Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [41]
They come to visit: “Where did you get a rug like this?” my father asks, making a face. “Did you get this thing in a junk shop or did somebody give it to you?”
“I like this rug.”
“What are you talking,” my father says, “it’s a worn-out rug.”
Light-hearted. “It’s worn, but not out. Okay? Enough?”
“Alex, please,” my mother says, “it is a very worn rug.”
“You’ll trip on that thing,” my father says, “and throw your knee out of whack, and then you’ll really be in trouble.”
“And with your knee,” says my mother meaningfully, “that wouldn’t be a picnic.”
At this rate they are going to roll the thing up any minute now, the two of them, and push it out the window. And then take me home!
“The rug is fine. My knee is fine.”
“It wasn’t so fine,” my mother is quick to remind me, “when you had the cast on, darling, up to your hip. How he shlepped that thing around! How miserable he was!”
“I was fourteen years old then, Mother.”
“Yeah, and you came out of that thing,” my father says, “you couldn’t bend your leg, I thought you were going to be a cripple for the rest of your life. I told him, ‘Bend it! Bend it!’ I practically begged him morning, noon, and night, ‘Do you want to be a cripple forever? Bend that leg!’ ”
“You scared the daylights out of us with that knee.”
“But that was in nineteen hundred and forty-seven. And this is nineteen sixty-six. The cast has been off nearly twenty years!”
My mother’s cogent reply? “You’ll see, someday you’ll be a parent, and you’ll know what it’s like. And then maybe you won’t sneer at your family any more.”
The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the body of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.
“You think,” my father the ironist asks, “it’ll be in our lifetime, Alex? You think it’ll happen before I go down into the grave? No—he’d rather take chances with a worn-out rug!” The ironist—and logician! “—And crack his head open! And let me ask you something else, my independent son—who would even know you were here if you were lying bleeding to death on the floor? Half the time you don’t answer the phone, I see you lying here with God only knows what’s wrong—and who is there to take care of you? Who is there even to bring you a bowl of soup, if God forbid something terrible should happen?”
“I can take care of myself! I don’t go around like some people“—boy, still pretty tough with the old man, eh, Al?—“some people I know in continual anticipation of total catastrophe!”
“You’ll see,” he says, nodding miserably, “you’ll get sick”—and suddenly a squeal of anger, a whine out of nowhere of absolute hatred of me!—“you’ll get old, and you won’t be such an independent big shot then!”
“Alex, Alex,” begins my mother, as my father walks to my window to recover himself, and in passing, to comment contemptuously about “the neighborhood he lives in.” I work for New York, and he still wants me to live in beautiful Newark!
“Mother, I’m thirty-three! I am the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York! I graduated first in my law school class! Remember? I have graduated first from every class I’ve ever been in! At twenty-five I was already special counsel to a House Subcommittee—of the United States Congress, Mother! Of America! If I wanted Wall Street, Mother, I could be on Wall Street! I am a highly respected man in my profession, that should be obvious! Right this minute, Mother, I am conducting an investigation of unlawful discriminatory practices in the building trades in New York—racial discrimination! Trying to get the Ironworkers’ Union, Mother, to tell me their little secrets! That’s what I did just today! Look, I helped solve the television quiz scandal, do you remember—?” Oh, why go on? Why go on in my strangled high-pitched adolescent voice? Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive