by Philip Roth
“She’s fine,” Jaffe said. “She’ll just go home.”
But Paul was still listening, apparently to hear what he had to do; it did not quite satisfy him, it seemed, that he had to do nothing.
Jaffe said again, almost helplessly, “And that’ll be that.”
A silence began to develop once more, and I rushed to fill it. “I’ll take care of her, Paul. Everything will be all right.”
“Oh,” he said, looking up at me. He slid his hand down into his trouser pocket, in a gesture almost of panic, and withdrew his wallet. He removed a check from the billfold section, examined it, and then handed it to me. I did not look at the figures as I put it in my pocket.
“Don’t lose it,” Libby said, pointing at my pocket.
I shook my head. “I won’t.”
Jaffe tried to laugh. “I guess we’ve all got Libby’s shakes.”
“I guess so,” Paul said. “Libby included.” He took one of his wife’s hands, and he too worked up a smile.
“Oh, my hands are just freezing though,” she said.
“Baloney,” Sid said.
Libby extended one hand over the seat. “Feel.”
Sid took it. “What are you talking about? They’re warm as toast. Here,” and he put Libby’s hand in mine.
“As cold toast,” I said, and everyone volunteered a little laugh, while Libby’s hands were held, one by her husband, one by me. Until I let the hand go, she was not very relaxed, but sat stiffly as though a Current were being conducted through her.
“Let’s go,” Sid said, and though his words were those of the gallant soldier leading his men over the top, he seemed, like the rest of us, to have been overcome by this last strong wave of confusion.
In front of the hospital was a row of yellow and black taxis in which drivers sat, reading newspapers. Sid said, “I’ll meet you right down here,” and went off to get a cab.
At the reception desk inside the lobby I asked for a pass to go up to the maternity ward. Then I went to the cashier’s counter and paid Theresa’s bill with the check that Paul had given to me.
The sister behind the desk asked, “Is this you, sir?”
“No.”
“Who is Mr. Paul Herz?”
“He’s a friend of the patient’s.” I did not know whether to refer to her as Miss Haug or Mrs. Haug. I could have simply said Theresa Haug, but that did not occur to me.
“And you are?” she asked.
Had Jaffe told me how to identify myself? Had I not been listening, or hadn’t we really talked everything over—or didn’t it matter, one way or the other? He had probably imagined that I could figure some things out for myself. What I did remember, of course, was Sid telling all of us that it was best for the hospital to know nothing of the adoption; should they find out the exact circumstances, they would most certainly bring pressure upon Theresa to give up the child to a Catholic family, or even to an orphanage. Jaffe had instructed Theresa herself not to discuss the future of the child with anyone in the hospital. If asked, she was simply to say that the infant would be raised by her own mother and father in Kentucky.
For a moment I stood silently before the nun, knowing that if there was one thing I didn’t want to do, it was to go out to the car and bring in Paul to verify his check.
“You see,” I said to the sister, as graciously as I could, “it’s not my check.”
“I understand. I wanted to know your relationship to Miss Haug.”
“I’m her brother,” I said.
After a second she said, “Thank you, sir.” She handed me the receipt. Theresa’s stay at the hospital had cost Paul $327.60. That did not include the money he had already given her to cover the prenatal checkups and her expenses during the last two months when she had been unable to work; nor did it include the money she was to get for the next two weeks while she recuperated. As I left the cashier’s counter, the only person I could think to hate was John Spigliano, who, though he had finally agreed in the Executive Committee to hire Paul for another year, had vetoed a raise for him on the grounds that Paul still had not finished his Ph.D. Walking to the elevator, I felt a disgust for him such as one feels for a scapegoat, or surrogate. One knows better but keeps hating anyway.
I took the Up elevator in the company of two young priests and a doctor who was wearing a blue surgery uniform. In soft voices they exchanged some words about a patient who was either dying or dead. When I stepped off into the corridor that led to the maternity ward, one of the priests looked up at me and smiled.
The sister behind the desk at the entrance to the ward took my pass card and led me down the aisle, between rows of beds, all white and fresh-looking. We stopped a few beds short of a large window through which the sunlight flowed. Theresa was sitting on her bed, wearing a bright-colored print dress which was decorated with pictures of burros and musical instruments and palm trees and the maps of certain South American countries. A little brown suitcase with a circular sticker that said “Carlsbad Caverns” was on the floor. When she saw me, she opened her mouth very wide, and then jumped off the bed. There was a comb in her hand, and even as she threw her arms around me, I caught the glint of a curler in her orange hair.
“You’re early—” I felt Theresa’s palms against my back, not her fingers themselves; then I smelled her nail polish. I proceeded to place my arms around her, for I realized we were being watched—which was what Theresa realized too.
“Hi. Hello,” I said. In the bed just beyond Theresa’s, a little woman with a big jaw and heavy bags under her eyes was giving me a friendly grin. I smiled back.
