CHAPTER
Four
ON MARCH 30, 1969, A MONTH AFTER PORTNOY WAS published, Roth’s father drolly warned him that his old rabbi, Herman L. Kahan, was asking around for his “telephone Number [sic] or address. . . . He probably did not cherish the Bar Mitzvah bit [in Portnoy] and wants to lay it on.” The “bit” had to do with “Rabbi Warshaw”—a.k.a. “Rabbi Syllable”—a “fat, pompous, impatient fraud” who stinks of Pall Mall cigarettes and ponderously commends Alex on his “one hunder-ed and-a fif-a-ty eight-a” IQ at the boy’s bar mitzvah. It was true Rabbi Kahan was a chain smoker, apt to send Philip to the corner store with a quarter for cigarettes (Old Golds, not Pall Malls), and Roth thinks the rabbi might have mentioned that the bar mitzvah boy was about to enter high school at the tender age of twelve (without actually specifying IQ), but otherwise he was “an unpretentious man” who tended to use the usual number of syllables when he spoke.
Roth acquitted himself at his bar mitzvah, at pains to impress family and friends, reading from the Torah “at breakneck speed (if not with full comprehension).” Afterward, though, he was done forever with the religious side of Judaism, telling his parents as much the next morning. Herman showed a little disappointment but was mollified by his levelheaded wife. Years later Roth would describe his personal religion, on a Post-it, as “polyamorous humorist.”
AT WEEQUAHIC HIGH the student population jumped after the war, so freshmen had to be bused to an annex at Hawthorne Avenue School, about fifteen minutes away. The first teacher Roth saw each morning, in homeroom, was Dr. Robert Lowenstein—Doc Lowenstein to his students—who’d recently been discharged from the Army Air Corps, for which he’d served in North Africa, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Lowenstein wore both his valor and his erudition (a Ph.D. in French literature from Johns Hopkins) lightly, and this “combination of braininess and masculinity” made a great impression on Roth; he gave such qualities to Murray Ringold in I Married a Communist, along with Lowenstein’s pronounced reluctance to suffer fools, which often took the form of hurling blackboard erasers at their heads. Roth never forgot the way he’d handled a couple of tough Italian kids, Albie and Duke, whose indifference to being “lovable, dutiful boys” (unlike the school’s Jewish majority) had aroused Roth’s curiosity. “How far can you guys spit?” Lowenstein asked the pair one day, when erasers had failed to do the trick. “Roth, open the windows.” While the others scrambled out of the way, Lowenstein told the Italians to stand across the room and try spitting all the way out the window; both fell short, whereupon Lowenstein sent a loogie sailing easily outdoors. “Now sit down and shut up,” he said.
In 1947, the Roths moved a few houses up the block to a first-floor flat at 385 Leslie, and Philip resumed walking to school—Weequahic High’s main building, next door to his old grade school on Chancellor Avenue. The high school had opened the year of Roth’s birth, designed in a handsome art deco style by the same architectural firm that had designed the swanky Robert Treat Hotel in downtown Newark; in 1939 a WPA mural was added to the school lobby, “History of the Enlightenment of Man,” a work of social realism that Sandy disparaged as the painterly equivalent of Norman Corwin: “stylized, heavy-handed—‘This Is America!’ Clank clank clank.” The basic effect, however, was elevating, a tone upheld by the school’s principal during those first two decades, Max J. Herzberg, a prolific book reviewer for the Newark Evening News and author of the Latin primer used by his freshmen. Roth remembered Herzberg as “a very academic, very serious man” and considered himself well served by the principal’s insistence that students memorize a list of poems including “Annabelle Lee,” “Invictus,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (“Whan that aprill with his shoures soote . . .”), which in later years Roth would “slowly recite over and over” every time he had to endure an invasive medical procedure with only a local anesthetic.
