Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I took no comfort in his “fairness,” however. Money was constantly on my mind: what was being extorted from me by Maureen, in collusion (as I saw it) with the state of New York, and what I was now borrowing from Moe, who refused to take interest or to set a date for repayment. “What do you want me to do, shylock my own flesh and blood?” he said, laughing. “I hate this, Moey.” “So you hate it,” was his reply.

My lawyer’s opinion was that actually I ought to be happy that the alimony now appeared to have been “stabilized” at a hundred a week, regardless of fluctuation in my income. I said, “Regardless of fluctuation down, you mean. What about fluctuation up?” “Well, you’d be getting more that way, too, Peter,” he reminded me. “But then ‘stabilized’ doesn’t mean stabilized at all, does it, if I should ever start to bring in some cash?” “Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to it? For the time being, the situation looks as good to me as it can.”

But it was only a few days after the last of our hearings that a letter arrived from Maureen; admittedly, I should have destroyed it unread. Instead I tore open the envelope as though it contained an unknown manuscript of Dostoevsky’s. She wished to inform me that if I “drove” her to “a breakdown,” I would be the one responsible for her upkeep in a mental hospital. And that would come to something more than “a measly” hundred dollars a week-it would come to three times that. She had no intention of obliging me by being carted off to Bellevue. It was clearly Payne Whitney she was shooting for. And this, she told me, was no idle threat-her psychiatrist had warned her (which was why she was warning me) that she might very well have to be institutionalized one day if I were to continue to refuse “to be a man.” And being a man, as the letter went on to explain, meant either coming back to her to resume our married life, and with it “a civilized role in society,” or failing that, going out to Hollywood where, she informed me, anybody with the Prix de Rome in his hip pocket could make a fortune. Instead I had chosen to take that “wholly unrealistic” job at Hofstra, working one day a week, so that I could spend the rest of my time writing a vindictive novel about her. “I’m not made of steel,” the letter informed me, “no matter what it pleases you to tell people about me. Publish a book like that and you will regret the consequences till your dying day.”

As I begin to approach the conclusion of my story, I should point out that all the while Maureen and I were locked in this bruising, painful combat-indeed, almost from the moment of our first separation hearing in January 1963, some six months after my arrival in New York-the newspapers and the nightly television news began to depict an increasingly chaotic America and to bring news of bitter struggles for freedom and power which made my personal difficulties with alimony payments and inflexible divorce laws appear by comparison to be inconsequential. Unfortunately, these highly visible dramas of social disorder and human misery did nothing whatsoever to mitigate my obsession; to the contrary, that the most vivid and momentous history since World War Two was being made in the streets around me, day by day, hour by hour, only caused me to feel even more isolated by my troubles from the world at large, more embittered by the narrow and guarded life I now felt called upon to live-or able to live-because of my brief, misguided foray into matrimony. For all that I may have been attuned to the consequences of this new social and political volatility, and like so many Americans moved to pity and fear by the images of violence flashing nightly across the television screen, and by the stories of brutality and lawlessness appearing each morning on page one of the New York Times, I simply could not stop thinking about Maureen and her hold over me, though, to be sure, my thinking about her hold over me was, as I well knew, the very means by which she continued to hold me. Yet I couldn’t stop-no scene of turbulence or act of terror that I read about in the papers could get me to feel myself any less embattled or entrapped.

