by Philip Roth
“Marge,” I said, not really knowing where to go from here, “why don’t you go out and talk to people?” It began to seem that I had found my Bartleby: I would have to go back to Iowa City and find a new apartment, leaving Marge behind in the old one. “Why don’t you go to the movies, go swimming. Make a life for yourself, baby, please?”
“I don’t like movies alone. I’m not being obstinate—I don’t. I had coffee with a friend of yours in the Union today.”
It depressed me considerably to hear her settling down to be chatty. “Who?”
“Paul Kurtz.”
“Herz.”
“He seemed very nice. A little lugubrious.”
“I hardly know him. What did he have to say?”
“We just chatted. His wife’s sick. I think she had what I had. She’s in the hospital. Gabe, is she really his wife, or is he just living with her?”
“Oh, Marge—”
“Gabe, he’s the only person I’ve spoken with in five days. Aren’t you going to come back for New Year’s Eve?”
“I’m visiting with my father. Look, you’ve got to move out. You just can’t keep being indulgent like this.”
“Hasn’t indulgence turned into anything?” she demanded to know. “You just can’t walk out!” she cried into the phone.
“We’re both walking out.”
“I’m not walking anywhere! Don’t tell me what I’m doing!”
“All right, I won’t. Just call a taxi, and take your stuff, and get out.”
“You don’t respond—that’s your trouble! You’re heartless!”
“I expect you to be gone when I get back.”
“How can you say that to me if you love me!”
“But I don’t love you. I never said I did.”
“You used me, you bastard.” And she began to weep.
“Oh, Margie, nobody uses anybody for four weeks.”
“Five weeks!”
“Look, hang up now, pack your bags, and leave.”
“I’ll ruin this place, you,” she screamed. “I really will!”
“You’re hysterical—” I said, astounding nobody with the insight.
“I’ll tear up all your books! I’ll break all the rotten spines—you’ll have to come back!”
“I’m coming back on the first of January.”
“Oh—” she wept, “I never expected this of you.”
“Margie, you romanticized—”
“You romanticized!” and at her end the phone slammed down.
When my mother was alive she had done everything possible to prevent my father from assuming the Cobra Posture on her prized living room rug. However, she was gone, and I did not live with the man, so after my phone call—determined to put out of my mind those long-distance protestations of love—I sat down on the orange raw silk of our scrolly Victorian sofa, and I watched. And for the first time since my arrival, I found my father oblivious to me. It pleased me to think that we two were occupants of the same room, and that he was not investigating my plans for next month, or fiddling around inside my mouth. Not me, but the Cobra Posture—Bhujungasana—was the object upon which he focused all his soul and all his body. Clad in a blue jockey bathing suit, he was stretched rigidly before me on the floor, his stomach down, his toes pointed back, his chest nobly arched. All that moved, while he held himself aloft on locked wrists and elbows, were the muscles in his forearms, which jiggled at a high speed against the thin pale shell of his skin. The features of his face moved around a bit too as he tried to work them into a picture of repose. It was all very familiar, even down to the hour of the day; over in the Park, everything was growing dim.
“That rug,” my mother used to say, dying to kick one arm out from under him, but knitting instead, “was woven by an entire village in North Africa, Gabriel, so that your father could make a damn fool of himself on it.” She had a strategy of making certain matters that were important to her sound unimportant; but she was, after all, a strenuous woman and I knew she wasn’t kidding. She had disapproved of his Yoga, as she had disapproved of his Reichian analysis, his health foods, and his allegiance in 1948 to Henry Wallace. She was a dedicated opponent of the impossible, which my father happened to be for; but he was for her too, and that was what had weakened him. Even so, it was no easy job for her to restore him to reason. It had finally been necessary, where his orgone box was concerned, to shame him out of the thing by hinting of its existence one night to a group of his colleagues at a convention of the American Dental Association in Miami. What had forced her to such a cruel extreme was something my father had done with his box one afternoon in her absence: he had put me in it. After the ADA convention, a length of wooden rod was purchased, some nails driven in the right places, and the next thing Millie knew she had a zinc lined wardrobe closet in the corner of her room. The end result of my mother’s maneuver was that it managed to bring my father back into his family living room in the evenings, the proper place, my mother told him, to be collecting sexual energy in the first place.
As for the avocado and fresh vegetable dinners, she had put up with them and put up with them, until finally she had forbidden Millie to set anything green and uncooked on our table. We all had to go without vitamin C until it was certain that my father was on the wagon. My mother claimed she would hold out until the entire family had scurvy, though my father gave in before the first symptoms of the disease made an appearance. Henry Wallace is a more complicated story. He had been entertained in the Wallach apartment, and treated graciously. My father, as I had told Marge, had been chairman of an organization of doctors and lawyers in New York City who had dedicated themselves to campaigning for the third party. One would imagine, of course, that my father would then have voted for Wallace, but he did not; election eve my mother had kept him up, feeding him coffee, until she had finally convinced him that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Dewey. What a moment it must have been for him in the booth, pulling down that Truman lever. How he must have hated the woman he loved.
