Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “But, Sissy, you don’t want to be a call girl. Do you know what’s very square, Sis? To want to be a call girl. Honestly, it’s like wanting to be an airline stewardness or a nurse.”

  “Do you think I love being a stinking X-ray technician? Is that a noble calling? Sixty-five bucks a week?”

  “Ah-ha, it’s a matter of honor. I didn’t know. The culture’s crowding you in. We ought to set up an interview for you, Sissy, with Erich Fromm.”

  “Don’t come on so motherly with me, Martha. You’re about two years older—”

  “True—”

  “—and your life isn’t exactly a model of order.”

  “You’re going to get kicked in the teeth, Sister, so why don’t you shut up.” Martha pressed out her cigarette just as the janitor came up the back porch, waved at her, tried to catch a peek of some bare corner of Sissy’s anatomy, and emptied—very, very slowly—the garbage.

  At the sink she held the turkey submerged in hot water. Behind her Sissy began to apologize. “I just thought about it, Martha—”

  “Who cares what you thought or what you did! Maybe what you ought to think about is moving out.”

  “I only just moved in.”

  “That’ll make packing easier. Just roll up all your brassieres, scatter those cigarette butts to the wind, and move the hell out.”

  “You going to throw me out on a morals charge? Because I don’t happen to be compulsively neat?”

  “I don’t want my kids lifting up the phone when your clients start to call—” Yet even as she spoke the whole business tired her. Everything tired her—even thinking about what she would have to do now. Take another ad, answer phone calls, arrange appointments, show the place to dozens of girls and ladies … Just the knowledge that after Sissy left she would have to scrub the place again from top to bottom weakened her resolve. Why hadn’t she rented to some eager little physics major in the first place? What insanity it had been to think that this jerk was going to be sweet, fun, laughs! All she wanted now, really, was for Sissy to crawl back into her grubby room and close the door and ruin her life however she wanted. She said nothing, but there must have been some sagging in her posture that inspired Sissy to be nasty.

  “Just because you have sex problems, Martha, don’t call somebody who doesn’t a nymphomaniac, all right? If you’re frigid, or whatever the hell is bugging you, I don’t say I’m not going to live in your house because of it. You, you’re a regular sexual Senator McCarthy, honest to God you are.”

  “I’m trying to fix a traditional Thanksgiving Day turkey. Why don’t you go play records.”

  “Actually, I think what it is that bugs you is that like Blair’s a dinge.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, friend, you can go down for the whole Nigerian Army and the Belgian Congo Marines. Just leave me alone, all right?”

  Sissy picked up her mirror and tweezers and left the room. And Martha Reganhart was sure that never before had she been so compromised and shat upon; never had she been so soft and expedient and unprincipled. Worst of all, never could it have bothered her less. If she had had the energy to be disgusted with herself, the object of her disgust would have been her inability to care any more. For nearly four years now she had been pretending to be two parents, and not half a set. Even the strict observance of national holidays had been a conscious noble decision, something she felt the divorced owed their offspring. Three and a half years ago she had made a whole potful of conscious noble decisions: if Cynthia had long legs, she would have ballet lessons; if she had a good head, she would go to the very best schools; Markie was going to learn to be as crazy over the White Sox as any Chicago kid with a full-time father … and so on and so on. Today, however, the whole fatuous lie, all that she had not done, screamed at her from every wall, door, and closet. With that granite turkey to roast and cranberries to boil and silverware to polish, she felt as though she had run her course. If she had been allowed one more hour of sleep she could doubtless have faced the next four years with an upper lip as stiff as ever. Now, everything foretold her doom—even the popped seam in her slacks, through which anyone who cared to look could see that Martha Reganhart was wearing no underwear.