Weequahic High embodied the postimmigrant ardor for education, if not quite for culture per se—as Roth put it, “It wasn’t a culture of books; it was a culture with a tremendous respect for books.” The main aspiration, though, was professional success and the dignity that attended it (“Help, help, my son the doctor is drowning!”), and at Weequahic High the gravity of that pursuit was palpable. In its first three decades, the school was reputed to have produced more doctors, lawyers, dentists, and CPAs than practically any high school in the country, certainly in New Jersey, and the flip side of the coin was an almost giddy disdain for the pointless, goyish violence of contact sports—a spirit captured by the school’s unofficial fight song, a portion of which Roth included in Portnoy:
Give a yell, give a yell
A good, substantial yell
And when we yell, we yell like hell
And this is what we yell
Ikey, Mikey, Jake, and Sam
We’re the boys who eat no ham*
We play football, we play soccer
We keep matzohs in our locker
Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!
White bread, rye bread
Pumpernickel, challah,
All those for Weequahic,
Stand up and hollah!
So famously bad was the football team that its only victory, Roth’s sophomore year, sparked a riot of sorts. Indeed, until fullback Fred Rosenberg plunged two yards into the end zone for the 6–0 margin, the Weequahic Indians had never beaten Barringer High in their fourteen-year history; as time expired, the Barringer side of City Stadium began streaming ominously toward the Jewish seats. Roth remembered making it out to the parking lot and onto a bus, which was surrounded by “ten or fifteen of the enemy . . . hammering their fists against its sides.” The driver pulled away just as Roth slammed his window down on some viciously prying fingers.
Before Untermann Field was completed in 1949, a football game was about the only reason for leaving a neighborhood where everything was a few steps away and almost every face was familiar. Roth lived right around the corner from his favorite hangout, Halem’s candy store, where he could always find friends around the pinball machine indulging in “wise guy talk and sex talk”; another candy store, George’s, was right across the street, and doubled as a bookie joint. A little farther along Chancellor was a “Hot Dog and Chazerai Palace” (as Mrs. Portnoy would have it), Syd’s, where Sandy and Philip worked part-time filling paper bags with greasy delicious fries, served with a wooden fork. As Sandy remembered, all the mothers—not just his—had misgivings about Syd’s, and Philip would pay a final tribute to the place in Nemesis, wherein Mrs. Beckerman laments the polio death of a boy who “wanted to be another Louis Pasteur” but instead “had to go to eat in a place crawling with germs.”
Roth’s best friend, Marty Weich, lived at 287 Leslie, about a block away on the other side of Lyons Avenue. Tall, handsome, polite—“every mother’s dream of the Jewish prince,” said their friend Bob Heyman—Weich was a good student and a dutiful son, rushing to his parents’ kosher butcher shop after school (in college too) so he could help make deliveries. He was even a good athlete, the only one of Roth’s circle who made a varsity team, basketball, a sport that was nonviolent and hence respectable. The two boys had met in Lowenstein’s homeroom at a time when Roth was enamored of the Sweet Science—a legacy of wartime boxing nights at Laurel Garden, where he and Sandy had blown their allowances betting a nickel on each fight (“one of us taking the black guy and the other the white guy or if both fighters were of the same race we bet the light trunks versus the dark trunks”). Challenging the larger, gentle-looking Weich, Roth promptly flung off his gloves (elasticized but unlaced) when Weich began to “flail the shit out of [him].”
Many years later, while writing Indignation, Roth consulted Weich about the niceties of kosher butchery (“Flick two chickens, Markie”). And in the previous decade, the two had discussed a far more somber aspect of Weich’s history, one that they’d skirted back in their school days. As everybody in the neighborhood had known, though, Marty’s older brother Bertram (“Chubby”) had been shot down and killed during an air raid over the Philippines in 1944. His parents were destroyed by the news: his mother took to bed and wept for months (“stupefied, finished”), and his father, a genial man who used to love kibitzing with customers, fell silent and rarely spoke again except to family. This was the basis for the tragedy in Sabbath’s Theater—the death of Sabbath’s brother, Morty—and, fifty years later, when Roth asked for details, Weich still couldn’t discuss it without crying. (“The crying was a lesson,” said Roth. “I bet my money on Sabbath’s grief . . . that’s what propels his philosophy, his attitude: everything you love disappears.”) Weich remembered the terrible day he came home from school, age twelve, and saw the rabbi’s car and immediately knew the worst. When his friend Bernie Swerdlow came around to the back stairs for a visit, Marty burst into tears and shut the door on him.
