by Philip Roth
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Could there really be something wrong? Could there really be something that she was subjected to that could lead her to something like that? I was confused too. I want you to know that I never really believed it and I didn't want to believe it. But of course I had to wonder. Anyone would have."
"And? And? Having had an affair with me—what the hell did you find out, having had your little affair with me?"
"That you're kind and compassionate. That you do just about everything you can to be an intelligent, decent person. Just as I would have imagined before she'd blown up that building. Seymour, believe me, please, I just wanted her to be safe. So I took her in. And got her showered and clean. And gave her a place to sleep. I really had no idea—"
"She blew up a building, Sheila! Somebody was killed! It was all over the goddamn television!"
"But I didn't know until I turned on the TV."
"So at six o'clock at night you knew. She was there for three days. And you do not contact me."
"What good would it have done to contact you?"
"I'm her father."
"You're her father and she blew up a building. What good was it going to do bringing her back to you?"
"Don't you grasp what I'm saying? She's my daughter!"
"She's a very strong girl."
"Strong enough to look after herself in the world? No!"
"Turning her over to you wasn't going to help any. She wasn't going to sit and eat her peas and mind her business. You don't go from blowing up a building to—"
"It was your duty to tell me that she came to your house."
"I just thought that would make it easier for them to find her. She'd come so far, she'd gotten so much stronger, I thought that she could make it on her own. She ¿5 a strong girl, Seymour."
"She's a crazy girl."
"She's troubled."
"Oh, Christ! The father plays no role with the troubled daughter?"
"I'm sure he played plenty of a role. That was why I couldn't ... I just thought something terrible had happened at home."
"Something terrible happened at the general store."
"But you should have seen her—she'd gotten so fat."
"I should have seen her? Where do you think she'd been? It was your responsibility to get in touch with her parents! Not to let the child run off into nowhere! She never needed me more. She never needed her father more. And you're telling me she never needed him less. You made a terrible error. I hope you know it. A terrible, terrible error."
"What could you have done for her then? What could anyone have done for her then?"
"I deserved to know. I had a right to know. She's a minor. She's my daughter. You had an obligation to get to me."
"My first obligation was to her. She was my client."
"She was no longer your client."
"She had been my client. A very special client. She'd come so far. My first obligation was to her. How could I violate her confidence? The damage had already been done."
"I don't believe you are saying any of this."
"It's the law."
"What's the law?"
"That you don't betray your client's confidence."
"There's another law, idiot—a law against committing murder! She was a fugitive from justice!"
"Don't talk about her like that. Of course she ran. What else could she do? I thought that maybe she would turn herself in. But that she would do it in her own time. In her own way."
"And me? And her mother?"
"Well, it killed me to see you."
"You saw me for four months. It killed you every day?"
"Each time I thought that maybe it would make a difference if I let you know. But I didn't see what difference it would really make. It wouldn't change anything. You were already so broken."
"You are an inhuman bitch."
"There was nothing else I could do. She asked me not to tell. She asked me to trust her."
"I don't understand how you could be so shortsighted. I don't understand how you could be so taken in by a girl who was so obviously crazy."
"I know it's difficult to face. The whole thing is impossible to understand. But to try to pin it on me, to try to act like anything I could have done would have made a difference—it wouldn't have made a difference in her life, it wouldn't have made a difference in your life. She was running. There was no bringing her back there. She wasn't the same girl that she'd been. Something had gone wrong. I saw no point in bringing her back. She'd gotten so fat."
"Stop that! What difference did that make!"
"I just thought she was so fat and so angry that something very bad must have gone on at home."
"That it was my fault."
"I didn't think that. We all have homes. That's where everything always goes wrong."
"So you took it on yourself to let this sixteen-year-old who had killed somebody run off into the night. Alone. Unprotected. Knowing God knows what could happen to her."
"You're talking about her as if she were a defenseless girl."
"She is a defenseless girl. She was always a defenseless girl."
