Instead his eyes assured her that he would do all he could to help but that when
she was with him she must stutter freely if she needed to. And yet he had said
to her, “N-n-no.” He had done what Dawn would rather die than do—he had made fun
of her.
“Awuh-awuh-awuh—”
“Oh, cookie,” he said, and at just the moment when he had understood that the
summer’s mutual, seemingly harmless playacting—the two of them nibbling at an
intimacy too enjoyable to swear off and yet not in any way to be taken
seriously, to be much concerned with, to be given an excessive significance,
something utterly uncarnal that would fade away once the vacation was over and
she was in school all day and he had returned to work, nothing that they
couldn’t easily find their way back from—just when he had come to understand
that the summer romance required some readjusting all around, he lost his
vaunted sense of proportion, drew her to him with one arm, and kissed her
stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking him for all month
long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for.
Was he supposed to feel that way? It happened before he could think. She was
only eleven. Momentarily it was frightening. This was not anything he had ever
worried about for a second, this was a taboo that you didn’t even think of as a
taboo, something you are prohibited from doing that felt absolutely natural not
to do, you just proceeded effortlessly—and then, however momentary, this. Never
in his entire life, not as a son, a husband, a father, even as an employer, had
he given way to anything so alien to the emotional rules by which he was
governed, and later he wondered if this strange parental misstep was not the
lapse from responsibility for
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which he paid for the rest of his life. The kiss bore no resemblance to anything
serious, was not an imitation of anything, had never been repeated, had itself
lasted five seconds… ten at most… but after the disaster, when he went
obsessively searching for the origins of their suffering, it was that anomalous
moment—when she was eleven and he was thirty-six and the two of them, all
stirred up by the strong sea and the hot sun, were heading happily home alone
from the beach—that he remembered.
* * *
But then he also wondered if after that day he had perhaps withdrawn from her
too radically, become physically distant more than was necessary. He had only
meant to let her know she needn’t be concerned that he would lose his
equilibrium again, needn’t worry about her own natural-enough infatuation, and
the result may well have been that having exaggerated the implications of that
kiss, having overestimated what constituted provocation, he went on to alter a
perfectly harmless spontaneous bond, only to exacerbate a stuttering child’s
burden of self-doubt. And all he had ever meant was to help her, to help her
heal!
What then was the wound? What could have wounded Merry? The indelible
imperfection itself or those who had fostered in her the imperfection? But by
doing what? What had they done other than to love her and look after her and
encourage her, give her the support and guidance and independence that seemed
reasonable to them—and still the undisclosed Merry had become tainted! Twisted!
Crazed! By what? Thousands upon thousands of young people stuttered—they didn’t
all grow up to set off bombs! What went wrong with Merry? What did he do to her
that was so wrong? The kiss? That kiss? So beastly? How could a kiss make
someone into a criminal? The aftermath of the kiss? The withdrawal? Was that the
beastliness? But it wasn’t as though he’d never held her or touched her or
kissed her again—he loved her. She knew that.
Once the inexplicable had begun, the torment of self-examination never ended.
However lame the answers, he never ran out of the questions, he who before had
again take life as it
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came or trust that his life wasn’t something very different from what he
perceived. He found himself recalling his own happy childhood, the success that
had been his boyhood, as though that were the cause of their blight. All the
triumphs, when he probed them, seemed superficial; even more astonishing, his
very virtues came to seem vices. There was no longer any innocence in what he
remembered of his past. He saw that everything you say says either more than you
wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does
either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do. What you
said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.
The Swede as he had always known himself—well-meaning, well-behaved, well-
ordered Seymour Levov—evaporated, leaving only self-examination in his place. He
couldn’t disentangle himself from the idea that he was responsible any more than
he could resort to the devilishly tempting idea that everything was accidental.
He had been admitted into a mystery more bewildering even than Merry’s
stuttering: there was no fluency anywhere. It was all stuttering. In bed at
night, he pictured the whole of his life as a stuttering mouth and a grimacing
face—the whole of his life without cause or sense and completely bungled. He no
longer had any conception of order. There was no order. None. He envisioned his
life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of his control.
Merry’s other great love that year, aside from her father, was Audrey Hepburn.
