American Pastoral Part 7

When they played marines, she did not stutter over a single word.The room was on the ground floor of a house that a hundred years ago might have been a boardinghouse, not a bad one either, a respectable boardinghouse, brownstone below the parlor floor, neat brickwork above, curved railings of cast iron leading up the brick steps to the double doorway. But the old boardinghouse was now a wreck marooned on a narrow street where there were only two other houses left. Incredibly, two of the old Newark plane trees were left as well.

The house was tucked between abandoned warehouses and overgrown lots studded with chunks of rusted iron junk, mechanical debris scattered amid the weeds. 234 .

From over the door of the house, the pediment was gone, ripped out; the cornices had been ripped out too, carefully stolen and taken away to be sold in some New York antiques store. All over Newark, the oldest buildings were missing ornamental stone cornices--cornices from as high up as four stories plucked off in broad daylight with a cherry picker, with a hundred-thousand-dollar piece of equipment; but the cop is asleep or paid off and n.o.body stops whoever it is, from whatever agency that has a cherry picker, who is making a little cash on the side. The turkey frieze that ran around the old Ess.e.x produce market on Was.h.i.+ngton and Linden, the frieze with the terra-cotta turkeys and the huge cornucopias overflowing with fruit--stolen. Building caught fire and the frieze disappeared overnight. The big Negro churches (Bethany Baptist closed down, boarded up, looted, bulldozed; Wycliffe Presbyterian disastrously gutted by fire)--cornices stolen. Aluminum drainpipes even from occupied buildings, from standing buildings--stolen. Gutters, leaders, drainpipes--stolen. Everything was gone that anybody could get to. Just reach up and take it. Copper tubing in boarded-up factories, pull it out and sell it. Anyplace where the windows aregone and boarded up tells people immediately, "Come in and strip it. Whatever's left, strip it, steal it, sell it." Stripping stuff--that's the food chain. Drive by a place where a sign says this house is for sale, and there's nothing there, there's nothing to sell. Everything stolen by gangs in cars, stolen by the men who roam a city with shopping carts, stolen by thieves working alone. The people are desperate and they take anything. They "go junkin'" the way a shark goes fis.h.i.+ng."If there's one brick still on top of the other," cried his father, "the idea gets into their heads that the mortar might be useful, so they'll push them apart and take that. Why not? The mortar! Seymour, this city isn't a city--it's a carca.s.s! Get out!"The street where Merry lived was paved with bricks. There couldn't be more than a dozen of these brick streets intact in the entire city. The last of the cobblestone streets, a pretty old cobblestone street, had been stolen about three weeks after the riots.235.

While the rubble still reeked of smoke where the devastation was the worst, a developer from the suburbs had arrived with a crew around one a.m., three trucks and some twenty men moving stealthily, and during the night, without a cop to bother them, they'd dug up the cobblestones from the narrow side street that cut diagonally back of Newark Maid and carted them all away. The street was gone when the Swede showed up for work the next morning."Now they're stealing streets?" his father asked. "Newark can't even hold on to its streets? Seymour, get the h.e.l.l out!" His father's had become the voice of reason.Merry's street was just a couple of hundred feet long, squeezed into the triangle between McCarter--where, as always, the heavy truck traffic barreled by night and day--and the ruins of Mulberry Street. Mulberry the Swede could recall as a Chinatown slum as long ago as the 1930s, back when the Newark Levovs, Jerry, Seymour, Momma, Poppa, used to file up the narrow stairwell to one of the family restaurants for a chow mein dinner on a Sunday afternoon and, later, driving home to Keer Avenue, his father would tell the boys unbelievable stories about the Mulberry Street "tong wars" of old.Of old. Stories of old. There were no longer stories of old. There was nothing.

