Zuckerman Unbound

by Philip Roth

  Rochelle had to ask the caller several times to make himself more intelligible. Zuckerman, silently listening, couldn’t understand him either. The Italian in pursuit of his interview? The Rollmops King hungry for his commercial? A man trying to speak like an animal, or an animal trying to speak like a man? Hard to tell.

  “Again, please,” said Rochelle.

  In touch with Zuckerman. Urgent. Put him on.

  Rochelle asked him to leave a name and number.

  Put him on.

  Again she asked for a name and the connection was broken.

  Zuckerman spoke up. “Hello, I’m on the line. What was that all about?”

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Zuckerman.”

  “What was that? Do you have any idea?”

  “It could just be a pervert, Mr. Zuckerman. I wouldn’t worry.”

  She worked nights, she should know. “Don’t you think it was somebody trying to disguise his voice?”

  “Could be. Or on drugs. I wouldn’t worry, Mr. Zuckerman.”

  The mail.

  Eleven letters tonight—one from André’s West Coast office and ten (still pretty much the daily average) forwarded to him in a large envelope from his publisher. Of these, six were addressed to Nathan Zuckerman, three to Gilbert Carnovsky; one, sent in care of the publishing house, was addressed simply to “The Enemy of the Jews” and had been forwarded to him unopened. They were awfully smart down in that mailroom.

  The only letters at all tempting were those marked “Photo Do Not Bend,” and there was none in this batch. He had received five so far, the most intriguing still the first, from a young New Jersey secretary who had enclosed a color snapshot of herself, reclining in black underwear on her back lawn in Livingston, reading a novel by John Updike. An overturned tricycle in the corner of the picture seemed to belie the single status she claimed for herself in the attached curriculum vitae. However, investigation with his Compact Oxford English Dictionary magnifying glass revealed no sign on the body that it had borne a child, or the least little care in the world. Could it be that the owner of the tricycle had just happened to be pedaling by and dismounted in haste when summoned to snap the picture? Zuckerman studied the photograph on and off for the better part of a morning, before forwarding it to Massachusetts, along with a note asking if Updike would be good enough to reroute photographs of Zuckerman readers mistakenly sent to him.

  From André’s office a column clipped out of Variety, initialed by the West Coast secretary, whose admiration for his work led her to send Zuckerman items from the show-business press that he might otherwise miss. The latest was underlined in red. “… Independent Bob ‘Sleepy’ Lagoon paid close to a million for Nathan Zuckerman’s unfinished sequel to the smasheroo…”

  Oh, did he? What sequel? Who is Lagoon? Friend of Paté and Gibraltar? Why does she send me this stuff!

  “—unfinished sequel—”

  Oh, throw it away, laugh it off, you keep ducking when you should be smiling.

  Dear Gilbert Carnovsky :

  Forget about satisfaction. The question is not is Carnovsky happy, or even, does Carnovsky have the right to happiness? The question to ask yourself is this: Have I achieved all that could be done by me? A man must live independent of the barometer of happiness, or fail. A man must …

  Dear Mr. Zuckerman:

  Il faut laver son linge sale en famille!

  Dear Mr. Zuckerman:

  This letter is written in memory of those who suffered the horror of the Concentration Camps …

  Dear Mr. Zuckerman:

  It is hardly possible to write of Jews with more bile and contempt and hatred …

  The phone.

  He reached for it this time without thinking—the way he used to get on the bus and go out for his dinner and walk by himself through the park. “Lorelei!” he cried into the receiver. As if that would summon her forth, and all their wonderful Bank Street boredom. His life back under control. His reputable face toward the world.

  “Don’t hang up, Zuckerman. Don’t hang up unless you’re looking for bad trouble.”

  The character he’d overheard with Rochelle. The hoarse, high-pitched voice, with the vaguely imbecilic intonation. Sounded like some large barking animal, yes, like some up-and-coming seal who had broken into human speech. It was the speech, supposedly, of the thickheaded.

  “I have an important message for you, Zuckerman. You better listen carefully.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I want some of the money.”

  “Which money?”