Before Audrey Hepburn there had been astronomy and before astronomy, the 4-H
Club, and along the way, a bit distressingly to her father, there was even a
Catholic phase. Her grandmother Dwyer took her to pray at St. Genevieve’s
whenever Merry was visiting down in Elizabeth. Little by little, Catholic
trinkets made their way into her room—and as long as he could think of them as
trinkets, as long as she wasn’t going overboard, everything was okay. First
there was the palm frond bent into the shape of the cross that Grandma had given
her after Palm Sunday. That was all right. Any kid might want that up on the
wall. Then came the candle, in thick glass, about a foot tall, the Eternal
Candle;
* * *
· 93 ‘
on its label was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a prayer that began,
“O Sacred Heart of Jesus who said, ‘Ask and you shall receive.’” That wasn’t so
great, but as she didn’t seem to be lighting and burning it, as it just seemed
to sit there on her dresser for decoration, there was no sense making a fuss.
Then, to hang over the bed, came the picture of Jesus, in profile, praying,
which really wasn’t all right, though still he said nothing to her, nothing to
Dawn, nothing to Grandma Dwyer, told himself, “It’s harmless, it’s a picture, to
her a pretty picture of a nice man. What difference does it make?”
What did it was the statue, the plaster statue of the Blessed Mother, a smaller
version of the big ones on the breakfront in Grandma Dwyer’s dini
ng room and on
the dressing table in Grandma Dwyer’s bedroom. The statue was what led him to
sit her down and ask if she would be willing to take the pictures and the palm
frond off the wall and put them away in her closet, along with the statue and
the Eternal Candle, when Grandma and Grandpa Levov came to visit. Quietly he
explained that though her room was her room and she had the right to hang
anything there she wanted, Grandma and Grandpa Levov were Jews, and so, of
course, was he, and, rightly or wrongly, Jews don’t, etc., etc. And because she
was a sweet girl who wanted to please people, and to please her daddy most of
all, she was careful to be sure that nothing Grandma Dwyer had given her was
anywhere to be seen when next the Swede’s parents visited Old Rimrock. And then
one day everything Catholic came down off the wall and off her dresser for good.
She was a perfectionist who did things passionately, lived intensely in the new
interest, and then the passion was suddenly spent and everything, including the
passion, got thrown into a box and she moved on.
Now it was Audrey Hepburn. Every newspaper and magazine she could get hold of
she combed for the film star’s photograph or name. Even movie timetables—
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10”—were clipped from the newspaper after
dinner and pasted in her Audrey Hepburn scrapbook. For months she went in and
out of pretending to be gaminish instead of herself, daintily walking to
94
her room like a wood sprite, smiling with meaningfully coy eyes into every
reflecting surface, laughing what they call an “infectious” laugh whenever her
father said a word. She bought the soundtrack from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and
played it in her bedroom for hours. He could hear her in there singing “Moon
River” in the charming way that Audrey Hepburn did, and absolutely fluently—and
so, however ostentatious and singularly self-conscious was the shameless
playacting, nobody in the house ever indicated that it was tiresome, let alone
ludicrous, an improbable dream of purification that had taken possession of her.
If Audrey Hepburn could help her shut down just a little of the stuttering, then
let her go on ludicrously pretending, a girl blessed with golden hair and a
logical mind and a high IQ and an adultlike sense of humor even about herself,
blessed with long, slender limbs and a wealthy family and her own brand of
dogged persistence—with everything except fluency. Security, health, love, every
advantage imaginable—missing only was the ability to order a hamburger without
humiliating herself.
How hard she tried! Two afternoons she went to ballet class after school and two
afternoons Dawn drove her to Morristown to see a speech therapist. On Saturday
she got up early, made her own breakfast, and then bicycled the five hilly miles
into Old Rimrock village to the tiny office of the local circuit-riding
psychiatrist, who had a slant that made the Swede furious when he began to see
Merry’s struggle getting worse rather than better. The psychiatrist got Merry
* * *
thinking that the stutter was a choice she made, a way of being special that she
had chosen and then locked into when she realized how well it worked. The
psychiatrist asked her, “How do you think your father would feel about you if
you didn’t stutter? How do you think your mother would feel?” He asked her, “Is
there anything good that stuttering brings you?” The Swede did not understand
how it was going to help the child to make her feel responsible for something
she simply could not do, and so he went to see the man. And by the time he left
he wanted to kill him.
