by Philip Roth
“That dreadful woman,” Maria said. “And that husband.”
With Phoebe at Mrs. Freshfield’s sister’s London flat and the nanny off till the following noon, with just the two of us alone together in the living room of the rented house, I was reminded of Maria lying on the sofa of my New York apartment the year before, trying to convince me how unsuitable she was. Unsuitability—what could be more suitable for a man like me?
“Yes,” I said, “the old guy really let her go.”
“I’ve seen a lot of that where I come from,” Maria said. “Women of a certain class and disposition behaving terribly, talking very loudly, and they allow them to get away with absolutely every last comma.”
“Because the men agree.”
“Could be, needn’t be. No, it’s their generation—you simply never contradict a lady, a lady is not wrong, and so on. They’re all misogynist anyway, those men. Their way to behave to women like that one is to be civil toward her and just let her rave. They don’t even hear them.”
“And she meant what I thought she meant.”
“Yes,” and just when it seemed that the restaurant incident had been completely defused, Maria began to cry.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I shouldn’t tell you.”
“The moral of this evening is that you should tell me everything.”
“No, I shouldn’t.” She dried her eyes and did her best to smile. “That was exhaustion, really. Relief. I’m delighted we’re home, I’m delighted by this bracelet, I was delighted by the shade of crimson you turned while telling that woman off, and now I have to go up to bed because I just can’t take any more pleasure.”
“What shouldn’t you tell me?”
“Don’t—don’t pump me. You know why it may be that I never explained about my mother? Not because I thought it would antagonize you, but because I was afraid it would be too intriguing. Because I do not want my mother in a book. Bad enough that’s my fate, but I do not want my mother in a book because of something that, shameful as it is, is doing no one any harm. Except herself, of course—isolating her from people like you whom she has every reason to admire and enjoy.”
“What made you cry?”
She closed her eyes, too exhausted to resist. “It was—well, when that woman was raving on, I had the most awful memory.”
“Of?”
“This is terrible,” she said. “It’s shameful. It really is. There was a girl in our office when I was at the magazine—before Phoebe was born. She was a girl I liked, a colleague, my age, a very nice girl, not a close friend but a very pleasant acquaintance. We were out in Gloucestershire working on a picture story, and I said, ‘Joanna, come and stay with us,’ because Chadleigh isn’t far from the village we were photographing. So she stayed at the house for a couple of nights. And my mother said to me, and I think Joanna may even have been in the house at the time, though she was certainly out of earshot—and I should add that Joanna is Jewish—”
“Like me—with the unmistakable genetic markings.”
“My mother wouldn’t miss it, I wouldn’t think. Anyway, she said to me exactly, but exactly what that woman said in the restaurant. They were her very words. I had forgotten this incident entirely, just put it completely out of my mind, until I heard that woman say, ‘They smell so funny, don’t they?’ Because I think my mother had, I don’t know, got into Joanna’s bedroom, or in some perfectly normal way—oh, I don’t know what, this is all very difficult to go into, and I just wish to hell I hadn’t remembered it and it would all go away.”
“So it wasn’t entirely accurate to tell me at dinner that no one would say that unless they were mad. Since your mother is clearly not mad.”
Softly, she said, “I was wrong … and wrong despite my knowledge … I told you, I’m ashamed of that. She thought it and she meant it—is it mad to say it? I don’t know. Must we go on about this? I’m so tired.”
“Is this why the night before I left, when all those well-brought-up English liberals were loathing Zionism and attacking Israel, you jumped in and started swinging?”
“No, not at all—I said what I believe.”
“But with all this baggage, what did you think would happen when you married me?”
“With all your baggage, what did you think when you married me? Please, we can’t start having one of those discussions. Not only is it beneath us, it doesn’t matter. You simply cannot start putting everything in a Jewish context. Or is this what comes of a weekend in Judea?”
“More likely it comes of never before having lived in Christendom.”
“What’s the United States, a strictly Jewish preserve?”
“I didn’t run into this stuff there—never.”
“Well, then you have led a very protected life. I heard plenty of it in New York.”
“Yes? What?”
