Zuckerman Unbound

by Philip Roth

  Only three hours into the visit, and Nathan had to be phoned in Manhattan—secretly, and tearfully, by his mother—and told to come right home to make peace between the Ragpicker and his father. Carrying messages back and forth between Henry—locked in his bedroom quoting Timmy and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt—and his father—in the living room enumerating the opportunities denied to him in 1918 that life was now offering to Henry on a silver platter—Nathan was able to negotiate a settlement by three a.m. All decisions about Henry’s career were to be postponed for twelve months. He could continue to act in student plays but at the same time he must continue to carry on as a chemistry major and to fulfill his “obligation,” if only for one more summer, to the Chernicks. Then, next year, they would all sit down together to reassess the situation … a meeting that never took place, because by the following fall Henry was engaged to Carol Goff, a girl judged by Henry’s father to have “a head on her shoulders,” and no more was heard of John Carradine or of Timmy, either. Timmy! The young drama student’s Christian name couldn’t have sounded more Christian, or more seditious, as enunciated by their father in the heat of the fray. During that memorable Friday-night family battle back in 1956, Nathan had himself dared to counter at one point with the sacred name of Paul Muni, but “Timmy!” his father cried, like a war whoop, “Timmy!” and Nathan saw that not even Paul Muni as wily Clarence Darrow, not even Paul Muni live in their living room as patient Louis Pasteur could have persuaded Dr. Zuckerman that a Jew in pancake makeup on the stage was probably no more or less ridiculous in the eyes of God than a Jew in a dental smock drilling a tooth. Then Henry met sweet and studious Carol Goff, a scholarship girl, and gave her his ZBT pin—and so the argument ended for good. Zuckerman figured that was why he’d given her the pin, though officially, he knew, it was to commemorate the loss of Carol’s virginity earlier that night. When Henry tried the next semester to get the pin back, it so upset Carol and her family that two weeks later Henry changed his mind and got engaged to Carol instead. And, in their senior year, the upshot of Henry gently trying to break the engagement was their marriage the month after graduation. No, Henry simply couldn’t bear to see this kindly, thoughtful, devoted, harmless, self-sacrificing creature suffering so, and suffering so over him. He couldn’t bear to make anybody who loved him suffer. He couldn’t be that selfish or that cruel.

  In the days after the funeral, Henry had several times simply begun to sob in the middle of a conversation—in the middle of a sentence having nothing even to do with the death of their father—and in order to collect himself, went out to take a long walk alone. One morning only minutes after Henry had fled the apartment, unshaven and again close to tears, Zuckerman called Essie in to keep his mother company at breakfast and ran downstairs after his brother. Henry seemed so disturbed, so in need of consolation. But when Zuckerman came out of the lobby onto the sunny esplanade beside the pool, he saw Henry already out on the street, making a call in a phone booth. So, another love affair. That torment too. The Crisis, thought Zuckerman, in the Life of a Husband.

  In Miami Beach, Zuckerman had refrained from bringing up the deathbed scene with his brother. For one thing, their mother was nearly always within earshot, and when he and Henry were alone, either Henry was too unhappy to talk to or they were making plans for their mother’s future. To their dismay, she had refused to come up with them to Jersey to stay awhile with Henry and Carol and the kids. Maybe later, but for now she insisted on remaining “close” to her husband. Essie was going to sleep on the living-room sofa bed so that their mother wouldn’t be alone at night, and her canasta-club friends had volunteered to take turns staying with the grieving widow during the day. Zuckerman told Essie it might be wise if Flora Sobol was excused from duty. None of them was going to relish a piece in the Miami Herald entitled “I Sat Shiva with Carnovsky’s Mother.”

  On the plane he had his first chance to learn what Henry thought about what he still couldn’t puzzle out for himself. “Tell me something. What was Dad’s last word that night? Did he say ‘Better’?”

  “‘Better’? Could be. I thought he said ‘Batter.’”

  Zuckerman smiled. As in “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” or “Batter up!”? “You sure?”

  “Sure? No. But I thought it was because of Essie talking about the old days and Grandma. I thought he was all the way back, seeing Grandma over the mandel bread.”

