Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “Where’s your friend?” Martha asked, conversationally.

  “She’s buying her mayonnaise.”

  Several seconds passed before either man publicly acknowledged the presence of the other; then Blair peered over the top rim of his sunglasses. “How’s the crime business, Your Honor? What’s swinging in the underworld?”

  “How are you?” Sid asked.

  “Oh me, I’m toeing the ethical norm.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Man, I make nothin’ but the super-ego scene.”

  Mark found the remark very funny; Cynthia curled up in Blair’s arms. Sid sat upright in his chair. There was no question about his being a hundred times the man Blair Stott was, and yet Martha discovered she could not stand him at that moment for being so proper and protective; it seemed a crushing limitation on her life.

  Partly out of pique with Sid, she cued Blair. “And how’s the hipster movement in North America? What’s new?” The children looked at her with wide eyes—she was drawing out the funny man for their enjoyment.

  “Well, Mrs. Reganhart,” said Blair, whose father was a highway commissioner in Pennsylvania, whose mother was a big shot in the NAACP, and whose masks were two: Alabama Nigger and Uppity Nigger, “well, to tell you the facts, we is all of us taking a deserved rest, for we expended a prodigious, a fantastic, a burdensomely amount of laboriousness and energy, as you might have been reading in the various organs, in placing in the White House that Supreme Hipster of them all, the Grand Potentate and Paragon of What Have You, the good general, DDE. It was a uphill battle and a mighty venture, and mightily did we deliver unto it. We are pushing presently for a hipster for Secretary of the State, and, of course, for Secretary of the Bread. What we are anxious to see primarily is one of our lad’s names on all them dollar bills. You know, This here bill is legal tender, signed, Baudelaire. Of course, in our moment of spiritual need and necessitation—which we is regularly having biweekly, you know—we are also turning our fond and prodigious efforts and attentions to the Holy Roman Church, and praying on our bended knees, with much whooping and wailing, that it is from amongst our ranks that the next Pontiff-to-be will be selectified. As may be within the ken of your knowledge, sugar, up till the present hour there has been an unquestioning dearth of hipster Popes—one must go a considerable way back down the road to find hisself one. Like since Peter, nothin’. The Pope we got now, the thin fella with the glasses—now in my opinion this is a very square Pope, though on the other hand I learn from our sources in Vatican that this same cat was very hip as a cardinal. What we is looking for with fervor and prodigiosity, not to mention piety and love, is someone we can call ‘Daddy’ and look up to. How many years has it been now since Rutherford B. Hayes?”

  “Coolidge,” Martha suggested, fearing for the dryness of her children’s underwear; both of them were slithering about in fits of laughter.

  “Hip, my dear blond bombshell, but no hipster. Markie, do you agree here with the predilections of my predigitation, or what? You sit so silent, man”—Mark was nearly on the floor—“have you no thriving interest in the life political and the heavenly bodies, or is you numb, Dad, with Coca-Colorama?”

  “Coke!” Mark erupted, as Sissy made her entrance, swinging within her clinging black tights her healthy behind, and unscrewing the cap on a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. She sat down at the booth and offered the jar around; then she dug in while Mark, awe-struck, watched every trip the spoon made from the jar to her mouth. For Martha, his absorption opened up a whole new world of agonies. Sid looked at her. Pleadingly he said, “It’s getting late.”

  She heard herself answer, “It’s only five to.”

  And Cynthia was shouting, “Blair! Blair!”

  Oh father-starved child, modulate your voice! But Martha said not a word. Let them enjoy every last Thanksgiving minute.

  “Blair! Tell an army story!”

  “A story!” Mark joined in.

  “Well, there I was—” Blair said, and the children hushed. “Up to here—no, higher—with dirty dishes and pots and pans laden and encrustated with an umbilicus of grease and various and sundry remnants and remains. I’m speaking of garbage, Markie—do you get the picture?”

  “Picture.”

