Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Martha Reganhart

  The first words I ever heard her speak were, “There’s a Negro little-boy problem”; the second: “What a dumb, silly, impossible bitch.” The dry whistling autumn air outside seemed to give to Martha Reganhart’s voice a special quality of exuberance; since she seemed to have no intention of being secretive in the first place, she ended up practically shouting. We had managed to escape from the club at the same time and had turned east toward Woodlawn together, under a perfectly beautiful evening sky. “What a thing—rape prone! Don’t you feel like stamping her out? Don’t you want to grind her into something? God, she makes me ferocious! She doesn’t read contemporary novels, do you know that? And she thinks water should be fluoridated. And her little girl can’t kiss her little brother for the same reason he can’t marry Negroes. Oh, you were there for that. You should have stopped by a little earlier—you missed all the casserole recipes, my friend. Do you know John speaks sixty—oh, you know all this. You don’t happen to be a pal of theirs …? Did you think I was? I sat there thinking, This fellow is going to hang me by association. Not that I read many contemporary novels myself, but I’m not against it for others, you know? Which is probably my fluoridation opinion too. What is fluoridation exactly? What? Oh I don’t even know how I got invited to dinner—Oh I do know. I’m a gay divorcée and Spigliano is in on the folklore.”

  “He made a pass? John?”

  “It does sound pretty unstructured of him, doesn’t it? I took a course from him downtown this summer. I was leaning over my Ibsen in his office and he snuck up from behind. He put his hands on my waist. My hips, I suppose. But that’s really all. I guess he felt, given that, I ought to meet his wife. Look, I don’t know what he thought. He invited me and since it’s nice to get out of the house once in a while, I came.”

  “How did it end?”

  “I said, Cut it out.”

  “And John?”

  “He said something about my not understanding his passionate Latin soul and then pole-vaulted out of the room. Excuse me, really. That woman makes me want to talk bawdy just as a kind of declaration of humanity. He wasn’t as silly as that. I shouldn’t even have been in that class in the first place. As I said, I get interested from time to time in getting out of— Does this all seem a little too defensive? I know what night school sounds like for a grown woman. Hiking up your earning ability. Improving your word power. But for me it was different, truly. I wore all kinds of jazzy clothes, and heels—so I suppose poor John’s not so much to blame. But tonight I didn’t know whether to apologize to that fastidious Arid-soaked little ladies’ magazine of his, or whether he had brought us all together to confess. She said he’d been talking about me all summer. I was one of his best students and so on, and I just sat there looking stony as I could. Did I look stony?”

  “Bored.”

  “Really? I wasn’t. After a while I thought maybe it was a joke. Go explain men’s consciences … I’m sorry if I’m being loud. It was a trying experience. You just had brandy—I sat there for two and a half hours. I thought I acted pretty well, though, didn’t you? Oh I said that thing about Negroes, but how could I help myself? And she doesn’t hear anyway. But you were wonderful, by the way-You were really excellent. I mean you know how to be stony, kid. After a while I began to wonder if you were one of them. I live down on Fifty-third, I have to turn off here.”

  “Would you like to have a beer with me?”

  “I have a baby-sitter waiting.”

  “A short beer. I’ll explain fluoridation.”

  “Explain the conscience of John Spigliano, if you want to do some explaining. Now that’s something, isn’t it?” She stood for a moment with her hands on her substantial hips, just a little off balance, contemplating the problem. In heels she was my equal, and when she stopped meditating and looked straight on at me, it was directly in the eye. Right off I liked Martha Reganhart a good deal. “To make a pass and then invite me to dinner with her,” she said. “Who in hell was he trying to prove what to? I mean it about men’s consciences. I don’t understand them. They can’t let go, you know? If they know they’re so guilty, then why do they keep acting like bastards? I’m sounding unladylike again, but a woman at least realizes there are certain rotten things she’s got to do in life and she does them. Men want to be heroes. They want to be noble and responsible, but they’re so soft about it. Do you agree with this or are you laughing at me?”

