Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Neither Martha nor I responded.

  “Mr. Wallach,” Mrs. Baker said, “I was myself married to two of the finest men who ever drew breath. And I lost them both, that was God’s will.” She filled up instantly with tears. “But I went right ahead, and Beverly is going to go right on, and Martha Lee has gone right on, and that’s the nature of a woman. To go right on, and raise her children to be strong and good, and not to be ashamed, and to respect their elders and love their country. I had two fine husbands, both of them Masons, not strong lodge men, I’ll admit that, but men’s men, who had the respect of their neighbors and knew their duty to their wife. After all, the husband chooses the wife, he gets down on bended knee—at least he used to—and then he’s got the duty to stand by her. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to the world, Mr. Wallach. If you’ll pardon me, I don’t mean this personally, but I don’t know what’s happened to our American men. I don’t understand this discontentment business and I can’t say that I ever have. I don’t know what men want any more. If this embarrasses Martha Lee, I’m just sorry, but heaven knows they don’t make them any smarter or any prettier than you, honey. And my own Bev, they didn’t make them any sweeter, you can attest to that, Martha Lee. The sweetest, kindest girl, loved animals, loved the seasons and her schoolwork, Queen of the Prom, I remember that, and a pretty girl too—and it’s just not imaginable what this world has turned around and given them. Now I don’t know Mr. Richard Reganhart except by name, and Billy has been very courteous through this whole ordeal, but I don’t think they either of them would know a good thing if they tripped over it. If they fell over it and broke their neck, as Mr. Baker used to say.”

  Cynthia’s voice came lancelike down the hall from the kitchen: Markie and Stevie were throwing Farina.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Baker, and she flustered and fidgeted until Martha rose and went off to the kitchen to put down the riot. Still standing by her genealogical journals, Mrs. Baker leaned in the direction of the disturbance; when the situation seemed under control, she came over and sat down next to me, where Martha had been.

  “They’re two fine children,” she said. “That Cindy is smart as a whip.”

  “She’s very good at looking after Markie,” I said.

  “They could make a man a very nice little family,” Mrs. Baker said, “believe me.”

  Again I nodded my head, agreeing.

  “I don’t know if you’re a Mason or not, Mr. Wallach, and I don’t want to pry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well,” she said, “I would certainly give it some thought. I’m not going to say much more, because if a man wants to become a Mason that’s up to him. You know you won’t even be invited, you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, you won’t, so don’t sit around waiting. They don’t believe in that. If a man decides he wants to be a Mason, then he’s got to step forward. Now I wouldn’t try to convince you of anything, Mr. Wallach. I’m only saying I think you might give it some thought. You know what they say: ‘Once a Mason, always a Mason.’ I was married to two men, both Masons, and both fine men, Mr. Wallach, respected in the community and in the home as well. They were stern men, and maybe they didn’t wipe the dishes like some husbands do, but they knew right from wrong. You just ask over at the University—you teach, isn’t that it, over at the University?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you just ask around there. You talk to the top professors and you see if they’re not Masons—the top professors, and deans, and so on.”

  “I will,” I said.

  At the door later, with Cynthia and Mark in their coats and the three Parrino children—hot cereal having cut through their gloom—running up and down the hallway, Mrs. Baker took my hand and whispered to me, “They’d make a man a nice fine little family, don’t think they wouldn’t.”

  In the back seat Martha sat beside her daughter; Mark and the little suitcase full of pajamas and comic books that the children had taken with them to the Parrinos were in front with me. After a momentary crisis on the street—Mrs. Baker all the while waving at us from upstairs—we had all submitted to Markie’s seating arrangement.

  “He’s traveled all the way from New York to see you,” Martha was saying now, “and he wants to have a good time with you, okay?”

  Uncooperatively, Cynthia mumbled that she would cooperate.

  Martha leaned forward, so that her hand was on my coat. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Markie answered.

  On Fifty-seventh Street we had to stop for the light. Martha said, “To help him have a good time, babies, I don’t think he wants to hear about some things. I think he wants to hear about school, and the playground, and about your Christmas presents, and about Markie’s cold that he had, and Cynthia’s ballet lessons—”

  “What doesn’t he want to hear about?” Cynthia asked.

  “I don’t think, for instance, he wants to hear about Sid Jaffe, you know—or about Gabe,” she said. “I don’t think that’s important to Daddy on such a short visit.”

  No one asked a question, not Mark, Cynthia, or me.

  “Do you understand, Markie?”

  “Okay,” he said, shrugging.

  “I don’t think Daddy’s interested that Gabe stays with us overnight. You see? If Daddy asks about Gabe you say he visits with Mother. Okay, honey?”

  Mark leaned over my way. “A secret from Daddy,” he whispered.

  “Oh but just a small secret, that’s all,” Martha said. “You’ll have plenty to talk about without worrying about such a little secret. Agreed, Cyn?”

  We waited, and then that small guardian of truth swung her great lantern over us all. “Gabe does sleep over. Gabe’s clothes are home.”

  “But for the time being, Gabe’s clothes are put away. Cyn, Gabe sleeps over, but I think that’s our private life. Your father has his private life, and we have ours. Isn’t that so?”

