| |
@@@@@Now there was only the mild steady sighing
@@@@@Now there was only the mild steady sighing of the
GulfAnd the beat of my own heart, soft and lowNot ringing, not bonging, not even
tickingI breathed deep and smelled the musty,
slightly damp aroma of a place that's been shut up
for a fairly long time except for the weekly (or
bi-weekly) ritual airingI thought I could also
smell salt and subtropical grasses for which I as
yet had no namesMostly I listened to the sigh of the waves, so
like the breath of some large sleeping creature,
and looked out through the glass wall that fronted
on the waterBecause of Big Pink's elevation, I
couldn't see the beach at all from where I was
sitting, fairly deep in the living room
chloe dior,omega pocket watch,gucci...
chloe dior,omega pocket watch,gucci gucci,discount fendi,chanel top@@@@@It wasn't as common a sight or sound as it had been beforeThe police force was only needed to
help in cases of accidents or other emergencies, not to enforce lawsMost civil servants didn't
have vehicles with sirens, unless the vehicle was an ambulance or a fire truckThis low, chloe dior sleek car behind us was not for any accidentThis was a vehicle made for pursuitI'd
never seen anything quite like it before, but I knew exactly what it meantJared was frozen, his foot still pushing down on the gas pedalI could see that he was trying to
find a solution, a way to omega pocket watch outrun them in this decrepit van or a way to evade them?to hide our
wide white profile in the low, gaunt brush of the desert?without leading them back to the restWithout giving everyone awayWe were so close to the others nowThey slumbered,
unaware?
When he gave up after two seconds gucci gucci of frantic thought, he exhaled?I'm so sorry, Wanda,? he whispered
?Jared??
He reached for my hand and eased up on the gasThe car started to slow?Got your pill?? he choked?Can Mel hear me??
Yes My voice only barely escaped being a sob, too
A short, aching silence?Wanda, I? I discount fendi care about you, tooYou're a good person, WandaYou deserve better than
what I've given you
He had something small, much too small to be so deadly, between his fingers?Wanda, we can't take the chanceWe can't outrun them, not in thisIf we try to run, a
thousand of them will swarm chanel top after
@@@@@He shifted his position on the cot, feigning
@@@@@He shifted his position on the cot, feigning some difficulty, and added, "Yeah, I'd like to get back to my buddies
"Well, you just take it easy," the doctor said, "and we'll see tomorrow morning He jotted down something in his notebook, and went on to the next cotThe sonofabitch, Minetta told himself, I can hardly walkAs if to prove it, his leg began to ache a trifle, and he thought with bitterness, They don't care if you live or die hereAll they want is to get you back where you can stop a bulletHe became sullen, and drowsed through the afternoonThey didn't even take stitches, he said once to himself It began to rain toward evening, and he felt comfortable and secure beneath the tentBoy, am I glad I don't have to be on guard tonight, he told himselfHe listened to the downpour on the tent, and thought with pleasurable pity of the men in the platoon who would be awakened in their damp blankets to sit shivering in the muddy machine-gun hole while the rain penetrated their clothing"Not for me," he said But then he remembered what the doctor had saidIt would be raining again tomorrow
@@@@@While, all the time, the music
was
playing
@@@@@While, all the time, the music
was
playing and earlier arrivals were dancing, and Scarlett's feet were
itching to danceIn Georgia, she thought impatiently, the people
giving the party come forward to meet their guestsThey don't keep
them waiting in line like a chain gangIt's a sight more welcoming than this foolishnessJust before she
followed MrsButler into the room, a dignified manservant offered her
a trayA pile of folded papers was on it, little booklets held
together by thin blue twine with a tiny pencil hanging from itDance cards? They must be dance cardsScarlett had heard Mammy
talk
about balls in Savannah when Ellen O 'Hara was a girl, but she'd never
quite believed that parties were so peaceful that a girl looked in a
book to see who she was supposed to dance withWhy, the Tarleton twins and the Fontaine boys would have split their
britches laughing if anyone told them they had to write their names on
a tiny piece of paper with a little pencil so dinky that it would break
in a real man's fingers! She wasn't even sure she wanted to dance
with
the kind of pantywaist who'd be willing to do thatYes, she was! She
was sure she'd dance with the devil himself, horns and tail and all,
just to be able to danceIt seemed like ten years, not one, since the
Masquerade Ball in Atlanta"I'm so happy to be here," said Scarlett
to Minnie Wentworth, and her voice throbbed with sincerityShe
smiled
at all the other Wentworths, each in turn, and then she was through
the
lineShe turned toward the dancing, her feet already moving in time
to the music, and she drew in her breathOh, it was so beautiful-so
strange and yet so familiar, like a dream she only half-rememberedThe candlelit room was alive with music, with the colors and rustling
of whirling skirtsAlong the walls dowagers were sitting in fragile
gold-painted chairs just as they always had, whispering behind their
fans to one another about the things they had always whispered
about:
the young people who were dancing too close together, the latest
horror
story of someone's daughter's prolonged childbirth, the newest scandal
about their dearest friendsWaiters in full-dress suits moved from
group to group of men and women who weren't dancing with silver
trays
of filled glasses and frosted silver julep cupsThere was a hum of
blended voices, punctuated by laughter, high and deep, the age-old
beloved noise of fortunate light-hearted people enjoying themselvesIt was as if the old world, the beautiful carefree world of her youth,
still existed, as if nothing was changed, and there had never been a
WarHer sharp eyes could see the scabby paint on the walls and the
spur-gouges in the floor under the layers of wax, but she refused to
noticeBetter to enter the illusion, to forget the War and the Yankee
patrols on the street outsideThere was music and there was dancing
and Rhett had promised to be niceNothing more was need
@@@@@?Doesn't bother me? if you can mind your
@@@@@?Doesn't bother me? if you can mind your manners
I had to move then?to knot my fingers together in front of meI wanted so badly to push
Jamie's untidy hair out of his eyes and then leave my arm around his neckSomething that
would not go over well, I was sure?Let's go,? Jeb said to us bothHe took us back out the way we had comeJeb walked on one
side of me, Jamie on the otherJamie seemed to be trying to stare at the floor, but he kept
glancing up at my face?just like I couldn't help glancing down at hisWhenever our eyes met,
we looked away again quicklyWe were about halfway down the big hall when I heard the quiet footsteps behind usMy
reaction was instantaneous and unthinkingI skittered to one side of the tunnel, sweeping Jamie
along with one arm so that I was between him and whatever was coming for me?Hey!? he protested, but he did not knock my arm awayJeb was just as quickThe gun twirled out of its strap with blinding speedIan and the doctor both raised their hands above their heads?We can mind our manners, too,? the doctor saidIt was hard to believe that this soft-spoken
man with the friendly expression was the resident torturer
@@@@@On the other, looking hideously withered and
@@@@@On the other, looking hideously withered and misshapen, Walter watched us approach?Are you up for visitors, Walt?? Ian whispered when Walter's eyes drifted in his direction?Ungh,? Walter moanedHis lips drooped from his slack face, and his skin gleamed wetly in the
low light?Is there anything you need?? I murmuredI pulled my hands free?they fluttered helplessly in
the air between me and WalterHis loosely rolling eyes searched the darkness?Is there anything we can do for you? Anything at all??
His eyes roamed till they found my faceAbruptly, they focused through the drunken stupor and
the pain?Finally,? he gaspedHis breath wheezed and whistled?I knew you would come if I waited
long enoughOh, Gladys, I have so much to tell you
CHAPTER 31
Needed
Ifroze and then looked quickly over my shoulder to see if someone was behind me?Gladys was his wife,? Jamie whispered almost silently
?Gladys,? Walter said to me, oblivious to my reaction?Would you believe I went and got
cancer? What are the odds, eh? Never took a sick day in my life?? His voice faded out until I
couldn't hear it, but his lips continued to moveHe was too weak to lift his hand
@@@@@I was able to get onto all fours, and then
@@@@@I was able to get onto all fours, and then I pulled my good leg forward so I was kneeling on the
badI tried to hop up onto my good leg from thereMy balance was all off, thanks to the
awkward weight of my sore legStrong hands caught me before I could fall on my faceI looked up, a little rueful, to thank IanThe words caught in my throat when I saw that it was Jared whose arms held me up?You could have just asked for help,? he said conversationally?I ?? I cleared my throatI didn't want to??
?Call attention to yourself?? He said the words as if he were truly curiousThere was no
accusation in themHe helped me hobble toward the cave entranceI shook my head once?I didn't want to? make anyone do anything, out of courtesy, that they
didn't want to do That didn't explain it exactly right, but he seemed to understand my
meaning?I don't think Jamie or Ian would begrudge you a helping hand
I glanced back at them over my shoulderIn the low light, neither had noticed I was gone yetThey were bouncing the ball off their heads, and laughing when Wes caught it in the face?But they're having funI wouldn't want to interrupt that
Jared examined my faceI realized I was smiling in affection?You care about the kid quite a bit,? he said?And the man??
