On the second night, as Roth remembered, he came home from dinner around ten thirty and found Felicity in the first-floor living room. They began to talk. At some point Felicity mentioned that she’d had a passionate love affair with a famous opera basso, a married man with children, during a recent production in which he sang a leading role and she was in the chorus. “How she got from telling me about the circumstances of her growing up to speaking about her erotic adventures I no longer remember,” Roth wrote. “Did I at some point ask her about them? I might well have, it’s not impossible, but I actually think the subject arose spontaneously in the course of her talking freely to me about herself for the first time in all the years we’d known each other.” As Felicity told her friend Anna, however, Roth’s “line of questioning” could hardly have been more pointed (“Do you have many lovers? Are you seeing anyone?”); he’d also inquired about Steiger’s love life, which Felicity declined to discuss.

  The matter was on Roth’s mind the following night, when he came home late from a jolly dinner chez Alvarez and encountered Felicity, in her nightgown, descending toward him on the second-floor landing. “Now, maybe she was going for a glass of buttermilk in the kitchen at midnight,” he said, “but it certainly didn’t look that way, particularly after last night’s conversation.” The tipsy Roth made to embrace the young woman, putting a hand on her waist; she recoiled and began shouting that he “was crazy and a monster to do this to [Claire] and that she was going back upstairs to pack her bag and leave”—so he recalled, along with his reply: “I apologize for misreading the situation. I seem to have taken a liberty. I thought an invitation was being extended.” He was getting ready for bed when he heard the downstairs door slam—or, as he subsequently remembered in a 2015 email, he heard the door slam early the next morning, “before [he] even rose for breakfast.” Afterward Felicity left an angry message on Bloom’s machine: she wanted to return and collect the rest of her things, but not while Roth was there. “If I remember correctly,” he wrote, “I left for work but put a note on her bed which said something like, ‘This is pure sexual hysteria.’ ”

  Anna Steiger said her friend was “incredibly upset” when she showed up at Anna’s apartment, where she told a somewhat different story. His pass on the stairs, she said, hadn’t bothered her all that much; she’d “simply declined and withdrew,” reminding him that she was a guest in Claire’s home and so on. The next morning she’d hoped to leave without seeing him, but an antic Roth was “awake and already in high gear,” as Steiger put it (paraphrasing her friend). “Morning [Felicity]!” he said, scampering after her on the stairs. “Come on, how long is it since I made a pass at you? Ten years? What were you then, twelve?‡ What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” This—not the relatively innocuous business on the stairs—was what rattled and angered the young woman, hence her indignant message on the answering machine. Again, Roth claimed she was already gone by the time he got up that morning, and certainly a side of him would have hesitated to add insult to injury that way. But another side of Roth was the Mickey Sabbath who aspired “[t]o affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted”—indeed, his impulse to mock a certain kind of bourgeois piety was among his most pronounced traits, both as a writer and a man.

  As for Felicity’s considered view of the incident, she permitted Steiger to quote her directly: “When the woman in question is the close friend of his stepdaughter and wife,§ the motive for making such a pass would indicate something more complex than simply responding to an ‘inviting smile from an attractive woman.’ . . . Its destructiveness seems clear; all the options were compromising.” Certainly Bloom thought so: in Doll’s House, she finds “intricate, subtle layers of intent” on the part of her former mate, a “Machiavellian strategist” whose moment of lechery on the staircase was part of “an ambitious and foolproof plan”—scrutinized at length in all its byzantine nuance—to punish the three women. “What, aside from a great nation’s decision to go to war, can carry such an amplitude of meaning?” Roth replied, and offered an alternative motive—the same motive, indeed, that he ventured to impute to Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and Yul Brynner for committing adultery with the younger Bloom: desire. “This is what people are,” Roth wrote. “This is what people do. Adultery does not correspond with anyone’s holiest wishes for what the world should be. Yet there it is. . . . Hate me for what I am, not for what I’m not.”

