American Pastoral (54 page)

The Swede knew that once he got him on the floor of the terrace he would have no difficulty in slamming Orcutt's head against the flagstones as many times as might be required to get him into that cemetery with his distinguished clan. Yes, something is wrong with this guy, there always was, and the Swede had known it all along—knew it from those terrible paintings, knew it from the reckless use of his hands in a backyard pickup game, knew it even at the cemetery, when for one solid hour Orcutt got to goyishly regale a Jewish sightseer.... Yes, big dissatisfaction there right from the start. Dawn said it was art, modern art, when all the time, baldly displayed on their living room wall, was William Orcutt's dissatisfaction. But now he has my wife. Instead of that misfortune Jessie, he's got revamped and revitalized Miss New Jersey of 1949. Got it made, got it
all
now, the greedy, thieving son of a bitch.

"Your father's a good man," Orcutt said. "Jessie doesn't usually get all this attention when she goes out. It's why she doesn't go out. He's a very generous man. He doesn't hold anything back, does he? Nothing left undisclosed. You get the whole person. Unguarded. Unashamed. Works himself up. It's wonderful. An amazing person, really. A huge presence. Always himself. Coming from where I do, you have to envy all that."

Oh, I'll bet you do, you son of a bitch. Laugh at us, you fucker. Just keep laughing.

"Where are they?" the Swede asked.

"He told her there's only one way to eat a fresh piece of pie. That's sitting at a kitchen table with a nice cold glass of milk. I guess they're in the kitchen with the milk. Jessie's learning a lot more about making a glove than she may ever need to know, but that's all right too. No harm in that. I hope you didn't mind that I couldn't leave her home."

"We wouldn't want you to leave her home."

"You're all very understanding."

"I was looking at the model of your house," the Swede told him, "in Dawn's study." But what he was looking at was a mole on the left side of Orcutt's face, a dark mole buried in the crease that ran from his nose to the corner of his mouth. Along with the snout nose Orcutt had an ugly mole. Does she find the mole appealing? Does she kiss the mole? Doesn't she ever find this guy just a wee bit fat in the face? Or, when it comes to an upper-class Old Rimrock boy, is she as unmindful of his looks, as unperturbed, as professionally detached as the whorehouse ladies over in Easton?

"Uh-oh," said Orcutt, amiably feigning how uncertain he was. Uses his hands when he plays football, wears those shirts, paints those paintings, fucks his neighbor's wife, and manages through it all to maintain himself as the ever-reasonable unknowable man. All facade and subterfuge.
He works so hard,
Dawn said,
at being one-dimensional.
Up top the gentleman, underneath the rat. Drink the devil that lurks in his wife; lust and rivalry the devils lurking in him. Sealed and civilized and predatory. To reinforce the genealogi cal aggression—the overpowering by origins—the aggression of scrupulous manners. The humane environmentalist and the calculating predator, protecting what he has by birthright and taking surreptitiously what he doesn't have. The civilized savagery of William Orcutt. His civilized form of animal behavior. I prefer the cows. "It's supposed to be seen
after
dinner—with the spiel," Orcutt said. "Did it make any sense without the spiel?" he asked. "I wouldn't think so."

But of course—being unknowable is the
goal.
Then you move instrumentally through life, appropriating the beautiful wives. In the kitchen he should have hit those two over the head with a skillet.

"It did. A lot," the Swede said. And then, as he could never stop himself from doing with Orcutt, he added, "It's interesting. I get the idea now about the light. I get the idea of the light washing over those walls. That's going to be something to see. I think you're going to be very happy in it."

Orcutt laughed. "You, you mean."

But the Swede had not heard his own error. He hadn't heard it because of the huge thought that had just come at him: what he should have done and failed to do.

He should have overpowered her. He should not have left her there. Jerry was right. Drive to Newark. Leave immediately. Take Barry. The two of them could subdue her and bring her back in the car to Old Rimrock. And if Rita Cohen is there? I'll kill her. If she is anywhere near my daughter, I'll pour gasoline all over that hair and set the little cunt on fire. Destroying my daughter. Showing me her pussy. Destroying my child.
There's
the meaning—they are destroying her for the pleasure of
destroying
her. Take Sheila. Take Sheila. Calm down. Take Sheila to Newark. Merry listens to Sheila. Sheila will talk to her and get her out of that room.

