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My God, it wasn’t hatred
“Still protecting that wife of yours,” said Rita, laughing at him again”Incredible incomprehensionYou know why else she hated her? She hated her because she’s your daughterIt’s all fine and well for Miss New Jersey to marry a JewBut to raise a Jew? That’s a whole other bag of tricksYou have a shiksa wife, Swede, but you didn’t get a shiksa daughterMiss New Jersey is a bitch, SwedeMerry would have been better off sucking the cows if she wanted a little milk and nurturanceAt least the cows have maternal feelings
He had allowed her to talk, he had allowed himself to listen, only because he wanted to know; if something had gone wrong, of course he wanted to knowWhat is the grudge? What is the grievance? That was the central mystery: how did Merry get to be who she is? But none of this explained anythingThis could not be what it was all aboutThis could not be what lay behind the blowing up of the buildingA desperate man was giving himself over to a vintage gucci bags treacherous girl not because she could possibly begin to know what went wrong but because there was no one else to give himself over toHe felt less like someone looking for an answer than like someone mimicking someone who was looking for an answerThis whole exchange had been a ridiculous mistakeTo expect this kid to talk to him truthfullyShe couldn’t insult him enoughEverything about their lives transformed absolutely by her hatredHere was the hater–this insurrectionist child!
“Where is she?”
“Why do you want to know where she is?”
“I want to see her,” he said
“Why?”
“She’s my daughterMy daughter is being accused of murder
“You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you? Do you know how many Vietnamese have been killed in the few minutes we’ve had the luxury to talk about whether or not Dawnie loves her daughter? It’s all relative, SwedeDeath is all relative
“Where is she?”
“Your daughter is safeYour daughter is lovedYour daughter is fighting for what she believes inYour rolex chain daughter is finally having an experience of the world
“Where is she, damn you!”
“She’s not a possession, you know–she’s not propertyShe’s not powerless anymoreYou don’t own Merry the way you own your Old Rimrock house and your Deal house and your Florida condo and your Newark factory and your Puerto Rico factory and your Puerto Rican workers and all your Mercedes and all your Jeeps and all your beautiful handmade suitsYou know what I’ve come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality
No one begins like this, the Swede thoughtThis can’t be what she isThis bullying infant, this obnoxious, stubborn, angry bullying infant cannot be my daughter’s protectorMerry with all her intelligence under the spell of this childlike cruelty and meannessThere’s more human sense in one page of the stuttering diary than in all the sadistic idealism in this reckless child’s headOh, to crush that hairy, old omega tough little skull of hers–right now, between his two strong hands, to squeeze it and squeeze it until all the vicious ideas came streaming from her nose!
How does a child get to be like this? Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yesHis only contact with his daughter was this child who did not know anything and would say anything and more than likely do anything–resort to anything to excite herselfHer opinions were all stimuli: the goal was excitement
“The paragon,” Rita said, speaking to him out of the side of her mouth, as though that would make it all the easier to wreck his life”The cherished and triumphant paragon who is in actuality the criminalThe great Swede Levov, ail-American capitalist criminal
She was some clever child crackpot gorging herself on an esca- pade entirely her own, a reprehensible child lunatic who’d never laid eyes on Merry except in the paper; some “politicized” crazy was what she was–the streets of New York were full of chanel j12 white watch them–a criminally insane Jewish kid who’d picked up her facts about their lives from the newspapers and the TV and from the school friends of Merry’s who were all out peddling the same quotation: “Quaint Old Rimrock is in for a big surprise From the sound of it, Merry had gone around school the day before the bombing telling that to four hundred kidsThat was the evidence against her, all these kids on TV claiming they heard her say it–that hearsay and her disappearance were the whole of the evidenceThe post office had been blown up, and the general store along with it, but nobody had seen her anywhere near it, nobody had seen her do the thing, nobody would have even thought of her as the bomber if she hadn’t disappeared”She’s been tricked!” For days Dawn went around the house crying, “She’s been abducted! She’s been tricked! She’s somewhere right now being brainwashed! Why does everybody say she did it? Nobody’s had any contact with herShe is not connected with it in any way at omega watch orange

It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the familyBill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov’s aid”And what is wrong with decency?” Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia
The Swede could not look at himOn top of all the things he could not think about there were two people–Sheila and Orcutt–he could not look atDid Dawn consider Bill Orcutt handsome? He never thought soRound face, snout nose, puckering lower lippiggy-looking bastardMust be something else that drove her to that frenzy over the kitchen sinkWhat? The easy assurance? Was that what got her going? The comfort taken by Bill Orcutt in being Bill Orcutt, his contentment in being Bill Orcutt? Was it because he wouldn’t dream of slighting you even if both you and he knew that you weren’t up to snuff? Was it his appropriateness that got her going like that, the flawless appropriateness, how very appropriately he played his role as steward of the Morris County past? Was it the sense he exuded of never having had to grub for anything or take shit from anyone or be at a loss as to how to behave even when the wife on his arm was a hopeless drunk? Was it because he’d entered the world expecting things dior china not even a Weequahic three-letterman begins to expect, that none of us begin to expect, that the rest of us, if we even get those things by working our asses off for them, still never feel entitled to? Was that why she was in heat over the sink–because of his inbred sense of entitlement? Or was it the laudable environmentalism? Or was it the great art? Or was it simply his cock? Is that it, Dawn dear? I want an answer! I want it tonight! Is it just his cock?
