Before the farm equipment and the cattle had been sold off, it was from there,
on warm evenings, that they looked out onto Dawn’s herd grazing along the rim of
the hill. Up a ways from the house was a field of eighteen acres, and some years
they’d have the cows up there all summer and forget them. But if they were
merely out of sight nearby, and Merry, in her pajamas, wanted to see them before
she went to bed, Dawn would call out, “Hereboy, Hereboy,” the kind of thing
people had been calling to them for thousands of years, and they’d sound off in
return and start up the hill and out from the swamp, come out of wherever they
were, bellowing their response as they trudged toward the sound of Dawn’s voice.
“Aren’t they beautiful, our girls?” Dawn would ask her daughter, and the next
day Merry and Dawn would be out at sunrise getting them all together again, and
he’d hear Dawn say, “Okay, we’re going to cross the road,” and Merry would open
the gate and just with a stick and the dog, Apu the Australian sheepdog, mother
and tiny daughter would move some twelve or fifteen or eighteen beasts, each
weighing about two thousand pounds. Merry, Apu, and Dawn, sometimes the vet, and
the boy down the road to help with the fencing and the haying when an
· 285 ·
extra hand was needed. I’ve got Merry to help me hay. If there’s a stray calf,
Merry gets after it. Seymour goes in there and those two cows will be very
unpleasant, they’ll paw the grass, they’ll shake their heads at him—but Merry
goes in, well, they know her, and they just tell her what they want. They know
her and they know exactly what she’s going to do with them.
How could she ever say to him, “I don’t want to talk about my mother”? What in
God’s name had her mother done? What crime had her mother committed? The crime
of being gentle master to these compliant cows?
During this last week, while his parents had been with them, up from Florida for
the annual late-summer visit, Dawn hadn’t even worried about keeping the two of
them entertained. Whenever she returned from the new building site or drove back
from the architect’s office, they were seated before the set with the father-in-
law in the role of assistant counsel to the committee. Her in-laws watched the
proceedings all day and then saw the whole thing over again at night. In what
time he had left to himself during the day, the Swede’s father composed letters
to the committee members which he read to everyone at dinner. “Dear Senator
Weicker: You’re surprised at what was going on in Tricky Dicky’s White House?
Don’t be a shnook. Harry Truman had him figured out in 1948 when he called him
Tricky Dicky.” “Dear Senator Gurney: Nixon equals Typhoid Mary. Everything he
touches he poisons, you included.” “Dear Senator Baker: You want to know WHY?
Because they’re a bunch of common criminals, that’s WHY!” “Dear Mr. Dash:” he
wrote to the committee’s New York counsel, “I applaud you. God bless you. You
make me proud to be an American and a Jew.”
His greatest contempt he reserved for a relatively insignificant figure, a
lawyer named Kalmbach, who’d arranged for large illegal contributions to sift
into the Watergate operation, and whose disgrace could not be profound enough to
suit the old man. “Dear Mr. Kalmbach: If you were a Jew and did what you did the
* * *
whole world would say, ‘See those Jews, real money-grubbers.’ But who is the
money-grubber, my dear Mr. Country Club? Who is the thief and
· 286 ·
the cheat? Who is the American and who is the gangster? Your smooth talk never
fooled me, Mr. Country Club Kalmbach. Your golf never fooled me. Your manners
never fooled me. Your clean hands I always knew were dirty. And now the whole
world knows. You should be ashamed.”
“You think I’ll get an answer from the son of a bitch? I ought to publish these
in a book. I ought to find somebody to print ‘em up and just distribute them
free so people could know what an ordinary American feels when these sons of
bitches … look, look at that one, look at him.” Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former
chief of staff, had appeared on the screen.
“Please, she’s unimportant,” her husband said. “This is a real fascist—the whole
bunch of ‘em, Von Ehrlichman, Von Haldeman, Von Kalmbach—”
“She still makes me nauseous,” his wife said. “You’d think she was a princess,
the way they carry on about her.”
“These so-called patriots,” Lou Levov said to Dawn, “would take this country and
make Nazi Germany out of it. You know the book It Can’t Happen Here? There’s a
wonderful book, I forget the author, but the idea couldn’t be more up-to-the-
moment. These people have taken us to the edge of something terrible. Look at
that son of a bitch.”
“I don’t know which one I hate more,” his wife said, “him or the other one.”
“They’re the same thing,” the old man told her, “they’re interchangeable, the
whole bunch of them.”
Merry’s legacy. That his father might have been no less incensed if she were
there, sitting with them all in front of the set, the Swede recognized, but now
that she was gone who better was there to hate for what had become of her than
these Watergate bastards?