  “Okay.”

  “Look, Cynthia—you have a perfect right to disapprove. You go ahead and think whatever you want. Even if you want to be angry, then you be angry. You have a private life too. I’m only asking you to please do what I tell you, because I think it’ll make us all happier. Baby-love, I’m sure you’re not against any of us being happy, are you?”

  “I’m not angry,” the child said.

  “That’s good, Cynthia—that’s a terrific girl. And this afternoon I’m going to have a talk with Daddy, and Gabe’s going to take you to the Museum.”

  “The Aquarium,” Mark demanded.

  “The Museum of Science and Industry, honey,” Martha said. “You can go down in the coal mine.”

  “We’ve been down in that coal mine,” Cynthia said, “about a hundred times.”

  “I want the fish,” Mark said.

  “Oh hell, Markie, don’t whine—not today—” began Martha, and then, making my first statement of the morning to the assembled Reganharts, I said sharply, “If he wants to go the Aquarium, we’ll go to the Aquarium. What’s so hard about that?”

  To the consternation of all of us, Mark grabbed my arm and kissed it. I almost drove up on the sidewalk; and in the back seat, even Cynthia, champion of unconditional surrender, broke down and said, “Thank you.” She said it softly, and when I turned my head to tell her she was welcome, I found the child, miraculously, giving me a sympathetic, almost a pitying, look.

  After driving Martha and the children home, I drove to my office, where I spent the rest of the morning marking freshman essays. Just before I went off to lunch—and from there to pick up Martha’s kids—I dialed the Herzes.

  “Is she terribly upset?” asked Libby.

  “I think everything’s under control,” I said.

  “Do you have any message for Paul?”

  “Whatever I tell you I would tell Paul.”

  “We’re very appreciative,” she said, “about Mr. Jaffe.”


  “That’s fine.”

  “Is she young?” she asked. Then: “Is she attractive? I don’t necessarily mean beautiful—”

  “She’s attractive, Libby. She’s nineteen.”

  “What about the husband?”

  “What?”

  “The father. Is he a student?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I thought he was a student too.”

  “He’s an architect,” I said.

  She said, “And he’s not going to get in the way?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So we can just sit back now?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well … it sounds very good. I didn’t realize he was an architect.”

  “It’s all perfect,” I said.

  After a moment, she said, “I want to say I’m sorry for my outburst.”

  “That’s neither here nor there, Libby.”

  “And how is Mrs. Reganhart?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Do you want Paul to call you about anything?”

  “Jaffe will call him.”

  “Of course,” Libby said, “we’re very appreciative.”

  “Of course,” I said, and hung up.

  It was like being under water, though perhaps that was some illusion I brought to the place, something to do with my sense that day of power and circumstance. At any rate, the corridors arched over, containing our movements, and the oblongs of light which gave a shape, an edge, to the darkness could have been glass-bottomed boats looking in on us; not even the noises were above-ground sounds. Everything—footfalls, laughter, parental reprimands—seemed to pulsate toward one vertically and then break under and over. Mark kept leaning across the railing and rapping on the windows of the tanks to get the attention of the fish. A guard finally told him to cut it out. “You get an angel fish excited,” the guard advised me, since it was I who would have to fork over the cash, “he’ll knock his head against the wall and kill himself.” “I’m sorry,” I said, and we walked on, up one side, past the long metallic fish of the Great Lakes, and down the other, past their rainbowed cousins of the Amazon and Nile. Long-legged Cynthia, a little Egyptian herself in an orange chemise dress and a purple pullover, seemed to pick up grace from watching the patient flutterings of the fins and the rippling gills of the baby shark, as he slid one way and then the other in his green cage.

  “They eat people,” Cynthia informed her brother, and then she did something on her toes that she had learned in her ballet class, and coasted on.

  It was a simple enough sentence she had uttered, but I don’t think the remark sank in. Mark ran off across the marble floor and disappeared around the corner; we came on him later in front of the sea horse, which he thought was a toy. I was the most permissive of adults, and followed where they led; and though other families arrived and departed, we stayed, for the mother and the father of my companions—the two unruly children, screaming and skipping up and down the echoing halls—were home having a long talk, the outcome of which none of us yet knew. Finally, tired out, I sat down on a bench in front of the hawksbill turtle, a bundle of coats and hats and scarves in my lap. The hawknose dipped and the ancient repulsive skin of the turtle’s neck flashed by, and then the armored bottom went sailing past the window. He receded into the murky waters at the far reaches of the tank, and Markie settled down beside me and promptly fell asleep, his head on my arm. Cynthia approached and asked, so politely, if she could take off her shoes.

  “They’re very nice shoes,” I said.

  “They’re Indian girls’ shoes from Arizona,” she said.

  “Are they too tight?”

  “No, they’re perfect.” Nevertheless, one beaded shoe dangled from either hand.

  “Why don’t you sit down and rest?” I asked. “The floor is a little cold.”

  “Thank you.” She seated herself not beside Markie, but me.

  “They are a little tight,” she admitted. “That’s the way the Indian children like them.”

