by Philip Roth
Though pain would come to Zuckerman in time—in the form of estrangement, mortification, fierce and unremitting opposition, antagonists who were not respectable deans or loving fathers or dimwitted officers in the Army Quartermaster Corps; oh yes, pain would enter his life soon enough, and not entirely without invitation. As the loving father had warned him, looking for trouble, he would find it—and what a surprise that would be. For in severity and duration, in sheer painfulness, it would be like nothing he had known at home, in school, or in the service, nor would it be like anything he had imagined while contemplating the harrowed, soulful face of Virginia Woolf, or while writing his A+ honors paper on the undercurrent of agony in her novels. Only a short time after having been shipped by providential error—his last big dose, as it turned out, of beginner’s luck—to the rural American southland instead of the Korean slaughter, adversity was to catch up with the young conquistador. He would begin to pay…for the vanity and the ignorance, to be sure, but above all for the contradictions: the stinging tongue and the tender hide, the spiritual aspirations and the lewd desires, the softy boyish needs and the manly, the magisterial ambitions. Yes, over the next decade of his life he was to learn all that his father might have wished Dale Carnegie to teach him about humility, and then some. And then some more.
But that is another story, and one whose luridness makes the small-time southern Jew-baiter lofting cotton golf balls toward his nose, makes even seventeen-year-old Sharon Shatzky, performing for him on a gourd like a Pigalle whore at an exhibition, seem as much a part of his idyllic and innocent youth as that afternoon he once spent sipping tea and eating watercress in Caroline Benson’s garden. The story of Zuckerman’s suffering calls for an approach far more serious than that which seems appropriate to the tale of his easeful salad days. To narrate with fidelity the misfortunes of Zuckerman’s twenties would require deeper dredging, a darker sense of irony, a grave and pensive voice to replace the amused, Olympian point of view…or maybe what that story requires is neither gravity nor complexity, but just another author, someone who would see it too for the simple five-thousand-word comedy that it very well may have been. Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny. “Unfortunate” because he wonders if that isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.
Courting Disaster
(or, Serious in the Fifties)
No, I did not marry for conventional reasons; no one can accuse me of that. It was not for fear of loneliness that I chose my wife, or to have “a helpmate,” or a cook, or a companion in my old age, and it certainly was not out of lust. No matter what they may say about me now, sexual desire had nothing to do with it. To the contrary: though she was a pretty enough woman-square, strong Nordic head; resolute blue eyes that I thought of admiringly as “wintry”; straight wheat-colored hair worn in bangs; a handsome smile; an appealing, openhearted laugh—her short, heavy-legged body struck me as very nearly dwarfish in its proportions and was, from first to last, unremittingly distasteful. Her gait in particular displeased me: mannish, awkward, it took on a kind of rolling quality when she tried to move quickly, and in my mind associated with images of cowhands and merchant seamen. Watching her run to meet me on some Chicago street—after we had become lovers—I would positively recoil, even at a distance, at the prospect of holding that body against me, at the idea that voluntarily I had made her mine.
Lydia Ketterer was a divorced woman, five years my senior, and mother of a ten-year-old girl who lived with Lydia’s former husband and his second wife in a new suburban housing development south of Chicago. During their marriage, whenever Lydia dared to criticize or question her husband’s judgment he would lift her from the floor—a massive man twice her weight and a foot taller—and heave her against the nearest wall; in the months following the divorce he abused her through her child, who was then six and in Lydia’s custody; and when Lydia broke down, Ketterer took the child to live with him, and subsequently, after Lydia had been released from the hospital and was back in her apartment, refused to return the little girl.
He was the second man nearly to destroy her; the first, Lydia’s father, had seduced her when she was twelve. The mother had been bedridden since Lydia’s birth, a victim it would seem of nothing more than lumbago, but perpetually weak unto dying. After the father fled, Lydia had been taken to be raised in the home of two spinster aunts in Skokie; until she ran off with Ketterer at the age of eighteen, she and her mother shared a room at the rear of this haven whose heroes were the aviator Lindbergh, the senator Bilbo, the cleric Coughlin, and the patriot Gerald L. K. Smith. It had been a life of little but punishment, humiliation, betrayal, and defeat, and it was to this that I was drawn, against all my misgivings.