It was during the Vietnam War that Lou Levov had begun mailing Merry copies of
the letters he sent to President Johnson, letters that he had written to
influence Merry’s behavior more than the
· 287 ·
president’s. Seeing his teenage granddaughter as enraged with the war as he
could get when things started to go too wrong with the business, the old man
became so distressed that he would take his son aside and say, “Why does she
care? Where does she even get this stuff? Who feeds it to her? What’s the
difference to her anyway? Does she carry on like this at school? She can’t do
this at school, she could harm her chances at school. She can harm her chances
for college. In public people won’t put up with it, they’ll chop her head off,
she’s only a child… .” To control, if he could, not so much Merry’s opinions
as the ferocity with which she sputtered them out, he would ostentatiously ally
himself with her by sending articles clipped from the Florida papers and
inscribed in the margins with his own antiwar slogans. When he was visiting he
would read aloud to her from the portfolio of his Johnson letters that he
carried around the house under his arm—in his effort to save her from herself,
* * *
tagging after the child as though he were the child. “We’ve got to nip this in
the bud,” he confided to his son. “This won’t do, not at all.”
“Well,” he’d say—after reading to Merry yet another plea to the president
reminding him what a great country America was, what a great president FDR had
been, how much his own family owed to this country and what a personal
disappointment it was to him and his loved ones that American boys were halfway
around the world fighting somebody else’s b
attle when they ought to be at home
with their loved ones—”well, what do you think of your grandfather?”
“J-j-Johnson’s a war criminal,” she’d say. “He’s not going to s-s-s-stop the w-
w-war, Grandpa, because you tell him to.”
“He’s also a man trying to do his job, you know.”
“He’s an imperialist dog.”
“Well, that is one opinion.”
“There’s no d-d-d-difference between him and Hitler.”
“You’re exaggerating, sweetheart. I don’t say Johnson didn’t let us down. But
you forget what Hitler did to the Jews, Merry dear. You weren’t born then, so
you don’t remember.”
“He did nothing that Johnson isn’t doing to the Vietnamese.”
· 288 ·
“The Vietnamese aren’t being put into concentration camps.”
“Vietnam is one b-b-big camp! The ‘American boys’ aren’t the issue. That’s like
saying, ‘Get the storm troopers out of Auschwitz in time for Chris-chris-chris-
dinsftnas.’”
“I gotta be political with the guy, sweetheart. I can’t write the guy and call
him a murderer and expect that he’s going to listen. Right, Seymour?”
“I don’t think that would help,” the Swede said.
“Merry, we all feel the way you do,” her grandfather told her. “Do you
understand that? Believe me, I know what it is to read the newspaper and start
to go nuts. Father Coughlin, that son of a bitch. The hero Charles Lindbergh—
pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler, and a so-called national hero in this country. Mr. Gerald
L. K. Smith. The great Senator Bilbo. Sure we have bastards in this country—
homegrown and plenty of ‘em. Nobody denies that. Mr. Rankin. Mr. Dies. Mr. Dies
and his committee. Mr. J. Parnell Thomas from New Jersey. Isolationist, bigoted,
know-nothing fascists right there in the U.S. Congress, crooks like J. Parnell
Thomas, crooks who wound up in jail and their salaries were paid for by the U.S.
taxpayer. Awful people. The worst. Mr. McCarran. Mr. Jenner. Mr. Mundt. The
Goebbels from Wisconsin, the Honorable Mr. McCarthy, may he burn in hell. His
sidekick Mr. Cohn. A disgrace. A Jew and a disgrace! There have always been sons
of bitches here just like there are in every country, and they have been voted
into office by all those geniuses out there who have the right to vote. And what
about the newspapers? Mr. Hearst. Mr. McCormick. Mr. Westbrook Pegler. Real
fascist, reactionary dogs. And I have hated their guts. Ask your father. Haven’t
I, Seymour—hated them?”
“You have.”
* * *
“Honey, we live in a democracy. Thank God for that. You don’t have to go around
getting angry with your family. You can write letters. You can vote. You can get
up on a soapbox and make a speech. Christ, you can do what your father did—you
can join the marines.”
“Oh, Grandpa—the marines are the prob-prob-prob—”
289
“Then damn it, Merry, join the other side,” he said, momentarily losing his
grip. “How’s that? You can join their marines if you want to. It’s been done.
