Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “You give my love to Sidney.”

  “We can’t possibly be jealous over anything,” she said, “so we shouldn’t really play at it. Should we?”

  “I’m a little deranged today, Martha. I wonder if we’ll ever manage to be level with one another.”

  “You come Monday, Gabe. I’ll be single.” Then, all at once, she did level with me. “They shouldn’t outlaw long distance. I feel you’ve saved my life.” It was the sort of statement I had come to expect her to qualify with an irony; she didn’t, however, and so neither did I.

  Instead I said, as though it were some revelation of character, “There is a father and a party, you know. And I look forward to seeing you.”

  But even while I spoke, she was explaining, “Sid is Sid Jaffe—he was my lawyer. He got me my divorce half-price, and I’m very indebted to him, Gabe, and the children are crazy about him, as crazy as they can be about anybody, anyway. And I have to stop talking on your money. Forgive me, please.”

  I remained seated at the phone table. There were some eight hundred miles between us, and yet our acquaintanceship had taken a sharp and serious turn. And when I had come out into the hallway I hadn’t even been intending to call her! She had been the escape hatch, to put it crudely, through which I could crawl from that new and startling image of my father. During the previous spring he had gone to see a psychotherapist; he had been advised to travel; he had been advised to spend large quantities of money, to enjoy the company of women, and if possible to give up all mystical activities for a period of six months. He had even asked me to take his long trip with him, and when I offered my job as an excuse, he had settled upon Gruber. And now, face to face with the results of that trip, I had called Chicago.

  I reached down and brought out the big Brooklyn telephone directory, mostly out of a feeling that if there was any call I should have made, it was the one I had been asked to make. Millie was charging past me, still starchy and angry and efficient. “You call this an American Thanksgiving?” she asked. “Smells to me like New Year’s Eve. Your father’s become ultra-European, you know,” she said, turning up her nose.

  “Times change, Millie.”

  “Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving, young man!”

  Light fell into the hallway from the living room, dull, apricot light, very comforting to find creeping along the rug and up your toes. The conversations I could hear from the lighted room sounded revitalized; aside from Mrs. Norton, nobody had made a move for the exit, though it was nearly four thirty. All their houses were empty; they stayed on.

  I opened the Brooklyn directory and found the name I was after. I marked it, realizing that if I had turned to Martha Reganhart to escape my father, I had also called her so as to escape an old friend as well. Libby Herz had asked me to call—to call upon—her husband’s parents. I have found in my life that I often phone one person when I expect myself, or others expect me, to be phoning someone else; it is what the telephone company calls displacement.

  Libby and I had managed well enough, respectably enough, since her arrival in Chicago. Though I had discovered that the feeling we had for one another had not changed after three years and one letter, I nevertheless got through the early fall without doing anything I can think of to make the feeling concrete. Then, just before leaving Chicago for Thanksgiving, I had run into her quite accidentally on Madison Street. I was going into Brooks Brothers, and she was headed for Goldblatt’s and then the Downtown College, where she was taking a course. My shopping expedition happened to have been of no little significance, for I was after a hat. A real man’s hat, you know—brim, crown, the works. It was to be my first; I was full with the knowledge that my father was waiting for me in New York, fresh from his world travels (“with a surprise” he had guaranteed me on the phone), and I had somehow reasoned that it would be to my advantage to confront him behatted. I felt at once gay and doubtful about the venture, and when I ran into Libby I asked her to come in with me to give her opinion. Even to myself I do not think of it as an invitation innocent of charm, nor do I think of her acceptance as so innocent either.

  My taste in personal effects is conventional, running to a kind of quiet fussiness, and marked by a decided Anglomania, common enough to my profession, I think, as well as my class and generation. That afternoon, however, I indulged my cabinet-minister inclinations with the wantonness of a Turk. Actually it was only of late that I had begun appreciating the pleasures to be derived from spending money on myself; as a child and youth, others for the most part had spent it on me. But with Libby, during those two solid hours of accumulation in Brooks, I unearthed new possibilities in capitalism, I saw that things are not going to be so easy for the Russians as they may think. There is something life-giving and religious in outfitting yourself.

