American Pastoral (35 page)

"There is a logic, Daddy. You mustn't raise your voice. I will explain. It all links up. I have given it much thought. It goes like this.
Ahimsa,
the Jain concept of nonviolence, appealed to Mahatma Gandhi. He was not a Jain. He was Hindu. But when he was looking in India for a group that was genuinely Indian and not Western and that could point to charitable works as impressive as those the Christian missionaries had produced, he landed on the Jains. We are a small group. We are not Hindus but our beliefs are akin to Hindus'. We are a religion founded in the sixth century b.c. Mahatma Gandhi took from us this notion of
ahimsa,
nonviolence. We are the core of truth that created Mahatma Gandhi. And Mahatma Gandhi, in his nonviolence, is the core of truth that created Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King is the core of truth that created the civil rights movement. And, at the end of his life, when he was moving beyond the civil rights movement to a larger vision, when he was opposing the war in Vietnam..."

Without stuttering. Speech that once would have impelled her to grimace and turn white and bang on the table—would have made of her an embattled speaker attacked by the words and obstinately attacking them back—delivered now patiently, graciously, still in that monotonous chant but edged with the gentlest tone of spiritual urgency. Everything she could not achieve with a speech therapist and a psychiatrist and a stuttering diary she had beautifully realized by going mad. Subjecting herself to isolation and squalor and terrible danger, she had attained control, mental and physical, over every sound she uttered. An intelligence no longer impeded by the blight of stuttering.

And intelligence was what he was hearing, Merry's quick, sharp, studious brain, the logical mind she'd had since earliest childhood. And hearing it opened him up to pain such as he had never before imagined. The intelligence was intact and yet she was mad, her logic a brand of logic bereft totally of the power to reason with which it had already entwined itself by the time she was ten. It was absurd—this being reasonable with her was
his
madness. Sitting there trying to act as though he were respectful of her religion when her religion consisted of an absolute failure to understand what life is and is not. The two of them acting as if he had come there to be educated. Being
lectured,
by her!

"...we do not understand salvation as in any way the union of the human soul with something beyond itself. The spirit of Jain piety lives in founder Mahavira's saying, 'O man, thou art thine own friend. Why seekest thou for a friend beyond thyself?'"

"Merry, did you do it? I must ask you this now. Did you do it?"

It was the question he had expected to ask her first, once they had reached her room and before everything else that was horrible began painfully to be sifted through and scrutinized. He thought he had waited because he did not want her to think that his first consideration was anything other than at long last seeing her and seeing to her, attending to her well-being; but now that he had asked, he knew that he hadn't already asked because he could not bear to hear an answer.

"Do what, Daddy?"

"Did you bomb the post office?"

"Yes."

"You intended to blow up Hamlin's too?"

"There was no other way to do it."

"Except not to do it. Merry, you must tell me now who made you do it?"

"Lyndon Johnson."

"That will not do. No! Answer me. Who talked you
into
it? Who brainwashed you? Who did you do it
for?
"

There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, "Lead me not into temptation." If people were not led by others, why was that the famous prayer that it was? A child who had been blessed with every privilege could not have done this on her own. Blessed with love. Blessed with a loving and ethical and prosperous family. Who had enlisted her and lured her into this?

"How strongly you still crave the idea" she said, "of your innocent offspring."

"Who was it? Don't protect them. Who is responsible?"

"Daddy, you can detest me alone. It's all right."

"You are telling me you did it all on your own. Knowing that Hamlin's would be destroyed too. That's what you are saying."

"Yes. I am the abomination. Abhor
me
."

He remembered then something she had written in the sixth or seventh grade, before she'd gone on to Morristown High. The students in her class at her Montessori school were asked ten questions about their "philosophy," one a week. The first week the teacher asked, "Why are we here?" Instead of writing as the other kids did—here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc.—Merry answered with her own question: "Why are apes here?" But the teacher found this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question more seriously—"Expand on this," the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: "Why are kangaroos here?" It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher that she had a "stubborn streak." The final question assigned to the class was "What is life?" Merry's answer was something her father and mother chuckled over together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily away with their phony deep thoughts, she—after an hour of thinking at her desk—wrote a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: "Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive." "You know," said the Swede, "it's smarter than it sounds. She's a kid—how has she figured out that life is short? She is somethin', our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard." But once again the teacher didn't agree, and she wrote beside Merry's answer, "Is that
all?
" Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank God, that is all; even that is unendurable.

The truth was that he had known all along: without a tempter's assistance, everything angry inside her had broken into the open. She was unintimidated, she was
unintimidatable,
this child who had written for her teacher not, like the other kids, that life was a beautiful gift and a great opportunity and a noble endeavor and a blessing from God but that it was just a short period of time in which you were alive. Yes, the intention had been all her own. That had to be. Her antagonism had been intent on murder and nothing less. Otherwise this mad repose would not be the result.

He tried to let reason rise once again to the surface. How hard he tried. What does a reasonable man say next? If, after being battered and once again brought nearly to tears by what he'd just heard uttered so matter-of-factly—everything incredible uttered so matter-of-factly—a man could hold on and be reasonable, what does he go ahead to say? What does a reasonable, responsible father say if he is able still to feel intact as a father?