  “They’re very colorful and pretty,” I said.

  “My father brought them.”

  “Did he bring you the dress too?”

  “And the sweater. They’re from June.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you know who June is?” she asked.

  “I suppose she’s his new wife, who he’s going to marry.”

  “She’s very pretty,” Cynthia said.

  “Did you see a picture?”

  “In an evening gown.”

  “Did Mark?” I asked.

  “Mark doesn’t understand everything,” she said. “I think we might get to live in New York,” she told me.

  “Your daddy said so?”

  “He asked me if I wanted to.”

  “I see,” I said.

  Cynthia pulled one foot up on the bench and began to knead her big toe. “I suppose my parents are having a talk about us,” she said.

  “I suppose they are.”

  “I’m not sure Markie wants to go live in New York.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think he knows my father very well. My father has a new mustache.”

  “Doesn’t Mark like the mustache?”

  “I don’t think he’s used to it.”

  “I’ll bet if you lived with him he’d probably get used to it.”

  She considered that. “He didn’t used to have one.”

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “people change and I guess we finally do get used to it.”

  “But he wouldn’t be home with us, you see,” Cynthia said. “He works.”

  “All fathers work,” I said. “Most, anyway. My father works.”

  Her next question had a fervent, open inquisitiveness about it, and it connected in my mind with that nearly tender glance she had given me in the car, and the fact that she had chosen now to sit down beside me. On this of all days I had stopped being only her mother’s property. “Is he a painter?” she asked me.

  “He’s a dentist.”

  “Ucch,” said Cynthia.

  “He doesn’t hurt though,” I said. “He’s a painless dentist.”

  For the first time in our short and disheartening acquaintanceship she tried to please me. “Boy, I’d like him to be my dentist.”

  “He lives in New York too.”

  What she said then might at first appear to have emerged more appropriately from the mouth of her brother; but the words belonged to Cynthia really, for she was the metaphysical one. “Is he any relation to me?” she asked.

  I told her that he wasn’t. We took our eyes off one another then and turned them upon that giant turtle, whose spinnings, past our gaze and back, over and over and over (endlessly, even after closing time, when no one was there), seemed nature’s inspiration for the self’s most urgent dreams. Chasing nothing, pursued by nothing, powerless to discontinue his own frantic rounds. The sight of him produced in me the kind of nervousness that makes some people want to scream and others get up and walk away as fast as they can.

  Cynthia said, “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Related to me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m your friend.”

  “I don’t think I like my father’s mustache,” she told me, and stood up and walked in her white anklets over to the turtle’s tank. When she came back, I asked her to mind Mark, and I walked down the long corridor and found a phone booth by the tropical fish.

  All Martha said was, “You can all come home now,” and so we three left the Aquarium and came out, above water, into the silver light of that February afternoon, with downtown Chicago, the skyline to our right, looking as eternal as a city can.

  In her purple suit—worn, I began to feel, only for historic occasions—and with her hair coiled up on her head, and sporting very high-heeled shoes, Martha looked solid and monumental, the type of girl who occasionally wins a beauty contest by sheer physical intimidation of the judges. Her face was lin
ed again, as it was not in the morning but had been the night before. At the sight of the three of us, however, her manner was cheery and untrammeled. “Hi. How were the fish? Did anybody fall in?”

  “Where is he?” Mark asked.

  “Who?”

  The boy shrugged. “Him.”

  “He went back to his hotel,” Martha told him.

  “I want milk and chocolate grahams,” Mark said.

  “It’s in the kitchen for you, all ready. Don’t spill it on your nice suit, Markie. Hi, Cynthia, you want some milk?”

  In the car, driving back from the Aquarium, I had been afraid I might say the wrong words to Cynthia and turn her back into herself. But she had managed the turning on her own. “I don’t want those lousy chocolate grahams, I’ll tell you that. Why can’t we ever have regular grahams?”

  “Chocolate grahams,” I said, “are supposed to be extra special.” But the magic clearly had gone out of me, and I was left with only the stickiness of the remark and the vision of Cynthia, swishing her coat back over one shoulder and moving off into the kitchen with an unambiguous display of feeling. From the other room we could already hear her brother exhaling over his milk.

  “How were the fish?” asked Martha, turning her back on the latest installment in The Plight of Cynthia Reganhart.

  “I think they liked it.”

  Martha sat down on the couch and crossed her legs, so that what light filtered in through the windows caught the sheen along the meaty side of her stockings. After carefully lighting a cigarette she removed a speck of tobacco from her tongue, a gesture dense, it turned out, with sexuality. She seemed to have worked up a decided air about herself. Perhaps it was only that I had grown so used to seeing her in uniforms, slacks, slips, and nightgowns, that I was confusing the elegance of her costume with some heightened emotional condition; yet cross-legged, expelling smoke, sipping brandy from one of the two glasses that had been set on the floor, she seemed to be wilfully charging the place with protestations of her womanliness.

  Even when she spoke, it was like one who has decided to give expression to a part of his character to which others, he feels, have not attended sufficiently in the past. The tone was artificial and vaguely defiant. “Would you like some brandy?” she asked.