Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [2]
In that ferocious and self-annihilating way in which so many Jewish men of his generation served their families, my father served my mother, my sister Hannah, but particularly me. Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream. Mine was its corollary: in my liberation would be his—from ignorance, from exploitation, from anonymity. To this day our destinies remain scrambled together in my imagination, and there are still too many times when, upon reading in some book a passage that impresses me with its logic or its wisdom, instantly, involuntarily, I think, “If only he could read this. Yes! Read, and understand—!” Still hoping, you see, still if-onlying, at the age of thirty-three … Back in my freshman year of college, when I was even more the son struggling to make the father understand—back when it seemed that it was either his understanding or his life—I remember that I tore the subscription blank out of one of those intellectual journals I had myself just begun to discover in the college library, filled in his name and our home address, and sent off an anonymous gift subscription. But when I came sullenly home at Christmastime to visit and condemn, the Partisan Review was nowhere to be found. Collier’s Hygeia, Look, but where was his Partisan Review? Thrown out unopened—I thought in my arrogance and heartbreak—discarded unread, considered junk-mail by this schmuck, this moron, this Philistine father of mine!
I remember—to go back even further in this history of disenchantment—I remember one Sunday morning pitching a baseball at my father, and then waiting in vain to see it go flying off, high above my head. I am eight, and for my birthday have received my first mitt and hardball, and a regulation bat that I haven’t even the strength to swing all the way around. My father has been out since early morning in his hat, coat, bow tie, and black shoes, carrying under his arm the massive black collection book that tells who owes Mr. Lindabury how much. He descends into the colored neighborhood each and every Sunday morning because, as he tells me, that is the best time to catch those unwilling to fork over the ten or fifteen measly cents necessary to meet their weekly premium payments. He lurks about where the husbands sit out in the sunshine, trying to extract a few thin dimes from them before they have drunk themselves senseless on their bottles of “Morgan Davis” wine; he emerges from alleyways like a shot to catch between home and church the pious cleaning ladies, who are off in other people’s houses during the daylight hours of the week, and in hiding from him on weekday nights. “Uh—oh,” someone cries, “Mr. Insurance Man here!” and even the children run for cover—the children, he says in disgust, so tell me, what hope is there for these niggers’ ever improving their lot? How will they ever lift themselves if they ain’t even able to grasp the importance of life insurance? Don’t they give a single crap for the loved ones they leave behind? Because “they’s all” going to die too, you know—“oh,” he says angrily, “ ‘they sho’ is!’ ” Please, what kind of man is it, who can think to leave children out in the rain without even a decent umbrella for protection!
We are on the big dirt field back of my school. He sets his collection