by Philip Roth
"I only speak the truth."
"I gave her ten thousand dollars for you. I gave her cash. Did you or did you not get that money?"
Her laugh was kindly. "Ten thousand dollars? Not yet, Daddy."
"Then I must have an answer from you. Who is the Rita Cohen who told me where I could find you? Is this the Melissa from New York?"
"You found me," she replied, "because you have been looking. I never expected not to be found by you. You sought me out because you must seek me."
"Did you come to Newark to help me find you? Is that why you came here?"
But she replied, "No."
"Then why did you come? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? You know where the office is. You know how very close it is. Where's the logic, Merry? This close and..."
"I got a ride, and here I was, you see."
"Like that. Coincidence. No logic. No logic anywhere."
"The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any. I relinquish all influence over everything. As to what constitutes a coincidence, you and I, Daddy—"
"Do you 'relinquish all influence'?" he cried. "Do you, 'all influence'?" The most maddening conversation of his life. The know-it-all-ism of her absurdly innocent, profoundly insane, unstuttering solemnity, the awful candor of the room and of the street outside, the awful candor of everything outside him that was so powerfully controlling him. "You have an influence over me," he shouted, "you are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me! What you sit there calling 'coincidence' is influence—your powerlessness is power over me, goddamn it! Over your mother, over your grandfather, over your grandmother, over everyone who loves you—wearing that veil is bullshit, Merry, complete and absolute bullshit! You are the most powerful person in the world!"
There was no solace to be found in thinking, This is not my life, this is the dream of my life. That was not going to make him any less miserable. Nor was the rage with his daughter, nor was the rage with the little criminal whom he had allowed to be cast as their savior. A cunning and malicious crook who suckered him without half trying. Took him for all she could get in four ten-minute visits. The viciousness. The audacity. The unshatterable nerves. God alone knew where such kids came from.
Then he remembered that one of them came from his house. Rita Cohen merely came from somebody else's house. They were brought up in houses like his own. They were raised by parents like him. And so many were girls, girls whose political identity was total, who were no less aggressive and militant, no less drawn to "armed action" than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They are willing to do anything they can imagine to make history change. The draft isn't even hanging over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorize against the war, competent to rob at gunpoint, equipped in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or inner contradiction—girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably extremist, completely unsociable. He read the names of girls in the papers who were wanted by the authorities for crimes allegedly stemming from antiwar activities, girls that he imagined Merry knew, girls with whose lives he imagined his daughter's to be now interlinked: Bernadine, Patricia, Judith, Cathlyn, Susan, Linda.... His father, after foolishly watching a TV news special about the police hunt for the underground Weathermen, among them Mark Rudd and Katherine Boudin and Jane Alpert—all in their twenties, Jewish, middle class, college-educated, violent in behalf of the antiwar cause, committed to revolutionary change and determined to overturn the United States government—went around saying, "I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework. What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can find oppression. Can't live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression. Once they ran away from being poor; now they run away from being rich. It's crazy. They have parents they can't hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate America instead." But Rita Cohen was a case unto herself: a vicious slut and a common crook.
Then how is he to explain her letter, if that is all she is? What happened to our smart Jewish kids? They are crazy. Something is driving them crazy. Something has set them against everything. Something is leading them into disaster. These are not the smart Jewish children intent on getting ahead by doing what they are told better than anyone else does. They only feel at home doing better than anyone else as they are not told. Distrust is the madness to which they have been called.
And here on the floor is the result in one of its more heartbreaking forms: the religious conversion. If you fail to bring the world into subjection, then subject yourself to the world.
"I love you," he was telling Merry, "you know I would look for you. You are my child. But how could I find you in a million years, wearing that mask and weighing eighty-eight pounds and living the way you live? How could anyone have found you, even here? Where were you?" he cried, as angry as the angriest father ever betrayed by a daughter or a son, so angry he feared that his head was about to spew out his brains just as Kennedy's did when he was shot. "Where have you been? Answer me!"
So she told him where she'd been.
And how did he listen? Wondering: If there was some point in their lives before she took the wrong path, where and when was it? Thinking: There was no such point, there was never any controlling Merry however many years she managed to deceive them, to seem safely theirs and under their sway. Thinking: Futile, every last thing he had ever done. The preparations, the practice, the obedience; the uncompromising dedication to the essential, to the things that matter most; the systematic system building, the patient scrutiny of every problem, large or small; no drifting, no laxity, no laziness; faithfully meeting every obligation, addressing energetically every situation's demands ... a list as long as the U.S. Constitution, his articles of faith—and all of it futility. The systemization of futility is all it had ever been. All he had ever restrained by his responsibility was himself.
