Free Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

in my mother’s uterus, and second, whether the growth they finally located was malignant … whether what she had was … oh, that word we cannot even speak in one another’s presence! the word we cannot even spell out in all its horrible entirety! the word we allude to only by the euphemistic abbreviation that she herself supplied us with before entering the hospital for her tests: C-A. And
genug!
The
n
, the
c
, the
e
, the
r
, we don’t need to hear to frighten us to Kingdom Come! How brave she is, all our relatives agree, just to utter those two letters! And aren’t there enough whole words as it is to whisper at each other behind closed doors? There are! There are! Ugly and cold little words reeking of the ether and alcohol of hospital corridors, words with all the appeal of sterilized surgical instruments, words like
smear
and
biopsy
… And then there are the words that furtively, at home alone, I used to look up in the dictionary just to
see
them there in print, the hard evidence of that most remote of all realities, words like
vulva
and
vagina
and
cervix
, words whose definitions will never again serve me as a source of illicit pleasure … And then there is that word we wait and wait and wait to hear, the word whose utterance will restore to our family what now seems to have been the most wonderful and satisfying of lives, that word that sounds to my ear like Hebrew, like
b’nai
or
boruch
—benign!
Benign!
Boruch atoh Adonai,
let it be benign!
Blessed art thou O Lord Our God,
let it be benign!
Hear O Israel, and shine down thy countenance, and the Lord is One, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will—
only let it be benign!
    And it was. A copy of
Dragon Seed
by Pearl S. Buck is open on the table beside the bed, where there is also a half-empty glass of flat ginger ale. It’s hot and I’m thirsty and my mother, my mind reader, says I should go ahead and drink what’s left in her glass, I need it more than she does. But dry as I am, I don’t want to drink from any glass to which she has put her lips—for the first time in my life the idea fills me with revulsion! “Take.” “I’m not thirsty.” “Look how you’re perspiring.” “I’m not thirsty.” “Don’t be polite all of a sudden.” “But I don’t
like
ginger ale.” “You? Don’t like ginger ale?” “
No
.” “Since when?” Oh, God! She’s alive, and so we are at it again—she’s alive, and right off the bat we’re starting in!
    She tells me how Rabbi Warshaw came and sat and talked with her for a whole half hour before—as she now so graphically puts it—she went under the knife. Wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that thoughtful? (Only twenty-four hours out of the anesthetic, and she knows, you see, that I refused to change out of my Levis for the holiday!) The woman who is sharing the room with her, whose loving, devouring gaze I am trying to edge out of, and whose opinion, as I remember it, nobody had asked for, takes it upon herself to announce that Rabbi Warshaw is one of the most revered men in all of Newark. Re-ver-ed. Three syllables, as the rabbi himself would enunciate it, in his mighty Anglo-oracular style. I begin to lightly pound at the pocket of my baseball mitt, a signal that I am about ready to go, if only someone will let me. “He loves baseball, he could play baseball twelve months a year,” my mother tells Mrs. Re-ver-ed. I mumble that I have “a league game.” “It’s the finals. For the championship.” “Okay,” says my mother, and lovingly, “you came, you did your duty, now run—run to your league game.” I can hear in her voice how happy and relieved she is to find herself alive on this beautiful September afternoon … And isn’t it a relief for me, too? Isn’t this what I prayed for, to a God I do not even believe is there? Wasn’t the unthinkable thing life without her to cook for us, to clean for us, to … to
everything
for us! This is what I