Of course, the contrast to my own background of familial devotion and solidarity was overwhelming: whereas Lydia remembered a thousand and one nights of rubbing Sloan’s liniment into her mother’s back, I could not remember a single hour of my childhood when my mother was incapable of performing the rites of her office. If indeed she ever had been indisposed, it seemed not even to interfere with her famous whistling, that continuous medley of “show tunes” she chirped melodiously away at through her day of housework and family chores. The sickly one in our home was me: suffocating diphtheria, subsequent annual respiratory infections, debilitating glandular fevers, mysterious visitations of “allergies.” Until puberty, I spent as much time at home in my bed or under a blanket on a sofa in the living room as I did in my seat in the classroom, all of which makes the disposition of my mother, the whistler—“Mrs. Zuckerbird” the postman called her—even more impressive. My father, though not so sunny in his indestructibility, and constitutionally a much more solemn person than my peppy peasant of a mother, was no less equal to the hardships our family endured: specifically, the Depression, my ailments, and my older sister Soma’s inexplicable marriages, twice to the sons of Sicilians: the first an embezzler and in the end a suicide; the second, honest in his business but otherwise “common as dirt” —in the Yiddish word, which alone seemed to carry the weight of our heartbreak and contempt, prust.
We ourselves were not elegant, but surely we were not coarse. Dignity, I was to understand, had nothing to do with one’s social station: character, conduct, was everything. My mother used to laugh and make cracks about the ladies around who had secret dreams of mink coats and Miami Beach vacations. “To her,” she would say disparagingly of some silly neighbor, “the be-all and end-all is to put on a silver fox and go gallivanting with the hoi polloi.” Not until I got to college and misused the word myself did I learn that what my mother took to mean the elite—perhaps because “hoi polloi” sounded like another of her disdainful expressions for people who put on airs, “the hoity-toity”—actually referred to the masses.
So much for the class struggle as a burning issue in my house, or social resentment or ambitiousness as a motive for action. A strong character, not a big bankroll, was to them the evidence of one’s worth. Good, sensible people. Why their two offspring should have wasted themselves as they did, why both children should have wed themselves to disaster, is difficult to understand. That my sister’s first husband and my only wife should both have taken their own lives would seem to suggest something about our common upbringing. But what? I have no theories. If ever a mother and father were not responsible for the foolishness of their children, it was mine.
My father was a bookkeeper. Because of his excellent memory and his quickness with figures, he was considered the local savant in our neighborhood of hardworking first-generation Jews and was the man most frequently consulted by people in trouble. A thin, austere, and humorless person, always meticulous in a white shirt and a tie, he communicated his love for me in a precise, colorless fashion that makes me ache with tenderness for him, especially now that he is the bedridden one, and I li
ve in self-exile thousands of miles from his bed.
When I was the sickly, feverish patient, I felt something more like mystification, as though he were a kind of talking electrical toy come to play with me promptly each evening at six. His idea of amusing me was to teach me to solve the sort of arithmetical puzzles at which he himself was a whiz. “‘Marking Down,’” he would say, not unlike a recitation student announcing the tide of a poem. “A clothing dealer, trying to dispose of an overcoat cut in last year’s style, marked it down from its original price of thirty dollars to twenty-four. Failing to make a sale, he reduced the price still further to nineteen dollars and twenty cents. Again he found no takers, so he tried another price reduction and this time sold it.” Here he would pause; if I wished I might ask him to repeat any or all of the details. If not, he proceeded. “All right, Nathan; what was the selling price, if the last markdown was consistent with the others?” Or: “‘Making a Chain.’ A lumberjack has six sections of chain, each consisting of four links. If the cost of cutting open a link—“ and so on. The next day, while my Mother whistled Gershwin and laundered my father’s shirts, I would daydream in my bed about the clothing dealer and the lumberjack. To whom had the haberdasher finally sold the overcoat? Did the man who bought it realize it was cut in last year’s style? If he wore it to a restaurant, would people laugh? And what did “last year’s style” look like anyway? “ ‘Again he found no takers,’” I would say aloud, finding much to feel melancholy about in that idea. I still remember how charged for me was that word “takers.” Could it have been the lumberjack with the six sections of chain who, in his rustic innocence, had bought the overcoat cut in last year’s style? And why suddenly did he need an overcoat? Invited to a fancy ball? By whom? My mother thought the questions I raised about these puzzles were “cute” and was glad they gave me something to think about when she was occupied with housework and could not take the time to play go fish or checkers; my father, on the other hand, was disheartened to find me intrigued by fantastic and irrelevant details of geography and personality and intention instead of the simple beauty of the arithmetical solution. He did not think that was intelligent of me, and he was right.
