Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [8]
“I told you—I don’t look in the bowl when I flush it! I’m not interested like you are in other people’s poopie!”
“Oh, oh, oh—thirteen years old and the mouth on him! To someone who is asking a question about his health, his welfare!” The utter incomprehensibility of the situation causes her eyes to become heavy with tears. “Alex, why are you getting like this, give me some clue? Tell me please what horrible things we have done to you all our lives that this should be our reward?” I believe the question strikes her as original. I believe she considers the question unanswerable. And worst of all, so do I. What have they done for me all their lives, but sacrifice? Yet that this is precisely the horrible thing is beyond my understanding—and still, Doctor! To this day!
I brace myself now for the whispering. I can spot the whispering coming a mile away. We are about to discuss my father’s headaches.
“Alex, he didn’t have a headache on him today that he could hardly see straight from it?” She checks, is he out of earshot? God forbid he should hear how critical his condition is, he might claim exaggeration. “He’s not going next week for a test for a tumor?”
“He is?”
“‘Bring him in,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m going to give him a test for a tumor.’”
Success. I am crying. There is no good reason for me to be crying, but in this household everybody tries to get a good cry in at least once a day. My father, you must understand—as doubtless you do: blackmailers account for a substantial part of the human community, and, I would imagine, of your clientele—my father has been “going” for this tumor test for nearly as long as I can remember. Why his head aches him all the time is, of course, because he is constipated all the time—why he is constipated is because ownership of his intestinal tract is in the hands of the firm of Worry, Fear & Frustration. It is true that a doctor once said to my mother that he would give her husband a test for a tumor—if that would make her happy, is I believe the way that he worded it; he suggested that it would be cheaper, however, and probably more effective for the man to invest in an enema bag. Yet, that I know all this to be so, does not make it any less heartbreaking to imagine my father’s skull splitting open from a malignancy.
Yes, she has me where she wants me, and she knows it. I clean forget my own cancer in the grief that comes—comes now as it came then—when I think how much of life has always been (as he himself very accurately puts it) beyond his comprehension. And his grasp. No money, no schooling, no language, no learning, curiosity without culture, drive without opportunity, experience without wisdom … How easily his inadequacies can move me to tears. As easily as they move me to anger!
A person my father often held up to me as someone to emulate in life was the theatrical producer Billy Rose. Walter Winchell said that Billy Rose’s knowledge of shorthand had led Bernard Baruch to hire him as a secretary—consequently my father plagued me throughout high school to enroll in the shorthand course. “Alex, where would Billy Rose be today without his shorthand? Nowhere! So why do you fight me?” 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.