Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Cramped in the bushes, peering between the iron pickets, he heard the word trouble thumping away in his head. In the distance, midway between the fence and the railroad tracks that bound the cemetery at the far side, he saw the mourners standing in the sunlight. The day kept getting bluer and bluer, and the sun rose and rose, and around him the gravestones glittered. Behind was a long line of automobiles, none of which he recognized. Wasn’t it his father being buried? Was he hiding needlessly? But time had passed—of course, everyone owned a new car. He looked back into the light. Where was the coffin? Was it over—the old man covered up? Then chapter one was history.

  He tried to feel relief. He rose on stiffened legs, telling himself he would now start fresh. But inside the cemetery men were taking the arms of the women and helping them along. He couldn’t be sure; were these his relatives? He edged along the fence, holding branches down so they would not flick back at him. He had to see just one pair of familiar eyes, and then he’d make a break for it, off and away into his new life. However, all the men were wearing hats and all the women holding handkerchiefs to their faces, and what made recognition even more difficult was the brightness, the luminosity of the day—

  He was out in the open. Where was the fence? Gone! Weaving along the paths, swaying around swollen burial plots, they were headed his way. And he was in the gateway. Almost at his back—the whiff first, then the sad sight—was a hearse full of flowers. A death had taken place. The thought penetrated into him all the way.

  There were several choices open to Paul that moment; it was not because all the paths of escape were blocked that, instead of moving out, he moved in. He could have run away, or simply walked away, but he moved in because in was the direction of his life. In and in and in, past all kinds of tombstones, fancy ones, plain ones, old ones, past memorials to cherished mothers and beloved fathers, faithful husbands and dutiful wives, and even little children, whose dates told the whole miserable story. Levine’s youngster, 1900–1907. Rappaport’s child, 1926-1931. Abraham’s child, 1929-1940. Born the same year as Paul. Drowned? Run over? Meningitis?

  Dates. Names. Flowers. Above, the sun. All came at him with sharpness and clarity. He saw now where he had misread. Not Abrahams. Abrams. Abraham’s child was Isaac. Here were interred the bones of Abrams, his contemporary. The thought seized him. He moved in and in, and then up ahead he saw a figure moving out and out, toward him. But his mind was occupied with the mystery of Abrams’ death and his own survival. Little Abrams catching spinal meningitis or diphtheria, himself skinning through on only German measles. Lucky him. Unlucky Abrams. Isaac, he thought … Every gravestone that he saw had a date on the right to go with the date on the left. That fact caused his knees to shake. Justice, will, order, change—the words whistled by him, windless as the day was, like spirits moving off in the opposite direction. Dates. Names. Flowers. Sky. Only facts of history and of nature had meaning. The rest was invention.

  So in he moved, in, and then he saw the faces. Yes, there that wicked mouth on his father’s sister, his. Aunt Gertie’s mouth. There a pair of sad blue eyes, more blue than sad: his simpleton cousin, the all-Brooklyn basketball star Harvey. The black hair of his beautiful cousin Clare. The soft hands of his Uncle Jerry. There in circles of fat, Maury; in black beside him, Doris. They were all clear to him; but at the center, a trick of the atmosphere, or of his senses, there was a haze, just a haze rushing toward him. He heard a cry—his name! Oh, and Asher. There was Asher. And what did Asher understand of anything? What had he understood himself? Who was the fellow in the black coat? Lichtman, who would not marry him to Libby? Who was—

  No one moved, just himself, and what rushed to meet him: a figure in black. And now at last he saw who that was too, yes, and now he closed his eyes and opened his arms and what he saw next was his life—he saw it for the sacrifice that it was. Isaac under the knife, Abraham wielding it. Both! While his mother kissed his neck and moaned his name, he saw his place in the world. Yes. And the world itself—without admiration, without pity. Yes! Oh yes! What he saw filled him for a moment with strength. Not that in a sweep of forgiving he could kiss that face that now kissed him; it was not that which he had seen. He kissed nothing—only held out his arms, open, and stood still at last, momentarily at rest in the center of the storm through which he had been traveling all these years. For his truth was revealed to him, his final premise melted away. What he had taken for order was chaos. Justice was illusion. Abraham and Isaac were one. His eyes opened, and in the midst of those faces—the faces of his dream, the faces of the bums, all the faces that had forever encircled him—he felt no humiliation and no shame. Their eyes no longer overpowered him. He felt himself under a wider beam.

  2

  Usually that summer we swam off the rocks at Fifty-fifth Street. We became friendly with other couples—some married, some like ourselves—and spent long Saturdays and Sundays on the tiers of rock that led down to cool Lake Michigan, talking and sunning and offering around sandwiches and white wine out of our straw hamper. I had bought the picnic hamper at Abercrombie’s as a gift for Martha, a commemoration of the Fourth of July, our first time in bathing suits together, and certainly a milestone for any American boy and his American girl.

