American Pastoral (58 page)

And so he humbled himself and he did it—against his better judgment, consented to come for the big night to Atlantic City with the rest of Dawn's relatives, and it was a disaster. When Dawn saw him waiting there in his Sunday suit in the lobby with her mother and her aunts and her uncles and her cousins, every last Dwyer in Union
and
Essex
and
Hudson counties, all she was allowed to do by her chaperone was to shake his hand, and he was fit to be tied. But that was a pageant rule, in case anybody who was watching might not know it was her father and see some kind of embrace and think something untoward was going on. It was all so that absolutely
nothing
smacked of impropriety, but Jim Dwyer, who had only recently recovered from the first heart attack and so was on edge anyway, had misunderstood, thinking that now she was such a big shot she had dared to rebuff her own dad, actually given her father the cold shoulder, and in public, before the entire public.

Of course, for the week that she was in Atlantic City under the watchful eye of the pageant, she had not been allowed to see the Swede
at all,
not in the company of her chaperone, not even in a public place, and so, until the very last night, he'd just stayed up in Newark and had to be content, like her family, to talk to her on the phone. But Dawn's sincerity in recounting to her father this hardship—of her being deprived, for a whole week, of the company of her Jewish beau—did not much impress him when, back in Elizabeth, she attempted to assuage his grudge at what he remembered for many years afterward as "the snub."

"That was just an Old World hotel that was the most wonderful place," Dawn was telling the Salzmans. "Huge place. Glorious. Right on the water. Something you see in a movie. Big rooms overlooking Lake Geneva. We loved that. I'm boring you," she suddenly said.

"No, no," they replied in unison.

Sheila pretended to be listening intently to every word Dawn spoke. She had to be pretending. Not even she could have recovered so completely from the eruption in Dawn's study. If she had—well, it would be hard then to say what sort of woman she was. She was nothing like the one he had imagined. And that was not because she had been passing herself off with him as something else or somebody else but because he had understood her no better than he was able to understand anyone. How to penetrate to the interior of people was some skill or capacity he did not possess. He just did not have the combination to that lock. Everybody who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be good. Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself. What was
he,
stripped of all the signs he flashed? People were standing up everywhere, shouting "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea of who or what they were than he had.
They
believed their flashing signs too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This
isn't
me! This
isn't
me!" They would if they had any decency. "This
isn't
me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.

Sheila Salzman may or may not have been listening to Dawn's every word, but Shelly Salzman surely was. The kindly doctor wasn't merely acting like the kindly doctor but appeared to have fallen somewhat under Dawn's spell—the spell of that alluring surface whose underside, as she presented it to people, was as charmingly straightforward as it could be. Yes, after all she'd been through, she looked and she behaved as though nothing had happened. For him there was this two-sidedness to everything: side by side, the way it had been and the way it was now. But Dawn made it sound as though the way it had been was
still
the way it was. After the tragic detour their lives had taken, she'd managed in the last year to arrive back at being herself, apparently just by not thinking about certain things. And arrived back not merely at Dawn with her face-lift and her petite gallantry and her breakdowns and her cattle and her decisions to change her life but back at the Dawn of Hillside Road, Elizabeth, New Jersey. A gate, some sort of psychological gate, had been installed in her brain, a mighty gate past which nothing harmful could travel. She locked the gate, and that was that. Miraculous, or so he'd thought, until he'd learned that the gate had a name. The William Orcutt III Gate.

Yes, if you'd missed her back in the forties, here once again was Mary Dawn Dwyer of Elizabeth's Elmora section, an up-and-coming Irish looker from a working-class family that was starting to do okay, respectable parishioners at St. Genevieve's, the classiest Catholic church in town—miles uptown from the church by the docks where her father and his brothers had been altar boys. Once again she was in possession of that power she'd had even as a twenty-year-old to stir up interest in whatever she said, somehow to touch you
inwardly,
which was not often true of the contestants who
won
at Atlantic City. But she could do that, lay bare something juvenile even in adults, by nothing more than venting ordinary lively enthusiasms through that flagrantly perfect, strikingly executed heart-shaped face. Maybe, until she spoke and revealed her attitudes as not so different from any decent person's, people were frightened of her for looking like that. Discovering that she was not at all a goddess, had no interest in pretending to be one—discovering in her almost an excess of
no
pretense—made even more riveting the brilliant darkness of her hair, the angular mask not much bigger than a cat's, and the eyes, the big pale eyes almost alarmingly keen and vulnerable. From the message in those eyes one would never have believed that this girl was going to grow up to be a shrewd businesswoman resolutely determined about turning a profit as a cattle breeder. What excited the Swede's tenderness always was that she who wasn't at all frail nonetheless looked so delicate and frail. This always impressed him: how strong she was (once was) and how vulnerable her kind of beauty caused her to appear, even to him, her husband, long after one might imagine that married life had dulled the infatuation.

