American Pastoral (41 page)

"Then damn it, Merry, join the
other
side," he said, momentarily losing his grip. "How's that? You can join
their
marines if you want to. It's been done. That's true. Look at history. When you're old enough you can go over and fight for the other army if you want it. I don't recommend it. People don't like it, and I think you're smart enough to understand why they don't. 'Traitor' isn't a pleasant thing to be called. But it's been done. It's an option. Look at Benedict Arnold. Look at him. He did it. He went over to the other side, as far as I remember. From school. And I suppose I respect him. He had guts. He stood up for what he believed in. He risked his own life for what he believed in. But he happened to be wrong, Merry, in my estimation. He went over to the other side in the Revolutionary War and, as far as I'm concerned, the man was dead wrong. Now you don't happen to be wrong. You happen to be
right.
This family is one hundred percent against this goddamn Vietnam thing. You don't have to rebel against your family
because your family is not in disagreement with you.
You are not the only person around here against this war. We are against it. Bobby Kennedy is against it—"

"
Now
," said Merry, with disgust.

"Okay, now. Now is better than not now, isn't it? Be realistic, Merry—it doesn't help anything not to be. Bobby Kennedy is against it. Senator Eugene McCarthy is against it. Senator Javits is against it, and he's a Republican. Senator Frank Church is against it. Senator Wayne Morse is against it. And how he is. I admire that man. I've written him to tell him and I have gotten the courtesy of a hand-signed reply. Senator Fulbright, of course, is against it. It's Fulbright who, admittedly, introduced the Tonkin Gulf resolu—"

"F-f-f-ful—"

"Nobody is saying—"

"Dad," said the Swede, "let Merry finish."

"I'm sorry, honey," said Lou Levov. "Finish."

"Ful-ful-fulbright is a racist."

"Is he? What are you talking about? Senator William Fulbright from Arkansas? Come on with that stuff. I think there's where you've got your facts wrong, my friend." She had slandered one of his heroes who'd stood up to Joe McCarthy, and to prevent himself from lashing out at her about Fulbright took a supreme effort of will. "But now just let
me
finish what I was saying. What was I saying? Where was I? Where the hell was I, Seymour?"

"Your point," the Swede said, acting evenhandedly as the moderator for these two dynamos, a role he preferred to being the adversary of either, "is that both of you are against the war and want it to stop. There's no reason for you to argue on that issue—I believe
that's
your point. Merry feels it's all gone beyond writing letters to the president. She feels that's futile. You feel that, futile or not, it's something within your power to do and you're going to do it, at least to continue to put yourself on record."

"Exactly!" the old man cried. "Here, listen to what I tell him here. 'I am a lifetime Democrat.' Merry, listen—T am a lifetime Democrat—'"

But nothing he told the president ended the war, nor did anything he told Merry nip the catastrophe in the bud. Yet alone in the family he had seen it coming. "I saw it coming. I saw it clear as day. I saw it. I knew it. I sensed it. I fought it. She was out of control. Something was wrong. I could smell it. I told you. 'Something has to be done about that child. Something is going wrong with that child.' And it went in one ear and out the other. I got, 'Dad, take it easy.' I got, 'Dad, don't exaggerate. Dad, it's a phase. Lou, leave her alone, don't argue with her.' 'No, I will
not
leave her alone. This is my granddaughter. I
refuse
to leave her alone. I refuse to lose a granddaughter by leaving her alone. Something is
haywire
with that child.' And you looked at me like I was nuts. All of you. Only I wasn't nuts. I was
right.
With a
vengeance
I was right!"

There were no messages for him when he got home. He had been praying for a message from Mary Stoltz.

"Nothing?" he said to Dawn, who was in the kitchen preparing a salad out of greens she'd pulled from the garden.

"Nope."

He poured a drink for himself and his father and carried the glasses out to the back porch, where the set was still on.

"You going to make a steak, darling?" his mother asked him.

"Steak, corn, salad, and Merry's big beefsteak tomatoes." He'd meant Dawn's tomatoes but did not correct himself once it was out.

"No one makes a steak like you," she said, after the first shock of his words had worn off.

"Good, Ma."

"My big boy. Who could want a better son?" she said, and when he embraced her she went to pieces for the first time that week. "I'm sorry. I was remembering the phone calls."

"I understand," he said.

"She was a little girl. You'd call, you'd put her on, and she'd say, 'Hi, Grandma! Guess what?' 'I don't know, honey—what?' And she'd tell me."

"Come on, you've been terrific so far. You can keep it up. Come on. Buck up."

"I was looking at the snapshots, when she was a baby..."

"Don't look at them," he said. "Try not to look at them. You can do it, Ma. You have to."

"Oh, darling, you're so brave, you're such an inspiration, it's such a tonic when we come to see you. I love you so."

"Good, Ma. I love you. But you mustn't lose control in front of Dawn."

"Yes, yes, whatever you say."

"That's my girl."

His father, continuing to watch the television set—and after having miraculously contained himself for ten full days—said to him, "No news."

"No news," the Swede replied.

"Nothing."

"Nothing."

"O-kay," his father said, feigning fatalism, "o-kay—if that's the way it is, that's the way it is," and went back to watching TV.

"Do you still think she's in Canada, Seymour?" his mother asked.

"I never thought she was in Canada."

"But that's where the boys went..."

"Look, why don't we save this discussion? There's nothing wrong with asking questions but Dawn will be in and out—"

"I'm sorry, you're right," his mother replied. "I'm terribly sorry."

"Not that the situation has changed, Mother. Everything is exactly the same."

"Seymour..." She hesitated. "Darling, one question. If she gave herself up now, what would happen? Your father says—"

"Why are you bothering him with that?" his father said. "He told you about Dawn. Learn to control yourself."

