by Philip Roth
Oh, he knew he ought not to leave. But Berta was already sitting out in the car. No, he just did not like the look of this scene. “You don’t want to soak them too long, Myra.” “Oh, Daddy, have a nice time,” she said, and so at last he went out the door and down to the car to be told that it had taken him five full minutes to say a simple thing like good night.
Well, it was just as he had expected: when Whitey got home, he didn’t like the scene either. The first suggestion he had for Myra was that she might at least pull the shades down so that everybody who walked by didn’t have to see what a suffering martyr she was. When in her panic she didn’t move, he pulled on one to show her how and it came clear off the fixture. She had only taken on all those piano students (seven years earlier, he neglected to add) so as to turn herself into a hag anyway, to cause him, if she could manage it—this, waving the shade in his hand—to start running around with other women, and then have that to cry over as well as her poor crippled toesies. Why she taught piano was the same damn reason she wouldn’t go down with him to Florida and let him start a brand-new life down there. Out of disrespect for what he was!
She tried to tell him what she had told her father—that she believed there was no essential connection between her feet and her job—but he would not hear of it. No, she would rather sit up here with her poor toesies, and listen while everybody told her what a no-good rotten s.o.b. she had for a husband, just because he liked to have a drink once in a while.
There was apparently nothing that a man shouldn’t say to a woman—even to one he hates, and the fact was that Whitey loved her, adored her, worshiped her—that he didn’t say to Myra. Then, as if a torn shade and a broken fixture and all those garbled insults weren’t enough for one night, he picked up the dishpan full of warm water and Epsom salts, and for no rational reason in the world, poured it out on the rug.
Most of what happened subsequently Willard learned from a sympathetic lodge brother who was on duty in the squad car that night. Apparently the police tried as best they could to make it look friendly and not like an out-and-out arrest: they drove up without the siren blowing, parked out of the glow of the street lamp, and stood patiently in the hallway while Whitey worked at buttoning up his jacket. Then they led him down the front steps and along the path to the patrol car so that to the neighbors in the windows it might appear that the three men were just off for one of those bracing strolls, two of them wearing pistols and cartridge belts. They were not so much holding him down as up, and trying to joke him along some too, when Whitey, using all his physical strength, broke from between them. In the first moment no one watching could figure out what he was doing. His body folded once in half, so that for a moment he seemed to be eating the snow; then with a jerk he straightened up, and swaying as if in a wind, heaved an armful of snow toward the house.
The powder fell upon her hair and her face and the shoulders of her sweater; but for all that she was only fifteen, and with her upturned nose and her straight blond hair looked to be no more than ten, she did not so much as flinch; she stood as she was, one loafer on the bottom step and one on the walk, and a finger in her schoolbook—all ready, it seemed, to return to her studies which she had interrupted only to dial the station house. “Stone!” Whitey shouted. “Pure stone!” And here he made his lunge. Willard’s lodge brother, frozen till then by the scene—by Lucy, he said, more than by Whitey, whose kind he’d seen before—leaped to his duty. “Nelson, it’s your own kid!” Whereupon the drunk, either remembering that he was father to the girl, or hoping to forget that connection for good, evaded the policeman’s grasp and went ahead and did apparently all it was he had intended to do in the first place: he pitched himself face-down into the snow.
The following morning Willard sat Lucy down first thing and gave her a talking-to.
“Honey, I know you have been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours. I know you have been through a lot in your whole life that would have been better for you never to have seen. But, Lucy, I have got to ask you something. I have got to make something very clear. Now, I want to ask why, when you saw what was happening here last night—Lucy, look at me—why didn’t you phone me out at the Erwins’?”
She shook her head.
“Well, you knew we were out there, didn’t you?”
To the floor she nodded.
“And the number is right there in the book. Well, isn’t that so, Lucy?”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“But what you did think of, young lady—look at me!”
“I wanted him to stop!”
“But calling the jail, Lucy—”
“I called for somebody to make him stop!”
“But why didn’t you call me? I want you to answer that question.”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because you can’t.”
