Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Later, my phone rang. It was Martha and she asked me if I wanted to come home.

  She said, opening the door, “I’m sorry I had to get you out.”

  “I was taking a breather, Martha.”

  “You were coming back?”

  “I think so.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t know for sure.”

  “If I’d realized that, I wouldn’t have called.”

  “You realized,” I told her, “and you called anyway.”

  “You might as well come all the way in,” she said, and left me alone at the door; a moment followed in which I might have gone back down the stairs and away. I considered it, and then moved into the apartment. It was as though I had been drawn in by that faint Hawaiian House odor that clung to Martha’s uniform; it was not that I liked the odor particularly, only that I had grown used to it. In the living room she said, “You can even take your coat off.” She sat down beside an ash tray thick with butts. “What were you going to do about all those classy suits?”

  “I was going to leave them for the next guy.”

  “Who were you going to move in with now?”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I began to understand hermits.”

  “You mean you were going to try moving in with the fellas?”

  “You’re thinking of monks, Martha. I was realizing that I have some fouled-up connections, some mistaken ideas. That I’m not in tune with myself. I was understanding why ascetism was once a basic Western value.”

  “The old light-hearted historian,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You seem eminently in tune with yourself.”

  “If I am what you’re trying to say I am, you ought to consider yourself lucky without me.”

  “I can’t say I’m sure what you are.”

  “Then why did you want me back?”

  “I think you want somebody to beat you up tonight, Gabe. I think maybe you’d better go home after all.”

  My coat was on my lap and my hat on my head, but I didn’t move. I saw only one alternative to running away. “Why don’t we get married, Martha?”

  “Oh this is too romantic to bear.”

  “Why don’t you stop crapping around?”

  “Why don’t you!”

  “I asked you if we shouldn’t get married. You want to give an answer?”

  “You’re the answer, you shmuck.”

  “Am I? I remember getting a long set of instructions when I moved in here not to propose to you.”

  “It’s curious,” she said, “what parts of the law you choose to obey and what parts you don’t.”

  “The law isn’t so uncomplicated.”

  “Don’t be a college teacher, I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Why don’t you want to get married, Martha?”

  “Is this obligation, or impulse, or what?”

  “It’s both, if you want to know. All three.”

  “You don’t want to bring up love or anything, is that it?”

  “You’re too full of principles, Mrs. Reganhart. You’re too high-minded.”

  “Wowee,” she said.

  “Why don’t you face the facts?”

  “Why don’t you! You don’t want to marry me. Isn’t that a pertinent fact?”

  “Wanting isn’t the right word.”

  “Oh hell then, what is? Loving isn’t the right word and wanting isn’t either. Look, buddy, don’t feel obligated. Oh you’ve got a nice fat trouble, my friend.”

  “Why don’t you go sit in the window, Martha, and wait for Mr. Right to come along in his big shoulders and his red convertible?”

  “You’re damn right I’m going to wait!”

  “It’s great you’re five nine, Martha, it’s perfect you’re hefty. The bigger they are the better they can enjoy the fall.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Your untrammeled, unselfish nobility is about one of the most disgustingly selfish exhibitions I’ve ever seen.”

  “Please don’t you be the one to bring up words like selfish around here, all right? God might send down thunder on this whole house. Have it understood, nobody’s marrying me out of a sense of loyalty. Someday somebody’s going to marry me because they want to. They’re going to choose little me.”

  “I’m choosing you. I’m making the choice.”

  “There must be some kind of noose around your neck. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there.”

  “You’ve got circumstances,” I said. “I’ve got them too. Don’t be an ass.”

  “Your circumstance is plain and simple. That isn’t what I meant was invisible.”

  “Go ahead, Martha, you might as well go all the way.”

  “You don’t need anybody,” she said. “If you did, you wouldn’t feel so obliged all the time.”

  “You don’t know what I need—you don’t begin to know!”

  “Nor you, me,” she said flatly.

  “Then maybe that’s why I was giving some thought to coming back or not. Maybe that deserves some thought.”

  “For instance,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken, “ten minutes you’re here and you haven’t even asked why I called.”

  “I didn’t think there was a specific reason.”

  “There is. I’m not you. I don’t make phone calls out of wistful nostalgia.” Her voice lost a bit of its edge. “Dick Reganhart’s back in town.”

  For a moment the words meant nothing; all I could think was that it was the name of some third child of Martha’s.

  “My first love,” she said. “He wants his kids. I thought you might have a suggestion,” she added; whereupon she left the room.

  When I found her in the kitchen she had already poured herself a cup of coffee and was drinking it standing up, looking out the back window.

  “What do you mean he wants his children?”

  “He wants his children. Simple as that. They’re half his.” She turned; in the little time it had taken to get from the living room to the kitchen her face had become pouchy with fatigue. She leaned against the window sill. “He’s a great success. New York’s latest fad. You can get yourself a Reganhart by plunking down a thousand bucks. He’s chic, my former husband. He’s grown a mustache. He’s getting married to a millionairess. His new father-in-law was once Ambassador to China. How’s that? A wife who can use chopsticks. All good things come to him who waits for it.”

