by Philip Roth
“I’m just upset,” she said.
That seemed a good enough explanation for Herz; a patient and forgiving man, he said, “We’ll work something out.”
“How?”
“We’ll work something out, please.”
“Oh how,” she burst out, “like in Michigan?”
“Will you please shut up!”
Three gas stations, two roadhouses, and no words later we were in Iowa City. Paul Herz instructed me with terse lefts and mumbled rights until we turned a corner and were rewarded with a panoramic view of the settlement of barracks. Lights were on in the undersized windows and smoke curled from all the metallic funnels, and I felt a little like the enemy sneaking up on the ambushed. It might have seemed that an army was encamped here, were it not for the tricycles tipped over on the gravel lawns, and the few pieces of clothing that had been forgotten, and still hung on the lines that crisscrossed from one gray rectangle to another. When the motor of the car was slowed down, I could hear a creaking and a straining and a clanging, as though the metal sides of the barracks and the concrete foundations were slowly sabotaging themselves in the dark.
“Thanks,” Herz said to me. “Right here is fine.”
I heard Libby stir in the back seat. Without turning, I said, “You’re welcome. And good night.”
Libby was opening the back door; Herz himself had a hand on the front door handle, where for a moment he hesitated. I felt he wanted to apologize to me for what I had had to see and hear. I only smiled as a signal of my sympathy, while his wife moved wordlessly out of the car.
After a moment he asked, “Have you had dinner?”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“Maybe you’d like to join us. What are we having?” he asked his wife.
“I don’t know.”
He looked back at me and asked quickly, “Would you care to have some spaghetti with us?”
“I don’t really think I can … I’m expecting a phone call.”
He reached out then and shook my hand; I saw him try to eradicate with a smile his rotten mood. He didn’t begin to succeed.
Suddenly his wife was speaking. “We have plenty—” Libby Herz seemingly had risen out of twenty feet of water. She spoke with that desperate breathlessness of hers, a girl who’d just discovered air. “Spaghetti, with garlic and oil. We’d love to have you.”
Paul Herz had already swung his briefcase through the door, and was stuck, half-in, half-out; he looked just as shabby and defeated as a man can who has been made a fool of by his wife. I imagined that even living with another, he was no less alone than I was.
“I don’t want to inconvenience you,” I said, looking at neither of them.
“It’s no inconvenience,” Libby Herz said. “Please come,” she said. “We have plenty.”
Plenty! From her mouth no word could have sounded more pathetic.
When I returned home I went directly to the phone, picked it up, and said hello.
“Hello, Gabe? Where were you?”
“I had dinner out.”
“Since five in the afternoon?”
“I was out before that for something else.”
“Well,” he said, working at being cheerful, “you’re a tough man to catch at home. I don’t know why you pay rent on an apartment, you’re hardly there.”
“Well, I had a busy day. How are you? I didn’t expect you’d call again,” I said. “You called last night.”
“I was thinking it was two or three nights already,” he said. “What’s new?”
“Nothing. How’s New York?”
“I took a walk after dinner. Millie made me an early dinner. What are you doing, still eating in restaurants? They overcook vegetables, I’ll tell you that.”
“I had dinner with friends.”
“Look, when is your vacation again? I’ve got a calendar right in front of me.”
“Christmas.”
“I thought Thanksgiving.”
“I don’t get off then,” I said. “Only Thanksgiving Day. I’m really busy with work, you know.”
“You have dinner with friends, maybe you can have dinner with your father sometimes.”
“It isn’t just dinner with you,” I said firmly, trying to keep separate my emotions and the facts. “It’s all the traveling. It wouldn’t be worth it coming all the way East for one or two days.”
“Worth it.” He simply repeated my words; then, having made his point, went on. “It’s not my fault you went a million miles away,” he reminded me. “There’s NYU, there’s Columbia, there’s City College. I could name them all night.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Please.”
“Do you think I call up to be insulted?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to insult you. But these phone calls, these phone calls are driving me nuts.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, after a pause. “I don’t mean to drive you nuts. I just thought a father had a right to call his son when he wanted to. Five minutes a couple times a week …”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Gabe—Gabe, I sit around here and I look at that orange sofa and I think of your mother. And I look at that Moroccan rug and I think of her. What am I supposed to do, get rid of all this furniture? We had it thirty years.”
“I understand.”
“Why don’t you fly in Thanksgiving? I’ll send you a check, get a ticket, come home for a little while. Millie will make a regular Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll have Dr. Gruber here. We’ll go down to the Penn-Cornell game. How does that strike you?”
“Why don’t we wait until Christmas. It’s only a few weeks later, and I’ll have plenty of time—”
“But Thanksgiving is traditional!” he exploded. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, and I heard him trying not to cry at the other end.
“I know it’s traditional,” I said. “I only get the day off. Just Thanksgiving Day. It’s just not enough time. But Christmas I’ll be home for two weeks.”
