Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  The crowds weren’t helping him any. He was—yes, shopping! Despite the complaints of merchants that the recession had cut Christmas trade by a third, the downtown shops were no less tumultuous than he remembered them to be at this season. Registers rang; clerks called, “Mr. M! Mr. R! Miss Gloria!”; the faces around him glowed red from the cold of the streets, from the heat of indoors. He spent the darkening hours of the afternoon walking out of one store and into another, through the blowy Loop and then straight into the wind up Michigan Boulevard—most of the time with no idea of what he was after. He opened the doors of shops that were completely inappropriate, or would have seemed so had he been able to establish what sort of gift was appropriate. As the day wore on, his fuzziness became indistinguishable from his apathy. Around five he pulled his car out of the garage on Wabash and found himself heading south in the murderous rush of homeward traffic.

  It was snowing—or sleeting, or sooting—when he pulled off the Outer Drive. His watch showed five-thirty. Since he did not want to go back and sit around his apartment for an hour before eating, he decided he would eat now, hungry or not, and have a long evening. He tried to relish the idea of a long evening. He had two applications to fill out later, one for a job teaching American literature in Greece, another for a position in Istanbul. Though he doubted that either was exactly the place he had been looking for, he was certain that he could not stay on much longer in Chicago; it was one of the few things he was certain of. In filling out the applications he would at least have begun to make a plan for departing. What was to be avoided was resigning and subsequently having no place to which he had to go. He might not even have returned after the summer, had it not been that there wasn’t any place he could think of to which he could migrate, no place where there would be a chance of a little peace and some happiness. Of course, it was not exactly happiness he had discovered in choosing to remain amidst familiar surroundings—it was just that by staying he had avoided the onus of running. Whether sailing off to the Middle East this coming September would be any less what it might have been a year before, he could not tell in advance. He could only make out the applications and wait to see what happened.

  He parked outside a delicatessen on Fifty-fifth Street. He tried hard to work up an appetite by looking at the salamis hanging in the window. The disorder that he had come to feel as an undercurrent in his life had arisen, he knew, out of just such absurdities as eating when he didn’t want to. He must try to bring together his actions and his appetites. Yet there always seemed to be extra bits of time to juggle with: a stretch between classes, a dull period after lunch, the solitary hours when the sun was setting. In more pleasant weather he might have taken a walk, but they were having a miserable December—and where was there to walk to? He thought of phoning Bill Lake, or calling Mona, and then he remembered a pleasant-looking, slightly assertive girl he had met at the Harnaps’ after a Moody lecture; but he did not know where she lived, and besides, he did not want new friends. Not now—he was leaving town. He should have left, he thought, watching his wipers deal with the sluggish precipitation, he should have left long before this. But at the end of the summer he had had strong feelings about “facing up” to what had happened, so he had returned from the East—and what was there to face up to? He had not come back for facing up’s sake; he had returned to Chicago to assert his sense of his own innocence.

  Forcefully he entered the delicatessen. Like someone’s mother, he pushed upon himself two sandwiches and then dessert. He did his best to stretch out the meal; he ate a pickle; he asked the waitress for a newspaper to read while he downed a second cup of coffee; nevertheless he was back out on the street in time to hear the grim old church on Kimbark ring out six o’clock—and there it was before him: his long evening.

  The streets of the neighborhood had a black sheen, like the backs of animals. He drove aimlessly around. Every few blocks there were washed-out-looking Christmas trees stacked up against buildings. The men trying to sell the trees stood by, hands in the pockets of their overcoats; some stirred at little fires they kept going in old paint buckets. The drizzle stopped and started, changed from rain to snow and back again. Still, he did not head home.

