Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “No, thanks.”

  “Do you mind if I …?”

  “Of course not.”

  But then Cynthia and Mark were at it in the kitchen.

  “Grahams!”

  “Chocolate grahams!”

  “Grahams!”

  “Stop it!” Martha shouted, and the bubble in which she had been trying to sit and sip her brandy instantly burst. “Please stop it,” she cried, “the two of you! Can’t you treat each other like a brother and sister!”

  “He stinks,” Cynthia shouted back, and the door slammed to her bedroom. In the silence that followed, I realized that the radio that was usually in the kitchen was behind me somewhere in the living room, and that it was softly playing. It was Saturday; in New York they were performing The Magic Flute. Dick Reganhart and his former wife—so as to lay the ground rules of their meeting, give it the dignity of their years—had been drinking brandy and listening to the opera.

  During all those years that Martha had been living her life in Oregon, I had been in New York living mine … This observation was pedestrian enough, but the emotion that accompanied had considerable force. So did the recollection of the long-gone Saturdays in my life, of my mother lying on the sofa, listening to the music, and of me stretched out on the rug doing my schoolwork, and at the window, his hair the color of the sunless eastern sky, my father looking down at Central Park, which was locked in the ferocity of one New York season, or turning blade by blade into another. We had had what Mrs. Baker would call a nice fine little family, and whatever my parents’ aches and pains, there had nevertheless been a comforting net about the three of us, and the permanence of its disappearance suddenly set loose in me a longing that rose and rose, until my hand, as though afloat on the floodlike emotion, moved up and onto Martha’s breast. But the fact that at this moment it was I who was seeking support in her flesh, was surely nothing I could expect her to appreciate.

  The arc of her throat was all I saw move. “He’s taking them,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Then let’s get out.” She crushed her cigarette in the ash tray; she jumped up; she smoothed her skirt; she was trying to grin; perhaps without even being aware of it, she was clapping her palms together. “Well, let’s get out. Let’s go. Fresh air. I’ll get my coat.”

  She went out of the room to the telephone. “You kids go down to Barbie’s,” I heard her say after hanging up. “Just go right down the back stairs. We’ll be home in a little while.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Cynthia, you hold Markie’s hand going down the stairs. Come on, Barbie’s waiting for you.”

  “Mother—”

  “Cynthia, let’s talk later. Gabe’s going to take your mother for a walk.”

  We walked in the only direction one can walk for the sake of pleasure or diversion or speculation in Chicago—toward the lake. The wind came straight into our faces, and the four-o’clock sun could barely illuminate the circle of sky around it, let alone make itself felt against our backs. We passed under the I.C. tracks and walked beyond the hotels and tennis courts and through the underpass beneath the drive. Then, still arm in arm and silent, we saw the water, which before our eyes went a color just this side of black, as though a heavy tarpaulin had been dropped over it. Private and alone, in the midst of the elements, we watched the gyrating gulls.

  “There’s a ship out there,” Martha said.

  “Where?”

  “Way out—over by Michigan.”

  “Yes,” I said, not seeing it.

  “I suppose,” she said, “I could go to Europe now, or stay out all night.”

  “If you wanted to.”

  “He’s supposed to be changed, Gabe. He’s got this big Italian mustache.”

  “So Cynthia said.”

  “How does she like it?”

  “I think she likes it,” I said.

  “Oh sure, he’s a regular image for a growing child. That’s the pitch. That he’s not the same old Dick. That’s supposed somehow to make me heartbroken and nostalgic for all the times I got slugged.”

  I did not ask, and Martha did not say, whether the pitch was simply a pitch.

  “I don’t think I’ll tell the kids for a few days. All right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Maybe I can lead into it. Maybe we can lead into it.”

  What could I do? Offer to marry her again? For Martha, had that ever been the issue? “I’ll do whatever I can,” I said.

  “What he had the gall to say was that it would be a favor to all of us to get the kids out of this environment. I don’t know whether he meant me or the paint flaking off the ceiling. He’s gotten very fancy. You know, he came in sort of shooting his cuffs, flashing the links, and so on. And the girl looks very upper-class Bryn Mawr and horsey. Rich. Wallet-sized photos by Bachrach. He suggested that money was good for children.”