There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole. The pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were on. And that's all there was.Above and beyond the roofline of her house, he could see the skyline of commercial Newark half a mile away and those three familiar, comforting words, the most rea.s.suring words in the English language, cascading down the elegantly ornate cliff that was once the focal point of a buzzing downtown--ten stories high the huge, white stark letters heralding fiscal confidence and inst.i.tutional permanence, civic progress and opportunity and pride, indestructible letters that you could read from the seat of your jetliner descending from the north toward the international airport:FIRST FIDELITY BANK. 236 .

That's what was left, that lie. First. Last, last fidelity bank. From down on the earth where his daughter now lived at the corner of Columbia and Green--where his daughter lived even worse than her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement--you could see a mammoth signboard designed for concealing the truth. A sign in which only a madman could believe.

A sign in a fairy tale.Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success.

Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.Her room had no window, only a narrow transom over the door that opened onto the unlit hallway, a twenty-foot-long urinal whose decaying plaster walls he wanted to smash apart with his fists the moment he entered the house and smelled it.

The hallway led out to the street through a door that had neither lock nor handle, nor gla.s.s in the double frame. Nowhere in her room could he see a faucet or a radiator. He could not imagine what the toilet was like or where it might be and wondered if the hallway was it for her as well as for the b.u.ms who wandered in off the highway or down from Mulberry Street. She would have lived better than this, far better, if she were one of Dawn's cattle, in the shed where the herd gathered in the worst weather with the proximity of one another's carca.s.ses to warm them, and the rugged coats they grew in winter, and Merry's mother, even in the sleet, even on an icy, wintry day, up before six carrying hay bales to feed them. He thought of the cattle not at all unhappy out there in the winter and he thought of those two they called the "derelicts," Dawn's retired giant, Count, and the old mare Sally, each of them in human years comparable to seventy or seventy-five, who found each other when they were both over the hill and then became inseparable--one would go and the other would follow, doing all the things together that would keep them well and happy. It was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they had.

Remembering how when it was sunny they237.

would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had become an animal.It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how he and Dawn could have been the source of it all. How could their innocent foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have been problems even without a war in Vietnam. She might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could be. But she would have been at home. At home you flip out a little and that's it. You do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated pleasure, you don't get to the point where you flip out a little so many times that finally you decide it's such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot?

At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalor. At home you can't live where the disorder is. At home you can't live where nothing is reined in. At home there is that tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines the world to be and the way the world is for her. Well, no longer is there that dissonance to disturb her equilibrium. Here are her Rim-rockian fantasies, and the culmination is horrifying.Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time--they did not have enough time with her. When she's your ward, when she's there, you can do it. If you have contact with your child steadily over time, then the stuff that is off--the mistakes in judgment that are made on both sides--is somehow, through thatsteady, patient contact, made better and better, until at last, inch by inch, day by day and inch by inch, there is remediation, there are the ordinary satisfactions of parental patience rewarded, of things working out. . . . But this. Where was the remediation for this? Could he bring Dawn here to see her, Dawn in her bright, tight new face and Merry sitting cross-legged on the pallet in her tattered sweats.h.i.+rt and ill-shapen trousers and black plastic shower clogs, meekly 238 .

composed behind that nauseating veil? How broad her shoulder bones were. Like his. But hanging off those bones there was nothing. What he saw sitting before him was not a daughter, a woman, or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow's clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life, a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could have fooled only a bird. How could he bring Dawn here? Driving Dawn down McCarter Highway, turning off McCarter and into this street, the warehouses, the rubble, the garbage, the debris ... Dawn seeing this room, smelling this room, her hands touching the walls of this room, let alone the unwashed flesh, the brutally cropped, bedraggled hair .. .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 s.e.xual pleasures, either with G.o.ds, 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 help239.

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 thatMerry 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 grat.i.tude. 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-- 240 .

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 compa.s.sionate, 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 cliches 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" into241.

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 Dwy-er'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 242 .

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 compa.s.sionate 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 sanct.i.ty. 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."243.

