Philip Roth - Indignation

“And is he like that at the store?”

“Yes. Fearful all the time. ‘We’re losing customers. The supermarket is ruining our business. They’re selling choice for prime, don’t think I don’t know it. They don’t give customers an honest weight, they’re charging them seventeen cents a pound for chicken, and then they turn around and get it up to twenty on the scale. I know how they work it, I know for a fact that they’re cheating the customer—’ On it goes, darling, night and day. It is true that our business is off, but everybody’s business is off in Newark. People are moving to the suburbs and the businesses are following behind. The neighborhood is undergoing a revolution. Newark’s not the same as it was during the war. Many people in the city are hurting suddenly, but still, it isn’t as though we’re starving to death. We have expenses to meet, but who doesn’t? Do I complain about working again? No. Never. Yet that’s how he acts. I prepare and wrap an order the same way I’ve been preparing and wrapping orders for twenty-five years, and he tells me, ‘Not like that — the customers don’t like it like that! You’re in such a hurry to go home, look how you wrap it!’ He even complains how I take orders on the phone. The customers always love to talk to me, to give the orders to me, because I show some concern. Now I talk too much to the customers. He has no patience anymore for me to be nice to our customers! I’m on the phone taking an order, and I say, ‘Oh, so your grandchildren are going to be coming. That’s nice. How do they like school?’ And your father will pick up the other phone and tell the customer, ‘You want to talk to my wife, you call at night, not during business hours,’ and he hangs up. If this goes on, if he keeps this up, if I have to keep watching him push the peas around the plate with his fork, looking like a crazy man for the cyanide pill … Darling, is this what they call a personality change or has something terrible happened to him? Is it something new — is that possible? Out of nowhere? At fifty? Or is it something long buried that has come to the surface? Have I been living all these years with a time bomb? All I know is that something has made my husband into a different person. My own dear husband, and now I am completely confused about whether he is one man or two!”

She ended there, in tears again, the mother who never cried, never faltered, a well-spoken American-born girl who picked up Yiddish from him so as to speak it to the elderly customers, a South Side High graduate who’d taken the commercial course there and could have easily worked as a bookkeeper at a desk in an office but who learned to butcher and prepare meat from him in order to work beside him in the store instead, whose bedrock dependability, whose sensible words and coherent thoughts, had filled me with confidence throughout a childhood that was unembattled. And she became a bookkeeper in the end anyway — a bookkeeper also, I should say, who after coming home from working all day at the store kept the accounts at night and spent the last day of each month sending out the bills on our own lined “Messner Kosher Meat” billing stationery with the little drawing of a cow on the upper left side and the drawing of a chicken on the upper right. When I was a child, what could buoy me up more than the sight of those drawings at the top of our billing stationery and the fortitude of the two of them? Once upon a time an admirable, well-organized, hardworking family, emanating unity, and now he was frightened of everything and she was out of her mind with grief over what she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not to label a “personality change”—and I had as good as run away from home.

“Maybe you should have told me,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me it was so extensive?”

“I didn’t want to bother you at school. You had your studies.”

“But when do you think this began?”

“The first night he locked you out of the house, that’s when. That night changed everything. You don’t know how I fought with him before you got home that night. I never told you. I didn’t want to embarrass him further. ‘What are you accomplishing by double-locking the door?’ I asked him. ‘Do you really want your son not to come into the house, is that why you’re double-locking it? You think you’re teaching him a lesson,’ I told him. ‘What will you do if he teaches you a lesson and goes somewhere else to sleep? Because that’s what a person with any sense does when he finds himself locked out — he doesn’t stand around in the cold, waiting to get pneumonia. He gets up and he goes where it’s warm and he’s welcome. He’ll go to a friend, you’ll see. He’ll go to Stanley’s house. He’ll go to Alan’s house. And their parents will let him in. He won’t take this sitting down, not Markie.’ But your father refused to budge. ‘How do I know where he is at this hour? How do I know he’s not in some whorehouse?’ We’re lying in bed and that’s what he’s hollering — about whether my son is in a whorehouse or not. ‘How do I know,’ he asks me, ‘that he’s not out at this hour ruining his life?’ I couldn’t control him, and this is the result.”

“What is the result?”

“You are now living in the middle of Ohio and he’s running around the house shouting, ‘Why is he having his appendix out in a hospital five hundred miles from home? There aren’t hospitals in New Jersey to take out an appendix? The best hospitals in the world are right here in this state! What is he doing out there in the first place?’ Fear, Marcus, fear leaking out at every pore, anger leaking out at every pore, and I don’t know how to stop either one.”

“Take him to a doctor, Mom. Take him to one of those wonderful hospitals in New Jersey and get them to find out what is wrong with him. Maybe they can give him something to settle him down.”

“Don’t make fun of this, Markie. Don’t make fun of your father. This has all the earmarks of a tragedy.”

“But I meant it. It sounds like he should see a doctor. See somebody. It all can’t fall on you like this.”

“But your father is your father. He won’t take an aspirin for a headache. He won’t give in. He won’t even go to see the doctor about the cough. People coddle themselves, in his eyes. ‘It’s smoking,’ he says, and saying that settles it. ‘My father smoked all his life. I’ve been smoking all my life. Shecky, Muzzy, and Artie have smoked all their lives. Messners smoke. I don’t need a doctor to tell me how to cut a shoulder steak, and I don’t need a doctor to tell me about smoking.’ He can’t drive in traffic now without blowing his horn at everybody who comes anywhere near him, and when I tell him there’s no need for the horn, he shouts, ‘There isn’t? With madmen out driving cars on the roads?’ But it’s him — he’s the madman on the roads. And I can’t take anymore.”

Concerned as I was for my mother’s well-being, disturbed as I was to see her so shaken — she who was the anchor and the mainstay of our home, who, behind the counter of the butcher shop, was every bit the artist with a meat cleaver that he was — I remembered from listening to her why I was at Winesburg. Forget chapel, forget Caudwell, forget Dr. Donehower’s sermons and the girls’ convent curfew hours and everything else wrong with this place — endure what is and make it work. Because by leaving home you saved your life. You saved his. Because I would have shot him to shut him up. I could shoot him now for what he was doing to her. Yet what he was doing to himself was worse. And how do you shoot someone whose onset of craziness at the age of fifty wasn’t just disrupting his wife’s life and irreparably altering his son’s life but devastating his own?