American Pastoral (34 page)

He kneeled down to read the index cards positioned just about where she once used to venerate, over her Old Rimrock bed, magazine photos of Audrey Hepburn.

I renounce all killing of living beings, whether subtile or gross, whether movable or immovable.

I renounce all vices of lying speech arising from anger, or greed, or fear, or mirth.

I renounce all taking of anything not given, either in a village, or a town, or a wood, either of little or much, or small or great, or living or lifeless things.

I renounce all sexual pleasures, either with gods, or men, or animals.

I renounce all attachments, whether little or much, small or great, living or lifeless; neither shall I myself form such attachments, nor cause others to do so, nor consent to their doing so.

As a businessman the Swede was astute, and if need be, beneath the genial surface of the man's man—capitalizing on the genial surface—he could be as artfully calculating as the deal required. But he could not see how even the coldest calculation could help american pastoral him here. Neither could all the fathering talent in the world collected and gathered up and mobilized in one man. He read through her five vows again, considered them as seriously as he could, all the while bewildering himself with the thought, For purity—in the name of purity.

Why? Because she'd killed someone, or because she would have needed purity whether she'd never killed a fly? Did it have to do with him? That foolish kiss? That was ten years behind them, and besides, it had been nothing, had come to nothing, did not appear to have meant anything much to her even at the time. Could something as meaningless, as commonplace, as ephemeral, as understandable, as forgivable, as innocent ... No! How could he be asked again and again to take seriously things that were not serious? Yet that was the predicament that Merry had forced on him all the way back when she was blasting away at the dinner table about the immorality of their bourgeois life. How could anybody take that childish ranting seriously? He had done as well as any parent could have—he had listened and listened when it was all he could do not to get up from dinner and walk away until she'd spewed herself out; he had nodded and agreed to as much as he could even marginally agree to, and when he opposed her—say, about the moral efficacy of the profit motive—always it was with restraint, with all the patient reasonableness he could muster. And this was not easy for him, given that it was the profit motive to which a child requiring tens of thousands of dollars' worth of orthodontia, psychiatry, and speech therapy—not to mention ballet lessons and riding lessons and tennis lessons, all of which, growing up, she at one time or another was convinced she could not survive without—might be thought to owe if not a certain allegiance then at least a minuscule portion of gratitude. Perhaps the
mistake
was to have tried so hard to take seriously what was in no way serious; perhaps what he should have done, instead of listening so intently, so
respectfully,
to her ignorant raving was to reach over the table and whack her across the mouth.

But what would that have taught her about the profit motive— what would it have taught her about him? Yet if he had,
if,
then the veiled mouth could be taken seriously. He could now berate himself, "Yes, I did it to her, I did it with my outbursts, my temper." But it seemed as though he had done whatever had been done to her because he could not
abide
a temper, had not wanted one or dared to have one. He had done it by kissing her. But that couldn't be.
None of this could possibly be.

Yet it was. Here we are. Here
she
is, imprisoned in this rat hole with these "vows."

She was better off steeped in contempt. If he had to choose between angry, fat Merry stuttering with Communist outrage and
this
Merry, veiled, placid, dirty, infinitely compassionate, this raggedly attired scarecrow Merry ... But why have to choose either? Why must she always be enslaving herself to the handiest empty-headed idea? From the moment she had become old enough to think for herself she had been tyrannized instead by the thinking of crackpots. What had he done to produce a daughter who, after excelling for years at school, refused to think for herself—a daughter who had to be either violently against everything in sight or pathetically
for
everything, right down to the microorganisms in the air we breathe? Why did a girl as smart as she was
strive
to let other people do her thinking for her? Why was it beyond her to strive—as he had every day of his life—to be all that one is, to be true to
that?
"But the one who doesn't think for himself is you!" she'd told him when he'd suggested that she might be parroting the clichés of others. "
You're
the living example of the person who
never
thinks for himself!" "Am I really?" he said, laughing. "Yes! You're the most conformist man I ever met! All you do is what's expec-expec-expected of you!" "That's terrible too?" "It's not
thinking,
D-d-dad! It isn't! It's being a s-s-stupid aut-aut-aut-aut-aut-automaton! A r-r-r-r-robot!" "Well," he replied, believing that it was all a phase, a bad-tempered phase she would outgrow, "I guess you're just stuck with a comformist father—better luck next time," and pretended that he had not been terrified by the sight of her distended, pulsating, frothing lips hammering "r-r-r-r-robot" into his face with the ferocity of a lunatic riveter. A phase, he thought, and felt comforted, and never once considered that thinking "a phase" might be a not bad example of not thinking for yourself.

Fantasy and magic. Always pretending to be somebody else. What began benignly enough when she was playing at Audrey Hepburn had evolved in only a decade into this outlandish myth of selflessness. First the selfless nonsense of the People, now the selfless nonsense of the Perfected Soul. What next, Grandma Dwyer's Cross? Back to the selfless nonsense of the Eternal Candle and the Sacred Heart? Always a grandiose unreality, the remotest abstraction around—never self-seeking, not in a million years. The lying, inhuman horror of all this selflessness.

Yes, he had liked his daughter better when she was as self-seeking as everyone else rather than blessed with flawless speech and monstrous altruism.

"How long have you been here?" he asked her.

"Where?"

"This room. This street. In Newark. How long have you been in Newark?"

"I came six months ago."

