Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

“Then who created the world, Alex?” he asks contemptuously. “It just happened, I suppose, according to you.”

“Alex,” says my sister, “all Daddy means is even if you don’t want to go with him, if you would just change your clothes—”

“But for what?” I scream. “For something that never existed? Why don’t you tell me to go outside and change my clothes for some alley cat or some tree— because at least they exist !”

“But you haven’t answered me, Mr. Educated Wise Guy,” my father says. “Don’t try to change the issue. Who created the world and the people in it? Nobody?”

“Right! Nobody!”

“Oh, sure,” says my father. “That’s brilliant. I’m glad I didn’t get to high school if that’s how brilliant it makes you.”

“Alex,” my sister says, and softly—as is her way—softly, because she is already broken a little bit too—“maybe if you just put on a pair of shoes—”

“But you’re as bad as he is, Hannah! If there’s no God, what do shoes have to do with it!”

“One day a year you ask him to do something for you, and he’s too big for it. And that’s the whole story, Hannah, of your brother, of his respect and love . . .”

“Daddy, he’s a good boy. He does respect you, he does love you—”

“And what about the Jewish people?” He is shouting now and waving his arms, hoping that this will prevent him from breaking into tears—because the word love has only to be whispered in our house for all eyes immediately to begin to overflow. “Does he respect them? Just as much as he respects me, just about as much . . .” Suddenly he is sizzling—he turns on me with another new and brilliant thought. “Tell me something, do you know Talmud, my educated son? Do you know history? One-two-three you were bar mitzvah, and that for you was the end of your religious education. Do you know men study their whole lives in the Jewish religion, and when they die they still haven’t finished? Tell me, now that you are all finished at fourteen being a Jew, do you know a single thing about the wonderful history and heritage of the saga of your people”

But there are already tears on his cheeks, and more are on the way from his eyes. “ A’s in school,” he says, “but in life he’s as ignorant as the day he was born.”

Well, it looks as though the time has come at last—so I say it. It’s something I’ve known for a little while now.

“You’re the ignorant one! You!”

“ Alex !” cries my sister, grabbing for my hand, as though fearful I may actually raise it against him.

“But he is ! With all that stupid saga shit!”

“Quiet! Still! Enough!” cries Hannah. “Go to your room—”

—While my father carries himself to the kitchen table, his head sunk forward and his body doubled over, as though he has just taken a hand grenade in his stomach. Which he has. Which I know. “You can wear rags for all I care, you can dress like a peddler, you can shame and embarrass me all you want, curse me, Alexander, defy me, hit me, hate me—”

The way it usually works, my mother cries in the kitchen, my father cries in the living room—hiding his eyes behind the NewarkNews —Hannah cries in the bathroom, and I cry on the run between our house and the pinball machine at the corner. But on this particular Rosh Hashanah everything is disarranged, and why my father is crying in the kitchen instead of my mother—why he sobs without protection of the newspaper, and with such pitiful fury—is because my mother is in a hospital bed recovering from surgery: this indeed accounts for his excrutiating loneliness on this Rosh Hashanah, and his particular need of my affection and obedience. But at this moment in the history of our family, if he needs it, you can safely bet money that he is not going to get it from me. Because my need is not to give it to him! Oh, yes, we’ll turn the tables on him, all right, won’t we, Alex you little prick! Yes, Alex the little prick finds that his father’s ordinary day-to-day vulnerability is somewhat aggravated by the fact that the man’s wife (or so they tell me) has very nearly expired, and so Alex the little prick takes the opportunity to drive the dagger of his resentment just a few inches deeper into what is already a bleeding heart. Alexander the Great!

No! There’s more here than just adolescent resentment and Oedipal rage—there’s my integrity! I will not do what Heshie did! For I go through childhood convinced that had he only wanted to, my powerful cousin Heshie, the third best javelin thrower in all New Jersey ( an honor, I would think, rich in symbolism for this growing boy, with visions of jockstraps dancing in his head), could easily have flipped my fifty-year-old uncle over onto his back, and pinned him to the cellar floor. So then (I conclude) he must have lost on purpose. But why? For he knew— I surely knew it, even as a child—that his father had done something dishonorable. Was he then afraid to win? But why, when his own father had acted so vilely, and in Heshie’s behalf! Was it cowardice? fear?—or perhaps was it Heshie’s wisdom? Whenever the story is told of what my uncle was forced to do to make my dead cousin see the light, or whenever I have cause to reflect upon the event myself, I sense some enigma at its center, a profound moral truth, which if only I could grasp, might save me and my own father from some ultimate, but unimaginable, confrontation. Why did Heshie capitulate? And should I? But how can I, and still remain “true to myself Oh, but why don’t I just try! Give it a little try, you little prick! So don’t be so true to yourself for half an hour!

Yes, I must give in, I must, particularly as I know all my father has been through, what minute by minute misery there has been for him during these tens of thousands of minutes it has taken the doctors to determine, first, that there was something growing in my mother’s uterus, and second, whether the growth they finally located was malignant . . . whether what she had was . . . oh, that word we cannot even speak in one another’s presence! the word we cannot even spell out in all its horrible entirety! the word we allude to only by the euphemistic abbreviation that she herself supplied us with before entering the hospital for her tests: C-A. And genug! The n, the c, the e, the r, we don’t need to hear to frighten us to Kingdom Come! How brave she is, all our relatives agree, just to utter those two letters! And aren’t there enough whole words as it is to whisper at each other behind closed doors? There are! There are! Ugly and cold little words reeking of the ether and alcohol of hospital corridors, words with all the appeal of sterilized surgical instruments, words like smear and biopsy . . . And then there are the words that furtively, at home alone, I used to look up in the dictionary just to see them there in print, the hard evidence of that most remote of all realities, words like and vagina and cervix , words whose definitions will never again serve me as a source of illicit pleasure . . . And then there is that word we wait and wait and wait to hear, the word whose utterance will restore to our family what now seems to have been the most wonderful and satisfying of lives, that word that sounds to my ear like Hebrew, like b’nai or boruch —benign! Benign ! Boruch atoh Adonai , let it be benign ! Blessed art thou O Lord Our God, let it be benign ! Hear O Israel, and shine down thy countenance, and the Lord is One, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will— only let it be benign !