by Philip Roth
Meaningless? Unspectacular? Nothing very enormous going on there? Well, what you make of it would depend on where you grew up and how life got opened up to you. Alan Meisner could not be said to have risen out of nothing; however, remembering him as a little hick obliviously yapping away nonstop in his seat at Ebbets Field, remembering him delivering the dry cleaning through our streets late on a winter afternoon, hatless and in a snow-laden pea jacket, one could easily imagine him destined for something less than the Tournament of Roses.
Only after strudel and coffee had capped off a chicken dinner that, what with barely anyone able to stay seated very long in one place to eat it, had required nearly all afternoon to get through; after the kids from Maple got up on the bandstand and sang the Maple Avenue School song; after classmate upon classmate had taken the microphone to say "It's been a great life" or "I'm proud of all of you"; after people had just about finished tapping one another on the shoulder and falling into one another's arms; after the ten-member reunion committee stood on the dance floor and held hands while the one-man band played Bob Hope's theme song, "Thanks for the Memory," and we applauded in appreciation of all their hard work; after Marvin Lieb, whose father sold my father our Pontiac and offered each of us kids a big cigar to smoke whenever we came to get Marvin from the house, told me about his alimony miseries—"A guy takes a leak with more forethought than I gave to my two marriages"—and Julius Pincus, who'd always been the kindest kid and who now, because of tremors resulting from taking the cyclosporin essential to the long-term survival of his transplant, had had to give up his optometry practice, told me ruefully how he'd come by his new kidney—"If a little fourteen-year-old girl didn't die of a brain hemorrhage last October, I would be dead today"—and after Schrimmer's tall young wife had said to me, "You're the class writer, maybe you can explain it. Why are they all called Utty, Dutty, Mutty, and Tutty?"; only after I had shocked Shelly Minskoff, another Daredevil, with a nod of the head when he asked, "Is it true what you said at the mike, you don't have kids or anything like that?," only after Shelly had taken my hand in his and said, "Poor Skip," only then did I discover that Jerry Levov, having arrived late, was among us.
3
I HADN'T EVEN thought to look for him. I knew from the Swede that Jerry lived in Florida, but even more to the point, he'd always been such an isolated kid, so little engaged by anything other than his own abstruse interests, that it didn't seem likely he'd have any more desire now than he'd had then to endure the wisdom of his classmates. But only minutes after Shelly Minskoff had bid me good-bye, Jerry came bounding over, a big man in a double-breasted blue blazer like my own, but with a chest like a large birdcage, and bald except for a ropelike strand of white hair draped across the crown of his skull. His body had really achieved a strange form: despite the majestic upper torso that had replaced the rolling-pin chest of the gawky boy, he locomoted himself on the same ladderlike legs that had made his the silliest gait in the school, legs no heavier or any shapelier than Olive Oyl's in the Popeye comic strip. The face I recognized immediately, from those afternoons when my own face was target for its focused animosity, when I used to see it weaving wildly above the Ping-Pong table, crimson with belligerence and lethal intention—yes, the core of that face I could never forget, long-limbed Jerry's knotted little face, the determined mask of the prowling beast that won't let you be until you're driven from your lair, the ferret face that declares, "Don't talk to me about compromise! I know nothing of compromise!" Now in that face was the obstinacy of a lifetime of smashing the ball back at the other guy's gullet. I could imagine that Jerry had made himself important to people by means different from his brother's.
"I didn't expect to see you here," Jerry said.
"I didn't expect to see you."
"I wouldn't have thought this was a big enough stage for you," he said, laughing. "I was sure you'd find the sentimentality repellent."
"Exactly what I was thinking about you."
"You're somebody who has banished all superfluous sentiments from his life. No asinine longings to be home again. No patience for the nonessential. Only time for what's indispensable. After all, what they sit around calling the 'past' at these things isn't a fragment of a fragment of the past. It's the past undetonated—nothing is really brought back, nothing. It's nostalgia. It's bullshit."
These few sentences telling me what I was, what everything was, would have accounted not merely for four wives but for eight, ten, sixteen of them. Everyone's narcissism is strong at a reunion, but this was an outpouring of another magnitude. Jerry's body may have been divided between the skinny kid and the large man but not the character—he had the character of one big unified thing, coldly accustomed to being listened to. What an evolution this was, the eccentric boy elaborated into a savagely sure-of-himself man. The original unwieldy impulses appeared to have been brought into a crude harmony with the enormous intelligence and willfulness; the effect was not only of somebody who called the shots and would never dream of doing what he was told but of somebody you could count on to churn things up. It seemed truer even than it had been when we were boys that if Jerry got an idea in his head, however improbable, something big would come of it. I could see why I had been infatuated with him as a kid, understood for the first time that my fascination had been not solely with his being the Swede's brother but with the Swede's brother's being so decisively odd, his masculinity so imperfectly socialized compared with the masculinity of the three-letterman.