The Swede could not stop imagining the particulars of Orcutt fucking his wife any more than he could stop imagining the particulars of the rapists fucking his daughterTonight the imagining would not let him be
“Decency?” Marcia said to Orcutt, foxily smiling back at him”Much overvalued, wouldn’t you say, the seductions of decency and civility and convention? Not the richest response to life I can think of
“So what do you recommend for ‘richness’?” Orcutt asked her”The high road of transgression?”
The patrician architect was amused by the literature professor and the menacing figure she tried to cut in order to appall the squaresAmused! But the Swede could not turn the dinner party into a battle for black chanel quilted his wifeThings were bad enough without colliding with Orcutt in front of his parentsAll he had to do was to not listen to himYet each time that Orcutt spoke, every word antagonized him, convulsed him with spite and hatred and sinister thoughts; and when Orcutt wasn’t speaking, the Swede was constantly looking down the table to see what in God’s name there was in that face that could so excite his wife
“Well,” Marcia was saying, “without transgression there isn’t very much knowledge, is there?”
“My God,” cried Lou Levov, “that’s one I never heard beforeExcuse me, Professor, but where the hell do you get that idea?”
“The Bible,” said Marcia, deliciously, “for a start
“The Bible? Which Bible?”
“The one that begins with Adam and EveIsn’t that what they tell us in Genesis? Isn’t that what the Garden of Eden story is telling us?”
“What? Telling us what?”
“Without transgression there is no knowledge
“Well, that ain’t what they taught me,” he replied, “about the Garden of EdenBut then I never got past eighth grade
“What did they teach you, Lou?”
“That when God above tells you not to do something, you damn well don’t do it–that’s whatDo it and you pay gucci indy bag the piperDo it and you will suffer from it for the rest of your days
“Obey the good Lord above,” said Marcia, “and all the terrible things will vanishyes,” he replied, though without conviction, realizing that he was being mocked”Look, we are way off the subject–we are not talking about the BibleThis is no place to talk about the BibleWe are talking about a movie where a grown woman, from all reports, goes in front of a movie camera, and for money, openly, for millions and millions of people to see, children, everyone, does everything she can think of that is degradingThat’s what we’re talking about
“Degrading to whom?” Marcia asked him
“To her, for God’s sakeShe has made herself into the scum of the earthYou can’t tell me you are in favor of that”
“Oh, she hasn’t made herself into the scum of anything, Lou
“To the contrary,” said Orcutt, laughing”She has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge
“And,” announced Marcia, “made herself into a superstarThe highest of the highI think Miss Lovelace is having the time of her life
“Adolf Hitler had the time of his life, Professor, shoveling Jews into the furnaceThat does not make it rightThis is a woman who is chanel tote poisoning young minds, poisoning the country, and in the bargain she is making herself the scum of the earth–period!”
There was nothing inactive in Lou Levov when he argued, and it looked as though just observing the phenomenon of an opinionated old man, fettered still to his fantasy of the world, was all that was prompting Marcia to persistTo bait and bite and draw bloodThe Swede wanted to kill herLeave him alone! Leave him alone and he’ll shut up! It’s no big deal getting him to say more and more and more–so stop it!
