IN SEPTEMBER 1967, ROTH ATTENDED A PUBLICATION party at “21” for Bill Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; despite his otherwise excellent physical condition after a vigorous summer on Martha’s Vineyard, Roth experienced an ominous malaise that, Kleinschmidt explained, was a psychosomatic manifestation of envy for his friend. Roth denied it: he loved Styron’s novel and was delighted by its success, but Kleinschmidt stood by his diagnosis “right down to the day I nearly died from a burst appendix and peritonitis,” as Roth recalled.*
A couple of weeks after the party at “21”—on Wednesday, October 11—Roth felt so terrible that he finally phoned his doctor, Arthur Seligman, who sent him to Doctor’s Hospital, across from Gracie Mansion. Roth was lying on a gurney when a tuxedo-attired surgeon, Ed Goodman, stopped on his way to a gala to examine him; he pressed hard on Roth’s right side and the patient almost fainted with pain. Goodman shed his tuxedo and operated almost immediately, discovering that Roth’s appendix had ruptured as long as a week ago, spreading deadly bacteria throughout his abdominal cavity. When Roth woke up the next day, his parents and Mudge were huddled at the foot of his bed; draining tubes protruded from his abdomen and he was heavily dosed with antibiotics, his survival in doubt for at least a day or two.
He was in the hospital for seventeen days that first time, and every night Mudge brought dinner (the hospital food was inedible) and lovingly kept him company. For a few weeks after his discharge he seemed to recover nicely, but then nausea returned and he resumed losing weight. Readmitted on December 6, Roth was again opened up by Dr. Goodman, who found that the stump of Roth’s appendix was badly infected and also needed to be removed. “When am I going to get out of here?” Roth complained, after another sixteen days in bed. “I’m missing the fall of 1967.” “Don’t you get it yet?” said Dr. Goodman. “You almost missed everything.”†
“Amazingly,” Roth wrote in The Facts, “I didn’t see my burst appendix as [Maggie’s] handiwork, probably because the poisons of peritonitis spread through my system without her accompanying barrage of moral indictment. . . . What had killed two of my uncles, and very nearly, in 1944, killed my father, had tried and failed to kill me.” Which is not to say Maggie had abandoned her efforts to bring him low. Almost five years after leaving her for good, Roth was still paying $110 a week in alimony—“court-ordered robbery” that galled him all the more when he remembered how he’d come to be married in the first place—while counting the days until September 1968, two years after their formal separation agreement, when a recently passed New York law would allow him, at last, to obtain a divorce. Meanwhile their 1966 agreement had cost him an additional $5,000 for “support and maintenance” (plus $750 in attorney fees) which “Mag” (as her attorney, Leo Boylan, fondly referred to her) had demanded two months early to cover her trip to Europe that summer.
By late 1967 it was rumored that Roth’s notorious Portnoy stories were part of what would prove “the Novel of the Century (or at least of 1968)”—so Lurie had gleaned from the Epsteins—and nobody was more eager for him to finish than Maggie, who’d heard plenty about it from her colleagues in publishing. Pamela Forcey, a fellow production editor at Harper & Row, working in the cubicle adjoining Maggie’s, remembered overhearing her long daily phone chats with her lawyer Boylan and others. By then Maggie was obsessed with getting “that fucker” who’d been so eager to divorce her and had unforgivably (she liked to say) cut Helen out of his life. On February 21, 1968, she fired the first cannon blast in her final campaign—an affidavit in support of almost tripling her alimony, from $110 to $300, and also requesting another $2,000 in counsel fees. This, of course, was only the beginning, based on the alleged success of his latest novel, When She Was Good, which had briefly appeared near the bottom of the Times best-seller list; also Bantam had reputedly acquired paperback rights “for a price of at least $120,000.00”—chicken feed (Maggie likely surmised, given the scuttlebutt) next to what he stood to get, all told, for Portnoy. “She would have ruined me,” said Roth, remembering. He laughed: “She would have gotten my Nobel Prize money!”
