American Pastoral: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

In 1973, the Swede receives a letter from Rita Cohen informing him that Merry is currently working in the old animal hospital in Newark. She is there every day, and the Swede can catch her there if he waits outside around 4:00 p.m. Rita wants to leave town, so now it’s the Swede’s turn to take care of Merry. In the letter, Rita claims that Merry has inspired her and changed her as a person. She says Merry has a great, captivating power and that Rita herself has only ever done what Merry told her to do. She describes Merry as “divine” and says that these days, Merry is going by the name “Mary Stoltz.”

The letter comes to the Swede totally unexpected, though he has waited for it for years. By this time, Dawn has finally thrown herself into designing their new house, having spent years praying for the unanswered miracle of Merry’s return and been hospitalized twice for suicidal depression. The Swede has finally “disentangle[d] her from her horror,” spending years by Dawn’s bedside comforting her through all her pain.

While in the hospital, Dawn would reminisce about her younger years as Miss New Jersey, asking in vain how she ended up in such a state of misery. “You, that’s how!” she would say to the Swede. In fact, being Miss New Jersey has ruined her life. She only applied in the first place for the money, so her brother could go to college—not for the attention. And yet the Swede entered the picture and wouldn’t leave her alone. He “had to make [her] into a princess”—and now, she tells the Swede, “Your princess is in a madhouse.” 

Driving home from the hospital, the Swede tries to remember Dawn as the young woman she really was when he first met her, who was really nothing like the woman she now describes. She and the Swede used to talk long-distance when she was away competing for the title of Miss America. He was just starting out at Newark Maid then, and he had gloves made to match Dawn’s gown. When Dawn ultimately lost to Miss Arizona, she wasn’t nearly as depressed as the other women. In the aftermath of the “superstimulating adventure,” though, she fretted over whether anything so exciting would ever happen to her again. When an invitation arrives for Dawn inviting her to the 20th reunion of her year’s Miss America contestants, Dawn is in the hospital again. It’s the second time she’s been hospitalized, and so the Swede chooses not to show Dawn the letter.

Not long after the reunion letter’s arrival, Dawn undergoes a “change” and suddenly becomes invested in reclaiming her life. It begins with the face-lift at the Geneva clinic Dawn read about in Vogue. Dawn starts to scrutinize her face in the mirror, pulling her sagging skin back. The Swede has noticed that their family tragedy has caused Dawn to age prematurely. With Dawn’s psychiatrists running out of options for her, he agrees to take Dawn to Geneva for the procedure. He comforts her through her post-operation recovery, though as he looks at her bandaged face, he at first fears he has not helped Dawn, but merely aided in “her mutilation.”   

But the Swede is wrong. Dawn recovers from the operation and feels renewed confidence in herself. From there, she decides to build a new, modern house on a lot the other side of Rimrock ridge with plans to sell the old one and all its outbuildings (she sold her cattle and farm machinery shortly after Merry’s disappearance). The Swede is shocked when he overhears Dawn telling the architect, their neighbor Bill Orcutt, that she always hated the old house. To Swede, it feels as though Dawn has said that she hated her husband, not the house. How can she hate the house when it’s all the Swede has dreamed of since he was a boy, when he’d fantasize about having a stone house all his own and family to go inside it?

But the Swede can’t ignore Dawn’s determination to sell the house. He even refrains from pointing out the real reason she wants to be done with it—because every room reminds her of Merry. He agrees to move into the small, new house, with its open floorplan (which Bill Orcutt describes as “‘luxuriously austere’”) and many windows. Dawn justifies the move, citing the expense of keeping the grass on their large property mowed. But this, in the Swede’s mind, doesn’t explain why she told Orcutt that she had always hated the old house. The thought crushes the Swede, who has seemingly spent years oblivious to her hatred.

The Swede wonders if things might have been different if they’d had more children. But Dawn didn’t want “to be the slavish mom to half a dozen kids and the nursemaid to a two-hundred-year-old house.” She wanted the cattle farm because she was tired of people reducing her to little more than a “former Miss New Jersey,” a glorified swimsuit model. After Merry is born and the family starts vacationing in Deal, New Jersey, people stare at Dawn in her bathing suit and snap photos of her. She resents the women who are skeptical of her, fearful that because Dawn is “a former whatever” that she “want[s] their husbands.” 

The Swede notices the male attention Dawn receives, but it never bothers him. Dawn, for her part, resents her beauty and the unwanted attention it brings her. After Merry starts nursery school, she decides to raise cattle, a dream with origins in her childhood—her mother’s father, an immigrant from Ireland, had kept dairy cows to supplement his meager income as a dock worker. A cousin taught young Dawn to milk them, and “she never forgot” the joy of it, even after her grandfather turned to plumbing instead, not wanting to continue with the hard physical labor that milking required.

Dawn throws herself into raising beef cattle, studying books and poring through catalogs featuring different animals for sale. She and the Swede travel to shows together. Dawn, watching the animals paraded around the ring, wryly remarks how similar the auctions are to the Miss America circuit. Dawn’s interest in the cows is “fascinating” to the Swede, and he observes her dedication to the new pursuit with awe. When the Swede’s accountants would look at the numbers for Arcady Breeders (so named for the Levovs’ address on Arcady Ave), he shrugs them off. Dawn will make money someday, and even if had doubts, he wouldn’t dream of stopping her.

