American Pastoral (53 page)

"Yes."

"You never told me!"

She did not answer.

"I could kill you!" he said, and, immediately upon saying it, let her go.

"You've seen her," Sheila said. Her hands neatly folded before her. That nonsensical calm, only moments after he had threatened to kill her. All that ridiculous self-control. Always that ridiculous, careful, self-controlled thinking.

"You know everything," he snarled.

"I know what you've been through. What can be done for her?"

"By
you?
Why did you let her go? She went to your house. She'd blown up a building. You knew all about it—why didn't you call me, get in touch with me?"

"I didn't know about it. I found out later that night. But when she came to me she was just beside herself. She was upset and I didn't know why. I thought something had happened at home."

"But you knew within the next few hours. How long was she with you? Two days, three days?"

"Three. She left on the third day."

"So you knew what happened."

"I found out later. I couldn't believe it, but—"

"It was on television."

"But she was in my house by then. I had already promised her that I would help her. And that there was no problem she could tell me that I couldn't keep to myself. She asked me to trust her. That was before I watched the news. How could I betray her then? I'd been her therapist, she'd been my client. I'd always wanted to do what was in her best interest. What was the alternative? For her to get arrested?"

"Call me. That was the alternative. Call her father. If you had gotten to me right there and then, and said, 'She's safe, don't worry about her,' and then not let her out of your sight—"

"She was a big girl. How can you not let her out of your sight?"

"You lock her in the house and keep her there."

"She's not an animal. She's not like a cat or a bird that you can keep in a cage. She was going to do whatever she was going to do. We had a trust, Seymour, and violating her trust at that point ... I wanted her to know that there was someone in this world she could trust."

"Ar
that moment, trust was not what she needed!. She needed me!
"

"But I was sure that your house was where they'd be looking. What good was calling you? I couldn't drive her out here. I even started thinking they would know she would be at my house. All of a sudden it seemed like it was the most obvious place for her to be. I started thinking my phone was bugged. How could I call you?"

"You could have somehow made contact."

"When she first came she was agitated, something had gone wrong, she was just yelling about the war and her family. I thought something terrible had happened at home. Something terrible had happened to
her.
She wasn't the same, Seymour. Something very wrong had happened to that girl. She was talking as if she hated you so. I couldn't imagine ... but sometimes you start to believe the worst about people. I think maybe that's what I was trying to figure out when we were together."

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Could there really be something wrong? Could there really be something that she was subjected to that could lead her to something like that? I was confused too. I want you to know that I never really believed it and I didn't want to believe it. But of course I had to wonder. Anyone would have."

"And? And? Having had an affair with me—what the hell did you find out, having had your little affair with me?"

"That you're kind and compassionate. That you do just about everything you can to be an intelligent, decent person. Just as I would have imagined before she'd blown up that building. Seymour, believe me, please, I just wanted her to be safe. So I took her in. And got her showered and clean. And gave her a place to sleep. I really had no idea—"

"She blew up a building, Sheila! Somebody was killed! It was all over the goddamn television!"

"But I didn't know until I turned on the TV."

"So at six o'clock at night you knew. She was there for three days. And you do not contact me."

"What good would it have done to contact you?"

"I'm her father."

"You're her father and she blew up a building. What good was it going to do bringing her back to you?"

"Don't you grasp what I'm saying? She's my daughter!"

"She's a very strong girl."

"Strong enough to look after herself in the world? No!"

"Turning her over to you wasn't going to help any. She wasn't going to sit and eat her peas and mind her business. You don't go from blowing up a building to—"

"It was your duty to tell me that she came to your house."

"I just thought that would make it easier for them to find her. She'd come so far, she'd gotten so much stronger, I thought that she could make it on her own. She ¿5 a strong girl, Seymour."

"She's a crazy girl."

"She's troubled."

"Oh, Christ! The father plays no role with the troubled daughter?"

"I'm sure he played plenty of a role. That was why I couldn't ... I just thought something terrible had happened at home."

"Something terrible happened at the general store."

"But you should have seen her—she'd gotten so fat."

"I should have
seen
her? Where do you think she'd been? It was your responsibility to get in touch with her parents! Not to let the child run off into nowhere! She never needed me more. She never needed her father more. And you're telling me she never needed him less. You made a terrible error. I hope you know it. A terrible, terrible error."

"What could you have done for her then? What could anyone have done for her then?"

"I deserved to know. I had a right to know. She's a minor. She's my daughter. You had an obligation to get to me."

"My first obligation was to her. She was my client."

"She was no longer your client."

"She had been my client. A very special client. She'd come so far. My first obligation was to her. How could I violate her confidence? The damage had already been done."

"I don't believe you are saying any of this."

"It's the law."

"What's the law?"

"That you don't betray your client's confidence."

"There's another law, idiot—a law against committing murder! She was a fugitive from justice!"

"Don't talk about her like that. Of course she ran. What else could she do? I thought that maybe she would turn herself in. But that she would do it in her own time. In her own way."

"And me? And her mother?"

"Well, it killed me to see you."

"You saw me for four months. It killed you every day?"

"Each time I thought that maybe it would make a difference if I let you know. But I didn't see what difference it would really make. It wouldn't change anything. You were already so broken."

"You are an inhuman bitch."

"There was nothing else I could do. She asked me not to tell. She asked me to trust her."

"I don't understand how you could be so shortsighted. I don't understand how you could be so taken in by a girl who was so obviously crazy."

"I know it's difficult to face. The whole thing is impossible to understand. But to try to pin it on me, to try to act like anything I could have done would have made a difference—it wouldn't have made a difference in her life, it wouldn't have made a difference in your life. She was running. There was no bringing her back there. She wasn't the same girl that she'd been. Something had gone wrong. I saw no point in bringing her back. She'd gotten so fat."