"Once she'd blown up the building there's nothing that could have been done, Seymour. I would have betrayed her confidence and what difference would it have made?"
"I would have been with my daughter! I could have protected her from what has happened to her! You don't know what has happened to her. You didn't see her the way I saw her today. She's completely crazy. I saw her today, Sheila. She's not fat anymore—she's a stick, a stick wearing a rag. She's in a room in Newark in the most awful situation imaginable. I cannot describe to you how she lives. If you had only told me, it would all be different!"
"We wouldn't have had an affair—that's all that would have been different. Of course I knew that you might be hurt."
"By what?"
"By my having seen her. But to bring it all up again? I didn't know where she was. I didn't have any more information on her. That's the whole thing. She wasn't crazy. She was upset. She was angry. But she wasn't crazy."
"It's not crazy to blow up the general store? It's not crazy to make a bomb, to plant a bomb in the post office of the general store?"
"I'm saying that at my house she wasn't crazy."
"She'd already been crazy. You knew she'd been crazy. What if she went on to kill somebody else? Isn't that a bit of a responsibility? She did, you know. She did, Sheila. She killed three more people. What do you think of that?"
"Don't say things just to torture me."
"I'm telling you something! She killed three more people! You could have prevented that!"
"You're torturing me. You're trying to torture me."
"She killed three more people!" And that was when he pulled Count's picture off the wall and hurled it at her feet. But that did not faze her—that seemed only to bring her under her own control again. Acting the role of herself, without rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room.
"What can be done for her?" he was growling, and all the while, down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the glass and dumping them into Dawn's wastebasket. "What can be done for her? What can be done for anyone? Nothing can be done. She was sixteen. Sixteen years old and completely crazy. She was a minor. She was my daughter. She blew up a building. She was a lunatic. You had no right to let her go!"
Without its glass, the picture of the immovable Count he hung again over the desk, and then, as though listening to people unabatedly chattering on about something or other were the task assigned him by the forces of destiny, he returned from the savagery of where he'd been to the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner party. That's what was left to hold him together—a dinner party. All there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his life continued careering toward destruction—a dinner party.
To the candlelit terrace he duteously returned, while bearing within him everyth
ing that he could not understand.
***
Dishes had been cleared, the salad eaten, and dessert served, fresh strawberry-rhubarb pie from McPherson's. The Swede saw that the guests had rearranged themselves for the last course. Orcutt, hiding still the vicious shit that he was behind the Hawaiian shirt and the raspberry trousers, had moved across the table and sat talking with the Umanoffs, all of them amiable and laughing together now that Deep Throat was off the agenda. Deep Throat had never been the real subject anyway. Boiling away beneath Deep Throat was the far more disgusting and transgressive subject of Merry, of Sheila, of Shelly, of Orcutt and Dawn, of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity among neighbors and friends, the subject of cruelty. The mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed—that was the subject here tonight!
The Swede's mother had come around to sit beside Dawn, who was talking with the Salzmans, and his father and Jessie were nowhere to be seen.
Dawn asked, "Important?"
"The Czech guy. The consul. The information I wanted. Where's my dad?"
He waited for her to say "Dead," but after she looked around she mouthed only "Don't know" and turned back to Shelly and Sheila.
"Daddy left with Mrs. Orcutt," his mother whispered. "They went somewhere together. I think in the house."