"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 life, and that you won't 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 of 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 if she were adrift on a plank in the middle of the sea. She's gone over the edge of the s.h.i.+p--how that happened is not the question now. She must be rescued immediately!"Tell me where you studied religions.""In libraries. n.o.body 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." 244 .

"Yes.""And church? Do you go to some sort of a church?""There is no church at the center. There is no G.o.d at the center. G.o.d is at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And G.o.d 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 G.o.d. Life isn't sacred, G.o.d is sacred.

But at the center for us is not a belief in the sovereignty of G.o.d but a belief in the sanct.i.ty 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 sanct.i.ty 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."245.

"There is a point of contact. I a.s.sure 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.""There is a logic, Daddy. You mustn't raise your voice. I will explain. It all links up. I have given it much thought. It goes like this. Ahitnsa, the Jain concept of nonviolence, appealed to Ma-hatma Gandhi. He was not a Jain. He was Hindu. But when he was looking in India for a group that was genuinely Indian and not Western and that could point to charitable works as impressive as those the Christian missionaries had produced, he landed on the Jains. We are a small group. We are not Hindus but our beliefs are akin to Hindus'. We are a religion founded in the sixth century b.c. Mahatma Gandhi took from us this notion of ahimsa, nonviolence. We are the core of truth that created Mahatma Gandhi. And Mahatma Gandhi, in his nonviolence, is the core of truth that created Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King is the core of truth that created the civil rights movement. And, at the end of his life, when he was moving beyond the civil rights movement to a larger vision, when he was opposing the war in Vietnam ..."Without stuttering. Speech that once would have impelled her to grimace and turn white and bang on the table--would have made of her an embattled speaker attacked by the words and obstinately attacking them back--delivered now patiently, graciously, still in that monotonous chant but edged with the gentlest tone of spiritual urgency. Everything she could not achieve with a speech therapist and a psychiatrist and a stuttering diary she had beautifully realized by going mad.

Subjecting herself to isolation and squalor and terrible danger, she had attained control, mental and physical, over every sound she uttered. An intelligence no longer impeded by the blight of stuttering.And intelligence was what he was hearing, Merry's quick, sharp, studious brain, the logical mind she'd had since earliest childhood. 246 .

[And hearing it opened him up to pain such as he had never before [imagined. The intelligence was intact and yet she was mad, her [logic a brand of logic bereft totally of the power to reason with [which it had already entwined itself by the time she was ten. It was (absurd--this being reasonable with her was his madness.

Sitting there trying to act as though he were respectful of her religion [when her religion consisted of an absolute failure to understand [what life is and is not. The two of them acting as if he had come [there to be educated. Being lectured, by her!". . . we do not understand salvation as in any way the union of the human soul with something beyond itself. The spirit of Jain piety lives in founder Mahavira's saying, 'O man, thou art thine own friend. Why seekest thou for a friend beyond thyself?'" "Merry, did you do it? I must ask you this now. Did you do it?" It was the question he had expected to ask her first, once they had reached her room and before everything else that was horrible began painfully to be sifted through and scrutinized. He thought he had waited because he did not want her to think that his first I consideration was anything other than at long last seeing her and [seeing to her, attending to her well-being; but now that he had asked, he knew that he hadn't already asked because he could not bear to hear an answer. "Do what, Daddy?" "Did you bomb the post office?" "Yes.""You intended to blow up Hamlin's too?" "There was no other way to do it.""Except not to do it. Merry, you must tell me now who made you do it?"

"Lyndon Johnson.""That will not do. No! Answer me. Who talked you into it? Who brainwashed you?

Who did you do it for?"There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, "Lead me not into temptation."

