American Pastoral (32 page)

Every Saturday when they drove Down Neck to collect that week's finished gloves, they'd bring along the gloves the Swede had marked with a pin where his mother had discovered a defect. If a glove bristled with three pins or more, his father would have to warn the family who had made it that if they wanted to work for Newark Maid, sloppiness would not be tolerated. "Lou Levov doesn't sell a table-cut glove unless it is a
perfect
table-cut glove," he told them. "I'm not here to play games. I'm here like you are—I'm here to make money. 'Na mano lava 'nad,
and don't forget it.
"

"What is calfskin, Seymour?" "The skin from young calves." "What kind of grain?" "It has a tight, even grain. Very smooth. Glossy." "What's it used for?" "Mostly for men's gloves. It's heavy." "What is Cape?" "The skin of the South African haired sheep." "Cabretta?" "Not the wool-type sheep but the hair-type sheep." "From where?" "South America. Brazil." "That's part of the answer. The animals live a little north and south of the equator. Anywhere around the world. Southern India. Northern Brazil. A band across Africa—" "We got ours from
Brazil.
" "Right. That's true. You're right. I'm only telling you they come from other countries too. So you'll know. What's the key operation in preparing the skin?" "Stretching." "And never forget it. In this business, a sixteenth of an inch makes all the difference in the world. Stretching! Stretching is a hundred percent right. How many parts in a pair of gloves?" "Ten, twelve if there's a binding." "Name 'em." "Six fourchettes, two thumbs, two tranks." "The unit of measurement in the glove trade?" "Buttons." "What's a one-button glove?" "A one-button glove is one inch long if you measure from the base of the thumb to the top." "Approximately one inch long. What is silking?" "The three rows of stitching on the back of the glove. If you don't do the end pulling, all the silking is going to come right out." "Excellent. I didn't even ask you about end pulling. Excellent. What's the most difficult seam to make on a glove?" "Full pique." "Why? Take your time, son—it's difficult. Tell me why." The prixseam. The gauge seam. Single draw points. Spear points. Buckskin. Mocha. English does. Soaking. Dehairing. Pickling. Sorting. Taxing. The grain finish. The velvet finish. Pasted linings. Skeleton linings. Seamless knitted wool. Cut-and-sewed knitted wool....

As they drove back and forth Down Neck, it never stopped. Every Saturday morning from the time he was six until he was nine and Newark Maid became a company with its own loft.

The dog and cat hospital was located on the corner in a small, decrepit brick building next door to an empty lot, a tire dump, patchy with weeds nearly as tall as he was, the twisted wreckage of a wire-mesh fence lying at the edge of the sidewalk where he waited for his daughter ... who lived in Newark ... and for how long ... and where, in what kind of quarters in this city? No, he did not lack imagination any longer—the imagining of the abhorrent was now effortless, even though it was impossible still to envisage how she had got herself from Old Rimrock to here. There was no delusion that he could any longer clutch at to soften whatever surprise was next.

This place where she worked certainly didn't make it look as if she continued to believe her calling was to change the course of American history. The building's rusted fire escape would just come down, just come loose from its moorings and crash onto the street, if anyone stepped on it—a fire escape whose function was not to save lives in the event of a fire but to uselessly hang there testifying to the immense loneliness inherent to living. For him it was stripped of any other meaning_no meaning could make better use of that building. Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise US ciS astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It's lonely if there are buildings and it's lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it—bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung—bow down to the great god Loneliness!

I'm lonesome, she used to say to him when she was a tiny girl, and he could never figure out where she had picked up that word. Lonesome. As sad a word as you could hear out of a two-year-old's mouth. But she had learned to say so much so soon, had talked so easily at first, so
intelligently—
maybe
that
was what lay behind the stutter, all those words she uncannily knew before other kids could pronounce their own names, the emotional overload of a vocabulary that included even "I'm lonesome."

