Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

A few years later, when I was away at Rutgers, Billy did my parents the favor of hanging himself by a cord from the drapery rod in their bedroom. I doubt that he expected it would hold him; knowing Billy, I guess he wanted the rod to give under his weight so that he might be found, still breathing, in a heap on the floor when my parents came back from their shopping. The sight of a son-in-law with a sprained ankle and a rope around his neck was supposed to move my father to volunteer to pay Billy’s five-thousand-dollar debt to his bookie. But the rod turned out to be stronger than Billy had thought, and he was strangled to death. Good riddance, one would think. But no; the next year Sunny married (in my father’s phrase) “another one.” Same wavy black hair, same “manly” cleft in his chin, same repellent background. Johnny’s weakness was not horses but hookers. The marriage has flourished, nonetheless. Each time my brother-in-law gets caught, he falls to his knees and begs Sunny’s forgiveness; this gesture seems to go a long way with my sister-not so with our father: “Kisses her shoes,” he would say, closing his eyes in disgust; “actually kisses shoes, as though that were a sign of love, of respect-of anything!” There are four handsome wavy-haired children, or were when last I saw them all in 1962: Donna, Louis, John Jr., and Marie (that name the unkindest cut of all). John Sr. builds swimming pools and brings in enough each week to be able to spend a hundred dollars on a New York call girl without feeling a thing, financially speaking. When last I saw it, their summer house in the Italian Catskills had even more pink “harem” pillows in the living room than the one in Scotch Plains, and an even grander pepper mill; in both “homes,” the silver, the linens, and the towels are monogrammed SZR, my sister’s initials.

How come? I used to be plagued by that question. How could it be that the sister of mine who had rehearsed for hours on end in our living room, over and over again singing to me the songs from Song of Norway and The Student Prince until I wished I were Norwegian or nobility; the sister who took “voice” from Dr. Bresslenstein in his studio in North Philadelphia and at fifteen was already singing “Because” for money at weddings; a sister who had the voluptuous, haughty airs of a prima donna when the other little girls were still fretting over boys and acne -how could she wind up in a house with a harem “motif,” mothering children taught by nuns, and playing “Jerry Vale Sings Italian Hits” on the stereo to entertain our silent parents when they come for a Sunday visit? How? Why?

I used to wonder, when Sonia married for the second time, if perhaps she were involved in a secret and mysterious religious rite: if she had not deliberately set out to mortify herself, so as to sound to the depths her spiritual being. I would imagine her in bed at night (yes, in bed), her pretty-boy slob of a husband asleep beside her, and Sonia exultant in the dark with the knowledge that unbeknownst to everyone-everyone being the bewildered parents and incredulous college-boy brother-she continued to be the very same person who used to enchant us from the stage of the Y with what Bresslenstein (a poor refugee from Palestine, but according to himself formerly the famous impresario of Munich) described to my mother as “a beautiful beautiful coloratura quality-the beginnings of another Lily Pons.” I could imagine her one evening at dinnertime knocking on the back door to our apartment, her black hair to her shoulders again, and wearing the same long embroidered dress in which she had appeared in The Student Prince-my graceful and vivacious sister, whose appearance on a stage would cause tears of pride to spring to my eyes, our Lily Pons, our Galli-Curci, returning to us, as bewitching as ever and uncorrupted: “1 had to do it,” she explains, when we three rush as one to embrace her, “otherwise it meant nothing.”

In brief: I could not easily make peace with the fact that I had a sister in the suburbs, whose pastimes and adornments-vulgar to a snobbish college sophomore, an elitist already reading Allen Tate on the sublime and Dr. Leavis on Matthew Arnold with his breakfast cereal-more or less resembled those of millions upon millions of American families. Instead I imagined Sonia Zuckerman Ruggieri in Purgatorio.

Lydia Jorgenson Ketterer I imagined in Hell. But who wouldn’t have, to hear those stories out of her lurid past? Beside hers, my own childhood, frailty, fevers, and all, seemed a version of paradise; for where I had been the child served, she had been the child servant, the child slave, round-the-clock nurse to a hypochondriacal mother and fair game to a benighted father.

The story of incest, as Lydia told it, was simple enough, so simple that it staggered me. It was simply inconceivable to me at the time that an act I associated wholly with a great work of classical drama could actually have taken place, without messengers and choruses and oracles, between a Chicago milkman in his Bloomfield Farms coveralls and his sleepy little blue-eyed daughter before she went off to school. Yet it had. “Once upon a time,” as Lydia liked to begin the story, early on a winter morning, as he was about to set off to fetch his delivery truck, her father came into her room and lay down beside her in the bed, dressed for work. He was trembling and in tears. “You’re all I have, Lydia, you’re all Daddy has. I’m married to a corpse.” Then he lowered his coveralls to his ankles, all because he was married to a corpse. “Simple as that,” said Lydia. Lydia the child, like Lydia the adult, did not scream out, nor did she reach up and sink her teeth into his neck once he was over her. The thought of biting into his Adam’s apple occurred to her, but she was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother, who needed her sleep. She was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother. And, moreover, she did not want to hurt him: he was her father. Mr. Jorgenson showed up for work that morning, but his truck was found abandoned later in the day in the Forest Preserve. “And where he went,” said Lydia, in mild storybook fashion, “nobody knew,” neither the invalid wife whom he had left penniless nor their horrified little child. Something at first made Lydia believe that he had run away “to the North Pole,” though simultaneously she was convinced that he was lurking in the neighborhood, ready to crush her skull with a rock if she should tell any of her little friends the dring he had done to her before disappearing. For years afterward-even as a grown woman, even after her breakdown-whenever she went to the Loop at Christmastime, she would wonder if he might not be one of the Santa Clauses standing outside the department stores ringing a little bell at the shoppers. In fact, having decided in the December of her eighteenth year to run away from Skokie with Ketterer, she had approached the Santa Claus outside Goldblatt’s and said to him, “I’m getting married. I don’t care about you any more. I’m marrying a man who stands six feet two inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds and if you ever so much as follow me again he’ll break every bone in your body.”

“I still don’t know which was more deranged,” said Lydia, “pretending that that poor bewildered Santa Claus was my father, or imagining that the oaf I was about to marry was a man.”

Incest, the violent marriage, then what she called her “flirtation” with madness. A month after Lydia had divorced Ketterer on grounds of physical cruelty, her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been readying herself for all her life. During the week the woman lay under the oxygen tent in the hospital, Lydia refused to visit her. “I told my aunts that I had put in all the hours I owed to the cause. If she were dying, what help could I be in preventing it? And if she were faking again, I refused to participate.” And when the mother did expire at long last, Lydia’s grief, or relief, or delight, or guilt, took the form of torpor. Nothing seemed worth bothering to do. She fed and clothed Monica, her six-year-old daughter, but that was as far as she went. She did not change her own clothes, make the bed, or wash the dishes; when she opened a can to eat something she invariably discovered that she was eating the cat’s tinned food. Then she began to write on the walls with her lipstick. The Sunday after the funeral, when Ketterer came to take Monica away for the day, he found the child in a chair, all dressed and ready to go, and the walls of the apartment covered with questions, printed in big block letters with a lipstick: WHY NOT? YOU TOO? WHY SHOULD THEY? SAYS WHO? WE WILL? Lydia was still at her breakfast, which consisted that morning of a bowl full of kitty litter, covered with urine and a sliced candle.