American Pastoral (Nathan Zuckerman)

by Philip Roth

  Her father was no longer wondering at what point he had lost control over her life, no longer thinking that everything he had ever done had been futile and that she was in the power of something demented. He was thinking instead that Mary Stoltz was not his daughter, for the simple reason that his daughter could not have absorbed so much pain. She was a kid from Old Rimrock, a privileged kid from paradise. She could not have worked potato fields and slept under bridges and for five years gone about in terror of arrest. She could never have slept with the blind woman and her dog. Indianapolis, Chicago, Portland, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, Florida—never could Merry have lived alone in all those places, an isolated vagabond washing dishes and hiding out from the police and befriending the destitute on park benches. And never would she have wound up in Newark. No. Living for six months ten minutes away, walking to the Ironbound through that underpass, wearing that veil and walking all alone, every morning and every night, past all those derelicts and through all that filth—no! The story was a lie, its purpose to destroy their villain, who was him. The story was a caricature, a sensational caricature, and she was an actress, this girl was a professional, hired and charged with tormenting him because he was everything they were not. They wanted to kill him off with the story of a pariah exiled in the very country where her family had triumphantly rooted itself in every possible way, and so he refused to be convinced by anything she had said. He thought, The rape? The bombs? A sitting duck for every madman? That was more than hardship. That was hell. Merry couldn't survive any of it. She could not have survived killing four people. She could not have murdered in cold blood and survived.

  And then he realized that she hadn't survived. Whatever the truth might be, whatever had truly befallen her, her determination to leave behind her, in ruin, her parents' contemptible life had driven her to the disaster of destroying herself.

  Of course this all could have happened to her. Things happen like this every day all over the face of the earth. He had no idea how people behaved.

  "You're not my daughter. You are not Merry."

  "If you wish to believe that I am not, that may be just as well. That may be for the best."

  "Why don't you ask me about your mother, Meredith? Should I ask you? Where was your mother born? What is her maiden name? What is her father's name?"

  "I don't want to talk about my mother."

  "Because you know nothing about her. Or about me. Or about the person you pretend to be. Tell me about the house at the shore. Tell me the name of your first-grade teacher. Who was your second-grade teacher? Tell me why you are pretending to be my daughter!"

  "If I answer the questions, you will suffer even more. I don't know how much suffering you want."

  "Oh, don't worry about my suffering, young lady—just answer the questions. Why are you pretending to be my daughter? Who are you? Who is 'Rita Cohen'? What are you two up to? Where is my daughter? I will turn this matter over to the police unless you tell me now what is going on here and where my daughter is."

  "Nothing I'm doing is actionable, Daddy."

  The awful legalism. Not only the awful Jainism, but this shit too. "No," he said, "now it isn't—now it's just horrible! What about what you did do!"

  "I killed four people," she replied, as innocently as she might once have told him, "I baked tollhouse cookies this afternoon."

  "No!" he shouted. The Jainism, the legalism, the egregious innocence, all of it desperation, all of it to distance herself from the four who are dead. "This will not do! You are not an Algerian woman! You are not from Algeria and you are not from India! You are an American girl from Old Rimrock, New Jersey! A very, very screwed-up American girl! Four people? No!" And now he refused to believe it, now it was he for whom the guilt made no sense and could not be. She had been much too blessed for this to be true. So had he. He could never father a child who killed four people. Everything life had provided her, everything life offered her, everything life demanded of her, everything that had happened to her from the day she was born made that impossible. Killing people? It was not one of their problems. Mercifully life had omitted that from their lives. Killing people was as far as you could get from all that had been given to the Levovs to do. No, she was not, she could not, be his. "If you are so big on not lying or taking anything, small or great—all that crap, Merry, completely meaningless crap—I beg you to tell me the truth!"

  "The truth is simple. Here is the truth. You must be done with craving and selfhood."

