by Philip Roth
But this information his father could live without. Of all that Dr. Zuckerman had so far lived without, and that Nathan would have preferred for him to live with, knowledge of the missing density factor was the least of it. Enough for now of what is and isn’t so. Enough science, enough art, enough of fathers and sons.
A major new development in the life of Nathan and Victor Zuckerman, but then the coronary-care unit of Miami Biscayne Hospital isn’t the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as anyone who’s ever been there doesn’t have to be told.
Though Dr. Zuckerman didn’t officially expire until the next morning, it was here that he uttered his last words. Word. Barely audible, but painstakingly pronounced. “Bastard,” he said.
Meaning who? Lyndon Johnson? Hubert Humphrey? Richard Nixon? Meaning He who had not seen fit to bestow upon His own universe that measly bit of missing matter, that one lousy little hydrogen atom for each volume of ten cubic feet? Or to bestow upon Dr. Zuckerman, ardent moralist from grade school on, the simple reward of a healthy old age and a longer life? But then, when he spoke his last, it wasn’t to his correspondence folders that he was looking, or upward at the face of his invisible God, but into the eyes of the apostate son.
* * *
The funeral was a tremendous strain. There was the heat, for one thing. Over the Miami cemetery, the sun made its presence known to Zuckerman as no Yahweh ever had; had it been the sun they were all addressing, he might have entered into the death rites of his people with something more than just respect for his mother’s feelings. The two sons had to support her between them from the moment they left the air-conditioned limousine and started down between a row of twirling sprinklers to the burial plot. Dr. Zuckerman had bought two plots, for himself and for his wife, six years earlier, the same week he’d bought their condominium in Harbor Beach Retirement Village. Her knees gave way by the grave, but as she had been worn down by her husband’s illness to little more than a hundred pounds, it was no problem for Henry and Nathan to keep her on her feet until the coffin was lowered and they could take refuge from the heat. Behind him, Zuckerman heard Essie tell Mr. Metz, “All the words, all the sermons, all the quotations, and no matter what they say, it’s still final.” Earlier, stepping from the limousine, she had turned to Zuckerman to give her assessment of the journey out for the man in the hearse. “You take a ride and you don’t get to see the scenery.” Yes, Essie and he were the ones who’d say anything.
Zuckerman, his brother, and the rabbi were, by decades, the youngest men present. The rest of them wilting there were either his parents’ elderly neighbors from Harbor Beach or Newark cronies of his father’s who’d also retired to Florida. A few had even been boys with Dr. Zuckerman in the Central Ward before the First World War. Most of them Zuckerman hadn’t seen since his childhood, when they’d been men not much older than he was now. He listened to the familiar voices coming out of the lined and jowled and fallen faces, thinking, If only I were still writing Carnovsky. What memories those tones touched off—the Charlton Street baths and the Lakewood vacations, the fishing expeditions to the Shark River inlet down the shore! Before the funeral everybody had come up to put their arms around him. Nobody mentioned the book; probably none of them had read it. Of all the obstacles in life that these retired salesmen and merchants and manufacturers had struggled with and overcome, reading through a book was not yet one. Just as well. Not even the young rabbi made mention of Carnovsky to the author. Perhaps out of respect for the dead. All the better. He was not there as “the author”—the author was back in Manhattan. Here he was Nathan. Sometimes life offers no more powerful experience than just such a divestment.
He recited the Mourners’ Kaddish. Over a sinking coffin, even a nonbeliever needs some words to chant, and “Yisgadal v’yiskadash…” made more sense to him than “Rage against the dying of the light.” If ever there was a man to bury as a Jew it was his father. Nathan would probably wind up letting them bury him as one too. Better as that than as a bohemian.
“My two boys,” said his mother, as they lifted her along the path back to the car. “My two tall strong handsome boys.”
