Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  The morning after our evening together, this same coat—whose cuff I noticed had already been sewn into one piece again—was swinging to and fro beside me. No words came from its owner, which made speech somewhat difficult for me. Upon arising I had thought of how I might be able to help Herz alleviate one of his problems; now his reticence made me hesitate to say what was on my mind. I had the feeling that he was nettled at me for having been witness to all that had happened the night before. If I were to make my suggestion, it would probably seem to him that I was prying into his affairs.

  I asked him how Libby was and he replied with the shortest of answers: fine. I invited him to the Union for coffee, but by the time we reached the stairs I couldn’t think of anything more to say that wouldn’t really have been beside the point—so I went ahead and offered him my car to drive up to Cedar Rapids on the afternoons he taught there.

  He turned and fastened on me a look whose penetration sent my own eyes up to the treetops for a moment. “That’s very nice of you,” he said, and in his voice, as in his gaze, there was something more than gratitude. Later I realized that what he’d been searching for was my motive.

  “I don’t need it in the afternoon,” I said. “I’m usually at the library.”

  “I appreciate the offer,” he said.

  Thinking that perhaps he could not accept until I assured him that the arrangement would inconvenience me in no way, I added, “I live close enough to the library to walk—”

  “Yes, but you see, my wife and I had a talk.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “We’re changing our plans.”

  He smiled; but there was in his manner something stiff and withdrawn, particularly when he had referred to Libby as “my wife.” I asked him, after a moment’s silence, if perhaps they had decided to leave Iowa. I said that I hoped they had not.

  “We’ve just worked something out,” he answered, and started down the stairs. I followed, too confused as yet to believe that I was simply being rebuffed. While we drank our coffee there came a moment (at least for me) when I felt that one or the other of us could have said, “Look, all I meant …” and so on. But neither of us felt called upon to be the one to say it. After all, it was only a car I was offering him a few afternoons a week, not a new overcoat. Why so curt?

  I waited, but he volunteered no further information. For someone whose clothing made such a strenuous appeal, it was a little silly of him, I thought, not to admit to his neediness out loud. Not that I expected him to come begging; I simply did not care for my offer to be written off as patronizing … unless of course he really did have a new plan, which made my car unnecessary. Perhaps it was prying of me, but I thought I had a right to an explanation somewhat more detailed than the one with which he had shut me up.

  I never got it. Outside the Union he was abrupt but by no means discourteous; he extended a hand, I shook it, and we said goodbye. But as I walked off I said to myself, So much for Mrs. Herz and her silent husband. And though we had an acquaintanceship of only some twenty-four hours, and not a particularly gracious one at that, I was saddened. Whether Herz was more proud than wise was beside the point for me; I had awakened that morning positively elated that I could come to his aid. Denying my help, he’d managed to deny me my elation as well.

  Finally I discovered myself piqued with him. However he chose to increase his discomfort, I realized, he chose to increase Libby Herz’s discomfort as well. Clearly, she had not the talent for misery that he had. Were she to go out after a new coat, she would not come back, I was sure, with such a wailing piece of goods. It seemed to me that Herz actually found pleasure in saying to the world: Woe is me. There was a scale moving inside me, and as my irritation with Herz grew weightier, my sympathy rose for his wife. The remark she had made late in the afternoon of the day before sounded clear once again in my ear.

  The stresses and strains of the previous day had allowed me to forget that this girl, whose husband wouldn’t sit behind the wheel of my car, had said to me that she had been moved by my mother’s words; doubtless, too, by my mother’s circumstance. And by my own? I wanted all at once to sit down with Libby Herz and explain to her why it was that my poor father had to be manipulated by the people with whom he shared his life. I wanted to explain why I had had to desert him. And for my explanation I would not have minded receiving the balm of sympathy. Which might have been the reason—might it not?—for Paul Herz finding it necessary to turn down my offer. When there’s trouble at home, why encourage a sympathy-hunting young man to hang around? One can never tell—if there happens to be a sympathy-hunting young wife at the other end—just how the balm may find expression. That deep gaze Herz had given me then was explained: he hadn’t been looking for a motive, he’d come up with one. Perhaps he did not see what Libby might give to me quite so clearly as he saw what he thought I could give to Libby, and what she might accept. But that had been enough to force him to rule me out as a friend or aid. And it was enough, I decided, to persuade me to rule myself out. We would each have to work out the problems of family life within the confines of the family in which the problem had arisen. I only hoped for Herz’s wife that she would come through her tribulations with her energy and her complexion undamaged. Both, I discovered, had touched me more than I had thought.