  "Merry," he cried, "Merry, Merry," and, the unbridled unchecked in him, powerless not to attack, with all his manly brawn he fell upon her huddled there on the grimy pallet. "It isn't you! You could not have done it!" She put up no resistance as he tore from her face the veil cut from the end of a stocking. Where the heel should be was her chin. Nothing is more fetid than something where your foot has been, and she puts her mouth up against it. We loved her, she loved us—and as a result she wears her face in a stocking. "Now speak!" he commanded her.

  But she wouldn't. He pried her mouth open, disregarding a guideline he had never before overstepped—the injunction against violence. It was the end of all understanding. There was no way for understanding to be there anymore, even though he knew violence to be inhuman and futile, and understanding—talking sense to each other for however long it took to bring about accord—all there was that could achieve a lasting result. The father who could never use force on his child, for whom force was the embodiment of moral bankruptcy, pried open her mouth and with his fingers took hold of her tongue. One of her front teeth was missing, one of her beautiful teeth. That proved it wasn't Merry. The years of braces, the retainer, the night brace, all those contraptions to perfect her bite, to save her gums, to beautify her smile—this could not be the same girl.

  "Speak!" he demanded, and at last the true smell of her reached him, the lowest human smell there is, excluding only the stench of the rotting living and the rotting dead. Strangely, though she had told him she did not wash so as to do no harm to the water, he had smelled nothing before—neither when they'd embraced on the street nor sitting in the dimness across from her pallet—nothing other than a sourish, nauseatingly unfamiliar something that he ascribed to the piss-soaked building. But what he smelled now, while pulling open her mouth, was a human being and not a building, a mad human being who grubs about for pleasure in its own shit. Her foulness had reached him. She is disgusting. His daughter is a human mess stinking of human waste. Her smell is the smell of everything organic breaking down. It is the smell of no coherence. It is the smell of all she's become. She could do it, and she did do it, and this reverence for life is the final obscenity.

  He tried to locate a muscle in his head somewhere to plug the opening at the top of his throat, something to stop him up and prevent their sliding still further into the filth, but there was no such muscle. A spasm of gastric secretions and undigested food started up the intestinal piping and, in a bitter, acidic stream, surged sickeningly onto his tongue, and when he cried out, "Who are you!" it was spewed with his words onto her face.

  Even in the dimness of that room, once he was over her he knew very well who she was. It was not necessary for her to speak with her face unprotected to inform him that the inexplicable had forever displaced whatever he once thought he knew. If she was no longer branded as Merry Levov by her stutter, she was marked unmistakably by the eyes. Within the chiseled-out, oversized eye sockets, the eyes were his. The tallness was his and the eyes were his. She was all his. The tooth she was missing had been pulled or knocked out.

  She looked not at him when he retreated to the door but anxiously all around her narrow room, as though in his frenzy he had battered most brutally the harmless microorganisms that dwelled with her in her solitude.

  Four people. Little wonder that she had vanished. Little wonder that he had. This was his daughter, and she was unknowable. This murderer is mine. His vomit was on her face, a face that, but for the eyes, was now most unlike her mother's
or her father's. The veil was off, but behind the veil there was another veil. Isn't there always?

  "Come with me," he begged.

  "You go, Daddy. Go."

  "Merry, you are asking me to do something that is excruciatingly painful. You are asking me to leave you. I just found you. Please," he begged her, "come with me. Come home."

  "Daddy, let me be."

  "But I must see you. I cannot leave you here. I must see you!"

  "You've seen me. Please go now. If you love me, Daddy, you'll let me be."

  The most perfect girl of all, one's daughter, had been raped.

  All he could think of was the two times she had been raped. Four people blown up by her—so grotesque, so out of scale, it was unimaginable. It had to be. To see the faces, to hear the names, to learn that one was a mother of three, the second just married, the third about to retire.... Did she know what or who they were ... care who they were...? He could not imagine any of it. Wouldn't. Only the rape was imaginable. Imagine the rape and the rest is blocked out: their faces remain out of sight, their spectacles, their hairdos, their families, their jobs, their birth dates, their addresses, their blameless innocence.