  But what was she supposed to have done? The dilemma she had had to face at seven A.M., before brushing her teeth or drinking her coffee, was whether or not she would be less of a slob, or more of a hundred-percent-American mother, with no pants under her slacks, or dirty ones—for it turned out there were none clean. She had made her choice in a stupor, and was now suffering dismal emotions as a result. Feeling bedraggled made her feel unworthy, and over her sink she closed her eyes to the near and distant future. She thought it might give ber some little solace if she could squeeze her hands around the neck of whoever it was who had raised her rent. But it wasn’t a person—it was an agency. There wasn’t even anybody to shout at really—they only worked here, lady—when you called up to complain.

  Shortly thereafter, her daughter came racing through the front door, impervious to the scab on her right knee that was leaking blood down her shin.

  “Mommy! Daddy’s picture!”

  “Daddy’s what? Cynthia, look at your knee—”

  “Daddy’s picture. A painting!”

  “Cynthia, what happened to your knee?”

  “Nothing. I slipped. Look!” Cynthia had the paper folded to the art column. She jerked it back and forth in front of Martha’s face, but did not relinquish it.

  “Calm down,” Martha said. “I can’t see it if you keep moving it, can I? Go wash your knee. Please—do you want to get an infection and turn blue?”

  “Daddy’s picture—”

  “Go wash your knee!”

  Cynthia threw the paper to the floor and, crestfallen, went hobbling off to the bathroom; if the knee was going to use her, she would use the knee. “Christ!” she howled, limping down the hallway. “Christ and Jesus!”

  With Cynthia gone, it was easier to take a look; she had not wanted a child around to witness whatever shock there might be. She picked up the paper from the floor and sat down with it at the kitchen table. Her heart slowly resumed its normal beat, though it was true, as Cynthia said, that a painting of her father’s was actually printed in the Times. She recognized it immediately; only the title had been changed. What had once been “Ripe Wife” was now labeled “Mexico.” The bastard. She allowed herself the pleasure of a few spiteful moments. Juvenilia. A steal from de Staël. Punk. Derivative. Corny. Literal. Indulgent. She repeated to herself all the words she would like to repeat to him, but all the incantation served to do was to bring back so vividly all that had been: all the awful quarrels, all the breakfasts he had thrown against the kitchen wall, all the times he had walked out, all the times he had come back, the times he had smacked her, the times he had wept, saying he was really a good and decent man … All of it lived at the unanesthetized edge of her memory. Mexico! Couldn’t he have changed it to Yugoslavia? Bowl of Fruit? Anything but rotten Mexico!

  Her eye ran up and down the column; she was unable to read it in any orderly way. It was captioned, Tenth St. Show Uninspired; Reganhart Exception.

  … except for Richard Reganhart. A resident of Arizona and Mexico, Reganhart, in his four paintings, reveals a talent …

  … manages a rigidity of space, a kind of compulsion to order, that makes one think of a fretful housekeeper …

  … especially “Mexico.” The dull gold rectangles are played off against a lust and violence of savage purples, blacks, and scarlets that continually break in through the rigid …

  … will alone emerge of the seven young people

  Crap! Fretful housekeeper, crap! Housebreaker! Weakling! Selfish! Destroyer of her life! She hated him—she would never forgive him. Some day when it suited her purpose, she would get that son of a bitch. It was nearly three years since he had sent a penny to support their children. Three very long years.

  She read the article over again from beginning to end.


  When Cynthia came out of the bathroom, a bandage over half her leg, the child asked, “Remember when we were in Mexico?”

  “Yes,” Martha said.

  “Can I remember it?”

  “I think you were too small.”

  “I think I can remember it,” Cynthia said. “Wasn’t it very warm there?”

  “Cyn, you know it’s warm there. You learned that in school.”

  Cynthia reached out and Martha handed her back the paper. “See Daddy’s name?” Cynthia asked.

  “Uh-huh. I didn’t mean to take it away from you, sweetie. I only wanted you to wash your knee—”

  “I like that picture, don’t you?” Cynthia asked.

  “I think it’s terrific,” Martha said. “I think it’s very beautiful.”

  “Can I cut it out and keep it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I hang it up?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Oh boy! Hey Markie—look what Mommy gave me!”

  “Oh Cynthia, don’t start that, will you? Cynthia—” But the little girl was skipping off toward the living room; she met her brother halfway.