  Martha was employed now at the University as secretary to Claude Delsey, the director of the summer quarter, and, at last, had weekends off and nights free. Some months earlier she had wrapped her two waitress uniforms in brown paper, tied the package with a string and given it to her cleaning lady, Annie LaSmith. Then, with her first University pay check in her purse, she had gone off to Marshall Fields and bought three summer dresses to wear to the office: one lavender, one pale blue, and the third, my favorite, an apricot color, with a wide square neck and a pleated skirt. The following week she bought shoes, two strands of pearls, and a pair of white gloves; and then one day when Delsey was out of town, she took a few hours off in the afternoon and went up to the Near North Side, from which she returned with her hair whirled up in an intricate and elegant coiffure. She looked quite stunning, even if not entirely like herself, but in bed that night she had to wear a silk stocking over her head for protection. I complained that her headpiece had a debilitating effect upon my passions, but she said that passion was out of the question anyway—she had to lie perfectly still. Fortunately, the hairdo was beginning to sag the next day at breakfast, by lunch-time was lopsided, and by dinner beyond repair; a little after midnight she crawled in close beside me again, bareheaded.

  I suppose there were times when she was really very happy, and when our life together would have seemed, to someone strolling beneath our open window on a summer night, peaceful and comfortable and serene: Martha, in shorts and a sleeveless blouse, stretched out on the sofa drinking iced coffee and reading a book; I in the chair across from her, with a yellow pad on my knee, scribbling notes for an American literature course I was to teach in the fall … It was a pleasant July, especially for Chicago. Whenever it threatened to turn muggy and hot, the clouds would pile up at dinnertime and a thunderstorm would clear the air and leave the city smelling like the country, and the streets perfect for a long walk over to the campus. There, with the trees damp and full and glittering in the early moonlight, the only sound was the comforting one of the night watchman going around and shaking the handles on the doors of the empty buildings. “In the fall I think I’m going to take a course,” Martha told me. “Delsey said it’s okay with him.” “What course?” I asked. “I’m not sure yet. I went over to the Administration Building and checked—if I take one course a quarter for the next two years I can get my B.A.” “Then what?” I asked. “Then,” she said, “I’ll have it.”

  On some nights the electrical storm did not come until very late, sometimes not till the early hours of the morning. Then the thunder, rumbling in and breaking over the city, would awaken the two of us, and we would lie under our thin sheet, silent but quite awake. Martha would reach over and flick the radio on, and then light a ciga
rette, while in the dark we listened to the dance music which crackled from time to time with the storm. When the cigarette had been smoked all the way down and the thunder had moved from over our heads, we would roll our different ways and go back to sleep.

  The weekends, however, were all blue skies and sunshine, and out on the rocks we must surely have looked as cheery as the next couple. We never missed a Saturday or a Sunday; we were there by eleven in the morning, and even at sundown, with half our newspapers blown away and our books still unopened, with a hamper full of cookie crumbs and wax paper and banana skins, we generally stayed on, after the others had drifted home, to watch the rosy dusk move in over the lake. Martha was particular during these months never to allow herself to feel rushed about anything; she stayed where she felt like staying just as long as she felt like staying there—except, of course, on those Sunday nights when we packed up early and were home and by the telephone promptly at six. For it was at six, twice a month, that she placed her call to Long Island, where Cynthia and Markie were spending their summer. And late on those Sunday afternoons there would invariably be a moment—I am pulling Martha by the hand up out of the water, I am just about to pour wine into her cup—when by the lake front it would become for us as it was in bed on those nights we were awakened by the thunder: What I feel Martha feeling toward me, what I know myself to be feeling toward her, is hate.

  On the last Saturday of July I received a letter from my father telling me that he and Fay Silberman had set a date for their wedding. It was not to be until Christmas, but Mrs. Silberman was going off in September to visit her children in California, and both the affianced had agreed that she should give some definite word to her sons and daughters-in-law out on the west coast, for they would have to begin to make plans about what to do with their children when they came East in December for the wedding. I read the letter several times that morning, and carried it in my trouser pocket when Martha and I went down to the lake. That evening, when I slipped my trousers on over my bathing suit, I took the letter out and read it again. This time I could not manage to be merely resigned; resignation became gloom.

  “Will it be large and fancy?” Martha asked.

  “I suppose just the family. Her children and me. He doesn’t really say.”

  “Well, Christmas is a long way off.”

  “Still, it sounds definite.” I looked back to the letter for some reason my father might have given to explain having decided now for Christmas—a reason, that is, other than Mrs. Silberman’s wanting to give her family plenty of time to ready baby-sitters. But there were no reasons, only more news. “He’s going to spend August out at her summer place, he says.”

  “You think that’s what he’s after—summer vacations?”

  “I think he’s marrying her because, one, she’s pressing him, and two, he’s lonely and doesn’t know what else he can do. But I know he’s been putting it off. They’ve been engaged since last Thanksgiving. He’s not sure himself.”

  “Where’s her summer place?”