If people were not led by others, why was that the famous prayer that it was? A child who had been blessed with every247 .

privilege could not have done this on her own. Blessed with love. Blessed with a loving and ethical and prosperous family. Who had enlisted her and lured her into this?"How strongly you still crave the idea," she said, "of your innocent offspring.""Who was it? Don't protect them. Who is responsible?""Daddy, you can detest me alone. It's all right.""You are telling me you did it all on your own. Knowing that Hamlin's would be destroyed too. That's what you are saying.""Yes. I am the abomination. Abhor me."He remembered then something she had written in the sixth or seventh grade, before she'd gone on to Morristown High. The students in her cla.s.s at her Montessori school were asked ten questions about their "philosophy," one a week.

The first week the teacher asked, "Why are we here?" Instead of writing as the other kids did--here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc.-- Merry answered with her own question: "Why are apes here?" But the teacher found this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question more seriously--"Expand on this," the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: "Why are kangaroos here?" It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher that she had a "stubborn streak." The final question a.s.signed to the cla.s.s was "What is life?" Merry's answer was something her father and mother chuckled over together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily away with their phony deep thoughts, she--after an hour of thinking at her desk-- wrote a single, unplat.i.tudinous declarative sentence: "Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive." "You know," said the Swede, "it's smarter than it sounds. She's a kid--how has she figured out that life is short?

She is somethin', our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard." But once again the teacher didn't agree, and she wrote beside Merry's answer, "Is that all?" Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank G.o.d, that is all; even that is unendurable.248.

The truth was that he had known all along: without a tempter's a.s.sistance, everything angry inside her had broken into the open. She was unintimidated, she was unintimidatable, this child who had written for her teacher not, like the other kids, that life was a beautiful gift and a great opportunity and a n.o.ble endeavor and a blessing from G.o.d but that it was just a short period of time in which you were alive. Yes, the intention had been all her own. That had to be.

Her antagonism had been intent on murder and nothing less. Otherwise this mad repose would not be the result.

He tried to let reason rise once again to the surface. How hard he tried. What does a reasonable man say next? If, after being battered and once again brought nearly to tears by what he'd just heard uttered so matter-of-factly--everything incredible uttered so mat-ter-of-factly--a man could hold on and be reasonable, what does he go ahead to say? What does a reasonable, responsible father say if he is able still to feel intact as a father?"Merry, may I tell you what I think? I think you are terrified of being punished for what you've done. I think that rather than evade your punishment you have taken it into your own hands. I don't believe that's a difficult conclusion to reach, honey. I don't believe I'm the only person in the world who, seeing you here, seeing you here looking like this, would come up with that idea. You're a good girl and so you want to do penance. But this is not penance. Not even the state would punish you like this. I have to say these things, Merry. I have to tell you truthfully what this looks like to me.""Of course you do.""Just look at what you've done to yourself--you are going to die if you keep this up. Another year of this and you will die--from self-starvation, from malnutrition, from filth. You cannot go back and forth every day under those railroad tracks. That underpa.s.s is a home for derelicts--for derelicts who do not play by your rules. Their world is a ruthless world, Merry, a terrible world--a violent world.""They won't harm me. They know that I love them."249.

The words sickened him, the flagrant childishness, the sentimental grandiosity of the self-deception. What does she see in the hopeless scurryings of these wretched people that could justify such an idea? Derelicts and love? To be a derelict living in an underpa.s.s is to have clobbered out of you a hundred times over the minutest susceptibility to love. This was awful. Now that her speech is finally cleared of the stuttering, all that comes through is this junk. What he had dreamed about--that his wonderful, gifted child would one day stop stuttering--had come to pa.s.s. She had mastered miraculously the agitated stuttering only to reveal, at the eye of the storm that was her erupted personality, this insane clarity and calm. What a great revenge to take: This is what you wanted, Daddy? Well, here it is.Her being able successfully to explain and to talk was now the worst thing of all.The harshness he felt but didn't want her to hear was in his voice nonetheless when he said, "You will meet a violent end, Meredith. Keep trying them out twice a day, keep it up and you'll find out just how much they know about your love.