Swerdlow was another member of Lowenstein’s homeroom at the Hawthorne annex, and it was he who told Roth about Chubby’s death when they first met. Swerdlow lived between Roth and Weich on Lyons, behind a tailor shop owned by his Russian immigrant parents—a family even more beset by tragedy than Weich’s: an older brother, Charles, had died two years before Bernie was born, while another brother, Sol, was schizophrenic and eventually lobotomized. As for Bernie himself, he suffered from colitis so severe that he had to leave school for two years and wear a colostomy bag. Unlike Weich (but very like Mickey Sabbath), Swerdlow rebelled against his misfortunes with an almost antic perversity—“a little devilish guy,” said Bob Heyman, who would “talk, talk, talk, talk.” Once, when Doc Lowenstein couldn’t get him to shut up, he yanked Swerdlow to his feet and slammed him against the lockers outside his classroom. The boy expected a “right hook,” but instead Lowenstein asked him what grammar school he’d attended, and thereby discovered that Swerdlow had come from a school for the handicapped, Branch Brook.
With Lowenstein, at least, Swerdlow probably didn’t touch on his precocious erotic career at the school, among disabled girls, and never mind the girl who lived upstairs from his parents’ shop and gave hand jobs! Such were the tales he told his pals with relish, and Roth paid close attention, later writing about Portnoy’s “lascivious classmate, Smolka, the tailor’s son,” to say nothing of the colitis-stricken, french-fry-eating Melvin Weiner. When Swerdlow miraculously went on to finish medical school (“he tried to screw female orderlies in the stairwell,” said Heyman) and become a psychiatrist—just like Marty Weich—he copped to being the model for Melvin Weiner (but not Smolka) in an interview with the Star-Ledger: “I am using the book [Portnoy] as an RX,” he told the newspaper. “I have patients—all males—with problems concerning their mothers and a relationship with guilt, and an inability to function as they should. . . . [Roth] used me so why shouldn’t I use him?”
Stuart Lehman was another friend with a blighted childhood—a matter too fraught to discuss at the time, though Roth would eventually canvass him as well, while writing Nemesis. Like Bucky Cantor’s mother, Lehman’s had died when he was a small child, and his father (for reasons unknown) had declined to raise him, leaving him in the care of his grandparents. Lehman’s friends called him “the Tiger” because he was so consummately the opposite: sweet and unassuming, he loved spending time at the Roth house, where he had a pair of de facto siblings and parents, too, since Herman and Bess doted on him and were forever encouraging him to stay for dinner (“Eat up! Eat what’s on your plate!”). When his grandfather died in 1954, just after Stu and the others had finished college, Bess wrote him a condolence note: “If, in a small way, we can make up to you for this loss, you know you have only to ask it of us. From the time you came to our home, as a friend of Philip’s, you have always seemed a part of the family.”
