who was supposed to have been the genius. She had spent her childhood master
ing dancing, mastering riding, mastering just about everything as though, if she didn’t, terrible tragedy and chaos would ensue. But now she was constantly changing jobs and losing men and, in Maria’s words, “fucking up, absolutely, any opportunity that’s presented to her, throwing it away in the most monumental way.” Sarah spoke to people with an almost alarming rapidity, when she spoke at all; in conversation she pounced and then abruptly withdrew, making no use whatsoever of the enigmatic smile that was her mother’s first line of defense and that even sedate-looking Maria, uneasy upon entering a room full of strangers, would shield herself with until the initial social timidity subsided. Unlike Georgina, whose awful shyness was a kind of trampoline to catapult her overeagerly into every minute and meaningless exchange, Sarah held herself aloof from all courteous pleasantries, leading me to think that when the time came, we two might actually be able to talk.

  I’d as yet had no success at breaking through to Mrs. Freshfield, though our first encounter a few weeks earlier hadn’t been quite the disaster that Maria and I had begun to imagine on the drive to Gloucestershire with Phoebe. We had our presents to ease the way—Maria’s was a piece of china for her mother’s collection that she’d found in a Third Avenue antique shop before we’d left New York, and I had, of all things, a cheese. From London, the day before we left, Maria had phoned to ask if there was anything we could bring with us, and her mother had told her, “What I’d like more than anything is a decent piece of Stilton. You can’t get proper Stilton down here anymore.” Maria immediately rushed to Harrods for the Stilton, which I was to present at the door.

  “And what do I talk about after the cheese?” I asked as we were turning off the motorway onto the country road to Chadleigh.

  “Jane Austen is always good,” Maria said.

  “And after Jane Austen?”

  “She has excellent furniture—what’s known as ‘good pieces.’ Very unostentatious, really nice eighteenth-century English furniture. You can ask about that.”

  “And then?”

  “You’re counting on some very ghastly silences.”

  “Is that impossible?”

  “Not at all,” Maria said.

  “Are you nervous?” She didn’t look nervous so much as a little too still.

  “I’m properly apprehensive. You are a homewrecker, you know. And she was very keen on your predecessor—socially speaking he was very acceptable. She’s not very good with men, anyway. And I believe she still thinks Americans are upstarts and brash.”

  “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “The worst? The worst would be that she will be so ill at ease that she will put you down after every sentence. The worst would be that whatever effort either of us makes, she will say one very clipped put-down remark, and then there will indeed be a frightful silence, and then another topic will be taken up and put down again in the same way. But that is not going to happen, because, one, there is Phoebe, whom she adores and who will distract us, and, two, there is you, a renowned wit of prodigious sophistication who is quite expert at these things. Isn’t that so?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  Before swinging through the hilly country lanes to get to her mother’s house in Chadleigh, we took a short detour in order for Maria to show me her school. As we passed the fields close by, Maria held Phoebe up so she could look at the horses—“Horses around here,” she said to me, “as far as the eye can see.”

  The school was a long way from any human habitation, set in a vast, immaculately kept, old deer park shaded by large cedar trees. The playing fields and the tennis courts were empty when we arrived—the girls were in class and there was no one at all to be seen outside the grand Elizabethan-looking stone building where Maria had lived as a boarder until she went off to Oxford. “Looks to me like a palace,” I said, rolling down the window to take in the view. “The joke was that the boys used to be brought up in laundry baskets at night,” she said. “And were they?” I asked. “Certainly not. No sex at all. Girls would get crushes on the hockey mistress, that sort of thing. We’d write our boyfriends pages of letters in various colored inks on pink paper sprayed with scent. But otherwise, as you see, a place of extreme innocence.”

