Hothead—just went nuts and started screaming when I couldn’t have it my way. You
were the one with the big outlook on things. You were more theoretical than the
rest of us. Even back then you had to hook up everything with your thoughts.
Sizing up the situation, drawing conclusions. You kept a sharp watch over
* * *
yourself. All the crazy stuff contained inside. A sensible boy. No, not like me
at all.”
62
“Well, we both had a big investment in being right,” I said.
“Yeah, being wrong,” Jerry said, “was unendurable to me. Absolutely
unendurable.”
“And it’s easier now?”
“Don’t have to worry about it. The operating room turns you into somebody who’s
never wrong. Much like writing.”
“Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may
get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As
pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.”
“How is your life? Where are you? I read somewhere, on the back of some book,
you were living in England with an aristocrat.”
“I live in New England now, without an aristocrat.”
“So who instead?”
“No one instead.”
“Can’t be. What do you do for somebody to eat dinner with?”
“I go without dinner.”
“For now. The Wisdom of the Bypass. But my experience is that personal
philosophies have a shelf life of about two weeks. Things’ll change.”
“Look, this is where life has left me. Rarely see anyone. Where I live in
western Massachusetts, a tiny place in the hills there, I talk to the guy who
runs the general store and to the lady at the post office. The postmistress.
That’s it.”
“What’s the name of the town?”
“You wouldn’t know it. Up in the woods. About ten miles from a college town
called Athena. I met a famous writer there when I was just starting out. Nobody
mentions him much anymore, his sense of virtue is too narrow for readers now,
but he was revered back then. Lived like a hermit. Reclusion looked awfully
austere to a kid. He maintained it solved his problems. Now it solves mine.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Certain problems having been taken out of my life—that’s the problem. At the
store the Red Sox, at the post office the weather— that’s it, my social
discourse. Whether we deserve the weather.
· 63 ·
When I come to pick up my mail and the sun is shining outside, the postmistress
tells me, ‘We don’t deserve this weather.’ Can’t argue with that.”
* * *
“And pussy?”
“Over. Live without dinner, live without pussy.”
“Who are you, Socrates? I don’t buy it. Purely the writer. The single-minded
writer. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more all along and I could have saved myself a lot of wear and tear.
That’s all I’ve had anyway to keep the shit at bay.”
“What’s ‘the shit’?”
“The picture we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. The
picture we have of ourselves. Useless. Presumptuous. Completely cocked-up. Only
we go ahead and we live by these pictures. ‘That’s what she is, that’s what he
is, this is what I am. This is what happened, this is why it happened—’ Enough.
You know who I saw a couple of months ago? Your brother. Did he tell you?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“He wrote me a letter and invited me to dinner in New York. A nice letter. Out
man. In the letter he asked for my help. I was curious about what he had in
mind. I was curious about him writing me to announce that he wanted to write
something. To you he’s just a brother—to me he’s still ‘the Swede.’ You carry
those guys around with you forever. I had to drive down. But at dinner he never
mentioned the tribute. We just uttered the pleasantries. At some place called
Vincent’s. That was it. As always, he looked terrific.”
“He’s dead.”
“Your brother’s dead?”
“Died Wednesday. Funeral two days ago. Friday. That’s why I was in Jersey.
Watched my big brother die.”
“Of what? How?”
“Cancer.”
“But he’d had prostate surgery. He told me they got it out.”
Impatiently Jerry said, “What else was he going to tell you?”
64
“He was thin, that was all.”
“That wasn’t all.”
So, the Swede too. What, astoundingly to Mendy Gurlik, was decimating the
Daredevils right up the middle; what, astoundingly to me, had, a year earlier,
made of me “purely a writer”; what, in the wake of all the other isolating
losses, in the wake of everything gone and everyone gone, had stripped me down
into someone whose aging powers had now but a single and unswerving aim, a man
who would be seeking his solace, like it or not, nowhere but in sentences, had
managed the most astounding thing of all by carrying off the indestructible hero
of the wartime Weequahic section, our neighborhood talisman, the legendary
Swede.