Somewhere toward the temperamental center of things was the puckish Bob Heyman, who lived in a one-family house on the more affluent part of Keer, below Maple Avenue; his prosperous father owned a necktie company, Beau Brummell Ties, and their next-door neighbor was the Apple King of Newark. Heyman’s parents and maternal grandparents were all born in America—his mother was a first cousin of Milton Berle, who would attend Bob’s wedding and meet Philip and the others—and they comported themselves, said Roth, with “no taint of Jewishness.” The family attended the grand Conservative temple on High Street, Oheb Shalom, and belonged to a suburban swimming club that Roth would use in the opening scene of Goodbye, Columbus. Perhaps the most potent status symbol was the finished basement chez Heyman: a spacious, pinepaneled rec room with its own bar, hi-fi, and bathroom. One day the exuberant Roth was there, singing along with the Four Aces, when he thrust his fist upward on the last word of “Tell! Me! WHY!” and put a hole in the ceiling. Alarmed, the boys ran to the hardware store for a bag of plaster and tried to patch it up, but Mr. Heyman was bleakly unimpressed by their work. “He’s a wise guy,” the man observed of the culprit.
Perhaps he was aware of Roth’s spot-on imitation of his Brooklynese hocking (nagging, berating) of his son, Robert, or “Robbit!” (For a time Heyman had a Japanese girlfriend who thought Roth and the others were saying “Rabbit”; thus she and her friends took to calling him Usagi—or even Usagi-san—rabbit in Japanese.) But the boys themselves were delighted by Roth’s shtick: “He was like a spark plug,” said Heyman, “a dynamo, and he made us funny.” For Roth’s part, the most cherished times of adolescence were the long bull sessions with his male friends, in somebody’s car late at night, when they’d laugh about their sexual frustration and plan the illustrious conquests to come—“something like the folk narrative of a tribe passing from one stage of human development to the next.” In 1982, Roth sat on the edge of a card game in Miami Beach, chatting with his widowed father and their old friends from the neighborhood; one of his playmates’ mothers took his hand and said, “Phil, the feeling there was among you boys—I’ve never seen anything like it again.” Roth replied (“altogether truthfully”) that he hadn’t either.
WHILE ROTH WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, his father went deeply into debt after the failure of a frozen-food distributorship he’d started with friends. By then Herman had despaired of advancing further at Metropolitan Life, and the roughly $125 a week he made as an assistant manager seemed more meager than ever with two sons heading to college. The money he borrowed for the new business† went mostly toward the purchase of a big refrigerated truck, which he took out at night to make deliveries and hustle business; on weekends he drove to Philadelphia and attended to paperwork at the company’s office. But it was no use: by then Birds Eye had been marketing frozen food for more than fifteen years, and Herman’s enterprise foundered among the 140 or so competitors that had sprung up in the meantime.
As luck would have it, Metropolitan Life was finally feeling pressure brought to bear by FDR’s Fair Employment Act, and Herman was belatedly promoted to manager of the Union City district, about twenty minutes northeast of Newark. As Philip recalled, it was “the worst office in New Jersey,” full of “goyish drunks,” but if anyone could rout these miscreants out of bars and back to work, it was Herman. (“Big-shot goyim,” says Levov’s hard-driving father in American Pastoral, “the presidents of companies, and they’re like Indians with firewater.”) “Every nickel will be paid back” was the mantra with which Herman goaded himself over the next few years, becoming “a figure of considerable pathos and heroism in my eyes,” said Philip in 1974, “a cross of a kind between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman.” It was a hard time for both parents, and Sandy remembered a series of “mild but distressing” arguments arising from the constant niggling over money—even the odd quarter for ice cream after the movies. Because Herman was a renter with no collateral to speak of (and because the Met would have fired him if they’d caught wind of a second job), he’d had to borrow most of the money from his brothers, Ed and Bernie, to whom he hated being beholden.
