Free The Humbling by Philip Roth Page B

challenge the parents so long as Pegeen doesn't yield.
    "Your mother was right—that's a wonderful haircut," she'd reported her father's telling her. "And she was right about your clothes too," he'd said. "Yes? Do you think I look nice?" "You look terrific," he'd said. "Better than I used to?" "Different. Quite different." "Do I look more like the daughter you would have liked to have had?" "You certainly have an air you never had before. Now tell me about Simon." "After the hard time he had at the Kennedy Center," she'd said, "he wound up at a psychiatric hospital. Is that what you want to talk about?" she'd asked. "Yes, it is," he'd said. "We all have serious problems, Dad." "We all have serious problems but we don't all wind up in psychiatric hospitals." "While we're at it," she'd said, "what about the difference in age? Don't you want to ask about that?" "Let me ask you something else: are you starstruck, Pegeen? You know how certain kinds of characters carry around their force field, an encircling electric force field? It comes, in his case, with being a star. Are you starstruck?" She'd laughed. "At the beginning, probably. By this time,

I assure you, he's just himself." "May I ask how committed you are to each other?" he'd said. "We don't really talk about it." "Maybe you ought to talk about it with me then. Are you going to marry him, Pegeen?" "I don't think he's interested in marrying anyone." "Are you?" "Why are you treating me as though I'm twelve?" she'd said. "Because it may be that where men are concerned you are more twelve than forty. Look, Simon Axler's an intriguing actor, and probably to a woman an intriguing man. But he is the age he is, and you are the age you are. He has had the life he's had, with its triumphant ups and its cataclysmic downs, and you have had the life you have had. And because those downs of his worry me greatly, I'm not going to talk about them as glibly as you do. I'm not going to tell you that I'm not going to try to bring any pressure to bear on you. I am going to do just that."
    And that he did—unlike the mother, he didn't end the day shopping with his daughter but instead he phoned her at her house every night around dinnertime to continue, in much the same strong vein, the conversation that had begun at lunch in New York. Rarely did father and daughter speak for less than an hour.
    In bed, the evening after she'd seen her father in New York, Axler had said to her, "I want you to know, Pegeen, that I'm flabbergasted by all this stuff with your parents. I don't understand the place they are coming to play in our lives. It seems entirely too large and, all things considered, a little absurd. On the other hand, I recognize that at any stage of life there are mysteries about people and their attachments to their parents that can be surprising. This being so, let me make a proposal: if you want me to fly out to Michigan and talk to your father, I'll fly out to Michigan, and I'll sit and listen to every word he wants to say, and when he tells me why he's against this, I won't even argue—I'll side with him. I'll tell him that everything he's concerned about makes perfect sense and that I agree—it is an unlikely arrangement on the face of it, and there are, to be sure, risks involved. But the fact remains that his daughter and I feel as we do about each other. And the fact that he and Carol and I were friends as youngsters back in New York is of no relevance whatsoever. That's the only defense I will make, Pegeen, if you want me to go and see him. It's up to you. I'll do it this week if you want me to. I'll do it tomorrow if that's what you want."
    "His seeing me was quite enough," she replied. "There's no need for this to be carried further. Especially as you have made it clear that you think it's already been carried too far."
    "I'm not so sure you're right," he said. "Better to take on the raging father—"
    "But my father isn't raging, it isn't in his nature to