But this problem that he had long ago learned to circumnavigate, in part by subduing his own personality, seemingly subjugating it to his father’s while maneuvering around Lou where he could–this problem of the father, of maintaining filial love against the onslaught of an unrelenting father–was not a problem that she’d had decades of experience integrating into her lifeJerry just told their father to fuck off; Dawn was driven almost crazy by him; and Sylvia Levov stoically and impatiently endured him, her only successful form of resistance being to freeze him out and live with the isolation–and see more of herself evaporating year by prada borse year

A lock isn’t something that is unique to Old Rimrock, New JerseyEver think of that, Seymour-Levov-it-rhymes-with-the-love? You think everything that is f-foreign to you is b-badDid you ever think that there are some things that are f-foreign to you that are good? And that as your daughter I would have some instinct to go with the right people at the right time? You’re always so sure I’m going to fuck up in some wayIf you had any confidence in me, you’d think that I might hang out with the right peopleYou don’t give me any credit
“Merry, you know what I’m talking aboutYou’re involving yourself with political radicalsB-b-because they don’t agree with y-y-y-you they’re radical
“These are people who necklace pearl chanel have very extreme political ideas–”
“That’s the only thing that gets anything done is to have strong ideas, Daddy
“But you are only sixteen years old, and they are much older and more sophisticated than youSo maybe I’ll learn somethingExtreme is b-b-b-110 blowing up a little country for some misunderstood notions about freedomB-b-b-blowing off b-b-boys’ legs and b-balls, that is extreme, DaddyTaking a b-bus or a train into New York and spending a night in a locked, secure apartment–I don’t see what’s so extreme about thatI think people sleep somewhere every night if they canT-t-tell me what’s so extreme about thatDo you think war is b-bad? Eww–extreme idea, DaddyIt’s not the idea that’s extreme–it’s omega speedmaster replica the fact that someone might care enough about something to try to make it differentYou think that’s extreme? That’s your problemIt might mean more to someone to try to save other people’s lives than to finish a d-d-d-d-d-d-degree at Columbia–that’s extreme? No, the other is extreme”
“You talking about Bill and Melissa?”
“YeahShe dropped out because there are things that are more important to her than a d-d-d-degreeTo stop the killing is more important to her than the letters B-b-bYou call that extreme? No, I think extreme is to continue on with life as usual when this kind of craziness is going on, when people are b-being exploited left, right, and center, and you can just go on and get into your omega speedmaster day-date suit and tie every day and go to workAs if nothing is happeningThat is extreme s-s-s-stupidity, that is what that is
Conversation #59 about New York”Who are they?”
“They went to ColumbiaThey live on Morningside Heights
“That doesn’t tell me enough, MerryThere are drugs, there are violent people, it is a dangerous cityMerry, you can wind up in a lot of troubleYou can wind up getting raped
“B-because I didn’t listen to my daddy?”
“That’s not impossible
“Girls wind up getting raped whether they listen to their daddies or notSometimes the daddies do the rapingRapists have ch-ch-chil-dren tooThat’s what makes them daddies
“Tell Bill and Melissa to come here and spend the weekend with us
“Oh, omega automatic seamaster they’d really like to stay out here
“Look, how would you like to go away to school in September? To prep school for your last two yearsMaybe you’ve had enough of living at home and living with us hereAlways trying to figure out the most reasonable course
“What else should I do? Not plan? I’m a man
“I run a b-b-b-business, therefore I am
“There are all kinds of schoolsThere are schools with all kinds of interesting people, with all kinds of freedomYou talk to your faculty adviser, I’ll make inquiries too–and if you’re sick and tired of living with us, you can go away to schoolI understand that there isn’t much for you to do out here anymoreLet’s all of us think seriously about your going away to dior china sch

“Well, I got a son down in Florida, Seymour’s brother, whose speciality is divorce/ thought his specialite was cardiac surgeryBut no, it’s divorceI thought I sent him to medical school–I thought that’s where all the bills were coming fromBut no, it was divorce schoolThat’s what he’s got the diploma in–divorceHas there ever been a more terrible thing for a child than the specter of divorce? I don’t think soAnd where will it end? What is the limit? You didn’t all grow up in this kind of worldWe grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, workwell, it was differentThe changes are beyond conceptionI sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever beenI don’t know what to make of the end of so many thingsThe lack of feeling for individuals that a person sees in that movie, the lack of feeling black chanel quilted for places like what is going on in Newark–how did this happen? You don’t have to revere your family, you don’t have to revere your country, you don’t have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of themBecause if you don’t, you are just out there on your own and I feel for youOrcutt, or am I wrong?”