Certainly it didn’t help, at the time, that Herman’s brothers were more successful than he. The owner of a cardboard box company, Ed had bought a one-family house in Irvington that his daughter, Florence, touted as “very elegant” by Roth standards, what with its fireplace flanked by built-in bookcases (“my father enrolled me in Book-of-the-Month Club when I was thirteen”) and fancy Victrola (“there was no Victrola at Bess and Herman’s”). Philip admitted that ownership of a one-family house put Ed “one step up” on the socioeconomic ladder, but the implication that his eldest uncle was a reader or otherwise refined was “over the top,” given the man’s sixth-grade education and slum-street manners. “He had a big voice and small brain,” said Sandy, and even Ed’s daughter conceded his foul temper and tendency to snipe: “When I went to high school, if I got a B, [he’d say] ‘Why didn’t you get a B+?’ If I got a B+, [he’d say] ‘Why didn’t you get an A?’ ” He was, in short, a less benevolent version of Herman; their niece Marilyn (Betty’s younger daughter) always regarded the latter as a kind man, whereas her most salient memory of Ed was the time she’d slugged him for being mean to her mother (“I was a tough Newark girl”).
Philip found his uncle entertaining in small doses, and Ed seemed to have a soft spot for his promising nephew. The highlight of their relationship was a 1948 trip to Princeton for a football game against Rutgers. Before kickoff, Ed took Philip to see the white clapboard cottage of a family hero, Albert Einstein, on Mercer Street. Ed made a point of warning Philip about Princeton’s anti-Semitic elitism, and both cheered for the state university, Rutgers, and its great Jewish All-American, Leon Root.‡ At Ed’s funeral in 1973, his nephew professed to be “stunned” when Aunt Irene, the widow, flung her arms around Philip and said of her “rough, aggressive, temper-ridden” husband, “Philip, nobody understood him.” “It wasn’t just writers who felt misunderstood!” Roth wrote a friend. “As a Kafka reader I oughtn’t to have had to be reminded.”
Uncle Bernie was the most successful of all, and easily the most worldly. Though he owned a small insurance company and lived in an elegant one-family house in upper-middle-class Maplewood, he was hardly a complacent Jewish bourgeois—on the contrary, he’d been an actual Communist in his youth, and was careful to point out to his nieces and nephews that they must never refer to his live-in maid as a shvartze. Bernie’s relations with the men in his family were bound to be problematic, going back to his decision to marry a portly young woman with prematurely gray hair, Byrdine Block, who came from a relatively affluent family of German Jews. “She’s not really Jewish,” Sender reportedly observed, while Herman indelicately wondered why his little brother wanted to marry a woman who “looks old enough to be your mother.” Eventually the brothers reconciled, but things fell apart again twenty years later, when Bernie declared that he was divorcing the mother of his two daughters and marrying a younger woman. Bess and Herman “were as stunned as if they’d heard that he’d killed somebody,” and naturally gave their support to Byrdine, a warm and gracious woman who was one of Bess’s knitting pals besides. When Bernie compounded the scandal by leaving his second wife a week or so after the honeymoon, Herman again saw fit to console the wronged woman.
“Bernie was on a different plane than Herman,” said his son-in-law, Don Aronson, who was persuaded to wear Paul Stuart clothing by the stylish Bernie (as was Bernie’s nephew Philip). For a while Bernie went through a Reichian phase and would sit in an orgone box—which, however, left him feeling enervated rather than revitalized, until it transpired that he’d placed the box above a doctor’s office and was being bombarded by X-ray radiation. At Duke University he underwent periodic fasting cleanses, and one night he phoned his daughter from Princeton and reported in a strange, halting voice that he’d joined an LSD experimentation group. “He was a man ahead of his time,” said his granddaughter Nancy Chilton, who noted that Bernie had collected Nakashima furniture well before it began appearing at the Metropolitan Museum; he took her to Nakashima’s woodworking studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania, when she was ten, and also on shopping expeditions for antique clocks.