That’s true. Look at history. When you’re old enough you can go over and fight
for the other army if you want it. I don’t recommend it. People don’t like it,
and I think you’re smart enough to understand why they don’t. ‘Traitor’ isn’t a
pleasant thing to be called. But it’s been done. It’s an option. Look at
Benedict Arnold. Look at him. He did it. He went over to the other side, as far
as I remember. From school. And I suppose I respect him. He had guts. He stood
up for what he believed in. He risked his own life for what he believed in. But
he happened to be wrong, Merry, in my estimation. He went over to the other side
in the Revolutionary War and, as far as I’m concerned, the man was dead wrong.
Now you don’t happen to be wrong. You happen to be right. This family is one
hundred percent against this goddamn Vietnam thing. You don’t have to rebel
against your family because your family is not in disagreement with you. You are
not the only person around here against this war. We are against it. Bobby
Kennedy is against it—”
“Now,” said Merry, with disgust.
“Okay, now. Now is better than not now, isn’t it? Be realistic, Merry—it doesn’t
help anything not to be. Bobby Kennedy is against it. Senator Eugene McCarthy is
against it. Senator Javits is against it, and he’s a Republican. Senator Frank
Church is against it. Senator Wayne Morse is against it. And how he is. I admire
that man. I’ve written him to tell him and I have gotten the courtesy of a hand-
signed reply. Senator Fulbright, of course, is against it. It’s Fulbright who,
admittedly, introduced the Tonkin Gulf resolu—”
“F-f-f-ful—”
“Nobody is saying—”
“Dad,” said the Swede, “let Merry finish.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” said Lou Levov. “Finish.”
“Ful-ful-fulbright is a racist.”
“Is he? What are you talking about? Senator William Fulbright from Arkansas?
Come on with that stuff. I think there’s where
290
you’ve got your facts wrong, my friend.” She had slandered one of his heroes
who’d stood up to Joe McCarthy, and to prevent himself from lashing out at her
about Fulbright took a supreme effort of will. “But now just let me finish what
I was saying. What was I saying? Where was I? Where the hell was I, Seymour?”
“Your point,” the Swede said, acting evenhandedly as the moderator for these two
dynamos, a role he preferred to being the adversary of either, “is that both of
you are against the war and want it to stop. There’s no reason for you to argue
* * *
on that issue—I believe that’s your point. Merry feels it’s all gone beyond
writing letters to the president. She feels that’s futile. You feel that, futile
or not, it’s something within your power to do and you’re going to do it, at
least to continue to put yourself on record.”
“Exactly!” the old man cried. “Here, listen to what I tell him here. ‘I am a
lifetime Democrat.’ Merry, listen—’I am a lifetime Demo-crat—
But nothing he told the president ended the war, nor did anything he told Merry
nip the catastrophe in the bud. Yet alone in the family he had seen it coming.
“I saw it coming. I saw it clear as day. I saw it. I knew it. I sensed it. I
fought it. She was out of control. Something was wrong. I could smell it. I told
you. ‘Something has to be done about that child. Something is going wrong with
that child.’ And it went in one ear and out the other. I got, ‘Dad, take it
easy.’ I got, ‘Dad, don’t exaggerate. Dad, it’s a phase. Lou, leave her alone,
don’t argue with her.’ ‘No, I will not leave her alone. This is my
granddaughter. I refuse to leave her alone. I refuse to lose a granddaughter by
leaving her alone. Something is haywire with that child.’ And you looked at me
like I was nuts. All of you. Only I wasn’t nuts. I was right. With a vengeance I
was right!”
There were no messages for him when he got home. He had been praying for a
message from Mary Stoltz.
“Nothing?”
he said to Dawn, who was in the kitchen preparing a salad out of
greens she’d pulled from the garden.
“Nope.”
291
He poured a drink for himself and his father and carried the glasses out to the
back porch, where the set was still on.
“You going to make a steak, darling?” his mother asked him.
“Steak, corn, salad, and Merry’s big beefsteak tomatoes.” He’d meant Dawn’s
tomatoes but did not correct himself once it was out.
“No one makes a steak like you,” she said, after the first shock of his words
had worn off.
“Good, Ma.”
“My big boy. Who could want a better son?” she said, and when he embraced her
she went to pieces for the first time that week. “I’m sorry. I was remembering
the phone calls.”
“I understand,” he said.
“She was a little girl. You’d call, you’d put her on, and she’d say, ‘Hi,
Grandma! Guess what?’ ‘I don’t know, honey—what?’ And she’d tell me.”
“Come on, you’ve been terrific so far. You can keep it up. Come on. Buck up.”
“I was looking at the snapshots, when she was a baby …”
“Don’t look at them,” he said. “Try not to look at them. You can do it, Ma. You
have to.”
* * *