  “Come off it. You’re Nathan Zuckerman, Zuckerman. Your money.”

  “Look, this isn’t entertaining, whoever you are. You can get in trouble like this, you know, even if the imitation is meant to be humorous. What is it you’re supposed to be, some punch-drunk palooka or Marlon Brando?” It was all getting much too ridiculous. Hang up. Say nothing more and hang up.

  But he couldn’t—not after he heard the voice saying, “Your mother lives at 1167 Silver Crescent Drive in Miami Beach. She lives in a condominium across the hall from your old cousin Essie and her husband, Mr. Metz, the bridge player. They live in 402, your mother lives in 401. A cleaning woman named Olivia comes in on Tuesdays. Friday nights your mother has dinner with Essie and her crowd at the Century Beach. Sunday mornings she goes to the Temple to help with the bazaar. Thursday afternoons there is her club. They sit by the pool and play canasta: Bea Wirth, Sylvia Adlerstein, Lily Sobol, Lily’s sister-in-law Flora, and your mother. Otherwise she is visiting your old man in the nursing home. If you don’t want her to disappear, you’ll listen to what I have to say, and you won’t waste time with cracks about my voice. This happens to be the voice that I was born with. Not everybody is perfect like you.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m a fan. I admit it, despite the insults. I’m an admirer, Zuckerman. I’m somebody who has been following your career for years now. I’ve been waiting for a long time for you to hit it big with the public. I knew it would happen one day. It had to. You have a real talent. You make things come alive for people. Though frankly I don’t think this is your best book.”

  “Oh, don’t you?”

  “Go ahead, put me down, but the depth isn’t there. Flash, yes; depth, no. This is something you had to write to make a new beginning. So it’s incomplete, it’s raw, it’s pyrotechnics. But I understand that. I even admire it. To try things a new way is the only way to grow. I see you growing enormously as a writer, if you don’t lose your guts.”

  “And you’ll grow with me, is that the idea?”

  The mirthless laugh of the stage villain. “Haw. Haw. Haw.”

  Zuckerman hung up. Should have as soon as he heard who it was and was not. More of what he simply must become inured to. Trivial, meaningless, only to be expected—he hadn’t, after all, written Tom Swift. Yes, Rochelle had the right idea. “Only some pervert, Mr. Zuckerman. I wouldn’t worry.”

  Yet he wondered if he shouldn’t dial the police. What was worrying was all that his caller had said about his mother in Florida. But since the Life cover story, and the attention she subsequently got from the Miami papers, details on Nathan Zuckerman’s mother were not so hard to come by, really, if you happened to be looking. She had herself successfully resisted all the determined efforts to flatter, beguile, and bully her into an “exclusive” interview; it was lonely Flora Sobol, Lily’s recently widowed sister-in-law, who’d been unable to hold out against the onslaught. Though afterward Flora insisted she had spoken with the newspaperwoman for only a few minutes on the phone, a half-page article had nonetheless appeared in the weekend amusement section of the Miami Herald, under the title, “I Play Canasta with Carnovsky’s Mother.” Accompanying the article, a picture of lonely, pretty, aging Flora and her two Pekinese.

  * * *

  Some six weeks before publication—when he could begin to see the size of the success that was coming, and had intimations that the Hallelujah Chorus might not be entirely a
pleasure from beginning to end—Zuckerman had flown down to Miami to prepare his mother for the reporters. As a result of what he told her over dinner, she was unable to get to sleep that night and had to cross the hall to Essie’s apartment finally and ask if she could come in for a tranquilizer and a serious talk.

  I am very proud of my son and that’s all I have to say. Thank you so much and goodbye.

  This was the line that she might be wisest to take when the journalists began phoning her. Of course, if she didn’t mind the personal publicity, if she wanted her name in the papers—

  “Darling, it’s me you’re talking to, not Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Whereupon, over their seafood dinner, he pretended that he was a newspaper reporter who had nothing better to do than call her up to ask about Nathan’s toilet training. She in turn had to pretend that some such thing was going to be happening every day once his new novel appeared in the bookstores.

