American Pastoral (24 page)

And this is just a part of what is meant by "Five years pass." A very tiny part. Everything he reads or sees or hears has a single significance. Nothing is impersonally perceived. For one whole year he cannot go into the village without seeing where the general store used to be. To buy a newspaper or a quart of milk or a tank of gas he has to drive almost clear into Morristown, and so does everybody else in Old Rimrock. The same to buy a stamp. Basically the village is one street. Going east there is the new Presbyterian church, a white pseudocolonial building that doesn't look like much of anything and that replaced the old Presbyterian church that burned to the ground in the twenties. Just a little ways from the church are The Oaks, a pair of two-hundred-year-old oak trees that are the town's pride. Some thirty yards beyond The Oaks is the old blacksmith shop that was converted, just before Pearl Harbor into the Home Shop where local women go to buy wallpaper and lampshades and decorative knicknacks and to get advice from Mrs. Fowler about interior decorating. Down at the far end of the street is the auto-repair garage run by Perry Hamlin a hard-drinking cousin of Russ Hamlin's who also canes chairs, and then beyond that encompassing some five hundred acres, is the rolling terrain of the dairy farm owned and worked by Paul Hamlin, who is Perry's younger brother. Hills like these where Hamlins have farmed now for close to two hundred years run northeast to southwest, in a thirty- or forty-mile-wide swath, crossing north Jersey at around Old Rimrock, a range of small hills that continue up into New York to become the Catskills and from there all the way up to Maine.

Diagonally across from where the store used to be is the yellow-stuccoed six-room schoolhouse. Before they sent her to the Montessori school and then on to Morristown High, Merry had been a pupil there for the first four grades. Every kid who goes there now sees every day where the store used to be, as do their teachers, as do their parents when they drive into the village. The Community Club meets at the school, they hold their chicken suppers there, people vote there, and everybody who drives up there and sees where the store used to be thinks about the explosion and the good man it killed, thinks about the girl who set off the explosion, and, with varying degrees of sympathy or of contempt, thinks about her family. Some people are overly friendly; others, he knows, try their best to avoid running into him. He receives anti-Semitic mail. It is so vile it sickens him for days on end. He overhears things. Dawn overhears things. "Lived here all my life. Never saw anything like this before." "What can you expect? They have no business being out here to begin with." "I thought they were nice people, but you never know." An editorial from the local paper, recording the tragedy and commemorating Dr. Conlon, is thumbtacked to the Community Club bulletin board and hangs there, right out by the street. There is no way that the Swede can take it down, much as he would like to, for Dawn's sake at least. You would think that what with exposure to the rain and the wind and the sun and the snow the thing would rot away in a matter of weeks, but it not only remains intact but is almost completely legible for one whole year. The editorial is called "Dr. Fred." "We live in a society where violence is becoming all too prevalent ... we do not know why and we may never understand ... the anger that all of us feel ... our hearts go out to the victim and his family, to the Hamlins, and to an entire community that is trying to understand and to cope with what has happened ... a remarkable man and a wonderful physician who touched all our lives ... a special fund in memory of 'Doctor Fred'...to contribute to this memorial, which will help indigent local families in time of medical need ... in this time of grief, we must rededicate ourselves, in his memory...." Alongside the editorial is an article headlined "Distance Heals All Wounds," which begins, "We'd all just as soon forget..." and continues, "...that soothing distance will come quicker to some than others.... The Rev. Peter Baliston of the First Congregational Church, in his sermon, sought to find some good in all the tragedy ... will bring the community closer together in a shared sorrow.... The Rev. James Viering of St. Patrick's Church gave an impassioned homily...." Beside that article is a third clipping, one that has no business being there, but he cannot tear that one down any more than he can go ahead and tear down the others, so it, too, hangs there for a year. It is the interview with Edgar Bartley—both the interview and the picture of Edgar from the paper, showing him standing in front of his family's house with a shovel and his dog and behind him the path to the house freshly cleared of snow. Edgar Bartley is the boy from Old Rimrock who'd taken Merry to the movies in Morristown some two years before the bombing. He was a year ahead of her at the high school, a boy as tall as Merry and, as the Swede remembered him, nice enough looking though terrifically shy and a bit of an oddball. The newspaper story describes him as Merry's boyfriend at the time of the bombing, though as far as her parents knew, Merry's date with Edgar Bartley two years earlier was the one and only date she'd ever had with him or with anyone. Whatever, someone has underlined in black all the quotations attributed to Edgar. Maybe a friend of his did it as a joke, a high school joke. Maybe the article with the photograph was hung there as a joke in the first place. Joke or not, there it remains, month after month, and the Swede cannot get rid of it. "It doesn't seem real.... I never thought she would do something like this.... I knew her as a very nice girl. I never heard her say anything vicious. I'm sure something snapped.... I hope they find her so that she can get the help that she needs.... I always thought of Old Rimrock as a place where nothing can happen to you. But now I'm like everybody, I'm looking over my shoulder. It's going to take time before things return to normal.... I'm just moving on. I have to. I have to forget about it. Like nothing happened. But it's very sad."