  We had a beer and on the way home, crossing Kenwood, I took her hand to guide her onto the curb. And then, with only sidewalk ahead, I kept it. Her next remark left me feeling rather feeble. “It’s only a hand,” she said. I released it. “I was only holding it,” I said. At the corner of Kimbark and Fifty-third she stopped. “The fifth ugly porch down is mine. I think I can make it alone. Thanks for walking me. Thanks for making everything clear about water fluoridation. I’d like to be against it, what with Mrs. Spigliano being for it, but I’m as cavity-oriented as the next parent. Good night, Gabe,” she said. I am of a forgiving nature, and if somebody wants to charm me, I let them. For a moment Martha Reganhart looked up at the white moon, showing the underside of what looked to be—despite my hospitable feelings toward her—a very uncompromising chin. She made a slight but weary sound. She was not so big, really, as she seemed.

  “Maybe we could have dinner some night,” I said. “Without the Spiglianos.”

  She looked from the heavens back to me with what I thought was genuine interest. Then she turned formal and altogether strange. “That’s very nice of you. Perhaps we can work that out some time.” Her smile didn’t help matters any. “I work, you know, at night. Tonight is—was—an exception. Thanks again for the beer.” As she was about to move off finally, she said, “Please excuse me, will you, if I sounded like a grande dame just now. It’s just the handholding. I don’t see the … I was going to say I don’t see the sense.” She turned here and hurried up the street. I saw that for the most part she took the width of her hips and the breadth of her thighs without very much complaint; in walking she made no attempt to be languorous or statuesque, nor did she hide her neck and slouch off inches in the shoulders, or even give in to buxomness and gyrate belly and can. She walked with an unquestionable solidity; not mannish, mind you, but not tinkley-tinkley or snap-snap either. I imagine that women over five eight have decisions to make that other women don’t; there’s no absolute relaxing, and probably they know best whether to be snugglers and handholders. On the stairway of her front stoop Martha Reganhart suddenly disappeared, and I wondered if she had fallen. But she had only bent over to pick up something from one of the steps. Throwing a child’s doll over her shoulder, she proceeded into the house.

  Gabe Wallach.

  Knows only two languages, and one badly, so perhaps he is snotty out of envy. Unlike his boss, he has no wife whom he deserves. As for girl friends, he would not be willing to say that he has actually deserved any of them. He is better, he believes, than anything that he has done in life has shown him to be. Often upon parting from friends and acquaintances, he has the suspicion that he has behaved badly; what may or may not have really happened alters very little his attitude toward himself. He has the malaise of many wealthy but ordinary young men: he does not exactly know what to do with himself. Though subject to his share of depressions, nightmares and melancholy, he cannot enjoy any of it thoroughly (and thereby feel his true and tragic worth) because of a nagging doubt that he is very lucky and ought to be thankful and shut up. It would help if he would imagine himself without hope. He has an income, he has perfect health, and he believes not only in the pursuit, but the catching by the tail and dragging down into the clover, of happiness. Unfortunately, all these beliefs don’t get too much in the way of his actions. If his own good fortune were inevitable, he should not have so much trouble making up his mind. For an optimist, he is very nervous and indecisive. Suppose happiness should twitch her butt and dance merrily off the side of a cliff—should he follow?

>   Five times during the day he had walked up the stairs of Cobb Hall to Spigliano’s office, and five times turned and walked back down again to his own. At the dinner table there had been at least five more occasions when he had been tempted to speak. In fact, all the while Pat congratulated herself on her good fortune, he ruminated silently on the brandy that slides down the throats of the undeserving, and the fevers, the popped pistons, the ugly iron beds of those who deserve, if not more, surely no less than the others. But when asked again by John Spigliano, he only shook his head and took his leave. It was walking home with Martha Reganhart—touching her hand, actually—that he had cause to remind himself that Libby Herz was not the only woman in the world who could engage his feelings. Not that Mrs. Reganhart, in their manic hour together, had engaged feelings of a sustaining and vibrant sort. The moon and stars, as much as she, had combined to prickle his easiest sentiments. But he had liked her, and in her frame and voice, her country stride, he had recognized something open and direct to which he could respond. She might turn out to be a little motherly and instructive, but if so he could move on. After all, the decision was not whether he should or should not marry Martha Reganhart. All he cared to make clear to himself was that if the Herzes should come to Chicago he could manage to have an active life of his own, independent of theirs. There was Martha Reganhart, and there were dozens of others too. It was not changing his own life that was finally uppermost in his mind; it was changing theirs. It was much too easy to imagine Herz out there in Reading resigning himself to no money and depressing surroundings and calling it “life.” A message from Chicago might well be what would lift the Herzes up into life. A job at the University would be an improvement for Herz in every way—and for his wife as well. And if that was so, then it had been dishonorable of him not to have suggested Paul right off.

