Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “I told your father I would contact you,” Jerry said. “But of course I can’t say anything. I don’t even know the girl. Paul, we hardly know each other. I didn’t complicate matters explaining any of this to Leonard. It wouldn’t have interested him. I understand,” he said to Paul, softly, intimately. “Paul, you tell me, all right. What do you think?”

  The young man’s voice was sharp when he answered. “What do I think? I think I’ll marry Libby! I don’t think any of this hysteria has anything to do with us. They hardly know her. In fact, they don’t know her.” Then his own chagrin swallowed him up; he had no reason whatsoever to be short-tempered with this particular uncle.

  “Your father says they met her?” Jerry inquired, still delicate.

  “I brought her here Thanksgiving. I wanted to please them.” Those words, like the rest of his familial generosity, suddenly turned a little sour on him. If his family wouldn’t please him, why must he be trying so hard to please them? “They knew I was going with a girl—I let them see her. She came for half an hour last week too, before I told them our plans.”

  “Your father said something about her being a sickly girl. I’m only repeating him, believe me.”

  “Jerry, she gets colds,” he answered wearily. “Jerry, let’s even say she’s a frail girl. But she’s not going to be a farmer. She’s going to be my wife. This is all very silly. Jerry, you know what they object to?”

  “She’s Catholic.”

  “She’s Catholic.” He himself knew that to be, however, only a strand in the whole tapestry of rejection. It was not just one crime they wanted to hang the girl on—there was her faith, plus her health, her youth, their son’s youth, and a dozen things more. If they had known the word they would have claimed that their sense of Paul’s error was intuitive; it was the word with which he had begun to argue with himself in favor of his decision. “Jerry, she’s a Catholic like I’m a Jew. It’s not the kind of thing that’ll have much to do with our lives. It hasn’t to do with us. It’s another ruse.”

  “Paul, I’m put in a position where I’m asking questions I don’t even want to ask. How could I hope to reason with you, anyway, one way or the other? Even if I had the foolish impulse to. We’re not dealing with the mind, with the practical senses anyway. This is the mysterious, spontaneous choice—the choice of the heart. The unencumbered heart,” Jerry said.

  “Yes,” Paul answered, unhinged slightly by his uncle’s reverent tones.

  “The heart, Paul, knows. It cost me half a lifetime to learn such a simple fact. I had such neuroses pressing in upon me, they were the size of mountains. Tremendous pathetic pressures building and building, cutting me off from what you think of as your inside self. Paul, I didn’t do a spontaneous thing in twenty-seven years. Because the heart was under this terrific pressure. But what the heart decides, Paul, must be. I’m telling you, it won’t give you peace if it’s defied Love!” Jerry cried.

  And Paul cried back, “Jerry, I love her.”

  And his uncle replied sweetly, “That’s all then. That’s all that counts.”

  Then, for having provoked such wholesale approval, Paul felt wave upon wave of indecency wash over him. True as they may have been, his words had been spoken out of nothing less than design. And why had he to convince Jerry? So Jerry could turn around and convince him? It was an unavoidable fact that, ever since his afternoon on Third Avenue, certainty had somehow been seeping away. He could not believe that Asher and his bird-brained mistress had demonstrated anything other than what everybody knew about squandered lives, yet he had begun to think of himself as being not so courageous as fearful. Fear began to seem the springboard of much that he had done in his short life. He was a scholarship holder all right, a planner, a young man investing emotions one day to accumulate love and admiration the next. He had come to see his marrying Libby in two distinct ways, both of which, unfortunately, cast doubt on his manliness and dignity.

  On the one hand, it all seemed so safe. Husband, wage-earner, father—right on down the line, all the duties and offices laid out for him. From home to college to a wife, no chances taken. Without much effort, he could recall from his past more than a few risks he had worked a little hard at avoiding. Even recently with his parents: he knocked against the walls of their house in December, hoping that somehow by May they would find a way to prevent the roof from falling in. He wanted to remain the good son. Even to himself he seemed to be working strenuously at being upright.

  Otherwise he would tell them to go to hell. Run off, marry the girl and leave them to drip tears till their eyes fell out. It was what Asher would have done, he thought. And because he saw it as being a choice that Asher might have made, it too caused him discomfort. If marrying Libby was taking no risks, it was also taking every risk. Asher’s life had unnerved him deeply; with a little twisting and turning he could think of it as his own. Way down, he had begun to bend an ear toward his parents’ objections. He was no longer so sure that he was seeing Libby as clearly as his uncle saw Patricia Ann, at least as he saw her in paint, if not in life. He did not know that he wanted to see that clearly. He only knew that he did not want merely to stick it right up in Libby; he wanted to love her.

  Feeling something less than a daredevil, he listened to Uncle Jerry on the other end comforting him. “Paul, good luck then. I think that’s the only proper thing for any of us to say.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Tell Libby good luck too.” Jerry pronounced her name easily, and Paul knew they would like each other right off. “When will you be married?”

  “Not till May. Around graduation.”

  “Will I get to see you before you go back? I’d like to take you to dinner. I’ll invite Claire and her husband. She’d love to see you.”

