how he’d been concentrated in the flesh. But whether that meant I’d imagined an
outright fantastical creature, lacking entirely
· 76 ·
the unique substantiality of the real thing; whether that meant my conception of
the Swede was any more fallacious than the conception held by Jerry (which he
wasn’t likely to see as in any way fallacious); whether the Swede and his family
came to life in me any less truthfully than in his brother—well, who knows? Who
can know? When it comes to illuminating someone with the Swede’s opacity, to
understanding those regular guys everybody likes and who go about more or less
incognito, it’s up for grabs, it seems to me, as to whose guess is more rigorous
than whose.
* * *
“You don’t remember me, do you?” asked the woman who had sent Jerry scurrying.
Smiling warmly, she had taken my two hands in hers. Beneath the short-cropped
hair, her head looked imposingly well made, large and durable, its angular mass
like the antique stone head of a Roman sovereign. Though the broad planes of her
face were deeply scored as if with an engraving stylus, the skin beneath the
rosy makeup looked to be seriously wrinkled only around the mouth, which, after
nearly six hours of exchanging kisses, had lost most of its lipstick; otherwise
there was an almost girlish softness to her flesh, indicating that perhaps she
hadn’t partaken of every last one of the varied forms of suffering available to
a woman over a lifetime.
“Don’t look at my name tag. Who was I?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“Joyce. Joy Helpern. I had a pink angora sweater. Originally my cousin’s.
Estelle’s. She was three years ahead of us. She’s dead, Nathan—in the ground. My
beautiful cousin, Estelle, who smoked and dated older guys. In high school she
was dating a guy who shaved twice a day. Her parents had the dress and corset
shop on Chancellor. Grossman’s. My mother worked there. You took me on a class
hayride. Believe it or not, I used to be Joy Helpern.”
Joy: a bright little girl with curly reddish hair, freckles, a round face, a
girl with a provocative chubbiness that did not go unobserved by Mr. Roscoe, our
stout, red-nosed Spanish teacher who on the mornings when Joy came to school in
a sweater was always
· 77 ·
asking her to stand at her desk to recite her homework. Mr. Roscoe called her
Dimples. Amazing what you could get away with back in those days when it didn’t
seem to me anybody got away with anything.
Because of an association of words not entirely implausible, Joy’s figure had
continued to tantalize me, no less than it had Mr. Roscoe, long after I last saw
her springing up Chancellor Avenue to school in that odd but stirring pair of
unclasped galoshes obviously outgrown by her older brother and handed down to
Joy like her beautiful cousin’s angora sweater. Whenever a couple of famous
lines from John Keats happened, for whatever reason, to fall into my head, I’d
invariably remember the full, plump feel of her beneath me, the wonderful
buoyancy of her that my adolescent boy’s exquisite radar sensed even through my
mackinaw on that hayride. The lines are from “Ode on Melancholy”: “… him
whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.”
“I remember that hayride, Joy Helpern. You weren’t as kind on that hayride as
you might have been.”
“And now I look like Spencer Tracy,” she said, breaking into laughter. “Now that
I’m no longer frightened it’s much too late. I used to be shy—I’m not shy
anymore. Oh, Nathan, aging,” she cried, as we embraced each other, “aging,
aging—it is so very strange. You wanted to touch my bare breasts.”
“I would have settled for that.”
“Yes,” she said. “They were new then.”
“You were fourteen and they were about one.”
“There’s always been a thirteen-year difference. Back then I was thirteen years
older than they were and now they’re about thirteen years older than I am. But
we certainly did kiss, didn’t we, darling?”
“Kissed and kissed and kissed.”
“I had practiced. All that afternoon I practiced kissing.”
“On whom?”
“My fingers. I should have let you undo my bra. Undo it now if you’d like to.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t the daring anymore to undo a brassiere in front of the
class.”
“What a surprise. Just when I’m ready, Nathan’s grown up.”
We bantered back and forth, our arms tight around each other, and leaning
backwards from the waist so each could see clearly what had happened to the
other’s face and figure, the external shape that half a century of living had
bestowed.