  “He said that?”

  “He’s a very straightforward fellow. I was going to ask if he’d always known it or if his friends had been keeping it a secret from him for four years.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of meeting. I even thought he was going to try to kiss me once or maybe feel me up.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Did you want him to?”

  “He made me very nervous. I was haughty and scared him.”

  “So it wasn’t a mess?”

  “Quite clean. He doesn’t even curse any more.”

  “No fighting, then? No threats?”

  She closed her eyes, making her admission. “What was there to fight about?”

  At bedtime, Mark offered his lips as usual, and Cynthia as usual turned her cheek, but when my mouth came down to it she whispered some words that I could not understand. Because Martha was only a foot behind me, I did not ask the child to repeat whatever it was she had said. Later we went to bed ourselves, and while we each waited patiently for sleep to put an end to the day, Martha finally asked me how it had gone with Theresa Haug.

  7

  In the middle of March they left us. It had been possible during the week before to arouse Markie’s interest and keep it pumped up with exotica about the Empire State Building and Coney Island, plus occasional tales from me entitled “A Manhattan Boyhood.” “Gabe was a little boy in New York,” says Martha, and “Oh yes,” I say, “we went on the subway and we went—”

  Cynthia was not so easy to manipulate, being an ace practitioner of the art herself. She began to tease. “I’ll bet there aren’t as many colored kids in my class,” she said. In a letter on blue vellum her new stepmother had informed her that she had been accepted as a student at a private school on West Eleventh Street. She would not even lose a term. “Private school is better anyway,” Cynthia said.

  “Private schools are very good,” Martha said.

  “Which kind did you go to?”

  It was not the first time that we heard the question. Martha did not even look up from the bed upon which she was separating those items of Markie’s wardrobe that were in need of repair. “I couldn’t afford to go to school. I delivered newspapers.”

  Cynthia tilted her nose and left the room; she was back minutes later, however, and addressed a statement to the woman who bore her as though that lady were Zephyr himself. “I’ll bet it’s not so damn windy in New York,” she said.

  “I’ll bet it’s not,” Martha said. “Don’t say damn.”

  “You do.”

  “I’m an adult—”

  “I’m an adult, you’re a child,” Cynthia mimicked, and moved off with a swift swooping grace, a submarine speeding home for more torpedoes.

  Martha tossed a pair of holey socks into the wastebasket at her feet. “Isn’t she the brainy little saboteur,” she said, a judgment, not a question, and another pair of socks followed the first.

  “What’s private school?” asked Mark, one eye on the diminishing pile of clo
thes.

  “Private school is what you pay for—oh, Markie, come here, why do you wear this stuff when it’s ripped? Why do you put on this underwear if it’s ripped in the back?”

  “Who?”

  “You. Your underpants are ripped. Why didn’t you say something? Do you want to show up at your father’s with ripped underwear?”

  The child, bewildered, slid his hand down the back of his trousers.

  “And take your hand out of there,” said Martha, bone weary.

  Markie began to bawl. “Oh baby, it’s Mommy’s fault,” Martha said, dropping a handful of shorts, “it’s my fault, I’m a slob and oh Markie—” She smothered him with kisses while he beat on her face with his hands. “Oh it’s not your fault it’s ripped, baby, it’s mine oh hell—”

  Day after day tempers were short, tears frequent, and apologies effusive and misdirected. But finally we were driving to the airport.

  “I sit in front with Mommy and Gabe,” Mark said.

  “I sit in front,” Cynthia said—an afterthought.

  “Me,” the boy said.

  “Look, I don’t like three in front,” I said. Martha said nothing at all; she had already slid in beside the driver’s seat.

  “I’d get to sit in front anyway,” Cynthia said, “because I’m older.”

  “I’m older,” Mark said.

  “You’re stupid,” his sister told him.

  “Stop it, will you?” I said. “Calm down, both of you.”