  “Look what Mommy gave me. I’m going to hang it up!”

  “I want it!” he shouted. “What is it?”

  “Daddy’s picture. Here. Don’t touch. Don’t touch.”

  “I want it. Where—where’s Daddy’s picture?”

  “Here, dope. Can’t you see?”

  “Cynthia—” Martha said, from the doorway to the living room. “Cynthia …” But she found herself unable to attach a command, an instruction, a warning, to her child’s name. Cynthia, Cynthia, born of sin.

  “Who—?” Markie was asking.

  “This—” Cynthia said. “It’s Daddy’s picture!”

  Mark didn’t get it; his jaw only hung lower and lower. Would he ever learn to read? Lately she had begun to wonder if he might not be retarded. Should she take him in for tests?

  “And it’s mine. I’m hanging it over my bed!” Cynthia cried.

  “My bed—” howled Mark, but his sister had already fled on one bare, one bandaged leg—both willowy, both more perfect every day—carrying her prize to some private corner of the house.

  It might have been Christmas, and Sid, Saint Nick. He arrived with bottles of Pouilly Fuissé, Beefeater’s, Noilly Prat dry vermouth, and a fifth of Courvoisier. “That’s for the kids,” he said, placing a row of liquor cartons at Markie’s feet. “And now for you,” and he unwrapped a doll almost three feet tall and a portable basketball set, both of which he deposited in Martha’s arms.

  “What’s for us?” Cynthia demanded.

  The sandpapery voice in which Cynthia had addressed him nearly flattened the man on the spot, but, hanging on courageously to what he had doubtless been planning for the last half hour, he said, “Whiskey.”

  “It’s sour!” Markie cried. “It’s beer!”

  “Oh Mommy,” cried Cynthia, “Mommy we didn’t get anything—”

  And then, just as Sid’s good intentions and his bad judgment threatened to plunge all present into despair, Martha swooped into the center of the room, gathered her children in with the armful of presents, and went spinning around in a circle. “Dummies, dummies, this is for you!” Spinning, they fell onto the rug, and the two children came up clutching their rightful gifts to their chests. And Sid was down on the floor with them too, clutching Martha’s wrist with his hand—and all the laughter and noise seemed to her only a mockery of a real and natural domesticity. Nevertheless, propelled by a seething desire to make the afternoon work, she kissed the faces of her two children and the brow of her gentleman caller. The skirt of her purple suit—an extravagance of her first winter back in Chicago—was above her knees. Sid Jaffe’s weighty brown eyes, those pleading, generous orbs, turned liquidy and hot; he tried to engage her in a significant glance, but she quickly began to explain to Markie the rules of basketball, as she understood them.

  There had been a scene with Sid the last time, which neither of them could have forgotten. Martha had rushed away from the sofa, trembling, but acting tough: “Stop persevering, will you! What are you—a schoolboy?” “Just the opposite, Martha!” he had said. “I want to sleep with you!” “I don’t care what you want—stop trying to cop feels!” And he had left, she knew, feeling more abusive than abused, an unfair state to have produced in a man forty-one years old. But then Sid could never think of himself as having been in the right for very long anyway. Forceful as he may have been in court, out of it he defended himself with only the rawness of his needs—he seemed so baldly willing to protect others and not himself. Much as this willingness of his sometimes discomfited her, in the end it was for sexual reasons that Martha had sworn she would let him drift out of her life, just as five or six men had had to drift out previously.

  It was almost immediately after Sid had left last time that she had called Gabe Wallach and asked him—whom she hardly knew—to join her and hers for Thanksgiving dinner. He was a smoothy, though, and had given some excuse about a party for his father in New York. She, whose parents were of an entirely different chapter of her life, had accepted his refusal graciously, if disbelievingly. Since she suspected Wallach of a kind of polished lechery anway, she almost felt relieved afterward—she might only have been throwing herself back into the struggle from which she had been trying to extricate herself. Yet she knew that Thanksgiving alone with the kids would be a hollow day. You might as well spend Thanksgiving in China if there wasn’t a man around to carve. So some days later she had called Sid’s office. And the first thing he said to her was that he was sorry, which only re-enforced a belief she had in her ability to emasculate when she put her mind to it. He said he had missed her; he said he had thought about her; he said he had thought about the kids; he said of course that he would come.