  We come now to an interlude about which there is not too much that need be explained. The girl’s name was Marjorie Howells and she was in revolt against Kenosha, Wisconsin. For several months she had been sitting beside me in Bibliography, and the morning that I was rejected by Paul Herz, I happened to run into her in the library. I was feeling at the time somewhat superfluous—and here was this girl, very pretty, albeit a little overhealthy. I did not know, when I asked her to have a beer with me that night, that she was in revolt against Kenosha, Wisconsin; I only believed that few complications could thrive behind such a perfect set of teeth. We had many beers, it turned out, and after a while she was looking across at me with flames flashing in her eyes, and asking me how it felt to be a Jew in America. I asked her how it felt to be a Protestant in America—and she told me. It was very dry and very typical. Jews, she explained, were different. Marge’s father, a white-haired investor in Chicago, of whom she showed me a rather intimidating photograph (high tariff written all over his face)—her father thought Jews were different too, but Margie thought they were different from the way her father thought they were different. When I told her that in 1948 my own father had been chairman of an organization called New York City Professional Men for, Wallace, I only fed the furnace. It wound up that I could not say anything that did not produce in her a larger and larger passion for me and my background: even the fact that the living room of my family’s apartment looked out over Central Park seemed to impress her disproportionately. Halvah and Harvard and Henry Wallace—I suppose I cut an exotic figure. We wound up back in my apartment with no lights on and my sense of reality—as happens in the dark—out the window. It was all as typical as Protestantism: I held the girl and kissed her and soon enough the two of us were revolting against Kenosha as though Caligula himself were city manager. Margie had spent four years at Northwestern and later in the night we got in our licks against that bourgeois institution too. When we spoke again I teased her about her image of me—me, a delicious specimen of Hebraic, Marxist exotica—which was not exactly my image of myself. But by then teasing was only another endearment.

  Margie said, “I’d like to stay with you.”

  “You can stay,” I said.

  “Can I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shouldn’t we go back and get some things?”

  “I have eggs and orange juice,” I assured her.

  “I meant stay,” she said. “Really stay.”

  I spoke then not only for Kenosha but for all small towns everywhere. “Marge, we hardly know each other.”

  “We can be happy as kings,” she said, very sweetly.

  “What do you need to get?”

 
; “Do you have Breck shampoo?”

  “No.”

  “I want to get my Breck and my Olivetti. I have an electric frying pan,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  “I have gas,” I pointed out.

  “Electric cooks perfect eggs,” she told me. “Oh I want to eat so many breakfasts here.”

  So we drove to Margie’s room and she packed a suitcase full of skirts and underwear, and in a large cardboard carton which I took from the shelf of her closet, I began to lay her frying pan and her Olivetti and her steam iron and her Breck and her Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse. And all the time I bent over the carton I wondered what I was doing. Some things—carrying George Herbert into a sinful union! Not till I felt fully the absurdity of what I was about did I realize how clutchy I had become of late: when I had seen Paul Herz in class, I had rushed to give him a book; when Libby called for a lift, I had dropped my studies and run right over. That very morning I had tried virtually to graft the Herzes to me by loaning them my car. That was an anxious way to interpret a simple act of kindness, but with all the evidence, with Marge Howell’s soapy smell moving back and forth only a foot behind me, what else could I think about myself? I had not realized that I had been missing my father as much as he had been missing me.

  She put her arms around me, this sweet empty-headed girl, and from behind me kissed my neck. With wryness, which never protected anyone from anything for very long, I said, “Oh, Margie, I am your Trotsky, your Einstein, your Moses Maimonides.” And that foe of Luther and the Middle West asked, “Was that his last name?”

  Was it a feeble joke or didn’t she know? Either way, I continued to lose confidence in myself.

  Mindlessly, mindlessly, mindlessly—pushing our shopping cart through the market, and late in the afternoon sipping cocoa in bed, and every few nights watching Marge let down her whirly blond hair to be washed. 1 would be sitting on the edge of the tub translating Beowulf to her while she leaned across the sink wearing her half slip and raising luxurious bubbles on her scalp. With her hair combed out straight, the wet strands just touching her back, she would turn to me with a look of perfect well-being and satisfaction. “And yet I don’t feel I have to marry you. Isn’t that something? I didn’t think I could feel so liberated.” There were nights when it was charming, but there were other nights too, and then the girl at the sink and 1 on the tub seemed no more facts of this life than those impossibilities, Hrothgar and Grendel, whose words and deeds I had just been trying to comprehend.

  Margie soon came down with the grippe and was very hard to deal with. In bed she took to wearing my pajamas, and posing in them. She wanted to hear about all the girls I had made love to, and then I could hear about all the boys who had wanted to make love to her. She would not sleep with the lights out, and finally when she did sleep and I was alone, I had to face the fact that she was not much different sick from what she was well: the strain was simply purer, that was all. On the third day of her illness I was at last able to tear myself away from her by way of the necessities of shopping. Leaving our casino game, I drove to the supermarket under threatening winter skies. I knew that when Margie was fully recovered, strong and bouncy, we would have to arrange a parting; I was no gray-haired Chicago investor, no left-wing Jewish intellectual, and I could not continue to serve as either, or both. Nevertheless, because I was at the time as weak in the face of loneliness as in the face of pleasure, I shopped for two for the week, buying in the drug section of the market four bottles of Breck and three jars of the dainty underarm deodorant she used, and later the chocolate drink she was so fond of. Then as I was rounding an aisle by the meat department, I saw Libby Herz pushing a cart toward my own. I ducked away, but a few minutes later we collided in front of Detergents.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Why, hello—how are you?”

