Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

By late afternoon I was in Dr. Spielvogel’s office; out in the waiting room Moe sat like a bouncer with his arms folded and his feet planted solidly on the floor, watching to be sure I did not slip off by myself to the airport. By nightfall Maureen was on her way East. Within two days I had notified the chairman of my department that I would be unable to return to my job in the fall. By the end of the week Maureen-having failed in several attempts to get past the door to Moe’s apartment-had returned to Madison, cleared our stuff out of our apartment, and come East a second time; she moved into a hotel for transients on lower Broadway, and there she intended to remain, she said, until I had let go of my brother’s apron strings and returned to our life together. Failing that, she said, she would do what I was “forcing” her to do through the courts. She told me on the phone (when it rang, I picked it up, Moe’s instructions to the contrary notwithstanding) that my brother was a “woman hater” and my new analyst a “fraud.” “He’s not even licensed, Peter,” she said of Spielvogel. “I looked him up. He’s a European quack-practicing here without any credentials at all. He’s not attached to a single psychoanalytic institute-no wonder he tells you to leave your wife!” “You’re lying again, Maureen-you just made that up! You’ll say anything!” “But you’re the liar! You’re the betrayer! You’re the one who deceived me with that little student of yours! Carried on with her for months behind my back! While I cooked your dinner and washed your socks!” “And what did you do to get me to marry you in the first place! Just what!” “Oh, I knew I should never have told you that-I knew you would use that against me some day, to excuse yourself and your rotten philandering! Oh, how can you allow two such people to turn you against your own wife-when you were the guilty one, you were the one who was screwing those students left and right!” “I was not screwing students left and right-“ “Peter, I caught you red-handed with that girl with the braids!” “That is not left and right, Maureen! And you are the one who turned me against you, with your crazy fucking paranoia!” “When? When did I do that, I’d like to know?” “From the beginning! Before we were even married!” “Then why on earth did you marry me, if I was so hateful to you even then? Just to punish me like this?” “I married you because you tricked me into marrying you! Why else!” “But that didn’t mean you had to-you still could decide on your own! And you did, you liar! Don’t you even remember what happened? You asked me to be your wife. You proposed.”

“Because among other things you threatened to kill yourself if 1 didn’t!” “And you mean to say you believed me?” “What?” “You actually believed that I would kill myself over you? Oh, you terrible narcissist! You selfish egomaniacal maniac! You actually do think that you are the be-all and end-all of human existence!” “No, no, it’s you who think I am! Why else won’t you leave me alone!” “Oh, Jesus,” she moaned, “oh Jesus-haven’t you ever heard of love?”

It is now nearly a year since I decided that I would not marry Susan McCall and ended our long love affair. Until last year marrying Susan had been legally impossible because Maureen continued to refuse to grant me a divorce under the existing New York State matrimonial laws or to consent to a Mexican or out-of-state divorce. But then one sunny morning (only one short year ago), Maureen was dead, and I was a widower, free at last of the wife I had taken, entirely against my inclinations but in accordance with my principles, back in 1959. Free to take a new one, if I so desired.

Susan’s own absurd marriage to the right Princeton boy had also ended with the death of her mate. It had been briefer even than my own, and also childless, and she wanted now to have a family before it was “too late.” She was into her thirties and frightened of giving birth to a mongoloid child; I hadn’t known how frightened until I happened by accident to come upon a secret stockpile of biology books that apparently had been picked up in a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue. They were stuffed in a splitting carton on the floor of the pantry where I had gone in search of a fresh can of coffee one morning while Susan was off at her analyst’s. I assumed at first that they were books she had accumulated years ago at school; then I noticed that two of them, The Basic Facts of Human Heredity by Amram Scheinfeld and Human Heredity by Ashley Montagu, hadn’t been published until she was already living alone and widowed in her New York apartment.

Chapter Six of the Montagu book, “The Effects of Environment Upon the Developing Human Being in the Womb,” was heavily marked with a black crayon, whether by Susan, or by whoever had owned the book before her, I had no sure way of knowing. “Studies of the reproductive development of the female show that from every point of view the best period during which the female may undertake the process of reproduction extends on the average from the age of twenty-one to about twenty-six years of age…From the age of thirty-five years onward there is a sudden jump in the number of defective children that are born, especially of the type known as mongoloids… In mongolism we have the tragic example of what may be an adequately sound genetic system being provided; with an inadequate environment with resulting disordered development in the embryo.” If it was not Susan who had done the heavy underlining, it was she who had copied out into the margin, in her round, neat schoolgirlish hand, the words “an inadequate environment.”

A single paragraph describing mongoloid children was the only one on the page that had not been framed and scored with the black crayon; in its own simple and arresting way, however, it gave evidence of having been read no less desperately. The seven words that I italicize here had, in the book, been underlined by a yellow felt-tipped pen, the kind that Susan liked to use to encourage correspondents to believe that she was in the highest of spirits. “Mongoloid children may or may not have the fold of skin over the inner angle of the eye (epicanthic fold) or the flat root of the nose that goes with this, but they do have smallish heads, fissured tongues, a transverse palmar crease, with extreme intellectual retardation. Their I.Q. ranges between 15 and 29 points, from idiocy to the upper limit of about seven years. Mongoloids are cheerful and very friendly personalities, with often remarkable capacities for imitation and memories for music and complex situations which far outrank their other abilities. The expectation of life at birth is about nine years.” After almost an hour with these books on the pantry floor, I returned them to the carton, and when I saw Susan again that evening said nothing about them. Nothing to her, but thereafter I was as haunted by the image of Susan buying and reading her biology books as she was of giving birth to a monstrosity.

But I did not marry her. I had no doubt that she would be a loving and devoted mother and wife, but having been unable ever to extricate myself by legal means from a marriage into which I’d been coerced in the first place, I had deep misgivings about winding up imprisoned once again. During the four years that Maureen and I had been separated, her lawyer had three times subpoenaed me to appear in court in an attempt to get Maureen’s alimony payments raised and my “hidden” bank accounts with their hidden millions revealed to the world. On each occasion I appeared, as summoned, with my packet of canceled checks, my bank statements, and my income tax returns to be grilled about my earnings and my expenses, and each time I came away from those proceedings swearing that I would never again put authority over my personal life into the hands of some pious disapproving householder known as a New York municipal judge. Never again would I be so stupid and reckless as to allow some burgher in black robes to tell me that I ought to “switch” to writing movies so as to make sufficient money to support the wife I had “abandoned.” Henceforth I would decide with whom I would live, whom I would support, and for how long, and not the state of New York, whose matrimonial laws, as I had experienced them, seemed designed to keep a childless woman who refused to hold a job off the public dole, while teaching a lesson to the husband (me!) assumed to have “abandoned” his innocent and helpless wife for no other reason than to writhe in the fleshpots of Sodom. At those prices, would that it were so!