“Oh, ‘stranglehold on the cultural life, on the economy,’ and so on—all the usual stuff. I think there’s more in America, actually, just because there are more Jews, and because they’re not so diffident as English Jews. English Jews are beleaguered, there are so few of them. On the whole they find the thing rather an embarrassment. But in the U.S. they speak up, they speak out, they’re visible everywhere—and the consequence, I can assure you, is that some people don’t like it, and say as much when Jews aren’t around.”
“But what about here, where I now live? What do you folks really think of us folks?”
“Are you trying to upset me,” she asked, “to bait me after what’s happened tonight to both of us?”
“I’m just trying to find out what I don’t know.”
“But this is all being blown out of proportion. No, I’m not telling you, because whatever I say you’re going to resent and you’re only going to go at me. Again.”
“What do the folks think here, Maria?”
“They think,” she said sharply, “‘Why do Jews make such a bloody fuss about being Jewish?’ That’s what they think.”
“Oh? And is that what you think?”
“It’s something I’ve felt at times, yes.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“It’s an extremely common feeling—and thought.”
“What is meant exactly by ‘fuss’?”
“Depends on what your starting point is. If you don’t actually like Jews at all, practically everything a Jew does you’ll perceive as Jewish. As something they ought to have dropped because it’s very boring they’re being so Jewish about it.”
“For instance?”
“This is a bad idea,” she said. “Don’t you see that this is a bad idea?”
“Go on.”
“I won’t. No. I am incapable of protecting myself against people when they start on me like this.”
“What is so boring about Jews being Jews?”
“It’s all or nothing, isn’t it? Our conversation doesn’t seem to have any middle road. Tonight it’s either sweetness or thunder.”
“I am not thundering—I am dismayed, and the reason, as I told you, is that I have never run into this stuff before.”
“I am not Nathan Zuckerman’s first Gentile wife. I am the fourth.”
“True enough. Yet never have I run into this ‘mixed marriage’ crap. You’re the fourth, but the first from a country about which, in matters relevant to my personal well-being, I seem to be totally ignorant. Boring? That’s a stigma that I would think attaches more readily to the English upper classes. Boring Jews? You must explain this to me. In my experience it’s usually boring without the Jews. Tell me, what is so boring to the English about Jews being Jews?”
“I will tell you, but only if we can have a discussion and not the useless, destructive, and painful clash that you want to instigate regardless of what I say.”
“What is so boring about Jews being Jews?”
“Well, I object to people—this is a feeling only, this is not a thought-out position; I might have to discipline it if you insist on k
eeping us up much longer, after the chablis and all that champagne—I object to people clinging to an identity just for the sake of it. I don’t think there’s anything admirable about it at all. All this talk about ‘identities’—your ‘identity’ is just where you decide to stop thinking, as far as I can see. I think all these ethnic groups—whether they are Jewish, whether they’re West Indian and think they must keep this Caribbean thing going—simply make life more difficult in a society where we’re trying to just live amicably, like London, and where we are now very very diverse.”
“You know, true as some of that may sound, the ‘we-ness’ here is starting to get me down. These people with their dream of the perfect, undiluted, unpolluted, unsmelly ‘we.’ Talk about Jewish tribalism. What is this insistence on homogeneity but a not very subtle form of English tribalism? What’s so intolerable about tolerating a few differences? You cling to your ‘identity,’ ‘just for the sake of it’—from the sound of it, no less than your mother does!”
“Please, I cannot be shouted at and keep talking. It’s not intolerable and that’s not what I said. I certainly do tolerate differences when I feel they’re genuine. When people are being anti-Semitic or anti-black or anti-anything because of differences, I despise it, as you know. All I have been saying is that I don’t feel that these differences are always entirely genuine.”
“And you don’t like that.”
“All right, I’ll tell you a thing I don’t like, since that’s what you are dying to push me to say—I don’t like going to north London, to Hampstead or Highgate, and finding it like a foreign country, which it really does seem to me.”
“Now we’re getting down to it.”
“I’m not getting down to anything. It’s the truth, which you wanted—if it happens to make you unreasonable, that’s not my fault. If you want to leave me as a result, that’s not my fault either. If the upshot of my malicious sister trying to destroy this marriage is that she actually succeeds, well, that’ll be her first great triumph. But it won’t be ours!”
