Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “But what’s a lawyer do?” Markie was asking. “I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

  “There are laws,” Sid was explaining, “like not crossing the street when the light is red. That’s a law, right?”

  “Of course,” Cynthia said.

  Mark nodded in agreement. He was hoisting a candied sweet potato to his mouth, not with his fork, but wrapped in the center of his fist. Martha waited for the inevitable to happen: sure as hell he would stick it in his eye. But through luck, or instinct, he managed to locate his lips; he had, however, borne down too heavily on the frail potato, and just as it was to slide safely within, most of it made an appearance along the edges of his fingers. Totally absorbed, and confused, by Sid’s explanation—“and the lawyer is the person, Markie, who explains to the judge why he thinks the other person, the person who crossed against the light, say”—floundering in the labyrinths of jurisprudence, Markie cleaned his hand on the front of his white shirt.

  “Mark!”

  Sid stopped short with his lecture; Markie looked up. “Who?”

  “Don’t you have a napkin?” Martha asked.

  He showed her that he did. Sid said, “Markie, when you want to wipe your hands off, use your napkin.”

  “It’s no use. I think he’s part Eskimo,” Martha said. “I think he’s going to grow up and just head north and find a nice Eskimo girl and the two of them are going to sit around for the rest of their lives asking each other Who? and ripping blubber apart with their hands. Markie, my baby-love, pay attention to your food, all right?”

  After speaking her last words she saw how she had hurt the feelings of her guest. He was being educational—his way of being fatherly—and she had directed the pupil away from his lessons and back to his plate and napkin. She tried to add some joke, but it was limp, and suddenly she felt unable to bear up much longer under Sid Jaffe’s good intentions. Why must he feel obliged to try so hard with her children? It made her angry that, as much as he wanted to visit with her, he seemed to want to visit with Cynthia and Mark.

  Sissy now traipsed through in her sheer robe. “Excuse me,” she said, leaving water prints across the fringe of the floor. “What do you say, counselor? Comment ça va?”

  Sid, who still could not understand Sissy’s presence in the house, mumbled a greeting. Martha had not told him that her rent had gone up for fear he would volunteer to take the case to the Rent Control Board. She felt pre-defeated in the face of administrative bodies, which seemed to her to work in mad ways of their own; and besides, she owed Sid too much that was not money already. She wanted really to work herself free of this lawyer and of those legal maneuverings which she had once believed might get her more just treatment in the world. At a very early point in her misery she had believed in a kind of parliamentarian approach to confusion; now she understood things better.

  “Sissy’s feet are wet,” Cynthia pointed out. “She’s leaving a mess again.”

  “It’s only dew, baby,” said Martha. After Sissy had departed, she said, “She’s part girl, part stripper—” But Sid was wiping his mouth and saying, “Sometimes I don’t understand you, honey.”

  Cynthia leaned over to whisper into Mark’s ear, “He called her honey again.”

  “Who?”

  Since Martha had to be at work by five, they had begun dinner early. Now it was not quite three, but with the meal finished and the dishes stacked, though not washed, it seemed to Martha as though it were time for dusk to settle in. In Oregon at this time—or later, at the real dusk—they would be coming back from their tramp in the woods. She would have pebbles in her girl scout shoes, and the dust from the red leaves would have caked around her ankles, to be discovered later when she took off her socks for sleep. Her grandfather would be whistling, her grandmother clearing her throat (forever clearing her throat), and her father would be pinching the behind of her mother—poor baffled beautiful woman—and tripping over every rock on the path. “It’s hot toddy time!” “Oh Floyd, you’ve had—” “For God’s sake, where’s your American spirit, Belle? Your old lady here is a matron of the DAR, and where is your American spirit residing, anyway?” “Why don’t you go in and nibble on some turkey; why don’t you—” “I’ll tell you what I want to nibble on, old sweetheart!” “Floyd, the child—” “Martha Lee, who wants a hot toddy, my baby-love? Who’s my baby-love? Who’s got a collection of women around him could make a sheik’s eyes pop? Is that right, Belle, isn’t a sheik one of those fellas with the harems? Baby-love, you’re in the sixth grade—haven’t they mentioned harems?” It was that Thanksgiving, some long, long-gone holiday, when for the first time she had become dreadfully and unexplainably nervous in his presence.