Forcey and Maggie were two of eight production editors, all women, in the College Department, and for a time the two were friendly, meeting after work for drinks and “weekend excursions.” Before that, Maggie had been close to their supervisor—a prim, somewhat awkward woman named Ginny, who Forcey suspected was gay or bisexual, which (she thought) had something to do with her “tempestuous” attachment to Maggie. At one point Maggie became president of the employees union, and when Forcey came to her apartment one night for a drink, she found the other six production editors all on hand: Maggie had devised a list of grievances to submit to her boss and former friend, Ginny, and wanted everyone to sign.‡ Forcey’s own bond with Maggie was mostly based on alcohol: her ex-husband had custody of their children and Forcey was sad and tipsy much of the time; Maggie had mentioned that she had two children of her own, but otherwise “never talked about them too much.” (“My mother was really beginning to drink a lot,” Helen remembered, remarking that Maggie remained “furious” about her defection to Kemper Hall and for a long time refused to let her return to New York except for summer visits.) One night she and Forcey ended up in bed together, drunk, and the next day Maggie said, “I have no morals. My only regret is that I didn’t come.”
Alcohol and sex were the main anodynes in Maggie’s life, and one was more reliably available than the other. During the summer of 1966, she divided a month in Europe between her old Princeton friends, the Fussells and the Keeleys. For the first trip, to Nice, she had her host’s assurance that she’d be well taken care of (“Paul’s letter, written in his usual tumescent spirit, suggests such orgiastic revels I’m half afraid to show up”), whereas the more monogamous Mike Keeley had to inquire among his Greek friends to find a willing partner for Maggie. When he explained to her that a certain friend hadn’t, in fact, been making eyes at her one night, but rather had been sleepy and merely trying to stay awake, she was so enraged that she kicked a dent in Keeley’s car (“You’re no help at all! What good are you?”).
She took off for Antigua at the beginning of February 1967, a few days before she started a new job at the Free Press, then an imprint of Macmillan. She was fired that December, and two months later submitted the affidavit requesting an almost treble increase in alimony: her income was now reduced, she claimed, to the defendant’s $110 a week plus $55 in unemployment benefits; meanwhile she’d become the sole support of her seventeen-year-old daughter. “Given the history of the plaintiff’s relationship with her daughter,” Roth replied in opposition, “it would seem premature to predict that [Helen Miller] will be living with the plaintiff many months more”; at any rate, he continued, the plaintiff was not the “sole support” of her daughter and never had been, since there was a court order requiring her first husband, Burt, to help support the girl, and moreover Roth thought some provision had been made in the will of Burt’s late uncle, Wilbur Walton of Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“Defendant states that I am not the sole support of my daughter,” Maggie replied on March 12, 1968. “I must disagree.” The previous summer, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, Helen had gone to Europe under the auspices of American Youth Hostels; while abroad she’d “unfortunately contracted hepatitis,” according to Maggie, and was subsequently expelled from Kemper Hall. She now lived in her mother’s one-bedroom apartment on East Fifteenth overlooking Stuyvesant Park, and was a third-year student at the nearby Washington Irving High School. As for Burt’s alleged support, Maggie claimed he hadn’t made a single payment since Roth’s desertion in 1963—a claim Miller predictably denied: “I don’t owe her a nickel,” he said in 2013. “I was the one guy in this whole mess who did the right thing.” Actually, as both he and his daughter attest, he was indeed helpful in at least one respect: when Helen had gotten pregnant in Europe during the summer of 1967—what Maggie called “hepatitis” in her affidavit—Burt took her to St. Louis for an abortion.
Maggie explained to the court that her unemployment insurance was due to expire in mid-May unless she attempted to find another job, but she was impeded “because of [her] mental health.” Her daughter, for one, would not have denied it: “I remember her being so rageful,” she said. “I also remember enduring months and months and months of her weeping.” Both mother and daughter were seeing psychiatrists—another expense—though in Maggie’s case her “depression and acute anxiety,” not to say intransigence, seemed little mitigated by therapy. That spring Art Geffen—Philip and Maggie’s old Chicago friend—spotted her outside the Cherry Lane Theatre in the Village, and made a special effort to be friendly (“I was not gonna take Philip’s side or hers”); Maggie was “stony-faced” until he finally gave up and said goodbye. Around that time, too, her friendship with Forcey abruptly ended when Maggie phoned her former coworker and asked her to dinner, whereupon the woman admitted she was already having dinner with Ginny, the supervisor. “My enemy!” Maggie snarled, and slammed the phone down.