  “All right, you got it. I don’t want no faking now. All right, up to here in muck. It was my duty, you understand, not only to native land, but to the ethical norm and the powers that am and was, to alleviate these crockeries of the burdensome load under which they was yoked by virtue of this delirious scum and dirt which so hid their splendor. Well, cheerily then, I am approaching the task when, coming from another part of the edifice, I smell upon my nostril’s entrance there, some sort of conflagration, and I think unto myself, I think: Slime, Scum, Private Lowlife, where there is conflagration there is smoke. Erstwhile, says I, this here mess hall is perhaps out to be victimized by the dreadness of fire. Alors! I am alarmed when into my area I behold a white-glove inspection is moving itself. Great Scott, says I to myself in my characteristic manner, it is a full colonel, a veritable bastion of democracy and he is headed my way, seeking out signs of filth and dirt and thereby disrespectability and so forth. He is followed up upon, lapped up after, in a manner of speaking, by two captains and a major, and several noncommissioned bastions, patriotic and knowledgeable men one and all. Well, I snap to, heave forth, I take the extreme attitude of attention, sucking in even on my hair, while I continue preparing my hot sudsy water—and yet, in the meantime, this distinct aroma of a conflagration is sweeping up into my olfactory system and presenting to me the idea that we is all in a pericolous state of danger. This idea mushrooms in my head, and at last—for I am myself a kind of bastion of our way of life; I always eat Dolly Madison ice cream whenever there is the choice—and so I say, ‘Your Colonelhood, pardon my humble ass—’ ”

  “Blair!” Sissy said.

  “ ‘Pardon my humble bones, suh, my low condition, my dribbilafaction—’ you seem puzzled, Cynthia honey—you ain’t heard of that?”

  “Yes. Oh yes.”

  “ ‘Well, pardon all that then, Colonel, my de facto status and all, but I smell—’ But I am cut off in the prime of life—from my larynx and general voice box region my warning is untimely ripped—and all the bastions is shouting at me at once and in unison. What we call A Capella. ‘Shut your bones, man. Do not address till you is yourself addressed, sealed, and dropped down the slot there.’ Me, I suspect them of high wisdom right off, so I sluk off, and cleave unto myself, and oh yes rightly so, for his name’s sake. And they too, in a huff, dealt me a parting glance not deficient in informing me of just who I was and why and what for, yes sir, and they were off to the sagitary, a very snappy group could make your eyes water just the sparkle alone. I was left alone—hang on now, Markie, we is edging up on the end—and all alone it was I who had the glorious and untrammeled experience, the delirious and delectafacatory happiness, the supreme and pleasurable moment—I had for myself, young ‘uns, a little life-arama and the last laugh, when that there edifice, all that government wood, and all them government nails and shingles, all them dishes and greasy-faced pots and pans, the whole works, my children, came burning right on down and into the good earth. Thanks go to the Wise Old Lord, too, for I fortunately escaped with my life, and I stood out there on that little ol’ company street, and I watched that there mess hall expire and groan and puff itself right out. It burned right on down to the ground, children, and into it, Amen.”

  “What did?” Cynthia asked.

  “Who?”

  “The edifice. Don’t you listen when I’m talking here?”

  It had been a long tiring day, and Cynthia’s bafflement brought her right to the edge of tears, with Mark only a step behind.

  “It’s a joke, sweethearts!” Martha cried. “A funny story!” And the little girl and her brother, relieved of their confusion, were swept away on waves of laughter, far away from the cares and conditions of their lives.

>   Necessity aside, it took an effort of the will for Martha to leave Hildreth’s. She was having a good time; she was liking Blair Stott; by extension, she was even liking Sissy. She remembered now how much she had liked her on that quiet afternoon she had come to look at the room—carefree and silly and, for all her experience, innocent. Now, both Blair and Sissy seemed to her very happy people. From the doorway, Martha turned back to them and waved a fluttery and uncharacteristic farewell. Sissy threw a kiss and Blair called after her, “Au revoir, blondie.”