  Mark was taking his nap, Sissy had glided out in flat Capezios and black tights, and Cynthia’s voice caroled up from the back yard, where she was jumping rope with Barbara, the janitor’s daughter.

  Sid kissed her. Following the old saw, she leaned back and tried, at least, to enjoy it. His hands were a great comfort, a regular joy—there was a nice easy stirring in her breasts that moved inward through her, picking up speed and power, until it produced at last a kind of groan in her bones down in the lowest regions of her torso. Then she was off the sofa.

  “No,” she said.

  “Martha,” Sid said calmly, “this is getting ridiculous. I’m a grown man, you’re a grown woman—”

  “It’s one of those things that’s ridiculous and is going to have to be, Sidney.”

  Sid swam an hour a day at the Chicago Athletic Club; he had been a Marine Corps officer in two wars; at forty-one he wore the same size belt he had at twenty-one—and now he asked, with a nervous display of bravado, if perhaps it was simply that she found him physically repellent.

  “I find you nothing of the sort,” she said, touched, but not of course impassioned, by the question. “A lot of traffic has moved across this sofa, Sid. I’ve been living here going on four years, and a lot of men have come through, you know, on their way home from work. I think there’s a bus stops in front of our steps, I don’t know. Anyway, if I let everybody’s hands go traveling down my blouse, what kind of mother would I be?”

  “I’d appreciate it, Martha, if you could just be serious for a minute.”

  He was dead serious, which caused her to feel all the strain of being a joker. She felt dumb and inconsequential and foolish. Here was a man with a hard-on (and all the seriousness that implied) and she wouldn’t give him a straight answer. But there she went again! She just couldn’t sneak out of things by turning phrases all the time. She addressed herself in a stern voice: Be serious … But if she were to become serious about old Sidney, she knew—why not face it—that she would marry him. Once they had stripped down together, and she had realized that aside from being a father to her children, he could also give her about as much bedroom excitement as any other girl she knew was getting—once she let him prove this, wouldn’t she be a goner? Wed once more for wrong and expedient reasons … No, there was only one bag to put your marbles in, one basket for your eggs, and that was love. Nobody was going to marry her again out of necessity; nobody was going to marry her for her breasts, her troubles, or her kids. Nor was she going to miss the mark herself. This time she would do it for love.

  At bottom, her demands were no more complicated or original than any other girl’s.

  Sid walked to where she stood running her hand over the bindings of her small and eclectic collection of paperbacks. He said, “I didn’t mean that, Martha,” whereupon she thought: What! What are you apologizing for now! “I understand,” he said. “You’re in a tricky position. I’m not trying to make things more difficult for you at all. I care for you so much, Martha. You’ve got a lot of guts, and you’ve been remarkable, really, in a very awkward situation. I do appreciate just how complicated it’s been for you. But, honey, there’s such a simple solution. It doesn’t have to go on like this at all. I’m going to get you down on the sofa, and you’re going to jump up, and th
ere’s such a simple and obvious solution.”

  “And what’s that?”

  He took her hand, as was appropriate. “Marry me.”

  Since her return to Chicago, two other proposals had come Martha’s way. One was from Andy Ratten, a Rush Street musician much admired by co-eds and their dates, who pretended to be Paul Hindemith to one set of friends and Dizzy Gillespie to another; when Martha turned him down, he had sent in the mail—the measure of his crew-cutted wit and marijuanaed charm—a Sammy Kaye LP. “Your fate, baby,” was all the enclosed card had said. The second proposal had come from Billy Parrino, who at the time was the husband of her best friend. On the playground, while soft-faced, bug-eyed exhausted Billy was watching his three kids—his wife was home cracking up, a phenomenon only recently completed—and Martha was watching her two, he had come right out with it. “Martha, let’s just take off.” “I think you have a wife named Beverley.” “She’s so wacked-up it’s driving me crazy.” “Well, I’d love to, Billy, but the kids—” “We’ll take them; we’ll take them all, and we’ll just go somewhere. Paris.” “It all sounds too glamorous—you, me, five kids, Paris.” “Oh,” wailed Billy, “how this life does stink,” and he went home.