  Where he met with one-way signs he had a stronger sense of purpose than he had at those intersections where he had a choice of directions—where he might head east, west, north or south, drive a thousand or two thousand miles to a place where nothing would suggest the past and he could turn into his old old self again. He remembered a self of his that was more substantial than the one he was saddled with now; he remembered being in the saddle. He remembered being happier. Well then, he would just take off—except there were certain practical matters to restrain him. His father’s wedding was the day after Christmas. It would only add to the wear and tear to move between now and then. Directly after the wedding, however, there was nothing to stop him from taking off for Europe …

  Except his having made up his mind to the contrary. He would not depart until he had a definite commitment about the future; he would depart in a dignified fashion, affairs in order. He was not the kind of man who could walk off a job, whatever the extremes of depression led him to believe about himself. Furthermore, there was no need for him to run away, not so long as he could continue to be realistic about what he had and had not done. He had only to distinguish for himself between the impact one had on the lives of others and the sheer momentum of fate—chance, luck, accident, for which no man who had merely crossed another’s path could be held accountable.

  But having a lucid moment, he was forced to contemplate the crossing of paths … The same impulse that had led him to want to tidy up certain messy lives had led him also to turn his back upon others that threatened to engulf his own. He had finally come to recognize in himself a certain dread of the savageness of life. Tenderness, grace, affection: they struck him now as toys with which he had set about to hammer away at mountains. He had tried to be reasonable with everyone—but the demands made upon him had been made by unreasonable people. But the demands made on them had not been reasonable. Still, he had tried to be true to his feelings, to what he was … So on the one hand he still believed himself put upon; on the other, he saw—or was willing to see—where he had not been savage enough. And he doubted that he ever could be, for it did not seem that he knew how to be; and he was not finally sure that he should be. Or had he been savage? Circles …

  Fortunately the choice now was not between extremes of impotence or savagery. He had simply to get back on his feet. There were two applications to make out, a wedding present to buy for his father.

  On the Midway he turned left and started for the Outer Drive. He would try it again. He should not have permitted himself to have been so indecisive all afternoon. The stores would be open late because of the holiday; he had only to go into one (which one?) and pick something out (what?). He couldn’t turn up at his father’s wedding empty-handed … though he would just as soon not turn up at all. The only reason he had wandered around all afternoon unable to make a choice was because he had not even wanted to recognize the necessity for making one.

  When he reached Stoney Island, he swung the car to the right, away from the Drive—no, he would not fly East on Christmas Day, he would invent an excuse—Then at Sixty-third he turned left, out toward the streaming lights headed for the Loop. How could he ignore a wedding he had helped bring about?

  Against his will! Almost on the Drive, he made a wild U-turn, and with cars bleating all around him he leaned over the wheel and headed into Sixty-third again, for he refused to be responsible for his father’s fate. In his aggravated mood he was finding it necessary to believe either in fate, blind fate, as having arranged for his father’s condition, or in himself as the agent of misery; himself as a kind of witch, mindless, malevolent … And in time past what was it he had seemed to others—Libby, Martha, his father—but an agent of deliverance? Well, he had delivered his father all right—into a lifeless, hopeless uni
on! How could he buy a present for what was not a wedding but a funeral? As a life went slipping away—oh how she would feed on his father’s good heart!—he was to stand by in his tuxedo, smiling!

  Impotence and savagery, that was precisely the choice. Either do nothing, or put his foot down and call a halt to the whole thing. Then what? The circumstances of his father’s union seemed to render him impotent. When he had the rights, he did not seem able to muster the power; when he had the power, he did not know if he had the rights—which washed away what power he had.

  With no plan at all—a condition no more comfortable for having become regular—he continued west on busy Sixty-third, under the iron structure of the El. A Salvation Army band, five men and two maidens, made a thin blue line across the intersection at Dorchester. “Silent Night, Holy Night” beat valiantly up into the thick wet air. A cornet lashed out at a high note, the neon lights sizzled in the rain, and then all was consumed in the roar of a train shooting by overhead. For evangelical reasons of its own, the band turned and was marching back toward the curb it had just stepped down from, missing a few beats in the change-over. Gabe slouched in his seat as horns blew behind him.

