Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Maury stood up and ran his thumb across her cheek. “How are you? Are you all right, sweetheart?”

  “Look,” said Mrs. Herz. “I’m all right if he’s all right.” And the voice of the martyr was heard in the land.

  Just then Doris approached me. My heart went out to something in her that was simple and bored and satisfied; I actually had an impulse to take her hand as she went past me, and felt a personal sense of loss when she and her husband slammed the door of the Herzes’ apartment behind them.

  “I hope I haven’t interrupted,” I said. “I should have called.” But behind me—a sound sweet as a rescue plane buzzing a life raft—a key turned in the lock and a hinge squeaked. There was a whispered exchange, then Maury’s voice. “Mr. Wallach,” he called, “I think you dropped something out here in the hall.”

  Dutifully, unthinkingly, Mrs. Herz rose from her chair to serve my needs.

  “No, please, I’ll get it,” I said. “Excuse me.”

  In the doorway, Maury’s tiny hooked nose, droopy cheeks, fleshy lips, and round little gray eyes all tried to come together in a smile, but mostly worry was written on his face. Doris took my hand and whispered, “Stop on the way out, please. Six-D. Horvitz.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be careful, kid, will you?” Maury said. Doris still held one of my hands; Maury took the other. “I’m Paul’s oldest friend,” he told me, and then the two of them turned down the hallway, past everybody’s milk bottles. They went the first few feet on their toes.

  When I came back into the living room I was met by the image of a united front. Mrs. Herz, with something of the pioneer woman about her, was standing beside her husband. I smiled at her, making believe that I was returning to my pocket something that I had dropped outside. But the woman had a bitter, drawn face that would not respond. She was tall, like Paul, but not skinny; rather she was hefty, large in the hips and feet and shoulders. Her hair had thinned on either side of the part and it bushed out from her head around the ears and neck—the genetic source of Paul’s black kinks. Her coloring was spiritless, a brownish-gray. Mr. Herz was also old and worn. Coming directly from scenes of middle-age rejuvenation, the sight of them was uncomfortably shocking; I had almost forgotten that most of those within earshot of eternity look as if they hear just what they hear. Not everyone can afford a mask, or wants one.

  “Take a seat,” said Mr. Herz, for I was the soul of politeness, and that finally got to him. “Would you like a glass of soda?”

  “No, thank you. I only dropped in.”

  “Darling,” he addressed his wife, “get me a little seltzer.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure, sure, I’m fine. I’m excellent. Only my mouth tastes bad.”

  No sooner had Mrs. Herz left the room than her husband shot straight up in the BarcaLounger, almost as though he’d been ripped down the center with the electric pains of a stroke. His face like a piece of crumpled white paper against the ruddy leather of the chair, he turned his palms down and supplicated with them, up and down—the motion of the umpire when the runner has slid in under the tag. “Please, please,” he whispered, “she’s having a very bad day. Please.” A fizzing sound approached from the kitchen, and he settled back into a posture that struck me as an open invitation to death. In that one moment he appeared to have used up a week’s energy.

  His wife handed him a little glass on a coaster. “The glass is warm,” he said. “It’s practically hot.”

  “I put it in a warm glass. Cold is a shock to the system.”

  “Who likes warm seltzer, for God’s sake.”

  “Drink it, please.” It was as though now that he didn’t like it, it would do him some good. While he drank, his hand went up to his chest and he performed various stretching gestures with his neck. Having thus coped successfully with the carbonation, he turned back to cope with me. Mrs. Herz returned to her chair—the edge of it—and her husband cupped his glass on his belly and took a businesslike but civil approach.

  “Very nice to meet a friend of Paul’s.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you. Paul asked that I stop in to say hello.”

  Nobody responded; was it so blatantly a lie?

  “You live here?” Mrs. Herz demanded, putting the question not so much to me as to the puce gloves. “In Brooklyn?”

  “My father lives in Manhattan,” I said.

  “What are you, a lawyer?” I was numbed by her particular brand of naïveté: it seemed a cross between xenophobia and plain old hate.

