by Philip Roth
Later, at the back landing, my Mother and father shake the water off themselves like dogs—our loyal Dalmatians, our life-saving Saint Bernards. They leave their umbrellas open in the bathtub to dry. They have carried home to me—two and a half miles through a storm, and with a war on—a jar of my grandmother Zuckerman’s stuffed cabbage, a shoe box containing my grandmother Ackerman’s strudel: food for a starving Nathan, to enrich his blood and bring him health and happiness. Later still, my exhibitionistic sister will stand exactly in the center of the living-room rug, on the “oriental” medallion, practicing her scales, while my father reads the battlefront news in the Sunday Inquirer and my mother gauges the temperature of my forehead with her lips, each hourly reading ending in a kiss. And I, all the while, an Ingres odalisque languid on the sofa. Was there ever anything like it, since the day of rest began?
How those rituals of love out of my own antiquity (no nostalgia for me!) return in every poignant nostalgic detail when I watch the unfolding of another horrific Ketterer Sunday. As orthodox as we had been in performing the ceremonies of familial devotion, so the Ketterers were in the perpetuation of their barren and wretched lovelessness. To watch the cycle of disaster repeating itself was as chilling as watching an electrocution—yes, a slow electrocution, the burning up of Monica Ketterer’s life, seemed to me to be taking place before my eyes Sunday after Sunday. Stupid, broken, illiterate child, she did not know her right hand from her left, could not read the clock, could not even read a slogan off a billboard or a cereal box without someone helping her over each syllable as though it were an alp. Monica. Lydia. Ketterer. I thought: “What am I doing with these people?” And thinking that, could see no choice for myself but to stay.
Sundays Monica was delivered to the door by Eugene Ketterer, just as unattractive a man as the reader, who has gotten the drift of my story, would expect to find entering the drama at this point. Another nail in Nathan’s coffin. If only Lydia had been exaggerating, if only I could have said to her, as it isn’t always impossible to say to the divorced of their former spouses, “Come on now, he isn’t nearly so bad as all that.” If only, even in a joking way, I could have teased her by saying, “Why, I rather like him.” But I hated him.
The only surprise was to discover him to be physically uglier than Lydia had even suggested. As if that character of his wasn’t enough. Bad teeth, a large smashed nose, hair brilliantined back for church, and, in his dress, entirely the urban yokel…Now how could a girl with a pretty face and so much native refinement and intelligence have married a type like this to begin with? Simple: he was the first to ask her. Here was the knight who had rescued Lydia from that prison house in Skokie.
To the reader who has not just “gotten the drift,” but begun to balk at the uniformly dismal situation that I have presented here, to the reader who finds himself unable to suspend his disbelief in a protagonist who voluntarily sustains an affair with a woman sexless to him and so disaster-ridden, I should say that in retrospect I find him nearly impossible to believe in myself. Why should a young man otherwise reasonable, farsighted, watchful, judicious, and self-concerned, a man meticulously precise in the bread-and-butter concerns of life, and the model of husbandry with his endowment, why should he pursue, in this obviously weighty encounter, a course so defiantly not in his interest? For the sake of defiance? Does that convince you? Surely some protective, life-sustaining instinct—call it common sense, horse sense, a kind of basic biological alarm system-should have awakened him to the inevitable consequences, even as a glass of cold water thrown in his face will bring the most far-gone sleepwalker back from the world of stairwells without depth and boulevards without traffic. I look in vain for anything resembling a genuine sense of religious mission—that which sends missionaries off to convert the savages or to minister to lepers—or for the psychological abnormality pronounced enough to account for this preposterous behavior. To make some sort of accounting, the writer emphasizes Lydia’s “moral glamor” and develops, probably with more thoroughness than is engrossing, the idea of Zuckerman’s “seriousness,” even going so far, in the subtitle, as to describe that seriousness as something of a social phenomenon; but to be frank, it does not seem, even to the author, that he has, suggestive subtitle and all, answered the objection of implausibility, any more than the young man Zuckerman’s own prestigious interpretations of his migraines seemed to him consonant with the pain itself. And to bring words like “enigmatic” and “mysterious” into the discussion not only goes against my grain, but hardly seems to make things any less inconceivable.
To be sure, it would probably help some if I were at least to mention in passing the pleasant Saturday strolls that Lydia and Nathan used to take together down by the lake, their picnics, their bicycle rides, their visits to the zoo, the aquarium, the Art Institute, to the theater when the Bristol Old Vic and Marcel Marceau came to town; I could write about the friendships they made with other university couples, the graduate-student parties they occasionally went to on weekends, the lectures by famous poets and critics they attended at Mandel Hall, the evenings they spent together reading by the fire in Lydia’s apartment. But to call up such memories in order to make the affair more credible would actually be to mislead the reader about the young man Nathan Zuckerman was; pleasures and comforts of the ordinary social variety were to him inconsequential, for they seemed without moral content. It wasn’t because they both enjoyed eating Chinese food on Sixty-third Street or even because both admired Chekhov’s short stories that he married Lydia; he could have married Sharon Shatzky for that, and for more. Incredible as it may seem to some—and I am one of them—it was precisely “the uniformly dismal situation” that did more for Lydia’s cause than all the companionable meals and walks and museum visits and the cozy fireside conversations in which he corrected her taste in books.