  Well, there was Tolstoy, thought Zuckerman, to support Henry’s conjecture. “To become a tiny boy, close to mother.” What Tolstoy had written only days before his own death. “Mama, hold me, baby me…”

  “I thought he said ‘Bastard,’” Zuckerman told him.

  Now Henry smiled. The smile his patients fell in love with. “No, I didn’t hear that.”

  “I thought he might be writing one last letter to Lyndon Johnson.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Henry. “The letters,” and went back unsmilingly to sipping his drink. Henry had received his share: after the near-defection at Cornell, a letter a week beginning “Dear Son.”

  Minutes later Henry said, “Even little Leslie, age seven, became a correspondent of Dad’s, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Poor kid. He’s never gotten another, before or since. He thinks he should get mail all the time now, because of his three letters from Miami.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “‘Dear Grandson. Be nicer to your sisters.’”

  “Well, from now on he can be as cruel to them as he likes. Now,” Zuckerman added, remembering his brother dashing down to the outdoor phone booth, “we can all be as cruel as we like.”

  Zuckerman ordered a martini too. First time in his life he’d had a drink only an hour after his eggs. The same was certainly true for Henry. But the inner man was having his day.

  Each finished the first drink and ordered a second.

  “You know all I could think at the funeral?” Henry said. “How can he be in that box?”

  “That’s mostly what everybody thinks,” Zuckerman assured him.

  “The top is screwed on and he’ll never get out.”

  They were flying over Carolina farmland. Clear from thirty-five thousand feet where Mondrian got the idea. The tons of tilled soil, the fibrous net of rooted vegetation, and his father under it all. Not only the lid, not only the few cubic feet of floury Florida loam and the dignified slab of marble to come, but the whole outer wrapping of this seven-sextillion-ton planet.

  “Do you know why I married her?” Henry suddenly said.

  Ah, so that’s who’s boxed in and will never get out. Dear Son. Screwed down beneath the tonnage of those two little words.

  “Why?” asked Zuckerman.

  Henry closed his eyes. “You won’t believe this.”

  “I’ll believe anything,” Zuckerman told him. “Professional deformity.”

  “I don’t want to believe it myself.” He sounded sick with self-recrimination, as though he were sorry now that he’d planted a bomb in his luggage. He was unhinged, all over again. He shouldn’t be drinking, Zuckerman thought. There would be worse recriminations later, if he went ahead and spilled some humiliating secret. But Zuckerman made no attempt to save his brother from himself. He had a powerful taste for such secrets. Professional deformity.

  “Know why I married Carol?” This time he used her name, as though deliberately to make what he was about to confess more brutishly indiscreet. But it wasn’t Henry’s savagery, really; it was the savagery of his conscience, overtaking him before he’d even begun to violate its tenets.

  “No,” replied Zuckerman, to whom Carol had always seemed pretty but dull, “not really.”

  “It wasn’t because she cried. It wasn’t because she’d been pinned with the pin and then engaged with the ring. It wasn’t even everybody’s parents expecting us to … I loaned her a book. I loaned her a book, and knew if I didn’t marry her I’d never see it again.”

  “What book?”

>   “An Actor Prepares. A book by Stanislavsky.”

  “Couldn’t you buy another?”

  “My notes were in it—from when I was rehearsing the Ragpicker. Do you remember when I was in that play?”

  “Oh, I remember it.”

  “You remember that weekend I came home?”

  “I sure do, Henry. Why didn’t you go and ask her for the book?”

  “It was in her room in the women’s dorm. I thought of getting her best friend to steal it for me. This is true. I thought of breaking in there and stealing it myself. I just couldn’t bring myself to say that I wanted it back. I didn’t want her to know that we were about to break up. I didn’t want her to think afterward that all I could think about at a time like that was my book.”

  “Why did you give it to her in the first place?”

  “I was a kid, Nate. She was my ‘girl.’ I loaned it to her after our first date. For her to see my notes. I was showing off, I suppose. Oh, you know how you loan somebody a book. It’s the most natural thing in the world. You get excited and you loan it to them. I was full of a friend I’d made—”

  “Timmy.”