“Did he know,” I asked, “when I saw him, that he was in trouble?”
* * *
“He had his hopes, but sure he knew. Metastasized. All through him.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“His fiftieth was coming up next month. You know what he said at the hospital on
Tuesday? To me and his kids the day before he died? Most of the time he was
incoherent, but twice he said, so we could understand him, ‘Going to get to my
fiftieth.’ He’d heard everyone from his class was asking, ‘Will the Swede be
there?’ and he didn’t want to let them down. He was very stoical. He was a very
nice, simple, stoical guy. Not a humorous guy. Not a passionate guy. Just a
sweetheart whose fate it was to get himself fucked over by some real crazies. In
one way he could be conceived as completely banal and conventional. An absence
of negative values and nothing more. Bred to be dumb, built for convention, and
so on. That ordinary decent life that they all want to live, and that’s it. The
social norms, and that’s it. Benign, and that’s it. But what he was trying to do
was to survive, keeping his group intact. He was trying to get through with his
platoon intact. It was a war for him, finally. There was a noble side to this
guy. Some excruciating renunciations went on in that life. He got caught in a
war he didn’t start, and he fought to keep it all together, and he went down.
Banal, conven-
· 65 ·
tional—maybe, maybe not. People could think that. I don’t want to get into
judging. My brother was the best you’re going to get in this country, by a long
shot.”
I was wondering while he spoke if this had been Jerry’s estimate of the Swede
while he was alive, if there wasn’t perhaps a touch of mourner’s rethinking
here, remorse for a harsher Jerry-like view he might once have held of the
handsome older brother, sound, well adjusted, quiet, normal, somebody everybody
looked up to, the n
eighborhood hero to whom the smaller Levov had been endlessly
compared while himself evolving into something slightly ersatz. This kindly
unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry,
compassion just a few hours old. That can happen when people die—the argument
with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at
times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing
way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the
limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for
admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one
permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish
of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering
afterward—even an outsider can’t judge. The sight of a coffin going into the
ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so
disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for
the mind in its search for the truth, this I don’t profess to know.
“My father,” Jerry said, “was one impossible bastard. Overbearing. Omnipresent.
I don’t know how people worked for him. When they moved to Central Avenue, the
first thing he had the movers move was his desk, and the first place he put it
was not in the glass-enclosed office but dead center in the middle of the
factory floor, so he could keep his eye on everybody. You can’t imagine the
noise out there, the sewing machines whining, the clicking machines pounding,
hundreds of machines going all at once, and right in the middle his desk and his
telephone and the great man himself.
66
* * *
The owner of the glove factory, but he would always sweep his own floors,
especially around the cutters, where they cut the leather, because he wanted to
see from the size of the scraps who was losing money for him. I told him early
on to fuck off, but Seymour wasn’t built like me. He had a big, generous nature
and with that they really raked him over the coals, all the impossible ones. Un-
satisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives, and the little murderer herself, the
monster daughter. The monster Merry. The solid thing he once was. At Newark Maid
he was an absolute, unequivocal success. Charmed a lot of people into giving
their all for Newark Maid. Very adroit businessman. Knew how to cut a glove,
knew how to cut a deal. Had an in on Seventh Avenue with the fashion people. The
designers there would tell the guy anything. That’s how he stayed abreast of the
pack. In New York, he was always stopping into the department stores, shopping
the competition, looking for something unique about the other guy’s product,
always in the stores taking a look at the leather, stretching the glove, doing
everything just the way my old man taught him. Did most of the selling himself.
Handled all the big house accounts. The lady buyers went nuts for Seymour. You
can imagine. He’d come over to New York, take these tough Jewish broads out to
dinner—buyers who could make or break you—wine and dine them, and they’d fall
head over heels for the guy. Instead of him buttering them up, by the end of the
evening they’d be buttering him up. Come Christmastime they’d be sending my
brother the theater tickets and the case of Scotch rather than the other way
around. He knew how to get the confidence of these people just by being himself.
