American Pastoral (33 page)

They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos—for whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition's chosen path to certainty, the rigorous daily given of life—and the daughter who is chaos itself.

S
HE HAD
become a Jain. Her father didn't know what that meant until, in her unhampered, chantlike speech—the unimpeded speech with which she would have spoken at home had she ever been able to master a stutter while living within her parents' safekeeping—she patiently told him. The Jains were a relatively small Indian religious sect—that he could accept as fact. But whether Merry's practices were typical or of her own devising he could not be certain, even if she contended that every last thing she now did was an expression of religious belief. She wore the veil to do no harm to the microscopic organisms that dwell in the air we breathe. She did not bathe because she revered all life, including the vermin. She did not wash, she said, so as "to do no harm to the water." She did not walk about after dark, even in her own room, for fear of crushing some living object beneath her feet. There are souls, she explained, imprisoned in every form of matter; the lower the form of life, the greater is the pain to the soul imprisoned there. The only way ever to become free of matter and to arrive at what she described as "self-sufficient bliss for all eternity" was to become what she reverentially called "a perfected soul." One achieves this perfection only through the rigors of asceticism and self-denial and through the doctrine of
ahimsa
or nonviolence.

The five "vows" she'd taken were typewritten on index cards and taped to the wall above a narrow pallet of dirty foam rubber on the unswept floor. That was where she slept, and given that there was nothing but the pallet in one corner of the room and a rag pile—her clothing—in the other, that must be where she sat to eat whatever it was she survived on. Very, very little, from the look of her; from the look of her she could have been not fifty minutes east of Old Rimrock but in Delhi or Calcutta, near starvation not as a devout purified by her ascetic practices but as the despised of the lowest caste, miserably moving about on an untouchable's emaciated limbs.

The room was tiny, claustrophobically smaller even than the cell in the juveniles' prison where, when he could not sleep, he would imagine visiting her after she was apprehended. They had reached her room by walking from the dog and cat hospital down toward the station, then turning west through an underpass that led to McCarter Highway, an underpass no more than a hundred and fifty feet long but of the kind that causes drivers to hit the lock button on the door. There were no lights overhead, and the walkways were strewn with broken pieces of furniture, with beer cans, bottles, lumps of things that were unidentifiable. There were license plates underfoot. The place hadn't been cleaned in ten years. Maybe it had never been cleaned. Every step he took, bits of glass crunched beneath his shoes. There was a bar stool upright in the middle of the walkway. It had got there from where? Who had brought it? There was a twisted pair of men's pants. Filthy. Who was the man? What had happened to him? The Swede would not have been surprised to see an arm or a leg. A garbage sack blocked their way. Dark plastic. Knotted shut. What was in it? It was large enough for a dead body. And there were bodies, too, that were living, people shifting around in the filth, dangerous-looking people back in the dark. And above the blackened rafters, the thudding of a train—the noise of the trains rolling into the station heard from beneath their wheels. Five, six hundred trains a day rolling overhead.

To get where Merry rented a room just off McCarter Highway, you had to make it through an underpass not just as dangerous as any in Newark but as dangerous as any underpass in the world.

They were walking because she would not drive with him. "I only walk, Daddy, I do not go in motor vehicles," and so he had left his car out on Railroad Avenue for whoever came along to steal it, and walked beside her the ten minutes it took to reach her room, a walk that would have brought him to tears within the first ten steps had he not continued to recite to himself, "This is life! This is our life! I cannot let her go," had he not taken her hand in his and, as they traversed together that horrible underpass, reminded himself, "This is her hand. Merry's hand. Nothing matters but her hand." Would have brought him to tears because when she was six and seven years old she'd loved to play marines, either him yelling at her or her yelling at him, "
Tenshun!
Stand at ease! Rest!"; she loved to march with him—"Forward
march!
To the left flank
march!
To the rear
march!
Right oblique
march!";
loved to do marine calisthenics with him—"You People, hit the deck!"; she loved to call the ground "the deck," to call their bathroom "the head," to call her bed "the rack" and Dawn's food "the chow"; but most of all she loved to count Parris Island cadence for him as she started out across the pasture—mounted up on his shoulders—to find Momma's cows. "By yo leh, rah, leh, rah, leh, rah yo leh. Leh, rah, yo leh...." And without stuttering. When they played marines, she did not stutter over a single word.

The room was on the ground floor of a house that a hundred years ago might have been a boardinghouse, not a bad one either, a respectable boardinghouse, brownstone below the parlor floor, neat brickwork above, curved railings of cast iron leading up the brick steps to the double doorway. But the old boardinghouse was now a wreck marooned on a narrow street where there were only two other houses left. Incredibly, two of the old Newark plane trees were left as well. The house was tucked between abandoned warehouses and overgrown lots studded with chunks of rusted iron junk, mechanical debris scattered amid the weeds.

From over the door of the house, the pediment was gone, ripped out; the cornices had been ripped out too, carefully stolen and taken away to be sold in some New York antiques store. All over Newark, the oldest buildings were missing ornamental stone cornices—cornices from as high up as four stories plucked off in broad daylight with a cherry picker, with a hundred-thousand-dollar piece of equipment; but the cop is asleep or paid off and nobody stops whoever it is, from whatever agency that has a cherry picker, who is making a little cash on the side. The turkey frieze that ran around the old Essex produce market on Washington and Linden, the frieze with the terra-cotta turkeys and the huge cornucopias overflowing with fruit—stolen. Building caught fire and the frieze disappeared overnight. The big Negro churches (Bethany Baptist closed down, boarded up, looted, bulldozed; Wycliffe Presbyterian disastrously gutted by fire)—cornices stolen. Aluminum drainpipes even from occupied buildings, from standing buildings—stolen. Gutters, leaders, drainpipes—stolen. Everything was gone that anybody could get to. Just reach up and take it. Copper tubing in boarded-up factories, pull it out and sell it. Anyplace where the windows are gone and boarded up tells people immediately, "Come in and strip it. Whatever's left, strip it, steal it, sell it." Stripping stuff—that's the food chain. Drive by a place where a sign says this house is for sale, and there's nothing there, there's nothing to sell. Everything stolen by gangs in cars, stolen by the men who roam a city with shopping carts, stolen by thieves working alone. The people are desperate and they take anything. They "go junkin'" the way a shark goes fishing.