In the spring of 1963, for instance, when for nights on end I could not get to sleep because of my outrage over Judge Rosenzweig’s alimony decision, police dogs were turned loose on the demonstrators in Birmingham; and just about the time I began to imagine myself plunging a Hoffritz hunting knife into Maureen’s evil heart, Medgar Evers was shot to death in his driveway in Mississippi. In August 1963, my nephew Abner telephoned to ask me to accompany him and his family to the civil rights demonstration in Washington; the boy, then eleven, had recently read A Jewish Father and given a report on it in school, likening me, his uncle (in a strained, if touching conclusion), to “men like John Steinbeck and Albert Camus.” So I drove down in their car to Washington with Morris, Lenore, and the two boys, and with Abner holding my hand, listened to Martin Luther King proclaim his “dream”-on the way home I said, “You think we can get him to speak when I go to alimony jail?” “Sure,” said Moe, “also Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They’ll assemble at City Hall and sing ‘Tarnopol Shall Overcome’ to the mayor.” I laughed along with the kids, but wondered who would protest, if I defied the court order to continue to support Maureen for the rest of her natural days and said I’d go to jail instead, for the rest of mine if need be. No one would protest, I realized: enlightened people everywhere would laugh, as though we two squabbling mates were indeed Blondie and Dagwood, or Maggie and Jiggs…In September, Abner was student chairman of his school’s memorial service to commemorate the death of the children killed in the Birmingham church bombing-I attended, again at his invitation, but halfway through a reading by a strapping black girl of a poem by Lang-ston Hughes, slipped out from my seat beside my sister-in-law to race over to my lawyer’s office and show him the subpoena that had been served on me earlier that morning while I sat getting my teeth cleaned in the dentist’s office-I had been asked to show cause why the alimony shouldn’t be raised now that I was “a full-time faculty member” of Hofstra College…In November President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I made my walk to Spielvogel’s office by what must have turned out to be a ten-mile route. I wandered uptown in the most roundabout fashion, stopping wherever and whenever I saw a group of strangers clustered together on a street corner; I stood with them, shrugged and nodded at whatever they said, and then moved on. And of course I wasn’t the only unattached soul wandering around like that, that day. By the time I got to Spielvogel’s the waiting-room door was locked and he had gone home. Which was just as well with me: I didn’t feel like “analyzing” my incredulity and shock. Shortly after I arrived at Susan’s I got a phone call from my father. “I’m sorry to bother you at your friend’s,” he said, somewhat timidly, “I got the name and number from Morris.” “That’s okay,” I said, “I was going to call you.” “Do you remember when Roosevelt died?” I did indeed-so too had the young protagonist of A Jewish Father. Didn’t my father remember the scene in my novel, where the hero recalls his own father’s grieving for FDR? It had been drawn directly from life: Joannie and I had gone down with him to the Yonkers train station to pay our last respects as a family to the dead president, and had listened in awe (and with some trepidation) to our father’s muffled, husky sobbing when the locomotive, draped in black bunting and carrying the body of FDR, chugged slowly through the local station on its way up the river to Hyde Park; that summer, when we went for a week’s vacation to a hotel in South Fallsburg, we had stopped off at Hyde Park to visit the fallen president’s grave. “Truman should be such a friend to the Jews,” my mother had said at the graveside, and the emotion that had welled up in me when she spoke those words came forth in a stream of tears when my father added, “He should rest in peace, he loved the common man.” This scene too had been recalled by the young hero of A Jewish Father, as he lay in bed with his German girl friend in Frankfurt, trying to explain to her in his five-hundred-word German vocabulary who he was and where he came from and why his father, a good and kindly man, hated her guts…Nonetheless my father had asked me on the phone that night, “Do you remember when Roosevelt died?”-for whatever he read of mine he could never really associate with our real life; just as I on the other hand could no longer have a real conversation with him that did not seem to me to be a reading from my fiction. Indeed, what he then proceeded to say to me that night struck me as something out of a book I had already written. And likewise what little I said to him-for this was a father-and-son routine that went way back and whose spirit and substance was as familiar to me as a dialogue by Abbott and Costello,…which isn’t to say that being a partner in the act ever left me unaffected by our patter. “You’re all right?” he asked, “I don’t mean to interrupt you at your friend’s. You understand that?” “That’s okay.” “But I just wanted to be sure you’re all right.” “I’m all right.” “This is a terrible thing. I feel for the old man-he must be taking it hard. To lose another son-and like that. Thank God there’s still Bobby and Ted.” “That should help a little.” “All, what can help,” moaned my father, “but you’re all right?” “I’m fine.” “Okay, that’s the most important thing. When are you going to court again?” he asked. “Next month sometime.” “What does your lawyer say? What are the prospects? They can’t sock you again, can they?” “We’ll see.” “You got enough cash?” he asked. “I’m all right.” “Look, if you need cash-“ “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.” “Okay. Stay in touch, will you, please? We’re starting to feel like a couple of lepers up here, where you’re concerned.” “I will, I’ll be in touch.” “And let me know immediately how the court thing turns out. And if you need any cash.” “Okay.” “And don’t worry about anything.