Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “It is yours.”

  “All right, you think that.”

  “Stop trying to get the upper hand!” she said. “I’m thinking it because it’s so.”

  “Libby, you’re twenty years old. We came down here to make some money. We want to go back to school. We’re married a year, we’re broke—”

  “We’re not broke if we’ve got four hundred and fifty dollars in the bank to throw out!”

  “In the end, a baby will cost more, much, much more. It’ll change our lives altogether. Honey, I’m only trying to protect us from even more crap. If there’s a baby, we have to move out of this room, you have to stop working. And we’ll never get caught up, Libby. I know it, we’ll just flounder along.”

  She turned back toward him, covering her face with her hands. “You think you shouldn’t even have married me. I made you marry me.”

  “Don’t talk stupidly, please.”

  “When I think of all the stuff I said I’m just so ashamed. You’ve changed me, now you’ve got to marry me—how can I ever go out with other boys—”

  “Lib,” Paul said, not sure that he wasn’t lying, “you never said any of that.”

  “I thought it.”

  “I wanted to marry you. I went out of my way to marry you.”

  “I made you want to.”

  “Go to sleep. Nobody’s talking sense at this hour.”

  “I can’t go to sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool … What does an osteopath know about uteruses?”

  “Osteopaths are like doctors. Smith is very well known.”

  “They’re bone-crackers.”

  “The man’s been doing this for years.”

  “What about infection?”

  “This is a doctor, Libby, not just anybody. Would he do it if it was risky?”

  “Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me your hand. Feel my breasts. Do they feel bigger?”

  “I think so, honey.”

  She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed it; she tried to be funny. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” Then, as he knew she would, she wept. “And it’s going to last one day. Oh Paul …” She lay still, holding his hand to her, and then because she was exhausted she soon fell asleep.

  He himself had no such luck. His own whirlpool went round and round and round … Infection was Libby’s worry; his own mind turned and turned now on a single word: jail. Korngold had been showing his pathetic photograph, and all he had been thinking was jail! Suppose the police should come in before Libby was in the operating room. Couldn’t he simply say she was there for an examination? Couldn’t they deny everything? Unless she were already on the table—then what? Whom do they put in jail? After all, he was her husband, not just a man who had got a girl into trouble. But what weight, if any, did that carry? Did that not make it seem worse? He tried to remember accounts of eases reported in the newspapers. Was the boy friend or husband an accomplice? The girl? Surely they didn’t throw her in jail! But in the headlines she was always dead.

  Through the hectic night, at the center of his imaginings, stood the police. You’re an accomplice to an abortion. No, my wife said she had to come here to have a cyst removed. All right, says the Captain, ask the wife … Libby, if anything should happen, if anybody should question you, say I didn’t know, say you told me it was a cyst—

  In the morning neither of them heard the alarm clock. They dressed in a frenzy, couldn’t get into the bathroom, and had no time for coffee on the hot plate. They parted at the bus stop without even a kiss. Only a few hours earlier, Paul had tried to force his way into sleep by telling himself that all this preoccupation with the police was only his super-ego asserting itself. But that had in no way been able to increase his self-respect; he felt lucky then to have avoided a morning conversation with his wife, for he might have confessed to her the nature of his fears and so shaken her even further. He was aware of his momentum again, carrying him forward.

  The bus started away from the corner, then stopped; someone was hammering on the side. The driver swung back the doors and Mr. Levy charged up the stairs, eyebrows floating and sinking, cane swinging disastrously near the driver’s head. “Don’t be disrespectful! I’ll take your number!” He started up the aisle, a little eager old man, sun-tanned from the ultraviolet bulb in his room. He snapped a sharp look into each seat until he spotted Paul. “Ah, nice morning,” he said; refining himself down into an oily friendliness, he slid in beside the young man. “A little chilly, but bracing.”

  “Good morning,” Paul said. He had to free his coat from Levy’s backside.