Orcutt came up to him. They were the same size, both big men, but the Swede had always been the stronger, going back to their twenties, to when Merry was born and the Levovs moved out to Old Rimrock from their apartment on Elizabeth Avenue in Newark and the newcomer had showed up for the Saturday morning touch-football games back of Orcutt's house. Out there just for the fun of it, to enjoy the fresh air and the feel of the ball and the camaraderie, to make some new friends, the Swede had not the slightest inclination to appear showy or superior, except when he simply had no choice: when Orcutt, who off the field had never been other than kind and considerate, began to use his hands more recklessly than the Swede considered sportsmanlike—in a way that the Swede considered cheap and irritating, for a pickup game the worst sort of behavior even if Orcutt's team did happen to have fallen behind. After it had occurred for two weeks in a row, he decided the third week to do what he of course could have done at any time—to dump him. And so, near the end of the game, with a single, swift maneuver—employing the other person's weight to do the damage—he managed at once to catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson and to make sure Orcutt was sprawled in the grass at his feet, before he pranced away to pile on the score. Pranced away and thought, of all things, "I don't like being looked down on," the words that Dawn had used to decline joining The Orcutt Family Cemetery Tour. He had not realized, not till he was speeding alone toward the goal line, how much Dawn's assailability had gotten to him nor how unsettled he was by the remotest likelihood (a likelihood that, to her face, he had dismissed) of his wife's being ridiculed out here for growing up in Elizabeth the daughter of an Irish plumber. When, after scoring, he turned around and saw Orcutt still on the ground, he thought, "Two hundred years of Morris County history, flat on its ass—that'll teach you to look down on Dawn Levov. Next time you'll play the whole game on your ass," before trotting back up the field to see if Orcutt was all right.
The Swede knew that once he got him on the floor of the terrace he would have no difficulty in slamming Orcutt's head against the flagstones as many times as might be required to get him into that cemetery with his distinguished clan. Yes, something is wrong with this guy, there always was, and the Swede had known it all along—knew it from those terrible paintings, knew it from the reckless use of his hands in a backyard pickup game, knew it even at the cemetery, when for one solid hour Orcutt got to goyishly regale a Jewish sightseer.... Yes, big dissatisfaction there right from the start. Dawn said it was art, modern art, when all the time, baldly displayed on their living room wall, was William Orcutt's dissatisfaction. But now he has my wife. Instead of that misfortune Jessie, he's got revamped and revitalized Miss New Jersey of 1949. Got it made, got it all now, the greedy, thieving son of a bitch.
"Your father's a good man," Orcutt said. "Jessie doesn't usually get all this attention when she goes out. It's why she doesn't go out. He's a very generous man. He doesn't hold anything back, does he? Nothing left undisclosed. You get the whole person. Unguarded. Unashamed. Works himself up. It's wonderful. An amazing person, really. A huge presence. Always himself. Coming from where I do, you have to envy all that."
Oh, I'll bet you do, you son of a bitch. Laugh at us, you fucker. Just keep laughing.
"Where are they?" the Swede asked.
"He told her there's only one way to eat a fresh piece of pie. That's sitting at a kitchen table with a nice cold glass of milk. I guess they're in the kitchen with the milk. Jessie's learning a lot more about making a glove than she may ever need to know, but that's all right too. No harm in that. I hope you didn't mind that I couldn't leave her home."
"We wouldn't want you to leave her home."
"You're all very understanding."
"I was looking at the model of your house," the Swede told him, "in Dawn's study." But what he was looking at was a mole on the left side of Orcutt's face, a dark mole buried in the crease that ran from his nose to the corner of his mouth. Along with the snout nose Orcutt had an ugly mole. Does she find the mole appealing? Does she kiss the mole? Doesn't she ever find this guy just a wee bit fat in the face? Or, when it comes to an upper-class Old Rimrock boy, is she as unmindful of his looks, as unperturbed, as professionally detached as the whorehouse ladies over in Easton?
"Uh-oh," said Orcutt, amiably feigning how uncertain he was. Uses his hands when he plays football, wears those shirts, paints those paintings, fucks his neighbor's wife, and manages through it all to maintain himself as the ever-reasonable unknowable man. All facade and subterfuge. He works so hard, Dawn said, at being one-dimensional. Up top the gentleman, underneath the rat. Drink the devil that lurks in his wife; lust and rivalry the devils lurking in him. Sealed and civilized and predatory. To reinforce the genealogi cal aggression—the overpowering by origins—the aggression of scrupulous manners. The humane environmentalist and the calculating predator, protecting what he has by birthright and taking surreptitiously what he doesn't have. The civilized savagery of William Orcutt. His civilized form of animal behavior. I prefer the cows. "It's supposed to be seen after dinner—with the spiel," Orcutt said. "Did it make any sense without the spiel?" he asked. "I wouldn't think so."