  Back on the street we surrendered ourselves to shame. The Balboic, the Columbian emotions I had first experienced upon discovering myself in the full-length mirror, now washed right by me. And that absolute delight and sparkle in Libby’s eyes—for it was she who had egged me on, past the fedora to the homburg, and on then to the puce gloves, the tight-rolled umbrella, the long lisle stockings, the garters, the ties, and finally to the glowing, noble scarlet smoking jacket—the sparkle that had given to Libby’s face such incredible life, that had won envy for me from every man in the store, ran out of her eyes now in two barely visible tears. I knew I should never again be able to kid myself, even if I returned the smoking jacket the following day, into feeling lofty or virginal about our relationship.

  “I have to run off—I have a class at six—I have to have a bite. I’m going, Gabe.”

  “I don’t feel very splendid, Libby, about this whole silly indulgence.”

  “You …” She almost laughed, crying. “You look splendid. You look terribly splendid.”

  “I’m walking toward the train,” I said.

  “I’m going to have one of those dollar-seven steaks.” She went off in the opposite direction, toward State Street.

  And so there I was, under sunny skies, tapping the pavement with the tip of my umbrella. I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window. What a dandy! How weak and feeble! Some match for my father and his surprise! And then hurtling at me from behind, practically flying, came Libby’s reflection. I turned to catch her, and she reached out with her hands to my new—our new—gloves. There on Madison Street, just within earshot of Michigan Boulevard, we came the closest we had come to each other in Chicago.

  “In New York,” she said, breathless from running, “go see Paul’s family, will you? Oh, Gabe, just tell them, will you, about his job, that I’m working, that I’m going to school, that everything is working out? Will you, please?”

  “Yes, sure, Lib—”

  “Just tell them.”

  On the train back to the South Side I could not work out in my head exactly how the lines and angles of our triangle had altered; nor could I begin to see what my visiting the elder Herzes would do for everybody’s well-being that it might not do to their detriment. I did not care either for the tone the mission had of a soldier paying a call on the family of a dead buddy. Despite definite feelings of obligation, I had a very imprecise sense of who I was feeling obliged to. In Chicago that day (and once again, sitting at the little phone table in my father’s apartment), Martha Regenhart began to loom in my head—and subsequently in my heart too—as a green, watery spot in a dry land; I felt in her something solid to which I could anchor my wandering and strained affections.

  Why I had called her now seemed perfectly clear. I slipped the Brooklyn directory back into the table and went into the kitchen, ostensibly because my mouth had gone dry, but actually, I think, to come close as I could to the pure, unspoiled realities of the holiday—the greasy turkey pan, the dirty dishes, the still-warm oven, the aromas of a happy and spontaneous American family life.

  Fay Silberman was there, her head over a coffee cup.

  Since I couldn’t simply turn and walk out, I went to the sink a
nd ran some cold water into a glass. Mrs. Silberman rose and smoothed her shaky hands over her smart velvet suit. My admiration for the fight she was trying to put up against her condition did not particularly alter my attitude toward the condition itself. She had made a silly fool of herself in the living room.

  “We haven’t had a chance to talk,” she said. “You resemble your father remarkably.”

  The father, I realized, was about to be courted through the son. All the desperation I had been witness to during the long afternoon suddenly centered for me on this hungover, handsome, game, miserable woman, who had been beauty-parlored nearly to death. Her hair floated and glowed like a sky, and her face had been lifted and was too tight; her nails, ten roses, were long enough to sink deep, to hang on, tenaciously. She was heartbreaking, finally, but I wasn’t in the mood.

  “I look a little like my mother too.”

  “I haven’t seen any pictures of her,” she said.

  “There are several in the living room.”

