Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“Oh, how he loved that,” Lydia told me. “You could just see his mind, or whatever you’d call what he’s got in there, turning over. He couldn’t bear, you see, that I had divorced him, he couldn’t bear that a judge in a courtroom had heard what a brute he was. He couldn’t bear losing his little punching bag. ‘You think you’re so smart, you go to art museums and you think that gives you a right to boss your husband around-’ and then he’d pick me up and throw me at the wall. He was always telling me how I ought to be down on my knees for saving me from the houseful of old biddies, how I ought to worship him for taking somebody who was practically an orphan and giving her a nice home and a baby and money to spend going to art museums. Once, you see, during the seven years, I had gone off to the Art Institute with my cousin Bob, the bachelor high-school teacher. He took me to the art museum and when we were all alone in one of the empty rooms, he exposed himself to me. He said he just wanted me to look at him, that was all. He said he didn’t want me to touch it. So I didn’t; I didn’t do anything. Just like with my father-I felt sorry for him. There I was, married to an ape, and here was Cousin Bob, the one my father used to call ‘the little grind.’ Quite a distinguished family I come from. Anyway: Ketterer broke down the door, saw the handwriting on the wall was mine, and couldn’t have been happier. Especially when he noticed what I was pretending to be eating for my breakfast. Because it was all pretense, you see. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had no intention of drinking my own urine, or eating a candle and kitty litter. I knew he was coming to call, that was the reason I did it. You should have heard how solicitous he was: ‘You need a doctor, Lydia, you need a doctor real bad.’ But what he called was a city ambulance. I had to smile when two men came into my apartment actually wearing white coats. I didn’t have to smile, that is, but I did. I said: ‘Won’t you gentlemen have some kitty litter?’ I knew that was the kind of thing you were supposed to say if you were mad. Or at least that’s what everybody else drought. What I really say when I’m insane are things like ‘Today is Tuesday,’ or ‘I’ll have a pound of chopped meat, please.’ Oh, that’s just cleverness. Strike that. I don’t know what I say if I’m mad, or if I’ve even been mad. Truly, it was just a mild flirtation.”

But that was the end of motherhood, nonetheless. Upon her release from the hospital five weeks later, Ketterer announced that he was remarrying. He hadn’t planned on “popping the question” so soon, but now that Lydia had proved herself in public to be the nut he had had to endure in private for seven miserable years, he felt duty bound to provide the child with a proper home and a proper mother. And if she wanted to contest his decision in court, well, just let her try. It seemed he had taken photographs of the walls she had defaced and had lined up neighbors who would testify to what she had looked like and smelted like in the week before “you flipped your Lydia, kid,” as it pleased Ketterer to describe what had happened to her. He did not care how much it would cost him in legal fees; he would spend every dime he had to save Monica from a crazy woman who ate her own filth. “And also,” said Lydia, “to get out of paying support money in the bargain.”

“I ran around frantically for days, begging the neighbors not to testify against me. They knew how much Monica loved me, they knew that I loved her-they knew it was only because my mother had died, because I was exhausted, and so on and so forth. I’m sure I terrified them, telling them all they ‘knew’ that they didn’t begin to know about my life. I’m sure I wanted to terrify them. I even hired a lawyer. I sat in his office and wept, and he assured me that I was within my rights to demand the child back, and that it was going to be a little harder for Mr. Ketterer than he thought, and so on and so forth, very encouraging, very sympathetic, very optimistic. So I left his office and walked to the bus station and took a bus to Canada. I went to Winnipeg to look for an employment agency-I wanted to be a cook in a logging camp. The farther north the better. I wanted to be a cook for a hundred strong, hungry men. All the way to Winnipeg in the bus I had visions of myself in the kitchen of a big mess hall up in the freezing wilds, cooking bacon and eggs and biscuits and pots and pots of coffee for the morning meal, cooking their breakfast while it was still dark-the only one awake in the logging camp, me. And then the long sunny mornings, cleaning up and beginning preparations for the evening meal, when they’d all come in tired from the heavy work in the forest. It was the simplest and most girlish little daydream you can imagine. I could imagine. I would be a servant to a hundred strong men, and they in return would protect me from harm. I would be the only woman in the entire camp, and because there was only one of me, no one would ever dare to take advantage of my situation. I stayed in Winnipeg three days. Going to movies. I was afraid to go to a logging camp and say I wanted work there-I was sure they would think I was a prostitute. Oh, how banal to be crazy. Or maybe just banal being me. What could be more banal than having been seduced by your own father and then going around being ‘scarred’ by it forever? You see, I kept thinking all the while, ‘There’s no need for me to be behaving in this way. There is no need to be acting crazy-and there never was. There is no need to be running away to the North Pole. I’m just pretending. All I have to do to stop is to stop.’ I would remember my aunts telling me, if I so much as uttered a whimper in objection to anything: ‘Pull yourself together, Lydia, mind over matter.’ Well, it couldn’t be that I was going to waste my life defying those two, could it? Because making myself their victim was sillier even than continuing to allow myself to be my father’s. There I sat in the movies in Canada, with all these expressions I used to hate so, going through my head, hut making perfect sense. Pull yourself together, Lydia. Mind over matter, Lydia. You can’t cry over spilled milk, Lydia. If you don’t succeed, Lydia-and you don’t-try, try again. Nothing could have been clearer to me than that sitting in the movies in Winnipeg was as senseless as anything I could do if I ever hoped to save Monica from her father. I could only conclude that I didn’t want to save her from him. Dr. Rutherford now tells me that that was exactly the case. Not that it requires a trained therapist to see through somebody like me. How did I get back to Chicago? According to Dr. Rutherford, by accomplishing what I set out to do. I was staying in a two-dollar-a-night hotel on what turned out to be Winnipeg’s skid row. As if Lydia didn’t know, says Dr. Rutherford. The third morning that I came down to pay for the room, the desk clerk asked me if I wanted to pick up some easy cash. I could make a lot of money posing for pictures, especially if I was blonde all over. I began to howl. He called a policeman, and the policeman called a doctor, and eventually somehow they got me home. And that’s how I managed to rid myself of my daughter. You would have thought it would have been simpler to drown her in the bathtub.”

To say that I was drawn to her story because it was so lurid is only the half of it: there was the way the tale was told. Lydia’s easy, familiar, even cozy manner with misery, her droll acceptance of her own madness, greatly increased the story’s appeal-or, to put it another way, did much to calm whatever fears one might expect an inexperienced young man of a conventional background to have about a woman bearing such a ravaged past. Who would call “crazy” a woman who spoke with such detachment of her history of craziness? Who could find evidence of impulses toward suicide and homicide in a rhetorical style so untainted by rage or vengeful wrath? No, no, this was someone who had experienced her experience, who had been deepened by all that misery. A decidedly ordinary looking person, a pretty little American blonde with a face like a million others, she had, without benefit of books or teachers, mobilized every ounce of her intelligence to produce a kind of wisdom about herself. For surely it required wisdom to recite, calmly and with a mild, even forgiving irony, such a ghastly narrative of ill luck and injustice. You had to be as cruelly simpleminded as Ketterer himself, I thought, not to appreciate the moral triumph this represented-or else you just had to be someone other than me.