American Pastoral (20 page)

"Where is she, damn you!"

"She's not a possession, you know—she's not property. She's not powerless anymore. You don't own Merry the way you own your Old Rimrock house and your Deal house and your Florida condo and your Newark factory and your Puerto Rico factory and your Puerto Rican workers and all your Mercedes and all your Jeeps and all your beautiful handmade suits. You know what I've come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality."

No one begins like this, the Swede thought. This can't be what she is. This bullying infant, this obnoxious, stubborn, angry bullying infant cannot be my daughter's protector. She is her jailer. Merry with all her intelligence under the spell of this childlike cruelty and meanness. There's more human sense in one page of the stuttering diary than in all the sadistic idealism in this reckless child's head. Oh, to crush that hairy, tough little skull of hers—right now, between his two strong hands, to squeeze it and squeeze it until all the vicious ideas came streaming from her nose!

How does a child get to be like this? Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes. His only contact with his daughter was this child who did not know anything and would say anything and more than likely do anything—resort to anything to excite herself. Her opinions were all stimuli: the goal was excitement.

"The paragon," Rita said, speaking to him out of the side of her mouth, as though that would make it all the easier to wreck his life. "The cherished and triumphant paragon who is in actuality the criminal. The great Swede Levov, all-American capitalist criminal."

She was some clever child crackpot gorging herself on an esca pade entirely her own, a reprehensible child lunatic who'd never laid eyes on Merry except in the paper; some "politicized" crazy was what she was—the streets of New York were full of them—a criminally insane Jewish kid who'd picked up her facts about their lives from the newspapers and the TV and from the school friends of Merry's who were all out peddling the same quotation: "Quaint Old Rimrock is in for a big surprise." From the sound of it, Merry had gone around school the day before the bombing telling that to four hundred kids. That was the evidence against her, all these kids on TV claiming they heard her say it—that hearsay and her disappearance were the whole of the evidence. The post office had been blown up, and the general store along with it, but nobody had seen her anywhere near it, nobody had seen her do the thing, nobody would have even thought of her as the bomber if she hadn't disappeared. "She's been tricked!" For days Dawn went around the house crying, "She's been abducted! She's been tricked! She's somewhere right now being brainwashed! Why does everybody say she did it? Nobody's had any
contact
with her. She is not connected with it in any way
at all.
How can they believe this of a
child?
Dynamite? What does Merry have to do with dynamite? No! It isn't true! Nobody knows a
thing!
"

He should have informed the FBI of Rita Cohen's visit the day she'd come to ask for the scrapbook—at the very least should have demanded proof from her of Merry's existence. And he should have taken into his confidence someone other than Dawn, formulated strategy with a person less likely to kill herself if he proceeded other than as her desperation demanded. Answering the needs of a wife incoherent with grief, in no condition to think or act except out of hysteria, was an inexcusable error. He should have heeded his mistrust and contacted immediately the agents who had interviewed him and Dawn at the house the day after the bombing. He should have picked up the phone the moment he understood who Rita Cohen was, even while she was seated in his office. But instead he had driven directly home from the office and, because he could never calculate a decision free of its emotional impact on those who claimed his love; because seeing them suffer was his greatest hardship; because ignoring their importuning and defying their expectations, even when they would not argue reasonably or to the point, seemed to him an illegitimate use of his superior strength; because he could not disillusion anyone about the kind of selfless son, husband, and father he was; because he had come so highly
recommended
to everyone, he sat across from Dawn at the kitchen table, watching her deliver a long, sob-wracked, half-demented speech, a plea to tell the FBI nothing.

Dawn begged him to do whatever the girl wanted: it remained possible for Merry to go unapprehended if only they kept her out of sight until the destruction of the store—and the death of Dr. Conlon—had been forgotten. If only they hid her somewhere, provided for her, maybe even in another country, until this war-mad witch-hunt was over and a new time had begun; then she could be treated fairly for something she never, never could have done. "She's been
tricked!
" and he believed this himself—what else
could
a father believe?—until he heard it, day after day, a hundred times a day, from Dawn.

So he'd turned over the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet slippers, the stuttering book; and now he was to meet Rita Cohen at a room in the New York Hilton, this time bearing five thousand dollars in unmarked twenties and tens. And just as he'd known to call the FBI when she asked for the scrapbook, he now understood that if he acceded any further to her malicious daring there'd be no bottom to it, there would only be misery on a scale incomprehensible to all of them. With the scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet slippers, and the stuttering book he had been craftily set up; now for the disastrous payoff.

But Dawn was convinced that if he traveled over to Manhattan, got himself lost in the crowds, then, at the appointed afternoon hour, certain he wasn't being tailed, made his way to the hotel, Merry herself would be there waiting for him—an absurd fairy-tale hope for which there wasn't a shred of justification, but which he didn't have the heart to oppose, not when he saw his wife shedding another layer of sanity whenever the telephone rang.

For the first time she was got up in a skirt and blouse, gaudily floral bargain-basement stuff, and wearing high-heeled pumps; when she unsteadily crossed the carpet in them, she looked tinier even than she had in her work boots. The hairdo was as aboriginal as before but her face, ordinarily a little pot, soulless and unadorned, had been emblazoned with lipstick and painted with eye shadow, her cheekbones highlighted with pink grease. She looked like a third grader who had ransacked her mother's room, except that the cosmetics caused her expressionlessness to seem even more fright-eningly psychopathic than when her face was just unhumanly empty of color.

"I have the money," he said, standing in the hotel room doorway towering above her and knowing that what he was doing was as wrong as it could be. "I have the money," he repeated, and prepared himself for the retort about the sweat and blood of the workers from whom he had stolen it.