“Well …” I said, and finally Theresa stepped away. Now I smiled at her too. “You look fine,” I said, and even while I spoke I felt the presence of the nun who had accompanied me down the corridor; Theresa’s glance kept darting over my shoulder, and finally I turned to the sister. Since I had gotten by with smiles so far, I smiled at her too. She did not take to it, however. She was a woman with striking blue eyes, who was made less than handsome by a skin eruption that ran around the edge of her cowl and fringed her face. It was clear that she disapproved, but it was not clear as yet of what. I could not tell how old or young she was.
“I’ll bring the baby,” the sister said to me. “I’ll wait by the elevator.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We’d appreciate it.”
“Thank you,” said Theresa, with both fear and devotion.
I picked up Theresa’s suitcase. The woman with the baggy eyes turned on her elbow and said to me, “How was your trip?”
“Oh,” I said, “fine.”
“I’ll bet you were surprised,” she said.
“This is Mrs. Butterworth,” Theresa said. “This is her seventh.”
“Eighth,” said Mrs. Butterworth.
“Imagine,” Theresa said.
I offered my congratulations.
“Oh I’m used to it,” Mrs. Butterworth told me. “It’s you two needs congratulating.”
Theresa took my hand, and I felt some of her nail polish rubbing off on me. The hand was just about as cold as Libby’s had been in the car. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“We live out here on the west side, right off Archer,” Mrs. Butterworth said. “You know where that is?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Well, you want to take a ride out on Sunday, why you just drive right out. I gave her the address. You got it, don’t you, honey?”
“Uh-huh,” Theresa said; she picked up her purse from the bed and waved it at her friend, indicating, I suppose, that the Butterworth address was safely locked away. It was the same plastic bag she’d been carrying that night I had met her, back in the winter.
“I think we’d better be going,” I said.
“You kids take it easy now,” Mrs. Butterworth called.
We started down the aisle of the ward, Theresa still with one metal curler in her hair which she must have forgotten about in the tension and excitement of leaving. Some of the
women who were awake sat up in their beds and said goodbye. Theresa took hold of my arm and moved between the beds, saying goodbye and so long and see ya. At the end of the corridor I saw the nun holding a bundle in her arms. She pushed the elevator buzzer and we all stepped in. The sister did not offer to show me the baby’s face within the blankets, and I did not ask to see it.
On the way down Theresa looked up at me. I tried to smile again, but she didn’t have it in her to smile back.
At the main floor the nun accompanied us to the front door. A taxi immediately swung up the crescent drive; I saw first the face of the driver, a Negro, and then Sid in the back seat.
We stood out in front of the new building, where the four nuns had been standing when Sid had driven by earlier. As yet Theresa had looked neither at the sister nor at the child; either she looked at me or at no one.
I turned to the nun. “Fine,” I said. “Thank you.”
She only stared with her very severe eyes.
“May I have it, please?” I asked. Theresa looked straight ahead, as though she were not with us. Down below, the back door of the taxi opened.
I could see that the nun was holding her teeth together; finally she gave me the baby, then turned and went back into the hospital. I did not know how much, or what, Theresa had told her.
“Right down there,” I said to Theresa. “Mr. Jaffe’s in the taxi.”
She preceded me down the stairs, and I realized how strange it must look for me to be carrying the baby and Theresa to be carrying her little suitcase. But she was well ahead of me—I was making my way down like an old man, one step at a time—and there was nothing to be done about it. I looked into the blankets now, to be sure there really was a baby there, and of course there really was. All of a sudden I found myself grinning euphorically; everything was going as it should. It even seemed more sensible that it was me who was carrying the baby, not Theresa.
Down below, Sid stepped out of the cab and Theresa got in. Then he ran around the back of the cab and went in the other door. On my side the door remained ajar, and I stepped into the cab at last, easing myself and the baby through, and then I was seated beside Theresa. When I looked back to where I had begun my journey, I saw a nun standing on the top step. Suddenly she threw us a kiss—she must have thought we were another party. I smiled at her through the window. Within the blanket I felt the baby stir.
“All right,” Sid said to the driver. As we started down the entryway, Theresa sighed. It was over.
“Well, how are you feeling?” Sid said to her. I saw that he had taken her hand and was patting it. Nail polish was sticking to everyone’s hand now; that alone seemed to be preventing things from being absolutely perfect. I knew the thought to be an irrational one even as it passed through my mind, and yet it rather set me on edge again. After all, the girl had put the polish on for me.
“I feel fine, Mr. Jaffe. I—”
The taxi stopped, swaying us all forward. Without turning, the driver reached around with his left arm and opened the door on Sid’s side; we were almost directly across the street from Sid’s four-door automobile. As planned, I handed the baby to Sid; I wondered why we had not arranged for the two of us to sit side by side, so that we would not have to pass the bundle over Theresa. Jaffe stepped out of the car and then the driver reached around again and closed the door. It all happened very quickly.
“What …” Theresa said feebly. She looked at me and then out the window to follow Sid crossing the street. He stepped into the car across the way and Theresa leaned even further across me; evidently she wanted to see whom he was handing the baby to. Then she turned back to me, stunned, but not crying.
“Do you feel all right?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” Looking down, she saw the nail polish on my jacket and on both our hands.