“I what?”
“Well,” she said, backing away, “you don’t …”
“Now sit down, now come back here, and listen to me. First thing—that’s it, sit!—whether you know it or not, I am not God. I am just me, that’s the first thing.”
“You don’t have to be God.”
“No backtalk, you hear me? You are just a schoolchild, and maybe, just maybe, you know, you don’t know the whole story of life yet. You may think you do, but I happen to think different, and who I am is your grandfather whose house this is.”
“I didn’t ask to live here.”
“But you do, you see! So quiet! You are never to call the jail again. They are not needed here! Is that clear?”
“The police,” she whispered.
“Or the police! Is that clear or not?”
She did not answer.
“We are civilized people in this house and there are some things we do not do, and that is number one. We are not riffraff, and you remember that. We are able to settle our own arguments, and conduct our own affairs, and we don’t require the police to do it for us. I happen to be the assistant postmaster of this town, young lady, in case you’ve forgotten. I happen to be a member in good standing of this community—and so are you.”
“And what about my father? Is he in good standing too, whatever that even means?”
“I am not talking about him right this minute! I will get to him, all right, and without your help too. Right now I am talking about you and a few things you may not know at fifteen years of age. The way we do it in this house, Lucy, is we talk to a person. We show him the right.”
“And if he doesn’t know it?”
“Lucy, we do not send him to jail! That’s the only point. Is it clear?”
“No!”
“Lucy, I ain’t the one who is married to him, Lucy. I don’t live in the same room with him, Lucy.”
“So what?”
“So what I am saying to you is that a lot of things, a great many things, you do not know the slightest thing about.”
“I know it’s your house. I know you give him a home, no matter what he does to her, or says to her—”
“I give my daughter a home, that’s what I do. I give you a home. I am in a situation, Lucy, and I do what I can for the people I happen to love around here.”
“Well,” she said, beginning to cry, “you’re not the only one who does, maybe, you know.”
“Oh, I know that, I know that, sweetheart. But, honey, don’t you see, they’re your parents.”
“Then why don’t they act like parents!” she cried, rushing out of the room.
Then Berta started in.
“I heard what she said to you, Willard. I heard that tone. It’s what I get all the time.”
“Well, I get it too, Berta. We all get it.”
“Then what are you going to do about it? Where will it stop with her? I thought becoming a Catholic at the age of fifteen was going to be the last thing up her sleeve. Running off to a Catholic church, going up to visit nuns for a whole weekend. And now this.”
“Berta, I can on
ly say what I can say. I only got so many words, and so many different ways to say them, and after that—”
“After that,” said Berta, “a good swat! Whoever in their life heard of such a thing? Making a whole household into a public scandal—”
“Berta, she lost her head. She got scared. He made the scandal, the damn idiot, doing what he did.”
“Well, any fool could have seen it coming a mile away. Any fool can see the next thing coming too—probably involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Berta, I’ll take care of it. Exaggerating don’t help things at all.”
“How are you going to start taking care of it, Willard? By going down to the jail and letting him out?”
“I am deciding about that right now, what I’m going to do.”
“I want to remind you, Willard, while you are deciding, that Higgles were among the founders of this town. Higgles were amongst the first settlers who built this town from the ground. My grandfather Higgle built the jail, Willard—I am glad he is not alive to see who it was he built it for.”
“Oh, I know all that, Berta. I appreciate all that.”
“Don’t you make light of my pride, Mr. Carroll. I am a person too!”
“Berta, she won’t do it again.”
“Won’t she? Beads and saints and every kind of Catholic gimcrack she has got up in that room of hers. And now this! She’s taking over here, as far as I can see.”
“Berta, I have explained to you: she got frightened.”
“And who isn’t when that barbarian goes on the warpath? In the olden days a man like that, they would put him on a rail and run him out of town.”
“Well, maybe this ain’t the olden days any more,” he said.
“Well, more’s the pity!”
Lastly Myra. His Myra.