  “The only trouble is he’s got no rights.”

  “He’s got rights,” she said. “He’s got you. You’re evidence that I’m an immoral woman. He’s going to take me to court and hold up your underwear as evidence.”

  “He knows about me?”

  “There are still creeps around this neighborhood who consider it a pleasure to have smoked pot with my ex-husband. They turned me in. I’m ah immoral character.”

  “Which isn’t so.”

  “Which is. That’s one more fact, since we’re counting facts.”

  “You saw him then.”

  “I served him his dinner. He’s still got the old instinct for comedy,” she said. “Tomorrow he’s going to come over and see his kids.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.” I tried to engage her eyes but she looked right past me; except for the rapidity and brittleness with which she spoke, she gave no sign of falling to pieces. I asked, for lack of anything else to say, “What do you think?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you.” She came over and sat down at the table.

  “Well, I think it’s ridiculous.” I sat down across from her. “As for my being evidence of your bad character, that’s one of those things that’s got to be proved. What the locals say, they say—it hasn’t the ring of proof. It’s assertion.”

  She did not answer; I realized that the first thing I had tried to explain was how I was not implicated.

  “Well,” I said, “what about his character? What about all those years of support payments unpaid? What about the divorce itself? You
can’t not be a father for six years, five years, whatever it was, and then suddenly decide you’re ready. No judge is going to listen to him, Martha. You’ve got Jaffe still, haven’t you? You’ve got—hell, Martha, it’s an empty threat.” She continued to look unconvinced. “You’re not immoral,” I said. “The power you’ve got is the fact that you know it isn’t so.”

  “But it is,” she told me when she saw that I was through. Only her jaw moved as outward evidence that she was not immune to feelings. “Because I want him to take the kids, Gabe. That’s the next fact.”

  To which I had no ready answer. I got up and poured myself a cup of coffee. Under the sink the garbage pail was overflowing; I set down my cup and took the pail out and emptied it into the can on the back porch. When I came back in, Martha had left the kitchen and I found her in the empty children’s room on Markie’s bed.

  “Surprised?” she said, looking up at me.

  “No.”

  “Shocked? Disgusted? Overcome? None of the above?”

  “None.”

  “That’s what she wants, isn’t it?” Martha said, throwing a hopeless hand toward Cynthia’s bed. “To live with her father awhile? Isn’t that it, or something like it? I can’t tell, I’m punch-drunk and fed up. I don’t want to worry about what she wants any more. Does that make me a witch?”

  “I don’t think it does.”

  “Well, you’re standing up there very big and judging,” she said.

  “I’ll sit down,” and I did, at the end of Cynthia’s bed, across from Martha’s feet.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t care. Let him come. Let him open the closets and pull out the drawers and let him find all the God damn underwear he wants. Who can care any more? All I want is to go out in the afternoon and get a cup of coffee and not have to run back and make anybody’s supper. I used to wheel Markie around the campus all the time, I used to wait for the hour to be up and watch the kids changing classes. That’s how I used to spend the afternoons. Right out there in front of Cobb, rocking my baby carriage. Then I got ashamed and picked myself up and went off to the playground where I belonged. But I don’t have too much love for that playground, I’ve got to admit it. If I have to push one more swing one more time … This is punky of me.”

  “No.”

  “I should keep them. I should tell him to take his new life and his new wife and shove them both. Just pay up, I should say. Shouldn’t I?”

  “What is it, Martha? What is it you want?”

  “Oh, please come here,” she moaned, rolling toward me. “Please, just lie down next to me. Please, and turn off the light.”

  Beside her, after five minutes of silence, I asked, “How will you feel without those kids?”

  “How will you?” she said.

  “I’ll marry you either way.”

  “Don’t say that, will you?”

  “Then I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say I’m not immoral, all right?”

  “You’re not. You’re not, sweetheart.”

  “Everything gets telescoped,” she said, touching my face. “I haven’t even known you two months, baby.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You don’t have to marry me is the difference. Why does everybody have to step up and marry me? I’m a drag on men. A strain on everybody. Oh Gabe, do you think making love would help matters? Hold me tighter, okay? Is that my whole damn downfall—hot pants? Oh let’s just do it, with the doors open and all the grunts and groans and nobody tiptoeing by and nobody’s neuroses blooming down the hall—nobody, nothing but our two selves.”

  Very early in the morning I awoke to find that Martha was no longer beside me in Markie’s bed. I supposed she had gone back to her own room, but I found her barefooted in the hallway, bending over the large cedar chest in which the kids’ old toys were stored. The toys, however, had been taken out and were strewn around in the hall; in their place Martha was packing away my belongings—shirts, suits, coats, underwear, ties—and hiding them out of sight.

