The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

the debt. To make matters worse, we didn’t look like a family in need. If anything, my mother, in a demure navy-blue dress, was dressed more attractively—though with no less propriety—than the assistant to the director of admissions; for jewelry she wore the little gold pin she’d been awarded after serving two terms as president of the PTA. She was forty-seven then, a slender, attractive woman with graying dark hair and lively brown eyes whose appearance and comportment were thoroughly Americanized. In fact, she was never wholly at ease except among Jews and for that reason cherished our part of Newark. She kept a kosher kitchen, lit Sabbath candles, and happily fulfilled all the Passover dietary regulations, though less out of religious proclivity than because of deep ties to her childhood household and to her mother, whose ideas of what made for a properly run Jewish home she wished to satisfy and uphold; being a Jew among Jews was, simply, one of her deepest pleasures. In a predominantly gentile environment, however, she lost her social suppleness and something too of her confidence, and her instinctive respectability came to seem more of a shield with which to safeguard herself than the natural expression of her decency.
    But this self-consciousness should not be exaggerated; I’m sure that to Miss Blake, during my Bucknell interview, my mother seemed nothing more or less than perfectly agreeable and ladylike.
    My father, a fit and solid-looking man of fifty, with thinning hair and rimless spectacles, wore a dark business suit with a vest and looked like someone who himself sat behind a desk and interviewed applicants, as indeed he frequently had done while reorganizing the unproductive staff at the Union City office. He certainly was not uneasy being inside a university building for the first time. The turnabout in his fortunes (and ours) had renewed his prodigious energies; between that and his almost palpable pride in me and my scholastic success, he radiated an unpolished, good-natured confidence that stirred my own pride but that, I felt certain, was killing my chances for a Bucknell scholarship. Had he been an embarrassment (and of course beforehand I feared he might be), had he tried too hard, setting out to sell Bucknell on what a good boy I was or telling Miss Blake about the progress made in America by our vast array of relatives, we could, in fact, have been in better shape for seeming that much cruder. As it was, the picture we presented, of a self-made, enterprising, happily cohesive and prospering family, convinced me that I was doomed. I’d get into Bucknell, all right, but for lack of funds I wouldn’t be able to enroll.
    Later that day Marty Castlebaum took us on a tour of the university grounds and around the charming tree-lined streets leading to the main shopping thoroughfare, where we had rooms for the night in the Hotel Lewisburger. Not since I’d been to Princeton with my Uncle Ed had I strolled around a town where people actually lived in houses dating back to the eighteenth century. On a tiny green near his fraternity house there was a Civil War cannon that Marty daringly told my parents went off “when a virgin walks by.”
    It was the campus that most beguiled me: ivy-covered brick buildings sparsely set amid large trees and long, rolling lawns. On “the Hill,” at the heart of the campus, the windows of the men’s dormitory looked beyond cornfields and pastures to the Lycoming hills. There was a clock in the cupola of the men’s dorm that chimed on the hour, an elegant spire atop the new library, a student hangout that Marty familiarly called Chet’s (though a sign identified it as The Bison), and a dormitory called Larison Hall, where that girlfriend of his had her room. Scattered about the campus and on streets down from the Hill were a dozen or so manorial-looking buildings with facades inspired either by English stately homes or by colonnaded plantation dwellings; here