American Pastoral (36 page)

"Who is Rita Cohen?" he asked.

"I don't know. Who is she?"

"The girl who came to me in your behalf. In '68. After you disappeared. She came to my office."

"Nobody has ever come to you in my behalf, no one I have ever sent."

"Yes, a short little girl. Very pale. Her hair in an Afro. Dark hair. I gave her your ballet slippers and your Audrey Hepburn scrapbook and your diary. Is she the person who put you up to this? Is she the person who made the bomb? You used to talk to somebody on the phone when you were still at home—those secret conversations you had." The secret conversations that, like the poster, he had also "respected." If only he had torn down that poster and pulled the plug on her phone and locked her up then and there! "Was that the person?" he asked her now. "Tell me the truth, please."

"I only speak the truth."

"I gave her ten thousand dollars for you. I gave her cash. Did you or did you not get that money?"

Her laugh was kindly. "Ten thousand dollars? Not yet, Daddy."

"Then I must have an answer from you. Who is the Rita Cohen who told me where I could find you? Is this the Melissa from New York?"

"You found me," she replied, "because you have been looking. I never expected not to be found by you. You sought me out because you
must
seek me."

"Did you come to Newark to help me find you? Is that why you came here?"

But she replied, "No."

"Then
why
did you come? What were you thinking?
Were
you thinking? You know where the office is. You know how very close it is. Where's the logic, Merry? This close and..."

"I got a ride, and here I was, you see."

"Like that. Coincidence. No logic. No logic anywhere."

"The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any. I relinquish all influence over everything. As to what constitutes a coincidence, you and I, Daddy—"

"Do you 'relinquish all influence'?" he cried. "Do you, '
all
influence'?" The most maddening conversation of his life. The know-it-all-ism of her absurdly innocent, profoundly insane, unstuttering solemnity, the awful candor of the room and of the street outside, the awful candor of
everything
outside him that was so powerfully controlling him. "You have an influence over
me,
" he shouted, "you are influencing
me!
You who will not kill a mite are killing
me!
What you sit there calling 'coincidence'
is
influence—your powerlessness is power over
me,
goddamn it! Over your mother, over your grandfather, over your grandmother, over everyone who loves you—wearing that veil is bullshit, Merry, complete and absolute
bullshit!
You are the most powerful person in the world!"

There was no solace to be found in thinking, This is
not my
life, this is the
dream
of my life. That was not going to make him any less miserable. Nor was the rage with his daughter, nor was the rage with the little criminal whom he had allowed to be cast as their savior. A cunning and malicious crook who suckered him without half trying. Took him for all she could get in four ten-minute visits. The viciousness. The audacity. The unshatterable nerves. God alone knew where such kids came from.

Then he remembered that one of them came from his house. Rita Cohen merely came from somebody else's house. They were brought up in houses like his own. They were raised by parents like him. And so many were girls, girls whose political identity was total, who were no less aggressive and militant, no less drawn to "armed action" than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They are willing to do anything they can imagine to make history change. The draft isn't even hanging over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorize against the war, competent to rob at gunpoint, equipped in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or inner contradiction—girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably extremist, completely unsociable. He read the names of girls in the papers who were wanted by the authorities for crimes allegedly stemming from antiwar activities, girls that he imagined Merry knew, girls with whose lives he imagined his daughter's to be now interlinked: Bernadine, Patricia, Judith, Cathlyn, Susan, Linda.... His father, after foolishly watching a TV news special about the police hunt for the underground Weathermen, among them Mark Rudd and Katherine Boudin and Jane Alpert—all in their twenties, Jewish, middle class, college-educated, violent in behalf of the antiwar cause, committed to revolutionary change and determined to overturn the United States government—went around saying, "I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework. What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can find oppression. Can't live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression. Once they ran away from being poor; now they run away from being rich. It's crazy. They have parents they can't hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate America instead." But Rita Cohen was a case unto herself: a vicious slut and a common crook.

Then how is he to explain her letter, if that is all she is? What happened to our smart Jewish kids? They
are
crazy. Something is
driving
them crazy. Something has set them against everything. Something is leading them into disaster. These are not the smart Jewish children intent on getting ahead by doing what they are told better than anyone else does. They only feel at home doing better than anyone else as they are
not
told. Distrust is the madness to which they have been called.

And here on the floor is the result in one of its more heartbreaking forms: the religious conversion. If you fail to bring the world into subjection, then subject yourself to the world.

"I
love
you," he was telling Merry, "you
know
I would look for you. You are my
child.
But how could I find you in a million years, wearing that mask and weighing eighty-eight pounds and living the way you live? How could anyone have found you, even here? Where were you?" he cried, as angry as the angriest father ever betrayed by a daughter or a son, so angry he feared that his head was about to spew out his brains just as Kennedy's did when he was shot. "Where have you
been?
Answer me!"

So she told him where she'd been.

And how did he listen? Wondering: If there was some point in their lives
before
she took the wrong path, where and when was it? Thinking: There was no such point, there was never any controlling Merry however many years she managed to deceive them, to seem safely theirs and under their sway. Thinking: Futile, every last thing he had ever done. The preparations, the practice, the obedience; the uncompromising dedication to the essential, to the things that matter most; the systematic system building, the patient scrutiny of every problem, large or small; no drifting, no laxity, no laziness; faithfully meeting every obligation, addressing energetically every situation's demands ... a list as long as the U.S. Constitution, his articles of faith—and all of it futility. The systemization of futility is all it had ever been. All he had ever restrained by his responsibility was himself.

