Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Gabe was saying, “I think it’s ‘The child is the father of the man ’—but I know what you mean.”

  It did not help the doctor’s condition any to know that his son now felt the need to be kind to him. “I believe in the depth of belief,” Dr. Wallach said, raising his voice. “If the other fellow’s got a belief, I honor that belief. We have to have more respect for the other fellow’s wish; he wants what he believes in. Who am I to tell him differently?”

  “You’d let the child die?” Gabe asked.

  “Absolutely!” He had not felt so sure before as he did now.

  “Well,” Gabe said, “I don’t know …”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know if you really would do it, faced with the situation.”

  “Then you don’t know me.”

  Apparently no one could think of what to say next. Dr. Wallach piled some silverware on his plate; then he turned and asked Fay her opinion. “Go ahead,” he said, “this is still a discussion as far as I’m concerned, not a dispute.”

  She put out her cigarette in the ash tray. The grainy look around her dark eyes gave her an air of knowingness—until she spoke. “This is certainly a case of morals,” she said, and the doctor heard his own words once again. “Morals certainly enters into it …”

  “Exactly,” he said, and quickly he turned to his son. “What do I seem to you here, Gabe, too—too Nietzschean?”

  “No, no, I don’t think that.”

  “I’m telling you, if the chips were down, if I had been this poor fellow in Texas, that’s what I would have done.”

  Gabe seemed at last to have run out of patience. “Why? So you wouldn’t lose your license?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Then it’s still a mystery to me.”

  “You believe I’d do it though?”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose I do.”

  “All right, all right. The why, I’ll grant you, is the crux all right.”

  Mrs. Silberman flicked open the initialed gold case that had been her engagement present, and put a new cigarette into her holder. Since she had stopped drinking, she smoked all the time. Did that serve to blur the image of her first husband too? If it was such a difficult image to blur, if it wouldn’t just stay blurred, then why was she even thinking of another man? Was he simply to be a convenience?

  “All right, why then?” Gabe asked.

  “Because,” said Dr. Wallach, his thoughts turning with difficulty back to the issue at hand, “I respect people.”

  Mrs. Silberman momentarily withdrew the match from the end of the cigarette. “Mordecai loves people,” she said, then she held very steady while she lit her cigarette.

  “And I don’t?”

  Dr. Wallach did not know to whom Gabe had directed the question. Immediately he said, “Well, you don’t respect the parents to disobey their wish that way.”

  “I respect the child,” Gabe said.

  The doctor moved one finger around in a circle just in front of his chin; he circled, he circled, then he saw the light. “Ah that’s something, that’s curious.” He turned to his fiancée. “You see that? That’s identification that I was telling you about. You see, he’s never been a parent, so he can’t understand the parent’s position. But what has he been? What?”

  Either she did not know, or out of respect was waiting for him to say it.

  “A child,” he announced. “So he takes the child’s side in this thing.”

  “I see,” Fay said.

  “Wait a minute,” Gabe said, “things are getting confused here. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I meant I respect the child’s right to live, and not the parent’s desire to kill it. I can’t have any respect for that. If you want to go ahead and be Freudian and pursue this thing all the way down—”

  “Sure, sure, what?—go ahead—” Dr. Wallach said. “What?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You might say that the parents are using what they see as moral and religious reasons for doing away with the child. You see, I don’t know anything about the case”—he motioned toward the floor, where the newspaper was—“the specifics of it, but it’s even possible that for some strange reason they want to kill the child. Look, we can’t begin to—”

  “Now that’s an awful thing to say,” Fay told him, “even in jest. Parents give themselves up for their children. Look at all your father has done for you. Harvard, nice clothes, a car—”

  “No, no,” said Dr. Wallach, silencing her, “let’s hear him. A theory is a theory. I’m very interested in his theories.”

  “It’s not a theory,” Gabe said. “I just want to rule out this identification business. You’re not arguing on the issue then. You’re wanting to argue with me.”

  Dr. Wallach pointed a finger at the boy, as though sharp thinking on his son’s part had caught him out, as though his lapse had been a deliberate point of strategy, a test of the young man’s alertness. “The old ad hominem—right,” he said. “Well, okay, I’ll give him that,” he told Fay.

  “Fine,” Gabe said, and took a deep breath.

  “Then you were saying?” Dr. Wallach asked.

  “I was only asking,” Gabe said, “what right, as a physician, you would have to allow the death of a child, a patient, whose life you could easily save. That’s all, really.”

  “And I told you. People have a firm religious belief, a way of life they cherish, then I leave them alone. I myself am an atheist—”

  Mrs. Silberman bestowed upon him a motherly look.

  “I am, Fay, please, and I have a perfect right to be. The same with these parents. Each man knows what’s best for himself. You’ll get older,” he told Gabe, “you’ll see you can’t rule the world.”

  “Don’t people trick themselves ever?”

  “That’s their business. What looks like a trick to you may not be a trick to them.”

  “Well …” Gabe said, and he stood up.