Their hunger, Merry, is not for love. Somebody will kill you!""But only to be reborn.""I doubt that, honey. I seriously doubt that.""Will you concede that my guess is as good as yours, Dad?""Won't you at least take off that mask while we're talking? So I can see you?""See me stutter, do you mean?""Well, I don't know if wearing that is what accounts for the disappearance of your stutter or not. You tell me that it has. You tell me that the stutter was only your way of doing no violence to the air and the things that live in the air ... is that correct? Have I understood what you were saying?""Yes.""Well... even if I were to concede that, I have to tell you I think you might eventually have a better life with your stutter. I don't250.

minimize the hards.h.i.+p it was for you. But if it turns out you had to carry things to this extreme to be rid of that d.a.m.n thing ... then I really do wonder ... well, if it's the best trade-off imaginable.""You can't explain away what I've done by motives, Daddy. I certainly wouldn't explain away what you've done by motives.""But I do have motives. Everyone has motives.""You cannot reduce the journey of a soul to that kind of psychology. It is not worthy of you.""Then you explain it. Explain it to me, please. How do you explain that when you took all this ... what looks to me like misery and nothing more, that when you did that, took upon yourself real suffering, which is all this is, suffering that you have chosen, Merry, real suffering and nothing more or less than suffering"--his voice was wavering but on he went, reasonable, reasonable, responsible, responsible--"then, only then--do you see what I'm saying?--the stutter vanished?""I've told you. I am done with craving and selfhood.""Sweet, sweet child and girl." He sat down amid the filth of the floor, helpless to do anything other than try to his utmost not to lose control.In the tiny room, where they now sat no more than an arm's length from each other, there was no light other than what fell through the dirty transom. She lived without light. Why? Had she renounced the vice of electricity too? She lived without light, she lived without everything. This was how their life had worked out: she lived in Newark with nothing, he lived in Old Rimrock with everything except her. Was his good fortune to blame for that too? The revenge of the have-nots upon those who have and own. All the self-styled have-nots, the playacting Rita Cohens seeking to a.s.sociate themselves with their parents' worst enemies, modeling themselves on whatever was most loathsome to those who most loved them.There used to be a slogan she'd crayoned in two colors on a piece of cardboard, a handmade poster that she'd hung over her desk,251.

replacing his Weequahic football pennant; the poster had hung there undisturbed all during the year before her disappearance. Till it went up, she had always coyly coveted the Weequahic pennant because the Swede's high school sweetheart had taken it to sewing cla.s.s in 1943 and st.i.tched into the felt along the bottom edge of the orange and brown triangle, in thick white thread, "To All-City Levov, x.x.xX, Arlene." The poster was the only thing he had dared to remove fromher room and destroy, and even doing that much had taken three months; appropriating the property of another, adult or child, was simply repugnant to him. But three months after the bombing he marched up the stairs and into her room and tore the poster down. It read: "We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmares." In large square letters the attribution: "weathermen motto." And because he was a tolerant man he'd tolerated that too. "Honky" in his daughter's hand. Hanging there for a year in his own home, each red letter shadowed heavily in black.And because even though he hadn't liked it one bit he did not believe it was his right blah-blah blah-blah blah, because--out of regard for her property and her personal freedom--he couldn't even pull down an awful poster, because he was not capable of even that much righteous violence, now the hideous realization of the nightmare had come along to test even further the limits of his enlightened tolerance. She thinks if she raises a hand she'll swat and kill an innocent mite that is innocently floating by her--so in touch is she with the environment that any and every move she makes will have the most stupendously dire consequences-- and he thinks that if he removes a hateful and disgusting poster that she has put up, he'll do damage to her integrity, to her psyche, to her First Amendment rights. No, he wasn't a Jain, thought the Swede, but he might as well have been-- he was just as pathetically and naively nonviolent. The idiocy of the uprightness of the goals he had set."Who is Rita Cohen?" he asked.252.