  It bears adding that Roth was rarely penitent with respect to Felicity. The note he left on her bed was more brutal mockery: he was amused, he wrote, by her “performance of virtue defiled,” as were the friends for whom he’d played her angry phone message, and if Claire wasn’t equally amused, when he played it for her, he’d “eat his hat”; he signed off “Kisses, Philip.” After he returned from Israel, he called her up on the pretext of discussing Claire’s mail, which Felicity was supposed to forward, and lightly inquired whether she planned to tell Claire what had happened; it was up to her, he said, since he could “play it either way.” And finally, later, on the odd occasion that he answered the phone when she called for Claire, he’d greet her with “Hi, little home wrecker,” or simply “Felicity who?”

  ROTH’S NOMINAL REASON for returning to Israel that January was to interview Appelfeld, whose newly translated The Immortal Bartfuss was about to be published in America; as luck would have it, Roth’s arrival also coincided with the war crimes trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian auto worker from Cleveland whom some had identified as a notoriously sadistic guard at Treblinka, “Ivan the Terrible.” Roth saw in the newspaper that the trial was open to the public and took to attending each morning, listening to the harrowing testimony—translated from Polish, Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew—and carefully watching Demjanjuk’s face. “You’re a liar!” the defendant bellowed at one point, and Roth turned to Avishai and said, “That’s the tell.” An innocent man, he said, would not so theatrically call a death-camp survivor a liar.

  Meanwhile the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada had just erupted in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Avishai was friends with the future prime minister Ehud Olmert, then a backbencher for the right-wing Likud party, and he arranged for Roth and Olmert to meet over lunch at the Knesset. Roth deplored the Israeli policy of violence against the rioters, many of them children, and wondered how Israelis hoped to cling to territories with such large and unruly Arab populations. Olmert countered by blaming the revolt in part on the failure of “inauthentic” American Jews to come over as settlers. “Are you crazy?” said Roth. “American Jews aren’t coming.” Olmert seemed surprised and asked why. “Because they have lives of their own! There is a Zion, and it’s called America.” As Avishai remembered, the lunch “quickly degenerated into raised voices and hurried departures,” though years later a more pacifist Olmert admitted the argument had changed his thinking on the issue: “If a good Jew like Roth felt this way,” he said, “then what could be expected of the others?”

  A more heated argument ensued over dinner with the Tumins, at Lahiere’s restaurant in Princeton, a few days after Roth’s return to the States. Mel was passionately concerned with Jewish survival, and he infuriated Roth by loudly defending Israel’s vicious reprisals against the Palestinians. Roth scribbled notes (some of them illegible) immediately afterward:

  . . . Beatings? [Mel:] Bad but another country would do even worse.

  I say the Palestinians should consider themselves lucky.

  [Mel:] “Right! Compare to Syria, compare to Jordan!”

  . . . The Israel myth. “Better” than other states. (Syria and Jordan) Better than France? Holland? Canada? Australia? Why can’t it just be the same . . . a democracy like any other . . .

  Auschwitz—therefore justified.

  Mel: they ought to all get out before the catastrophe occurs. Come and resettle in America. . . . We can’t afford to lose Jews again.

  Mel’s notion of a kind of patriotic, reverse Zionism (“Come and resettle in America”)—the opposite of Olmert’s solution—would stick in Roth’s mind, all the more as he became aware of his own considerable ambivalence. In Israel he’d befriended Emma Playfair, an English lawyer for the Palestinian human-rights organization Al-Haq, and when she came to New York he arranged a dinner for her to meet various literary people. “I never heard my friends before engage in such anti-Israeli hatred as they displayed that night in Emma’s presence,” he remembered. “She was the catalyst, though she was by no means a hater herself. I practiced old dependable detached observation, though I was boiling within.” One friend gloatingly observed that Israel had been “revealed,” while another wondered, “Who needs a European country in the region anyway?”—as if to challenge, à la Arafat, Israel’s very right to exist. To make matters worse, these “bourgeois-bohemians” (Roth) ended up sticking him with a four-hundred-dollar check. “What is going to happen in Israel?” he wrote Updike in March. “READ MY NEXT NOVEL AND FIND OUT.”

