The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  “Look at you, the carriage of Caesar’s wife, and the morals of a high school harlot who pulls down her pants for the football team.”

  “I have my diversions, Spenser, and you have yours.”

  “Diversions? I happen to be the patron and the patriarch of a great American metropolis. I have made Tri-City into the Florence of America. I am a financier, a sportsman, and a patron of the arts. I endow museums. I build libraries. My baseball team is an inspiration to the youth and the men of the U.S.A. I could have been the Governor of this state, Angela. Some say I could have been the President of the country, if only I did not have as my wife a woman whose name is scribbled on locker room walls.”

  “You diminish my accomplishments, Spenser, though, I must say, you certainly do justice to your own.”

  “Babe Ruth,” he said contemptuously.

  “Yes, Babe Ruth.”

  “What do you do after you make love to Babe Ruth? Discuss international affairs? Or Benvenuto Cellini?”

  “We eat hot dogs and drink pop.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “Don’t,” said Angela Whittling Trust.

  “A woman,” he said bitterly, “with your aristocratic profile.”

  “A woman does not live by her profile alone, my dear.”

  “Oh? And in what ways is a baseball player able to gratify you that a billionaire is not?” He was a fit and handsome man, with no more doubt of his prowess in sex than in banking. “I’d be interested to learn wherein Babe Ruth is more of a man than Spenser Trust.”

  “But he isn’t more of a man, darling. He’s more of a boy. That’s the whole point.”

  “And that is irresistible to you, is it?”

  “To me,” said his wife, “and about a hundred million other American citizens as well.”

  “You gum-chewing, star-struck adolescent! Hear me now, Angela: if at the age of sixty-one you should now take it into your selfish, spoiled head to sirenize a Tri-City Tycoon—”

  “I assured you long ago that I would not cuckold you with any of your players. I realize by what a slender thread your authority, as it were, hangs.”

  “Because I am not running a stud farm for aged nymphomaniacs!”

  “I understand what you are running. It is something more on the order of a money-making machine.”

  “Call it what you will. They are the most accomplished team in Organized Baseball, and they are not to be tampered with by a bored and reckless bitch who is utterly without regard for the rules of civilized life. A fastball pitcher’s floozie! Whore to whomever hits the longest home run! That’s all you are, Angela—a stadium slut!”

  “Or slit, as the players so neatly put it. No, it wouldn’t do for the Governor of the state to be married to a slit instead of a lady, would it, Spenser? And whoever heard of the President being married to a wayward woman? It isn’t done that way in America, is it, my patron and patriarch?”

  “To think, you have kept me from the White House just for the sake of debauching yourself with baseball stars.”

  “To think,” replied his wife, “you would keep me from debauching myself with baseball stars, just for the sake of getting into the White House.”

  That winter, while Angela waited in dread for the news that Gil Gamesh was dead (if not beaten to a pulp like his father before him, stomped to death by Tierra del Fuegans whom he had insulted in some poolroom somewhere, then dead by his own wrathful hand), her own husband was fatally injured in a train wreck. His broken body was removed from the private car that had been speeding him to Chicago for a meeting with Judge Landis, and Angela was summoned to the hospital to bid him farewell. When she arrived she found his bed surrounded by his lawyers, whom he had called together to be sure that the dynasty was in order before he took his leave of it; all fifteen attorneys were in tears when they left the room. Then the Tri-City Tycoons were called in. The regulars, like eight sons, stood on one side of the bed, the pitching staff lined up on the other, and the remaining players gathered together at his feet, which he himself could no longer feel; they had come in uniform to say goodbye. Hospital regulations had made it necessary for them to remove their spikes in the corridor, but once inside his room, they had donned them again and crossed the floor to the dying owner’s bedside with that clackety-clack-clack that had always been music to his ears.

  Angela stood alone by the window, hers the only dry eyes in the room. Dry, and burning with hatred, for Spenser had just announced that he had passed the ownership of the club on to his wife.

