Philip Roth - Indignation

“Mom, you don’t have to go on. Stop right here. We have a deal.”

Here she took me in those arms of hers, arms as strong as mine, if not stronger, and she said, “You are an emotional boy. Emotional like your father and all of his brothers. You are a Messner like all the Messners. Once your father was the sensible one, the reasonable one, the only one with a head on his shoulders. Now, for whatever reason, he’s as crazy as the rest. The Messners aren’t just a family of butchers. They’re a family of shouters and a family of screamers and a family of putting their foot down and banging their heads against the wall, and now, out of the blue, your father is as bad as the rest of them. Don’t you be. You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you— life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again. Feelings can be life’s biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks. They played them on me when I came to you and said I was going to divorce your father. Now I have dealt with those feelings.

Promise me you will deal the same with yours.”

“I promise you. I will.”

We kissed, and thinking in unison of my father, we were as though welded together by our desperate passion for a miracle to occur.

At the infirmary, I was shown to the narrow hospital bed — one of three in a smallish, bright room looking onto the campus woods — that would be mine for the next week. The nurse showed me how to pull the curtain to encircle the bed for privacy, though, as she told me, the two other beds were unoccupied, so for the time being I’d have the place to myself. She pointed out the bathroom across the hall, where there was a sink, a toilet, and a shower. The sight of each made me remember my mother cleaning the bathroom at the hospital after Olivia had left us to return to the campus — after Olivia had left, never to be invited into my life again, should I go ahead and keep the promise I’d made to my mother.

Sonny Cottler was with me at the infirmary and helped me move my belongings — textbooks and a few toilet items — so that, in keeping with the parting instructions from the doctor, I didn’t have to carry or lift anything. Driving back from the hospital in the car, Sonny had said I could call on him for whatever I might need and invited me to the fraternity house for dinner that night. He was as kind and attentive as he could be, and I wondered if my mother had spoken to him about Olivia and if he was being so solicitous to prevent me from pining for her and breaking my deal with my mother or if he was secretly planning on calling her himself and taking her out again now that I had forsworn her. Even with him helping me, I couldn’t get over my suspiciousness.

Everything I saw or heard caused my thoughts to turn to Olivia. I declined going to the fraternity house with Sonny and instead ate my first meal back on campus alone at the student cafeteria, hoping to find Olivia eating by herself at one of the smaller tables. To return to the infirmary, I took the long way around, passing the Owl, where I put my head inside to see if she might be eating by herself at the counter, even though I knew she disliked the place as much as I did. And all the while I went looking for an opportunity to run into her, and all the while I was discovering that everything, starting with the bathroom at the infirmary, reminded me of her, I was addressing her inside my head: “I miss you already. I’ll always miss you. There’ll never be anybody like you!” And intermittently, in response, came her melodic, lighthearted “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth I knew not where.” “Oh, Olivia,” I thought, beginning to write her another letter, this too in my head, “you are so wonderful, so beautiful, so smart, so dignified, so lucid, so uniquely sexed-up. What if you did slit your wrist? It’s healed, isn’t it? And so are you! So you blew me — where’s the crime? So you blew Sonny Cottler — where’s …” But that thought, and the snapshot accompanying it, was not so easy to manage successfully and took more than one effort to erase. “I want to be with you. I want to be near you. You are a goddess — my mother was right. And who deserts a goddess because his mother tells him to? And my mother won’t divorce my father no matter what I do. There is no way that she would send him to live with the cats in back of the store. Her announcing that she was divorcing him and had engaged an attorney was merely the ploy by which she tricked me. But then it couldn’t be a ploy, since she’d already told me about divorcing him before she’d even known of you. Unless she’d already learned of you through Cottler’s relatives in Newark. But my mother would never deceive me like that. Nor could I deceive her. I’m caught — I’ve made her a promise I can never break, whose keeping is going to break me!”

Or perhaps, I thought, I could fail to keep the promise without her finding out … But when I got to history class on Tuesday, any possibility of betraying my mother’s trust disappeared, because Olivia wasn’t there. She was absent from class on Thursday as well. Nor did I see her seated anywhere at chapel when I attended on Wednesday. I checked every seat in every row, and she wasn’t there. And I had thought, We’ll sit side by side through chapel, and everything that drives me crazy will suddenly be a source of amusement with Olivia enchantingly laughing beside me.

But she’d left school entirely. I had known it the moment I saw she was absent from history class, and had then confirmed it by calling her dormitory and asking to speak to her. Whoever picked up said, “She’s gone home,” politely, but in such a way as to make me think something had happened beyond Olivia’s simply having “gone home”—something that none of them were supposed to talk about. When I did not call or contact her, she had tried again to kill herself — that had to be what had happened. After being called “Miss Hutton” a dozen times in twenty minutes by my mother, after waiting in vain for me to phone once I was back and settled into the infirmary, she had taken measures of just the kind my mother had warned me about. So I was lucky, was I not? Spared a suicidal girlfriend, was I not? Yes, and never before so devastated.

And what if she had not merely tried to kill herself — suppose she’d succeeded? What if she had slit both wrists this time, and bled to death in the dormitory — what if she had done it out at the cemetery where we had parked that night? Not only would the college do everything to keep it a secret, but so would her family. That way no one at Winesburg would ever know what happened, and no one but me would know why. Unless she’d left a note. Then everyone would blame her suicide on me — on my mother and on me.

I had to walk back to Jenkins and down to the basement, across from the post office, to find a pay phone with a folding door that I could tightly shut in order to make my call without anyone overhearing it. There was no note from her at the post office — that was what I’d checked first after Sonny had installed me in the infirmary. Before making my call, I checked again, and this time found there a college envelope containing a handwritten letter from Dean Caudwell:

Dear Marcus:

We’re all glad to have you back on campus and to be assured by the doctor that you came through in top-notch shape. I hope now you’ll reconsider your decision not to go out for baseball when spring comes. This coming year’s team needs a rangy infielder, à la Marty Marion of the Cards, and you look to me as if you might well fill the bill. I suspect you’re fast on your feet, and as you know, there are ways to get on base and help score runs that don’t necessitate hitting the ball over the fence. A bunt dropped for a base hit can be one of the most beautiful things to behold in all of sports. I’ve already put in a word with Coach Portzline. He is eager to see you at tryouts when they’re held on March 1. Welcome back rejuvenated to the Winesburg community. I like to think of this moment as your return to the fold. I hope you’re thinking that way too. If I can be of any help to you, please do not hesitate to stop by the office.