Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  But Maury brooded, even while he ate his strudel; he seemed occupied with the disappearance of the past. Then back in the present, he asked, “How did it go?”

  “Mr. Herz seems sick,” I said. “They both seemed very tired.”

  “He looked awful today, Maur.” Doris was resting her head on her husband’s knee and she tipped her throat back so as to look up at him when she spoke. “They both make me feel sad. They both have no life at all. Maury tried to get them interested at least in books, you know? We get Book of the Month, we get Harper’s and Look, we belong to Play of the Month—” She threw an arm toward the wall behind me, to which I turned to find half a dozen framed Playbills. “We go to the Temple lectures, and we volunteer, we’ll drive them there, right to the door. Last week we heard Dore Schary, and they wouldn’t even go. They won’t do anything! They sit, they mope, they worry, they live in the dead past. Personally, to my way of thinking, I don’t know what the end is going to be for them.”

  “How come Paul didn’t come himself?” Maury asked.

  “What?”

  “How come Paul asked you to come?” He reminded me of father’s accountant trying to get to the bottom of some tax problem.

  “Paul didn’t ask me,” I said. “Libby did.”

  “We never met her. Neither did the folks, you know.”

  “The Herzes?”

  “Never met her,” Doris said.

  “They did, though,” I said. “They met her twice.”

  “I mean Paul never had her for dinner or anything,” Maury said.

  I agreed, though I knew I had been taken advantage of—rather, Paul had.

  “What is she like?” The question was Doris’s.

  “I’m very fond of her,” I said. “She’s sweet and fragile and a very loving girl.”

  I had the feeling that not one word I had spoken had sunk in.

  “I used to go out with Paul myself,” Doris informed me. “Then he went away, you know, and I don’t know, he came back, and we just didn’t have the same interests. He was very gloomy to talk to. Remember, Maur?”

  “He became an intellectual,” Maury explained.

  “I see,” I said, and I suppose that at that moment I began really to tire of them and that damn leaning over the coffee table. Maury, however, was not nearly so insensitive as I thought; he caught whatever small flicker of boredom and resentment had crossed my face.

  He said, “Paul just carried it too far there for a while, that was all. I mean he was all right,” he added, cuing his wife, “he was always Paul.”

  “Oh he was a terrific fella,” Doris chimed in. “Nobody ever said anything about that. You know, my interests must have changed too. I’m not saying it was strictly one-sided.”

  Here Maury decided to direct us all to the heart of the matter. “But the tragedy,” he said, “is his folks. That’s what you’ve got to face.”

  “They seemed very unhappy,” I said.

  “They’re losing out on a lot of fun in their late years. This could be a terrific time for them, but they’ve just given up. They live like hermits.”

  “Hermits is right,” Doris said. “It’s terrible.” She offered me more coffee.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “I’ll just have to throw it out,” she said. “I can’t reheat espresso, it loses something.” To pour she had to lean her face very close to mine; meanwhile, Maury did some serious thinking. It was clear that there was a good deal of satisfaction for these two in caring for Paul Herz’s parents, if not his memory. But the way I had heard it, the tragedy the elder Herzes were suffering was a tragedy they had themselves constructed.

  I said, “Don’t you think, somehow, his parents might call Paul?”

  I went no further; Maury looked at Doris, Doris at Maury. “Please,” Doris said.

  What seemed a solution to me was a cut-and-dried impossibility to those in the know. No, no, absolutely not! However, if there was something that Paul wanted to do at long last, if there was any humanity left in him (the humanities!), then perhaps what he should begin to think about was getting to work—that was Maury’s phrase, getting to work—and bringing into the world a child for his mother and father to cherish as once they had cherished him.

  “When they have a baby,” said Doris, the last word on the struggle of the generations, “then that’ll be that. What else?” she asked, showing me her palms. “We have two, and my parents, believe me, are having a whole new life through the grandchildren.”

  “Gabe,” Maury said, frank and serious, “you know Paul probably better now than I do.” But with his practical business head, I knew he did not believe I knew anything better than he did, except perhaps how to parse a sentence. “Gabe, would you do me a favor, do us all a favor? When you go back there to the University, when you see Paul and his wife, would you tell them that Maury Horvitz, Mushie, sends his regards? As far as I’m concerned, personally, I mean, whatever Paul did was all right with me—”

  “Look, nobody’s objecting to that,” Doris announced. “Whatever he thought he wanted to do, he should have done. Nobody’s denying him that.”

  “But his father is a sick man, we see how sick he is every day. This is something Paul doesn’t see. And his mother is giving herself up to that man, she waits on him hand and foot. Just like she always waited on Paul. That woman has aged in three years in a most terrific way. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one thing that can keep those two from just drying up and dying—”

  “Maury—” said Doris.

  “A baby!” declared Maury. “A baby would heal that rift, I know it. Gabe, I would write to Paul myself, I would tell him my feelings on this whole thing—but to Paul I’m probably just an old friend he doesn’t even remember. But you could tell him. Somebody has to tell him. You can’t be selfish all your life. Paul was my best friend, but he always had a tendency to be a little selfish. Not to think of the other guy. Just a tendency, but still …”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said, as the phone rang.