I have no nostalgia for that childhood of illness, none at all. In early adolescence, I underwent daily schoolyard humiliation (at the time, it seemed to me there could be none worse) because of my physical timidity and hopelessness at all sports. Also, I was continually enraged by the attention my parents insisted upon paying to my health, even after I had emerged, at the age of sixteen, into a beefy, broad-shouldered boy who, to compensate for his uncoordinated, ludicrous performances in right field or on the foul line, took to shooting craps in the fetid washroom of the corner candy store and rode out on Saturday nights in a car full of “smoking wise guys”—my father’s phrase—to search in vain for that whorehouse that was rumored to be located somewhere in the state of New Jersey. The dread I felt was of course even greater than my parents’: surely I would awaken one morning with a murmuring heart, or gasping for air, or with one of my fevers of a hundred and four…These fears caused my assault upon them to be particularly heartless, even for a teenager, and left them dazed and frightened of me for years thereafter. Had my worst enemy said, “I hope you the, Zuckerman,” I could not have been any more provoked than I was when my well-meaning father asked if I had remembered to take my vitamin capsule, or when my Mother, to see if a cold had made me feverish, did so under the guise of giving my forehead a lingering kiss at the dinner table. How all that tenderness enraged me! I remember that it was actually a relief to me when my sister’s first husband got caught with his fist in the till of his uncle’s heating-oil firm, and Sonia became the focus of their concern. And of my concern. She would sometimes come back to the house to cry on my seventeen-year-old shoulder, after having been to visit Billy in jail where he was serving a year and a day; and how good it felt, how uplifting it was, not to be on the receiving end of the solicitude, as was the case when Sonia and I were children and she would entertain the little shut-in by the hour, and without complaint.
A few years later, when I was away at Rutgers, Billy did my parents the favor of hanging himself by a cord from the drapery rod in their bedroom. I doubt that he expected it would hold him; knowing Billy, I guess he wanted the rod to give under his weight so that he might be found, still breathing, in a heap on the floor when my parents came back from their shopping. The sight of a son-in-law with a sprained ankle and a rope around his neck was supposed to move my father to volunteer to pay Billy’s five-thousand-dollar debt to his bookie. But the rod turned out to be stronger than Billy had thought, and he was strangled to death. Good riddance, one would think. But no; the next year Sunny married (in my father’s phrase) “another one.” Same wavy black hair, same “manly” cleft in his chin, same repellent background. Johnny’s weakness was not horses but hookers. The marriage has flourished, nonetheless. Each time my brother-in-law gets caught, he falls to his knees and begs Sunny’s forgiveness; this gesture seems to go a long way with my sister—not so with our father: “Kisses her shoes,” he would say, closing his eyes in disgust; “actually kisses shoes, as though that were a sign of love, of respect—of anything!” There are four handsome wavy-haired children, or were when last I saw them all in 1962: Donna, Louis, John Jr., and Marie (that name the unkindest cut of all). John Sr. builds swimming pools and brings in enough each week to be able to spend a hundred dollars on a New York call girl without feeling a thing, financially speaking. When last I saw it, their summer house in the Italian Catskills had even more pink “harem” pillows in the living room than the one in Scotch Plains, and an even grander pepper mill; in both “homes,” the silver, the linens, and the towels are monogrammed SZR, my sister’s initials.
How come? I used to be plagued by that question. How could it be that the sister of mine who had rehearsed for hours on end in our living room, over and over again singing to me the songs from Song of Norway and The Student Prince until I wished I were Norwegian or nobility; the sister who took “voice” from Dr. Bresslenstein in his studio in North Philadelphia and at fifteen was already singing “Because” for money at weddings; a sister who had the voluptuous, haughty airs of a prima donna when the other little girls were still fretting over boys and acne —how could she wind up in a house with a harem “motif,” mothering children taught by nuns, and playing “Jerry Vale Sings Italian Hits” on the stereo to entertain our silent parents when they come for a Sunday visit? How? Why?