Returning through Miami to the apartment, the limousine stopped for a light just by a supermarket; the women shoppers, most of them middle-aged and Cuban, were wearing halters and shorts, and high-heeled sandals. A lot of protoplasm to take in straight from the post-retirement village of the dead. He saw Henry looking too. A halter had always seemed to Zuckerman a particularly provocative piece of attire—cloth not quite clothing—but the only thought inspired by these women oozing flesh was of his father decomposing. He’d been unable to think of much else since earlier in the day when the family had taken seats together in the first row at the Temple and the young rabbi—bearded very like Che Guevara—began to extol from the altar the virtues of the deceased. The rabbi praised him not simply as father, husband, and family man, but as “a political being engaged by all of life and anguished by the suffering of mankind.” He spoke of the many magazines and newspapers Dr. Zuckerman had subscribed to and studied, the countless letters of protest he had painstakingly composed, he spoke of his enthusiasm for American democracy, his passion for Israel’s survival, his revulsion against the carnage in Vietnam, his fears for the Jews in the Soviet Union, and meanwhile all Zuckerman was thinking was the word “extinguished.” All that respectable moralizing, all that repressive sermonizing, all those superfluous prohibitions, that furnace of pieties, that Lucifer of rectitude, that Hercules of misunderstanding, extinguished.
Strange. It was supposed to be just the opposite. But never had he contemplated his father’s life with less sentiment. It was as though they were burying the father of some other sons. As for the character being depicted by the rabbi, well, nobody had ever gotten Dr. Zuckerman quite so wrong. Maybe the rabbi was only trying to distance him from the father in Carnovsky, but from the portrait he painted you would have thought Dr. Zuckerman was Schweitzer. All that was missing was the organ and the lepers. But why not? Whom did it harm? It was a funeral, not a novel, let alone the Last Judgment.
What made it such a strain? Aside from the unrelenting heat and their lost, defenseless, seemingly legless mother? Aside from the pitiful sight of those old family friends, looking down into the slot where they too must be deposited, thirty, sixty, ninety days hence—the kibitzing giants out of his earliest memories, so frail now, some of them, that despite the healthy suntans, you could have pushed them in with his father and they couldn’t have crawled out…? Aside from all this, there were his emotions. The strain of feeling no grief. The surprise. The shame. The exultation. The shame of that. But all the grieving over his father’s body had taken place when Nathan was twelve and fifteen and twenty-one: the grief over all his father had been dead to while living. From that grief the death was a release.
By the time he boarded the Newark plane with Henry, it felt like a release from even more. He couldn’t entirely explain—or manage to control—this tide of euphoria sweeping him away from all inane distractions. It was very likely the same heady feeling of untrammeled freedom that people like Mary and André had been expecting him to enjoy from becoming a household name. In fact it had rather more to do with the four-day strain of Florida, with the wholly un-inane exigencies of arranging for the burial of one parent and the survival of the other, that had put the household name and the Hallelujah Chorus behind him. He had become himself again—though with something unknowable added: he was no longer any man’s son. Forget fathers, he told himself. Plural.
Forget kidnappers too. During the four days away, his answering service had taken no message from either an ominous palooka or an addled Alvin Pepler. Had his landsman spent into Zuckerman’s handkerchief the last of his enraged and hate-filled adoration? Was that the end of this barrage? Or would Zuckerman’s imagination beget still other Peplers conjuring up novels out of his—novels disguising themselves as actuality itself, as nothing less than real? Zuckerman the stupendous sublimato
r spawning Zuckermaniacs! A book, a piece of fiction bound between two covers, breeding living fiction exempt from all the subjugations of the page, breeding fiction unwritten, unreadable, unaccountable and uncontainable, instead of doing what Aristotle promised from art in Humanities 2 and offering moral perceptions to supply us with the knowledge of what is good or bad. Oh, if only Alvin had studied Aristotle with him at Chicago! If only he could understand that it is the writers who are supposed to move the readers to pity and fear, not the other way around!