As for that scandalous first divorce: Bernie and Byrdine remained such good friends that she was sometimes introduced as his “other wife”—this in light of his taking a third wife, Ruth, whom Byrdine and their daughter Margery had both insisted he marry, overcoming his reluctance after the fiasco of his second marriage. Meanwhile he kept his exasperation in check vis-à-vis the moralizing Bess and Herman, not least because he was fond of their children. “Sandy was his usual charming self,” he observed in passing after a 1966 visit with his brother’s family, though the main subject of his letter was the already rather famous Philip, a person of “dignity, refinement and beauty” whom Bernie had come to regard as a kindred soul. (“They’re all celebrity fuckers,” Sandy remarked of this common preference among the family.) “In my own way,” Bernie continued, “my feelings reached out towards Phillip [sic], and I found in him a rare human being. I can now understand a quality that must stem from the very marrow of his bones, that makes him the obvious genius that he is, and I just feel that his writings in the future will be even greater than that of the past because of this rare quality that I sense is within him.” One assumes Bernie felt vindicated three years later, with the worldwide success of Portnoy, which incidentally gave him and Byrdine a piquant new moniker for Herman’s wife: “Mrs. Portnoy.”
ACCORDING TO ROTH’S 1965 Midcentury Authors entry, the first book that made a momentous impact on him was Citizen Tom Paine, by Howard Fast—“a gifted mediocre writer” (as he later put it) who appealed to his youthful patriotism and burgeoning sense of social injustice. Still enthralled by Corwin, too, young Philip was writing radio plays that were apprentice exercises, said Sandy, akin to his own “drawing of Li’l Abner’s collar.” In I Married a Communist, the young Nathan Zuckerman hopes to impress a hard-boiled University of Chicago professor, Leo Glucksman, with his Corwin-and Fast-inspired play The Stooge of Torquemada. “Who taught you art is slogans?” Glucksman berates him. “This play of yours is crap. It’s awful. It’s infuriating. It is crude, primitive, simple-minded, propagandistic crap.” Mentors like Glucksman would come later for Roth; at the time he had Irv Cohen, a radical ex-GI who’d married his cousin Florence in 1946. The rangy, argumentative redhead had more in common with Philip than just a high-minded affinity for the common man; both were crazy about baseball, for one thing, and Cohen would fungo balls to the boy on Sunday afternoons and take him to Dodgers games at Ebbets Field. Cohen worked as a truck driver for his father-in-law’s box company, and sometimes he’d take Philip on delivery runs; best of all was stopping at a roadside diner after a long morning of unloading the truck, sweatily disembarking like a couple of real working stiffs.
Cohen had grown up poor in Newark and dropped out of high school, harboring the resentments of a bright, self-educated young man from a deprived background. Roth seemed to recall he’d read a few key books at Cohen’s behest—Looking Backward, The Jungle, Arthur Miller’s Focus—but mostly Cohen worked on him with “didactic hocking.” Unlike his fictional counterpart, Ira Ringold, Cohen was never a card-carrying Communist, but rather associated with the loose confederacy of left-wing causes known as the Popular Front; as such, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Henry Wallace, the 1948 presidential candidate for the Progressive Party, whose virtues he doggedly impressed on Philip. Cohen served as one of Wallace’s bodyguards during campaign appearances in New Jersey, and once Philip helped him set up chairs at a meeting of the pro-Wallace American Veterans Committee. Both Herman Roth and his older brother Ed took a dim view of Cohen’s politics. “Don’t give me that Commie crap!” was a frequent refrain when they engaged with the young man, who seemed especially determined to prevail in the presence of his protégé, Philip, who in turn was deeply torn: Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats were also draining votes away from Truman, and a vote for Wallace could help swing the election to the Republican Thomas Dewey. In the end Philip was relieved he couldn’t vote yet, and nothing but thrilled when Truman won. Soon enough, too, he became disenchanted with Cohen’s “simpleminded ideology,” though he thought of the man tenderly and attended his funeral in 2003. At the cemetery he asked Florence where her parents were buried, and lo, they were close at hand—right beside their obstreperous son-in-law. “Okay, Pop,” said Florence. “Irv is here. You’ve got someone to argue with now.”