I used to wonder, when Sonia married for the second time, if perhaps she were involved in a secret and mysterious religious rite: if she had not deliberately set out to mortify herself, so as to sound to the depths her spiritual being. I would imagine her in bed at night (yes, in bed), her pretty-boy slob of a husband asleep beside her, and Sonia exultant in the dark with the knowledge that unbeknownst to everyone—everyone being the bewildered parents and incredulous college-boy brother—she continued to be the very same person who used to enchant us from the stage of the Y with what Bresslenstein (a poor refugee from Palestine, but according to himself formerly the famous impresario of Munich) described to my mother as “a beautiful beautiful coloratura quality—the beginnings of another Lily Pons.” I could imagine her one evening at dinnertime knocking on the back door to our apartment, her black hair to her shoulders again, and wearing the same long embroidered dress in which she had appeared in The Student Prince—my graceful and vivacious sister, whose appearance on a stage would cause tears of pride to spring to my eyes, our Lily Pons, our Galli-Curci, returning to us, as bewitching as ever and uncorrupted: “1 had to do it,” she explains, when we three rush as one to embrace her, “otherwise it meant nothing.”
In brief: I could not easily make peace with the fact that I had a sister in the suburbs, whose pastimes and adornments—vulgar to a snobbish college sophomore, an elitist already reading Allen Tate on the sublime and Dr. Leavis on Matthew Arnold with his breakfast cereal—more or less resemb
led those of millions upon millions of American families. Instead I imagined Sonia Zuckerman Ruggieri in Purgatorio.
Lydia Jorgenson Ketterer I imagined in Hell. But who wouldn’t have, to hear those stories out of her lurid past? Beside hers, my own childhood, frailty, fevers, and all, seemed a version of paradise; for where I had been the child served, she had been the child servant, the child slave, round-the-clock nurse to a hypochondriacal mother and fair game to a benighted father.
The story of incest, as Lydia told it, was simple enough, so simple that it staggered me. It was simply inconceivable to me at the time that an act I associated wholly with a great work of classical drama could actually have taken place, without messengers and choruses and oracles, between a Chicago milkman in his Bloomfield Farms coveralls and his sleepy little blue-eyed daughter before she went off to school. Yet it had. “Once upon a time,” as Lydia liked to begin the story, early on a winter morning, as he was about to set off to fetch his delivery truck, her father came into her room and lay down beside her in the bed, dressed for work. He was trembling and in tears. “You’re all I have, Lydia, you’re all Daddy has. I’m married to a corpse.” Then he lowered his coveralls to his ankles, all because he was married to a corpse. “Simple as that,” said Lydia. Lydia the child, like Lydia the adult, did not scream out, nor did she reach up and sink her teeth into his neck once he was over her. The thought of biting into his Adam’s apple occurred to her, but she was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother, who needed her sleep. She was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother. And, moreover, she did not want to hurt him: he was her father. Mr. Jorgenson showed up for work that morning, but his truck was found abandoned later in the day in the Forest Preserve. “And where he went,” said Lydia, in mild storybook fashion, “nobody knew,” neither the invalid wife whom he had left penniless nor their horrified little child. Something at first made Lydia believe that he had run away “to the North Pole,” though simultaneously she was convinced that he was lurking in the neighborhood, ready to crush her skull with a rock if she should tell any of her little friends the dring he had done to her before disappearing. For years afterward—even as a grown woman, even after her breakdown—whenever she went to the Loop at Christmastime, she would wonder if he might not be one of the Santa Clauses standing outside the department stores ringing a little bell at the shoppers. In fact, having decided in the December of her eighteenth year to run away from Skokie with Ketterer, she had approached the Santa Claus outside Goldblatt’s and said to him, “I’m getting married. I don’t care about you any more. I’m marrying a man who stands six feet two inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds and if you ever so much as follow me again he’ll break every bone in your body.”