“I never see shithead [Maggie], and my lawyer has given up making offers of money to get me free, since no matter what is offered she wants more,” Roth reported to their wedding witnesses, the Gibberds, adding however that two years of formal separation were now grounds for divorce under the new law—all the more reason (he subsequently implored the court) not to proceed with an alimony hearing in the spring of 1968, as Maggie requested, since the question would naturally arise during their divorce hearing that September: “If this Court requires a hearing now, I will have to pay the expense of two trials in one year.” Not so fast, Maggie replied: “[Defendant] did not make current alimony payments to me for a long period in 1965 and therefore breached the terms of the separation decree, the faithful performance of which is a requisite for a divorce under the new law.”§ So there was that to consider.
The man who’d fired Maggie from her job at the Free Press was a “gorgeous, charming, very small” editor named Carter Hunter, according to Helen, who further described him as “bright, articulate, and a major bullshitter.” (Helen would presently have an affair with him.) The thirty-three-year-old Hunter and Maggie had been drinking buddies outside of work, and continued as such when they were no longer colleagues. “Oh god, Maggie,” Betty Fussell thought when her friend brought Hunter along for a visit to Princeton and both got so drunk Fussell had begged them to spend the night. Helen wondered in retrospect whether both her mother and Hunter had been fired around that time, given their heavy drinking, but a Times item about a “May Wine” party at the Museum of Modern Art on May 8, 1968, suggests that Hunter, at least, was still employed: “ ‘It’s so cold out here I’m drinking January gin,’ said Mr. Hunter, the slight, mustached managing editor of the Free Press, which publishes books on sociology.”
On Friday, May 10, two days after the MoMA event, and a few days before Maggie’s unemployment insurance was due to lapse, she and Hunter attended a party on the Upper West Side with a third friend, who urged them to take a taxi home afterward. But Hunter wanted to show off his snazzy new Jaguar convertible, and while racing along the Sixty-sixth Street transverse in Central Park, at around five in the morning, he lost control and slammed into a tree on the passenger side. Maggie was killed instantly. Helen remembered that the police had “beat the shit” out of Hunter, who was black, when they detected his condition and noticed the dead white woman in his car.
Things had been improving lately between Maggie and her daughter. Maggie was drinking less and was therefore better company, and Helen had just gotten a pleasant summer job at a shop around the corner while also volunteering for an antiwar organization (she would soon earn the nickname “Hanoi [Helen]”). Maggie was killed the day before Mother’s Day; she’d known Helen had bought a gift for her, and they’d parted on loving terms. That night, however, Helen felt “extremely anxious” and couldn’t sleep; she stayed up watching TV until four in the morning, and was woken around eight thirty by the phone. It was the police: Was she the daughter of Margaret Roth? “Why are you asking me these questions?” said Helen, panicking, but they only told her to sit tight and wait. A few minutes later, the doorman rang to say two policemen were coming up to see her. After she got the news, she phoned Ronald at Morgan Academy: “My sister was very distraught,” he recalled. “I felt nothing.” (Burt Miller corroborated his son’s bland affect: Ronald “said ‘Good.’ One happy family, right?”)
Roth had just arrived at Kips Bay to start his morning’s work when the phone rang. “Philip,” said Helen, “Mother’s been killed.” At first he thought it was a trick—a ghoulish enticement for him “to say something self-incriminating that could be recorded and used to sway the judge to increase the alimony in our next court go-round.” “And where is she now?” he asked skeptically. “In the morgue,” the girl replied, bursting into tears. Roth came down to the apartment on East Fifteenth, where Helen was being comforted by a family friend; he found himself staring at the shelves of books—all the Modern Library novels he’d bought at bookstores along Fourth Avenue, and later in Hyde Park as a graduate student. Helen begged him to go identify the body, but Roth didn’t think it was his place: “there were plenty of people to do that other than her or me,” he wrote in The Facts; “if she wished, however, I would make the funeral arrangements.” (As it happened Helen did have to identify her mother’s remains: one side of the head was badly disfigured, while the other looked as though she were “peacefully sleeping.”)