“To wonder where the limit is?” Orcutt replied
“Well, yes,” said Lou Levov, who, the Swede observed–and not for the first time–had spoken of children and violence without any sense that the subject intersected with the life of his immediate familyMerry had been used for somebody else’s evil purposes–that was the story to which it was crucial for them all to remain anchoredHe kept such a sharp watch over each and every one of them to be certain that nobody wavered for a moment in their belief in that storyNo one in this family was going to cartier must 21 fall into doubt about Merry’s absolute innocence, not so long as he was alive
Among the many things the Swede could not think about from within the confines of his box was what would happen to his father when he learned that the death toll was four
“You’re right,” Bill Orcutt was saying to Lou Levov, “to wonder where the limit isI think everybody here is wondering where the limit is and worrying where the limit is every time they look at the papersExcept the professor of transgressionBut then we’re all stifled by convention–we’re not great outlaws like William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade and the holy saint Jean GenetThe Let Every Man Do Whatever He Wishes School of LiteratureThe brilliant school of Civilization Is Oppression and Morality Is Worse
And he did not blush”Morality” without batting an eye”Transgression” as though he were a stranger to it, as though it were not he of all the men rolex chain here–William III, latest in that long line of Orcutts advertised in their graveyard as virtuous men–who had transgressed to the utmost by violating the unity of a family already half destroyed
His wife had a loverAnd it was for the lover that she’d undergone the rigors of a face-lift, to woo and win himYes, now he understood the gushing letter profusely thanking the plastic surgeon for spending “the five hours of your time for my beauty,” thanking him as if the Swede had not paid twelve thousand dollars for those five hours, plus five thousand more for the clinic suite where they had spent the two nightsIt is quite wonderful, dear doctorIt is as though I have been given a new lifeBoth from within and from the outsideIn Geneva he had sat up with her all night, held her hand through the nausea and the pain, and all of it for the sake of somebody elseIt was for the sake of somebody else that she was replica santos cartier building the houseThe two of them were designing the house for each other
To run away to Ponce to live with Sheila after Merry disappeared–no, Sheila had made him come to his senses and recover his rectitude and go back to his wife and as much of their life as remained intact, to the wife even a mistress knew he could not wound, let alone desert, in such a crisisYet these other two were going to pull it offHe knew it the moment he saw them in the kitchenOrcutt dumps Jessie and she dumps me and the house is for themShe thinks our catastrophe is over and so she is going to bury the past and start anew–face, house, husband, all newTry as you will, you can’t get under my skin tonight
They are the outlawsOrcutt, said Dawn to her husband, lived completely off what his family once was–well, she was living off what she’d just becomeDawn and Orcutt: two predators
The outlaws are everywhereThey’re inside the miu miu clutch ga

“Now they’re stealing streets?” his father asked”Newark can’t even hold on to its streets? Seymour, get the hell out!” His father’s had become the voice of reason
Merry’s street was just a couple of hundred feet long, squeezed into the triangle between McCarter–where, as always, the heavy truck traffic barreled by night and day–and the ruins of Mulberry StreetMulberry the Swede could recall as a Chinatown slum as long ago as the 1930s, back when the Newark Levovs, Jerry, Seymour, Momma, Poppa, used to file up the narrow stairwell to one of the family restaurants for a chow mein dinner on a Sunday afternoon and, later, driving home to Keer Avenue, his father would tell the boys unbelievable stories about the Mulberry Street “tong wars” of oldThere were no longer stories of oldThere was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a poleThe pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were onAnd that’s all there was
Above and beyond the roofline of her house, he could see the skyline of commercial Newark half a mile away and those three familiar, comforting words, the most reassuring words in the English language, cascading down the elegantly ornate cliff that was once the focal point of a buzzing downtown–ten stories high the huge, white stark letters heralding fiscal confidence and institutional permanence, civic progress and opportunity and pride, chanel white watch indestructible letters that you could read from the seat of your jetliner descending from the north toward the international airport: FIRST FIDELITY BANK
That’s what was left, that lieLast, last fidelity bankFrom down on the earth where his daughter now lived at the corner of Columbia and Green–where his daughter lived even worse than her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement–you could see a mammoth signboard designed for concealing the truthA sign in which only a madman could believeA sign in a fairy taleThree generations in raptures over AmericaThree generations of becoming one with a peopleAnd now with the fourth it had all come to nothingThe total vandalization of their world
Her room had no window, only a narrow transom over the door that opened onto the unlit hallway, a twenty-foot-long urinal whose decaying plaster walls he wanted to smash apart with his fists the moment he entered the house and smelled itThe hallway led out to the street through a door that had neither lock nor handle, nor glass in the double frameNowhere in her room could he see a faucet or a radiatorHe could not imagine what the toilet was like or where it might be and wondered if the hallway was it for her as well as for the bums who wandered in off the highway or down from Mulberry StreetShe would have lived better than this, far better, if she were one of Dawn’s cattle, in the shed sac chloe where the herd gathered in the worst weather with the proximity of one another’s carcasses to warm them, and the rugged coats they grew in winter, and Merry’s mother, even in the sleet, even on an icy, wintry day, up before six carrying hay bales to feed themHe thought of the cattle not at all unhappy out there in the winter and he thought of those two they called the “derelicts,” Dawn’s retired giant, Count, and the old mare Sally, each of them in human years comparable to seventy or seventy-five, who found each other when they were both over the hill and then became inseparable–one would go and the other would follow, doing all the things together that would keep them well and happyIt was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they hadRemembering how when it was sunny they would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had become an animal
