The Anatomy Lesson

by Philip Roth

  From the cemetery they went back to their cousin Essie’s apartment, across the hall from their mother’s, to receive and feed the mourners. Some of the women asked Henry if they might have his eulogy. He promised to oblige as soon as he got back to his office, where his receptionist would make photocopies and mail them off. “He’s the dentist,” Zuckerman overheard one of the widows saying, “and he writes better than the writer.” Zuckerman learned from several of her friends how his mother taught the widowers to fold their laundry when they took it out of the dryer. A vigorous-looking man with a white fringe of hair and a tanned face came over to shake his hand. “Maltz is my name—sorry about your mother.” “Thank you.” “You left New York when?” “Yesterday morning.” “How was the weather? Very cold?” “Not too bad.” “I should never have come here,” Maltz said. TB stay till the lease runs out. Two more years. If I live, I’ll be eighty-five. Then Igo home. I have fourteen grandchildren in north Jersey. Somebody’1Ilake me in.” While Mr. Maltz spoke, a woman wearing dark glasses stood to the side and listened. Zuckerman wasn’t sure if she could see, though she appeared to be by herself. He said, “I’m Nathan, how do you do?” “Oh, I know who you are. Your mother talked about you all the time.” “Did she?” “I told her, ‘Next time he comes, Selma, bring him around—Icould give him plenty of stories to write.’ My brother owns a nursing home in Lake wood, New Jersey, and the things he sees you could make a book out of. If somebody wrote it, it might do the world some good.” “What does he see?” Zuckerman asked. “What doesn’t he see. An old lady there sits by the door, by the entrance to the home, all day long. When he asks her what she’s doing, she says, ‘I’m waiting for my son.’ Next time the son visits, my brother says to him, ‘Your mother sits by the door waiting for you every day. Why don’t you come to visit her a little more often?’ And you know what he says? I don’t even have to tell you what he says. He says, ‘Do you know what the traffic is like getting over to Jersey from Brooklyn?’”

  They stayed for hours. They talked to him, to Henry, to each other, and though nobody asked for a drink, they ate up most of the food, and Zuckerman thought, No, it can’t be easy on these people down here when somebody in the building dies—everybody wonders if he’s going to be next. And somebody is.

  Henry flew back with the children to New Jersey and his patients, leaving Carol behind with Nathan to go through the apartment and decide what to give away to the Jewish charities—Carol, so that there’d be no fights. She never fought with anyone—“the sweetest disposition in the world,” by the in-laws’ reports. She was a peppy, youthful thirty-four, a girlishly pretty woman who cut her hair short and fancied woolen knee socks and about whom Zuckerman could say very little more, though she’d been his brother’s wife for almost fifteen years. She always pretended when he was around to know nothing, to have read nothing, to have no thoughts on any subject; if he was in the same room, she wouldn’t even dare to recount an anecdote, though Zuckerman often heard from his mother how “thoroughly delightful” she could be when she and Henry entertained the family. But Carol herself, in order to reveal nothing he could criticize or ridicule, revealed to him nothing at all. All he knew for sure about Carol was that she didn’t want to wind up in a book.

  They emptied the two shallow drawers at the top of his mother’s dresser and spread her little boxes between them on the dining table. They opened them one at a time. Carol offered Nathan a ring bearing a tag that read “Grandma Shechner’s wedding band.” He remembered from childhood how it had astounded him to hear of her taking it from her mother’s finger moments after she had died: his mother had touched a corpse and then come home and made their dinner. “You keep it,” said Nathan—”the jewelry should go to the girls someday. Or to Leslie’s wife.” Carol smiled—Leslie, her son, was ten. “But you must have something of hers,” she pleaded. “It isn’t right. our taking it all.” She didn’t know what he had already—the white piece of paper with the word “HOLOCAUST” on it. “I didn’t want to throw it away,” the neurologist had said to him; “not until you’d seen it.” Nathan had thanked him and put it in his wallet; now he couldn’t throw it away.