  “Heigh ho, heigh ho, off to work you go?”

  “Yes,” Paul said. “Yourself?”

  “Enterprises, enterprises. I’m moving some gloves for a friend. You wrote the letter?”

  He found himself looking out the window as he said, “I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “I thought maybe Korngold picked it up last night.”

  “No.”

  “I thought maybe it was his limp I heard dragging down the hall. Must be some mistake.”

  Paul’s eyes fixed on the dull two-storied rooming houses along the street.

  “You look a little underneath the weather,” commented Levy. “Up too late at night, no?”

  “No.”

  “Funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Over sixty-five you can’t trust your senses. My hearing is a tricky item where I’m concerned.” Levy made a quick survey of the ads posted in the bus, checking the competition. He said, “Korngold, of course, is an old old friend, but senility will rob him of his sense of fair play, I’m afraid.”

  Paul at last forced himself to engage Levy’s excited glittery eyes. “He doesn’t seem senile. Maybe a little fatigued. He seems to have had a lot of trouble.”

  “Oh, nobody’s taking his troubles away from him. A sad case, that man. Fleeced all his life, then health goes, whew! No wonder he’s such a suspicious specimen. It’s pathetic how he doesn’t know the best road no longer. Needs help. Good thing you and me are around, because drowning would be his end. Starvation probably.”

  They rode on a little further. Paul’s growing discomfort with Levy arose in part from a sense of incongruity; it was not simply that he did not like the fellow—it was that here was a crisis in his life, the crisis perhaps, and these two old men had somehow gotten tied up in it. It was all he could do not to get up and change his seat.

  “So,” said Levy, with a flourish of his cane, “you’ll have it typed up this afternoon, righto?”

  “I’ve got to work all day.”

  “So tonight?”

  “Tonight I’m busy.”

  “More doctors?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say nothing.”

  “What is it, Mr. Levy? What are you following me around this morning for?”

  “My boy, my boy, don’t be paranoyal. I got kid gloves I’m moving for a friend.”

  But when Paul rose to leave, Levy followed. The bus pulled away and the two of them were alone on the corner, within sight of the gate to the plant. “What is it, Levy? What do you want to tell me?”

  Levy only sniffed in some of the bracing air. “We’re going the same way,” he said. “Smells like pine trees in the vicinity.”

  “What are you getting at? What’s on your mind?”

  “That question I’m saving for you.” With Paul on his heels, Levy started to cross the street. A car came roaring down on them, and Paul couldn’t believe his impulse: he wanted to push the old bastard in front of it.

  “Look,” he began, helping the elderly man up the opposite curb, “Korngold—”

  “Korngold is senile. Korngold shouldn’t go in the dark streets at night. He’ll lose his footing and crack a hip. Then death. Korngold shouldn’t be encouraged along foolish lines.”

  Paul was no longer helping Levy up the curb; nevertheless, he kept his fingers wrapped around the strin
gy arm. “Korngold asked me to write to his son for him,” Paul said, spinning the old man around. “All right? So he came in our room. He spilled his old sick heart out. I listened, my wife listened. I don’t have to hide anything from you, Mr. Levy. What the hell is going on here? Korngold has some rights in this thing.”

  “For rights,” said Levy, shaking free his coat and smoothing out the cloth, “a legal mind is called for. Which I got, not you.”

  “Mr. Levy, this whole thing,” said Paul, calming himself as best he could, “is very foolish. None of it is my business.”

  Levy suddenly took a strangle hold on that admission; in anger he said, “Leave it to the parties of the first and second part to judge the wisdom of Mr. Korngold’s family problem. You just type neat the letter I gave you. Or”—he shook his cane—“give it back and go your way. Understand? Clear? This is in the shape of a warning, my young Mr. Herz. Keep your nose poked out of my professional life—”

  But Paul could not bear for another moment to be in the company of meanness, his own or anybody else’s. “Look, I don’t care about your professional life, Levy. I don’t care about your letter—” And then, because Levy had the nerve to give him a menacing glance, he added, “you presumptuous little bastard!” It felt so good to say it—he had taken too much already, from everybody. “What kind of Senate investigation! What kind of petty thief are you, screwing poor Korngold!”