  “I teach English at the University of Chicago. Paul is a colleague of mine.”

  “A colleague already.” She made a face of mock awe toward her husband. “Next thing we know he’ll be president of the college.”

  “He’s doing very well. It’s a very good university.”

  She put me quickly in my place. “Schools are wonderful things wherever they are,” she said. “I was a teacher myself.”

  “He teaches English?” Mr. Herz asked. “What is that, spelling, grammar, that business?”

  “One course is Freshman Composition. Then he also teaches Humanities.”

  “I see,” they both said. Mrs. Herz seemed pressed to add something knowledgeable about the humanities but gave up and only grunted general disapproval of whatever that title encompassed.

  “Libby works for the Dean of the College, you know.”

  No one knew; no one cared. “She’s one of my favorite people,” I said, and was rewarded for that complicated extravagance with a flush that took minutes to subside. Fortunately, the Herzes were now immune to anyone’s feelings but their own. “She also takes courses in the evenings. She’s a very hard-working girl.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” mumbled Mr. Herz, but the object of his certainty did not seem to be the subject of my conversation.

  “I was visiting in Manhattan for the holiday, and so I came-over here. I hope I haven’t interrupted anything,” I said, limp with my own repetitiveness.

  “Mr. Herz has been sick,” his wife informed me, having actually stared me into silence. “We decided to stay home for the day. Who wants to get tied up in all that traffic?”

  “Yeah, we decided to stay home,” Mr. Herz said. “We were going to go to Rio de Janeiro for the weekend, but we decided to stay home. Look, I think maybe I can move my bowels,” he told his wife, and instantly she was out of her chair and freeing him from the languorous curves of the BarcaLounger. He insisted on walking under his own steam to the bathroom.

  “Leave the door open a little,” she said to him.

  “All right, all right.” Newspapers covered the floor at the entrance to the kitchen, and he crossed over them as though they were ice. Some seconds later the bathroom door shut. Mrs. Herz left the room hastily; I heard her call, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Don’t strain,” she said. “Leave the door open.”

  Back in the living room those eyes that had so examined my habit and person now were kept carefully averted; she fussed about, straightening things.

  “Is he very sick?” I asked.

  “He has a terrible heart.” She folded and refolded the afghan that had lain across her husband’s feet.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “What kind of courses—” she asked suddenly though her back was all she would show me. “She’s going to school forever?”

  “Who? What?”

  “Her.”

  “Libby,” I said, and waited for Mrs. Herz herself to repeat the name. I waited; then I said that Libby had not yet finished with her A.B.

  “Sure—she was in a big rush.” She came back to her chair, acting as though we hadn’t been conversing at all. “You all right?” she called into the other room.

  We both hung now on the reply, which was not forthcoming.

  “Leonard, is everything all right in there?” And again she was up and off to the bathroom.

  “I’m all right,” her husba
nd called. “I’m all right.”

  “Don’t strain. If nothing happens, nothing happens. You’re not engaged in some contest, Leonard.” When she returned to the living room, she said, “He’s having the worst day he’s had in years.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m sorry.” I was sure that now I was in for some lecture from her. But I did not depart; I felt bound to wait for Mr. Herz’s ascension back into his easeful chair.

  “You teach what—law?” she asked.

  My garb, my prosperity, my Harvard tones—and Mrs. Herz’s colossal disappointment. I had not suspected that what she had always wanted her little Paul to be was an attorney. “No. I teach English, too.”

  “And what’s humanities? What does Paul know about humanities?”

  There was an intention in her words that I did not understand immediately. “It’s a kind of literature course,” I explained. “It’s an introduction to literature. Paul teaches it very well. He’s a very good critic, very sharp.”

