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Is she the most ruthless or are there others who are worse, those others who are holding Merry captive right now? Maybe she is the most intelligentMaybe she is the most corruptMaybe this is all a game to them, middle-class kids out on a spree
“Don’t I suit you?” she asked”No crude desires in a big guy like you? Come on, I’m not such a frightening personYou can’t have met your match in little meA child in terror of being disgracedIsn’t there anything else in there except your famous purity? I bet there isI bet you’ve got yourself quite a pillar in there,” she said”The pillar of society
“What is the aim of all this talk? Will you tell me?”
“The aim? SureTo introduce you to reality
“And how much ruthlessness is sac chloe necessary?”
“To introduce you to reality? To get you to admire reality? To get you to partake of reality? To get you out there on the frontiers of reality? It ain’t gonna be no picnic, jocko
He had braced himself not to become entangled in her loathing for him, not to be affronted by anything she saidHe was prepared for the verbal violence and prepared, this time, not to reactShe was not unintelligent and she was not afraid to say anything–he knew that muchBut what he had not counted on was lust, an urge–he had not counted on being assailed by something other than the verbal violenceDespite the repugnance inspired by the sickly whiteness of her flesh, by the comically childish makeup and the cheap cotton clothes, half reclining chloe paddington handbag on the bed was a young woman half reclining on a bed, and the Swede himself, the superman of certainties, was one of the people whom he could not deal with
“Poor thing,” she said scornfully”Little Rimrock rich boyAll locked up like thatLet’s fuck, D-d-d-daddyI’ll take you to see your daughterWe’ll wash your prick and zip up your fly and I’ll take you to where she is
“Do I know you will? How do I know you will?”
“WaitSee how things turn outThe worst is you get yourself some twenty-two-year-old gashCome on over to the bed, D-d-d–”
“Stop this! My daughter has nothing to do with any of this! My daughter has nothing to do with you! You little shit–you’re not fit to wipe my daughter’s shoes! My daughter had nothing to do fendi spy bag replica with that bombingYou know that!”
“Calm down, SwedeIf you want to see your daughter as much as you say, you’ll just calm down and come on over here and give Rita Cohen a nice big fuckFirst the fuck, then the dough
She had raised her knees toward her chest and now, with either foot planted on the bed, she let her legs fall openThe floral skirt was gathered up by her hips and she wore no underwear
“There,” she said softlyIt’s all permissible, baby He did not know what to reach for in his estimable strongbox of reactions–this boiling up of something so visceral in with the rhetorical was not the attack he had prepared himself forShe’d brought to the hotel a stick of dynamite to throw
“What is it, dear?” she replied”You must motorcycle balenciaga speak up like a big boy if you wish to be heard
“What does this display have to do with what has happened?”
“Everything,” she said”You’ll be surprised by what a very clear picture of things you’re going to get from this display She edged her two hands down onto her pubic hair”Look at it,” she told him and, by rolling the labia lips outward with her fingers, exposed to him the membranous tissue veined and mottled and waxy with the moist tulip sheen of flayed flesh
“It’s a jungle down there,” she said”Nothing in its placeNothing on the left side like anything on the right sideHow many extras are there? Nobody knowsThere are glands down thereThere’s another holeDon’t you see what this has to do with what happened? Take a chanel quilted replica lo

How can they believe this of a child? Dynamite? What does Merry have to do with dynamite? No! It isn’t true! Nobody knows a thing!”
He should have informed the FBI of Rita Cohen’s visit the day she’d come to ask for the scrapbook–at the very least should have demanded proof from her of Merry’s existenceAnd he should have taken into his confidence someone other than Dawn, formulated strategy with a person less likely to kill herself if he proceeded other than as her desperation demandedAnswering the needs of a wife incoherent with grief, in no condition to think or act except out of hysteria, was an inexcusable errorHe should have heeded his mistrust and contacted immediately the agents who had interviewed him and Dawn at the house the day after the bombingHe should have picked up the phone the moment he understood who Rita Cohen was, even while she was seated in his officeBut instead he had driven directly home from the office and, because he could never calculate a decision free of its emotional impact on those who claimed his love; because seeing them suffer was his greatest hardship; because ignoring their importuning and defying their expectations, even when they would not argue reasonably or to the point, seemed to him an illegitimate use of his superior strength; vintage gucci bags because he could not disillusion anyone about the kind of selfless son, husband, and father he was; because he had come so highly recommended to everyone, he sat across from Dawn at the kitchen table, watching her deliver a long, sob-wracked, half-demented speech, a plea to tell the FBI nothing
Dawn begged him to do whatever the girl wanted: it remained possible for Merry to go unapprehended if only they kept her out of sight until the destruction of the store–and the death of DrConlon–had been forgottenIf only they hid her somewhere, provided for her, maybe even in another country, until this war-mad witch-hunt was over and a new time had begun; then she could be treated fairly for something she never, never could have done”She’s been tricked!” and he believed this himself–what else could a father believe?–until he heard it, day after day, a hundred times a day, from Dawn
So he’d turned over the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet slippers, the stuttering book; and now he was to meet Rita Cohen at a room in the New York Hilton, this time bearing five thousand dollars in unmarked twenties and tensAnd just as he’d known to call the FBI when she asked for the scrapbook, he now understood that if he acceded any further to her malicious daring there’d be no borse gucci bottom to it, there would only be misery on a scale incomprehensible to all of themWith the scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet slippers, and the stuttering book he had been craftily set up; now for the disastrous payoff