"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.""n.o.body 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 sc.r.a.pbook 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 const.i.tutes a coincidence, you and I, Daddy--"253.

"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, unstutter-ing 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, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! Over your mother, over your grandfather, over your grandmother, over everyone who loves you--wearing that veil is bulls.h.i.+t, Merry, complete and absolute bulls.h.i.+t! 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. G.o.d 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 ident.i.ty 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 254 .

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 cla.s.s, 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 h.e.l.l happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, G.o.d 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 s.l.u.t 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.255.

"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. Const.i.tution, 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 s.h.i.+t. 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 256 .

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 f.u.c.ked 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 Leath-erware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the f.u.c.ked-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 Salz-man, 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 on257.

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 BIT 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 focusingon 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 succ.u.mbing 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 258 .

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. a.s.sembling 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.Then something happened between the woman and her hus- 259 .

band, a violent argument that necessitated Merry's leaving the commune to restore peace.It was while hiding in eastern Idaho, where she worked in the potato fields, that she decided to flee to Cuba. At night in the farm camp barracks she began to study Spanish. Living in the camp with the other laborers, she felt even more pa.s.sionately committed to her beliefs, though the men were frightening when they were drunk and again there were s.e.xual incidents. She believed that in Cuba she could live among workers without having to worry about their violence. In Cuba she could be Merry Levov and not Mary Stoltz.She had concluded by this time that there could never be a revolution in America to uproot the forces of racism and reaction and greed. Urban guerrilla warfare was futile against a thermonuclear superstate that would stop at nothing to defend the profit principle. Since she could not help to bring about a revolution in America, her only hope was to give herself to the revolution that was. That would mark the end of her exile and the true beginning of her life.The next year was devoted to rinding her way to Cuba, to Fidel, who had emanc.i.p.ated the proletariat and who had eradicated injustice with socialism. But in Florida she had her first close brush with the FBI. There was a park in Miami full of Dominican refugees. It was a good place to practice Spanish and soon she found herself teaching the boys there how to speak English. Affectionately they called her La Farfulla, the stutterer, which did not prevent them from mischievously stuttering when they repeated the English words she taught them.

In Spanish her own speech was flawless. Another reason to flee to the arms of the world revolution.One day, Merry told her father, she noticed a youngish black b.u.m, new to the park, watching her tutoring her boys. She knew immediately what that meant. A thousand times before she'd thought it was the FBI and a thousand times she'd been wrong--in Oregon, in Idaho, in Kentucky, in Maryland, the FBI watching her at the stores where she clerked; watching in the diners and the cafeterias where she washed dishes; watching on the shabby streets 260 .

where she lived; watching in the libraries where she hid out to read the newspapers and to study the revolutionary thinkers, to master Marx, Marcuse, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, a French theorist whose sentences, litanized at bedtime like a supplication, had sustained her in much the same way as the ritual sacrament of the vanilla milk shake and the BLT. It must be constantly borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as "a woman alone in the street" and her revolutionary mission instinctively. The Algerian woman is not a secret agent. It is without apprentices.h.i.+p, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag. She does not have the sensation of playing a role. There is no character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises directly to the level of tragedy.I Thinking: And the New Jersey girl descends to the level of idiocy.)*' The New Jersey girl we sent to Montessori school because she was(, so bright, the New Jersey girl who at Morristown High got only A's and B's-- the New Jersey girl rises directly to the level of disgraceful;, playacting. The New Jersey girl rises to the level of psychosis.

t: Everywhere, in every city where she went to hide, she thought'$ she saw the FBI--but it was in Miami that she was finally discovered while stuttering away on a park bench trying to teach her boys to speak English. Yet how could she not teach them? How could she turn away from those who had been born to nothing, condemned to nothing, who appeared even to themselves to be human trash? On the second day when she came to the park and found the same young black b.u.m pretending to be asleep on a bench beneath a blanket of newspapers, she turned back to the street and began to run and she did not stop until she saw a blind woman begging in the street, a large black woman with a dog. The woman was jiggling a cup and saying softly, "Blind, blind, blind." On the pavement at her feet lay a ragged wool coat inside which Merry realized she could hide. But she couldn't just take it from her; instead she asked the woman if she could help her beg, and the woman said sure, and 261 .