  We proceeded down Fifty-fifth Street in silence, until overhead we could hear the planes circling to land.

  “We’re almost there and I never sat in front yet,” Cynthia said. “Just little stinky Markie.”

  Martha only looked at the license plate of the car in front of us. “Please, Cynthia,” I said. “Let’s try to be generous to each other.”

  “Oh sure,” she said.

  Martha swung around to the back, pointing a finger. “We can’t all sit in front, can we? Just stop it.”

  The only comment was Markie’s. “Ha ha,” he said.

  At the airport parking lot, I carried three of the suitcases; Martha, hanging a few steps behind, carried the fourth.

  Inside the terminal, Cynthia displayed a considerable interest in the departure proceedings. She watched the scales to see how much each piece of luggage weighed, and she made sure that the proper tags were tied to the handles. As the suitcases joggled down the moving platform, she followed them with her eyes until they were out of sight. Then she inquired of the ticket girl if there were toilets and ice water on the plane.

  “Is there someone there to pick them up?” asked the girl behind the counter.

  “My father,” Cynthia said.

  The girl behind the counter smiled her girl-behind-the-counter smile. “All right then,” she said, and told us which gate the plane would leave from.

  In the time that remained I took Mark to the terminal bathroom, where, turning to ask me, “Hey, who owns us?” he managed to pee all over my cuff. When we came out Martha and Cynthia were standing at the newspaper stand, flipping through magazines. The angle of their heads, the way they supported themselves on their legs and moved their arms, would have indicated to anybody that they were mother and daughter. Neither of them was reading or even looking at the pictures. As I approached, Cynthia reached into her little red purse and asked the newsdealer for a copy of Life. She paid for it with a handful of pennies of her own, and it was then that I saw Martha’s composure weaken.

  “I have to sit over the wing,” Cynthia told me as we started down the corridor to the departure gate. “I get sick any place else.”

  “I thought you never flew before.”

  “I know I’ll get sick any place else,” she said, and she ran ahead of us, catching up to her brother, who was skipping down to the gate, handsome in his new hat, coat, and suit sent from Lord & Taylor’s in New York.

  On the plane I had to ask several people if they would move so that Cynthia would have a place over the wing. Markie slid in beside her and immediately grabbed all the paraphernalia in the pocket before him; most of it fell to the floor. He waved the paper bag up toward Martha.

  “A bag,” he said.

  Cynthia took it from his hand and returned it to the slot. A blond stewardess—running, it appeared, for number-one charmer of the airways—gave us a look at all her teeth. “Everything hunky-dory up here?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I’m afraid you folks will have to be going now,” she said.

  But at this point Martha pushed past her—she had been standing aside till then, letting me do what had to be done. When she bent down across the children the jacket of her suit hiked up, showing where her slip was weakening at the seam. She had put on six or seven pounds in the last month; she was big, and not very pretty. “Goodbye, babies. Now, you write letters, hear? You’ve got the stamps in your suitcase and all the envelopes are addressed. You just write the letters, all right? And take care of your brother, Cyn. You listen to Cynthia, Mark. Be nice to each other, all right?”

  “We’re nice to each other,” Cynthia insisted.

  “I know,” Martha said, kissing them both. She turned, and without even a glance at me, left the plane.

  I leaned down one last time, and Cynthia asked if I was going to marry Martha.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I’m glad we two became friends, Cynthia.”

  She toughened instantly. “I’m always friends.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark. Be a good boy. Send me a card from the Statue of Liberty.”

  Some connection was made. “Coney Island!” Markie shouted, and I started down the aisle of the plane. The blond stewardess said to me, “We’ll take extra good care of them, you bet.”

  Minutes later we watched the plane taxi up the field, and then it was aloft, without incident. Martha said that she would just as soon not go right back to the apartment, and so we took a long ride that afternoon, all the way out to Evanston to look at the big trees and the pretty houses. Finally it was dark and we had to go home.

