He turned to me, of all people, and he was...
He turned to me, of all people, and he was conscious of everything and I missed everything
And now Chris, Steve, Kent, and their mother would be at the Rimrock house, perhaps along with the Swede's old mother, with MrsThe mother must be ninetySitting shiva at ninety for her beloved SeymourAnd the daughter, Meredith, Merryobviously hadn't attended the funeral, not with that outsized uncle around who hated her guts, that vindictive uncle who might even take it upon himself to turn her inBut with Jerry now gone, she dares to leave her hideout to join in the mourning, makes her way to Old Rimrock, perhaps in disguise, and there, alongside her half-brothers and her stepmother and Grandma Levov, weeps her heart out over her father's deathBut no, she was dead tooIf the Swede had been telling Jerry the truth, the daughter in hiding had died--perhaps in hiding she had been murdered or had even taken her own lifeAnything might have occurred--and "anything" wasn't supposed to occur, not to him
The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible manWhatever Happened to Swede LevovSurely not what befell the Kid from TomkinsvilleEven as boys we must have known that it couldn't have been as easy for him as it looked, that a part of it was a mystique, but who could have imagined that his life would come apart in this horrible way? A sliver off the comet of the American chaos had come loose and spun all the way out to Old Rimrock and himHis great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from all self-doubt by his heroic role--that all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder tiffany canada made me think of the compelling story not of John RTunis's sacrificial Tomkinsville Kid but of Kennedy, John FKennedy, only a decade the Swede's senior and another privileged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-forties just five years before the Swede's daughter violently protested the Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father's lifeI thought, But of course
Meanwhile Joy was telling me things about her life that I'd never known as a single-minded kid searching the neighborhood for a grape to burst--Joy was tossing into this agitated pot of memory called "the reunion" yet more stuff no one knew at the time, that no one had to know back when all our storytelling about ourselves was still eloquently naiveJoy was telling me about how her father had died of a heart attack when she was nine and the family was living in Brooklyn; about how she and her mother and Harold, her older brother, had moved from Brooklyn to the Newark haven of Grossman's Dress Shop; about how, in the attic space above the shop, she and her mother slept in the double bed in their one big room while Harold slept in the kitchen, on a sofa he made up each night and unmade each morning so they could eat breakfast there before going to schoolShe asked if I remembered Harold, now a retired pharmacist in Scotch Plains, and told me how just the week before she'd gone out to the cemetery in Brooklyn to visit her father's grave--as frequently as once a month she went out there, all the way to Brooklyn, she said, surprised herself by how much this graveyard now mattered to her"What do you do at the omega watch orange cemetery?"
"I unabashedly talk to him," Joy said"When I was ten it wasn't nearly as bad as it is nowI thought then it was odd that people had two parentsOur threesome seemed right
"Well, all this," I told her, as we stood there just swaying together to the one-man band closing the day down singing, "Dreamwhen you're feelin' blue,that's the thing to do"--"all this I did not know," I told her, "on the harvest moon hayride in October 1948
"I didn't want you to knowI didn't want anybody to knowI didn't want anybody to find out Harold slept in the kitchenThat's why I wouldn't let you undo my braI didn't want you to be my boyfriend and come to pick me up and see where my brother had to sleepIt had nothing to do with you, sweetheart
"Well, I feel better for being told thatI wish you'd told me sooner
"I wish I had," she said, and first we were laughing and then, unexpectedly, Joy began to cry and, perhaps because of that damn song, "Dream," which we used to dance to with the lights turned down in somebody or other's basement back when the Pied Pipers still had Jo Stafford and used to sing it the way it's supposed to be sung--in locked harmony, to that catatonic forties beat, with the ethereal tinkle of the xylophone hollowly sounding behind them-- or perhaps because Alan Meisner had become a Republican and second baseman Bert Bergman had become a corpse and Ira Pos-ner, instead of shining shoes at the newsstand outside the Essex County courthouse, had escaped his Dostoyevskian family and become a psychiatrist, because Julius Pincus had disabling tremors from the drug that prevented the rejection from his body of the fourteen-year-old miu miu bow bag girl's kidney keeping him alive and because Mendy Gurlik was still a horny seventeen-year-old kid and because Joy's brother, Harold, had slept for ten years in a kitchen and because Schrimmer had married a woman nearly half his age who had a body that didn't make him want to slit his throat but to whom he now had to explain every single thing about the past, or perhaps because I seemed alone in having wound up with no children, grandchildren, or, in Minskoff's words, "anything like that," or perhaps because after all these years of separation this reuniting of perfect strangers had all gone on a little too long, a load of unruly emotion began sliding around in me, too, and there I was thinking again of the Swede, of the notorious significance that an outlaw daughter had thrust on him and his family during the Vietnam WarA man whose discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflectionAll that normalcy interrupted by murderAll the small problems any family expects to encounter exaggerated by something so impossible ever to reconcileThe disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation's getting smarter--smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before--out of each new generation's breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining gucci clearance obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals
And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image of his father's fatherthe angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive--initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyoneThe daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral--into the indigenous American berserk
The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary SwedeA guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differentlyIn no way prepared for what is going to hit himHow could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakesRuns his business like a charmHandles his handful of an old man well tiffany diamond en