It was Hatha Yoga that she had not been able to lick. Even when my father had ceased being a damned fool on her Moroccan rug, his nurse reported persistence after hours in the waiting room. The fact was that his wife could have as easily shamed him out of Yoga as out of dentistry. He was much too attached to the idea of healing. At least that was the way he might have thought of it himself. More likely, for all his belief in restitution, progress, reform, reconstruction—he had rebuilt some of the most talked-about mouths in New York—he was more attracted to ideas of disease. Wilhelm Reich, Henry Wallace, leafy green vegetables: all somehow were antibodies. And the disease? He apparently blamed some bug, some germ, for his perennially swollen heart. The disease was the doctor’s feelings. Not that he ever said this to anyone; to the worlds, professional and lay, he claimed dedication only to science. To the upper Fifth Avenue rabbis who made their way through our apartment, he was open-faced about his atheism. I have myself heard him explain his high colonic Yogic enema to the biggest internist in New York, absolutely physiologically, no mention of the soul at all. And Bhujangansa, of course, stimulated the autonomous and sympathetic nervous systems.
Well, that all may or may not have been so. My own suspicion, even as a growing boy, was that my father’s particular trouble wasn’t with his sympathetic nervous system at all. It was, as a matter of fact, with his sympathies: his passions ached him. Whatever terror he saw in life, whatever turbulence gave him inward hell, he was unable to answer it with reason. So he took to magic.
My mother was a different kind of person, which may be obvious by now. She was the one in our family with the expressive face—baggy eyes, long nose, wide clown’s mouth—but she had controlled it like a master. On the surface she was neither overly affectionate nor overly retiring, and as for surface manners, people have said on occasion that I take after her. Love her as I did, I don’t know how much that pleases me. What with my father’s steely physiognomy and my mother’s crafty rule over her
responses, I don’t suppose I look much like a young man giving things away. I don’t believe I look out-and-out mean, so much perhaps as self-concerned. My mother was more fortunate: she looked self-aware. She gave one the feeling that she knew precisely what she was doing when she made her offer of reason to my father. It was that—reason—which she had given him. Since no marriage is so simple, there were of course other offerings as well; but it was reason more than anything else, for that was what my father seemed most desperately in need of. And that may have been what she had an excess of herself.
She checked cockeyed enthusiasms left and right, and for those of us up close it was almost impressive. During the early years, however, my father did not apparently understand fully the exchange he had entered into. From time to time he would try to model himself after the handsome woman he had chosen, and for two or three weeks would defect from Yoga and charge at life from a reasonable angle. It was a change his very essence deplored; exercising a painful self-control, he wound up constipating himself. It was clear even to me, the child in the house, that he was not a logical man; while I listened to his explanations I knew that truth, whatever it was, plunged deeper than what he was telling me. But the difference between reason and unreason was for a child nothing more than a distinction. In the beginning I had no favorites. It was eventually under my mother’s tutelage—and that consisted primarily of just being around her—that I came to have attitudes toward the objects of my father’s passions. But then all the young finally get sophistication and go around the house feeling themselves surrounded by second-rate minds; it is to first-rate hearts that they cling, with innocence and greed. Red twilights in the park, every last patient having taken home his reconstructed jaw, my father would toss his darling son up toward the branches of the trees. Miles below me the grass would twirl, so that even I knew it was too high for safety. My father, however, was a turbulent man, and since nine in the morning he’d been working in millimeters.
But one evening, which it seems I will not forget, I came down into his arms wailing not with joy, but with fright. Up near the trees I had looked still higher, and from our living-room window I had seen a pair of hands stretching out and down, toward me. The hands were my mother’s. I came back to earth whimpering, and my father had to hold me and then to carry me home on his shoulders, chattering all the while of circuses we would go to and fun we would have. I quickly got over my fantasy, but that made it no less significant: there had always been a struggle for me in the Wallach household. Each apparently saw my chances in life diminished if I grew in the image of the other. So I was pulled and tugged between these two somewhat terrorized people—a woman who gripped at life with taste and reason and a powerful self-control, and a man who preferred the strange forces to grip him. And still, I managed to move up through adolescence and into manhood without biting my nails or wetting my bed or stealing hubcaps off parked cars. Whatever it was in that apartment on Central Park West that had been compounded out of the polar personalities of my parents, I myself experienced it as love.
Death upset everything. When my mother died in 1952 she was clearly no less dedicated to helping my father keep his footing in this world than she had been in 1942; that he could not keep his footing alone had been the cause of much of the grief she chose to keep to herself. Immediately after her death I found myself blaming my father for having been unworthy of her. But then her letter was sent on to me, and heartbroken as I was, awed as I was by what had been the circumstance of its composition, the confession it contained forced upon me a truth that I had never permitted myself to see. She had been so attractive a person in life that it had been hard to judge her. But in death she came to seem a kind of villain, and I left the Army willing to believe that it was she who had ruined my father’s life. He was the worthy one, for he had accepted the woman he had married. Mordecai Wallach loved Anna Wallach; she had loved what he was to be alchemized into six months hence. A woman of moderate emotions and good sense, and yet she had apparently had her love affair with power. Her restraint hadn’t been all it had looked to be.