But Dawn was convinced that if he traveled over to Manhattan, got himself lost in the crowds, then, at the appointed afternoon hour, certain he wasn’t being tailed, made his way to the hotel, Merry herself would be there waiting for him–an absurd fairy-tale hope for which there wasn’t a shred of justification, but which he didn’t have the heart to oppose, not when he saw his wife shedding another layer of sanity whenever the telephone rang
For the first time she was got up in a skirt and blouse, gaudily floral bargain-basement stuff, and wearing high-heeled pumps; when she unsteadily crossed the carpet in them, she looked tinier even than she had in her work bootsThe hairdo was as aboriginal as before but her face, ordinarily a little pot, soulless and unadorned, had been emblazoned with lipstick and painted with eye shadow, her cheekbones highlighted with pink greaseShe looked like a third grader who had ransacked her mother’s room, except that the cosmetics caused her expressionlessness to seem even more fright-eningly psychopathic than when her face was just torebki louis vuitton unhumanly empty of color
“I have the money,” he said, standing in the hotel room doorway towering above her and knowing that what he was doing was as wrong as it could be”I have the money,” he repeated, and prepared himself for the retort about the sweat and blood of the workers from whom he had stolen itDo come in,” the girl saidI’d like you to meet my parentsMom and Dad, this is SeymourAn act for the factory, an act for the hotelDo make yourself at home
He had the money packed into his briefcase, not just the five thousand in the tens and twenties she’d asked for but five thousand more in fiftiesA total of ten thousand dollars–and with no idea whyWhat good would any of it do Merry? Merry wouldn’t see a penny of itStill, he said yet again–summoning all his strength so as not to lose hold–”I’ve brought the money you requested He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything
She had moved onto the bedspread and, with her legs crossed at the ankle and two pillows propped up behind her head, began lightly to sing: “Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, my encyclo-pid-e-a, oh Lydia, the tattooed lady
It was one of the old, silly songs he’d taught his little daughter once they saw that singing, she could always be fluent
“Come to fuck Rita Cohen, rolex chain have you?”
“I’ve come,” he said, “to deliver the money
“Let’s f-f-f-fuck, D-d-d-dad
“If you have any feeling for what everyone is going through–”
“Come off it, SwedeWhat do you know about ‘feeling’?”
“Why are you treating us like this?”
“Boo-hooYou came here to fuck meWhy does a middle-aged capitalist dog come to a hotel room to meet a young piece of ass? To fuck herSay it, just say, ‘I came to fuck you
“I don’t want to say any such thingStop all this, please
“I’m twenty-two years old
Could this lead to Merry, this onslaught of sneering and mockery? She could not insult him enoughWas she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared beforehand? Or was he dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because she was mad? She was like a gang memberWas she the gang leader, this tiny white-faced thug? In a gang the authority is given to the one who is most ruthlessIs she the most ruthless or are there others who are worse, those others who are holding Merry captive right now? Maybe she is the most intelligentMaybe she is the most corruptMaybe this is all a game to them, middle-class kids out on a spree
“Don’t I suit you?” she asked”No crude desires in a big guy like you? Come on, I’m not such a frightening personYou can’t have met your match in dior logo littl

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What the hell does he need all that ground for anyway?” Lou Levov demanded of the Swede’s mother, who was standing between the two men in her coat and trying her best to stay out of the discussion by studying the tops of the roadside trees(Or so the Swede thought; later he learned that, in vain, she had been looking down the road for street lights “What are you going to do with all the ground,” his father asked him, “feed the starving Armenians? You know what? You’re dreamingI wonder if you even know where this isLet’s be candid with each other about this–this is a narrow, bigoted areaThe Klan thrived out here in the twentiesDid you know that? The Ku Klux KlanPeople had crosses burned on their property chanel quilted replica out here
“Dad, the Ku Klux Kian doesn’t exist anymore
“Oh, doesn’t it? This is rock-ribbed Republican New Jersey, SeymourIt is Republican out here from top to bottom
“Dad, Eisenhower is president–the whole country is RepublicanEisenhower’s the president and Roosevelt is dead
“Yeah, and this place was Republican when Roosevelt was livingRepublican during the New DealWhy did they hate Roosevelt out here, Seymour?”
“I don’t know whyBecause he was a Democrat
“No, they didn’t like Roosevelt because they didn’t like the Jews and the Italians and the Irish–that’s why they moved out here to begin withThey didn’t like Roosevelt because he accommodated himself to these new AmericansHe understood what borse gucci they needed and he tried to help themBut not these bastardsThey wouldn’t give a Jew the time of dayI’m talking to you, son, about bigotsNot about the goose step even–just about hateAnd this is where the haters live, out here
The answer was NewsteadIn Newstead he would not have the headache of a hundred acresIn Newstead it would be rock-ribbed DemocratIn Newstead he could live with his family among young Jewish couples, the baby could grow up with Jewish friends, and the commute door-to-door to Newark Maid, taking South Orange Avenue straight in, was half an hour topsDad, I drive to Morristown in fifteen minutes
“Not if it snows you don’tNot if you obey the traffic laws you don’t
“The 8: 28 express replica santos cartier gets me to Broad Street 8: 56I walk to Central Avenue and I’m at work six minutes after nine
“And if it snows? You still haven’t answered meIf the train breaks down?”