  In a way Martha had missed him too, or missed the chance he had given her; she almost regretted now not having submitted to his passion and her own stifled, immeasurable itch. Sid was a vigorous man with a bald head and a broken nose, both of which gave him a kind of athletic, trampled-on good looks. His body was exercised and a little thick, like a weight-lifter’s, though he was two inches taller than Martha. He was a little too prissy about not running to seed, but that was a minor quibble and hardly the sort that soured lust. Which was fortunate, for it was lust (plus a natural instinct for sharing pleasure, an inability even to see a movie alone) that she would finally have to rely on with Sid. Well of decency that he was, she did not love him and never could. The affection he did inspire made her feel sorry for him, and sorrow had never for a moment produced a single quiver in her loins. Early in life she had allowed herself the luxury of many men, but she had never been swept backwards into bed out of feelings of pity or pathos. For all her genuine humanity the plight that touched her most was her own. She looked up fiercely and demandingly into men’s faces, and some of them—those with more staying power than perception—had circulated stories of nymphomania, when what they had witnessed was only simple selfishness, the grinding out of one’s own daily bread.

  Sid gazed once again into her eyes; thinking to herself, why not? what’s lost? she gazed back. Then she saw him soften, saw his eyes saying to her that he demanded no more than he deserved. Ah, he was too just, too kind. It seemed that almost as great as his desire to sleep with her was his desire to pay her bills and get her a steady maid; something he had once said led her to believe that he had already talked over the possibility with his own cleaning lady.

  But despite the feelings which washed over and over her through the afternoon, she carried on with the festivities. After Markie had broken the hoop on the basketball set, and Cynthia had spilled Sid’s martini—burrowing into his lap whenever he conversed with her mother—they had their dinner.

  Martha Reganhart was sure you could tell something about a man’s character from the way he carved a turkey. If he twittered and made excuses and finally hacked the bird to bits, he was Oedip
al, wilted under responsibility, and considered himself a kind of aristocrat in the first place—voilà, Dick Reganhart. If he made a big production out of it, clanging armor and sharpening knives, performing the ritual and commenting on it at the same time, he was either egomaniacal or alcoholic, or in certain spectacular cases—her father’s, for instance—both. Of course if the man just answered the need, if he stood up, executed his historical function, and then sat down and ate, chances were he was dutiful, steady, and boring. That was her grandfather, who had had to carve through many bleak Oregon Thanksgivings, after her father had packed his valise, looted the liquor cabinet, and left that eloquent, fateful note: “I am going to California or some God damned place where they make the stuff and you can at least sit in the sun and drink it with nobody looking out for your health.” He had bequeathed his office and utensils to his father-in-law, a hard-working railroad engineer, and he had left forever.

  Grandpa had filled the gap all right—and so too did Sid Jaffe, who freed both drumsticks from their sockets and laid them, one each, on the children’s plates. Martha tried not to take any notice of the sinking in her stomach, which she knew to be a sure signal that self-deception is rampant in the body. She tried to ignore the fact that she had not her grandmother’s taste: she tried with all her heart to look over at Sid Jaffe, carving away so efficiently there, and melt with love for him. She imagined all the good it would do them if she could only fall for him. She considered the $54 owed these many months to Marshall Fields, and the $300 loan from the co-op; she thought of the $36 bled from her by that thief, Dr. Slimmer. (Those she hated in this world and would never forgive were Dick Reganhart, her father, and Dr. Slimmer, the last for knowing nothing and charging double.) She thought of Sissy and the messy room—she heard Sissy, in fact, singing in the bathtub—and she knew that the only sensible thing was to close her eyes, tip forward, and dive down into an easy love. So she went under three times, but each time came bobbing back up to the surface.