  Out his side window he saw a lanky colored man hustling in and out of a flock of evergreens. Wet, dark, and limp, the branches tipped against the wall of a brick apartment building. Moving amongst them, holding her coat together under her chin, was Martha. Parked at the curb was the little beat-up convertible that he knew she had bought for herself; the bumpers were crusty and one door wasn’t shut tight. He saw her remove her wallet from her purse. She handed a bill to the Negro—and traffic was moving again, horns blowing down his neck. But he did not start forward—he couldn’t. A train overhead drove down on the piles of the El with all its force. An equivalent force drove down in him. For the moment he had been stripped of his clothing and thrown in a dark cell for a crime he had not committed. But the bars, the blackness, the disgrace, the humiliation—he must have committed it! Unwatched, he followed Martha’s face; he had not seen it since he had stood across from her in the little graveyard near the tip of Long Island, where Markie had been buried—and where he had felt, with the same intensity, the confusion he felt now.

  His second trip to the Loop was not altogether unsuccessful. A small package sat on the seat beside him when he arrived back on the South Side a little after eight. Carrying it up the dim stairway to the Herz apartment, he could feel the muddiness of the stairs under his shoes. Galoshes stood outside doorways on each landing. Beneath an exhausted bulb on the third floor, he rubbed his feet on the welcome mat and knocked. A slender girlish figure swung the door back; she was wearing slacks and a sweater, and her hair was in her face. She made a small noiseless clap with her hands. It was a gamble dropping in on someone as unpredictable as Libby, and he was relieved that she seemed pleased to see him.

  “Hi!” She pushed her hair up with both hands. “Come in—shhhh, though.” Her fingers went up to her lips.

  He whispered, “I just want to drop something off.”

  “What?”

  He had been holding the package behind him. Coyly. “This.” They were in the living room, beside the false fireplace, inside of which sat piles of books. Candles burned in a long tin holder on the mantle, flitting light over half of Libby’s face. A hard glare from a gooseneck lamp fell on the frazzled upholstery of the couch and chairs. The room seemed a vast and barren place; no rug still, and little furniture—though café curtains had been hooked on to several of the windows.

  Libby rattled the gayly wrapped box. “What is it?”

  He pointed down the hall, to what had formerly been Paul’s study. “For the smallest Herz.”

  With a jerky movement of her head, she shot her hair back and flopped down on the sofa. But the hair fell forward, along the fragile line that ran from the corner of her eyes to the corner of her mouth, a line he had first appreciated long ago. “How sweet, Gabe.” She held the package in her lap, fingering the ribbon. “Chanukah gelt,” she said.

  For a moment he was puzzled; then her suggesting that he had meant to present Rachel with a gift for the Jewish holiday disappointed him. She did not appreciate the good-natured spontaneity of the purchase—that looking for a wedding present, he had settled on a baby present. “Just a little toy,” he said.

  “For Chanukah—”

  He interrupted, smiling. “Is it Chanukah time again?”

  “You like too much to tease me about that.”

  “When I got up this morning I was thinking how much I felt like Purim.”

  “What you don’t want to say is that you really brought it for Christmas.”

  He let the matter drop. Earlier in the year, when they all had begun to act like friends again, he had submitted to a thorough examination on the subject of his lack of faith. He was to be accused now, and only half-playfully, of celebrating the Christian heresy. Libby herself was in the clutches of another divinity. He simply smiled, again.

  “May I open it for her?” Libby asked.

  While she worked away at the ribbon, he asked where Paul was. But she wasn’t giving him much attention; the present she was so feverishly opening might have been for herself. “He’ll be back—what sweet wrapping paper—we haven’t seen—ooops, I don’t want to tear it—seen you for what, a month?—you have to come to dinner—though you can drop in when—aahhh—” Two sheets of tissue paper floated down around her house slippers. “Oh she’ll love it,” she said, lifting the dog from the box. “Gabe, it’s such a charming little—Do you wind this, yes?”