“Stockbrokers take this train to workLawyers, businessmen who go into ManhattanIt’s not the milk train–it doesn’t break downOn the early-morning trains they’ve got their own parlor car, for God’s sake
“You could have fooled me,” his father replied
But the Swede, rather like some frontiersman of old, would not be turned backWhat was impractical and ill-advised to his father was an act of bravery to himNext to marrying Dawn Dwyer, buying that house and the hundred acres and moving out to Old Rimrock was the most daring thing he had ever bolsas louis doneWhat was Mars to his father was America to him–he was settling Revolutionary New Jersey as if for the first timeOut in Old Rimrock, all of America lay at their doorThat was an idea he lovedJewish resentment, Irish resentment–the hell with itA husband and wife each just twenty-five years of age, a baby of less than a year–it had been courageous of them to head out to Old RimrockHe’d already heard tell of more than a few strong, intelligent, talented guys in the leatherware business beaten down by their fathers, and he wasn’t going to let it happen to himHe’d fallen in love with the same business as his old man had, he’d taken his birthright, and now he was moving beyond it to damn well live where he torebki louis vuitton wan

Out of the skins he supplied they cut and sewed ladies’ gloves that he peddled around the stateBy the time the war broke out, he had a collective of Italian families cutting and stitching kid gloves in a small loft on West Market StreetIt was a marginal business, no real money, until, in 1942, the bonanza: a black, lined sheepskin dress glove, ordered by the Women’s Army CorpsHe leased the old umbrella factory, a smoke-darkened brick pile fifty years old and four stories high on Central Avenue and 2nd Street, and very shortly purchased it outright, leasing the top floor to a zipper companyNewark Maid began pumping out gloves, and every two or three days the truck backed up and took them away
A cause for jubilation even greater than the government contract was the Bamberger accountNewark Maid cracked Bamber-ger’s, and then became the major manufacturer of their fine ladies’ gloves, because of an unlikely encounter between Lou Levov and Louis BambergerAt a ceremonial dinner for Meyer Ellenstein, a city commissioner since 1933 and the only Jew ever to be mayor of Newark, some higher-up from Barn’s, hearing that Swede Levov’s father was present, came over to congratulate him on his boy’s selection by the Newark News as an all-county center in basketballAlert to the opportunity of a lifetime–the opportunity to cut through all obstructions and go right to the top–Lou Levov brazenly talked his way into an introduction, right there at the Ellenstein dinner, to the legendary LBamberger himself, founder of Newark’s most prestigious department store white chanel watch ceramic and the philanthropist who’d given the city its museum, a powerful personage as meaningful to local Jews as Bernard Baruch was meaningful to Jews around the country for his close association with FDRAccording to the gossip that permeated the neighborhood, although Bamberger barely did more than shake Lou Levov’s hand and quiz him (about the Swede) for a couple of minutes at most, Lou Levov had dared to say to his face, “MrBamberger, we’ve got the quality, we’ve got the price–why can’t we sell you people gloves?” And before the month was out, Barn’s had placed an order with Newark Maid, its first, for five hundred dozen pairs
By the end of the warNewark Maid had established itself–in no small part because of Swede Levov’s athletic achievement–as one of the most respected names in ladies’ gloves south of Gloversville, New York, the center of the glove trade, where Lou Levov shipped his hides by rail, through Fultonville, to be tanned by the best glove tannery in the businessLittle more than a decade later, with the opening of a factory in Puerto Rico in 1958, the Swede would himself become the young president of the company, commuting every morning down to Central Avenue from his home some thirty-odd miles west of Newark, out past the suburbs–a short-range pioneer living on a hundred-acre farm on a back road in the sparsely habitated hills beyond Morristown, in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey, a long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America, paring away from the true skin the rubbery flesh that had borse gucci ghoulishly swelled to twice its thickness in the great lime vats
The day after graduating Weequahic in June ’45, the Swede had joined the Marine Corps, eager to be in on the fighting that ended the warIt was rumored that his parents were beside themselves and did everything to talk him out of the marines and get him into the navyEven if he surmounted the notorious Marine Corps anti-Semitism, did he imagine himself surviving the invasion of Japan? But the Swede would not be dissuaded from meeting the manly, patriotic challenge–secretly set for himself just after Pearl Harbor–of going off to fight as one of the toughest of the tough should the country still be at war when he graduated high schoolHe was just finishing up his boot training at Parris Island, South Carolina–where the scuttlebutt was that the marines were to hit the Japanese beaches on March 1, 1946–when the atomic bomb was dropped on HiroshimaAs a result, the Swede got to spend the rest of his hitch as a “recreation specialist” right there on Parris IslandHe ran the calisthenic drill for his battalion for half an hour before breakfast every morning, arranged for the boxing smokers to entertain the recruits a couple of nights a week, and the bulk of the time played for the base team against armed forces teams throughout the South, basketball all winter long, baseball all summer longHe was stationed down in South Carolina about a year when he became engaged to an Irish Catholic girl whose father, a marine major and a one-time Purdue football coach, had procured him the cushy job as fendi spy bag replica drill instructor in order to keep him at Parris Island to play ballSeveral months before the Swede’s discharge, his own father made a trip to Parris Island, stayed for a full week, near the base at the hotel in Beaufort, and departed only when the engagement to Miss Dunleavy had been broken offThe Swede returned home in ’47 to enroll at Upsala College, in East Orange, at twenty unencumbered by a Gentile wife and all the more glamorously heroic for having made his mark as a Jewish marine–a drill instructor no less, and at arguably the crudest military training camp anywhere in the worldMarines are made at boot camp, and Seymour Irving Levov had helped to make them
We knew all this because the mystique of the Swede lived on in the corridors and classrooms of the high school, where I was by then a studentI remember two or three times one spring trekking out with friends to Viking Field in East Orange to watch the Upsala baseball team play a Saturday home gameTheir star cleanup hitter and first baseman was the SwedeThree home runs one day against MuhlenbergWhenever we saw a man in the stands wearing a suit and a hat we would whisper to one another, “A scout, a scout!” I was away at college when I heard from a schoolyard pal still living in the neighborhood that the Swede had been offered a contract with a Double A Giant farm club but had turned it down to join his father’s company insteadLater I learned through my parents about the Swede’s marriage to Miss New JerseyBefore competing at Atlantic City for the 1949 Miss America title, she had been chanel quilted replica Miss Union County, and before that Spring Queen at Upsala
One night in the summer of 1985, while visiting New York, I went out to see the Mets play the Astros, and while circling the stadium with my friends, looking for the gate to our seats, I saw the Swede, thirty-six years older than when I’d watched him play ball for UpsalaHe wore a white shirt, a striped tie, and a charcoal-gray summer suit, and he was still terrifically handsomeThe golden hair was a shade or two darker but not any thinner; no longer was it cut short but fell rather fully over his ears and down to his collar
In this suit that fit him so exquisitely he seemed even taller and leaner than I remembered him in the uniform of one sport or anotherThe woman with us noticed him first” Who is that? That’s–that’sIs that John Lindsay?” she askedYou know who that is? It’s Swede Levov I told my friends, “That’s the Swede!”
A skinny, fair-haired boy of about seven or eight was walking alongside the Swede, a kid under a Mets cap pounding away at a first baseman’s mitt that dangled, as had the Swede’s, from his left handThe two, clearly a father and his son, were laughing about something together when I approached and introduced myself”I knew your brother at Weequahic
“You’re Zuckerman?” he replied, vigorously shaking my hand”The author?”
“I’m Zuckerman the author
“Sure, you were Jerry’s great pal
“I don’t think Jerry had great palsHe was too brilliant for palsHe just used to beat my pants off at Ping-Pong down in your basementBeating me at Ping-Pong was very important to torebki louis vuitton Jerry

Those girls are there to be ogledThe more money they give for it, the worse it isDwyer agreed finally to come down to Atlantic City had been due to the persuasive skills of Dawn’s favorite aunt, Peg, her mother’s sister, the schoolteacher who’d married rich Uncle Ned and taken Dawn as a kid to the hotel in Spring Lake”It would make any father uncomfortable seeing his baby up there,” Peg had told her brother-in-law in that gentle, diplomatic way Dawn always admired and wanted to emulate”It brings certain images to mind that a father would just as soon not have associated with his daughterI’d feel that way if it were my daughter,” she told him, “and I don’t have what it is that fathers naturally feel for their daughtersIt would bother me, of course it wouldI would think that what you feel is the case with a lot of dadsThey’re really proud, their buttons are popping and all that, but at the same time, ‘Oh, my God, that’s my baby up there’ But Jim, this is so clean and beyond reproach there is just nothing to worry aboutThe chanel j12 white watch trashy ones get sifted out early–they go on to work the truckers’ conventionThese are just ordinary kids from small towns, decent, sweet girls whose fathers own the grocery store and don’t belong to the country clubThey get them up to look like debutantes but there is nothing big in their backgroundsThey’re just good kids who go home and settle down and marry the boy next doorAnd the judges are serious peopleJim, this is for Miss AmericaIf it were compromising to the girls, they wouldn’t allow it
Dawn wants you there to share in that honorShe will not be very happy if you are not there, JimmyShe will be crushed, especially if you are the only father who isn’t there
“Peggy, it’s beneath herIt’s beneath all of us So that’s when she laid into him about his responsibility not merely to Dawn but to the nation”You wouldn’t come when she won at the local levelYou wouldn’t come when she won at the state levelAre you now telling me that you are not going to come if she wins at the national level? If she is awarded Miss America and rolex chain you’re not there to walk up on the stage and hug your daughter with pride, what will they think? They’ll think, ‘A great tradition, a part of the American heritage, and her father isn’t therePhotographs of Miss America with her family, and her father isn’t in a one of them’ Tell me, how’s that going to go down the next day?”
