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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