  In one of the boxes Carol came upon the round gold pin his mother had received for being president of the PTA back when he and Henry were in grade school: on the face, the name of their school engraved above a flowering tree; on the reverse side the inscription “Selma Zuckerman, 1944-45.” I’d be better off, he thought, carrying that around in my wallet. He told Carol to take it for Henry, however. In his eulogy, Henry had gone on for nearly a page about her PTA presidency and what a proud child that had made him.

  Opening a tortoiseshell box Zuckerman found a stack of knitting instructions. The handwriting was hers, so were the precision and the practical thinking, “1 ROW SC ALL AROUND, HELD IN TO KEEP FLAT… FRONT SAME AS BACK UP TO ARMHOLE… SLEEVE 46 STS K 2 P 2 FOR 2 ½ / ADD 1 ST EACH END EVERY 5 ROWS…” Each sheet of instructions was folded in half and bore on the outside the name of the grandchild, the niece, the nephew, the daughter-in-law for whom she was preparing her gift. He read the names of each of his wives in his mother’s writing. “Vest for Betsy.” “Raglan cardigan—Virginia.” “Laura’s navy sweater.” “Suppose I take this,” Zuckerman said. He tied the bundle with a five-inch snippet of pinkish-white yarn that he found at the bottom of the tortoiseshell box—a sample, he thought, to be matched up at the yarn shop for some project being planned only the day before yesterday. There was a snapshot at the bottom of the box, a picture of himself. Severe unsmiling face, dark low hairline, clean polo shirt, khaki Bermudas, white sweat socks, suitably dirtied white tennis sneakers, and clutched in his hand, a Modem Library Giant. His tall skinny frame looked to him tense with impatience for the whole enormously unknown future. On the back of the snapshot his mother had written, “N., Labor Day 1949. On his way to college.” It had been taken on the rear lawn of the Newark house by his father. He remembered the brand-new Brownie box camera and how his father was absolutely certain that the sun was supposed to shine into the camera. He remembered the Modern Library Giant: Das Kapital.

  He waited for Carol to say it: “And this is the woman the world will remember as Mrs. Carnovsky, this woman who adored you.” But having seen how his mother had identified the picture, she made no accusations. All she did was put one hand over her eyes as though the radiance off the bay was momentarily too much. She’d been up all night too, Nathan realized, helping Henry compose his seventeen pages. Perhaps she’d written them. She was supposed to have written wonderfully exhaustive letters to her in-laws, itemizing all she and Henry had seen and eaten when they were off on their vacation trips. She read prodigiously too, and not the books he might have imagined from the mask of innocuous niceness that she invariably showed him. Once, while using the upstairs phone in South Orange, Zuckerman had gone through the pile of books on the table at her side of the bed: a note-covered pad thrust into the second volume of a history of the Crusades, a heavily underlined paperback copy of Huizinga on the Middle Ages, and at least six books on Charlemagne borrowed from the Seton Hall University library, historical works written in French. Back in 1964, when Henry drove to Manhattan and stayed up all night in Nathan’s apartment trying to decide whether he had the right to leave Carol and the children for the patient with whom he was then having an affair, he had positively rhapsodized over her “brilliance,” calling her, in an exceptional outburst of lyricism, “my brain, my eyes, my understanding.” When they were traveling abroad on Henry’s vacation, her fluent French enabled them to see everything, go everywhere, to have a really wonderful time; when he’d made his First small investments, Carol had read up on stocks and bonds and given him more good practical advice than the guy at Merrill Lynch; her backyard full of flowers, a spectacular success written up and photographed for the local weekly, had been planted only after a winter of patient planning on graph paper and studying landscape gardening books. Henry spoke movingly of the strength she’d give
n her parents when her twin brother died of meningitis in his second year of law school. “If only she’d gone on for her Ph.D.” He said this mournfully a dozen times. “She was made for a Ph.D.”—as though, had the wife as well as her husband (had the wife Instead of the husband) proceeded after their early student marriage to do three years of post-graduate work, Henry would somehow be free to disregard the claims of loyalty, habit, duty, and conscience—and his forebodings of social censure and eternal doom—and run away with the mistress whose brilliance seemed to reside largely in her sexual allure.