It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how he and Dawn could have been the source of it allHow could their innocent foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have been problems even without a war in VietnamShe might chanel earrings fake have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could beBut she would have been at homeAt home you flip out a little and that’s itYou do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated pleasure, you don’t get to the point where you flip out a little so many times that finally you decide it’s such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot? At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalorAt home you can’t live where the disorder isAt home you can’t live where nothing is reined inAt home there is that tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines the world to be and the way the world is for herWell, no longer is there that dissonance to disturb her equilibriumHere are her Rim-rockian fantasies, and the culmination is horrifying
Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time–they did not have enough time with herWhen she’s your ward, when she’s there, you can do itIf you have contact with your child steadily over time, then the stuff that is off–the mistakes in judgment that are made on both sides–is somehow, through that steady, patient contact, made better and better, until at last, inch by inch, day by day and inch by inch, there is remediation, there are the ordinary satisfactions of parental patience rewarded, of things working outWhere was the remediation for this? Could he bring Dawn here to see her, Dawn in her uhr rolex bright, tight new face and Merry sitting cross-legged on the pallet in her tattered sweatshirt and ill-shapen trousers and black plastic shower clogs, meekly composed behind that nauseating veil? How broad her shoulder bones wereBut hanging off those bones there was nothingWhat he saw sitting before him was not a daughter, a woman, or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow’s clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life, a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could have fooled only a birdHow could he bring Dawn here? Driving Dawn down McCarter Highway, turning off McCarter and into this street, the warehouses, the rubble, the garbage, the debrisDawn seeing this room, smelling this room, her hands touching the walls of this room, let alone the unwashed flesh, the brutally cropped, bedraggled hair
He kneeled down to read the index cards positioned just about where she once used to venerate, over her Old Rimrock bed, magazine photos of Audrey Hepburn
I renounce all killing movable or immovableof living beings, whether subtile or gross, whether I renounce all vices mirthof lying speech arising from anger, or greed, or fear, I renounce all taking of anything not given, either in a village, or a town, or a wood, either of little or much, or small or great, or living or lifeless things
I renounce all sexual pleasures, either with gods, or men, or old omega animals

Last, last fidelity bankFrom down on the earth where his daughter now lived at the corner of Columbia and Green–where his daughter lived even worse than her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement–you could see a mammoth signboard designed for concealing the truthA sign in which only a madman could believeA sign in a fairy taleThree generations in raptures over AmericaThree generations of becoming one with a peopleAnd now with the fourth it had all come to nothingThe total vandalization of their world
Her room had no window, only a narrow transom over the door that opened onto the unlit hallway, a twenty-foot-long urinal whose decaying plaster walls he wanted to smash apart with his fists the moment he entered the house and smelled itThe hallway led out to the street through a door that had neither lock nor handle, nor glass in the double frameNowhere in her room could he see a faucet or a radiatorHe could not imagine what the toilet was like or where it might be and wondered if the hallway was it for her as well as for the bums who wandered in off the highway or down from Mulberry StreetShe would have lived better than this, far better, if she were one of Dawn’s cattle, in the shed where the herd gathered in the worst weather with the proximity of one another’s carcasses to warm them, and the rugged coats they grew in winter, and Merry’s mother, even in the sleet, even on an icy, wintry day, up before six carrying hay bales to feed themHe thought of the cattle not at all unhappy out there in chanel big the winter and he thought of those two they called the “derelicts,” Dawn’s retired giant, Count, and the old mare Sally, each of them in human years comparable to seventy or seventy-five, who found each other when they were both over the hill and then became inseparable–one would go and the other would follow, doing all the things together that would keep them well and happyIt was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they hadRemembering how when it was sunny they would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had become an animal
It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how he and Dawn could have been the source of it allHow could their innocent foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have been problems even without a war in VietnamShe might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could beBut she would have been at homeAt home you flip out a little and that’s itYou do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated pleasure, you don’t get to the point where you flip out a little so many times that finally you decide it’s such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot? At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this gucci back pack squalorAt home you can’t live where the disorder isAt home you can’t live where nothing is reined inAt home there is that tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines the world to be and the way the world is for herWell, no longer is there that dissonance to disturb her equilibriumHere are her Rim-rockian fantasies, and the culmination is horrifying
Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time–they did not have enough time with herWhen she’s your ward, when she’s there, you can do itIf you have contact with your child steadily over time, then the stuff that is off–the mistakes in judgment that are made on both sides–is somehow, through that steady, patient contact, made better and better, until at last, inch by inch, day by day and inch by inch, there is remediation, there are the ordinary satisfactions of parental patience rewarded, of things working outWhere was the remediation for this? Could he bring Dawn here to see her, Dawn in her bright, tight new face and Merry sitting cross-legged on the pallet in her tattered sweatshirt and ill-shapen trousers and black plastic shower clogs, meekly composed behind that nauseating veil? How broad her shoulder bones wereBut hanging off those bones there was nothingWhat he saw sitting before him was not a daughter, a woman, or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow’s clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life, a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could have fooled only a birdHow could he bring Dawn here? Driving Dawn dior china down McCarter Highway, turning off McCarter and into this street, the warehouses, the rubble, the garbage, the debrisDawn seeing this room, smelling this room, her hands touching the walls of this room, let alone the unwashed flesh, the brutally cropped, bedraggled hair
He kneeled down to read the index cards positioned just about where she once used to venerate, over her Old Rimrock bed, magazine photos of Audrey Hepburn
I renounce all killing movable or immovableof living beings, whether subtile or gross, whether I renounce all vices mirthof lying speech arising from anger, or greed, or fear, I renounce all taking of anything not given, either in a village, or a town, or a wood, either of little or much, or small or great, or living or lifeless things
I renounce all sexual pleasures, either with gods, or men, or animals
I renounce all attachments, whether little or much, small or great, living or lifeless; neither shall I myself form such attachments, nor cause others to do so, nor consent to their doing so
As a businessman the Swede was astute, and if need be, beneath the genial surface of the man’s man–capitalizing on the genial surface–he could be as artfully calculating as the deal requiredBut he could not see how even the coldest calculation could help him hereNeither could all the fathering talent in the world collected and gathered up and mobilized in one manHe read through her five vows again, considered them as seriously as he could, all the while bewildering himself with the thought, For purity–in the name of purity
Why? prada borse Because she’d killed someone, or whether she’d never killed a fly? Did because she would have needed purity it have to do with him? That foolish kiss?
That was ten years behind them, and besides, it had been nothing, had come to nothing, did not appear to have meant anything much to her even at the time
Could something as meaningless, as forgivable, as innocentas commonplace, as ephemeral, as understandable, No! How could he be asked again and again to take seriously things that were not serious? Yet that was the predicament that or Merry had forced on him all the way back when she was blasting away at the dinner table about the immorality of their bourgeois lifeHow could anybody take that childish ranting seriously? He had done as well as any parent could have–he had listened and listened when it was all he could do not to get up from dinner and walk away until she’d spewed herself out; he had nodded and agreed to as much as he could even marginally agree to, and when he opposed her–say, about the moral efficacy of the profit motive–always it was with restraint, with all the patient reasonableness he could musterAnd this was not easy for him, given that it was the profit motive to which a child requiring tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of orthodontia, psychiatry, and speech therapy–not to mention ballet lessons and riding lessons and tennis lessons, all of which, growing up, she at one time or another was convinced she could not survive without–might be thought to owe if not a certain allegiance then at least a minuscule portion of chanel tote gratitu

She asked me not to tellShe asked me to trust her
“I don’t understand how you could be so shortsightedI don’t understand how you could be so taken in by a girl who was so obviously crazy
“I know it’s difficult to faceThe whole thing is impossible to understandBut to try to pin it on me, to try to act like anything I could have done would have made a difference–it wouldn’t have made a difference in her life, it wouldn’t have made a difference in your lifeThere was no bringing her back thereShe wasn’t the same girl that she’d beenSomething had gone wrongI saw no point in bringing her back
“Stop that! What difference did that dior logo make!”
“I just thought she was so fat and so angry that something very bad must have gone on at home
“That it was my fault
“I didn’t think thatThat’s where everything always goes wrong
“So you took it on yourself to let this sixteen-year-old who had killed somebody run off into the nightKnowing God knows what could happen to her
“You’re talking about her as if she were a defenseless girl
“She is a defenseless girlShe was always a defenseless girl
“Once she’d blown up the building there’s nothing that could have been done, SeymourI would have betrayed her confidence and what difference would it have made?”
“I would have 2.55 chanel jumbo been with my daughter! I could have protected her from what has happened to her! You don’t know what has happened to herYou didn’t see her the way I saw her todayShe’s completely crazyI saw her today, SheilaShe’s not fat anymore–she’s a stick, a stick wearing a ragShe’s in a room in Newark in the most awful situation imaginableI cannot describe to you how she livesIf you had only told me, it would all be different!”
“We wouldn’t have had an affair–that’s all that would have been differentOf course I knew that you might be hurt
“By what?”