"Why did you come?" Jerry asked.
About the cancer scare of the year before, and the impact on urogenital function of the ensuing prostate surgery, I said nothing directly. Or rather, said everything that was necessary—and perhaps not merely for myself—when I replied, "Because I'm sixty-two. I figured that of all the forms of bullshit-nostalgia available, this was the one least likely to be without unsettling surprises."
He enjoyed that. "You like unsettling surprises."
"Might as well. Why did you come?"
"I happened to be up here. At the end of the week I had to be up here, so I came." Smiling at me, he said, "I don't think they were expecting their writer to be so laconic. I don't think they were expecting quite so much modesty." Keeping in mind what I took to be the spirit of the occasion, when I'd been called up to the microphone near the end of the meal by the MC (Erwin Levine, Children 43, 41, 38, 31. Grandchildren 9, 8, 3, 1, 6 weeks), I'd said only, "I'm Nathan Zuckerman. I was vice president of our class in 4B and a member of the prom committee. I have neither child nor grandchild but I did, ten years ago, have a quintuple bypass operation of which I am proud. Thank you." That was the history I gave them, as much as was called for, medical or otherwise—enough to be a little amusing and sit down.
"What were you expecting?" I asked Jerry.
"That. Exactly that. Unassuming. The Weequahic Everyman. What else? Always behave contrary to their expectations. You even as a kid. Always found a practical method to guarantee your freedom."
"I'd say that was a better description of you, Jer."
"No, no. I found the impractical method. Rashness personified, Little Sir Hothead—just went nuts and started screaming when I couldn't have it my way. You were the one with the big outlook on things. You were more theoretical than the rest of us. Even back then you had to hook up everything with your thoughts. Sizing up the situation, drawing conclusions. You kept a sharp watch over yourself. All the crazy stuff contained inside. A sensible boy. No, not like me at all."
"Well, we both had a big investment in being right," I said.
"Yeah, being wrong," Jerry said, "was unendurable to me. Absolutely unendurable."
"And it's easier now?"
"Don't have to worry about it. The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing."
"Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it
doesn't completely wreck your life."
"How is your life? Where are you? I read somewhere, on the back of some book, you were living in England with an aristocrat."
"I live in New England now, without an aristocrat."
"So who instead?"
"No one instead."
"Can't be. What do you do for somebody to eat dinner with?"
"I go without dinner."
"For now. The Wisdom of the Bypass. But my experience is that personal philosophies have a shelf life of about two weeks. Things'll change."
"Look, this is where life has left me. Rarely see anyone. Where I live in western Massachusetts, a tiny place in the hills there, I talk to the guy who runs the general store and to the lady at the post office. The postmistress. That's it."
"What's the name of the town?"
"You wouldn't know it. Up in the woods. About ten miles from a college town called Athena. I met a famous writer there when I was just starting out. Nobody mentions him much anymore, his sense of virtue is too narrow for readers now, but he was revered back then. Lived like a hermit. Reclusion looked awfully austere to a kid. He maintained it solved his problems. Now it solves mine."
"What's the problem?"
"Certain problems having been taken out of my life—that's the problem. At the store the Red Sox, at the post office the weather—that's it, my social discourse. Whether we deserve the weather. When I come to pick up my mail and the sun is shining outside, the postmistress tells me, 'We don't deserve this weather.' Can't argue with that."
"And pussy?"
"Over. Live without dinner, live without pussy."
"Who are you, Socrates? I don't buy it. Purely the writer. The single-minded writer. Nothing more."
"Nothing more all along and I could have saved myself a lot of wear and tear. That's all I've had anyway to keep the shit at bay."
"What's 'the shit'?"
"The picture we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. The picture we have of ourselves. Useless. Presumptuous. Completely cocked-up. Only we go ahead and we five by these pictures. 'That's what she is, that's what he is, this is what I am. This is what happened, this is why it happened—' Enough. You know who I saw a couple of months ago? Your brother. Did he tell you?"
"No, he didn't."
"He wrote me a letter and invited me to dinner in New York. A nice letter. Out of the blue. I drove down to meet him. He was composing a tribute to your old man. In the letter he asked for my help. I was curious about what he had in mind. I was curious about him writing me to announce that he wanted to write something. To you he's just a brother—to me he's still 'the Swede.' You carry those guys around with you forever. I had to drive down. But at dinner he never mentioned the tribute. We just uttered the pleasantries. At some place called Vincent's. That was it. As always, he looked terrific."
"He's dead."
"Your brother's dead?"
"Died Wednesday. Funeral two days ago. Friday. That's why I was in Jersey. Watched my big brother die."
"Of what? How?"
"Cancer."
"But he'd had prostate surgery. He told me they got it out."
Impatiently Jerry said, "What else was he going to tell you?"
"He was thin, that was all."
"That wasn't all."