"You've been..." Because there was everything to say, to ask, to demand to know, he could say no more. Six months. In Newark six months. There was no here and now for the Swede, there were just two inflammatory words matter-of-factly spoken: six months.

He stood over her, facing her, his power pinned to the wall, rocking almost imperceptibly back on the heels of his shoes, as though in this way he might manage to take leave of her
through
the wall, then rocking forward onto his toes, as though at any moment to grab her, to whisk her up into his arms and out. He couldn't return home to sleep in perfect safety in the Old Rimrock house knowing that she was in those rags in that veil on that mat, looking like the loneliest person on earth, sleeping only inches from a hallway that sooner or later had to catch up with her.

This girl was mad by the time she was fifteen, and kindly and stupidly he had tolerated that madness, crediting her with nothing worse than a point of view he didn't like but that she would surely outgrow along with her rebellious adolescence. And now look what she looked like. The ugliest daughter ever born of two attractive parents. I renounce this! I renounce that! I renounce everything!
That
couldn't be it, could it? All of it to renounce his looks and Dawn's? All of it because the mother was once Miss New Jersey? Is life this belittling? It can't be. I won't have it!

"How long have you been a Jain?"

"One year."

"How did you find out about all this?"

"Studying religions."

"How much do you weigh, Meredith?"

"More than enough, Daddy."

Her eye sockets were huge. Half an inch above the veil, big, big dark eye sockets, and inches above the eye sockets the hair, which no longer streamed down her back but seemed just to have happened onto her head, still blond like his but long and thick no longer because of a haircut that was itself an act of violence. Who'd done it? She or someone else? And with what? She could not, in keeping with her five vows, have renounced any attachment as savagely as she had renounced her once-beautiful hair.

"But you don't look as though you eat
anything,
" and despite his intention to state this to her unemotionally, he as good as moaned—unbidden a voice emerged from the Swede wretchedly laced with all his dismay. "What do you
eat?
"

"I destroy plant life. I am insufficiently compassionate as yet to refuse to do that."

"You mean you eat vegetables. Is that what you mean? What is wrong with that? How could you refuse to do that? Why
should
you?"

"It is an issue of personal sanctity. It is a matter of reverence for life. I am bound to harm no living being, neither man, nor animal, nor plant."

"But you would
die
if you did that. How can you be 'bound' to that? You would eat nothing."

"You ask a profound question. You are a very intelligent man, Daddy. You ask, 'If you respect life in all forms, how can you live?' The answer is you cannot. The traditional way by which a Jain holy man ends his life is by
salla khana—
self-starvation. Ritual death by
salla khana
is the price paid for perfection by the perfect Jain"

"I cannot believe this is you. I have to tell you what I think.

"Of course you do."

I cannot believe, clever as you are, that you know what you are saying or what you are doing here or why. I cannot believe that you are telling me that a point will come when you will decide that you will not even destroy plant lite, and that you wont eat anything and that you will just doom yourself to death. For whom, Merry?. For what?"

"It's all right. It's all right, Daddy. I can believe that you can't believe that you know what I'm saying or what I' m doing or why."

She addressed him as though
he
were the child and
she
were the parent with nothing but sympathetic understanding with that loving tolerance that he once had so disastrously extended to her. And it galled him. The condescension or a lunatic. Yet he neither bolted for the door nor leaped to do what had to be done. He remained the reasonable father. The reasonable father of someone mad. Do something!. Anything!. In the name of everything reasonable stop being reasonable this child needs a hospital She could not be in any greater peril it she were adrift on a plank in the middle oi the sea. She's gone over the edge of the ship—how that happened is not the question now. She must be rescued immediately!

"Tell me where you studied religions."

"In libraries. Nobody looks for you there. I was in libraries often, and so I read. I read a lot."

"You read a lot when you were a little girl."

"I did? I like to read."

"That's where you became a member of this religion. In a library."

"Yes."

"And church? Do you go to some sort of a church?"

"There is no church at the center. There is no god at the center. God is at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And God may say, 'Take life.' And it is then not just permissible but obligatory. That's all over the Old Testament. There are examples even in the New Testament. In Judaism and Christianity the position is taken that life belongs to God. Life isn't sacred, God is sacred. But at the center for us is not a belief in the sovereignty of God but a belief in the sanctity of life."

The monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to foot—the monotonous, spellbound chant of those whose turbulence can be caged only within the suffocating straitjacket of the most supercoherent of dreams. What was missing from her unstuttered words was not the sanctity of life—missing was the sound of life.

"How many of you are there?" he asked, working fiercely to adjust to clarifications with which she was only further bewildering him.

"Three million."

Three million people like her? It could not be. In rooms like this one? Locked away in three million terrible rooms? "Where are they, Merry?"

"In India."

"I'm not asking you about India. I don't care about India. We do not live in India. In America, how many of you are there?"

"I don't know. It's unimportant."

"I would think very few."

"I don't know."

"Merry, are you the only one?"

"My spiritual exploration I undertook on my own."

"I do not understand. Merry, I do not understand. How did you get from Lyndon Johnson to this? How do you get from point A to point Z, where there is no point of contact
at all?
Merry, it does not hang together."

"There is a point of contact. I assure you there is. It all hangs together. You just don't see it."

"Do
you?
"

"Yes."

"Tell it to me then. I want you to tell it to me so that I can understand what has
happened
to you."