by Philip Roth
When I came back into the bedroom again, Libby was sitting in her bed just as I had found her when I’d entered earlier. Only now she looked even more completely the victim of her undiagnosed illness.
“I managed it,” she said.
I looked at her from the doorway. “What?”
“To tell somebody everything.”
I walked over and handed her the water. She took only a sip and then handed it back. I felt the touch of both the cool glass and her fingers. I sat down on the edge of the bed and without too much confusion, we kissed each other. We held together afterwards, but for only a second.
“I’ll be all right, I think,” she said.
I stood, and then I sat again, very upright in the wicker chair.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “You don’t have to stay until Paul gets back.” Her husband’s name gave her trouble.
“I think I’d rather stay,” I said.
“But I don’t mind being alone.”
“That’s all right.”
“I just don’t want you to think I expect anything.”
“I don’t think you expect anything!” I answered. “Jesus, Libby.”
She raised her hands to her face again so that the fingers barely touched it, as though the bone beneath were sore and fragile. “I wormed that out of you too,” she said.
Following our embrace I had been visited with a mess of emotions, no one of which I could clearly identify. It wasn’t so much emotion, in fact, as emotionality: much strong feeling, no particular object. Now all I’d felt refined itself down into anger. “Listen, you didn’t have to do any worming of anything out of anybody. I did what I wanted to do. Stop feeling guilty about everything, will you? I don’t even believe it. You wanted me to kiss you, and I wanted to. I was glad I had, in fact, until you started talking. I’m not going to run off now, Libby, and I’m not sneaking out of any bedroom windows. I’ll wait till Paul gets back—” The name, short and simple as it was, gave me some trouble too. “I came over here to ask him something anyway.” I had difficulty, momentarily, remembering what it was.
“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “You’re right.”
Now, sitting straight in my wicker chair, I found it impossible to look at anything other than the Utrillo print. I saw that they had used thumb tacks to secure the two top corners to the wall, and two pieces of ragged Scotch tape to secure the bottom.
“I’m something,” Libby said.
“Why don’t you rest? Why don’t you try to get to sleep?”
“That’s a good idea … Oh Gabe, what am I? Am I awful or am I crazy?”
“Go to sleep.”
She turned her head on the pillow, closed her eyes, and tried for thirty seconds to follow my directions. Then her eyes opened. “Excuse me, but I don’t think I can with you sitting there.”
“I’ll sit in the other room.”
“That might be a help,” she said.
I got up and went to the door and behind me I heard her say, very softly, “I’ll really be all right, you know. I mean you could go home.”
“It was only a kiss, Libby,” I said, turning to face her.
She looked up at me hopelessly. “Still,” she said.
And then, along with her, I felt ashamed for our having turned out to be just about as unreliable as Paul Herz had given us the opportunity to be. I went out of her room and in the kitchen found my copy of Portrait of a Lady. I left, telling myself that I had no business in the lives of these people and that I would not come back, no matter who invited me. I got into my car and started away, and as I slowly took the first corner I saw Herz trudging home through the snow. He was no more innocent than any of us, and no braver, and yet he was Libby’s husband, and I felt moved to pull the car over and confess to him that I had held his wife—and that my holding her was as good as saying to her that her husband gave her a rotten life. Which perhaps he did.
I passed snow banks and moved cautiously around stalled cars, and heard the trees creaking under the storm’s weight. Soon I was worrying all over again as to the whereabouts of Marge Howells. I should have pulled over to Herz to ask … But what business of mine was she any more? If Marge Howells wanted to run, let her run! If my father wanted to pine, let him pine! If Libby Herz wanted to weep, let her weep!
When I had crossed the bridge and was turning into Dubuque Street, I had to slow up because of an accident ahead. A police car and an ambulance and half a dozen people were gathered under the street light. There was a tow truck on the scene too, the driver of which I recognized, and down on the icy street I saw a stretcher. I was ready to drive around the squad car and head up the next cross street when I saw that on the stretcher there was a blanket, and under the blanket a person. I stopped my car and got out and walked straight toward the center of the circle. I suppose the policemen must have thought I was a friend or relative who had been summoned, for the two of them stepped aside and let me through. What I saw surprised me. The face sticking up above the blanket belonged to nobody I knew.
3
December 14, 1955
Reading, Pa.