"Oh, hi. Do come in," the girl said.
I'd like you to meet my parents. Mom and Dad, this is Seymour.
An act for the factory, an act for the hotel. "Please, do come in. Do make yourself at home."

He had the money packed into his briefcase, not just the five thousand in the tens and twenties she'd asked for but five thousand more in fifties. A total of ten thousand dollars—and with no idea why. What good would any of it do Merry? Merry wouldn't see a penny of it. Still, he said yet again—summoning all his strength so as not to lose hold—"I've brought the money you requested." He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

She had moved onto the bedspread and, with her legs crossed at the ankle and two pillows propped up behind her head, began lightly to sing: "Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, my encyclo-pid-e-a, oh Lydia, the tattooed lady..."

It was one of the old, silly songs he'd taught his little daughter once they saw that singing, she could always be fluent.

"Come to fuck Rita Cohen, have you?"

"I've come," he said, "to deliver the money."

"Let's f-f-f-fuck, D-d-d-dad."

"If you have any feeling for what everyone is going through—"

"Come off it, Swede. What do you know about 'feeling'?"

"Why are you treating us like this?"

"Boo-hoo. Tell me another. You came here to fuck me. Ask anybody. Why does a middle-aged capitalist dog come to a hotel room to meet a young piece of ass? To fuck her. Say it, just say, 'I came to fuck you. To fuck you good.' Say it, Swede."

"I don't want to say any such thing. Stop all this, please."

"I'm twenty-two years old. I do everything. I do it all. Say it, Swede."

Could this lead to Merry, this onslaught of sneering and mockery? She could not insult him enough. Was she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared beforehand? Or was he dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because she was mad? She was like a gang member. Was she the gang
leader,
this tiny white-faced thug? In a gang the authority is given to the one who is most ruthless. Is she the most ruthless or are there others who are worse, those others who are holding Merry captive right now? Maybe she is the most intelligent. Their actress. Maybe she is the most corrupt. Their budding whore. Maybe this is all a
game
to them, middle-class kids out on a spree.

"Don't I suit you?" she asked. "No crude desires in a big guy like you? Come on, I'm not such a frightening person. You can't have met your match in little me. Look at you. Like a naughty boy. A child in terror of being disgraced. Isn't there anything else in there except your famous purity? I bet there is. I bet you've got yourself quite a pillar in there," she said. "The pillar of society."

"What is the aim of all this talk? Will you tell me?"

"The aim? Sure. To introduce you to reality. That's the aim."

"And how much ruthlessness is necessary?"

"To introduce you to reality? To get you to admire reality? To get you to partake of reality? To get you out there on the frontiers of reality? It ain't gonna be no picnic, jocko."

He had braced himself not to become entangled in her loathing for him, not to be affronted by anything she said. He was prepared for the verbal violence and prepared, this time, not to react. She was not unintelligent and she was not afraid to say anything—he knew that much. But what he had not counted on was lust, an urge—he had not counted on being assailed by something
other
than the verbal violence. Despite the repugnance inspired by the sickly whiteness of her flesh, by the comically childish makeup and the cheap cotton clothes, half reclining on the bed was a young woman half reclining on a bed, and the Swede himself, the superman of certainties, was one of the people whom he could not deal with.

"Poor thing," she said scornfully. "Little Rimrock rich boy. All locked up like that. Let's fuck, D-d-d-daddy. I'll take you to see your daughter. We'll wash your prick and zip up your fly and I'll take you to where she is."

"Do I know you will? How do I know you will?"

"Wait. See how things turn out. The worst is you get yourself some twenty-two-year-old gash. Come on, Dad. Come on over to the bed, D-d-d—"

"Stop this! My daughter has nothing to do with
any
of this! My daughter has nothing to do with
you!
You little shit—you're not fit to wipe my daughter's
shoes!
My daughter had nothing to do with that bombing. You know that!"

"Calm down, Swede. Calm down, lover boy. If you want to see your daughter as much as you say, you'll just calm down and come on over here and give Rita Cohen a nice big fuck. First the fuck, then the dough."

She had raised her knees toward her chest and now, with either foot planted on the bed, she let her legs fall open. The floral skirt was gathered up by her hips and she wore no underwear.

"There," she said softly. "Put it right there. Attack there. It's all permissible, baby."

"Miss Cohen..." He did not know what to reach for in his estimable strongbox of reactions—this boiling up of something so visceral in with the rhetorical was not the attack he had prepared himself for. She'd brought to the hotel a stick of dynamite to throw. This was it. To blow
him
up.

"What is it, dear?" she replied. "You must speak up like a big boy if you wish to be heard."

"What does this display have to do with what has happened?"

"Everything," she said. "You'll be surprised by what a very clear picture of things you're going to get from this display." She edged her two hands down onto her pubic hair. "Look at it," she told him and, by rolling the labia lips outward with her fingers, exposed to him the membranous tissue veined and mottled and waxy with the moist tulip sheen of flayed flesh. He looked away.

"It's a jungle down there," she said. "Nothing in its place. Nothing on the left side like anything on the right side. How many extras are there? Nobody knows. Too many to count. There are glands down there. There's another hole. There are flaps. Don't you see what this has to do with what happened? Take a look. Take a good long look."

"Miss Cohen," he said, fixing on her eyes, the one mark of beauty she was blessed with—a child's eyes, he discovered, a
good
child's eyes that had nothing in common with what she was up to, "my daughter is missing. Someone is dead."

"You don't get the point. You don't get the point about anything. Look at it. Describe it to me. Have I got it wrong? What do you see? Do you see anything? No, you don't see anything. You don't see anything because you don't look at anything."