To the reader who “believes” in Zuckerman’s predicament as I describe it, but is unwilling to take such a person as seriously as I do, let me say that I am tempted to make fun of him myself. To treat this story as a species of comedy would not require more than a slight alteration in tone and attitude. In graduate school, for a course tided “Advanced Shakespeare,” I once wrote a paper on Othello proposing just such a shift in emphasis. I imagined, in detail, several unlikely productions, including one in which Othello and Iago addressed each other as “Mr. Interlocutor” and “Mr. Bones,” and another, somewhat more extreme, in which the racial situation was entirely reversed, with Othello acted by a white man and the rest of the cast portrayed by blacks, thus shedding another kind of light (I concluded) on the “motiveless malignity.”
In the story at hand, it would seem to me that from the perspective of this decade particularly, there is much that could be ridiculed having to do with the worship of ordeal and forbearance and the suppression of the sexual man. It would not require too much ingenuity on my part to convert the protagonist here into an insufferable prig to be laughed at, a character out of a farce. Or if not the protagonist, then the narrator. To some, the funniest thing of all, or perhaps the strangest, may not be how I conducted myself back then, but the literary mode in which I have chosen to narrate my story today: the decorousness, the orderliness, the underlying sobriety, that “responsible” manner that I continue to affect. For not only have literary manners changed drastically since all this happened ten years ago, back in the middle fifties, but I myself am hardly who I was or wanted to be: no longer am I a member in good standing of that eminently decent and humane university community, no longer am I the son my parents proudly used to address by mail as “professor.” By my own standards, my private life is a failure and a disgrace, neither decorous, nor sober, and surely not “responsible.”
Or so it seems to me: I am full of shame and believe myself to be a scandalous figure. I can’t imagine that I shall ever have the courage to return to live in Chicago, or anywhere in America. Presently we reside in one of the larger Italian cities; “we” are myself and Monica, o
r Moonie, as I eventually came to call her in our intimacy. The two of us have been alone together now since Lydia gouged open her wrists with the metal tip of a can opener and bled to death in the bathtub of our ground-floor apartment on Woodlawn, where the three of us were living as a family. Lydia was thirty-five when she died, I was just thirty, and Moonie sixteen. After Ketterer’s second divorce, I had gone to court, in Lydia’s behalf, and sued to regain custody of her daughter—and I won. How could I lose? I was a respectable academic and promising author whose stories appeared in serious literary quarterlies; Ketterer was a wife beater, two times over. That was how Moonie came to be living with us in Hyde Park—and how Lydia came to suffer her final torment. For she could not have been any more excluded from their lives by the aunts in Skokie, or more relegated to the position of an unloved Cinderella, than she was by what grew up between Moonie and myself and constituted during those years my only sexual yearning. Lydia used to awaken me in the middle of the night by pounding on my chest with her fists. And nodding Dr. Rutherford might do or say could stop her. “If you ever lay a finger on my daughter,” she would cry, “I’ll drive a knife into your heart!” But I never did sleep with Moonie, not so long as her mother was alive. Under the guise of father and daughter, we touched and fondled one another’s flesh; as the months went by we more and more frequently barged in upon one another—unknowingly, inadvertently—in the midst of dressing or unclothed in the bathtub; raking leaves in the yard or out swimming off the Point we were playful and high-spirited, as a man and his young mistress might be expected to be…but in the end, as though she were my own offspring or my own sister, I honored the incest taboo. It was not easy.
Then we found Lydia in the tub. Probably none of our friends or my colleagues assumed that Lydia had killed herself because I had been sleeping with her daughter—until I fled with Moonie to Italy. I did not know what else to do, after the night we finally did make love. She was sixteen years old—her mother a suicide, her father a sadistic ignoramus, and she herself, because of her reading difficulties, still only a freshman in high school: given all that, how could I desert her? But how ever could we be lovers together in Hyde Park?
So I at last got to make the trip to Europe that I had been planning when Lydia and I first met, only it wasn’t to see the cultural monuments and literary landmarks that I came here.
I do not think that Moonie is as unhappy in Italy as Anna Karenina was with Vronsky, nor, since our first year here, have I been anything like so bewildered and disabled as was Aschenbach because of his passion for Tadzio. I had expected more agony; with my self-dramatizing literary turn of mind, I had even thought that Moonie might go mad. But the fact is that to our Italian friends we are simply another American writer and his pretty young girl friend, a tall, quiet, somber kid, whose only distinction, outside of her good looks, appears to them to be her total devotion to me; they tell me they are unused to seeing such deference for her man in a long-legged American blonde. They rather like her for this. The only friend I have who is anything like an intimate says that whenever I go out of a room, leaving her behind, Moonie seems almost to cease to exist. He wonders why. It isn’t any longer because she doesn’t know the language; happily, she became fluent in Italian as quickly as I did and, with this language, suffers none of those reading difficulties that used to make her nightly homework assignments such hell for the three of us back in Chicago. She is no longer stupid; or stubborn; though she is too often morose.