  Chadleigh, less grand but more innocent-looking even than the school, was thirty minutes on, set halfway up a very steep, very lonely Gloucestershire valley. Years ago, before the wool industry moved off, it had been a village of poor weavers. “In the old days,” said Maria as we turned into the narrow main road, “these were just hovels of tuberculosis—thirteen children and no TV.” Now Chadleigh was a picturesque cluster of streets and lanes, situated dramatically across the valley from a hanging beech woods—a muddle of monochromatic stone houses, grayish and austere under the clouds, and a long triangular village green where some dogs were playing. Just beyond the houses and their kitchen gardens, the farms on the rising hillside were parceled off like New England fields with old dry stone walls, meticulously laid layers of tilelike rock the color of the houses. Maria said that the first sight of the stone walls and the irregular pattern of the fields was always very emotional for her if she hadn’t been back for a while.

  Holly Tree Cottage seemed from the road a sizable house, though nothing like as impressive, Maria told me, as The Barton, where the family had lived before her father had taken flight. His family had been rich, but he was a second son and had got the family name with nothing to go with it. After university he’d been a banker in the City, only weekending with his family, but he hadn’t much liked work and eventually skipped to Leicestershire with a very famous, horsy woman of the fifties, who had worn a top hat with a veil and ridden sidesaddle and had been known maliciously, for witty and (to me) obscure English reasons, as “Keep Death Off the Road.” To put himself beyond the financial edicts of the divorce court he’d wound up only a few years later in Canada, married to a rich Vancouver girl and occupied mainly with sailing around the Sound and playing golf. The Barton proved to be too big and—after the support payments stopped coming in—beyond maintaining on Mrs. Freshfield’s income. She had been left only her mother’s modest capital and, thanks to the help of her stockbroker and some very stern economical management of her own, the small sum had proved to be just sufficient to get the girls through school. But this had meant selling The Barton, which lay in the open country, and renting Holly Tree Cottage, at the edge of Chadleigh village.

  There was a log fire in the drawing room when we arrived and, after the presents were opened and admired and Phoebe had been allowed a wild run around the garden and given a glass of milk, we sat there having a drink before lunch. It was a pleasant room with worn Oriental carpets on the dark wood floors and on the walls a lot of family portraits along with several portraits of horses. Everything was a little worn and all in very discreet taste—chintz curtains with birds and flowers and lots of polished wood.

  Following the advice garnered on the drive down, I said, “That’s a very nice desk.”

  “Oh, it’s just a copy of Sheraton,” Mrs. Freshfield replied.

  “And that’s a beautiful bookcase.”

  “Oh, well, Charley Rhys-Mill was here the other day,” she said, looking while she spoke at neither Maria nor me, “and he said he thought that it might well be a Chippendale design, but I’m certain it’s a country piece. If you look there,” she said, momentarily acknowledging my presence, “you can see the way the locks are put in, it’s very rural. I think it’s taken from the pattern book but I don’t think it’s Chippendale.”

  I decided that if she was going to belittle everything I admired, I had better stop here.

  I said nothing more and just sipped my gin until Mrs. Freshfield took it upon herself to try to make me feel at home.

  “Where are you from exactly, Mr. Zuckerman?”

  “Newark. In New Jersey.”

  “I’m not very good at American geography.”

  “It’s across the river from New York.”

  “I didn’t
know New York was on a river.”

  “Yes. Two.”

  “What was your father’s profession?”

  “He was a chiropodist.”

  There was a great silence while I drank, Maria drank, and Phoebe crayoned; we could hear Phoebe crayoning.

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “I have a younger brother,” I said.

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a dentist.”

  Either these were all the wrong answers or else she knew by then all she needed to know, for the conversation about my background lasted all of half a minute. The chiropodist father and the dentist brother seemed to have summed me up instantly. I wondered if perhaps these were occupations that were simply too useful.

  She had cooked the lunch herself—very English, perfectly nice, and rather bland. “There is no garlic in the lamb.” She said this with what seemed to me a most ambiguous smile.

  “Fine,” I said amiably, but still uncertain as to whether there might not be lurking in her remark some dire ethnic implication. Perhaps this was as close as she would come to mentioning my strange religion. I couldn’t imagine that was any less difficult for her than my being American. I clearly had everything going for me.