  The next morning Mrs. Baker ushered us into her kitchen (hers until her daughter came out of Billings’ psycho ward) and in a cheery, we’ve-all-been-up-here-for-hours voice heralded our arrival. “Look who’s come! It’s Markie and Cindy’s mommy, and Mr. Wallach.”

  The three Parrino offspring, sullen children with downy faces, took our appearance in their stride; hardly a face rose out of its cereal bowl despite their grandmother’s exuberance. Cynthia, however, never without resources for drama, jumped up from the table and leaped half the length of the kitchen. She threw her arms around Martha. “Daddy’s here!” she cried.

  “How do you know, baby?”

  “Isn’t he?” she demanded. “Did he go, already?”

  “No, no—he’s here. I just didn’t know you knew.”

  “He called me,” she said. “Ask Mrs. Baker. Didn’t my daddy call me here?”

  A white-haired woman with pale hands and active fingers, who always moved around the house in full dress—weighty oxfords, fur jacket, and pink pillbox hat, veil up—Mrs. Baker gave a small birdlike reply, as though she were cracking a seed in her teeth. “That’s right, dear. Last night at eleven-thirty.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that, sweetie.” Martha managed to maintain her composure in the face of Dick Regenhart’s surprises and energies. “I’ll bet you were excited. Does Mark know?”

  “He gets confused, Mother.”

  Martha went to the table and smoothed back the boy’s cowlick. “How are you, young man? Did you have fun sleeping over? Did you talk to Daddy?”

  He looked confused all right. “I was sleeping,” he said.

  “You finish your breakfast now,” Martha said. “Then you’re going to visit with Daddy.”

  “Oh terrific,” Cynthia said. Mark and the Parrino children said nothing.

  “Hello, Stephanie,” I said. “How are you?”

  Mrs. Baker said, “Stephanie’s daddy and Tony’s daddy and Stevie’s daddy is going to visit with them next month, isn’t that right, honey?” She had made it sound like three people.

  Stephanie nodded, and Cynthia, on the edge of her seat, said, “Do we go now?”

  “Don’t be impolite. You finish your breakfast,” Martha said, “and we’ll wait in the other room.”

  Mrs. Baker followed us, and when Martha and I had settled onto the sofa, she said, “Mr. Reganhart wanted to come over last night”—she had been looking only at Martha, but I now got a significant glance as well—“and I thought it over and weighed all sides and then I thought, well, it’s just going to overexcite those two children. Now I hope I didn’t do wrong, honey. I didn’t know how you felt about it. I didn’t want to call you and wake you up too. I know when Billy comes, I just think it overexcites the children.” She had a very excited, anticipatory air about herself, as though there was always the possibility that she might be strung up for her last statement. She seemed to sense some acute division between herself and the general drift of life.

  “Thank you,” Martha said. “I think you were right.”

  “You don’t want to disrupt their sleep,” the older woman said, this time only to me. “I don’t know how you folks feel, but personally eleven-thirty doesn’t seem to me an hour for telephoning all around town.”

  “I suppose he was anxious to talk to them,” Martha said.

  “You’re perfectly right, Martha,” said Mrs. Baker. “I didn’t mean that, you know. Billy certainly loves his children one hundred percent too. I didn’t mean they didn’t love their little ones. What kind of men would they be then?” Again the question was for me. “Billy’s certainly been very good while Bev’s been recuperating, I don’t mean that. It’s just that they’re not women and you can’t expect that they’re going to understand a child the way a woman can. You men are our wage-earners and our husbands,” Mrs. Baker told me, “but there’s nobody like a mother.”

  I agreed. She squared the edge of a pile of magazines on top
of the TV set. “These are mine, you know—for Bev.” She held up a magazine before her, as a child will hold up something for the entire class to see, facing each of us in turn. “These are my genealogical journals of Illinois, Mr. Wallach. My daughter has gotten very interested in her family history, and we think that’s a very hopeful sign. You know, Martha, Beverly never much cared about DAR matters. But I suppose now she’s had all that time to think and so forth, and to appreciate, and well, we think it’s a good sign. I had to go all the way out to Highland Park the other day to bring in all my books and magazines, but I’d make a hundred trips back and forth a week if we can have our girl back the way she was. She even asked about you, Martha Lee.”

  “Did she?” Martha said. “That’s very sweet.”

  “Oh she talks about her daddy and her brothers, and her old old friends—little children all grown up by now—and about you, Martha Lee, and about Richard too—that’s Mr. Reganhart,” Mrs. Baker informed me. “In fact, she’s suggested—and it was all her suggestion, mind you—that I try to get hold of a genealogy from Oregon. She wants to work out your family for you, Martha Lee. Now isn’t that something? I’ve already written off to see what we can do. Wouldn’t you call that reason to be cheered up?”

  “She sounds like she’s coming along,” Martha said.

  “Well, the doctors are encouraged, and the children are managing beautifully, and I don’t mean to say that Billy hasn’t been a help. We have nothing against Billy,” she said, “per se. If a marriage doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, I suppose. Perhaps we’ll find out later that this was all for the best.”