The only solace the Swede can take from the Community Club bulletin board is that no one has posted there the clipping whose headline reads "Suspected Bomber Is Described as Bright, Gifted but with 'Stubborn Streak.'" That one he
would
have torn down. He would have had to go there in the middle of the night and just do it. This one article is no worse, probably, than any of the others that were appearing then, not just in their local weekly but in the New York papers—the
Times,
the
Daily News,
the
Daily Mirror,
the
Post;
in the Jersey dailies—the
Newark News,
the
Newark Star-Ledger,
the
Morristown Record,
the
Bergen Record,
the
Trenton Times,
the
Paterson News;
in the nearby Pennsylvania papers—the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
the
Philadelphia Bulletin,
and the
Easton Express;
and in
Time
and
Newsweek.
Most of the papers and the wire services dropped the story after the first week, but the
Newark News
and the
Morristown Record
in particular wouldn't let up—the
News
had three star reporters on the case, and both papers were churning out their stories about the Rimrock Bomber every single day for weeks. The
Record,
with its local orientation, couldn't stop reminding its readers that the Rimrock bombing was the most shattering disaster in Morris County since the September 12, 1940, Hercules Powder Company explosion, some twelve miles away in Kenvil, when fiftytwo people were killed and three hundred injured. There had been a murder of a minister and a choirmaster in the late twenties, down in Middlesex County, in a lane just outside New Brunswick, and in the Morris village of Brookside there had been a murder by an inmate who had walked off the grounds of the Greystone mental asylum, visited his uncle in Brookside, and split the man's head open with an ax—and these stories, too, are dug up and rehashed. And, of course, the Lindbergh kidnapping down in Hopewell, New Jersey, the abduction and murder of the infant son of Charles A. Lindbergh, the famous transatlantic aviator—that, too, the papers luridly recall, reprinting details over thirty years old about the ransom, the baby's battered corpse, the Flemington trial, reprinting newspaper excerpts from April 1936 about the electrocution of the convicted kidnapper-murderer, an immigrant carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann. Day after day, Merry Levov is mentioned in the context of the region's slender history of atrocities—her name several times appearing right alongside Hauptmann's—and yet nothing of what's written wounds him as savagely as the story about her "stubborn streak" in the local weekly. There is something concealed there—yet implicit—a degree of provincial smugness, of simplemindedness, of sheer stupidity, that is so enraging to him that he could not have borne to see it hanging up for everybody to read and to shake their heads over at the Community Club bulletin board. Whatever Merry may or may not have done, he could not have allowed her life to be on display like that just outside the school.

SUSPECTED BOMBER IS DESCRIBED AS BRIGHT, GIFTED BUT WITH "STUBBORN STREAK"

To her teachers at Old Rimrock Community School, Meredith "Merry" Levov, who allegedly bombed Hamlin's General Store and killed Old Rimrock's Dr. Fred Conlon, was known as a multi-talented child, an excellent student and somebody who never challenged authority. People looking to her childhood for some clue about her alleged violent act remained stymied when they remembered her as a cooperative girl full of energy.

