American Pastoral by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

subjugate with a smile, even one that kind and warm, all the things that are out to get you, with a smile hold it all together when the strong arm of the unforeseen comes crashing down on your head. Once again I began to think that he might be mentally unsound, that this smile could perhaps be an indication of derangement. There was no sham in it—and that was the worst of it. The smile wasn't insincere. He wasn't imitating anything. This caricature was
it,
arrived at spontaneously after a lifetime of working himself deeper and deeper into ... what? The idea of himself neighborhood stardom had wreathed him in—had that mummified the Swede as a boy forever? It was as though he had abolished from his world everything that didn't suit him—not only deceit, violence, mockery, and ruthlessness but anything remotely coarse-grained, any threat of contingency, that dreadful harbinger of helplessness. Not for a second did he stop trying to make his relation to me appear as simple and sincere as his seeming relationship to himself.
    Unless, unless, he was just a mature man, as devious as the next mature man. Unless what was awakened by the cancer surgery— and what had momentarily managed to penetrate a lifelong comfy take on things—the hundred percent recovery had all but extinguished. Unless he was not a character with no character to reveal but a character with none that he wished to reveal—just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your confidence is a working novelist. Give the novelist, instead of your life story, the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his.
    "Jerry's been married four times," said the Swede, smiling. "Family record."
    "And you?" I had already figured, from the ages of his three boys, that the fortyish blonde with the golf clubs was more than likely a second wife and perhaps a third. Yet divorce didn't fit my picture of someone who so refused to register life's irrational element. If there had been a divorce, it had to have been initiated by Miss New Jersey. Or she had died. Or being married to someone who had to keep the achievement looking perfect, someone devoted heart and soul to the illusion of stability, had led her to suicide. Maybe
that
was the shock that had befallen ... Perversely, my attempts to come up with the missing piece that would make the Swede whole and coherent kept identifying him with disorders of which there was no trace on his beautifully aging paragon's face. I could not decide if that blankness of his was like snow covering something or snow covering nothing.
    "Me? Two wives, that's my limit. I'm a piker next to my brother. His new one's in her thirties. Half his age. Jerry's the doctor who marries the nurse. All four, nurses. They revere the ground Dr. Levov walks on. Four wives, six kids.
That
drove my dad a little nuts. But Jerry's a big guy, a gruff guy, the high-and-mighty prima donna surgeon—got a whole
hospital
by the short hairs—and so even my dad fell in line. Had to. Would have lost him otherwise. My kid brother doesn't screw around. Dad kicked and screamed through each divorce, wanted to shoot Jerry a hundred times over, but as soon as Jerry remarried, the new wife, in my father's eyes, was more of a princess than the wife before. 'She's a doll, she's a sweetheart, she's my girl....' Anybody said anything about any of Jerry's wives, my father would have murdered him. Jerry's kids he outright adored. Five girls, one boy. My dad loved the boy, but the girls, they were the apple of his eye. There's nothing he wouldn't do for those kids. For any of our kids. When he had everybody around him, all of us, all the kids, my old man was in heaven. Ninety-six and never sick a day in his life.