Dear Gabe,
I have had so much time to correspond with old friends lately and it has been so long since either Paul or myself has had a chance to hear how you’re doing, that I thought to write to you. When I mentioned it Paul thought it would be a good idea, and he wants to send along his good wishes. He is doing well in the department here, though the quality of the students isn’t all one could ask for. The novel is coming along, despite interruptions and distractions and those omnipresent freshman essays. We are hoping, however, that he’ll be able to finish it by the end of the year and get his degree and perhaps move on then to a college a little further from the coal fields. There’s still the German to pass, but he’s getting on top of that and with a little time will probably be able to pass it with ease. I had an excellent job here up until a few months ago when that old fever business started and I finally wound up in the hospital. It turns out I’ve got some kind of kidney disturbance, but now that it’s been properly diagnosed, I’ve gotten the proper drugs and am out of the hospital and feel much better. I’ve had much time and even tried writing a story—which was awful—but have been able to read volumes and volumes. I finally got around to Wings of the Dove, which I think is the best of them all. Didn’t you do your dissertation on it? Kate Croy engaged me so very much—does that say bad things about my character? Aside from my almost dying—which I almost did and which I repeat merely for the romance of it—the next most exciting thing of the last six months was that we met a famous poet. Through some fluke, D—— came to the campus to read his poetry. (He’d been invited by the head of the dept.—the only man in the state of Pennsylvania who reads a little bit of the Faerie Queene at bedtime each night—and apparently thought it was some other school, because he showed up.) He was older than I had thought, but I was consoled by the fact that he was thin, had tight skin, and a youthful manner. He seems to me everything his poems indicate. After an evening reading in the chapel, D. and his wife were given a party by the dept. head. The entire English staff was invited, along with other greater or lesser folks, so I got to see and hear him informally. I’d memorized a little speech beforehand, but I got too shy to say anything to him, so I stared instead. And I wasn’t disappointed at all. Both D. and his very beautiful wife are all that you would like—kind, quiet in a shy way and not distant, deeply in love with each other (I could tell, of course) and naturally, most intelligent. When I saw them together, I kept thinking of how happy they are, and I loved her for being the inspiration of all those nice husbandly poems etc. The party went on, with people drinking nervously, talking nervously, and those younger ones of us feeling ill at ease and clinging to those we knew. After a while, bolstered by Scotch of course, I followed D. into another room and sat on a long chintzy couch opposite him and watched and listened to the general chatter which never got very profound about anything (including poetry) and
glowed from my Scotch and my fever and the new red dress I had on—two dollars a week saved from my job here in the Dean’s office, but beautiful I think anyway. So red dress and all, I was hardly inconspicuous, though most silent. But to get to the point, finally the Dean came to say goodnight to D. and noticed me sitting there and said, “Have you met my secretary yet?” And as I was walking across that long room to say hello (finally), D replied, “Not officially, but we’ve been staring at each other all evening.” And they all laughed, and I said in an exaggeratedly low voice I was happy to meet him and then thank God the Dean introduced our poet (published in the obscurest of quarterlies) Charlie Regan and I retreated awkwardly to my couch. Then after a confused while, D. and his wife decided to leave—the whole thing must have been awful for them—and again I followed, staring, and stood with the others waving goodbye. And I was desperately wishing to say something to him, when he noticed me, said “Oh,” and came in again, walked over to me, took my hand and then KISSED me on the forehead and said something, but I don’t know what, I was so stunned. And then I said, “Thank you for your poetry,” and he looked pleased and bowed thank-you and left. And I went soaring up to the stars literally; I’ve never in my life had such a feeling. I thought at the time that it all was most symbolic, even though I realized that he thought I was a sweet silly girl, in love with the idea of a poet. Reading all this over I see that it sounds just like that, like so much honey and roses. But 1 can’t help it because it’s all true. And I was very happy. I’m looking forward now to getting up and around, and even to getting back to the filing cabinets in the Dean’s office, so you see that I must be well, having become so edgey. I’ve written letters to dozens of people, and since you helped us out so long ago, when we were both down in the dumps, I thought it might be pleasant to write to you. The sad thing in life is that we don’t see friends and let small things separate us, and after a while you just think that even a greeting is insignificant. I know that Paul does send his best, and the two of us hope your life at Chicago and your job at the university is going well. It seems like a marvelous opportunity for you, and we would of course be interested in hearing how everything is going and how you like teaching there. It’s time for me to take one of my pills, they’re as big as stones and expensive as jewels, so I must close …
Best,
Libby
I did not answer.