“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s nothing at all.”
The driver sat with his large hands on the wheel, while the motor ran and the meter ticked.
“But you feel all right?” I asked.
She dropped her fingers limply into her lap. “Sister Mary Frances is very strict,” she said.
“That’s all over.”
“I don’t think she liked that I said I was married.”
“Well, that was silly of her.”
“I said the baby was in the incubator. I said you were away on business—”
“That’s all right, Theresa.”
“Otherwise,” the girl said, looking down still at her hands, “who would I have had to talk to?”
The driver was looking at us now in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t know what more to say. “Do you have any pains? Anything at all?”
After considering an answer for a while, she said, “Uh-uh. No.”
I reached into my wallet and took out a five-dollar bill which I handed across to the driver. On the other side of the street I heard Jaffe’s car start up.
“Mr. Jaffe gave you the money, didn’t he? For the next couple of weeks?”
She whispered so the driver would not hear. “Yes.”
“Okay then.”
“… Mr. Wallace?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to take me home?”
“The driver will take you home, Theresa. Right to the door. Everything’s going to be all right.”
She never gave me an answer.
I said to the driver, hesitating. “Would you help her into the house?”
“Yes, sir.”
For lack of anything more I could think to do, I reached into my wallet and handed the fellow another dollar.
Just before I left the cab I said, “You’ve been very brave, Theresa. Good luck to you,” and then I was headed across the street. I saw that in the other car Jaffe’s head was turned and he was speaking to the Herzes. On the street, I turned back; there was Theresa’s face in the taxi window. She was saying something—she seemed to be shouting something. I thought the worst: she is going to push the door open, she is going to come running across the street to demand her child back. In fact, her window did begin to roll down, and I heard, or imagined I heard her calling my name. My first name. I did not remain on the street to find out. I moved around the back of Jaffe’s car, opened the door and slid in beside him just as the automobile was beginning to move. When Jaffe looked over at me I saw that he was startled. I wondered if I had nail polish on my face, if I looked as though I were bleeding—if he thought that there had been some violence between Theresa and myself. Then I realized that he had not been waiting for me. But he said nothing, and we drove away.
In the back seat Libby had begun to talk softly to the baby. It sounded as though she were doing what she thought she was supposed to be doing, and it added a final pathetic note to the day’s dealings. And yet, despite Libby’s theatrics, despite the misunderstanding between Jaffe and myself, I knew that a series of events in which I had taken a hand had at last come to a happy ending. I turned to the back seat to appreciate the tableau of baby, mother, and father, but what I saw was out beyond the rear window: Theresa’s taxi moving off in the opposite direction. I thought of the girl going back to Gary alone, and 1 knew that nothing had really ended. In not staying with her I had made another mistake.
No, yes, yes, no, no, yes … on to infinity. Had I remained in the cab, would she not have wanted me to accompany her into her little room? And once in the room, would that have been enough? Would that have been anything? If I was not to tease, or to make false promises, or to dangle before her the hope of a better or a different future, what else could I do about Theresa Haug’s suffering except turn my back on it?
At the Herzes we all went upstairs and watched as Libby gently laid Rachel in her crib, which had been set up in the room that had been Paul’s study. Watching Libby bend across the brand new crib, Paul was near tears. Finally he went off to the bathroom, so that I did not get a chance to say goodbye to him. When we left, his tear-filled wife kissed both Sid and me.
When I answered him, I tried to find some comfort in the fact that I had learned something; I tried to engage Jaffe’s eye and let him know that I believed I meant what I was saying, but he was only waiting for me to get out of the car. “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t see that it made much sense.”
3
It was easier than it should have been for Dr. Wallach to imagine an old age other than this one. He set an elbow onto the sand, leaned back, and little by little he was able to bring his breathing under control. He felt encouraged by the sun’s ability to dry the water on his skin, and soon his chest was moving up and down at its normal speed. He slapped his belly where it was still flat and hard; he made a fist, one hand, then the other. He had taken care of this small body of his, he had exercised it daily and fed it upon foods rich in protein and vitamins; he may have been the victim of a fad or two, but at least he had gotten through life on a minimum of fried foods. Looking down at himself in a bathing suit, he did not experience the repugnance or shame that another man sixty years of age might have felt. He looked as he had always hoped and expected he would; it was not the appearance that he could imagine to be different, it was the circumstances.
Fifty feet out from the beach, his only child continued to swim back and forth through the surf. Now and then a wave rolled in to cover the moving form, but then an arm glistened, that shock of brown hair broke the surface, and he could follow again the progress of his son, cutting effortlessly through the water. Yes, he could imagine it all to have turned out another way. He could imagine that when Gabe had returned from the Army, he had moved back into his old room in the Central Park West apartment; he could imagine that the two of them had taken up a calm and amiable life together. Gabe could have done graduate work at Columbia, and then there would have been someone with whom Dr. Wallach could have eaten his dinner in the evening and discussed the Times in the morning, someone with whom he could have played tennis at the club and with whom he might have gone for pleasant walks in the park when the weather was right. Someone he loved.