"We are in disbelief," ORCS Principal Eileen Morrow said about the suspected bomber. "It is hard to understand why this happened."

As a student at the six-room elementary school, Principal Morrow said, Merry Levov was "very helpful and never in trouble."

"She's not the kind of person who would do that," Mrs. Morrow said. "At least not when we knew her here."

At ORCS, Merry Levov had a straight A average and was involved in school activities, Mrs. Morrow said, and was well liked by both students and faculty.

"She was hard-working and enthusiastic and set very high standards for herself," Mrs. Morrow said. "Her teachers respected her as a quality student and her peers admired her."

At ORCS Merry Levov was a talented art student and a leader in team sports, particularly kickball. "She was just a normal kid growing up," Mrs. Morrow said. "This is something we would never have dreamt could happen," the principal said. "Unfortunately, nobody can see the future."

Mrs. Morrow said that Meredith associated with "model students" at the school, though she did show a "stubborn streak," for example, sometimes refusing to do school assignments which she thought unnecessary.

Others remembered the alleged bomber's stubborn streak, when she went on to become a student at Morristown High School. Sally Curren, a 16-year-old classmate, described Meredith as someone with an attitude she described as "arrogant and superior to everybody else."

But 16-year-old Barbara Turner said Meredith "seemed nice enough, though she had her beliefs."

Though Morristown High students asked about Merry had many different impressions, all the students who knew her agreed that she "talked a lot about the Vietnam war." Some students remembered her "lashing out in anger" if somebody else opposed her way of thinking about the presence of American troops in Vietnam.

According to her homeroom teacher, Mr. William Paxman, Meredith had been "working hard and doing well, As or B's" and had expressed a strong interest in attending his alma mater, Penn State.

"If you mention her family, people say, 'What a nice family,'" Mr. Paxman said. "We just can't believe this has happened."

The only ominous note about her activities came from one of the alleged bomber's teachers who has been interviewed by agents from the FBI. "They told me, 'We have received a great deal of information about Miss Levov.'"

For a year there is "where the store used to be." Then construction begins on a new store, and month after month he watches it going up. One day a big red, white, and blue banner appears—"Greatly Expanded! New! New! New! McPherson's Store!"—announcing the grand opening on the Fourth of July. He has to sit Dawn down and tell her they are going to shop at the new store like everyone else and, though for a while it will not be easy for them, eventually....But it is never easy. He cannot go into the new store without remembering the old store, even though the Russ Hamlins have retired and the new store is owned by a young couple from Easton who care nothing about the past and who, in addition to an expanded general store, have put in a bakery that turns out delicious cakes and pies as well as bread and rolls baked fresh every day. At the back of the store, alongside the post office window, there is now a little counter where you can buy a cup of coffee and a fresh bun and sit and chat with your neighbor or read your paper if you want to. McPherson's is a tremendous improvement over Hamlin's, and soon everybody around seems to have forgotten their blown-up old-fashioned country store, except for the local Hamlins and for the Levovs. Dawn cannot go near the new place, simply refuses to go in there, while the Swede makes it his business, on Saturday mornings, to sit at the counter with his paper and a cup of coffee, despite what anybody who sees him there may be thinking. He buys his Sunday paper there too. He buys his stamps there. He could bring stamps home from his office, could do all the family mailing in Newark, but he prefers to patronize the post office window at McPherson's and to linger there musing over the weather with young Beth McPherson the way he used to enjoy the same moment with Mary Hamlin, Russ's wife.

That is the outer life. To the best of his ability, it is conducted just as it used to be. But now it is accompanied by an inner life, a gruesome inner life of tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations, horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions. Sleeplessness and self-castigation night after night. Enormous loneliness. Unflagging remorse, even for that kiss when she was eleven and he was thirty-six and the two of them, in their wet bathing suits, were driving home together from the Deal beach. Could
that have
done it? Could anything have done it? Could
nothing
have done it?