Merry asked if she could wear the woman's dark gla.s.ses and her coat, and the woman said, "Anything, honey," and so Merry stood in the sun in Miami in that heavy old coat, wearing the dark gla.s.ses, shaking the cup for her while the woman chanted "Blind, blind, blind." That night she hid out alone beneath a bridge, but the next day she went back to beg with the black woman, once again disguised by the coat and the gla.s.ses, and eventually she moved in with her and her dog and took care of her.That was when she began to study religions. Bunice, the black woman, sang to her in the mornings when they awoke in the bed where they slept, she and Merry and the dog. But when Bunice got cancer and died, that was the worst: the clinics, the ward, the funeral at which she was the only mourner, losing the person she'd loved most in the world ... that was the hardest it ever was.During the months while Bunice was dying she found in the library the books that led her to leave behind forever the Judeo-Christian tradition and find her way to the supreme ethical imperative of ahimsa, the systematic reverence for life and the commitment to harm no living being.Her father was no longer wondering at what point he had lost control over her life, no longer thinking that everything he had ever done had been futile and that she was in the power of something demented. He was thinking instead that Mary Stoltz was not his daughter, for the simple reason that his daughter could not have absorbed so much pain. She was a kid from Old Rimrock, a privileged kid from paradise. She could not have worked potato fields and slept under bridges and for five years gone about in terror of arrest. She could never have slept with the blind woman and her dog. Indianapolis, Chicago, Portland, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, Florida--never could Merry have lived alone in all those places, an isolated vagabond was.h.i.+ng dishes and hiding out from the police and befriending the dest.i.tute on park benches. And never would she have wound up in Newark. No. Living for six months ten minutes away, walking to the Ironbound through that underpa.s.s, wearing that veil and walking all alone, every morning and 262 .

every night, past all those derelicts and through all that filth--no! The story was a lie, its purpose to destroy their villain, who was him. The story was a caricature, a sensational caricature, and she was an actress, this girl was a professional, hired and charged with tormenting him because he was everything they were not. They wanted to kill him off with the story of a pariah exiled inthe very country where her family had triumphantly rooted itself in every possible way, and so he refused to be convinced by anything she had said. He thought, The rape? The bombs? A sitting duck for every madman? That was more than hards.h.i.+p. That was h.e.l.l. Merry couldn't survive any of it. She could not have survived killing four people. She could not have murdered in cold blood and survived.And then he realized that she hadn't survived. Whatever the truth might be, whatever had truly befallen her, her determination to leave behind her, in ruin, her parents' contemptible life had driven her to the disaster of destroying herself.Of course this all could have happened to her. Things happen like this every day all over the face of the earth. He had no idea how people behaved."You're not my daughter. You are not Merry.""If you wish to believe that I am not, that may be just as well. That may be for the best.""Why don't you ask me about your mother, Meredith? Should I ask you? Where was your mother born? What is her maiden name? What is her father's name?""I don't want to talk about my mother.""Because you know nothing about her. Or about me. Or about the person you pretend to be. Tell me about the house at the sh.o.r.e. Tell me the name of your first-grade teacher. Who was your second-grade teacher? Tell me why you are pretending to be my daughter!""If I answer the questions, you will suffer even more. I don't know how much suffering you want.""Oh, don't worry about my suffering, young lady--just answer the questions. Why are you pretending to be my daughter? Who are you? Who is 'Rita Cohen'? What are you two up to? Where is my 263 .