Thinking: She is not in my power and she never was. She is in the power of something that does not give a shit. Something demented. We all are. Their elders are not responsible for this. They are themselves not responsible for this. Something else is.

Yes, at the age of forty-six, in 1973, almost three-quarters of the way through the century that with no regard for the niceties of burial had strewn the corpses of mutilated children and their mutilated parents everywhere, the Swede found out that we are all in the power of something demented. It's just a matter of time, honky. We all are!

He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of the violent Uncorrupted who called him a criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have.
The Swede finally found out!
They were delirious with joy, delighted having destroyed his once-pampered daughter and ruined his privileged life, shepherding him at long last to their truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their insatiable greed. The something that's demented, honky, is American history! It's the American empire! It's Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard Oil and Newark Maid Leatherware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the fucked-over-by-America human race!

She told him that for the first seventy-two hours after the bombing she had been hidden in the Morristown home of Sheila Salzman, her speech therapist. Safely she made her way to Sheila's house, was taken in, and lived hidden away in an anteroom to Sheila's office during the day and in the office itself at night. Then her underground wandering began. In just two months she had fifteen aliases and moved every four or five days. But in Indianapolis, where she was befriended by a movement minister who knew only that she was an antiwar activist gone underground, she took a name from a tombstone in a cemetery, the name of a baby born within a year of herself who had died in infancy. She applied for a duplicate birth certificate in the baby's name, which was how she became Mary Stoltz. After that, she obtained a library card, a Social Security number, and when she turned seventeen, a driver's license. For nearly a year, Mary Stoltz washed dishes in the kitchen of an old people's home—a job she got through the minister—until one morning he reached her on the pay phone and said that she was to leave work immediately and meet him at the Greyhound station. There he gave her a ticket to Chicago, told her to stay two days, then to buy a ticket for Oregon—north of Portland was a commune where she could find sanctuary. He gave her the commune's address and some money to buy clothes, food, and the tickets, and she left for Chicago, where she was raped on the night she arrived. Held captive and raped and robbed. Just seventeen.

In the kitchen of a dive not as friendly as the kitchen at the old people's home, she washed dishes to earn the money to get to Oregon. There was no minister to advise her in Chicago and she was afraid that if she tried to make contact with the underground she would do something wrong and be apprehended. She was too frightened even to use a pay phone to call the Indianapolis minister. She was raped again (in the fourth rooming house where she went to live) but this time she wasn't robbed, and so after six weeks as a dishwasher she had put together enough money to head for the commune.

In Chicago the loneliness had been so all-enveloping, she felt it as a current coursing through her. There wasn't a day, on some days not an hour, when she did not set out to phone Old Rimrock. But instead, before remembering her childhood room could completely undo her, she would find a diner or a luncheonette and sit on a stool at the counter and order a BLT and a vanilla milk shake. Saying the familiar words, watching the bacon curl on the grill, watching for her toast to pop up, carefully removing the toothpicks when she was served, eating the layered sandwich between sips of the shake, concentrating on crunching the tasteless fibers from the lettuce, extracting the smoke-scented fat from the brittle bacon and the flowery juices from the soft tomato, swilling everything in with the mash of the mayonnaised toast, grinding patiently away with her jaws and her teeth, thoughtfully pulverizing every mouthful into a silage to settle her down—concentrating on her BLT as fixedly as her mother's livestock focusing on the fodder at the trough—gave her the courage to go on alone. She would eat the sandwich and drink the shake and remember how she got there and go on. By the time she left Chicago she had discovered she no longer needed a home; she would never again come close to succumbing to the yearning for a family and a home.

In Oregon she was involved in two bombings.

Instead of stopping her, killing Fred Conlon had only inspired her; after Fred Conlon, instead of her being crippled by conscience, she was delivered from all residual fear and compunction. The horror of having killed, if only inadvertently, an innocent man, a man as good as any she would ever hope to know, had not taught her anything about that most fundamental prohibition, which, stupefyingly enough, she had failed to learn to observe from being raised by Dawn and him. Killing Conlon only confirmed her ardor as an idealistic revolutionary who did not shrink from adopting any means, however ruthless, to attack the evil system. She had proved that being in opposition to everything decent in honky America wasn't just so much hip graffiti emblazoned on her bedroom wall.

He said, "You planted the bombs."

"I did."

"At Hamlin's and in Oregon you planted the bombs."

"Yes."

"Was anyone killed in Oregon?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"People."

"People," he repeated. "How many people, Merry?"

"Three," she said.

There was plenty to eat at the commune. They grew a lot of their own food and so there was no need, as there had been when she first got to Chicago, to scavenge for wilted produce outside supermarkets at night. At the commune she began to sleep with a woman she fell in love with, the wife of a weaver whose loom Merry learned to operate when she was not working with the bombs. Assembling bombs had become her specialty after she'd successfully planted her second and third. She loved the patience and the precision required to safely wire the dynamite to the blasting cap and the blasting cap to the Woolworth's alarm clock. That's when the stuttering first began to disappear. She never stuttered when she was with the dynamite.