For Sandy—and perhaps Philip more indirectly—the most important family mentor was Bess’s little brother, Mickey, a bachelor artist of humble means. Mickey kept a little photography studio in Philadelphia, coloring his black-and-white portraits by hand and sleeping on a couch in the back room. Summers he closed shop and traveled abroad to the great museums of Europe, reproducing the old masters with an impressive degree of technical skill.§ Sandy was rarely without a drawing pad from the age of thirteen or so, and his facility for dashing off likenesses was amazing to Philip and his friends. For high school Sandy had wanted to attend the vocational Arts High, which would have entailed a thirty-minute bus ride, but his parents preferred he stay close to home. It was Mickey who suggested a compromise, and so the boy began taking Saturday classes at his uncle’s alma mater, the Art Students League in Manhattan. Philip was astonished to learn that his teenage brother got to sit in the same room with a naked woman once a week, and there were even more naked bodies in the various art books Mickey gave him, including the classic work on anatomy drawing by Mickey’s old teacher George Bridgman.
After high school Sandy enlisted in the navy for two years, and when he was discharged in 1948 he enrolled as a commercial art student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, with all fees paid by the G.I. Bill. Almost every Friday night he’d come home to Newark, spread newspapers over the dining room table, set up his easel and other materials, and sit there doing his homework until his departure Sunday evening. By then the Roth house had become a social hub for the brothers’ friends, and, while Sandy worked, the “second- and third-hand Buicks” would pull up and the place would get noisy with kibitzing and laughter. Bess loved feeding so many nice Jewish boys, and Herman would join the card game and tell his jokes. Sandy’s circle of twenty-year-old pre-professionals were “raucous but not obscene” around Bess and Herman; when it was only the boys, though, the conversation quickly turned to sex. “What’d you get?” they’d ask one another about their Friday night dates. This was when Sandy’s jokester navy buddy Arnie Gottlieb would shine, dazzling the “hypnotized” Philip with his inspired lewdness: “He was the first stand-up comic I ever saw live,” he remembered. “I had talents in that direction myself, and Arnie was an unforgettable model.”
For the last year of high school, Philip and Marty Weich double-dated with a pair of pretty cousins, Betty Rogow and Joan Gelfman, and so it went for senior prom. After the dance their friends were planning to gather at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in Times Square, and Philip—who’d never drunk anything alcoholic except Passover Manischewitz—asked his mother to name a drink he could order. Scarcely more bibulous than her son, Bess suggested he try asking for a “Canasta Collins,” and this he did. The waiter looked briefly puzzled (“probably there was no such thing”), then scribbled it down and canvassed the others. One by one, they all ordered Canasta Collinses.
According to his yearbook, Roth was on the Prom Committee and seemed to live up to the character summary under his senior photo: “A boy of real intelligence, / Combined with wit and common sense.” The wit part was reflected in such items as his “dream” of being appointed “Ambassador to Lower Slobbovia” (both he and Sandy were Li’l Abner fans) or even elected “5B President”—an allusion perhaps to his actual standing as 4A vice president. Common sense and solidity were further suggested by his other offices: he sat on student councils for both his 4A class and the school at large, and served as a so-called Sagamore (“a hall patrol jerk,” he explained, “who sat in a chair in one of the halls during a free hour to be sure that whoever was walking in the hall had a pass”).
Otherwise the flashy, grade-skipping wunderkind of grammar school (“Land ho!”) had settled into a passably diligent regular guy. The towering author who would someday appear on the cover of Le Nouvel Observateur as “Philippe Roth / Le roi” was a mediocre French student whose cutting up in class, with Dorothy Brand, was once conspicuously punished by their martinet teacher, Mademoiselle Cummings, who clapped her hands and made them stand in silence for “fifteen minutes by the clock.” He was a somewhat better Spanish student, but both languages dissipated over time and he was monoglot as an adult. Overall Roth was a B student who got occasional As in subjects such as English and history, Cs in math and PE, and even a D in physics (“I learned what it was to be dumb in physics”). Such a record seems mediocre amid the rampant grade inflation of a later era, but at Weequahic High, in 1950, it was good enough to rank Roth a respectable 15th out of a bright, industrious class of 173. Still, nobody envisaged him as a future Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur. When The New York Times sent a reporter to Weequahic in the wake of Roth’s Portnoy notoriety, the consensus among his teachers was “intelligent but unimpressive,” and his pal Stu Lehman couldn’t help boasting that he (a pre-med student!) had outscored Roth in English on their college placement test.
