392
PHILIP ROTH
Where were we? My father.
A person my father often held up to me as someone to emulate
in life was the theatrical producer, Billy Rose. He had read in
Walter Winchell that it was Billy Rose's knowledge of shorthand that
had led Bernard Baruch to hire him as a secretary-consequently he
plagued and pestered me throughout high school to enroll in the
shorthand course. "A person who has shorthand will never have to
worry. A person who has shorthand is always in demand. Why do
you fight with me when this is a proven fact? Where would Billy
Rose be today without his shorthand? Answer me that."
Earlier it was the piano we battled over. For a man whose
house was without a phonograph or a record, he was passionate on
the subject of a musical instrument. "I don't understand why you
won't take a musical instrument, this
is
beyond my comprehension.
Your little cousin Toby can sit down at the piano and play whatever
popular song you can name. All she has to do
is
sit down at the
piano and everybody in the room is her friend. She'll never lack for
friends, she'll never lack for a good time, even when she's alone.
Say you'll take up piano, Alex, and I'll have one in here tomorrow
morning. Alex, are you even listening to me? I am offering you a
piano that could change your social life for the rest of your life!"
What he had to offer I didn't want, what I wanted he didn't
have to offer. But how unusual
is
that? Why has it caused such grief?
Doctor, what must I rid myself of, the hatred of them-or the love?
I haven't begun to tell you, you see, of all I remember with pleas–
ure-all those memories that seem somehow to be bound up with
weather and the time of day, and that flash so suddenly into my
mind, with such vividness, that momentarily I am not in the subway,
or my apartment, or at dinner with a girl, but back then, back there.
And for all that they are so gripping, they are really very simple.
They are memories of practically nothing-and I have them all the
time. I am standing at the kitchen window, my mother says to me,
"Look outside, a real Fall sky." It is an iron-cold January day, dusk
-oh these memories of dusk, of chicken fat on rye bread to tide me
over to dinner, and the moon already outside the kitchen window–
I have just come in with a dollar I have earned shovelling snow.
"You know what you're going to have for dinner," my mother says