And so he humbled himself and he did it–against his better judgment, consented to come for the big night to Atlantic City with the rest of Dawn’s relatives, and it was a disasterWhen Dawn saw him waiting there in his Sunday suit in the lobby with her mother and her aunts and her uncles and her cousins, every last Dwyer in Union and Essex and Hudson counties, all she was allowed to do by her chaperone was to shake his hand, and he was fit to be tiedBut that was a pageant rule, in case anybody who was watching might not know it was her father and see some kind of embrace and think something untoward was going onIt was all so that absolutely nothing smacked of impropriety, but Jim Dwyer, who had only necklace pearl chanel recently recovered from the first heart attack and so was on edge anyway, had misunderstood, thinking that now she was such a big shot she had dared to rebuff her own dad, actually given her father the cold shoulder, and in public, before the entire public
Of course, for the week that she was in Atlantic City under the watchful eye of the pageant, she had not been allowed to see the Swede at all, not in the company of her chaperone, not even in a public place, and so, until the very last night, he’d just stayed up in Newark and had to be content, like her family, to talk to her on the phoneBut Dawn’s sincerity in recounting to her father this hardship–of her being deprived, for a whole week, of the company of her Jewish beau–did not much impress him when, back in Elizabeth, she attempted to assuage his grudge at what he remembered for many years afterward as “the snub
“That was just an Old World hotel that was the most wonderful place,” Dawn was telling the SalzmansSomething you see in a movieBig rooms overlooking Lake lady dior bag GenevaI’m boring you,” she suddenly said
“No, no,” they replied in unison
Sheila pretended to be listening intently to every word Dawn spokeShe had to be pretendingNot even she could have recovered so completely from the eruption in Dawn’s studyIf she had–well, it would be hard then to say what sort of woman she wasShe was nothing like the one he had imaginedAnd that was not because she had been passing herself off with him as something else or somebody else but because he had understood her no better than he was able to understand anyoneHow to penetrate to the interior of people was some skill or capacity he did not possessHe just did not have the combination to that lockEverybody who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be goodEverybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyalEverybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligentAnd so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress–probably had never even begun to see into chanel white watch himse

“What we’ve got now,” his father argued each time he flew up I from Florida to plead with his son to get the hell out before a second riot destroyed the rest of the city, “is that every step of the way we’re no longer making one step, we’re making two, three, and four stepsEvery step of the way you have got to go back a step to get it cut again, to get it stitched again, and nobody is doing a day’s work and nobody is doing it rightA whole business is going down the drain because of that son of a bitch LeRoi Jones, that Peek-A-Boo-Boopy-Do, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hatI built this with my hands! With my blood! They think somebody gave it to me? Who? Who gave it to me? Who gave me anything, ever? Nobody! What I have I built! With work–w-o-r-k! But they took that city and now they are going to take that business and everything that I built up a day at a time, an inch at a time, and they are going to leave it all in ruins! And that’ll do ‘em a world of good! They burn down their own houses–that’ll show whitey! Don’t fix ‘em up–burn ‘em downOh, that’ll do wonders for a man’s black pride–a totally ruined city to live in! A great city turned into a total nowhere! They’re just going to love living in that! And I hired ‘em! How’s that for a laugh? / hired ‘em! ‘You’re nuts, Levov’–this is what my friends in the steam room used to tell me–’What are you hiring schvartzes for? You won’t get gloves, Levov, you’ll get dreck’ But I hired ‘em, treated them like human beings, kissed Vicky’s ass for twenty-five years, bought all the girls a Thanksgiving turkey every goddamn Thanksgiving, came in every morning with my tongue hanging out of my mouth so I could lick their asses with it’How is everybody,’ I said, ‘how are we all, my time is yours, I don’t want you complaining to anybody but me, here at this desk isn’t just a boss, here is your ally, your buddy, your friend’ And the party I gave for cartier must 21 Vicky’s twins when they graduated? And what a jerk-off I wasTo this day! I’m by the pool and my wonderful friends look up from the paper and they tell me they ought to take the schvartzes and line ‘em up and shoot ‘em, and I’m the one who has to remind them that’s what Hitler did to the JewsAnd you know what they tell me, as an answer? ‘How can you compare schvartzes to Jews?’ They are telling me to shoot the schvartzes and I am hollering no, and meanwhile I’m the one whose business they are ruining because they cannot make a glove that fitsBad cutting, the stretch is wrong–the glove won’t even go onCareless people, careless, and it is inexcusableOne operation goes wrong, the whole operation is spoiled all the way through, and, still, when I am arguing with these fascist bastards, Seymour, Jewish men, men of my age who have seen what I’ve seen, who should know better a million times over, when I am arguing with them, I am arguing against what I should be arguing forr “Well, sometimes you wind up doing that,” the Swede said”Why? Tell me why!”
“I suppose out of conscience
“Conscience? Where is theirs, the schvartzes’ conscience? Where is their conscience after working for me for twenty-five years?”
Whatever it cost him to deny his father relief from his suffering, stubbornly to defy the truth of what his father was saying, the Swede could not submit to the old man’s arguments, for the simple reason that if Merry were to learn–and she would, through Rita Cohen, if Rita Cohen actually had anything to do with her–that Newark Maid had fled the Central Avenue factory she would be all too delighted to think, “He did it! He’s as rotten as the rest! My own father! Everything justified by the profit principle! Everything! Newark’s just a black colony for my own fatherExploit it and exploit it and then, when there’s trouble, fuck it!”