When she was twenty-one, and legally speaking no longer my “ward,” I decided to marry Moonie. The very worst of it was over by then, and I mean by that, voracious, frenzied lust as well as paralyzing fear. I thought marriage might carry us beyond this tedious second stage, wherein she tended to be silent and gloomy, and I, in a muted sort of way, to be continually anxious, as though waiting in a hospital bed to be wheeled down to the operating room for surgery. Either I must marry her or leave her, take her upon me forever or end it entirely. So, on her twenty-first birthday, having firmly decided which was the choice for me, I proposed. But Moonie said no, she didn’t ever want to be a wife. I lost my temper, I began to speak angrily in English—in the restaurant people looked our way. “You mean, my wife!” “E di chi altro potrei essere?” she replied. Whose could I ever be anyway?
That was that, the last time I attempted to make things “right.” Consequently, we live on together in this unmarried state, and I continue to be stunned at the thought of whom my dutiful companion is and was and how she came to be with me. You would think I would have gotten over that by now, but I seem unable, or unwilling, to do so. So long as no one here knows our story, I am able to control the remorse and the shame.
However, to stifle the sense I have that I am living someone else’s life is beyond me. I was supposed to be elsewhere and otherwise. This is not the life I worked and planned for! Was made for! Outwardly, to be sure, I am as respectable in my dress and manner as I was when I began adult life as an earnest young academic in Chicago in the fifties. I certainly appear to have no traffic with the unlikely or the unusual. Under a pseudonym, I write and publish short stories, somewhat more my own by now than Katherine Mansfield’s, but still strongly marked by irony and indirection. To my surprise, reading through the magazines at the USIS library one afternoon recently, I came upon an article in an American literary journal, in which “I” am mentioned in the same breath with some rather famous writers as one whose literary and social concerns are currently out of date. I had not realized I had ever become so well known as now to be irrelevant. How can I be certain of anything from here, either the state of my pseudonymous reputation or my real one? I also teach English and American literature at a university in the city, to students more docile and respectful than any I have ever had to face. The U. of C. was never like this. I pick up a little extra cash, very little, by reading American novels for an Italian publishing house and telling them what I think; in this way I have been able to keep abreast of the latest developments in fiction. And I don’t have migraines any more. I outgrew them some twenty years before the neurologist said I might—make of that what you wish…On the other hand, I need only contemplate a visit to my aging and ailing father in New Jersey, I have only to pass the American airline offices on the Via ——, for my heart to go galloping off on its own and the strength to flow out of my limbs. A minute’s serious thought to being reunited with those who used to love me, or simply knew me, and I am panic-stricken…The panic of the escaped convict who imagines the authorities have picked up his scent—only I am the authority as well as the escapee. For I do want to go home. If only I had the wherewithal to extradite myself! The longer I remain in hiding like this, the more I allow the legend of my villainy to harden. And how do I even know from here that such a legend exists any longer outside my imagination? Or that it ever did? The America I glimpse on the TV and read about once a month in the periodicals at the USIS library does not strike me as a place where people worry very much any more about who is sleeping with whom. Who cares any longer that this twenty-four-year-old woman was once my own stepdaughter? Who cares that I took her virginity at sixteen and “inadvertently” fondled her at twelve? Who back there even remembers the late Lydia Zuckerman or the circumstances surrounding her suicide and my departure in 1962? From what I read it would appear that in post-Oswald America a man with my sort of record can go about his business without attracting very much attention. Even Ketterer could cause us no harm, I would think, now that his daughter is no longer a minor; not that after we ran off he felt much of anything anyway, except perhaps relief at no longer having to fork over the twenty-five bucks a week that the court had ordered him to pay us for Moonie’s support.
I know then what I must do. I know what must be done. I do know! Either I must bring myself to leave Moonie (and by this action, rid myself of all the confusion that her nearness keeps alive in me); either I must leave her, making it clear to her beforehand that there is another man somewhere in this wo
rld with whom she not only could survive, but with whom she might be a gayer, more lighthearted person—I must convince her that when I go she will not be left to dwindle away, but will have (as she will) half a hundred suitors within the year, as many serious men to court a sweet and statuesque young woman like herself as there are frivolous ones who follow after her here in the streets, hissing and kissing at the air, Italians imagining she is Scandinavian and wild—either I must leave Moonie, and now (even if for the time being it is only to move across the river, and from there to look after her like a father who dwells in the same city, instead of the lover who lies beside her in bed and to whose body she clings in her sleep), either that, or return with her to America, where we will live, we two lovers, like anybody else—like everybody else, if I am to believe what they write about “the sexual revolution” in the newsmagazines of my native land.
