Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “So does my father. He’s a famous artist.”

  “He’s a famous artist, Cynthia,” I said, and then, hesitating only a moment, I added, “but he doesn’t support you.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “No,” I answered, “he doesn’t.”

  “Well, he sends presents.”

  He didn’t; however, I said, “That’s very nice, but sending presents to people isn’t the same as supporting them. Supporting them is much harder. Presents are like cakes with icing, and supporting is like all the other food you eat every day. Which is more necessary, Cynthia? Which is more important?”

  After a moment, in a superior tone, she said, “I don’t even like cake.”

  “I like cake,” Mark said.

  I smiled, and Cynthia said to me, “He doesn’t understand.”

  It was by no means a friendly remark but it was the result, I thought, of some conscious decision to give up the fight—it was only depressing in that it made perfectly clear that what her brother didn’t understand, she did. It left me feeling that the child had much too small a back for all her burdens; I pitied her her intelligence.

  Yet as a kind of tribute to her years, I said, “He’s just a small boy.”

  “I’m her brother,” Mark said.

  Cynthia stood now and feigned a yawn. “I think I’m going to sleep,” she said, quite formally. “I’m very tired.”

  “Good night then,” I said.

  She turned to face Mark. “I think you had better go to sleep too.” With her hands on her hips, she was, in both posture and tone, as much like Martha as she could manage to be. “Come on, Markie.”

  Instantly Markie made known his objection.

  Taking a quick look my way, she folded her arms, then glared at her brother. “That kid’s going to drive me crazy,” she said, and with that, made her exit.

  Markie lay himself down on the floor, facing the TV set, and within minutes was asleep. I got up and turned off the television and the floor lamp, and covered him where he slept with an afghan from the sofa. Sitting back in a chair, I watched the boy’s small back rise and fall; I could barely hear his breathing. I was sure that in her bed Cynthia’s eyes were wide open; whatever straightening out I had attempted had to do with only the surface of her family life. How could a seven-year-old child be expected to understand her mother’s troubles? How could I begin to understand the child’s? I felt now that it would have been wiser of me had I remained in bed, and let her cry over whatever it was hers to cry over. I did not begin to know all that had happened over the last seven years, and it almost seemed a mistaken sense of duty—and also a decided uneasiness about my presence, where Cynthia was concerned—that had led me to defend Martha against her daughter. Yet all that had been said in the hallway between Sissy and Cynthia had seemed to me totally unjust; Martha was not rotten for a moment, and she did not stink, and I believed that I had fallen in love with her.

  Having had my scene with Martha’s daughter, however, I was sure that I was not falling in love with Martha’s predicament. Her life was complicated in ways that would not uncomplicate themselves by a mere lapse of time. There were these two small children to consider; loving her, must I not love them too? Was I up to it? Did I really want to?

  I looked blankly into the lights of the Christmas tree for a long while. Did I want to? I wondered what Markie and Markie’s older sister could ever be to me? Was this what I wanted for my life?

  When I awoke, Markie was asleep in my lap, where he must have crawled some time during the night. Martha was standing over the two of us, her coat slung over one shoulder.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “After one. One fifteen.”

  “You better lift him off. I hope I didn’t give him anything.”

  But she did not take the child immediately; she stood where she was, looking down. Then she bent so close that I could feel the cold on her skin, and lifted Markie from me.

  When she came back into the living room, she was still carrying her coat. “Hadn’t you better be going back to bed?” she asked.

  “Not for a little while.”

  She spread her coat over me and sat down at my feet with her arms around my legs. I began to take the pins from her hair.

  “It’s been so nice,” she said. “So comfortable and nice. And I’m so tired.”

  “Just rest.”

  After a while she asked if Sissy had gone.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Was there any kind of scene?”

  “Cynthia got a little upset. But she’s all right.”

  “And she never really liked Sissy. Do you know? They never really got along.”

  “Well then, she’ll probably mourn my passing too.”

  “Me too,” Martha said.

  “I think I’ll go tomorrow, Martha. I don’t have a fever any more.”

  “You’re still weak.”

  “I can be weak at home, I suppose.”

  “Who’ll make your meals?”

  “I will.”

  She said nothing then, nor did I.

  “Martha,” I said, some minutes later, “I can’t stay here. It would get terribly complicated.”

  “I know.”

  “You seem so tired. Maybe you should go to sleep.”

  “Theresa Haug became hysterical in the kitchen. I had her station and mine.”

  “Who’s Theresa Haug?”

  “The girl we drove to the El.”

  “That seems a year ago.”

  “Two nights,” Martha said. “Just two nights.”

  I remembered the girl now, sobbing into her handkerchief in the back seat of my car. “It’s too bad,” I said.

  “It’s awful,” Martha said.

  “Who’s her boy friend?”

  “He’s become shy; he’s married, he won’t have anything to do with it.”

  She said that, and because it was dark, and because I was tired, and because we were becoming blue—and doubtless for other reasons as well—I was reminded of the several people it seemed I had disappointed in my life.

  Martha shrugged her shoulders and said, “Gabe.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I guess pleasure depresses me too. Do you know what we should do?”