"Stop that! What difference did
that
make!"

"I just thought she was so fat and so angry that something very bad must have gone on at home."

"That it was my fault."

"I didn't think that. We all have homes. That's where everything always goes wrong."

"So you took it on yourself to let this sixteen-year-old who had killed somebody run off into the night. Alone. Unprotected. Knowing God knows what could happen to her."

"You're talking about her as if she were a defenseless girl."

"She is a defenseless girl. She was
always
a defenseless girl."

"Once she'd blown up the building there's nothing that could have been done, Seymour. I would have betrayed her confidence and what difference would it have made?"

"I would have been with my daughter! I could have protected her from what has happened to her! You don't know what has happened to her. You didn't see her the way I saw her today. She's completely crazy. I saw her today, Sheila. She's not fat anymore—she's a stick, a stick wearing a rag. She's in a room in Newark in the most awful situation imaginable. I cannot describe to you how she lives. If you had only told me, it would all be different!"

"We wouldn't have had an affair—that's all that would have been different. Of course I knew that you might be hurt."

"By what?"

"By my having seen her. But to bring it all up again? I didn't know where she was. I didn't have any more information on her. That's the whole thing. She wasn't crazy. She was upset. She was angry. But she wasn't crazy."

"It's not crazy to blow up the general store? It's not crazy to make a bomb, to plant a bomb in the post office of the general store?"

"I'm saying that at my house she wasn't crazy."

"She'd already
been
crazy. You
knew
she'd been crazy. What if she went on to kill somebody else? Isn't that a bit of a responsibility? She did, you know. She did, Sheila. She killed three more people. What do you think of that?"

"Don't say things just to torture me."

"I'm telling you something! She killed three more people! You could have prevented that!"

"You're torturing me. You're trying to torture me."

"She killed three more people!" And that was when he pulled Count's picture off the wall and hurled it at her feet. But that did not faze her—that seemed only to bring her under her own control again. Acting the role of herself, without rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room.

"What can be
done
for her?" he was growling, and all the while, down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the glass and dumping them into Dawn's wastebasket. "What can be done for her? What can be done for
anyone? Nothing
can be done. She was sixteen. Sixteen years old and completely crazy. She was a minor. She was my daughter. She blew up a building. She was a lunatic. You had no
right
to let her go!"

Without its glass, the picture of the immovable Count he hung again over the desk, and then, as though listening to people unabatedly chattering on about something or other were the task assigned him by the forces of destiny, he returned from the savagery of where he'd been to the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner party. That's what was left to hold him together—a dinner party. All there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his life continued careering toward destruction—a dinner party.

To the candlelit terrace he duteously returned, while bearing within him everything that he could not understand.

***

Dishes had been cleared, the salad eaten, and dessert served, fresh strawberry-rhubarb pie from McPherson's. The Swede saw that the guests had rearranged themselves for the last course. Orcutt, hiding still the vicious shit that he was behind the Hawaiian shirt and the raspberry trousers, had moved across the table and sat talking with the Umanoffs, all of them amiable and laughing together now that
Deep Throat
was off the agenda.
Deep Throat
had never been the real subject anyway. Boiling away beneath
Deep Throat
was the far more disgusting and transgressive subject of Merry, of Sheila, of Shelly, of Orcutt and Dawn, of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity among neighbors and friends, the subject of cruelty. The mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed—that was the subject here tonight!

The Swede's mother had come around to sit beside Dawn, who was talking with the Salzmans, and his father and Jessie were nowhere to be seen.

Dawn asked, "Important?"

"The Czech guy. The consul. The information I wanted. Where's my dad?"

He waited for her to say "Dead," but after she looked around she mouthed only "Don't know" and turned back to Shelly and Sheila.

"Daddy left with Mrs. Orcutt," his mother whispered. "They went somewhere together. I think in the house."

Orcutt came up to him. They were the same size, both big men, but the Swede had always been the stronger, going back to their twenties, to when Merry was born and the Levovs moved out to Old Rimrock from their apartment on Elizabeth Avenue in Newark and the newcomer had showed up for the Saturday morning touch-football games back of Orcutt's house. Out there just for the fun of it, to enjoy the fresh air and the feel of the ball and the camaraderie, to make some new friends, the Swede had not the slightest inclination to appear showy or superior, except when he simply had no choice: when Orcutt, who off the field had never been other than kind and considerate, began to use his hands more recklessly than the Swede considered sportsmanlike—in a way that the Swede considered cheap and irritating, for a pickup game the worst sort of behavior even if Orcutt's team did happen to have fallen behind. After it had occurred for two weeks in a row, he decided the third week to do what he of course could have done at any time—to dump him. And so, near the end of the game, with a single, swift maneuver—employing the other person's weight to do the damage—he managed at once to catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson and to make sure Orcutt was sprawled in the grass at his feet, before he pranced away to pile on the score. Pranced away and thought, of all things, "I don't like being looked down on," the words that Dawn had used to decline joining The Orcutt Family Cemetery Tour. He had not realized, not till he was speeding alone toward the goal line, how much Dawn's assailability had gotten to him nor how unsettled he was by the remotest likelihood (a likelihood that, to her face, he had dismissed) of his wife's being ridiculed out here for growing up in Elizabeth the daughter of an Irish plumber. When, after scoring, he turned around and saw Orcutt still on the ground, he thought, "Two hundred years of Morris County history, flat on its ass—that'll teach you to look down on Dawn Levov. Next time you'll play the whole
game
on your ass," before trotting back up the field to see if Orcutt was all right.