Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [90]
From the mountains,
To the prairies,
To the oceans, white-with-my-fooaahhh-mmm!
God bless A-me-ri-cuuuuhhhh!
My home, SWEET HOOOOOHHHH-M!
Imagine what it meant to me to know that generations of Maulsbys were buried in the graveyard at Newburyport, Massachusetts, and generations of Abbotts in Salem. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride … Exactly. Oh, and more. Here was a girl whose mother’s flesh crawled at the sound of the words “Eleanor Roosevelt.” Who herself had been dandled on the knee of Wendell Willkie at Hobe Sound, Florida, in 1942 (while my father was saying prayers for F.D.R. on the High Holidays, and my mother blessing him over the Friday night candles). The Senator from Connecticut had been a roommate of her Daddy’s at Harvard, and her brother, “Paunch,” a graduate of Yale, held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and (how lucky could I be?) played polo (yes, games from on top of a horse!) on Sunday afternoons someplace in Westchester County, as he had throughout college. She could have been a Lindabury, don’t you see? A daughter of my father’s boss! Here was a girl who knew how to sail a boat, knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could pick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon—like a Chinese with his chopsticks! What skills she had learned in far-off Connecticut!). Activities that partook of the exotic and even the taboo she performed so simply, as a matter of course: and I was as wowed (though that’s not the whole story) as Desdemona, hearing of the Anthropapagi. I came across a newspaper clipping in her scrapbook, a column entitled “A Deb A Day,” which began, “SARAH ABBOTT MAULSBY—‘Ducks and quails and pheasants better scurry’ around New Canaan this fall because Sally, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Maulsby of Greenley Road, is getting in practice for small game season. Shooting—” with a gun, Doctor—“shooting is just one of Sally’s outdoor hobbies. She loves riding too, and this summer hopes to try a rod and reel—” and get this; I think this tale would win my son too—“hopes to try a rod and reel on some of those trout that swim by ‘Wind-view’ her family’s summer home.”
What Sally couldn’t do was eat me. To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her. She was sorry, she said, if I was going to take it so hard, but it was just something she didn’t care to try. I mustn’t act as though it were a personal affront, she said, because it had nothing at all to do with me as an individual … Oh, didn’t it? Bullshit, girlie! Yes, what made me so irate was precisely my belief that I was being discriminated against. My father couldn’t rise at Boston & Northeastern for the very same reason that Sally Maulsby wouldn’t deign to go down on me! Where was the justice in this world? Where was the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League—! “I do it to you,” I said. The Pilgrim shrugged; kindly she said, “You don’t have to, though. You know that. If you don’t want to …” “Ah, but I do want to—it isn’t a matter of ‘have’ to. I want to.” “Well,” she answered, “I don’t.” “But why not?” “Because. I don’t.” “Shit, that’s the way a child answers, Sarah—‘because’! Give me a reason!” “I—I just don’t do that, that’s all.” “But that brings us back to why. Why?” “Alex, I can’t. I just can’t.” “Give me a single good reason!” “Please,” she replied, knowing her rights, “I don’t think I have to.”
No, she didn’t have to—because to me the answer was clear enough anyway: Because you don’t know how to hike out to windward or what a jib is, because you have never owned evening clothes or been to a cotillion … Yes sir, if I were some big blond goy in a pink