Yes, the overwhelming spell that we continue to cast on one another, right down
to the end, with the body’s surface, which turns out to be, as I suspected on
that hayride, about as serious a thing as there is in life. The body, from which
one cannot strip oneself however one tries, from which one is not to be freed
this side of death. Earlier, looking at Alan Meisner I was looking at his
father, and looking now at Joy I was looking at her mother, the stout seamstress
with her stockings rolled down to her knees in the back room of Grossman’s Dress
Shop on Chancellor Avenue… . But who I was thinking of was the Swede, the
Swede and the tyranny that his body held over him, the powerful, the gorgeous,
the lonely Swede, whom life had never made shrewd, who did not want to pass
through life as a beautiful boy and a stellar first baseman, who wanted instead
to be a serious person for whom others came before himself and not a baby for
whose needs alone the wide, wide world of satisfactions had been organized. He
wanted to have been born something more than a physical wonder. As if for one
person that gift isn’t enough. The Swede wanted what he took to be a higher
calling, and his bad luck was to have found one. The responsibility of the
school hero follows him through life. Noblesse oblige. You’re the hero, so then
you have to behave in a certain way—there is a prescription for it. You have to
be modest, you have to be forbearing, you have to be deferential, you have to be
understanding. And it all began—this heroically idealistic maneuver, this
strategic, strange spiritual desire to be a bulwark of duty and ethical
obligation—because of the war, because of all the terrible uncertainties bred by
the war, because of
79
how strongly an emotional community whose beloved sons were far away facing
death had been drawn to a lean and muscular, austere boy whose talent it was to
be able to catch anything anybody threw anywhere near him. It all began for the
Swede—as what doesn’t?—in a circumstantial absurdity.
And ended in another one. A bomb.
When we’d met at Vincent’s, perhaps he insisted on how well his three boys had
turned out because he assumed I knew about the bomb, about the daughter, the
Rimrock Bomber, and had judged him harshly, as some people must have. Such a
sensational thing, in his life certainly�
��even twenty-seven years later, how
* * *
could anybody not know or have forgotten? Maybe that explains why he couldn’t
stop himself, even had he wanted to, from going interminably on and on to me
about the myriad nonviolent accomplishments of Chris, Steve, and Kent. Maybe
that explains what he had wanted to talk about in the first place. “The shocks”
that had befallen his father’s loved ones was the daughter—she was “the shocks”
that had befallen them all. This was what he had summoned me to talk about—had
wanted me to help him write about. And I missed it—I, whose vanity is that he is
never naive, was more naive by far than the guy I was talking to. Sitting there
at Vincent’s getting the shallowest bead I could on the Swede when the story he
had to tell me was this one, the revelation of the interior life that was
unknown and unknowable, the story that is tragic and awful and impossible to
ignore, the ultimate reunion story, and I missed it entirely.
The father was the cover. The burning subject was the daughter. How much of that
was he aware of? All of it. He was aware of everything—I had that wrong too. The
unconscious one was me. He knew he was dying, and this terrible thing that had
happened to him—that over the years he’d been partially able to bury, that
somewhere along the way he had somewhat overcome—came back at him worse than
ever. He’d put it aside as best he could, new wife, new kids—the three terrific
boys; he sure seemed to me to have put it aside the night in 1985 I saw him at
Shea Stadium with young
80
Chris. The Swede had got up off the ground and he’d done it—a second marriage, a
second shot at a unified life controlled by good sense and the classic
restraints, once again convention shaping everything, large and small, and
serving as barrier against the improbabilities—a second shot at being the
traditional devoted husband and father, pledging allegiance all over again to
the standard rules and regulations that are the heart of family order. He had
the talent for it, had what it took to avoid anything disjointed, anything
special, anything improper, anything difficult to assess or understand. And yet
not even the Swede, blessed with all the attributes of a monumental
ordinariness, could shed that girl the way Jerry the Ripper had told him to,
could go all the way and shed completely the frantic possessiveness, the
paternal assertiveness, the obsessive love for the lost daughter, shed every
trace of that girl and that past and shake off forever the hysteria of “my
child.” If only he could have just let her fade away. But not even the Swede was
that great.
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense. And
when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial
and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself
and one’s history. The nice gentle man with his mild way of dealing with
conflict and contradiction, the confident ex-athlete sensible and resourceful in
any struggle with an adversary who is fair, comes up against the adversary who
is not fair—the evil ineradicable from human dealings—and he is finished. He
whose natural nobility was to be exactly what he seemed to be has taken in far
too much suffering to be naively whole again. Never again will the Swede be
content in the trusting old Swedian way that, for the sake of his second wife
and their three boys—for the sake of their naive wholeness— he ruthlessly goes
on pretending to be. Stoically he suppresses his horror. He learns to live
behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin.