  Outside Sid was already at the curb, crossing the children. He had warned and warned her about being late, until finally he had stopped whispering his warnings and gotten up and gone ahead. She watched him now as he looked both ways up the street. She started to follow him, but she couldn’t. At first it was only that she wanted to turn back into Hildreth’s and have one last cup of coffee. But then she wanted more; she wanted him to take her children not just across the street, but as far as he liked. She wanted all three of them to continue walking, right out of her life. She wanted to be as mindless as a high school sophomore. She wanted to be taken on a date in somebody’s father’s car. What she wanted were all those years back. She had never had the simple pleasure of being able to think of herself as a girl in her twenties. One day she had been nineteen; tomorrow she would be thirty. For a moment, she wanted time to stop. I want to paint my toenails and worry about my hair. I want—

  She looked back over her shoulder into Hildreth’s window and saw Sissy eating her mayonnaise. Suddenly it was as though her old old Fifty-seventh Street had been pulled from beneath her: she was floating, nothing above or below. All her life seemed an emptiness, a loss.

  At the door to the Hawaiian House, Sid stood holding Markie’s hand. Cynthia was asking him, “Were you in the Army?”

  “The Marines,” he told her.

  “Were you in a war?”

  “Two.” And he looked at Martha with his most open appeal of the day: Two. All those years. I have no wife, no child. Don’t deny me.

  “Tell us a story,” Mark said.

  “Children,” Martha said, “Sid has to go home. He has some work to do.”

  “That’s okay.” His annoyance with her had disappeared. He spoke softly, setting the scene. It was here and now that she was supposed to say yes, kiss him, fall into his arms. He stood waiting in his big raglan coat, a solid and decent man. “I’ll stay with them,” he said.

  “They can stay alone. It’s all right, really.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  “As long as I’m in by one, Cynthia likes to stay alone.” She touched her first baby’s cheek. “Don’t you, lovey? She’s the best baby-sitter in Chicago. Barbie’s mother looks in every hour or so.”

  “I can dial the police,” Cynthia said, “the fire, the ambulance, Doctor Slimmer, I can dial Mother, I can dial Aunt Bev, I can find out the weather, the time—”

  Martha bent down to kiss the children good night; it was four minutes after five. Kissing Cynthia, she said, “You’re a very good brave girl. But, baby-love, don’t call the weather any more, will you? It’s tragically expensive. If you want to know how it is just look out the window. Good night, Markie. Are you happy, honeybunch?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, yawning.

  “Good night, Sid. Thank you for a merry Thanksgiving.”

  “Martha, if you want me to sit with them—”

  “You have work to do.”

  “I can work at your place, honey.”

  Cynthia looked at Markie: honey. Martha put her cheek to Sid’s and, for a second, kept it there.

  “Martha—” he began. However, she chose to misunderstand him; no, no, they could stay alone; it was good for them, it developed character; it destroyed silly fears. But Cynthia, don’t forget, you don’t open the door for anybody. Then, feeling no compulsion to say any more, she left the three of them—it was dusk—and went into the Hawaiian House to feed a bunch of strangers their Thanksgiving dinner.

  3

  I suppose I have certain advantages over my colleagues (and 99 percent of the world’s population) in not needing my job. I am alone in the world, and self-sufficient—economically, that is—while they, on pay checks that are slipped bimonthly into their boxes at Faculty Exchange, must buy provisions for wives, children, and in a few instances, psychoanalysts. Worse, they have aspirations, visions of tenure and professorships, and all of this combines to make them jittery on other scores as well. I teach out of neither spiritual nor financial urgency. Perhaps I could receive my share of satisfaction from some other job, but at present I prefer not to. I have never had any pressing interest in buying or selling, and I possess neither the demonic genius nor the duodenum necessary for mass persuasion. There are occupations outside the University that have interested me, but they are, to be frank, tasks that play footsy with the arts; whenever I think of them, I think of all those girls I used to know in Cambridge who, the day after graduation from Radcliffe, zoomed down to New York to be copyreaders in the text-book departments of vast publishing houses, or script girls for Elia Kazan, or secretaries at twenty a week for perennially collapsing, perenially sprouting, little magazines. Perhaps the other sex can afford such lapses into fetishism, but the rest of us are wise to take our places as men in the world as early as we can possibly make arrangements to.