  “God, yes. Timmy. You remember. The Provincetown Players and Timmy. Not that I had an ounce of talent. I thought acting was seething and sobbing. No, nothing would have come of it. And it isn’t that I don’t love my own work. I do, and I’m goddamn good at it. But the book meant something to me. I wanted Carol to understand. ‘Just read this,’ I told her. And the next thing I knew, we were married.”

  “At least you got the book back.”

  He finished off the second drink. “And a lot of good it did me.”

  Then do him some good, thought Zuckerman. It’s why he’s made you his confessor. Help him raise this lid still holding him down. Lend a hand. As their father used to say, “He’s your brother—treat him like a brother.”

  “Did you ever act in Chekhov that year at Cornell?”

  “I had a career of two plays at Cornell. Neither was Chekhov.”

  “Do you know what Chekhov said as a grown man about his youth? He said he’d had to squeeze the serf out of himself drop by drop. Maybe what you ought to start squeezing out of yourself is the obedient son.”

  No response. He had closed his eyes again—he might not even be listening.

  “You’re not a kid, Henry, beholden to narrow conventional people whose idea of life you’re obliged to fulfill. He’s dead, Henry. Aside from being in that box with the lid screwed down, he is also dead. You loved him and he loved you—but he tried to make you somebody who would never do anything or be anything that couldn’t be written up in the Jewish News under your graduation picture. The Jewish slice of the American piety—it’s what we both fed on for years. He’d come out of the slums, he’d lived with the roughnecks—it must have terrified him to think we’d grow up bums like Sidney. Cousin Sidney, collecting the quarters from the kids who sold the football pools. But to Daddy he was Longy Zwillman’s right arm. To Dad he was Lepke.”

  “To Dad, becoming a drama major at Cornell made you Lepke.” His eyes were still shut, and the smile was sardonic.

  “Well, a little of Lepke wouldn’t kill you at this point.”

  “It isn’t me I’m worried about killing.”

  “Come on, you’re a bigger character than this. An actor prepares. Well, you’ve been preparing for thirty-two years. Now deliver. You don’t have to play the person you were cast as, not if it’s what’s driving you mad.”

  Inventing people. Benign enough when you were typing away in the quiet study, but was this his job in the unwritten world? If Henry could perform otherwise, wouldn’t he have done so long ago? You shouldn’t put such ideas in Henry’s head, especially when he’s already reeling. But reeling was when somebody could catch you right on the jaw. And besides, Zuckerman was by now a little drunk, as was his kid brother, and somehow a little drunk, it seemed to him idiotic that his kid brother shouldn’t have what he wanted. To whom was he closer? Probably more corresponding genes in Henry than in any other animal in the species. More corresponding memories, too. Bedrooms, bathrooms, duties, diseases, remedies, refrigerators, taboos, toys, trips, teachers, neighbors, relatives, yards, stoops, stairwells, jokes, names, places, cars, girls, boys, bus lines …

  Batter. The mixture time had beaten together for making Zuckermans. Suppose their father had closed things out with that: Boys, you are what I baked. Very different loaves, but God bless you both. There’s room for all types.

  Neither the Father of Virtue nor the Father of Vice, but the Father of Rational Pleasures and Reasonable Alternatives. Oh, that would have been very nice indeed. But the way it works, you get what you get and the rest you have to do yourself.

  “How unhappy are you at home, Henry?”

  He answered with his eyes pressed tightly shut. “It’s murder.”

  “Then, for Christ’s sake, start squeezing.”

  * * *

  At Newark Airport Zuckerman’s limousine was waiting. He had phoned early that morning from Miami to arrange to be met by a car with an armed driver. It was from the same outfit that drove Caesara around in New York. He’d found their card where he’d left it—his bookmark in Caesara’s Kierkegaard. Before leaving for Miami, he’d pocketed the card, just in case. The book he still meant to return, but several times had restrained himself from sending it, in care of Castro, to Cuba.