  I turned to the letter again. For all my readings of it, it was amazing how few of the words written in that large open hand I could manage to keep in mind. “East Hampton. He says I’m invited too. To get to know her.”

  Martha was putting on her shorts over her white suit. It was not until she had zipped up the side and fastened the button that she turned back to me. “Why don’t you go?”

  I answered as casually as she had asked. “Because I’m here.”

  “I thought you might want to get away for a while, that’s all.”

  Earlier in the afternoon, Martha’s lightheartedness had amused both Bill Lake and Frank Tozier, who, having stopped to visit for a few minutes, had wound up camped on our blanket for several hours, eating out of our basket. Now what could be seen of the lightheartedness was only the residue—the irritating part of the frivolity, the unconvincing part of the offhandedness. What with still trying to comprehend my father’s decision, I myself had no reserves of patience and sense, and I said, “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She put a towel over her shoulders and sat down and looked out across the lake where a last water-skier was flying over the surface. “I just thought that if you wanted to see your father, you should certainly feel that you can.”

  “Well, I feel that I can, if I want to.”

  “What about Theresa’s baby?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t you have to wait for it to come?”

  “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything, Martha. Did I seem to you to express a desire to go East and have a talk with my father? I didn’t mean to. What would I say? What is there to say? Last November he bought her a nice big ring and now they’ve set the date, and now he’s going out to the seashore with her. He’s entitled to his pleasures, if those are what he thinks they are.”

  She took her watch from her pocket and when she put it on her wrist, I saw her look at the time.

  “Would you like to leave?” I asked.

  “… No. It’s lovely now.”

  “Martha, are you asking me why I don’t go East, why I don’t do something about him?”

  “No.”

  “Because there’s nothing to do.”

  “All I meant to say,” she said, smiling, “is that if you want to see your father, or, I don’t know, visit anybody, I don’t want you to think that you’re tied down here. That’s all. If something were to come up—”

  “You want me to go somewhere?”

  “That isn’t what I said.”

  “Then what’s depressing you?”

  “Your father’s setting the date, I suppose. I suppose I’m only sharing your feelings.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and what more?”

  “Nothing.” She smiled again, then shrugged. “1 just felt like calling the kids. I don’t any more.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ll go home, you can call them.” The idea gave me my first real lift in hours.

  “It’s not Sunday.”

  “What’s the difference? It’s getting chilly here anyway.”

  “I think I’d rather stay.”

  “All right. We’ll stay.” I put the letter back into my pocket; tonight or tomorrow I would have to write some sort of answer—send my congratulations, my approval, my blessings. The hell with it.

  A few seconds passed before I realized that I had spoken those last few words out loud. Martha leaned her head back on the rocks so that her loose hair was spread around her. I saw her mouth move and barely restrained myself from reaching out and placing my hand across it. I did not care to be told again that I had her permission to go East if I so desired.

  She said, “Is East Hampton on Long Island?”

  “Yes.”

  “Near Springs?”

  “Springs is out there too, I think.” Springs was the name of the town to which she placed her phone calls twice a month. “I don’t know exactly where. Do you have any idea how far out it is?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I think I have a New York map in the car.”

  “It’s not important,” she said.

  “Martha, if you want to call tonight, why don’t you?”

  She answered sharply. “Because I don’t want to!”

  “It was simply a suggestion,” I said.

  She rose then, picked up the comb that was on the blanket, and started off down along the rocks. She was pulling the comb absent-mindedly through her hair as she disappeared around the edge of the cove. A little time passed, and then she was back.

  She dropped the comb onto my toes. “I’m not going to give in to myself. Okay?”

  “At the risk of your getting angry again, I don’t think you should think of it as giving in to yourself.”

  “Don’t you?” she asked dubiously.

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, kneeling beside me, “I’m just suddenly having a bad day.” She took my hand. />
  “I shouldn’t have brought out that letter half a dozen times either. I depressed everybody.”

  “You have a right to your troubles.”

  “They’re not even new troubles—they’re old ones. Whatever could have been done had to have been done a long time ago. And I don’t even know what that was. The hell with it.”

  “You said that already.”

  “What is it, Martha? I thought you were happy today. You told all those jokes, you were even nice and loud, sweetheart—”

  “I was. Happy, I mean. I am happy. I just thought before that today was Sunday, and then I realized it’s only Saturday.”

  “There’s no law that says you can only dial New York on Sundays.”

  “There is,” she said. “I made it.”

  If that was the way she wanted it, that’s the way it would have to be. But I could not escape feeling that if she did call her children, we might have a more pleasant evening in store for us. Though that was to reason directly in the face of past experience—whenever Martha put the phone back down on the hook, it took us some time before we could look each other in the eye. “Well,” I said, feeling nagged at and naggy, “Sunday’s tomorrow anyway.”

  “Right. I’ll call then.”

  But she became bluer and bluer. “Should I get the map?” I asked. “Do you want just to see how far Springs is from East Hampton—?”

  “Let’s sit here and enjoy the view.”