  The players moved up to say farewell, in the order in which they batted. He grasped their powerful hands with the little strength that remained in his own, and when he spoke his last words to each of them, they had virtually to put their ears to his lips to understand what he was saying. He was fading quickly now.

  “Lay off the low ones, Tom, you’re golfin’ ’em.”

  “I will, Mr. Trust, I will—s’long, Mr. Trust…”

  “Mike, your ass is in the dugout on those curveballs. Stand strong in there, big fella.”

  “Yes, sir. Always, sir … See ya’, sir…”

  “If I had a son, Tuck, I’d have wanted him to be able to pinch-hit like you.”

  “Oh, jeez, Mr. Trust, I won’t forget that, ever…”

  “Victor—Victor, what can I say, lad? If it’s 3 and 0, and he lays it in there, suit yourself.”

  “I will, Boss, I will. Oh thank you, Mr. Trust.”

  “Just make sure it’s in there. No bad pitches.”

  “No, never, sir, never…”

  Finally there was just his wife and himself.

  She had never despised him more. “And me, Spenser?” she asked, shaking with rage at the thought of all he had burdened her with. “Just what am I supposed to do with your wonderful team?”

  He beckoned for her to come around to the side of his pillow. In one of his bandaged hands, it turned out, he was clutching a baseball. With a final effort of his patriarchal will, he tossed it to her. “Learn to be a responsible human being, Angela,” and with that, the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Massachusetts closed his eyes and passed into oblivion.

  * * *

  … Now, to the Roland Agni who would woo her with his swing and his follow-through, Angela Trust said, “For your information, Agni, I had you scouted when you were eleven years old. What do you think of that?” Nothing wistful in her voice, nothing flirtatious or lascivious, much as he reminded her of the Loner who had been the love of her life; no, remembering what she had been, she remembered who she was—a responsible human being.

  Yes, a decade earlier Spenser had died, leaving her holding the ball, and the ball had been her salvation.

  “You did?” Agni said.

  “I have a dossier on you going back to the fifth grade. I have photographs of you at bat against your uncle Art on a family picnic in the year 1936, him in his shirtsleeves and mustache, and you in overalls and sneakers.”

  “You do?”

  “Young man, the day you graduated from high school, who was the first on line to offer you a contract? That was no ‘hunch’ on my part, I wasn’t just hopping on the bandwagon like the rest of my colleagues. I had arrived at my decision about you when you were still playing in that vacant lot at the corner of Chestnut and Summit.”

  “You had?”

  “But you and your dad went with the Mundys instead. Well, so be it. Life must go on. I have reports on my desk right now of six-year-old boys, little tykes who still won’t even go to sleep with the light off, who nonetheless have the makings of big leaguers. They’re my concern now, not you.”

  “But—”

  “But what? Win the pennant? I’d give my eyeteeth for that flag. If any Tycoon team ever deserved it, it’s these stars of a decade ago, who have come out of retirement so as to keep us all above water during these terrible years. Sure they need help right now. But there are the Mundys to think of, too.”

  “But the Mundys are fifty games out of first!
They’re finishing the lowest last in history!”

  “And without you, they would not finish at all.”

  “So what! They don’t deserve to finish! And they don’t deserve me! Mrs. Trust, I am a Tycoon dressed up in a Mundy baseball suit, and that’s the truth! Ya’ have to trade for me, Mrs. Trust—ya’ gotta!”

  “And win the flag in a seven-team league? You are all that makes the Mundys major league. I tremble to think of them without you.”

  “I tremble thinkin’ of them with me! Now we even got Ockatur! The dwarf who blinded Yamm! And Nickname Damur, who crippled that beautiful girl! It’s like livin’ with criminals—and all I want to do is just play ball!” And here, seated beneath Mike Mazda’s forty-two-ounce bat, the .370 hitter fell to weeping.

  “Roland,” she said, unable to bear the sight of him in tears, “I’m going to tell you something now that’s going to astound you. Stop crying, Roland, and listen carefully to what I have to say.”

  “You’re tradin’ for me!” he shouted triumphantly.