?Ian is? Ian believes meHe can be so very kind? for a hu
As you point out, you could even just play cards...
As you point out, you could even just play cards against itBut these days it's getting harder and harder to find reliefThe grotesque is supplanting everything commonplace that people love about this countryToday, to be what they call 'repressed' is a source of shame to people--as not to be repressed used to be
"That is true, that is trueLet me tell you about Al HabermanYou want to talk about the old-style world and what used to be, let's talk about AlA wonderful fella, Al, a handsome fellaGot rich cutting glovesYou could in those daysA husband and a wife who had any ambition could get a few skins and make some glovesEnded up in a small room, two men cutting, a couple of women sewing, they could make the gloves, they could press them and ship themThey made money, they chanel logo necklace were their own bosses, they could work sixty hours a weekWay, way back when Henry Ford was paying the unheard-of sum of a dollar a day, a fine table cutter would make five dollars a dayBut look, in those days it was nothing for an ordinary woman to own twenty, twenty-five pair of glovesA woman used to have a glove wardrobe, different gloves for every outfit--different colors, different styles, different lengthsA woman wouldn't go outside without a pair in any weatherIn those days it wasn't unusual for a woman to spend two, three hours at the glove counter and try on thirty pair of gloves, and the lady behind the desk had a sink and she would wash her hands between each colorIn a fine ladies' glove, we had quarter sizes into the fours and up to eight and a halfGlove gucci pantheon cutting is a wonderful trade--was, anywayEverything now is 'was' A cutter like Al always had a shirt and a tie onIn those days a cutter never worked without a shirt and a tieYou could work at seventy-five and eighty years old tooThey could start in the way Al did, at fifteen, or even younger, and they could go to eightySeventy was a spring chickenAnd they could work at their leisure, Saturday and SundayThese people could work constantlyMoney to send their kids to schoolMoney to fix up their homes nicelyAl could take a piece of leather, say to me, for a gag, 'What do you want, Lou, eight and nine-sixteenths?' And just snip it off without a ruler, measuring it perfectly with just his eyeThe cutter was the prima donnaBut all that pride of craftsmanship is gone, of courseOf the relojes omega actual table cutters who could cut a sixteen-button white glove, I think Al Haberman may have been the last guy in America who could do itThe long glove, of course, vanished' There was the eight-button glove which became very popular, silk-lined, but that was gone by '65We were already taking gloves that were longer, chopping off the tops, making shorties, and using the top to make another gloveFrom this point where the thumb seam is, every inch on out they used to put a button, so we still talk, in terms of length, of buttonsThank God in i960 Jackie Kennedy walked out there with a little glove to the wrist, and a glove to the elbow, and a glove above the elbow, and a pillbox hat, and all of a sudden gloves were in style againFirst Lady of the glove industryWore a size chanel 2.55 bag six and a halfPeople in the glove industry were praying to that ladyShe herself stocked up in Paris, but so what? That woman put the ladies' fine leather glove back on the mapBut when they assassinated Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy left the White House, that and the miniskirt was the end of the ladies' fashion gloveThe assassination of John FKennedy and the arrival of the miniskirt, and together that was the death knell for the ladies' dress gloveTill then it was a twelve-month, year-round businessThere was a time when a woman would not go out unless she wore a pair of gloves, even in the spring and the summerNow the glove is for cold weather or for driving or for sports--"
"Lou," his wife said, "nobody is talking about--"
"Let me finish, pleaseDon't interrupt me, chanel white ceramic watch plea
I don't always remember that everything here is...
I don't always remember that everything here is good that was?that was bad where I've come from She looked down at her Viennese fan of eagle feathers, and he saw that her lips trembled
"I'm so sorry," he said impulsively
At any rate she would understand at once that,...
At any rate she would understand at once that, wherever she went, he was goingHe meant to leave a note for May that should cut off any other alternative
He had fancied himself not only nerved for this plunge but eager to take it
Went twice a year to Asbury Park on the...
Went twice a year to Asbury Park on the excursionThat was the vacationDid my swimming in the Arthur Kill, underneath the Goethals BridgeI'd come home with grease in my hair and my mother would say, 'You are swimming in the Arthur Kill again' And I'd say, 'Elizabeth River? You think I'm crazy?' And all the while my hair is sticking up greasy, you know
It was not quite so easy as this for the two mothers-in-law to find common ground and hit it off, for though Dorothy Dwyer could be a bit loquacious herself at Thanksgiving--just about as loquacious as she was nervous--her subject always was churchPatrick's, that was the original one down there, at the port, and that was Jim's parishThe Germans started StMichael's parish and the Polish had StAdalbert's, at Third Street and East Jersey Street, and StPatrick's is right behind Jackson Park, around the cornerMary's is up in south Elizabeth, in the West End omega pocket watches section, and that's where my parents startedThey had the milk business there on Murray StreetPatrick's, Sacred Heart in north Elizabeth, Blessed Sacrament, Immaculate Conception Church, all IrishThat's up in WestminsterWell, it's on the city lineActually it's in Hillside, but the school across the street is in ElizabethAnd then our church, StGenevieve's, when it started, was a missionary church, you see, just a part of StIt's a big, beautiful church nowBut the building that stands now--and I remember when I first went in it--"
That was as trying as it ever got: Dorothy Dwyer prattling on about Elizabeth as though this were the Middle Ages and beyond the fields tilled by the peasants the only points of demarcation were the spires of the parish churches on the horizonDorothy Dwyer prattling on about StCatherine's while Sylvia Levov sat across from her too polite to do anything other than nod and smile chanel vintage jewelry but her face as white as a sheetJust sat there and endured it, and good manners got her throughSo all in all, it was never anywhere near as bad as everybody had been expectingAnd it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligion-ized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds allA moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the yearA moratorium on all the grievances fendi spy replica and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone elseIt is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hoursThe Presidential SuiteThree bedrooms and a living roomThat's what you got in those days for having been a Miss New JerseyI guess it wasn't booked, so we got on board and they just gave it to us
Dawn was telling the Salzmans about their trip abroad to look at the Simmentals in Switzerland "I'd never been to Europe before, and all the way over everybody was telling me, 'There's nothing like France, just wait until we come into Le Havre in the morning and you smell France' So I waited, and early in the morning Seymour was still in bed and I knew we had docked and so I raced on deck and I sniffed," Dawn said, laughing, "and it was just garlic and onions all over the place
She had raced out of the cabin with chloe bag bay Merry while he was still in bed, but in the story she was on deck alone, astonished to find that France didn't smell like one big flower "The train to ParisYou see miles and miles of woods, but every tree is in lineThey plant their forests in a lineWe had a wonderful time, didn't we, darling?"
"We did," said the Swede "We walked around with great big bread sticks sticking out of our pocketsThey practically said, 'Hey, look at us, a couple of rubes from New Jersey' We were probably just the kind of Americans they laugh atBut who cared? We walked around, nibbling at the tops of them, looking at everything, the Louvre, the garden of the Tuileries--it was just wonderfulWe stayed at the CrillonThe greatest treat of the whole tripThen we got on the night train, the Orient Express to Zurich, and the porter didn't get us up on timeRemember, Seymour?"
Yes, he rememberedMerry wound up on the platform in her tiffany knockoff paj
"So you're the guyMy mother says, 'And he was...