"—leave it to our visiting intellectual to get everything wrong. The complacent rudeness with which she plays the old French game of beating up on the bourgeoisie...." Orcutt was confiding to the Swede his amusement with Marcia's posturing. "It's to her credit, I suppose, that she doesn't defer to the regulation dinnerparty discipline of not saying anything about anything. But still it's amazing, constantly amazes me, how emptiness always goes with cleverness. She hasn't the faintest idea, really, of what she's talking about. Know what my father used to say? 'All brains and no intelligence. The smarter the stupider.' Applies."

Not Dawn? No. Dawn wanted nothing further to do with their catastrophe. She was just biding her time with him until the house was built. Go and do it yourself.
Get back in the fucking car and get her. Do you love her or don't you love her? You're acceding to her the way you acceded to your father, the way you have acceded to everything in your life. You're afraid of letting the beast out of the bag. Quite a critique she has made of decorum. You keep yourself a secret. You don't choose ever!
But how could he bring Merry home, now, tonight, in that veil, with his father here? If his father were to see her, he'd expire on the spot. To where else then? Where would he take her? Could the two of
them
go live in Puerto Rico? Dawn wouldn't care where he went. As long as she had her Orcutt. He had to get her before she again set foot in that underpass. Forget Rita Cohen. Forget that inhuman idiot Sheila Salzman. Forget Orcutt. He does not matter. Find a place for Merry to live where there is not that underpass. That's
all
that matters. Start with the underpass. Save her from getting herself killed in the underpass. Before the morning, before she has even left her room—
start there.

He had been cracking up in the only way he knew how, which is not really cracking up at all but sinking, all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight. A man who never goes full out and explodes, who only sinks ... but now it was clear what to do. Go get her out of there before dawn.

After Dawn. After Dawn life was inconceivable. There was nothing he could do without Dawn. But she wanted Orcutt. "That Wasp blandness," she'd said, all but yawning to make her point. But that blandness had terrific glamour for a little Irish Catholic girl. The mother of Merry Levov needs nothing less than William Orcutt III. The cuckolded husband understands. Of course. Under stands everything now. Who will get her back to the dream of where she has always wanted to go? Mr. America. Teamed up with Orcutt she'll be back on the track. Spring Lake, Atlantic City, now Mr. America. Rid of the stain of our child, the stain on her credentials, rid of the stain of the destruction of the store, she can begin to resume the uncontaminated life. But I was stopped at the general store. And she knows it. Knows that I am allowed in no farther. I'm of no use anymore. This is as far as she goes with me.

He brought a chair around, sat himself down between his wife and his mother, and, even as Dawn spoke, took her hand in his. There are a hundred different ways to hold someone's hand. There are the ways you hold a child's hand, the ways you hold a friend's hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent's hand, the ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and of the dead. He held Dawn's hand the way a man holds the hand of a woman he adores, with all that excitement passing into his grip, as though pressure on the palm of the hand effects a transference of souls, as though the interlinking of fingers symbolizes every intimacy. He held Dawn's hand as though he possessed no information about the condition of his life.

But then he thought: She wants to be back with me, too. But she can't because it's all too awful. What else can she do? She must think she's poison. She gave birth to a murderer. She
has
to put on a new crown.

He should have listened to his father and never married her. He had defied him, just that one time, but that was all it had taken—that did it. His father had said, "There are hundreds and thousands of lovely Jewish girls, but you have to find
her.
You found one down in South Carolina, Dunleavy, and finally you saw the light and got rid of her. So now you come home and find Dwyer up here.
Why,
Seymour?" The Swede could not say to him, "The girl in South Carolina was beautiful, but not half as beautiful as Dawn." He could not say to him, "The authority of beauty is a very irrational thing." He was twenty-three years old and could only say, "I'm in love with her."