“Your mother’s been gone sixty-two weeks!” His unreason was nothing to the shaking in his voice. Yet there were no longer any patient explanations for me to make. Here it was November, 1953, the funeral had been in September of 1952, and still he was spinning down and around, deeper in his morbid sea. When I had been released from the Army early in August I had only suspicions about what it would be like; but three weeks with a drowning roommate had been all that I could bear. I could not help him out with his loneliness: I could not prop him up, counsel him, direct him, run him. I could not be Anna Wallach. I had finally to tell him (it had been a cold and nasty scene) that I was not his wife or his mother, but his son. A son, he said, a son exactly! What he wanted to know was if all sons run off, leaving fathers to sink forever by themselves.
I gave him several seconds now to get control. “Why don’t you call Dr. Gruber?” I asked. “Why don’t you go to the theater with him? See a show, go skating at Rockefeller Plaza—”
“Gruber? Gruber’s happy. He had a wife he hated. I sit around with him all night and all he does is grin. It’s worse than being alone, being with Gruber. I went skating with him last week. All he does, Gabe, all afternoon, is little figure eights, and all the time, smiling. What kind of man is that?”
He was not laughing, but at least the worst was over; he was willing to tease himself.
“Dad,” I said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“That’s funny,” he said softly, “because I know just what to tell you.”
“I don’t think I’d be a help.” I felt myself losing control.
“I think you would. Look, what’s wrong with going back to Harvard? At least I’ll expect you Thanksgiving, huh?”
I knew he was wrong; everything in my experience told me he was wrong, and yet I said, “I’ll see about Thanksgiving. I can’t promise.”
“I never asked for promises, Gabe. Just try. Just meet me halfway. I’ll send you a check for the plane.”
&nb
sp; “Why don’t you hold it off until I see—”
“It’s only a check.”
“I’ve got two checks I haven’t even cashed yet.”
“Cash them. You want to foul up my bank statements?” he asked gaily.
“I just don’t need all that money, that’s all. I’ve got the G.I. Bill. I’ve got Mother’s money—”
“Will it kill you to cash them?” he asked. “I send them off, it makes me feel good. Will it kill you if I can balance up my account at the end of the month?”
“No.”
“You cash those checks. Is that too big a favor to ask?”
I said no again, with as little conviction this time as before.
“And I’ll see you Thanksgiving,” he said.
“Please, Dad—please stop pushing me—about Thanksgiving—”
“Who’s pushing? Let’s get it straight, are you coming Thanksgiving or aren’t you? You want me to have Millie buy a turkey or not?”
“I don’t really see how I can make it, truly.”
“You have time for other things, to eat dinner out—you have time to visit people—”
“That was involved. I was doing somebody a favor.”
“Well, that’s all I’m asking for.”
“Please, stop pleading!”
“Don’t shout at me!”
“Well, don’t beg me!”
“Tell me, tell me, how else does one get through to you?”
“By making decent demands, that’s how.”
“I don’t want to push your generosity too far.”
“It’s not even generosity we’re dealing with.”
“No, you’re right. It’s supposed to be love.”
“I don’t think I deserve all this,” I said.
“Nobody told you to run away.”
“I didn’t run.”
“Iowa. Why not Canada! That’s farther.”
“That’s closer,” I said, but he wouldn’t laugh. “I don’t think either of us wants to have these kind of conversations. I don’t think this is how either of us feels. Let’s relax.”
“Gabe, I’m sitting here with a calendar in front of me. I count days. I know how many days between now and Thanksgiving, between now and Christmas, from now to Easter. Maybe I’m going nuts, I don’t know.”
“You’re just lonely.”
“Yeah,” he said, “some just.”
“Please,” I said, “I do understand. I’ll do my best.”
“All right, all right.” He sounded suddenly very tired.
“You’re feeling all right, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “Terrific.”
“Maybe you should go to sleep.”
“It’s all right, I’m watching a little television. Why aren’t you in bed? It’s midnight where you are. It’s like wearing two watches; whenever I think what time it is here, I think what time it is there. What are you doing so late?”
“I’m going to study some Anglo-Saxon.”
“That would impress your mother,” he said, wisecracking. “It doesn’t impress me.”
“It doesn’t impress me either. It bores hell out of me.”
“Then,” he began, “I don’t know why you do it—”
“Let’s go to sleep,” I said.
“Okay, okay,” he said, and when he yawned it was as though we were in the same room. “Take it easy, boy.”
“Good night.”
“See you Thanksgiving,” he said, and hung up before I could answer.
When I finally got to bed that night, I found it impossible to get any solace from feeling sorry for myself. The irritation I generally felt toward my father—for things like hanging up as calculatingly as he had—I now felt for myself. Fresh from their drafty little house, I could not help comparing my condition with the Herzes’: what I had learned at dinner was that all that my father would bless me with, the Herzes of Brooklyn and the DeWitts of Queens withheld from their struggling offspring. Once Jew had wed Gentile wounds were opened—in Brooklyn, in Queens—that were unhealable. And all that Paul and Libby could do to make matters better had apparently only made them worse. Conversion, for instance, had been a fiasco. “Switching loyalties,” Libby Herz had said, “somehow proved to them I didn’t have any to begin with. I read six thick books on the plights and flights of the Jews, I met with this cerebral rabbi in Ann Arbor once a week, and finally there was a laying on of hands. I was a daughter of Ruth, the rabbi told me. In Brooklyn,” she said, pouring me a second glassful of tinny-tasting tomato juice, “no one was much moved by the news. Paul called and they hung up. I might be Ruth’s daughter—that didn’t make me theirs. A shikse once,” she said, drinking a tomato juice toast to herself, “a shikse for all time.” As for her parents, they hadn’t even been notified. Over the spaghetti I learned that a priest and two nuns already graced Mrs. DeWitt’s side of the family; no Jew was needed to round things out.