He was the one she could talk to. "Daddy, let's have a conversation." More often than not, the conversations were about Mother. She would tell him that Mother had too much say about her clothes, too much say about her hair. Mother wanted to dress her more adultlike than the other kids. Merry wanted long hair like Patti, and Mother wanted it cut. "Mother would really be happy if I had to wear a uniform the way she did at St. Genevieve's." "Mother's conservative, that's all. But you do like shopping with her." "The best part of shopping with Mother is that you get a nice little lunch, which is fun. And sometimes it's fun picking out clothes. But still, Mother has too much s-s-s-s-say." At lunch in school she never ate what Mother gave her. "Baloney on white bread is disgusting. Liverwurst is disgusting. Tuna in the lunch bag gets all wet. The only thing that I like is Virginia ham, but with the crusts
off.
I like hot s-s-soup." But when she took hot soup to school she was always breaking the thermos. If not the first week, the second. Dawn got her special breakproof ones, but even those she could break. That was the extent of her destructiveness.

After school, when she baked with her friend Patti, Merry would always have to crack the eggs because Patti said cracking eggs made her sick. Merry thought this was silly, and so one afternoon she cracked the egg right in front of her and Patti threw up.
And that was her destructiveness—breaking a thermos and cracking an egg.
And getting rid of whatever her mother gave her for lunch. Never complained about it, just wouldn't eat it. And when Dawn began suspecting what was up and asked her what she had for lunch, Merry might have thrown it out without checking. "You're sometimes a troublesome child," Dawn told her. "I'm not. I'm not that t-t-t-troublesome if you don't ask what I had for lunch." Exasperated, her mother said, "It isn't always easy being you, is it, Merry?" "I think it's easier being me, Mom, than maybe it is being n-n-near me." To her father she confided, "I didn't think the fruit was that ex-ex-citing, so I threw that out too." "And the milk you threw out." "The milk was a little bit warm, Dad." But there was always a dime at the bottom of the lunch bag for ice cream, and so that's what she would have. Didn't like mustard. That was another complaint in the years before she began to complain about capitalism. "What kid does?" she asked him. The answer was Patti. Patti would eat sandwiches with mustard and processed cheese; Merry, as she confided to her father in their conversations, didn't understand that "
at all
" Melted cheese sandwiches were what Merry preferred to everything else. Melted Muenster cheese and white bread. After school she'd bring Patti home with her, and because Merry had thrown out her lunch, they made melted cheese sandwiches. Sometimes they would just melt cheese on a piece of foil. She was sure that she could survive on melted cheese alone, she told her father, if she ever had to. That was probably the most irresponsible thing the child had ever done—after school with Patti melting cheese on pieces of foil and gobbling it down—until she blew up the general store. She couldn't even bring herself to say how much Patti got on her nerves, for fear of hurting Patti's feelings. "The problem is when somebody comes over to your house, after a while you get s-s-s-sick of them." But always she acted with Dawn as though she wanted Patti to stay longer.
Mom, can Patti stay for dinner? Mom, can Patti stay overnight? Mom, can Patti wear my hoots? Mom, can you drive me and Patti to the village?

In fifth grade she gave her mother a Mother's Day gift. On a doily in school they were asked to write something they would do for their mothers, and Merry wrote that she would prepare dinner every Friday night, a fairly generous offer for a ten-year-old but one she made good on and kept up largely because that way she could be sure that one night a week they got baked ziti; also, if you made dinner you didn't have to clean up. With Dawn's help she would sometimes make lasagna or stuffed shells, but the baked ziti she made by herself. Sometimes on Friday it would be macaroni and cheese but mostly it was baked ziti. The important thing, she told her father, was to see that the cheese melted, though it was equally important to be sure that the top zitis got hard and crunchy. He was the one who cleaned up when she cooked the baked ziti, and there was always a lot to clean up. But he loved it. "Cooking is fun and cleaning up is not," she confided in him, but that was not his experience when Merry was cooking. When he heard from a Bloomingdale's buyer that a restaurant on West 49th Street had the best baked ziti in New York, he began to take the family to Vincent's once a month. They'd go to Radio City or to a Broadway musical, and then to Vincent's. Merry loved Vincent's. And a young waiter named Billy loved her, as it turned out, because of a kid brother he had at home who also stuttered. He told Merry about the TV stars and the movie stars who showed up at Vincent's to eat. "See where your dad is sitting? See his chair, signorina? Danny Thomas sat in that chair last night. You know what Danny Thomas says when people come up to his table and introduce themselves to him?" "I d-d-don't," said the signorina. "He says, 'Nice to see you.'" And on Monday, at school, she repeated to Patti whatever Billy at Vincent's in New York had told her the day before. Had there ever been a happier child? A less destructive child? A little signorina any more loved by her mother and father?

