Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Moe has, as he says, only himself to congratulate for their moral heroics; ever since they could understand an English sentence, he has been sharing with them his disappointment with the way this rich country is run. The history of the postwar years, with particular emphasis upon continuing social injustice and growing political repression, has been the stuff of their bedtime stories: instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the strange adventures of Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee; instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King. I can’t remember once eating dinner at Moe’s, that he was not conducting a seminar in left-wing politics for the two little boys wolfing down their pot roast and kasha-the Rosenbergs, Henry Wallace, Leon Trotsky, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, Harry Bridges, Samuel Gompers, just a few whose names are apt to be mentioned between appetizer and dessert-and, simultaneously, looking to see that everybody is eating what is best for him, pushing green vegetables, cautioning against soda pop gulped too quickly, and always checking the serving bowls to be sure there is Enough. “Sit!” he cries to his wife, who has been on her feet all day herself, and like an enormous lineman going after a loose fumble, rushes into the kitchen to get another quarter pound of butter from the refrigerator. “A glass of ice water, Pop!” calls Abner. “Who else for ice water? Peppy? You want another beer? I’ll bring it anyway.” His big paws full, he returns to the table, distributes the goods, waving for the boys to go on with what they were saying-intently he listens to them both, the one little boy arguing that Alger Hiss must have been a Communist spy, while the other (in a voice even louder than his brother’s) tries to come to grips with the fact that Roy Cohn is a Jew.

It was to this household that I went to collapse. Moe, at my request, telephoned Maureen the first night after the Brooklyn College episode to say that I had been taken ill and was resting in bed at his apartment. She asked to speak to me; when Moe said, “He just can’t talk now,” she replied that she was getting on the next plane and coming East. Moe said, “Look, Maureen, he can’t see anybody right now. He’s in no condition to.” “I’m his wife!” she reminded him. “But he cannot see anybody.” “What is going on there, Morris, behind my back? He is not a baby, no matter how you people think of him. Are you listening to me? I demand to speak to my husband! I will not be put off by somebody who wants to play big brother to a man who has won the Prix de Rome!” But he was not intimidated, my big bother, and hung up.

At the end of two days of hiding behind his bulk, I told Moe I was “myself” again; I was going back to the Midwest. We had rented a cabin for the summer in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and I was anxious to get out of the apartment in Madison and up to the woods. I said I had to get back to my novel. “And to your beloved,” he reminded me.

Moe made no secret ever of how much he disliked her; Maureen maintained that it was because, unlike his own wife, she, one, was a Gentile, and, two, had a mind of her own. I tried to give him the same stone face that I had given my sister when she had criticized my marriage and my mate. I hadn’t yet told Moe, or anyone, what I had learned from Maureen two months earlier about the circumstances under which we had married-or about my affair with an undergraduate that Maureen had discovered. I just said, “She’s my wife.” “So you spoke to her today.” “She’s my wife, what do you expect me to do!” “She telephoned and so you picked it up and talked to her.” “We talked, right.” “Ah, you jerk-off! And do me a favor, will you, Peppy? Stop telling me she’s your ‘wife.’ The word does not impress me to the extent it does you two. She’s ruining you, Peppy! You’re a wreck! You had a nervous breakdown here only two mornings ago! I don’t want my kid brother cracking up-do you understand that?” “But I’m fine now.” “Is that what your ‘wife’ told you you were on the phone?” “Moe, lay off. I’m not a frail flower.” “But you are a frail flower, putz. You are a frail flower if I ever saw one! Look, Peppy-you were a very gifted boy. That should be obvious. You stepped out into the world like a big, complicated, hypersensitive million-dollar radar system, and along came Maureen, flying her four-ninety-eight model airplane right smack into the middle of it, and the whole thing went on the fritz. And it’s still on the fritz from all I can see!” “I’m twenty-nine now, Moey.” “But you’re still worse than my fifteen-year-old kids! They’re at least going to get killed in behalf of a noble ideal! But you I don’t understand-trying to be a hero with a bitch who means nothing. Why, Peppy? Why are you destroying your young life for her? The world is full of kind and thoughtful and pretty young girls who would be delighted to keep a boy with your bella figura company. Peppy, you used to take them out by the dozens!”

I thought (not for the first time that week) of the kind and thoughtful and pretty young girl, my twenty-year-old student Karen Oakes, whose mistake it had been to involve herself with a Bluebeard like me. Maureen had just that afternoon-during the course of our fifth phone conversation of the hour; if I hung up, she just called back, and I felt duty bound to answer-Maureen had threatened once again to create a scandal at school for Karen-“that sweet young thing, with her bicycle and her braids, blowing her creative writing teacher!”-if I did not get on a plane and come home “instantly.” But it wasn’t to prevent the worst from happening that I was returning; no, whatever reckless act of revenge I thought I might forestall by doing as I was told and coming home, I was not so deluded as to believe that life with Maureen would ever get better. I was returning to find out what it would be like when it got even worse. How would it all end? Could I imagine the grand finale? Oh, I could, indeed. In the woods of Michigan she would raise her voice about Karen, and I would split her crazy head open with an ax-if, that is, she did not stab me in my sleep or poison my food, first. But one way or another, I would be vindicated. Yes, that was how I envisioned it. I had by then no more sense of reasonable alternatives than a character in a melodrama or a dream. As if I ever had, with her.

I never made it to Wisconsin. Over my protests, Moe went down in the elevator with me, got in the taxi with me, and rode with me all the way out to LaGuardia Airport; he stood directly behind me in the Northwest ticket line, and when his turn came, bought a seat on the same plane I was to take back to Madison. “You going to sleep in bed with us too?” I asked, in anger. “I don’t know if I’ll sleep,” he said, “but I’ll get in there if I have to.” Whereupon I collapsed for the second time. In the taxi back to Manhattan I told him, through my tearful blubbering, about the deception that Maureen had employed to get me to marry her. “Good Christ,” he moaned, “you were really up against a pro, kiddo.” “Was I? Was I?” I had my face pressed into his chest, and he was holding me in his two arms. “And you were still going back to her,” he said, now with a groan. “I was going to kill her, Moey!” “You? You were?” “Yes! With an ax! With my bare hands!” “Oh, I’ll bet. Oh, you poor, pussy-whipped bastard, I’ll just bet you would have.” “I would have,” I croaked through my tears. “Look, you’re just the same as when you were a kid. You can give it, but you can’t take it. Only now, on top of that, you can’t give it either.” “Oh, why is that? What happened?” “The world didn’t turn out to be the sixth-grade classroom at P.S. 3, that’s what happened. With gribben on a fat slice of rye bread waiting for you when you got home from a day of wowing the teachers. You weren’t exactly trained to take punishment, Peppy.” Still weeping, but bitterly now, I asked him, “Is anybody?” “Well, from the look of things, your ‘wife’ got very good instruction in it-and I think she was planning to pass the torch on to you. She sounds to me just from our phone conversation like one of the great professors in the subject.” “Yes?” You see, driving back from the airport that day I felt like somebody being filled in on what had transpired on earth during the sabbatical year he had just spent on Mars; I could have just stepped off a space ship, or out of steerage-I felt so green and strange and lost and dumb.