American Pastoral Page 5

  therefore just great, right in the American grain.

  “Is Jerry gay?” I suddenly asked.

  “My brother?” The Swede laughed. “You’re kidding.”

  * * *

  Maybe I was and had asked the question out of mischief, to alleviate the

  boredom. Yet I did happen to be remembering that line the Swede had written me

  about how much his father “suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved

  ones,” which led me to wondering again what he’d been alluding to, which

  spontaneously reminded me of the humiliation Jerry had brought upon himself in

  our junior year of high school when he attempted to win the heart of a

  strikingly unexceptional girl in our class who you wouldn’t have thought

  required a production to get her to kiss you.

  As a Valentine present, Jerry made a coat for her out of hamster skins, a

  hundred and seventy-five hamster skins that he cured in the sun and then sewed

  together with a curved sewing needle pilfered from his father’s factory, where

  the idea dawned on him. The high school biology department had been given a gift

  of some three hundred hamsters for the purpose of dissection, and Jerry

  diligently finagled to collect the skins from the biology students; his oddness

  and his genius made credible the story he told about “a

  scientific experiment” he was conducting at home. He finagled next to find out

  the girl’s height, he designed a pattern, and then, after he got most of the

  stink out of the hides—or thought he had—by drying them in the sun on the roof

  of his garage, he meticulously sewed the skins together, finishing the coat off

  with a silk lining made out of a section of a white parachute, an imperfect

  parachute his brother had sent home to him as a memento from the marine air base

  in Cherry Point, North Carolina, where the Parris Island team won the last game

  of the season for the Marine Corps baseball championship. The only person Jerry

  told about the coat was me, the Ping-Pong stooge. He was going to send it to the

  girl in a Bamberger’s coat box of his mother’s, wrapped in lavender tissue paper

  and tied with velvet ribbon. But when the coat was finished, it was so stiff—

  because of the idiotic way he’d dried the skins, his father would later explain—

  that he couldn’t get it to fold up in the box.

  Across from the Swede in Vincent’s restaurant, I suddenly recalled seeing it in

  the basement: this big thing sitting on the floor with sleeves. Today, I was

  thinking, it would win all kinds of prizes at the Whitney Museum, but back in

  Newark in 1949 nobody knew dick about what great art was and Jerry and I racked

  our brains trying to figure out what he could do to get the coat into the box.

  He was set on that box because she would think, when she began to open it, that

  it contained an expensive coat from Barn’s. I was thinking of what she would

  think when she saw that wasn’t what it contained; I was thinking that surely it

  didn’t take such hard work to gain the attention of a chubby girl with bad skin

  and no boyfriend. But I cooperated with Jerry because he had a cyclonic

  personality you either fled or yielded to and because he was Swede Levov’s

  brother and I was in Swede Levov’s house and everywhere you looked were Swede

  Levov’s trophies. Eventually Jerry tore the entire coat apart and resewed it so

  that the stitching lay straight across the chest, creating a hinge of sorts

  where the coat could be bent and placed in the box. I helped him—it was like

  sewing a suit of armor. Atop the coat he placed a heart that he cut out of card-

  board and painted his name on in Gothic letters, and the package was sent parcel

  post. It had taken him three months to transform an improbable idea into nutty

  reality. Brief by human standards.

  She screamed when she opened the box. “She had a fit,” her girlfriends said.

  Jerry’s father also had a fit. “This is what you do with the parachute your

  brother sent you? You cut it up? You cut up a parachute?” Jerry was too

  humiliated to tell him that it was to get the girl to fall into his arms and

  kiss him the way Lana Turner kissed Clark Gable. I happened to be there when his

  father went after him for curing the skins in the midday sun. “A skin must be

  * * *

  preserved properly. Properly! And properly is not in the sun—you must dry a skin

  in the shade. You don’t want them sunburned, damn it! Can I teach you once and

  for all, Jerome, how to preserve a skin?” And that he proceeded to do, in a boil

  at first, barely able to contain his frustration with his own son’s ineptitude

  as a leather worker, explaining to both of us what they had taught the traders

  to do to the sheepskins in Ethiopia before they shipped them to Newark Maid to

  be contracted out to the tanner. “You can salt it, but salt’s expensive.