These thoughts and thoughts even stupider–engendered in her by the likes of big black bag The Communist Manifesto–would surely foreclose any chance of ever seeing her againDespite all that he could tell Angela Davis that might favorably influence her about his refusal to desert Newark and his black employees, he knows that the personal complications of that decision could not begin to conform to the utter otherworldliness of the ideal of StAngela, and so he decides instead to explain to a vision that he is one of two white trustees (this is not true–the father of a friend is the trustee) of an antipov-erty organization that meets regularly in Newark to promote the city’s comeback, which (also not true–how could it be?) he still believes inHe tells Angela that he attends evening meetings all over Newark despite his wife’s fearsHe is trying to do everything he can for the liberation of her peopleHe reminds himself to repeat these words to her every night: the liberation of the people, America’s black colonies, the inhumanity of the society, embattled humanity
He does not tell Angela that his daughter is childishly boasting, lying in order to impress her, that his daughter knows nothing about dynamite or revolution, that these are just words to her and she blurts them out to make herself feel powerful despite her speech impedimentNo, Angela is the person who knows Merry’s whereabouts, and if Angela has come to him like this, it’s no mere friendly visitWhy would Angela Davis drop out of nowhere into the Levovs’ Old Rimrock kitchen at midnight every single night if she weren’t the revolutionary leader assigned to looking after his daughter’s well-being? What’s in it for her otherwise–why else would she keep coming back?
So he says to her yes, his daughter is a soldier of freedom, yes, he is proud, yes, everything he has heard about Communism is a lie, yes, the United States is concerned solely with making the world safe for business and keeping the have-nots from encroaching on the haves–yes, the chanel big United States is responsible for oppression everywhereEverything is justified by her cause, Huey Newton’s cause, Bobby Seale’s cause, George Jackson’s cause, Merry Levov’s causeMeanwhile he mentions Angela’s name to no one, certainly not to Vicky, who thinks Angela Davis is a troublemaker and who says as much to the girls at workAlone then and in secret he prays–ardently prays to God, to Jesus, to anyone, to the Blessed Virgin, to StJoseph–for Angela’s acquittalAnd when it happens he is jubilantShe is free! But he does not send her the letter that he sits up writing in the kitchen that night, nor does he some weeks later when Angela, in New York, behind a four-sided shield of bulletproof glass and before fifteen thousand exultant supporters, demands the freedom of political prisoners deprived of due process and unjustly imprisonedFree the Rimrock Bomber! Free my daughter! Free her, please! cries the Swede”I think it’s about time,” Angela says, “for all of us to begin to teach the rulers of this country a few lessons,” and yes, cries the Swede, yes, it is about time, a socialist revolution in the United States of America! But nonetheless he remains alone at his kitchen table because he still cannot do anything that he should do or believe anything that he should believe or even know any longer what it is he does believeDid she do it or didn’t she do it? He should have fucked Rita Cohen, if only to find out–fucked the conniving little sexual terrorist until she was his slave! Until she took him to the hideout where they made the bombs! If you want to see your daughter as much as you say, you’ll just calm down and come over here and give Rita Cohen a nice big fuckHe should have looked at her cunt and tasted it and fucked herIs that what any father would have done? If he would do anything for Merry, why not that? Why did he run?
And this is just a part of what is meant by “Five years passEverything he reads fake birkin or sees or hears has a single significanceNothing is impersonally perceivedFor one whole year he cannot go into the village without seeing where the general store used to beTo buy a newspaper or a quart of milk or a tank of gas he has to drive almost clear into Morristown, and so does everybody else in Old RimrockThe same to buy a stampBasically the village is one streetGoing east there is the new Presbyterian church, a white pseudocolonial building that doesn’t look like much of anything and that replaced the old Presbyterian church that burned to the ground in the twentiesJust a little ways from the church are The Oaks, a pair of two-hundred-year-old oak trees that are the town’s prideSome thirty yards beyond The Oaks is the old blacksmith shop that was converted, just before Pearl Harbor, into the Home Shop, where local women go to buy wallpaper and lampshades and decorative knicknacks and to get advice from MrsFowler about interior decoratingDown at the far end of the street is the auto-repair garage run by Perry Hamlin, a hard-drinking cousin of Russ Hamlin’s who also canes chairs, and then beyond that, encompassing some five hundred acres, is the rolling terrain of the dairy farm owned and worked by Paul Hamlin, who is Perry’s younger brotherHills like these where Hamlins have farmed now for close to two hundred years run northeast to southwest, in a thirty- or forty-mile-wide swath, crossing north Jersey at around Old Rimrock, a range of small hills that continue up into New York to become the Catskills and from there all the way up to Maine
Diagonally across from where the store used to be is the yellow-stuccoed six-room schoolhouseBefore they sent her to the Mon-tessori school and then on to Morristown High, Merry had been a pupil there for the first four gradesEvery kid who goes there now sees every day where the store used to be, as do their teachers, as do their parents when they drive into the dior china villa

I think that Merry may even feel that if she doesn’t stutter, then, oh boy, people are really going to find the real problem with her, particularly in a highly pressured perfectionist family where they tend to place an unrealistically high value on her every utterance’If I don’t stutter, then my mother is really going to read me the riot act, then she’s going to find out my real secrets’”
“Who said we’re a highly pressured perfectionist family? JesusWe’re an ordinary familyAre you quoting Merry? That’s what she told you, about her mother? That she was going to read her the riot act?’ “Not in so many words
“Because it’s not true” the Swede said”That’s not the causeSometimes I just think it’s because her brain is so quick, it’s so much quicker than her tongue–” Oh, the pitying way he is looking at me and my pathetic explanationCold, heartless bastardThat’s the worst of it–the stupidityAnd all of it is because he looks the way he looks and I look the way I look and Dawn looks the way she looks and”We frequently see fathers who can’t accept, who refuse to believe–” Oh, these people are completely useless! They only make things worse! Whose idea was this fucking psychiatrist! “I’m not not accepting anything, damn itI brought her here,” the Swede said, “in the first placeI do everything any professional has told me to do to help support her efforts to stopI just want to know from you what good it is doing my daughter, with her grimacing and her tics and her leg twitches and her banging on the table and turning white in the face, with all of that difficulty, to be told that, on top of everything coco chanel handbags else, she’s doing all this to manipulate her mother and father
“Well, who is in charge when she is banging on the table and turning white? Who is in control there?”