  “Listen to me, I said. You may not understand this, it may well be beyond you—God knows, it’s beyond older and more worldly men than yourself—but the fact is this: there is nothing that the enemies of this country would like better than for Angela Whittling Trust to buy Roland Agni from the Ruppert Mundys.”

  “The who?”

  “The enemies of America. Those who want to see this nation destroyed.”

  “And if you buy me, they’ll like it?”

  “If I buy you, they will adore it.”

  “But—”

  “But why? But how? Believe me, I do not talk tommyrot. I do not have the largest army of baseball scouts in America in my employ for nothing. It isn’t just about exceptional young athletes that my scouts keep me informed. They live close to the people. In many cases they are not even suspected of being Tycoon scouts at all, but appear to their friends and neighbors to be ordinary townsfolk like themselves. As a result, I know what goes on in this country. Not even the Federal Bureau of Investigation knows what I do, until I tell them.”

  “But—but why me? I don’t get it, Mrs. Trust. Why does Hitler—”

  “Hitler? Who mentioned that madman? Oh no, Roland, we are dealing with an enemy far more cunning and insidious than that deluded psychopath out to conquer the world with bombs and bullets. No, even while this war rages on against the Germans and the Japs, the other war against us has already begun, the invisible war, the silent assault upon the very fabric that holds us together as a nation. You look puzzled. What does hold this nation together, Roland? The stars and the stripes? Is that what men talk about over a beer, how much they love Old Glory? On the streetcars, on the trains, on the jitneys, what does one American say to another, to strike up a conversation, ‘O say can you see by the dawn’s early light?’ No! He says, ‘Hey, how’d the Tycoons do today?’ He says, ‘Hey, did Mazda get himself another homer?’ Now, Roland, now do you remember what it is that links in brotherhood millions upon millions of American men, makes kin of competitors, makes neighbors of strangers, makes friends of enemies, if only while the game is going on? Baseball! And that is how they propose to destroy America, young man, that is their evil and ingenious plan—to destroy our national game!”

  “But—but how? How can they do a thing like that?”

  “By making it a joke! By making it a laughingstock! They are planning to laugh us into the grave!”

  “But—who is?”

  “The Reds,” said Mrs. Trust, studying his reaction.

  “Aww, but they’re finishin’ in the money, Mrs. Trust, back a’ the Cards. I don’t get it. What’s their kick?”

  “No, no, not Cincinnati, my boy. If only it were … No, it’s not Bill McKechnie’s boys we’re up against this year, but General Joe Stalin’s. The Russian Reds, Roland. From Stalin-to-Lenin-to-Marx.”

  “Well, I’m sure glad to hear it don’t involve Johnny Vander Meer. That’d be like Shoeless Joe again.”

  He could not understand—but then could General Oakhart? Could Kenesaw Mountain Landis? “Roland, it may sound outlandish and far-fetched to you, and yet, I assure you, it is true. In order to destroy America, the Communists in Russia and their agents around the world are going to attempt to destroy the major leagues. They have selected as their target the weakest link in the majors—our league. And the weakest link within our league—the Mundys. Roland, why do you think the Mundys are homeless? Whose idea do you think that was?”

  “Well … the Mundy brothers … no?”

  “The Mundy brothers are only pawns. Not even fellow travelers—just stupid pawns, who can be manipulated for a few hundred thousand dollars without their even knowing it. Much as I despise those playboys, the fact remains that the plan to send the Mundys on the road while the U.S. government takes over the stadium in Port Ruppert was not hatched in the Mundy front office. It began in our own War Department. Do you understand the implications of what I have just said?”

  “Well, I don’t know … for sure.”

  “The plan was conceived in our own War Department. In other words, there are Communists in the War Department of the United States government. There are Communists in the State Department.”

  “Gee, there are?”

  “Roland, there are even Communists in the Patriot League itself … right … this … minute!”

  “There are?”

  “The owner of the Kakoola Reapers, to name but one.”

  “Mr. Mazuma?”