The two families, it seemed, had chosen to withdraw help just when it was needed most. The young couple had been married at Cornell, sometime near the end of Paul’s senior year and Libby’s junior year. Apparently, in the weeks afterward, there followed some very stern phone calls from Queens. “Still,” as Libby said, “they were phone calls. Someone at least did some dialing.” When they went on to Ann Arbor, Paul for his M.A., Libby still for her B.A., the phone had gone dead. Only occasionally was there a check for twenty-five dollars, and that was to be paid to the order of Elizabeth DeWitt. The Herzes quit school and moved three suitcases and a typewriter into a housekeeping room in Detroit in order to accrue some capital. “And then,” Libby explained, ladling out the Bartlett pears, “the money stopped. Paul worked in an automobile plant, hinging trunks, and I was a waitress. And my father wrote us a little note to say that he had obligations to a daughter in school, but none to Jewish housewives in Detroit. We saved what we could, which turned out to be about half what we’d planned—” At this point a fierce look from her husband caught her up short; when she started in again it was clear that she had passed over a little of their history. “And we came to Iowa. Now we don’t hear from them at all,” she told me. “They’re my parents; I suppose I like them for some things—but mostly I despise them.”
Paul Herz had already looked down into his pears and so did not see what it had cost his wife to speak those last words. And that was too bad, for she had said them for his benefit. Having doubtless realized how much she had irritated him by chronicling so thoroughly their bad luck, she had tried to square things with him by denouncing those people who had once fed and clothed her, and probably loved her too. Whatever had befallen them—she had decided to make clear at the very end—had not been the fault of her husband, but of those despised parents in the East.
I finished my dessert and went off to the bathroom, where I stood looking in the mirror for a long time, hoping that when I returned to the table the both of them would be better able to face me as a guest again. Paul Herz may have smiled from time to time during dinner, but I knew he was not happy with his wife’s performance. So I took my time, but coming out of the bathroom I was probably more stealthy than I had intended. I had given them no signal—I neither flushed the toilet, nor did I slam the door, the last only to spare the beaverboard interior of the house, which looked as though a little too much force might well bring down the works. From the hallway I was able to see into the living room, where the two Herzes were standing beside the dining table. Paul’s arms were around his wife’s waist, and his chin rested on her black hair. I stood with my hand on the bathroom door, unable to move one way or the other; I saw what Libby could not: her husband’s face. His eyes were closed like a man in prayer. I heard him say, “Please don’t complain. All you’ve done all night is complain.” Earlier Libby had changed into a black full skirt, and now her hands were held close up against it; her head was bowed and no part of her touched her husband that could be prevented from touching him. “I’m not complaining,” she said. “Every time I t
ell a story you think I’m complaining.” Herz took his hands from her. “Well, you were complaining.” I did not know what might come next and did not want to know; at the risk of unhinging the whole place, I laid my shoulder into the door and came clomping down the hallway, a man with shoes and ears entirely too large for himself. For our separate reasons, we were all uncomfortable saying good night.
From this I had come home to hear myself indicted for spitting on parental benevolence. Here was I (I had been reminded) with all that these Herzes were without. When my mother died, in fact, she had left to me all that her family had left to her, which, if not a fortune, was enough to spare me from calamity for the rest of my life; on top of this there was my father and his checks. Phone calls. Love. Money. It did not seem very manly of me to be suffering over my abundance, and I began to wonder, as I went to sleep that night, how I would perform if I were Paul Herz.
The following morning, out in the sunlight, I got a good look at Herz’s new coat. It could have been handed down from a beggar; it had, I’m afraid, that much class. A big brown tent, it enveloped him; for all anyone knew, within it he might be living a separate life. When he walked no knees were to be seen anywhere. Cloth shuffled and he moved three feet closer to wherever he was going. Standing still and seated he picked up more dignity. Swimming brown eyes, good dark skin, and hair that rose in tenacious kinky ridges off a marked brow gave him a grim and cocky air. On the first of November he had had to give up on the T-shirt; now in a dark brown shirt and a frayed green tie he had the look about him of a dissatisfied civil servant, a product of some nineteenth-century Russian imagination. In class he inhabited not the room but just his own chair. Where the others skittered on the syntax of their Beowulf like a pack of amateur mountain climbers, Herz, when asked to recite aloud, delivered Old English so that the blackboards shook; the vowels were from Brooklyn, but the force was strictly for meadhalls. Finished, he slid his books into a crumpling tan briefcase—the smell of egg salad wafted up from its bottom—and head down, left the room, silent as the North Pole. The separate life lived under the new coat was dead serious.