“She certainly isn’t!” said the Swede angrily”You find me taking a very uncharitable view toward her,” replied the doctorin a way, as her father, yesIt never seems to occur to you that there might be some physiological basis for this
“No, I didn’t say thatLevov, I can give you organic theories if you want themBut that isn’t the way I have found I can be most effective
Her stuttering diaryWhen she sat at the kitchen table after dinner writing the day’s entry in her stuttering diary, that’s when he most wanted to murder the psychiatrist who had finally to inform him–one of the fathers “who can’t accept, who refuse to believe”–that she would stop stuttering only when stuttering was no longer necessary for her, when she wanted to “relate” to the world in a different way–in short, when she found a more valuable replacement for the manipulativenessThe stuttering diary was a red three-ring notebook in which, at the suggestion of her speech therapist, Merry kept a record of when she stutteredCould she have been any more the dedicated enemy of her stuttering than when she sat there scrupulously recalling and recording how the stuttering fluctuated throughout the day, in what context it was least likely to occur, when it was most likely to occur and with whom? And could anything have been more heartbreaking for him than reading that notebook on the Friday evening she rushed off to the movies with her friends and happened to leave it cartier love open on the table? “When do I stutter? When somebody asks me something that requires an unexpected, unrehearsed response, that’s when I’m likely to stutterWhen people are looking at mePeople who know I stutter, particularly when they’re looking at meThough sometimes it’s worse with people who don’t know me On she went, page after page in her strikingly neat handwriting–and all she seemed to be saying was that she stuttered in all situationsShe had written, “Even when I’m doing fine, I can’t stop thinking, ‘How soon is it going to be before he knows I’m a stutterer? How soon is it going to be before I start stuttering and screw this up?’” Yet, despite every disappointment, she sat where her parents could see her and worked on her stuttering diary every night, weekends includedShe worked with her therapist on the different “strate-98 gies” to be used with strangers, store clerks, people with whom she had relatively safe conversations; they worked on strategies to be used with the people who were closer to her–teachers, girlfriends, boys, finally her grandparents, her father, her motherShe recorded the strategies in the diary
She listed in the diary what topics she could expect to talk about with different people, wrote down the points she would try to make, anticipating when she was most likely to stutter and getting herself thoroughly preparedHow could she bear the hardship of all that self-consciousness? The planning required of her to make the spontaneous unspontaneous, the persistence with which she refused to shrink from these tedious tasks–was that what the arrogant son of a bitch had meant tiffany co earrings by “a vindictive exercise”? It was unflagging commitment the likes of which the Swede had never known, not even in himself that fall they turned him into a football player and, reluctant as he was to go banging heads in a sport whose violence he never really liked, he did it, excelled at it, “for the good of the school
But none of what she diligently worked at did Merry an ounce of goodIn the quiet, safe cocoon of her speech therapist’s office, taken out of her world, she was said to be terrifically at home with herself, to speak flawlessly, make jokes, imitate people, singBut outside again, she saw it coming, started to go around it, would do anything, anything, to avoid the next word beginning with a b–and soon she was sputtering all over the place, and what a field day that psychiatrist had the next Saturday with the letter b and “what it unconsciously signified to her Or what m or c or g “unconsciously signified And yet nothing of what he surmised meant a goddamn thingNone of his great ideas disposed of a single one of her difficultiesNothing anybody said meant anything or, in the end, made any senseThe psychiatrist didn’t help, the speech therapist’s strategies didn’t help, the stuttering diary didn’t help, he didn’t help, Dawn didn’t help, not even the light, crisp enunciation of Audrey Hepburn made the slightest dentShe was simply in the hands of something she could not get out of
And then it was too late: like some innocent in a fairy story who has been tricked into drinking the noxious potion, the grasshopper child who used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across chanel top every available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout–she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries, pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall, nicknamed by her schoolmates Ho Chi Levov