Or had it? Was she not, finally, loyal and honest and good? She did the best she could in balancing the emotional budget in the house of an extravagant man. When I speak of her as having acted villainously, I wonder if I am not speaking as a member of that vast and treacherous populace that has lately come out for Compassion. We seem called upon more and more to make very pious, very public, demonstrations of our feelings. You turn a corner and there’s a suburban lady in a pillbox hat, jingling a container full of coins at you, demanding, give. Watch television, and fifty entertainers and ten disc jockeys are staging “a marathon”; they lose sleep, take their meals on the run, sing, make jokes and display themselves, and none of this for their own benefit. It is a peculiar age indeed, when even the corrupt and the unfeeling are out collecting so as to beat down hardening of the arteries. It’s the age to feel sorry—a bleeding heart is standard equipment.
And the fact is that there are few of us who can resist an appeal. After all, you could free the slaves and hang the tyrants by their heels, but as for the rest, the other horrors, what do you do after you’ve bought your Christmas seals? We feel a debt, I know, hearing of the other fellow’s sorrows, but the question I want to raise here is, What good is the bleeding heart? What’s to be done with all this pitying? Look, even my mother had it; she pitied my father. Isabel Archer pitied Osmond. I pity you, you may pity me. I don’t know if it makes any of us behave better, or wiser. Terrible struggles go on in the heart, to which the heart itself will not admit, when pity is mistaken for love.
As I was traveling west, away from a cold glittery day in New York, a fierce snowstorm had been traveling east from the great plains, and we met on the evening of New Year’s Day, the moment I stepped off the plane. By seven o’clock the storm had gotten the upper hand over the population; on the street there were few cars and no pedestrians, and behind living-room windows I could see people peering out from between the curtains, gauging the power of the enemy.
I raced for the front door, but once inside the hallway took my time mounting the stairs. There was nothing for me in the mailbox, and upstairs no envelope was thumbtacked to my door. I waited to hear music playing, or water running, and then I entered the kitchen, turned the light on, and saw something glitter on the sink. To the key was attached a note, a note written on pink stationery with scalloped edges.
I gave too much to you. I don’t think anybody can ever
hurt me the way you have. I don’t know what I’ll do.
That was all: my extra key and these twenty-four words, no one of them too much influenced by her reading of Proust. I unpacked my bags and emptied my pockets of the dental floss my father had given me at the airport, and then walked around my three rooms, picking up seven hairpins, a copy of Swarm’s Way—the corner of page seven turned back—and a tube of the neutral polish that I remembered Marge massaging into her buff pumps. The Proust went back on the shelf, and what she had left behind, including the note, went into the empty garbage pail.
That, of course, was not the end. I then paced from room to room, turning up three more of her hairpins; I suppose I was looking for them. If New York had turned out better, I probably would not have been so susceptible to Marge’s indictment, but as always happened with my father, our final hours together were as strained as our first; the dental floss, in fact, had been something more than hygienic: it was a last-minute attempt to bind us together across some thousand miles of this vast republic. “Take care of your teeth, sonny,” he had said to me, and I had looked back to see that the smile on his face, like the one on the face of the stewardess, involved none of the deeper muscles. “See you when, Washington’s Birthday?” were the last gallant, murderous words he had called out to me as I stepped aboard the plane. That was the state to which I had reduced him, anticipating patriotic holidays.
But that was mild compared to the night before, when my father and Dr. Gruber an
d I had celebrated the coming of the New Year at the theater. While to my right Gruber howled every time some character on the stage said “Oh God damn you” to some other character on the stage, to my left my father cried. Not until the middle of the last act did I notice. Then I inched my hand over the chair arm that separated us, until I touched his sleeve. Under my Playbill—so that Gruber would not see—I took his hand and held it until the final curtain and the light. I told myself he was impossible and I told myself he was unfair, but in the darkness there was nothing I could tell myself that was able to make him less unhappy.
With all this in the very recent past, I had now to confront the final, condemnatory words of my late mistress. To defend myself I tried to work up defamatory thoughts about her. I had no trouble at all imagining her going around the apartment planting hairpins. But the knowledge that she had soap-opera passions and a moral fiber as soft as her skin only worked to soften my own melting sense of dignity. I went to the window and must have watched an inch of snow pile against the houses across the street. Twice I circled the phone before deciding I would call Marge’s rooming house and explain to her, as calmly and exactly as I could, why it was to her benefit that we discontinue seeing one another.
“Miss Howells?” said Mr. Trumbull, husband of the landlady. “Just a minute.”
In a minute he was back. “Miss Howells don’t live here, no sir.” There was a great deal of television racket behind him, so that I could hardly hear what he was saying.
I tried to be polite. “But she does live there.”
“Just a minute.” When he returned, he said, “Nope. She don’t.”
“You mean she’s left?”
“Just a minute.” When he came back to the phone he told me yep, she’d left.
“Where? When?” I asked.