“Myra, I am sitting here debating what to do. And I am really of two minds, I’ll tell you that. What has happened here, I never thought I would ever live to see. I have spoken to Lucy. I have gotten her to promise that nothing like this is ever going to happen again.”
“She promised?”
“More or less, I would say, yes. And I have just finished talking with your mother. She is at the end of her tether, Myra. I can’t say that I blame her. But I believe I have made her see the light. Because her feeling, to put it blunt, is to let him sit in that jail and rot.”
Myra closed her eyes, so deep, so deep in purple rings from all her secret weeping.
“But I have calmed her down,” he said.
“Yes?”
“More or less, I think so. She is going to accept my judgment of the thing. Myra,” he said, “it has been a long twelve-year haul. For everybody living here it has been a long struggle.”
“Daddy, we’re going to move, so it’s over. The struggle is over.”
“What?”
“We’re going to Florida.”
“Florida!”
“Where Duane can start fresh—”
“Myra, there ain’t a morning of his life he can’t start fresh, and right here.”
“But here someone else’s roof, Daddy, is over his head.”
“And how come? Well, what’s the answer, Myra? Where is it he is going to get the stick-to-it-iveness in Florida that he is not able to have up here? I’d like to know.”
“He has relatives in Florida.”
“You mean now he’s going to go down and live off them?”
“Not live off them—”
“And suppose last night had happened in Florida. Or Oklahoma. Or wherever!”
“But it wouldn’t!”
“And why not? The nice climate? The beautiful color of the sky?”
“Because he could be on his own. That’s all he wants.”
“Honey, it’s all I want too. It’s what we all want. But where is the evidence, Myra, that on his own, with a daughter, with a wife, with all the thousand responsibilities—”
“But he’s such a good man.” Here she began to sob. “I wake up in the night—oh, Daddy, I wake up, and ‘Myra,’ he says to me, ‘you are the best thing I have, Myra—Myra, don’t hate me.’ Oh, if only we could go—”
In the middle of her very first semester, when Lucy came home at Thanksgiving time to say that she was getting married, Whitey sat himself down on the edge of the sofa in the parlor and just caved in. “But I wanted her to be a college graduate,” he said, lowering his head into his hands, and the sounds that emerged from his mouth might have softened in you everything that had hardened against him, if you didn’t have to wonder if that wasn’t why he was making the sounds in the first place. For the first hour he wept steadily like a woman, then gaspingly like a child for another, until even though he wanted you to forgive him, you almost had to anyway, watching him have to perform that way within plain view of his own family.
And then the miracle happened. At first he looked to be sick, or maybe even about to do something to himself. It was actually frightening to see. For days on end he hardly ate, though he was there at every dinner hour; in the evening he would sit out on the front porch, refusing to speak or to come in out of the cold. Once in the middle of the night Willard heard moving in the house and came into the kitchen in his robe to see Whitey looming over a cup of coffee. “What’s the trouble, Whitey, can’t you sleep?” “… don’t want to sleep.” “What is it, Whitey? Why are you all dressed?” Here Whitey turned to the wall, so that all Willard could see, as his son-in-law’s whole big body began to tremble, was the back of his broad shoulders and his wide powerful neck. “What is it, Whitey, what is it you are thinking of doing? Now tell me.”
The day after Lucy’s wedding Whitey came down to breakfast wearing a tie with his workshirt, and went off to the shop that way; at home in the evening he took out the box of brushes, rags and polish and gave his shoes a shine that looked to be professional. To Willard he said, “Want one, while I’m at it?” And so Willard handed over his shoes and sat there in his stockinged feet while the incredible happened before his very eyes.
When the weekend came Whitey whitewashed the basement and chopped practically a whole cord of wood; Willard stood at the kitchen window watching him bring down the ax in violent, regular whacks.
So that month passed, and the next, and though eventually he came out of the silent morbid mood and took up a little more his old teasing and kidding ways, there could no longer be any doubt that at long last something had happened to penetrate his heart.