  So a full-hearted, unqualified, sensible proposal from a man as substantial as Sid Jaffe—which now that it was here melted the cartilage in her knees—was a considerable achievement. Sid made $15,000 a year, was neat and clean, and, God knew, his heart was in the right place. Just three weeks before, they had sat by her TV set, and while poor Adlai Stevenson had conceded defeat in measured eighteenth-century sentences, tears had rolled from Sid’s eyes. Sid Jaffe was for all the right things; he was decent and just and kind (she would always have her way; she would be in a marriage, imagine it, where she would always have her way) and he was good to children, if somewhat plodding. And even that was mostly eagerness, and would surely have disappeared by the time of their first anniversary—to be celebrated, no doubt, with ten days in the Bahamas …

  She had really to search for some switch to throw, something to divert the current that was building up to carry her toward an affirmative reply. “My kids, you know, are little Protestant kids. Markie’s circumcision was strictly pragmatic, I don’t want you to be tricked by that. He’s a slow learner, Sid, and it may take him fifteen years to figure out what a Jew is. And Cynthia may turn out to be an anti-Semite; she comes home with something new every day. My grandmother, you know, is a flying buttress still of the DAR—” Yet even as her mouth released all this feeble chatter, she remembered her old grandmother’s balanced judgment on the men of Zion: “They’re tight-fisted ugly little fellas, Martha Lee, but they’re good to their wives and children.”

  “Martha, you don’t have to give me an answer in the next sixty seconds.”

  When it came to honoring the other person’s surface emotions, Sid Jaffe was a very sweet considerate man. “Let me think about it, Sid—all right?”

  But he had suggested she wait, apparently, not expecting she would choose to; he had to turn away to hide the fact that he was crushed. Suddenly Martha had a vision of Sid proposing to girls ever since high school.

  And then he was pressing her to him. She was wearing her one other extravagance, her white silk V-neck blouse, and Sid had buried his head in the V. His mouth sent through her an arc, a spasm of passion, and if Markie was not sleeping in the other room, if Cynthia’s jump-rope song had not ceased, if the phone had not all at once begun to ring, Martha Reganhart might have had a far different future.

  “Martha, we can just have the most wonderful—” His mouth went down and down and she closed her eyes.

  “Wonderful wonderful—”

  “—The phone.”

  “Let it ring.”

  But it stopped ringing.

  “Mommy! It’s Daddy!”

  “What!” She was racing for the kitchen—racing away, not toward. “What is it, Cynthia? What?”

  “It’s Daddy from New York! For Mrs. Reganhart! You, Mommy! The operator!”

  She took the receiver from Cynthia’s hands, wondering—among other things—how long the child had been in the kitchen. Couldn’t she even get felt up in private? And now this—Dick Reganhart! From where! “Yes? … Operator? This is Martha Reganhart.”

  “It’s not Daddy, however,” said the voice at the other end.

  She sank down in a chair. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Shall I hang up?”

  “Certainly not—my child’s drunk on Mott’s apple juice. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Daddyland,” Gabe Wallach answered. “New York.”

  “Oh do excuse her. She gets overexcited when she’s not in school. I think she’s reacting to the company.” She lowered her voice, for she saw the company pacing back and forth in the living room. Was he trying to overhear, or was he walking off lust? How unnatural everything was.

  Gabe Wallach asked, “Who’s there?” He sounded a little demanding, but Thanksgiving was doubtless a strain on everybody.

  “An old friend,” Martha said. “He stimulates the children.”