Dawn works hard every day. When her first prized cow, Count, gets old and wanders off one day, ultimately getting stuck in a portion of swamp, it’s days before Dawn can find him, and he’s in rough shape. But she gives him medicine and cajoles him out, though it takes Dawn and Merry together multiple attempts to urge the resistant, hurting animal back into the field. When he sees Merry and Dawn drenched with rain and covered with mud, the Swede thinks that this is enough, and he feels blessed and grateful for his life. The Swede is no more capable of hating anything about the house than he is of hating Merry, even after everything she has done.

Nor has the Swede ever hated being an American. He thinks back to his own childhood and considers how his father couldn’t have imagined a life as good as the one the Swede went on to live. He remembers being in the marines as “the best experience [he] ever had,” though it was tough and grueling work. He remembers his friend marine Manny Rabinowitz, who was the toughest Jewish guy the Swede ever met. With Manny by his side, no one in the Marines gave them any trouble. And then the Swede was discharged on June 2, 1947, and he went on to marry a Gentile, and to run his father’s business, though his own father’s father never spoke any English. And the Swede got to live in the prettiest place on Earth. How could anyone hate this America?

How could Merry hate America? How could she not grasp that her own family’s fortune was the product of generations of hard, unrelenting work? The Swede guesses that Merry knows that there’s little difference between hating America and hating the Levovs, that she hates everything the Swede is and loves. Thinking about all this now, with Rita Cohen’s letter in his hands, he wonders why he shouldn’t just rip it up and forget all about Merry. Rita and people like her hate people like the Levovs because they are “prudent” and “hardworking”—because they have not failed.

The Swede remembers the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Dawn was sedated at the time, so the Swede went alone to the Hamlins’ to give his condolences. Later he went to Dr. Conlon’s wake. The biggest challenge came later, when he visited Conlon’s widow for tea. But he did it, even if his words sounded hollow when he spoke them aloud. Worse still, Mrs. Conlon responded with calm, gentle compassion, acknowledging that nothing that happened was the Swede and Dawn’s fault—they raised Merry how they knew best. It was Merry’s choice to do what she did. And ultimately, the Swede and Dawn’s loss of a child was far greater than the loss Mrs. Conlon and her children suffered. Mrs. Conlon implied that the Levovs would never recover. The Swede doesn’t go to see Mrs. Conlon again.

In 1973, though the Swede considers ripping up Rita Cohen’s letter, he instead goes to the old animal hospital by the railroad tracks, a 10-minute drive from Newark Maid, in the shadow of the railroad viaduct—the city’s brownstone “Chinese wall.” Old, Civil-War era factories stand to the east side of the wall. The rioters hadn’t made it this far east—if they had, the old factories would be reduced to “rubble.” But these old factories, “pyramids of Newark,” have persisted, “as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every historical right to be.”

The Swede recalls traveling with his father throughout Down Neck to deliver skins to the immigrant families who worked for him in the old days, the best of whom would go on to work at the factory. Lou Levov would bring home the families’ finished gloves for his wife, Sylvia, to inspect for imperfections. Lou would quiz the Swede on what kind of grain different skins had and about other intricacies of glove making.

Now, in 1973, the Swede stands outside the dog and cat hospital, looking for Merry. From the look of the old, decrepit building, it certainly doesn’t look like Merry has continued her political cause. He thinks back to Merry’s early childhood. When she was very young, she told him she was “lonesome,” serious, sad words to hear coming from such a young child. She confided in him how hard Dawn was on her, how she cared so much about Merry’s clothes and hair. When Merry was young, the “most irresponsible thing” she’d done (before the bomb, of course) was throw out her packed lunches at school and return home to eat melted-cheese sandwiches. 

In fifth grade, Merry gave Dawn a Mother’s Day gift she made in school. The students were supposed to write something on the card they’d do for their mothers, and Merry’s promise to Dawn was to make dinner every Friday night—an ambitious goal for a 10-year-old. Merry’s favorite thing to make was baked ziti, the process for which she enthusiastically explained to the Swede, whose job it was to clean up the mess. When he heard about a restaurant, Vincent’s, that made New York’s best baked ziti, he started taking the family there once a month. A young waiter, Billy, took a liking to Merry, who reminded him of his kid brother, who also had a stutter. Billy would tell Merry about all the TV stars who ate at Vincent’s. On Monday at school, Merry would repeat to her friend Patti everything that Billy told her the weekend before. 

Back in 1973, the Swede stands outside the old dog and cat hospital. Finally, he spots a tall, slender female figure emerging from the building. Had he not been told to look here for his daughter, he never would have recognized Merry. In that moment, he knows it is “too much to bring home to Dawn’s new face.” He wants to run from the figure, but he cannot: she is his child, after all. And anyway, Merry has by now seen him. Merry runs across the street toward the Swede, as innocent as the hypothetical child of his he used to imagine he’d have someday when he himself was just a child. She throws her arms around him in a tight embrace. “Daddy! Daddy!” she cries, and the chaos-rejecting Swede cries too, as he embraces his “daughter who is chaos itself.”