  Zuckerman waited for Carol to look up at him and say, “This woman, this touching, harmless woman who saved this picture in this box, who wrote ‘N. ON HIS WAY TO COLLEGE,’ that was her reward.” But Carol, who after all these years had still not spoken with Nathan, in English or French, about her brother’s tragic death, or the waning of the Middle Ages, or stocks, or bonds, or landscape gardening, was not about to open her heart about his shortcomings as a son. not to a trigger-happy novelist like him. But then Carol, as everyone knew, wouldn’t fight with anyone, which was why Henry had left her behind to settle the touchy business of who should take home what from their mother’s dresser. Perhaps Henry had also left her behind because of the touchier business of the mistress—either another mistress, or maybe stilt the same one—whom he could more readily arrange to see with a wife away in Florida a few more days. It had been an exemplary eulogy, deserving all of the praise it received—nor did Zuckerman mean to cast doubt upon the sincerity of his brother’s grief; still, Henry was only human, however heroically he tried not to show it. Indeed, a son of Henry’s filial devotion might even find in the hollow aftermath of such a sudden loss the need for dizzying, obliterating raptures categorically beyond the means of any wife, with or without a Ph.D.

  Two hours later Zuckerman was out the door with his overnight bag and his knitting instructions. In his free hand he carried a cardboard-covered book about the size of the school composition books he used for taking notes. Carol had found it at the bottom of the lingerie drawer under some boxes of winter gloves still in their original store wrappings. Reproduced on the cover was a pinkish pastel drawing of a sleeping infant, angelically blond and endowed with regulation ringlets, lashes, and globular cheeks; an empty bottle lay to the side of the billowing coverlet, and one of the infant’s little fists rested half open beside its cherry-red tiny bow lips. The book was called Your Baby’s Care. Printed near the bottom of the cover was the name of the hospital where he’d been born. Your Baby’s Care must have been presented to her in her room shortly after his delivery. Use had weakened the binding and she had fastened the covers back together with transparent tape—two old strips of tape that had gone brownish-yellow over the decades and that cracked at the spine when Zuckerman opened the book and saw on the reverse of the cover the footprint he’d left there in the first week of life. On the first page, in her symmetrical handwriting, his mother had recorded the details of his birth—day, hour, name of parents and attending physician; on the next page, beneath the title “Notes on Development of the Baby,” was recorded his weekly weight throughout his first year, then the day he held up his head, the day he sat up, crept, stood alone, spoke his first word, walked, and cut his first and second teeth. Then the contents—a hundred pages of “rules” for raising and training a newborn child. “Baby care is a great art,” the new mother was told; “… these rules have resulted from the experience of physicians over many years …” Zuckerman put his suitcase on the floor of the elevator and began to turn the pages. “Let the baby sleep in the sun all morning … To weigh the baby, undress him completely … After the bath, dry him gently with soft, warm towels, patting the skin gently… The best stockings for a baby are cotton … There are two kinds of croup… The morning is the best time for play …”

  The elevator stopped, the door opened, but Zuckerman’s attention was fixed on a small colorless blot halfway down the page headed “Feeding.” “It is important that each breast be emptied completely every 24 hours in order to keep up the supply of milk. To empty the breast by hand …”

  His mother’s milk had stained the page. He had no hard evidence to prove it, but then he was not an archaeologist presenting a paper: he was the son who had learned to live on her body, and that body was now in a box underground, and he didn’t need hard evidence. If he who had spoken his first word in her presence on March 3, 1934—and his last word on the phone to her the previous Sunday—if he should choose to believe that a drop of her milk had fallen just there while she followed the paragraph instructing a young mother in how to empty her breasts, what was to stop him? Closing his eyes, he put his tongue to the page, and when he opened them again saw that he was being watched through the elevator door by an emaciated old woman across the lobby, leaning in exhaustion on her aluminum walker. Well, if she knew what she’d just seen she could now tell everyone in the building that she’d seen everything.