  “And you?”

  More demanding yet. She would have been annoyed were it not as though some hand had reached down to pull her out of the fire. “No, no. No—that’s true. Listen, I’m sounding tragic. How’s your father’s party? Is there really a father and a party, or is some tootsie nestled beside you in her underwear?”

  “I call in the absence of the latter.”

  “It’s very sweet of you to call. Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “I’m having a nice unhappy one.”

  “Mommy!” Cynthia said. “I want to talk to him—I want to—”

  “Just a minute, will you?” Martha said into the phone. Then, away from it, “Cynthia, it is not Daddy!”

  “It is!”

  “It is not! I’m telling you the truth, Cynthia. Go talk to Sid, he’s all alone. Cynthia!” The child was threatening to throw a lollipop at her. “Cynthia!”

  In tears, the little girl went toward the room where Markie was napping.

  “I’m back,” Martha said.

  “Good,” Wallach said.

  Good for what? What kind of weak-kneed out was she going to make this into? Surely she couldn’t reject a man who had been so good to her through all these rotten years for another with whom she’d eaten one lousy dinner two weeks before? What right had she to use this flukey phone call against Sid—in fact, to use Sid?

  She could tell instantly from the voice on the other end that she had hurt the feelings of still another gentleman. “I just wanted to say Merry Thanksgiving to you.”

  “Thank you …” Then she realized that he was about to hang up. “Shall I go ahead,” she asked, “and invite you to another meal? Will you eat leftovers when you come back?”

  “I’ll be back Monday.”

  “Come then,” Martha Reganhart said, “for dinner.”

  “Yes, I will … Who’s Sid?”

  “He’s a man who just asked me to marry him.”

  “I see.”

  “You’ll come Monday night.”

  “As long as you’re still single,” he answered, “I suppose so.”

  “Single as ever,” she said.

  “Does that upset you?” Wallach asked.

  “Specifically, no; generally, I’m not sure. This is some longdistance conversation.”

  “Long distance should be outlawed anyway,” he said. “Were you expecting a phone call from your husband?”

  “My ex-husband—from whom I have no expectations whatsoever.” A cry went up from Markie’s room. “Oh God, my son just hit my daughter with a chair or something. Give my love to the girl in her underwear.”

  “You give my love to Sidney.”

  She felt, when he said that, all the strangeness of their conversation; she wouldn’t have minded being angry with him. “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’m wondering,” he said, in a very forlorn voice, “if well ever manage to level with one another.”

  And then she wanted really only to be level—she wanted to be serious, to be normal; she wanted to be soft and feminine; she wanted a love affair that was no jokes, just intensity; and because the man on the other end was practically a stranger, she led herself into thinking that he could service her in just that way. She wanted to be out of what she was inextricably a part of—her own life. “You come Monday, Gabe. I’ll be single. They shouldn’t outlaw long distance,” she said, holding the phone very close to her. “I feel you’ve saved my life.”

  And on the other end he was saying, “There is a father and a party, you know. And I look forward to seeing you.”

  And 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.” She hung up, thinking herself her own woman.

  But while she changed into her waitress uniform, she heard laughing and chatter from the kitchen. The uproar in the kid’s room had been a false alarm, and Markie had gone back to sleep; the two people having such a good time were her daughter and her lawyer. When she emerged in her starchy blue waitress uniform—her Renoir proportions having taken on the angles of a coffin—she saw that Sid had his sleeves rolled up and was washing the dishes. And Cynthia—complainer, beggar, favor-monger, liar, fatherless baby—Cynthia wiped, and wore upon her face the very sweetest of smiles.

  Martha leaned against the door to her bedroom and let the tears come.

  “My father painted a picture of me that was in the paper,” Cynthia was saying.

  “Did he?” Sid asked.

  “We used to live in Mexico and he drew it down there. It’s very hot down there, even in the winters.”

  “Can I see the picture? Did he make you as pretty as you are? Did he get those blue eyes in it?”