  Especially in Africa, very, very expensive. And they steal the salt there. These

  people don’t have salt. You have to put poison into the salt over there so they

  won’t steal it. Other way is to pack the skin up, various ways, either on a

  board or on a frame, you tie it, and make little cuts, tie it up and dry it in

  the shade. In the shade, boys. That’s what we call flint-dried skin. Sprinkle a

  little flint on it, keeps it from deteriorating, prevents the bugs from

  entering—” Much to my own relief, the outrage had given way surprisingly fast to

  a patient, if tedious, pedagogical assault, which seemed to gall Jerry even more

  than being blown down by his father’s huffing and puffing. It could well have

  been that very day when Jerry swore to himself never to go near his father’s

  business.

  To deal with malodorous skins, Jerry had doused the coat with his mother’s

  perfume, but by the time the coat was delivered by the postman it had begun to

  stink as it had intermittently all along, and the girl was so revolted when she

  opened the box, so insulted and

  33

  horrified, that she never spoke to Jerry again. According to the other girls,

  she thought he had gone out and hunted and killed all those tiny beasts and then

  sent them to her because of her blemished skin. Jerry was in a rage when he got

  the news and, in the midst of our next Ping-Pong game, cursed her and called all

  girls fucking idiots. If he hadn’t before had the courage to ask anyone out on a

  date, he never tried after that and was one of only three boys who didn’t show

  up at the senior prom. The other two were what we identified as “sissies.” And

  that was why I now asked the Swede a question about Jerry that I would never

  have dreamed of asking in 1949, when I had no clear idea what a homosexual was

  and couldn’t imagine that anybody I knew could be one. At the time I thought

  Jerry was Jerry, a genius, with obsessive naivete and colossal innocence about

  girls. In those days, that explained it all. Maybe it still does. But I was

  really looking to see what, if anything, could roil the innocence of this regal

  Swede—and to prevent myself from being so rude as to fall asleep on him—so I

  asked him, “Is Jerry gay?”

  “As a kid there was always something secretive about Jerry,” I said. “There were

  never any girls, never close friend
s, always something about him, even besides

  his brains, that set him apart….”

  The Swede nodded, looking at me as though he understood my deeper meaning as no

  human being ever had before, and because of this probing stare that I would

  swear saw nothing, all this giving that gave nothing and gave away nothing, I

  had no idea where his thoughts might be or if he even had “thoughts.” When,

  momentarily, I stopped speaking, I sensed that my words, rather than falling

  into the net of the other person’s awareness, got linked up with nothing in his

  brain, went in there and vanished. Something about the harmless eyes—the promise

  they made that he could never do anything other than what was right—was becoming

  annoying to me, which has to be why I next brought up his letter instead of

  keeping my mouth shut until the bill came and I could get away from him for

  another fifty years so that when 2045 rolled around I might actually look

  forward to seeing him again.

  34

  * * *

  You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people

  without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance,

  as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half

  a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of

  tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open

  mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get

  them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong

  before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong

  while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the

  meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them

  with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception,

  an astonishing farce of mispercep-tion. And yet what are we to do about this

  terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the

  significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is

  ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior

  workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit

  secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out

  of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing

  than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact

  remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s

  getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and

  then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know

  we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or

  wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well,

  lucky you.

  “When you wrote me about your father, and the shocks he’d suffered, it occurred

  to me that maybe Jerry had been the shock. Your old man wouldn’t have been any

  better than mine at coming to grips with a queer son.”

  35

  The Swede smiled the smile that refused to be superior, that was meant to

  reassure me that nothing in him ever could or would want to resist me, that

  signaled to me that, adored as he was, he was no better than me, even perhaps a

  bit of a nobody beside me. “Well, fortunately for my father, he didn’t have to.

  Jerry was the-son-the-doctor. He couldn’t have been prouder of anyone than he

  was of Jerry.”

  “Jerry’s a physician?”

  “In Miami. Cardiac surgeon. Million bucks a year.”

  “Married? Jerry married?”