No.

A black woman in tight yellow slacks, a woman colossal as a dray horse through the hindquarters, tottered up to him on her high-heeled shoes, extending a tiny scrap of paper in one hand. Her face was badly scarred. He knew she had come to inform him that his daughter was dead. That was what was written on the paper. It was a note from Rita Cohen. "Sir," she said, "can you tell me where the Salvation Army is?" "Is there one?" he asked. She did not look as though she thought there was. But she replied, "I believe so, yeah." She held up the piece of paper. "Says so. Do you know where it is, sir?" Anything beginning with sir or ending with sir usually means "I want money," and so he reached into his pocket, passed her some bills, and she lurched away, disappeared down into the underpass on those ill-fitting shoes, and after that he saw no one.

He waited for forty more minutes and would have waited another forty, have waited there until it grew dark, might well have remained long after that, a man in a seven-hundred-dollar custom-made suit with his back against a lamppost like a vagrant in threadbare rags, a man who from all appearances had meetings to attend and business to transact and social obligations to fulfill, self-consciously loitering on a blighted street near the railroad station, maybe a rich out-of-towner under the mistaken impression that he'd landed in the red-light district, pretending to stare aimlessly into space while his head is full of secrets and his heart is (as it was) thumping away. On the chance that, horribly enough, Rita Cohen was telling the truth and always had been, he might well have stood vigil there all night long and through to the next morning, thinking to catch Merry
coming
to work. But, mercifully, if that is the word, in only forty minutes she appeared a figure tall and female but one he might never have taken for his daughter had he not been told to look for her there.

Again imagination had failed him. He felt as though he had no control over muscles that he'd mastered at the age of two—he wouldn't have been surprised if everything, not excluding his blood, had come gushing from him onto the pavement. This was too much to battle with. This was too much to bring home to Dawn's new face. Not even electrically operated skylights over a modern kitchen whose heart was a state-of-the-art cooking island would enable her to find her way back from this. Eighteen hundred nights at the mercy of a murderer's father's imagination still hadn't prepared him for her incognito. It had not required this to elude the FBI. How she got to this was too horrible for him to contemplate. But to run from his own child? In fear? There was her
soul
to cherish. "Life!" he instructed himself. "I cannot let her go! Our life!" And by then Merry had seen him, and had it even been possible for him, he did not fall to pieces and run, because it was now too late to run.

And to what would he have run anyway? To that Swede who did it all so effortlessly? To that Swede blessedly oblivious of himself and his thoughts? To the Swede Levov who once upon a time ... He might as well turn for help to that hefty black woman with the scarred face, expect to find himself by asking her, "Madam, do you know where it is that I am? Have you any idea where I went?"

Merry had seen him. How could she miss him? How could she have missed him even on a street where there was life and not death, where there was a throng of the striving and the harried and the driven and the decisive and not this malignant void? There was her handsome, utterly recognizable six-foot-three father, the handsomest father a girl could have. She raced across the street, this frightful creature, and like the carefree child he used to enjoy envisioning back when he was himself a carefree child—the girl running from her swing outside the stone house—she threw herself upon his chest, her arms encircling his neck. From beneath the veil she wore across the lower half of her face—obscuring her mouth and her chin, a sheer veil that was the ragged foot off an old nylon stocking—she said to the man she had come to detest, "Daddy! Daddy!" faultlessly, just like any other child, and looking like a person whose tragedy was that she'd never been anyone's child.