"So you're the guyMy mother says, 'And he was such a nice, quiet child when he came to the house' You know who this is?" the Swede said to the boy"The guy who wrote those books
Mystified, the boy shrugged and muttered, "Hi
"This is my son Chris
"These are friends," I said, sweeping an arm out to introduce the three people with me"And this man," I said to them, "is the greatest athlete in the history of Weequahic HighA real artist in three sportsPlayed first base like Hernandez--thinkingA line-drive doubles hitterDo you know that?" I said to his son"Your dad was our Hernandez
"Hernandez's a lefty," he replied "Well, that's the only difference," I said to the little literalist, and put out my hand again to his father"Nice to see you, Swede
"Remember me to your brother," I said He laughed, we parted, and someone was saying to me, "Well, well, the greatest athlete in the history of Weequahic High called you'Skip And I did feel almost as cambon chanel wonderfully singled out as I had the one time before, at the age often, when the Swede had got so personal as to recognize me by the playground nickname I'd acquired because of two grades I skipped in grade school Midway through the first inning, the woman with us turned to me and said, "You should have seen your face--you might as well have told us he was ZeusI saw just what you looked like as a boy
The following letter reached me by way of my publisher a couple of weeks before Memorial Day, 1995
Dear Skip Zuckerman:
I apologize for any inconvenience this letter may cause youYou may not remember our meeting at Shea StadiumI was with my oldest son (now a first-year college student) and you were out with some friends to see the MetsThat was ten years ago, the era of Carter-Gooden-Hernandez, when you could still watch the Mets I am writing to ask if we might meet sometime to talkI'd be delighted to take you to dinner in New York if you cartier tank louis would permit me I'm taking the liberty of proposing a meeting because of something I have been thinking about since my father died last yearHe was his feisty, combative self right down to the endThat made it all the harder to see him go, despite his advanced age I would like to talk about him and his lifeI have been trying to write a tribute to him, to be published privately for friends, family, and business associatesMost everybody thought of my father as indestructible, a thick-skinned man on a short fuseThat was far from the truthNot everyone knew how much he suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved onesPlease be assured that I will understand if you haven't time to respond
Sincerely,
Seymour "Swede" Levov,
WHS 1945
Had anyone else asked if he could talk to me about a tribute he was writing to his father, I would have wished him luck and kept my nose out of itBut there were compelling reasons for my getting off a note white ceramic chanel watch to the Swede--within the hour--to say that I was at his disposalThe first was Swede Levov wants to meet meRidiculously, perhaps, at the onset of old age, I had only to see his signature at the foot of the letter to be swamped by memories of him, both on and off the field, that were some fifty years old and yet still captivatingI remembered going up every day to the playing field to watch football practice the year that the Swede first agreed to join the teamHe was already a high-scoring hook-shot artist on the basketball court, but no one knew he could be just as magical on the football field until the coach pressed him into duty as an end and our losing team, though still at the bottom of the city league, was putting up one, two, even three touchdowns a game, all scored on passes to the SwedeFifty or sixty kids gathered along the sidelines at practice to watch the Swede--in a battered leather helmet and the brown jersey numbered, in orange, dolce gabbana handbags 11--working out with the varsity against the JVsThe varsity quarterback, Lefty Leventhal, ran pass play after pass play ("Lev-en- thai to Le-vov' Lev-en-thal to Le-vov'" was an anapest that could always get us going back in the heyday of the Swede), and the task of the JV squad, playing defense, was to stop Swede Levov from scoring every timeI'm over sixty, not exactly someone with the outlook on life that he'd had as a boy, and yet the boy's beguilement has never wholly evaporated, for to this day I haven't forgotten the Swede, after being smothered by tacklers, climbing slowly to his feet, shaking himself off, casting an upward, remonstrative glance at the darkening fall sky, sighing rue-18 fully, and then trotting undamaged back to the huddleWhen he scored, that was one kind of glory, and when he got tackled and piled on hard, and just stood up and shook it off, that was another kind of glory, even in a scrimmage And then one day I shared in that gucci g watch glory
I never expected not to be found by youYou sought...
I never expected not to be found by youYou 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 isYou know how very close it isWhere's the logic, Merry? This close and
"I got a ride, and here I was, you see
"The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have anyI relinquish all influence over everythingAs to what constitutes a coincidence, you and I, Daddy--"
"Do you 'relinquish all influence'?" he cried"Do you, 'all influence'?" The most maddening conversation of his lifeThe know-it-all-ism of her absurdly innocent, profoundly insane, unstuttering 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 louis vuitton backpacks 'coincidence' is influence--your powerlessness is power over me, goddamn it! Over your mother, over your grandfather, over your grandmother, over everyone who loves you--wearing that veil is bullshit, Merry, complete and absolute bullshit! 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 lifeThat was not going to make him any less miserableNor was the rage with his daughter, nor was the rage with the little criminal whom he had allowed to be cast as their saviorA cunning and malicious crook who suckered him without half tryingTook him for all she could get in four ten-minute visitsThe unshatterable nervesGod alone knew where such kids came from Then he remembered that one of them came from his houseRita Cohen merely came from somebody else's houseThey were brought up in houses like his ownThey were raised by parents like himAnd so many were girls, girls whose political identity was total, who were no less aggressive and militant, no less drawn to "armed action" omega aqua terra watch than the boysThere is something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformationThey renounce their roots to take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most ruthlesslyThey manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that propels their steely idealismTheir rage is combustibleThey are willing to do anything they can imagine to make history changeThe draft isn't even hanging over their heads
You couldn't have everything, after allIf you...
You couldn't have everything, after allIf you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines
They'd go to Radio City or to a Broadway musical,...
They'd go to Radio City or to a Broadway musical, and then to Vincent'sMerry loved Vincent'sAnd a young waiter named Billy loved her, as it turned out, because of a kid brother he had at home who also stutteredHe told Merry about the TV stars and the movie stars who showed up at Vincent's to eat"See where your dad is sitting? See his chair, signorina? Danny Thomas sat in that chair last nightYou know what Danny Thomas says when people come up to his table and introduce themselves to him?"
"I d-d-don't," said the signorina"He says, 'Nice to see you'" And on Monday, at school, she repeated to Patti whatever Billy at Vincent's in New York had told her the day beforeHad there ever been a happier child? A less destructive child? A little signorina any more loved by her mother and father? No A black woman in tight yellow slacks, a woman colossal as a dray horse through the hindquarters, tottered up to him on her high-heeled shoes, extending a tiny scrap of paper in one handHer face was badly scarredHe knew she had come to inform him that his daughter was deadThat was what was written on the paperIt was a note from Rita Cohen"Sir," she said, "can you tell me where the Salvation Army is?"
"Is there one?" he askedShe did not look as though she thought there wasBut she replied, "I believe so, yeah She held up the piece replicas de bolsas of paperDo you know where it is, sir?" Anything beginning with sir or ending with sir usually means "I want money," and so he reached into his pocket, passed her some bills, and she lurched away, disappeared down into the underpass on those ill-fitting shoes, and after that he saw no one He waited for forty more minutes and would have waited another forty, have waited there until it grew dark, might well have remained long after that, a man in a seven-hundred-dollar custom-made suit with his back against a lamppost like a vagrant in threadbare rags, a man who from all appearances had meetings to attend and business to transact and social obligations to fulfill, selfconsciously loitering on a blighted street near the railroad station, maybe a rich out-of-towner under the mistaken impression that he'd landed in the red-light district, pretending to stare aimlessly into space while his head is full of secrets and his heart is (as it was) thumping awayOn the chance that, horribly enough, Rita Cohen was telling the truth and always had been, he might well have stood vigil there all night long and through to the next morning, thinking to catch Merry coming to workBut, mercifully, if that is the word, in only forty minutes she appeared, a figure tall and female but one he might never have taken for his daughter had he chanel earings not been told to look for her there Again imagination had failed himHe felt as though he had no control over muscles that he'd mastered at the age of two--he wouldn't have been surprised if everything, not excluding his blood, had come gushing from him onto the pavementThis was too much to battle withThis was too much to bring home to Dawn's new faceNot even electrically operated skylights over a modern kitchen whose heart was a state-of-the-art cooking island would enable her to find her way back from thisEighteen hundred nights at the mercy of a murderer's father's imagination still hadn't prepared him for her incognitoIt had not required this to elude the FBIHow she got to this was too horrible for him to contemplateBut to run from his own child? In fear? There was her soul to cherish"Life!" he instructed himself"I cannot let her go! Our life!" And by then Merry had seen him, and had it even been possible for him, he did not fall to pieces and run, because it was now too late to run And to what would he have run anyway? To that Swede who did it all so effortlessly? To that Swede blessedly oblivious of himself and his thoughts? To the Swede Levov who once upon a timeHe might as well turn for help to that hefty black woman with the scarred face, expect to find himself by asking her, "Madam, do you know where it omega constellation is that I am? Have you any idea where I went?"
Merry had seen himHow could she miss him? How could she have missed him even on a street where there was life and not death, where there was a throng of the striving and the harried and the driven and the decisive and not this malignant void? There was her handsome, utterly recognizable six-foot-three father, the handsomest father a girl could haveShe raced across the street, this frightful creature, and like the carefree child he used to enjoy envisioning back when he was himself a carefree child--the girl running from her swing outside the stone house--she threw herself upon his chest, her arms encircling his neckFrom beneath the veil she wore across the lower half of her face--obscuring her mouth and her chin, a sheer veil that was the ragged foot off an old nylon stocking--she said to the man she had come to detest, "Daddy! Daddy!" faultlessly, just like any other child, and looking like a person whose tragedy was that she'd never been anyone's child They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos--for whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition's chosen path to certainty, the rigorous daily given of life--and the daughter who is chaos itselfs, 'he had kelly handbag become a JainHer father didn't know what that meant until, in her unhampered, chantlike speech--the unimpeded speech with which she would have spoken at home had she ever been able to master a stutter while living within her parents' safekeeping--she patiently told himThe Jains were a relatively small Indian religious sect--that he could accept as factBut whether Merry's practices were typical or of her own devising he could not be certain, even if she contended that every last thing she now did was an expression of religious beliefShe wore the veil to do no harm to the microscopic organisms that dwell in the air we breatheShe did not bathe because she revered all life, including the verminShe did not wash, she said, so as "to do no harm to the water She did not walk about after dark, even in her own room, for fear of crushing some living object beneath her feetThere are souls, she explained, imprisoned in every form of matter
"My first obligation was to her
"She was no...