  He’d slept poorly the night before, thinking of his return to Manhattan and the possibility that the ravishing of his handkerchief by Pepler was not the end of his defilement but only the beginning. What if the wanton ex-Marine was packing a gun? What if he should be hiding in the elevator and try strangling Zuckerman to death? Zuckerman could not only envision the scene—by four a.m., he could smell it. Pepler weighed a ton and reeked of Aqua Velva. He was freshly shaved. For the murder or for the TV interview afterward? You stole it, Nathan! My hang-up! My secret! My money! My fame! JERK-OFF ARTIST KILLS BARD OF JERKING-OFF; ZUCKERMAN DEAD BY ONANIST’S HAND. Most disappointing to be gripped once again by such elemental fears—fears that by dawn had all but vanished; nonetheless, before leaving, he had phoned ahead to hire somebody at least to protect him during the initial stage of reentry. But when he saw the limousine, he thought, I should have taken the bus. Forget retribution. That’s over too. There are no avengers.

  He walked up to the limousine. It was Caesara’s young driver, in full livery and dark glasses. “I’ll bet you never thought you’d see me again,” said Zuckerman.

  “Oh, yes I did.”

  He came back to his brother. Henry was waiting to say goodbye before going to pick his car up in the parking lot.

  “I’m all alone,” Zuckerman said. “If you should need a place to sleep.”

  Henry recoiled a little at the suggestion. “I have to get to work, Nathan.”

  “You’ll call me if you need me?”

  “I’m all right,” Henry said.

  He’s angry, Zuckerman thought. Now he has to go home knowing he doesn’t have to. I should have let him be. You can leave her if you want to. Only he doesn’t want to.

  They shook hands in front of the terminal. Nobody watching would ever have imagined that once upon a time they had eaten ten thousand meals together, or that only an hour earlier they were momentarily as close as they had been back before either had written a book or touched a girl. A plane took off from Newark, roaring in Nathan’s ears.

  “He did say ‘Bastard,’ Nathan. He called you a bastard.”

  “What?”

  Suddenly Henry was furious—and weeping. “You are a bastard. A heartless conscienceless bastard. What does loyalty mean to you? What does responsibility mean to you? What does self-denial mean, restraint—anything at all? To you everything is disposable! Everything is exposable! Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families—everything is grist for your fun-machine. Even your shiksas go down the drain when they don’t tickle your fancy anymore. Love, marriage, childre
n, what the hell do you care? To you it’s all fun and games. But that isn’t the way it is to the rest of us. And the worst is how we protect you from knowing what you really are! And what you’ve done! You killed him, Nathan. Nobody will tell you—they’re too frightened of you to say it. They think you’re too famous to criticize—that you’re far beyond the reach now of ordinary human beings. But you killed him, Nathan. With that book. Of course he said ‘Bastard.’ He’d seen it! He’d seen what you had done to him and Mother in that book!”

  “How could he see? Henry, what are you talking about?”

  But he knew, he knew, he knew, he’d known it all along. He’d known it when Essie, over their midnight snack, had told him, “If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to one goddamn thing they say.” He’d known during the rabbi’s eulogy. And he’d known before that. He’d known when he was writing the book. But he’d written it anyway. Then, like a blessing, his father had the stroke that sent him into the nursing home, and by the time Carnovsky appeared he was too far gone to read it. Zuckerman thought he had beaten the risk. And beaten the rap. He hadn’t.

  “How could he see it, Henry?”

  “Mr. Metz. Stupid, well-meaning Mr. Metz. Daddy made him bring it to him. Made him sit there and read it aloud. You don’t believe me, do you? You can’t believe that what you write about people has real consequences. To you this is probably funny too—your readers will die laughing when they hear this one! But Dad didn’t die laughing. He died in misery. He died in the most terrible disappointment. It’s one thing, God damn you, to entrust your imagination to your instincts, it’s another, Nathan, to entrust your own family! Poor Mother! Begging us all not to tell you! Our mother, taking the shit she’s taking down there because of you—and smiling through it! And still protecting you from the truth of what you’ve done! You and your superiority! You and your hijinks! You and your ‘liberating’ book! Do you really think that conscience is a Jewish invention from which you are immune? Do you really think you can just go have a good time with the rest of the swingers without troubling yourself about conscience? Without troubling about anything but seeing how funny you can be about the people who have loved you most in the world? The origin of the universe! When all he was waiting to hear was ‘I love you!’ ‘Dad, I love you’—that was all that was required! Oh, you miserable bastard, don’t you tell me about fathers and sons! I have a son! I know what it is to love a son, and you don’t, you selfish bastard, and you never will!”