"If there's one brick still on top of the other," cried his father, "the idea gets into their heads that the
mortar
might be useful, so they'll push them apart and take
that.
Why not? The mortar! Seymour, this city isn't a city—it's a carcass! Get out!"

The street where Merry lived was paved with bricks. There couldn't be more than a dozen of these brick streets intact in the entire city. The last of the cobblestone streets, a pretty old cobblestone street, had been stolen about three weeks after the riots. While the rubble still reeked of smoke where the devastation was the worst, a developer from the suburbs had arrived with a crew around one
A.M.,
three trucks and some twenty men moving stealthily, and during the night, without a cop to bother them, they'd dug up the cobblestones from the narrow side street that cut diagonally back of Newark Maid and carted them all away. The street was gone when the Swede showed up for work the next morning.

"Now they're stealing streets?" his father asked. "Newark can't even hold on to its streets? Seymour, get the hell out!" His father's had become the voice of reason.

Merry's street was just a couple of hundred feet long, squeezed into the triangle between McCarter—where, as always, the heavy truck traffic barreled by night and day—and the ruins of Mulberry Street. Mulberry the Swede could recall as a Chinatown slum as long ago as the 1930s, back when the Newark Levovs, Jerry, Seymour, Momma, Poppa, used to file up the narrow stairwell to one of the family restaurants for a chow mein dinner on a Sunday afternoon and, later, driving home to Keer Avenue, his father would tell the boys unbelievable stories about the Mulberry Street "tong wars" of old.

Of old. Stories of old. There were no longer stories of old. There was nothing. There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole. The pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were on. And that's all there was.

Above and beyond the roofline of her house, he could see the skyline of commercial Newark half a mile away and those three familiar, comforting words, the most reassuring words in the English language, cascading down the elegantly ornate cliff that was once the focal point of a buzzing downtown—ten stories high the huge, white stark letters heralding fiscal confidence and institutional permanence, civic progress and opportunity and pride, indestructible letters that you could read from the seat of your jetliner descending from the north toward the international airport:
FIRST FIDELITY BANK
.

That's what was left, that lie. First.
Last,
last fidelity bank. From down on the earth where his daughter now lived at the corner of Columbia and Green—where his daughter lived even worse than her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement—you could see a mammoth signboard designed for concealing the truth. A sign in which only a madman could believe. A sign in a fairy tale.

Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.

Her room had no window, only a narrow transom over the door that opened onto the unlit hallway, a twenty-foot-long urinal whose decaying plaster walls he wanted to smash apart with his fists the moment he entered the house and smelled it. The hallway led out to the street through a door that had neither lock nor handle, nor glass in the double frame. Nowhere in her room could he see a faucet or a radiator. He could not imagine what the toilet was like or where it might be and wondered if the hallway was it for her as well as for the bums who wandered in off the highway or down from Mulberry Street. She would have lived better than this, far better, if she were one of Dawn's cattle, in the shed where the herd gathered in the worst weather with the proximity of one another's carcasses to warm them, and the rugged coats they grew in winter, and Merry's mother, even in the sleet, even on an icy, wintry day, up before six carrying hay bales to feed them. He thought of the cattle not at all unhappy out there in the winter and he thought of those two they called the "derelicts," Dawn's retired giant, Count, and the old mare Sally, each of them in human years comparable to seventy or seventy-five, who found each other when they were both over the hill and then became inseparable—one would go and the other would follow, doing all the things together that would keep them well and happy. It was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they had. Remembering how when it was sunny they would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had become an animal.

It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how he and Dawn could have been the source of it all. How could their innocent foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have been problems even without a war in Vietnam. She might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could be. But she would have been at home. At home you flip out a little and that's it. You do not have the pleasure of the
unadulterated
pleasure, you don't get to the point where you flip out a little so many times that finally you decide it's such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot? At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalor. At home you can't live where the disorder is. At home you can't live where nothing is reined in. At home there is that tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines the world to be and the way the world is for her. Well, no longer is there that dissonance to disturb her equilibrium. Here are her Rimrockian fantasies, and the culmination is horrifying.

Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time—they did not have enough time with her. When she's your ward, when she's there, you can do it. If you have contact with your child steadily over time, then the stuff that is off—the mistakes in judgment that are made on both sides—is somehow, through that steady, patient contact, made better and better, until at last, inch by inch, day by day and inch by inch, there is remediation, there are the ordinary satisfactions of parental patience rewarded, of things working out.... But this. Where was the remediation for
this?
Could he bring Dawn here to see her, Dawn in her bright, tight new face and Merry sitting cross-legged on the pallet in her tattered sweatshirt and ill-shapen trousers and black plastic shower clogs, meekly composed behind that nauseating veil? How broad her shoulder bones were. Like his. But hanging off those bones there was nothing. What he saw sitting before him was not a daughter, a woman, or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow's clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life, a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could have fooled only a bird. How could he bring Dawn here? Driving Dawn down McCarter Highway, turning off McCarter and into this street, the warehouses, the rubble, the garbage, the debris ... Dawn seeing this room, smelling this room, her hands touching the walls of this room, let alone the unwashed flesh, the brutally cropped, bedraggled hair...