"In love,' what does that mean? What is 'in love' going to do for you when you have a child? How are you going to raise a child? As a Catholic? As a Jew? No, you are going to raise a child who won't be one thing or the other—all because you are 'in love'."

His father was right. That was what happened. They raised a child who was neither Catholic nor Jew, who instead was first a stutterer, then a killer, then a Jain. He had tried all his life never to do the wrong thing, and that was what he had done. All the wrongness that he had locked away in himself, that he had buried as deep as a man could bury it, had come out anyway, because a girl was beautiful. The most serious thing in his life, seemingly from the time he was
born,
was to prevent the suffering of those he loved, to be kind to people, a kind person through and through. That was why he had brought Dawn to meet secretly with his father at the factory office—to try to resolve the religious impasse and avoid making either of them unhappy. The meeting had been suggested by his father: face to face, between "the girl," as Lou Levov charitably referred to her around the Swede, and "the ogre," as the girl called him. Dawn hadn't been afraid; to the Swede's astonishment she agreed. "I walked out on that runway in a bathing suit, didn't I? It wasn't easy, in case you didn't know. Twenty-five thousand people. It's not a very dignified feeling, in a bright white bathing suit and bright white high heels, being looked at by twenty-five thousand people. I appeared in a
parade
in a bathing suit. In Camden. Fourth of July. I had to. I hated that day. My father almost died. But I did it. I taped the back of that damn bathing suit to my skin, Seymour, so it wouldn't ride up on me—masking tape on my own behind. I felt like
a freak.
But I took the job of Miss New Jersey and so I did the work. A very tiring job. Every town in the state. Fifty dollars an appearance. But if you work hard, the money adds up, so I did it. Working hard at something totally different that scared me to death—but I did it. The Christmas I broke the news to my parents about Miss Union County—you think that was fun?
But I did it.
And if I could do all that, I can do this, because this isn't being a silly girl on a float, this is my
life,
my entire
future.
This is for
keeps!
But you'll be there, won't you? I cannot go there by myself. You
have to
be there!"

She was so incredibly gutsy there was no choice but to say, "Where else would I be?" On the way down to the factory, he warned her not to mention rosary beads or the cross or heaven and to stay away from Jesus as much as possible. "If he asks if there are any crosses hanging in the house, say no." "But that's a lie. I can't say no." "Then say one." "That's a lie." "Dawnie, it won't help anything if you say three. One is just the same as three. It gets your point over. Say it. For me. Say one." "We'll see." "And you don't have to mention the other stuff." "What other stuff?" "The Virgin Mary." "That is not
stuff.
" "The statues. Okay? Just forget it. If he asks, 'Do you have any statues?' just tell him no, just tell him, 'We don't have statues, we don't have pictures, the one cross and that's it.'" Religious ornaments, he explained, statues like those in her dining room and her mother's bedroom, pictures like those her mother had on the walls were sore subjects with his father. He wasn't defending his father's position. He was just explaining that the man had been brought up a certain way, and that's the way he was, and there was nothing anybody could do about it, so why stir him up?

Opposing the father is no picnic and not opposing the father is no picnic—that's what he was discovering.

Anti-Semitism was another sore subject. Watch out what you say about Jews. Best to say nothing about Jews. And stay away from priests, don't talk about priests. "Don't tell him that story about your father and the priests when he was a caddie at the country club as a kid." "Why would I ever tell him that?" "I don't know, but don't go near it." "
Why?
" "I don't
know—
just
don't.
"

But he knew why. Because if she told him that the first time her father realized priests had genitals was in the locker room when he used to caddie on weekends, that up until then he didn't even think they were
anatomically
sexual, his own father might very well be tempted to ask her, "You know what they do with the foreskins of the little Jewish boys after the circumcision?" And she would have to say, "I don't know, Mr. Levov. What
do
they do with the foreskins?" and Mr. Levov would reply—the joke was one of his favorites—"They send them to Ireland. They wait till they got enough of them, they collect them all together, then they send them to Ireland and they make priests out of them."