"Merry, may I tell you what I think? I think you are terrified of being punished for what you've done. I think that rather than evade your punishment you have taken it into your own hands. I don't believe that's a difficult conclusion to reach, honey. I don't believe I'm the only person in the world who, seeing you here, seeing you here looking like this, would come up with that idea. You're a good girl and so you want to do penance. But this is not penance. Not even the state would punish you like this. I have to say these things, Merry. I have to tell you truthfully what this looks like to me."

"Of course you do."

"Just look at what you've done to yourself—you are going to
die
if you keep this up. Another year of this and you
will
die—from self-starvation, from malnutrition, from
filth.
You cannot go back and forth every day under those railroad tracks. That underpass is a home for derelicts—for derelicts who do not play by your rules. Their world is a ruthless world, Merry, a terrible world—a
violent
world."

"They won't harm me. They know that I love them."

The words sickened him, the flagrant childishness, the sentimental grandiosity of the self-deception. What does she see in the hopeless scurryings of these wretched people that could justify such an idea? Derelicts and love? To be a derelict living in an underpass is to have clobbered out of you a hundred times over the minutest
susceptibility
to love. This was awful. Now that her speech is finally cleared of the stuttering, all that comes through is this junk. What he had dreamed about—that his wonderful, gifted child would one day stop stuttering—had come to pass. She had mastered miraculously the agitated stuttering only to reveal, at the eye of the storm that was her erupted personality, this insane clarity and calm. What a great revenge to take: This is what you wanted, Daddy? Well, here it is.

Her being able successfully to explain and to talk was now the worst thing of all.

The harshness he felt but didn't want her to hear was in his voice nonetheless when he said, "You will meet a violent end, Meredith. Keep trying them out twice a day, keep it up and you'll find out just how much they know about your love. Their hunger, Merry, is not for love. Somebody will kill you!"

"But only to be reborn."

"I doubt that, honey. I seriously doubt that."

"Will you concede that my guess is as good as yours, Dad?"

"Won't you at least take off that mask while we're talking? So I can see you?"

"See me stutter, do you mean?"

"Well, I don't know if wearing that is what accounts for the disappearance of your stutter or not. You tell me that it has. You tell me that the stutter was only your way of doing no violence to the air and the things that live in the air ... is that correct? Have I understood what you were saying?"

"Yes."

"Well ... even if I were to concede that, I have to tell you I think you might eventually have a better life
with
your stutter. I don't minimize the hardship it was for you. But if it turns out you had to carry things to this extreme to be rid of that damn thing ... then I really do wonder ... well, if it's the best trade-off imaginable."

"You can't explain away what I've done by motives, Daddy. I certainly wouldn't explain away what
you've
done by motives."

"But I
do
have motives.
Everyone
has motives."

"You cannot reduce the journey of a soul to that kind of psychology. It is not worthy of you."

"Then
you
explain it. Explain it to me,
please.
How do you explain that when you took all this ... what looks to me like misery and nothing more, that when you did that, took upon yourself real suffering, which is all this is, suffering that you have
chosen,
Merry, real suffering and nothing more or less than suffering"—his voice was wavering but on he went, reasonable, reasonable, responsible, responsible—"then, only
then—do
you see what I'm saying?—the stutter vanished?"

"I've told you. I am done with craving and selfhood."

"Sweet, sweet child and girl." He sat down amid the filth of the floor, helpless to do anything other than try to his utmost not to lose control.

In the tiny room, where they now sat no more than an arm's length from each other, there was no light other than what fell through the dirty transom. She lived without light. Why? Had she renounced the vice of electricity too? She lived without light, she lived without everything. This was how their life had worked out: she lived in Newark with nothing, he lived in Old Rimrock with everything except her. Was his good fortune to blame for that too? The revenge of the have-nots upon those who have and own. All the self-styled have-nots, the playacting Rita Cohens seeking to associate themselves with their parents' worst enemies, modeling themselves on whatever was most loathsome to those who most loved them.

There used to be a slogan she'd crayoned in two colors on a piece of cardboard, a handmade poster that she'd hung over her desk, replacing his Weequahic football pennant; the poster had hung there undisturbed all during the year before her disappearance. Till it went up, she had always coyly coveted the Weequahic pennant because the Swede's high school sweetheart had taken it to sewing class in 1943 and stitched into the felt along the bottom edge of the orange and brown triangle, in thick white thread, "To All-City Levov, XXXX, Arlene." The poster was the only thing he had dared to remove from her room and destroy, and even doing that much had taken three months; appropriating the property of another, adult or child, was simply repugnant to him. But three months after the bombing he marched up the stairs and into her room and tore the poster down. It read: "We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmares." In large square letters the attribution: "
WEATHERMEN MOTTO
." And because he was a tolerant man he'd tolerated that too. "Honky" in his daughter's hand. Hanging there for a year in his own home, each red letter shadowed heavily in black.

And because even though he hadn't liked it one bit he did not believe it was his right blah-blah blah-blah blah, because—out of regard for her property and her personal freedom—he couldn't even pull down an awful poster, because he was not capable of even that much righteous violence, now the hideous realization of the nightmare had come along to test even further the limits of his enlightened tolerance. She thinks if she raises a hand she'll swat and kill an innocent mite that is innocently floating by her—so in touch is she with the environment that any and every move she makes will have the most stupendously dire consequences—and he thinks that if he removes a hateful and disgusting poster that she has put up, he'll do damage to her integrity, to her psyche, to her First Amendment rights. No, he wasn't a Jain, thought the Swede, but he might as well have been—he was just as pathetically and naively nonviolent. The idiocy of the uprightness of the goals he had set.