  Levy’s eyes became tiny coin slots, big enough for dimes. “You want to pay for the label bastard, or you want to pay for that disgusting word screw? Which?”

  “Don’t threaten me.”

  “Dr. Thomas Smith. BA three dash three three four nine.” For the first time Paul could remember, Levy proceeded to smile. He walked on then, Paul grabbing after his coat.

  “What business is that of yours!”

  “Don’t hit an old man on the streets. Let go.”

  In absolute confusion, Paul dropped his hands to his sides.

  “I’m interested in the law,” said Levy. “When it gets busted, I feel a pain.”

  “You little thief! You eavesdropping little son of a bitch! You sneak looks at my wife in the john, you disgusting old fart!”

  “Libel is a crime, Mr. Herz, even if only the other party is a witness. It’s a crime against my feelings. Also illegal medical proceeding is a crime in a great state like Michigan, Watch your step!” With that, Levy turned back the way they had come, smashing at the pavement with his cane.

  Late in the afternoon Paul complained to the foreman that his left wrist was throbbing, and managed to see the doctor. In the infirmary Dr. Esposito undid the bandage. “You called and took care of your business?”

  “Everything is all right,” Paul said.

  The doctor smeared a cool ointment onto the wrist. “Well. Good. It’s your business.”

  “You see, it worked out. She menstruated this morning.”

  “Is that so?” Esposito asked, smiling.

  “No,” Paul said. “No—look, is he all right, this Smith? Is he a quack?”

  “Topnotch for what he does,” Esposito said softly.

  “I didn’t like the looks of the nurse.”

  “You’re overnervous. Who does the scraping, the nurse or Smitty?”

  “Look, I appreciate everything. Please, call the foreman, will you? Tell him I’m sick. I’ve got to get home.”

  Esposito continued to be the most decent person around. He made the call, adding that Herz might not be able to come in for work the next day either.

  From the bus Paul raced past his own house, flung open the little iron gate next door, and two at a time took the stairs of Korngold’s red-sided rooming house. A rotund man was eating potato chips out of a bag and listening to the radio in the sitting room, a dark place where everything, floor, tables, chairs, seemed knee-deep in rugs and coverlets. “What!” the man boomed, before anything was said.

  “Korngold.”

  “Next to the sink,” said the man in a heavy accent. “Upstairs. What are you to him?” As Paul moved away, he shouted after him, “He owes his rent!”

  Paul mounted the stairs. He knocked at the door to which a business card was thumbtacked:

  MAX KORNGOLD

  Haberdashery Kiddies Wear

  Waiting for some word from the other side, he looked in the sink. There was a Bab-o can on the ledge and he shook it and shook it over the filth; nothing, unfortunately, sprinkled forth.

  “Who?” Korngold moaned.

  “Paul Herz. From next door. Open up, please.”

  Minutes passed before Korngold—long underwear beneath his robe, his stained fedora back on his head—appeared in the doorway. “All right. Come in.”

  The tiny room was squeezed into an angle of the house, and so had five cracking walls. Around three of the walls cartons were piled; beside the bed, under whose covers Korngold had been laid out, was an end table with a flashlight, a glass, a paper-covered book, and a milk bottle half full of urine. In the grip of sadness and disgust, Paul looked away from Korngold’s possessions. The old man, with some oow-ing and ahh-ing, had taken his place back in the bed.

  “I got the shivers,” Korngold explained. “Sit, why don’t you.”

  “I’m in a hurry. I want to say to you that I had a talk with your friend Mr. Levy this morning. I think he has your interests at heart. What good would money be to you without a helper, somebody to give you a hand going up and down stairs, to sit across from you at meals? He has your interests at heart.” He had gotten through it on just one breath.