Swede Levov lives a double life.
And now he is dying and what sustained him in a double life can sustain him no
longer, and that horror mercifully half sub-
· 81 ·
* * *
merged, two-thirds submerged, even at times nine-tenths submerged, comes back
distilled despite the heroic creation of that second marriage and the fathering
of the wonderful boys; in the final months of the cancer, it’s back worse than
ever; she’s back worse than ever, the first child who was the cancellation of
everything, and one night in bed when he cannot sleep, when every effort fails
to control his runaway thoughts, he is so depleted by his anguish he thinks,
“There’s this guy who was in my brother’s class, and he’s a writer, and maybe if
I told him… .” But what would happen if he told the writer? He doesn’t even
know. “I’ll write him a letter. I know he writes about fathers, about sons, so
I’ll write him about my father—can he turn that down? Maybe he’ll respond to
that.” The hook to which I am to be the eye. But I come because he is the Swede.
No other hook is necessary. He is the hook.
Yes, the story was back worse than ever, and he thought, “If I can give it to a
pro …,” but when he got me there he couldn’t deliver. Once he got my attention
he didn’t want it. He thought better of it. And he was right. It was none of my
business. What good would it have done him? None at all. You go to someone and
you think, “I’ll tell him this.” But why? The impulse is that the telling is
going to relieve you. And that’s why you feel awful later—you’ve relieved
yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it’s not better, it’s worse—the
exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse. The Swede
realized this. He was nothing like the chump I was imagining, and he had figured
this out simply enough. He realized that there was nothing to be had through me.
He certainly didn’t want to cry in front of me the way he had with his brother.
I wasn’t his brother. I wasn’t anyone—that’s what he saw when he saw me. So he
just blabbered deliberately on about the boys and went home and, the story
untold, he died. And I missed it. He turned to me, of all people, and he was
conscious of everything and I missed everything.
And now Chris, Steve, Kent, and their mother would be at the Rimrock house,
perhaps along with the Swede’s old mother, with Mrs. Levov. The mother must be
ninety. Sitting shiva at ninety for
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her beloved Seymour. And the daughter, Meredith, Merry… obviously hadn’t
attended the funeral, not with that outsized uncle around who hated her guts,
that vindictive uncle who might even take it upon himself to turn her in. But
with Jerry now gone, she dares to leave her hideout to join in the mourning,
makes her way to Old Rimrock, perhaps in disguise, and there, alongside her
half-brothers and her stepmother and Grandma Levov, weeps her heart out over her
father’s death… . But no, she was dead too. If the Swede had been telling
Jerry the truth, the daughter in hiding had died—perhaps in hiding she had been
murdered or had even taken her own life. Anything might have occurred—and
“anything” wasn’t supposed to occur, not to him.
The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man. Whatever Happened
to Swede Levov. Surely not what befell the Kid from Tomkinsville. Even as boys
we must have known th
at it couldn’t have been as easy for him as it looked, that
a part of it was a mystique, but who could have imagined that his life would
come apart in this horrible way? A sliver off the comet of the American chaos
had come loose and spun all the way out to Old Rimrock and him. His great looks,
his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from
all self-doubt by his heroic role— that all these manly properties had
precipitated a political murder made me think of the compelling story not of
John R. Tunis’s sacrificial Tomkinsville Kid but of Kennedy, John F. Kennedy,
only a decade the Swede’s senior and another privileged son of fortune, another
man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-
forties just five years before the Swede’s daughter violently protested the
* * *
Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father’s life. I thought, But of course. He
is our Kennedy.
Meanwhile Joy was telling me things about her life that I’d never known as a
single-minded kid searching the neighborhood for a grape to burst—Joy was
tossing into this agitated pot of memory called “the reunion” yet more stuff no
one knew at the time, that no one had to know back when all our storytelling
about ourselves was
· 83 ·
still eloquently naive. Joy was telling me about how her father had died of a
heart attack when she was nine and the family was living in Brooklyn; about how
she and her mother and Harold, her older brother, had moved from Brooklyn to the