  So, for myself, I taught classes as diligently as I could, straining daily at being Socratic and serious; I marked all those weekly compositions with the wrath of the Old Testament God and the mercy of the New; I emerged bored but uncomplaining from endless, fruitless staff meetings; and every six months or so, I plunged into my grimy dissertation and mined from it another Jamesian nugget to be exhibited, for the sake of the bosses and their system, in some scholarly journal. But in the end I knew it was not from my students or my colleagues or my publications, but from my private life, my secret life, that I would extract whatever joy—or whatever misery—was going to be mine.

  I reached Chicago so late on Sunday night, feeling so broken and foggy, that it was not until I awakened the following day that I realized that the taxi I had taken from the airport had skidded me home to my apartment through a snowstorm. My limbs and mind had been fatigued from both my journey and my visit, and that distant corner where consciousness still burned was fed with recollections of the weekend—of my father, his fiancée, the Horvitzes, the old Herzes, Martha Reganhart, and of myself, what I had and had not done. When I am about to die the last sound you hear will be that of conscience cracking its whip. I am not claiming that this makes me a better man or a worse man; it is merely what happens with me.

  At seven-thirty the next morning, the alarm sang out one stiff brassy note. Beyond my frosted window, it was a lithographer’s dream of winter; such Decembers they have in the Holland of children’s books. The snow covered the ground, and the sun the snow. With a happiness so intense that I saw no reason to question it, I rose from my blankets. Just living, sheer delightful breathing, had, in earlier periods of my life, convinced me that a man, like a dog, is most himself wagging his tail. This truth now asserted itself again, and it was with genuine pleasure that I shaved my face, selected my clothes, and prepared my breakfast. Four inches of snow, and life had changed back to what it once had been, what it should be forever.

  I walked to the University through the crackling weather and the virgin snows, and arrived at Cobb Hall feeling as righteous, as American, as inner-directed as a young Abe Lincoln. Ears tingling, I taught two consecutive classes with such passion and good spirits that one of my students—a kittenish girl who never read the assignments but had a strong desire to please—carried her pouty lips down the corridor after me and, before my office door, allowed them to part. “Mr. Wallach, I think that was the most important hour of my life. It opened up whole new worlds.” We did not touch, but I went into my office thinking we had. My spirits remained untrammeled. I decided that before I began to mark papers I would call Martha Reganhar
t and verify our dinner date. By mistake I dialed the Herzes’ number. Paul answered; following a moment of dumb silence, I hung up.

  The moral: Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on.

  Later, because it was four o’clock and because it was Monday, there was the usual meeting of the staff; so life is ordered in academe. I arrived early, chose a seat near the window, and made myself comfortable at the round meeting table. I had with me mimeographed copies of four student essays which had been handed out to us the Monday before; they were to have been graded and mulled over preparatory to today’s meeting. A quarterly examination was coming up, and the object of evaluating these essays was to make sure that we were all in agreement about standards of judgment. We lived forever on the edge of a deep abyss: there was a chance that one of us might give an A to an essay to which another of us had given a B. And, intoned our more pious members, it was the student who paid the penalty. But it was we who paid the penalty, these grading sessions being nothing less than the student’s last revenge on his teacher. If the phenomenon we all engaged in that afternoon were ever to be staged in the theater, I would suggest that a chorus of freshman be placed behind a gauze screen, visible to the audience but not to those playing the part of teachers; rhythmically, while the meeting progresses, the chorus is to chant ha ha ha.

  My colleagues drifted in, alone and in pairs. First—always first, with a clean pad of lined yellow paper and a cartridge-belt arrangement of sharpened pencils around his middle—Sam McDougall, a man whose dedication to the principles of grammar could actually cover you with sorrow. Sam had written a long work on the history of punctuation, and though he looked to be the world’s foremost authority on hayseed, he was in fact one of its foremost authorities on the semicolon and the dash. A year ago he had unearthed two comma faults in an article of mine in American Studies, and ever since had chosen to sit next to me at staff meetings to show me the light.