Philip Roth - Indignation

“I never doubted that,” Olivia said.

“Well, for good or bad, that’s what I was.”

“Am. Are.”

“Mrs. Sklon was the only one of the customers who didn’t want to fix me up with their daughters. I couldn’t trick Mrs. Sklon,” I said. “No one could. I would deliver to her. And every time I delivered she would take the order apart. And it was always a big order. And she would take it out of the bag and undo the wax paper and take everything out and weigh everything to make sure the weight was correct. I had to stand there and watch this show. I was always in a rush because I was always looking to deliver the orders as fast as I could and then get back to the schoolyard to play ball. So at a certain point I’d bring her order around to the back door, plop it down on the top step, knock on the door once, and run like hell. And she would catch me. Every time. ‘Messner! Marcus Messner! The butcher’s son! Come back here!’ I always felt, when I was with Mrs. Sklon, that I was at the heart of things. I felt that with Big Mendelson. I mean what I’m saying, Olivia. I felt that with people in the butcher shop. I got enjoyment out of that butcher shop.” But only before, I thought, before his thoughts made my father defenseless.

“And she had a scale in the kitchen, Mrs. Sklon — was that it?” Olivia asked me.

“In the kitchen, yes. But it was not an accurate scale. It was a baby scale. Besides, she never found that there was anything wrong. But she always weighed the meat, and she always caught me when I tried to run away. I could never escape this woman. She used to give me a quarter tip. A quarter was a good tip. Most were nickels and dimes.”

“You had humble origins. Like Abe Lincoln. Honest Marcus.”

“Insatiate Olivia.”

“What about the war, when meat was rationed? What about the black market? Was your father in the black market?”

“Did he bribe the owner of the slaughterhouse? He did. But his customers didn’t have ration stamps sometimes, and they were having company, they were having family over, and he wanted them to have meat, so he would give the slaughterhouse owner some cash each week, and he was able to get more meat. It wasn’t a big deal. It was as easy as that. But otherwise my father was a man who never broke the law. I think that was the only law he ever broke in his life, and in those days everyone broke that one, more or less. You know kosher meat has to be washed every three days. My father would take a whisk broom with a bucket of water and wash all the meat down. But sometimes you had a Jewish holiday, and though we ourselves weren’t strictly observant, we were Jews in a Jewish neighborhood, and what’s more, kosher butchers, and so the store was closed. And one Jewish holiday, my father told me, he forgot. Say the Passover Seder was going to be on a Monday and a Tuesday, and he washed the meat on the previous Friday. He would have to come back on Monday or Tuesday to do it again, and this one time he forgot. Well, nobody knew he’d forgotten, but he knew, and he would not sell that meat to anyone. He took it all and sold it at a loss to Mueller, who had a nonkosher butcher store on Bergen Street. Sid Mueller. But he would not sell it to his customers. He took the loss instead.”

“So you did learn to be honest from him in the store.”

“Probably. I certainly can’t say I ever learned anything bad from him. That would have been impossible.”

“Lucky Marcus.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” Olivia said.

“Tell me about being a doctor’s daughter.”

All color passed out of her face when she replied, “There’s nothing to tell.”

“You—”

She let me get no further. “Practice tact, ” she said coldly, and with that, as though a switch had been thrown or a plug pulled — as though gloom had swept through her like a storm — her face simply shut down. For the first time in my presence, so too did the beauty. Gone. The play and the luster suddenly gone, the fun of the butcher shop stories gone, and replaced by a terrible, sick-looking pallor the instant I wanted to know more about her.

I feigned indifference but I was shocked, so shocked that I blotted out the moment almost immediately. It was as if I’d been spun round and round till I was giddy and needed first to regain my balance, before I could reply, “Tact it is, then, and tact it shall be.” But I wasn’t happy, and earlier I’d been so happy, not just because of my raising Olivia’s laughter but because of my remembering my father as he’d once been — as he’d always been — back in those unimperiled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place. I’d been remembering my father as if that’s the way he still was and our lives had never taken this freakish turn. I’d been remembering him when he was anything but defenseless — when he was, without dispute, untyrannically, reassuringly, matter-of-factly boss, and I, his child and beneficiary, had felt so astonishingly free.

Why wouldn’t she answer me when I asked what it was like to be a doctor’s daughter? At first I blotted out that moment, but later it returned and wouldn’t go away. Was it the divorce she didn’t want to talk about? Or was it something worse? “Practice tact.” Why? What did that mean?

On Sunday, in the late morning, my mother arrived and we went to speak alone together in the solarium at the end of the corridor. I wanted to show her how steady I was on my feet and how far I could walk and how well I felt altogether. I was thrilled to see her here, away from New Jersey, in a part of the country unknown to her — nothing like that had ever happened before — but knew that when Olivia came I would have to introduce the two of them and that my mother, who missed nothing, would see the scar on Olivia’s wrist and ask me what I was doing with a girl who had tried to commit suicide, a question whose answer I didn’t yet know. Rarely an hour went by when I didn’t ask it of myself.

I thought at first to tell Olivia not to visit on the day that my mother was coming. But I’d already hurt her enough by stupidly alluding to her blowing Cottler and then again when I’d asked in all innocence for her to tell me about being a doctor’s daughter. I didn’t want to hurt her again, and so did nothing to keep her slashed wrist out of the range of my hawk-eyed mother. I did nothing — which is to say, I did exactly the wrong thing. Again.

My mother was exhausted from her overnight train journey — followed by an hourlong bus ride — and though it was only a couple of months since I’d seen her at home, she struck me as a much older, more haggard mother than the one I’d left behind. A harried look I was unaccustomed to seeing deepened her wrinkles and pervaded her features and seemed ingrained in her very skin. Though I kept reassuring her about me — and trying to reassure myself about her — and though I lied about how happy I was with everything at Winesburg, she emanated a sadness so uncharacteristic of her that finally I had to ask, “Ma, is there something wrong that I don’t know?”

“Something’s wrong that you do know. Your father,” she said and startled me further by beginning to cry. “Something is very wrong with your father, and I don’t know what it is.”

“Is he sick? Does he have something?”

“Markie, I think he’s losing his mind. I don’t know what else to call it. You know how he was with you on the phone about the operation? That’s how he is now about everything. Your father, who could confront any hardship in the family, survive any ordeal with the store, be pleasant to the worst of the customers — even after we were robbed that time and the thieves locked him in the refrigerator and emptied the register, you remember how he said, ‘The money we can replace. Thank God nothing happened to any of us.’ The same man who could say that, and believe that, now he can’t do anything without a million worries. This is the man who when Abe got killed in the war held Uncle Muzzy and Aunt Hilda together, who when Dave got killed in the war held Uncle Shecky and Aunt Gertie together, who to this day has held together the whole Messner family, with all of their tragedies — and now you should see what happens when all he’s doing is driving the truck. He’s been driving around Essex County all his life and now suddenly he’s delivering orders as though everyone on the road is a maniac except him. ‘Look at the guy — look what he did. Did you see that woman — is she crazy? Why must people cross with the yellow light? Do they want to get run down, do they not want to live to see their grandchildren grow up and go to school and get married?’ I serve him his dinner and he sniffs at his food as if I’m trying to poison him. This is true. ‘Is this fresh?’ he says. ‘Smell this.’ Food prepared by me in my own spotless kitchen and he won’t eat it for fear that it’s spoiled and will poison him. We’re at the table, just the two of us, and I’m eating and he’s not. It’s horrible. He sits there not taking a bite and waiting to see if I keel over.”