4
Nevertheless, on a dull afternoon late in October of 1956, I was at Midway Airport watching for a plane coming toward Chicago out of the east. In that rippled gray sky I could not be sure which plane was which, but I saw one above me lurch off to the side, tremble in the air for a moment, and I took it to be the one I was waiting to meet. Other planes landed all around, swishing beautifully in, while this one circled and circled and circled. I counted landing gear, I checked the wings, I spotted a dismal little cloud and called it smoke out of the tail. The plane made several worried turns around the clock, and then was roaring down, its nose aiming for the swinging Shell sign across the road from the airport. I closed my eyes and waited. When I looked out again I found it had cleared the sign and was motionless, one safe colossal hulk on the runway.
After most of the passengers had disembarked, a dark undernourished-looking couple stuck their heads through the door. The woman was bundled in a coat and wore a black hat that shadowed her face. The man’s suit pinched his waist as suits were supposed to in 1928. He carried a typewriter and a briefcase; the woman’s arms were filled with two brown paper bags. They whispered to one another and then peered out again at the banal geological dullness of Cook County, Illinois—they might have just made it out of some steamy Latin American country only a few hours before the regime had fallen. I called out to them several times, and finally had to run onto the field shouting their names. Only then, above their parcels and belongings, did I see Paul and Libby smile.
The character sketches which follow may help to explain the reappearance of the Herzes in my life.
John Spigliano.
Chairman of the Humanities II staff, my boss, at one time an undergraduate with me at Harvard. He is reputed now to be one of the most reasonable and scholarly young men in our midst. At staff meetings John explicates texts with the craftiest of understanding. Gibbon’s sentences grow longer—explains John, engraving the blackboard with graphs and charts—as he discusses the furthest outposts of the Empire, and shorter as he returns to the Imperial City itself. “I think we should point out to the student,” John says, having compared the number of adjectival clauses in one paragraph with the number in the next, “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”
As it were, my ass. Spigliano is a member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders who, finding a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own ambiguous lives, each year walk through classroom doors and lay siege to the minds of the young, revealing to them Zoroaster in Sam Clemens and the hidden phallus in the lines of our most timid lady poets. Structure and form are two words that pass from his lips as often as they do from any corset manufacturer’s on New York’s West Side. He is proprietary, too, about languages, knowing as he does six, or sixteen. Where a few measly syllables of some other tongue have been borrowed and absorbed into our own, John reveals the strictest loyalty to the provenance of the word. He, for instance, does not go to the Bijou Theater—he goes to the Bijou. Only Don Quixote does he pronounce with the hard X, and he had to learn that in Cambridge, where, having been born poor and Italian, he felt it necessary for himself to swim a little with the fashion. At a party which he and his wife give once a year, John dances a jumpy peasant number that his parents brought over with them to the South End from the Abruzzi; he is not sober at the time, and afterwards those of us who cannot stand him get together, not very sober ourselves, and say that John really isn’t such a bad fellow. He is a nuisance, though, to his more slothful colleagues, because he writes, as he will tell you, an article a month, and publishes pathologically. He was trained as a child to be a Catholic, and though he has now given all that up, he apparently feels it necessary to earn everything, tenure included, for eternity. I cannot believe that all that ambition is for this life alone.
John is only recently the chairman of our department. On October 12, 1956, Edna Auerbach was attacked and beaten on S. Maryland Avenue and forced to resign for the year as both chairman and teacher. At the age of thirty-one, John was selected by the Dean to be father to ten staff members (it is a small staff—we all teach two sections of freshman English and a section of Humanities on the side), a cranky secretary, and two mimeograph machines. It is not sour grapes to say that it is a finicky scissors-and-paste job after which nobody else on the staff had particularly been whoring. But where John is concerned, there needn’t really be that much connection between the task and the promotion. If the next step up involved swabbing the latrines in Cobb Hall, John Spigliano might not have turned advancement aside without a thought. He was not considered a reasonable young man for nothing.
On October 18, after a week-long search for someone to teach Edna’s sections, John asked if I knew of anybody he might be able to get hold of right away. His preference, he told me privately, was for another Harvard man.
Pat Spigliano.