Thinking: She is not in my power and she never was. She is in the power of something that does not give a shit. Something demented. We all are. Their elders are not responsible for this. They are themselves not responsible for this. Something else is.
Yes, at the age of forty-six, in 1973, almost three-quarters of the way through the century that with no regard for the niceties of burial had strewn the corpses of mutilated children and their mutilated parents everywhere, the Swede found out that we are all in the power of something demented. It's just a matter of time, honky. We all are!
He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of the violent Uncorrupted who called him a criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have. The Swede finally found out! They were delirious with joy, delighted having destroyed his once-pampered daughter and ruined his privileged life, shepherding him at long last to their truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their insatiable greed. The something that's demented, honky, is American history! It's the American empire! It's Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard Oil and Newark Maid Leatherware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the fucked-over-by-America human race!
She told him that for the first seventy-two hours after the bombing she had been hidden in the Morristown home of Sheila Salzman, her speech therapist. Safely she made her way to Sheila's house, was taken in, and lived hidden away in an anteroom to Sheila's office during the day and in the office itself at night. Then her underground wandering b
egan. In just two months she had fifteen aliases and moved every four or five days. But in Indianapolis, where she was befriended by a movement minister who knew only that she was an antiwar activist gone underground, she took a name from a tombstone in a cemetery, the name of a baby born within a year of herself who had died in infancy. She applied for a duplicate birth certificate in the baby's name, which was how she became Mary Stoltz. After that, she obtained a library card, a Social Security number, and when she turned seventeen, a driver's license. For nearly a year, Mary Stoltz washed dishes in the kitchen of an old people's home—a job she got through the minister—until one morning he reached her on the pay phone and said that she was to leave work immediately and meet him at the Greyhound station. There he gave her a ticket to Chicago, told her to stay two days, then to buy a ticket for Oregon—north of Portland was a commune where she could find sanctuary. He gave her the commune's address and some money to buy clothes, food, and the tickets, and she left for Chicago, where she was raped on the night she arrived. Held captive and raped and robbed. Just seventeen.
In the kitchen of a dive not as friendly as the kitchen at the old people's home, she washed dishes to earn the money to get to Oregon. There was no minister to advise her in Chicago and she was afraid that if she tried to make contact with the underground she would do something wrong and be apprehended. She was too frightened even to use a pay phone to call the Indianapolis minister. She was raped again (in the fourth rooming house where she went to live) but this time she wasn't robbed, and so after six weeks as a dishwasher she had put together enough money to head for the commune.
In Chicago the loneliness had been so all-enveloping, she felt it as a current coursing through her. There wasn't a day, on some days not an hour, when she did not set out to phone Old Rimrock. But instead, before remembering her childhood room could completely undo her, she would find a diner or a luncheonette and sit on a stool at the counter and order a BLT and a vanilla milk shake. Saying the familiar words, watching the bacon curl on the grill, watching for her toast to pop up, carefully removing the toothpicks when she was served, eating the layered sandwich between sips of the shake, concentrating on crunching the tasteless fibers from the lettuce, extracting the smoke-scented fat from the brittle bacon and the flowery juices from the soft tomato, swilling everything in with the mash of the mayonnaised toast, grinding patiently away with her jaws and her teeth, thoughtfully pulverizing every mouthful into a silage to settle her down—concentrating on her BLT as fixedly as her mother's livestock focusing on the fodder at the trough—gave her the courage to go on alone. She would eat the sandwich and drink the shake and remember how she got there and go on. By the time she left Chicago she had discovered she no longer needed a home; she would never again come close to succumbing to the yearning for a family and a home.
In Oregon she was involved in two bombings.
Instead of stopping her, killing Fred Conlon had only inspired her; after Fred Conlon, instead of her being crippled by conscience, she was delivered from all residual fear and compunction. The horror of having killed, if only inadvertently, an innocent man, a man as good as any she would ever hope to know, had not taught her anything about that most fundamental prohibition, which, stupefyingly enough, she had failed to learn to observe from being raised by Dawn and him. Killing Conlon only confirmed her ardor as an idealistic revolutionary who did not shrink from adopting any means, however ruthless, to attack the evil system. She had proved that being in opposition to everything decent in honky America wasn't just so much hip graffiti emblazoned on her bedroom wall.
He said, "You planted the bombs."
"I did."
"At Hamlin's and in Oregon you planted the bombs."
"Yes."
"Was anyone killed in Oregon?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
"People."
"People," he repeated. "How many people, Merry?"
"Three," she said.