"My first obligation was to her
"She was no longer your client
"She had been my clientA very special clientMy first obligation was to herHow could I violate her confidence? The damage had already been done
"I don't believe you are saying any of this
"What's the law?"
"That you don't betray your client's confidence
"There's another law, idiot--a law against committing murder! She was a fugitive from justice!"
"Don't talk about her like thatWhat else could she do? I thought that maybe she would turn herself inBut that she would do it in jumbo chanel flap bag her own time
"And me? And her mother?"
"Well, it killed me to see you
"You saw me for four monthsIt killed you every day?"
"Each time I thought that maybe it would make a difference if I let you knowBut I didn't see what difference it would really makeIt wouldn't change anythingYou were already so broken
"You are an inhuman bitch
"There was nothing else I could doShe asked me not to tellShe asked me to trust her
"I don't understand how you could be so shortsightedI don't understand how you could be so taken in by a girl who was so mens gucci watches obviously crazy
"I know it's difficult to faceThe whole thing is impossible to understandBut to try to pin it on me, to try to act like anything I could have done would have made a difference--it wouldn't have made a difference in her life, it wouldn't have made a difference in your lifeThere was no bringing her back thereShe wasn't the same girl that she'd beenSomething had gone wrongI saw no point in bringing her back
"Stop that! What difference did that make!"
"I just thought she was so fat and so angry that something very bad must have gone on at relojes omega home
"That it was my fault
"I didn't think thatThat's where everything always goes wrong
"So you took it on yourself to let this sixteen-year-old who had killed somebody run off into the nightKnowing God knows what could happen to her
"You're talking about her as if she were a defenseless girl
"She is a defenseless girlShe was always a defenseless girl
"Once she'd blown up the building there's nothing that could have been done, SeymourI would have betrayed her confidence and what difference would it have made?"
"I would have been with my chanel 2.55 bag daughter! I could have protected her from what has happened to her! You don't know what has happened to herYou didn't see her the way I saw her todayShe's completely crazyI saw her today, SheilaShe's not fat anymore--she's a stick, a stick wearing a ragShe's in a room in Newark in the most awful situation imaginableI cannot describe to you how she livesIf you had only told me, it would all be different!"
"We wouldn't have had an affair--that's all that would have been differentOf course I knew that you might be hurt
"By what?"
"By my having seen seamaster de ville he
The hide man was himself a tannery worker, a big,...
The hide man was himself a tannery worker, a big, gruff Pole with tattoos up and down his massive arms, and the Swede had vague memories of his father's standing at the garage's one window holding the finished hides up to the light and searching them for defects, then stretching them over his knee before making his selection"Feel this," he'd say to the Swede once they were safely back in the car, and the child would crease a delicate kidskin as he'd seen his father do, finger the fineness appreciatively, the velvet texture of the skin's close, tight grain" That's leather," his father told him"What makes kidskin so delicate, Seymour?"
"I don't know
"Well, what is a kid?"
"A baby goatAnd what does he eat?"
"Milk?"
"RightAnd because all the animal has eaten is milk, that's what makes the grain smooth and beautifulLook at the pores of this skin with a magni-220 fying glass and they're so fine you can't even see 'emBut the kid starts eating grass, that skin's a different storyThe goat eats grass and the skin is like sandpaperThe finest glove leather for a formal glove is what, Seymour?"
"KidBut it's not only the kid, son, it's the tanningYou've got to prada clutch know your tanneryIt's like a good cook and a bad cookYou get a good piece of meat and a bad cook can spoil it for youHow come someone makes a wonderful cake and the other doesn't? One is moist and nice and the other is drySame thing in leatherI worked in the tanneryIt's the chemicals, it's the time, it's the temperatureThat's where the difference comes inThat, and not buying second-rate skins to begin withCost as much to tan a bad skin as a good skinCost more to tan a bad one--you work harder at itBeautiful, beautiful," he said, "wonderful stuff," once again lovingly kneading the kidskin between his fingertips"You know how you get it like this, Seymour?"
"How, Daddy?"
"You work at it
There were eight, ten, twelve immigrant families scattered throughout Down Neck to whom Lou Levov distributed the skins along with his own patterns, people from Naples who had been glovers in the old country and the best of whom wound up working at Newark Maid's first home when he could come up with the rent for the small loft on West Market Street on the top floor of the chair factoryThe old Italian grandfather or the father did the cutting on the kitchen table, with the louis vuitton backpacks French rule, the shears, and the spud knife he'd brought from ItalyThe grandmother or the mother did the sewing, and the daughters did the laying off--ironing the glove--in the old-fashioned way, with irons heated up in a box set atop the kitchen's potbellied stoveThe women worked on antique Singers, nineteenth-century machines that Lou Levov, who'd learned to reassemble them, had bought for a song and then repaired himself
Conversation #67 about New York"You can be as...
Conversation #67 about New York"You can be as active in the antiwar movement as you like here in Morristown and here in Old RimrockYou can organize people here against the war, in your school--"
"Daddy, I want to do it my w-wayThe people here in Old Rimrock are not antiwarYou want to be in opposition? Be in opposition here
"You can't do anything about it hereWhat am I going to do, march around the general store?"
"You can organize here
"Rimrockians Against the War? That's going to make a b-big differenceMorristown High Against the WarIsn't that the slogan? So do it--bring the war home to your townYou gucci horsebit hobo like to be unpopular? You'll be plenty unpopular, I can assure you
"I'm not looking to be unpopular
"Well, you will beBecause it's an unpopular position hereIf you oppose the war here with all your strength, believe me, you will make an impactWhy don't you educate people here about the war? This is part of America too, you know
"These people are Americans, MerryYou can be actively against the war right here in the villageYou don't have to go to New York
"Yeah, I can be against the war in our living room
"You can be against the war at the Community Club
"All twenty people
"Morristown is the county chanel earrings stud seatGo into Morristown on SaturdaysThere are people there who are against the warJudge Fontane is against the war, you know thatAvery is against the warThey signed the ad with meThe old judge went to Washington with mePeople around here weren't very happy to see my name there, you knowBut that's my positionYou can organize a march in MorristownYou can work on the march
"And the Morristown High School paper is going to cover itThat'll get the troops out of Vietnam
"I understand you're quite vocal about the war at Morristown High alreadyWhy do you even bother if you don't think it matters? You do think it miu miu black bag mattersEveryone's point of view in America matters in terms of this warStart in your hometown, MerryThat's the way to end the war
"Revolutions don't b-b-begin in the countryside
"We're not talking about revolution
"You're not talking about revolution
And that was the last conversation they ever had to have about New YorkInterminable, but he was patient and reasonable and firm and it workedAs far as he knew, she did not go to New York againShe took his advice and stayed at home, and, after turning their living room into a battlefield, after turning Morristown High into a battlefield, she went out one day and blew omega geneve automatic up the post office, destroying right along with it DrFred Conlon and the village's general store, a small wooden building with a community bulletin board out front and a single old Sunoco pump and the metal pole on which Russ Hamlin--who, with his wife, owned the store and ran the post office--had raised the American flag every morning since Warren Gamaliel Harding was president of the United States
II
The Fall
A tiny, bone-white girl who looked half Merry's age but claimed to be some six years older, a Miss Rita Cohen, came to the Swede four months after Merry's disappearanceShe was dressed like balenciaga motorcycle handbags Dr
And where will it end? What is the limit? You...
And where will it end? What is the limit? You didn't all grow up in this kind of worldWe grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, workwell, it was differentThe changes are beyond conceptionI sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever beenI don't know what to make of the end of so many thingsThe lack of feeling for individuals that a person sees in that movie, the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in Newark--how did this happen? You don't have to revere your family, you don't have to revere your country, you don't have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of themBecause if you don't, you are just out there on your own and I feel for youOrcutt, or am I wrong?"