  Five

  Children and Men

  1

  Of course he had been miserable. Between the pretension and the fact, what’s invented and what’s given, stands one’s own tortured soul. Paul Herz had been pretending all these awful years that he was of another order of men. It occurred to him now—as an icicle occurs to a branch, after a cold hard night of endless dripping—that, no, he was not a man of feeling; it occurred to him that if he was anything at all it was a man of duty. And that when his two selves had become confused—one self, one invention—when he had felt it his duty to be feeling, that then his heart had been a stone, and his will, instead of turning out toward action, had remained a presence in his body, a concrete setting for the rock of his heart. It all led to a very heavy sense of self—an actual sensation of these last years—to a weird textual consciousness of what stood between him and others, a weighted-down feeling under the burden of underwear, tie, shirt, jacket, and coat; a sense of the volume of air itself.

  Nowhere was it worse than in bed with his wife; paradoxically, undressed was worse than dressed, by a long shot. Beneath the sheets he was made particularly aware of the heaviness, the brutal materiality of his own body; his little fingers and toes, all the hard extremities of his body, were like little steel caps. The dancer has a sense of flow into the world—he felt blunt. The only hard extremity in which he felt soft was his penis. Though it rose on occasion to duty’s call, and on rarer occasion to feeling’s provocation, for the most part it seemed to have retired from active life. He might almost have forgotten about it had he not had reason (getting in and out of bed each day with a woman) to think about it so much. In adolescence, of course, one of his burdens had been his erection; it had seemed to him his cross to bear. Getting off buses he had tried slouching; along the corridors at school he had covered himself with his three-ring notebook; at the urinal, one out of two t
imes he was peeing up in the air. But now at twenty-seven, in a state apparently of hormonal balance, or loss, he was in need of some stimulant. For a moment in his seat in the dark coach, he thought about getting up and going into the rocking bathroom at the end of the car and stimulating himself. It was not simply the movement of the train that suggested the idea; he had entertained it, and succumbed to it, in the past, at home when Libby was out; there had even been times with Libby sleeping in the other room. It was not so much an act of defiance, or spite, or even perversion, as of conviction: I am a man yet. But afterwards it was not usually that of which he was convinced; afterwards it was as though the milk of life itself had drained out of him, and he slumped onto the toilet seat a hollow thing, as though if he were to crack a bone upon the bathroom tile, the dull ringing of his body would reverberate through the house, even to the ears of his wife.

  The train was dragging to a stop. Outside it was black and beginning to rain; they were somewhere in Ohio. Please Do Not Masturbate While Train Is In Station. He responded to neither duty nor feeling, just common sense. There was nothing to be gained by making a bad thing worse. No? Then why was he headed East?

  The telegram had come to him at the University. He had put it in his pocket and gone about his business, which, that afternoon, was to journey down to LaSalle Street and talk to the lawyer. He had given Jaffe a check for thirty-six dollars, covering three visits that the girl had made to the obstetrician. Of course, had it been Libby’s own pregnancy there would have been Blue Cross and Blue Shield to cover expenses; now, following their uninsured crisis in Pennsylvania, he was insured to the teeth—but now it was not his wife’s hospital bills he was going to have to pay. None of their dealings with doctors had ever come under normal headings anyway, items the insurance companies recognized. But then little in his life had come under normal headings: abortion, adoption, familial excommunication … Still, he had only recently been introduced to Jaffe and he did not want to appear unappreciative, or self-pitying. He had handed over the money, smiling, and Jaffe had assured him that the obstetrician had assured Jaffe that it was a perfectly normal pregnancy. But if it’s a normal pregnancy keep smiling, this is for free why must she go to see him so often? She’s nervous, Jaffe answered impatient with me? Well, it’s my money, it’ll be my baby she needs reassuring, that’s all. Excuse me, Paul, I’ve got a client waiting I’m a client, I came all the way down here, I’m nervous, I need reassuring—hey, how much more is this going to cost—Thank you, Sid, thanks for everything something for nothing, be nice, you pauper, we appreciate, we appreciate, I’m deeply appreciative get out, he’s got a client waiting, smile and go home.