He had never so enjoyed a takeoff in his life. He let his knees fall open and, as the plane went gunning like a hot rod down the runway, felt the driving level force of the fuselage as though it were his own. And when it lifted off—lifted like some splendid, ostentatious afterthought—Zuckerman suddenly pictured Mussolini hanging by his heels. He’d never forgotten that photograph on the front page of the papers. Who could, of his generation of American youngsters? But to remember the vengeful undoing of that vile tyrant after the death of your own law-abiding, anti-Fascist, nonviolent father, chief air-raid warden of Keer Avenue and lifetime champion of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League? Reminder to the outer man of the inner man he’s dealing with.
Of course for some seventy-two hours now he had been wondering if his father’s last word could really have been “Bastard.” Under the strain of that long vigil his hearing may not have been too subtle. Bastard? To mean what? You were never my real son. But was this father equal to such unillusioned thought, ever? Though maybe that’s what he read in my eyes: Henry’s your boy, Papa, not me. But from my two eyes? No, no, some things I’m not unillusioned enough for either, out of the safety of the study. Maybe he just said “Faster.” Telling Death his job the way he told his wife how to roll the winter rugs and Henry how to do homework when he dawdled. “Vaster”? Unlikely. Nathan’s cosmology lecture notwithstanding, for his father, in dying as in living, there were still but two points of reference in all the vastness: the family and Hitler. You could do worse, but you could also do better. Better. Of course! Not “Bastard” but “Better.” First principle, final precept. Not more light but more virtue. He had only been reminding them to be better boys. “Bastard” was the writer’s wishful thinking, if not quite the son’s. Better scene, stronger medicine, a final repudiation by Father. Still, when Zuckerman wasn’t writing he was also only human, and he’d just as soon the scene wasn’t so wonderful. Kafka once wrote, “I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?” Agreed, as to books. But as for life, why invent a blow to the head where none was intended? Up with art, but down with mythomania.
Mythomania? Alvin Pepler. The very word is like a bell that tolls thee back to me.
That Pepler’s credentials were in order—if nothing else—Essie had confirmed for Zuckerman the night after the funeral, when everyone else had gone to sleep. The two were in her kitchen eating the remains of the cinnamon cake served the guests earlier in the day. For as long as Zuckerman could remember, Essie was supposed to be eating herself into an early grave. Also smoking herself to death. She was one of many his father could always find time to lecture about the right way to live. “He used to sit at the window,” Essie told Nathan, “sit there in that wheelchair and call down to the people parking their cars. They didn’t park right to suit him. Just yesterday I ran into a woman who your mother is still afraid to talk to because of your old man. Old Mrs. Oxburg. She is from Cincinnati, a multimillionairess ten times over. When your little mother spots her coming, she runs the other way. One day Victor saw Mrs. Oxburg sitting in the lobby by an air conditioner, minding her own business, and he told her to move, she was going to give herself pneumonia. She said to him, ‘Please, Dr. Zuckerman, where I sit is none of your business.’ But, no, he wouldn’t accept that for an answer. Instead he started telling her how our little cousin Sylvia died in 1918 of influenza, and how beautiful and smart she was, and what it did to Aunt Gracie. Your mother couldn’t stop him. Whenever she tried just wheeling him away, he threw a fit. She had to go to the doctor to get Valium, and the Valium I had to keep for her here because if he found it he would start shouting at her about becoming a drug addict.”
“He went a little over the top in that chair, Essie. We all know that.”
“Poor Hubert Humphrey. I pity that poor bastard, if he read your father’s postal cards. What the hell could Humphrey do, Nathan? He wasn’t President, Vietnam wasn’t his idea. He was as flummoxed as the next guy. But you couldn’t tell that to Victor.”
“Well, Humphrey’s torment’s over now.”
“So is Victor’s.”
“That too.”
“Okay, Nathan—let’s move on. You and me are not lilies of the valley. This is my chance to get the dirt, and without your mother in between, making believe you still use your little putz just to run water through. I want to hear about you and the movie star. What happened? You dropped her or she dropped you?”
“I’ll tell you all about the movie star, first tell me about the Peplers.”
“From Newark? With the son, you mean? Alvin?”