  “Better. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. What’s the matter?” I asked. “Were you sick? Or are you just feeling generally better?”

  “I had a fever.”

  “There’s one going around.”

  “It’s gone now,” she answered cheerily; too cheerily, for looking at her I saw the after-effects of illness still in her face.

  “How’s your husband?”

  “He’s fine.”

  We both did not know where to go from there. She must have heard, as 1 did, that I had not called Paul Paul.

  “You must come see us some night,” Libby suggested.

  “I’ve been very busy.”

  A strand of hair that was swept away from the side of her head suddenly engaged her; she brushed it with her hand, and pulled everything tighter through the rubber band at the back. “I want to thank you,” she said, “for the car offer. That was very nice. Paul told me.”

  “I’m sorry he couldn’t use it.”

  With her hair out of the way, she began fiddling with the items in her cart; she had a great deal of oleo but no Breck. “Thank you anyway,” she said, and we both looked off at the shelves of Tide and Rinso.

  “How do you get all those groceries home now?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Walk.”

  “It’s far.”

  “Not that far.”

  “Why don’t you wait—” I found myself looking at a crease that extended from the edges of her nostrils to the edges of her mouth, barely visible, but still a mark on the skin. “Maybe you shouldn’t walk …”

  “Oh but I’m fine.”

  “I can drive you. I’m almost finished.”

  When she looked to see how finished I was, I realized that it was clear from my cartful that I was feeding and deodorizing more than one. It was also clear—to me—that the other person was not one toward whom I had a great deal of feeling. It was beginning to seem that toward those for whom I felt no strong sentiment, I gravitated; where sentiment existed, I ran. There was my father; there was even the girl before me. With her, of course, circumstances had combined with judgment to hold me back. But no circumstances had forced me, really, into a liaison with Margie Howells, whose sickroom behavior informed me that even if I had not developed feelings, I had at any rate initiated obligations. Standing there with Libby Herz, I found myself feeling rather shabby.

  “Do let me drive you,” I said.

  “I’ll wait just outside.”

  In the car I put my bundles out of sight on the back seat. I propped up Libby’s bag in front, between us, and asked her how school was.

  “I’m not in school any more.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “I decided to quit a couple of weeks ago. A few days after we saw you, I guess.”

  “I suppose it’s less hectic.”

  She shrugged her shoulders again, and I saw that somehow I was making her nervous. “I’m working in the registrar’s office,” she said. “You’re right, it is less hectic. I mean generally.” And rather than explain, she raced ahead. “I finished your book. You don’t mind if we keep it for a while, do you? Paul hasn’t gotten around to it yet. He’s just starting to get some time.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Isabel has a lot of courage in the end,” she said. “You were right. Going back to Osmond, I mean. I don’t know—I think some people might think it was stubbornness. Do you think it was?”

  I thought she thought it was, so I said, yes, in a way it probably was. However, I said, stubbornness might be the other side of courage.

  “That’s very hard to figure out,” she answered. “When you’re being stubborn and when you’re being courageous. I mean, if you were alone—but there are other people …” The conversation seemed suddenly to depress her. Whenever we talked principle it always wound up seeming as though we were talking about her. I could tell when she spoke next that she had told herself to stop brooding.

  “Why don’t you come visit us?” she asked.

  I did not answer.

  “Don’t judge us by that night,” Libby said. “Please don’t. We,
both of us, were preoccupied.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Actually I’ve just been busy.”

  “Paul …” she began slowly, “did appreciate your offering the car.” She looked out the side window as she spoke, and I was reminded vividly of our first interview. “It simply wasn’t a solution for us. I hope you didn’t think he was ungrateful. He did appreciate the ride. He appreciated it very much. He’s—very private. He’s sweet, you know”—she toppled one word on the next—“and, I know, I know he can look a little rude, to strangers—”

  “No, no. I didn’t think him rude at all.”

  “We’re much better off now, really. I thought it was awfully kind of you, considering what we’d been the night before. I realize,” she said in a voice too loud for a two-door sedan, “that I must have complained all night.”

  “Oh no. I just thought you were telling some stories.”

  What I said confused me, and confused Libby too. Her voice was hardly natural when she said, “Paul was just overworked. It’s not nearly so bad as I must have made it seem.”

  “Doesn’t he teach at Coe any more?” I asked.

  “Well, he does—but he won’t be, starting next semester. It’s too much. And I don’t mind working. Really, it’s sort of a nice change. There’s a bus, he found out, that goes up to Cedar Rapids and he’s finishing out the semester taking that. It shoots a lot of his day—but that’s okay anyway because he can read on it—and oh, I know it sounds involved, but now in fact it’s less involved than it was. Before he couldn’t write, and he was up every night marking papers, and he was too upset. We’ll finish one education at a time. I think tempers are better all around.”