They deserved one another. At those parties at which her Johnny let his hair down and danced for us, Mrs. Spigliano swished about in her taffeta dress, fiercely American Young Mother, and—soon enough—fiercely The Chairman’s Wife. At a Spigliano party every contingency appeared to have been taken care of in advance. Over the door to the room where coats were to be deposited, was a handprinted sign to greet the first guest: COATS HERE. Above the table where one picked up one’s watery cocktail was written, a little misleadingly: AND DRINKS HERE. And signed, P.&J. Even Pat’s little party hors d’oeuvres were apparently prepared in the morning and refrigerated on the spot, so that by evening the bread, as I recall it, wa
s particularly without tension. Oftentimes one’s teeth had to make their first soggy journey down into a Liverwurst Delight, with Pat at one’s elbow, waiting. Oh, we would all comment in barely audible voices, how does Pat manage to look so fresh, wondering just the opposite about the lettuce. She stays so thin, we would add—for it has come to seem that she will not move on until something like this is said—and so youthful. “Oh I’m thin,” I suppose, admits Pat, fingering her front buttons as though they were little awards for virtue, “because I’m just busy all the time.” Eleven different budgetary tins on her kitchen counter encouraged one to believe that what she kept herself busy with most of the time was portioning out pleasure to her family. A piece of adhesive tape across one of the tins read—
JOHN
Tobacco, scholarly journals, foot powder
The night I ran into them having dinner at the Faculty Club, Pat had just found a new apartment on Woodlawn into which the family was to be moved the following week. After dinner I was invited to their table for a drink, to celebrate their good fortune. “We’re so glad to be moving from Maryland,” Pat told me, “especially after what happened—Edna’s accident. And the new apartment is marvelous. I have a wonderful kitchen, and John has a wonderful study, and really,” she said, “what with his promotion, we’re having too much good luck. I expect there’ll be an earthquake or some terrible catastrophe to even things up.” What riled me was that she didn’t even expect rain. Though I had breakable possessions of my own—a new car, in fact—I wouldn’t that moment have minded hearing a rumbling under the floor and seeing the trees go sailing down outside the window on Fifty-seventh. “But our Michelle—she’s one of the twins—Michelle was bringing”—she made a quick check of the waiters—“little colored boys home from school with her. Well, that’s when I thought I’d better start looking. She was bringing them into the house for cookies, which is perfectly sweet, except Michelle is an affectionate child—I suppose she’s always had a lot of affection—and she was kissing them. On the lips. Well, sweet as it was, it was a problem. It’s difficult to explain these things to children, yet I feel you’ve got to be realists with them. They want you to be a realist—especially Michelle and Stella, at their age. How old is your little girl, Mrs. Reganhart?” She asked this of a blond woman in a purple suit who had eaten dinner with them. Mrs. Reganhart’s long hair was braided high on her head, and her features were large and Nordic and symmetrical. On no one of them had I seen a sign of any emotion, save boredom. “Seven,” the woman said. “You know then,” said Pat, “what little realists they are. We have a boy, John Junior, the twins’ older brother—and so we explained to Michelle that she couldn’t kiss little colored children for the same reason that she couldn’t marry her brother. And I believe she understood. There is a Negro problem in the neighborhood,” said Pat, “and I don’t know what’s to be gained by not recognizing it.” “There’s a Negro little-boy problem,” said Mrs. Reganhart, looking into her brandy glass, and Pat agreed. I don’t think you can insult this woman, by the way, because I don’t think she listens. “Edna, for instance,” she began, “well apparently it was a giant of a colored man. Harold came by tonight—that’s her husband, the doctor,” she explained to Mrs. Reganhart. “A chiropodist,” said John, who had till then been busy constructing a personality around his pipe. “But a very nice fellow,” Pat added. “He said Edna was badly shaken up—she’s had a very serious emotional breakdown. Perhaps I’m wrong, but speaking personally I really do think that certain women are rape prone. Carriage, for instance, has a great deal to do with it. Your psychological make-up—” she told Mrs. Reganhart while John turned to me and asked if I had picked up the essays Edna’s class had written. “I wonder if you could mark a pile of them,” he said. “I’ve read a few myself, and I’m afraid it’s not a pleasant job. Edna is an excellent grammarian, but I don’t know how much she’s able to get over to the students about structural principles—” Whenever he could, John used his pipe to enforce his meaning; it was clear he would be a maiden with it until he died. I couldn’t really look at him without feeling a little ashamed for all our puny masculine disguises. “You haven’t thought of anyone since this morning, have you?” he asked. “I’m just opposed to letting a graduate student onto the staff. Now, ideally a Harvard man was what I was think ing—”