“Right. Alvin from Newark. What do you have on him?”
“Well, he was on television. They had those quiz programs, remember? I think he won twenty-five grand. He had a big write-up in the Star-Ledger. This is years ago already. He was in the Marines before that. Didn’t they award him a Purple Heart? I think he got it in the head. Maybe it was the foot. Anyway, when he came on they used to play ‘From the Halls of Montezuma’ in his honor. What do you want to know about him for?”
“I ran into him in New York. He introduced himself on the street. I would say from our meeting that it was the head, not the foot.”
“Oh yeah? A screwball? Well, he was supposed to know his Americana inside out—that’s how he won the dough. But of course they gave them the answers anyway. That was the big scandal. For a while he was all anybody in Newark talked about. I went to high school with his Aunt Lottie back in the year one, so I followed every week how he came out. Look, everybody did. Then he lost and that was that. Now he’s nuts?”
“A little, I thought.”
“Well, that’s what they tell me about you, you know. And not just a little.”
“What do you tell them?”
“I say it’s true. I say he has to wear a straitjacket all the way to the bank. That shuts them up. How about the movie star? Who dumped who?”
“I dumped her.”
“Idiot. She’s gorgeous and must be worth a fortune. For Christ’s sake, Nathan, why?”
“She’s gorgeous and worth a fortune, but not of our faith, Esther.”
“I don’t remember that stopping you before. I thought, myself, it egged you on. So who are you driving wild now?”
“Golda Meir.”
“Oh, you’re a sly little fox, Nathan, behind those harmless professor’s glasses. You were always taking it in, even as a kid. There was your brother, the goody-good patrol boy who never stayed up past his bedtime, and there was you, thinking to yourself what a bunch of stupid bastards we all were. Still, I have to hand it to you, you have put something over on the public with this book. If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to one goddamn thing they say.”
* * *
The seat-belt sign had flashed off, and Henry had tilted his seat back and was sipping the martini he’d ordered at takeoff. He was hardly what you’d call a drinking man, and in fact was taking down the martini like a slightly noxious medicinal preparation. His complexion seemed somehow darkly sickish that morning—rather than darkly romantic—as though cinders had been ground into his skin. Zuckerman couldn’t remember seeing his brother so emotionally done in since a weekend thirteen years before, when he’d come down from Cornell as a sophomore and announced he was giving up chemistry to become a “drama major.” He was fresh from appearing as the Ragpicker in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Henry had gotten the lea
d role in the first college production he’d tried out for, and now he spoke with reverence at the dinner table of the two new influences on his life: John Carradine, who had played the Ragpicker on Broadway, and whom he hoped to emulate on the stage (in appearance as well—he’d already lost ten pounds trying), and Timmy, the young student director of the Cornell Madwoman. Timmy had painted flats the summer before in Provincetown, where his parents had a vacation house. Timmy was sure he could get Henry work there too, “in stock.” “And when is this?” asked Mrs. Zuckerman, who was still abashed at why he’d gotten so thin. “Timmy says next summer,” answered Henry. “Next June.” “And what about the Chernicks?” his father asked. The previous two summers Henry had worked as a waterfront counselor for two Newark gym-teacher brothers who owned a camp for Jewish children in the Adirondacks. The job had come to someone as young as Henry as a special favor from the Chernicks to his father. “What about your responsibility to Lou and Buddy Chernick?” he was asked. In the way of vulnerable, ceremonious, intelligent children who all their lives have been delivering obedience in the form of streaming emotion, Henry couldn’t give his father the kind of answer he might have come up with in a course in ethics—he ran from the table instead. Because all the way down from Ithaca he’d been expecting the worst—because for three days he’d been unable to eat, in dread of this very meal—he collapsed before it even got half as bad as he’d predicted it would to Timmy. The two boys had for days rehearsed the scene together in their dorm, Timmy playing Dr. Zuckerman like a miniature Lear, and Henry as a rather outspoken version of himself—Henry playing at being Nathan.