  “Well what?”

  “Nothing. I just believe you’re talking theoretically. If you pulled a tooth, and the patient was bleeding unduly and a transfusion was necessary—well, you’d give it. At least I think you would.”

  “I would not,” Dr. Wallach said in a loud voice. “I absolutely would not.”

  “Well,” said Gabe, closing his hands slowly, “okay.”

  “You see, this is a perfect example of an inability on your part to recognize somebody’s beliefs. You don’t know why people do what they do, believe me.”

  “True. I simply said that if one were to let somebody die needlessly, that would be wrong.”

  “To you what I do is wrong. Not to me!”

  “I didn’t say you were wrong. I said I felt the position was wrong!”

  “I’m the positon.” Dr. Wallach was trembling. “I have my set of beliefs, you have yours—”

  His son was leaning toward him, his hands on the back of a chair. “Please, I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I guess we just don’t agree about the transfusion. I’m willing to accept that.”

  Fay was trying to absorb herself in smoking, but it wasn’t working. She had gone pale. “Sure, it’s only a game,” she said. “I know people who scream at each other over Scrabble.”

  “It’s not a game.” Dr. Wallach lifted his napkin and threw it on the table. His eyes were burning and he looked at neither of them. “This actually happened … in … in …” He picked a section of the paper off the rug. He cleared his throat; he found it necessary to clear it again. “In Texas. Here.” He handed the paper across to Mrs. Silberman. “There, in black and white, what could happen to any of us. This man is going to lose his license, he can go to jail. It’s a historical fact—go ahead, read it. I didn’t make it up.”

  Mrs. Silberman looked at the paper, then handed it to Gabe.

  Dr. Wallach began stacking the breakfast dishes. “People’s lives, you don’t go fooling in them. You let people be themselves—you can ruin a life like that. Your own mother, on her last nigh
t, that’s what she talked about. That’s what she regretted above anything else. Don’t interfere—”

  He set the dishes down and left the room.

  In a few minutes the door opened and someone walked over to the bed. He did not open his eyes.

  “Mordecai?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I just became overexcited.”

  He felt her sit lightly down beside him. He could sense that she was afraid. She had reason to be. He wanted to open his eyes and tell her that he could not marry her. Youthful and trim as he had tried to keep himself, abreast as he had tried to stay of current affairs, he was an old man and he had had his life. Anna had been more than he could handle or understand, but he had asked her to marry him; maybe that was why he had asked her. He did not know. He had thought at the time and he thought still that he had loved Anna. He could no longer tell; he had never really been good at figuring people out. All he knew now was what he felt, and what he felt was no love for Fay. And no love for his son either. What was the use of loving him any more? He had sat there like a stranger, never once saying the right thing.

  Fay was speaking. “Let him think what he wants, Mordecai.”

  “I’m not telling him what to think.”

  “Everybody’s entitled to his own opinion,” she said. “The individuals involved know what’s best.”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  There was a knock on the door. Fay got up from the bed and opened it a little. Dr. Wallach heard his son ask if everything was all right.

  “He’s resting,” Fay answered. “I think his swim tired him out.”

  “Tell him I’m sorry.”

  “Look, young man, you’re entitled to your opinions.”

  “Please, just tell him that I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”

  She closed the door and came back to the bed. “When they grow up,” she said, “they think they know more than their parents. He says that he’s sorry. Now he says it.”

  “Fay,” Dr. Wallach said, “take my hand.”

  “Of course, darling. He had no right, Mordecai, it was only a game—”

  “Just take my hand,” he said. “Please, don’t say anything.”

  4

  That morning, when Cynthia rolled over, she found that her brother had climbed the ladder of the double-decker bed and crawled into the upper bunk beside her. Barely awake, she felt she must be floating in the hollow of a bad bad dream, and suddenly, furious, confused, she pushed with violence at the sleeping little boy. He rolled only once and fell from the bed. There was the thud of his head against the wooden floor, then no further sound. It appeared that Markie was going to sleep right through it; he did not even cry.

  But when Cynthia leaned out over the top bunk, she noticed something more. At first it seemed to be a red string wedged in the crack between the floor boards—only it was moving toward the wall. Trembling, she waited for her father or June to come through the door and see what she had done. When time passed and no one had entered, she thought she had just better try to fall back to sleep again. And then it became clear to her that it could not be a bad dream she was having, for if it were, she would be trying to wake herself up rather than fall asleep. She rolled toward the wall anyway and closed her eyes. It was then that she began to scream.