  “‘But what about being Carnovsky’s mother? Let’s face it, Mrs. Zuckerman, this is who you are now.’”

  “‘I have two fine sons I’m very proud of.’”

  “That’s good, Ma. If you want to put it that way, that’s all right. Though you don’t even have to say that much if you don’t want to. You can just laugh, if you like.”

  “In his face?”

  “No, no—no need to insult anyone. That wouldn’t be a good idea either. I mean, just lightly laugh it off. Or say nothing at all. Silence is fine, and most effective.”

  “All right.”

  “‘Mrs. Zuckerman?’”

  “‘Yes?’”

  “‘The whole world wants to know. They’ve read in your boy’s book all about Gilbert Carnovsky and his mother, and now they want to know from you, how does it feel to be so famous?’”

  “‘I couldn’t tell you. Thank you for your interest in my son.’”

  “Ma, good enough. But the point I’m making is that you can say goodbye any time. They never quit, these people, so all you have to do is say goodbye and hang up.”

  “‘Goodbye.’”

  “‘But wait a minute, not yet, please, Mrs. Zuckerman! I’ve got to come back with this assignment. I’ve got a new baby, a new house, I have bills to pay—a story about Nathan could mean a big raise.’”

  “‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll get one anyway.’”

  “Mother, that is excellent. Keep going.”

  “‘Thank you for calling. Goodbye.’”

  “‘Mrs. Zuckerman, just two minutes off the record?’”

  “‘Thank you, goodbye.’”

  “‘One minute. One line. Won’t you please, Mrs. Z., one little line for my article about your remarkable son?’”

  “‘Goodbye, goodbye now.’”

  “Ma, the truth is, you don’t even have to keep saying goodbye. That’s hard for a courteous person to understand. But by this time you could go ahead and hang up without feeling that you’ve slighted anyone.”

  Over dessert he put her through it again, just to be sure she was ready. Any wonder that by midnight she needed a Valium?

  He knew nothing about how disturbing a visit it had been until his last trip to Miami just three weeks ago. First they went to visit his father in the nursing home. Dr. Zuckerman could not really speak comprehensibly since the last stroke—just half-formed words and truncated syllables—and there were times when he didn’t know at first who she was. He looked at her and moved his mouth to say “Molly,” the name of his dead sister. That you could no longer tell just how much of anything he knew was what made her daily visits such hell. Nonetheless, she seemed that day to be looking better than she had in years, if not quite the curly-headed young madonna cuddling her somber first-born son in the 1935 seaside photograph framed on his father’s bed table, certainly not so done-in as to frighten you about her health. Ever since the trial of caring for his father had begun for her four years back—four years during which he wouldn’t let her out of his sight—she had been looking far less like the energetic and indomitable mother from whom Nathan had inherited the lively burnish of his eyes (and the mild comedy of his profile) than like his gaunt, silent, defeated grandmother, the spectral widow of the tyrannical shopkeeper, her father.

  When they got home, she had to lie down on the sofa with a cold cloth on her forehead.

  “You look better, though, Ma.”

  “It’s easier with him there. I hate to say it, Nathan. But I’m just beginning to feel a little like myself.” He had been in the nursing home now for some twelve weeks.

  “Of course it’s easier,” said her son. “That was the idea.”

  “Today was not a good day for him. I’m sorry you saw him like this.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “But he knew who you were, I’m sure.”

  Zuckerman wasn’t so sure, but said, “I know he did.”

  “I only wish he knew how wonderful you’re doing. All this success. But it’s really too much, dear, to explain in his condition.”

  “And it’s all right too if he doesn’t know. The best thing is to let him rest comfortably.”

  Here she lowered the cloth over her eyes. She was beginning to weep, and didn’t want him to see.

  “What is it, Ma?”