"
Me
control myself?"

"Mother, you must stop thinking these thoughts. She is gone. She may never want to see us again."

"
Why?
" his father erupted. "Of course she wants to see us again. This I refuse to believe!"

"Now who's controlling himself?" his mother asked.

"Of course she wants to see us again. The problem is
she can't
."

"Lou dear," his mother said, "there are children, even in ordinary families, who grow up and go away and that's the end of it."

"But not at
sixteen.
For Christ's sake, not under these circumstances. What are you talking about 'ordinary' families?
We
are an ordinary family. This is a child who needs help. This is a child who is in trouble and we are not a family who walks out on a child in trouble!"

"She's twenty years old, Dad. Twenty-one."

"Twenty-one," his mother said, "last January."

"Well, she's not a child," the Swede told them. "All I'm saying is that you must not set yourself up for disappointment, neither of you."

"Well, I don't," his father said. "I have more sense than that. I assure you I don't."

"Well, you mustn't. I seriously doubt that we will ever see her again."

The only thing worse than their never seeing her again would be their seeing her as he had left her on the floor of that room. Over these last few years, he had been moving them in the direction, if not of total resignation, of adaptation, of a realistic appraisal of the future. How could he now tell them what had happened to Merry, find words to describe it to them that would not destroy them? They haven't the faintest picture in their mind of what they'd see if they were to see her. Why does anyone have to know? What is so indispensable about any of them knowing?

"You got reason to say that, son, that we'll never see her?"

"The five years. The time that's gone by. That's reason enough."

"Seymour, sometimes I'm walking on the street, and I'm behind someone, a girl who's walking in front of me, and if she's tall—"

He took his mother's hands in his. "You think it's Merry."

"Yes."

"That happens to all of us."

"I can't stop it."

"I understand."

"And every time the phone rings," she said.

"I know."

"I tell her," his father said, "that she wouldn't do it with a phone call anyway."

"And why not?" she said to her husband. "Why not phone us? That's the safest thing she could possibly do, to phone us."

"Ma, none of this speculation means anything. Why not try to keep it to a minimum tonight? I know you can't help having these thoughts. You can't be free of it, none of us can be. But you have to try. You can't make happen what you want to happen just by thinking about it. Try to free yourself from a little of it."

"Whatever you say, darling," his mother replied. "I feel better now, just talking about it. I can't keep it inside me all the time."

"I know. But we can't start whispering around Dawn."

It was never difficult, as it was with his restless father—who spent so much of life in a transitional state between compassion and antagonism, between comprehension and blindness, between gentle intimacy and violent irritation—to know what to make of his mother. He had never feared battling with her, never uncertainly wondered what side she was on or worried what she might be inflamed by next. Unlike her husband, she was a big industry of nothing other than family love. Hers was a simple personality for whom the well-being of the boys was everything. Talking to her he'd felt, since earliest boyhood, as though he were stepping directly into her heart. With his father, to whose heart he had easy enough access, he had first to collide with that skull, the skull of a brawler, to split it open as bloodlessly as he could to get at whatever was inside.

It was astonishing how small a woman she had become. But what hadn't been consumed by osteoporosis had, in the last five years, been destroyed by Merry. Now the vivacious mother of his youth, who well into middle age was being complimented on her youthful vigor, was an old lady, her spine twisted and bent, a hurt and puzzled expression embedded in the creases of her face. Now, when she did not realize people were watching her, tears would rise in her eyes, eyes bearing that look both long accustomed to living with pain and startled to have been in so much pain so long. Yet all his boyhood recollections (which, however hard to credit, he knew to be genuine; even the ruthlessly unillusioned Jerry would, if asked, have to corroborate them) were of his mother towering over the rest of them, a healthy, tall reddish blonde with a wonderful laugh, who adored being the woman in that masculine household. As a small child he had not found it nearly so odd and amazing as he did looking at her now to think that you could recognize people as easily by their laugh as by their face. Hers, back when she had something to laugh about, was light and like a bird in flight, rising, rising, and then, delightfully, if you were her child, rising yet again. He didn't even have to be in the same room to know where his mother was—he'd hear her laughing and could pinpoint her on the map of the house that was not so much
in
his brain as it
was
his brain (his cerebral cortex divided not into frontal lobes, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, and occipital lobes but into the downstairs, the upstairs, and the basement—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, etc.).

What had been oppressing her when she arrived from Florida the week before was the letter she was carrying secreted in her purse, a letter addressed by Lou Levov to the second wife Jerry had left, from whom he had only recently separated. Sylvia Levov had been given a stack of letters to mail by her husband, but that one she simply could not send. Instead she had dared to go off alone and open it, and now she had brought the contents north with her to show Seymour. "You know what would happen with Jerry if Susan ever got this? You know the rampage Jerry would go on? He is not a boy without a temper. He never was. He's not you, dear, he is not a diplomat. But your father has to stick his nose in everywhere, and what the results will be means nothing to him, so long as he's got his nose in the wrong place. All he has to do is send her this, and put Jerry in the wrong like this, and there will be hell to pay with your brother—unmitigated hell."

The letter, two pages long, began, "Dear Susie, The check enclosed is for you and for nobody else's information. It is found money. Put it somewhere where nobody knows about it. I'll say nothing and you say nothing. I want you to know that I have not forgotten you in my will. This money is yours to do whatever you want with. The children I'll take care of separately. But if you decide to invest it,
and I strongly hope you do,
my suggestion is gold stocks. The dollar isn't going to be worth a thing. I myself have just put ten thousand into three gold stocks. I will give you the names. Bennington Mines. Castworp Development. Schley-Waiggen Mineral Corp. Solid investments. I got the names from the Barrington Newsletter that has never steered me wrong yet."