  She smiled hard, the end of round one. I summoned up whatever good sense I had accumulated over the years and came out like a small, affectionate dog for round two. “My father looks fine—he hasn’t looked this well in years. The trip seems to have done him a lot of good.”

  “All he did was laugh. He laughed all the way through Europe.”

  “He can be a very happy man,” I said.

  Her answer confused me a moment. “Thank you,” she said. “Nobody …” She swayed, tilting in some private breeze, but found strength against the sink. “Nobody should miss it. Europe. It’s just another culture.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I feel fine!” Then, focusing her eyes on the wall clock, she added, “I had too much to eat.”

  “So did I—”

  “Don’t hate me, young man. You have no right to hate me!” She slumped down into a kitchen chair and covered her eyes. I did not know now what to say or do, and only prayed that no one would come into the kitchen. “I have children of my own in California,” she said, as though that were some threat against our house.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Silberman. I have to be going.”

  “Your father said you were here for the weekend.” She spoke almost with alarm.

  “I have to go to Brooklyn.”

  “I’ve never been to Brooklyn in my life.” I wondered if that was supposed to have been a gay remark. Was she soused, or stupid, or both? “You better stay,” said Mrs. Silberman, turning regal before my eyes. “After coffee, your father is going to announce our engagement.” She stood up, quite steady now—the weather in the kitchen having calmed for her purposes—and turned to face me. I took a sip of water, waiting for my own responses (which were slow, very slow), and when I looked up again what I saw was that her face had gone all to pieces. “This is a wonderful thing in everybody’s life. Don’t you go throw a monkey wrench,” she begged. “You’re supposed to be an educated person!” Her whole body stiffened with that last plea.

  “Maybe you better calm yourself.”

  “I’m not an invalid. I’m a very young woman. I’m fifty-four. What’s wrong with that? I’ve had a shock in my life. I chose your father, after all, not Dr. Gruber.”

  I had to admit that her choice was meritorious, and whatever she might have thought, I had no intention of being caustic, nor anything to gain thereby; in fact, I wanted for personal reasons to give her all the credit her selection deserved. Unfortunately for all our futures, I chose the wrong words. “You did well for yourself.”

  “I make him laugh. It’s more than anybody else in his family ever did! I make him feel important!”

  “You don’t know a great deal about what’s happened, Mrs. Silberman. Lives are complicated and private.”

  “I know more than you think,” she answered; and then with the wildness, the unbuttonedness of someone who has lost most of his perspective and a few of his faculties, she added irrelevantly, “Don’t you worry about that!”

  Fifteen minutes later we all stood at attention in the living room and drank a toast to the affianced. Mrs. Silberman’s champagne ran down her chin, cutting a trail through her powder.

  As soon as I pushed the buzzer to Paul Herz’s parents’ apartment, I knew I should have called in advance—perhaps simply called and left it at that. I pulled myself up to my full height, dropped my gloves into my hat and rang again, this time with a premonition that when I left this building, in fifteen or twenty minutes, I would not be the same man I had been when I entered. The boundaries of my own personality seemed as blurry and indefinite, as hazy, as the damp blowy mist above the river I had crossed from Manhattan.

  A wide blubbery man with a jovial, self-pitying face answered the door; I had never seen a man so young so fat. Drifting between his voluminous trouser legs, sweeping past his thinning brown hair, came the sounds of television and talk. Friendly enough, he said, “This is four-C.”

  “Do the Herzes live here?”

  “Sure, sure, come on in. I’m sorry—” He raised his arms to signal some mix-up and smiled helpfully over nothing.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

  “No-no-no.” He was a very helpful person.

  “Who is it, Maury?” a voice called.

  “Come on in,” Maury said to me. “We’re just leaving. We live in the building.”

  I followed him down a long narrow corridor that was lit by three little bulbs meant to resemble candles; along the hallway at waist level hung a row of tiny framed documents. Before entering the living room, I bent over and took a close look at one of them: it was a grammar school report card made out to Paul Herz.