  Not one Fred Conlon—four Fred Conlons.

  The rape. The rape obscured everything else. Concentrate on the rape.

  What were the details? Who were these men? Was it somebody who was part of that life, somebody who was against the war and on the run like her, was it somebody she knew or was it a stranger, a bum, an addict, a madman who'd followed her home and into the hallway with a knife? What went on? Had they held her down and threatened her with a knife? Had they beaten her? What did they make her do? Were there no people to help her? Just what did they make her do? He would kill them. She had to tell him who they were. I want to find out who those people are. I want to know where it happened. I want to know when it happened. We're going to go back and find those people and I'm going to kill them!

  Now that he could not stop imagining the rapes, there was no relief, not for one second, from the desire to go out and kill somebody. With all the walls he'd built up, she gets raped. All of that protection and he could not prevent her from getting raped. Tell me everything about it! I'm going to kill them!

  But it was too late. It had happened. He could do nothing to make it not happen. For it to not happen, he would have had to kill them before it happened—and how could he manage that? Swede Levov? Off the playing field, when had Swede Levov laid a hand on anyone? Nothing so repelled this muscular man as the use of force.

  The places she was in. The people. How did she survive without people? That place she was in now. Were all her places like that or even worse? All right, she should not have done what she did, should never have done it, yet to think of how she'd had to live....

  He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who'd come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, "Leave! Leave! Leave!" He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world. And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of the glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wanton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In Newark's burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history's rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.

  And all the while the Swede is there in the factory with Vicky, waiting with just Vicky beside him for his place to go up, waiting for police with pistols, for soldiers with submachine guns, waiting for protection from the Newark police, the state police, the National Guard—from someone—before they burn to the ground the business built by his father, entrusted to him by his father ... and that wasn't as bad as this. A police car opens fire into the bar across the street, out his window he sees a woman go down, buckle and go down, shot dead right on the street, a woman killed in front of his eyes ... and not even that was as bad as this. People screaming, shouting, firemen pinned to the ground by gunfire so they cannot fight the flames; explosions, the sound suddenly of bongo drums, in the middle of the night a volley of pistol shots blowing out every one of the street-level windows displaying Vicky's signs ... and this is worse by far. And then they left, everyone, fled the smoldering rubble—manufacturers, retailers, the banks, the shop owners, the corporations, the department stores; in the South Ward, on the residential blocks, there are two moving vans per day on every street throughout the next year, homeowners fleeing, deserting the modest houses they treasure for whatever they can get ... but he stays on, refuses to leave, Newark Maid remains behind, and that did not prevent her from getting raped. Not even during the worst of it does he abandon his factory to the vandals; he does not abandon his workers afterward, does not turn his back on these people, and still his daughter is raped.

  Hanging on the wall directly back of his desk, framed and under glass, there is a letter from the Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder thanking Mr. Seymour I. Levov for his testimony as an eyewitness to the riots, praising him for his courage, for his devotion to Newark, an official letter signed by ten distinguished citizens, two of them Catholic bishops, two of them ex-governors of the state; and on the wall alongside that, also framed and under glass, an article that six months earlier appeared in the Star-Ledger, with his photograph and the headline, "Glove Firm Lauded for Staying in Newark"—and still she is raped.

  The rape was in his bloodstream and he would never get it out. The odor of it was in his bloodstream, the look of it, the legs and the arms and the hair and the clothing. There were the sounds—the thud, her cries, the careening in a tiny enclosure. The horrible bark of a man coming. His grunting. Her whimpering. The stupen-dousness of the rape blotted out everything. All unsuspectingly, she had stepped out of her doorway and they had grabbed her from behind and thrown her down and there was her body for them to do with as they wished. Only some cloth covered her body and they tore it off. There was nothing between her body and their hands. Inside her body. Filling the inside of her body. The tremendous force with which they did it. The tearing force. They knocked out her tooth. One of them was insane. He sat over her and let loose a stream of shit. They were all over her. These men. They were speaking a foreign language. Laughing. Whatever they felt the urge to do, they did. One waited behind the other. She saw him waiting. There was nothing she could do.