daughter? I will turn this matter over to the police unless you tell me now what is going on here and where my daughter is.""Nothing I'm doing is actionable, Daddy."The awful legalism. Not only the awful Jainism, but this s.h.i.+t too. "No," he said, "now it isn't--now it's just horrible! What about what you did do!""I killed four people," she replied, as innocently as she might once have told him, "I baked tollhouse cookies this afternoon.""No!" he shouted. The Jainism, the legalism, the egregious innocence, all of it desperation, all of it to distance herself from the four who are dead. "This will not do! You are not an Algerian woman! You are not from Algeria and you are not from India! You are an American girl from Old Rimrock, New Jersey! A very, very screwed-up American girl! Four people? No!" And now he refused to believe it, now it was he for whom the guilt made no sense and could not be. She had been much too blessed for this to be true. So had he. He could never father a child who killed four people. Everything life had provided her, everything life offered her, everything life demanded of her, everything that had happened to her from the day she was born made that impossible. Killing people? It was not one of their problems. Mercifully life had omitted that from their lives.Killing people was as far as you could get from all that had been given to the Levovs to do. No, she was not, she could not, be his. "If you are so big on not lying or taking anything, small or great--all that c.r.a.p, Merry, completely meaningless c.r.a.p--I beg you to tell me the truth!""The truth is simple. Here is the truth. You must be done with craving and selfhood.""Merry," he cried, "Merry, Merry," and, the unbridled unchecked in him, powerless not to attack, with all his manly brawn he fell upon her huddled there on the grimy pallet. "It isn't you! You could not have done it!" She put up no resistance as he tore from her face the veil cut from the end of a stocking.

Where the heel should be was her chin. Nothing is more fetid than something where your foot has been, and she puts her mouth up against it. We 264 .

loved her, she loved us--and as a result she wears her face in a stocking. "Now speak!" he commanded her.But she wouldn't. He pried her mouth open, disregarding a guideline he had never before overstepped--the injunction against violence. It was the end of all understanding. There was no way for understanding to be there anymore, even though he knew violence to be inhuman and futile, and understanding--talking sense to each other for however long it took to bring about accord--all there was that could achieve a lasting result. The father who could never use force on his child, for whom force was the embodiment of moral bankruptcy, pried open her mouth and with his fingers took hold of her tongue. One of her front teeth was missing, one of her beautiful teeth. That proved it wasn't Merry. The years of braces, the retainer, the night brace, all those contraptions to perfect her bite, to save her gums, to beautify her smile--this could not be the same girl."Speak!" he demanded, and at last the true smell of her reached him, the lowest human smell there is, excluding only the stench of the rotting living and the rotting dead. Strangely, though she had told him she did not wash so as to do no harm to the water, he had smelled nothing before--neither when they'd embraced on the street nor sitting in the dimness across from her pallet--nothing other than a sourish, nauseatingly unfamiliar something that he ascribed to the p.i.s.s-soaked building. But what he smelled now, while pulling open her mouth, was a human being and not a building, a mad human being who grubs about for pleasure in its own s.h.i.+t. Her foulness had reached him. She is disgusting. His daughter is a human mess stinking of human waste. Her smell is the smell of everything organic breaking down. It is the smell of no coherence. It is the smell of all she's become. She could do it, and she did do it, and this reverence for life is the final obscenity.He tried to locate a muscle in his head somewhere to plug the opening at the top of his throat, something to stop him up and prevent their sliding still further into the filth, but there was no such muscle. A spasm of gastric secretions and undigested food265.

started up the intestinal piping and, in a bitter, acidic stream, surged sickeningly onto his tongue, and when he cried out, " Who are you!" it was spewed with his words onto her face.Even in the dimness of that room, once he was over her he knew very well who she was. It was not necessary for her to speak with her face unprotected to informhim that the inexplicable had forever displaced whatever he once thought he knew. If she was no longer branded as Merry Levov by her stutter, she was marked unmistakably by the eyes.