Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Lydia Ketterer was a divorced woman, five years my senior, and mother of a ten-year-old girl who lived with Lydia’s former husband and his second wife in a new suburban housing development south of Chicago. During their marriage, whenever Lydia dared to criticize or question her husband’s judgment he would lift her from the floor-a massive man twice her weight and a foot taller-and heave her against the nearest wall; in the months following the divorce he abused her through her child, who was then six and in Lydia’s custody; and when Lydia broke down, Ketterer took the child to live with him, and subsequently, after Lydia had been released from the hospital and was back in her apartment, refused to return the little girl.

He was the second man nearly to destroy her; the first, Lydia’s father, had seduced her when she was twelve. The mother had been bedridden since Lydia’s birth, a victim it would seem of nothing more than lumbago, but perpetually weak unto dying. After the father fled, Lydia had been taken to be raised in the home of two spinster aunts in Skokie; until she ran off with Ketterer at the age of eighteen, she and her mother shared a room at the rear of this haven whose heroes were the aviator Lindbergh, the senator Bilbo, the cleric Coughlin, and the patriot Gerald L. K. Smith. It had been a life of little but punishment, humiliation, betrayal, and defeat, and it was to this that I was drawn, against all my misgivings.

Of course, the contrast to my own background of familial devotion and solidarity was overwhelming: whereas Lydia remembered a thousand and one nights of rubbing Sloan’s liniment into her mother’s back, I could not remember a single hour of my childhood when my mother was incapable of performing the rites of her office. If indeed she ever had been indisposed, it seemed not even to interfere with her famous whistling, that continuous medley of “show tunes” she chirped melodiously away at through her day of housework and family chores. The sickly one in our home was me: suffocating diphtheria, subsequent annual respiratory infections, debilitating glandular fevers, mysterious visitations of “allergies.” Until puberty, I spent as much time at home in my bed or under a blanket on a sofa in the living room as I did in my seat in the classroom, all of which makes the disposition of my mother, the whistler-“Mrs. Zuckerbird” the postman called her-even more impressive. My father, though not so sunny in his indestructibility, and constitutionally a much more solemn person than my peppy peasant of a mother, was no less equal to the hardships our family endured: specifically, the Depression, my ailments, and my older sister Soma’s inexplicable marriages, twice to the sons of Sicilians: the first an embezzler and in the end a suicide; the second, honest in his business but otherwise “common as dirt” -in the Yiddish word, which alone seemed to carry the weight of our heartbreak and contempt, prust .

We ourselves were not elegant, but surely we were not coarse. Dignity, I was to understand, had nothing to do with one’s social station: character, conduct, was everything. My mother used to laugh and make cracks about the ladies around who had secret dreams of mink coats and Miami Beach vacations. “To her,” she would say disparagingly of some silly neighbor, “the be-all and end-all is to put on a silver fox and go gallivanting with the hoi polloi.” Not until I got to college and misused the word myself did I learn that what my mother took to mean the elite-perhaps because “hoi polloi” sounded like another of her disdainful expressions for people who put on airs, “the hoity-toity”-actually referred to the masses.

So much for the class struggle as a burning issue in my house, or social resentment or ambitiousness as a motive for action. A strong character, not a big bankroll, was to them the evidence of one’s worth. Good, sensible people. Why their two offspring should have wasted themselves as they did, why both children should have wed themselves to disaster, is difficult to understand. That my sister’s first husband and my only wife should both have taken their own lives would seem to suggest something about our common upbringing. But what? I have no theories. If ever a mother and father were not responsible for the foolishness of their children, it was mine.

My father was a bookkeeper. Because of his excellent memory and his quickness with figures, he was considered the local savant in our neighborhood of hardworking first-generation Jews and was the man most frequently consulted by people in trouble. A thin, austere, and humorless person, always meticulous in a white shirt and a tie, he communicated his love for me in a precise, colorless fashion that makes me ache with tenderness for him, especially now that he is the bedridden one, and I live in self-exile thousands of miles from his bed.

When I was the sickly, feverish patient, I felt something more like mystification, as though he were a kind of talking electrical toy come to play with me promptly each evening at six. His idea of amusing me was to teach me to solve the sort of arithmetical puzzles at which he himself was a whiz. “‘Marking Down,’” he would say, not unlike a recitation student announcing the tide of a poem. “A clothing dealer, trying to dispose of an overcoat cut in last year’s style, marked it down from its original price of thirty dollars to twenty-four. Failing to make a sale, he reduced the price still further to nineteen dollars and twenty cents. Again he found no takers, so he tried another price reduction and this time sold it.” Here he would pause; if I wished I might ask him to repeat any or all of the details. If not, he proceeded. “All right, Nathan; what was the selling price, if the last markdown was consistent with the others?” Or: “‘Making a Chain.’ A lumberjack has six sections of chain, each consisting of four links. If the cost of cutting open a link-“ and so on. The next day, while my Mother whistled Gershwin and laundered my father’s shirts, I would daydream in my bed about the clothing dealer and the lumberjack. To whom had the haberdasher finally sold the overcoat? Did the man who bought it realize it was cut in last year’s style? If he wore it to a restaurant, would people laugh? And what did “last year’s style” look like anyway? “ ‘Again he found no takers,’” I would say aloud, finding much to feel melancholy about in that idea. I still remember how charged for me was that word “takers.” Could it have been the lumberjack with the six sections of chain who, in his rustic innocence, had bought the overcoat cut in last year’s style? And why suddenly did he need an overcoat? Invited to a fancy ball? By whom? My mother thought the questions I raised about these puzzles were “cute” and was glad they gave me something to think about when she was occupied with housework and could not take the time to play go fish or checkers; my father, on the other hand, was disheartened to find me intrigued by fantastic and irrelevant details of geography and personality and intention instead of the simple beauty of the arithmetical solution. He did not think that was intelligent of me, and he was right.

I have no nostalgia for that childhood of illness, none at all. In early adolescence, I underwent daily schoolyard humiliation (at the time, it seemed to me there could be none worse) because of my physical timidity and hopelessness at all sports. Also, I was continually enraged by the attention my parents insisted upon paying to my health, even after I had emerged, at the age of sixteen, into a beefy, broad-shouldered boy who, to compensate for his uncoordinated, ludicrous performances in right field or on the foul line, took to shooting craps in the fetid washroom of the corner candy store and rode out on Saturday nights in a car full of “smoking wise guys”-my father’s phrase-to search in vain for that whorehouse that was rumored to be located somewhere in the state of New Jersey. The dread I felt was of course even greater than my parents’: surely I would awaken one morning with a murmuring heart, or gasping for air, or with one of my fevers of a hundred and four…These fears caused my assault upon them to be particularly heartless, even for a teenager, and left them dazed and frightened of me for years thereafter. Had my worst enemy said, “I hope you the, Zuckerman,” I could not have been any more provoked than I was when my well-meaning father asked if I had remembered to take my vitamin capsule, or when my Mother, to see if a cold had made me feverish, did so under the guise of giving my forehead a lingering kiss at the dinner table. How all that tenderness enraged me! I remember that it was actually a relief to me when my sister’s first husband got caught with his fist in the till of his uncle’s heating-oil firm, and Sonia became the focus of their concern. And of my concern. She would sometimes come back to the house to cry on my seventeen-year-old shoulder, after having been to visit Billy in jail where he was serving a year and a day; and how good it felt, how uplifting it was, not to be on the receiving end of the solicitude, as was the case when Sonia and I were children and she would entertain the little shut-in by the hour, and without complaint.