  “That’s very kind, Jerry. I’ll call Libby. I think tomorrow night, if you could, would be best for us. We were going to meet with news from both fronts.”

  “How is she bearing up?”

  “Fine,” Paul said, lying, as if he had to spare that two-time loser from any further knowledge of the hardships of loving.

  “I know I’ve got character in my face, but won’t someone say I’m pretty?” Well, on the steps of the Plaza, with all that swank hurrying by, she had her wish. Character had been bled from her for the evening, and in its place was prettiness. She had made up her eyes heavily, and managed even to reduce the proud leap of her nose—its sailing proportions were lost beneath the great mast of her black hair, which was piled atop her head, revealing a slender boyish back of the head. The doorman bowed and opened the door for both the lady and her escort, who even in dark suit and tie made a slightly seedy appearance—seedy perhaps only by comparison to the glitter and chic of the slender girl beside him.

  At the sight of Libby, Paul had been visited with a definite burst of pleasure. Gradually, however, he became irritated because she had decked herself out. Why? Actually she was wearing only a simple black suit with a tight jacket and a full skirt, but its fetchingness—acknowledged by its owner in her very gait—was in the way it made so apparent the delicacy of her shoulders and neck. Despite her dripping nose and the weather, she had worn no blouse, so that one was of course touched by the wistful fragility revealed in the wide neck of the jacket. The wad of Kleenex in her white glove (there to inform his parents of sanitoriums and hospital bills) only made more glamorous her tiny garnet earrings and bracelet. They proceeded through the lobby to the entrance of the Oak Room, and when Paul looked at her again, he looked deeply, intently, for some sign of the college girl he had planned to marry: the straight shoulder-length black hair, the pale lips, the over-used eyes, the winterized, libraryized, studentized Libby. What he found instead was something that bothered him, something that he could only think of as aspiration.

  Yet as they spotted Uncle Jerry, and moved into the dining room, Paul put his mouth to her hair. He explained her little display of prosperity and polish to himself as an attempt to impress some Herz. That
his mother and father dreaded her so for their son, led her, he knew, to begin to wonder what kind of ogre she might actually be. He knew this, and he knew how much protection his intended needed. He said into her ear, “My wife,” feeling a little ripple of well-being as the word passed from his lips.

  “Husband,” Libby whispered, and that thrilled him too. Oh Libby had come a long long way from being a sorority sister to being a woman. He, Paul, had lifted her up from childhood with him. Now—the thought had a peculiar forcefulness as Libby swished up to Uncle Jerry—now she was all his!

  Uncle Jerry’s daughter Claire was Paul’s age. It had always been expected in the family that because they had been born within a month of each other they should like each other. But even during the flirtation they had carried on in the closing months of their seventeenth year, there had been little affection between them. Following an evening when they had taken off their clothes and stood glaring, breathlessly, at one another, Paul had gone on to college and high literature, and Claire to a promiscuity at Syracuse, stories of which had reached Paul’s ears every Monday morning, sixty miles away at Cornell. But with dinner at the Plaza—snow fell on the carriages out the window, beyond Libby’s hair—all was changed. Claire seemed to be taking a special delight in showing Paul how matronly she had become, and how human. With her whole being she listened to the remarks of her husband, an average crew-cut sort of I.B.M. machine, who had taken away from Syracuse an M.A. in Business Administration, and hot Claire Herz. The firm he was with was splitting stock or changing hands, or something that Paul was not following; whatever, Claire responded as though he was singing exquisite tenor. Once Paul thought he saw her eyes shut when her husband spoke about a large loan a Mr. Richmond was floating. She might have been visualizing it aloft. Finally she discovered Libby and her clothes; and Libby, it seemed, discovered herself.

  “I never usually go to Carita,” Libby said, measuring Claire’s response, “because you have to wait so long.”

  “They do do a wonderful job,” Claire said. “It’s so lovely.”

  “It’s only the second time I’ve been there.”

  Claire lifted a finger as though to touch Libby’s crown, and Paul realized that they were not talking about Libby’s clothes; Carita was where she had had her hair set. He had imagined that she had fixed it herself before the bathroom mirror in Queens. His astonishment led him into a grave contemplation of the future. All his thinking of the last few days had been grave in tone, and large in scope. He was no longer thinking ahead strictly in terms of semesters and summers.

  In the meantime the young women had proceeded into a discussion of Delman’s shoes. Finally, Libby excused herself and went off to the powder room—doubtless, thought Paul, to work her eyes up a little more.

  Claire put her hand on her cousin’s. “She’s wonderful, Paul. I think she’s the most wonderful thing that could have happened to you. She’s so charming, and so alive, and so pretty. Her skin, her hair …”

  “We wish you all the luck,” Claire’s husband said, and he snapped his head at Paul, meaning it. “I think we have to go home, hon,” he said to his stout, good-looking young wife.