  And nothing he could do. The ma
n grows crazier and crazier to do something just when there is nothing left for him to do.

  Her body in the crib. Her body in the bassinet. Her body when she starts to stand on his stomach. The belly showing between her dungarees and her shirt while she hangs upside down from him when he comes home from work. Her body when she leaves the earth and leaps into his arms. The abandon of her body flying into his arms, granting him a father's permission to touch. The unquestioning adoration of him that is in that leaping body, a body seemingly all finished, a perfected creation in miniature, with all of the miniature's charm. A body that looks quickly put on after having just been freshly ironed—no folds anywhere. The naive freedom with which she discloses it. The tenderness this evokes. Her bare feet padded like a little animal's feet. New and unworn, her uncorrupted paws. Her grasping toes. The stalky legs. Utilitarian legs. Firm. The most muscular part of her. Her sorbet-colored underpants. At the great divide, her baby tuchas, the gravity-defying behind, improbably belonging to the upper Merry and not as yet to the lower. No fat. Not an ounce anywhere. The cleft, as though an awl had made it—that beautifully beveled joining that will petal outward, evolving in the cycle of time into a woman's origami-folded cunt. The implausible belly button. The geometric torso. The anatomical precision of the rib cage. The pliancy of her spine. The bony ridges of her back like keys on a small xylophone. The lovely dormancy of the invisible bosom before the swell begins. All the turbulent wanting-to-become blessedly, blessedly dormant. Yet in the neck somehow is the woman to be, there in that building block of a neck ornamented with down. The face. That's the glory. The face that she will not carry with her and that is yet the fingerprint of the future. The marker that will disappear and yet be there fifty years later. How little of her story is revealed in his child's face. Its youngness is all he can see. So very new in the cycle. With nothing as yet totally defined, time is so powerfully present in her face. The skull is soft. The flare of the unstructured nose is the whole nose. The color of her eyes. The white, white whiteness. The limpid blue. Eyes unclouded. It's all unclouded, but the eyes particularly, windows, washed windows with nothing yet of the revelation of what's within. The history in her brow of the embryo. The dried apricots that are her ears. Delicious. If once you started eating them you'd never stop. The little ears always older than she is. The ears that were never just four years old and yet hadn't really changed since she was fourteen months. The preternatural fineness of her hair. The health of it. More reddish, more like his mother's than his then, still touched with fire then. The smell of the whole day in her hair. The carefreeness, the abandon of that body in his arms. The catlike abandon to the all-powerful father, the reassuring giant. It is so, it is true—in the abandon of her body to him, she excites an instinct for reassurance that is so abundant that it must be close to what Dawn says she felt when she was lactating. What he feels when his daughter leaves the earth to leap into his arms is the absoluteness of their intimacy. And built into it always is the knowledge that he is not going too far, that he cannot, that it is an enormous freedom and an enormous pleasure, the equivalent of her breast-feeding bond with Dawn. It's true. It's undeniable. He was wonderful at it and so was she. So wonderful. How did all this happen to this wonderful kid? She stuttered. So what? What was the big deal? How did all this happen to this perfectly normal child? Unless this is the sort of thing that does happen to the wonderful, perfectly normal kids. The nuts don't do these things—the normal kids do. You protect her and protect her—and she is unprotectable. If you don't protect her it's unendurable, if you do protect her it's unendurable. It's all unendurable. The awfulness of her terrible autonomy. The worst of the world had taken his child. If only that beautifully chiseled body had never been born.