  “Yes, Mr. ‘Mazuma,’ as you call him, is a Communist spy.”

  “But—”

  “Roland, who else is making such a mockery of baseball? Who else so mocks and shames the free enterprise system? Yes, through the person of our friend, Mr. Frank Mazuma, they are going to turn the people, not only against the national game, but simultaneously against the profit system itself. Midgets! Horse races! And he’ll have colored on that team soon enough, just wait and see. I’ve had him under surveillance now since the day he came into the league, I know every move he makes before he makes it. Colored, Roland, colored major league players! And that is only the beginning. Only wait until Hitler is defeated. Only wait until the international Communist conspiracy can invade every nook and cranny of our national life. They will do to every sacred American institution, to everything we hold dear, just what Mazuma has done to the integrity and honor of our league. They will make a travesty of it! Our own people will grow ashamed and bewildered as everything they once lived by is reduced to the level of a joke. And in our ridiculousness, our friends and our neighbors, those who have looked to us as a model and an inspiration, will come to despise us. And all this the Communists will have accomplished without even dropping a bomb or firing a bullet. They will have Frank Mazumas everywhere, they will do to General Motors and to U.S. Steel just what they have done to us—turn those great corporations into cartoons out of a Russian newspaper! They’ve given up on the idea of taking over the working class, Roland—that didn’t work, so now they are going to take over the free enterprise system itself. How? By installing spies as presidents of great companies, and saboteurs as chairmen of the board! Mark my word, the day will come when in the guise of an American capitalist, a friend of Big Business and a member of the Republican Party, a Communist will run for President of the United States. And if he is elected, he will ring down the curtain on the American tragedy—a tragedy because it will have been made into a farce! And when that terrible day comes, Roland, when a President Mazuma is installed in the White House, they won’t need a Red Army marching down Trust Street to blow up the Industrial and Maritime Exchange; the poor bewildered American people will do it themselves … But then they won’t be Americans by then, no, no, not as you and I know them. No, when baseball goes, Roland, you can kiss America goodbye. Try to imagine it, Roland, an American summer Sunday without doubleheaders, an American October without the World Series, March in America without spring training. No, they can call it America, but it’ll be so
mething very different by then. Roland, once the Communists have made a joke of the majors, the rest will fall like so many dominoes.

  “You don’t believe me, do you? Well, neither do the men at the top of the leagues—‘Angela, you’re blaming the Communists for what you people have brought upon yourselves. You’ve let the league go to pot, and now you are paying the price with playboys like the Mundys, and clowns like Mazuma, and undesirables like the little Jew.’ But, Roland, who is the little Jew? Now, I have no final proof as yet, this is still only conjecture, but it all fits together too neatly to be dismissed out of hand. The Jew who bought the Greenbacks in 1933, this seemingly comical little fellow in his dark suit and hat, this foreigner with an accent who plunged what we believed to be his life’s earnings into those scandal-ridden Greenbacks, is a Communist agent too. Yes, taking his orders from Moscow—and his money! But tell this to Frick, or Harridge, or Oakhart, or even Judge Landis. Behind my back, they call me a fanatic, a bitter old woman who has lost her looks and her lovers and now has nothing better to do than cause them trouble. But I have not ‘lost’ anything—I have only fulfilled the request my husband made of me on his deathbed. ‘Become a responsible human being,’ he told me. I hated him for saying that, Roland. In my selfish womanish ignorance, I did not even know the meaning of the words. I wanted poetry, passion, romance, adventure. Well, let me tell you, there is more poetry and passion and romance and adventure in being a responsible human being than in all the boudoirs in France! And I do not intend to be irresponsible ever again!”

  “In other words,” said Agni, tears once more welling up in his eyes now that he saw that she was finished, “in other words, on account of your husband and what he said and so on, and all that other stuff you just said, I am stuck with the Mundys for the rest of my life!”

  “Would you prefer to be ‘stuck’ with Communism, you stupid boy? Would you rather that you and your children and your children’s children be ‘stuck’ with atheistical totalitarian Communism till the end of time?”