  “He was always critical.” She acknowledged the painful truth with a slow wagging of her head. “Suddenly nobody was good enough for him. In his whole life we never asked him to do one thing, one favor. He came home and told us he was going to Cornell—that was good enough for us. He was going to work in South Fallsburg, we wouldn’t see him for a whole summer—we never said a word. We gave him all the independence he wanted. Maury Horvitz—his mother was always running his life. Maury drink this, Maury drink that—she used to run to school with his rubbers if it was only a little sun shower. Paul never had to put up with that. We always recognized his independence.” She was picking threads from her apron while she spoke and depositing them in the pocket of her house dress. “But he wounded his father in such a way,” she said, coming down with a fist on her knee, “you can never imagine it. He made that man an old man. One thing we asked him in his whole life. One thing.” She held up a finger to convince me of the tininess of their request in the face of the vast universe. “He gave his father a wound that man will never forget. His father worked like a slave for him all his life, took every chance, and all he got was bad luck and a terrible slap in the face. Some Thanksgiving,” she said, and with her hp trembling, she removed herself from the room.

  Minutes went by, and then I heard her ask, “You finished?”

  “I’m finished.”

  “You feel all right?”

  “A little tired.”

  “I told you don’t strain. The doctor told you—”

  “I didn’t!”

  “You just let Mother Nature do the job.”

  I rose and waited for them to enter the living room. In my mind I ran over what had happened and what had been said. Had I done less than I believed Libby had intended for me to do? What more was it possible to do? I was no magician; her marriage to Paul was going to have to heal itself or finally rot away without my intervention. As I heard the forlorn sound of Mr. Herz’s slippers cautiously crossing into the living room, I was moved to sorrow for him—and then to suspicion toward his adversary. At that moment, in fact, Libby seemed to be my adversary; I recognized how much craftiness there was in her behavior toward me. What craftiness there happened to be in my behavior toward her, seemed to me a craftiness of reservation and restraint, a decorousness on the side of virtue. If I was at fault, it was because I had actually permitted myself to be a good deal less crafty at times than it was my obligation to be. I felt a little abused by her, a little made a convenience of, and I shared momentarily in that suspiciousness toward her that this heart victim and his wife had allowed to ruin the last years of their lives. There must be some weakness in men, I thought, (in Paul and myself, I later thought) that Libby wormed her way into. Of course I had no business distrusting her because of my weakness—and yet women have a certain historical advantage (all those years of being downtrodden and innocent and sexually compromised) which at times can turn even the most faithful of us against them. I turned slightly at that moment myself, and was repelled by the sex toward which at bottom I have a considerable attachment.

  I took my leave with soft words; I did not feel the shame of the intruder so much as his misguidedness and self-deception.

  “Good luck in your new career,” Mr. Herz called after me.

  Though I could not locate the inspiration for his congratulatory remark, I thanked him. He lifted one hand as though to wave, then only rubbed it softly, with a sense of surrender, across his delicate chest.

  I was halfway down the street when I remembered Doris and Maury Horvitz waiting for me in 6D. I turned and came back along the treeless block and entered the red-brick Tudorized apartment building where only one thing had been asked of Paul Herz in his entire life. The building was called “The Liverpool Arms.”

  When Doris whisked open her door and whisked me in, I felt as though I’d been followed. Once I was safely over the apartment threshold, she relaxed inside her toreador pants and white blouse and directed me to the living room with a copy of Harper’s which she was holding in her hand. We were surrounded on all sides by pale blue carpeting and very low furniture. The room appeared to have been decorated with a special eye out for the comfort of aerial creatures. There was a lot of flying space over our heads, but if you happened to be a simple biped you had to chance it with your ankles through a Scandinavian jungle of coffee tables, throw cushions, and potted avocados. Maury’s figure hogged a blond Swedish chair that cradled his behind no more than three inches off the carpet; like Doris, he had changed into home attire, and was now sporting a pair of trousers the watery pastel color of some fruit-flavored Popsicle. They were cotton and baggy, and in place of a belt they had a three-inch band of elastic that could be stretched to accommodate the wearer. In the spectrum I would place them at cherry-raspberry. He had tiny, multicolored slippers on, and I noticed how thin his calves and ankles were; there was a kind of buoyancy about him, in fact, as though once out of the low chair, he would rise to the ceiling and bump helplessly along it. Tapering down as he did, he reminded me of a Daumier barrister. He greeted me with a tremendously appreciative smile, and I realized that all that fat made him think of himself as a good guy. His lithe and sexy wife begged me to settle down on a cushion, and offered me a cup of Medaglio d’Oro. I accepted, and her black toreadored behind moved westward into the kitchen.

