"Epstein"

Mixed comedy and pathos, melodrama and farce characterize "Epstein" also, though in different doses and for different purposes. So do moral earnestness and what appears to be, on the surface anyway, a kind of poetic justice not unlike that meted out at the end to Private Grossbart. Old, hardworking Lou Epstein's life is suddenly transformed after his nephew Michael comes to spend a weekend at his home. Epstein is at an extremely vulnerable point in a middle-aged man's life. His wife of many years, Goldie, is no longer as attractive as she once was. His son, Herbie, dead of polio early in life, is kept alive only in memory, and in the bedroom where his baseball pictures still hang on the wall. His daughter, Sheila, once a pretty child, at 23 is coarse and unlovely. Engaged to a folksinger, she is active politically and socially, her leftist values hardly reflecting those of her middle-class family.

Into this milieu Epstein's nephew enters, slipping inside the house at night with his date from across the street. At first Epstein thinks it is Sheila and her boyfriend, Marvin, and braces himself for the inevitable zippings and unzippings of their lovemaking in the living room. An unhandsome couple, they fill him with disgust, not lust. Usually he ignores their vigorous pantings and carryings on, but this night he goes downstairs to give them a piece of his mind. He is astonished to find not Sheila and Marvin but Michael and Linda, the girl from across the street, who make quite a different sight from the one he expected, one far more erotic and exciting.

Watching unseen and tingling all the while, Epstein at last tiptoes back upstairs. Until the couple leaves, however, he is unable to sleep, and no sooner have they gone than Sheila and her boyfriend arrive and the zippings begin all over again. Epstein ponders to himself: "The whole world . . . the whole young world, the ugly ones and the pretty ones, the fat and the skinny ones, zipping and unzipping!" He grabs his great shock of gray hair and yanks it until his scalp hurts, while beside him Goldie shuffles, mumbles, and pulls the blankets over her. "Butter! She's dreaming about butter," Epstein muses. "Recipes she dreams while the world zips." He finally closes his eyes and pounds himself "down down into an old man's sleep."

Later Epstein wonders whether that evening or some other event was the beginning of his "big trouble." But he decides that it all began when it appeared to begin, when he saw Linda's mother, Ida Kaufman, waiting for a bus and offered her a lift. Only recently a neighbor, Ida was unlikely to remain in her house long, now that her husband had died and she had the house in Barnegat to go to. Epstein drives her there, attracted by her voluptuousness, and they carry on an affair for several weeks—until one night Epstein discovers a rash near his genitals.

The rash precipitates a crisis that nearly wrecks Epstein's family and his life. Trying to pass off the affliction as prickly heat, a sand rash, or something he picked up from a toilet seat in his paper bag factory, Epstein fails to convince Goldie, who is sure he has venereal disease. Turmoil ensues; Epstein is ordered out of the conjugal bedroom and into the spare bed in Herbie's room where, unable to sleep, he talks to Michael, reminiscing about the past. It is all both funny and sad: Epstein's arrival with his parents at Ellis Island; the early years with Goldie; Herbie; his estrangement from his brother, Michael's father, years ago. When the young man becomes judgmental, Epstein makes this apologia: "You're a boy, you don't understand. When they start taking things away from you, you reach out, you grab—maybe like a pig even, but you grab. And right, wrong, who knows! With tears in your eyes, who can even see the difference!"

The next morning, Sunday, the family has quieted down, but the weekend routine has changed. Instead of Epstein, Marvin the folksinger goes out for lox and a newspaper. As coffee percolates and family members sit around the table, Lou enters and the turmoil resumes. So Epstein has his breakfast at the corner luncheonette. Afterward, wondering where he should go, he sees Ida in her backyard in shorts and a halter, hanging underwear on a clothesline. She smiles at him, and that determines his decision.

Catastrophe follows. At noon a siren goes off. When Goldie, Sheila, and the others see an ambulance across the street, they suddenly realize its import but do not fully grasp it until a stretcher emerges from Ida Kaufman's house with Epstein on it. Sex and stress have taken their toll: he has had a heart attack.

However melodramatic and contrived, the ending of the story is, again, not without its humor. At the sight of her stricken husband Goldie explodes into grief and concern characteristic of a matronly Jewish housewife. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, the doctor tries to reassure her. When he comments, "A grown man can't act like a boy," Goldie puts her hands over her eyes and Lou opens his. Everything will be all right, the doctor says. "All he's got to do is live a normal life, normal for sixty." Now Goldie reassures Lou, who cannot or will not talk; though he opens his mouth, his tongue—an image of enforced impotence—"hung over his teeth like a dead snake." He'll live, but it is the end. As for the rash—not a symptom of venereal disease after all—the doctor reassures Goldie that he can fix that up, too, "So it'll never come back."

Epstein's world, like Mr. Patimkin's in Goodbye, Columbus, is "one taken up entirely by the economics of making it in America, and of demonstrating that you have achieved something to those around you," as Sol Gittleman says [From Shtetl to Suburbia: The Family in Jewish Literary Imagination, 1978]. Therein lies the tragedy. The pathetic part is how little Epstein has achieved, really, and the comedy derives from what he tries to grab for himself once he realizes how little the little that he has is. Ironically, even the little that he reaches for turns out to be too much. What happens to Epstein is partly the result of the disintegration of "kinship values," which have been the essence of Jewish survival through the centuries [Gittleman], and Roth knows it. Far from attacking Jewish values, then, Roth through his satire is crying out for their realization and, presumably, their restoration in contemporary American life.

Roth's instrument of attack, here as in Goodbye, Columbus and in much of his later fiction, is satire, which after we stop laughing helps us better understand the incongruities that have set us laughing in the first place. On the one hand, it is incongruous that a 60-year-old man, Lou Epstein, should try to behave like his young nephew, for Lou is well past the age of "zippings." On the other hand, he has enough life left in him both to envy the young and to think he can emulate them. But the world knows better, he discovers, not so much to his chagrin as to his sorrow. Being carried out of his paramour's home across the street on a stretcher on a Sunday morning is comical, as Roth presents it. What is not so funny (though it has its humorous side) is the image of the future that Goldie holds out for Lou in the ambulance. Marvin and Sheila will marry and run the business, and he can retire. She'll take care of him and they can go someplace together. "Don't try to talk," she says. "I'll take care. You'll be better soon and we can go someplace. We can go to Saratoga, to the mineral baths, if you want. We'll just go, you and me—." No wonder that, as she talks, Lou's eyes roll in his head.