"To wonder where the limit is?" Orcutt replied "Well, yes," said Lou Levov, who, the Swede observed--and not for the first time--had bolsas louis spoken of children and violence without any sense that the subject intersected with the life of his immediate familyMerry had been used for somebody else's evil purposes--that was the story to which it was crucial for them all to remain anchoredHe kept such a sharp watch over each and every one of them to be certain that nobody wavered for a moment in their belief in that storyNo one in this family was going to fall into doubt about Merry's absolute innocence, not so long as he was alive Among the many things the Swede could not think about from within the confines of his box was what would happen to his father when he learned that the death toll was four "You're right," Bill Orcutt was saying to Lou Levov, "to wonder where the limit isI think everybody here is wondering where the limit is and worrying where the limit is every time they look at the papersExcept the professor of transgressionBut then we're all stifled by convention--we're not great outlaws like William Burroughs chanel reporter bag and the Marquis de Sade and the holy saint Jean GenetThe Let Every Man Do Whatever He Wishes School of LiteratureThe brilliant school of Civilization Is Oppression and Morality Is Worse
And he did not blush"Morality" without batting an eye"Transgression" as though he were a stranger to it, as though it were not he of all the men here--William III, latest in that long line of Orcutts advertised in their graveyard as virtuous men--who had transgressed to the utmost by violating the unity of a family already half destroyed His wife had a loverAnd it was for the lover that she'd undergone the rigors of a face-lift, to woo and win himYes, now he understood the gushing letter profusely thanking the plastic surgeon for spending "the five hours of your time for my beauty," thanking him as if the Swede had not paid twelve thousand dollars for those five hours, plus five thousand more for the clinic suite where they had spent the two nightsIt is quite wonderful, dear doctorIt is as though chanel big I have been given a new lifeBoth from within and from the outsideIn Geneva he had sat up with her all night, held her hand through the nausea and the pain, and all of it for the sake of somebody elseIt was for the sake of somebody else that she was building the houseThe two of them were designing the house for each other To run away to Ponce to live with Sheila after Merry disappeared--no, Sheila had made him come to his senses and recover his rectitude and go back to his wife and as much of their life as remained intact, to the wife even a mistress knew he could not wound, let alone desert, in such a crisisYet these other two were going to pull it offHe knew it the moment he saw them in the kitchenOrcutt dumps Jessie and she dumps me and the house is for themShe thinks our catastrophe is over and so she is going to bury the past and start anew--face, house, husband, all newTry as you will, you can't get under my skin tonight They are the outlawsOrcutt, said Dawn to her husband, omega automatic seamaster lived completely off what his family once was--well, she was living off what she'd just becomeDawn and Orcutt: two predators The outlaws are everywhereThey're inside the gates H, h a d a phone callOne of the girls came out of the kitchen to tell himShe whispered, "It's from I think Czechoslovakia
He took the call in Dawn's downstairs study, where Orcutt had already moved the large cardboard model of the new houseAfter leaving Jessie on the terrace with the Swede and his parents and the drinks, Orcutt must have gone back to the van to get the model and carried it into Dawn's study and set it up on her desk before proceeding into the kitchen to help her shuck the corn Rita Cohen was on the lineShe knew about Czechoslovakia because "they" were following him: they'd followed him earlier in the summer to the Czech consulate
Austrey, arrives next week on the RussiaHe is...
Austrey, arrives next week on the RussiaHe is coming to enter his new sloop, the Guinevere, in next summer's International Cup Race
There was never an alarm clock in Merry's...
There was never an alarm clock in Merry's life--Dawn was her alarm clockBefore six o'clock Dawn was already out in the barn, but at promptly six-thirty she stopped tending the herd, came back in the house, and went up to the child's room, where, as she sat at the edge of the bed, daybreak's comforting observance beganWithout a word it began--Dawn simply stroking Merry's sleeping head, a pantomime that could go on for two full minutesNext, almost singing the whispered words, Dawn lightly inquired, "A sign of life?" Merry responded not by opening her eyes but by moving a little finger"Another sign, please?" On the game went--Merry playing along by wrinkling her nose, by moistening her lips, by sighing just audibly--till eventually she was up out of bed ready to goIt was a game embodying a loss, for Merry the state of being completely protected, for Dawn the project of completely protecting what once had seemed completely protectableWaking The Baby: it continued until the baby was nearly twelve, the one rite of infancy that Dawn could not resist indulging, that neither one of them ever appeared eager to outgrow How he loved to sight them doing together what mothers and daughters doTo a father's eye, one seemed to amplify the otherIn bathing suits rushing out of the surf together and racing each other to the towels--the wife now a little past her robust moment and the daughter edging up to the beginning of hersA delineation of life's cyclical nature that left him feeling afterward as though he had a spacious understanding of the whole female sexMerry, with her growing curiosity about the trappings of womanhood, putting on Dawn's jewelry while, beside her at the mirror, Dawn helped her preenMerry confiding in Dawn about her fears of ostracism--of other rolex vintage women's watch kids ignoring her, of her girlfriends ganging up on herIn those quiet moments from which he was excluded (daughter relying on mother, Dawn and Merry emotionally one inside the other like those Russian dolls), Merry appeared more poignantly than ever not a small replica of his wife, or of himself, but an independent little being--something similar, a version of them, yet distinctive and new--for which he had the most passionate affinity It wasn't the house Dawn hated--what she hated, he knew, was that the motive for having the house (for making the beds, for setting the table, for laundering the curtains, for organizing the holidays, for apportioning her energies and differentiating her duties by the day of the week) had been destroyed right along with Hamlin's store
The kid in that swing, the kid in that treeThe...
The kid in that swing, the kid in that treeThe kid in that tree who was now on the floor of that room The Orcutts had come early so that Bill and Dawn would have time together to go over the problem of the link that was to join the one-story house to the two-story garageOrcutt had been away in New York for a couple of days, and Dawn was impatient to get this, their last problem, resolved after weeks of thinking and rethinking how to create a harmonious relationship between the very different buildingsEven if the garage was more or less disguised as a barn, Dawn didn't want it too close, overwhelming the distinctiveness of the house, but she was afraid that a link twenty-four feet long, which was Orcutt's proposal, might impart the look of a motel They ruminated together almost daily, not only over the dimensions but now over whether the effect should perhaps be that of a greenhouse rather than of the simple passageway first plannedWhenever Dawn felt that Orcutt was trying to impose on her, however graciously, a solution that had more to do with some old-fashioned architectural aesthetic of his own than with the rigorous modernity she had in mind for their new home, she could be quite peeved, and she even wondered, on those few occasions when she was outright furious with him, if it hadn't been a mistake to turn to someone who, though he had considerable authority with the local contractors--guaranteeing a first-class construction job)--and an excellent professional reputation, was "essentially a restorer of antiques Years had passed since she'd been intimidated by the snobbery that, fresh from Elizabeth and the family home (and the pictures on the wall and the statue in the hallway), omega constellation she'd taken to be more or less Orcutt's whole storyNow his credentials as county gentry were what she was most cutting about when the two of them were at oddsThe angry disdain disappeared, however, when Orcutt came back to her, usually within twenty-four hours, having alighted on--in Dawn's words--"a perfectly elegant plan," whether it was for the location of the washer-dryer or a bathroom skylight or the stairway to the guest room above the garage Orcutt had brought with him, along with the large one-sixteenth-inch scale model out in the van, samples of a new transparent plastic material he wanted her to consider for the walls and the roof of the linkHe'd gone into the kitchen to show it to herAnd there the two of them remained, the resourceful architect and the exacting client, debating all over again--while Dawn cleaned the lettuce, sliced the tomatoes, shucked the two dozen ears of corn the Orcutts had brought over in a bag from their garden--the pros and cons of a transparent link rather than the board-and-batten enclosure Orcutt had first proposed to unify it with the exterior of the garageAnd meanwhile on the back terrace that looked out toward the hill where, in another time, on an evening like this one, Dawn's herd would be silhouetted against the flamboyance of the late-sum-327 mer sunset, the Swede prepared the barbecue coalsKeeping him company were his father and Jessie Orcutt, who rarely these days was seen out socializing with Bill but who, according to Dawn, was going through what had wearily been described--by Orcutt, phoning to ask if they wouldn't mind his wife's coming along with him for dinner--as "the calm that heralds the manic upswing
The Orcutts had three boys chanel classic bag and two girls, all grown now, living and working at jobs in New York, five kids to whom Jessie, from all reports, had been a conscientious motherIt was after they'd gone that the heavy drinking began, at first only to lift her spirits, then to suppress her misery, and in the end for its own sakeYet back when the two couples had first met, it was Jessie's soundness that had impressed the Swede: so fresh, so outdoorsy, so cheerily at one with life, not the least bit false or insipidor that's how she'd struck the Swede, if not his wife Jessie was a Philadelphia heiress, a finishing-school girl, who always during the day, and sometimes in the evening, wore her mud-spattered jodhpurs and who generally had her hair arranged in flossy flaxen braidsWhat with those braids and her pure, round, unblemished face--behind which, said Dawn, if you bit into it, you'd find not a brain but a Mclntosh apple--she could have passed for a Minnesota farm girl well into her forties, except on those days when her hair was worn up and she could look as much like a young boy as like a young girlThe Swede would never have imagined that there was anything missing from Jessie's endowment to prevent her from sailing right on through into old age as the laudable mother and lively wife who could make a party for everyone's children out of raking the leaves and whose Fourth of July picnics, held on the lawn of the old Orcutt estate, were a treasured tradition among her friends and neighborsHer character struck the Swede back then as a compound in which you'd find just about everything toxic to desperation and dreadAt the core of her he could imagine a nucleus of confidence plaited just as neatly and tightly as her vintage omega watches braided hair Yet hers was another life broken cleanly in twoNow the hair was a ganglion of iron-gray hemp always in need of brushing, and Jessie was a haggard old woman at fifty-four, an undernourished drunk hiding the bulge of a drunk's belly beneath her shapeless sack dressesAll she could ever find to talk about--on the occasions when she managed to leave the house and go out among people--was the "fun" she'd had back before she'd ever had a drink, a husband, a child, or a single thought in her head, before she'd been enlivened (as she certainly had looked to him to be) by the stupendous satisfactions of being a dependable person That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you downWhat was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry forIt was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckupIt was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinityAnd how odd it made him seem to himself to think that he who had always felt blessed to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily chanel jumbo flap rooted "We had a place outside Paoli," Jessie was telling his father"We always raised animalsWhen I was seven I got the most wonderful thingSomebody gave me a pony and a cartAnd after that there was nothing to stop meI've ridden all my lifeWas involved in a drag down there in school in VirginiaWhen I went to school in Virginia I was the whip
"Wait a minute," said MrI don't know what a drag and a whip isYou got a guy from Newark here
She pursed her lips--when he called her "MrsOrcutt"--seemingly for his having addressed her as though he were her social inferior, which, the Swede knew, was in part why his father had called her "MrsOrcutt" to Lou Levov also because of the distancing disdain he had for the drink in her glass, her third Scotch and water in under an hour, and the cigarette--her fourth--burning down between the fingers of her trembling handHe was amazed by her lack of control--by anyone's lack of control but particularly by the lack of control of the goy who drankDrink was the devil that lurked in the goy--"Big-shot goyim," his father said, "the presidents of companies, and they're like Indians with firewater
'"Jessie,"' she said, "'Jessie,' please," her grin painfully artificial, disguising, by the Swede's estimate, about ten percent of the agony she now felt at having decided against staying alone at home with her dogs and her TV tray and her own J
The kid in that swing, the kid in that treeThe...