  “Talk loud,” she called, “so I can hear.”

  “We’ll wait for you, Dor,” her husband answered. While we waited, I noticed a photograph on the hi-fi cabinet; Maury noticed me noticing it. It was a large framed picture of Doris in a bathing suit. Maury said, “We’ll be going down there again in a few weeks. Right after Christmas. It’s terrific. It’s fabulous.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said affably.

  “You get a terrific sense of a good time down there. Everything they’ve got there is to make you comfortable and to give you a good time. Even the lobbies. After all, what do you do in a lobby? You wait for somebody, you kill time. But even there they’ve got your sense of beauty, of restfulness, in mind. Doris is crazy about it. All she talks about before we go to Miami is Miami, and all she talks about when we come back from Miami is Miami.”

  It left one with the impression that Miami was all Doris ever talked about, but I only showed her husband my admiration for his good luck. He did not, however, need my admiration; Maury seemed to be convinced that he had some moral edge over the rest of his generation simply by way of having taken his wife to spend their winter vacations in Miami Beach. I wondered what kind of advice Maury was going to give me to take back to Paul. What word was I to carry to Chicago from the world of heavy food and unbroken family relations? Maury’s flashy up-to-date possessions crowed their master’s satisfaction and contentment. How did he do it? What was the solution? I was asking not just for Paul, but for myself as well. How do you love girls like Doris? How do you keep life going exactly as it was when you were ten years old? That day I wouldn’t have minded arranging such a life for myself. I began—or perhaps continu
ed—in Maury’s living room, to miss my mother and to miss the past.

  “Just a minute,” Maury suddenly said. “I want to show you something …”

  When he returned he was holding a baseball in his right hand. He gave the ball to me and I turned it slowly around so as to read the inscription.

  To that Great Battery

  Much Horvitz and

  Paul Herz—

  Your pal

  Kirby Higbe

  “Mush was my nickname,” Maury said. “Higbe spelled it wrong. Everybody was screaming at him anyway.” He placed before me next a photograph that he’d been holding in his other hand. I took it just as Doris came back into the room, carrying a tray. I felt Maury’s fingers on my shoulder. “That’s Paul, there. That’s me, with my arm around him. Christ,” he said, “we were like this,” and he showed me with two fingers, one twisted around the other.

  In the picture Paul looked at twelve or thirteen pretty much what he was now, except that his kinky hair came down in an even line almost to his eyebrows. Maury was a round-faced bar mitzvah boy, all cream sodas and smiles and surprises. “That’s Heshy Lerner,” Maury said. “He was killed in Korea, and the rest of the guys are everywhere. A lot of the guys have moved to the suburbs, but I don’t know, I love this block. To me there’s nothing like the city. Does Paul ever mention Heshy?” he asked, making the ball roll up his forearm and bounce off his elbow. “I wonder if he even knows he’s dead.”

  “Heshy dead is just impossible to believe. Just thinking about it,” Doris said, setting out some frozen strudel she had heated for us, “is something. He was a terrific dancer, remember, Maur?”

  “Heshy was a terrific everything. He was going to be a commercial artist. He used to draw caricatures of everybody, and Paul used to write little captions for them. They were the two talented guys, all right. Boy, I’m telling you …” He shook his head—a man of eighty walking through his small-town graveyard.

  Now all three of us were on cushions around the coffee table; I was the only one still wearing shoes. We all drank out of demitasse cups that the Horvitzes had picked up on a cruise to St. Thomas, and every time Maury finished one of the tiny portions, Doris—with one hand on his leg—poured him another. I envied him his wife, nearly to the point of covetousness; and curiously, the envy did not diminish, the muscles in my chest only tightened another notch when Doris said, in the purest Brooklynese I’d ever heard, “Oy am I really tired. I mean I’m really beat, Maur.”