  Later in the morning her father telephoned from Southampton Hospital. Cynthia sat in the sunny living room turning the pages of a large picture book of statues, while in the hallway June whispered into the mouthpiece. Her stepmother hung up the phone and came in to tell her to put on her bathing suit. They would go to the beach; was that all right? The child turned another page, and then June was kneeling down and holding Cynthia to her. She allowed herself to be held. Her stepmother’s hair, a sunnier shade than her real mother’s hair, was swept up at the back of her head; Cynthia could imagine the way it looked from the way it felt against her cheek. Soft, fine, whirled up—Markie said it was candy. She could see her brother stiffen with pleasure when he drew in his breath and lowered his face right down into the swell of June’s hair. June was very thin, and when she wore a bathing suit or a summer dress, all silky and flower-smelling, Cynthia could see that she had no breasts; there was just skin over bone, like a man. All a child could really push his face into was her hair; and though Markie might amuse himself in this way, Cynthia did not think that it was suitable for her. Not that June had ever favored Markie; it was only that her hair had somehow seemed his property from the start. Certainly June had never scolded her when she spilled her milk—and she had spilled it often during the first month she had come to live in New York City. Nor had June ever once been as cross as her real mother had been to her so many times. Even now June’s first impulse was not to blame Cynthia for what had happened, which was surely what her old mother would have done. No one, in fact, had had a chance to ask questions or make accusations. Only minutes after she had begun screaming, her father had carried Markie down to the car wrapped in a big towel, and driven him away in the station wagon. Though it had looked comical for a grownup to be backing a car out of a driveway wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, she had managed not to laugh. When the car swerved down into the road, there had been a flash of blood on the front side door, and then any hint of a smile had vanished completely from her face. She had walked back to the house, taken a sculpture book she liked from the shelf, and settled into a chair by the window; she pretended to be absorbed in the book, while above all she was absorbing herself in being quiet. A blind person could not have heard her turn the pages, and her respiration was as silent as the shifting of the tides of her blood—a shifting that seemed to be taking place in the hollow of her throat.

  The house was quieter than it had ever been during the daytime. No child was scooting up the stairs, no friend was slamming through the front screen door, no one was arguing with anyone—and that was a change. Lately her father and June seemed always to be bickering at one another at breakfasttime. Ever since they had come out to Springs, there was something that June kept saying to her father in the mornings that made him angry. One morning he had become so angry that he had picked up his plate and thrown it clear across the breakfast nook to the kitchen. Markie had begun to giggle and point to where the yolk was slipping down the wallpaper onto the enamel of the sink, but she knew enough to keep her eyes on her bowl and continue spooning cereal into her dry mouth. Only June had gotten up to leave the table.

  And yet that evening, when the two of them were sitting out in the white garden chairs after dinner, she had seen her father lean over and kiss June’s hands and then her hair and her neck—all while Mark went circling around the house on his tricycle, pretending to be a fire engine, until it was time for him to go to bed. Earlier in the summer there had been an evening when she had been asked to go into the house for some ice from the refrigerator; when she had come onto the back steps holding the cold tray, she had seen her father open a button of June’s blouse and put a hand to where her breasts should have been. June was thin, but beautiful too, and she had those perfect white teeth that Cynthia saw at that moment, as her stepmother’s head went back and her father pulled her to him with his other hand. When her father hugged and kissed June, she knew it was because June was beautiful, and had been a debutante, and was rich, and had gone to Bryn Mawr College. She would be going there too now that she was rich; Martha had not gone there because she had not been rich at all. Markie was to go to Harvard College, June said, which seemed to Cynthia a ridiculous statement—Markie could not read yet, or even count successfully beyond twelve. But June and her father said ridiculous things quite often, her father particularly. In Springs he was thought of as a very funny man, though everyone agreed that Cynthia was his toughest audience. “Come on, Ed Sullivan,” he would finally have to say to her, “how about just a giggle, just a little snort—just raise a lip even—” Whenever there were people around he would amuse them, unless, of course, he was unhappy, as he had bee
n when June had made him throw his egg.

  At night June and her father slept together in their own room in only one bed. Consequently, she knew that June would be having a baby soon. No one had spoken about it yet, but she was aware that there were happenings of which she was not warned in advance. She had figured out that the baby was coming, for she had been able to discover it was the right month. Some time earlier she had found out that a woman could only have a baby if it was the right month. She knew it was the right month because Mrs. Griffin had simply come right out and said so. She had leaned back onto her beach towel and put two wet little pieces of cotton over her eyes, and she had remarked what a perfect month it had been—it had been just right.

  So she knew—and she did not like it either. She was not anxious to have still another brother or sister around the house. The smaller the child the more adults seemed to like it. At least the bigger she became the less people cared about her. She knew for a fact that all her father’s friends in Springs liked Markie better than her. They were always picking him up and putting him down, though she herself did not really weigh that much more. She had even heard her father say to June that though Markie was the same jolly boy he had always been, Cynthia had turned into a very grave child. And whatever that meant, it was not so. She would have told June—if she had thought that June would not have been predisposed in another direction—that it was her father who had changed. Of course he called her his “special baby,” and of course he swung her over his head, and whenever June kissed Markie he would march right over and kiss her. Yet whatever he did displeased her; every time she suspected he was about to do something that would make her happy, he did it, and it made her sad. Surely when he kissed her she should be happy—but she knew that June did not particularly like him to do it, and so even that finally caused discomfort.