  “Go ahead, tell me.”

  “Whatever we want. Simple as that.”

  “And what’s that, Martha?”

  “You should just keep staying here,” she said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s what I want … So can’t we do it?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  “I think it’s about time,” she said. “I have rights in this world too, don’t I? The whole situation isn’t normal to begin with—being twenty-six and having these kids and working every night. That’s not normal, so how can I even pretend to have a normal love life? My life is cockeyed and different, and my daughter is just going to have to learn that. Is that asking way too much? I can’t keep going around and around with these two little psyches in my pocket. I had an alcoholic old man, and that’s the way it is—nobody can go around protecting you from everything. Oh Gabe, aren’t they on their own a little bit too? I’ll do my best, I promise, but can’t I have a lover like anybody else? Every goofy girl in the street has someone who can stay all night, but mine has to leave at three in the morning. Does that seem fair?” She turned on her knees then and took my face in her hands. “Gabe, just tell me, do I seem selfish and mean? There’s them, but then there’s still me, isn’t there?” she asked. “Is there?” She buried her head in my lap. “Please stay with me, Gabe. Stay and live with me.”

  I closed my eyes a moment, hoping that what I ought to do and what I wanted to do would be one. When I opened them and looked down at Martha’s face, I believed they were.

  In bed, where Martha came to be with me a while, she said, “It isn’t marriage, you know. You don’t have to t
hink about that—nobody has to marry me. Do you understand? Nobody ever has to feel obliged to marry me. Please don’t worry about my babies, they’ll be all right. They’re nobody else’s worry but my own. Nobody has to take them off my hands, Gabe. I don’t need a husband, sweetheart—just a lover, Gabe, just someone to plain and simple love me.”

  In the morning I lay in bed until I figured that everyone was through in the bathroom. Cynthia and Markie had already held some sort of relay race in the hallway, but it was silent now, and I assumed that breakfast had begun. I wanted to surprise Martha—and to lighten her load—and before she brought my tray to me, I thought I would appear at the table, shaved and groomed, showing myself to everyone in my recovered condition. That morning I understood what people mean when they talk about feeling like a bigger person. With the cheery disposition not only of a physical convalescent, but a moral one as well, I put my bare feet into my shoes and moved as quietly as I could across the hall and into the bathroom.

  Martha’s bathroom walls were covered with travel posters, two to mask windows opening onto the outside stairwell, and another to hide a crack in the plaster, which ran from the ceiling down to the toilet. Visit Switzerland! Visit France! Visit Holland! Brushing my teeth, I felt magnanimous about all three countries, especially little Holland, whose porcelain-faced girls in traditional garb would forever be tending tulips within the direct line of vision of whoever was sitting on the can. I picked up a brush that was on the sink; no sooner did I run it through my hair than my forehead and ears were draped with Martha’s long blond strands. I didn’t even feel a ripple of annoyance. Why should I?

  I looked for a razor and found one in the soap dish of the bathtub; the blade was dull and I set out looking for a new one, feeling, as one can while engaged in trivial works, at one with the world. Perhaps it was because my spirits were so high that they were able to tumble so low when I opened the medicine chest. Capless bottles, squeezed-out tubes, open jars, toothless combs, a cracked orange stick, three wilted old toothbrushes, hairpins, pills and capsules scattered everywhere. Perhaps there was a blade, but in that square foot of chaos, who could tell? Curiously, the sight of that mess was a knife sunk right down into the apple of my well-being. Nevertheless, I stuck my head into the hallway and called out, in an unexasperated voice, “Honey! Do you have a razor blade?”

  The conversational mumblings in the kitchen continued.

  “Martha! Have you got a new blade? I want to shave!”

  No answer. I took another poke at the medicine cabinet. About the only thing one could get one’s hands on—without everything falling after—was a bottle on the bottom shelf with a skull-and-crossbones label. I put my feet back into my shoes, and started down the hall, one of Martha’s hairs floating down over my nose. Clutching her old misshapen bathrobe around me, I charged into the kitchen to behold Mark and Cynthia spooning Wheatena, and Martha talking to a man. At first he was only a tannish leather jacket and a big shock of red hair combed flat with water—and then, for an instant, an astonished toothy smile and a little courtly bow. He even stuck a hand out toward me, but I was in flight, my unlaced shoes dropping off my heels with each step, clopping my guilt and shame after me. There hadn’t been much dignity in my getaway, which was perfectly evident to me as I leaned against the poster of Holland, catching my breath.

  And it had only been the janitor. The janitor! The fury I began to feel was first directed at those damn shoes, then at my legs, which seemed by themselves to have carried me away before I’d even had a chance to think. But finally I was furious with myself for having thought again that I could simplify life.

  My search through Martha’s bathroom was now undertaken with the kind of single-mindedness one associates with the insane. I was no longer even thinking about shaving, only about the blade. I flung open the medicine chest to be confronted again by that skull and crossbones. Big as life it said: DANGER. But she didn’t seem to know there were children in the house! She apparently didn’t read in the papers about all the poisoned kids! A mess! An unexcusable mess!