  A woman in her early twenties was standing before a logless fireplace, one hand on her hip and the other out in front of her, making a point to a bathrobed man in a BarcaLounger. A shiny black pump stood beside each of her feet; the lines of her cocktail dress, a close-fitting black crepe number yoked daringly in front and fitted tightly at the knee, were the lines of her almost lovely figure—unfortunately her posture and the lines were not in exact accord. All she needed, however, was to suck in her little paunch and heave backwards with her shoulders to make perfect the whole works. But it was almost as though she didn’t care to be perfect; tall and erect and exquisite, she might not have known what to make of herself. “So my sister-in-law said,” the girl was explaining, the borough of her birth winding down through the faint arch of her nose, “this is my sister-in-law Ruthie from Roslyn. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if the child is not happy there, what’s the sense? All that money, it’s ridiculous. The child’s happiness is what’s uppermost, certainly, but if the child is not happy, if the child is not having herself a good time,’ she said, ‘then the money is money wasted.’ And personally, Ruthie, to my way of thinking, is right!” The final dentalized t in right buzzed once around the room and then flew up the chimney. “I don’t believe in that kind of money being wasted on a child. My brother-in-law Harvey doesn’t find it growing on trees, believe me. The child can be perfectly happy at home.”

  The bathrobed man she was addressing glanced across the room at a tired-looking woman seated in an armchair, who I took to be his wife, and Paul’s mother. “Absolutely,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion that everyone was better off at home. “What’s wrong with Brooklyn College?”

  “Absolutely …” And then my presence was all at once recorded. Maury had been blocking me out, and now I was past him, into the living room, where despite the animated conversation, the TV set was on. The screen showed three men dressed as Pilgrims, scanning the horizon from the railing of a ship. “It looks to be land, sir,” said one of them in an Anglo-Irish accent—while I said, “How do you do, my name is Gabe Wallach.”

  “Yes?” replied the man in the BarcaLounger.

  “I’m a friend of your son’s,” I said. “Of Paul’s. How do you do?” I looked away from the astonished face of Mr. Herz to the face of the young woman; it had not actually collapse
d into horror, but considering the stiff, pretty, frozen face it was, it did display, all at once, some marked change.

  “Maury,” the girl said, stepping into her shoes, “I really think we have to run, doll.” The heels gave her legs their final touch of beauty. “I keep tasting turkey,” she said, half-smiling at me. I smiled back, with understanding; it was not that I had brought the plague into the room, it was simply that she had eaten too much.

  Maury came up now to Mr. Herz, and smoothing for him the collar of his white terry cloth robe, said, “Look, take it easy, kiddo. Give yourself a couple more days rest. Stay off your feet, you’ll wear the carpet out, huh?”

  “Don’t run on my account—” I said to Maury, who seemed a kind of bulwark to me against the worst. “Please don’t,” I said, and my eyes settled at last on Mrs. Herz, whose own eyes had been settled on me since I had come in and announced whose friend I was.

  “No-no-no.” Maury’s meaty comforting hands moved away from Mr. Herz and onto my shoulders. “We had Thanksgiving out in Great Neck, and I’m telling you, kid, we’re exhausted. We left the kids out there with their grandparents, and now we’re going to enjoy a little peace and quiet. Look, take it easy, Leonard,” he said, turning back to Mr. Herz, “stay off the carpet, will you, for a few days—”

  “Leonard, I’ll lend you Marjorie Morningstar.”

  “Look, Doris, I’ll be all right.”

  I heard a sigh of hope rise from Mrs. Herz. Her husband went on. “It was indigestion. Something stuck in my chest, overexcitement. I’m fine.” But he became vague even while he spoke.

  “Just don’t rush back,” Maury said. “I’ve got everything under control, Leonard. Harry is taking care of yours.” Now he strode to the club chair where Mrs. Herz was sitting and he placed one hand on either of the plastic coverlets that protected the arms. I could see only his back, but I heard lips smack together, and Mrs. Herz’s hand came up onto his neck. “God bless you, Maury,” she said.