  “Baby-sitters,” Claire said. She spoke wearily, but it was an affect; she was obviously charmed by her own maternal obligations. She rose, a matron at twenty-one. She went around to her father, who pushed back his chair and rose too. At fifty-five Uncle Jerry might have been her beau; he stood straight and was dressed like his son-in-law in a narrow suit and a narrow tie. All that marred his crisp good looks was a distressing willingness in the eyes.

  When Claire and her husband had left, he said, “Harold is a fine boy. A very solid boy.”

  “He seems very nice.” Paul tried to concentrate on his uncle instead of himself; he was divided in his feelings about Libby’s return to the table. When she had gotten up to leave he had actually felt relief, so uncertain was he about what she might say next. And he seemed to have become uncertain on the basis of her not setting her hair at home! He waited for her to return with a conscious ambivalence.

  “He’s especially fine for Claire,” Jerry said. “He holds her in check. You may not have known it, but she had an exuberant streak in her in college.”

  “Yes?”

  “Paul, she was a very promiscuous girl at Syracuse. She could have made a mess of herself. When I left Selma,” Jerry said, “she lost a father image, there’s no doubt about that. But had I stayed longer, she would have lost it anyway. Worse things might have happened.” Paul wondered, until Jerry told him. “None of us,” his uncle said, “are without incestuous feelings. And it isn’t the feelings, you see—it’s how you act them out.”

  Jerry seemed to feel that he had explained something; Paul only felt the desperate sordid decency of admitting to such motives. “This young man,” Jerry was saying, “he’s no whiz, no spectacular ball of fire. But he’s steady and he’s a mensch, and he’s done wonders for Claire. You ought to see her with that baby. She relates so beautifully it could make you cry.”

  “I’ll bet she’s fine.”

  “She’s become an outstanding mother.”

  “Yes,” Paul said, “I’m glad we all had a chance to be together.”

  “I’m glad we all had a chance to meet Libby. I think you’ve got a fine girl.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank yourself. It’s not often young people know what they want. It’s not often you find a young person who’s discovered the essentials. They run around and play around—like Claire—trying each other out. It’s not a healthy thing, what’s happening with this generation. They ‘get laid,’ they ‘screw,’ ” he said, “and those expressions express just about what they do. A lot of grabbing and pawing, Paul, but very little touching. But I see your Libby and I see Claire now, and they look like two girls who know what that means, to touch.” Uncle Jerry’s eyes were wet suddenly. In the cultivated atmosphere of the dining room, with a steak sizzling at the next table and the candlelight shimmering on the long curtains, and outside the white flakes falling on the park, Jerry was not able to prevent the tears from sliding down his face. After he dried them, Paul expected he might see a pale spot where his uncle’s coloring had been rubbed off by the napkin. Uncle Jerry, forever struggling up for air in the dark sea of maladjustment and poor mental health, had shed two tears for Love. Love was the name painted on the ship that would come along and pull him safely to shore. It had rescued his daughter, and now he was telling Paul it had rescued him, and one sunny day perhaps it would come along and rescue Jerry too. He would find a woman who was not a mother-figure, like the oversized Selma, nor a daughter-figure, like the short-lived twenty-seven-year-old; just a woman who could touch him.

  Paul realized that since dinner had begun he had been looking at his uncle through Asher’s eyes. Now he tried looking at himself through Asher’s eyes. Just then Libby came back to the table, and so she was seen through Asher’s eyes too. When Paul tried to look at her through Jerry’s eyes, it occurred to him that that may have been how he had been looking all along. It was no longer clear in his mind whether he could consider himself a realist or a romantic.

  “Are you all right?” Paul whispered, as he pulled her chair out for her.

  “I just put some nose drops in to get some air,” she said, but he smelled a perfume on her that he had never smelled before. “I was talking to Claire and Jack in the lobby,” she said to Jerry.

  “All this time?” asked Paul.

  “Yes. They’re awfully nice,” she said to Jerry.

  “They’re all a father could hope for,” Jerry answered, and from there he and Libby proceeded, for the rest of the evening, to discuss the theater. Jerry sat there, awed and charmed and won, while Libby’s fingers waved above her water glass, and her eyes in turn grew grave and puzzled and gay. In the hour that followed, Paul heard her say art, and he heard her say beauty, and he heard her say truth three times. Twice she said objective correlative. But, of course, it d
id not matter that she echoed him; of course she was still learning. She had come a long way already from the Pi Phi house, on whose steps he had found her a little less than a year ago. In courting her he had changed her, he had worked at changing her; but now he wondered if she would ever be the genuine article. Was she bright? Was she true? Would she grow? Trying to improve her had he only made a monkey of her? What a time to be asking himself such questions!

  He tried to admire her for winning so completely the affection of his uncle, but he was not able to.

  *

  On the subway back to Queens he asked her how much it cost to have one’s hair set at the Carita Salon.

  “Eight dollars.”

  “Just to heap it up like that?”

  “They wash it and they set it—and then there’s the tip. They have to tease my hair, it’s so straight.”

  “Is the teasing figured into the bill, or is that free?”

  “Did I behave badly?” Libby demanded. “Did I talk too much? I realized I was talking a lot. Oh Paul, what’s the matter?”