There was plenty to eat at the commune. They grew a lot of their own food and so there was no need, as there had been when she first got to Chicago, to scavenge for wilted produce outside supermarkets at night. At the commune she began to sleep with a woman she fell in love with, the wife of a weaver whose loom Merry learned to operate when she was not working with the bombs. Assembling bombs had become her specialty after she'd successfully planted her second and third. She loved the patience and the precision required to safely wire the dynamite to the blasting cap and the blasting cap to the Woolworth's alarm clock. That's when the stuttering first began to disappear. She never stuttered when she was with the dynamite.
Then something happened between the woman and her hus band, a violent argument that necessitated Merry's leaving the commune to restore peace.
It was while hiding in eastern Idaho, where she worked in the potato fields, that she decided to flee to Cuba. At night in the farm camp barracks she began to study Spanish. Living in the camp with the other laborers, she felt even more passionately committed to her beliefs, though the men were frightening when they were drunk and again there were sexual incidents. She believed that in Cuba she could live among workers without having to worry about their violence. In Cuba she could be Merry Levov and not Mary Stoltz.
She had concluded by this time that there could never be a revolution in America to uproot the forces of racism and reaction and greed. Urban guerrilla warfare was futile against a thermonuclear superstate that would stop at nothing to defend the profit principle. Since she could not help to bring about a revolution in America, her only hope was to give herself to the revolution that was. That would mark the end of her exile and the true beginning of her life.
The next year was devoted to finding her way to Cuba, to Fidel, who had emancipated the proletariat and who had eradicated injustice with socialism. But in Florida she had her first close brush with the FBI. There was a park in Miami full of Dominican refugees. It was a good place to practice Spanish and soon she found herself teaching the boys there how to speak English. Affectionately they called her La Farfulla, the stutterer, which did not prevent them from mischievously stuttering when they repeated the English words she taught them. In Spanish her own speech was flawless. Another reason to flee to the arms of the world revolution.
One day, Merry told her father, she noticed a youngish black bum, new to the park, watching her tutoring her boys. She knew immediately what that meant. A thousand times before she'd thought it was the FBI and a thousand times she'd been wrong—in Oregon, in Idaho, in Kentucky, in Maryland, the FBI watching her at the stores where she clerked; watching in the diners and the cafeterias where she washed dishes; watching on the shabby streets where she lived; watching in the libraries where she hid out to read the newspapers and to study the revolutionary thinkers, to master Marx, Marcuse, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, a French theorist whose sentences, litanized at bedtime like a supplication, had sustained her in much the same way as the ritual sacrament of the vanilla milk shake and the BUT. It must be constantly borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as "a woman alone in the street" and her revolutionary mission instinctively. The Algerian woman is not a secret agent. It is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag. She does not have the sensation of playing a role. There is no character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises directly to the level of tragedy.
Thinking: And the New Jersey girl descends to the level of idiocy. The New Jersey girl we sent to Montessori school because she was so bright, the New Jersey girl who at Morristown High got only As and B's—the New Jersey girl rises directly to the level of disgraceful playacting. The New Jersey girl rises to the level of psychosis.
Everywhere, in every city where she went to hide, she thought she saw the FBI—but it was in Miami that she was finally discovered while stuttering away on a
park bench trying to teach her boys to speak English. Yet how could she not teach them? How could she turn away from those who had been born to nothing, condemned to nothing, who appeared even to themselves to be human trash? On the second day when she came to the park and found the same young black bum pretending to be asleep on a bench beneath a blanket of newspapers, she turned back to the street and began to run and she did not stop until she saw a blind woman begging in the street, a large black woman with a dog. The woman was jiggling a cup and saying softly, "Blind, blind, blind." On the pavement at her feet lay a ragged wool coat inside which Merry realized she could hide. But she couldn't just take it from her; instead she asked the woman if she could help her beg, and the woman said sure, and Merry asked if she could wear the woman's dark glasses and her coat, and the woman said, "Anything, honey," and so Merry stood in the sun in Miami in that heavy old coat, wearing the dark glasses, shaking the cup for her while the woman chanted "Blind, blind, blind." That night she hid out alone beneath a bridge, but the next day she went back to beg with the black woman, once again disguised by the coat and the glasses, and eventually she moved in with her and her dog and took care of her.
That was when she began to study religions. Bunice, the black woman, sang to her in the mornings when they awoke in the bed where they slept, she and Merry and the dog. But when Bunice got cancer and died, that was the worst: the clinics, the ward, the funeral at which she was the only mourner, losing the person she'd loved most in the world ... that was the hardest it ever was.
During the months while Bunice was dying she found in the library the books that led her to leave behind forever the Judeo-Christian tradition and find her way to the supreme ethical imperative of ahimsa, the systematic reverence for life and the commitment to harm no living being.