  “Just turn the key.”

  “It plays?”

  “I think so.”

  “Gabe, thank you so much,” she said, as a tune tinkled out of the animal. “She’ll be crazy about it.”

  “I was a little afraid it might be too old for her—the key turning—”

  “She happens to be a brilliant six-month-old. Would you like to see her?”

  “Should you wake her?”

  “We can watch her sleep. I spend hours watching her sleep.”

  “If that’s okay with you—”

  “You haven’t seen her for ages,” Libby whispered, as he followed her down the hall. “She’s grown and grown …”

  In Rachel’s room they stood side by side over the crib. Striped curtains were pulled across the windows; a double row of framed Mother Goose pictures hung from the wall. Since his last visit—the night Libby had called the office and asked Paul to bring him home for a drink to celebrate Rachel’s third month in the family—a new floor of black and white linoleum squares had been laid. When Libby brushed by the curtains, they gave off a crisp sound. The floor shone … She might have ruffled him earlier by muddling the reasons for his gift-bearing, but that was no longer important. It hadn’t really been so spontaneous a purchase anyway. It was, in fact, for this moment that he had driven from the Loop directly to the Herzes. He waited beside the crib for those feelings that he believed he deserved to have. He waited.

  “Her hair gets blacker,” Libby whispered, “and her eyes get bluer … She’s a Rachel, isn’t she? Can’t you see her drawing water from a well—” The infant stirred; Libby’s wistfulness ceased for a moment. She resumed, in a voice barely audible, “—out of a well in what-do-you-call-it, Dan, Nineveh? Isn’t she something?”

  “She’s a honey.”

  “She’s our baby,” Libby said.

  They watched the child sleep. The “our” had not been unintentional, of that he felt sure; it was simply Libby’s final refusal to give up a claim on anyone. She kept her hold on you—for if she was not in desparate need at the moment, there was always the future. She was what she had charged him with being: the tease. He scowled at her in the dim room, remembering that letter full of sweetness she had sent to him from Reading. He believed he must still have it somewhere. He couldn’t bear her, really. Our baby. Nineveh!

  However, he had not dropped in unannounced, bearing an offering, to work up old gr
ievances. He had come for the satisfactions that a new child is said to give. He had expected to be able to look down into the crib and know that all was not wrong in the world, or in himself. But no such assurance was forthcoming.

  Yet he had helped to rescue Rachel, he had helped to place her in this crib … But nothing happened, no matter what weights he placed on his own scales. He stood beside Libby, looking down at Rachel, at the white sheet, at the wool blanket, at the incredible infant hands … Then he saw his solace, what it was that would set his days right. During these last few months he had been continuing to live the restricted bachelor existence—necessary, of course, to a discovery of taste, pleasures, limitations—when he was just about ready for a more expansive career. Till now everything had been by way of initiation. Bumbling toward a discovery of his nature, he had made the inevitable errors of a young man. But he was ready now to be someone’s husband, someone’s father. Looking down at Rachel, he was convinced that he had been feeling edgy of late only because he was on the edge of something. What else? It explained much that seemed inconclusive, uncertain, about the past.

  Turning, Rachel made a weak nasal sound. It was slight, but human and penetrable; it broke through the thin skin of his reflections. What looked to be truth poured through: he was imagining in the name of the future what should have been a past; he could have left young manhood, stopped bumbling, whenever he chose …

  When Libby put the musical dog at the end of the mattress, he was unprepared for the urge he felt to reach in and take it back. He found himself reduced to elemental emotions and passions. He had been hoping that the child would render him less culpable than he had been feeling since dinner. Now he turned from Rachel’s dog. He still did not have a present for his father and Mrs. Silberman. Nothing has changed.

  In the hallway, Libby asked, “Isn’t she darling? An honest opinion now. A few unbiased words to an objective mother.”

  “Unbiased, I’d say she’s perfect.”