“By my having seen herBut to bring it all up again? I didn’t know where she wasI didn’t chanel quilted replica have any more information on herThat’s the whole thingBut she wasn’t crazy
“It’s not crazy to blow up the general store? It’s not crazy to make a bomb, to plant a bomb in the post office of the general store?”
“I’m saying that at my house she wasn’t crazy
“She’d already been crazyYou knew she’d been crazyWhat if she went on to kill somebody else? Isn’t that a bit of a responsibility? She did, you knowShe killed three more peopleWhat do you think of that?”
“Don’t say things just to torture me
“I’m telling you something! She killed three more people! You could have prevented that!”
“You’re torturing meYou’re trying to motorcycle balenciaga torture me
“She killed three more people!” And that was when he pulled Count’s picture off the wall and hurled it at her feetBut that did not faze her–that seemed only to bring her under her own control againActing the role of herself, without rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room
“What can be done for her?” he was growling, and all the while, down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the glass and dumping them into Dawn’s wastebasket”What can be done for her? What can be done for anyone? Nothing can be doneSixteen years old and completely crazyShe blew up a omega speedmaster replica build

Back on the property somewhere, an abandoned iron mineJust after the Revolution, the original house, a wood structure, and the sawmill had burned down and the house was replaced by this one–according to a date engraved on a stone over the cellar door and carved into a corner beam in the front room, built in 1786, its exterior walls constructed of stones collected from the fireplaces of the Revolutionary army’s former campsites in the local hillsA house of stone such as he had always dreamed of, with a gambrel roof no less, and, in what used to be the kitchen and was now the dining room, a fireplace unlike any he’d ever seen, large enough for roasting an ox, fitted out with an oven door and a crane to swing an iron kettle around over the fire; a nineteen-inch-high lintel beam extending seventeen feet across the whole width of the roomFour smaller fireplaces in other rooms, all working, with the original chimneypieces, the wooden carving and moulding barely visible beneath coats miu miu clutch and coats of a hundred and sixty-odd years of paint but waiting there to be restored and revealedA central hallway ten feet wideA staircase with newel posts and railings carved of pale-striped tiger maple–according to the realestate lady, tiger maple a rarity in these parts at that timeTwo rooms to either side of the staircase both upstairs and downstairs, making in all eight rooms, plus the kitchen, plus the big back porchWhy the hell shouldn’t it be his? Why shouldn’t he own it? “I don’t want to live next door to anybodyI don’t want to see the stoop out the window–I want to see the landI want to see the streams running everywhereI want to see the cows and the horsesYou drive down the road, there’s a falls thereWe don’t have to live like everybody else–we can live any way we want to nowWe can go anywhere, we can do anythingDawnie, we’re free!”
Moreover, getting to be free had not been painless, what with the pressure from his father to buy in the Newstead development in chloe paddington handbag suburban South Orange, to buy a modern house with everything in it brand new instead of a decrepit “mausoleum
“You’ll never heat it,” predicted Lou Levov the Saturday he first laid eyes on the huge, vacant old stone house with the For Sale sign, a house on a hilly country road out in the middle of nowhere, eleven miles west of the nearest train stop, the Lackawanna station in Morristown, where the screen-door-green cars with the yellowish cane seats took people all the way into New YorkBecause it came with the hundred acres and with a collapsing barn and a fallen-down gristmill, because it had been vacant and up for sale for almost a year, it was going for about half the price of things that sat on just a two-acre lot in Newstead”Heat this place, cost you a fortune, and you’ll still freeze to deathWhen it snows out here, Seymour, how are you going to get to the train? On these roads, you’re notWhat the hell does he need all that ground for anyway?” Lou Levov demanded of the chanel j12 Swede’s mother, who was standing between the two men in her coat and trying her best to stay out of the discussion by studying the tops of the roadside trees(Or so the Swede thought; later he learned that, in vain, she had been looking down the road for street lights “What are you going to do with all the ground,” his father asked him, “feed the starving Armenians? You know what? You’re dreamingI wonder if you even know where this isLet’s be candid with each other about this–this is a narrow, bigoted areaThe Klan thrived out here in the twentiesDid you know that? The Ku Klux KlanPeople had crosses burned on their property out here
“Dad, the Ku Klux Kian doesn’t exist anymore
“Oh, doesn’t it? This is rock-ribbed Republican New Jersey, SeymourIt is Republican out here from top to bottom
“Dad, Eisenhower is president–the whole country is RepublicanEisenhower’s the president and Roosevelt is dead
“Yeah, and this place was Republican when Roosevelt was livingRepublican during the chanel necklace New DealWhy did they hate Roosevelt out here, Seymour?”