  He would have lifted the phone then, had it not been that he knew the situation was not nearly so black and white as that. He was not (let a truth be repeated that is probably known already) a strong man. He was prone to self-deceptions, and some of his impetuosities were rehearsed as much as two or three months in advance. He had reason to believe that he might have fallen in love with Libby Herz. He had reason to believe that she might have fallen in love with him. So for whom, for what end, was he doing favors?

  He marked three unstructured freshman papers, took a bath—but finally, he called.

  “Pat, is John home?”

  She said he was out at the Dean’s. “Gabe, we do hope you liked Mrs. Reganhart. It must be hard for her to find a man as tall as she is, but when you walked out John commented on how well you went together. She has to wear Tall Gals’ shoes, you know, so she is a tall person.”

  “She seems very nice. I didn’t get a good look at her shoes. Will you ask John to call me?”

  “She’s divorced and has children and works as a waitress to support them—and takes courses. We think that’s quite admirable.”

  When the phone rang twenty minutes later, he told John that a fellow he had known at Iowa was now teaching in Pennsylvania, and from what he understood he might be willing to leave his job. “His name is Paul Herz,” he said.

  “Didn’t he have something in Modern Philology recently? Herz?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s a writer.”

  “A creative writer?”

  “A novelist.”

  “What’s he published?”

  “I don’t believe anything yet. He’s just finishing a book. He was finishing it last year.”

  “Then he hasn’t his degree yet?” John asked.

  “Everything but the dissertation—the novel.”

  “You mean—” The voice on the other end was Pat Spigliano’s. “You mean they do some kind of creative writing instead of a work of scholarship?”

  He waited patiently for Spigliano to tell his wife to get the hell off the extension.

  “Isn’t that something?” Still Patricia. “I had thought you did a dissertation on James.”

  “I did.”

  “Oh, one has a choice then. I suppose Harvard is a little more traditional, though that is very up to date. We wondered why you didn’t stay on for graduate work at Cambridge, but I see now that you probably preferred the freedom—”

  “John, are you still there?”

  “I’m here. I’m thinking.”

  “Well, it’s only a suggestion.”

  “This is very considerate of you, Gabe, but you know the difficulty with creative writers.”

  “What?”

  “They’re apt to be a little too personal about literature.”

  “Oh.”

  “Most of them are without any real critical system. I’ve never really known a writer who finally understood writing.”

  There was no sense, he knew, in bringing up old Henry James; there was no sense in bringing up anything.

  He said, “Paul is a very bright guy. He’s an excellent man.”

  An hour later, when he had already settled into a chair convinced that he had at least done the decent thing, the phone rang again.

  “Look, do you think this Herz could come out here right away? Within a day or two?”

  “You’d have to ask him. It would probably depend on whether he could get out of the job he has.”

  “Will you call him for us?”

  “What?”

  “Call him for us.”

  He found himself terribly unsettled by this very obvious suggestion. “Don’t you think you’d better call, John? As chairman? I can give you his address. Just wait a minute.”

  He left the receiver hanging off the edge of the desk and hunted through the bookshelf for his copy of Portrait of a Lady. In its middle pages were two envelopes. He carried one back to the phone and read the return address to John Spigliano. After he hung up he read the letter itself. Then he settled into a chair and read the other letter too.

  Two

  Paul Loves Libby

  1

  He had uncles who had failed. He had a father who had failed too, but that was in the world of commerce. Mr. Herz bought and sold with little talent and saved where interest amounted to pennies; when he finally emerged from his fourth failure—this last in frozen foods—he had nothing to show for himself save a sinus condition and holy dread of heart failure. He took to melting Vicks in a spoon under his nose and arranged for a small bank loan so as to purchase, for his heart’s ease, a BarcaLounger; and then he settled down to wait for the end. Still, there is a hierarchy of failures; better bankruptcy than tension in the kitchen and in the bed. There was a man’s home life to judge him by. Uncle Asher might have clear nasal passages but he had a ruined life: he had never married. Up close you could see and smell his single condition—suits swollen at the knee, heels a disgrace, and as far as anyone could tell, only one tie to his name. His sister, who was Paul Herz’s mother, said that from Asher’s smell alone she didn’t even have to guess what shape his linens were in. One foul snowy evening she had seen her baby brother emerge from Riker’s with a toothpick in his mouth. Riker’s! For an Asher! She had cried herself to sleep for a week.