“It’s pleasing to hear you raise your voice to make a point like those of us who smell.”
“Oh, that is not fair. Not at all.”
“I want to learn about Hampstead and Highgate being a foreign country. Because they’re heavily Jewish? Can’t there be a Jewish variety of Englishman? There is an English variety of human being, and we all manage to tolerate that somehow.”
“If I may stick to the point—there are many Jews who live there, yes. People there who are my generation, who are my peers—they have the same sort of responses, they probably went to the same sort of schools, generally they’d have similar kinds of education, forgetting religious education, but they all have a different style from me, and I am not saying that’s distasteful—”
“Just boring.”
“Nor boring. Only that I do feel alien among them—being there makes me feel left out and it makes me feel that I’m better off somewhere I feel more normal.”
“The net of the Establishment draws ever tighter. How is the style different?”
All this time she’d been lying across the sofa, her head propped on a pillow, looking toward the fire and the chair where I was sitting. Suddenly she sat straight up and hurled the pillow onto the floor. The catch must have come undone on the bracelet, because it came flying off and fell to the floor too. She picked it up and, leaning forward, laid it between us on the glass top of the coffee table. “Of course nothing is understood! Nothing is ever understood! Not even with you! Why won’t you stop? Why don’t you save your nettle-grasping for your writing?”
“Why don’t you just go on and tell me all the things you shouldn’t tell me? Certainly not telling them to me hasn’t worked.”
“All right. All right. Now that we have overestimated the meaning of everything and are assured that whatever I say will come back to haunt me—all I was going to tell you, which was no more than an anthropological aside, is that it is common parlance—though it is not necessarily anti-Semitic—for people to say, ‘Oh, such-and-such is frightfully Jewish.’”
“I would have thought such sentiments were more subtly coded here. In England, they say that outright? Really?”
“Indeed they do. You betcha.”
“Give me examples, please.”
“Why not? Why not, Nathan? Why stop? An example. You go for drinks somewhere in Hampstead, and you’re plied by an active hostess with an overabundance of little things to eat and sort of assaulted with extra drinks and, generally speaking, made to feel uncomfortable by a superabundance of hospitality and introductions and energy—well, then one is liable to say, ‘That’s very Jewish.’ There is no anti-Semitic feeling behind the statement, it is merely drawing-room sociology, a universal phenomenon—everybody does it everywhere. I’m sure there have been times when even a tolerant and enlightened citizen of the world like you has been at least tempted to say, ‘That’s very goyish’—maybe even about something that I have done. Oh, look,” she said, coming to her feet in that perfect green dress, “why don’t you go back to America where they do ‘mixed marriages’ right? This is absurd. This was all a great mistake, and I’m sure the fault is entirely mine. Stick to American shiksas. I should never have made you come back here with me. I should never have tried to paper over things about my family that it would be impossible for you to understand or accept—though that’s exactly why I did it. I shouldn’t have done anything I’ve done, beginning with letting you invite me into your apartment for that one cup of tea. Probably I should just have let him go on shutting me up for the rest of my life—what difference does it make who shuts me up, at least that way I would have kept my little family together. Oh, it just makes me feel terribly cross that I went through all this to wind up with yet another man who cannot stand the things I say! It’s been such an extended education—and for nothing, endless preparation for just nothing! I stayed with him for my daughter, stayed with him because Phoebe went around with a sign on her head saying, ‘One father in residence—and it’s a lot of fun.’ Then stupidly, after you and I met, I said, ‘But what about me? Instead of an enemy for a husband, what about a soul mate—that unattainable impossibility!’ I’ve gone through hell, really, to marry you—you’re the most daring thing I’ve ever done. And now it turns out that you actually think that there is an International Gentile Conspiracy of which I am a paid-up member! Inside your head, it now turns out, there is really no great difference between you and that Mordecai Lippman! Your brother’s off his rocker? You are your brother! Do you know what I should have done, despite his generally outrageous behavior to me? True to the tradition of my school, I should have laced my shoes up tighter and got on with it. Only you feel so dishonest and so cowardly—compromising, compromising—but maybe the compromising is just being grown-up and looking for soul mates is so much idiocy. I certainly didn’t find a soul mate, that’s for sure. I found a Jew. Well, you certainly never struck me as very Jewish, but that’s where I was wrong again. Clearly I never began to understand the depths of this thing. You disguise yourself as rational and moderate when you are the wild nut! You are Mordecai Lippman! Oh, this is a disaster. I’d have an abortion if you could have an abortion after five months. I don’t know what to do about that. The house we can sell, and as for me, I’d rather be on my own if this is going to go on all our lives. I just can’t face it. I don’t have that kind of emotional reserves. How terribly unfair for you to turn on me—I didn’t plant that woman next to us! And my mother really isn’t my fault, you know, nor are the attitudes with which she was raised. You think I don’t know about people in this country and how petty and vicious they can be? I don’t say this to excuse her, but in her family, you know, if you weren’t a dog or didn’t have a penis, you weren’t likely to get much attention—so she’s had to put up with her shit too! And quite on her own has come a very long way. As have we all! I did not choose to have a malicious sister and I didn’t choose to have an anti-Semitic mother—no mor
e than you chose to have a brother in Judea toting a gun, or a father who, from all you say, was not extremely rational about Gentiles, either. Nor, I remind you, has my mother said a single thing to offend you, or, privately, to offend me. When she first saw your picture, when I showed her a photograph, she did say, rather quietly, ‘Very Mediterranean-looking, isn’t he?’ And I said, just as quietly, ‘You know, Mummy, I think, taking a global view, that blue eyes and blond hair may be on the way out.’ She nearly wet herself, she was so astonished to hear such a sentiment from the lips of her amiable child. But, you see, like many of us, the illusion she’s come to is the one she wants. However, she was quite smooth about it, really, didn’t rise to it in any way—and otherwise, though you are a homewrecker, as I’ve explained to you, and any new man of mine, Gentile as well as Jew, would be clouded by that, she said nothing more and was actually quite nice, wildly so, really, for someone who, as we know, is not all that keen on Jews. If this evening she was ‘glacial,’ it’s because that’s how she is, but she has also been as affable as she can, and probably that is because she is very anxious not to see us now go off in different directions. You really think she wants me to have a second divorce? The irony is, of course, that she’s the one who’s turned out to be right—not you and me with our enlightened blather but my bigoted mother. Because it’s obvious that you can’t have people from such different starting points understand each other about anything. Not even we, who seemed to understand each other so marvelously. Oh, the irony of everything! Life always something other than what you expect! But I just cannot take this subject as the center of my life. And you, to my astonishment, want suddenly to take it as the center of yours! You, who in New York hit the ceiling when I called the Jews a ‘race,’ are now going to tell me that you’re genetically unique? Do you really think that your Jewish beliefs, which I can’t see on you anywhere, frankly, make you incompatible with me? God, Nathan, you’re a human being—I don’t care if you’re a Jew. You ask me to tell you what ‘us folks’ think about you folks, and then when I try to, as truthfully as I can, without fudging things, you resent what I say, as predicted. Like a narrow-minded fart! Well, I can’t stand it. I won’t! I already have a narrow-minded mother! I already have a crazy sister! I’m not married to Mr. Rosenbloom in North Finchley, I’m married to you! I don’t think of you, I don’t go around thinking of you as being a Jew or a non-Jew, I think of you as yourself. When I go down to see how the house is coming along, do you think I ask myself, ‘Is the Jew going to be happy here? Can a Jew find happiness in a house in Chiswick?’ You’re the one who’s mad. Maybe on this subject all Jews are mad. I can understand how they might be, I can see why Jews feel so touchy and strange and rejected, and certainly misused, to put it mildly, but if we are going to go on misunderstanding each other about this, quarreling all the time and putting this subject at the center of our lives, then I don’t want to live with you, I can’t live with you, and as for our baby—oh, God only knows, now I’ll have two children without fathers. Just what I wanted! Two children without fathers in residence, but even that is better than this, because this is just too stupid. Go back to America, please, where everybody loves Jews—you think!”