  HERMAN ROTH HAD spent much of that first summer after his wife’s death (1981) lurking around Philip’s house in Connecticut, at loose ends; when he could muster the energy, he’d go outside and rake leaves. One day he linked arms with a visitor, David Plante, and led him down to the pool. “Are you married, Dave?” he asked. Plante said he wasn’t, and offered condolences about Bess. “A wonderful woman,” said Herman, “a really wonderful woman, Dave,” and his face crumpled with tears.

  That winter he shared a condo in Bal Harbour, just north of Miami Beach, with a fellow widower and old Bradley Beach co-lodger, Bill Weber. His remarkable rejuvenation was due in part, Roth thought, to Weber’s being “a fairly good stand-in for my mother—a good-natured, even-tempered, untroublesome partner whose faults and failings he could correct unceasingly.” As for Herman’s son, he was now an eminent novelist in midjourney, barely perturbed anymore by his father’s hocking and gaucherie; on the contrary he loved hanging around with Herman and other “lucky survivors” gathered in Florida (“Either you’re dead or you’re there”), laughing at their jokes and returning their tenderness. “Spent an evening in the lobby of Meyer Lansky’s hotel, The Singapore, with the last of Newark’s Jewish population,” he wrote a friend. “Old men I’d known as young men when I was a little boy. Strange to think of the anger it once took to free myself from their embrace. Now you could knock them over with a feather.”

  Roth reported to Mildred Martin that Herman had become “a great lively favorite with the widows” in Florida (“It’s inspiring and admirable”), and after that first winter Herman was pretty much his old self again: railing at Reagan, phoning nephews and nieces and grandchildren with advice, writing letters to newspapers, and “monitoring the caloric intake” of his new girlfriend, Lillian Beloff, a plumpish, stoical widow eighteen years his junior. (“Always tell them you’re ten years older than you are,” Herman advised, “so if you say you’re ninety, they say ‘You look great!’—whereas, if you tell them you’re eighty, they’re like, ‘Eh, he looks eighty.’ ”) Herman had met Lillian while he was sitting at his back window one day and caught her pulling into Dr. Horowitz’s parking space. “Hey!” he called. “You’re in Dr. Horowitz’s slot!” Then: “You’re a good-looking woman. What’s your name?” As it happened, Herman knew all about her: her late husband’s father (“You were married to Soand-so, weren’t you?”) had run a stationery store on Central Avenue in downtown Newark; she worked at an auto supply place run by an old boyhood pal of Philip, Lenny Lonoff, whose family used to live right across the street from the Roths in Weequahic, etc. “She was dumbstruck,” said Philip.

  So it went for the next five or six years. Herman and Lillian had just arrived in West Palm Beach for the winter months of 1987–88, when he awoke one morning to find that the right side of his face “had gone slack and lifeless as though the bone had been filleted,” Roth wrote in Patrimony. At first Herman thought he’d had a stroke—his “worst fear” given what he remembered of his own father’s paralysis and slow death—but a subsequent MRI revealed a massive tumor that would prove to consist of cartilaginous material (“a little like your fingernail”), which, though not malignant, would in time become large enough to kill him.

  Meanwhile—because the MRI alone couldn’t determine the nature of the tumor—Herman endured a painful biopsy, in June 1988, that entailed getting a hole punched in his upper palate so the doctor could extract a sample of tumor tissue. During the two-hour drive to Connecticut afterward, Philip stopped at a restaurant and got a bag full of ice cubes, and by the time they got home Herman’s shirt was soaked from the ice he’d sucked with his aching, half-paralyzed mouth. Father and son entered the house through the kitchen door and Bloom, standing there at the stove, “threw her hands up to her face in horror, began to scream, and ran out of the house,” as Roth remembered. He steered his bewildered father upstairs and got him settled into the guest bedroom, then went looking for Bloom—whom he found, at last, “cowering beside the woods about a third of a mile from the house. . . . I said something like, ‘He’s sick. He’s been in the hospital. He’s dying. He’s eighty-six and he’s in hell. What do you expect him to look like? . . . Do you think I liked handling your mother’s corpse?’ ”