  Next to the bathtub was a closet with two narrow doors. Till then I’d had no occasion to look into Mrs. Reganhart’s closets—so there were things that I could not have known. The apartment itself had always appeared to me to be not so much chaotic as in a state of disarray, a condition I originally liked to think of as an extension of the lighter side of Martha’s nature. Magazines spilled over onto the rugs; tables and chairs were turned so as to accommodate upraised feet; apple cores browned in brimming ashtrays. But all this had only seemed the sign of a relaxed life; I took it for evidence of a deep humanitarianism. But what I looked into as I swung open the doors of the bathroom closet was evidence of madness—dirty bed sheets thrown in amongst clean towels, wet wash clothes draped over torn Modess boxes, five bottles of suntan lotion (all sticky and dribbling), a stack of National Geographics, a beach pail not entirely empty of the beach, dish towels, blankets, a length of garden hose, several coffee cups full of pencil shavings—why go on? I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, and my hand came to rest in the little aluminum tray that was attached to the wall; several old wet hairy slivers of soap were instantly brought to my attention.

  There was a knock at the bathroom door.

  “Come on in,” I said, and the door flew back.

  “Haven’t you at least got a razor blade without a little crud on it?” I demanded.

  “Haven’t you got a head with brains in it?”

  “I was only looking for a razor. I didn’t know anybody was out there.”

  “I thought you were sick. I thought you were too sick to get out of bed.”

  “I wanted to shave—I thought it might give a little lift to the general appearance of the place.”

  She was wearing a pair of tight red cotton slacks with some kind of abstract black and white design all over them. I wanted to ask if her husband had painted her pants for her, then I remembered he was her ex-husband, and then I remembered—with an unfortunate degree of vividness—all that we had attested to and promised the night before. Yet I hated her that instant for those circusy slacks, and hated her behind, which bloomed without mystery within, and I didn’t care too much for her sweater either. Lumpy, turtlenecked, immense, it made her body seem mountainous and her head a pin. A pinhead! A dreamer!

  “It would please me no end,” she said, as I registered on my face precisely the amount of sympathy I felt for her outfit, “if you wouldn’t flounce around this place in your nightclothes!”

  “What the hell do you expect me to flounce around in? I didn’t come prepared to stay.”

  “Then don’t flounce around! You jerk!”

  “Me? This place,” I said, getting off the tub and raising my arms as though to protest to the postered walls, “this place is a mess! Look,” I said, “look at this!” I flung open the medicine chest, which suddenly did not seem so hellish as it had two minutes earlier. If my sense wasn’t right, however, there was something right about the general direction in which I was charging. I presented to her the bottle that said DANGER. “IS this any way to keep drugs with kids in the house? Here, so even Markie can reach it?”

  “I’ll worry about what Markie can reach, all right? You just worry about a little decorum.”

  “And what am I supposed to do, hide? Is that what all that sweetness and light was about, is that what it means to be Mrs. Reganhart’s lover? Hole up in the latrine till the janitor leaves! What do you think I am? What the hell kind of nerve do you have telling me to be decorous anyway! Look at this place, look at it!” I turned and pulled back the closet door. A bottle of suntan lotion clinked obligingly out onto the tiles.

  She did, I think, give a little gasp: found out at last.

  “You could,” she said in a more respectful tone, “have waited until he left. Was that asking too much?”

  “I didn’t know he was here. That’s the point, Martha. You want to wire the place, flash lights back and forth? What are you mak
ing of me?” I considered the closet again. “Look at that!”

  “Oh shut up.” She pulled the cover down on the toilet and sat down. “Just shut up.”

  But I didn’t want to, or intend to. I had moved well beyond the closet. I saw myself as having been weak and unimaginative the night before. Right at the start I should have had the sense, the courage, to go off and be ill by myself. I was old enough and wise enough. How could I live in a house where no strange man would ever live in peace?

  I picked the lotion bottle up from the floor. “You ought to be ashamed,” I said. It was not quite to the point, but I couldn’t think of much else that was nasty to say. Bending over had made me woozy, and when the wooziness passed I still found it difficult to sustain my powers of concentration. What was it we were arguing about?

  “Oh will you please …” she moaned.

  “You don’t know what you want, do you know? You don’t know what in the world you want.”

  She had been ruminating, her turtleneck pulled over her chin. Now she looked up. “Look, if you don’t want to stay here, nobody’s twisting your arm. You don’t have to precipitate some lousy argument to leave. Spare me that, will you? If you want to go”—she made a slow backhanded movement—“just go.”

  “You know,” I said, leaning against the sink, “I’m beginning to have a little sympathy for your first husband, that poor bastard.”

  “Oh, that poor bastard. We all ought to shed tears for you and him. He was another one who couldn’t walk out until we had a real rip-snorter that gave him the right. If you want to leave, Gabriel, just leave, all right?”

  “What is it you want though? Can you tell me? Can you put it into a sentence or two? Tell me how you expect somebody who’s supposed to be living here not to ever show his face in the kitchen. How can you want one thing,” I said, slamming the sink, “and then not be willing to take what follows—”

  She rose and stuck a fist under my nose. “I can take what follows, damn you! Don’t tell me about consequences, you!”