It seemed that the etiology of Merry’s problem had largely to do
95
with her having such good-looking and successful parents. As best the Swede
could follow what he was hearing, her parental good fortune was just too much
for Merry, and so, to withdraw from the competition with her mother, to get her
mother to hover over and focus on her and eventually climb the walls—and, in
addition, to win the father away from the beautiful mother—she chose to
stigmatize herself with a severe stutter, thereby manipulating everyone from a
point of seeming weakness. “But Merry is made miserable by her stutter,” the
Swede reminded him. “That’s why we brought her to see you.” “The benefits may
far outweigh the penalties.” For the moment, the Swede couldn’t understand what
the doctor was explaining and replied, “But, no, no—watching her stutter is
killing my wife.” “Maybe, for Merry, that’s one of the benefits. She is an
extremely bright and manipulative child. If she weren’t, you wouldn’t be so
angry with me because I’m telling you that stuttering can be an extremely
manipulative, an extremely useful, if not even a vindictive type of behavior.”
He hates me, thought the Swede. It’s all because of the way I look. Hates me
because of the way Dawn looks. He’s obsessed with our looks. That’s why he hates
us—we’re not short and ugly like him! “It’s difficult,” the psychiatrist said,
“for a daughter to grow up the daughter of somebody who had so much attention
for what sometimes seems to the daughter to be such a silly thing. It’s tough,
on top of the natural competition between mother and daughter, to have people
asking a little girl, ‘Do you want to grow up to be Miss New Jersey just like
your mommy?”’ “But nobody asks her that. Who asks her that? We never have. We
never talk about it, it never comes up. Why would it? My wife isn’t Miss New
Jersey—my wife is her mother.” “But people ask her that, Mr. Levov.” “Well, for
God’s sake, people ask children all sorts of things that don’t mean anything—
that is not the problem here.” “But you do see how a child who has reason to
feel she doesn’t quite measure up to Mother, that she couldn’t come close, might
choose to adopt—” “She hasn’t adopted anything. Look, I think that perhaps you
put an unfair burden on my daughter by making her see this as a ‘choice.’ She
has no choice. It’s perfect
96
hell for her when she stutters.” “That isn’t always what she tells me. Last
Saturday, I asked her point-blank, ‘Merry, why do you stutter?’ and she told me,
‘It’s just easier to stutter.”’ “But you know what she meant by that. It’s
obvious what she meant by that. She means she doesn’t have to go through all
that she has to go through when she tries not to stutter.” “I happen to think
she was telling me something more than that. I think that Merry may even feel
that if she doesn’t stutter, then, oh boy, people are really going to find the
real problem with her, particularly in a highly pressured perfectionist family
where they tend to place an unrealistically high value on her every utterance.
‘If I don’t stutter, then my mother is really going to read me the riot act,
then she’s going to find out my real secrets.’” “Who said we’re a highly
pressured perfectionist family? Jesus. We’re an ordinary family. Are you quoting
Merry? That’s what she told you, about her mother? That she
was going to read
* * *
her the riot act?’ “Not in so many words.” “Because it’s not true” the Swede
said. “That’s not the cause. Sometimes I just think it’s because her brain is so
quick, it’s so much quicker than her tongue—” Oh, the pitying way he is looking
at me and my pathetic explanation. Superior bastard. Cold, heartless bastard.
Stupid bastard. That’s the worst of it—the stupidity. And all of it is because
he looks the way he looks and I look the way I look and Dawn looks the way she
looks and … “We frequently see fathers who can’t accept, who refuse to
believe—” Oh, these people are completely useless! They only make things worse!
Whose idea was this fucking psychiatrist! “I’m not not accepting anything, damn
it. I brought her here,” the Swede said, “in the first place. I do everything
any professional has told me to do to help support her efforts to stop. I just
want to know from you what good it is doing my daughter, with her grimacing and
her tics and her leg twitches and her banging on the table and turning white in
the face, with all of that difficulty, to be told that, on top of everything
else, she’s doing all this to manipulate her mother and father.” “Well, who is
in charge when she is banging on the table and turning white? Who is in control
there?” “She certainly isn’t!” said the Swede angrily. “You find me taking a
very
· 97 ·
uncharitable view toward her,” replied the doctor. “Well … in a way, as her
father, yes. It never seems to occur to you that there might be some
physiological basis for this.” “No, I didn’t say that. Mr. Levov, I can give you
organic theories if you want them. But that isn’t the way I have found I can be