“I don’t know whyBecause he was a Democrat
“No, they didn’t like Roosevelt because they didn’t like the Jews and the Italians and the Irish–that’s why they moved out here to begin withThey didn’t like Roosevelt because he accommodated himself to these new AmericansHe understood what they needed and he tried to help themBut not these bastardsThey wouldn’t give a Jew the time of dayI’m talking to you, son, about bigotsNot about the goose step even–just about hateAnd this is where the haters live, out here
The answer was NewsteadIn Newstead he would not have the headache of a hundred acresIn Newstead it would be rock-ribbed DemocratIn Newstead he could live with his family among young Jewish couples, the baby could grow up with Jewish friends, and the commute door-to-door to Newark Maid, taking South Orange Avenue straight in, was half an hour topsDad, I drive to Morristown in fifteen minutes
“Not if it snows you omega geneve don’t

Welcome to my first blog

aradise Remembered

The SwedeDuring the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athleteThe name was magical; so was the anomalous faceOf the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov
The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseballOnly the basketball team was ever any good–twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer–but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn’t matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all elsePhysical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community–advanced degrees wereNonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopesPrimarily, they could forget the war
The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fosteredWith the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again
And how did this affect him–the omega planet ocean watches glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the SwedeUnlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashedThe cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a passEven at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first baseIt was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bahbah-fraW and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloom- ers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyesand not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede”Swede Levov! It rhymes withSwede Levov! It rhymes withSwede Levov! It rhymes with’The Love’!”
Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with himThe candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us “Hey-you-no!” or “Kid-cut-it-out!”; him they called, respectfully, “Swede Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as “Seymour The chattering girls he passed on the street would omega watch replica ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, “Come back, come back, Levov of my life!” And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of all that love, looking as though he didn’t feel a thingContrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feelingIn this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many–as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school’s servicemen home unscathed from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa–there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility
But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you’re getting your way as a godEither there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn’tHis aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the schoolHe was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he’d broken the Weequahic basketball record–by scoring twenty-seven points against Barringer–on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak, and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from bombing Germany
The Swede’s younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small-headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick, something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1950 valedictorianThough Jerry never really had a friendship with anyone, in his imperious, irascible gucci black bag way, he took an interest in me over the years, and that was how I wound up, from the age of ten, regularly getting beaten by him at Ping-Pong in the finished basement of the Levovs’ one-family house, on the corner of Wynd-moor and Keer–the word “finished” indicating that it was paneled in knotty pine, domesticated, and not, as Jerry seemed to think, that the basement was the perfect place for finishing off another kid
The explosiveness of Jerry’s aggression at a Ping-Pong table exceeded his brother’s in any sportA Ping-Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so that it cannot take out your eyeI would not otherwise have played in Jerry Levov’s basementIf it weren’t for the opportunity to tell people that I knew my way around Swede Levov’s house, nobody could have got me down into that basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddleNothing that weighs as little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn’t have been far from his mindIt never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede LevovSince I couldn’t imagine anything better than being the Swede’s brother–short of being the Swede himself–I failed to understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse
The Swede’s bedroom–which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when I used the toilet outside Jerry’s room–was tucked under the eaves at the back of the houseWith its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy’s roomFrom the two windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof of the Levovs’ garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter–an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John RTunis called The Kid from TomkinsvilleI came to that book and to other of Tunis’s baseball books–Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, chloe paddington bags Champion’s Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year–by spotting them on the built-in shelf beside the Swede’s bed, all lined up alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin’s “The Thinker Immediately I went to the library to borrow all the Tunis books I could find and started with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is four and whose mother dies when he is sixteen and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at “MacKenzie’s drugstore on the corner of South Main
The book, published in 1940, had black-and-white drawings that, with just a little expressionistic distortion and just enough anatomical skill, cannily pictorialize the hardness of the Kid’s life, back before the game of baseball was illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate, when major leaguers looked less like big healthy kids and more like lean and hungry workingmenThe drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression AmericaEvery ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a dramatic physical moment in the story–”He was able to put a little steam in it,”
“It was over the fence,”
“Razzle limped to the dugout”–there is a blackish, ink-heavy rendering of a scrawny, shadow-faced ballplayer starkly silhouetted on a blank page, isolated, like the world’s most lonesome soul, from both nature and man, or set in a stippled simulation of ballpark grass, dragging beneath him the skinny statuette of a wormlike shadowHe is unglamorous even in a baseball uniform; if he is the pitcher, his gloved hand looks like a paw; and what image after image makes graphically clear is that playing up in the majors, heroic though it may seem, is yet another form of backbreaking, unremu-nerative chanel handbags on sale labo