Before proceeding to the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison and Eighty-first, Roth stopped back at his apartment and made a few phone calls. “Yes,” Fingerhood assured him, when he asked whether this meant he was divorced in the state of New York. “Good,” said Sandy, echoing the dead woman’s son. Roth was walking to the subway when it occurred to him that he no longer had to divide his income; the taxi he took to Campbell’s “was the first tangible result” of his liberation. “Got the good news early, huh?” the cabbie remarked as he pulled to the curb, and Roth realized he’d been whistling the entire ride.
Maggie had wanted a Jewish funeral service, and Roth was oddly gratified to find himself in the director’s office with David Seligson, one of the prominent New York rabbis who’d denounced his work as a bane to the Jews. “I didn’t go so far as to wear a yarmulke at the service,” Roth wrote, “but had the rabbi asked me to, I would have forsworn my secular convictions out of respect for the beliefs of the deceased. When I saw the casket, I said to [Maggie], ‘You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it.’ Whereupon the late Jew replied, ‘Mazel tov.’ ” The funeral was well attended—perhaps a hundred of Maggie’s family, coworkers, fellow New School students, and members of her various therapy groups (“did they get an earful about my enemas!”), for whose sake the widower kept a seemly aspect of grief afloat. “What relief he must be feeling,” Pamela Forcey remembered thinking when she spotted Roth sitting with the family. Burt Miller and Bea Walton had come for the children’s sake, and other mourners included Maggie’s vilified supervisor Ginny (“extremely well-mannered,” Roth recalled, “perhaps a lesbian”) and Carter Hunter, who still looked “dazed and shaken” but appeared uninjured except for a bandage over one eye. Roth shook hands with him but didn’t inquire as to the wherefores of the accident, lest a member of Maggie’s therapy groups figure him as an accomplice. “I never saw, or heard of, my emancipator again,” Roth noted of the editor.¶
Betty Fussell thought Helen looked like a woebegone “orphan child” at the funeral and wondered what would become of her. Helen, for her part, remembered the particular kindness of their old Princeton friend Naomi Savage, who spoke to her tenderly and later sent a “beautiful package” of photographs she’d taken of her mother and stepfather; also, for a while, Savage made a point of keeping in touch with the girl (“the only adult who reached out that way”). As for Roth, he was startled when Helen murmured to him, once the funeral was over, “Now we can run away together.” “I wanted to be rescued,” she later explained.
On May 17, Roth boarded the Adirondack bus at Port Authority and traveled to Yaddo, where he holed up in Hillside Cottage for twelve days finishing his novel. The famous last lines—Spielvogel’s only utterance—had “a secondary, more personal irony” for the author, “as both hopeful instruction and congratulatory message: ‘So [said the doctor], now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?’ ”
* Roth’s delight over his friend’s success was tempered a little, maybe, given the relative failure of When She Was Good. The ten-point remonstrance of Random House he’d written to Donadio that summer included “Tell Bennett [Cerf] that I am going to watch carefully the advertising of Styron’s book.”
† The medical part of this episode is precisely described in Everyman, ending with this exchange between doctor and patient.
‡ It’s according to Forcey that Maggie was briefly president of their union, the Association of Harper & Row Employees, but Roth remembered his first wife’s title as “chairman of the union grievances committee.” “Nice?” he said to me, chuckling. “Nice touch? If you wrote this, people would say, ‘A little heavy-handed, huh?’ ”
§ A debatable point. For a few weeks in 1965, in lieu of alimony checks, Roth had sent Maggie signed withdrawal slips for their sequestered joint account at the Greenwich Savings Bank. Maggie refused to co-sign the slips, as that would have been tantamount to admitting that Roth was entitled to the funds in that account.
¶ Helen had seen Hunter “a day or two after the accident” and attested to how battered he was on other parts of his body. He’d assured Helen that he had maximum liability insurance and encouraged her to sue him—a position he later recanted. Meanwhile, Fingerhood assured Roth that he’d be reimbursed for the $853 funeral bill as soon as Burt Miller’s wrongful death action against Hunter was settled, but, as Roth remembered, Hunter “skipped town” after the funeral and “was never seen around these parts again.” Roth didn’t seem to grudge him the expense.