  “This,” Korngold asked, “is something he told you?”

  “I observed him. I listened to him, yes. Why don’t you let him go through with his plan? See what happens.”

  Korngold stretched his neck up on his pillows, crossing his arms for protection. “You told him I came talking to you?”

  “He knew it. He heard you.”

  “Oy, he’s got six ears that guy! I thought he was asleep by eight. He says that, see, for propaganda. See how he tricks you out on things?” He seemed ready for tears.

  “No, no. It’s all right. I said you just wanted to give me your son’s address.”

  Korngold put his head in his hands, and he let out some air with a high flutey sound. “Oh, nice thinking,” he said.

  “So you’ll just go along, all right?”

  “You saved my life, believe me.”

  “Your life’s not in jeopardy, Mr. Korngold. What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s no good crossing Levy, I’m sure. Not when a fellow offers you so much.”

  “Don’t be so nervous, please. I’m only saying that this is to your advantage.”

  “Of course it is. Sure. You’re right. See what a wreck I turned into? Someone offers a helping hand, I give him for a reward suspicion. I could have made a bad mistake.”

  “You’ll just go along then?”

  Korngold raised a hand and waved it. “Of course. Lucky break,” he said, as though to himself. Then: “What size?”

  “What?”

  Korngold considered Paul’s physique. “What size in a jockey brief?”

  “I don’t wear jockeys.”

  “Foolish. Plus comfort, it protects from strains and hazards. Go take yourself a pair for a present. What—a thirty-two?”

  “In the waist I’m thirty.”

  “Three boxes down, to the left by the window. Go ahead, take a pair. A pair,” he added a little shyly, “is one. Two days wearing will change your whole attitude toward underwear. Please, for saving my life.”

  When Paul had removed the shorts from a box, Korngold said, “Give me a look, would you?” The old haberdasher and outfitter of kiddies fingered the briefs in his hand. “Once I thought, I’ll build myself an empire. Now the gonifs want for nothing. Levy—sure, Levy—of course—you’re right. With him is my last hopes. What good are cartons sitting in my room, huh? Wear it, enjoy it. And how is that little maydele, your wife? I could see right away all the
sweetness in that face.”

  First the bathroom was occupied. Paul had to go out and hammer on the door.

  “Please don’t disturb,” came Levy’s voice from within.

  “Somebody else wants to get in there,” Paul shouted.

  “Please don’t disturb please,” Levy sang out.

  Back in the room Libby gnawed on her fingers. “The doctor said to do it by five. It’s almost six,” she said.

  “He’ll be right out.”

  “You’re nervous now.”

  “Just be patient, please.”

  He went out into the hall and knocked again on the bathroom door.

  “Please, Mr. Levy—my wife has to use the bathroom.”

  “I don’t like carrying on conversations in such circumstances. Will you, please?”

  “I’m giving you five minutes.”

  “The doctor will wait,” whispered Levy.

  “Shut up! Shut your mouth!”

  “Please, this is not my cup of tea. Move away, all right?”

  Paul pressed himself against the door, his body, his mouth. “I spoke to Korngold. He wants you to represent him. To write the letter, to be his companion.”

  “This is fact or fiction?”

  “A fact. An hour ago. All right?”

  “If true, all right.”

  “You understand me …?”

  “Please, I’m finishing up now.”

  “You understand me, don’t you?”

  “Understood,” answered Levy, rattling paper.

  While in the bathroom Libby readied herself for Dr. Smith, Paul collapsed onto the bed. All at once he remembered what he had forgotten. He jumped up, tied his shoelaces in knots, and without a coat—though it was the worst of winter in Detroit—ran all the way to the corner delicatessen. He dialed the doctor’s number so fast he got no connection. Woozy, he dialed again. Solly kept wanting to kibitz through the phone-booth door.

  “Dr. Smith, this is Paul Herz.”