And how plain Sheila looked sitting alongside her, purportedly listening to her, plain and proper, sensible, dignified, and dreary. So dreary. Everything in her severely withheld. Hidden. There was nothing hearty in Sheila. There was lots in Dawn. There once was in him. That once described everything there was in him. It was not easy to understand how he could ever have found in this prim, severe, hidden whatever-she-was a woman more magnetic than Dawn. How pathetic he must have been, how depleted, a broken, helpless creature escaping from everything that had collapsed, running in the headlong way that someone in trouble will take flight in order to make a bad thing worse. Almost all there was to attract him was that Sheila was someone else. Her clarity, her candor, her equilibrium, her perfect self-control were at first almost beside the point. Shrinking from such a blinding catastrophe—disconnected as he'd never been before from his ready-made life; notorious and disgraced as he'd never been before—he turned in a daze to the one woman other than his wife whom he knew even remotely in a personal way. That was how he got there, seeking asylum, hounded—the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of being untrue. But amorousness had little to do with his clutching. He could not offer the passionate love that Dawn drew from him. Lust was far too natural a task for someone suddenly so misshapen—the father of someone gruesomely misbegotten. He was there for the illusion. He lay atop Sheila like a person taking cover, digging in, a big male body in hiding, a man disappearing: because she was somebody else, maybe he could be somebody else too.

But that she
was
someone else was what made it all wrong. Alongside Dawn, Sheila was a well-groomed impersonal thinking-machine, a human needle threaded with a brain, nobody he could want to touch, let alone sleep with. Dawn was the woman who had inspired the feat for which even his record-breaking athletic career had barely fortified him: vaulting his father. The feat of standing up to his father. And how she had inspired it was by looking as spectacular as she looked and yet talking like everyone else.

Was it bigger, more important, worthier things that inclined others to a lifelong mate? Or at the heart of everyone's marriage was there something irrational and unworthy and odd?

Sheila would know. She knew it all. Yes, she'd have an answer to that one too.... She'd come so far, Sheila had said, she'd gotten so much stronger I thought that she could make it on her own. She's a strong girl, Seymour.
She's a crazy girl. She's crazy!
She's troubled.
And the father plays no role with the troubled daughter?
I'm sure he played plenty of a role. I just thought something terrible had happened at home....

Oh, he wanted his wife back—it was impossible to exaggerate the extent to which he wanted her back, the wife so serious about being a serious mother, the woman so fiercely disinclined to be thought spoiled or vain or frivolously nostalgic for her once-glamorous eminence that she would not wear even as a joke for her family the crown in the hatbox at the top of her closet. His endurance had run out—he wanted that Dawn back
right now.

"What were the farms like?" Sheila asked her. "In Zug. You were going to tell us about the farms." This interest of Sheila's in figuring it all out—how could he have wanted
anything
to do with her? These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who'd never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold anything and didn't know how to sell anything, who'd never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker—people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. All that
awareness,
all that introspective Sheila-like gazing into every nook and cranny of one's soul went repellently against the grain of life as he had known it. To his way of thinking it was simple: you had only to carry out your duties strenuously and unflaggingly like a Levov and orderliness became a natural condition, daily living a simple story tangibly unfolding, a deeply un-agitating story, the fluctuations predictable, the combat containable, the surprises satisfying, the continuous motion an undulation carrying you along with the utmost faith that tidal waves occur only off the coast of countries thousands and thousands of miles away—or so it all had seemed to him
once upon a time,
back when the union of beautiful mother and strong father and bright, bubbly child rivaled the trinity of the three bears.

"I got lost, yes. Oh, lots and lots of farms," said Dawn, gratified just by the thought of all those farms. "They showed us their best cows. Wonderful warm barns. We were there in the early spring when they haven't been out to pasture yet. They're living under the house and the chalet is on top. Porcelain stoves, very ornate..."
I don't understand how you could be so shortsighted. So taken in by a girl who was obviously crazy.
She was running. There was no bringing her back there. She wasn't the same girl that she'd been. Something had gone wrong. She'd gotten so fat. 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. "...and they gave us wine that they made, little things to eat, and so friendly," Dawn said. "When we went back the second time it was fall. The cows live up in the mountains all summer and they milk them and the cow that made the most milk all summer would be the first one to come down with a great bell on her neck. That was the number-one cow. They put flowers on her horns and had great celebrations. When they come down from the high mountain pastures they come down in a line, the leading cow the first one."
What if she went on to kill somebody else? Isn't that a bit of a responsibility? She did, you know. She killed three more people. What do you think of that?
Don't say these 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 all the people, all the children, the girls and the women who had been milking all summer would come in beautiful clothes, all dressed in Swiss outfits, and a band, music, a big fiesta down in the square. And then the cows would all go in for the winter in the barns under the houses. Very clean and very nice. Oh, that was an occasion, seeing that. Seymour took lots of pictures of all their cows so we could put them on the projector."

"Seymour took pictures?" his mother asked. "I thought you couldn't take a picture if it killed you," and she leaned over and kissed him. "My wonderful son," whispered Sylvia Levov, in her eyes adoring admiration shining for her firstborn boy.

"Well, he did back then, the wonderful son. He was a Leica man back then," Dawn was saying. "You took good pictures, didn't you, dear?"

Yes, he had. That was him all right. That was the wonderful son himself who had taken the pictures, who had bought Merry the Swiss girl's outfit, who had bought Dawn the jewelry in Lausanne, and who had told his brother and Sheila that Merry killed four people. Who had bought for the family, as a memento of Zug, of the gloriously Switzerlandish state of their lives, the ceramic candelabra, now half encased with candle drippings, and who had told his brother and Sheila that Merry killed four people. Who had been a Leica man and told those two—the two he could least trust in the world and over whom he had no control—what Merry had done.