ROTH GRADUATED ON January 25, 1950, and wouldn’t begin college until the fall; meanwhile he and his family endured a tragedy that would haunt them forever. Philip’s kindly aunt Ethel (“Ettie”), Bess’s oldest sister, had been the brains of the family, working as her father’s bookkeeper in her early teens. She and Bess adored each other, and looked alike, but Ethel lived in Pelham, New York, and toll calls were a luxury. The wife of a dry cleaner, Max Greiss, Ethel remained “a terribly nice woman” despite some pretty daunting sorrows: her son, Philip, suffered from ulcerative colitis, and her daughter, Helene, was mentally disabled. During their occasional visits to Weequahic, the two Philips (both named after their grandfather) would walk to the ball field at school, waiting every so often for Helene to catch up in her wandering way.
That spring Ethel was terminally ill with cancer of the tongue that had spread to the throat and lymph nodes. She needed round-the-clock care, but her husband was busy tending his shop, and their children had special needs of their own. Bess offered to take care of Ethel as long as it took. With Sandy at Pratt, she proposed to let her sister have his bed, giving Philip the option of sharing a room with the dying woman, or else sleeping on a couch in the parlor. “I wanted to prove I was strong,” Roth remembered, and of course he was fond of Ettie and loath to shirk his duty in caring for her. The woman was all too lucid and in agonizing pain, and would often have bad nights when she couldn’t hide her suffering; also, half her tongue had been cut away, and her speech was “spooky” at the best of times. “This was not usual,” Roth remembered. “Most kids didn’t have to endure that unless they were in a war zone.” Still, he was deeply impressed by his parents’ compassion. Bess was flawlessly loving and attentive, and Herman made a point of pretending that Ethel was on the mend, helping her to her feet each night and taking her on a “constitutional” around the parlor: “That’s a girl, Ethel, you can do it,” he’d say, while he led her tottering from one piece of furniture to the next, barely able to keep her feet.
Finally she was admitted to Mount Vernon Hospital, near Pelham, where she died in June. Nobody had told Dora that her oldest daughter was slowly succumbing to a terrible form of cancer; instead they said Ethel had had a sudden stroke and never revived. It didn’t matter: Dora went into decline and died the following February. As for Philip: though he’d often claim he was “glad” for the experience (“a tremendous education”), his brother thought it was “terribly traumatic” for such an impressionable young man. Curiously Philip was later convinced his aunt had died in 1946, when he was even younger and more vulnerable; he was startled to be reminded, late in life, that the episode had actually occurred shortly after high school. Remembering Ethel during a taped interview in 2004, he broke down and couldn’t speak for long intervals. “I learned too much,” he said in a choked and strangely childish voice. “I saw it, and remember seeing it. . . . Without my brother. My brother was gone.” He was also affected by his mother’s grief, which never went away. Ethel’s daughter, Helene, was sent to a group home in upstate New York about a year after her mother’s death, and one night, many years later, Bess was watching a news feature about that very institution when the adult Helene appeared on the screen—a “dead ringer” for her mother, and hence for Bess, who burst into tears. The nearest Roth ever got to converting the ordeal into fiction was in The Plot Against America, where little Philip’s amputee cousin, Alvin, shares a room with him. In real life he was sometimes irresistibly reminded of Ethel’s torment when he himself was suffering—as he was, many years later, from ghastly back pain that had intensified while he was trying to withdraw from Vicodin. “That poor woman,” he began to sob, “that poor woman.”