That winter he grew his mustache. Apparently in the first weeks he got the usual jokes from the boys at the shop, but he just kept on with it, and by March you actually forgot how he used to look, and began to believe that the big strapping healthy misdirected boy had, at the age of forty-two, decided to become a man. More and more Willard heard himself calling him, as Berta and Myra always had, by his given name, Duane.
He actually began to behave now as Willard had had every reason to expect he would, given the eager young fellow he had been back in 1930. At that time he was already a first-rate electrician, and a pretty good carpenter too, and he had plans, ambitions, dreams. One of them was to build a house for himself and Myra, if only she would be his bride: a Cape Cod-style house with a fenced-in yard, to be built with his own hands … And that wasn’t so far-fetched a dream either. At the age of twenty-two he seemed to have the strength and the vigor for it, and the know-how too. The way he figured it, with the exception of the plumbing (and a friend over in Winnisaw had already agreed to install the piping at cost), he could put up a whole two-story house in six months of nights and weekends. He even went ahead and plunked down a one-hundred-dollar deposit on a tract of land up at the north end, a wise move too, for what was only woods then was now Liberty Grove, the fanciest section of the town. He had plunked down a deposit, he had begun to draw up his own building plans, he was halfway into his first year of marriage, when along came national calamity—followed quickly by the birth of a daughter.
As it turned out, Whitey too
k the Great Depression very personally. It was as though a little baby, ready to try its first step, stands up, smiles, puts out one foot, and one of those huge iron balls such as they used to knock down whole buildings comes swinging out of nowhere and wallops him right between the eyes. In Whitey’s case it took nearly ten years for him to get the nerve to stand up and even try walking again. On Monday, December 8, 1941, he took the bus down to Fort Kean to enlist in the United States Coast Guard, and was rejected for heart murmur. The following week he tried the Navy, and then his last choice, the Army. He told them how he had played three years of ball up at the old Selkirk High, but to no avail. He wound up working over in the fire-extinguisher plant in Winnisaw for the duration, and in the evenings was less and less at home and more and more at Earl’s Dugout.
But now, here he was on his feet again, informing Myra that when the school year was over she was to call the parents of her students and tell them that she was going out of the piano business. She knew as well as he did that when she had started giving lessons it was only supposed to be temporary anyway. He should never have allowed her to keep it up, even if it did mean extra dollars coming in every week. And he didn’t care whether she didn’t mind occupying herself that way or not. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was, he did not require a cushion behind him to catch him if he fell. Because he wasn’t falling any longer. That was the whole trouble to begin with: he had gotten himself all those props and cushions to give him a start back into the world, and all they had done was impede his progress by reminding him of the failure he had been, right off the bat. Somehow you start thinking you’re a failure, and that there’s nothing to do about it, and so the next thing you know there is nothing you are doing about it, except failing some more. Drinking, and losing jobs, and getting jobs, and drinking, and losing them … It’s a vicious cycle, Myra.
Maybe, he said, if he had gone into the Army he would have come out of that experience a different person, with some of his confidence back. But instead he had to walk the streets of Liberty Center all those years while other men were risking their lives—and while people in town wondered how a big bruiser like Whitey Nelson had got out of the fighting and dying, and pointed a finger at him under their breath for living off his father-in-law. No, no, Myra, I know what people gossip, I know what they say—and the worst of it is, they are probably right. No, heart murmur isn’t a person’s fault, I know that; no, the Depression isn’t a person’s fault either, but this isn’t the Depression any more, you know. Take a look around. This is booming prosperity. This is a new age, and this time he was not going to be left behind, not when every Tom, Dick and Harry you could think of was getting rich and making the money that was just out there for the asking. So the first thing, she was to inform those parents that she was out of the music business as of the end of the school year. And the next thing was to think about moving out of her father’s house. No, not to Florida. Willard was probably right about that being so much running away from the truth. What he had begun to think about—and he wasn’t going to promise right off and be made a fool of a second time—but what he had begun to think about was maybe looking into one of these prefab jobs like the kind the fellow had put up out near Clark’s Hill …