  Roth elided the episode in Patrimony, where he was careful to emphasize Bloom’s good works—the way she’d prepared a big pot of vegetable soup for Herman and cut flowers for his room. The next day Herman felt well enough, at first, to sit down for lunch with Philip, Claire, and their visitors—Sandy’s son Seth and his wife, Ruth—but Herman kept leaving the table at intervals; when it occurred to Philip, over coffee, that his father hadn’t returned in a while, he went looking for him. “I smelled the shit halfway up the stairs to the second floor,” he wrote in Patrimony. The anesthetic had painfully constipated his father, who’d tried and tried to defecate at various service stations on the way home from the hospital; now Roth found him standing naked in an upstairs bathroom, dripping wet from the shower. “I beshat myself,” he said forlornly. While undressing, Herman had “managed to spread the shit over everything,” and Philip helped him back into the shower and then wrapped him up in a clean bathrobe and put him to bed. Many readers of Patrimony would protest Roth’s inclusion of the whole mortifying episode, but caring for his father so intimately, scrubbing up the ubiquitous shit (on his toothbrush, in his hair), had been a kind of holy experience—“one of the most extraordinary and wonderful things that’s ever happened to me,” he wrote Updike at the time. Afterward, Roth took Bloom aside and explained what had happened. “With undisguised loathing,” he later recounted, “she said, ‘Why can’t he learn to control himself?’ ”

  Roth didn’t plan to publish Patrimony until after Herman’s death, and never told his father he’d been taking notes as long ago as Bess’s funeral. (“What kind of people are we?” Plante remarked back then. “We don’t even stop taking notes at a funeral.”) As Roth explained in 1993, “I imagined that somewhere down the line, it would be useful to know what it was like to watch someone you love die.” He finished a partial “final draft” in January 1989; then, after his father’s death nine months later, he wrote the last chapter, ending with an elegiac dream he’d had the previous summer, in which he stood on a Newark pier some fifty years ago, watching a “defunct warship driving blindly into shore”—a “plaintive metaphor” for his father that his “wide-awake mind” would never have condoned: “Rather, it was sleep that, in its wisdom, kindly delivered up to me this childishly simple vision so rich with truth and crystallized my own pain so aptly in the figure of a small, fatherless evacuee on the Newark docks, as stunned and bereft as the entire nation had once been at the passing of a heroic president.”

  ROTH WROTE no fiction for almost two years after finishing The Counterlife, and sometimes wondered whether he’d ever write fiction again. In the midst of his pain problems and Halcion depression, the best he could do in the way of narrative was to “retrace the steps” of his own life—beginning with a few sketches about Bucknell and other early memories. “I’m tired of the make-up and the false whiskers and the wig,” he wrote, “tired of putting the stuff on and taking it off and putting it on again. Autobiography is another kind of mask, of course, but it’s a change.” By the spring of 1987 he’d managed to produce fifty or sixty pages, and one day, in his usual funk, he began reading them aloud to Avishai—then, after an hour or so, he suddenly snapped the folder shut: “Oh well, this is boring.”

  But it served a purpose. While reading to Avishai, his low spirits lifted ever so slightly when he came to a line addressed to Maggie’s corpse—“You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it”—which he repeated at least three times with dawning gratification. “I think what may lay behind the writing is the desire to make peace with a lot of old turmoil,” he wrote Miss Martin.

  Also, an obsessive preoccupation with mortality. I’ve lived two-thirds of my life, maybe even more. I’ve done a lot of work. I’ve written and published what I think is not only my best book [Counterlife], but perhaps the best book I’ll ever be able to write. Claire and I are clearly together for the rest of our lives. I’ve had no children and won’t. My father is 85 and can’t live much longer, despite his relatively good health. My mother is irrevocably gone, by which I mean that I don’t really talk to her ghost any more, though I do miss her and love her, perhaps somewhat the way I did as a boy. Time is real, and so is one’s history.

  That prediction about his “best book” was arguably mistaken, and certainly the one about Bloom—indeed, he would do well to make peace with “old turmoil” given the fresh kind that lay ahead.