And the impediment became the machete with which to mow all the bastard liars down”You f-f-fucking madman! You heartless mi-mi-mi-miserable m-monster!” she snarled at Lyndon Johnson whenever his face appeared on the seven o’clock newsInto the televised face of Humphrey, the vice president, she cried, “You prick, sh-sh-shut your lying m-m-mouth, you c-c-coward, you f-f-f-f-filthy fucking collaborator!” When her father, as a member of the ad hoc group calling itself New Jersey Businessmen Against the War, went down to Washington with the steering committee to visit their senator, Merry refused his invitation to come along”But,” said the Swede, who had never belonged to a political group before and would not have joined this one and volunteered for the steering committee and paid a thousand dollars toward their protest ad in the Newark News had he not hoped his conspicuous involvement might deflect a little of her anger away from him, “this is your chance to say what’s on your mind to Senator CaseYou can confront him chanel black handbags directly

Welcome to my first blog

Causes, clear answers, who there is to blameBut there are no reasonsShe is obliged to be as she isCould how we lived as a family ever have come back as this bizarre horror? It couldn’tJerry tries to rationalize it but you can’tThis is all something else, something he knows absolutely nothing aboutIt is chaos from start to finish”I don’t want that,” the Swede tells him
“Too brutal for youIn this world, too brutalThe daughter’s a murderer but this is too brutalA drill instructor in the Marine Corps but this is too brutalOkay, Big Swede, gentle giantI got a waiting room full of patients

III

Paradise Lost

It was the summer of the Watergate hearingsThe Levovs had spent nearly every night on the back porch watching the replay of the day’s session on Channel 13Before the farm equipment and the cattle had been sold off, it was from there, on warm evenings, that they looked out onto Dawn’s herd grazing along the rim of the hillUp cartier tank louis a ways from the house was a field of eighteen acres, and some years they’d have the cows up there all summer and forget themBut if they were merely out of sight nearby, and Merry, in her pajamas, wanted to see them before she went to bed, Dawn would call out, “Hereboy, Hereboy,” the kind of thing people had been calling to them for thousands of years, and they’d sound off in return and start up the hill and out from the swamp, come out of wherever they were, bellowing their response as they trudged toward the sound of Dawn’s voice”Aren’t they beautiful, our girls?” Dawn would ask her daughter, and the next day Merry and Dawn would be out at sunrise getting them all together again, and he’d hear Dawn say, “Okay, we’re going to cross the road,” and Merry would open the gate and just with a stick and the dog, Apu the Australian sheepdog, mother and tiny daughter would move some twelve or fifteen or eighteen beasts, each weighing about two vintage hermes thousand poundsMerry, Apu, and Dawn, sometimes the vet, and the boy down the road to help with the fencing and the haying when an extra hand was neededI’ve got Merry to help me hayIf there’s a stray calf, Merry gets after itSeymour goes in there and those two cows will be very unpleasant, they’ll paw the grass, they’ll shake their heads at him–but Merry goes in, well, they know her, and they just tell her what they wantThey know her and they know exactly what she’s going to do with them
How could she ever say to him, “I don’t want to talk about my mother”? What in God’s name had her mother done? What crime had her mother committed? The crime of being gentle master to these compliant cows?
During this last week, while his parents had been with them, up from Florida for the annual late-summer visit, Dawn hadn’t even worried about keeping the two of them entertainedWhenever she returned from the new building site or drove back from the vuitton gold bag architect’s office, they were seated before the set with the father-in-law in the role of assistant counsel to the committeeHer in-laws watched the proceedings all day and then saw the whole thing over again at nightIn what time he had left to himself during the day, the Swede’s father composed letters to the committee members which he read to everyone at dinner”Dear Senator Weicker: You’re surprised at what was going on in Tricky Dicky’s White House? Don’t be a shnookHarry Truman had him figured out in 1948 when he called him Tricky Dicky
“Dear Senator Gurney: Nixon equals Typhoid MaryEverything he touches he poisons, you included
“Dear Senator Baker: You want to know WHY? Because they’re a bunch of common criminals, that’s WHY!”
“Dear MrDash:” he wrote to the committee’s New York counsel, “I applaud youYou make me proud to be an American and a Jew
His greatest contempt he reserved for a relatively insignificant figure, a lawyer named tiffany and co jewelry Kalmbach, who’d arranged for large illegal contributions to sift into the Watergate operation, and whose disgrace could not be profound enough to suit the old manKalmbach: If you were a Jew and did what you did the whole world would say, ‘See those Jews, real money-grubbers’ But who is the money-grubber, my dear MrCountry Club? Who is the thief and the cheat? Who is the American and who is the gangster? Your smooth talk never fooled me, MrCountry Club KalmbachYour golf never fooled meYour manners never fooled meYour clean hands I always knew were dirtyAnd now the whole world knowsYou should be ashamed
“You think I’ll get an answer from the son of a bitch? I ought to publish these in a bookI ought to find somebody to print ‘em up and just distribute them free so people could know what an ordinary American feels when these sons of bitcheslook, look at that one, look at him Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former chief of staff, had appeared on the chanel black tote bag scree