  “It’s that I’m so relieved, really, about you. I never told you, I kept it to myself, but the day you flew down to tell me all that was going to happen because of the book, I thought—well, I thought you were headed for a terrible fall. I thought maybe it was because you didn’t have Daddy now as somebody who was always there behind you—that you didn’t on your own know which way to turn. And then Mr. Metz”—the new husband of Dr. Zuckerman’s old cousin Essie—”he said it sounded to him like ‘delusions of grandeur.’ He doesn’t mean any harm, Mr. Metz—he goes every week to read Daddy ‘The News in Review’ from the Sunday paper. He’s a wonderful man, but that was his opinion. And then Essie started in. She said that all his life your daddy has had delusions of grandeur—that even when they were children together he wasn’t happy unless he was telling everybody how to live and butting in on what was none of his business. This is Essie, mind you, with that mouth she has on her. I said to her, ‘Essie, let’s leave your argument with Victor out of this. Since the man can’t even talk anymore to make himself understood, maybe that should put a stop to it.’ But what they said scared the daylights out of me, sweetheart. I thought, Maybe it’s true—something in his makeup that he got from his father. But I should have known better. My big boy is nobody’s fool. The way you are taking all this is just wonderful. People down here ask me, ‘What is he like now with his picture in all the papers?’ And I tell them that you are somebody who never put on airs and never will.”

  “But, Ma, you mustn’t let them get you down with this business about Carnovsky’s mother.”

  All at once she was like a child at whose bedside he was sitting, a child who’d been cruelly teased at school and had come home in tears, running a fever.

  Smiling bravely, removing the cloth and showing him the burnish of his eyes in her head, she said, “I try not to.”

  “But it’s hard.”

  “But sometimes it’s hard, darling, I have to admit it. The newspapers I can deal with, thanks to you. You would be proud of me.”

  To the end of her sentence he silently affixed the word “Papa.” He had known her papa, and how he’d made her and her sisters toe the line. First the domineering father, then the domineering, father-dominated husband. For parents Zuckerman could claim the world’s most obedient daughter and son.

  “Oh, you should hear me, Nathan. I’m courteous, of course, but I cut them dead, exactly the way you said. But with people I meet socially it’s different. People say to me—and right out, without a second thought—’I didn’t know you were crazy like that, Selma.’ I tell them I’m not. I tell them what you told me: that it’s a story, that she is a character in a book. So they say, ‘Why does he write a story like that, unless it’s true?’ And then really
what can I say—that they’ll believe?”

  “Silence, Ma. Don’t say anything.”

  “But you can’t, Nathan. If you say nothing, it doesn’t work. Then they’re sure they’re right.”

  “Then tell them your boy is a madman. Tell them you’re not responsible for the things that come into his head. Tell them you’re lucky he doesn’t make up things even worse. That’s not far from the truth. Mother, you know you are yourself and not Mrs. Carnovsky, and I know you are yourself and not Mrs. Carnovsky. You and I know that it was very nearly heaven thirty years ago.”

  “Oh, darling, is that true?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But that isn’t what the book says. I mean, that isn’t what people think, who read it. They think it even if they don’t read it.”

  “There’s nothing to do about what people think, except to pay as little attention as possible.”

  “At the pool, when I’m not there, they say you won’t have anything to do with me. Can you believe that? They tell this to Essie. Some of them say you won’t have anything to do with me, some of them say I won’t have anything to do with you, and the others say I’m living on Easy Street because of all the money you send me. I’m supposed to have a Cadillac, courtesy of my millionaire son. What do you think of that? Essie tells them that I don’t even drive, but that doesn’t stop them. The Cadillac has a colored driver.”

  “Next they’ll be saying he’s your lover.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they say it already. They say everything. Every day I hear another story. Some I wouldn’t even repeat. Thank God your father isn’t able to hear them.”

  “Maybe Essie shouldn’t pass on to you what people say. If you want, I’ll tell her that.”

  “There was a discussion of your book at our Jewish Center.”

  “Was there?”

  “Darling, Essie says it is already the main topic of discussion at every Jewish wedding, bar mitzvah, social club, women’s club, sisterhood meeting, and closing luncheon in America. I don’t know the details about everywhere else, but at our Center it wound up a discussion of you. Essie and Mr. Metz went. I thought I was better off minding my own business at home. Somebody named Posner gave the lecture. Then there was the discussion. Do you know him, Nathan? Essie says he’s a boy your age.”