  “Thanks, kiddo,” Maury said, taking my arm. Then he was on his sprightly elfin feet and had picked up the phone, which was pale blue to go with the carpet. I really couldn’t stand him.

  “Hello? What … No-no-no. Just chatting …”

  “Who?” Doris whispered, and for an answer Maury merely had to close his eyes.

  Doris nodded. She said, sotto voce, “They call three times a day.”

  When Maury hung up, he said, “I have to go down for a few minutes. Leonard says she’s hysterical. She keeps crying about Thanksgiving.”

  “I hope I didn’t do it,” I said. “I probably shouldn’t have come.”

  “How could you know?” Doris demanded in her singsong voice. “She’s been like this for a week already.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Maury said.

  “Take Marjorie Morningstar,” Doris said. “Maybe they’ll read it. If he’ll just start it,” she explained to me, “I’m sure he’ll be gripped. Have you read it?”

  “Not yet,” I said, and began to get up.

  “Wait a minute,” Maury said to me. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I have to run on home myself.”

  “Why don’t you wait until I talk to the folks? I’d appreciate that.”

  “Sure. Okay.” I sat down on the cushions.

  When we were alone, Doris lost a little of her composure, or whatever you may choose to call it, and began to hum. She said finally, “You don’t look Jewish, you know?”

  “No?”

  “You look Irish.”

  “Not really. Not Irish.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. Paul always looked very Jewish.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You ought to read Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “It’s about a girl who one of her problems is, I don’t think she wants to be Jewish. I think maybe Paul ought to read it.”

  “You think I ought to recommend it to him?”

  She did
not know what to make of my response. She said, “Look, it’s just funny when a boy you went out with marries a Gentile girl. I mean I always thought of Paul as a very Jewish fella. He worked in the mountains, he never got in any trouble, he went to college, he had a good sense of humor—and then he turns around and does a thing like that. I don’t think those things generally work out, do you? Most divorces are intermarried, you know. Maybe Paul’s will work out, I’m not saying that. I’m sure if Paul picked her she’s a very nice girl. Certainly I have nothing against her. I don’t even know her. It’s just, I don’t know, none of us expected it. Do you get what I’m talking about?”

  “I think so. Yes, I do.”

  “Let me give you an example. Maury—now Maury, I mean you just know Maury wouldn’t do it. Maury is a very Jewish fella. He’s a very haymishe fella. To him a family is very important, a nice place to live is very important, he has a good sense of humor—” She got up off the floor and went to the piano, where there was another framed photograph. “This is Maury,” she said, carrying it back to me, “with Ted Mack. Ted Mack from the Amateur Hour. You know Ted Mack, don’t you?”

  When I told her I did, she seemed somewhat relieved about my chances in the world.

  “Now, Maury could have been a singer. Maury could have been a terrific singer on the style of Frankie Laine. Maury is a very interpretive fella with a song. He won two weeks in a row on Ted Mack, and when he lost, it was only to that little Rhonda whatever her name; you know, the one who had polio and overcame it. I mean that’s very nice, but it certainly didn’t have very much to do with talent. Maury was very unfortunate with that whole thing. Still, two weeks is definitely not nothing, and Arthur Godfrey was very interested in Maury, and the phone calls were coming in from agents for a week. In fact, we had a friend whose cousin was Ed Sullivan, so I mean anything could have happened. I mean Eddie Fisher just happened to meet Eddie Cantor and that was the whole thing. What I’m getting at is that Maury is a very different fella from Paul.” Her point—some point—made, she took the picture back to the piano. I stood up to stretch my legs.

  “When I met Maury,” Doris was saying, “I had only really stopped seeing Paul because he went away to Cornell. Otherwise I don’t know, I probably would still have been dating Paul. I was in NYU and I personally did not even know Maury was a friend of Paul’s, can you imagine? And I was in this psychology class, and the first day in walks this very attractive fella, and it was Maury. And I knew how he had been on Ted Mack already, and what a terrific showman he was, and Maury asked me out, and then we just saw each other right on through, and then we got married. And that’s it.”

  “And that’s it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said mousily, and shrugged her shoulders. “That was all really. We met each other and we liked each other and that was all.” She put one hand on her hip; she seemed almost to have become angry with me. “I mean I never put out for Paul, you know. I mean I knew I would marry Maury very early.”

  “In life?”

  “You remind me of a guy in Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “Noel Airman. He’s an intellectual, you know, and also a wise guy. When I was reading the book, in fact, I was thinking of Paul. I’ll bet he turned out a little bit that way too.”

  At this point I kissed her. I closed my eyes, dreaming of the simplest, the very simplest of lives.

  For a second she looked nothing more than irritated, as though out on a picnic the weather had taken an unexpected turn. But then she bit her lip, and life became, even for Doris, a very threatening affair. Then that passed, too. She turned her back to me. I took my place on the cushion, and for the next five minutes neither of us said anything. She broke down at last and began to file her nails.

  Maury came back shortly after. “I calmed her down,” he said. “I told them Paul was thinking of having a baby. Even the old man got some blood in his face.”