  The smile again. The vulnerability in that smile was the surprising element—the

  vulnerability of our record-breaking muscleman faced with all the crudeness it

  takes to stay alive. The smile’s refusal to recognize, let alone to sanction in

  himself, the savage obstinacy that seven decades of surviving requires of a man.

  As though anyone over ten believes you can subjugate with a smile, even one that

  kind and warm, all the things that are out to get you, with a smile hold it all

  together when the strong arm of the unforeseen comes crashing down on your head.

  Once again I began to think that he might be mentally unsound, that this smile

  could perhaps be an indication of derangement. There was no sham in it—and that

  was the worst of it. The smile wasn’t insincere. He wasn’t imitating anything.

  This caricature was it, arrived at spontaneously after a lifetime of working

  himself deeper and deeper into … what? The idea of himself neighborhood

  stardom had wreathed him in— had that mummified the Swede as a boy forever? It

  was as though he had abolished from his world everything that didn’t suit him—

  * * *

  not only deceit, violence, mockery, and ruthlessness but anything |

  remotely coarse-grained, any threat of contingency, that dreadful

  i harbinger of helplessness. Not for a second did he stop trying to

  make his relation to me appear as simple and sincere as his seeming relationship

  to himself.

  Unless, unless, he was just a mature man, as devious as the next mature man.

  Unless what was awakened by the cancer surgery—

  and what had momentarily managed to penetrate a lifelong comfy take on things—

  the hundred percent recovery had all but extinguished. Unless he was not a

  character with no character to reveal but a character with none that he wished

  to reveal—just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your

  privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your

  confidence is a working novelist. Give the novelist, instead of your life story,

  the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your

  prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back

  to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his.

  “Jerry’s been married four times,” said the Swede, smiling. “Family record.”

  “And you?” I had already figured, from the ages of his three boys, that the

  fortyish blonde with the golf clubs was more than likely a second wife and

  perhaps a third. Yet divorce didn’t fit my picture of someone who so refused to

  register life’s irrational element. If there had been a divorce, it had to have

  been initiated by Miss New Jersey. Or she had died. Or being married to someone

  who had to keep the achievement looking perfect, someone devoted heart and soul

  to the illusion of stability, had led her to suicide. Maybe that was the shock

  that had befallen … Perversely, my attempts to come up with the missing

  piece that would make the Swede whole and coherent kept identifying him with

  disorders of which there was no trace on his beautifully aging paragon’s face. I

  could not decide if that blankness of his was like snow covering something or

  snow covering nothing.

  “Me? Two wives, that’s my limit. I’m a piker next to my brother. His new one’s

  in her thirties. Half his age. Jerry’s the doctor who marries the nurse. All

  four, nurses. They revere the ground Dr. Levov walks on. Four wi
ves, six kids.

  That drove my dad a little nuts. But Jerry’s a big guy, a gruff guy, the high-

  and-mighty prima donna surgeon—got a whole hospital by the short hairs—and so

  even my dad fell in line. Had to. Would have lost him otherwise.

  37

  My kid brother doesn’t screw around. Dad kicked and screamed through each

  divorce, wanted to shoot Jerry a hundred times over, but as soon as Jerry

  remarried, the new wife, in my father’s eyes, was more of a princess than the

  wife before. ‘She’s a doll, she’s a sweetheart, she’s my girl… .’ Anybody

  said anything about any of Jerry’s wives, my father would have murdered him.

  Jerry’s kids he outright adored. Five girls, one boy. My dad loved the boy, but

  the girls, they were the apple of his eye. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for

  those kids. For any of our kids. When he had everybody around him, all of us,

  all the kids, my old man was in heaven. Ninety-six and never sick a day in his

  life. After the stroke, for the six months before he died, that was the worst.

  But he had a good run. Had a good life. A real fighter. A force of nature.

  Unstoppable guy.” A light, floating tone to the words when he goes off on the

  subject of his father, the voice resonant with amorous reverence, disclosing

  * * *

  unashamedly that nothing had permeated more of his life than his father’s

  expectations.

  “The suffering?”

  “Could have been a lot worse,” the Swede said. “Just the six months, and even

  then he didn’t know half the time what was going on. He just slipped away one

  night… and we lost him.”

  By “suffering” I had meant that suffering he had referred to in his letter,