The kid in that swing, the kid in that treeThe kid in that tree who was now on the floor of that room The Orcutts had come early so that Bill and Dawn would have time together to go over the problem of the link that was to join the one-story house to the two-story garageOrcutt had been away in New York for a couple of days, and Dawn was impatient to get this, their last problem, resolved after weeks of thinking and rethinking how to create a harmonious relationship between the very different buildingsEven if the garage was more or less disguised as a barn, Dawn didn't want it too close, overwhelming the distinctiveness of the house, but she was afraid that a link twenty-four feet long, which was Orcutt's proposal, might impart the look of a motel They ruminated together almost daily, not only over the dimensions but now over whether the effect should perhaps be that of a greenhouse rather than of the simple passageway first plannedWhenever Dawn felt that Orcutt was trying to impose on her, however graciously, a solution that had more to do with some old-fashioned architectural aesthetic of his own than with the rigorous modernity she had in mind for their new home, she could be quite peeved, and she even wondered, on those few occasions when she was outright furious with him, if it hadn't been a mistake to turn to someone who, though he had considerable authority with the local contractors--guaranteeing a first-class construction job)--and an excellent professional reputation, was "essentially a restorer of antiques Years had passed since she'd been intimidated by the snobbery that, fresh from Elizabeth and the family home (and the pictures on the wall and the statue in the hallway), authentic hermes she'd taken to be more or less Orcutt's whole storyNow his credentials as county gentry were what she was most cutting about when the two of them were at oddsThe angry disdain disappeared, however, when Orcutt came back to her, usually within twenty-four hours, having alighted on--in Dawn's words--"a perfectly elegant plan," whether it was for the location of the washer-dryer or a bathroom skylight or the stairway to the guest room above the garage Orcutt had brought with him, along with the large one-sixteenth-inch scale model out in the van, samples of a new transparent plastic material he wanted her to consider for the walls and the roof of the linkHe'd gone into the kitchen to show it to herAnd there the two of them remained, the resourceful architect and the exacting client, debating all over again--while Dawn cleaned the lettuce, sliced the tomatoes, shucked the two dozen ears of corn the Orcutts had brought over in a bag from their garden--the pros and cons of a transparent link rather than the board-and-batten enclosure Orcutt had first proposed to unify it with the exterior of the garageAnd meanwhile on the back terrace that looked out toward the hill where, in another time, on an evening like this one, Dawn's herd would be silhouetted against the flamboyance of the late-sum-327 mer sunset, the Swede prepared the barbecue coalsKeeping him company were his father and Jessie Orcutt, who rarely these days was seen out socializing with Bill but who, according to Dawn, was going through what had wearily been described--by Orcutt, phoning to ask if they wouldn't mind his wife's coming along with him for dinner--as "the calm that heralds the manic upswing
The Orcutts had three boys louis vuitton white speedy and two girls, all grown now, living and working at jobs in New York, five kids to whom Jessie, from all reports, had been a conscientious motherIt was after they'd gone that the heavy drinking began, at first only to lift her spirits, then to suppress her misery, and in the end for its own sakeYet back when the two couples had first met, it was Jessie's soundness that had impressed the Swede: so fresh, so outdoorsy, so cheerily at one with life, not the least bit false or insipidor that's how she'd struck the Swede, if not his wife Jessie was a Philadelphia heiress, a finishing-school girl, who always during the day, and sometimes in the evening, wore her mud-spattered jodhpurs and who generally had her hair arranged in flossy flaxen braidsWhat with those braids and her pure, round, unblemished face--behind which, said Dawn, if you bit into it, you'd find not a brain but a Mclntosh apple--she could have passed for a Minnesota farm girl well into her forties, except on those days when her hair was worn up and she could look as much like a young boy as like a young girlThe Swede would never have imagined that there was anything missing from Jessie's endowment to prevent her from sailing right on through into old age as the laudable mother and lively wife who could make a party for everyone's children out of raking the leaves and whose Fourth of July picnics, held on the lawn of the old Orcutt estate, were a treasured tradition among her friends and neighborsHer character struck the Swede back then as a compound in which you'd find just about everything toxic to desperation and dreadAt the core of her he could imagine a nucleus of confidence plaited just as neatly and tightly as her vuitton pink bag braided hair Yet hers was another life broken cleanly in twoNow the hair was a ganglion of iron-gray hemp always in need of brushing, and Jessie was a haggard old woman at fifty-four, an undernourished drunk hiding the bulge of a drunk's belly beneath her shapeless sack dressesAll she could ever find to talk about--on the occasions when she managed to leave the house and go out among people--was the "fun" she'd had back before she'd ever had a drink, a husband, a child, or a single thought in her head, before she'd been enlivened (as she certainly had looked to him to be) by the stupendous satisfactions of being a dependable person That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you downWhat was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry forIt was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckupIt was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinityAnd how odd it made him seem to himself to think that he who had always felt blessed to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily women's tank watch replica rooted "We had a place outside Paoli," Jessie was telling his father"We always raised animalsWhen I was seven I got the most wonderful thingSomebody gave me a pony and a cartAnd after that there was nothing to stop meI've ridden all my lifeWas involved in a drag down there in school in VirginiaWhen I went to school in Virginia I was the whip
"Wait a minute," said MrI don't know what a drag and a whip isYou got a guy from Newark here
She pursed her lips--when he called her "MrsOrcutt"--seemingly for his having addressed her as though he were her social inferior, which, the Swede knew, was in part why his father had called her "MrsOrcutt" to Lou Levov also because of the distancing disdain he had for the drink in her glass, her third Scotch and water in under an hour, and the cigarette--her fourth--burning down between the fingers of her trembling handHe was amazed by her lack of control--by anyone's lack of control but particularly by the lack of control of the goy who drankDrink was the devil that lurked in the goy--"Big-shot goyim," his father said, "the presidents of companies, and they're like Indians with firewater
'"Jessie,"' she said, "'Jessie,' please," her grin painfully artificial, disguising, by the Swede's estimate, about ten percent of the agony she now felt at having decided against staying alone at home with her dogs and her TV tray and her own J
Why don't you say it? Are you afraid I'm going to...
Why don't you say it? Are you afraid I'm going to get laid? Is that what you're afraid of? I'm not that moronic to get knocked upWhat have I ever done in my life that's irresponsible?"
