Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“You met her mother?”

“We stayed overnight at their house. Maureen’s been back twice to see her. They spend whole days talking about the past. Oh, she’s trying so hard to forgive her too. To forgive, to forget.”

“Forget what? Forgive what?”

“Mrs. Johnson wasn’t much of a mother, Peter…”

Flossie volunteered no lurid details, nor did I ask.

“Maureen didn’t want you, above all, ever to know any of this. We would try so hard to tell her that they weren’t her fault. I mean intellectually of course she understood that…but emotionally it was just embedded in her from her earliest childhood, that shame. It was really a classic case history.”

“Sounds that way.”

“Oh, I told her you would understand.”

“I believe I do.”

“How can she die? How can a person with her will to live and to struggle against the past, someone who battles for survival the way she does, and for a future-how can she die! The last time she came down from Elmira, oh, she was so torn up. That’s why we all thought Puerto Rico might lift her spirits. She’s such a wonderful dancer.”

“Oh?”

“But all that dancing, and all that sun, and just getting away -and then she got back and just took a nose dive. And did this. She’s so proud. Too proud sometimes, I think. That’s why she takes things so much to heart. Where you’re concerned, especially. Well, you were everything to her, you know that. You see, intellectually she knows by now how sorry you are. She knows that girl was just a tramp, and one of those things men do. It’s partly Mr. Egan-I shouldn’t say it, but it’s being in his clutches. Every time you go plead with her to come back to you, he turns around and says no, you’re not to be trusted. Maybe I’m telling tales out of school-but we are talking about Maureen’s life. But you see, he’s such a devout Catholic, Mr. Egan, and Mrs. Egan even more so-and, Peter, being Jewish you may not understand what it means to them when a husband did what you did. My parents would react the same way. I grew up in that kind of atmosphere, and I know how strong it is. They don’t know how the world has changed-they don’t know about girls like that Karen, and they don’t want to know. But I see those college girls today, the kinds of morals they have, and their disrespect for everything. I know what they’re capable of. They get a beeline on an attractive man old enough to be their own father-“

The doctor appeared.

Tell me she is dead. I’ll go to jail forever. Just let that filthy ·psychopathic liar he dead. The world will be a better place.

But the news was “good.” Mr. Tarnopol could go in now to see his wife. She was out of danger-she had come around; the doctor had even gotten her to speak a few words, though she was so groggy she probably hadn’t understood what either of them had said. Fortunately, the doctor explained, the whiskey she had taken with the pills had made her sick and she’d thrown up most of “the toxic material” that otherwise would have killed her. The doctor warned me that her face was bruised-“Yes? It is?”-as she had apparently been lying for a good deal of the time with her mouth and nose pushed into the mattress and her own vomit. But that too was fortunate, for if she had not been on her stomach while throwing up, she probably would have strangulated. There were also bruises on the buttocks and thighs. “There are?” Yes, indicating that she had spent a part of the two days on her back as well. All that movement, the doctor said, was what had kept her alive.

I was in the clear.

But so was Maureen.

“How did they find her?” I asked the doctor.

T found her,” Flossie said.

‘We have Miss Koerner to thank for that,” the doctor said.

T was calling there for days,” said Flossie, “and getting no answer. And then last night she missed Group. I got suspicious, even though she sometimes doesn’t come, when she gets all wrapped up in her flute or something-but I just got very suspicious, because I knew she was in this depression since coming back from Puerto Rico. And this afternoon I couldn’t stand worrying any more, and I told Sister Mary Rose that I had to leave and in the middle of an arithmetic class I just got in a taxi and came over to Maureen’s and knocked on the door. I just kept knocking and then I heard Delilah and I was sure something was up.”

“Heard who?”

“The cat. She was meowing away, but there was still no answer. So I got down on my hands and knees in the corridor there, and there’s a little space under the door, because it doesn’t fit right, which I always told Maureen was dangerous, and I called to the pussy and then I saw Maureen’s hand hanging down over the side of the bed. I could see her fingertips almost touching the carpet. And so I ran to a neighbor and phoned the police and they broke in the door, and there she was, just in her underwear, her bra too I mean, and all this…mess, like the doctor said.”

I wanted to find out from Flossie if a suicide note had been found, but the doctor was still with us, and so all I said was, “May I go in to see her now?”

“I think so,” he said. “Just for a few minutes.”

In the darkened room, in one of the half dozen criblike beds, Maureen lay with her eyes closed, under a sheet, hooked up by tubes and wires to various jugs and bottles and machines. Her nose was swollen badly, as though she’d been in a street brawl. Which she had been.

I looked silently down at her, perhaps for as long as a minute, before I realized that I had neglected to call Spielvogel. I wanted all at once to talk over with him whether I really ought to be here or not. I would like to ask him his opinion. I would like to know my own. What was I doing here? Rampant narcissismo-or, as Susan diagnosed it, just me being a boy again? Coming when called by my master Maureen! Oh, if so, tell me how I stop! How do I ever get to be what is described in the literature as a man? I had so wanted to be one, too-why then is it always beyond me? Or-could it be?-is this boy’s life a man’s life after all? Is this it? Oh, could be, I thought, could very well be that I have been expecting much too much from “maturity.” This quicksand is it-adult life!

Maureen opened her eyes. She had to work to bring me into focus. I gave her time. Then I leaned over the bed’s side bars, and with my face looming over hers, said, “This is Hell, Maureen. You are in Hell. You have been consigned to Hell for all eternity.”

I meant for her to believe every word.

But she began to smile. A sardonic smile for her husband, even in extremis. Faindy, she said, “Oh, delicious, if you’re here too.”

“This is Hell, and I am going to look down at you for all of Time and tell you what a lying bitch you are.”

“Just like back in Life Itself.”

I said, shaking a fist, “What if you had died!”

For a long time she didn’t answer. Then she wet her lips and said, “Oh, you would have been in such hot water.”

“But you would have been dead.”

That roused her anger, that brought her all the way around. Yep, she was alive now. “Please, don’t bullshit me. Don’t give me ‘Life is Sacred.’ It is not sacred when you are constantly in pain.” She was weeping. “My life is just pain.”

You’re lying, you hitch. You’re lying to me, like you lie to Flossie Koerner, like you lie to your Group, like you lie to everyone. Cry, hut I won’t cry with you!

So swore he who aspired to manhood; but the little boy who will not the began to go to pieces.

“The pain, Maureen,”-the tears from my face plopped onto the sheet that covered her-“the pain comes from all this lying that you do. Lying is the form your pain takes. If only you would make an effort, if only you would give it up-“