  In the lobby there was a sign up for an Israel Bond Rally at a Bal Harbour Hotel, and hanging beside it a crayoned notice, now out of date, for a Hanukkah festival party in the condominium lobby sponsored by the building’s Social Committee. He passed the bank of mailboxes and then came back and looked for hers. “ZUCKERMAN S. / 414.” He set down his suitcase, placed the baby book beside it, and touched the raised letters of the nameplate with his fingers. When World War I began, she was ten. When it ended, she was fourteen. When the stock market crashed, she was twenty-five. She was twenty-nine when I was born and thirty-seven on December 7, 1941. When Eisenhower invaded Europe, she was just my age… But none of this answered the cradle-question of where Mama had gone.

  The day before, Henry had left instructions for the post office to forward her mail to South Orange. There was a plain white envelope, however, down in the box, probably a condolence note dropped through the slot by a neighbor that morning. In his jacket pocket Nathan had her extra set of house keys; one of her little tags was still attached, labeling them “Extra set of house keys.” With the tiniest of the keys he opened the box. The envelope was not addressed. Inside was a pale green index card on which someone who preferred remaining anonymous had printed with a fountain pen

  MAY YOUR MOTHER SUCK

  COCKS IN HELL—

  AND YOU SOON

  JOIN HER!

  YOU DESERVE IT.

  ONE OF YOUR

  MANY FOES

  In hell no less. An act she never even committed on earth, you stupid son of a bitch. Who’d written him this? The fastest way to find out was to go back upstairs and ask Esther. She knew everybody’s business. She also had no aversion to reprisals; her success in life was founded on them. They’d check together through the building directory until Essie had figured out who it was, who living in which apartment, then he’d walk over to Meyer Lansky’s hotel to find out from the bell captain who could be hired to do a little job. Why not that for a change, instead of flying back to New York to file the green index card under “Mother’s Death”? You could not be a nothing writer fellow forever, doing nothing with the strongest feelings but turning them over to characters to deal with in books. It’d be worth a couple thousand to have the ten fingers that wrote those twenty words smashed beneath some moron’s boot. You could probably do it down here on your Diners Club card.

  Only whose maimed fingers would they turn out to be? What would the comedy come up with this time—one of the widowers she’d taught how to fold laundry, or the old guy tottering around the parking lot who’d waved to Zuckerman up by the window while he was watering her plants?

  A nothing fellow, he flew home to his files. A nasty, nothing fellow, surreptitiously vindictive, covertly malicious, who behind the mask of fiction had punished his adoring mother for no reason. True or false? In a school debate, he could have argued persuasively for either proposition.

  * * *

  Gone. Mother, father, brother, birthplace, subject, health, hair—according to the critic Milton Appel, his tale
nt too. According to Appel, there hadn’t been much talent to lose. In Inquiry, the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteen years earlier had published Zuckerman’s first stories, Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn’t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.

  Zuckerman didn’t know Appel. They’d met only twice—one August out in the Springs on Long Island, strolling by each other at the Barnes Hole beach, then briefly at a big college arts festival where each was sitting on a different panel. These meetings came some years after Appel’s review of Zuckerman’s first book had appeared in the Sunday Times. That review had thrilled him. In the Times in 1959. the twenty-six-year-old author had looked to Appel like a wunderkind, the stories in Higher Education “fresh, authoritative, exact”—for Appel, almost too pointed in their portraiture of American Jews clamoring to enter Pig Heaven: because the world Zuckerman knew still remained insufficiently transformed by the young writer’s imagination, the book, for all its freshness, seemed to Appel more like social documentation, finally, than a work of art.

  Fourteen years on, following the success of Carnovsky, Appel reconsidered what he called Zuckerman’s “case”: now the Jews represented in Higher Education had been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy and the tenets of realistic fiction. Except for a single readable story, that First collection was tendentious junk, the by-product of a pervasive and unfocused hostility. The three books that followed had nothing to redeem them at all—mean, joyless, patronizing little novels, contemptuously dismissive of the complex depths. No Jews like Zuckerman’s had ever existed other than as caricature; as literature that could interest grown people, none of the books could be said to exist at all, but were contrived as a species of sub-literature for the newly “liberated” middle class, for an “audience,” as distinguished from serious readers. Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite, Zuckerman was certainly no friend of the Jews: Carnovsky’s ugly animus proved that.