"You broke the agreementThat's the end of it
"This is not a corporationThis isn't b-b-b-b-b-b-b-business, DaddyEvery day in this house is like being under house arrest
"I don't like you very much when you act like thisI don't like you either
Conversation #44 about New York"I'm not driving you to the trainYou're not leaving the house
"What are you going to do? B-barricade me in? How you going to stop me?
You going to tie me to my high chair? Is that how you treat your daughter? I can't b-b-believe my own father would threaten me I with physical force
"I'm not threatening you with physical force
"Then how are you going to keep me discount hermes in the house? I'm not just one , of Mom's dumb c-c-c-c-cows! I'm not going to live here forever and ever and everC-cool, Calm, and CollectedWhat is it that ' you're so afraid of? What is it you're so afraid of people for? Haven't you ever heard that New York is one of the world's great cultural centers? People come from the whole world to experience New YorkYou always wanted me to experience everything elseWhy can't I experience New York? Better than this d-dump hereWhat are you so angry about? That I might have a real idea of my own? Something that you didn't come up with first? Something that isn't one of your well-thought-out plans for the family and how things should go? All I'm doing is taking a fucking train into the cityMillions of men and women do it every day to go to workFall in with the wrong peopleGod forbid I vintage cartier watch should ever get another point of viewYou married an Irish CatholicWhat did your family think about your falling in with the wrong people? She married a J-j-j-j-jewWhat did her family think about her falling in with the wrong people? How much worse can I do? Maybe hang out with a guy with an Afro--is that what you're afraid of? I don't think so, DaddyWhy don't you worry about something that matters, like the war, instead of whether or not your overprivileged little girl takes a train into the b-big city b-by herself?"
Conversation #53 about New York
"You still won't tell me what kind of horrible fucking fate is going to b-b-befall me if I take a fucking train to the cityThey have apartments and roofs in New York tooThey have locks and doors tooA lock isn't something that is unique to Old Rimrock, New JerseyEver think of dolce gabbana handbags that, Seymour-Levov-it-rhymes-with-the-love? You think everything that is f-foreign to you is b-badDid you ever think that there are some things that are f-foreign to you that are good? And that as your daughter I would have some instinct to go with the right people at the right time? You're always so sure I'm going to fuck up in some wayIf you had any confidence in me, you'd think that I might hang out with the right peopleYou don't give me any credit
"Merry, you know what I'm talking aboutYou're involving yourself with political radicalsB-b-because they don't agree with y-y-y-you they're radical
"These are people who have very extreme political ideas--"
"That's the only thing that gets anything done is to have strong ideas, Daddy
"But you are only sixteen years old, and they are much older and more sophisticated than cartier tank louis youSo maybe I'll learn somethingExtreme is b-b-b-110 blowing up a little country for some misunderstood notions about freedomB-b-b-blowing off b-b-boys' legs and b-balls, that is extreme, DaddyTaking a b-bus or a train into New York and spending a night in a locked, secure apartment--I don't see what's so extreme about thatI think people sleep somewhere every night if they canT-t-tell me what's so extreme about thatDo you think war is b-bad? Eww--extreme idea, DaddyIt's not the idea that's extreme--it's the fact that someone might care enough about something to try to make it differentYou think that's extreme? That's your problemIt might mean more to someone to try to save other people's lives than to finish a d-d-d-d-d-d-degree at Columbia--that's extreme? No, the other is extreme"
"You talking about Bill and cambon chanel Melissa?"
"Yea
I believe you've been asleep!" She laughed, and...
I believe you've been asleep!" She laughed, and drawing out her hat pins tossed her velvet hat on the sofaShe looked paler than usual, but sparkling with an unwonted animation
"I went to see Granny, and just as I was going away Ellen came in from a walk
when you're feelin' blue,that's the thing to...
when you're feelin' blue,that's the thing to do"--"all this I did not know," I told her, "on the harvest moon hayride in October 1948
"I didn't want you to knowI didn't want anybody to knowI didn't want anybody to find out Harold slept in the kitchenThat's why I wouldn't let you undo my braI didn't want you to be my boyfriend and come to pick me up and see where my brother had to sleepIt had nothing to do with you, sweetheart
"Well, I feel better for being told thatI wish you'd told me sooner
"I wish I had," she said, and first we were laughing and then, unexpectedly, Joy began to cry and, perhaps because of that damn song, "Dream," which we used to dance to with the lights turned down in somebody or other's basement back when the Pied Pipers still had Jo Stafford and used to sing it the way it's supposed to be sung--in locked harmony, to that catatonic forties beat, with the ethereal tinkle of the xylophone hollowly sounding behind them-- or perhaps because Alan Meisner had become a Republican and second baseman Bert Bergman had become a corpse and Ira Pos-ner, instead of shining shoes at the newsstand outside the Essex County courthouse, had escaped his Dostoyevskian family and become a psychiatrist, because Julius Pincus had disabling tremors from the drug that prevented the rejection from his body of the fourteen-year-old girl's kidney keeping him alive and because Mendy Gurlik was still a horny seventeen-year-old kid and because Joy's brother, Harold, had slept for ten years in a kitchen and because Schrimmer had married a woman nearly half his age who had a body that cartier roadster replica didn't make him want to slit his throat but to whom he now had to explain every single thing about the past, or perhaps because I seemed alone in having wound up with no children, grandchildren, or, in Minskoff's words, "anything like that," or perhaps because after all these years of separation this reuniting of perfect strangers had all gone on a little too long, a load of unruly emotion began sliding around in me, too, and there I was thinking again of the Swede, of the notorious significance that an outlaw daughter had thrust on him and his family during the Vietnam WarA man whose discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflectionAll that normalcy interrupted by murderAll the small problems any family expects to encounter exaggerated by something so impossible ever to reconcileThe disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation's getting smarter--smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before--out of each new generation's breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he dior rasta had been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image of his father's fatherthe angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive--initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyoneThe daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral--into the indigenous American berserk The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary SwedeA guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differentlyIn no way prepared for what is going to hit himHow could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakesRuns his business like a charmHandles his handful of an old man well enoughHe was really living it out, his version of paradiseThis is how successful people liveThey're good citizensGod is smiling down on themThere are problems, they omega seamaster replica watches adjustAnd then everything changes and it becomes impossibleNothing is smiling down on anybodyAnd who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossibleBut who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? NobodyThe tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy He kept peering in from outside at his own lifeThe struggle of his life was to bury this thingBut how could he?
Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed After all the effervescent strain of resuscitating our class's mid-century innocence--together a hundred aging people recklessly turning back the clock to a time when time's passing was a matter of indifference--with the afternoon's exhilarations finally coming to an end, I began to contemplate the very thing that must have baffled the Swede till the moment he died: how had he become history's plaything? History, American history, the stuff you read about in books and study in school, had made its way out to tranquil, untrafficked Old Rimrock, New Jersey, to countryside where it had not put in an appearance that was notable since Washington's army twice wintered in the highlands adjacent to MorristownHistory, which had made no drastic impingement on the daily life of the women's tank watch replica local populace since the Revolutionary War, wended its way back out to these cloistered hills and, improbably, with all its predictable unforeseenness, broke helter-skelter into the orderly household of the Seymour Levovs and left the place in a shamblesPeople think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing In earnest, right then and there, while swaying with Joy to that out-of-date music, I began to try to work out for myself what exactly had shaped a destiny unlike any imagined for the famous Weequahic three-letterman back when this music and its sentimental exhortation was right to the point, when the Swede, his neighborhood, his city, and his country were in their exuberant heyday, at the peak of confidence, inflated with every illusion born of hopeWith Joy Helpern once again close in my arms and quietly sobbing to hear the old pop tune enjoining all of us sixty-odd-year-olds, "Dreamand they might come true," I lifted the Swede up onto the stageThat evening at Vincent's, for a thousand different excellent reasons, he could not bring himself to ask me to do thisFor all I know he had no intention of asking me to do thisTo get me to write his story may not have been why he was there at allMaybe it was only why I was there Basketball was never like this He'd invoked in me, when I was a boy--as he did in hundreds of other boys--the strongest fantasy I had of being someone elseBut to wish oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you gucci bangle watch are
"To whom? To him? I don't think soTo the dead,"...
"To whom? To him? I don't think soTo the dead," said Ira, "it's a drop in the bucket Just then, from directly behind me, I heard Mendy Gurlik saying to someone, "Whoja jerk off over?"
"Lorraine," a second man repliedWho else?" said Mendy
"Selma? I didn't realize that," Mendy said"I'm surprised to hear thatNo, I never wanted to fuck SelmaFor me it was always twirlersWatch 'em practicing up on the field after school and then go home and beat offCocoa-colored pancake makeupYou notice something? The guys on the whole don't look too bad, a lot of them work out, but the girls, you knowno, a forty-fifth reunion is not the best place to come looking for ass
"True, true," said the other man, who spoke softly and seemed not to have found in the occasion quite the nostalgic license that Mendy had, "time has not been kind to the women
"You know who's dead? Bert and Utty," Mendy saidThank God I get the testYou get the test?"