He’d find out a buyer’s favorite charity, get a ticket to the annual dinner at
the Waldorf-Astoria, show up like a movie star in his tuxedo, on the spot make a
fat donation to cancer, muscular dystrophy, whatever it was, United Jewish
Appeal—next thing Newark Maid had the account. Knew all the stuff: what colors
are going to be next season’s colors, whether the length is going to be up or
down. Attractive, responsible, hardworking guy. A couple of unpleasant strikes
in the sixties, a lot of tension. But his employees are out on the picket line
· 67 ·
and they see him pull up in the car and the women who sew the gloves start
falling all over themselves apologizing for not being at the machines. They were
more loyal to my brother than they were to their union. Everybody loved him, a
perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt forever. No reason
for him to know anything about anything except gloves. Instead he is plagued
with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his life. The incessant
questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my
brother. He got the meaning for his life some other way. I don’t mean he was
simple. Some people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kind.
But Seymour was never that simple. Simple is never that simple. Still, the self-
questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there’s anything worse than
self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too
late. His life was blown up by that bomb. The real victim of that bombing was
him.”
“What bomb?”
“Little Merry’s darling bomb.”
“I don’t know what ‘Merry’s darling bomb’ is.”
“Meredith Levov. Seymour’s daughter. The ‘Rimrock Bomber’ was Seymour’s
daughter. The high school kid who blew up the post office and killed the doctor.
The kid who stopped the war in Vietnam by blowing up somebody out mailing a
letter at five a.m. A doctor on his way to the hospital. Charming child,” he
said in a voice that was all contempt and still didn’t seem to contain the load
of contempt and hatred that he felt. “Brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by
blowing up the post office in the general store. Place is so small the post
office is in the general store—just a window at the back of the general store
* * *
and a couple rows of those boxes with the locks, and that’s the whole post
office. Get your stamps right in there with the Rinso and the Lifebuoy and the
Lux. Quaint Americana. Seymour was into quaint Americana. But the kid wasn’t. He
took the kid out of real time and she put him right back in. My brother thought
he could take his family out of human confusion and into Old Rimrock, and she
put them right back in.
· 68 ·
Somehow she plants a bomb back behind the post office window, and when it goes
off it takes out the general store too. And takes out the guy, this doctor,
who’s just stopping by the collection box to drop off his mail. Good-bye,
Americana; hello, real time.”
“This passed me by. I had no idea.”
“That was ‘68, back when the wild behavior was still new. People suddenly forced
to make sense of madness. All that public display. The dropping of inhibitions.
Authority powerless. The kids going crazy. Intimidating everybody. The adults
don’t know what to make of it, they don’t know what to do. Is this an act? Is
the ‘revolution’ real? Is it a game? Is it cops and robbers? What’s going on
here? Kids turning the country upside down and so the adults start going crazy
too. But Seymour wasn’
t one of them. He was one of the people who knew his way.
He understood that something was going wrong, but he was no Ho-Chi-Minhite like
his darling fat girl. Just a liberal sweetheart of a father. The philosopher-
king of ordinary life. Brought her up with all the modern ideas of being
rational with your children. Everything permissible, everything forgivable, and
she hated it. People don’t like to admit how much they resent other people’s
children, but this kid made it easy for you. She was miserable, self-righteous—
little shit was no good from the time she was born. Look, I’ve got kids, kids
galore—I know what kids are like growing up. The black hole of self-absorption
is bottomless. But it’s one thing to get fat, it’s one thing to let your hair
grow long, it’s one thing to listen to rock-and-roll music too loud, but it’s
another to jump the line and throw a bomb. That crime could never be made right.
There was no way back for my brother from that bomb. That bomb detonated his
life. His perfect life was over. Just what she had in mind. That’s why they had
it in for him, the daughter and her friends. He was so in love with his own good
luck, and they hated him for it. Once we were all up at his place for
Thanksgiving, the Dwyer mother, Dawn’s kid brother Danny, Danny’s wife, all the
Levovs, our kids, everybody, and Seymour got up to make a toast and he said,