Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“Karen sounds as if she can take care of herself.”

“But you don’t know Maureen once she gets going. She could murder somebody. She used to grab the wheel of our VW in Italy and try to run us off the side of a mountain-because I hadn’t opened a door for her leaving the hotel in Sorrento! She could carry a grudge like that for days-then she would erupt with it, in the car, weeks later! You can’t imagine what it’s like when she goes wild!”

“Well, then, Karen should be properly warned, if that is the case.

“It is the case! It’s hair-raising! Grabbing the wheel from my hands and spinning it the other way when we’re winding down a mountain road! You must believe what I’ve been through-I am not exaggerating! To the contrary, I’m leaving things out!”

Now, with my avenger dead and her ashes scattered from a plane into the Atlantic Ocean, now with all that rage stilled, it seems to me that I simply could not have been so extensively unmanned by Maureen Johnson Mezik Walker Tarnopol, dropout from Elmira High, as I indicated (and demonstrated) to Spielvogel during our first hour together. I was, after all, bigger than she was, more intelligent than she was, better educated than she was, and far more accomplished. What then (I asked the doctor) had made me such a willing, or will-less, victim? Why couldn’t I find the strength, or just the simple survival mechanism, to leave her once it became obvious that it was no longer she who needed rescuing from her disasters, but I from mine? Even after she had confessed to committing the urine fraud, even then I couldn’t get up and go! Now why? Why should someone who had battled so determinedly all his life to be independent- his own child, his own adolescent, his own man-why should someone with my devotion to “seriousness” and “maturity” knuckle under like a defenseless little boy to this cornball Clytemnestra?

Dr. Spielvogel invited me to look to the nursery for the answer. The question with which he began our second session was, “Does your wife remind you of your mother?”

My heart sank. Psychoanalytic reductivism was not going to save me from the IRT tracks, or worse, from returning to Wisconsin at the end of the week to resume hostilities with Maureen. In reply to the question I said, no, she did not. My wife reminded me of no one I had ever known before, anywhere. Nobody in my entire lifetime had ever dared to deceive, insult, threaten, or blackmail me the way she did-certainly no woman I had ever known. Nor had anyone ever hollered at me like that, except perhaps the basic training cadre at Fort Dix. I suggested to Spielvogel that it wasn’t because she was like my mother that I couldn’t deal with her, but, if anything, because she was so unlike her. My mother was not aggrieved, contentious, resentful, violent, helpless, or suicidal, and she did not ever want to see me humbled-far from it. Certainly, for our purposes, the most telling difference between the two was that my mother adored me, worshipped me across the board, and I had basked in that adoration. Indeed, it was her enormous belief in my perfection that had very likely helped to spawn and nourish whatever gifts I had. I supposed that it could be said that I had knuckled under to my mother when I was still a little boy-but in a little boy that is not knuckling under, is it? That is just common sense and a feel for family life: childhood realpolitik. One does not expect to be treated like a thirty-year-old at five. But at fifteen I certainly did expect deferential treatment of a kind, and from my mother I got it. As I remember it, I could sweet-talk that lady into just about anything during my high-school years, without too much effort get her to agree to the fundamental soundness of my position on just about every issue arising out of my blooming sense of prerogatives; in fact, it was with demonstrable delight (as I recalled it) that she acquiesced to the young prince whom she had been leading all these years toward the throne.

It was the supernumerary father I’d had to struggle with back then. He was anxious for me in my ambitiousness and cockiness. He had seen less of me as a child-off in the store all day, and in bad times selling roofing and siding for his brother-in-law door to door at night-and understandably he had some trouble when he first discovered that the little bird’s beak he’d been feeding all those years had been transformed overnight into a yapping adolescent mouth that could outtalk him, outreason him, and generally outsmart him with the aid of “logic,” “analogy,” and assorted techniques of condescension. But then came my four-year scholarship to Brown, and that crown of crowns, straight As in college, and gradually he too gave in and left off even trying to tell me what to think and do. By my seventeenth year it was already pretty clear tiiat I did not mean to use my freedom from parental constraint and guidance to become a bum, and so, to his credit, he did the best an aggressive entrepreneur and indestructible breadwinner and loving father could, to let me be.

Spielvogel wouldn’t see it that way. He questioned my “fairly happy childhood,” suggesting that people could of course delude themselves about the good old days that had never been. There might be a harsher side to it all that I was conveniently forgetting-the threatening aspect of my mother’s competence and vigor and attentiveness, and the “castration anxiety,” as he called it, that it had fostered in her baby boy, the last, and emotionally the most fragile, of her offspring. From my descriptions of Morris’s life and my few vivid childhood recollections of him, Dr. Spielvogel concluded that my brother had been “constitutionally” a much tougher specimen than I to begin with, and that tins biological endowment had been reinforced in his formative years when he had virtually to raise himself while my mother was off working most of each day in the store with my father. As for Joan, it was Spielvogel’s educated guess that as the ugly duckling and the girl in the family she had hardly been in danger of being overwhelmed by my mother’s attention; to the contrary, she had probably felt herself at the periphery of the family circle, neglected and useless as compared with the hearty older brother and the clever younger one. If so (he continued, writing his Tarnopol family history), it would not be surprising to find her in her forties still so avid to have- famous friends, modish beauty, exotic travels, fancy and expensive clothes: to have, in a word, the admiration and envy of the crowd. He shocked me by asking if my sister also took lovers with such avidity. “Joannie? It never occurred to me.” “Much hasn’t,” the doctor assured the patient.

Now I for one had never denied that my mother might have been less than perfect; of course I remembered times when she seemed to have scolded me too severely or needlessly wounded my pride or hurt my feelings; of course she had said and done her share of thoughtless things while bringing me up, and at times, in anger or uncertainty, had like any parent taken the tyrannical way out. But not until I came under the influence of Dr. Spielvogel could I possibly have imagined a child any more valued or loved than Mrs. Tarnopol’s little boy. Any more, in fact, and I really would have been in trouble. My argument with this line the doctor began to take on my past was that if I had suffered anything serious from having had a mother like my own, it was because she had nourished in me a boundless belief in my ability to win whatever I wanted, an optimism and innocence about my charmed life that (now that I thought about it) could very well have left me less than fortified against the realities of setback and frustration. Yes, perhaps what made me so pathetic at dealing with Maureen in her wildest moments was that I simply could not believe that anybody like her could exist in the world that had been advertised to me as Peter’s oyster. It wasn’t the repetition of an ancient “trauma” that rendered me so helpless with my defiant wife-it was its uniqueness. I might as well have been dealing with a Martian, for all the familiarity I had with female rage and resentment.