"What test?" the other fellow asked"Shit, you don't get the test?"
"Skip," said Mendy, pulling me away from Ira, "Meisner doesn't get the test
Now Meisner was MrMeisner, Abe Meisner, a short, swarthy, heavyset man with stooped shoulders and a jutting head, proprietor of Meisner's Cleaners--"5 Hour Cleaning Service"--situated on Chancellor between the shoe repair shop, where the Italian radio station was always playing while you waited on the seat behind the swinging half-door for Ralph to fix your heels, and the beauty salon, Roline's, from chloe dior which my mother once brought home the copy of Silver Screen where I read an article that stunned me called "George Raft Is a Lonely ManMeisner, a short, indestructible earthling like her husband, worked with him in the store and one year also sold war bonds and stamps with my mother in a booth right out on Chancellor AvenueAlan, their son, had gone through school with me, beginning with kindergarten, skipping the same grades I did all through grade schoolAlan Meisner and I used to be thrown into a room together by our teacher and, as though we were George SKaufman and Moss Hart, told to turn something out whenever a play was needed at assembly for a national holidayFor a couple of seasons right after the war MrMeisner--through some miracle--got to be the dry cleaner for the Newark Bears, the Yankees' Triple A farm team, and one summer day, and a great day it was, I was enlisted by Alan to help him carry the Bears' freshly dry-cleaned away uniforms, via three buses, to the Ruppert Stadium clubhouse all the way down on Wilson AvenueJesus," I said, "you are your old man
"Who else's old man should I be?" he replied, and, taking my face between his hands, gave me a kiss"Al," Mendy said, "tell Skippy what you heard Schrimmer telling his wifeSchrimmer's got a new wife, SkipThree years ago he went to a psychiatristThe psychiatrist said to him, 'What do you think when I ask you to imagine your wife's body'
'I think I should slit my throat,' Schrim saidSo he divorces louis vuitton purses her and marries the shiksa secretaryAl, tell Skip what she said, the longer loksh
"She said to Schrim," said Alan, the two of us grinning as we clutched each other's diminished biceps, "she said, 'Why are they all Mutty and Utty and Dutty and Tutty? If his name is Charles, why is he called Tutty?'
'I shouldn't have brought you,' Schrim said to her'I knew I shouldn'tI can't explain it,' Schrim said to her, 'nobody canIt's beyond explanation'
And what was Alan now? Raised by a dry cleaner, worked after school for a dry cleaner, himself a dead ringer for a dry cleaner, he was a superior court judge in PasadenaIn his father's pocket-sized dry-cleaning shop there had been a rotogravure picture of FDR framed on the wall above the pressing machine, beside an autographed photo of Mayor Meyer EllensteinI remembered these photographs when Alan told me that he had twice been a member of Republican delegations to the presidential conventionWhen Mendy asked if Alan could get him tickets to the Rose Bowl, Alan Meisner, with whom I used to travel to Brooklyn to see Dodger Sunday doubleheaders the year that Robinson broke in, with whom I'd start out at eight aon a bus from our corner, take it downtown to Penn Station, switch to the tubes to New York, in New York switch to the subway to Brooklyn, all to get to Ebbets Field and eat our sandwiches from our lunch bags before batting practice began--Alan Meisner, who, once the ballgame got under way, drove everybody around us vintage omega watches crazy with his vocally unmodulated play-by-57 play of both ends of the doubleheader--this same Alan Meisner took a pocket diary out of his jacket and carefully inscribed a note to himselfI saw what he'd written from over his shoulder: "R
Meaningless? Unspectacular? Nothing very enormous going on there? Well, what you make of it would depend on where you grew up and how life got opened up to youAlan Meisner could not be said to have risen out of nothing
She started up, and freeing herself from him...
She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth"Ah, don't make love to me! Too many people have done that," she said, frowning
Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have given him"I have never made love to you," he said, "and I never shallBut you are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us
"Possible for either of us?" She looked at him with unfeigned astonishment"And you say that?when it's you who've made it impossible?"
He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow of light tore its blinding way
"I'VE made it impossible??"
"You, you, YOU!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the verge of tears"Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing?give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage and to spare one's family the publicity, the chanel white watches scandal? And because my family was going to be your family?for May's sake and for yours?I did what you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to doAh," she broke out with a sudden laugh, "I've made no secret of having done it for you!"
She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of her dress like a stricken masquerader
I thought somehow I could keep it all a secret...
I thought somehow I could keep it all a secret and just win the moneyI was a baby! I was sure at least I wasn't going to win Miss New Jersey, I was positiveI looked around and there was this sea of good-looking girls and they all knew what to do, and I didn't know anythingThey knew how to use hair rollers and put false eyelashes on, and I couldn't roll my hair right until I was halfway through my Miss New Jersey yearI thought, 'Oh, my God, look at their makeup,' and they had beautiful wardrobes and I had a prom dress and borrowed clothes, and so I was convinced there was no way I could ever winAnd then they were coaching me on how to sit and how to stand, even how to listen--they sent me to a model agency to learn how to walkThey didn't like the way I walkedI didn't care how I walked--I walked! I walked well enough to become Miss New Jersey, didn't I? If I don't walk well enough to become Miss America, the hell with it! But you have to glideNo! I will walk the way I walk! Don't swing your arms too much, but don't hold them stiffly at your sideAll these little tricks of the trade to make me so self-conscious I could barely move! To land not on your heels but on the balls of your feet--this is the kind of thing I went throughIf I can just drop out of this thing! How can I back out of this thing? Leave me alone! All of you leave me alone! I never wanted this in the first place! Do you see why I married you? Now do you relojes omega understand? One reason only! I wanted something that seemed normal! So desperately after that year, I wanted something normal! How I wish it had never happened! None of it! They put you up on a pedestal, which I didn't ask for, and then they rip you off it so damn fast it can blind you! And I did not ask for any of it! I had nothing in common with those other girlsI hated them and they hated meThose tall girls with their big feet! None of them giftedAll of them so chummy! I was a seriousmusic student! All I wanted was to be left alone and not to have that goddamn crown sparkling like crazy up on top of my head! I never wanted any of it! Never!"
It was a great help to him, driving home after one of those visits, to remember her as the girl she had really been back then, who, as he recalled it, was nothing like the girl she portrayed as herself in those tiradesDuring the week in September of 1949 leading up to the Miss America Pageant, when she called Newark every night from the Dennis Hotel to tell him about what happened to her that day as a Miss America contestant, what radiated from her voice was sheer delight in being herselfHe'd never heard her like that before--it was almost frightening, this undisguised exulting in being where she was and who she was and what she wasSuddenly life existed rapturously and for Dawn Dwyer aloneThe surprise of this new and uncharacteristic immoderation even made him wonder if, when the week was over, montre cartier tank she could ever again be content with Seymour LevovAnd suppose she should winWhat chance would he have against all the men who set their sights on marrying Miss America? Actors would be after herMillionaires would be after herThey'd flock to her--the new life opening up to her could attract a host of powerful new suitors and wind up excluding himNonetheless, as the current suitor, he was spellbound by the prospect of Dawn's winning
Just then, from directly behind me, I heard Mendy...
Just then, from directly behind me, I heard Mendy Gurlik saying to someone, "Whoja jerk off over?"
"Lorraine," a second man repliedWho else?" said Mendy
"Selma? I didn't realize that," Mendy said"I'm surprised to hear thatNo, I never wanted to fuck SelmaFor me it was always twirlersWatch 'em practicing up on the field after school and then go home and beat offCocoa-colored pancake makeupYou notice something? The guys on the whole don't look too bad, a lot of them work out, but the girls, you knowno, a forty-fifth reunion is not the best place to come looking for ass
"True, true," said the other man, who spoke softly and seemed not to have found in the occasion quite the nostalgic license that Mendy had, "time has not been kind to the women
"You know who's dead? Bert and Utty," Mendy saidThank God I get the testYou get the test?"
"What test?" the other fellow asked"Shit, you don't get the test?"
"Skip," said Mendy, pulling me away from Ira, "Meisner doesn't get the test
Now Meisner was MrMeisner, Abe Meisner, a short, swarthy, heavyset man with stooped shoulders and a jutting head, proprietor of Meisner's Cleaners--"5 Hour Cleaning Service"--situated on Chancellor between the shoe repair shop, where the Italian radio station was always playing while you waited on the seat behind the swinging half-door for Ralph to fix your heels, and the beauty salon, Roline's, from which my mother once brought home the copy of Silver Screen where I read an article that stunned me called "George Raft Is a Lonely ManMeisner, a short, indestructible earthling like dolce
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