But of course—being unknowable is the goal. Then you move instrumentally through life, appropriating the beautiful wives. In the kitchen he should have hit those two over the head with a skillet.
"It did. A lot," the Swede said. And then, as he could never stop himself from doing with Orcutt, he added, "It's interesting. I get the idea now about the light. I get the idea of the light washing over those walls. That's going to be something to see. I think you're going to be very happy in it."
Orcutt laughed. "You, you mean."
But the Swede had not heard his own error. He hadn't heard it because of the huge thought that had just come at him: what he should have done and failed to do.
He should have overpowered her. He should not have left her there. Jerry was right. Drive to Newark. Leave immediately. Take Barry. The two of them could subdue her and bring her back in the car to Old Rimrock. And if Rita Cohen is there? I'll kill her. If she is anywhere near my daughter, I'll pour gasoline all over that hair and set the little cunt on fire. Destroying my daughter. Showing me her pussy. Destroying my child. There's the meaning—they are destroying her for the pleasure of destroying her. Take Sheila. Take Sheila. Calm down. Take Sheila to Newark. Merry listens to Sheila. Sheila will talk to her and get her out of that room.
"—leave it to our visiting intellectual to get everything wrong. The complacent rudeness with which she plays the old French game of beating up on the bourgeoisie...." Orcutt was confiding to the Swede his amusement with Marcia's posturing. "It'
s to her credit, I suppose, that she doesn't defer to the regulation dinnerparty discipline of not saying anything about anything. But still it's amazing, constantly amazes me, how emptiness always goes with cleverness. She hasn't the faintest idea, really, of what she's talking about. Know what my father used to say? 'All brains and no intelligence. The smarter the stupider.' Applies."
Not Dawn? No. Dawn wanted nothing further to do with their catastrophe. She was just biding her time with him until the house was built. Go and do it yourself. Get back in the fucking car and get her. Do you love her or don't you love her? You're acceding to her the way you acceded to your father, the way you have acceded to everything in your life. You're afraid of letting the beast out of the bag. Quite a critique she has made of decorum. You keep yourself a secret. You don't choose ever! But how could he bring Merry home, now, tonight, in that veil, with his father here? If his father were to see her, he'd expire on the spot. To where else then? Where would he take her? Could the two of them go live in Puerto Rico? Dawn wouldn't care where he went. As long as she had her Orcutt. He had to get her before she again set foot in that underpass. Forget Rita Cohen. Forget that inhuman idiot Sheila Salzman. Forget Orcutt. He does not matter. Find a place for Merry to live where there is not that underpass. That's all that matters. Start with the underpass. Save her from getting herself killed in the underpass. Before the morning, before she has even left her room—start there.
He had been cracking up in the only way he knew how, which is not really cracking up at all but sinking, all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight. A man who never goes full out and explodes, who only sinks ... but now it was clear what to do. Go get her out of there before dawn.
After Dawn. After Dawn life was inconceivable. There was nothing he could do without Dawn. But she wanted Orcutt. "That Wasp blandness," she'd said, all but yawning to make her point. But that blandness had terrific glamour for a little Irish Catholic girl. The mother of Merry Levov needs nothing less than William Orcutt III. The cuckolded husband understands. Of course. Under stands everything now. Who will get her back to the dream of where she has always wanted to go? Mr. America. Teamed up with Orcutt she'll be back on the track. Spring Lake, Atlantic City, now Mr. America. Rid of the stain of our child, the stain on her credentials, rid of the stain of the destruction of the store, she can begin to resume the uncontaminated life. But I was stopped at the general store. And she knows it. Knows that I am allowed in no farther. I'm of no use anymore. This is as far as she goes with me.