So, the Swede too. What, astoundingly to Mendy Gurlik, was decimating the Daredevils right up the middle; what, astoundingly to me, had, a year earlier, made of me "purely a writer"; what, in the wake of all the other isolating losses, in the wake of everything gone and everyone gone, had stripped me down into someone whose aging powers had now but a single and unswerving aim, a man who would be seeking his solace, like it or not, nowhere but in sentences, had managed the most astounding thing of all by carrying off the indestructible hero of the wartime Weequahic section, our neighborhood talisman, the legendary Swede.
"Did he know," I asked, "when I saw him, that he was in trouble?"
"He had his hopes, but sure he knew. Metastasized. All through him."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"His fiftieth was coming up next month. You know what he said at the hospital on Tuesday? To me and his kids the day before he died? Most of the time he was incoherent, but twice he said, so we could understand him, 'Going to get to my fiftieth.' He'd heard everyone from his class was asking, 'Will the Swede be there?' and he didn't want to let them down. He was very stoical. He was a very nice, simple, stoical guy. Not a humorous guy. Not a passionate guy. Just a sweetheart whose fate it was to get himself fucked over by some real crazies. In one way he could be conceived as completely banal and conventional. An absence of negative values and nothing more. Bred to be dumb, built for convention, and so on. That ordinary decent life that they all want to live, and that's it. The social norms, and that's it. Benign, and that's it. But what he was trying to do was to survive, keeping his group intact. He was trying to get through with his platoon intact. It was a war for him, finally. There was a noble side to this guy. Some excruciating renunciations went on in that life. He got caught in a war he didn't start, and he fought to keep it all together, and he went down. Banal, conven tional—maybe, maybe not. People could think that. I don't want to get into judging. My brother was the best you're going to get in this country, by a long shot."
I was wondering while he spoke if this had been Jerry's estimate of the Swede while he was alive, if there wasn't perhaps a touch of mourner's rethinking here, remorse for a harsher Jerry-like view he might once have held of the handsome older brother, sound, well adjusted, quiet, normal, somebody everybody looked up to, the neighborhood hero to whom the smaller Levov had been endlessly compared while himself evolving into something slightly ersatz. This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a. new development in Jerry, compassion just a few hours old. That can happen when people die—the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral forced without any claptrap in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward—even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.
"My father," Jerry said, "was one impossible bastard. Overbearing. Omnipresent. I don't know how people worked for him. When they moved to Central Avenue, the first thing he had the movers move was his desk, and the first place he put it was not in the glass-enclosed office but dead center in the middle of the factory floor, so he could keep his eye on everybody. You can't imagine the noise out there, the sewing machines whining, the clicking machines pounding, hundreds of machines going all at once, and right in the middle his desk and his telephone and the great man himself. The owner of the glove factory, but he would always sweep his own floors, especially around the cutters, where they cut the leather, because he wanted to see from the size of the scraps who was losing money for him. I told him early on to fuck off, but Seymour wasn't built like me. He had a big, generous nature and with that they really raked him over the coals, all the impossible ones. Unsatisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives, and the little murderer herself, the monster daughter. The monster Merry. The solid thing he once was. At Newark Maid he was an absolute, unequivocal success. Charmed a lot of people into giving their all for Newark Maid. Very adroit businessman. Knew how to cut a glove, knew how to cut a deal. Had an in on Seventh Avenue with the fashion people. The designers there would tell the guy anything. That's how he stayed abreast of the pack. In New York, he was always stopping into the departme
nt stores, shopping the competition, looking for something unique about the other guy's product, always in the stores taking a look at the leather, stretching the glove, doing everything just the way my old man taught him. Did most of the selling himself. Handled all the big house accounts. The lady buyers went nuts for Seymour. You can imagine. He'd come over to New York, take these tough Jewish broads out to dinner—buyers who could make or break you—wine and dine them, and they'd fall head over heels for the guy. Instead of him buttering them up, by the end of the evening they'd be buttering him up. Come Christmastime they'd be sending my brother the theater tickets and the case of Scotch rather than the other way around. He knew how to get the confidence of these people just by being himself. He'd find out a buyer's favorite charity, get a ticket to the annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, show up like a movie star in his tuxedo, on the spot make a fat donation to cancer, muscular dystrophy, whatever it was, United Jewish Appeal—next thing Newark Maid had the account. Knew all the stuff: what colors are going to be next season's colors, whether the length is going to be up or down. Attractive, responsible, hardworking guy. A couple of unpleasant strikes in the sixties, a lot of tension. But his employees are out on the picket line and they see him pull up in the car and the women who sew the gloves start falling all over themselves apologizing for not being at the machines. They were more loyal to my brother than they were to their union. Everybody loved him, a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt forever. No reason for him to know anything about anything except gloves. Instead he is plagued with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his life. The incessant questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my brother. He got the meaning for his life some other way. I don't mean he was simple. Some people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kind. But Seymour was never that simple. Simple is never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late. His life was blown up by that bomb. The real victim of that bombing was him."