  On that note I left.

  The lights were out at home and I took it that everything had been cleared away and all were asleep. It was after midnight—I had come back from Brooklyn by way of the Village, where I had stopped off at several bars I used to habituate as a young man (a younger man) down from Cambridge. But the girls were the same and the boys were the same and so were the jazz musicians. I had enough beer to make me feel exactly as uncomfortable as the same amount had made me feel years ago, and then, whistling “Linda,” the hit song of 1947, I had taken the Eighth Avenue subway home, the end of an atavistic day. I had spent much of the day looking for some door that would lead me back into the simple life, but I had not found one. On the subway I had a vision of dopey Doris Horvitz in bed snuggling up to Maury; then I had a vision of myself, spinning further and further from my youth, and kissing as I went all the women who had ever entered Paul Herz’s life.

  I sobered quickly at the entrance to the apartment. Though the lights were out not everyone was asleep. Gruber was in the living room showing himself slides, while in a posture of abandon—or rather in the posture of one abandoned—Mrs. Silberman was flung across a love seat. Her head lolled over one end, and one arm hung to the floor, dripping fingers. Over the further end, her hooked knees were weighted in place by two exhausted, earthbound legs. My father was rolled up on the sofa, his big jaw cradled on his knees. I stood in the doorway unnoticed as all the world flicked by. I watched them ride a gondola in Venice and mount the Acropolis in Greece; in the doorways of cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, and Milan, they all stood grinning. Beside the river Seine, my father took a woman’s hand.

  Gruber, thinking himself unobserved, made various noises; some were necessary to the maintenance of his body, the rest were appreciative, recollective. I came into the room and whispered hello, though it would have taken a cannon to awaken the two sleepers.

  “Sit down. Want to see Europe? Want to see how the other half lives?” he asked. “Ten countries in fifteen minutes. England, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, France, Andorra—”

  I plunged down into the deepest chair I could find and groaned like a man twice my age. “I’ve been to Europe,” I said.

  “Not in style, boy,” the doctor said. “Bet you’ve never seen little Andorra. Look at that, that’s me eating cannelloni in Sorrento.”

  “I think I saw you eating cannelloni in Fiesole.”

  “I ate it everywhere. Do you know the three smallest countries in Europe?”

  “Andorra,” I said, “and two others.”

  The wind leaving his sails came whistling by my ears. “Okay,” he said, “a wise guy like your old man,” and clicked off the machine. And then the room was dark, except for what light came up from the street below. We both burrowed into our chairs, witnesses only to our own thoughts and the deep sleep of the others.

  “Look …” Dr. Gruber began.

  Well, at least I would not have to bring it up myself; he too knew a mistake when he saw one.

  “Yes?” I said, inviting him not to be shy.

  “Look, who’s this E. E. Cunningham? What’s he trying to do, put something over on the public?”

  “What? Who?”

  “E. E. Cunningham. He writes poems. Does he think he’s going to put something over on the public?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “What is that stuff supposed to be anyway? A poem?”

  I had been willing to raise my mind out of grogginess for a discussion of the crisis in my home, but I could not manage to drag it higher, to manage Gruberian literary criticism. I remembered that when he had read Hemingway in Life, it had been me to whom he had come directly with his complaint: “What is this guy supposed to be, great?” Now, I supposed, Cummings had been quoted in Time, or, who knows, the ADA Journal. Culture is everywhere.

  “I don’t think the guy’s going to put anything over on anybody. People,” Gruber said, “have got a lot of native sense.”

  At that moment I couldn’t think of anybody I knew who had a drop, but I only nodded my head. I said, “Dr. Grube
r, I hate to change the subject, but don’t you think she drinks a good deal?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. S.”

  “Fay? She’s a good-time Charley! She’s a terrific gal!”

  “But she drinks a lot. Is my father drunk?”

  “He had the time of his life—he’s a new man. Christ, he was a melancholy specimen. Now he’s topnotch.”

  “Do you think he’s going to be happy, Doc?”

  “What’s the matter with you, boy? He is happy. Look at him now—he’s smiling, for God’s sake, in his sleep. We had the time of our lives.” He suddenly leaped up. “Here,” he said, “I want you to see some happy faces.”

  He flipped on the machine. “Switzerland! Just before we left. Skating in November, can you imagine?”

  Alas, we were on a lake, cupped between two white peaks. Dr. Gruber was holding up Mrs. Silberman under the arms; the two of them were laughing, their heads thrown back, their mouths open. Over at the left-hand edge of the picture, stood my father, wearing a feathered Alpine hat and his gray pin-striped suit. Like the others, he was on skates, but his attention didn’t seem to be on the sport.

  “Look at her ankles!” Dr. Gruber said, but I was looking at those two eyes that were the color of my own. They were directed toward the distant mountains, fastened forever on the impossible.

  In the morning, of course, neither Millie nor I, nor either of the lovers, commented on the fact that once again at our breakfast table sat three.

  2

  Sarah Vaughan awakened Martha Reganhart. She twisted around until she had plugged “Tenderly” out of her ears with her sheet and pillow—but then Markie was in bed beside her.